The ultimate metric that I would like to propose for user friendliness is quite simple: if this system was a person, how long would it take before you punched it in the nose?
The best lesson that any people can learn is that there is no patent cure-all which will make the body politic perfect, and that any man who is able glibly to answer every question as to how to deal with the evils of the body politic is at best a foolish visionary and at worst an evil-minded quack. Neither doctrinaire socialism nor unrestricted individualism nor any other ism will bring about the millennium. Collectivism and individualism must be used as supplementary, not as antagonistic, philosophies. In the last analysis the welfare of a nation depends on its having throughout a healthy development. A healthy social system must of necessity represent the sum of very many moral, intellectual, and economic forces, and each such force must depend in its turn partly upon the whole system; and all these many forces are needed to develop a high grade of character in the individual men and women who make up the nation. Much of the discussion about socialism and individualism is entirely pointless, because of failure to agree on terminology. The very reason why we object to state ownership, that it puts a stop to individual initiative and to the healthy development of personal responsibility, is the reason why we object to an unsupervised, unchecked monopolistic control in private hands. We urge control and supervision by the nation as an antidote to the movement for state socialism. Those who advocate total lack of regulation, those who advocate lawlessness in the business world, themselves give the strongest impulse to what I believe would be the deadening movement toward unadulterated state socialism. [“The Thralldom of Names,” History as Literature .]
Wherever the Industrial system has reached its second generation it is threatened by two mortal perils. The first is the demand by an organized proletariat for sustenance without relation to the product of its labor; a demand which threatens the very existence of PROFIT (on the necessary presumption of which Capitalism reposes). The second, and immediately graver danger is that of a revolt for the confiscation of the means of production. [ Survivals and New Arrivals: The Old and New Enemies of the Catholic Church . Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1992, p. 52.]
I want to walk through life instead of being dragged through it.
What those who feel this way [i.e., that private ownership is inherently evil] don’t realize is that property is a notion that has to do with control—that property is a system for the dispersal of power…. The absence of property almost invariably means the concentration of power in the state. [ Nation’s Business , February 1976, p. 22.]
Democracy is the healthful life-blood which circulates through the veins and arteries, which supports the system, but which ought never to appear externally, and as the mere blood itself.
Language is rooted half in the bodily and half in the mental nature of man. The vocal sounds which form the raw materials of language could not be produced without a peculiar conformation of the organs of speech; the enunciation of duly accented syllables would be impossible without the nicest coordination of the action of the muscles which move these organs; and such co-ordination depends on the mechanism of certain portions of the nervous system. It is therefore conceivable that the structure of this highly complex speaking apparatus should determine a man's linguistic potentiality; that is to say, should enable him to use a language of one class and not of another. It is further conceivable that a particular linguistic potentiality should be inherited and become as good a race mark as any other. As a matter of fact, it is not proven that the linguistic potentialities of all men are the same.
"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple
The absolute justice of the system of things is as clear to me as any scientific fact The gravitation of sin to sorrow is as certain as that of the earth to the sun, and more so--for experimental proof of the fact is within reach of us all--nay, is before us all in our own lives, if we had but the eyes to see it.
Central bank functions and operations are widely misunderstood, not only by the public in general but also by many financial and economic professionals. The Federal Reserve system operates in such a way that it makes no contribution whatever to the spread of ownership of productive assets among the population. Indeed, its policies have tended to concentrate economic power by restricting credit to those with an existing asset base and by maintaining an interest rate structure designed to reward speculation and discourage productive entrepreneurship. [“Fed Should Share the Wealth,” The Journal of Commerce , May 15, 1989.] Bailey, Dr. Norman A. The problem with monetary economists is that they don’t understand money. [1988.]
But I say to you, and to our whole country, and to all the crowned heads and aristocratic powers and feudal systems that exist, that it is to self-government, the great principle of popular representation and administration, the system that lets in all to participate in the counsels that are to assign the good or evil to all, that we may owe what we are and what we hope to be.--_Daniel Webster._
The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its capacity
Work is a means; it is not an end. And for any tasks that can be performed or eliminated by a capital instrument, human labor is not the best means…. Furthermore, we have science, engineering and management — the three disciplines — that really plan and control the production of goods and services, trying to eliminate labor. Who the hell is government to come along and try to create labor? The people who are producing wealth are trying to eliminate toil, while the politicians are trying to create it. This to me is absence of logic, absence of plan, absence of system, absence of thought.
Each new user of a new system uncovers a new class of bugs.
It is only when the mind, which has taken shelter behind the walls of self-protection, frees itself from its own creations that there can be that exquisite reality. After all, these walls of self-protection are the creations of the mind which, conscious of its insufficiency, builds these walls of protection, and behind them takes shelter. One has built up these barriers unconsciously or consciously, and one’s mind is so crippled, bound, held, that action brings greater conflict, further disturbances. So the mere search for the solution of your problems is not going to free the mind from creating further problems. As long as this center of self-protectiveness, born of insufficiency, exists, there must be disturbances, tremendous sorrow, and pain; and you cannot free the mind of sorrow by disciplining it not to be insufficient. That is, you cannot discipline yourself, or be influenced by conditions and environment, in order not to be shallow. You say to yourself, “I am shallow; I recognize the fact, and how am I going to get rid of it?” I say, do not seek to get rid of it, which is merely a process of substitution, but become conscious, become aware of what is causing this insufficiency. You cannot compel it; you cannot force it; it cannot be influenced by an ideal, by a fear, by the pursuit of enjoyment and powers. You can find out the cause of insufficiency only through awareness. That is, by looking into environment and piercing into its significance there will be revealed the cunning subtleties of self-protection. After all, self-protection is the result of insufficiency, and as the mind has been trained, caught up in its bondage for centuries, you cannot discipline it, you cannot overcome it. If you do, you lose the significance of the deceits and subtleties of thought and emotion behind which mind has taken shelter; and to discover these subtleties you must become conscious, aware. Now to be aware is not to alter. Our mind is accustomed to alteration which is merely modification, adjustment, becoming disciplined to a condition; whereas if you are aware, you will discover the full significance of the environment. Therefore there is no modification, but entire freedom from that environment. Only when all these walls of protection are destroyed in the flame of awareness, in which there is no modification or alteration or adjustment, but complete understanding of the significance of environment with all its delicacies and subtleties—only through that understanding is there the eternal; because in that there is no “you” functioning as a self-protective focus. But as long as that self-protecting focus which you call the “I” exists, there must be confusion, there must be disturbance, disharmony, and conflict. You cannot destroy these hindrances by disciplining yourself or by following a system or by imitating a pattern; you can understand them with all their complications only through the full awareness of mind and heart. Then there is an ecstasy, there is that living movement of truth, which is not an end, not a culmination, but an ever-creative living, an ecstasy which cannot be described, because all description must destroy it. So long as you are not vulnerable to truth, there is no ecstasy, there is no immortality.
Know that some people will do everything they can to game the system, finding ways to win that you never could have imagined. If only to keep yourself sane, try to applaud their ingenuity rather than curse their greed.
Every vicious habit and chronic disease communicates itself by descent, and by purity of birth the entire system of the human body and soul may be gradually elevated, or by recklessness of birth degraded, until there shall be as much difference between the well-bred and ill-bred human creature (whatever pains be taken with their education) as between a wolf-hound and the vilest mongrel cur.
When you introduce competition into the public school system, most studies show that schools start to do better when they are competing for students.
Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile the excluded are still waiting. [ Evangelii Gaudium, op. cit., §54, Nov. 26, 2013. ]
There is often more true spiritual force in a proverb than in a philosophical system.
The body is a machine of the nature of an army..... Of this army each cell is a soldier, an organ a brigade, the central nervous system headquarters and field telegraph, the alimentary and circulatory system the commissariat Losses are made good by recruits born in camp, and the life of the individual is a campaign, conducted successfully for a number of years, but with certain defeat in the long run.
The true Vedantic spirit does not start out with a system of preconceived ideas. It possesses absolute liberty and unrivaled courage among religions with regard to the facts to be observed and the diverse hypotheses it has laid down for their coordination. Never having been hampered by a priestly order, each man has been entirely free to search wherever he pleased for the spiritual explanation of the spectacle of the universe.
The smaller man approaching our modern banking system, which controls all issue of credit and therefore pretty well all our industrial and commercial activities, is not what the controllers of that credit call “interesting.” He borrows with difficulty and upon high terms, and must pledge security out of all proportion to that which his richer rival has to put down. The very large units of production and exchange have access to credit on a large scale, sometimes without any cover at all, merely upon the prospect of their success, and always upon terms far easier than are open to their smaller rivals. It is perhaps on this line of easier credit that large capital today does most harm to small capital, drives it out and ruins it. [ The Crisis of Civilization, Being the Matter of a Course of Lectures Delivered at Fordham University, 1937 . Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1991, p. 132.]
The people of Central America — and, in a broader sense, the entire developing world — need to know first-hand that freedom and opportunity are not just for the elite, but the birthright of every citizen; that property is not just something enjoyed by a few, but can be owned by any individual who works hard and makes correct decisions; that free enterprise is not just the province of the rich, but a system of free choice in which everyone has rights, and that business, large or small, is something in which everyone can own a piece of the action. [Speech on Project Economic Justice, August 3, 1987.]
The distribution of the ownership of property…is the all important question.… There are many millions…that have little or no property.… It is the size of this group that constitutes the challenge to our American civilization. Theirs is the problem we must solve in our march toward that ideal state contemplated by our fathers. [Accordingly we must restore to this country a system in which] freedom will be combined with security through the distribution of the ownership of property among so large a proportion of the families of the country as to fix the character of society, making it neither Communist nor Fascist, but Proprietary. [Address to the Women’s Republican Club of Massachusetts, May 8, 1935, New York Herald Tribune, May 9, 1935.]
~Atheism.~--By burning an atheist, you have lent importance to that which was absurd, interest to that which was forbidding, light to that which was the essence of darkness. For atheism is a system which can communicate neither warmth nor illumination except from those fagots which your mistaken zeal has lighted up for its destruction.--_Colton._
I build no system. I ask an end to privilege, the abolition of slavery, equality of rights, and the reign of law. Justice, nothing else; that is the alpha and omega of my argument: to others I leave the business of governing the world.
The Open Market Committee, as presently established, is plainly not in the public interest. This committee must be operated by purely public servants, representatives of the people as a whole and not any single interest group. The Open Market Committee should be abolished, and its powers transferred to the Federal Reserve Board — the present public members of the committee, with reasonably short terms of office. Also, the Federal Advisory Committee should be enlarged and reorganized. Members should be chosen for the broadest possible representation of the public interest, their main qualification: ability. It may seem strange, but Congress has never developed a set of goals for guiding Federal Reserve policy. In founding the System, Congress spoke about the country’s need for “an elastic currency.” Since then, Congress has passed the Full Employment Act, declaring its general intention to promote “maximum employment, production, and purchasing power.” But it has never directly counseled the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve has filled this vacuum itself. The ends its policies are intended to achieve are those chosen by the Federal Reserve — all certainly admirable, but not necessarily those which the Federal Reserve should take on itself to pursue. For example, there have been times when the Federal Reserve has restricted the money supply and raised interest rates to gain an end, which had much better been left to another Government agency or the Congress to attain. The country could have had lower interest rates without sacrificing anything else. [ A Primer on Money, supra , p. 4.]
Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily ; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only a security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become “profiteers,” who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuate wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery. Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose. [“Europe After the Treaty,” The Economic Consequences of the Peace , 1919.]
The system was down for backups from 5am to 10am last Saturday.
The widespread distribution of private property ownership is the cornerstone of American liberty. Without it, neither our free enterprise system nor our republican form of government could long endure. [Platform, 1980 Republican National Convention, Detroit, July 14, 1980.]
In my mind, he was guilty of no error, he was chargeable with no exaggeration, he was betrayed by his fancy into no metaphor, who once said that all we see about us, kings, lords, and Commons, the whole machinery of the State, all the apparatus of the system, and its varied workings, end in simply bringing twelve good men into a box.
A disordered currency is one of the greatest political evils. It undermines the virtues necessary for the support of the social system, and encourages propensities destructive to its happiness. It wars against industry, frugality, and economy, and it fosters the evil spirits of extravagance and speculation. [ Congressional Record , March 4, 1946.]
Government has the responsibility to provide the climate in which Americans, all Americans, have an opportunity for good jobs; and not only for good jobs, but an opportunity if they have the ability and the desire, to be owners and managers, to have a piece of the action, because if they have a piece of the action, then they believe in the system rather than fighting against it. [Junior Chamber of Commerce Speech, April 26, 1971.]
"The Amiga is the only personal computer where you can run a multitasking
Never trust an operating system.
"Probably the best operating system in the world is the [operating system]
All human history is the struggle between systems that attempt to shackle the human personality in the name of some intangible good on the one hand and systems that enable and expand the scope of human personality in the pursuit of extremely tangible aims. The American system is the most successful in the world because it harmonizes best with the aims and longings of human personality while allowing the best protection to other personalities.
Espionage=--The spy system.
In the firm expectation that when London shall be a habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul and Westminster Abbey shall stand shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh, when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some Transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism the respective merits of the Bells
The first priority of humankind in this era is to establish an effective system of world law that will assure peace with justice among the peoples of the world.
Two hundred years ago the first liberal economist, Adam Smith, warned businessmen that they could absorb only a certain amount of rigidity. In the easy days after World War II…wage rises could be financed out of inflationary price increases. But now that foreign steel, and foreign cars, are moving into the United States in increased quantities at relatively low prices, the United States can no longer keep its business system fluid by inflation. Thus a new way of finding fluidity will inevitably be imposed on management and labor alike. The profit-sharing, or “progress” sharing union contract is the only possible way of satisfying labor and the consumer without saddling industry with fixed costs that in depression periods can kill off marginal companies like flies.
This is the genius of the system: even if you manage to avoid the draft, you, your mother, and your family become part of the network of bribes and fears and simulations; you learn to become an actor playing out his different roles in his relationship with the state, knowing already that the state is the great colonizer you fear and want to avoid or cheat or buy off. Already you are semilegal, a transgressor. And that’s fine for the system: as long as you’re a simulator you will never do anything real, you will always look for your compromise with the state, which in turn makes you feel just the right amount of discomfort. Whichever way, you’re hooked. Indeed, it could be said that if a year in the army is the overt process that molds young Russians, a far more powerful bond with the system is created by the rituals of avoiding military service.
When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is trying to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.
C++ is the best example of second-system effect since OS/360.
Vivunt in Venerem frondes, etiam nemus omne per altum / Felix arbor amat; nutant ad mutua palm? / F?dera, populeo suspirat populus ictu, / Et platani platanis, alnoque assibilat alnus=--The leaves live to love, and over the whole lofty grove each happy tree loves; palm nods to palm in mutual pledge of love; the poplar sighs for the poplar's embrace; plane whispers to plane, and alder to alder. _Claud., in anticipation of the sexual system of Linn?us._
Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach.
"You can have my Unix system when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers."
Established technology tends to persist in the face of new technology.
From the poetry of Lord Byron they drew a system of ethics compounded of misanthropy and voluptuousness,--a system in which the two great commandments were to hate your neighbour and to love your neighbour's wife.
Music can be all things to all persons. It is like a great dynamic sun in the center of a solar system which sends out its rays and inspiration in every direction.... Music makes us feel that the heavens open and a divine voice calls. Something in our souls responds and understands.
There is a magic in the memory of schoolboy friendships; it softens the heart, and even affects the nervous system of those who have no hearts.
The essence of capitalism is expressed in two of its basic features: a) profit maximization and b) market competition. In their abstract formulations none of them was supposed to have anything conspiratorial against the poor. But in real life they turn out to be the “killers” of the poor — by making rich the richer and poor the poorer. [“Does the Capitalist System have to be the Handmaiden of the Rich?”, Grameen Dialogue , October, 1994.]
Computers are unreliable, but humans are even more unreliable.
There are but three political-economic roads from which we can choose…. We could take the first course and further exacerbate the already concentrated ownership of productive capital in the American economy. Or we could join the rest of the world by taking the second path, that of nationalization. Or we can take the third road, establishing policies to diffuse capital ownership broadly, so that many individuals, particularly workers, can participate as owners of industrial capital.… The choice is ours. There is no way to avoid this decision. Non-action is a political decision in favor of continued, and indeed increased, concentrated ownership of productive capital. [Debates on converting the eastern rail system into an employee-owned company, December 11, 1972.]