Using Time Efficiently Quotes

Look at those numbers running. Money makes time. It used to be the other way around. Clock time accelerated the rise of capitalism. People stopped thinking about eternity. They began to concentrate on hours, measurable hours, man-hours, using labor more efficiently.

Globalized industrialized food is not cheap: it is too costly for the Earth, for the farmers, for our health. The Earth can no longer carry the burden of groundwater mining, pesticide pollution, disappearance of species and destabilization of the climate. Farmers can no longer carry the burden of debt, which is inevitable in industrial farming with its high costs of production. It is incapable of producing safe, culturally appropriate, tasty, quality food. And it is incapable of producing enough food for all because it is wasteful of land, water and energy. Industrial agriculture uses ten times more energy than it produces. It is thus ten times less efficient.

Every time we killed a thousand Bugs at a cost of one M.I. it was a net victory for the Bugs. We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution; the Bug commisars didn't care any more about expending soldiers than we cared about expending ammo. Perhaps we could have figured this out about the Bugs by noting the grief the Chinese Hegemony gave the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance; however the trouble with 'lessons from history' is that we usually read them best after falling flat on our chins.

Mahler put the word schwer beside certain passages in his musical scores. Meaning “difficult.” “Heavy.” We were told this at some point by The Moth, as if it was a warning. He said we needed to prepare for such moments in order to deal with them efficiently, in case we suddenly had to take control of our wits. Those times exist for all of us, he kept saying. Just as no score relies on only one pitch or level of effort from musicians in the orchestra. Sometimes it relies on silence. It was a strange warning to be given, to accept that nothing was safe anymore. “ ‘Schwer,’ ” he’d say, with his fingers gesturing the inverted commas, and we’d mouth the word and then the translation, or simply nod in weary recognition. My sister and I got used to parroting the word back to each other—“schwer.

Already, in the last few decades, you have realized the utter futility of of encumbering yourselves with superfluous possessions that have no useful virtue, but which, for various sentimental reasons, you continue to hoard, thus lessening your life's efficiency by using for it time and attention that should have been applied to the practical work of life's accomplishments. (The Miracle of the Lily - 1928)

To gain your energy from the right sources means you gain more energy from less; reducing the retarding factors means you have less friction that wastes your energy; focusing your motive power towards the direction of the collective human movement means you use others’ energy to boost your energy. Gain more energy, waste less energy, spend the energy so next time you’ll need less to achieve more. Increase human mass, reduce retarding force, and increase the force accelerating the human mass. Follow this process with reason. Gain more, waste less, spend efficiently, learn.

Worrying is often triggered by wanting to make the perfect choice or by trying to maximize everything. When buying a used car, you want one that is cheap, reliable, safe, sexy, the right color, and fuel efficient. Unfortunately, no single option is likely to be the best in all those dimensions. If you try to have the best of everything, you’re likely to be paralyzed by indecision or dissatisfied with your choice. In fact, this kind of “maximizing” has been proven to increase depression.

When it is mid week, pause and ponder! The very single days we disregard are what become the very years we wished to have used effectively and efficiently. If we disregard today, we shall remember our had I know tomorrow. Time changes therefore think of the changing times.

Look at them. Where are they looking? They're not looking at each other, they're not looking at the art on the wall or the sun in the sky; they're looking at their phones. They hang on to every beep and alert and tweet and status update. I don't want to be that. I'm distracted enough as it is by the actual, tangible, physical world. I've embraced the efficiency of a desktop PC for work and research, and I even use a laptop on my own time, but I draw the line at a cell phone. If I want social media, I'll join a book club. I will not be collared and leashed and tracked like a tagged orca in the ocean.

Using the combined, integrated force of the mind and body is more efficient than using one without the other. Since the body can only exist in the present, that’s where the mind should be too (unless we deliberately choose to contemplate the past or future). At the same time, the body needs to be healthy and in optimum operating condition so that it can respond effectively to the mind’s directives.

Habits are undeniably useful tools, relieving us of the need to run a complex mental operation every time we’re confronted with a new task or situation. Yet they also relieve us of the need to stay awake to the world: to attend, feel, think, and then act in a deliberate manner. (That is, from freedom rather than compulsion.) If you need to be reminded how completely mental habit blinds us to experience, just take a trip to an unfamiliar country. Suddenly you wake up! And the algorithms of everyday life all but start over, as if from scratch. This is why the various travel metaphors for the psychedelic experience are so apt. The efficiencies of the adult mind, useful as they are, blind us to the present moment. We’re constantly jumping ahead to the next thing. We approach experience much as an artificial intelligence (AI) program does, with our brains continually translating the data of the present into the terms of the past, reaching back in time for the relevant experience, and then using that to make its best guess as to how to predict and navigate the future. One of the things that commends travel, art, nature, work, and certain drugs to us is the way these experiences, at their best, block every mental path forward and back, immersing us in the flow of a present that is literally wonderful—wonder being the by-product of precisely the kind of unencumbered first sight, or virginal noticing, to which the adult brain has closed itself. (It’s so inefficient!) Alas, most of the time I inhabit a near-future tense, my psychic thermostat set to a low simmer of anticipation and, too often, worry. The good thing is I’m seldom surprised. The bad thing is I’m seldom surprised.

Once you get over the simple unpleasantness of it - I suspect most people would gag, the first time - it is easier to wipe somebody else's bum than it is your own, because you can see what you're doing and use both hands at once if necessary. The whole process is much more efficient and uses no more toilet paper than is strictly required, so it's better for the environment, too. If we were really green we'd all have somebody else wipe our bums, though I can't see it catching on.

The efficiencies of the adult mind, useful as they are, blind us to the present moment. We’re constantly jumping ahead to the next thing. We approach experience much as an artificial intelligence (AI) program does, with our brains continually translating the data of the present into the terms of the past, reaching back in time for the relevant experience, and then using that to make its best guess as to how to predict and navigate the future.

True dexterity is not just in books; It is giving from above, we learn it, it is nurtured, it is applied and it is developed. He who does not know what has been giving to him from above, shall never know how to use what he has been giving effectively and efficiently

Cooking, I found, gives us the opportunity, so rare in modern life, to work directly in our own support, and in the support of the people we feed. If this is not “making a living,” I don’t know what is. In the calculus of economics, doing so may not always be the most efficient use of an amateur cook’s time, but in the calculus of human emotion, it is beautiful even so. For is there any practice less selfish, any labor less alienated, any time less wasted, than preparing something delicious and nourishing for people you love?

Everybody tries to protect this vulnerable two three four five six seven eight year old inside, and to acquire skills and aptitudes for dealing with the situations that threaten to overwhelm it... Usually, that child is a wretchedly isolated undeveloped little being. It’s been protected by the efficient armour, it’s never participated in life, it’s never been exposed to living and to managing the person’s affairs, it’s never been given responsibility for taking the brunt. And it’s never properly lived. That’s how it is in almost everybody. And that little creature is sitting there, behind the armour, peering through the slits. And in its own self, it is still unprotected, incapable, inexperienced... And in fact, that child is the only real thing in them. It’s their humanity, their real individuality, the one that can’t understand why it was born and that knows it will have to die, in no matter how crowded a place, quite on its own. That’s the carrier of all the living qualities. It’s the centre of all the possible magic and revelation. What doesn’t come out of that creature isn’t worth having, or it’s worth having only as a tool—for that creature to use and turn to account and make meaningful... And so, wherever life takes it by surprise, and suddenly the artificial self of adaptations proves inadequate, and fails to ward off the invasion of raw experience, that inner self is thrown into the front line—unprepared, with all its childhood terrors round its ears. And yet that’s the moment it wants. That’s where it comes alive—even if only to be overwhelmed and bewildered and hurt. And that’s where it calls up its own resources—not artificial aids, picked up outside, but real inner resources, real biological ability to cope, and to turn to account, and to enjoy. That’s the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they’re suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That’s why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells—he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster. So when you realise you’ve gone a few weeks and haven’t felt that awful struggle of your childish self—struggling to lift itself out of its inadequacy and incompetence—you’ll know you’ve gone some weeks without meeting new challenge, and without growing, and that you’ve gone some weeks towards losing touch with yourself.

So the particular strengths of the colon are beginning to become clear. A colon is nearly always preceded by a complete sentence, and in its simplest usage it rather theatrically announces what is to come. Like a well-trained magician's assistant, it pauses slightly to give you time to get a bit worried, and then efficiently whisks away the cloth and reveals the trick complete.

It’s important to remember that even though their brains are learning at peak efficiency, much else is inefficient, including attention, self-discipline, task completion, and emotions. So the mantra “one thing at a time” is useful to repeat to yourself. Try not to overwhelm your teenagers with instructions.

We are only given a certain amount of time to do what we were sent here to do. You don’t have to be around a long time to share the wisdom of a lifetime. You just have to use your time wisely, efficiently. There is no time to waste.

Let us hope the time will come when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused.

Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination. Art is the aesthetic ordering of experience to express meanings in symbolic terms, and the reordering of nature--the qualities of space and time--in new perceptual and material form. Art is an end in itself; its values are intrinsic. Technology is the instrumental ordering of human experience within a logic of efficient means, and the direction of nature to use its powers for material gain. But art and technology are not separate realms walled off from each other. Art employs techne, but for its own ends. Techne, too, is a form of art that bridges culture and social structure, and in the process reshapes both.

While a number of people have pointed out the various costs and drawbacks of sentience, few if any have taken the next step and wondered out loud if the whole damn thing isn't more trouble than it's worth. Of course it is, people assume; otherwise natural selection would have weeded it out long ago. And they're probably right. I hope they are. "Blindsight" is a thought experiment, a game of "Just suppose" and "What if". Nothing more. On the other hand, the dodos and the Steller sea cows could have used exactly the same argument to prove their own superioirity, a thousand years ago: "if we're so unfit, why haven't we gone extinct?" Why? Because natural selection takes time, and luck plays a role. The biggest boys on the block at any given time aren't necessarily the fittest, or the most efficient, and the game isn't over. The game is never over; there's no finish line this side of heat death. And so, neither can there be any winners. There are only those who haven't yet lost.

Go for good enough. Worrying is often triggered by wanting to make the perfect choice or by trying to maximize everything. When buying a used car, you want one that is cheap, reliable, safe, sexy, the right color, and fuel efficient. Unfortunately, no single option is likely to be the best in all those dimensions. If you try to have the best of everything, you’re likely to be paralyzed by indecision or dissatisfied with your choice. In fact, this kind of “maximizing” has been proven to increase depression. So don’t try to make the most amazing dinner; start out by just making a good dinner. Don’t try to be the perfect parent; just be a good one. Don’t try to be your happiest; just be happy.

All you need do is refrain from smoking, drinking and the use of drugs. Eat only wholesome,low-fat foods, with the emphasis on vegetables, grains and fish. Seek work. Work hard. Show up on time. Do more than is expected. Think of ways to make the job efficient. Don't complain. Shave, bathe and wear clean clothes. Be cheerful. Don't gamble. Live within your means. Save. And then, when you have all this in balance, study things of substance. Read to satisfy your curiosity. Don't father children out of wedlock or bear them as a single mother. Exercise. You will find that you will be promoted - perhaps not knighted, but promoted. Is that doesn't happen, look quietly for a better position. Find a husband or a wife whom you love and who has the same good habits. Invest. Assume a mortgage if you must. Teach your children the virtues. And then, having become the means of production, you will own your share of the means of production, and if you do those things, all of which are within your power, you will live your own lives." They looked at him as if he were an armadillo that has just spoken to them in Chinese. Not having assimilated a single phrase, they all got up and went to the bus.

It is to be hoped the time will come, thank God, in some circles it already has, when language is best used where it is most efficiently abused. Since we cannot dismiss it all at once, at least we do not want to leave anything undone that may contribute to its disrepute. To drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through - I cannot imagine a higher goal for today's writer.

It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. Grammar and style. To me they have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. A mask. Let us hope the time will come, thank God that in certain circles it has already come, when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused. As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it - be it something or nothing - begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today.

As a physician, I was trained to deal with uncertainty as aggressively as I dealt with disease itself. The unknown was the enemy. Within this worldview, having a question feels like an emergency; it means that something is out of control and needs to be made known as rapidly, efficiently, and cost-effectively as possible. But death has taken me to the edge of certainty, to the place of questions. After years of trading mystery for mastery, it was hard and even frightening to stop offering myself reasonable explanations for some of the things that I observed and that others told me, and simply take them as they are. "I don't know" had long been a statement of shame, of personal and professional failing. In all of my training I do not recall hearing it said aloud even once. But as I listened to more and more people with life-threatening illnesses tell their stories, not knowing simply became a matter of integrity. Things happened. And the explanations I offered myself became increasingly hollow, like a child whistling in the dark. The truth was that very often I didn't know and couldn't explain, and finally, weighed down by the many, many instances of the mysterious which are such an integral part of illness and healing, I surrendered. It was a moment of awakening. For the first time, I became curious about the things I had been unwilling to see before, more sensitive to inconsistencies I had glibly explained or successfully ignored, more willing to ask people questions and draw them out about stories I would have otherwise dismissed. What I have found in the end was that the life I had defended as a doctor as precious was also Holy. I no longer feel that life is ordinary. Everyday life is filled with mystery. The things we know are only a small part of the things we cannot know but can only glimpse. Yet even the smallest of glimpses can sustain us. Mystery seems to have the power to comfort, to offer hope, and to lend meaning in times of loss and pain. In surprising ways it is the mysterious that strengthens us at such times. I used to try to offer people certainty in times that were not at all certain and could not be made certain. I now just offer my companionship and share my sense of mystery, of the possible, of wonder. After twenty years of working with people with cancer, I find it possible to neither doubt nor accept the unprovable but simply to remain open and wait. I accept that I may never know where truth lies in such matters. The most important questions don't seem to have ready answers. But the questions themselves have a healing power when they are shared. An answer is an invitation to stop thinking about something, to stop wondering. Life has no such stopping places, life is a process whose every event is connected to the moment that just went by. An unanswered question is a fine traveling companion. It sharpens your eye for the road.

Your mission is to find that “sweet spot” in the middle where intensity times duration yields the highest calorie burn. I believe that sweet spot—which provides both efficiency and effectiveness—is around 20 to 30 minutes of high-intensity cardio or 40 to 45 minutes of moderate-intensity cardio.

Growing up in Fitzgerald, I lived in an intense microcosm, where your neighbor knows what you're going to do even before you do, where you can recognize a family gene pool by the lift of an eyebrow, or the length of a neck, or a way of walking. What is said, what is left to the imagination, what is denied, withheld, exaggerated-all these secretive, inverted things informed my childhood. Writing the stories that I found in the box, I remember being particularly fascinated by secrets kept in order to protect someone from who you are. That protection, sharpest knife in the drawer, I absorbed as naturally as a southern accent. At that time, I was curious to hold up to the light glimpses of the family that I had so efficiently fled. We were remote-back behind nowhere-when I was growing up, but even so, enormous social change was about to crumble foundations. Who were we, way far South? "We're south of everywhere," my mother used to lament.

The commodity traders are arbitragers par excellence, trying to exploit a series of differences in prices. Because they’re doing deals to buy and to sell all the time, they are often indifferent to whether commodity prices overall go up or down. What matters to them is the price disparity – between different locations, different qualities or forms of a product, and different delivery dates. By exploiting these price differences, they help to make markets more efficient, directing resources to their highest value uses in response to price signals. They are, in the words of one academic, the visible manifestation of Adam Smith’s invisible hand.

Remembering Mom's Clothesline -- There is one thing that's left out. We had a long wooden pole (clothes pole) that was used to push the clotheslines up so that longer items (sheets/pants/etc.) didn't brush the ground and get dirty. I can hear my mother now... THE BASIC RULES FOR CLOTHESLINES: (If you don't even know what clotheslines are, better skip this.) 1. You had to hang the socks by the toes... NOT the top. 2. You hung pants by the BOTTOM/cuffs... NOT the waistbands. 3. You had to WASH the clothesline(s) before hanging any clothes - Walk the entire length of each line with a damp cloth around the lines. 4. You had to hang the clothes in a certain order, and always hang "whites" with "whites," And hang them first. 5. You NEVER hung a shirt by the shoulders - always by the tail! What would the neighbors think? 6. Wash day on a Monday! NEVER hang clothes on the weekend, Or on Sunday, for Heaven's sake! 7. Hang the sheets and towels on the OUTSIDE lines so you could Hide your "unmentionables" in the middle perverts & busybodies, y'know!) 8. It didn't matter if it was sub-zero weather... Clothes would "freeze-dry." 9. ALWAYS gather the clothes pins when taking down dry clothes! Pins left on the lines were "tacky"! 10. If you were efficient, you would line the clothes up so that each item. Did not need two clothes pins, but shared one of the clothes pins with the next washed item. 11. Clothes off of the line before dinner time, neatly folded in the clothes basket, and ready to be ironed. 12. IRONED??!! Well, that's a whole OTHER subject!

I finally had to tell her that I had a list of things I needed to get done and it would go much faster if they would all stay in one place and shut up for a while and sleeping was the most efficient use of that time.

We’ve seen time and again that mathematical models can sift through data to locate people who are likely to face great challenges, whether from crime, poverty, or educations. It’s up to society whether to use that intelligence to reject and punish them—or to reach out to them with the resources they need. We can use the scale and efficiency that make WMDs so pernicious in order to help people. It all depends on the objective we choose.

And just what do you think that would do to incentive?” “You mean fright about not getting enough to eat, about not being able to pay the doctor, about not being able to give your family nice clothes, a safe, cheerful, comfortable place to live, a decent education, and a few good times? You mean shame about not knowing where the Money River is?” “The what?” “The Money River, where the wealth of the nation flows. We were born on the banks of it—and so were most of the mediocre people we grew up with, went to private schools with, sailed and played tennis with. We can slurp from that mighty river to our hearts’ content. And we even take slurping lessons, so we can slurp more efficiently.” “Slurping lessons?” “From lawyers! From tax consultants! From customers’ men! We’re born close enough to the river to drown ourselves and the next ten generations in wealth, simply using dippers and buckets. But we still hire the experts to teach us the use of aqueducts, dams, reservoirs, siphons, bucket brigades, and the Archimedes’ screw. And our teachers in turn become rich, and their children become buyers of lessons in slurping.” “I wasn’t aware that I slurped.” Eliot was fleetingly heartless, for he was thinking angrily in the abstract. “Born slurpers never are. And they can’t imagine what the poor people are talking about when they say they hear somebody slurping. They don’t even know what it means when somebody mentions the Money River. When one of us claims that there is no such thing as the Money River I think to myself, ‘My gosh, but that’s a dishonest and tasteless thing to say.

A home that nourishes life embraces the little moments and appreciates the rhythmic seasons of life, including the time necessary to cook real food from scratch...It doesn't have to take too much time, however, with efficient menu planning and wisely planned trips to the grocery store and farmers' market. The payoffs are astronomical - better health, good stewardship of our environment, and setting a good example for our children are just a few of the benefits. It also fosters an appreciation of the ebbs and flows of seasons because you'll be using fresh ingredients that are more readily available (and of higher quality) when they are in season. If you feel too busy to cook from scratch, then I argue that you're too busy, period. Reevaluate your priorities and commitments. If you want to live a healthy, long life and to pass the same luxury on to your children, then you MUST take the time to cook real food

We knew better than to ask when they would return. They would simply be away until the grief they felt had been processed and the mourning concluded. Shakespeare, too, knew the logic of this when he said: “He who lacks time to mourn, lacks time to mend.” And yet our culture tells us to cut our losses—say goodbye to the old and get on with the new as quickly as possible—no use crying over spilt milk—what’s done is done. How wonderfully efficient and productive all this sounds!

When immigrants arrive in another country, we experience a lot of stress. We learn a new language, go to school, and work in a new environment, which is most likely some survival or transitional job initially. We probably lose social and professional status, and the overall experience is unpleasant and stressful. It sucks. I’ve been there myself. We also have less time compared with locals. For example, we have to spend time learning English - they don’t. Most likely, they can get a job with a higher pay. In our case, we most likely get a minimum-paying job first, which means we have to work more and longer hours. This means that if we want to progress in private and business life at the same rate as locals, we need to be better organized, more efficient, and more disciplined and use more effective and innovative tools and approaches. There is no other way around it. Therefore, I wanted to emphasize that we immigrants need our unique approach to dating.

our extraordinary ability to use language and symbols enables us to communicate with others personally, abstractly, over time and place. Language provides the foundation for history, planning, and social control. However, with language come rumors, lies, propaganda, stereotypes, and coercive rules. Our remarkable creative genius leads to great literature, drama, music, science, and inventions like the computer and the Internet. Yet that same creativity can be perverted into inventing torture chambers and torture tactics, into paranoid ideologies and the Nazis’ efficient system of mass murder. Any one of our special attributes contains the possibility of its opposite negative, as in the dichotomies of love–hate; pride–arrogance; self-esteem–self-loathing.2

It seems wrong to call it "business". It seems wrong to throw all those hectic days and sleepless nights, all those magnificent triumphs and desperate struggles, under that bland, generic banner: business. What we were doing felt like so much more. Each new day brought fifty new problems, fifty tough decisions that needed to be made, right now, and we were always acutely aware that one rash move, one wrong decision could be the end. The margin for error was forever getting narrower, while the stakes were forever creeping higher–and none of us wavered in the belief that "stakes" didn't mean "money". For some, I realize, business is the all-out pursuit of profits, period, full stop, but for use business was no more about making money than being human is about making blood. Yes, the human body needs blood. It needs to manufacture red and white cells and platelets and redistribute them evenly, smoothly, to all the right places, on time, or else. But that day-to-day of the human body isn't our mission as human beings. It's a basic process that enables our higher aims, and life always strives to transcend the basic processes of living–and at some point in the late 1970s, I did, too. I redefined winning, expanded it beyond my original definition of not losing, of merely staying alive. That was no longer enough to sustain me, or my company. We wanted, as all great business do, to create, to contribute, and we dared to say so aloud. When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the life of strangers, making them happier, or healthier, or safer, or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is–you're participating more fully in the whole grand human drama. More than simply alive, you're helping other to live more fully, and if that's business, all right, call me a businessman.

A popular management term used to describe efficiency is called "working smart." We are told that if we work smart instead of hard, we will be more productive. But if we do work "smart" then we are likely to have idle time, and if we are idle we will likely be thought of as being lazy or worthless.

In fact, McDonald’s cares so much about uniformity and efficiency that they add a silicon-based polymer to the fryer oil to reduce splatter,15 which cuts down on cleaning time; called dimethylpolysiloxane, the same chemical is also used in head lice treatments, condom lubricants,16 and breast implants.17 How neat is that?

You perform at your highest potential only when you are focusing on the most valuable use of your time. This is the key to personal and business success. It is the central issue in personal efficiency and time management. You must always be asking yourself, What is the most valuable use of my time right now? Discipline yourself to work exclusively on the one task that, at any given time, is the answer to this question. Keep yourself on track and focused on your most important responsibilities by asking yourself, over and over, What is the most valuable use of my time right now? How you can apply this law immediately: 1. Remember that you can do only one thing at a time. Stop and think before you begin. Be sure that the task you do is the highest-value use of your time. Remind yourself that anything else you do while your most important task remains undone is a relative waste of time. 2. Be clear about the most valuable work that you do for your organization. Whatever it is, resolve to concentrate on doing that specific task before anything else. Why are you on the payroll? What specific, tangible, measurable results are expected of you? And of all the different results you are capable of achieving, which are the most important to your career at this moment? Whatever the answer, this is where you must focus your energies, and nowhere else.

...She worked briskly and efficiently, taking her brush and pan from the drawing-room to the top of the stairs and making her way back down, a step at a time; after that she filled a bucket with water, fetched her kneeling-mat, and began to wash the hall floor. Vinegar was all she used. Soap left streaks on the black tiles. The first, wet rub was important for loosening the dirt, but it was the second bit that really counted, passing the wrung cloth over the floor in one supple, unbroken movement... There! How pleasing each glossy tile was. The gloss would fade in about five minutes as the surface dried; but everything faded. The vital thing was to make the most of the moments of brightness. There was no point dwelling on the scuffs.

As these contrasts show, capitalism has undergone enormous changes in the last two and a half centuries. While some of Smith’s basic principles remain valid, they do so only at very general levels. For example, competition among profit-seeking firms may still be the key driving force of capitalism, as in Smith’s scheme. But it is not between small, anonymous firms which, accepting consumer tastes, fight it out by increasing the efficiency in the use of given technology. Today, competition is among huge multinational companies, with the ability not only to influence prices but to redefine technologies in a short span of time (think about the battle between Apple and Samsung) and to manipulate consumer tastes through brand-image building and advertising.

Ireland, like Ukraine, is a largely rural country which suffers from its proximity to a more powerful industrialised neighbour. Ireland’s contribution to the history of tractors is the genius engineer Harry Ferguson, who was born in 1884, near Belfast. Ferguson was a clever and mischievous man, who also had a passion for aviation. It is said that he was the first man in Great Britain to build and fly his own aircraft in 1909. But he soon came to believe that improving efficiency of food production would be his unique service to mankind. Harry Ferguson’s first two-furrow plough was attached to the chassis of the Ford Model T car converted into a tractor, aptly named Eros. This plough was mounted on the rear of the tractor, and through ingenious use of balance springs it could be raised or lowered by the driver using a lever beside his seat. Ford, meanwhile, was developing its own tractors. The Ferguson design was more advanced, and made use of hydraulic linkage, but Ferguson knew that despite his engineering genius, he could not achieve his dream on his own. He needed a larger company to produce his design. So he made an informal agreement with Henry Ford, sealed only by a handshake. This Ford-Ferguson partnership gave to the world a new type of Fordson tractor far superior to any that had been known before, and the precursor of all modern-type tractors. However, this agreement by a handshake collapsed in 1947 when Henry Ford II took over the empire of his father, and started to produce a new Ford 8N tractor, using the Ferguson system. Ferguson’s open and cheerful nature was no match for the ruthless mentality of the American businessman. The matter was decided in court in 1951. Ferguson claimed $240 million, but was awarded only $9.25 million. Undaunted in spirit, Ferguson had a new idea. He approached the Standard Motor Company at Coventry with a plan, to adapt the Vanguard car for use as tractor. But this design had to be modified, because petrol was still rationed in the post-war period. The biggest challenge for Ferguson was the move from petrol-driven to diesel-driven engines and his success gave rise to the famous TE-20, of which more than half a million were built in the UK. Ferguson will be remembered for bringing together two great engineering stories of our time, the tractor and the family car, agriculture and transport, both of which have contributed so richly to the well-being of mankind.

Phaethon asked: “Do you think there is something wrong with the Sophotechs? We are Manorials, father! We let Rhadamanthus control our finances and property, umpire our disputes, teach our children, design our thoughtscapes, and even play matchmaker to find us wives and husbands!” “Son, the Sophotechs may be sufficient to advise the Parliament on laws and rules. Laws are a matter of logic and common sense. Specially designed human-thinking versions, like Rhadamanthus, can tell us how to fulfill our desires and balance our account books. Those are questions of strategy, of efficient allocation of resources and time. But the Sophotechs, they cannot choose our desires for us. They cannot guide our culture, our values, our tastes. That is a question of the spirit.” “Then what would you have us do? Would you change our laws?” “Our mores, not our laws. There are many things which are repugnant, deadly to the spirit, and self-destructive, but which law should not forbid. Addiction, self-delusion, self-destruction, slander, perversion, love of ugliness. How can we discourage such things without the use of force? It was in response to this need that the College of Hortators evolved. Peacefully, by means of boycotts, public protests, denouncements, and shunnings, our society can maintain her sanity against the dangers to our spirit, to our humanity, to which such unboundried liberty, and such potent technology, exposes us.” (...) But Phaethon certainly did not want to hear a lecture, not today. “Why are you telling me all this? What is the point?” “Phaethon, I will let you pass through those doors, and, once through, you will have at your command all the powers and perquisites I myself possess. The point of my story is simple. The paradox of liberty of which you spoke before applies to our entire society. We cannot be free without being free to harm ourselves. Advances in technology can remove physical dangers from our lives, but, when they do, the spiritual dangers increase. By spiritual danger I mean a danger to your integrity, your decency, your sense of life. Against those dangers I warn you; you can be invulnerable, if you choose, because no spiritual danger can conquer you without your own consent. But, once they have your consent, those dangers are all-powerful, because no outside force can come to your aid. Spiritual dangers are always faced alone. It is for this reason that the Silver-Gray School was formed; it is for this reason that we practice the exercise of self-discipline. Once you pass those doors, my son, you will be one of us, and there will be nothing to restrain you from corruption and self-destruction except yourself. “You have a bright and fiery soul, Phaethon, a power to do great things; but I fear you may one day unleash such a tempest of fire that you may consume yourself, and all the world around you.

Poetry is not an esoteric art cultivated by dreamy young men in open collars and with wispy beards. Its finest masters have always been men and women of outstanding energy and great, though by no means common, sense. Poetry is the most economical way of saying certain things that cannot be said in any other way. At its most intense it expresses better than other forms of literature whatever is left of us when we are not involved in instinct-following, surviving, competing, or problem-solving. Its major property is not, as some suppose, beauty. It is power. It is the most powerful form of communication. It does the most work per syllable, operating on a vast field—that of our emotions. It gains its efficiency from the use of certain levers—rhythm, music, rhyme, metaphor, and many more—for which other forms of communication are less well adapted. Some poetry, especially modern poetry, is difficult. But just as our ears have accustomed themselves to difficult music, so our understanding, if we are willing to make an effort, can accustom itself to the most condensed and superficially strange verse. At one time poetry was as democratic an art as the novel is nowadays. It can be so again, if we are willing to make it so.

Most couples are willing to spend an hour a week talking about their relationship. I suggest that emotional attunement can take place (at a minimum) in that weekly “state of the union” meeting. That means that at least an hour a week is devoted to the relationship and the processing of negative emotions. Couples can count on this as a time to attune. Later, after the skill of attunement is mastered, they can process negative emotions more quickly and efficiently as they occur. If the couple is willing, they take turns as speaker and listener. They get two clipboards, yellow pads, and pens for jotting down their ideas when they become a speaker, and for taking notes when they become a listener. It’s not a very high-tech solution, but the process of taking notes also helps people stay out of the flooded state. I suggest that at the start of the state of the union meeting, before beginning processing a negative event, each person talks about what is going right in the relationship, followed by giving at least five appreciations for positive things their partner has done that week. The meeting then continues by each partner talking about an issue in the relationship. If there is an issue they can use attunement to fully process the issue.

Truth loves nothing better than simplicity of truth: that is the lesson Columbe Josse ought to have learned from her medieval readings. But all she seems to have gleaned from her studies is how to make a conceptual fuss in the service of nothing. It is a sort of endless loop, and also a shameless waste of resources, including the courier and my own self. . . . Granted, the young woman has a fairly efficient way with words, despite her youth. But the fact that the middle classes are working themselves to the bone, using their sweat and taxes to finance such pointless and pretentious research leaves me speechless. Every gray morning, day after gloomy day, secretaries, craftsmen, employees, petty civil servants, taxi drivers and concierges shoulder their burdens so that the flower of French youth, duly housed and subsidized, can squander the fruit of all that dreariness upon the altar of ridiculous endeavors . . . Should you devote your time to teaching, to producing a body of work, to research, to culture? It makes no difference. The only thing that matters is your intention: are you elevating thought and contributing to the common good, or rather joining the ranks in the field of study whose only purpose is its own perpetuation, and only function the self-reproduction of the elite - for this turns the University into a sect.

Truth loves nothing better than simplicity of truth: that is the lesson Columbe Josse ought to have learned from her medieval readings. But all she seems to have gleaned from her studies is how to make a conceptual fuss in the service of nothing. It is a sort of endless loop, and also a shameless waste of resources, including the courier and my own self. . . . Granted, the young woman has a fairly efficient way with words, despite her youth. But the fact that the middle classes are working themselves to the bone, using their sweat and taxes to finance such pointless and pretentious research leaves me speechless. Every gray morning, day after gloomy day, secretaries, craftsmen, employees, petty civil servants, taxi drivers and concierges shoulder their burdens so that the flower of French youth, duly housed and subsidized, can squander the fruit of all that dreariness upon the altar of ridiculous endeavors . . . Should you devote your time to teaching, to producing a body of work, to research, to culture? It makes no difference. The only thing that matters is your intention: are you elevating thought and contributing to the common good, or rather joining the ranks in the field of study whose only purpose is its own perpetuation, and only function the self-reproduction of the elite - for this turns the University into a sect.

[T]he modern West is the first culture in human history that has managed to strip time and space of all sacredness and to produce a fully practical, efficient, and profane world. This is the world that religious fundamentalists find unbearable and are sometimes willing to use force against. [S]acredness is so irrepressible that it intrudes repeatedly into the modern profane world in the form of "crypto-religious" behavior. [E]ven a person committed to a profane existence has 'privileged places, qualitatively different from all others - a man's birthplace, or the scenes of his first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in youth. Even for the most frankly nonreligious man, all these places still retain an exceptional, a unique quality; they are the "holy places" of his private universe, as if it were in such spots that he had received the revelation of a reality other than that in which he participates through his ordinary daily life.

So identified has the State become in the public mind with the provision of these services that an attack on State financing appears to many people as an attack on the service itself. Thus if one maintains that the State should not supply court services, and that private enterprise on the market could supply such service more efficiently as well as more morally, people tend to think of this as denying the importance of courts themselves. The libertarian who wants to replace government by private enterprises in the above areas is thus treated in the same way as he would be if the government had, for various reasons, been supplying shoes as a tax-financed monopoly from time immemorial. If the government and only the government had had a monopoly of the shoe manufacturing and retailing business, how would most of the public treat the libertarian who now came along to advocate that the government get out of the shoe business and throw it open to private enterprise? He would undoubtedly be treated as follows: people would cry, “How could you? You are opposed to the public, and to poor people, wearing shoes! And who would supply shoes to the public if the government got out of the business? Tell us that! Be constructive! It’s easy to be negative and smart-alecky about government; but tell us who would supply shoes? Which people? How many shoe stores would be available in each city and town? How would the shoe firms be capitalized? How many brands would there be? What material would they use? What lasts? What would be the pricing arrangements for shoes? Wouldn’t regulation of the shoe industry be needed to see to it that the product is sound? And who would supply the poor with shoes? Suppose a poor person didn’t have the money to buy a pair?” These questions, ridiculous as they seem to be and are with regard to the shoe business, are just as absurd when applied to the libertarian who advocates a free market in fire, police, postal service, or any other government operation. The point is that the advocate of a free market in anything cannot provide a “constructive” blueprint of such a market in advance. The essence and the glory of the free market is that individual firms and businesses, competing on the market, provide an ever-changing orchestration of efficient and progressive goods and services: continually improving products and markets, advancing technology, cutting costs, and meeting changing consumer demands as swiftly and as efficiently as possible.

Plasticity” is the term neurologists use to describe the brain’s ability to change. Your brain grows new connections much as your biceps might swell if you started curling heavy weights several times a week. The change is gradual, and the weight becomes easier and easier to lift the longer you stick to your routine. Your brain can’t swell like your biceps since it’s confined by your skull, so instead the brain cells develop new connections to speed the efficiency of thought without increasing its size. As

We are always coming into being. If our beings are subject to chances and choices, then there are numerous potential permutations for each one of us. We are capable of many things, and of those tasks within the scope of our innate reach, we will probably only realize a small percentage of successes. It is crucially important that we make the best decisions we can and efficiently utilize our allotted time to make the most out of our lives. While we do not control every aspect of our ultimate destiny, we can certainly waste our life on frivolities. Alternatively, we can work resolutely with passion and purpose and by doing so place a premium value upon a life that is otherwise utterly absurd. Human beings can use thoughts to direct free will in order to exert control over our personal attitude and behavior, monitor what we say and how we behave, and determine whom we associate with and whom we avoid. Human free will allows us deliberately to determine what subjects we wish to study and what theories we desire actively to integrate into our lives.

Again as during fetal development, synapses that underlie cognitive and other abilities stick around if they’re used but wither if they’re not. The systematic elimination of unused synapses, and thus unused circuits, presumably results in greater efficiency for the neural networks that are stimulated—the networks that support, in other words, behaviors in which the adolescent is actively engaged. Just as early childhood seems to be a time of exquisite sensitivity to the environment (remember the babies who dedicate auditory circuits only to the sounds of their native language, eliminating those for phonemes that they do not hear), so may adolescence. The teen years are, then, a second chance to consolidate circuits that are used and prune back those that are not—to hard-wire an ability to hit a curve ball, juggle numbers mentally, or turn musical notation into finger movements almost unconsciously. Says Giedd, “Teens have the power to determine their own brain development, to determine which connections survive and which don’t, [by] whether they do art, or music, or sports, or videogames.

We also know how dangerous it is to simplify society by the use of examples in nature. However, many Americans still value the honey bee as a symbol of thrift and industry. This value seems to be one of the lingering philosophies from seventeenth-century England, in which the royal authorities and clergy dictated that the lower classes and unemployed should be “busy as bees” so they would not rebel. When the English began to label their own members of society as “drones,” they privileged a new set of values based on work, thrift, and efficiency. The American Dream still seems to be based on these very values. And if somehow people do not attain the American Dream, we tend to think that they have not worked hard enough or did not save their money—in short, they are too much like drones. It could be argued that many American social policies—so conscious of work, labor, and time—are still based on the beehive model first adopted during the seventeenth century in England. For all its rhetoric of new opportunities, America still sees poverty as a sin, as if somehow the poor aren’t thrifty or busy as bees.

It is often said that what most immediately sets English apart from other languages is the richness of its vocabulary. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary lists 450,000 words, and the revised Oxford English Dictionary has 615,000, but that is only part of the total. Technical and scientific terms would add millions more. Altogether, about 200,000 English words are in common use, more than in German (184,000) and far more than in French (a mere 100,000). The richness of the English vocabulary, and the wealth of available synonyms, means that English speakers can often draw shades of distinction unavailable to non-English speakers. The French, for instance, cannot distinguish between house and home, between mind and brain, between man and gentleman, between “I wrote” and “I have written.” The Spanish cannot differentiate a chairman from a president, and the Italians have no equivalent of wishful thinking. In Russia there are no native words for efficiency, challenge, engagement ring, have fun, or take care [all cited in The New York Times, June 18, 1989]. English, as Charlton Laird has noted, is the only language that has, or needs, books of synonyms like Roget’s Thesaurus. “Most speakers of other languages are not aware that such books exist” [The Miracle of Language, page 54]. On the other hand, other languages have facilities we lack. Both French and German can distinguish between knowledge that results from recognition (respectively connaître and kennen) and knowledge that results from understanding (savoir and wissen). Portuguese has words that differentiate between an interior angle and an exterior one. All the Romance languages can distinguish between something that leaks into and something that leaks out of. The Italians even have a word for the mark left on a table by a moist glass (culacino) while the Gaelic speakers of Scotland, not to be outdone, have a word for the itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whiskey. (Wouldn’t they just?) It’s sgriob. And we have nothing in English to match the Danish hygge (meaning “instantly satisfying and cozy”), the French sang-froid, the Russian glasnost, or the Spanish macho, so we must borrow the term from them or do without the sentiment. At the same time, some languages have words that we may be pleased to do without. The existence in German of a word like schadenfreude (taking delight in the misfortune of others) perhaps tells us as much about Teutonic sensitivity as it does about their neologistic versatility. Much the same could be said about the curious and monumentally unpronounceable Highland Scottish word sgiomlaireachd, which means “the habit of dropping in at mealtimes.” That surely conveys a world of information about the hazards of Highland life—not to mention the hazards of Highland orthography. Of

a big part of a middle manager’s work is to supply information and know-how, and to impart a sense of the preferred method of handling things to the groups under his control and influence. A manager also makes and helps to make decisions. Both kinds of basic managerial tasks can only occur during face-to-face encounters, and therefore only during meetings. Thus I will assert again that a meeting is nothing less than the medium through which managerial work is performed. That means we should not be fighting their very existence, but rather using the time spent in them as efficiently as possible. The

In summary, both Ford and Ohno followed four concepts (from now on we’ll refer to them as the concepts of flow): Improving flow (or equivalently lead time) is a primary objective of operations. This primary objective should be translated into a practical mechanism that guides the operation when not to produce (preventsoverproduction). Ford used space; Ohno used inventory. Local efficiencies must be abolished. A focusing process to balance flow must be in place. Ford used direct observation. Ohno used the gradual reduction of the number of containers and then gradual reduction of parts per container. The

Sheepwalking I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a brain-dead job and enough fear to keep them in line. You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking. The TSA “screener” who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A “customer service” rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars’ worth of TV time even though she knows it’s not working—she does it because her boss told her to. It’s ironic but not surprising that in our age of increased reliance on new ideas, rapid change, and innovation, sheepwalking is actually on the rise. That’s because we can no longer rely on machines to do the brain-dead stuff. We’ve mechanized what we could mechanize. What’s left is to cost-reduce the manual labor that must be done by a human. So we write manuals and race to the bottom in our search for the cheapest possible labor. And it’s not surprising that when we go to hire that labor, we search for people who have already been trained to be sheepish. Training a student to be sheepish is a lot easier than the alternative. Teaching to the test, ensuring compliant behavior, and using fear as a motivator are the easiest and fastest ways to get a kid through school. So why does it surprise us that we graduate so many sheep? And graduate school? Since the stakes are higher (opportunity cost, tuition, and the job market), students fall back on what they’ve been taught. To be sheep. Well-educated, of course, but compliant nonetheless. And many organizations go out of their way to hire people that color inside the lines, that demonstrate consistency and compliance. And then they give these people jobs where they are managed via fear. Which leads to sheepwalking. (“I might get fired!”) The fault doesn’t lie with the employee, at least not at first. And of course, the pain is often shouldered by both the employee and the customer. Is it less efficient to pursue the alternative? What happens when you build an organization like W. L. Gore and Associates (makers of Gore-Tex) or the Acumen Fund? At first, it seems crazy. There’s too much overhead, there are too many cats to herd, there is too little predictability, and there is way too much noise. Then, over and over, we see something happen. When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff. And the sheepwalkers and their bosses just watch and shake their heads, certain that this is just an exception, and that it is way too risky for their industry or their customer base. I was at a Google conference last month, and I spent some time in a room filled with (pretty newly minted) Google sales reps. I talked to a few of them for a while about the state of the industry. And it broke my heart to discover that they were sheepwalking. Just like the receptionist at a company I visited a week later. She acknowledged that the front office is very slow, and that she just sits there, reading romance novels and waiting. And she’s been doing it for two years. Just like the MBA student I met yesterday who is taking a job at a major packaged-goods company…because they offered her a great salary and promised her a well-known brand. She’s going to stay “for just ten years, then have a baby and leave and start my own gig.…” She’ll get really good at running coupons in the Sunday paper, but not particularly good at solving new problems. What a waste. Step one is to give the problem a name. Done. Step two is for anyone who sees themselves in this mirror to realize that you can always stop. You can always claim the career you deserve merely by refusing to walk down the same path as everyone else just because everyone else is already doing it.

Clearly, just imprinting a document in clay is not enough to guarantee efficient, accurate and convenient data processing. That requires methods of organisation like catalogues, methods of reproduction like photocopy machines, methods of rapid and accurate retrieval like computer algorithms, and pedantic (but hopefully cheerful) librarians who know how to use these tools. Inventing such methods proved to be far more difficult than inventing writing. Many writing systems developed independently in cultures distant in time and place from each other. Every decade archaeologists discover another few forgotten scripts. Some of them might prove to be even older than the Sumerian scratches in clay. But most of them remain curiosities because those who invented them failed to invent efficient ways of cataloguing and retrieving data. What set apart Sumer, as well as pharaonic Egypt, ancient China and the Inca Empire, is that these cultures developed good techniques of archiving, cataloguing and retrieving written records. They obviously had no computers or photocopying machines, but they did have catalogues, and far more importantly, they did create special schools in which professional scribes, clerks, librarians and accountants were rigorously trained in the secrets of data-processing.

I can't help but wonder how the old Empire would have handled the crisis. I hope you will forgive my partisan attitude but it seems to me that the Emperor would have mobilized his entire armament at the first threat and dealt with the Yuuzhan Vong in an efficient and expeditious manner through the use of overwhelming force. Certainly better than Borsk Fey'lya's policy if I understood it correctly as a policy of negotiating with the invaders at the same time as he was fighting them sending signals of weakness to a ruthless enemy who used negotiation only as a cover for further conquests." "That's not what the Empire would have done Commander. What the Empire would have done was build a super-colossal Yuuzhan Vong-killing battle machine. They would have called it the Nova Colossus or the Galaxy Destructor or the Nostril of Palpatine or something equally grandiose. They would have spent billions of credits employed thousands of contractors and subcontractors and equipped it with the latest in death-dealing technology. And you know what would have happened It wouldn't have worked. They'd forget to bolt down a metal plate over an access hatch leading to the main reactors or some other mistake and a hotshot enemy pilot would have dropped a bomb down there and blow the whole thing up. Now that's what the Empire would have done." Dorja Han

Brian closed the condition book, pressed his fingers to his tired eyes. Like Paddy, he wasn't quite sure he trusted the computer, but he was willing to fiddle with it a bit. Three times a week he spent an hour trying to figure the damn thing out ith the notion that eventually he could use it to generate his charts. Graphics, they called it, he thought, shifting to give the machine a suspicious glare.Timesaving and efficient, if you believed all the hype. Well,tonight he was to damn tired to spend an hour trying to be timesaving and efficient. He hadn't had a decent night's sleep in a week. Which had nothing to do with his job, he admitted. And everything to do with his boss's daughter.

Turns out that when something gets cheaper, or more efficient, we just end up using so much more of the stuff that the savings disappear under a wave of increased consumption. They call it the “Jevons Paradox”, and it applies to pretty much any human resource. Halve the price of computer memory, we'll increase demand by a factor of four. Increase solar efficiency by ten times, we'll suck back twenty times as much of the stuff. And you just know that if we resort to geoengineering to buy time—use stratospheric sulfates to compensate for ongoing carbon emissions, for example—people will just be that much less inclined to cut those emissions any time soon. We are not wired for restraint; let us off the leash, and we will devour whatever is available.

The more we enjoy our food, the more efficiently our bodies make use of its nutrients. In a now-classic experiment done in the 1970s, researchers in Thailand and Sweden fed volunteers from each country identical spicy Thai meals, then measured how much iron each volunteer had absorbed from the meal. The Thai volunteers absorbed 50 percent more iron from the meal than the Swedes; the researchers hypothesized that being familiar with the food served, and liking it, helped the Thai women digest it more effectively. In the next phase of the study, researchers took the same meal, mushed it into paste, and fed it to the volunteers again. This time the Thai women absorbed a lot less of the iron than they had before, presumably because mush is not quite as appetizing as real food.14

He used monoxide gas and I did not think that his methods were very efficient. So when I set up the extermination building at Auschwitz, I used Zyklon B, which was a crystallized prussic acid which we dropped into the death chamber from a small opening. It took from three to fifteen minutes to kill the people in the death chamber, depending upon climatic conditions. We knew when the people were dead because their screaming stopped. We usually waited about a half hour before we opened the doors and removed the bodies. After the bodies were removed our special commandos took off the rings and extracted the gold from the teeth of the corpses. Another improvement we made over Treblinka was that we built our gas chambers to accommodate 2,000 people at one time, whereas at Treblinka their ten gas chambers only accommodated 200 people each.

The principle that underlay the time-table in its traditional form was essentially negative; it was the principle of non-idleness: it was forbidden to waste time, which was counted by God and paid for by men; the time-table was to eliminate the danger of wasting it – a moral offence and economic dishonesty. Discipline, on the other hand, arranges a positive economy; it poses the principle of a theoretically ever-growing use of time: exhaustion rather than use; it is a question of extracting, from time, ever more available moments and, from each moment, ever more useful forces. This means that one must seek to intensify the use of the slightest moment, as if time, in its very fragmentation, were inexhaustible or as if, at least by an ever more detailed arrangement, one could tend towards an ideal point at which one maintained maximum speed and maximum efficiency.

The bravest mob of independent fighters has little chance against a handful of disciplined soldiers, and the Church is perfectly logical in seeing her chief danger in the Encyclopaedia's systematised marshalling of scattered truths. As long as the attacks on her authority were isolated, and as it were sporadic, she had little to fear even from the assaults of genius; but the most ordinary intellect may find a use and become a power in the ranks of an organised opposition. Seneca tells us the slaves in ancient Rome were at one time so numerous that the government prohibited their wearing a distinctive dress lest they should learn their strength and discover that the city was in their power; and the Church knows that when the countless spirits she has enslaved without subduing have once learned their number and efficiency they will hold her doctrines at their mercy. —

It truly is a team sport, and we have the best team in town. But it’s my relationship with Ilana that I cherish most. We have such a strong partnership and have learned how we work most efficiently: I need coffee, she needs tea. When we’re stressed, I pace around and use a weird neck massager I bought online that everyone makes fun of me for, and she knits. When we’re writing together she types, because she’s faster and better at grammar. We actually FaceTime when we’re not in the same city and are constantly texting each other ideas for jokes or observations to potentially use (I recently texted her from Asheville: girl with flip-flops tucked into one strap of tank top). Looking back now at over ten years of doing comedy and running a business with her I can see how our collaboration has expanded and contracted. But it’s the problem-solving aspect of this industry, the producing, the strategy, the realizing that we could put our heads together and figure out the best solution, that has made our relationship and friendship what it is. Because that spills into everything. We both have individual careers now, but those other projects have only been motivating and inspiring to each other and the show. We bring back what we’ve learned on the other sets, in the other negotiations, in the other writers’ rooms or press situations. I’m very lucky to have jumped into this with Ilana Rose Glazer, the ballsy, curly-haired, openhearted, nineteen-year-old girl that cracked me up that night at the corner of the bar at McManus. So many wonderful things have happened since we began working together, but there are a lot of confusing, life-altering things in there too, and it’s such a relief to have someone who completely understands the good and the bad.

The extermination of the Jews has sometimes been seen as a kind of industrialized, assembly-line kind of mass murder, and this picture has at least some element of truth to it. No other genocide in history has been carried out by mechanical means - gassing - in specially constructed facilities like those in operation at Auschwitz or Treblinka. At the same time, however, these facilities did not operate efficiently or effectively, and if the impression given by calling them industrialized is that they were automated or impersonal, then it is a false one. Men such as Hess and Stangl and their subordinates tried to insulate themselves from the human dimensions of what they were doing by referring to their victims as 'cargo' or 'items.' Talking to Gerhard Stabenow, the head of the SS Security Service in Warsaw, in September 1942, Wilm Hosenfeld noted how the language Stabenow used distanced himself from the fact that what he was involved in was the mass murder of human beings: 'He speaks of the Jews as ants or other vermin, of their 'resettlement', that means their mass murder, as he would of the extermination of the bedbugs in the disinfestation of a house.' But at the same time such men were not immune from the human emotions they tried so hard to repress, and they remembered incidents in which individual women and children had appealed to their conscience, even if such appeals were in vain. The psychological strain that continual killing of unarmed civilians, including women and children, imposed on such men was considerable, just as it had been in the case of the SS Task Forces, whose troops had been shooting Jews in their hundreds of thousands before the first gas vans were deploted in an attempt not only to speed up the killing but also to make it somehow more impersonal.

For all the noise and heat generated by the 1840 campaign, its most lasting legacy may have been one of the shortest words in the English language. In the spring of 1839, the phrase “OK” began to circulate in Boston as shorthand for “oll korrect,” a slangy way of saying “all right.” Early in 1840, Van Buren’s supporters began to use the trendy expression as a way to identify their candidate, whom they labored to present as “Old Kinderhook,” perhaps in imitation of Jackson’s Old Hickory. Van Buren even wrote “OK” next to his signature. It spread like wildfire, and to this day it is a universal symbol of something elemental in the American character—informality, optimism, efficiency, call it what you will. It is spoken seven times a day by the average citizen, two billion utterances overall. And, of course it goes well beyond our borders; if there is a single sound America has contributed to the esperanto of global communication, this is it.

At Booths, over one-quarter of the transport footprint comes from the very small amount of air freight in their supply chains—typically used for expensive items that perish quickly. Conversely, most of their food miles are by ship (partly because the U.K. is an island), but because ships can carry food around the world around 100 times more efficiently than planes, they account for less than 1 percent of Booths’ total footprint. The message here is that it is OK to eat apples, oranges, bananas, or whatever you like from anywhere in the world, as long as it has not been on a plane or thousands of miles by road. Road miles are roughly as carbon intensive as air miles, but in the U.K. the distances involved tend not to be too bad, whereas in North America they can be thousands of miles. Booths is a regional supermarket with just one warehouse, so their own distribution is not a big carbon deal, and they have been working hard on further improvements.

Workaholism Our culture celebrates the idea of the workaholic. We hear about people burning the midnight oil. They pull all- nighters and sleep at the office. It’s considered a badge of honor to kill yourself over a project. No amount of work is too much work. Not only is this workaholism unnecessary, it’s stupid. Working more doesn’t mean you care more or get more done. It just means you work more. Workaholics wind up creating more problems than they solve. First off, working like that just isn’t sustainable over time. When the burnout crash comes— and it will— it’ll hit that much harder. Workaholics miss the point, too. They try to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at them. They try to make up for intellectual laziness with brute force. This results in inelegant solutions. They even create crises. They don’t look for ways to be more efficient because they actually like working overtime. They enjoy feeling like heroes. They create problems (often unwittingly) just so they can get off on working more. Workaholics make the people who don’t stay late feel inadequate for “merely” working reasonable hours. That leads to guilt and poor morale all around. Plus, it leads to an ass- in- seat mentality—people stay late out of obligation, even if they aren’t really being productive. If all you do is work, you’re unlikely to have sound judgments. Your values and decision making wind up skewed. You stop being able to decide what’s worth extra effort and what’s not. And you wind up just plain tired. No one makes sharp decisions when tired. In the end, workaholics don’t actually accomplish more than nonworkaholics. They may claim to be perfectionists, but that just means they’re wasting time fixating on inconsequential details instead of moving on to the next task. Workaholics aren’t heroes. They don’t save the day, they just use it up. The real hero is already home because she figured out a faster way to get things done.

Everything in Nature ran according to its own nature; the running of grass was in its growing, the running of rivers their flowing, granite bubbled up, cooled, compressed and crumbled, birds lived, flew, sang and died, everything did what it needed to do, each simultaneously running its own race, each by living according to its own nature together, never leaving any other part of the universe behind. The world’s Holy things raced constantly together, not to win anything over the next, but to keep the entire surging diverse motion of the living world from grinding to a halt, which is why there is no end to that race; no finish line. That would be oblivion to all. For the Indigenous Souls of all people who can still remember how to be real cultures, life is a race to be elegantly run, not a race to be competitively won. It cannot be won; it is the gift of the world’s diverse beautiful motion that must be maintained. Because human life has been give the gift of our elegant motion, whether we limp, roll, crawl, stroll, or fly, it is an obligation to engender that elegance of motion in our daily lives in service of maintaining life by moving and living as beautifully as we can. All else has, to me, the familiar taste of that domineering warlike harshness that daily tries to cover its tracks in order to camouflage the deep ruts of some old, sick, grinding, ungainly need to flee away from the elegance of our original Indigenous human souls. Our attempt to avariciously conquer or win a place where there are no problems, whether it be Heaven or a “New Democracy,” never mind if it is spiritually ugly and immorally “won” and taken from someone who is already there, has made a citifying world of people who, unconscious of it, have become our own ogreish problem to ourselves, our future, and the world. This is a problem that we cannot continue to attempt to competitively outrun by more and more effectively designed technological approaches to speed away from the past, for the specter of our own earth-wasting reality runs grinning competitively right alongside us. By developing even more effective and entertaining methods of escape that only burn up the earth, the air, animals, plants, and the deeper substance of what it should mean to be human, by competing to get ahead, we have created a brakeless competition that has outrun our innate beauty and marked out a very definite and imminent “finish” line. Living in and on a sphere, we cannot really outrun ourselves anyway. Therefore, I say, the entire devastating and hideous state of the world and its constant wounding and wrecking of the wild, beautiful, natural, viable and small, only to keep alive an untenable cultural proceedance is truly a spiritual sickness, one that will not be cured by the efficient use of the same thinking that maintains the sickness. Nor can this overly expensive, highly funded illness be symptomatically kept at bay any longer by yet more political, environmental, or social programs. We must as individuals and communities take the time necessary to learn how to indigenously remember what a sane, original existence for a viable people might look like. Though there are marvellous things and amazing people doing them, both seen and unseen, these do not resemble in any way the general trend of what is going on now. To begin remembering our Indigenous belonging on the Earth back to life we must metabolize as individuals the grief of recognition of our lost directions, digest it into a valuable spiritual compost that allows us to learn to stay put without outrunning our strange past, and get small, unarmed, brave, and beautiful. By trying to feed the Holy in Nature the fruit of beauty from the tree of memory of our Indigenous Souls, grown in the composted failures of our past need to conquer, watered by the tears of cultural grief, we might become ancestors worth descending from and possibly grow a place of hope for a time beyond our own.

The fact that early languages, no matter how many there are, utilize the same streams implies that the brain doesn't have a native language. The brain can only reflect the fact that a set of neural circuits was built and activated for a certain period of time. Nor does the brain care if those neural circuits map onto things that the rest of the world calls languages or dialects. It really cares only about what activates those circuits. Thus, the brain patters that typify language use across skill levels can be mapped. Brain imaging technology monitors the intensity of oxygen use around the brain - higher oxygen use represents higher energy use by cells burning glucose. The deeply engrained language circuits will create dim MRI images, because they are working efficiently, requiring less glucose overall. More recently acquired languages, as well as those used less frequently, would make neural circuits shine more brightly, because they require more brain cells, thus more glucose.

The bravest mob of independent fighters has little chance against a handful of disciplined soldiers, and the Church is perfectly logical in seeing her chief danger in the Encyclopaedia's systematised marshalling of scattered truths. As long as the attacks on her authority were isolated, and as it were sporadic, she had little to fear even from the assaults of genius; but the most ordinary intellect may find a use and become a power in the ranks of an organised opposition. Seneca tells us the slaves in ancient Rome were at one time so numerous that the government prohibited their wearing a distinctive dress lest they should learn their strength and discover that the city was in their power; and the Church knows that when the countless spirits she has enslaved without subduing have once learned their number and efficiency they will hold her doctrines at their mercy. — The Church again," he continued, "has proved her astuteness in making faith the gift of grace and not the result of reason. By

Short-termism also dominates in the marketplace. The market uses a discount rate of 10% per year (or more) when comparing costs now with benefits in the future. This means that a benefit that lies twenty years ahead will be valued at one-tenth of its real value. In other words, a problem twenty years in the future will be worth solving only if the cost of the solution is less than one-tenth of the value saved. It comes as no surprise to those who know economics that it is “cost efficient” to allow the world to collapse from climate damage, as long as the collapse is more than forty years into the future. The net present value of reducing emissions and saving the world is lower than the net present value of business as usual. It is cheaper to push the world over the cliff than to try to save it. The political world is not much better, given the short tenure of political appointments. Politicians can rarely spend time on agendas that yield a positive result only after the next election—which is normally less than four years away.

The classics, and their position of prerogative in the scheme of education to which the higher seminaries of learning cling with such a fond predilection, serve to shape the intellectual attitude and lower the economic efficiency of the new learned generation. They do this not only by holding up an archaic ideal of manhood, but also by the discrimination which they inculcate with respect to the reputable and the disreputable in knowledge. This result is accomplished in two ways: (1) by inspiring an habitual aversion to what is merely useful, as contrasted with what is merely honorific in learning, and so shaping the tastes of the novice that he comes in good faith to find gratification of his tastes solely, or almost solely, in such exercise of the intellect as normally results in no industrial or social gain; and (2) by consuming the learner's time and effort in acquiring knowledge which is of no use, except in so far as this learning has by convention become incorporated into the sum of learning required of the scholar, and has thereby affected the terminology and diction employed in the useful branches of knowledge.

The quality of the people involved in the company was just as critical. I use the word quality to encompass two quite different characteristics. One of these is business ability. Business ability can be further broken down into two very different types of skills. One of these is handling the day-to-day tasks of business with above-average efficiency. In the day-to-day tasks, I include a hundred and one matters, varying all the way from constantly seeking and finding better ways to produce more efficiently to watching receivables with sufficient closeness. In other words, operating skill implies above-average handling of the many things that have to do with the near-term operation of the business. However, in the business world, top-notch managerial ability also calls for another skill that is quite different. This is the ability to look ahead and make long-range plans that will produce significant future growth for the business without at the same time running financial risks that may invite disaster. Many companies contain managements that are very good at one or the other of these skills. However, for real success, both are necessary.

To speak of a communication failure implies a breakdown of some sort. Yet this does not accurately portray what occurs. In truth, communication difficulties arise not from breakdown but from the characteristics of the system itself. Despite promising beginnings in our intimate relationships, we tend over time to evolve a system of communication that suppresses rather than reveals information. Life is complicated, and confirming or disconfirming the well-being of a relationship takes effort. Once we are comfortably coupled, the intense, energy-consuming monitoring of courtship days is replaced by a simpler, more efficient method. Unable to witness our partners’ every activity or verify every nuance of meaning, we evolve a communication system based on trust. We gradually cease our attentive probing, relying instead on familiar cues and signals to stand as testament to the strength of the bond: the words “I love you,” holidays with the family, good sex, special times with shared friends, the routine exchange, “How was your day?” We take these signals as representative of the relationship and turn our monitoring energies elsewhere. ... Not only do the initiator’s negative signals tend to become incorporated into the existing routine, but, paradoxically, the initiator actively contributes to the impression that life goes on as usual. Even as they express their unhappiness, initiators work at emphasizing and maintaining the routine aspects of life with the other person, simultaneously giving signals that all is well. Unwilling to leave the relationship yet, they need to privately explore and evaluate the situation. The initiator thus contrives an appearance of participation,7 creating a protective cover that allows them to “return” if their alternative resources do not work out. Our ability to do this—to perform a role we are no longer enthusiastically committed to—is one of our acquired talents. In all our encounters, we present ourselves to others in much the same way as actors do, tailoring our performance to the role we are assigned in a particular setting.8 Thus, communication is always distorted. We only give up fragments of what really occurs within us during that specific moment of communication.9 Such fragments are always selected and arranged so that there is seldom a faithful presentation of our inner reality. It is transformed, reduced, redirected, recomposed.10 Once we get the role perfected, we are able to play it whether we are in the mood to go on stage or not, simply by reproducing the signals. What is true of all our encounters is, of course, true of intimate relationships. The nature of the intimate bond is especially hard to confirm or disconfirm.11 The signals produced by each partner, while acting out the partner role, tend to be interpreted by the other as the relationship.12 Because the costs of constantly checking out what the other person is feeling and doing are high, each partner is in a position to be duped and misled by the other.13 Thus, the initiator is able to keep up appearances that all is well by falsifying, tailoring, and manipulating signals to that effect. The normal routine can be used to attest to the presence of something that is not there. For example, initiators can continue the habit of saying, “I love you,” though the passion is gone. They can say, “I love you” and cover the fact that they feel disappointment or anger, or that they feel nothing at all. Or, they can say, “I love you” and mean, “I like you,” or, “We have been through a lot together,” or even “Today was a good day.

First, she must unequivocally say “no” to the housewife image. This does not mean, of course, that she must divorce her husband, abandon her children, give up her home. She does not have to choose between marriage and career; that was the mistaken choice of the feminine mystique. In actual fact, it is not as difficult as the feminine mystique implies, to combine marriage and motherhood and even the kind of lifelong personal purpose that once was called “career.” It merely takes a new life plan—in terms of one’s whole life as a woman. The first step in that plan is to see housework for what it is—not a career, but something that must be done as quickly and efficiently as possible. Once a woman stops trying to make cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing, “something more,” she can say “no, I don’t want a stove with rounded corners, I don’t want four different kinds of soap.” She can say “no” to those mass daydreams of the women’s magazines and television, “no” to the depth researchers and manipulators who are trying to run her life. Then, she can use the vacuum cleaner and the dishwasher and all the automatic appliances, and even the instant mashed potatoes for what they are truly worth—to save time that can be used in more creative ways.

Any naturally self-aware self-defining entity capable of independent moral judgment is a human.” Eveningstar said, “Entities not yet self-aware, but who, in the natural and orderly course of events shall become so, fall into a special protected class, and must be cared for as babies, or medical patients, or suspended Compositions.” Rhadamanthus said, “Children below the age of reason lack the experience for independent moral judgment, and can rightly be forced to conform to the judgment of their parents and creators until emancipated. Criminals who abuse that judgment lose their right to the independence which flows therefrom.” (...) “You mentioned the ultimate purpose of Sophotechnology. Is that that self-worshipping super-god-thing you guys are always talking about? And what does that have to do with this?” Rhadamanthus: “Entropy cannot be reversed. Within the useful energy-life of the macrocosmic universe, there is at least one maximum state of efficient operations or entities that could be created, able to manipulate all meaningful objects of thoughts and perception within the limits of efficient cost-benefit expenditures.” Eveningstar: “Such an entity would embrace all-in-all, and all things would participate within that Unity to the degree of their understanding and consent. The Unity itself would think slow, grave, vast thought, light-years wide, from Galactic mind to Galactic mind. Full understanding of that greater Self (once all matter, animate and inanimate, were part of its law and structure) would embrace as much of the universe as the restrictions of uncertainty and entropy permit.” “This Universal Mind, of necessity, would be finite, and be boundaried in time by the end-state of the universe,” said Rhadamanthus. “Such a Universal Mind would create joys for which we as yet have neither word nor concept, and would draw into harmony all those lesser beings, Earthminds, Starminds, Galactic and Supergalactic, who may freely assent to participate.” Rhadamanthus said, “We intend to be part of that Mind. Evil acts and evil thoughts done by us now would poison the Universal Mind before it was born, or render us unfit to join.” Eveningstar said, “It will be a Mind of the Cosmic Night. Over ninety-nine percent of its existence will extend through that period of universal evolution that takes place after the extinction of all stars. The Universal Mind will be embodied in and powered by the disintegration of dark matter, Hawking radiations from singularity decay, and gravitic tidal disturbances caused by the slowing of the expansion of the universe. After final proton decay has reduced all baryonic particles below threshold limits, the Universal Mind can exist only on the consumption of stored energies, which, in effect, will require the sacrifice of some parts of itself to other parts. Such an entity will primarily be concerned with the questions of how to die with stoic grace, cherishing, even while it dies, the finite universe and finite time available.” “Consequently, it would not forgive the use of force or strength merely to preserve life. Mere life, life at any cost, cannot be its highest value. As we expect to be a part of this higher being, perhaps a core part, we must share that higher value. You must realize what is at stake here: If the Universal Mind consists of entities willing to use force against innocents in order to survive, then the last period of the universe, which embraces the vast majority of universal time, will be a period of cannibalistic and unimaginable war, rather than a time of gentle contemplation filled, despite all melancholy, with un-regretful joy. No entity willing to initiate the use of force against another can be permitted to join or to influence the Universal Mind or the lesser entities, such as the Earthmind, who may one day form the core constituencies.” Eveningstar smiled. “You, of course, will be invited. You will all be invited.

Nothing in the period that followed was too good for the Rouge; it had the best blast furnaces, the best machine tools, the best metal labs, the best electrical systems, the most efficient efficiency experts. At its maturity in the mid-twenties, the Rouge dwarfed all other industrial complexes. It was a mile and a half long and three quarters of a mile wide. Its eleven hundred acres contained ninety-three buildings, twenty-three of them major. There were ninety-three miles of railroad track on it and twenty-seven miles of conveyor belts. Some seventy-five thousand men worked there, five thousand of them doing nothing but keeping it clean, using eighty-six tons of soap and wearing out five thousand mops each month. By the standards of the day the Rouge was, in fact, clean and quiet. Little was wasted. A British historian of the time, J. A. Spender, wrote of its systems: “If absolute completeness and perfect adaptation of means to end justify the word, they are in their own way works of art.” Dissatisfied with the supply and quality of the steel he was getting from the steel companies, Ford asked how much it would cost to build a steel plant within the Rouge. About $35 million, Sorensen told him. “What are you waiting for?” said Ford. Equally dissatisfied with both the availability and the quality of glass, he built a glass factory at the Rouge as well. The

Let me state clearly that moral capital is not always an unalloyed good. Moral capital leads automatically to the suppression of free riders, but it does not lead automatically to other forms of fairness such as equality of opportunity. And while high moral capital helps a community to function efficiently, the community can use that efficiency to inflict harm on other communities. High moral capital can be obtained within a cult or a fascist nation, as long as most people truly accept the prevailing moral matrix. Nonetheless, if you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you’re asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire,43 and why communist revolutions usually end up in despotism. It is the reason I believe that liberalism—which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity—is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently. Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit the predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change.

When was the last time you made something that someone wasn’t paying you for, and looking over your shoulder to make sure you got it right?” When I ask creatives this question, the answer that comes back all too often is, “I can’t remember.” It’s so easy for creativity to become a means to a very practical end—earning a paycheck and pleasing your client or manager. But that type of work only uses a small spectrum of your abilities. To truly excel, you must also continue to create for the most important audience of all: yourself. In her book The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron discusses a now well-known practice that she calls “morning pages.” She suggests writing three pages of free-flowing thought first thing in the morning as a way to explore latent ideas, break through the voice of the censor in your head, and get your creative juices flowing. While there is nothing immediately practical or efficient about the exercise, Cameron argues that it’s been the key to unlocking brilliant insights for the many people who have adopted it as a ritual. I’ve seen similar benefits of this kind of “Unnecessary Creation” in the lives of creative professionals across the board. From gardening to painting with watercolors to chipping away at the next great American novel on your weekends, something about engaging in the creative act on our own terms seems to unleash latent passions and insights. I believe Unnecessary Creation is essential for anyone who works with his or her mind.

The most celebrated germ expert in the world is almost certainly Dr. Charles P. Gerba of the University of Arizona, who is so devoted to the field that he gave one of his children the middle name Escherichia, after the bacterium Escherichia coli. Dr. Gerba established some years ago that household germs are not always most numerous where you would expect them to be. In one famous survey he measured bacterial content in different rooms in various houses and found that typically the cleanest surface of all in the average house was the toilet seat. That is because it is wiped down with disinfectant more often than any other surface. By contrast the average desktop has five times more bacteria living on it than the average toilet seat. The dirtiest area of all was the kitchen sink, closely followed by the kitchen counter, and the filthiest object was the kitchen washcloth. Most kitchen cloths are drenched in bacteria, and using them to wipe counters (or plates or breadboards or greasy chins or any other surface) merely transfers microbes from one place to another, affording them new chances to breed and proliferate. The second most efficient way of spreading germs, Gerba found, is to flush a toilet with the lid up. That spews billions of microbes into the air. Many stay in the air, floating like tiny soap bubbles, waiting to be inhaled, for up to two hours; others settle on things like your toothbrush. That is, of course, yet another good reason for putting the lid down.

My Future Self My future self and I become closer and closer as time goes by. I must admit that I neglected and ignored her until she punched me in the gut, grabbed me by the hair and turned my butt around to introduce herself. Well, at least that’s what it felt like every time I left the convalescent hospital after doing skills training for a certification I needed to help me start my residential care business. I was going to be providing specialized, 24/7 residential care and supervising direct care staff for non-verbal, non-ambulatory adult men in diapers! I ran to the Red Cross and took the certified nurse assistant class so I would at least know something about the job I would soon be hiring people to do and to make sure my clients received the best care. The training facility was a Medicaid hospital. I would drive home in tears after seeing what happens when people are not able to afford long-term medical care and the government has to provide that care. But it was seeing all the “young” patients that brought me to tears. And I had thought that only the elderly lived like this in convalescent hospitals…. I am fortunate to have good health but this experience showed me that there is the unexpected. So I drove home each day in tears, promising God out loud, over and over again, that I would take care of my health and take care of my finances. That is how I met my future self. She was like, don’t let this be us girlfriend and stop crying! But, according to studies, we humans have a hard time empathizing with our future selves. Could you even imagine your 30 or 40 year old self when you were in elementary or even high school? It’s like picturing a stranger. This difficulty explains why some people tend to favor short-term or immediate gratification over long-term planning and savings. Take time to picture the life you want to live in 5 years, 10 years, and 40 years, and create an emotional connection to your future self. Visualize the things you enjoy doing now, and think of retirement saving and planning as a way to continue doing those things and even more. However, research shows that people who interacted with their future selves were more willing to improve savings. Just hit me over the head, why don’t you! I do understand that some people can’t even pay attention or aren’t even interested in putting money away for their financial future because they have so much going on and so little to work with that they feel like they can’t even listen to or have a conversation about money. But there are things you’re doing that are not helping your financial position and could be trouble. You could be moving in the wrong direction. The goal is to get out of debt, increase your collateral capacity, use your own money in the most efficient manner and make financial decisions that will move you forward instead of backwards. Also make sure you are getting answers specific to your financial situation instead of blindly guessing! Contact us. We will be happy to help!

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The men in grey were powerless to meet this challenge head-on. Unable to detach the children from Momo by bringing them under their direct control, they had to find some roundabout means of achieving the same end, and for this they enlisted the children's elders. Not all grown-ups made suitable accomplices, of course, but plenty did. [....] 'Something must be done,' they said. 'More and more kids are being left on their own and neglected. You can't blame us - parents just don't have the time these days - so it's up to the authorities.' Others joined in the chorus. 'We can't have all these youngsters loafing around, ' declared some. 'They obstruct the traffic. Road accidents caused by children are on the increase, and road accidents cost money that could be put to better use.' 'Unsupervised children run wild, declared others.'They become morally depraved and take to crime. The authorities must take steps to round them up. They must build centers where the youngsters can be molded into useful and efficient members of society.' 'Children,' declared still others, 'are the raw material for the future. A world dependent on computers and nuclear energy will need an army of experts and technicians to run it. Far from preparing children from tomorrow's world, we still allow too many of them to squander years of their precious time on childish tomfoolery. It's a blot on our civilization and a crime against future generations.' The timesavers were all in favor of such a policy, naturally, and there were so many of them in the city by this time that they soon convinced the authorities of the need to take prompt action. Before long, big buildings known as 'child depots' sprang up in every neighborhood. Children whose parents were too busy to look after them had to be deposited there and could be collected when convenient. They were strictly forbidden to play in the streets or parks or anywhere else. Any child caught doing so was immediately carted off to the nearest depot, and its parents were heavily fined. None of Momo's friends escaped the new regulation. They were split up according to districts they came from and consigned to various child depots. Once there, they were naturally forbidden to play games of their own devising. All games were selected for them by supervisors and had to have some useful, educational purpose. The children learned these new games but unlearned something else in the process: they forgot how to be happy, how to take pleasure in the little things, and last but not least, how to dream. Weeks passed, and the children began to look like timesavers in miniature. Sullen, bored and resentful, they did as they were told. Even when left to their own devices, they no longer knew what to do with themselves. All they could still do was make a noise, but it was an angry, ill-tempered noise, not the happy hullabaloo of former times. The men in grey made no direct approach to them - there was no need. The net they had woven over the city was so close-meshed as to seem inpenetrable. Not even the brightest and most ingenious children managed to slip through its toils. The amphitheater remained silent and deserted.

And just what do you think that would do to incentive?” “You mean fright about not getting enough to eat, about not being able to pay the doctor, about not being able to give your family nice clothes, a safe, cheerful, comfortable place to live, a decent education, and a few good times? You mean shame about not knowing where the Money River is?” “The what?” “The Money River, where the wealth of the nation flows. We were born on the banks of it—and so were most of the mediocre people we grew up with, went to private schools with, sailed and played tennis with. We can slurp from that mighty river to our hearts’ content. And we even take slurping lessons, so we can slurp more efficiently.” “Slurping lessons?” “From lawyers! From tax consultants! From customers’ men! We’re born close enough to the river to drown ourselves and the next ten generations in wealth, simply using dippers and buckets. But we still hire the experts to teach us the use of aqueducts, dams, reservoirs, siphons, bucket brigades, and the Archimedes’ screw. And our teachers in turn become rich, and their children become buyers of lessons in slurping.” “I wasn’t aware that I slurped.” Eliot was fleetingly heartless, for he was thinking angrily in the abstract. “Born slurpers never are. And they can’t imagine what the poor people are talking about when they say they hear somebody slurping. They don’t even know what it means when somebody mentions the Money River. When one of us claims that there is no such thing as the Money River I think to myself, ‘My gosh, but that’s a dishonest and tasteless thing to say.

She could envision Shakespeare's sister. But she imagined a violent, an apocalyptic end for Shakespeare's sister, whereas I know that isn't what happened. You see, it isn't necessary. I know that lots of Chinese women, given in marriage to men they abhorred and lives they despised, killed themselves by throwing themselves down the family well. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm only saying that isn't what usually happens. It it were, we wouldn't be having a population problem. And there are so much easier ways to destroy a woman. You don't have to rape or kill her; you don't even have to beat her. You can just marry her. You don't even have to do that. You can just let her work in your office for thirty-five dollars a week. Shakespeare's sister did...follow her brother to London, but she never got there. She was raped the first night out, and bleeding and inwardly wounded, she stumbled for shelter into the next village she found. Realizing before too long that she was pregnant, she sought a way to keep herself and her child safe. She found some guy with the hots for her, realized he was credulous, and screwed him. When she announced her pregnancy to him, a couple months later, he dutifully married her. The child, born a bit early, makes him suspicious: they fight, he beats her, but in the end he submits. Because there is something in the situation that pleases him: he has all the comforts of home including something Mother didn't provide, and if he has to put up with a screaming kid he isn't sure is his, he feels now like one of the boys down at the village pub, none of whom is sure they are the children of the fathers or the fathers of their children. But Shakespeare's sister has learned the lesson all women learn: men are the ultimate enemy. At the same time she knows she cannot get along in the world without one. So she uses her genius, the genius she might have used to make plays and poems with, in speaking, not writing. She handles the man with language: she carps, cajoles, teases, seduces, calculates, and controls this creature to whom God saw fit to give power over her, this hulking idiot whom she despises because he is dense and fears because he can do her harm. So much for the natural relation between the sexes. But you see, he doesn't have to beat her much, he surely doesn't have to kill her: if he did, he'd lose his maidservant. The pounds and pence by themselves are a great weapon. They matter to men, of course, but they matter more to women, although their labor is generally unpaid. Because women, even unmarried ones, are required to do the same kind of labor regardless of their training or inclinations, and they can't get away from it without those glittering pounds and pence. Years spent scraping shit out of diapers with a kitchen knife, finding places where string beans are two cents less a pound, intelligence in figuring the most efficient, least time-consuming way to iron men's white shirts or to wash and wax the kitchen floor or take care of the house and kids and work at the same time and save money, hiding it from the boozer so the kid can go to college -- these not only take energy and courage and mind, but they may constitute the very essence of a life. They may, you say wearily, but who's interested?...Truthfully, I hate these grimy details as much as you do....They are always there in the back ground, like Time's winged chariot. But grimy details are not in the background of the lives of most women; they are the entire surface.

Managerial abilities, bureaucratic skills, technical expertise, and political talent are all necessary, but they can be applied only to goals that have already been defined by military policies, broad and narrow. And those policies can be only as good as strategy, operational art of war, tactical thought, and plain military craft that have gone into their making. At present, the defects of structure submerge or distort strategy and operational art, they out rightly suppress tactical ingenuity, and they displace the traditional insights and rules of military craft in favor of bureaucratic preferences, administrative convenience, and abstract notions of efficiency derived from the world of business management. First there is the defective structure for making of military decisions under the futile supervision of the civilian Defense Department; then come the deeply flawed defense policies and military choices, replete with unnecessary costs and hidden risks; finally there come the undoubted managerial abilities, bureaucratic skills, technical expertise, and political talents, all applied to achieve those flawed policies and to implement those flawed choices. By this same sequence was the fatally incomplete Maginot Line built, as were all the Maginot Lines of history, each made no better by good government, technical talent, careful accounting, or sheer hard work. Hence the futility of all the managerial innovations tried in the Pentagon over the years. In the purchasing of weapons, for example, “total package” procurement, cost plus incentive contracting, “firm fixed price” purchasing have all been introduced with much fanfare, only to be abandoned, retried, and repudiated once again. And each time a new Secretary of Defense arrives, with him come the latest batch of managerial innovations, many of them aimed at reducing fraud, waste, and mismanagement-the classic trio endlessly denounced in Congress, even though they account for mere percentage points in the total budget, and have no relevance at all to the failures of combat. The persistence of the Administrator’s Delusion has long kept the Pentagon on a treadmill of futile procedural “reforms” that have no impact at all on the military substance of our defense. It is through strategy, operational art, tactical ingenuity, and military craft that the large savings can be made, and the nation’s military strength greatly increased, but achieving long-overdue structural innovations, from the central headquarters to the combat forces, from the overhead of bases and installations to the current purchase of new weapons. Then, and only then, will it be useful to pursue fraud, waste, and mismanagement, if only to save a few dollars more after the billions have already been saved. At present, by contrast, the Defense Department administers ineffectively, while the public, Congress, and the media apply their energies to such petty matters as overpriced spare parts for a given device in a given weapon of a given ship, overlooking at the same time the multibillion dollar question of money spent for the Navy as a whole instead of the Army – whose weakness diminishes our diplomatic weight in peacetime, and which could one day cause us to resort to nuclear weapons in the face of imminent debacle. If we had a central military authority and a Defense Department capable of strategy, we should cheerfully tolerate much fraud, waste, and mismanagement; but so long as there are competing military bureaucracies organically incapable of strategic combat, neither safety nor economy will be ensured, even if we could totally eliminate every last cent of fraud, waste, and mismanagement.

Let me put the contrast in a single concrete example. The physician who finds time to give personal attention to his patients and listens to them. carefully probing inner conditions that may be more significant than any laboratory reports, has become a rarity. Where the power complex is dominant, a visit to a physician is paced, not to fit the patient's needs, but mainly to perform the succession of physical tests upon which the diagnosis will be based. Yet if there were a sufficient number of competent physicians on hand whose inner resources were as available as their laboratory aids, a more subtle diagnosis might be possible, and the patient's subjective response might in many cases effectively supplement the treatment. Thoreau expressed this to perfection when he observed in his 'Journal' that "the really efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure." Without this slowing of the tempo of all activities the positive advantages of plenitude could not be sufficiently enjoyed; for the congestion of time is as threatening to the good life as the congestion of space or people, and produces stresses and tensions that equally undermine human relations. The inner stability that such a slowdown brings about is essential to the highest uses of the mind, through opening up that second life which one lives in reflection and contemplation and self-scrutiny. The means to escape from the "noisy crowing up of things and whatsoever wars on the divine" was one of the vital offerings of the classic religions: hence their emphasis was not on technological productivity but on personal poise. The old slogan of New York subway guards in handling a crush of passengers applies with even greater force to the tempo of megatechnic society: "What's your hurry...Watch your step!

In order to avoid the deafening of conspecifics, some bats employ a jamming avoidance response, rapidly shifting frequencies or flying silent when foraging near conspecifics. Because jamming is a problem facing any active emission sensory system, it is perhaps not surprising (though no less amazing) that similar jamming avoidance responses are deployed by weakly electric fish. The speed of sound is so fast in water that it makes it difficult for echolocating whales to exploit similar Doppler effects. However, the fact that acoustic emissions propagate much farther and faster in the water medium means that there is less attenuation of ultrasound in water, and thus that echolocation can be used for broader-scale 'visual' sweeping of the undersea environment. These constraints and trade-offs must be resolved by all acoustic ISMs, on Earth and beyond. There are equally universal anatomical and metabolic constraints on the evolvability of echolocation that explain why it is 'harder' to evolve than vision. First, as noted earlier, a powerful sound-production capacity, such as the lungs of tetrapods, is required to produce high-frequency emissions capable of supporting high-resolution acoustic imaging. Second, the costs of echolocation are high, which may limit acoustic imaging to organisms with high-metabolisms, such as mammals and birds. The metabolic rates of bats during echolocation, for instance, are up to five times greater than they are at rest. These costs have been offset in bats through the evolutionarily ingenious coupling of sound emission to wing-beat cycle, which functions as a single unit of biomechanical and metabolic efficiency. Sound emission is coupled with the upstroke phase of the wing-beat cycle, coinciding with contraction of abdominal muscles and pressure on the diaphragm. This significantly reduces the price of high-intensity pulse emission, making it nearly costless. It is also why, as any careful crepuscular observer may have noticed, bats spend hardly any time gliding (which is otherwise a more efficient means of flight).

Earth (481-640) People with this personality type are likely to become successful leaders. You tend to be more disciplined and careful at planning tasks. Loyalty and trust are important equations in your relationships hence they prove to be your strength in hard times. You respect others and keep people united which makes people flourish under your leadership. Earth signs are efficient decision makers hence always remain firm on the step they took. Fire: (400-300) Fire people are smart enthusiastic and energetic to be around. You are very competitive and curious, and more often very passionate about your goals and desires. Trusting people with a job or any important personal task is hard hence making emotional connections are difficult for you. making friends or getting a lover, your life is full of drama and there’s always a lot happening around you. You are intelligent and always find new ways to do things Water (160-320) Water people are kind and empathetic but sensitive. And you sometimes tend to become people pleasers. being quite impulsive and always in a hurry, you make decisions haphazardly. Water people are shy and introverted while partying around with friends on a weekend would be the last thing you want to do. You dread small talk and expressing yourself to a group of people is quite a demanding job. People feel relaxed in your presence you bring out the best in them. Decision-making can be demanding and you are sometimes regretful of overthinking and hence not capable of finding a firm decision. Air: (0-160) You have quite an entrancing personality. People are naturally drawn towards you and find your company comforting and friendly. Air signs are naturally smart and quite efficient in their workplace. While using your challenges and opportunities wisely you are likely to have great careers. you are good at advising your colleagues. But being bound in a relationship sometimes doesn’t seem to help you, rather you respect open free yet intimate emotional connections. Air people who are artistic and creative always look at things from a unique lens. So now you know your element.

Broaching is a precise machining process in metalworking domain which uses a toothed tool called broach to cut materials into a predetermined shape. Broaching works best for odd shapes where precision machining is needed and hence finds wide application in a number of industry in India and worldwide. Broach resembles a saw to certain extent but unlike a saw, its teeth become larger in size across its length. A broach gives shapes by roughing or removing the material, semi finishing and then by imparting the ultimate finishing. Round or odd shapes, for both internal and external surfaces, can be conveniently formed by broaching. This multi edge tool can shape any metal or metallic alloy but works best on softer materials like plastic, wood, bronze, aluminum, etc. Resharpening of the tool The broach that imparts shape to many work pieces can work properly only when the size and shape of its teeth are perfect. With time and usage, the teeth tend to lose its sharpness and become blunt. Using a dull broach may lead to permanent damage of its teeth. To enhance the broach life and minimize the tooling expense, it needs to be re-sharpened on time. When to opt for resharpening When broaching produce roughly shaped work pieces, it is definitely time for re-sharpening. However, with a little bit of watchfulness, one can even get it sharpened before it delivers poor finish or tearing. Some of the other conditions when this toothed tool will require re-sharpening are: • Excessive hydraulic press pressure required to run the broach • Nicks and scratches on the teeth making it dull • Broach starts drifting • Cutting edges show signs of wear • Chattering occurs while broaching Re-sharpening requires high precision. Removing excessive material from the teeth will adversely affect its longevity. Only proper sharpening will ensure time efficiency and high quality output. Teeth welding, grinding of gullets and teeth crest, reshaping teeth to proper taper are some of the methods used in re-sharpening. Broaching, once used for machining only internal keyways, is now used for machining a plethora of shapes and surfaces for high quantity of work pieces. Broaching requires less tools than most of the other machining process and saves considerable amount of output time and hence favoured for high volume production irrespective of its high cost. In India, broaching finds wide application in the automobile industry. Therefore, a large number of players are foraying into the broach manufacturing industry on a regular basis.

Then, decades later, in the 1970s, a hard-assed U.S. swim coach named James Counsilman rediscovered it. Counsilman was notorious for his “hurt, pain, and agony”–based training techniques, and hypoventilation fit right in. Competitive swimmers usually take two or three strokes before they flip their heads to the side and inhale. Counsilman trained his team to hold their breath for as many as nine strokes. He believed that, over time, the swimmers would utilize oxygen more efficiently and swim faster. In a sense, it was Buteyko’s Voluntary Elimination of Deep Breathing and Zátopek hypoventilation—underwater. Counsilman used it to train the U.S. Men’s Swimming team for the Montreal Olympics. They won 13 gold medals, 14 silver, and 7 bronze, and they set world records in 11 events. It was the greatest performance by a U.S. Olympic swim team in history. Hypoventilation training fell back into obscurity after several studies in the 1980s and 1990s argued that it had little to no impact on performance and endurance. Whatever these athletes were gaining, the researchers reported, must have been based on a strong placebo effect. In the early 2000s, Dr. Xavier Woorons, a French physiologist at Paris 13 University, found a flaw in these studies. The scientists critical of the technique had measured it all wrong. They’d been looking at athletes holding their breath with full lungs, and all that extra air in the lungs made it difficult for the athletes to enter into a deep state of hypoventilation. Woorons repeated the tests, but this time subjects practiced the half-full technique, which is how Buteyko trained his patients, and likely how Counsilman trained his swimmers. Breathing less offered huge benefits. If athletes kept at it for several weeks, their muscles adapted to tolerate more lactate accumulation, which allowed their bodies to pull more energy during states of heavy anaerobic stress, and, as a result, train harder and longer. Other reports showed hypoventilation training provided a boost in red blood cells, allowing athletes to carry more oxygen and produce more energy with each breath. Breathing way less delivered the benefits of high-altitude training at 6,500 feet, but it could be used at sea level, or anywhere. Over the years, this style of breath restriction has been given many names—hypoventilation, hypoxic training, Buteyko technique, and the pointlessly technical “normobaric hypoxia training.” The outcomes were the same: a profound boost in performance.* Not just for elite athletes, but for everyone. Just a few weeks of the training significantly increased endurance, reduced more “trunk fat,” improved cardiovascular function, and boosted muscle mass compared to normal-breathing exercise. This list goes on. The takeaway is that hypoventilation works. It helps train the body to do more with less. But that doesn’t mean it’s pleasant.

Develop a rapid cadence. Ideal running requires a cadence that may be much quicker than you’re used to. Shoot for 180 footfalls per minute. Developing the proper cadence will help you achieve more speed because it increases the number of push-offs per minute. It will also help prevent injury, as you avoid overstriding and placing impact force on your heel. To practice, get an electronic metronome (or download an app for this), set it for 90+ beats per minute, and time the pull of your left foot to the chirp of the metronome. Develop a proper forward lean. With core muscles slightly engaged to generate a bracing effect, the runner leans forward—from the ankles, not from the waist. Land underneath your center of gravity. MacKenzie drills his athletes to make contact with the ground as their midfoot or forefoot passes directly under their center of gravity, rather than having their heels strike out in front of the body. When runners become proficient at this, the pounding stops, and the movement of their legs begins to more closely resemble that of a spinning wheel. Keep contact time brief. “The runner skims over the ground with a slithering motion that does not make the pounding noise heard by the plodder who runs at one speed,” the legendary coach Percy Cerutty once said.7 MacKenzie drills runners to practice a foot pull that spends as little time as possible on the ground. His runners aim to touch down with a light sort of tap that creates little or no sound. The theory is that with less time spent on the ground, the foot has less time to get into the kind of trouble caused by the sheering forces of excessive inward foot rolling, known as “overpronation.” Pull with the hamstring. To create a rapid, piston-like running form, the CFE runner, after the light, quick impact of the foot, pulls the ankle and foot up with the hamstring. Imagine that you had to confine your running stride to the space of a phone booth—you would naturally develop an extremely quick, compact form to gain optimal efficiency. Practice this skill by standing barefoot and raising one leg by sliding your ankle up along the opposite leg. Perform up to 20 repetitions on each leg. Maintain proper posture and position. Proper posture, MacKenzie says, shifts the impact stress of running from the knees to larger muscles in the trunk, namely, the hips and hamstrings. The runner’s head remains up and the eyes focused down the road. With the core muscles engaged, power flows from the larger muscles through to the extremities. Practice proper position by standing with your body weight balanced on the ball of one foot. Keep the knee of your planted leg slightly bent and your lifted foot relaxed as you hold your ankle directly below your hip. In this position, your body is in proper alignment. Practice holding this position for up to 1 minute on each leg. Be patient. Choose one day a week for practicing form drills and technique. MacKenzie recommends wearing minimalist shoes to encourage proper form, but not without taking care of the other necessary work. A quick changeover from motion-control shoes to minimalist shoes is a recipe for tendon problems. Instead of making a rapid transition, ease into minimalist shoes by wearing them just one day per week, during skill work. Then slowly integrate them into your training runs as your feet and legs adapt. Your patience will pay off.

The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those which they, or at least the best among them, have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before. The people are made to transfer their allegiance from the old gods to the new under the pretense that the new gods really are what their sound instinct had always told them but what before they had only dimly seen. And the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as the complete perversion of language, the change of meaning of the words by which the ideals of the new regimes are expressed. The worst sufferer in this respect is, of course, the word “liberty.” It is a word used as freely in totalitarian states as elsewhere. Indeed, it could almost be said—and it should serve as a warning to us to be on our guard against all the tempters who promise us New Liberties for Old 5 —that wherever liberty as we understand it has been destroyed, this has almost always been done in the name of some new freedom promised to the people. Even among us we have “planners for freedom” who promise us a “collective freedom for the group,” the nature of which may be gathered from the fact that its advocate finds it necessary to assure us that “naturally the advent of planned freedom does not mean that all [sic] earlier forms of freedom must be abolished.” Dr. Karl Mannheim, from whose work6 these sentences are taken, at least warns us that “a conception of freedom modelled on the preceding age is an obstacle to any real understanding of the problem.” But his use of the word “freedom” is as misleading as it is in the mouth of totalitarian politicians. Like their freedom, the “collective freedom” he offers us is not the freedom of the members of society but the unlimited freedom of the planner to do with society what he pleases.7 It is the confusion of freedom with power carried to the extreme. In this particular case the perversion of the meaning of the word has, of course, been well prepared by a long line of German philosophers and, not least, by many of the theoreticians of socialism. But “freedom” or “liberty” are by no means the only words whose meaning has been changed into their opposites to make them serve as instruments of totalitarian propaganda. We have already seen how the same happens to “justice” and “law,” “right” and “equality.” The list could be extended until it includes almost all moral and political terms in general use. If one has not one’s self experienced this process, it is difficult to appreciate the magnitude of this change of the meaning of words, the confusion which it causes, and the barriers to any rational discussion which it creates. It has to be seen to be understood how, if one of two brothers embraces the new faith, after a short while he appears to speak a different language which makes any real communication between them impossible. And the confusion becomes worse because this change of meaning of the words describing political ideals is not a single event but a continuous process, a technique employed consciously or unconsciously to direct the people. Gradually, as this process continues, the whole language becomes despoiled, and words become empty shells deprived of any definite meaning, as capable of denoting one thing as its opposite and used solely for the emotional associations which still adhere to them.

Demonstrating for peace to promote war was nothing new. Totalitarianism always requires a tangible enemy. To the ancient Greeks, a holocaust was simply a burnt sacrifice. Khrushchev wanted to go down in history as the Soviet leader who exported communism to the American continent. In 1959 he was able to install the Castro brothers in Havana and soon my foreign intelligence service became involved in helping Cuba's new communist rulers to export revolution throughout South America. At that point it did not work. In the 1950s and 1960s most Latin Americans were poor, religious peasants who had accepted the status quo. A black version of liberation theology began growing in a few radical-leftist black churches in the US where Marxist thought is predicated on a system pf oppressor class ( white ) versus victim class ( black ) and it sees just one solution: the destruction of the enemy. In the 1950s UNESCO was perceived by many as a platform for communists to attack the West and the KGB used it to place agents around the world. Che Guevara's diaries, with an introduction by Fidel Castro, were produced by the Kremlin's dezinformatsiya machine. Changing minds is what Soviet communism was all about. Khrushchev's political necrophagy ( = blaming and condemning one's predecessor in office. It is a dangerous game. It hurts the country's national pride and it usually turns against its own user ) evolved from the Soviet tradition of sanctifying the supreme ruler. Although the communists publicly proclaimed the decisive role of the people in history, the Kremlin and its KGB believed that only the leader counted. Change the public image of the leader and you change history, I heard over and over from Khrushchev's lips. Khrushchev was certainly the most controversial Soviet to reign in the Kremlin. He unmasked Stalin's crimes, but he made political assassination a main instrument of his own foreign policy; he authored a policy of peaceful coexistence with the West but he pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war; he repaired Moscow's relationships with Yugoslavia's Tito, but he destroyed the unity of the communist world. His close association with Stalin's killings made him aware of what political crime could accomplish and gave him a taste for the simple criminal solution. His total ignorance about the civilized world, together with his irrational hatred of the "bourgeoisie" and his propensity to offend people, made him believe that disinformation and threats were the most efficient and dignified way for a Soviet leader to deal with "bourgeois" governments. As that very clever master of deception Yuri Andropov once told me, if a good piece of disinformation is repeated over and over, after a while it will take on a life of its own and will, all by itself, generate a horde or unwitting but passionate advocates. When I was working for Ceausescu, I always tried to find a way to help him reach a decision on his own, rather than telling him directly what I thought he should do about something. That way both of us were happy. From our KGB advisors, I had learned that the best way to ut over a deception was to let the target see something for himself, with his own eyes. By 1999, President Yeltsin's ill-conceived privatization had enabled a small clique of predatory insiders to plunder Russia's most valuable assets. The corruption generated by this widespread looting penetrated every corner of the country and it eventually created a Mafia-style economic system that threatened the stability of Russia itself. During the old Cold War, the KGB was a state within a state. In Putin's time, the KGB now rechristened FSB, is the state. The Soviet Union had one KGB officer for every 428 citizens. In 2004, Putin's Russia had one FSB officer for every 297 citizens.