Amazon consistently ranks as the most trusted and beloved brand. It is becoming an operating system for your life. The foundational principles of the Bezonomics philosophy are customer obsession, extreme innovation, and long-term management. His secret is what he calls his flywheel. The software is the business model. Voice commands will become the most common way we interact with the Internet.

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Bezonomics

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Bibi’s amazing personal story illuminates the amazing history of Israel and its likely future]. Learning is important above all else. The real foundation of peace in our area is hope derived from strength, and the consequent realization by our neighbors that Israel is here to stay. Arab propaganda systematically covered up the root cause of the Israeli-Arab conflict—the persistent Arab refusal to recognize a Jewish state. Whereas a public campaign should center on questions of justice, the appeal to leaders should center on interests. Say something clearly or nothing at all. It is not the Jews who usurped the land from the Arabs, but the Arabs who usurped the land from the Jews. My direct connection to Likud voters became the enduring basis of my political power. Without a basic understanding of economics, military affairs, technology and science a prime minister is rendered helpless before the “experts.” The combination of military and economic power will give us diplomatic power. I would emphasize that it was our historical right and not only our might that justified our claim to the Land of Israel. I would seek to build Israel’s economic, military and diplomatic power to ensure its future and to achieve a genuine peace with those in the Arab world who wanted it. Free markets are indispensable for wealth creation. In democracies, significant economic reforms never reach fruition without leaders willing to spill their own political blood. We passed in the Knesset the most revolutionary free market program in Israel’s history. Once people get used to freedom they seldom want to go back. Government may not always go forward with new reforms, but they seldom go backward and undo reforms that have been passed. Money, trade and investments flow to freer economies and away from more controlled ones. Power attracts, weakness repels. Israel is the only country in the Middle East where all citizens have equal rights. The influence of geographic factors diminishes as technology grows. I set up a Bible study group that met in the prime minister residence.

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Bibi: My Story

386 kB

Quantitative change has led to a qualitative one. Big data refers to things one can do at a large scale that cannot be done at a smaller one. With information, as with physics, size matters. It leads society to abandon its time-honored preference for causality, and in many instances tap the benefits of correlation. Social sciences have lost their monopoly on making sense of empirical social data. There is a premium on diversity within a group and in society at large. Correlations lie at the heart of big data and are now used so frequently that we sometimes fail to appreciate their inroads. FICO is also used as a cheap proxy for people’s income levels. MOOC (massive open online courses) may upend the entire education industry and pop the growing cost bubble. Infrastructures were focused on flows of water and knowledge, as were the telephone and the internet. In contrast, Datafication represents an essential enrichment in human comprehension. It is almost certain that the value of data will show up on corporate balance sheets and emerge as a new asset class. Data is to the information society what fuel was to the industrial economy.

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Big Data

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[Because the Bakers live in such a desperate part of the world and look for the most difficult cases through which to display the love of God, they experience more than their share of tragedy and sorrow. I know of no one who has faced greater challenges to their faith than Roland and Heidi Baker. It is the army of children cared for by the Bakers’ ministry that are some of the best at bringing a miracle to an impossible situation. Heidi highlights the central key of keeping intimacy at the center of our journey and being lost in love with God. She shows that this is how to be fearless and find hope and perseverance in the hardest moments.] Developing a life in God’s presence above all else is the only way to fulfill our God-given destinies. To the degree we are united with God’s heart and in love with Jesus, we will be fruitful. All fruitfulness flows from intimacy. His method for changing your nation is you. Most of the time you will be confined to activities you know how to produce and control. God wants to take us beyond what we can control. While He is pruning us above the ground, He is also multiplying our root system below. I try to pray for 3-5 hours every day.

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Birthing the Miraculous

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Talib was the only one who predicted the 2008 crisis and bet on it with his own money. Categorizing always produces reduction in complexity. Metaphors and stories are far more potent than ideas; they are also easier to remember and more fun to read. Ideas come and go; stories stay. We are better at explaining than understanding. Narrativity can viciously affect the remembrance of past events as follows: we tend to more easily remember those facts from our past that fit a narrative. To avoid the ills of the narrative fallacy, favor experimentation over storytelling, experience over history, and clinical knowledge over theories. It is the asymmetry of the bonus system that got us into the 2008 crisis--no incentives without disincentives. Capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards.]

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Black Swan

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Mouthbreathing, it turns out, changes the physical body and transforms airways, all for the worse. Inhaling from the nose has the opposite effect. Big, heavy breaths are bad for us because they deplete our bodies of carbon dioxide. Learn how to inhale and exhale slowly. When we breathe slower and hold in more carbon dioxide, pH lowers and blood becomes more acidic. We produce and signal stem cells to build more maxilla bone in the face by clamping down on the back molars over and over--chewing.

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Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

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King Josiah’s reading of the Bible led to revival simply by reading their history. Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Benjamin Rush cited ending slavery as a primary reason to be independent from Great Britain. African Americans started every southern state Republican Party. On the 14th Amendment to the Constitution passed in 1866 [granting citizenship to all persons born in the US], not a single Democrat voted for it. Not another civil rights law was passed from 1875 to 1964 because in 1876 Republicans lost control of the Senate. In 1875, the Republican Congress banned all segregation, but in 1882, the Supreme Court struck down the law and in1896 reaffirmed their pro-segregation position. The Klu Klux Klan was started to oppose Republicans and was the terrorist arm of the Democratic Party. Not one Southern Democrat voted for either of the civil rights acts even in the 1960s! Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican. One simple act of gratitude caused Black America to quickly forget that the Republican Party was birthed in America [in 1854] as the antislavery party to end the scourge of slavery and combat the terror of racism and segregation.

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bridging_the_racial_and_political_divide.pdf

71 kB

Words sell things. Story is a sense-making mechanism. When we use a story, we create a map. No one can look away from a good story. Companies tend to sell solutions to external problems, but people buy solutions to internal problems. Our website isn’t the only tool but it usually does the heavy lifting. People don’t read websites; they scan them.

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Building a Story Brand

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Great literature depends upon a passionate commitment to the real world, which demands a foundation in a deeper order of things grounded in the nature and will of God. In the journey of the mind to God, Tolkien helped Lewis to realize that the problem lay not in Lewis’s rational failure to understand the theory, but in his imaginative failure to grasp its significance.

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cslewis.pdf

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[This is one of the most important books I've ever read]. You already are hearing God’s voice and have been for years. We have made an art form of distancing themselves from God and then blaming God for the distance. He continues to speak to us symbolically through daily events as if they were parables. Prophesy is sharing something God has shown you. Retreating to the supposed safety of “figuring things out for ourselves” is another version of the fleshly mind trying to think independently of God. The Spirit has led us into truth that our Bibles and church traditions alone did not. Christian deism: God set things up in the beginning but has pretty much left the running of things to us, only intervening in our lives if absolutely necessary. Signs are only meant to encourage us along the path of faith not to help us overcome our skepticism. The cynic is a thief of hope. The beatitudes show us a type of “prophetic respiration’ in which the disciple inhales the fullness of the Spirit in contemplative prayer then exhales justice and mercy into the community.

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Can you hear me 2.pdf

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This is a short primer on the role and value of financial capital and why slowing growth will accelerate income inequality. Soaring inequality concentrates income in the hand of those who tend to save, which is a deleveraging affect. Does this reflect an advance of the Kingdom of God? To him who has shall more be given.

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Capitalism in the 21st Century

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Ideas, knowledge, and social relations are intangible. Investment seems low because of not measuring all the investment being made. Intangible investments are in ideas, knowledge, aesthetic content, software, brands, networks, and relationships. They are shot through with systems and rely almost entirely for their success on things you cannot touch. Spillovers from intangibles make living in cities more attractive and increase inequality. As returns on capital exceed the growth of the economy, the slice of the economic pie owned by the rich will grow. What makes new infrastructure valuable is the development of new tools and habits of using them to connect and work together. The least physical form of infrastructure is trust and social capital. The growth of intangibles seems to increase inequality and social divisions, but making the most of their spillovers and synergies requires good social institutions and trust.

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Capitalism without Capital

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Coaching is management. Effective leaders create a sound strategy, recruit good people, lead by example, adapt to changing conditions, honor their commitments, admit their mistakes, and take responsibility for their failures. Confidence is earned with work, time, and dedication. Winning is a by-product of the process. Positive reinforcement is crucial to team building.

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arolina Way: Leadership Lessons from a Life in Coaching

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There are 8 conundrums—the Big 8. Christians believe in 5 things: God exists; God is good, God is all-powerful; God is all-wise; and evil exists. The overwhelming majority of pain in the world is caused by our choices. The universe is a soul-making machine. The point of our lives in this world isn’t comfort, but training and preparation for eternity. Suffering is the single greatest challenge to the Christian faith. We find ‘irreducible complexity’ in nature—organisms that could not have evolved. The origin of life is the Achilles heel of evolution. God makes sense of the universe’s origin & complexity, objective moral values & the Resurrection. People assume that what’s wrong for us is wrong for God. Every religion seeks to answer 4 questions: Origin, meaning, morality, and destiny.

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Case for Faith

214 kB