The Contractor Movie Quotes

The Ten Ways to Evaluate a Market provide a back-of-the-napkin method you can use to identify the attractiveness of any potential market. Rate each of the ten factors below on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is terrible and 10 fantastic. When in doubt, be conservative in your estimate: Urgency. How badly do people want or need this right now? (Renting an old movie is low urgency; seeing the first showing of a new movie on opening night is high urgency, since it only happens once.) Market Size. How many people are purchasing things like this? (The market for underwater basket-weaving courses is very small; the market for cancer cures is massive.) Pricing Potential. What is the highest price a typical purchaser would be willing to spend for a solution? (Lollipops sell for $0.05; aircraft carriers sell for billions.) Cost of Customer Acquisition. How easy is it to acquire a new customer? On average, how much will it cost to generate a sale, in both money and effort? (Restaurants built on high-traffic interstate highways spend little to bring in new customers. Government contractors can spend millions landing major procurement deals.) Cost of Value Delivery. How much will it cost to create and deliver the value offered, in both money and effort? (Delivering files via the internet is almost free; inventing a product and building a factory costs millions.) Uniqueness of Offer. How unique is your offer versus competing offerings in the market, and how easy is it for potential competitors to copy you? (There are many hair salons but very few companies that offer private space travel.) Speed to Market. How soon can you create something to sell? (You can offer to mow a neighbor’s lawn in minutes; opening a bank can take years.) Up-front Investment. How much will you have to invest before you’re ready to sell? (To be a housekeeper, all you need is a set of inexpensive cleaning products. To mine for gold, you need millions to purchase land and excavating equipment.) Upsell Potential. Are there related secondary offers that you could also present to purchasing customers? (Customers who purchase razors need shaving cream and extra blades as well; buy a Frisbee and you won’t need another unless you lose it.) Evergreen Potential. Once the initial offer has been created, how much additional work will you have to put in in order to continue selling? (Business consulting requires ongoing work to get paid; a book can be produced once and then sold over and over as is.) When you’re done with your assessment, add up the score. If the score is 50 or below, move on to another idea—there are better places to invest your energy and resources. If the score is 75 or above, you have a very promising idea—full speed ahead. Anything between 50 and 75 has the potential to pay the bills but won’t be a home run without a huge investment of energy and resources.

It would have been easy for Donald to be a hero. People who have hated and criticized him would have forgiven or overlooked his endless stream of appalling actions if he’d simply had somebody take the pandemic preparedness manual down from the shelf where it was put after the Obama administration gave it to him. If he’d alerted the appropriate agencies and state governments at the first evidence the virus was highly contagious, had extremely high mortality rates, and was not being contained. If he’d invoked the Defense Production Act of 1950 to begin production of PPE, ventilators, and other necessary equipment to prepare the country to deal with the worst-case scenario. If he’d allowed medical and scientific experts to give daily press conferences during which facts were presented clearly and honestly. If he’d ensured that there was a systematic, top-down approach and coordination among all of the necessary agencies. Most of those tasks would have required almost no effort on his part. All he would have had to do was make a couple of phone calls, give a speech or two, then delegate everything else. He might have been accused of being too cautious, but most of us would have been safe and many more of us would have survived. Instead, states are forced to buy vital supplies from private contractors; the federal government commandeers those supplies, and then FEMA distributes them back to private contractors, who then resell them. While thousands of Americans die alone, Donald touts stock market gains. As my father lay dying alone, Donald went to the movies. If he can in any way profit from your death, he’ll facilitate it, and then he’ll ignore the fact that you died.

the military classified Patent 2,292,387 as top secret and, in the 1950s, gave it to a contractor for the construction of a sonobuoy that could detect submarines in the water and then transmit that information to an airplane above using Hedy’s unjammable frequency-hopping idea. Later, the military and other private entities began to make their own inventions using this interpretation of spread-spectrum technology—without any recompense to Hedy, as the patent had expired—and today, aspects of her frequency-hopping idea can be found in the wireless devices we use every day. Hedy’s role in these advancements was unknown until the 1990s, when she received a few awards for her invention, recognition she considered more important than the success of her movies.

THERE WAS ONE MAN in the movie business immune to the usual pressures of dealing with actors, directors, set design, and union contractors. He created stars who never aged, never complained, never walked off the job, and never demanded salaries. By 1937 Walt Disney was already a dominant parallel force to the studio system, “the Horatio Alger hero of Cinema.” He did need distribution, but his company’s work had such a strong draw at the box office that the distribution arms needed Disney more than the other way around. He controlled the biggest star in the world, Mickey Mouse, who had debuted in a short seven-minute cartoon Steamboat Willie in 1928. Even better, Mickey was a commercial phenomenon away from the box office.