Andrés Mc Cormack

“Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Someday you will be on your deathbed and maybe you will remember me.  What I say to the world is that if you don’t do something about the way death and assisted suicide are dealt with, you may someday find yourselves in an unimaginably horrible situation with no way out.  Someday when you are helpless you may realize that your life is not your own after all and you will see that sometimes being forced to live is the ultimate tyranny and enslavement.”
― Clayton Atreus, Two Arms and a Head: The Death of a Newly Paraplegic Philosopher

“In the immediate postbubble period, the wealth effect of asset price movements has a bigger impact on economic growth rates than monetary policy does. People tend to underestimate the size of this effect. In the early stages of a bubble bursting, when stock prices fall and earnings have not yet declined, people mistakenly judge the decline to be a buying opportunity and find stocks cheap in relation to both past earnings and expected earnings, failing to account for the amount of decline in earnings that is likely to result from what’s to come. But the reversal is self-reinforcing. As wealth falls first and incomes fall later, creditworthiness worsens, which constricts lending activity, which hurts spending and lowers investment rates while also making it less appealing to borrow to buy financial assets. This in turn worsens the fundamentals of the asset (e.g., the weaker economic activity leads corporate earnings to chronically disappoint), leading people to sell and driving down prices further. This has an accelerating downward impact on asset prices, income, and wealth.”
― Ray Dalio, A Template for Understanding Big Debt Crises

“I did not want much from the world in dying.  To be able to put my affairs in order without fear of being taken prisoner and treated like I was insane.  To say goodbye to those I loved without the same fear.  To die a painless death without worrying about leaving behind something gruesome.  And to be comforted as I died.  When a person has absolutely nothing left and is facing annihilation, all he wants is not to be alone.  But maybe you have to be there to truly understand it.  I wanted someone to hold my hand, to touch my face, to be with me.  The thing I feared most in life was being alone.  How empty to exist in this universe and share your feelings and experience with nobody!  But that is how you, the world, have left me to die, alone.  But what you don’t realize is this: in turning your backs on me, you have turned your backs on yourselves.”
― Clayton Atreus, Two Arms and a Head: The Death of a Newly Paraplegic Philosopher