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8b44811
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Fracking--to take one example--was not the brainchild of private-sector research but the fruit of research paid for twenty years ago by the DOE. Yet fracking has collapsed the price of oil and gas and led to American energy independence. Solar and wind technologies are another example. The
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Michael Lewis |
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fourth risk: the electrical grid. The river and its tributaries generate more than 40 percent of the hydroelectric power for the United States; were the dams to fail, the effects would be catastrophic.
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Michael Lewis |
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d1ee40a
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automated voices and the bells from the row of testing machines in the back. The walls were white cinder block, the floors speckled linoleum. At the front desk were four large black ladies. Leigh Anne handed all the documents over to one of them, who took one look at them and said in a slow drawl, "Uh-uh. This school"
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Michael Lewis |
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162a8da
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This was only one of many recent changes along the capitalist food chain. Wall Street had gone from being the celebrities of the money culture to being its lackeys.
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Michael Lewis |
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9bfc992
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The only thing capitalism cannot survive is stability. Stability--true stability--is an absence of progress, and a dearth of new wealth.
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Michael Lewis |
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1e9d248
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The old Soviet culture also left its former citizens oddly prepared for Wall Street in the early twenty-first century. The Soviet-controlled economy was horrible and complicated but riddled with loopholes. Everything was scarce; everything was also gettable, if you knew how to get it. "We had this system for seventy years," said Constantine. "People learn to work around the system. The more you cultivate a class of people who know how to wo..
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Michael Lewis |
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They end when the career ends,
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Michael Lewis |
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To Redelmeier the very idea that there was a great deal of uncertainty in medicine went largely unacknowledged by its authorities. There was a reason for this: To acknowledge uncertainty was to admit the possibility of error. The entire profession had arranged itself as if to confirm the wisdom of its decisions.
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Michael Lewis |
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932042f
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I'd thought it strange, after the financial crisis, in which Goldman had played such an important role, that the only Goldman Sachs employee who had been charged with any sort of crime was the employee who had taken something from Goldman Sachs. I'd thought it even stranger that government prosecutors had argued that the Russian shouldn't be freed on bail because the Goldman Sachs computer code, in the wrong hands, could be used to "manipul..
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Michael Lewis |
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4a02f26
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Don't worry. You gave him the right answer." Actually, Michael was after something more important than the fate of his Briarcrest teammate. "I wanted to see what type of person he was," he said later. "If he's pulling scholarships that they'd promised kids, would you want to play for that kind of person? Be around that kind of person?" Coach O wasn't that kind of person, he decided; more interestingly, Coach"
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Michael Lewis |
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97187b4
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RBC invited Brad along with a bunch of other nonwhite people to a meeting to discuss the issue. Going around the table, people took turns responding to a request to "talk about your experience of being a minority at RBC." When Brad's turn came he said, "To be honest, the only time I've ever felt like a minority is this exact moment. If you really want to encourage diversity you shouldn't make people feel like a minority."
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Michael Lewis |
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The quarterback of the Washington Redskins, Joe Theismann, turns and hands the ball to running back John Riggins. He watches Riggins run two steps forward, turn, and flip the ball back to him. It's what most people know as a "flea-flicker," but the Redskins call it a "throw back special." Two Mississippi: Theismann searches for a receiver but instead sees Harry Carson coming"
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Michael Lewis |
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And so it went in football. The game attracted the very people most likely to get in trouble outside
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Michael Lewis |
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6ae941e
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WHEN HE WAS a young man Billy Beane could beat anyone at anything.
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Michael Lewis |
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acd9658
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For geniuses, they are really dumb," she said. "Some of them are really pampered: They can't even put together a cardboard box. They don't think you do something. They think you call somebody."
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Michael Lewis |
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9a86739
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I share your feeling that such behavior is, in some sense, unwise or erroneous, but this does not mean that it does not occur,' Amos wrote to an American economist who complained about the description of human nature implied by 'Value Theory.' 'A theory of vision cannot be faulted for predicting optical illusions. Similarly, a descriptive theory of choice cannot be rejected on the grounds that it predicts 'irrational behavior' if the behavi..
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illusions
complain
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Michael Lewis |
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8e353d4
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Clark liked to say that human beings, when they took risks, fell into one of two types, pigs or chickens. "The difference between these two kinds of people," he'd say, "is the difference between the pig and the chicken in the ham-and-eggs breakfast. The chicken is interested, the pig is committed. If you are going to do anything worth doing, you need a lot of pigs." The"
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Michael Lewis |
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95c2b13
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After the markets closed Vinny would get into his Cadillac and drive out to his big house in Long Island. Now there is the guy called Vladimir who gets into his jet and flies to his estate in Aspen for the weekend. I used to worry a little about Vinny. Now I worry a lot about Vladimir.
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Michael Lewis |
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278ae9a
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Left alone in a dark room with a pile of money, the Irish decided what they really wanted to do with it was buy Ireland. From each other. An Irish economist named Morgan Kelly, whose estimates of Irish bank losses have been the most prescient, has made a back-of-the-envelope calculation that puts the property-related losses of all Irish banks at roughly 106 billion euros. (Think $10.6 trillion.) At the rate money flows into the Irish treasu..
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Michael Lewis |
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3e766bc
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The fact that it is such an opaque industry should be alarming," Brad said. "The fact that the people who make the most money want the least clarity possible--that should be alarming, too."
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Michael Lewis |
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81d12b9
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It was as if this baseball coach had reached inside me, found a rusty switch marked: 'turn on before attempting use' - and flipped it.
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Michael Lewis |
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6446b0f
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What happened was that everyone in Ireland had the idea that somewhere in Ireland there was a little wise old man who was in charge of the money, and this was the first time they'd ever seen this little man," says McCarthy. "And then they saw him and said, Who the fuck was that??? Is that the fucking guy who is in charge of the money??? That's when everyone panicked."
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Michael Lewis |
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Take whatever is thrown at you and build upon it. "Yes . . . and" rather than "No . . . but." "The idiot is bound by his pride," he says. "It always has to be his way. This is also true of the person who is deceptive or doing things wrong: he always tries to justify himself. A person who is bright in regard to his spiritual life is humble. He accepts what others tell him--criticism, ideas--and he works with them."
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Michael Lewis |
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565b0c7
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The first day after the merger, Brad got a call from a worried female employee, who whispered, "There is a guy in here with suspenders walking around with a baseball bat in his hands, taking swings." That turned out to be Carlin's CEO, Jeremy Frommer, who, whatever else he was, was not RBC nice. One of Frommer's signature poses was feet up on his desk, baseball bat swinging wildly over his head while some poor shoeshine guy tried to polish ..
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Michael Lewis |
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ac1f88a
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The nice thing about things that are urgent," he liked to say, "is that if you wait long enough they aren't urgent anymore."
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Michael Lewis |
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ratings in the NFL. Then Kemp, too, was injured. His replacement was a fellow named Mike Moroski, so obscure that any question concerning his NFL career would be considered out of bounds in a game of Trivial Pursuit. Moroski had been with the 49ers for exactly two weeks before he became, by default, their starting quarterback. He completed 57.5 percent of his passes. Eventually people must have noticed. As Walsh performed miracle after mira..
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Michael Lewis |
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3de3b1d
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As they worked through the order types, they created a taxonomy of predatory behavior in the stock market. Broadly speaking, it appeared as if there were three activities that led to a vast amount of grotesquely unfair trading. The first they called "electronic front-running"--seeing an investor trying to do something in one place and racing him to the next. (What had happened to Brad, when he traded at RBC.) The second they called "rebate ..
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Michael Lewis |
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679f5e7
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A new force in pro football, Taylor demanded not just a tactical response but an explanation. Many people pointed to his unusual combination of size and speed. As one of the Redskins' linemen put it, "No human being should be six four, two forty-five, and run a four-five forty."
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Michael Lewis |
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5d47349
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The orders resting on BATS were typically just the 100-share minimum required for an order to be at the front of any price queue, as their only purpose was to tease information out of investors. The HFT firms posted these tiny orders on BATS--orders to buy or sell 100 shares of basically every stock traded in the U.S. market--not because they actually wanted to buy and sell the stocks but because they wanted to find out what investors wante..
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Michael Lewis |
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07744fa
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Then came the so-called flash crash. At 2:45 on May 6, 2010, for no obvious reason, the market fell six hundred points in a few minutes. A few minutes later, like a drunk trying to pretend he hadn't just knocked over the fishbowl and killed the pet goldfish, it bounced right back up to where it was before. If you weren't watching closely you could have missed the entire event--unless, of course, you had placed orders in the market to buy or..
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Michael Lewis |
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a5a06cd
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A new force in pro football, Taylor demanded not just a tactical response but an explanation. Many people pointed to his unusual combination of size and speed. As one of the Redskins' linemen put it, "No human being should be six four, two forty-five, and run a four-five forty." Bill Parcells thought Taylor's size and speed were closer to the beginning than to the end of the explanation. New York Giants' scouts were scouring the country for..
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Michael Lewis |
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b058add
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She dropped the matter, and his birthday remained May 28. Armed with the Social Security card, the birth certificate, and the letter from Principal Simpson of the Briarcrest Christian School, they drove the next day to the Department of Motor Vehicles. This time they had Collins in tow. Collins
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Michael Lewis |
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f7ef28a
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This was tricky. They had, right now, at home, boxes of letters addressed to Michael from college football coaches and boosters and just people who wanted to get to know the future star. They had a personal letter from Congressman Harold Ford Jr., who seemed to want to become Michael's friend, and a stack of letters from a football coach at the University of Alabama, who seemed prepared to offer his hand in marriage.
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Michael Lewis |
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Light fades as it travels; the fainter it becomes, the less capable it is of transmitting data.
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Michael Lewis |
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When Neil Armstrong took his small step from Apollo 11 and looked around, he probably thought, Wow, sort of like Iceland--even though the moon was nothing like Iceland. But then, he was a tourist, and a tourist can't help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head when he got there. When ..
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Michael Lewis |
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9e2448e
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Microsoft had made it clear that the only way to preserve your station in Valley life was to create a monopoly. If you created a monopoly, you were at least partially exempt from the ordinary rapid cycle of creation and destruction.
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Michael Lewis |
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He had little patience for the mystical, spiritual approach of computer programming.
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Michael Lewis |
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a thousand people don't build anything; if you need to build something really complicated really fast, you hire fifty of the smartest people you can find.
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Michael Lewis |
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Lance was to computer programming what Joyce was to literature, possibly profound but also baffling.
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Michael Lewis |
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The trouble was that clarity and simplicity were more important in computer language than in human language.
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Michael Lewis |
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9a60d42
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The smart person accepts. The idiot insists.
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Michael Lewis |
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Success was his chosen form of revenge.
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Michael Lewis |
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Leverage buys you a glimpse of a prosperity you haven't really earned.
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Michael Lewis |
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8ea599d
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there must be some connection between his excessively romantic attitude toward computer programming and his appeal to women.
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Michael Lewis |