Viability Quotes

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Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?
Roland Barthes (A Lover's Discourse: Fragments)
At most unsuspected moments, we may all be victims of life's mishaps and realize we must ask ourselves how to run up the hill without missing the essential appointments with the achievability and viability of our choices. (“The Infinite Wisdom of Meditation“)
Erik Pevernagie
If we expect to identify ourselves in a second other but don’t recognize ourselves in our choice, living can turn into bitterness because the wheel of time has set another compass. When we understand that the chosen one is merely a fabrication of our imagination, the ivory tower of our expectations patently crumbles down. Only by revisiting and resetting our emotional construction do we ingrain its substance and viability. ( "Alpha and Omega")
Erik Pevernagie
The whole [scientific] process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species which is being tested for viability in that niche.
David Deutsch (The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes--and Its Implications)
We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder ‘censorship,’ we call it ‘concern for commercial viability.
David Mamet
Van Gogh would’ve sold more than one painting if he’d put tigers in them.
Bill Watterson
Intimate relationships cannot substitute for a life plan. But to have any meaning or viability at all, a life plan must include intimate relationships.
Harriet Lerner
It is our action that determines the viability of our dream.
Steve Maraboli (Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience)
The jubilee then is about restoring to people the capacity to participate in the economic life of the community for their own viability and society's benefit.
Christopher J.H. Wright (The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible's Grand Narrative)
One way to assess the viability of a business idea is to consider it's ability to be monetized. If something can't be monetized, it ain't a business. And if there's no path to profitability, then it has no worth.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
U.S. military spending, which consumes half of all discretionary spending, has had a profound social and political cost. Bridges and levees collapse. Schools decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. Trillions in debt threaten the viability of the currency and the economy. The poor, the mentally ill, the sick, and the unemployed are abandoned. Human suffering is the price for victory, which is never finally defined or attainable.
Chris Hedges (The Death of the Liberal Class)
Wish" gives the warmth, the content, the imagination, the child's play, the freshness, and the richness to "will." "Will" gives the self-direction, the maturity, to "wish." Without "wish," "will" loses its life-blood, its viability, and tends to expire in self-contradiction. If you have only "will" and no "wish," you have the dried-up, Victorian, neopuritan man. If you have only "wish" and no "will," you have the driven, unfree, infantile person who, as an adult-remaining-an-infant, may become the robot man.66
Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
It is not only the viability and variety of the seed that makes the harvest look plumpy. Sometimes, the soil must value the value of the seed. When the soil is not supportive, the seed's value becomes a waste!
Israelmore Ayivor
You can't approach business the same way you approach an algebra equation or something. When you're considering the viability of a business, you have to also consider the psychology of human beings, the logistics of peoples emotions, cultural factors, sociopolitical factors, peoples habits, and more. There's a lot to consider when you're thinking about what people are going to pay for and how much they'll pay and why they'll pay and what they really value.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
The Los Angeles parade would begin in Griffith Park, where a large crowd would assemble and the speeches would be given. Every politician of consequence would be there. There was no way they would miss a chance to publicly praise the troops and honor those who had lost their lives in service. Some of the tributes would be sincere and heartfelt, and some less so. But participating in the event, vowing undying support for the U.S. military, was an absolute must to maintain political viability. It was okay to vote to cut funds for veterans' healthcare, but don't dare miss a chance to jump on the Memorial Day bandwagon.
David Rosenfelt (Unleashed (Andy Carpenter, #11))
If we are going to preserve the viability of life on this planet, we must strive to understand the connections, the interrelatedness of all things.
Laurence Overmire (The One Idea That Saves The World: A Call to Conscience and A Call to Action)
An artistic image is one that ensures its own development, its historical viability. An image is a grain, a self-evolving retroactive organism. It is a symbol of actual life, as opposed to life itself. Life contains death. An image of life, by contrast, excludes it, or else sees in it a unique potential for the affirmation of life. Whatever it expresses—even destruction and ruin—the artistic image is by definition an embodiment of hope, it is inspired by faith. Artistic creation is by definition a denial of death. Therefore it is optimistic, even if in an ultimate sense the artist is tragic. And so there can never be optimistic artists and pessimistic artists. There can only be talent and mediocrity.
Andrei Tarkovsky (Journal 1970-1986)
You can keep going on much less attention than you crave.
Idries Shah (Reflections)
It is futile to judge the viability of a new movement by the truth of its doctrine and the feasibility of its promises. What has to be judged is its corporate organization for quick and total absorption of the frustrated. Where new creeds vie with each other for the allegiance of the populace, the one which comes with the most perfected collective framework wins.
Eric Hoffer (The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements)
Aside from wanting to write cracking good books that turn children into lifelong readers, I really want to create stories that enable kids to LOOK at the world around them. To see it for what it is, with wide open, wondering eyes. Our mass media is so horribly skewed. It presents this idea of 'normalcy' which excludes and marginalises so many for an idea of commercial viability which is really nothing but blinkered prejudice. People who are black and Asian and Middle Eastern and Hispanic, people who are gay or transgendered or genderqueer, people who have disabilities, disfigurements or illnesses - all have this vision of a world which does not include them shoved down their throats almost 24-7, and they're told 'No one wants to see stories about people like you. Films and TV shows about people like you won't make money. Stories about straight, white, cisgendered, able-bodied people are universal and everyone likes them. You are small and useless and unattractive and you don't matter.' My worry is that this warped version of 'normal' eventually forms those very same blinkers on children's eyes, depriving them of their ability to see anyone who isn't the same as them, preventing them from developing the ability to empathise with and appreciate and take joy in the lives and experiences of people who are different from them. If Shadows on the Moon - or anything I write - causes a young person to look at their own life, or the life of another, and think, 'Maybe being different is cool' I will die a happy writer. -Guest blog - what diversity means to me
Zoë Marriott
how are we to tone down the voices of nationalism, or of those in support of profiteering, or religious fanaticism, racial superiority, or cultural exceptionalism? If economic viability trumps human health in systems of governance, and if personal rights trump community obligations at almost every turn, what sort of future can we expect never to see?
Barry Lopez (Horizon)
Happiness is a combination of inner peace, economic viability, and above all, world peace.
Dalai Lama XIV (How to See Yourself As You Really Are)
Uncertainty in estimating viability is related in this way not only to the innate difficulty of predicting the future but also to power and interests.
Bent Flyvbjerg (Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition)
Within every little dream seed is the potential viability of sprouting to becoming a great forest.
Israelmore Ayivor (Shaping the dream)
Believing in the divinity of Jesus is the heart of Christian orthodoxy. But believing in the viability of Jesus’s ideas makes Christianity truly radical.
Brian Zahnd (A Farewell to Mars: An Evangelical Pastor's Journey Toward the Biblical Gospel of Peace)
Those who seek to undermine the existing structure,” he advised, must do two things. First, they must alter beneficiaries’ view of Social Security’s viability, because that would “make abandonment of the system look more attractive.”35 If you have ever seen a television ad showing older people with worried faces wondering if Social Security will be around when they need it, or heard a politician you think is opposed to the retirement program suddenly fretting about whether it will be there for you and others, listen more carefully the next time for a possible subliminal message.
Nancy MacLean (Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America)
A visitor from outer space would assume the viability of the United States depended entirely on the ability of the citizenry to carry eight-by-four sheets of board, safely and in vast quantities.
Lee Child (Never Go Back (Jack Reacher, #18))
Like Semmering Academy, the Grove School was a Gothic pile of bricks run by 1950s-era chalk drones, which maintained its cultural viability by perpetuating a weirdly seductive anxiety throughout its community. Mary herself was a victim of the seduction; despite the trying and repetitive emotional requirements of her job, she remained eternally fascinated by the wicker-thin girls and their wicker-thin mothers, all of them favoring dark wool skirts and macintoshes and unreadably far-away expressions; if she squinted, they could have emerged intact from any of the last seven decades.
Heidi Julavits (The Uses of Enchantment)
My target customer will be? The problem my customer wants to solve is? My customer’s need can be solved with? Why can’t my customer solve this today? The measurable outcome my customer wants to achieve is? My primary customer acquisition tactic will be? My earliest adopter will be? I will make money (revenue) by? My primary competition will be? I will beat my competitors primarily because of? My biggest risk to financial viability is? My biggest technical or engineering risk is? What assumptions do we have that, if proven wrong, would cause this business to fail?  (Tip: include market size in this list) You should be able to look at this list and spot
Giff Constable (Talking to Humans)
Schumpeter remarked how pleased he was with the Russian Revolution. Socialism was now no longer a discussion on paper, but had to prove its viability. Max Weber responded in great agitation: Communism, at this stage in Russian development, was virtually a crime, the road would lead over unparalleled human misery and end in a terrible catastrophe. "Quite likely", Schumpeter answered, "but what a fine laboratory". "A laboratory filled with mounds of corpses", Weber answered heatedly.
Karl Jaspers (Leonardo, Descartes, Max Weber (Routledge Revivals): Three Essays)
The Law of Financial Viability When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, seek evidence of whether people are willing to pay for it. If you find this evidence, continue. If not, move on. When
Cal Newport (So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love)
People say, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” as they hasten that very death, both literally and figuratively. They trade their health for a few more working hours. They trade the long-term viability of their business or their career before the urgency of some temporal crisis.
Ryan Holiday (Stillness is the Key)
It’s one thing to be shown a supply and demand graph and told that minimum wage increases can destroy the viability of a business: it’s quite another to see the NPV of a business disappear at the press of a button, simply by increasing the minimum wage by a dollar or two.
Economics for Business (Austrian Economics In Contemporary Business Applications: Think Better, Think Austrian)
How can one talk about the economics of small independent countries? How can one discuss a problem that is a non-problem? There is no such thing as the viability of states or of nations, there is only a problem of viability of people: people, actual persons like you and me, are viable when they can stand on their own feet and earn their keep. You do not make nonviable people viable by putting large numbers of them into one huge community, and you do not make viable people non-viable by splitting a large community into a number of smaller, more intimate, more coherent and more manageable groups. All this is perfectly obvious and there is absolutely nothing to argue about. Some people ask: 'What happens when a country, composed of one rich province and several poor ones, falls apart because the rich province secedes?' Most probably the answer is: 'Nothing very much happens.' The rich will continue to be rich and the poor will continue to be poor. 'But if, before secession, the rich province had subsidised the poor, what happens then?' Well then, of course, the subsidy might stop. But the rich rarely subsidise the poor; more often they exploit them.
Ernst F. Schumacher (Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered)
A businessman would not consider a firm to have solved its problems of production and to have achieved viability if he saw that it was rapidly consuming its capital. How, then, could we overlook this vital fact when it comes to that very big firm, the economy of Spaceship Earth and, in particular, the economies of its rich passengers?
Ernst F. Schumacher (Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (Vintage classics))
She knew that in order to be a participant in capitalism rather than solely a victim of it, she had to have something to sell, but she didn’t believe in her own viability as a product and had no ideas for better ones. As an account manager at Relevancy PR, she shilled goods she knew to be third-rate, and her lack of conviction fed her stasis.
Jessie Gaynor (The Glow)
The most powerful country in the world has handed over all of it's affairs, the prosperity of an entire economy, the security of some 300 million citizens, the purity of it's water, the viability of it's air, the safety of it's food, the future of it's vast system of education, the soundness of it's national highways, airways, and railways, the apocalyptic potential of nuclear arsenal to a carnival barker who introduce the phrase "grab em by the pussy", into the national lexicon. It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say "if a black man can be president than any white man, no matter how fallen, can be president", and in that perverse way, the democratic dreams of Jefferson and Jackson were fulfilled. The American Tragedy now being wrought, is larger than most imaged and will not end with Trump. In recent times, whiteness as an overt political tactic has been restrained by a kind of cordiality held that it's overt invocation would scare off moderate whites. This has proved to be only half-true at best. Trump's legacy will be exposing the patina of decency for what it is and revealing just how much a demagague can get away with. It does not take much to imagine another politician, wiser in the ways of Washington, schooled in the methodology of governance, now liberated from the pretense of anti-racist civility, doing a much more effective job than Trump.
Ta-Nehisi Coates (We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy)
Gorse bitter pea Meaning: Ill-natured beauty Daviesia ulicifolia | All states Spiny shrub with stunning yellow and red pea flowers. Blooms in summer. Easy propagation from seed, following scarification. Seed retains viability for many years. Unpopular with gardeners for its very prickly habit, but beneficial to small birds as a refuge from predators.
Holly Ringland (The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart)
What is most striking and troubling in the Enlightenment perspective, though, is its naive confidence that reason operates autonomously, largely free from the effects of personal disposition, social context, cultural background and religious community. Not only does postmodern philosophy and hermeneutics challenge this assertion, but classical Christianity doubts its fundamental viability.
Christopher A. Hall (Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers)
I also believed that love was nothing more than a precursor for pain. After all, this world has no room for love. It’s harsh and violent and thrives from taking, but still we seek it out, because the will to live and love is the only universal thing that binds us as a species and ensures our viability—an ever-constant pulse that drives us, in spite of the pain and hate that seeks to destroy us along the way.
Keri Lake (Juniper Unraveling (Juniper Unraveling #1))
Due to my own experience in local ministry, the ones described in the first two chapters of this book, I have come to the conclusion that for we who live in the Western world, the major challenge to the viability of Christianity is not Buddhism, with all its philosophical appeal to the Western mind, nor is it Islam, with all the challenge that it poses to Western culture. It is not the New Age that poses such a threat; in fact, because there is a genuine search going on in new religious movements, it can actually be an asset to we who are willing to share the faith amidst the search. All these are challenges to us, no doubt, but I have come to believe that the major threat to the viability of our faith is that of consumerism. This is a far more heinous and insidious challenge to the gospel, because in so many ways it infects each and every one of us.
Alan Hirsch (The Forgotten Ways)
However one may interpret this culturally, the upshot is the same: people carry within them a great number of wishes to which they react passively and which they hide. Stoicism, in our day, is not strength to overcome wishes, but to hide them. To a patient who, let us say, is interminably rationalizing and justifying this and that, balancing one thing against another as though life were a tremendous market place where all the business is done on paper and tickertape and there are never any goods, I sometimes have the inclination in psychotherapy to shout out, “Don't you ever want anything?” But I don't cry out, for it is not difficult to see that on some level the patient does want a good deal; the trouble is he has formulated and reformulated it, until it is the “rattling of dry bones,” as Eliot puts it. Tendencies have become endemic in our culture for our denial of wishes to be rationalized and accepted with the belief that this denial of the wish will result in its being fulfilled. And whether the reader would disagree with me on this or that detail, our psychological problem is the same: it is necessary for us to help the patient achieve some emotional viability and honesty by bringing out his wishes and his capacity to wish. This is not the end of therapy but it is an essential starting point.
Rollo May (Love and Will)
Obama himself, underestimating Trump and thus underestimating the power of whiteness, believed the Republican nominee too objectionable to actually win. In this Obama was, tragically, wrong. And so the most powerful country in the world has handed over all of its affairs—the prosperity of an entire economy, the security of some 300 million citizens, the purity of its water, the viability of its air, the safety of its food, the future of its vast system of education, the soundness of its national highways, airways, and railways, the apocalyptic potential of its nuclear arsenal—to a carnival barker who introduced the phrase “grab ’em by the pussy” into the national lexicon. It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, “If a black man can be president, then any white man—no matter how fallen—can be president.” And in that perverse way the democratic dreams of Jefferson and Jackson were fulfilled.
Ta-Nehisi Coates (We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy)
As the head of Eher Verlag—essentially the Nazi Party publishing house—he commissioned market research on the viability of a Hitler book. The response he received was astonishing: “If the publisher issues a limited collector’s edition of only 500 copies of a work by Hitler with special treatment [laid paper and semi-leather binding], each numbered and signed by Mr. Hitler, it would have a collector’s value of at least 500 marks each,” wrote the assessor.12 Amann
Peter Ross Range (1924: The Year That Made Hitler)
The disenfranchisement of African Americans preserved white supremacy and Democratic Party dominance in the South, which helped maintain the Democrats’ national viability. With racial equality off the agenda, southern Democrats’ fears subsided. Only then did partisan hostility begin to soften. Paradoxically, then, the norms that would later serve as a foundation for American democracy emerged out of a profoundly undemocratic arrangement: racial exclusion and the consolidation of single-party rule in the South.
Steven Levitsky (How Democracies Die)
He described the theme in this way: “It’s a Wonderful Life sums up my philosophy of film making. First, to exalt the worth of the individual. Second, to champion man—plead his causes, protest any degradation of his dignity, spirit, or divinity. And third, to dramatize the viability of the individual—as in the theme of the film itself . . .There is a radiance and glory in the darkness, could we but see, and to see we have only to look. I beseech you to look.”5 Nearly seventy years after The Greatest Gift was written
Philip van Doren Stern (The Greatest Gift: A Christmas Tale)
The Overton window is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time. It is also known as the window of discourse. The term is named after Joseph P. Overton, who stated that an idea's political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within this range, rather than on politicians' individual preferences. The Overton Window is an approach to identifying the ideas that define the spectrum of acceptability of governmental policies. Politicians can only act within the acceptable range. Shifting the Overton Window involves proponents of policies outside the window persuading the public to expand the window. Proponents of current policies, or similar ones within the window, seek to convince people that policies outside it should be deemed unacceptable. In 1998, Noam Chomsky said: "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.
Wikipedia: Overton Window
Our failure to live authentically and to speak truly may have little to do with evil or exploitative intentions. Quite the contrary, pretending more frequently reflects a wish, however misguided, to protect others and to ensure the viability of the self as well as our relationships. Pretending reflects deep prohibitions, real and imagined, against a more direct and forthright assertion of self. Pretending stems naturally from the false and constricted definitions of self that women often absorb without question. “Pretending” is so closely associated with “femininity” that it is, quite simply, what the culture teaches women to do.
Harriet Lerner (The Dance of Deception: A Guide to Authenticity and Truth-Telling in Women's Relationships)
Even when a marriage is basically good people are not always happy. Marriage is a crucible for becoming a more mature, compassionate person. It offers an unflinchingly up-close-and-personal example of how we treat another human being. We see our minds in action, both our worst tendencies and our best. In this light how can we even judge the viability of our marriages without making sure we've gotten enough sleep, exercised, eaten right, and developed some means of reflection, prayer, or meditation? Our emotions and bodies whip us around, and we're so often mystified as to what's causing a given mood. It's so easy to blame the person at hand, which in marriage, unfortunately is often one's spouse.
Daphne de Marneffe (The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together)
When have we ever believed that the world wasn’t ending? “I had a fascinating conversation with my mother once, where she talked about the guilt she and her friends had felt about bringing children into the universe. This was in the mid-2160s, in Colony Two. It’s hard to imagine a more tranquil time or place, but they were concerned about asteroid storms, and if life on the moon became untenable, about the continued viability of life on Earth—” Olive’s mother drinking coffee in Olive’s childhood home: yellow flowered tablecloth hands clasped around a blue coffee mug her smile “—and my point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.” In a world that no longer exists but whose exact end date is unclear, Captain George Vancouver stands on the deck of the HMS Discovery, gazing anxiously out at a landscape with no people in it “But all of this raises an interesting question,” Olive said. “What if it always is the end of the world?” She paused for effect. Before her, the holographic audience was almost perfectly still. “Because we might reasonably think of the end of the world,” Olive said, “as a continuous and never-ending process.
Emily St. John Mandel (Sea of Tranquility)
When dealing with Arab society, [we are dealing with] a production system that is in competition with others (and not with a theoretical opposition between specific economic rationalities), a social structure that must at all times prove its viability in the world arena (and not with its inner logic, which is theoretically as total, as elegant, and plausible as that of any other society whatever), a practical politics that is in perpetual disequilibrium (and not with elaborate theories about the best form of government), a language that must constantly prove its creativity and capacity for adaptation in competition with other languages in an accelerating evolutionary situation (and not with a theory of the language at a given moment of its evolution).
Abdallah Laroui (The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual: Traditionalism or Historicism?)
the Dionysian philosophy suggests that it impossible to develop spiritually without also embracing the realities of life – for Dionysos is a god of substance. The ancient Greeks had two different words for our word, ‘life’: the first was bios which referred to the literal, mortal existence of an individual, and the other was zöe which referred to the ‘spirit’ of life. This ethos was reflected at the core of Dionysian religion, which recognised both the reality of existence and also a profound spiritual awareness. Dionysos is sometimes described as “other-worldly without being world-denying” [vi] the Dionysian cult brought religion and the corporeal into one without negating the importance or viability of either; arguably, perhaps something that is missing in many spiritual and religious paths available today.
Vikki Bramshaw (Dionysos: Exciter to Frenzy)
Our potent contemporary cultural sanctuaries shape the Dharma to fit our cultural traditions so that the mirroring needed for spiritual paths to work can occur. It is important to the viability of any path that students see themselves reflected in it. This does not have to be only in terms of race, sexuality, or gender, but also in terms of the true nature of students' lives... The Buddha's teachings that are passed on in Dharma centers can certainly benefit everyone. But we will not recognize our true nature until we honestly look at ourselves. To embark on that path of healing or liberation requires exposure--where we can be comfortably seen without encountering another's guilt, explanation, or justification... Cultural sanctuaries provide a space where appearance doesn't act as a platform to launch diversity campaigns, or provide a basis for special attention, which many people of color do not want. They are refuges in which one can participate in the collective, rather than being perceived as a distinct individual in the midst of sameness.
Zenju Earthlyn Manuel (The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender)
Until recently, attempts to resolve the contradictions created by urbanization, centralization, bureaucratic growth and statification were viewed as a vain counterdrift to "progress"—a counterdrift that could be dismissed as chimerical and reactionary. The anarchist was regarded as a forlorn visionary, a social outcast, filled with nostalgia for the peasant village or the medieval commune. His yearnings for a decentralized society and for a humanistic community at one with nature and the needs of the individual—the spontaneous individual, unfettered by authority—were viewed as the reactions of a romantic, of a declassed craftsman or an intellectual "misfit." His protest against centralization and statification seemed all the less persuasive because it was supported primarily by ethical considerations—by Utopian, ostensibly "unrealistic," notions of what man could be, not by what he was. In response to this protest, opponents of anarchist thought—liberals, rightists and authoritarian "leftists"—argued that they were the voices of historic reality, that their statist and centralist notions were rooted in the objective, practical world. Time is not very kind to the conflict of ideas. Whatever may have been the validity of libertarian and non-libertarian views a few years ago, historical development has rendered virtually all objections to anarchist thought meaningless today. The modern city and state, the massive coal-steel technology of the Industrial Revolution, the later, more rationalized, systems of mass production and assembly-line systems of labor organization, the centralized nation, the state and its bureaucratic apparatus—all have reached their limits. Whatever progressive or liberatory role they may have possessed, they have now become entirely regressive and oppressive. They are regressive not only because they erode the human spirit and drain the community of all its cohesiveness, solidarity and ethico-cultural standards; they are regressive from an objective standpoint, from an ecological standpoint. For they undermine not only the human spirit and the human community but also the viability of the planet and all living things on it.
Murray Bookchin (Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Working Classics))
In every generation, the embrace of Calvinism by a faction of students and faculty placed schools and administrators in a difficult position. Since the 1920s, Calvinism had acquired a reputation among fundamentalist institutions of higher education as both compelling and disruptive. Calvinists often demanded greater theological consistency than school leaders wanted to endorse. And they sometimes disparaged important elements of American evangelicalism, including the emotional revivalism and dispensational Bible-reading methods beloved by so many evangelicals. In addition, school administrators remained painfully aware of the fact that their interdenominational schools needed to remain friendly to a relatively wide variety of denominational backgrounds. The big tent of American evangelicalism often included groups that considered Calvinism a foreign imposition. As in all things, school administrators balked at the idea of embracing any idea that would drive away students and their tuition dollars. In effect, Calvinism served as a perennial reminder of the unresolvable tension in fundamentalist and evangelical institutions between the demands of theological purity, interdenominational viability, and institutional pragmatism.
Adam Laats (Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education)
The feelings of powerlessness are an adaptive function. The child adopts behavior that sets himself or herself up for more of the same. He or she becomes antisocial and stops evoking a feeling of warmth in other people, thus reinforcing the notion of powerlessness. Children then stay on the same pathway. These courses are not set in stone, but the longer a child stays on one course, the harder it is to move on to another. By studying the behavior of adults in later life who had shared this experience of learning powerlessness during infancy, the psychologists who specialize in attachment theory have found that an assumption of powerlessness, once lodged in the brains of infants, turns out to be difficult—though not impossible—to unlearn. Those who grow into adulthood carrying this existential assumption of powerlessness were found to be quick to assume in later life that impulsive and hostile reactions to unmet needs were the only sensible response. Indeed, longitudinal studies conducted by the University of Minnesota over more than thirty years have found that America’s prison population is heavily overrepresented by people who fell into this category as infants. The key difference determining which lesson is learned and which posture is adopted rests with the pattern of communication between the infant and his or her primary caregiver or caregivers, not with the specific information conveyed by the caregiver. What matters is the openness, responsiveness, and reliability, and two-way nature of the communication environment. I believe that the viability of democracy depends upon the openness, reliability, appropriateness, responsiveness, and two-way nature of the communication environment. After all, democracy depends upon the regular sending and receiving of signals—not only between the people and those who aspire to be their elected representatives but also among the people themselves. It is the connection of each individual to the national conversation that is the key. I believe that the citizens of any democracy learn, over time, to adopt a basic posture toward the possibilities of self-government.
Al Gore (The Assault on Reason)
During the Russia-NATO Council session in Bucharest in April 2008, Putin called Ukraine “a complex state formation. If the NATO issue is added there,” he said, “along with other problems, this may bring Ukraine to the verge of existence as a sovereign state.” Later during the same summit, in a discussion with U.S. President George Bush, Putin said that Ukraine was “not a real country.” This is clearly light-years away from the “common principles” laid down in the Founding Act, signed by Russia and the members of NATO in 1997, in which Russia had recognized the inherent right of all countries “to choose the means to ensure their own security.” Putin’s declaration was a scarcely veiled threat that Russia would intervene if Ukraine decided to join NATO. Doubts on Ukraine’s viability as a sovereign state were expressed on many occasions by leading Russians. On March 16, 2009, the Kremlin ideologue Gleb Pavlovsky wrote in the Russkiy Zhurnal, a Russian online magazine of which he is the owner, an article titled: “Will Ukraine Lose Its Sovereignty?” This article was followed four days later by an interview with Sergey Karaganov, the éminence grise of the Russian foreign policy community and head of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy. This article had the title: “No One Needs Monsters. Desovereignization of Ukraine.” Karaganov depicted Ukraine as a failed state that was in a process of “passive desovereignization.” The process was, however, not only “passive.” Karaganov warned that “Russia will not want to see absolutely ungovernable territories close by.” Yuriy Shcherbak, former Ukrainian ambassador to the United States, wrote in response: “In military language it is called the ideological-propagandistic support of the future operation on capturing the territory of a sovereign state.” In fact, Russian politicians continued to denounce Ukraine as an “artificial” country that had no right to exist. At the height of the financial crisis Valery Fadeyev, editor of the political journal Ekspert, wrote: “Ukraine is cheap, we can buy it.” It sounded less aggressive, almost as a joke, but it expressed the same contempt for Russia’s neighbor and its status as an independent, sovereign state [239―40].
Marcel H. Van Herpen (Putin's Wars: The Rise of Russia's New Imperialism)
See especially academia, which has effectively become a hope labor industrial complex. Within that system, tenured professors—ostensibly proof positive that you can, indeed, think about your subject of choice for the rest of your life, complete with job security, if you just work hard enough—encourage their most motivated students to apply for grad school. The grad schools depend on money from full-pay students and/or cheap labor from those students, so they accept far more master’s students than there are spots in PhD programs, and far more PhD students than there are tenure-track positions. Through it all, grad students are told that work will, in essence, save them: If they publish more, if they go to more conferences to present their work, if they get a book contract before graduating, their chances on the job market will go up. For a very limited few, this proves true. But it is no guarantee—and with ever-diminished funding for public universities, many students take on the costs of conference travel themselves (often through student loans), scrambling to make ends meet over the summer while they apply for the already-scarce number of academic jobs available, many of them in remote locations, with little promise of long-term stability. Some academics exhaust their hope labor supply during grad school. For others, it takes years on the market, often while adjuncting for little pay in demeaning and demanding work conditions, before the dream starts to splinter. But the system itself is set up to feed itself as long as possible. Most humanities PhD programs still offer little or nothing in terms of training for jobs outside of academia, creating a sort of mandatory tunnel from grad school to tenure-track aspirant. In the humanities, especially, to obtain a PhD—to become a doctor in your field of knowledge—is to adopt the refrain “I don’t have any marketable skills.” Many academics have no choice but to keep teaching—the only thing they feel equipped to do—even without fair pay or job security. Academic institutions are incentivized to keep adjuncts “doing what they love”—but there’s additional pressure from peers and mentors who’ve become deeply invested in the continued viability of the institution. Many senior academics with little experience of the realities of the contemporary market explicitly and implicitly advise their students that the only good job is a tenure-track academic job. When I failed to get an academic job in 2011, I felt soft but unsubtle dismay from various professors upon telling them that I had chosen to take a high school teaching job to make ends meet. It
Anne Helen Petersen (Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation)
I have come to believe that the major threat to the viability of our faith is that of consumerism. This
Alan Hirsch (The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church)
Research suggests that in over 90 percent of all successful new businesses, historically, the strategy that the founders had deliberately decided to pursue was not the strategy that ultimately led to the business’s success.12 Entrepreneurs rarely get their strategies exactly right the first time. The successful ones make it because they have money left over to try again after they learn that their initial strategy was flawed, whereas the failed ones typically have spent their resources implementing a deliberate strategy before its viability could be known. One of the most important roles of senior management during a venture’s early years is to learn from emergent sources what is working and what is not, and then to cycle that learning back into the process through the deliberate channel.
Clayton M. Christensen (The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth (Creating and Sustainability Successful Growth))
On taxes, he had repudiated his 1980 “voodoo economics” language. It was a large price to pay for political viability, for Bush had been right that tax cuts alone could not lead to long-term fiscal health. Together with a general failure to curb spending in the Reagan years, the supply-side view, with its emphasis on lower taxes, was driving up the federal deficits and debt. Reagan’s successor, whoever he might be, would be forced to reckon with unpaid bills and persistent shortfalls.
Jon Meacham (Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush)
In the side refrigerators, where Vito so carefully arranges the morning's new attractions, you'll find even more examples of a traditional caseificio gone rogue: a wheel of aged goat cheese coated in a rough armor of wild herbs; a thick, blue-veined goat cheese soaked red with purple with Primitivo wine; goat yogurt in half a dozen international flavors. You won't be surprised to find that the early efforts of the Dicecca boys were met with opposition- both from the family and the regular clientele. Each brother has a story about the resistance he has encountered along the way- the parental eye rolling at the cacao-coated goat cheese, the sisterly skepticism about mango-stuffed burrata, the customers' confusion at the latest experiment to emerge from the lactic laboratory in back. Every story ends the same way: with one or all of the family members doubting the viability of another esoteric cheese, followed by the long, slow acceptance by enough customers to justify its real estate space in the display case. "When I started making cheese with the Nikka barrel, they made fun of me, said I was destroying the taste of the cheese. Now they're copying me. That's the pattern we always see: at first they make fun, then they start to copy.
Matt Goulding (Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture (Roads & Kingdoms Presents))
Today St. Kitts is the only Leeward Island, of the Caribbean, that still grows sugar cane. However, sugar cane is very expensive to grow, harvest, and process. The fields are now state owned and the entire island crop is processed in one government-run factory. The dozens of sugar plantations, which had dotted the island, climbing from the shore up into the mountains, were gradually abandoned. In time, the handsome stone structures -- complete factories-- fell to wind, weather, and vandalism. Here and there on the island one can still see a signature smokestack rising a hundred feet into the sky, or the egg-shaped base of an old windmill. The possibility of a merger with other Leeward Islands and the Virgin Islands has been debated, as has the growing problem of drug trafficking, in which St Kitts & Nevis, like most small Caribbean islands, has become involved. The people of Nevis are themselves deeply split, roughly between the population of the southern towns, which favor independence, and the rest of the island, which does not. Were Nevis to become independent, it would be the world's smallest sovereign state after the Vatican, which naturally gives rise to concerns about its economic viability.
Carol Boyle (ST. KITTS & NEVIS: Where Two Oceans Meet (Carol's Worldwide Cruise Port Itineraries Book 1))
If man evolved spontaneously from nothingness to flesh then man must be immortal. Why? Well, man in his development from nothingness to substance did not exist in a controlled environment and so lay prone to countless assaults from elements of his coarse environment. To preserve his viability, he had to ride materially unscathed through all those assaults. So it is reasonable to expect that man must be immune to destruction by all malevolent forces whose vicious tackles he stumbled through in the course of his development from cell to flesh. For how can he in the stoutness of maturity be susceptible to destruction by blows that he absorbed without peril in his infancy?
Agona Apell
It is difficult to overstate the tragic significance of these events. Because civil and voting rights were regarded by many southern Democrats as a fundamental threat, the parties’ agreement to abandon those issues provided a basis for restoring mutual toleration. The disenfranchisement of African Americans preserved white supremacy and Democratic Party dominance in the South, which helped maintain the Democrats’ national viability.
Steven Levitsky (How Democracies Die)
Vendors are becoming aware that their future relevance and viability will depend not on their salespeoples’ willingness to let the CIO beat them at a round of golf, but their ability to get the rank and file to genuinely value their technologies. As we’ll see, those that manage this transition most successfully turn sales from a costly and complex negotiation to a fait accompli.
Stephen O’Grady (The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World)
Change will not be apologized for. Why apologize for something that will improve the strength of the organization? Every change is made (every last one of them) for the sole purpose of strengthening the ultimate viability of the organization. That’s why you advocate the change. That’s why you sell it to your team.
Steve Chandler (100 Ways to Motivate Others: How Great Leaders Can Produce Insane Results Without Driving People Crazy)
There are always alternative interpretations of the same data. It is often the case, however, that the alternatives that are rejected are treated as if they don’t exist. But they do. And we should be aware not only of their existence and potential viability, but of the possibility that the hypotheses that we might embrace so strongly today may very well be the rejects of tomorrow.
Jeffrey H. Schwartz
A great deal of the American medical community’s resources is geared to addressing the cosmetic needs of both women and men whom fear that by showing the deleterious effects of aging their marital relationship is in jeopardy. The most ethical plastic surgeons decline to perform impetuous work; the less ethical, but often the wealthiest professionals, perform all requested work irrespective of the long-term viability of the services rendered. The plastic surgeon’s sales pitch is predictable: everyone can receive the face that he or she can afford.
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
The web nearness of your organization assumes a huge part in the accomplishment of your business. These days, business people like to do online research of your organization and study your site completely before contributing or marking any business contract. Business visionaries who are not usual with web extends and don't know how to choose the ideal website architecture organization regularly arrive up picking the wrong one. Benefiting the administrations of a wrong website architecture firm can deliver pulverizing impacts and influence your business unfavorably. In any case, as indicated by website architecture specialists, there are few focuses which ought to be mulled over while choosing the ideal website architecture organization. Such focuses may include: Website architecture Pricing: Decent quality web architecture guarantees fantastic business openings. In the realm of web outlining, a great quality Designer requests a nice cost, while a minimal effort likens to pitiable quality. In any case, few web organizations offer starting quotes and shroud the genuine cost which in the long run heaps up. In few cases, regularly customer’s grumble of working with "Markdown Web Design Companies" which guarantees of a diminished cost however brings about loss of time alongside cash. Subsequently, choice of web organizations on the premise of estimating ought to be deliberately directed. Search engine optimization Services: Such administrations concentrate on enhancing the positioning of your site in different web indexes like Google and Bing. Higher web search tools draw in the natural leads, which are gotten without paying a penny to Google. On the off chance that the viability of SEO is dismissed, even a pulling in and magnificent showcasing system won't have the capacity to draw in guests to your site.
credofy
DHA, is its role in regulating gene expression for the production of BDNF. Put simply, DHA helps orchestrate the production, connectivity, and viability of brain cells while at the same time enhancing function.
David Perlmutter (Grain Brain: The Surprising Truth about Wheat, Carbs, and Sugar--Your Brain's Silent Killers)
For Klein, reproduction offered proof that something could survive and grow internally despite destructive feelings; pregnancy reflected the viability and goodness of one’s internal object world.
Stephen A. Mitchell (Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought)
When it comes to defending the economic viability of our nation, it is naïve to count on the honesty and integrity of people responsible for our markets when they stand to gain so much by manipulating the system to their advantage.
Ben Carson (America the Beautiful: Rediscovering What Made This Nation Great)
When economic imbalances became extreme, the lack of equilibrium and viability could threaten social and political order.
Joshua A. Berman (Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought)
African Americans weren’t the only ones who took a hit. The states of the Deep South, which fought Brown tooth and nail, today all fall in the bottom quartile of state rankings for educational attainment, per capita income, and quality of health.139 Prince Edward County, in particular, bears the scars of a place that saw fit to fight the Civil War right into the middle of the twentieth century. Certainly it is no accident that, in 2013, despite a knowledge-based, technology-driven global economy, the number one occupation in the county seat of Farmville was “cook and food preparation worker.” Nor is it any accident that in 2013, while 9.9 percent of white households in the county made less than ten thousand dollars in annual income, fully 32.9 percent of black households fell below that threshold.140 The insistence on destroying Brown, and thus the viability of America’s schools and the quality of education children receive regardless of where they live, has resulted in “the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession” for wide swaths of the American public.
Carol Anderson (White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide)
The OBOR project seeks economic connectivity both on the Eurasian continent and in the Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean regions. China has deduced that the viability and success of its OBOR project hinges on the flagship China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which will link Kashgar in China to the Gwadar Port in Pakistan.
Pravin Sawhney (Dragon on Our Doorstep: Managing China Through Military Power)
There are a lot of really broken people. Unfortunately, especially for women, your sense of self and your viability is so under assault from this terrible culture focused on youth. Men have permission for eternal childhoods. So many people I know by all rights should have been married. They're sad. They're alone. They're hurt. They're angry at all the sexual passing along. Men as well as women. So let's have another reason for marriage. Even people who are divorced have a certain dignity around the fact that that had happened. We need to look at marriage from the standpoint of aging, from the standpoint of cultural disposability, and to look to an institution that says, 'You are precious. Your union is precious. The community is supposed to think your union is precious. We're going to do this in public so everybody knows and everybody is accountable.' That's huge. It's the opposite of saying you're disposable or that there's no hope or help for you if things go awry.
Ada Calhoun (Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give)
Peter Drucker suggested the transformation into a post-modern world happened between 1937 and 1957 (when he was writing). He described an as yet "nameless era" which he characterized as a shift to conceptual world based on pattern, purpose, and process rather than mechanical cause, outlined by four new realities: the emergence of Educated Society, the importance of international development, the decline of the nation state, and the collapse of the viability of non-Western cultures
Wikipedia :-)
using money as a “neutral indicator of value”—a way of determining whether or not you have enough career capital to succeed with a pursuit. I called this the law of financial viability, and concluded that it’s a critical tool for navigating your own acquisition of control. This holds whether you are pondering an entrepreneurial venture or a new role within an established company. Unless people are willing to pay you, it’s not an idea you’re ready to go after.
Cal Newport (So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love)
My target customer will be? (Tip: how would you describe your primary target customer) The problem my customer wants to solve is? (Tip: what does your customer struggle with or what need do they want to fulfill) My customer’s need can be solved with? (Tip: give a very concise description / elevator pitch of your product) Why can’t my customer solve this today? (Tip: what are the obstacles that have prevented my customer from solving this already) The measurable outcome my customer wants to achieve is? (Tip: what measurable change in your your customer’s life makes them love your product) My primary customer acquisition tactic will be? (Tip: you will likely have multiple marketing channels, but there is often one method, at most two, that dominates your customer acquisition — what is your current guess) My earliest adopter will be? (Tip: remember that you can’t get to the mainstream customer without getting early adopters first) I will make money (revenue) by? (Tip: don’t list all the ideas for making money, but pick your primary one) My primary competition will be? (Tip: think about both direct and indirect competition) I will beat my competitors primarily because of? (Tip: what truly differentiates you from the competition?) My biggest risk to financial viability is? (Tip: what could prevent you from getting to breakeven? is there something baked into your revenue or cost model that you can de-risk?) My biggest technical or engineering risk is? (Tip: is there a major technical challenge that might hinder building your product?)
Giff Constable (Talking to Humans)
federal government to protect it from foreign terrorist attacks. That lesson caused him to create a global intelligence division and a counterterrorism force. The audacity of the idea was breathtaking—a local police force with a worldwide perspective that could unearth terrorist plots wherever conceived and prevent them from reaching New York City. When Kelly proposed hiring a deputy commissioner for counterterrorism and another for a reconceived intelligence unit, Bloomberg approved it. “The world no longer stops at the oceans,” the mayor said at the time. “We have to make sure we get the best information as quickly as we possibly can,” he asserted. It was the same concept—accurate information delivered in real time to people making important, complex decisions—that had been the basis for Bloomberg’s global business. Kelly had little trouble convincing his boss of the need, or the viability of the bold idea, even though at the time he had not yet developed a detailed plan.15 Kelly rapidly changed the status of the NYPD on the Joint Task Force on Terrorism that the FBI had been running in New York City since 1980. He named retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Frank Libutti the first NYPD deputy commissioner for counterterrorism, and he increased the number of NYPD detectives assigned to the group from twenty to more
Chris McNickle (Bloomberg: A Billionaire's Ambition)
In September 2009 the lead article in the journal Nature said that above 350 we “threaten the ecological life-support systems that have developed in the late Quaternary environment, and severely challenge the viability of contemporary human societies.”41 A month later, the journal Science offered new evidence of what the earth was like 20 million years ago, the last time we had carbon levels this high: sea levels rose one hundred feet or more, and temperatures rose as much as ten degrees.
Bill McKibben (Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet)
The purpose of product discovery is to address these critical risks: Will the customer buy this, or choose to use it? (Value risk) Can the user figure out how to use it? (Usability risk) Can we build it? (Feasibility risk) Does this solution work for our business? (Business viability risk) And it's not enough that it's just the product manager's opinion on these questions. We need to collect evidence.
Marty Cagan (Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love (Silicon Valley Product Group))
In recent decades, the default position of most carbon intensive industries, like coal mining firms or petrochemicals producers, has been to resist or to obstruct any transition toward an economy which might not risk the continued viability of the climate and ecosystems upon which we rely.
Adrienne Buller (The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism)
To get an accurate indicator of commercial viability, don’t ask people if they would buy—ask them to buy. The response to the second is the only one that matters.
Timothy Ferriss (The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich)
Walnuts in particular have been associated with a host of positive biological effects, such as improved cardiovascular parameters, enhanced brain viability with aging, reduced cardiovascular deaths, and longer life span.
Joel Fuhrman (The End of Heart Disease: The Eat to Live Plan to Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease (Eat for Life))
In modern teams, we tackle these risks prior to deciding to build anything. These risks include value risk (whether customers will buy it), usability risk (whether users can figure out how to use it), feasibility risk (whether our engineers can build what we need with the time, skills, and technology we have), and business viability risk (whether this solution also works for the various aspects of our business—sales, marketing, finance, legal, etc.).
Marty Cagan (Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love (Silicon Valley Product Group))
The purpose of product discovery is to address these critical risks: Will the customer buy this, or choose to use it? (Value risk) Can the user figure out how to use it? (Usability risk) Can we build it? (Feasibility risk) Does this solution work for our business? (Business viability risk)
Marty Cagan (Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love (Silicon Valley Product Group))
2008, Nokia faced stiff competition from low-cost Asian rivals, which had driven prices down by 35% in a few years. Over the same period, labour costs in Nokia’s plant in Bochum, Germany, had risen by 20%. Nokia decided to close Bochum. The closure may well have grown the pie – without it, Nokia’s long-term viability may have been jeopardised.
Alex Edmans (Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit – Updated and Revised)
Of course, like Eiheiji in Japan, Tassajara was not supposed to be a permanent refuge from the world for anyone. It was a training monastery; however, a few facts mitigated this concept. First, almost no one who arrived at Tassajara had any previous training, so it was clear that a year or two would not make them masters, capable of starting and sustaining their own Zen temples. Second, there was nowhere else in America for students to be trained, and very few had had the wit or the wherewithal to get themselves to Japan. Third, Tassajara needed a reliable labor pool for year-round restoration and building projects, as well as competent staff for the summer guest season, which was essential to the monastery's viability.
Michael Downing (Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center)
The inability of refugees to earn a living within the standard UNHCR approach was not only psychologically diminishing for the refugees, but also highlighted the lack of viability of the financing model. Paying for 4 million refugees to live without work for ten years was manifestly unsustainable. Even at a cost of only $1,000 per refugee per year, which would have implied a drastic reduction in lifestyle relative to Syrian pre-refugee conditions, the bill would have amounted to $40bn.
Alexander Betts (Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System)
The foundation of the Chosŏn dynasty (1392- 1910), with its pronounced Neo-Confucian sympathies, brought an end to Buddhism's hegemony in Korean religion and upset this ideological status quo. Buddhism's close affiliation with the vanquished Koryŏ rulers led to centuries of persecution during this Confucian dynasty. While controls over monastic vocations and conduct had already been instituted during the Koryŏ period, these pale next to the severe restrictions promulgated during the Chosŏn dynasty. The number of monks was severely restricted—and at times a complete ban on ordination instituted—and monks were prohibited from entering the metropolitan areas. Hundreds of monasteries were disestablished (the number of temples dropping to 242 during the reign of T'aejong [r. 1401-1418]), and new construction was forbidden in the cities and villages of Korea. Monastic land holdings and temple slaves were confiscated by the government in 1406, undermining the economic viability of many monasteries. The vast power that Buddhists had wielded during the Silla and Koryŏ dynasties was now exerted by Confucians. Buddhism was kept virtually quarantined in the countryside, isolated from the intellectual debates of the times. Its lay adherents were more commonly the illiterate peasants of the countryside and women, rather than the educated male elite of the cities, as had been the case in ages past. Buddhism had become insular, and ineffective in generating creative responses to this Confucian challenge.
Robert E. Buswell Jr. (The Zen Monastic Experience)
Empowerment was again the key: give a citizen equality under the law, freedom, and economic viability, and his talents will bloom and enrich the state at large.4
Victor Davis Hanson (The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America)
To understand the social meaning of the prison today within the context of a developing prison industrial complex means that punishment has to be conceptually severed from its seemingly indissoluble link with crime. How often do we encounter the phrase "crime and punishment"? To what extent has the perpetual repetition of the phrase "crime and punishment" in literature, as titles of television shows, both fictional and documentary, and in everyday conversation made it extremely difficult to think about punishment beyond this connection? How have these portrayals located the prison in a causal relation to crime as a natural, neces-sary, and permanent effect, thus inhibiting serious debates about the viability of the prison today? The notion of a prison industrial complex insists on understandings of the punishment process that take into account economic and political structures and ideologies, rather than focusing myopically on individual criminal conduct and efforts to "curb crime." The fact, for example, that many corporations with global markets now rely on prisons as an important source of profit helps us to understand the rapidity with which prisons began to proliferate precisely at a time when official studies indicated that the crime rate was falling. The notion of a prison industrial complex also insists that the racialization of prison populations--and this is not only true of the United States, but of Europe, South America, and Australia as well--is not an incidental feature. Thus, critiques of the prison industrial complex undertaken by abolitionist activists and scholars are very much linked to critiques of the global persistence of racism. Antiracist and other social justice movements are incomplete with attention to the politics of imprisonment.
Angela Y. Davis (Are Prisons Obsolete?)
In May 1901, Edison formed the Edison Storage Battery Company. Edison had big plans for his new battery, which he thought could be used by trolley companies and others. To extend the viability of his invention into the countryside, Edison even proposed that small windmills be attached to electrical generators. Together, they would be used to recharge batteries in cars while homeowners were asleep in a manner that would be cheaper than gasoline.25 This model of decentralized household distributed energy plus electric car is being revisited today in the Honda House of the Future on the University of California, Davis, campus, again raising the prospect that we lost what could have been an opportunity to do things differently one hundred years ago.
Amy Myers Jaffe (Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security (Center on Global Energy Policy Series))
Energy transition is no longer a question of technical feasibility or economic viability, but of political will.
Bill McKibben (Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?)
As the legend goes, the confused prince sat under that tree for forty-nine days. We won’t delve into the biological viability of sitting in the same spot for forty-nine days, but let’s just say that in that time the prince came to a number of profound realizations. One of those realizations was this: that life itself is a form of suffering. The rich suffer because of their riches. The poor suffer because of their poverty. People without a family suffer because they have no family. People with a family suffer because of their family. People who pursue worldly pleasures suffer because of their worldly pleasures. People who abstain from worldly pleasures suffer because of their abstention. This isn’t to say that all suffering is equal. Some suffering is certainly more painful than other suffering. But we all must suffer nonetheless.
Mark Manson (The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life)
are valuable (our customers will buy the product and/or choose to use it), and viable (it will meet the needs of the business). Together with a product designer who is responsible for ensuring the solution is usable, and a tech lead who is responsible for ensuring the solution is feasible, the team is able to collaborate to address this full range of risks (value, viability, usability, and feasibility). Together, they own the problem and are responsible and accountable for the results.2
Marty Cagan (Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products)
The successful adoption of societal systems to the AI revolution and the digital age is crucial for the viability of the systems in the future. The education systems is one such pivotal system that, if well-prepared, will facilitate the successful integration of AI and digital technologies into other societal structures.
Evalyne Kemuma
The Bush administration caught a break when the Supreme Court handed down a compromise on June 29. Ruling 5–4, the justices preserved key portions of the Pennsylvania law but also upheld Roe, striking down the portion of the Abortion Control Act that placed an “undue burden” on the mother’s efforts to seek an abortion, which was just the spousal notification requirement. The court also overturned the trimester standard governing abortion restrictions in favor of the looser concept of “viability.” Sandra Day O’Connor, writing the majority opinion, expressed a degree of exasperation with the Republican administration’s continued efforts to attack Roe: “Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt. Yet 19 years after our holding that the Constitution protects a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy in its early stages, Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113 (1973), that definition of liberty is still questioned. Joining the respondents as amicus curiae, the United States, as it has done in five other cases in the last decade, again asks us to overrule Roe.” Justice O’Connor’s opinion also included a good deal of concern for the institutional damage that would happen if the court were politically whipsawed to overturn the settled precedent of Roe: “A decision to overrule Roe’s essential holding under the existing circumstances would address error, if error there was, at the cost of both profound and unnecessary damage to the Court’s legitimacy, and to the nation’s commitment to the rule of law. It is therefore imperative to adhere to the essence of Roe’s original decision, and we do so today.” In his dissent, Chief Justice William Rehnquist complained that the court had rendered Roe a “facade” and replaced it with something “created largely out of whole cloth” and “not built to last.” “Roe v. Wade stands as a sort of Potemkin village,” Rehnquist wrote, “which may be pointed out to passers-by as a monument to the importance of adhering to precedent.
John Ganz (When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s)