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64b805c
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I know a lot about this subject because I saw a healthy community get built, brick by brick, block by block, neighbor by neighbor, close up. It was the one that I grew up in: St. Louis Park, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis.
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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af71b30
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It was like working in a dark cave with the aid of a single candle. Just when you thought you had spotted the white light of Truth, you would chase it, only to discover that it was someone else, also holding a candle, also looking for the light. A
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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7305fd0
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One is that you should never take no for an answer. There is always some way to make a sale if you have confidence in your merchandise. Just because a customer says no doesn't mean he isn't buying. You just have to sift your way through all the rhetoric and get to the heart of the deal. The
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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4059a47
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This Levantine spirit developed gradually in Beirut after the Industrial Revolution, as the burgeoning Lebanese silk trade and the invention of the steamboat combined to bring men and women of America and Western Europe in large numbers to the Levant. These settlers from the West were Catholic and Protestant missionaries, diplomats, and merchants, Jewish traders, travelers and physicians; and they brought with them Western commerce, manners..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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71b03e5
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As the Lebanese sociologist Samir Khalaf summed it up: "Though the average Lebanese derives much ... social support and psychological reinforcement from ... local and communal allegiances, these forces are the same elements that ... prompt him on occasion to violate and betray his society's normative standards. The Lebanese is being demoralized, in other words, by the very forces that are supposed to make him a more human and sociable being..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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4fde1e1
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When American astronaut Neil Armstrong, a devout Christian, visited Israel after his trip to the moon, he was taken on a tour of the Old City of Jerusalem by Israeli archaeologist Meir Ben-Dov. When they got to the Hulda Gate, which is at the top of the stairs leading to the Temple Mount, Armstrong asked Ben-Dov whether Jesus had stepped anywhere around there. "I told him, 'Look, Jesus was a Jew,'" recalled Ben-Dov. "These are the steps tha..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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6987b26
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One of the strengths of Labor Zionism had always been its strong pragmatic outlook, its philosophy that a new reality can be built only by careful planning and then constructing things brick by brick, acre after acre. It
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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7609fa1
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Second, in the desert there was no outside mediator or government to enforce laws or to adjudicate disputes in a neutral way between tribes when they resorted to predatory behavior in order to survive.
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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504fd6e
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When I arrived at St. Louis Park High in September 1968, I took journalism as a sophomore from our then legendary high school journalism teacher, Hattie M. Steinberg. People often speak about the teachers who changed their lives. Hattie changed mine. I took her introductory journalism course in tenth grade, in room 313, and have never needed, or taken, another course in journalism since. It was not that I was that good. It was that she was ..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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cc314ae
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Technology creates possibilities for new behaviors and experiences and connection," he added, "but it takes human beings to make the behaviors principled, the experiences meaningful and connections deeper and rooted in shared values and aspirations."
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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720f9b4
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My time in the Middle East led me to realize that, with a few rare exceptions, the dominant political ideology there--whether you were talking about Sunnis or Shiites or Kurds, Israelis, Arabs, Persians, Turks, or Palestinians--was "I am weak, how can I compromise? I am strong, why should I compromise?" The notion of there being "a common good" and "a middle ground" that we all compromise for and upon--not to mention a higher community call..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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42b1659
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When I asked Marine Sergeant Jeffrey Roberts what he thought was happening in Lebanon, he explained, "To me it was a civil war, only it wasn't just the North against the South. It was North against South, East against West, Northeast against Southwest, Southeast against Northwest, and we were in the middle of it all. There were just too many different sides. If we picked one, we had four others against us." Marine"
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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a577653
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Social conservatives from the right wing of the Republican party, who do not like globalization or closer integration with the world because it brings too many foreigners and foreign cultural mores into America, might align themselves with unions from the left wing of the Democratic Party, who don't like globalization for the way it facilitates the outsourcing and offshoring of jobs. They might be called the Wall Party...
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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c30ba09
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Here and elsewhere, desertification acts as the trigger; climate change and population growth act as amplifiers; interethnic and tribal conflicts are the political by-product, and WhatsApp provides both an alluring picture of where things might be better--Europe--and a cheap tool for hopping a migration caravan to get there. "In the old days," says Barbut, "we could just give them a Live Aid concert in Europe or America and then forget abou..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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eb9f925
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Another way Mother Nature builds resilience is by being very federal in how she self-organizes. She nests her communities--which are analogous to states, counties, and towns--within a flexible framework that makes the whole more than the sum of its parts. That is, she's built on trillions and trillions of small-scale networks, starting with microorganisms and building into bigger and bigger ecosystems. But each one is a little community, na..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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140bbd0
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Some of our bonding moments were times of great tragedy, but there were many happy memories as well. Though we each have since retreated to the different worlds from whence we came, the bond between us will never be broken.
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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b132689
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Lin Wells, who teaches strategy at the National Defense University. According to Wells, it is fanciful to suppose that you can opine about or explain this world by clinging to the inside or outside of any one rigid explanatory box or any single disciplinary silo. Wells describes three ways of thinking about a problem: "inside the box," "outside the box," and "where there is no box." The only sustainable approach to thinking today about prob..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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392c1e2
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Olin
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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4d33fa1
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You live in a world of defined contributions--your wages and benefits will now be more and more directly correlated to your exact contribution, and with big data we will
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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5cb5e32
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Education is a process, not a place." Education can and must go on everywhere all the time-in schools, offices, at home, online, in the classroom, over your iPod..."
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process
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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65b3836
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All of this weakened the G.O.P.'s foundation and opened the way for an invasive species such as Donald Trump to make deep inroads into its garden.
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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827b586
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The agency was started by the tribe's economic development corporation, in an effort to diversify from its gambling casino called "WinnaVegas." You read this right: Plains Indians publishing Arabic brochures for Nebraskans who are importing machinery from Koreans to be customized by a South Sioux City company for customers in Kuwait."
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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eeab70b
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Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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bceb7c2
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Now the nation's largest billboard company, Clear Channel Outdoor Inc., is bringing customized pop-up ads to the interstate. Its Radar program, up and running in Boston and 10 other US cities, uses data AT&T Inc. collects on 130 million cellular subscribers, and from two other companies, PlaceIQ Inc. and Placed Inc., which use phone apps to track the comings and goings of millions more. Clear Channel knows what kinds of people are driving p..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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68549ab
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globalization of flows: pulling commodity parts mainly from China and South Korea, using open-source software and collaboration tools, and employing the design/manufacturing/assembly abilities of two companies in the West--DataWind and Conexant Systems--and Quad in India.
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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e7e2c05
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We want America in the twenty-first century to be the launching pad where everyone in the world comes to launch his or her moon shot. We want it to be the place where innovators and entrepreneurs the world over come to locate all or part of their operations because our workforce is so productive; our infrastructure and Internet bandwidth are so advanced; our openness to talent from anywhere is second to none; our funding for basic research ..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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cd4fbff
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Removing tyrants sometimes does indeed lead to freedom. At other times it merely leads to new kinds of tyranny. Happy the revolution where the revolutionaries are both freedom-loving and effectively organized for the long haul of political struggle.
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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1c35c51
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the words of Marie Curie never rang more true to me or felt more relevant: "Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less." It"
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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9f576f7
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When my dad died suddenly, my widowed mom couldn't afford my college tuition, so Morrie and his friend Jake Garber, my dad's boss, and my aunt and uncle, all pitched in. Morrie was the driving force behind it all, though. I did not come to him for help. He just came to me one day and said, "You can't afford this," and that he would make it happen. It was a powerful lesson in community for me: When you are in a real one, never, ever say to s..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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b274fca
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because our workforce is so productive; our infrastructure and Internet bandwidth are so advanced; our openness to talent from anywhere is second to none; our funding for basic research is so generous; our rule of law, patent protection, and investment- and manufacturing-friendly tax code is superior to what can be found in any other country; and our openness to collaboration is unparalleled--all because we have updated and expanded our for..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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560d686
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In the twenty-first century, knowing all the answers won't distinguish someone's intelligence--rather, the ability to ask all the right questions will be the mark of true genius." Indeed,"
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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9f6c36a
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The political scientist Francis Fukuyama: Social capital is a capability that arises from the prevalence of trust in a society or in certain parts of it. It can be embodied in the smallest social group: a family, as well as the largest of all groups, the nation. And in all the other groups in between. Where trust is prevalent, groups and societies can move and adapt quickly through many informal contracts. By contrast, people who do NOT tru..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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71712dc
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It is the equivalent of a "phase change" in chemistry from a solid to a liquid. What is the feature of something solid? It is full of friction. What is the feature of a liquid? It feels friction-free. When you simultaneously take the friction and complexity out of more and more things and provide interactive one-touch solutions, all kinds of human-to-human and business-to-consumer and business-to-business interactions move from solids to li..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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733bf7b
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My host, GitHub's CEO, Chris Wanstrath, began by telling me how the "Git" got into GitHub. Git, he explained, is a "distributed version control system" that was invented in 2005 by Linus Torvalds, one of the great and somewhat unsung innovators of our time. Torvalds is the open-source evangelist who created Linux, the first open-source operating system that competed head-to-head with Microsoft Windows. Torvalds's Git program allowed a team ..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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647979c
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As a result, the motto in Silicon Valley today is: everything that is analog is now being digitized, everything that is being digitized is now being stored, everything that is being stored is now being analyzed by software on these more powerful computing systems, and all the learning is being immediately applied to make old things work better, to make new things possible, and to do old things in fundamentally new ways. For instance, the in..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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74b6a82
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The architect is not just working with a set of drawings but with a data model that understands the whole building as a three-dimensional living system--its windows, air-conditioning, sunlight, lighting, elevators, and how they all interact," explained Bass. The different teams working on the building can also interact and collaborate, as each change they make is dynamically integrated and optimized against the others. When"
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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ad5de83
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Marie Curie never rang more true to me or felt more relevant: "Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less."
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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bf3f64b
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Tom Goodwin, senior vice president of strategy and innovation at Havas Media, observed in a March 3, 2015, essay on TechCrunch.com: "Uber, the world's largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world's most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world's largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening." Something"
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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52451ef
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When technology enables such a huge leap in the prototyping process, it empowers the designer--who can immediately see all the implications of any idea he or she attempts. At the same time, the process removes so much guessing and therefore so many mistakes, and so much lost time and money. It also invites more experimentation and creativity. And
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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474c971
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On local city councils being effective: The job of the council is to get together and debate and discuss. But you do it in a way that preserves the relationships so that we can get together next week and do it again.
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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cf87c83
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I don't always agree," he said. "Great," I responded. "It means you always have to check."
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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0d74681
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The fall of the Berlin Wall on 11/9/89 unleashed forces that ultimately liberated all the captive peoples of the Soviet Empire
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freedom
soviet-union
russia
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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5eb2a56
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El fenomeno ha sido denominado <> y promete entretejer el mundo mas estrecha y rapidamente, simplificando y acelerando cada vez mas las interacciones complejas.
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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c65a918
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Because when we weaken all top-down authority structures and strengthen bottom-up ones; when we create a world with not only superpowers but also super-empowered individuals; when we put so many distant strangers into proximity; when we accelerate the flow of ideas and innovation energy; when we give machines the power to think, alter DNA to remove diseases, and design plants and new materials; when Greeks not paying taxes can undermine bon..
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Thomas L. Friedman |