Viability
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According to the Global Slavery Index, nearly 500,000 people are believed to be currently enslaved within Thailand’s borders—and a significant number of them are likely to be out at sea.
We said that love is an almost-unimaginable proliferation, is the daughter-product of love. Love, we said, yields. Love is the generous field that bends toward me, the radiance during the blast. We said that love increases as memory increases. We measured love in tiers and tables and in equivalent megatons. We measured love, and love increased.
Absolute Advantage: The ability of a country, individual, company or region to produce a good or service at a lower cost per unit than the cost at which any other entity produces that good or service. Entities with absolute advantages can produce a product or service using a smaller number of inputs and/or using a more efficient process than another party producing the same product or service. Here is an example of how absolute advantage works:
Jane can knit a sweater in 10 hours, while Kate can knit a sweater in 8 hours. Kate has an absolute advantage over Jane, because it takes her fewer hours (the input) to produce a sweater (the output).
An entity can have an absolute advantage in more than one good or service. Absolute advantage also explains why it makes sense for countries, individuals and businesses to trade with one another. Because each has advantages in producing certain products and services, they can both benefit from trade. For example:
Jane can produce a painting in 5 hours while Kate needs 9 hours to produce a comparable painting. Jane has an absolute advantage over Kate in painting. Remember Kate has an absolute advantage over Jane in knitting sweaters. If both Jane and Kate specialize in the products they have an absolute advantage in and buy the products they don’t have an absolute advantage in from the other entity, they will both be better off.
Less, and less, to love. Of ourselves, too. We have tried everything. Children waiting in a horoscope, the tips of a ministerial light—Temperance crossed by the knight in our Tarot. Very soon, his teeth will emerge one by one. You will pound them in a circle to the side of the barn, and wait for the sun to strike it. To mark it with another B.
Where there is no love, put love—and you will find love. Put wire.
—John of the Cross
Where there is no love, put wire—and you will refine love.
—John of the Cross
Falling Knife: A slang phrase for a security or industry in which the current price or value has dropped significantly in a short period of time.
This term implies that the investment will never be a good one again.
Daydream: I am grotesquely huge so that when I lean over to pick up my teacup the pressure makes the blood of my body fall out my mouth. Fall smoothly, like buckets of blood simply falling. My body deflates as the pressure of all the blood falling increases: now blood from my mouth like blood from a fire hose—blood sprays and my face is thrown back from the force. Now I’m heaving blood. I’m heaving and my mouth, open wide, is pouring—pausing—pouring. The teacup in my hand as blood is falling. Blood down the walls and over the floor as blood is falling. I’m soaked with blood and the room is soaking up blood when human teeth fill the blood.
The price of slaves fluctuated widely, being subject to the waves of speculation in cotton. Furthermore, the price depended, among other things, upon the age, sex, disposition, degree of training, and condition of the slave. In order to hold these variables roughly constant, we shall confine our present analysis to eighteen–twenty-year-old prime field hands and wenches. Some summary data on slave prices were compiled by U. B. Phillips on the basis of available market quotations, bills of transactions, and reports of sales in most of the important slave markets of Georgia. His estimates of the best averages for several years between 1828 and 1860 are presented in Table 2. On the basis of these data it would appear that both the median and the mean price for prime field hands were in the range of from $900 to $950 in the period 1830–50.
Where there is no love, put infants in Table 2. Put angels in Table 1. Where there is no love, put the best averages. Where there is no love, put infants in most of the important slave markets. Where there is no love, where there are no angels, put infants or put no infants—and there you will still find no love. There is some increase in infant radiance.
—John of the Cross
Angel investors are high-net-worth individuals who deploy their own funds to provide startup capital to promising early-stage ventures. Silicon Valley, where many of the world’s biggest technology companies got their start, is home to numerous archangels.
One infant had his start when he was carved quietly out, and the other, his little trucks covering the table while we wait. Is it better to say lost than to write it—the burn until he cooled inside of a hospital, inside cure’s humiliations.
Life on a 15-metre trawler is brutal, violent and unpredictable. Many of the slaves interviewed by the Guardian recalled being fed just a plate of rice a day. Men would take fitful naps in sleeping quarters so cramped they would crawl to enter them, before being summoned back out to trawl fish at any hour. Those who were too ill to work were thrown overboard, some interviewees reported, while others said they were beaten if they so much as took a lavatory break.
Put acute exposure. Put luminosity at a maximum. Put official registration, put a conglomerate, put annual revenue of more than $30 billion, put 500,000 tons of shrimp a year, put an Ocean Health Index.
—John of the Cross
Where there is no infant, put Americium—there you will find the infant radiating.
—John of the Cross
Americium (pronounced AM-e-RISH-ee-em) is a radioactive transuranic chemical element with symbol Am and atomic number 95. This member of the actinide series is located in the periodic table under the lanthanide element europium, and thus by analogy was named after another continent, America.
The longest-lived and most common isotopes of americium, 241Am and 243Am, have half-lives of 432.2 and 7,370 years, respectively. Therefore, any primordial americium (americium that was present on Earth during its formation) should have decayed by now.
Existing americium is concentrated in the areas used for the atmospheric nuclear weapons tests conducted between 1945 and 1980, as well as at the sites of nuclear incidents, such as the Chernobyl disaster.
Where there is no love, put infant—there you will find the money radiating.
—John of the Cross
Love Money: Seed money or capital given by family or friends to an entrepreneur to start a business. The decision to lend money and the terms of the agreement are usually based on qualitative factors and the relationship between the two parties, rather than on a formulaic risk analysis.
Storm. You pronounce it out loud, like to a dog—stop. Turn. Unstoppably, the living one sleeps. His rest was as bare as my memory of that snow, or as a warning—and the whole tree sparkles across the road. We are trying to return home from the hospital when irrigation pipes also curl over the roads like we imagine the DNA curls. The road is pure gold glass at sunset. He is silent behind us, the monsters of his sleep are gone, the sky is buried, finally, everything gone.
Seasons: The current stage of a proposed business idea or concept. Seasons is a slang term that is generally used among venture capitalists. The seasons are spring (infancy), summer (adolescence), fall (maturing) and winter (mature).
But, despite the fact that the problem is ostensibly one in economic history, no attempt has ever been made to measure the profitability of slavery according to the economic (as opposed to accounting) concept of profitability. This paper is an attempt to fill this void.
Where there is a void, there you will find the Index. There you will find relentlessness. There you will find proliferation. But was that a void to be filled? That was not a void to be filled. Did you think that was a void to be filled? Is that what the Index told you?
—John of the Cross
Sentiment Indicator: A graph
ical or numerical indicator designed to show how a group feels about the market, business environment or other factor. A sentiment indicator seeks to quantify how various factors, such as unemployment, inflation, macroeconomic conditions or politics, influence future behavior.
Root, relentless. Little dream, you offer your ghost of an answer . . . are you pitiless? I have called you. Come. We’ll all—that I cannot, right now, remember we will.
Billionaire: An individual who has assets or a net worth of at least one billion currency units such as dollars, euros or pounds. Each year, Forbes magazine publishes a list of the world’s billionaires. When Forbes produced the first list in 1987, there were 140 names on the list. Twenty-five years later, in 2012, the list had grown to 1,226, an all-time high. Twenty-four of the billionaires on the original 1987 list remained on the list for 2012.
According to the 2012 Forbes report, there are billionaires from 58 countries, with the most coming from the United States, Russia and mainland China. As of 2012, some of the world’s wealthiest billionaires included Carlos Slim Helú (net worth: $69 billion, source: telecommunications), Bill Gates ($61 billion, Microsoft), Warren Buffett ($44 billion, Berkshire Hathaway) and Bernard Arnault ($41 billion, LVMH).
Monster coined, and the persistent thought at the back of the mind, at the front of the mind: what about the money. What about the health. What about the money. What about the health. What about the actual care for the actual infant. What about the actual health. What about the actual money to buy the animal to feed the infant.
The infant will, in time, rub clean—like an old gold coin smoothed of its ruler. Of an almost mythical completeness. A simple cut. A severing will follow the slope that returns him to the shame of all real love. Operation, if this were meant to happen gently. Operation, if the infant has a shelf-life. If the infant has a half-life. If the infant becomes a trained muscle. If a billionaire became this infant’s fragility, radiating.
Anti-Fragility: A postulated antithesis to fragility where high-impact events or shocks can be beneficial. Anti-fragility is a concept developed by professor, former trader and former hedge fund manager Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Taleb coined the term “anti-fragility” because he thought the existing words used to describe the opposite of “fragility,” such as “robustness,” were inaccurate. Anti-fragility goes beyond robustness; it means that something does not merely withstand a shock but actually improves because of it.
For example, he describes an anti-fragile trading strategy as one that does not merely withstand a turbulent market but becomes more appealing under such conditions. Another example he gives is weight lifting, which trains muscles not just to withstand heavy lifting but to develop increased strength as the body repairs the muscle fiber tears.
At various points along the way, checkpoints are passed and officials bribed—with Thai border police often playing an integral role.
“Police and brokers—the way I see it—we’re business partners,” explains the broker, who claims to have trafficked thousands of migrants into Thailand over the past five years. “We have officers working on both sides of the Thai-Burmese border. If I can afford the bribe, I let the cop sit in the car and we take the main road.”
Lindsay Lohan Stock Index: A stock index comprised of companies associated with actress Lindsay Lohan. Investors might correlate the popularity of Lohan with increased sales surrounding her related products. Firms involved with Lohan endorsements, advertising or movies are included in the index.
Fans may see Lindsay Lohan use a certain product, such as her Mercedes-Benz, and rush to purchase one for themselves. The increased demand will usually drive up a company’s sales, merely for being associated with Lohan. Companies involved in the index include Disney (NYSE: DIS), who produce many of Lohan’s films, Daimler Chrysler (NYSE: DCX) and Mattel (NASDAQ: MAT).
As with most celebrity-related terms, buzzwords such as this usually have a shorter shelf life and may become irrelevant.
Where there is no love. Where there is no love. Where there are no super-angels. Where there is no blast wave. Where there is no cooling pool. Where there is no half-life. Where there are no trash-fish. Where there is no by-catch. Where there is no inedible or infant species of fish. Where there is no fragility. Where there is no curve. Where there is no Index. Where there are no women. Where there is no animal. Where there is no price. Where there is no infant. Where there is no infant. Where there is no infant. Where there is no infant in the cooling pond. Where there is no infant.
—John of the Cross
The evidence employed in this debate has been provided by the few, usually fragmentary, accounting records that have come down to us from early plantation activities. The opposing parties have arranged and rearranged the data in accordance with various standard and sometimes imaginary accounting conventions. Indeed, the debate over the value of the different constituent pieces of information reconstructs in embryo much of the historical development of American accounting practices.
Where there is no embryo, put bikinis. Where there is no embryo, reconstruct the Embryo of American Accounting Practices. Put actual animals into the embryo. Put bears. Put cows. Put chickens. Put all the inedible and infant fish into the embryo. Put shrimp into the embryo. Put animals into bikinis. Put them into the embryo. Put americium into the embryo. Put High-Level Waste into the embryo. Put uranium-235 into the embryo. Put plutonium-239 into the embryo. Put tritium into the embryo. Put Bikini Atoll into the embryo. Radiate the embryo, and there you will find the Embryo of American Accounting Practices.
—John of the Cross
Night, the three of us watch, holding hands, a children’s roller coaster in the shape of a dragon, and you say: As if someone could disappear without residue. Without a stain of love somewhere on earth. Christ salted his fish. He tore the column of bones out along its back—perhaps I once believed you were knowable. You tell our son the story of the talking babydoll, cooked into a loaf of bread that hollers Mama, Mama from the oven. The babydoll the dragon and Jesus, you say, are each the other’s world entire. It’s better, simply, to say that now we know each other. To say that now I can whisper something to you, and it didn’t hurt.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a high-ranking broker explained to the Guardian how Thai boat owners phone him directly with their “order”: the quantity of men they need and the amount they’re willing to pay for them.
Animal Spirits: A term used by John Maynard Keynes in one of his economics books. In his 1936 publication, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, the term “animal spirits” is used to describe human emotion that drives consumer confidence. According to Keynes, animal spirits also generate human trust.
There has been a resurgence of interest in the idea of animal spirits in recent years. Several books and articles have been published on this topic. Keynes believed that animal spirits were necessary to motivate people to take positive action.
From this statement of the problem, it is obvious that the following information is needed to determine the profitability of slaveholding from the slaveholder’s point of view: (a) the longevity of slaves; (b) the costs of slaves and any necessary accompanying capital investments; (c) the interest rate; and (d) the annual returns from slave productive activities, defined to include both field labor and procreation.
If we need to determine the profitability of slaveholding from the slaveholder’s point of view, if we need use the word procreation, if animal spirits motivate people to take positive action, if animal spirits also generate human trust, if the wire that the Index has wrapped around the animal spirits were also the rigging of the Santa Maria, if the wood from the Santa Maria was used to build the fortress called La Navidad, if La Navidad refers to the birth of the infant who grew to the man we are to eat eternally or is it relentlessly, if the wire wrapped around the animal spirits is wrapped also around the animals, wrapped also around the infants, wrapped also around the continents, wrapped also around the
most important slave markets, wrapped also around the brains, wrapped also around the mouth, shoved also into the vagina, wrapped also around the testicles, hanging also from the anuses, tied also to each of the four boats, is eternal or is it relentless.
—John of the Cross
Daydream: Whimpering is a nasal sound, rising above the throat and nose, sweetly echoing. Groaning is like the deep rumble of a cloud, coming out of the throat. Crying is well known, and should be heartrending. Panting is another name for “sighing.” Explain babbling, shrieking, and sobbing. These seven are indistinct sounds. Modes of slapping and the accompanying moaning. There are eight kinds of screaming: whimpering, groaning, babbling, crying, panting, shrieking, or sobbing. At this I babble. With sounds inside my mouth, and then I sob.