Shipping Prices Quotes

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If you lack the iron and the fuzz to take control of your own life, if you insist on leaving your fate to the gods, then the gods will repay your weakness by having a grin or two at your expense. Should you fail to pilot your own ship, don't be surprised at what inappropriate port you find yourself docked. The dull and prosaic will be granted adventures that will dice their central nervous systems like an onion, romantic dreamers will end up in the rope yard. You may protest that it is too much to ask of an uneducated fifteen-year-old girl that she defy her family, her society, her weighty cultural and religious heritage in order to pursue a dream that she doesn't really understand. Of course it is asking too much. The price of self-destiny is never cheap, and in certain situations it is unthinkable. But to achieve the marvelous, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.
Tom Robbins (Jitterbug Perfume)
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath)
You couldn't swing a battleaxe in the Nine Worlds without hitting some kind of wolf: Fenris Wolf, Odin's wolves, Loki's wolves, werewolves, big bad wolfs and independently contracted small business wolves that would kill anybody for the right price.
Rick Riordan (The Ship of the Dead (Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard, #3))
The stars are brilliant at this time of night and I wander these streets like a ritual I don’t dare to break for darling, the times are quite glorious. I left him by the water’s edge, still waving long after the ship was gone and if someone would have screamed my name I wouldn’t have heard for I’ve said goodbye so many times in my short life that farewells are a muscular task and I’ve taught them well. There’s a place by the side of the railway near the lake where I grew up and I used to go there to burry things and start anew. I used to go there to say goodbye. I was young and did not know many people but I had hidden things inside that I never dared to show and in silence I tried to kill them, one way or the other, leaving sin on my body scrubbing tears off with salt and I built my rituals in farewells. Endings I still cling to. So I go to the ocean to say goodbye. He left that morning, the last words still echoing in my head and though he said he’d come back one day I know a broken promise from a right one for I have used them myself and there is no coming back. Minds like ours are can’t be tamed and the price for freedom is the price we pay. I turned away from the ocean as not to fall for its plea for it used to seduce and consume me and there was this one night a few years back and I was not yet accustomed to farewells and just like now I stood waving long after the ship was gone. But I was younger then and easily fooled and the ocean was deep and dark and blue and I took my shoes off to let the water freeze my bones. I waded until I could no longer walk and it was too cold to swim but still I kept on walking at the bottom of the sea for I could not tell the difference between the ocean and the lack of someone I loved and I had not yet learned how the task of moving on is as necessary as survival. Then days passed by and I spent them with my work and now I’m writing letters I will never dare to send. But there is this one day every year or so when the burden gets too heavy and I collect my belongings I no longer need and make my way to the ocean to burn and drown and start anew and it is quite wonderful, setting fire to my chains and flames on written words and I stand there, starring deep into the heat until they’re all gone. Nothing left to hold me back. You kissed me that morning as if you’d never done it before and never would again and now I write another letter that I will never dare to send, collecting memories of loss like chains wrapped around my veins, and if you see a fire from the shore tonight it’s my chains going up in flames. The time of moon i quite glorious. We could have been so glorious.
Charlotte Eriksson (You're Doing Just Fine)
Why can't people love one another and still remain free?" Althea demanded suddenly. Amber paused to rub her eyes, then tug thoughtfully at her earring. "One can love that way," she conceded regretfully. "But the price on that kind of love may be the highest of all." She strung her words together as carefully as she strung her beads. "To love another person like that, you have to admit that his life is as important as yours. Harder still, you have to admit to yourself that perhaps he has needs you cannot fill, and that you have tasks that will take you far away from him. It costs loneliness and longing and doubt and...
Robin Hobb (The Mad Ship (Liveship Traders, #2))
Whatever can be threatened, whatever can be shaken, whatever you fear cannot stand, is destined to crash. Do not go down with the ship. Let that which is destined to become the past slip away. Believe that the real you is that which beckons from the future. If it is a sadder you, it will be a wiser one. And dawn will follow the darkness sooner or later. Rebirth can never come without death.
Robert M. Price
In 1855, as the price of paper rose, Dr. Deck proposed to dig up 2 1/2 million tons of Egyptian mummies, ship them to New York, unroll them; and use their linen wrappings to make paper.
Nicholson Baker (Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper)
The thing about violence, see, is that the Empire has a lot more to lose than we do. Violence disrupts the extractive economy. You wreak havoc on one supply line, and there’s a dip in prices across the Atlantic. Their entire system of trade is high-strung and vulnerable to shocks because they’ve made it thus, because the rapacious greed of capitalism is punishing. It’s why slave revolts succeed. They can’t fire on their own source of labour – it’d be like killing their own golden geese. ‘But if the system is so fragile, why do we so easily accept the colonial situation? Why do we think it’s inevitable? Why doesn’t Man Friday ever get himself a rifle, or slit Robinson Crusoe’s neck in the night? The problem is that we’re always living like we’ve lost. We’re all living like you. We see their guns, their silver-work, and their ships, and we think it’s already over for us. We don’t stop to consider how even the playing field actually might be. And we never consider what things would look like if we took the gun.
R.F. Kuang (Babel)
When people fight for ideals, no price is too high, and no fight can be surrendered. They aren't fighting for money, or power, or control. Not really. They're fighting to destroy their enemies.
Paolo Bacigalupi (The Drowned Cities (Ship Breaker, #2))
I was captain of my own ship, yes. But I still had to answer to the sea, the weather, the storm on the horizon.
Brenna Aubrey (At Any Price (Gaming the System, #1))
Under the redwood tree my grave was laid, and I beguiled my true love to lie down. The stream of our kiss put a waterway around the world, where love like a refugee sailed in the last ship. My hair made a shroud, and kept the coyotes at bay while we wrote our cyphers with anatomy. The winds boomed triumph, our spines seemed overburdened, and our bones groaned like old trees, but a smile like a cobweb was fastened across the mouth of the cave of fate. Fear will be a terrible fox at my vitals under my tunic of behaviour. Oh, canary, sing out in the thunderstorm, prove your yellow pride. Give me a reason for courage or a way to be brave. But nothing tangible comes to rescue my besieged sanity, and I cannot decipher the code of the eucalyptus thumping on my roof. I am unnerved by the opponents of God, and God is out of earshot. I must spin good ghosts out of my hope to oppose the hordes at my window. If those who look in see me condescend to barricade the door, they will know too much and crowd in to overcome me. The parchment philosopher has no traffic with the night, and no conception of the price of love. With smoky circles of thought he tries to combat the fog, and with anagrams to defeat anatomy. I posture in vain with his weapons, even though I am balmed with his nicotine herbs. Moon, moon, rise in the sky to be a reminder of comfort and the hour when I was brave.
Elizabeth Smart (By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept)
Anything can be bought for the right price. Even secrets.
Maria Kuzniar (The Ship of Shadows (The Ship of Shadows #1))
Who can find a virtuous woman? the proverb asks. For her price is above rubies. She seeketh wool and flax and worketh willingly with her hands. She is like the merchants’ ships, that bringeth food from afar.
Stephen King (11/22/63)
No, the Arctic does not yield its secret for the price of a ship's ticket. You must live through the long night, the storms, and the destruction of human pride. You must have gazed on the deadness of all things to grasps their livingness. In the return of light, in the magic of the ice, in the life-rhythm of the animals observed in the wilderness, in the natural laws of all being, revealed here in their completeness, lies the secret of the Arctic and the overpowering beauty of its lands.
Christiane Ritter (A Woman in the Polar Night)
Who worked for nothin’ in that war? When they work for nothin’, I’ll work for nothin’. Did they ship a gun or a truck outa Detroit before they got their price? Is that clean? It’s dollars and cents, nickels and dimes; war and peace, it’s nickels and dimes, what’s clean? Half the Goddam country is gotta go if I go! That’s why you can’t tell me.
Arthur Miller (The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays)
Now...place a finger on the nub between your nether lips." "But it's a sin," I said, wishing to heaven it wasn't. "Only on dry land. On my ship, it's downright sacred.
Lyla Sinclair (Captain's Price)
Oh, come on, Einstein. What do you expect? You’re a dangerous prisoner and the ship is under attack. What do you think I’m going to do? Hang around for a cup of tea and a cozy chat?
Mina Carter (Cyborg's Price (Zodiac Cyborgs, #1))
The Faroes, Iceland, and Greenland were all found by accident when ships were driven off course in bad weather; nobody just set out for a far horizon. It is also important to remember that many of these Viking voyagers were simply never seen again.
Neil Price (Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings)
I gave a magic wand to Amanda Rinderle of Tuckerman & Co., maker of probably the world's most sustainable dress shirts. If she could use it, I asked, to change one thing in order to help create an economy of better but less, what would that one thing be?...she would make prices tell the whole truth. Right now, prices reflect demand for goods and services and the costs of producing them: materials, energy, manufacturing, shipping. Mostly excluded are the consequences of production and consumption, from pollution to soil erosion to carbon emissions to habitat loss and onward to the human health effects of all these, the incredible destruction wrought by wildfires, floods and storms in the age of climate chaos, the burden of two billion tonnes of garbage each year, and the incalculable moral injury of driving million-year-old species into extinction.
J.B. MacKinnon (The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves)
Yet what bothers Maher most is a less tangible harm: the insult of seeing the clothes his company makes sell for prices that show just how little they are valued. 'Generation Z and millennials are really demanding ethical products,' he said. 'But when you buy a fast-fashion T-shirt for four dollars, or two dollars, you never ask, 'How could this have landed in Berlin or London or Montreal for this price? How does the cotton get grown, ginned, spun, woven, dyed, printed, sewn, packed, shipped, all for four dollars?' You've never realized how many lives you are touching, all because your payment doesn't pay for their wages.
J.B. MacKinnon (The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves)
Underlying all this activity—in the customhouses, on the wharves, in every place of business—were numbers. Merchants measured out their wares and negotiated prices; customs officers calculated taxes to be levied on imports; scribes and stewards prepared ships’ manifests, recording the values in long columns using Roman numerals. They would have put their writing implements to one side and used either their fingers or a physical abacus to perform the additions, then picked up pen and parchment once again to enter the subtotals from each page on a final page at the end. With no record of the computation itself, if anyone questioned the answer, the entire process would have to be repeated.
Keith Devlin (The Man of Numbers: Fibonacci's Arithmetic Revolution)
That was when the Venetians made an important discovery. More money could be made buying and selling salt than producing it. Beginning in 1281, the government paid merchants a subsidy on salt landed in Venice from other areas. As a result, shipping salt to Venice became so profitable that the same merchants could afford to ship other goods at prices that undersold their competitors. Growing fat on the salt subsidy, Venice merchants could afford to send ships to the eastern Mediterranean, where they picked up valuable cargoes of Indian spices and sold them in western Europe at low prices that their non-Venetian competitors could not afford to offer. This meant that the Venetian public was paying extremely high prices for salt, but they did not mind expensive salt if they could dominate the spice trade and be leaders in the grain trade. When grain harvests failed in Italy, the Venetian government would use its salt income to subsidize grain imports from other parts of the Mediterranean and thereby corner the Italian grain market.
Mark Kurlansky (Salt: A World History)
Most long-distance travel and commerce went by water, which explains why most cities were seaports—Cincinnati on the Ohio River and St. Louis on the Mississippi being notable exceptions. To transport a ton of goods by wagon to a port city from thirty miles inland typically cost nine dollars in 1815; for the same price the goods could be shipped three thousand miles across the ocean.
Daniel Walker Howe (What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848)
To see what happens in the real world when an information cascade takes over, and the bidders have almost nothing but one another’s behavior to estimate an item’s value, look no further than Peter A. Lawrence’s developmental biology text The Making of a Fly, which in April 2011 was selling for $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping) on Amazon’s third-party marketplace. How and why had this—admittedly respected—book reached a sale price of more than $23 million? It turns out that two of the sellers were setting their prices algorithmically as constant fractions of each other: one was always setting it to 0.99830 times the competitor’s price, while the competitor was automatically setting their own price to 1.27059 times the other’s. Neither seller apparently thought to set any limit on the resulting numbers, and eventually the process spiraled totally out of control.
Brian Christian (Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions)
Mladić was convinced that she had been murdered. This to him was the only logical explanation. Ana would never kill herself. He could not conceive that his daughter, his own daughter, who played Sinking Ships with him at twenty-three, could condemn him for what he did. He could not understand it. Instead of talking, they were playing childish games. To think she had been killed was easier for him: it relieved him of all responsibility. To understand why she had committed suicide would require him to admit - at least to himself - that he had indeed committed war crimes. This General Mladić could never do. Not even the death of his own dear child could make him acknowledge it. It was as if he had to sacrifice his own daughter - not his soldiers and his own life, as Prince Lazar did - to become a mythological hero. If this was the price for his immortality, the gods left him alive only to make him endure the incredible pain.
Slavenka Drakulić (They Would Never Hurt a Fly: War Criminals on Trial in The Hague)
if you don’t much care for regulation now, you might be in for a hard time. As climate change causes sea levels to rise, more and more people are going to get displaced. More and more people are going to want to come live where you are living—or worse, you will be among those forced to do the moving. Cities are going to need storm walls; farmers will need compensation to relocate their fields. If you think action on behalf of climate change is expensive, just wait until you see the price of inaction. Regulations will be required sooner or later, but if we wait until things reach crisis level they will be a lot more onerous. There may be requirements to restrict your use of gasoline. Requirements that restrict your access to proteins, such as steak and fish. Regulators watching what you put in the trash. There may be limits on shipping and air travel. And by then, your neighbors will probably be voting for these regulations. The environmental and just plain cash-money costs will be staggering the longer we go without getting going.
Bill Nye (Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World)
Riots were a proud country tradition, and long practice had worn them into a comfortable pattern: you showed up, you shouted and waved a banner or two, you went home once you’d made your point. Perhaps you did a bit of conscientious liberating of property—Penelope remembered one such occasion, when the mob had seized Squire Theydon’s corn from a Sweden-bound ship. They had sold it at once to local farmers and villagers at traditional prices, they’d given the squire his profits afterward, and nobody at all had been hurt. It had all been very disciplined and neatly organized.
Olivia Waite (The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows (Feminine Pursuits, #2))
What is the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen?” Dragging his gaze from the beauty of the gardens, Ian looked down at the beauty beside him. “Any place,” he said huskily, “were you are.” He saw the becoming flush of embarrassed pleasure that pinkened her cheeks, but when she spoke her voice was rueful. “You don’t have to say such things to me, you know-I’ll keep our bargain.” “I know you will,” he said, trying not to overwhelm her with avowals of love she wouldn’t yet believe. With a grin he added, “Besides, as it turned out after our bargaining session, I’m the one who’s governed by all the conditions, not you.” Her sideways glance was filled with laughter. “You were much too lenient at times, you know. Toward the end I was asking for concessions just to see how far you’d go.” Ian, who had been multiplying his fortune for the last four years by buying shipping and import-export companies, as well as sundry others, was regarded as an extremely tough negotiator. He heard her announcement with a smile of genuine surprise. “You gave me the impression that every single concession was of paramount importance to you, and that if I didn’t agree, you might call the whole thing off.” She nodded with satisfaction. “I rather thought that was how I ought to do it. Why are you laughing?” “Because,” he admitted, chuckling, “obviously I was not in my best form yesterday. In addition to completely misreading your feelings, I managed to buy a house on Promenade Street for which I will undoubtedly pay five times its worth.” “Oh, I don’t think so,” she said, and, as if she was embarrassed and needed a way to avoid meeting his gaze, she reached up and pulled a leaf off an overhanging branch. In a voice of careful nonchalance, she explained, “In matters of bargaining, I believe in being reasonable, but my uncle would assuredly have tried to cheat you. He’s perfectly dreadful about money.” Ian nodded, remembering the fortune Julius Cameron had gouged out of him in order to sign the betrothal agreement. “And so,” she admitted, uneasily studying the azure-blue sky with feigned absorption, “I sent him a note after you left itemizing all the repairs that were needed at the house. I told him it was in poor condition and absolutely in need of complete redecoration.” “And?” “And I told him you would consider paying a fair price for the house, but not one shilling more, because it needed all that.” “And?” Ian prodded. “He has agreed to sell it for that figure.” Ian’s mirth exploded in shouts of laughter. Snatching her into his arms, he waited until he could finally catch his breath, then he tipped her face up to his. “Elizabeth,” he said tenderly, “if you change your mind about marrying me, promise me you’ll never represent the opposition at the bargaining table. I swear to God, I’d be lost.” The temptation to kiss her was almost overwhelming, but the Townsende coach with its ducal crest was in the drive, and he had no idea where their chaperones might be. Elizabeth noticed the coach, too, and started toward the house. "About the gowns," she said, stopping suddenly and looking up at him with an intensely earnest expression on her beautiful face. "I meant to thank you for your generosity as soon as you arrived, but I was so happy to-that is-" She realized she'd been about to blurt out that she was happy to see him, and she was so flustered by having admitted aloud what she hadn't admitted to herself that she completely lost her thought. "Go on," Ian invited in a husky voice. "You were so happy to see me that you-" "I forgot," she admitted lamely.
Judith McNaught (Almost Heaven (Sequels, #3))
was tempted to tell him the truth: “See here, sir, the reason is there’s so much misery in Spain that we have to dunk our bread in puddles, there are no cats left in my town because we’ve eaten all the rats, the Republicans killed my mother because she had a cousin who was a nun hiding in our house, and then the Nationalists killed my father because he refused to bend his knee before a portrait of the caudillo. I have no family left, but I don’t wanna spend the rest of my life breaking my back in the mines, devoured by lice, and I sold my grandmother’s wedding ring—may she rest in peace—so I could buy a third-class ticket on a ship and start from zero, with just the clothes on my back, on the other side of the world. The reason is I wanna survive.
Susana López Rubio (The Price of Paradise)
I have no will. That is to say,’—he coloured a little,—‘ next to none that I can put in action now. Trained by main force; broken, not bent; heavily ironed with an object on which I was never consulted and which was never mine; shipped away to the other end of the world before I was of age, and exiled there until my father’s death there, a year ago; always grinding in a mill I always hated; what is to be expected from me in middle life? Will, purpose, hope? All those lights were extinguished before I could sound the words.’ ‘Light ’em up again!’ said Mr Meagles. ‘Ah! Easily said. I am the son, Mr Meagles, of a hard father and mother. I am the only child of parents who weighed, measured, and priced everything; for whom what could not be weighed, measured, and priced, had no existence.
Charles Dickens (The Charles Dickens Collection: Boxed Set)
Althea leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms stubbornly. ‘I can’t help it. That’s what I want.’ When Amber said nothing, Althea asked, almost angrily, ‘Don’t try to tell me that that is what love is, giving it all up for someone else!’ ‘But for some people, it is,’ Amber pointed out inexorably. She bound another bead into the necklace, then held it up to look at it critically. ‘Others are like two horses in harness, pulling together towards a goal.’ ‘I suppose that wouldn’t be so bad,’ Althea conceded. Her knitted brows said she did not entirely believe it. ‘Why can’t people love one another and still remain free?’ she demanded suddenly. Amber paused to rub her eyes, then tug thoughtfully at her earring. ‘One can love that way,’ she conceded regretfully. ‘But the price on that kind of love may be the highest of all.’ She strung her words together as carefully as she strung her beads. ‘To love another person like that, you have to admit that his life is as important as yours. Harder still, you have to admit to yourself that perhaps he has needs you cannot fill, and that you have tasks that will take you far away from him. It costs loneliness and longing and doubt and –’ ‘Why must love cost anything? Why does need have to be mixed up with love? Why can’t people be like butterflies, coming together in bright sunshine and parting while the day is still bright?’ ‘Because they are people, not butterflies. To pretend that people can come together, love, and then part with no pain or consequences is more false a role than pretending to be a proper Trader’s daughter.
Robin Hobb (The Mad Ship (Liveship Traders, #2))
Whiskey?” Camille cried as she stood on a wharf in Port Adelaide harbor. “You brought us onto a whiskey cargo ship?” Ira spread out his arms. “And rum, love. Don’t forget the rum.” The high tide slowly swallowed the wharf pilings, and the Juggernaut, a whiskey runner, was in the final process of loading. “Listen,” Ira said to both Oscar and Camille, who looked at their escort with doubt. “There couldn’t be a better cargo to ride with than whiskey and rum. You think if there were pots and pans and spoons in there, the captain would take her full chisel to Talladay? People pay a pretty price for liquor, mates, and the ones delivering it make out like bandits.” The Juggernaut wasn’t worth the ten crowns it cost Monty to secure a spot aboard. The schooner didn’t look seaworthy with its chipped paint, barnacle-covered hull, sloppy lines, and patched canvas sail.
Angie Frazier (Everlasting (Everlasting, #1))
century. The most visible legacy of the wealth and splendor generated by the medieval spice trade still dazzles the eye today in Venice, whose grand palazzi and magnificent public architecture were built largely on profits from pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, and cloves. A hundred pounds of nutmeg, purchased in medieval Alexandria for ten ducats, might easily go for thirty or fifty ducats on the wharves of Venice. Even after payments for shipping, insurance, and customs duties at both ends, profits well in excess of 100 percent were routine; a typical Venetian galley carried one to three hundred tons between Egypt and Italy and earned vast fortunes for the imaginative and the lucky. During the medieval period, a corpulent Croesus was called a “pepper sack,” not a thoroughgoing insult, since the price of a bag of pepper was usually higher than that of a human being.
William J. Bernstein (A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World)
But our ill fortune did not afflict the Portuguese in our town: they still shipped gold and wool to Porto and still sent hanbals, kiswas and other woven goods to Guinea. If anything, the drought and famine we were experiencing had only made their trade more profitable, because the price of the wool had fallen so low that they could purchase larger quantities of it. That year, a strange thing happened. The farmers who had neither the funds to pay the Portoguese tax nor grain to sell at marked had to give their children as payment. Girls of marriagable age were worth two arrobas of wheat; boys twice as that. A custom official of my acquaintance swore that he had seen three Portuguese caravels leave Azzemur, each carrying two hundred girls and women, who would be transported to Seville, where they would be sold as domestics and concubines. From that blighted time came the saying: when bellies speak, reason is lost.
Laila Lalami (The Moor's Account)
The slave trade was not controlled by any state or government. It was a purely economic enterprise, organised and financed by the free market according to the laws of supply and demand. Private slave-trading companies sold shares on the Amsterdam, London and Paris stock exchanges. Middle-class Europeans looking for a good investment bought these shares. Relying on this money, the companies bought ships, hired sailors and soldiers, purchased slaves in Africa, and transported them to America. There they sold the slaves to the plantation owners, using the proceeds to purchase plantation products such as sugar, cocoa, coffee, tobacco, cotton and rum. They returned to Europe, sold the sugar and cotton for a good price, and then sailed to Africa to begin another round. The shareholders were very pleased with this arrangement. Throughout the eighteenth century the yield on slave-trade investments was about 6 per cent a year – they were extremely profitable, as any
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
Cornelius Vanderbilt and his fellow tycoon John D. Rockefeller were often called 'robber barons'. Newspapers said they were evil, and ran cartoons showing Vanderbilt as a leech sucking the blood of the poor. Rockefeller was depicted as a snake. What the newspapers printed stuck--we still think of Vanderbilt and Rockefeller as 'robber barons'. But it was a lie. They were neither robbers nor barons. They weren't robbers, because they didn't steal from anyone, and they weren't barons--they were born poor. Vanderbilt got rich by pleasing people. He invented ways to make travel and shipping things cheaper. He used bigger ships, faster ships, served food onboard. People liked that. And the extra volume of business he attracted allowed him to lower costs. He cut the New York--Hartford fare from $8 to $1. That gave consumers more than any 'consumer group' ever has. It's telling that the 'robber baron' name-calling didn't come from consumers. It was competing businessmen who complained, and persuaded the media to join in. Rockefeller got rich selling oil. First competitors and then the government called him a monopolist, but he wasn't--he had competitors. No one was forced to buy his oil. Rockefeller enticed people to buy it by selling it for less. That's what his competitors hated. He found cheaper ways to get oil from the ground to the gas pump. This made life better for millions. Working-class people, who used to go to bed when it got dark, could suddenly afford fuel for their lanterns, so they could stay up and read at night. Rockefeller's greed might have even saved the whales, because when he lowered the price of kerosene and gasoline, he eliminated the need for whale oil. The mass slaughter of whales suddenly stopped. Bet your kids won't read 'Rockefeller saved the whales' in environmental studies class. Vanderbilt's and Rockefeller's goal might have been just to get rich. But to achieve that, they had to give us what we wanted.
John Stossel (Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media...)
Many wild foods have their charms, but the dearest one to my heart - my favorite fruit in the whole world - is the thimbleberry. Imagine the sweetest strawberry you've ever tasted, crossed with the tartest raspberry you've ever eaten. Give in the texture of silk velvet and make it melt to sweet juice the moment it hints your tongue. Shape it like the age-old sewing accessory that gives the fruit its name, and make it just big enough to cup a dainty fingertip. That delicious jewel of a fruit is a thimbleberry. They're too fragile to ship and too perishable to store, so they are one of those few precious things in life that can't be commoditized, and for me they always symbolize the essence of grabbing joy while I can. When it rains in thimbleberry season, the delicate berries get so damp that even the gentlest pressure crushes them, so instead of bringing them home as mush, I lick each one of my fingers as soon as it is picked. These sweet berries are treasure beyond price...
Sarah A. Chrisman (This Victorian Life: Modern Adventures in Nineteenth-Century Culture, Cooking, Fashion, and Technology)
The slave trade was not controlled by any state or government. It was a purely economic enterprise, organised and financed by the free market according to the laws of supply and demand. Private slave-trading companies sold shares on the Amsterdam, London and Paris stock exchanges. Middle-class Europeans looking for a good investment bought these shares. Relying on this money, the companies bought ships, hired sailors and soldiers, purchased slaves in Africa, and transported them to America. There they sold the slaves to the plantation owners, using the proceeds to purchase plantation products such as sugar, cocoa, coffee, tobacco, cotton and rum. They returned to Europe, sold the sugar and cotton for a good price, and then sailed to Africa to begin another round. The shareholders were very pleased with this arrangement. Throughout the eighteenth century the yield on slave-trade investments was about 6 per cent a year – they were extremely profitable, as any modern consultant would be quick to admit.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
The vendor looked at him through narrow eyes. “What is your name, what is your island, and what is your dance?” The questions shocked him through to the core. It took him a moment to pull up the traditional answers. “I am Cliopher Mdang of Tahivoa in Gorjo City. My island is Loaloa.” He paused a moment, before the desire for it to be true overcame the fear that he overreached himself in the claim. His third answer came, as a result, much more quietly. “My dance is Aōteketētana.” “Where have you danced the fire?” These were the questions out of the Lays of the Wide Seas. Cliopher had been expecting to haggle over price, not his identity. He took a breath. No one was listening to him but the vendor. “I learned the steps on Loaloa from the direction of the tanà, my great-uncle Tovo. My feet bear the scars of my learning.” He gestured down, though the old burns on the sides of his feet, where he had brushed up against the coals, were hidden by his Solaaran-style sandals. “And I danced the fire across the Wide Seas when I sailed down the river of time in a ship of my own hands’ shaping.
Victoria Goddard (The Hands of the Emperor (Lays of the Hearth-Fire, #1))
The dessert was tartufo, a dark chocolate gelato dusted with cocoa. Eighty-five percent of the world's chocolate is made from the common or garden-variety Forastero cocoa bean. About 10 percent is made from the finer, more subtle Trinitario bean. And less than 5 percent is made from the rare, aromatic Criollo bean, which is found only in the remotest regions of Colombia and Venezuela. These beans are so sought after that, pound for pound, they can command prices many times higher than the other local crop, cocaine. Having been fermented, shipped, lightly roasted and finally milled to a thickness of about fifteen microns, the beans are finally cooked into tablets, even a tiny crumb of which, placed on the tongue, explodes with flavor as it melts. A tartufo is a chocolate gelato shaped to look like a truffle, but it is an appropriate name for other reasons, too. Made from egg yolk, sugar, a little milk, and plenty of the finest Criollo chocolate, with a buried kick of chile, Bruno's tartufo was as richly sensual and overpowering as the fungus from which it took its name---and even more aphrodisiac.
Anthony Capella (The Food of Love)
The slave trade was not controlled by any state or government. It was a purely economic enterprise, organised and financed by the free market according to the laws of supply and demand. Private slave-trading companies sold shares on the Amsterdam, London and Paris stock exchanges. Middle-class Europeans looking for a good investment bought these shares. Relying on this money, the companies bought ships, hired sailors and soldiers, purchased slaves in Africa, and transported them to America. There they sold the slaves to the plantation owners, using the proceeds to purchase plantation products such as sugar, cocoa, coffee, tobacco, cotton and rum. They returned to Europe, sold the sugar and cotton for a good price, and then sailed to Africa to begin another round. The shareholders were very pleased with this arrangement. Throughout the eighteenth century the yield on slave-trade investments was about 6 per cent a year – they were extremely profitable, as any modern consultant would be quick to admit. This is the fly in the ointment of free-market capitalism. It cannot ensure that profits are gained in a fair way, or distributed in a fair manner. On the contrary, the craving to increase profits and production blinds people to anything that might stand in the way.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
what about your new way of looking at things? We seem to have wandered rather a long way from that.’ ‘Well, as a matter of fact,’ said Philip, ‘we haven’t. All these camisoles en flanelle and pickled onions and bishops of cannibal islands are really quite to the point. Because the essence of the new way of looking is multiplicity. Multiplicity of eyes and multiplicity of aspects seen. For instance, one person interprets events in terms of bishops; another in terms of the price of flannel camisoles; another, like that young lady from Gulmerg,’ he nodded after the retreating group, ‘thinks of it in terms of good times. And then there’s the biologist, the chemist, the physicist, the historian. Each sees, professionally, a different aspect of the event, a different layer of reality. What I want to do is to look with all those eyes at once. With religious eyes, scientific eyes, economic eyes, homme moyen sensuel eyes . . .’ ‘Loving eyes too.’ He smiled at her and stroked her hand. ‘The result . . .’ he hesitated. ‘Yes, what would the result be?’ she asked. ‘Queer,’ he answered. ‘A very queer picture indeed.’ ‘Rather too queer, I should have thought.’ ‘But it can’t be too queer,’ said Philip. ‘However queer the picture is, it can never be half so odd as the original reality. We take it all for granted; but the moment you start thinking, it becomes queer. And the more you think, the queerer it grows. That’s what I want to get in this book—the astonishingness of the most obvious things. Really any plot or situation would do. Because everything’s implicit in anything. The whole book could be written about a walk from Piccadilly Circus to Charing Cross. Or you and I sitting here on an enormous ship in the Red Sea. Really, nothing could be queerer than that. When you reflect on the evolutionary processes, the human patience and genius, the social organisation, that have made it possible for us to be here, with stokers having heat apoplexy for our benefit and steam turbines doing five thousand revolutions a minute, and the sea being blue, and the rays of light not flowing round obstacles, so that there’s a shadow, and the sun all the time providing us with energy to live and think—when you think of all this and a million other things, you must see that nothing could well be queerer and that no picture can be queer enough to do justice to the facts.’ ‘All the same,’ said Elinor, after a long silence, ‘I wish one day you’d write a simple straightforward story about a young man and a young woman who fall in love and get married and have difficulties, but get over them, and finally settle down.’ ‘Or
Aldous Huxley (Point Counter Point)
The clearest signs of Hakodate's current greatness, though, can be found clustered around its central train station, in the morning market, where blocks and blocks of pristine seafood explode onto the sidewalks like an edible aquarium, showcasing the might of the Japanese fishing industry. Hokkaido is ground zero for the world's high-end sushi culture. The cold waters off the island have long been home to Japan's A-list of seafood: hairy crab, salmon, scallops, squid, and, of course, uni. The word "Hokkaido" attached to any of these creatures commands a premium at market, one that the finest sushi chefs around the world are all too happy to pay. Most of the Hokkaido haul is shipped off to the Tsukiji market in Tokyo, where it's auctioned and scattered piece by piece around Japan and the big cities of the world. But the island keeps a small portion of the good stuff for itself, most of which seems to be concentrated in a two-hundred-meter stretch in Hakodate. Everything here glistens with that sparkly sea essence, and nearly everything is meant to be consumed in the moment. Live sea urchins, piled high in hillocks of purple spikes, are split with scissors and scraped out raw with chopsticks. Scallops are blowtorched in their shells until their edges char and their sweet liquor concentrates. Somewhere, surely, a young fishmonger will spoon salmon roe directly into your mouth for the right price.
Matt Goulding (Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture)
History favors the bold. Compensation favors the meek. As a Fortune 500 company CEO, you’re better off taking the path often traveled and staying the course. Big companies may have more assets to innovate with, but they rarely take big risks or innovate at the cost of cannibalizing a current business. Neither would they chance alienating suppliers or investors. They play not to lose, and shareholders reward them for it—until those shareholders walk and buy Amazon stock. Most boards ask management: “How can we build the greatest advantage for the least amount of capital/investment?” Amazon reverses the question: “What can we do that gives us an advantage that’s hugely expensive, and that no one else can afford?” Why? Because Amazon has access to capital with lower return expectations than peers. Reducing shipping times from two days to one day? That will require billions. Amazon will have to build smart warehouses near cities, where real estate and labor are expensive. By any conventional measure, it would be a huge investment for a marginal return. But for Amazon, it’s all kinds of perfect. Why? Because Macy’s, Sears, and Walmart can’t afford to spend billions getting the delivery times of their relatively small online businesses down from two days to one. Consumers love it, and competitors stand flaccid on the sidelines. In 2015, Amazon spent $7 billion on shipping fees, a net shipping loss of $5 billion, and overall profits of $2.4 billion. Crazy, no? No. Amazon is going underwater with the world’s largest oxygen tank, forcing other retailers to follow it, match its prices, and deal with changed customer delivery expectations. The difference is other retailers have just the air in their lungs and are drowning. Amazon will surface and have the ocean of retail largely to itself.
Scott Galloway (The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google)
Managerial abilities, bureaucratic skills, technical expertise, and political talent are all necessary, but they can be applied only to goals that have already been defined by military policies, broad and narrow. And those policies can be only as good as strategy, operational art of war, tactical thought, and plain military craft that have gone into their making. At present, the defects of structure submerge or distort strategy and operational art, they out rightly suppress tactical ingenuity, and they displace the traditional insights and rules of military craft in favor of bureaucratic preferences, administrative convenience, and abstract notions of efficiency derived from the world of business management. First there is the defective structure for making of military decisions under the futile supervision of the civilian Defense Department; then come the deeply flawed defense policies and military choices, replete with unnecessary costs and hidden risks; finally there come the undoubted managerial abilities, bureaucratic skills, technical expertise, and political talents, all applied to achieve those flawed policies and to implement those flawed choices. By this same sequence was the fatally incomplete Maginot Line built, as were all the Maginot Lines of history, each made no better by good government, technical talent, careful accounting, or sheer hard work. Hence the futility of all the managerial innovations tried in the Pentagon over the years. In the purchasing of weapons, for example, “total package” procurement, cost plus incentive contracting, “firm fixed price” purchasing have all been introduced with much fanfare, only to be abandoned, retried, and repudiated once again. And each time a new Secretary of Defense arrives, with him come the latest batch of managerial innovations, many of them aimed at reducing fraud, waste, and mismanagement-the classic trio endlessly denounced in Congress, even though they account for mere percentage points in the total budget, and have no relevance at all to the failures of combat. The persistence of the Administrator’s Delusion has long kept the Pentagon on a treadmill of futile procedural “reforms” that have no impact at all on the military substance of our defense. It is through strategy, operational art, tactical ingenuity, and military craft that the large savings can be made, and the nation’s military strength greatly increased, but achieving long-overdue structural innovations, from the central headquarters to the combat forces, from the overhead of bases and installations to the current purchase of new weapons. Then, and only then, will it be useful to pursue fraud, waste, and mismanagement, if only to save a few dollars more after the billions have already been saved. At present, by contrast, the Defense Department administers ineffectively, while the public, Congress, and the media apply their energies to such petty matters as overpriced spare parts for a given device in a given weapon of a given ship, overlooking at the same time the multibillion dollar question of money spent for the Navy as a whole instead of the Army – whose weakness diminishes our diplomatic weight in peacetime, and which could one day cause us to resort to nuclear weapons in the face of imminent debacle. If we had a central military authority and a Defense Department capable of strategy, we should cheerfully tolerate much fraud, waste, and mismanagement; but so long as there are competing military bureaucracies organically incapable of strategic combat, neither safety nor economy will be ensured, even if we could totally eliminate every last cent of fraud, waste, and mismanagement.
Edward N. Luttwak
What you’re saying makes no sense. At least, it doesn’t make sense to lower spatial dimensions as a weapon. In the long run, that’s the sort of attack that would kill the attacker as well as the target. Eventually, the side that initiated attack would also see their own space fall into the two-dimensional abyss they created.” Nothing but silence. After a long while, Cheng Xin called out, “Dr. Guan?” “You’re too … kind-hearted,” Guan Yifan said softly. “I don’t understand—” “There’s a way for the attacker to avoid death. Think about it.” Cheng Xin pondered and then said, “I can’t figure it out.” “I know you can’t. Because you’re too kind. It’s very simple. The attacker must first transform themselves into life forms that can survive in a low-dimensional universe. For instance, a four-dimensional species can transform itself into three-dimensional creatures, or a three-dimensional species can transform itself into two-dimensional life. After the entire civilization has entered a lower dimension, they can initiate a dimensional strike against the enemy without concern for the consequences.” Cheng Xin was silent again. “Are you reminded of anything?” Yifan asked. Cheng Xin was thinking of more than four hundred years ago, when Blue Space and Gravity had stumbled into the four-dimensional fragment. Yifan had been a member of the small expedition that conversed with the Ring. Did you build this four-dimensional fragment? You told me that you came from the sea. Did you build the sea? Are you saying that for you, or at least for your creators, this four-dimensional space is like the sea for us? More like a puddle. The sea has gone dry. Why are so many ships, or tombs, gathered in such a small space? When the sea is drying, the fish have to gather into a puddle. The puddle is also drying, and all the fish are going to disappear. Are all the fish here? The fish responsible for drying the sea are not here. We’re sorry. What you said is really hard to understand. The fish that dried out the sea went onto land before they did this. They moved from one dark forest to another dark forest. “Is it worth it to pay such a price for victory in war?” Cheng Xin asked. She could not imagine how it was possible to live in a world of one fewer dimension. In two-dimensional space, the visible world consisted of a few line segments of different lengths. Could anyone who was born in three-dimensional space willingly live in a thin sheet of paper with no thickness? Living in three dimensions must be equally confining and unimaginable for those born to a four-dimensional world. “It’s better than death,” said Yifan. While
Liu Cixin (Death's End (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #3))
The best way not to have to use your military power is to make sure that power is visible. When people know that we will use force if necessary and that we really mean it, we’ll be treated differently. With respect. Right now, no one believes us because we’ve been so weak with our approach to military policy in the Middle East and elsewhere. Building up our military is cheap when you consider the alternative. We’re buying peace and we’re locking in our national security. Right now we are in bad shape militarily. We’re decreasing the size of our forces and we’re not giving them the best equipment. Recruiting the best people has fallen off, and we can’t get the people we have trained to the level they need to be. There are a lot of questions about the state of our nuclear weapons. When I read reports of what is going on, I’m shocked. It’s no wonder nobody respects us. It’s no surprise that we never win. Spending money on our military is also smart business. Who do people think build our airplanes and ships, and all the equipment that our troops should have? American workers, that’s who. So building up our military also makes economic sense because it allows us to put real money into the system and put thousands of people back to work. There is another way to pay to modernize our military forces. If other countries are depending on us to protect them, shouldn’t they be willing to make sure we have the capability to do it? Shouldn’t they be willing to pay for the servicemen and servicewomen and the equipment we’re providing? Depending on the price of oil, Saudi Arabia earns somewhere between half a billion and a billion dollars every day. They wouldn’t exist, let alone have that wealth, without our protection. We get nothing from them. Nothing. We defend Germany. We defend Japan. We defend South Korea. These are powerful and wealthy countries. We get nothing from them. It’s time to change all that. It’s time to win again. We’ve got 28,500 wonderful American soldiers on South Korea’s border with North Korea. They’re in harm’s way every single day. They’re the only thing that is protecting South Korea. And what do we get from South Korea for it? They sell us products—at a nice profit. They compete with us. We spent two trillion dollars doing whatever we did in Iraq. I still don’t know why we did it, but we did. Iraq is sitting on an ocean of oil. Is it out of line to suggest that they should contribute to their own future? And after the blood and the money we spent trying to bring some semblance of stability to the Iraqi people, maybe they should be willing to make sure we can rebuild the army that fought for them. When Kuwait was attacked by Saddam Hussein, all the wealthy Kuwaitis ran to Paris. They didn’t just rent suites—they took up whole buildings, entire hotels. They lived like kings while their country was occupied. Who did they turn to for help? Who else? Uncle Sucker. That’s us. We
Donald J. Trump (Great Again: How to Fix Our Crippled America)
Broken, according to Webster’s Dictionary, means, to be fractured, upheld, discontinuous, or interrupted. In a way this is true with God; when He decides to break us, we become fractured, broken, and interrupted in our everyday ways. We will see situations—which we were looking forward to having fall into place—suddenly discontinued. Things will become dry, and people start falling away from us. Slowly, but surely, it will happen. Sometimes, it will not even come through us asking. When the Lord chooses to interrupt us, it will come to pass. However, this mainly happens when God is calling us or training us for ministry. We must always be in a place where we are able to listen to His voice while sensing His heart’s desire for our lives. He is not a toy we play with any time we become bored and uninterested. Many unbelievers in the past have tested Him and have paid a high price. The owner of the Titanic stood on the bow, cursed God, and shook his fist to Heaven in doubt and anger, dictating to the Lord that He couldn’t sink his ship. As you very well know, on the night of April 1912, a huge iceberg struck the ship and sank it,—as many have done in the past and still today.
Luis Lopez (Taken: 25 Minutes in Heaven)
THE ASPARAGUS of the world are disappearing.  Container ships of the vegetable are being hijacked every day.  Asparagus farms and even private gardens are inexplicably laid bare of Asparagus Officinalis.  People panic, the price of asparagus goes through the roof, and concerned vegans are wearing little plastic asparagus on their suits in support of the Liliaceae.
Holland Dayze (A is for Asparagus (Jacques Couteau Mystery))
All purchases made on client’s behalf will be billed to client. In all cases, such prices will reflect a markup of ___%. Charges for sales tax, insurance, storage, and shipping and handling are additional to the price of each purchase. In the event client purchases materials, services, or any items other than those specified by the designer, the designer is not liable for the cost, quality, workmanship, condition, or appearance of such items. Schedule of Payment Hourly Rate: Regular billing periods (bimonthly, monthly) based on hours consumed or periodic approval points. Fee Billing: ___ percent upon project commencement, ___ percent following completion of concept development, ___ percent upon completion of design development, ___ percent upon completion of production, ___ percent upon completion of implementation. Invoices are payable upon receipt. Termination Policy Client and Designer may terminate project based upon mutually agreeable terms to be determined in writing, either prior to signing of this proposal or within the final Client-Designer Contract. Term of Proposal The information contained in this proposal is valid for 30 days. Proposals approved and signed by the Client are binding upon the Designer and Client beginning on the date of Client’s signature. If the information in this Proposal meets with Client’s approval, Client’s signature below authorizes Designer to begin work. Kindly return a signed copy of this Proposal/Agreement to Designer’s office. Designer Signature _____________ Print Designer Name _____________ Date _____________ Client Signature _____________ Print Client Name _____________ Date _____________
Eva Doman Bruck (Business and Legal Forms for Graphic Designers)
America today is not the same nation as when you were born. Depending on your age, if you were born in America, your home nation was a significantly different land than it is today:   ·                    America didn’t allow aborting babies in the womb; ·                     Same sex marriage was not only illegal, no one ever talked about it, or even seriously considered the possibility; (“The speed and breadth of change (in the gay movement) has just been breathtaking.”, New York Times, June 21, 2009) ·                    Mass media was clean and non-offensive. Think of The I Love Lucy Show or The Walton Family, compared with what is aired today; ·                    The United States government did not take $500 million dollars every year from the taxpayers and give it to Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider. ·                    Videogames that glorify violence, cop killing and allow gamesters who have bought millions of copies, to have virtual sex with women before killing them, did not exist. ·                    Americans’ tax dollars did not fund Title X grants to Planned Parenthood who fund a website which features videos that show a “creepy guidance counselor who gives advice to teens on how to have (safe) sex and depict teens engaged in sex.” ·                    Americans didn’t owe $483,000 per household for unfunded retirement and health care obligations (Peter G. Peterson Foundation). ·                    The phrase “sound as a dollar” meant something. ·                    The Federal government’s debt was manageable.            American Christian missionaries who have been abroad for relatively short times say they find it hard to believe how far this nation has declined morally since they were last in the country. In just a two week period, not long ago, these events all occurred: the Iowa Supreme Court declared that same sex marriage was legal in the State; the President on a foreign tour declared that “we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation…” and a day later bowed before the King of the nation that supplied most of the 9/11 terrorists; Vermont became the first State to authorize same sex marriage by legislative action, as opposed to judicial dictate; the CEO of General Motors was fired by the federal government; an American ship was boarded and its crew captured by pirates for the first time in over 200 years; and a major Christian leader/author apologized on Larry King Live for supporting California’s Proposition 8 in defense of traditional marriage, reversing his earlier position. The pace of societal change is rapidly accelerating.
John Price (The End of America: The Role of Islam in the End Times and Biblical Warnings to Flee America)
But could she do it? Would she do it? Back to that debate. Was it murder if she caught him just standing around, non-threatening? How about when he was just standing there in the FLDS Mormon Temple a few months back? Would it have been murder then? His female victims were being held captive. Armond was waiting for the right price before he’d sell those innocent teenage girls into sex slavery. He had shot Sarah that day. Why can’t she just shoot him back? Make it even. She’d be the better shot. Once Armond was dead, no more little girls could be kidnapped, shipped overseas and sold to horny old men. Once Armond
Jonas Saul (The Crypt (Sarah Roberts, #3))
Increasingly, product developers roll out what’s known as a minimum viable product (MVP).6 An MVP accomplishes the goal of the customer—it tracks your exercise, cooks your food, or monitors your blood sugar—with services and some style, to support the higher price tag it carries. Companies that ship MVPs know that they will improve them and that ideas for those improvements will be generated from the people who first use the product. As Stefan Olander, vice president and general manager of digital sport at Nike, puts it “Get going. Then get better.”7 Software development for websites and applications is undergoing a revolution, from huge complex projects and infrequent releases to the continuous, agile development cycles happening now.
Ted Schadler (The Mobile Mind Shift: Engineer Your Business To Win in the Mobile Moment)
determine profit take the Amazon price and multiply it by .85 because Amazon takes out a 15% commission. Then if you’re using FBA, Amazon has a per unit fee and a per order fee and then a weight handling fee. We use $2.50 for our items because the per unit fee is $1, the order fee is $1, and the weight based fee is usually around $.50 depending on the weight of the item. Also, you have to figure in the cost of shipping it to you and the cost of shipping it to Amazon.
Ryan Reger (Real Wholesale Sources: Over 200 Legitimate Sources of Online Inventory for your Online and Offline Business)
Her eyes flashed up at him, then back down at the box. She opened it eagerly. Inside lay the cameo necklace he had seen the new housemaid pawn at a shop in Weavering Street. “You bought it back for me,” she breathed, eyes shining. “You have no idea what this means—it was a gift from my father.” He nodded. “There is more.” She looked inside the box again. Under the cameo lay a piece of thick paper. She extracted it and handed him the box to hold. She turned the paper over, revealing the small watercolor of Lime Tree Lodge. Her brow puckered. “Thank you, but you might have kept it. I wouldn’t have minded.” He tucked his chin as though offended, and insisted, “I spent a great deal of money on it.” “On this?” She raised her fair brows, incredulous. “Not on the painting. On Lime Tree Lodge itself.” She stared at him, stunned. “You didn’t . . .” “I did.” “But . . . my solicitor told me some vicar was very keen on buying it.” “He was. But I was keener.” “How did you . . . Forgive me, but I know you needed every shilling for Fairbourne Hall and to repair your ship.” “True.” “Then, how?” “I sold my ship. The damage did not lower its value as much as I had feared, and it brought a good price. Besides, I have no need of it any longer.
Julie Klassen (The Maid of Fairbourne Hall)
The chief predators were the Knights of St John, who turned their base in Malta into the last European centre of the slave-trade. They always had their eye on Jews and took them even from Christian ships on the grounds that they were Ottoman subjects. The knights kept their captives in a slave-barracks and sold them off periodically to speculators, who paid a price for Jews above the going rate; it was assumed all Jews were rich and would be ransomed.
Paul Johnson (History of the Jews)
Should global energy prices rise enough, then higher shipping costs will curtail or slow the globalization of production. The consequences of such a slowdown would be global and serious.
James Peoples
alternative apparel wholesale When you shop clothes, drop shipping facilities are also available for the customer by the dealer to deliver the clothing materials straightly to the customer. Of course, it is one of the smart as well as efficient methods that help people to save their budget price on buying clothes in wholesale shop. When you buy those kinds of clothing, if the clothes are not perfectly suits you either in size or some other issues, and then they offer you alternative apparel wholesale for customers. When comparing to the normal retail shop, you have to spend more money to buy the clothes. You can get all kinds of clothes at leading brands along with reasonable price.
livebnfd
Shippers and logistics service providers impose multiple requirements on their transportation carriers regardless of the product shipped. These include low and predictable price; short and consistent travel times; high departure and arrival frequency; high equipment availability; accurate and damage-free delivery; and ease of doing business with the carriers. No
Yossi Sheffi (Logistics Clusters: Delivering Value and Driving Growth (The MIT Press))
Those are God-like qualities. Not in power, but in choice. If He had created us in such a way that we could only do good, if we were incapable of acting badly, selfishly, causing pain or harm, then the notion of free will would be meaningless, would it not? Not only that, true free will precludes God’s intervention in our lives. There is no real free will if God intercedes to protect us or save us from the consequences of our own or other people’s actions and choices. We have to face those consequences ourselves. That is the price we pay for free will.” Father
Richard Paul Russo (Ship of Fools)
Money, without brains, always is dangerous. Properly used, it is the most important essential of civilization. The simple breakfast here described could not have been delivered to the New York family at a dime each, or at any other price, if organized capital had not provided the machinery, the ships, the railroads, and the huge armies of trained men to operate them. Some
Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich (Start Motivational Books))
Blaming Satan can absolve oppressors quicker than God's grace. I really am not that bad - so the logic goes - it is Satan, since the Garden of Eden, who has been leading humanity astray. I am really a good person, but I do wrestle with my secret demons. When I participate in the pain of others (not just physical but also caused by society and economics) of others, it is the devil that made me do it. Thankfully, Jesus took our place on the cross so that we do not need to pay the price for our sins. The devil made me do it, and Jesus cleaned up my mess. As a new creature in Christ "I" can move on without really addressing the consequences of or restitution for those sins the devil made me do. Hence, Nazi concentration guards can torture all week long and still attended worship ship services on Sunday mornings. Politicians can lead armies to war under false pretenses without addressing the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, who are killed or maimed because, after all, our intentions were pure - it was the enemy who was really evil. Repentance from Wall Street greed that tanked the U.S. economy and swindled thousands out of their life savings in 2008 can occur without having to deal with issues of public accountability and restitution to individual investors.
Miguel A. de la Torre (The Quest for the Historical Satan)
How could one ever steer a ship, unless one kept ones eyes fixed on the course ahead? If you suspect there are rockd you must avoid them, but it would be a waste of time wondering how you cane to be where you are. - William Price
Sybil G. Brinton (Old Friends and New Fancies)
Total Cost Analysis When the purchasing staff considers switching to a new supplier or consolidating its purchases with an existing one, it cannot evaluate the supplier based solely on its quoted price. Instead, it must also consider the total acquisition cost, which can in some cases exceed a product’s initial price. The total acquisition cost includes these items: • Material. The list price of the item being bought, less any rebates or discounts. • Freight. The cost of shipping from the supplier to the company. • Packaging. The company may specify special packaging, such as for quantities that differ from the supplier’s standards and for which the supplier charges an extra fee. • Tooling. If the supplier had to acquire special tooling in order to manufacture parts for the company, such as an injection mold, then it will charge through this cost, either as a lump sum or amortized over some predetermined unit volume. • Setup. If the setup for a production run is unusually lengthy or involves scrap, then the supplier may charge through the cost of the setup. • Warranty. If the product being purchased is to be retained by the company for a lengthy period of time, it may have to buy a warranty extension from the supplier. • Inventory. If there are long delays between when a company orders goods and when it receives them, then it must maintain a safety stock on hand to guard against stock-out conditions and support the cost of funds needed to maintain this stock. • Payment terms. If the supplier insists on rapid payment terms and the company’s own customers have longer payment terms, then the company must support the cost of funds for the period between when it pays the supplier and it is paid by its customers. • Currency used. If supplier payments are to be made in a different currency from the company’s home currency, then it must pay for a foreign exchange transaction and may also need to pay for a hedge, to guard against any unfavorable changes in the exchange rate prior to the scheduled payment date. These costs are only the ones directly associated with a product. In addition, there may be overhead costs related to dealing with a specific supplier (see “Sourcing Distance” later in the chapter), which can be allocated to all products purchased from that supplier.
Steven M. Bragg (Cost Reduction Analysis: Tools and Strategies (Wiley Corporate F&A Book 7))
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We’ve got to know our WHY because if we don’t, our WHEN will be off and on, starting and stopping and accomplishing little in the arena that we have been placed. Knowing our WHY lets us carry through on the days when we want to jump ship. Knowing our WHY will motivate us to go the extra mile when everyone else is home and on their second piece of cake. Knowing our WHY strongly will propel us into the future with a strong reason presently to pay the price – until. Do you know your WHY and if you don’t, can you see any reason why it can’t be defined clearly in your life and work?
christopher gregas
The industry thrives by selling escapist fun at prices the middle class can afford. The mega-ships circling the Caribbean are essentially floating American hotels, freed by foreign flagging from American labor laws. Filipinos work seventy hours a week at less than the minimum wage to bring Americans the blessings of cheap mai tais.
Jason DeParle (A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves: One Family and Migration in the 21st Century)
Life’s a mess. Success comes with a price. Relationships test our resolve. It’s not just about finding purpose or significance, but finding a purpose worth burning our ships—a purpose that will cause us to live bigger, live bolder, live beyond self.
L.C. Fowler (Dare To Live Greatly)
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Subsidy economics tends to drive prices up, not down, as recipients chase subsidies more than customers. Adam Smith figured this out in 1776. He examined the subsidies in his day for commercial fishing. In his era the word bounty referred to gifts the government bestowed on the owners of herring ships. He concluded that to collect subsidies, people will appear to engage in a commercial activity. Smith wrote: The bounty [subsidy] to the white-herring fishery is a tonnage bounty; and is proportioned to the burden [size] of the ship, not to her diligence or success in the fishery; and it has, I am afraid, been too common for vessels to fit out for the sole purpose of catching, not the fish, but the bounty.
David Cay Johnston (Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill))
But if her brother were now to be imprisoned for years, she herself, being the eldest, would have to find a way of providing for the family. Living was hard even with her brother working so diligently. Though they ate only the bare minimum, they could not even keep up with rent payments, and debts kept piling up. In autumn when various grains ripened, prices fell, and just when tenant farmers absolutely had to sell, they hit rock bottom. Then it would be winter, and by the time spring came, prices always began to rise. That was the time when landowners and urban wholesale merchants who had taken and stored the tenant farmers’ grain would begin to sell. People like Okei stood no chance at all. To make up for the “gap,” they took up day labor, piled up gravel, cut timber, and dug irrigation ditches. Now her brother would be gone. Okei felt she could see what kind of life lay ahead of her. The Yamagami girl’s cries now pierced Okei’s body like shards of broken glass, one by one. “You got your money, you had your fun—what in the world are you still bawling about?!” Okei heard the words but could not bear to listen to them. Agitated, she stood up and then promptly sat down. In a short while, her mother returned.
Takiji Kobayashi (The Crab Cannery Ship: and Other Novels of Struggle)
We become beholden to them, laborers on the Facebook farm, where our content can be seen by hundreds or thousands, but it is owned, along with our digital identities, by the Facebook mother ship. We’re not just the product, we’re also making the product. It’s for this reason that some observers have come to think of our relationship to social media as something like feudalism. They call it “digital serfdom.
Jacob Silverman (Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection)
faster. As I was closing this book, Walmart announced that to upgrade its ability to compete in e-commerce with Amazon—which still does eight times Walmart’s sales online—it was buying Jet, a year-old Internet retail startup. The Economist reported on August 13, 2016, that Jet’s appeal to Walmart was its “real-time pricing algorithm, which tempts customers with lower prices if they add more items to their basket. The algorithm also identifies which of Jet’s vendors is closest to the consumer, helping to minimize shipping costs and allowing them to offer discounts. Walmart plans to integrate the software with its own.” It turns out that “under a second” was just too damned slow.
Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
look no further than Peter A. Lawrence’s developmental biology text The Making of a Fly, which in April 2011 was selling for $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping) on Amazon’s third-party marketplace. How and why had this—admittedly respected—book reached a sale price of more than $23 million? It turns out that two of the sellers were setting their prices algorithmically as constant fractions of each other: one was always setting it to 0.99830 times the competitor’s price, while the competitor was automatically setting their own price to 1.27059 times the other’s. Neither seller apparently thought to set any limit on the resulting numbers, and eventually the process spiraled totally out of control. It’s possible that a similar mechanism was in play during the enigmatic and controversial stock market “flash crash” of May 6, 2010, when, in a matter of minutes, the price of several seemingly random companies in the S&P 500 rose to more than $100,000 a share, while others dropped precipitously—sometimes to $0.01 a share. Almost $1 trillion of value instantaneously went up in smoke.
Brian Christian (Algorithms To Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions)
Every choice has a cost, Miss Song. The real question is whether or not one is willing to pay it.” “No, Blake. The real question is whether it’s worth the price.
Heidi Heilig (The Ship Beyond Time (The Girl From Everywhere, #2))
total of 1,599,640 man hours of labor went into the building of the LZ-129 “Hindenburg”. The price for technology is often measured in the lifes lost. Two workers are known to have been killed in Friedrichshafen during the construction of the “Hindenburg”. One worker who was walking along the roof, during an inspection check tour, slipped on the wet gangway along the roof, near the shed door and fell 50 meters to his death. A second worker was killed, when
John Provan (The Hindenburg - a ship of dreams)
total of 1,599,640 man hours of labor went into the building of the LZ-129 “Hindenburg”. The price for technology is often measured in the lifes lost. Two workers are known to have been killed in Friedrichshafen during the construction of the “Hindenburg”. One worker who was walking along the roof, during an inspection check tour, slipped on the wet gangway along the roof, near the shed door and fell 50 meters to his death. A second worker was killed, when the moveable scaffolding collapsed during work on the tail section. He too fell to this death. Unfortunately, the names of both workers have been lost through time.
John Provan (The Hindenburg - a ship of dreams)
locations for joining the girder sections. The empty aluminum structure had a total weight of 56,368 kg, a figure which doubled, when all equipment was placed onboard. A total of 1,599,640 man hours of labor went into the building of the LZ-129 “Hindenburg”. The price for technology is often measured in the lifes lost. Two workers are known to have been killed in Friedrichshafen during the construction of the “Hindenburg”.
John Provan (The Hindenburg - a ship of dreams)
Like many lifelong spacers, Ashby didn't care much for heights on land. Looking down at a planet from orbit was no problem, because out there, falling meant floating. If you took a long fall inside a ship--say, down the engine shaft on a big homesteader--you'd have enough time to shout the word "falling!" This would prompt the local AI to turn off the adjacent artigrav net. Your descent would abruptly end, and you'd be free to drift over to the nearest railing. You'd piss off anyone in the vicinity who'd been drinking mek or working with small tech parts, but it was a fair price to pay for staying alive (the "falling" safety was also popularly exploited by kids, who found the sudden reversal in gravity within a crowded walkway or a classroom to be the height of hilarity). But planetside, there was no artigrav net. Even a drop of a dozen feet could mean death, if you landed wrong. Ashby didn't care much for gravity that couldn't be turned off.
Becky Chambers
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Christmas Days at sea are of varied character, fair to middling and down to plainly atrocious. In this statement I do not include Christmas Days on board passenger ships. A passenger is, of course, a brother (or sister), and quite a nice person in a way, but his Christmas Days are, I suppose, what he wants them to be: the conventional festivities of an expensive hotel included in the price of his ticket.
Charles Dickens (Delphi Christmas Collection Volume I (Illustrated) (Delphi Anthologies Book 6))
American government does not care whether you are a one-day-old baby who was brought here and ended up illegal or whether you were blindfolded and tossed into a shipping container and woke up to find yourself in Kansas City. You hear me? American government doesn’t give the tiniest piece of shit whose fault it is. Once you are here illegally, you are here illegally. You will pay the price.
Imbolo Mbue (Behold the Dreamers)
fuel to May’s ever-glowing fire. His in-laws would create and so would his father. Wilbur had been determined to see the infant shipped off to the workhouse and out of their lives. But he could handle his da the same as the rest of them if he was strong enough, and he would be strong over this. Mostly for his mother’s sake, he had to admit; she’d go mad with grief if the baby was put away, but also to make some sort of reparation to Bess, late though it was. And then there was Amy herself. He glanced down at the tot on his lap who was sleeping with her thumb in her mouth, her other hand clasping the front of his jacket. She had been sitting on Mrs Price’s lap finishing her supper when he had walked in the house, and when she had caught sight of him she had smiled and held out her arms. She had never done that before. Of course it was probably because she associated him with her grandma, he knew that, but nevertheless it had touched something inside him, melting the hardness.When all was said and done, you couldn’t blame the bairn for her beginnings. If anyone was the innocent in all of this, she was. As the tram jolted and creaked its way along, he looked out of the window, his mouth grim. There was
Rita Bradshaw (The Rainbow Years)
The consequences of this policy were twofold,” according to the historian John Fiske. “It was a long time before the Duke of Parma, who was besieging the city, succeeded in so blockading the Scheldt as to prevent ships laden with eatables from coming in below. Corn and preserved meats might have been hurried into the beleaguered city by thousands of tons. But no merchant would run the risk of having his ships sunk by the Duke’s batteries merely for the sake of finding a market no better than many others which could be reached at no risk at all. . . . . If provisions had brought a high price in Antwerp they would have been carried thither. As it was the city, by its own stupidity, blockaded itself far more effectually than the Duke of Parma could have done.” “In the second place,” Fiske concludes, “the enforced lowness of prices prevented any general retrenchment on the part of the citizens. Nobody felt it necessary to economize. So the city lived in high spirits until all at once provisions gave out. . . .”[10] In 1585 the city of Antwerp surrendered and was occupied by the forces of Spain.
Robert Lindsay Schuettinger (Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls: How Not to Fight Inflation)
But Ansel’s mood changed when they stood before the empty hippo cage. “The children miss Happy the Hippo, may he rest in peace,” he said. The taciturn visitor finally spoke. “Going price for that kind of wild animal is six thousand dollars.” Ansel stared misty-eyed into the empty cage for a minute before responding. “Three thousand five hundred,” he whispered. “Won’t even cover shipping,” the hunter responded. “Forty five hundred, final offer,” the lion of Dorchester roared. “Deal,” said the stranger.
Lawrence Harmon (The Death of an American Jewish Community: A Tragedy of Good Intentions)
1.​Textile production produces an estimated 1.2 billion tonnes of CO2e per year, which is more than international flights and maritime shipping combined.47 2.​The average person buys 60 per cent more items of clothing than they did just fifteen years ago, and keeps them for about half as long.48 3.​By 2030, global clothing consumption is projected to rise by 63 per cent, from 62 million tonnes to 102 million tonnes. That’s equivalent to more than 500 billion extra T-shirts.49 4.​By 2050, the equivalent of almost three earths could be required to provide the natural resources it would take to sustain our current lifestyles.50 5.​A polyester shirt has more than double the carbon footprint of a cotton shirt.51 And yet the cotton needed to make a single T-shirt can take 2,700 litres of water to grow – that’s enough drinking water to last a person three years.52 6.​At its current rate, the fashion industry is projected to use 35 per cent more land to grow fibres by 2030. That’s an extra 115 million hectares of land that could otherwise be used to grow food, or left to protect biodiversity.53 7.​Approximately 80 per cent of workers in the global garment industry are women aged 18–35.54 But only 12.5 per cent of clothing companies have a female CEO.55 8.​Among seventy-one leading retailers in the UK, 77 per cent believe there is a likelihood of modern slavery (forced labour) occurring at some stage in their supply chains.56 9.​More than 90 per cent of workers in the global garment industry have no possibility of negotiating their wages and conditions.57 10.​Increasing the price of a garment in the shop by 1 per cent could be enough to pay the workers who made it a living wage.58
Lauren Bravo (How To Break Up With Fast Fashion: A guilt-free guide to changing the way you shop – for good)
Economists are beginning to use attention to explain economic decisions.2 As a nice example, if shoppers were to pay full attention to the price they paid for goods and services, we would predict that $4.00 CDs could be advertised on eBay as $0.01 plus $3.99 shipping or $4.00 plus no shipping and generate the same sales. But in reality, shoppers pay much more attention to the sale price and much less to the shipping cost, and so sellers make more sales in the former condition.3 The inherent scarcity of attention has also caught on in the business world; it’s described as the “attention economy,” where obtaining the attention of customers and employees who are constantly bombarded by information and technology is an essential element of commercial success.
Paul Dolan (Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think)
Carry individual items as opposed to whole lines. We wouldn’t try to carry a whole line of spices, or bag candy, or vitamins. Each SKU (a single size of a single flavor of a single item) had to justify itself, as opposed to riding piggyback into the stores just so we had a “complete” line. Depth of assortment now was of no interest. As soon as Fair Trade ended in 1978, we began to get rid of the hundred brands of Scotch, seventy brands of bourbon, and fifty brands of gin. And slowly (it was like pulling teeth) we dismantled the broad assortment of California boutique wines. No fixtures. By 1982, the store would have most of its merchandise displayed in stacks with very little shelving. This implied a lower SKU count: a high-SKU store needs lots of shelves. The average supermarket carries about 27,000 SKUs in 30,000 square feet of sales area, or roughly one SKU per square foot. Trader Joe’s, by 1988, carried one SKU per five square feet! Price-Costco, one of my heroes, carried about one SKU per twenty square feet. As much as possible I wanted products to be displayed in the same cartons in which they were shipped by the manufacturers. This was already a key element in our wine merchandising. Each SKU would stand on its own two feet as a profit center. We would earn a gross profit on each SKU that was justified by the cost of handling that item. There would be no “loss leaders.” Above all we would not carry any item unless we could be outstanding in terms of price (and make a profit at that price per #7) or uniqueness. By the end of 1977, we increased the size of the buying staff, adding one very key person, Doug Rauch, whom we hired out of the wholesale health food trade. Leroy, Frank Kono, Bob Berning, and Doug rolled out Five Year Plan ’77, which for purposes of this history I call Mac the Knife. Back in those days we had no idea how sharp that knife would become! We just wanted to survive deregulation. Everything now depended on buying. So here we go into the next chapter, Intensive Buying.
Joe Coulombe (Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys)
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When God created human beings, He bestowed upon us the greatest gift besides His love. Out of His love. Two gifts, really, but so interconnected they are like one. First, the capacity to do anything, good or evil, wise or unwise, loving or hateful. And second, true free will to act upon that capacity. “Those are God-like qualities. Not in power, but in choice. If He had created us in such a way that we could only do good, if we were incapable of acting badly, selfishly, causing pain or harm, then the notion of free will would be meaningless, would it not? Not only that, true free will precludes God’s intervention in our lives. There is no real free will if God intercedes to protect us or save us from the consequences of our own or other people’s actions and choices. We have to face those consequences ourselves. That is the price we pay for free will.” Father Veronica sighed heavily, and when she resumed there was an ache in her voice. “Can you imagine the sacrifice God has made to provide us with this gift? He knows we will not always make good choices, He knows we will cause ourselves and others terrible pain and grief. Can you imagine His own pain and grief, knowing that He could intercede, could change our lives and ease our suffering, but knowing also that to do so would be to take back the wonderful gift He has bestowed? “For we can also love and comfort one another, we can choose good over evil, we can relish and appreciate life, we can revel in all the small, wonderful pleasures of being alive, we can love and be loved, and those things are all the greater because they are freely chosen. Because we are not puppets.
Richard Paul Russo (Ship of Fools)
Tis in vain therefore to go about effectually to reduce the price of Interest by a Law; and you may as rationally hope to set a fixt Rate upon the Hire of Houses, or Ships, as of Money.
John Locke (Some Considerations of the Lowering of Interest and Raising the Value of Money)
Hedge funds using satellite intelligence on ships and tank levels to identify upcoming impact to oil producers and commodity prices
Alexander Denev (The Book of Alternative Data: A Guide for Investors, Traders and Risk Managers)
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Avinavan Iyaar
Boy Lost Picture a sunset in a small port town by the sea. Two teenaged boys sitting on the docks watching the ships as they fly across the water. One reaches out and takes the other’s hand. In this brush of skin for skin, a thousand unspoken promises erupt between them, and both are determined to keep them. This is what youth is. The sheer belief that you will be able to keep every promise you made to someone else. That you will be able to love someone into a forever when you do not even understand what forever means. An evening spent in the headiness of love, they go back to their respective homes. One boy helps his mother with cooking and cleaning and looking after his little sister. His father is a good man, a sailor who brings home with him meagre wages, but a heart full of love and a quicksilver tongue that tells stories of faraway lands to enthral them all. But this boy, despite his blessings, is not happy. He may have been blessed with a loving family, but that faraway look is made of unrest and wanderlust, something about him says fae, changeling, wearing the skin of a boy who was always destined to fly, to leave.   The other boy returns home to a father who drinks and a mother who works so hard that she is never there. He is the unwanted creature in this home, a beating waiting for him at every corner. His father’s temper is a beast so powerful that a boy made of paper bones barely held together cannot fight him. He hides in his room. He lives for a boy at sunset, hope made into a human being. Now picture this. This boy of paper bones alone at the docks the next sunset. And this boy alone on the docks again on a rainy day. And this boy alone on the docks every day after, waiting for someone who promised him forevers he never intended to keep. This boy becoming a man, a heart wounded so young in youth that it never quite healed right. Imagine him becoming a sailor, searching land after land for a boy he once loved, thinking he was hurt, or stolen, just needing to know what happened to him. Now see him finally finding out that the boy he loved in his boyhood ran away to a magical land where he never grew up. That without a second glance, he just forgot every promise of forever. Imagine his rage, that ancient pain turning to a terrible anger and escaping from the forgotten attic of his mangled heart. Think of what happens when immense love turns into immense hate. An anger so intense it cannot be controlled. What he would give up to avenge the boy he once was, paper-boned, standing on the docks, broken without a single person to love him, simply all alone. A hand is a small price to pay for a magical ship that will take him to Neverland, a place that lives on a star. Becoming a villain called Captain Hook is a small exchange to show Peter Pan that you cannot throw away love and think you will get away unscarred.
Nikita Gill (Fierce Fairytales: Poems and Stories to Stir Your Soul)
Women, I’ve noticed, are easily distracted by clothing stores, and I was certain that the ladies on the Titanic stopped at the ship’s apparel shop for the Half-Price Sinking Sale on their way to the lifeboats.
Nelson DeMille (Wild Fire (John Corey, #4))
The data we’d collected over the years through many tests just reinforced this. Shipping promotions drove significantly higher growth than any other type of promotion. The perceived value of free shipping was higher than straight discounting of product prices. Put another way, if the average discount of a free shipping promotion was 10 percent, we’d see significantly more demand lift (called elasticity) by offering free shipping than by discounting product prices by 10 percent. It wasn’t even close. Free shipping drove sales. We just had to figure out a sustainable way to offer free shipping.
Colin Bryar (Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon)
We are all more than just our bodies, but also our thoughts, emotions, and spirituality, which combine to determine our health.” “Our bodies have a natural wisdom with intrinsic knowledge of how to grow, heal, balance, and regenerate.” “We have the ability to change our own genetic blueprints for ourselves and for our children.” “Your body is more than the sum of its parts; it has an energy, or life force, that goes beyond the mere physical nature of your body or your generation.” “Human health is intricately and inextricably connected to planetary health.” “Water is the life source and most essential component of each cell of your body.” “Learn to live in the moment and tune in to mindful breathing while engaging all of your senses to soak in the universe around you.” “Healthy sleep habits will help you learn faster, get stronger and more fit, and protect yourself from diseases.” “Spiritual awakening is important for the state of consciousness with which you meet the world.” “If you don’t make self-care a priority in your life, you will pay a high price as your health declines.” “Balance is not something you are born with, nor is it something you find. Rather, it is something you must create” “If your body is balanced, your mind will be at peace and your spirit will soar!” “Resilience to injury is not an inborn trait; it must be nurtured and acquired.” “Excessive fear of injury takes away the joy of living.” “Allow nature to nurture a child’s backbone, literally and figuratively.” “Dig deep and find the foundation of your own core to prepare you for all adversity, sustain your health and wellness through all your endeavors, and build the home of your dreams for your mind-body-spirit.” “The shared challenges of despair, hardship, and adversity promote collaboration, and collaboration fortifies the collective consciousness of the international community.” “Learn to live your life from your core, and harness and embrace your unlimited potential for strength, health, and growth.” “Hang loose and fly like a butterfly to withstand all the perturbations and punches life brings your way.” “Get back in touch with your primitive animal spirit and pop some pandiculation into your day” “Cultivating body awareness will help you stand taller, look slimmer, and find your grace against gravity.” “Exercise, outlook, diet, and lifestyle choices actually change the way your DNA is expressed within your body to help you avoid injury, fight disease, and thrive.” “When you substitute negative beliefs with positive ones, you will begin to notice positive results.” “Find what floats your boat and enjoy the journey!” “Do not fear the storm, for you will learn to sail your ship through wind and wave.
Bohdanna Zazulak (Master Your Core: A Science-Based Guide to Achieve Peak Performance and Resilience to Injury)
It’s hard to imagine Tim Cook blurbing a Samsung phone. That’s because Apple seeks to corner the market, not to spread an idea or create a positive change. They’re in the business of raising their stock price, and everything else is merely a tactic.
Seth Godin (The Practice: Shipping Creative Work)
Wood,” explained Nancy, “that’s been treated with Wolman solution so termites—tropical wood-eating ants—won’t touch it. Jim was shipping over five million feet
E. Hoffmann Price (The E. Hoffmann Price Spicy Adventure MEGAPACK ®: 14 Tales from the "Spicy" Pulp Magazines!)