A Quote by Thorstein Veblen
English orthography satisfies all the requirements of the canons of reputability under the law of conspicuous waste. It is archaic, cumbrous, and ineffective; its acquisition consumes much time and effort; failure to acquire it is easy of detection.
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Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.
Other countries, such as Israel, successfully employ behavior detection techniques at their airports, but the bloated, ineffective bureaucracy of TSA has produced another security failure for U.S. transportation systems.
A general “law of least effort” applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills. It is not the effort nor the failure tires. The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.
After spending so much time in America, I started travelling with 'In Defence of English Cooking' by George Orwell. It's archaic and old-fashioned in its Englishness and reminds me of home.
Nullification is not a 'defense' recognized by law, but rather a mechanism that permits a jury, as community conscience, to disregard the strict requirements of law where it finds that those requirements cannot justly be applied in a particular case.
The early ascendancy of leisure as a means of reputability is traceable to the archaic distinction between noble and ignoble employments. Leisure is honourable and becomes imperative partly because it shows exemption from ignoble labour.
All should be taught that the highest ambition is to be happy, and to add to the well-being of others; that place and power are not necessary to success; that the desire to acquire great wealth is a kind of insanity. They should be taught that it is a waste of energy, a waste of thought, a waste of life, to acquire what you do not need and what you do not really use for the benefit of yourself or others.
There is no waste in the world that equals the waste from needless, ill-directed, and ineffective motions...
This loving person is a person who abhors waste - waste of time, waste of human potential. How much time we waste. As if we were going to live forever.
The way this country deals with drugs is just not funny. What a waste of everyone's time and effort. What a waste of a lot of people's lives.
If your strategy calls for you to be in America, then you will go into America. If your strategy calls for you to be in M&A, then you'll do an acquisition. You usually acquire a company to acquire technology, geographic advantage, etc. Similarly, geographic expansion is very much like M&A. It's done to advance a strategy.
For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.
It's so easy to wish that we'd made an effort in the past, so that we'd happily be enjoying the benefit now, but when now is the time when that effort must be made, as it always is, that prospect is much less inviting.
The story of English spelling is the story of thousands of people - some well-known, most totally unknown - who left a permanent linguistic fingerprint on our orthography.
In separating out, say, legal and moral requirements, I tend to work with paradigms rather than strict divisions - eg, paradigmatically, legal requirements are jurisdictionally bound whereas ethical requirements are aspirationally universal; ethical requirements focus especially on intentions whereas legal requirements focus primarily on conduct; ethical requirements take priority over legal requirements; and so on.
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