In the mid-1990s, there were nearly 8,000 public companies listed in the U.S. Today, there are half as many, and at the current rate, we’ll see that number halved again by 2044. “The total should have grown dramatically, not shrunk,” --Dimon
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...as an economist, it was her view (Yellens) that China could benefit if it stopped giving subsidies to firms that would fail without government support.--Tabarrok
Ponder that.
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in 2010, President Obama directed the CIA to assassinate an American citizen in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, despite the fact that he had never been charged with (let alone convicted of) any crime, and the agency successfully carried out that order a year later with a September 2011 drone strike. While that assassination created widespread debate — the once-again-beloved ACLU sued Obama to restrain him from the assassination on the grounds of due process and then, when that suit was dismissed, sued Obama again after the killing was carried out
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Born Bloodless
Is there a conflict between living and experience?
Is there a conflict between living and experience?
We have become a people of experience.
"As in the traditional folktale, and as in the Christopher Marlowe play, Goethe’s Faust sells his soul to the Devil, Mephistopheles. But in Goethe’s version what he asks in exchange is not magic powers or supernatural knowledge. It is, rather, experience—a life lived at fever pitch, “a frenzied round of agonizing joy, / Of loving hate, of stimulating discontent.” The condition of his deal is that the Devil may take his so
ul whenever he grows too contented with life: “If I should bid the passing moment stay, or try / To hold its fleeting beauty, then you may / Cast me in chains and carry me away.”
The central issue of Goethe’s life and work is on what terms is life worth living? For Faust, as for Werther before him, ordinary existence is flavorless and intolerable; like an alcoholic, he demands ever-stronger draughts of emotional intoxication. Above all, he demands the intoxication of love, and he finds it with Gretchen, an innocent and virtuous young girl, whom he seduces and abandons. Not until the end of the play, when Faust returns to find Gretchen in prison for infanticide, and on the edge of madness, does he realize how selfish his quest for experience has been. A heavenly voice announces that Gretchen will be saved—Goethe, no moralist when it comes to sex, can forgive her for being carried away by passion. But there is no salvation for Faust, whose crime is the one transgression that Goethe can never forgive—solipsism, the refusal to acknowledge the full reality of other people."--Adam Kirsch in "The New Yorker"
"As in the traditional folktale, and as in the Christopher Marlowe play, Goethe’s Faust sells his soul to the Devil, Mephistopheles. But in Goethe’s version what he asks in exchange is not magic powers or supernatural knowledge. It is, rather, experience—a life lived at fever pitch, “a frenzied round of agonizing joy, / Of loving hate, of stimulating discontent.” The condition of his deal is that the Devil may take his so
ul whenever he grows too contented with life: “If I should bid the passing moment stay, or try / To hold its fleeting beauty, then you may / Cast me in chains and carry me away.”
The central issue of Goethe’s life and work is on what terms is life worth living? For Faust, as for Werther before him, ordinary existence is flavorless and intolerable; like an alcoholic, he demands ever-stronger draughts of emotional intoxication. Above all, he demands the intoxication of love, and he finds it with Gretchen, an innocent and virtuous young girl, whom he seduces and abandons. Not until the end of the play, when Faust returns to find Gretchen in prison for infanticide, and on the edge of madness, does he realize how selfish his quest for experience has been. A heavenly voice announces that Gretchen will be saved—Goethe, no moralist when it comes to sex, can forgive her for being carried away by passion. But there is no salvation for Faust, whose crime is the one transgression that Goethe can never forgive—solipsism, the refusal to acknowledge the full reality of other people."--Adam Kirsch in "The New Yorker"
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