Cristian

“Adding manpower to a late software project, makes it later.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“The truth is like salt. Men want to taste a little, but too much makes everyone sick.”
― Joe Abercrombie, The Heroes

“Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign “aid” organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natural resources. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization. I should know; I was an EHM.* Those were the opening words of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, published in 2004. A book that exposes the unforgivable acts I committed as chief economist at a major US consulting firm and the crimes executed by the CIA assets, known as jackals, who stood behind me, it quickly became a New York Times bestseller (for seventy-three weeks), as well as an international bestseller. After reading it, my former college professor and author of the bestselling classic A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn, invited me to lunch. I told him I was haunted by guilt over what I’d done. “We’re all guilty,” Howard replied. “We allow ourselves to be duped. We have to admit that although the big corporations own the propaganda machine, we allow ourselves to be duped. Inertia is powerful. We will do anything to maintain a system that has failed us.”
― John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man