Like Ray himself, her granddad had bought the right to be privately eccentric by doing good public legal works.

Augmenting her reliable perimeter shooting was a growing taste for driving to the basket. She was no longer on speaking terms with physical pain.

Eliza was exactly half pretty.

The autobiographer now thinks that compliments were like a beverage she was unconsciously smart enough to deny herself even one drop of, because her thirst for them was infinite.

sounded like her unpretended true self.

because serious fans always need to feel uniquely connected to the object of their fandom; they jealously guard those points of connection, however tiny or imaginary, that justify the feeling of uniqueness.

There are few things harder to imagine than other people’s conversations about yourself.

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There is nothing so stupid or dangerous that people won’t eagerly do it, if by doing it they will make others believe they are better or stronger or more honorable.

Any dog can do that. Are you a dog? You’re not a human being until you value something more than the life of your body. And the greater the thing you live and die for, the greater you are.

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I knew I shouldn’t do it. I just knew it. It was too dark and too high and completely unclear if anyone had ever successfully pulled it off before. But those risks also meant glory awaited the bold one willing to try. 

Nobody would have called me bold. Mostly, I was just plain irrelevant. The irrelevance didn’t bother me, but I had started to view my lack of gumption as a personal flaw in need of correcting. 

So I jumped.

And yup, I was right all along.

The darkness had obscured an army of rocks nestled just below the water’s surface.

The pain was tremendous; the blood was everywhere; and then, just like that, it was all over.

Financial markets history is littered with stories of traders who bought an instrument and tried to reduce the risks by selling a “highly correlated one against it. only to discover that they doubled their risks. The trader after seeing on the screen the price of one of the two instruments go down (the one he is long, of course) and the other go up (the one he is short) will blame markets for not being well behaved.

A deeper analysis would show that, typically, some of the instruments that are easy to buy against easy-to-sell “correlated siblings” are invitations for trouble. They act as a trap that will attract many hedgers and arbitrage traders then force them into noisy liquidations. This effect can lead to disastrous results on gullible managers using such apparatus as the “value at risk.”

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To avoid that, you need a raw material inventory. But how large should it be? The principle to be applied here is that you should have enough to cover your consumption rate for the length of time it takes to replace your raw material.

A common rule we should always try to heed is to detect and fix any problem in a production process at the lowest-value stage possible.

The limiting step here should clearly be obtaining a conviction. The construction cost of a jail cell even today is only some $80k. This, plus the $10-$20k it costs to keep a person in kail for a year, is a small amount compared to the million dollars required to secure a conviction. Not to jail a criminal in whom society has invested over a million dollars for lack of an $80k jail cell clearly misuses society’s total investment in the criminal justice system. And this happens because we permit the wrong step (the availability of jail cells) to limit the overall process.

In fact, if indicators are put in place, the competitive spirit engendered frequently has an electrifying effect on the motivation each group brings to its work, along with a parallel improvement in performance.

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Instead, they would be compensated in proportion to the relative value units (RVUs) of the care they dispensed. RVUs are a measure of productivity used to determine medical billing.

Generalists like Dr. W. are assigned RVUs primarily according to the complexity of their exams and treatment plans, which are coded on a scale of levels 1 to 5. A simple level 2 visit may yield $60;  level 3, $120; level 4, $210; and so on. “What started to happen is lots of pinkeye was billed at a level 4,” he explained. There was a financial incentive: colleagues who were coding expansively could make twice as much – over $300,000 instead of $170,000.

—

Oncologists prospered buying chemotherapy drugs from manufacturers and infusing them in the office, generally with a hefty markup, a practice known as “buy and bill.”

As the wholesale price of the new drugs jumped again and again, doctors had little motivation to complain, because they were allowed a markup that was often a set percentage above cost. Doctors who used more expensive drugs earned far more. The practice of buy and bill increased dramatically in the late 1990s and into the new century.

With it, the median compensation for oncologists nearly doubled from 1995 to 2004, to $350,000. One study in 2013 attributed 65% of the revenue in a typical oncology practice to such payments. “Drugs and biologicals make up approximately 80% of all medical oncology charges submitted to Medicare each year.”
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In a well-intentioned effort to increase tranquility, happiness, and fulfillment, the modern world is littered with exhortations to feel gratitude. Just think about how lucky you are. Just think about how much you have to be thankful for. Just think about the billions, literally billions, suffering through incredibly stressful existences.

As evidenced by a society seemingly no better than previous iterations at reaching an enlightened state, the exhortations aren’t doing much good. To be sure, if one is able to remember that things can always be worse, that moment takes on a different, possibly superior tenor, but that experience is stubbornly impermanent.

I posit that this conundrum is solved through determined action, since it is terribly unlikely to replace negative thoughts through thought alone. Thoughts lead to action and action defines character and on and on – I’m not saying anything original. Yet, I kept thinking about these concepts while watching you in xxxxxxxxx, thinking how people were going to take away the wrong lesson.

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Please allow me to counter myself: fuck balance. There is nothing more important than purpose, and it comes with a steep price. But it’s a price that anyone should want to pay because, as I just declared, there is nothing more important than purpose. All the things we say we want – love, money, health, etc. – are inhabitants in the kingdom of purpose.

There’s a major difference between doing things and doing things. People living in the non-italicized state may think they comprehend some truth that the overweight mogul has missed; they are wrong. The mogul knew the rules – there is a steep price to pay – and decided to play anyway. Some on the path to doing things may pretend the rules don’t apply. They are also wrong. These are the people, specifically women in our current “The Future is Female” moment, who “want it all.” I want to be CEO AND a great mother AND healthy AND well-read AND a great spouse. Naw, it doesn’t work like that, because operating at the highest levels requires a form of singular purpose that blocks out other endeavors – maintaining concentrated purpose is hard enough that spreading it across disciplines is damn near impossible.

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