Seventeen years passed between the moment Robert M. Pirsig burst onto the literary scene with his successful debut "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," and the publication of "Lila." Fedro, the phantom alter-ego who haunted the narrator of "Zen," has exchanged his motorcycle for a sailboat on which he travels alone, still on his personal quest in pursuit of the Metaphysics of Quality, radically distanced from the parameters of traditional moral extremism. "Diecisiete anos pasaron desde que Robert M. Pirsig irrumpio en el mundo literario con su exitosa opera prima, "Zen y el arte del mantenimiento de la motocicleta," hasta la publicacion de "Lila." Fedro, el alter ego fantasma que acosaba al narrador de "Zen," ha cambiado la motocicleta por un velero en el que navega solitario, y persevera en su personal busqueda de un sistema de pensamiento, la Metafisica de la Calidad, radicalmente alejado de los parametros de la maniquea moral tradicional."
The controversial book linking intelligence to class and race in modern society, and what public policy can do to mitigate socioeconomic differences in IQ, birth rate, crime, fertility, welfare, and poverty.
Allen Farrington and Sacha Meyers chart a crash course through the errors of modern economic theory and the world's broken fiat currency system with a hopeful destination: Bitcoin Is Venice. What if a global, digital, sound, open-source, programmable currency was monetizing from absolute zero? What might economies look like under a Bitcoin standard that pushes beyond Hernando de Soto’s abstraction of “capital” as "economic potential energy?" What might this new form of capital do to our current governing bodies? Can Bitcoin bring about a new global Renaissance? With Farrington and Meyers, the discussion is as revolutionary as the answers. "Entertaining and erudite, this is a manifesto for a more ethical monetary and financial system, for capitalism in its purest form and for 'number go up' technology. This book bridges the gap between the concept of an open-source sound money and the practical reality of an ethical and workable financial system." --Harris Irfan, author of Heaven’s Bankers “A great deep dive into how Bitcoin provides a transmission mechanism to a world of truth, freedom, and abundance.” --Jeff Booth, author of The Price of Tomorrow “Perhaps you found it surprising that a human rights advocate be asked to write the foreword to a book about finance and economics. But read the book, and you’ll understand why I’ve been tasked with preparing you for this journey. This isn’t simply about how money and finance work -- though you’ll learn a lot about that along the way -- it’s a book about how we can, and how we must, harness the power of Bitcoin to secure liberty in the electronic age.” --Alex Gladstein, Chief Strategy Officer, Human Rights Foundation All profits from Bitcoin is Venice are donated to the Human Rights Foundation. Allen Farrington is a regular contributor to Bitcoin Magazine. Read more of his insights on the world of finance and society at www.bitcoinmagazine.com.
Since ancient times we have been taught that we are not alone. We are not alone in our universe, nor are we alone here on our own planet. Aliens, Angels, & Demons takes us on a journey from the secret teachings about Inner Earth and Pre-Adamic civilized humanity to the many extraterrestrial races in outer space, their relationship to us (and to G-d), and our collective human future in dawning “messianic” times.Aliens, Angels & Demons looks at the teachings of the ancients alongside modern understandings, and insights. What we explore and discover is that the legends of old and the legends of today might very well be one and the same. More so, what is considered by many to be merely legend may indeed be something far greater; something very real and very relevant to us all.If you want to know what is out there, you might very well find your answers in here.
What is money? How does it work, and what effects does it have on our society and economy? Hardly anyone has penetrated the answers to these questions better and explained them more comprehensibly than Alfred Lansburgh, who published them in the form of letters to his son, under the pseudonym “Argentarius” in his publishing house “Die Bank”. This edition contains the following collections of letters from the years 1921 to 1923: * On Money * Valuta * The Central Bank * Monetary Crisis
[ MP3 CD Format ] A venture capitalist draws on expertise developed at the premier venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, and as an executive at Uber to address how tech's most successful products have solved the dreaded "cold start problem" -- by leveraging networks effects to launch and scale towards billions of users. Although software has become easier to build, launching and scaling new products and services remains difficult. Startups face daunting challenges entering the technology ecosystem, including stiff competition, copycats, and ineffective marketing channels. Teams launching new products must consider the advantages of "the network effect," where a product or service's value increases as more users engage with it. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other tech giants utilize network effects, and most tech products incorporate them, whether they're messaging apps, workplace collaboration tools, or marketplaces. Network effects provide a path for fledgling products to break through, attracting new users through viral growth and word of mouth. Yet most entrepreneurs lack the vocabulary and context to describe them - much less understand the fundamental principles that drive the effect. What exactly are network effects? How do teams create and build them into their products? How do products compete in a market where every player has them? Andrew Chen draws on his experience and on interviews with the CEOs and founding teams of LinkedIn, Twitch, Zoom, Dropbox, Tinder, Uber, Airbnb, Pinterest - to provide unique insights in answering these questions. Chen also provides practical frameworks and principles that can be applied across products and industries. The Cold Start Problem reveals what makes winning networks successful, why some startups fail to successfully scale, and most crucially, why products that create and compete using the network effect are virally important today.
"With its gentle affirmations, inspirational quotes, fill-in-the-blank lists and tasks — write yourself a thank-you letter, describe yourself at 80, for example — The Artist’s Way proposes an egalitarian view of creativity: Everyone’s got it."—The New York Times "Morning Pages have become a household name, a shorthand for unlocking your creative potential"—Vogue Over four million copies sold! Since its first publication, The Artist's Way phenomena has inspired the genius of Elizabeth Gilbert and millions of readers to embark on a creative journey and find a deeper connection to process and purpose. Julia Cameron's novel approach guides readers in uncovering problems areas and pressure points that may be restricting their creative flow and offers techniques to free up any areas where they might be stuck, opening up opportunities for self-growth and self-discovery. The program begins with Cameron’s most vital tools for creative recovery – The Morning Pages, a daily writing ritual of three pages of stream-of-conscious, and The Artist Date, a dedicated block of time to nurture your inner artist. From there, she shares hundreds of exercises, activities, and prompts to help readers thoroughly explore each chapter. She also offers guidance on starting a “Creative Cluster” of fellow artists who will support you in your creative endeavors. A revolutionary program for personal renewal, The Artist's Way will help get you back on track, rediscover your passions, and take the steps you need to change your life.
A trio of experts on high-tech business strategy and innovation reveal the principles that have made platform businesses the most valuable firms in the world and the first trillion-dollar companies. Managers and entrepreneurs in the digital era must learn to live in two worlds—the conventional economy and the platform economy. Platforms that operate for business purposes usually exist at the level of an industry or ecosystem, bringing together individuals and organizations so they can innovate and interact in ways not otherwise possible. Platforms create economic value far beyond what we see in conventional companies. The Business of Platforms is an invaluable, in-depth look at platform strategy and digital innovation. Cusumano, Gawer, and Yoffie address how a small number of companies have come to exert extraordinary influence over every dimension of our personal, professional, and political lives. They explain how these new entities differ from the powerful corporations of the past. They also question whether there are limits to the market dominance and expansion of these digital juggernauts. Finally, they discuss the role governments should play in rethinking data privacy laws, antitrust, and other regulations that could reign in abuses from these powerful businesses. Their goal is to help managers and entrepreneurs build platform businesses that can stand the test of time and win their share of battles with both digital and conventional competitors. As experts who have studied and worked with these firms for some thirty years, this book is the most authoritative and timely investigation yet of the powerful economic and technological forces that make platform businesses, from Amazon and Apple to Microsoft, Facebook, and Google—all dominant players in shaping the global economy, the future of work, and the political world we now face.
Amazon Best Seller in Financial Services Industry, Analysis & Trading Investing Strategies, and Stock Market Investing National Indie Excellence Award--WINNER, Business 2023 Nonfiction Book Awards Gold Winner A better approach to investing This is not a typical investment book. It is an experiential guide on cultivating the mindset and behavior necessary to weather inherently uncertain and unpredictable markets. It doesn’t just tell you how to invest but how to think better about investing. Referencing studies on psychology, decision making, and investment behavior, Jennings provides a no-nonsense analysis of the financial markets and a road map to navigating its inevitable twists and turns. Jennings uses mental models to create a latticework of wisdom that will help you evaluate investment advice and learn better behavior in the face of uncertainty. To name a few: ignore expert predictions, be wary of stories, and try to invest like a dead person. An engaging dive into investing psychology and best practices, The Uncertainty Solution is an authoritative, accessible guide for both lay investors and professionals inundated with financial news and data. Read this book to improve your thinking about investing, practice better investment behavior, and ultimately, have more money.
A Comprehensive Overview of the Past, Present, and Future of Money Broken Money explores the history of money through the lens of technology. Politics can affect things temporarily and locally, but technology is what drives things forward globally and permanently. The book's goal is for the reader to walk away with a deep understanding of money and monetary history, both in terms of theoretical foundations and in terms of practical implications. From shells to gold, from papyrus bills of exchange to central banks, and from the invention of the telegraph to the creation of Bitcoin, Lyn Alden walks the reader through the emergence of new technologies that have shaped what we use as money over the ages. And beyond that, Alden explores the concept of what money is at its very foundation to give the reader a framework to analyze and compare different types of monetary technologies and monetary theories. The book also takes a distinctively human look at how money impacts the lives of real people, and how new monetary technologies shape the power structures within society. In the modern era, energy abundance and technological enhancements have broadly improved human well-being, but the global monetary system has been slow to keep up. There are over 160 active currencies in the world, each with a local monopoly over its own country, and with little or no acceptance elsewhere. Many of them are rapidly diluted, which continually devalues the savings and the wages of the billions of people who live and work within those jurisdictions. Being born in the "wrong" country makes saving money far harder than it needs to be. Nigeria has a population of over 200 million people and has averaged 13% annualized inflation over the past decade. Egypt cut its currency in half relative to the dollar twice over the past decade, which instantly devalued the savings and wages of its 100 million citizens. Dozens of countries have experienced at least triple-digit year-over-year inflation within the past four decades, including Brazil that outright hyperinflated in the 1990s while it was the fifth most populous country in the world. Europe and Japan had $18 trillion worth of negative-yielding bonds in 2019, right before a wave of inflation wiped their purchasing power away. In 2021, the chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve dismissed the idea that the sharp rise in the money supply from the pandemic stimulus would lead to price inflation. By 2022, as major inflation emerged, the chairman rapidly changed his outlook and tightened monetary policy so quickly that it led to the failure of some of the largest banks in the country. How did we get to this point? Why isn't our money better than this in the 21st century? Broken Money answers these questions by examining the current mix of technology that has led to these limitations, and then explores emerging technologies that may be able to provide us with a monetary system that is fit for the modern era.
One of the biggest questions of the financial crisis has not been answered until now: What happened at Lehman Brothers and why was it allowed to fail, with aftershocks that rocked the global economy? In this news-making, often astonishing book, a former Lehman Brothers Vice President gives us the straight answers—right from the belly of the beast. In A Colossal Failure of Common Sense, Larry McDonald, a Wall Street insider, reveals, the culture and unspoken rules of the game like no book has ever done. The book is couched in the very human story of Larry McDonald’s Horatio Alger-like rise from a Massachusetts “gateway to nowhere” housing project to the New York headquarters of Lehman Brothers, home of one of the world’s toughest trading floors. We get a close-up view of the participants in the Lehman collapse, especially those who saw it coming with a helpless, angry certainty. We meet the Brahmins at the top, whose reckless, pedal-to-the-floor addiction to growth finally demolished the nation’ s oldest investment bank. The Wall Street we encounter here is a ruthless place, where brilliance, arrogance, ambition, greed, capacity for relentless toil, and other human traits combine in a potent mix that sometimes fuels prosperity but occasionally destroys it. The full significance of the dissolution of Lehman Brothers remains to be measured. But this much is certain: it was a devastating blow to America’s—and the world’s—financial system. And it need not have happened. This is the story of why it did.
THE BEST BOOK THAT DESCRIBES THE WORLD OF 2020's Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel, often published as 1984, is a dystopian social science fiction novel by English novelist George Orwell. It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final book completed in his lifetime. Thematically, Nineteen Eighty-Four centres on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and repressive regimentation of persons and behaviours within society. Orwell, himself a democratic socialist, modeled the authoritarian government in the novel after Stalinist Russia. More broadly, the novel examines the role of truth and facts within politics and the ways in which they are manipulated. The story takes place in an imagined future, the year 1984, when much of the world has fallen victim to perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, historical negationism, and propaganda. Great Britain, known as Airstrip One, has become a province of a totalitarian superstate named Oceania that is ruled by the Party who employ the Thought Police to persecute individuality and independent thinking. Big Brother, the leader of the Party, enjoys an intense cult of personality despite the fact that he may not even exist. The protagonist, Winston Smith, is a diligent and skillful rank-and-file worker and Party member who secretly hates the Party and dreams of rebellion. He enters into a forbidden relationship with a colleague, Julia, and starts to remember what life was like before the Party came to power. Nineteen Eighty-Four has become a classic literary example of political and dystopian fiction. It also popularised the term "Orwellian" as an adjective, with many terms used in the novel entering common usage, including "Big Brother", "doublethink", "thoughtcrime", "Newspeak", "memory ho