Tools Of The Trade Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Tools Of The Trade. Here they are! All 100 of them:

So you think that money is the root of all evil? [...] Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?
Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
In the end, the most important thing is to be true to yourself and those you love and work hard. I mean, work like there's no tomorrow. Train. Strive. I mean, really train and cultivate your talent to the highest degree. Be the best at what you do. Get to know more about your field than anybody alive. Use the tools of your trade, if it's books or a floor to dance on or a body of water to swim in. Whatever it is, it's yours.
Michael Jackson (Moonwalk)
The writing of poetry is a chancy business, it's currency solitude and loss, its tools coffee and too much wine, its hours midnight, dawn, and dusk, and unlike other trade the hours asleep are not time off.
Keith Miller (The Book of Flying)
Make your peace with the fact that saying ‘no’ often requires trading popularity for respect.” —Greg McKeown, Essentialism
Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
Being simply “better than average” is not good enough. You have to be head and shoulders above the crowd to win a minus-sum game.
Alexander Elder (The New Trading for a Living: Psychology, Discipline, Trading Tools and Systems, Risk Control, Trade Management (Wiley Trading))
Markets need a fresh supply of losers just as builders of the ancient pyramids needed a fresh supply of slaves. Losers bring money into the markets, which is necessary for the prosperity of the trading industry.
Alexander Elder (The New Trading for a Living: Psychology, Discipline, Trading Tools and Systems, Risk Control, Trade Management (Wiley Trading))
So far, the only people who've made money from trading systems are their sellers.
Alexander Elder (The New Trading for a Living: Psychology, Discipline, Trading Tools and Systems, Risk Control, Trade Management (Wiley Trading))
An astute trader aims to enter the market during quiet times and take profits during wild times.
Alexander Elder (The New Trading for a Living: Psychology, Discipline, Trading Tools and Systems, Risk Control, Trade Management (Wiley Trading))
The answer is to draw a line between a businessman's risk and a loss. As traders, we always take businessman's risks, but we may never take a loss greater than this predetermined risk.
Alexander Elder (The New Trading for a Living: Psychology, Discipline, Trading Tools and Systems, Risk Control, Trade Management (Wiley Trading))
Here, bodies are just another tool, to be stolen or traded as the people in power see fit. Burning down someone's lab before they've been properly vanquished, on the other hand, is rude.
Seanan McGuire (Come Tumbling Down (Wayward Children, #5))
I’ve spent a lot of time talking about the psychological judo that I’ve made my stock in trade: the calibrated questions, the mirrors, the tools for knocking my counterpart off his game and getting him to bid against himself.
Chris Voss (Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It)
I have found that the tools for my trade- writing, are very basic: paper, a pen, time, food and perhaps a little tequila...
José N. Harris
To help ensure success, practice defensive money management. A good trader watches his capital as carefully as a professional scuba diver watches his air supply.
Alexander Elder (The New Trading for a Living: Psychology, Discipline, Trading Tools and Systems, Risk Control, Trade Management (Wiley Trading))
All European writers are ‘slaves of their baptism,’ if I may paraphrase Rimbaud; like it or not, their writing carries baggage from an immense and almost frightening tradition; they accept that tradition or they fight against it, it inhabits them, it is their familiar and their succubus. Why write, if everything has, in a way, already been said? Gide observed sardonically that since nobody listened, everything has to be said again, yet a suspicion of guilt and superfluity leads the European intellectual to the most extreme refinements of his trade and tools, the only way to avoid paths too much traveled. Thus the enthusiasm that greets novelties, the uproar when a writer has succeeded in giving substance to a new slice of the invisible; merely recall symbolism, surrealism, the ‘nouveau roman’: finally something truly new that neither Ronsard, nor Stendahl , nor Proust imagined. For a moment we can put aside our guilt; even the epigones begin too believe they are doing something new. Afterwards, slowly, they begin to feel European again and each writer still has his albatross around his neck.
Julio Cortázar (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)
Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade—with reason, not force, as their final arbiter—it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability—and the degree of a man’s productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?
Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
Dantes examined the various articles shown to him with the same attention that he had bestowed on the curiosities and strange tools exhibited in the shops at Marseilles as the works of the savages in the South Seas from whence they had been brought by the different trading vessels.
Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo)
Later Michel went up to the priest as he was packing away the tools of the trade. “I was very interested in what you were saying earlier…” The man of God smiled urbanely, then Michel began to talk about the Aspect experiments and the EPR paradox: how two particle, once united, are forever and inseparable whole, “which seems pretty much in keeping with what you were saying about one flesh.” The priest’s smile froze slightly. “What I’m trying to say, “Michel went on enthusiastically, “is that from an ontological point of view, the pair can be assigned a single vector in Hilbert space. Do you see what I mean?
Michel Houellebecq (The Elementary Particles)
So you think money is the root of all evil? Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim you product by tears, or of looters, who can take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?
Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
He put into his one little glass everything he raised to his lips, and it was as if he had always carried in his pocket, like a tool of his trade, this receptacle, a little glass cut with a fineness of which the art had long since been lost, and kept in an old morocco case stamped in uneffaceable gilt with the arms of a deposed dynasty.
Henry James (The Golden Bowl)
To win in the markets, we need to master three essential components of trading: sound psychology, a logical trading system, and an effective risk management plan.
Alexander Elder (The New Trading for a Living: Psychology, Discipline, Trading Tools and Systems, Risk Control, Trade Management (Wiley Trading))
It is hard enough to know what the market is going to do; if you don't know what you are going to do, the game is lost.
Alexander Elder (The New Trading for a Living: Psychology, Discipline, Trading Tools and Systems, Risk Control, Trade Management (Wiley Trading))
A stock screening feature is then used to find the leading stocks within the leading sectors.
Debabrata (David) Das (Make Money Trading Leading Stocks: A Beginner's Guide to Free Trading Tools, Technical Analysis, Money and Risk Management, Trading Log for profits in ... Stock Market, Trend and Momentum Trading))
then I realize that I’m reverting to analyst mode, to the seesaw give-and-take of Q&A. Curiosity and compassion: the tools of my trade.
A.J. Finn (The Woman in the Window)
According to Q-Jo, the whole tarot deck, or at least the twenty-two trump cards of the Major Arcana, may be read as the Fool's journey. "On one important level," she explained, "the major cards are chapters in the story of a quest. I'm talking the universal human quest for understanding and divine reunion. And it doesn't matter whether the quest starts with the Fool or ends with him, because it's a loop anyhow, a cycle endlessly repeated. When the naive young Fool finally tumbles over the precipice, he falls into the world of experience. Now his journey has really begun. Along the way, he'll meet all the teachers and tempters - the tempters are teachers, too - and challenging situations that a person is likely to meet in the task of his or her growing. The Fool is potentially everybody, but not everybody has the wisdom or the guts to play the fool. A lot of folks don't know what's in that bag they're carrying. And they're all too willing to trade it for cash. Inside the bag, the have every tool they need to facilitate their life's journey, but they won't even open it up and glance inside. Subconsciously, the goal of all of us out-of-control primates is essentially the same, but let me assure you of this: the only ones who'll ever reach that goal are the ones who have the courage to make fools of themselves along the way.
Tom Robbins (Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas)
In these story telling moments we equip our children, with crucial solution tools for life. To deprive them of these necessary teachable moments is like denying a carpenter the tools of his trade.
Drexel Deal (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped in My Father Book 1))
The mystery of existence will always remain a mystery. All we know for sure is what the ancients knew: each succeeding generation forms a link in the braided cord of humanity. Each of our lives is shallower if we do not know and pay homage to where we came from. The past forms the world that we currently inhabit, and our actions today, comparable to our ancestors’ actions of yesterday, will reverberate in the history of tomorrow. While the tools of our trades evolve from generation to generation, the way that people behave and the motives behind their behavior remains constant. Each generation must chart the same dangerous territories of the heart. Each succeeding generation must diagnosis the illnesses that imperil their mental, physical, social, and economic wellbeing. Life is brutally painful and extraordinary joyful.
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
The essential difference between rich societies and poor societies does not stem from any greater effort the former devote to work, nor even from any greater technological knowledge the former hold. Instead it arises mainly from the fact that rich nations possess a more extensive network of capital goods wisely invested from an entrepreneurial standpoint. These goods consists of machines, tools, computers, buildings, semi-manufactured goods, software, etc., and they exist due to prior savings of the nation's citizens. In other words, comparatively rich societies possess more wealth because they have more time accumulated in the form of capital goods, which places them closer in time to the achievement of much more valuable goals.
Jesús Huerta de Soto
There are good trading systems out there, but they have to be monitored and adjusted using individual judgment. You have to stay on the ball—you cannot abdicate responsibility for your success to a mechanical system.
Alexander Elder (The New Trading for a Living: Psychology, Discipline, Trading Tools and Systems, Risk Control, Trade Management (Wiley Trading))
People trade for many reasons—some rational and many irrational. Trading offers an opportunity to make a lot of money in a hurry. Money symbolizes freedom to many people, even though they often don't know what to do with it.
Alexander Elder (The New Trading for a Living: Psychology, Discipline, Trading Tools and Systems, Risk Control, Trade Management (Wiley Trading))
The Maya’s economy was based on extensive occupational specialization, with skilled potters, weavers, woodworkers, and tool and ornament makers. They also traded obsidian, jaguar pelts, marine shells, cacao, salt, and feathers among themselves and other polities over long distances in Mexico. They probably had money, too, and like the Aztecs, used cacao beans for currency. The
Daron Acemoğlu (Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty)
Why do most traders lose and wash out of the markets? Emotional and mindless trading are big reasons, but there is another. Markets are actually set up so that most traders must lose money. The trading industry slowly kills traders with commissions and slippage.
Alexander Elder (The New Trading for a Living: Psychology, Discipline, Trading Tools and Systems, Risk Control, Trade Management (Wiley Trading))
No human pursuit achieves dignity until it can be called work, and when you can experience a physical loneliness for the tools of your trade, you see that the other things — the experiments, the irrelevant vocations, the vanities you used to hold — were false to you.
Beryl Markham (West with the Night)
What’s it like to be us? Too much. We feel too much. React too much. Say too much. Need too much. So says the world. I say: the world is wrong. There is an exquisite trade-off for a life so differently led: complex imagination, limitless curiosity, profound compassion, and restless independent thought. They are the core of everything I am. They will be responsible for whatever legacy I leave behind.
Jennifer O'Toole (Autism in Heels: The Untold Story of a Female Life on the Spectrum)
I like the name writing practices better than Creative Writing. As I have said, nobody can teach creative writing—run like mad from anybody who thinks he can. But one can teach practices, like finger exercises on the piano; one can share the tools of the trade, and what one has gleaned from the great writers: it is the great writers themselves who do the teaching, rather than the leader of a seminar. It doesn’t take long for the gifted student to realize that there are certain things the great writers always do, and certain things they never do; it is from these that we learn.
Madeleine L'Engle (A Circle of Quiet (The Crosswicks Journals Book 1))
Our medicines are not something you'll find at the drugstore, but at the bookshop, in the library, or downloaded onto your electronic reading device. We are bibliotherapists, and the tools of our trade are books. Our apothecary contains Balzacian balms and Tolstoyan tourniquets, the salves of Saramago and the purges of Perec and Proust.
Ella Berthoud & Susan Elderkin (The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You)
Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?
Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
Use limit orders almost exclusively—except when placing stops. Be careful on what tools you spend money: there are no magic solutions. Success cannot be bought, only earned.
Alexander Elder (The New Trading for a Living: Psychology, Discipline, Trading Tools and Systems, Risk Control, Trade Management (Wiley Trading))
The New Sell & Sell Short: How to Take Profits, Cut Losses, and Benefit from Price Declines (John Wiley & Sons, 2011).
Alexander Elder (The New Trading for a Living: Psychology, Discipline, Trading Tools and Systems, Risk Control, Trade Management (Wiley Trading))
Robert lay on the bed and checked the remote to see the time on the television screen. Other than that function, the black box was completely useless, another tool of control.
Kenneth Eade (An Evil Trade (Paladine Political Thriller))
Learn both the good and evil in the world. Learn the ways of men—young, adult, and old. Learn a skill or trade and master it well. They are your tools to a life that is swell.
Rodolfo Martin Vitangcol, The Pink Poetry
Buying stocks when the broader overall market is trending up is a good idea, for long positions. The trend will provide a tailwind for the stock prices to move higher.
Debabrata (David) Das (Make Money Trading Leading Stocks: A Beginner's Guide to Free Trading Tools, Technical Analysis, Money and Risk Management, Trading Log for profits in ... Stock Market, Trend and Momentum Trading))
For international readers, the FREE tools presented in this book are applicable for trading any stock market in the world.
Debabrata (David) Das (Make Money Trading Leading Stocks: A Beginner's Guide to Free Trading Tools, Technical Analysis, Money and Risk Management, Trading Log for profits in ... Stock Market, Trend and Momentum Trading))
The tools and resources used in this book are FREE and readily available on the internet. Details on how to access these tools are shown.
Debabrata (David) Das (Make Money Trading Leading Stocks: A Beginner's Guide to Free Trading Tools, Technical Analysis, Money and Risk Management, Trading Log for profits in ... Stock Market, Trend and Momentum Trading))
The tools of his trade included faith, perseverance, resilience, and the ability to learn—to change and to grow. But his greatest tool of all, always, was hope.
Shimon Peres (No Room for Small Dreams: Courage, Imagination and the Making of Modern Israel)
No human pursuit achieves dignity until it can be called work, and when you can experience a physical loneliness for the tools of your trade,
Beryl Markham (West with the Night)
The public wants gurus, and new gurus will come. As an intelligent trader, you must realize that in the long run, no guru is going to make you rich. You have to work on that yourself.
Alexander Elder (The New Trading for a Living: Psychology, Discipline, Trading Tools and Systems, Risk Control, Trade Management (Wiley Trading))
They say you had a trade as a blacksmith; is that correct?" Now she will say, shoe a horse? "It was my father's trade." "I begin to understand you." She nods. "The blacksmith makes his own tools.
Hilary Mantel (Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell, #1))
How thoroughly the chimps and bonobos have erased the list of purported human distinctions!-self-awareness, language, ideas and their association, reason, trade, play, choice, courage, love and altruism, laughter, concealed ovulation, kissing, face-to-face sex, female orgasm, division of labor, cannibalism, art, music, politics, and featherless bipedalism, besides tool using, tool making, and much else. Philosophers and scientists confidently offer up traits said to be uniquely human, and the apes casually knock them down--toppling the pretension that humans constitute some sort of biological aristocracy among the beings of Earth. Instead, we are more like the nouveau riche, incompletely accommodated to our recent exalted state, insecure about who we are, and trying to put as much distance as possible between us and our humble origins. It's as if our nearest relatives, by their very existence, refute all our explanations and justifications. So as counterweights to human arrogance and pride, it is good for us that there are still apes on Earth.
Carl Sagan
The obvious cure for the tragic shortcomings of human intuition in a high-tech world is education. And this offers priorities for educational policy: to provide students with the cognitive tools that are most important for grasping the modern world and that are most unlike the cognitive tools they are born with. The perilous fallacies we have seen in this chapter, for example, would give high priority to economics, evolutionary biology, and probability and statistics in any high school or college curriculum. Unfortunately, most curricula have barely changed since medieval times, and are barely changeable because no one wants to be the philistine who seems to be saying that it is unimportant to learn a foreign language, or English literature, or trigonometry, or the classics. But no matter how valuable a subject may be, there are only twenty-four hours in a day, and a decision to teach one subject is also a decision not to teach another one. The question is not whether trigonometry is important, but whether it is more important than statistics; not whether an educated person should know the classics, but whether it is more important for an educated person to know the classics than to know elementary economics. In a world whose complexities are constantly challenging our intuitions, these trade-offs cannot responsibly be avoided.
Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature)
So the first biological lesson of history is that life is competition. Competition is not only the life of trade, it is the trade of life—peaceful when food abounds, violent when the mouths outrun the food. Animals eat one another without qualm; civilized men consume one another by due process of law. Co-operation is real, and increases with social development, but mostly because it is a tool and form of competition; we co-operate in our group—our family, community, club, church, party, “race,” or nation—in order to strengthen our group in its competition with other groups. Competing groups have the qualities of competing individuals: acquisitiveness, pugnacity, partisanship, pride. Our states, being ourselves multiplied, are what we are; they write our natures in bolder type, and do our good and evil on an elephantine scale. We are acquisitive, greedy, and pugnacious because our blood remembers millenniums through which our forebears had to chase and fight and kill in order to survive, and had to eat to their gastric capacity for fear they should not soon capture another feast. War is a nation’s way of eating. It promotes co-operation because it is the ultimate form of competition. Until our states become members of a large and effectively protective group they will continue to act like individuals and families in the hunting stage.
Will Durant (The Lessons of History)
I am that man, the sum of him, the all of him, the hairless biped who struggled upward from the slime and created love and law out of the anarchy of fecund life that screamed and squalled in the jungle. I am all that that man was and did become. I see myself, through the painful generations, snaring and killing the game and the fish, clearing the first fields from the forest, making rude tools of stone and bone, building houses of wood, thatching the roofs with leaves and straw, domesticating the wild grasses and meadow roots, fathering them to become the progenitors of rice and millet and wheat and barley and all manner of succulent edibles, learning to scratch the soil, to sow, to reap, to store, beating out the fibers of plants to spin into thread and to weave into cloth, devising systems of irrigation, working in metals, making markets and trade routes, building boats, and founding navigation—ay, and organizing village life, welding villages to villages till they became tribes, welding tribes together till they became nations, ever seeking the laws of things, ever making the laws of humans so that humans might live together in amity and by united effort beat down and destroy all manner of creeping, crawling, squalling things that might else destroy them.
Jack London (The Star Rover (Modern Library Classics))
A loser's true problem is not account size but overtrading and sloppy money management. He takes risks that are too big for his account size, however small or big. No matter how good his system may be, a streak of bad trades is sure to put him out of business.
Alexander Elder (The New Trading for a Living: Psychology, Discipline, Trading Tools and Systems, Risk Control, Trade Management (Wiley Trading))
Skill teachers are made scarce by the belief in the value of licenses. Certification constitutes a form of market manipulation and is plausible only to a schooled mind. Most teachers of arts and trades are less skillful, less inventive, and less communicative than the best craftsmen and tradesmen. Most high-school teachers of Spanish or French do not speak the language as correctly as their pupils might after half a year of competent drills. Experimentsconducted by Angel Quintero in Puerto Rico suggest that many young teen-agers, if given the proper incentives, programs, and access to tools, are better than most schoolteachers at introducing their peers to the scientific exploration of plants, stars, and matter, and to the discovery of how and why a motor or a radio functions.
Ivan Illich (Deschooling Society)
The mental baggage from childhood can prevent you from succeeding in the markets. You have to identify your weaknesses and work to change. Keep a trading diary—write down your reasons for entering and exiting every trade. Look for repetitive patterns of success and failure.
Alexander Elder (The New Trading for a Living: Psychology, Discipline, Trading Tools and Systems, Risk Control, Trade Management (Wiley Trading))
Quantitative historians who use statistical tools to study big-picture historical trends, created a vast database of research on more than 36,000 slave ship voyages that took place over four hundred years. They found that there was a revolt on at least one in ten of these voyages. That was a much higher number than anyone expected. Revolts were never easy, but revolts on slave ships in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean were basically suicide missions. Nonetheless, many captives chose death over this exceptionally horrid new kind of slavery. This type of resistance was so expensive and time-consuming for the slavers, these historians estimate that it prevented at least a million more people from being captured and entering the slave trade. So why would a revolt happen on one ship and not another? The quantitative historians couldn't find a clear pattern, other than that captives tried to revolt whenever they would. But one thing did stand out: The more women onboard a slave ship, the more likely a revolt. Let me emphasize this point: the more women onboard a slave ship, the more likely a revolt would occur.
Rebecca Hall (Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts)
- Ten thousand years ago, when we were divided into many small groups, the propensities may have served our species well. We can understand why they should be easy to evoke, why they are stock in trade of every demagogue and hack politician. But we cannot wait for natural selection to further mitigate these ancient primate algorithms. That would take too long. We must work with what tools we have – to understand who we are, how we got to be that way, and how to transcend our deficiencies. Then we can begin to create a society less apt to bring out the worst in us.
Carl Sagan (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors)
The biblical way to help people rise out of poverty is through wealth creation, not wealth redistribution. For lasting results, we must offer the poor a hand up, not merely a handout. You spell long-term poverty reduction “j-o-b-s.” Training and tools liberate people. Trade, not aid, builds the prosperity of nations.
Wayne Grudem (The Poverty of Nations: A Sustainable Solution)
No one is alone in this world. No act is without consequences for others. It is a tenet of chaos theory that, in dynamical systems, the outcome of any process is sensitive to its starting point-or, in the famous cliche, the flap of a butterfly's wings in the Amazon can cause a tornado in Texas. I do not assert markets are chaotic, though my fractal geometry is one of the primary mathematical tools of "chaology." But clearly, the global economy is an unfathomably complicated machine. To all the complexity of the physical world of weather, crops, ores, and factories, you add the psychological complexity of men acting on their fleeting expectations of what may or may not happen-sheer phantasms. Companies and stock prices, trade flows and currency rates, crop yields and commodity futures-all are inter-related to one degree or another, in ways we have barely begun to understand. In such a world, it is common sense that events in the distant past continue to echo in the present.
Benoît B. Mandelbrot (The (Mis)Behavior of Markets)
I looked out through the narrow door. The traffic ceaselessly passed; men and women hurried along with set faces. Phantasms of horror, all of them: infernal realms wherein they dwelt. Outside, men lived under the tyranny of things. Their every action was determined by the orders of mere matter, by money, and the tools of their trade and the unthinking laws of habit and convention. But here I seemed to be safe from things, living at a remove from actuality; here where a bearded old man, improbable survival from some other time, indomitably played the music of romance, despite the fact that the phantasms of horror might occasionally drown the sound of it with their clamour.
Aldous Huxley (The Bookshop)
Archaeologists excavating 30,000-year-old Sapiens sites in the European heartland occasionally find there seashells from the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts. In all likelihood, these shells got to the continental interior through long-distance trade between different Sapiens bands. Neanderthal sites lack any evidence of such trade. Each group manufactured its own tools from local materials.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
Thieving was not a sheer absurdity. It was a form of human industry, perverse indeed, but still an industry exercised in an industrious world; it was work undertaken for the same reason as the work in potteries, in coal mines, in fields, in tool-grinding shops. It was labour, whose practical difference from the other forms of labour consisted in the nature of its risk, which did not lie in ankylosis, or lead poisoning, or fire-damp, or gritty dust, but in what may be briefly defined in its own special phraseology as "Seven years' hard". Chief Inspector Heat was, of course, not insensible to the gravity of moral differences. But neither were the thieves he had been looking after. They submitted to the severe sanction of a morality familiar to Chief Inspector Heat with a certain resignation. They were his fellow citizens gone wrong because of imperfect education, Chief Inspector Heat believed; but allowing for that difference, he could understand the mind of a burglar, because, as a matter of fact, the mind and the instincts of a burglar are of the same kind as the mind and the instincts of a police officer. Both recognize the same conventions, and have a working knowledge of each other's methods and of the routine of their respective trades. They understand each other, which is advantageous to both, and establishes a sort of amenity in their relations. Products of the same machine, one classed as useful and the other as noxious, they take the machine for granted in different ways, but with a seriousness essentially the same. The mind of Chief Inspector Heat was inaccessible to ideas of revolt. But his thieves were not rebels. His bodily vigour, his cool, inflexible manner, his courage, and his fairness, had secured for him much respect and some adulation in the sphere of his early successes. He had felt himself revered and admired. And Chief Inspector Heat, arrested within six paces of the anarchist nicknamed the Professor, gave a thought of regret to the world of thieves--sane, without morbid ideals, working by routine, respectful of constituted authorities, free from all taint of hate and despair.
Joseph Conrad (The Secret Agent)
The processes of corporate power do not work in isolation. The economic and legal mechanisms that allow the privatization of the commonwealth, externalization of costs, predatory economic practices, political influence-buying, manipulation of regulation and deregulation, control of the media, propaganda and advertising in schools, and the use of police and military forces to protect the property of the wealthy-all of these work synergistically to weave a complex web of power. Activists have dedicated lifetimes of necessary work to deal with the results of corporate power, by trying to mitigate the results of power: an ever-increasing disparity in wealth and power and continual economic, political, environmental, and human rights crises. For social justice campaigns to be strategic, it is also necessary to examine how privatization, externalization, monopoly, and other corporate power processes have been institutionalized. This institutionalization is exemplified in the structural adjustment programs of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and in recent "free" trade agreements which have culminated in the creation of the World Trade Organization. An understanding of such institutions provides a necessary tool for achieving the long-term goals of environmental sustainability and social justice.
George Draffan
From the moneyless economics of the classical school there evolved modern, orthodox macroeconomics: the science of monetary society taught in universities and deployed by central banks. From the practitioners’ economics of Bagehot, meanwhile, there evolved the academic discipline of finance—the tools of the trade taught in business schools, used by bankers and bond traders. One was an intellectual framework for understanding the economy without money, banks, and finance. The other was a framework for understanding money, banks, and finance, without the rest of the economy. The result of this intellectual apartheid was that when in 2008 a crisis in the financial sector caused the biggest macroeconomic crash in history, and when the economy failed to recover afterwards because the banking sector was broken, neither modern macroeconomics nor modern finance could make head nor tail of it.
Felix Martin (Money: The Unauthorised Biography)
Natural gas, even more than oil, had become Russia’s most powerful tool in foreign policy. Oil trades freely, sloshing through the world’s economy; gas requires fixed pipelines, linking the nations of Europe to Russia. The network of pipelines, dating to the Soviet era, gave Russia clout and, with rising energy prices, the prospect of the wealth that Putin nearly a decade before had argued in his dissertation was the core of the state’s power. Ukraine,
Steven Lee Myers (The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin)
Egypt was rich in copper ore, which, as the base of bronze, had been valuable through the entire Meditarranean world. By 1150 B.C., however, the Iron Age had succeeded the bronze Age. Egypt had no iron and so lost power in the Asiatic countries where the ore existed; the adjustment of its economy to the new metal caused years of inflation and contributed to the financial distress of the central government. The pharaoh could not meet the expenses of his government; he had no money to pay the workers on public buildings, and his servants robbed him at every opportunity. Still a god in theory, he was satirized in literature and became a tool of the oligarchy. During the centuries after the twelfth B.C., the Egyptian state disintegrated into local units loosely connected by trade. Occasional spurts of energy interrupted the decline, but these were short-lived and served only to illuminate the general passivity.
Norman F. Cantor (Antiquity: The Civilization of the Ancient World)
In the end, the most important thing is to be true to yourself and those you love and work hard. I mean, work like there’s no tomorrow. Train. Strive. I mean, really train and cultivate your talent to the highest degree. Be the best at what you do. Get to know more about your field than anybody alive. Use the tools of your trade, if it’s books or a floor to dance on or a body of water to swim in. Whatever it is, it’s yours. That’s what I’ve always tried to remember
Michael Jackson (Moonwalk: A Memoir)
But it is far more important that we allow developing countries to use protection, subsidies, and regulation of foreign investment adequately in order to develop their own economies, rather than giving them bigger agricultural markets overseas. Especially if agricultural liberalization by the rich countries can only be 'bought' by the developing countries giving up their use of the tools of infant industry promotion, the price is not worth paying. Developing countries should not be forced to sell their future for small immediate gains.
Ha-Joon Chang (Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism)
So you think that money is the root of all evil? Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?
Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
1. Recruit the smallest group of people who can accomplish what must be done quickly and with high quality. Comparative Advantage means that some people will be better than others at accomplishing certain tasks, so it pays to invest time and resources in recruiting the best team for the job. Don’t make that team too large, however—Communication Overhead makes each additional team member beyond a core of three to eight people a drag on performance. Small, elite teams are best. 2. Clearly communicate the desired End Result, who is responsible for what, and the current status. Everyone on the team must know the Commander’s Intent of the project, the Reason Why it’s important, and must clearly know the specific parts of the project they’re individually responsible for completing—otherwise, you’re risking Bystander Apathy. 3. Treat people with respect. Consistently using the Golden Trifecta—appreciation, courtesy, and respect—is the best way to make the individuals on your team feel Important and is also the best way to ensure that they respect you as a leader and manager. The more your team works together under mutually supportive conditions, the more Clanning will naturally occur, and the more cohesive the team will become. 4. Create an Environment where everyone can be as productive as possible, then let people do their work. The best working Environment takes full advantage of Guiding Structure—provide the best equipment and tools possible and ensure that the Environment reinforces the work the team is doing. To avoid having energy sapped by the Cognitive Switching Penalty, shield your team from as many distractions as possible, which includes nonessential bureaucracy and meetings. 5. Refrain from having unrealistic expectations regarding certainty and prediction. Create an aggressive plan to complete the project, but be aware in advance that Uncertainty and the Planning Fallacy mean your initial plan will almost certainly be incomplete or inaccurate in a few important respects. Update your plan as you go along, using what you learn along the way, and continually reapply Parkinson’s Law to find the shortest feasible path to completion that works, given the necessary Trade-offs required by the work. 6. Measure to see if what you’re doing is working—if not, try another approach. One of the primary fallacies of effective Management is that it makes learning unnecessary. This mind-set assumes your initial plan should be 100 percent perfect and followed to the letter. The exact opposite is true: effective Management means planning for learning, which requires constant adjustments along the way. Constantly Measure your performance across a small set of Key Performance Indicators (discussed later)—if what you’re doing doesn’t appear to be working, Experiment with another approach.
Josh Kaufman (The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business)
So you think that money is the root of all evil?” said Francisco d’Anconia. “Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?
Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
So you think that money is the root of all evil?” said Francisco d’Anconia. “Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil? “When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor—your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money. Is this what you consider evil?
Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
One day, Carmona had an idea. Axcom had been employing various approaches to using their pricing data to trade, including relying on breakout signals. They also used simple linear regressions, a basic forecasting tool relied upon by many investors that analyzes the relationships between two sets of data or variables under the assumption those relationships will remain linear. Plot crude-oil prices on the x-axis and the price of gasoline on the y-axis, place a straight regression line through the points on the graph, extend that line, and you usually can do a pretty good job predicting prices at the pump for a given level of oil price.
Gregory Zuckerman (The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution)
The Irish butter market, like its competition around the world, wouldn’t have existed without the manual labor of women. All together, their ability to transform a daily tide of milk into tubs, balls, bricks, mottes, and prints of butter constituted a cottage industry of global proportion. Although their production varied in quality and quantity across the buttermaking world, the basic techniques and tools dairywomen used were nearly identical across time and place. It’s easy to forget that the simple equipment women wielded to make butter also drove dairy trade, and more than any other tools they were proof of women’s pivotal economic role on the farm.
Elaine Khosrova (Butter: A Rich History)
To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss—the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery—that you must offer them values, not wounds—that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade—with reason, not force, as their final arbiter—it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability—and the degree of a man’s productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?
Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
Senseless people name evil good, call good evil. As you are doing. You accuse Us of passing false judgement: you do Us injustice. We shall prove this to you. You ask who We are: We are God’s handle, Master Death, a truly effective reaper. Our scythe works its way. It cuts down white, black, red, brown, green, blue, grey, yellow, and all kinds of lustrous flowers in its path, irrespective of their splendour, their strength, their virtue. And the violet’s beautiful colour, rich perfume, and palatable sap, avail it nought. See: that is justice. Our justification was acknowledged by the Romans and the poets, for they knew Us better than you do. You ask what We are: We are nothing, and yet something. Nothing, because We have neither life, nor being, nor form, and We are no spirit, not visible, not tangible; something, because We are the end of life, the end of existence, the beginning of nullity, a cross between the two. We are a happening that fells all people. Huge giants must fall before Us; all living beings must be transformed by Us. You ask where We are: We are not ascertainable. But Our form was found in a temple in Rome*, painted on a wall, as a hoodwinked man sitting on an ox; this man wielded a hatchet in his right hand and a shovel in his left hand, with which he was beating the ox. A great crowd of all kinds of people was hitting him, fighting him, and making casts at him, each one with the tools of his trade: even the nun with her psalter was there. They struck and made casts at the man on the ox, he who signified Us; yet Death contested and buried them all. Pythagoras likens Us to a man’s form with the eyes of a basilisk: they wandered to the ends of the Earth, and every living creature had to die at their glance. You ask where We are: We are from the Earthly Paradise. God created Us there and gave Us Our true name, when he said: «The day that ye bite of this fruit, ye shall die the death.» And for that reason We call ourself: «We, Death, mighty ruler and master on Earth, in the air, and in the rivers of the sea.» You ask what good We do: you have already heard that We bring the world more advantage than harm. Now cease, rest content, and thank Us for the kindness we have done you!
Johannes von Saaz (Death and the Ploughman)
It was always about using these sweeping deals, as well as a range of other tools, to lock in a global policy framework that provided maximum freedom to multinational corporations to produce their goods as cheaply as possible and sell them with as few regulations as possible—while paying as little in taxes as possible. Granting this corporate wishlist, we were told, would fuel economic growth, which would trickle down to the rest of us, eventually. The trade deals mattered only in so far as they stood in for, and plainly articulated, this far broader agenda. The three policy pillars of this new era are familiar to us all: privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and lower corporate taxation, paid for with cuts to public spending.
Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
I select the right practice gun, the one about the size of a pistol, but bulkier, and offer it to Caleb. Tris’s fingers slide between mine. Everything comes easily this morning, every smile and every laugh, every word and every motion. If we succeed in what we attempt tonight, tomorrow Chicago will be safe, the Bureau will be forever changed, and Tris and I will be able to build a new life for ourselves somewhere. Maybe it will even be a place where I trade my guns and knives for more productive tools, screwdrivers and nails and shovels. This morning I feel like I could be so fortunate. I could. “It doesn’t shoot real bullets,” I say, “but it seems like they designed it so it would be as close as possible to one of the guns you’ll be using. It feels real, anyway.” Caleb holds the gun with just his fingertips, like he’s afraid it will shatter in his hands. I laugh. “First lesson: Don’t be afraid of it. Grab it. You’ve held one before, remember? You got us out of the Amity compound with that shot.” “That was just lucky,” Caleb says, turning the gun over and over to see it from every angle. His tongue pushes into his cheek like he’s solving a problem. “Not the result of skill.” “Lucky is better than unlucky,” I say. “We can work on skill now.” I glance at Tris. She grins at me, then leans in to whisper something to Christina. “Are you here to help or what, Stiff?” I say. I hear myself speaking in the voice I cultivated as an initiation instructor, but this time I use it in jest. “You could use some practice with that right arm, if I recall correctly. You too, Christina.” Tris makes a face at me, then she and Christina cross the room to get their own weapons. “Okay, now face the target and turn the safety off,” I say. There is a target across the room, more sophisticated, than the wooden-board target in the Dauntless training rooms. It has three rings in three different colors, green, yellow, and red, so it’s easier to tell where the bullets it. “Let me see how you would naturally shoot.” He lifts up the gun with one hand, squares off his feet and shoulders to the target like he’s about to lift something heavy, and fires. The gun jerks back and up, firing the bullet near the ceiling. I cover my mouth with my hand to disguise my smile. “There’s no need to giggle,” Caleb says irritably. “Book learning doesn’t teach you everything, does it?” Christina says. “You have to hold it with both hands. It doesn’t look as cool, but neither does attacking the ceiling.” “I wasn’t trying to look cool!” Christina stands, her legs slightly uneven, and lifts both arms. She stares the target for a moment, then fires. The training bullet hits the outer circle of the target and bounces off, rolling on the floor. It leaves a circle of light on the target, marking the impact site. I wish I’d had this technology during initiation training. “Oh, good,” I say. “You hit the air around your target’s body. How useful.” “I’m a little rusty,” Christina admits, grinning.
Veronica Roth (Allegiant (Divergent, #3))
They sat together at a table in the corner of a basement speakeasy, and they drank beer, and Mike related his favorite tale of how he had fallen five stories when a scaffolding gave way under him, how he had broken three ribs but lived to tell it, and Roark spoke of his days in the building trades. Mike did have a real name, which was Sean Xavier Donnigan, but everyone had forgotten it long ago; he owned a set of tools and an ancient Ford, and existed for the sole purpose of traveling around the country from one big construction job to another. People meant very little to Mike, but their performance a great deal. He worshipped expertness of any kind. He loved his work passionately and had no tolerance for anything save for other single-track devotions. He was a master in his own field and he felt no sympathy except for mastery. His view of the world was simple: there were the able and there were the incompetent; he was not concerned with the latter. He loved buildings. He despised, however, all architects.
Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)
Many of us have the false idea that a relationship’s purpose is to somehow fulfill our needs and desires. We look to see what we can get out of the relationship instead of what we can put in. Looked at like this, relationships are often little more than a needs exchange. We need this (safety, love, intimacy); a man needs that (security, companionship, sex). When we come across a good fit, both parties tacitly agree to do a trade and call it love. This transaction-based relationship model is why so many relationships feel empty and dead. They are completely devoid of anything real and intimate. After the initial rush of excitement is over, they’re more like business contracts than sacred unions. Let’s face it. We’ve all been conditioned to use relationships for the wrong reasons: to end loneliness, relieve depression, recover from a previous breakup, or find security. The problem is that this is not what relationships are for. Relationships are a spiritual opportunity for personal evolution. There is no greater arena for discovering your capacity for love, forgiveness, compassion, personal greatness, and full self-expression. Nowhere else will you meet the grandest and smallest parts of yourself. Nowhere else will you confront your self-imposed limits to intimacy. Nowhere else can you forgive so deeply or love so purely. This is relationship’s real purpose: to serve the mutual growth and soulful expression of each individual. It’s a chance to share your enthusiasm for being alive and give of yourself to another. Relationships provide the opportunity to shed light on any area within you that remains cloaked in fear and uncertainty, to hold a vision of another’s greatness so that he may step into the magnificence his soul is yearning to express. In this way, relationship becomes the ultimate tool for personal discovery and spiritual growth. When we engage in relationship to see what we can put into it rather than what we can get out of it, our whole lives transform. We no longer see our partners as antagonists. We see them as teachers and allies who are here to help us discover and experience our glory.
Marie Forleo (Make Every Man Want You: How to Be So Irresistible You'll Barely Keep from Dating Yourself!)
Paul himself spent years of his life on the road, carrying (presumably on pack animals) his tent, clothing and tools - not many scrolls, if any. He carried the Bible safely tucked away in his head, where it belongs. As an apostle, he often supported himself by plying his trade. He was busy, traveling, working with his hands, winning people for Christ, shepherding or coping with his converts, responding to questions and problems. And he was very human; he knew not only fighting without but also fears within (2 Cor 7:5). Paul the completely confident academic and systematic theologian - sitting at his desk, studying the Bible, working out a system, perfect and consistent in all its parts, unchanging over a period of thirty years, no matter how many new experiences he and his churches had - is an almost inhuman character, either a thinking machine or a fourth person of the Trinity. The real Paul knew anger, joy, depression, triumph, and anguish; he reacted, overreacted, he repented, he apologized, he flattered and cajoled, he rebuked and threatened, he argued this way and that way: he did everything he could think of in order to win some.
E.P. Sanders
OPTIONS FOR REDUCING While thrift stores such as Goodwill or the Salvation Army can be a convenient way to initially let go, many other outlets exist and are often more appropriate for usable items. Here are some examples: • Amazon.com • Antiques shops • Auction houses • Churches • Consignment shops (quality items) • Craigslist.org (large items, moving boxes, free items) • Crossroads Trading Co. (trendy clothes) • Diggerslist.com (home improvement) • Dress for Success (workplace attire) • Ebay.com (small items of value) • Flea markets • Food banks (food) • Freecycle.org (free items) • Friends • Garage and yard sales • Habitat for Humanity (building materials, furniture, and/or appliances) • Homeless and women’s shelters • Laundromats (magazines and laundry supplies) • Library (books, CDs and DVDs) • Local SPCA (towels and sheets) • Nurseries and preschools (blankets, toys) • Operation Christmas Child (new items in a shoe box) • Optometrists (eyeglasses) • Regifting • Rummage sales for a cause • Salvage yards (building materials) • Schools (art supplies, magazines, dishes to eliminate class party disposables) • Tool co-ops (tools) • Waiting rooms (magazines) • Your curb with a “Free” sign
Bea Johnson (Zero Waste Home: The Ultimate Guide to Simplifying Your Life by Reducing Your Waste)
The cinema today: end or impossibility of ending? Most current films, through the bloody drift of their content, the weakness of their plots and their technological trumpery – useless high-tech – reveal an extraordinary contempt on the part of film-makers for the tools of their own trade, for their own profession: a supreme contempt for the image itself, which is prostituted to any special effect whatsoever; and, consequently, contempt for the viewer, who is called upon to figure as impotent voyeur of this prostitution of images, of this promiscuity of all forms beneath the alibi of violence. There is in fact no real violence in this, nothing of a theatre of cruelty, but merely a second-level irony, the knowing wink of quotation, which no longer has anything to do with cinematic culture, but derives from the resentment that culture feels towards itself, that culture which precisely cannot manage to come to an end and is becoming infinitely debased - a debasement being raised to the power of an aesthetic and spiritual commodity, bitter and obsolescent, which we consume as a 'work of art' with the same complicity with which we savour the debasement of the political class. The sabotaging of the image by the image professionals is akin to the sabotaging of the political by the politicians themselves.
Jean Baudrillard (Fragments)
The fragility of the US economy had nearly destroyed him. It wasn't enough that Citadel's walls were as strong and impenetrable as the name implied; the economy itself needed to be just as solid. Over the next decade, he endeavored to place Citadel at the center of the equity markets, using his company's superiority in math and technology to tie trading to information flow. Citadel Securities, the trading and market-making division of his company, which he'd founded back in 2003, grew by leaps and bounds as he took advantage of his 'algorithmic'-driven abilities to read 'ahead of the market.' Because he could predict where trades were heading faster and better than anyone else, he could outcompete larger banks for trading volume, offering better rates while still capturing immense profits on the spreads between buys and sells. In 2005, the SEC had passed regulations that forced brokers to seek out middlemen like Citadel who could provide the most savings to their customers; in part because of this move by the SEC, Ken's outfit was able to grow into the most effective, and thus dominant, middleman for trading — and especially for retail traders, who were proliferating in tune to the numerous online brokerages sprouting up in the decade after 2008. Citadel Securities reached scale before the bigger banks even knew what had hit them; and once Citadel was at scale, it became impossible for anyone else to compete. Citadel's efficiency, and its ability to make billions off the minute spreads between bids and asks — multiplied by millions upon millions of trades — made companies like Robinhood, with its zero fees, possible. Citadel could profit by being the most efficient and cheapest market maker on the Street. Robinhood could profit by offering zero fees to its users. And the retail traders, on their couches and in their kitchens and in their dorm rooms, profited because they could now trade stocks with the same tools as their Wall Street counterparts.
Ben Mezrich (The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees)
OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY I don’t know of people who do everything from going to school, learning different skills and basically develop themselves so that they stay at home. It’s ingrained in every kid that they should study hard and excel so that they can get good jobs and live well. With that said, working is what makes us build nations and fulfill some our dreams so it’s important to ensure that the work environment is kept safe and comfortable for workers so that they can remain productive for the longest time. However as long as we are living there will SWMS always be greedy employers who will take short cuts or fail to protect their employees and this is where OSHA(occupational safety and health administration)comes in to rectify these issues. Occupational safety is ensuring that employees work in danger free environment. There are many industries of different nature and hence the possible hazards vary. For example in the textile and clothing industry, employees deal with dyes, chemicals and machines that spin , knit and weave to ensure production. In some countries there have been cases of sweatshops where people make clothes in poorly ventilated places for long hours. The tools of trade in all industries are still the ones that cause hazards e.g. machines can cut people, chemicals emit poisonous fumes or burn the skin and clothes etc. Its therefore the mandate of employers to ensure work places are safe for workers and incase the industry uses chemicals or equipments that may harm the workers in any way, they should provide protective gear. Employers can also seek the services of occupational safety specialists who can inspect their companies to ensure they adhere to the set health and safety standards. These specialists can also help formulate programs that will prevent hazards and injuries. Workers should report employers to OSHA if they fail to comply. As a worker you now know it’s partly your duty to hold your employer accountable so do not agree to work in a hazardous environment.
Peter Gabriel
Naval’s Laws The below is Naval’s response to the question “Are there any quotes you live by or think of often?” These are gold. Take the time necessary to digest them. “These aren’t all quotes from others. Many are maxims that I’ve carved for myself.” Be present above all else. Desire is suffering (Buddha). Anger is a hot coal that you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at someone else (Buddhist saying). If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day. Reading (learning) is the ultimate meta-skill and can be traded for anything else. All the real benefits in life come from compound interest. Earn with your mind, not your time. 99% of all effort is wasted. Total honesty at all times. It’s almost always possible to be honest and positive. Praise specifically, criticize generally (Warren Buffett). Truth is that which has predictive power. Watch every thought. (Always ask, “Why am I having this thought?”) All greatness comes from suffering. Love is given, not received. Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts (Eckhart Tolle). Mathematics is the language of nature. Every moment has to be complete in and of itself. A Few of Naval’s Tweets that are Too Good to Leave Out “What you choose to work on, and who you choose to work with, are far more important than how hard you work.” “Free education is abundant, all over the Internet. It’s the desire to learn that’s scarce.” “If you eat, invest, and think according to what the ‘news’ advocates, you’ll end up nutritionally, financially, and morally bankrupt.” “We waste our time with short-term thinking and busywork. Warren Buffett spends a year deciding and a day acting. That act lasts decades.” “The guns aren’t new. The violence isn’t new. The connected cameras are new, and that changes everything.” “You get paid for being right first, and to be first, you can’t wait for consensus.” “My one repeated learning in life: ‘There are no adults.’ Everyone’s making it up as they go along. Figure it out yourself, and do it.” “A busy mind accelerates the passage of subjective time.
Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
Slavery has a special interaction with the normal structures of being a human being. So a human being is sort of a generalist creature with a capacity to have its software re-worked for different habitats. The reason that human beings are able to exploit every terrestrial habitat where plants grow is that they don't all have the software program that's the same, right? You can have a software program for hunting in the Calihari, you can have one for terracing the Andes to grow potatoes, you can have any one of a number of software programs. Well, slavery took the software program that Africans who were brought into the slave trade had, and it did its best to erase that program – and to render that program non-functional. It rendered it non-functional by combining people from different places who didn't even necessarily speak a language so there was not one culture available. And it sort of forces the bootstrapping of a new culture, which was composed of various things but of course it was, you know, prohibition against teaching slaves to read and things like that, and so there was a systematic breaking of the original culture that Africans had during the New World, and a substituting of a version that was not a much of a threat to the slave-holding population, right? And at the point that slavery comes to an end, it is not as if, frankly, even, you know, we didn't even have the tools to talk about these things in responsible terms. There wasn't enough known about how the mind works and what its relationship is to the body and all...so, the thing that makes the black population and the Indian population different, I would argue, is the systematic hobbling of the on-board, the inherited, evolved culture in the case of Indians by transporting them to reservations and by putting them in schools that disrupt the passage of normal culture and in the case of Africans, it was breaking apart of families, keeping people from being in contact with others they had the right language to talk to and all...so in any case, that carries through to the present: it creates a situation where there has not been access to the materials to fully update software.
Bret Weinstein
[A] central theme is why social, political, and economic institutions tend to coevolve in a manner that reinforces rather than undermines one another. The welfare state is not 'politics against markets,' as commonly assumed, but politics with markets. Although it is popular to think that markets, especially global ones, interfere with the welfare state, and vice versa, this notion is simply inconsistent with the postwar record of actual welfare state development. The United States, which has a comparatively small welfare state and flexible labor markets, has performed well in terms of jobs and growth during the past two decades; however, before then the countries with the largest welfare states and the most heavily regulated labor markets exceeded those in the United States on almost any gauge of economic competitiveness and performance. Despite the change in economic fortunes, the relationship between social protection and product market strategies continues to hold. Northern Europe and Japan still dominate high-quality markets for machine tools and consumer durables, whereas the United States dominates software, biotech, and other high-tech industries. There is every reason that firms and governments will try to preserve the institutions that give rise to these comparative advantages, and here the social protection system (broadly construed to include job security and protection through the industrial relations system) plays a key role. The reason is that social insurance shapes the incentives workers and firms have for investing in particular types of skills, and skills are critical for competitive advantage in human-capital-intensive economies. Firms do not develop competitive advantages in spite of systems of social protection, but because of it. Continuing this line of argument, the changing economic fortunes of different welfare production regimes probably has very little to do with growing competitive pressure from the international economy. To the contrary, it will be argued in Chapter 6 that the main problem for Europe is the growing reliance on services that have traditionally been closed to trade. In particular, labor-intensive, low-productivity jobs do not thrive in the context of high social protection and intensive labor-market regulation, and without international trade, countries cannot specialize in high value-added services. Lack of international trade and competition, therefore, not the growth of these, is the cause of current employment problems in high-protection countries.
Torben Iversen (Capitalism, Democracy, and Welfare (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics))
Many models are constructed to account for regularly observed phenomena. By design, their direct implications are consistent with reality. But others are built up from first principles, using the profession’s preferred building blocks. They may be mathematically elegant and match up well with the prevailing modeling conventions of the day. However, this does not make them necessarily more useful, especially when their conclusions have a tenuous relationship with reality. Macroeconomists have been particularly prone to this problem. In recent decades they have put considerable effort into developing macro models that require sophisticated mathematical tools, populated by fully rational, infinitely lived individuals solving complicated dynamic optimization problems under uncertainty. These are models that are “microfounded,” in the profession’s parlance: The macro-level implications are derived from the behavior of individuals, rather than simply postulated. This is a good thing, in principle. For example, aggregate saving behavior derives from the optimization problem in which a representative consumer maximizes his consumption while adhering to a lifetime (intertemporal) budget constraint.† Keynesian models, by contrast, take a shortcut, assuming a fixed relationship between saving and national income. However, these models shed limited light on the classical questions of macroeconomics: Why are there economic booms and recessions? What generates unemployment? What roles can fiscal and monetary policy play in stabilizing the economy? In trying to render their models tractable, economists neglected many important aspects of the real world. In particular, they assumed away imperfections and frictions in markets for labor, capital, and goods. The ups and downs of the economy were ascribed to exogenous and vague “shocks” to technology and consumer preferences. The unemployed weren’t looking for jobs they couldn’t find; they represented a worker’s optimal trade-off between leisure and labor. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these models were poor forecasters of major macroeconomic variables such as inflation and growth.8 As long as the economy hummed along at a steady clip and unemployment was low, these shortcomings were not particularly evident. But their failures become more apparent and costly in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008–9. These newfangled models simply could not explain the magnitude and duration of the recession that followed. They needed, at the very least, to incorporate more realism about financial-market imperfections. Traditional Keynesian models, despite their lack of microfoundations, could explain how economies can get stuck with high unemployment and seemed more relevant than ever. Yet the advocates of the new models were reluctant to give up on them—not because these models did a better job of tracking reality, but because they were what models were supposed to look like. Their modeling strategy trumped the realism of conclusions. Economists’ attachment to particular modeling conventions—rational, forward-looking individuals, well-functioning markets, and so on—often leads them to overlook obvious conflicts with the world around them.
Dani Rodrik (Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science)
Geopolitics is ultimately the study of the balance between options and lim­itations. A country's geography determines in large part what vulnerabilities it faces and what tools it holds. "Countries with flat tracks of land -- think Poland or Russia -- find building infrastructure easier and so become rich faster, but also find them­selves on the receiving end of invasions. This necessitates substantial stand­ing armies, but the very act of attempting to gain a bit of security automat­ically triggers angst and paranoia in the neighbors. "Countries with navigable rivers -- France and Argentina being premier examples -- start the game with some 'infrastructure' already baked in. Such ease of internal transport not only makes these countries socially uni­fied, wealthy, and cosmopolitan, but also more than a touch self-important. They show a distressing habit of becoming overimpressed with themselves -- and so tend to overreach. "Island nations enjoy security -- think the United Kingdom and Japan -- in part because of the physical separation from rivals, but also because they have no choice but to develop navies that help them keep others away from their shores. Armed with such tools, they find themselves actively meddling in the affairs of countries not just within arm's reach, but half a world away. "In contrast, mountain countries -- Kyrgyzstan and Bolivia, to pick a pair -- are so capital-poor they find even securing the basics difficult, mak­ing them largely subject to the whims of their less-mountainous neighbors. "It's the balance of these restrictions and empowerments that determine both possibilities and constraints, which from my point of view makes it straightforward to predict what most countries will do: · The Philippines' archipelagic nature gives it the physical stand-off of is­lands without the navy, so in the face of a threat from a superior country it will prostrate itself before any naval power that might come to its aid. · Chile's population center is in a single valley surrounded by mountains. Breaching those mountains is so difficult that the Chileans often find it easier to turn their back on the South American continent and interact economically with nations much further afield. · The Netherlands benefits from a huge portion of European trade because it controls the mouth of the Rhine, so it will seek to unite the Continent economically to maximize its economic gain while bringing in an exter­nal security guarantor to minimize threats to its independence. · Uzbekistan sits in the middle of a flat, arid pancake and so will try to expand like syrup until it reaches a barrier it cannot pass. The lack of local competition combined with regional water shortages adds a sharp, brutal aspect to its foreign policy. · New Zealand is a temperate zone country with a huge maritime frontage beyond the edge of the world, making it both wealthy and secure -- how could the Kiwis not be in a good mood every day? "But then there is the United States. It has the fiat lands of Australia with the climate and land quality of France, the riverine characteristics of Germany with the strategic exposure of New Zealand, and the island fea­tures of Japan but with oceanic moats -- and all on a scale that is quite lit­erally continental. Such landscapes not only make it rich and secure beyond peer, but also enable its navy to be so powerful that America dominates the global oceans.
Peter Zeihan (The Absent Superpower: The Shale Revolution and a World Without America)
WILL ALIGNMENT Despot's ultimate goal, using terror as his tool in trade = Corporal punishment in schools Kamil Ali
Kamil Ali (The Initiates (The Appointed Collection, # 1))
fulfill our mission with the Rational ApproachTM, a comprehensive softwareengineering solution consisting of three elements: • A configurable set of processes and techniques for the development of software, based on iterative development, object modeling, and an architectural approach to software reuse. • An integrated family of application construction tools that automate the Rational Approach throughout the software lifecycle. • Technical consulting services delivered by our worldwide field organization of software engineers and technical sales professionals. Our customers include businesses in the Asia/Pacific region, Europe, and North America that are leaders in leveraging semiconductor, communications, and software technologies to achieve their business objectives. We serve customers in a diverse range of industries, such as telecommunications, banking and financial services, manufacturing, transportation, aerospace, and defense.They construct software applications for a wide range of platforms, from microprocessors embedded in telephone switching systems to enterprisewide information systems running on company-specific intranets. Rational Software Corporation is traded on the NASDAQ system under the symbol RATL.1
Anonymous
The tools of their trade were simple, effective things: iron knuckles, saps and the like. But the iconic tool of the scuttler arsenal was a woven leather belt with a heavy iron or brass buckle used to decrease intelligence one wallop at a time.
S.C. Barrus (Discovering Aberration)
A specification is a clear and concise but complete description of the exact item desired so that all vendors have a common basis for price quotations and bids. As such, it is an essential communication tool between buyer and seller. Specifications should be realistic and should not include details that cannot be verified or tested or that would make the product too costly. Without up-to-date product information, specifications are useless. The specific information varies with each type of food, but all specifications should include at least the following information:Δ Clear, simple description using common or trade or brand name of product; when possible, use a name or standard of identity formulated by the government such as IMPS Amount to be purchased in the most commonly used terms (case, package, or unit) Name and size of basic container (10/10# packages) Count and size of the item or units within the basic container (50 pork chops, 4 ounces each) Range in weight, thickness, or size Minimum and maximum trims, or fat content percentage (ground meat, 90 percent lean and 10 percent fat, referred to as 90/10) Degree of maturity or stage of ripening Type of processing required (such as individually quick-frozen [IQF]) Type of packaging desired Unit on which price will be based Weight tolerance limit (range of acceptable weights, usually in meat, seafood, and poultry)
Ruby Parker Puckett (Foodservice Manual for Health Care Institutions (J-B AHA Press Book 150))
One of the many downsides of living in communities in which we are always surrounded by people like ourselves is that we experience very little conflict. That means we don’t develop the tools we need to manage conflict and we lack confidence in our ability to do so. We persuade ourselves that the absence of conflict is the same as happiness, but that trade-off leaves us strangely powerless.
Anonymous
...crossed the room to where a selection of implements was arranged on a table top. These could have been mistaken for the trade tools of a cook, physician, or torturer, save for the fact that the surface on which they rested was a slab of polished pink marble, topping a white and gilt dressing table-cum-sculpture, done up in the new, hyper-Baroque style named Rococo. It was adorned, for example, with several cherubs, bows drawn, eyes asquint, as they drew beads on unseen targets, butt cheeks polished to a luster with jeweler’s rouge. It had, in other words, all the earmarks of a gift that had been sent to the princess by someone with a lot of money who did not know her very well.
Neal Stephenson
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Charles Ferguson won an Oscar in 2011 for Inside Job, his documentary on the financial crisis, and was an Oscar nominee for his first documentary, No End In Sight, on the war in Iraq. He is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, holds a PhD in Political Science from MIT, and has been a technology policy consultant to the White House and the Office of the US Trade Representative, as well as to leading technology companies including Apple, IBM, and Texas Instruments. He was the co-founder of Vermeer Technologies, which invented the web tool Front Page, later sold to Microsoft. A former visiting scholar at MIT and Berkeley, he has also been a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. He has written four books, and is a life member of the Council of Foreign Relations and a director of the French-American Foundation.
Charles H. Ferguson (Inside Job: The Rogues Who Pulled Off the Heist of the Century)
o n o f R a t i o n a l S o f t w a r e C o r p o r a t i o n i s t o e n s u r e t h e s u c c e s s o f c u s t o m e r s c o n s t r u c t i n g t h e s o f t w a r e s y s t e m s t h a t t h e y d e p e n d o n . We enable our customers to achieve their business objectives by turning software into a source of competitive advantage, speeding time-to-market, reducing the risk of failure, and improving software quality. We fulfill our mission with the Rational ApproachTM, a comprehensive softwareengineering solution consisting of three elements: • A configurable set of processes and techniques for the development of software, based on iterative development, object modeling, and an architectural approach to software reuse. • An integrated family of application construction tools that automate the Rational Approach throughout the software lifecycle. • Technical consulting services delivered by our worldwide field organization of software engineers and technical sales professionals. Our customers include businesses in the Asia/Pacific region, Europe, and North America that are leaders in leveraging semiconductor, communications, and software technologies to achieve their business objectives. We serve customers in a diverse range of industries, such as telecommunications, banking and financial services, manufacturing, transportation, aerospace, and defense.They construct software applications for a wide range of platforms, from microprocessors embedded in telephone switching systems to enterprisewide information systems running on company-specific intranets. Rational Software Corporation is traded on the NASDAQ system under the symbol RATL.1
Anonymous
Figure 3.35 shows examples of nonstandard trend lines: FIGURE 3.35 Nonstandard Trend Lines in XLF A is drawn between lows in a downtrend instead of between highs in a downtrend. B is also drawn between lows in a downtrend. Furthermore, it ignores a large price spike in an effort to fit the line to later data. C is more of a best-fit line drawn through the center of a price area. These may be drawn freehand or via a procedure like linear regression. D is drawn between highs in an uptrend. E raises a critical point about trend lines: They are lines drawn between successive swings in the market. If there are no swings, there should be no trend line. It would be hard to argue that the market was showing any swings at E, at least on this time frame. This trend line may be valid on a lower time frame, but it is nonstandard on this time frame. In general, trend lines are tools to define the relationship between swings, and are a complement to the simple length of swing analysis. As such, one of the requirements for drawing trend lines is that there must actually be swings in the market. We see many cases where markets are flat, and it is possible to draw trend lines that touch the tops or bottoms of many consecutive price bars. With one important exception later in this chapter, these types of trend lines do not tend to be very significant. They are penetrated easily by the smallest motions in the market, and there is no reliable price action after the penetration. Avoid drawing these trend lines in flat markets with no definable swings.
Adam H. Grimes (The Art and Science of Technical Analysis: Market Structure, Price Action, and Trading Strategies (Wiley Trading Book 547))
Jon Stone spoke thirteen languages and was fluent in six, French being one. He spoke it so well the girls thought he was a native Parisian pretending to be an American. This ability to blend with the natives was a valuable tool when Jon plied his trade. Jon eased from the bed. Floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors lined the back of his house, ten-foot-tall, custom-designed monsters so Jon could Zen on the view. Golden lights glittered to the horizon, ruby flashes marked ghetto-bird prowlers, jets descending toward LAX were strung like pearls across a tuxedo black sky. The doors were heavy as trucks, but silent as silk when they slid open. Jon stepped out and went to the pool. Pike was a silhouette cutout, backlit by the city as Jon swaggered close. “What
Robert Crais (The Promise (Elvis Cole, #16; Joe Pike, #5; Scott James & Maggie, #2))
Money has always been a tool used to control the people. It did not evolve from thousands of years of barter and trade like we are led to believe; the priest-kings of ancient Sumer first introduced it. Written in the Sumerian tablets (the oldest written and deciphered record of human history), is a financial transaction of depositing silver shekels at the palace temple. It is one of the earliest examples of a “Bill of Exchange” used by modern banks, and tells us that temples in antiquity served as the first banks, creating a link between bankers and royal bloodlines as far back as we can trace.
Joseph P. Kauffman (Conscious Collective: An Aim for Awareness)