Women should never be blamed for being raped.
“A century from now the 400 million acres of farmland will have produced staggering amounts of corn, wheat, cotton, and other crops – and will continue to produce that valuable bounty, whatever the currency may be. Exxon Mobil will probably have delivered trillions of dollars in dividends to its owners and will also hold assets worth many more trillions (and, remember, you get 16 Exxons). The 170,000 tons of gold will be unchanged in size and still incapable of producing anything. You can fondle the cube, but it will not respond.”
“Q Can I just ask — the President wants to extend unemployment benefits. You did a study a few months ago suggesting the longer people are out of work the less time they end up spending looking for work. So how does that square with trying to give people more benefits and stay unemployed longer?
MR. KRUEGER: And I hope you’ve read the study.
Q Not the entire —
MR. KRUEGER: That’s all right.
Q It was written about extensively.”
It’s not a hardship to read Alan Krueger’s work. It’s generally well written and engaging. Would it kill these journalists to read primary literature?
“Our first shareholder letter, in 1997, was entitled, “It’s all about the long term.” If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow—and we’re very stubborn. We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details.” - Bezos
Only once in your life, I truly believe, you find someone who can completely turn your world around. You tell them things that you’ve never shared with another soul and they absorb everything you say and actually want to hear more.
You share hopes for the future, dreams that will never come true,…
C, Courtship
I can’t believe what a bunch of sleazeballs these animals are. That’s what strikes me whenever I read about courtship rituals in the animal kingdom. These critters –at least the male ones– are some slime, deceitful operators. Consider the shameless debauchee known as the swordtail characin fish (whom I first encountered in the animal behavior section). The male swordtail characin, you see, has long stringy bits that dangle from his gills –bits that are designed to look exactly like the daphnia worm, the characin’s favorite snack. When a hungry female characin sees this tantalizing daphnia, she naturally approaches, anticipating a nice meal. Instead, when she’s close enough, she gets an unpleasant surprise: the male shtups her. A literal bait and switch.
There are dozens of such stories. Here’s just one other, for variety. The female cichlid fish are called “mouth breeders,” which means they’re incubating eggs in their mouth. The females swallow up any stray eggs and keep them stored safely between the cheeks. The male cichlid fish knows about this, so he’s developed his fins to look exactly like an egg –same size, same mustard color. The poor lady cichlid spies one of these so called eggs, and paddles over to try to swallow it up. But as soon as she opens her mouth, bam, the male sprays her with sperms. Just like that.
“
| — | The Know-It-All by AJ Jacobs |
