When Do You Offset Quotes

When we do a moral act to offset an immoral one, we are engaged in “moral cleansing.” When we do nothing, or perhaps something perceived as immoral (because we feel like we have enough in the moral bank account to get away with it) we are engaged in “moral licensing.

From then on, my computer monitored my vital signs and kept track of exactly how many calories I burned during the course of each day. If I didn’t meet my daily exercise requirements, the system prevented me from logging into my OASIS account. This meant that I couldn’t go to work, continue my quest, or, in effect, live my life. Once the lockout was engaged, you couldn’t disable it for two months. And the software was bound to my OASIS account, so I couldn’t just buy a new computer or go rent a booth in some public OASIS café. If I wanted to log in, I had no choice but to exercise first. This proved to be the only motivation I needed. The lockout software also monitored my dietary intake. Each day I was allowed to select meals from a preset menu of healthy, low-calorie foods. The software would order the food for me online and it would be delivered to my door. Since I never left my apartment, it was easy for the program to keep track of everything I ate. If I ordered additional food on my own, it would increase the amount of exercise I had to do each day, to offset my additional calorie intake. This was some sadistic software. But it worked. The pounds began to melt off, and after a few months, I was in near-perfect health. For the first time in my life I had a flat stomach, and muscles. I also had twice the energy, and I got sick a lot less frequently. When the two months ended and I was finally given the option to disable the fitness lockout, I decided to keep it in place. Now, exercising was a part of my daily ritual.

Yes, in the same way we are not supposed to hedge our language, but research has found that hedging can offset the likability penalty women face when they do negotiate. One script that negotiation expert Hannah Riley Bowles suggests: "I don't know how typical it is for people at my level to negotiate, but I'm hopeful that you'll see my skill at negotiating as something important that I can bring to the job." Basically, you've reframed your greedy, unfeminine need for money as a professional asset.

I splash enough water in Chloe's face to put out a small house fire. I don't want to drown her, just exfoliate her eyeballs with sea salt. When she thinks I'm done, she opens her eyes-and her mouth. Big mistake. The next wave rinses off the hangy ball in the back of her throat and makes it to her lungs before she can swallow. She chokes and coughs and rubs her eyes as if she's been maced. "Great, Emma! You got my new hair wet!" she sputters. "Happy now?" "Nope." "I said I was sorry." She blows her nose in her hand, then sets the snot to sea. "Gross. And sorry's not good enough." "Fine. I'll make it up to you. What do you want?" "Let me hold your head underwater until I feel better," I say. I cross my arms, which is tricky when straddling a surfboard being pitched around in the wake of a passing speedboat. Chloe knows I'm nervous being this far out, but holding on would be a sign of weakness. "I'll let you do that because I love you. But it won't make you feel better." "I won't know for sure until I try it." I keep eye contact, sit a little straighter. "Fine. But you'll still look albino when you let me back up." She rocks the board and makes me grab it for balance. "Get your snotty hands off the surfboard. And I'm not albino. Just white." I want to cross my arms again, but we almost tipped over that time. Swallowing my pride is a lot easier than swallowing the Gulf of Mexico. "White than most," she grins. "People would think you're naked if you wore my swimsuit." I glance down at the white string bikini, offset beautifully against her chocolate-milk skin. She catches me and laughs. "Well, maybe I could get a tan while we're here," I say, blushing. I feel myself cracking and I hate it. Just this once, I want to stay mad at Chloe. "Maybe you could get a burn while we're here, you mean. Matterfact, did you put sunblock on?" I shake my head. She shakes her head too, and makes a tsking sound identical to her mother's. "Didn't think so. If you did, you would've slipped right off that guy's chest instead of sticking to it like that." "I know," I groan. "Got to be the hottest guy I've ever seen," she says, fanning herself for emphasis. "Yeah, I know. Smacked into him, remember? Without my helmet, remember?" She laughs. "Hate to break it to you, but he's still staring at you. Him and his mean-ass sister." "Shut up." She snickers. "But seriously, which one of them do you think would win a staring contest? I was gonna tell him to meet us at Baytowne tonight, but he might be one of those clingy stalker types. That's too bad, too. There's a million dark little corners in Baytowne for you two to snuggle-" "Ohmysweetgoodness, Chloe, stop!

Mrs. Fritz is wearing her favorite purple, floral dress today. Her deep-set eyes are offset, as usual, by her purple eyeglasses and her almost-explosive frizzy hair. “Those are good examples. Do you all want to hear what my favorite urban legend is?” We nod. “It’s the one about the grandchildren who actually call to say thanks when you send them birthday presents.” We stare at her.

If your needs are not attainable through safe instruments, the solution is not to increase the rate of return by upping the level of risk. Instead, goals may be revised, savings increased, or income boosted through added years of work. . . . Somebody has to care about the consequences if uncertainty is to be understood as risk. . . . As we’ve seen, the chances of loss do decline over time, but this hardly means that the odds are zero, or negligible, just because the horizon is long. . . . In fact, even though the odds of loss do fall over long periods, the size of potential losses gets larger, not smaller, over time. . . . The message to emerge from all this hype has been inescapable: In the long run, the stock market can only go up. Its ascent is inexorable and predictable. Long-term stock returns are seen as near certain while risks appear minimal, and only temporary. And the messaging has been effective: The familiar market propositions come across as bedrock fact. For the most part, the public views them as scientific truth, although this is hardly the case. It may surprise you, but all this confidence is rather new. Prevailing attitudes and behavior before the early 1980s were different. Fewer people owned stocks then, and the general popular attitude to buying stocks was wariness, not ebullience or complacency. . . . Unfortunately, the American public’s embrace of stocks is not at all related to the spread of sound knowledge. It’s useful to consider how the transition actually evolved—because the real story resists a triumphalist interpretation. . . . Excessive optimism helps explain the popularity of the stocks-for-the-long-run doctrine. The pseudo-factual statement that stocks always succeed in the long run provides an overconfident investor with more grist for the optimistic mill. . . . Speaking with the editors of Forbes.com in 2002, Kahneman explained: “When you are making a decision whether or not to go for something,” he said, “my guess is that knowing the odds won’t hurt you, if you’re brave. But when you are executing, not to be asking yourself at every moment in time whether you will succeed or not is certainly a good thing. . . . In many cases, what looks like risk-taking is not courage at all, it’s just unrealistic optimism. Courage is willingness to take the risk once you know the odds. Optimistic overconfidence means you are taking the risk because you don’t know the odds. It’s a big difference.” Optimism can be a great motivator. It helps especially when it comes to implementing plans. Although optimism is healthy, however, it’s not always appropriate. You would not want rose-colored glasses in a financial advisor, for instance. . . . Over the long haul, the more you are exposed to danger, the more likely it is to catch up with you. The odds don’t exactly add, but they do accumulate. . . . Yet, overriding this instinctive understanding, the prevailing investment dogma has argued just the reverse. The creed that stocks grow steadily safer over time has managed to trump our common-sense assumption by appealing to a different set of homespun precepts. Chief among these is a flawed surmise that, with the passage of time, downward fluctuations are balanced out by compensatory upward swings. Many people believe that each step backward will be offset by more than one step forward. The assumption is that you can own all the upside and none of the downside just by sticking around. . . . If you find yourself rejecting safe investments because they are not profitable enough, you are asking the wrong questions. If you spurn insurance simply because the premiums put a crimp in your returns, you may be destined for disappointment—and possibly loss.

There is redemption out there, if you want it badly enough. This might just be your chance.” “I don’t know that I can ever make up for what I’ve done,” I said, shaking my head. “Not make up for it. Not even offset it. Just ... do your best to try and tilt the balance back in the other direction.” She sighed. “Live a life where you’re doing your best to fight back from what you were, what you did. Become a person who’s the opposite of what you were when you dove deep into the waters of revenge. Someone who stands up for what’s right.

Reading Group Guide  1.   The river town of Hobnob, Mississippi, is in danger of flooding. To offset the risk, the townspeople were offered the chance to relocate in exchange for money. Some people jumped at the opportunity (the Flooders); others (the Stickers) refused to leave, so the deal fell through. If you lived in Hobnob, which choice would you make and why? If you’d lived in New Orleans at the time of Hurricane Katrina, would you have fled the storm or stayed to protect your house? Did the two floods remind you of each other in terms of official government response or media coverage?  2.   How are the circumstances during the Prohibition era (laws against consuming or selling alcohol, underground businesses that make and sell booze on the black market, corruption in the government and in law enforcement) similar to what’s happening today (the fight to legalize and tax marijuana, the fallout of the drug war in countries like Mexico and Colombia, jails filled with drug abusers)? How are the circumstances different? Do you identify with the bootleggers or the prohibitionists in the novel? What is your stance on the issue today?  3.   The novel is written in third person from two different perspectives—Ingersoll’s and Dixie Clay’s—in alternating chapters. How do you think this approach adds to or detracts from the story? Are you a fan of books written from multiple perspectives, or do you prefer one character to tell his/her side of the story?  4.   The Tilted World is written by two authors. Do you think it reads differently than a book written by only one? Do you think you could coauthor a novel with a loved one? Did you try to guess which author wrote different passages?  5.   Language and dialect play an important role in the book. Do you think the southern dialect is rendered successfully? How about the authors’ use of similes (“wet towels hanging out of the upstairs windows like tongues”; “Her nylon stockings sagged around her ankles like shedding snakeskin.”). Do they provide necessary context or flavor?  6.   At the end of Chapter 5, when Jesse, Ham, and Ingersoll first meet, Ingersoll realizes that Jesse has been drinking water the entire time they’ve been at dinner. Of course, Ham and Ingersoll are both drunk from all the moonshine. How does this discovery set the stage for what happens in the latter half of the book?  7.   Ingersoll grew up an orphan. In what ways do you think that independence informed his character? His choices throughout the novel? Dixie Clay also became independent, after marrying Jesse and becoming ostracized from friends and family. Later, after Ingersoll rescues her, she reflects, “For so long she’d relied only on herself. She’d needed to. . . . But now she’d let someone in. It should have felt like weakness, but it didn’t.” Are love and independence mutually exclusive? How did the arrival of Willy prepare these characters for the changes they’d have to undergo to be ready for each other?  8.   Dixie Clay becomes a bootlegger not because she loves booze or money but because she needs something to occupy her time. It’s true, however, that she’s not only breaking the law but participating in a system that perpetrates violence. Do you think there were better choices she could have made? Consider the scene at the beginning of the novel, when there’s a showdown between Jesse and two revenuers interested in making an arrest. Dixie Clay intercepts the arrest, pretending to be a posse of gunslingers protecting Jesse and the still. Given what you find out about Jesse—his dishonesty, his drunkenness, his womanizing—do you think she made the right choice? If you were in Dixie Clay’s shoes, what would you have done?  9.   When Ham learns that Ingersoll abandoned his post at the levee to help Dixie Clay, he feels not only that Ingersoll acted

We lack space here to discuss in detail the pros and cons of market forecasting. A great deal of brain power goes into this field, and undoubtedly some people can make money by being good stock-market analysts. But it is absurd to think that the general public can ever make money out of market forecasts. For who will buy when the general public, at a given signal, rushes to sell out at a profit? If you, the reader, expect to get rich over the years by following some system or leadership in market forecasting, you must be expecting to try to do what countless others are aiming at, and to be able to do it better than your numerous competitors in the market. There is no basis either in logic or in experience for assuming that any typical or average investor can anticipate market movements more successfully than the general public, of which he is himself a part. There is one aspect of the “timing” philosophy which seems to have escaped everyone’s notice. Timing is of great psychological importance to the speculator because he wants to make his profit in a hurry. The idea of waiting a year before his stock moves up is repugnant to him. But a waiting period, as such, is of no consequence to the investor. What advantage is there to him in having his money uninvested until he receives some (presumably) trustworthy signal that the time has come to buy? He enjoys an advantage only if by waiting he succeeds in buying later at a sufficiently lower price to offset his loss of dividend income. What this means is that timing is of no real value to the investor unless it coincides with pricing—that is, unless it enables him to repurchase his shares at substantially under his previous selling price.

When playing a bear market, the same rules hold: You want to diversify your risks, especially knowing that collapses move even faster than rallies. You need to decide how much safe cash or near cash you want to hold to sleep at night and to handle financial emergencies, like the loss of your job or your house. Then decide how much to put into longer-term high-quality bonds, like those 30-year Treasuries and AAA corporates, but I think it’s still premature to make this move at the time of this writing, in August 2017. Then decide how much you want to put into a dollar bull fund or the ETF UUP, which tracks the U.S. dollar versus its six major trading partners. If you’re willing to risk part of your wealth, you can also bet on financial assets going down—from stocks to gold. Stocks are the one type of financial asset that goes down in either a deflationary crisis, like the 1930s, or an inflationary one, like the 1970s. So shorting stocks is the best way to prosper in the downturn, either way. But don’t leverage this bet. The markets are simply too volatile. You can short the stock market with no leverage by simply buying an ETF (exchange-traded fund) like the ProShares Short S&P 500 (NYSEArca: SH). It’s an inverse fund on the S&P 500, so if the index goes down 50 percent, you make 50 percent. The ProShares Ultrashort (NYSEArca: QID) is double short the NASDAQ 100, which is likely to get hit the worst. If you make this play, just do a half share, to avoid that two-times leverage (hold the other half in cash or short-term bonds). Direxion Daily Small Cap Bear 3X ETF (NYSEArca: TZA) is triple short the Russell 2000, which is also likely to lead on the way down. So buy only a one-third share of this one, to remain without leverage. (That means the money you allocate here should be one-third in TZA and two-thirds in cash, to offset the leverage.) And unlike the gold bugs, I see gold collapsing. It’s an inflation hedge, not a deflation hedge. If gold rallies back as high as $1,425—on my predicted bear-market rally—then it could easily drop to around $700 within a year. Your last decision is whether to risk some of your funds betting on gold’s downside, for the greatest potential returns. You can buy DB Gold Double Short ETN (NYSEArca: DZZ)—double short gold—at a half share, to offset the leverage, or just simply short GLD, the ETF that follows gold. There you have it. How to handle the coming crash.

When you’re ready to sell your rental property, you may be in for a very large windfall. That could produce a substantial tax bill, unless you take some steps to reduce that tax burden. There are three main ways to do that with rental properties: • Sell off some losing assets (like stocks that have plummeted) to offset the gain • Structure a special deal called a 1031 exchange • Turn the property into your primary residence for a couple of years before you sell

The crowd began to murmur in the indistinguishable syllables of backstage banter. As the ball ascended, so did the volume of the murmurs. Words could be made out. Then phrases. “Lovely golf stroke.” “Super golf shot.” “Beautiful golf shot.” “Truly fine golf stroke.” They always said golf stroke, like someone might mistake it for a swim stroke, or—as Myron was currently contemplating in this blazing heat—a sunstroke. “Mr. Bolitar?” Myron took the periscope away from his eyes. He was tempted to yell “Up periscope,” but feared some at stately, snooty Merion Golf Club would view the act as immature. Especially during the U.S. Open. He looked down at a ruddy-faced man of about seventy. “Your pants,” Myron said. “Pardon me?” “You’re afraid of getting hit by a golf cart, right?” They were orange and yellow in a hue slightly more luminous than a bursting supernova. To be fair, the man’s clothing hardly stood out. Most in the crowd seemed to have woken up wondering what apparel they possessed that would clash with, say, the free world. Orange and green tints found exclusively in several of your tackiest neon signs adorned many. Yellow and some strange shades of purple were also quite big—usually together—like a color scheme rejected by a Midwest high school cheerleading squad. It was as if being surrounded by all this God-given natural beauty made one want to do all in his power to offset it. Or maybe there was something else at work here. Maybe the ugly clothes had a more functional origin. Maybe in the old days, when animals roamed free, golfers dressed this way to ward off dangerous wildlife. Good

The same goes for chores: in her book More Work for Mother, the historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan shows that when housewives first got access to “labor-saving” devices like washing machines and vacuum cleaners, no time was saved at all, because society’s standards of cleanliness simply rose to offset the benefits; now that you could return each of your husband’s shirts to a spotless condition after a single wearing, it began to feel like you should, to show how much you loved him. “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,” the English humorist and historian C. Northcote Parkinson wrote in 1955, coining what became known as Parkinson’s law. But it’s not merely a joke, and it doesn’t apply only to work. It applies to everything that needs doing. In fact, it’s the definition of “what needs doing” that expands to fill the time available.

Balance your risk portfolio. When you’re going to take a risk in one domain, offset it by being unusually cautious in another realm of your life. Like the entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs while testing their ideas, or Carmen Medina taking a job to protect against security leaks when she was pushing the CIA to embrace the internet, this can help you avoid unnecessary gambles. 7. Highlight the reasons not to support your idea. Remember Rufus Griscom, the entrepreneur in chapter 3 who told investors why they shouldn’t invest in his company? You can do this, too. Start by describing the three biggest weaknesses

THE DREADFUL DOCTRINE One more thing that stands in the middle of the road of easy-believism is the truth of the sovereignty of God. Years ago, I used to hear people say, “Don’t ever preach the doctrine of the sovereignty of God when you have nonbelievers in the audience.” People literally warned me against that. But here is another offensive bit of news for the unbeliever: God is sovereign, and you are not. You are not the captain of your soul or the master of your fate. You do not hold your destiny in your own hand. According to 1 Corinthians 1:24, those who believe are those whom God calls and sovereignly draws. God calls them because He has chosen them (v. 27), eklegomi, picked them out for Himself. The word appears again in verse 28. How could anybody get saved under those terms? You’ve got nothing left! You’re absolutely stripped of everything. Verse 30: “But of Him you are in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God—and righteousness and sanctification and redemption.” So, if it’s all God’s doing anyway, why would I tamper with the message? Why would I try to manipulate the results? Verse 31: “He who glories, let him glory in the LORD.” My friend R. C. Sproul has said that “God’s favorite doctrine is sovereignty, and if you were God, it would be yours too.” A wonderful sentiment like that helps offset the sick feeling I get when I hear contemporary evangelicals attack the sovereignty of God. His elective purpose is salvation, because if God isn’t saving people, they won’t be saved. This is a hard truth that many prominent evangelicals deny, stealing glory from God and overestimating the ability of the spiritually dead!

One more thing that stands in the middle of the road of easy-believism is the truth of the sovereignty of God. Years ago, I used to hear people say, “Don’t ever preach the doctrine of the sovereignty of God when you have nonbelievers in the audience.” People literally warned me against that. But here is another offensive bit of news for the unbeliever: God is sovereign, and you are not. You are not the captain of your soul or the master of your fate. You do not hold your destiny in your own hand. According to 1 Corinthians 1:24, those who believe are those whom God calls and sovereignly draws. God calls them because He has chosen them (v. 27), eklegomi, picked them out for Himself. The word appears again in verse 28. How could anybody get saved under those terms? You’ve got nothing left! You’re absolutely stripped of everything. Verse 30: “But of Him you are in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God—and righteousness and sanctification and redemption.” So, if it’s all God’s doing anyway, why would I tamper with the message? Why would I try to manipulate the results? Verse 31: “He who glories, let him glory in the LORD.” My friend R. C. Sproul has said that “God’s favorite doctrine is sovereignty, and if you were God, it would be yours too.” A wonderful sentiment like that helps offset the sick feeling I get when I hear contemporary evangelicals attack the sovereignty of God. His elective purpose is salvation, because if God isn’t saving people, they won’t be saved. This is a hard truth that many prominent evangelicals deny, stealing glory from God and overestimating the ability of the spiritually dead!