62
" Some writers might tell you that writing is like a piece of magic - a process of creating something out of nothing, and I guess I used to think about it that way too a long long time ago. But as I've lived my life and loved and lost friends and family, and seen dreams smashed and resurrected, and marveled at the pettiness, drear ambition and ignorance of the herd of which I am a part, I can no longer say that a poem or a story or a script comes from nothing. If it's any good, if it has any power, any potent emotional body, then it's something that a writer has paid for, not only in time, but in all the anxiety that accompanies living and those small fret-filled acts of becoming present that make it possible for us to see beyond our little patch of immediacy. It's not just a reaching out, but a reaching in, into the depths of our being from whence we've sprung. "
63
" Some people believe labor-saving technological change is bad for the workers because it throws them out of work. This is the Luddite fallacy, one of the silliest ideas to ever come along in the long tradition of silly ideas in economics. Seeing why it's silly is a good way to illustrate further Solow's logic.The original Luddites were hosiery and lace workers in Nottingham, England, in 1811. They smashed knitting machines that embodied new labor-saving technology as a protest against unemployment (theirs), publicizing their actions in circulars mysteriously signed " King Ludd." Smashing machines was understandable protection of self-interest for the hosiery workers. They had skills specific to the old technology and knew their skills would not be worth much with the new technology. English government officials, after careful study, addressed the Luddites' concern by hanging fourteen of them in January 1813.The intellectual silliness came later, when some thinkers generalized the Luddites' plight into the Luddite fallacy: that an economy-wide technical breakthrough enabling production of the same amount of goods with fewer workers will result in an economy with - fewer workers. Somehow it never occurs to believers in Luddism that there's another alternative: produce more goods with the same number of workers. Labor-saving technology is another term for output-per-worker-increasing technology. All of the incentives of a market economy point toward increasing investment and output rather than decreasing employment; otherwise some extremely dumb factory owners are foregoing profit opportunities. With more output for the same number of workers, there is more income for each worker.Of course, there could very well be some unemployment of workers who know only the old technology - like the original Luddites - and this unemployment will be excruciating to its victims. But workers as a whole are better off with more powerful output-producing technology available to them. Luddites confuse the shift of employment from old to new technologies with an overall decline in employment. The former happens; the latter doesn't. Economies experiencing technical progress, like Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, do not show any long-run trend toward increasing unemployment; they do show a long-run trend toward increasing income per worker.Solow's logic had made clear that labor-saving technical advance was the only way that output per worker could keep increasing in the long run. The neo-Luddites, with unintentional irony, denigrate the only way that workers' incomes can keep increasing in the long-run: labor-saving technological progress.The Luddite fallacy is very much alive today. Just check out such a respectable document as the annual Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Program. The 1996 Human Development Report frets about " jobless growth" in many countries. The authors say " jobless growth" happens whenever the rate of employment growth is not as high as the rate of output growth, which leads to " very low incomes" for millions of workers. The 1993 Human Development Report expressed the same concern about this " problem" of jobless growth, which was especially severe in developing countries between 1960 and 1973: " GDP growth rates were fairly high, but employment growth rates were less than half this." Similarly, a study of Vietnam in 2000 lamented the slow growth of manufacturing employment relative to manufacturing output. The authors of all these reports forget that having GDP rise faster than employment is called growth of income per worker, which happens to be the only way that workers " very low incomes" can increase. "
66
" When I wasn’t in the barn garden, helping out, sorting seeds or checking hoses I’d spend time alone, usually in the bathroom adjacent to Joel’s room, staring into the shattered mirror as my hand gently caressed my baby bump.
More often than not I would cry. Not because my pregnancy upset me, or that my hormones were getting the better of me, but because I missed Joel, my baby’s father. That the baby would grow up without a dad made me anxious. Then again, if he had survived, what irreparable damage would he have suffered and how would his pain translate to his child? Jesus, I was studying myself in the very mirror he’d smashed the night he chose to take his own life.
The bump had grown slowly in the last couple of months. With these limited resources, I didn’t have the privilege of eating whatever I craved. Had that been the case, I was sure I would have been bigger by now. Still, I tried to eat as well and as often as I could and the size of my belly had proven that my attempts at proper nutrition were at least growing something in there.
Nothing made me happier than feeling my baby move. It was a constant source of relief for me. In our present circumstances, with no vitamins and barely any meat products save the recent stash of jerky Earl had found in an abandoned trailer, my diet consisted of berries, lettuce, and canned beans for the most part. Feeling the baby move inside me was an experience I often enjoyed alone. I would think of Joel then as well. Imagining his hand on my belly, with mine guiding his to the kicks and punches. "
― Michael Poeltl , Rebirth (The Judas Syndrome, #2)
77
" More than two dozen kids lined a low railing around the gazebo. They were all tied to it by a rope leash that gave them no more than a few feet of movement. Neck to rail, like tethered horses. Each of the kids was weighed down by a concrete block that encased their hands. Their eyes were hollow, their cheeks caved in.
Astrid used a word that Sam had never imagined coming from her.
“Nice language,” Drake said with a smirk. “And in front of the Pe-tard, too.”
A cafeteria tray had been placed in front of each of the prisoners. It must have been a very recent delivery because some were still licking their trays, hunched over, faces down, tongues out, licking like dogs.
“It’s the circle of freaks,” Drake said proudly, waving a hand like a showman.
In a crusty old wheelbarrow to one side, three kids were using a short-handled shovel to mix cement. It made a heavy sloshing sound. They dumped a shovelful of gravel into the mix and stirred it like lumpy gravy.
“Oh, no,” Lana said, backing away, but one of the Coates kids smashed her behind the knee with his baseball bat, and she crumpled.
“Gotta do something with unhelpful freaks,” Drake said. “Can’t have you people running around loose.” He must have seen Sam start to react because he stuck his gun against Astrid’s head. “Your call, Sam. You so much as flinch and we’ll get to see what a genius brain really looks like.”
“Hey, I got no powers, man,” Quinn said.
“This is sick, Drake. Like you’re sick,” Astrid said. “I can’t even reason with you because you’re just too damaged, too hopelessly messed up.”
“Shut up. "
― Michael Grant
78
" Speech is the pen and the sword of humankind and it is the foundation of their kingdom. Wherever the flag of speech waves, the most powerful armies are. defeated and scattered. In the arenas in which speech shouts out, the sounds of cannon balls become like the buzzing of bees. from behind the battlements on which the banner of speech has been raised, the sound of its drums are heard. In the precincts where its march reverberates, kings shake in their boots. The Master of Speech smashed to pieces many insurmountable walls, in the face of which Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and many others despaired or retread; and the pen of Speech, imparting and compliance, was saluted and praised. "
― M. Fethullah Gülen , Speech and Power of Expression: On Language, Esthetics, and Belief
80
" Lucy preferred gin and tonics during the summer and switched over to whiskey sours in the winter. At dinner, a sit-down affair with the family, Lucy drank whatever the Temerlins drank, including expensive French wines. " She never gets obnoxious, even when smashed to the brink of unconsciousness," wrote Maurice, revealing more about the chimp's alcoholism than perhaps he intended. At one point, he tried to wean Lucy off the good stuff and onto Boone's Farm apple wine. Assuming she would delight in the fruity swill, he purchased a case and filled her glass one night at dinner. Lucy took a sip of the apple wine, noticed her parents were drinking something else, and put her glass down. She then graabbed Maurice's glass of Chablis and polished it off. She finished Jane's next. Not another sip of Boone's farm ever touched her lips. "
