269 products in Books

On the heels of George Carlin's #1 New York Times bestseller Napalm & Silly Putty comes When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? -- infused with Carlin's trademark irreverent humor and biting cultural observations. Here we go again . . . George Carlin's hilarious When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? offers his cutting-edge opinions and observational humor on everything from evasive euphemistic language to politicians to the media to dead people. Nothing and no one is safe! Despite the current climate of political correctness, Carlin is not afraid to take on controversial topics: * Carlin on the media: The media comprises equal parts business, politics, advertising, public relations, and show business. Nice combination. Enough bull for Texas to open a chain of branch offices. * Carlin on the battle of the sexes: Here's all you have to know about men and women: women are crazy, men are stupid. And the main reason women are crazy is that men are stupid. * Carlin on hygiene: When did they pass a law that says the people who make my sandwich have to be wearing gloves? I'm not comfortable with this. I don't want glove residue all over my food; it's not sanitary. Who knows where these gloves have been? * Carlin on evasive language: Just to demonstrate how far using euphemisms in language has gone, some psychologists are now actually referring to ugly people as those with "severe appearance deficits." Hey, Doctor. How's that for "denial"? * Carlin on politics: No self-respecting politician would ever admit to working in the government. They prefer to think of themselves "serving the nation." To help visualize the service they provide the country, you may wish to picture the things that take place on a stud farm. The thinking person's comic who uses words as weapons, Carlin puts voice to issues that capture the modern imagination. For instance, why are there Ten Commandments? Are UFOs real? What will the future really be like? This brand-new collection tackles all that and more. In When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? Carlin's razor-sharp observations demolish everyday values and leave you laughing out loud--delivering exactly what his countless fans have been waiting for.

Over a million copies sold! A fundamental influence on modern libertarianism, this classic guide to the basics of economic theory defends capitalism and the free market from economic myths that persist to this day. “A magnificent job of theoretical exposition.”—Ayn Rand Considered among the leading economic thinkers of the “Austrian School,” which includes Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich (F.A.) Hayek, and others, Henry Hazlitt wrote Economics in One Lesson in 1946. Concise and instructive, it is also deceptively prescient and far-reaching in its efforts to dissemble economic fallacies that are so prevalent they have almost become a new orthodoxy. Economic commentators across the political spectrum have credited Hazlitt with foreseeing the collapse of the global economy which occurred more than fifty years after the initial publication of Economics in One Lesson. Hazlitt’s focus on non-governmental solutions, strong—and strongly reasoned—anti-deficit position, and general emphasis on free markets, economic liberty of individuals, and the dangers of government intervention make Economics in One Lesson every bit as relevant and valuable today as it has been since publication.

The New York Times bestselling author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels draws on the latest data and new insights to challenge everything you thought you knew about the future of energy For over a decade, philosopher and energy expert Alex Epstein has predicted that any negative impacts of fossil fuel use on our climate will be outweighed by the unique benefits of fossil fuels to human flourishing--including their unrivaled ability to provide low-cost, reliable energy to billions of people around the world, especially the world’s poorest people. And contrary to what we hear from media “experts” about today’s “renewable revolution” and “climate emergency,” reality has proven Epstein right: * Fact: Fossil fuels are still the dominant source of energy around the world, and growing fast—while much-hyped renewables are causing skyrocketing electricity prices and increased blackouts. * Fact: Fossil-fueled development has brought global poverty to an all-time low. * Fact: While fossil fuels have contributed to the 1 degree of warming in the last 170 years, climate-related deaths are at all-time lows thanks to fossil-fueled development. What does the future hold? In Fossil Future, Epstein, applying his distinctive “human flourishing framework” to the latest evidence, comes to the shocking conclusion that the benefits of fossil fuels will continue to far outweigh their side effects—including climate impacts—for generations to come. The path to global human flourishing, Epstein argues, is a combination of using more fossil fuels, getting better at “climate mastery,” and establishing “energy freedom” policies that allow nuclear and other truly promising alternatives to reach their full long-term potential. Today’s pervasive claims of imminent climate catastrophe and imminent renewable energy dominance, Epstein shows, are based on what he calls the “anti-impact framework”—a set of faulty methods, false assumptions, and anti-human values that have caused the media’s designated experts to make wildly wrong predictions about fossil fuels, climate, and renewables for the last fifty years. Deeply researched and wide-ranging, this book will cause you to rethink everything you thought you knew about the future of our energy use, our environment, and our climate.

Swarmwise (2013) is a tactical guide to changing the world using cost-efficient swarm methodology. It is a leadership handbook that outlines how the Swedish Pirate Party was able to beat the political competition on less than one percent of their budget, and shows how any cash- and time-strapped executive or manager can use swarm methodologies, whether the goal is business, social, or political. That organization, founded by one man without resources, has now spread to over 70 countries using the same cost-efficient swarm methods. Swarmwise will tell you what it takes to found a swarm of volunteers, to organize and energize it, and to lead it to success. The book doesn’t go into theoretical detail, psychology, or deep research papers. Rather, it is very hands-on leadership advice from pure experience – it covers everything from how you give instructions to new marketing assistants or activists about handing out flyers in the street, up to and including how you communicate with TV stations and organize hundreds of thousands of people in a coherent swarm. Above all, it focuses on the cost-efficiency of the swarm structure, and is a tactical instruction manual for anybody who wants to dropkick their competition completely – no matter whether their game is business, social, or political. A chapter overview of Swarmwise: Chapter 1 - Understanding the Swarm deals with the basic concepts of a swarm organization, and explains why the swarm is open and transparent. It introduces the concept of a cost-efficiency advantage of two orders of magnitude. In Chapter 2 - Launching Your Swarm, we learn that the published project plan must be tangible, credible, inclusive, and epic, and what that means in practice. Chapter 3 - Getting Your Swarm Organized gives tangible advice on how to organize a volunteer organization and why. We look at the dynamics of different group sizes and how to build a culture of trust. One of the more counterintuitive lessons is detailed in Chapter 4 - Control the Vision, but Never the Message. It explains how you need to use volunteers to translate your vision into messages that fit a specific social context, rather than using an one-size-fits-all slogan. A healthy dose of classic project management is found in Chapter 5 - Keep People's Eyes On Target, And Paint It Red Daily. We talk about metrics, choosing the right metrics, and causing self-organization to happen when you publish the right metrics to optimize. In Chapter 6 - Screw Democracy, We're on a Mission from God, we talk about conflict resolution mechanisms and how to optimize the swarm for speed, trust, and scalability. Chapter 7 - Surviving Growth Unlike Anything the MBAs Have Seen details how the swarm can grow by 200% in a week when some events play out, and how to handle such situations. One of the more advanced chapters, Chapter 8 - Using Social Dynamics To Their Potential goes into how we can tap into the long tail of people and effectively cross-use online and offline friendships to grow organically. Seeing how most organizations need to deal with TV, newspapers, and radio, there is also Chapter 9 - Managing Oldmedia that details everything from press release processes to TV crews. Finally, Chapter 10 - Beyond Success shares a bit of experience of what happens when you feel at the top of the world, and what to do then. "Your most valuable asset isn't your employees," I told the executive. "Your most valuable asset is the thousands of people who want to work for you for free, and you don't let them." The book can also be downloaded as a PDF from the author's website at http://falkvinge.net/books/.

When this gem first appeared in 1963, it took the form of a small paperback designed for mass distribution. We've conjured up that spirit again with this special edition of Rothbard's primer on money and government.Innumerable economists, investors, commentators, and authors have learned from this book through the decades. After fifty years, it remains the best book in print on the topic, a real manifesto of sound money.Rothbard boils down the Austrian theory to its essentials. The book also made huge theoretical advances. Rothbard was the first to prove that the government, and only the government, can destroy money on a mass scale, and he showed exactly how they go about this dirty deed. But just as importantly, it is beautifully written. He tells a thrilling story because he loves the subject so much.The passion that Murray feels for the topic comes through in the prose and transfers to the reader. Readers become excited about the subject, and tell others. Students tell professors. Some, like the great Ron Paul of Texas, have even run for political office after having read it.Rothbard shows precisely how banks create money out of thin air and how the central bank, backed by government power, allows them to get away with it. He shows how exchange rates and interest rates would work in a true free market. When it comes to describing the end of the gold standard, he is not content to describe the big trends. He names names and ferrets out all the interest groups involved.Since Rothbard's death, scholars have worked to assess his legacy, and many of them agree that this little book is one of his most important. Though it has sometimes been inauspiciously packaged and is surprisingly short, its argument took huge strides toward explaining that it is impossible to understand public affairs in our time without understanding money and its destruction.

2019 Reprint of 1963 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition software. This book is an analysis of the causes of the Great Depression of 1929. The author concludes that the Depression was caused not by laissez-faire capitalism, but by government intervention in the economy. The author argues that the Hoover administration violated the tradition of previous American depressions by intervening in an unprecedented way and that the result was a disastrous prolongation of unemployment and depression so that a typical business cycle became a lingering disease.

What Has Government Done to Our Money? details the history of money, from early barter systems, to the gold standard, to present-day systems of paper money. Rothbard explains how money was originally developed, and why gold was chosen as the preferred commodity to use as money. The author also explains how the gold standard makes money a commodity, and how market forces create a stable economy. Rothbard shows that many European governments went bankrupt due to World War I and left the gold standard in order to try to solve their financial issues, which was not the right solution. He also argues that this strategy was partially responsible for World War II and led to economic problems throughout the world.

Los Angeles Times Bestseller How do we stop the unrelenting evolution of the economic hit man strategy and China’s takeover? The riveting third edition of this New York Times bestseller blows the whistle on China’s economic hit man (EHM) strategy, exposes corruption on an international scale, and offers much-needed solutions for curing the degenerative Death Economy. In this shocking exposé, former EHM John Perkins gives an insider view into the corrupt system that cheats and strong-arms countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars and ultimately causes staggering income inequality and ecological devastation.   EHMs are highly paid professionals who use development loans to saddle countries with huge debts and force them to serve US interests. Now, a new EHM wave is infecting the world, and at the peak of the devastation sits China, a newly dominant economic power, with its own insidious version of the US EHM blueprint. Twelve explosive new chapters detail the allure, exploitation, and wreckage of China’s EHM strategy in Latin America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe.   If allowed to continue its rampage, the EHM strategy—whether executed by the United States or China—will destroy life as we know it. However, all is not lost. Perkins offers a plan for transforming this system that places profits above all into a Life Economy that restores the earth. He inspires readers to take actions toward a new era of global cooperation that will end the United States’s and China’s EHM strategies for good.

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.

¡Vuelve este clásico del manga! Rally y Minnie se ocupan en el día a día de llevar una armería en Chicago... ¡Pero también se dedican a la caza de recompensas! Su tarea principal es la persecución de forajidos sobre cuya cabeza pesa una recompensa. Sin embargo, de algún modo siempre acaban aceptando trabajos arriesgados y metiéndose en líos considerables.

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.

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.