[PDF] The Fifth Risk eBook

Author : Michael Lewis
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 10,95 MB
Release : 2018-10-02
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1324002654

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New York Times Bestseller What are the consequences if the people given control over our government have no idea how it works? "The election happened," remembers Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, then deputy secretary of the Department of Energy. "And then there was radio silence." Across all departments, similar stories were playing out: Trump appointees were few and far between; those that did show up were shockingly uninformed about the functions of their new workplace. Some even threw away the briefing books that had been prepared for them. Michael Lewis’s brilliant narrative takes us into the engine rooms of a government under attack by its own leaders. In Agriculture the funding of vital programs like food stamps and school lunches is being slashed. The Commerce Department may not have enough staff to conduct the 2020 Census properly. Over at Energy, where international nuclear risk is managed, it’s not clear there will be enough inspectors to track and locate black market uranium before terrorists do. Willful ignorance plays a role in these looming disasters. If your ambition is to maximize short-term gains without regard to the long-term cost, you are better off not knowing those costs. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it’s better never to really understand those problems. There is upside to ignorance, and downside to knowledge. Knowledge makes life messier. It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview. If there are dangerous fools in this book, there are also heroes, unsung, of course. They are the linchpins of the system—those public servants whose knowledge, dedication, and proactivity keep the machinery running. Michael Lewis finds them, and he asks them what keeps them up at night.

Author : Michael Lewis
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 211 pages
File Size : 40,11 MB
Release : 2021-05-04
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0393881563

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New York Times Bestseller For those who could read between the lines, the censored news out of China was terrifying. But the president insisted there was nothing to worry about. Fortunately, we are still a nation of skeptics. Fortunately, there are those among us who study pandemics and are willing to look unflinchingly at worst-case scenarios. Michael Lewis’s taut and brilliant nonfiction thriller pits a band of medical visionaries against the wall of ignorance that was the official response of the Trump administration to the outbreak of COVID-19. The characters you will meet in these pages are as fascinating as they are unexpected. A thirteen-year-old girl’s science project on transmission of an airborne pathogen develops into a very grown-up model of disease control. A local public-health officer uses her worm’s-eye view to see what the CDC misses, and reveals great truths about American society. A secret team of dissenting doctors, nicknamed the Wolverines, has everything necessary to fight the pandemic: brilliant backgrounds, world-class labs, prior experience with the pandemic scares of bird flu and swine flu…everything, that is, except official permission to implement their work. Michael Lewis is not shy about calling these people heroes for their refusal to follow directives that they know to be based on misinformation and bad science. Even the internet, as crucial as it is to their exchange of ideas, poses a risk to them. They never know for sure who else might be listening in.

Author : Michael Lewis
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 182 pages
File Size : 27,15 MB
Release : 2011-10-03
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0393082245

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“Lewis shows again why he is the leading journalist of his generation.”—Kyle Smith, Forbes The tsunami of cheap credit that rolled across the planet between 2002 and 2008 was more than a simple financial phenomenon: it was temptation, offering entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge. Icelanders wanted to stop fishing and become investment bankers. The Greeks wanted to turn their country into a pinata stuffed with cash and allow as many citizens as possible to take a whack at it. The Germans wanted to be even more German; the Irish wanted to stop being Irish. Michael Lewis's investigation of bubbles beyond our shores is so brilliantly, sadly hilarious that it leads the American reader to a comfortable complacency: oh, those foolish foreigners. But when he turns a merciless eye on California and Washington, DC, we see that the narrative is a trap baited with humor, and we understand the reckoning that awaits the greatest and greediest of debtor nations.

Author : Jeffrey Archer
Publisher : St. Martin's Press
Page : 416 pages
File Size : 43,4 MB
Release : 2018-11-06
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1250172519

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Heads You Win is international #1 bestseller Jeffrey Archer’s most ambitious and creative work since Kane and Abel, with a final twist that will shock even his most ardent of fans. Leningrad, Russia, 1968: From an early age it is clear that Alexander Karpenko is destined to lead his countrymen. But when his father is assassinated by the KGB for defying the state, Alexander and his mother will have to escape Russia if they hope to survive. At the docks, they have an irreversible choice: board a container ship bound for America or one bound for Great Britain. Alexander leaves the choice to a toss of a coin... In a single moment, a double twist decides Alexander’s future. During an epic tale, spanning two continents and thirty years, we follow Alexander through triumph and defeat as he sets out on parallel lives as Alex in New York and Sasha in London. As this unique story unfolds, both come to realize that to find their destiny they must face the past they left behind as Alexander in Russia.

Author : Eric Klinenberg
Publisher : Public Books
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 36,77 MB
Release : 2019
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780231190107

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Antidemocracy in America is a collective effort to understand the fragility of American democracy and how to protect it from the buried contradictions that Trump's victory brought into view. It offers essays from leading scholars on topics including race, religion, gender, civil liberties, protest, inequality, immigration, and the media.

Author : Richard A. Clarke
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 354 pages
File Size : 21,25 MB
Release : 2020-09-15
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0525561986

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An urgent warning from two bestselling security experts--and a gripping inside look at how governments, firms, and ordinary citizens can confront and contain the tyrants, hackers, and criminals bent on turning the digital realm into a war zone. "In the battle raging between offense and defense in cyberspace, Clarke and Knake have some important ideas about how we can avoid cyberwar for our country, prevent cybercrime against our companies, and in doing so, reduce resentment, division, and instability at home and abroad."--Bill Clinton There is much to fear in the dark corners of cyberspace: we have entered an age in which online threats carry real-world consequences. But we do not have to let autocrats and criminals run amok in the digital realm. We now know a great deal about how to make cyberspace far less dangerous--and about how to defend our security, economy, democracy, and privacy from cyber attack. Our guides to the fifth domain -- the Pentagon's term for cyberspace -- are two of America's top cybersecurity experts, seasoned practitioners who are as familiar with the White House Situation Room as they are with Fortune 500 boardrooms. Richard A. Clarke and Robert K. Knake offer a vivid, engrossing tour of the often unfamiliar terrain of cyberspace, introducing us to the scientists, executives, and public servants who have learned through hard experience how government agencies and private firms can fend off cyber threats. With a focus on solutions over scaremongering, and backed by decades of high-level experience in the White House and the private sector, The Fifth Domain delivers a riveting, agenda-setting insider look at what works in the struggle to avoid cyberwar.

Author : Frank H. Knight
Publisher : Cosimo, Inc.
Page : 401 pages
File Size : 32,91 MB
Release : 2006-11-01
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 1602060053

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A timeless classic of economic theory that remains fascinating and pertinent today, this is Frank Knight's famous explanation of why perfect competition cannot eliminate profits, the important differences between "risk" and "uncertainty," and the vital role of the entrepreneur in profitmaking. Based on Knight's PhD dissertation, this 1921 work, balancing theory with fact to come to stunning insights, is a distinct pleasure to read. FRANK H. KNIGHT (1885-1972) is considered by some the greatest American scholar of economics of the 20th century. An economics professor at the University of Chicago from 1927 until 1955, he was one of the founders of the Chicago school of economics, which influenced Milton Friedman and George Stigler.

Author : National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher : National Academies Press
Page : 207 pages
File Size : 22,6 MB
Release : 2018-06-18
Category : Science
ISBN : 0309471699

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Climate change poses many challenges that affect society and the natural world. With these challenges, however, come opportunities to respond. By taking steps to adapt to and mitigate climate change, the risks to society and the impacts of continued climate change can be lessened. The National Climate Assessment, coordinated by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, is a mandated report intended to inform response decisions. Required to be developed every four years, these reports provide the most comprehensive and up-to-date evaluation of climate change impacts available for the United States, making them a unique and important climate change document. The draft Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4) report reviewed here addresses a wide range of topics of high importance to the United States and society more broadly, extending from human health and community well-being, to the built environment, to businesses and economies, to ecosystems and natural resources. This report evaluates the draft NCA4 to determine if it meets the requirements of the federal mandate, whether it provides accurate information grounded in the scientific literature, and whether it effectively communicates climate science, impacts, and responses for general audiences including the public, decision makers, and other stakeholders.

Author : William J. Bernstein
Publisher :
Page : 56 pages
File Size : 15,80 MB
Release : 2013-08
Category : Asset allocation
ISBN : 9780988780316

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This booklet takes portfolio design beyond the familiar "black box" mean-variance framework. Most importantly, the short-term volatility of financial assets, commonly measured as standard deviation, is a highly imperfect measure of the actual long-horizon perils faced by real-world investors subject to the vagaries of financial and military history. These risks have names--inflation, deflation, confiscation, and devastation--and any useful discussion of portfolio design of necessity incorporates their probabilities, consequences, and costs of mitigation ... This booklet contains ... with luck, a framework within income and all-equity portfolios. This booklet contains ... with luck, a framework within which to think more clearly about risk. Note: the entire Investing for Adults series is not for beginners.

Author : Toby Ord
Publisher : Hachette Books
Page : 480 pages
File Size : 24,75 MB
Release : 2020-03-24
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 031648489X

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This urgent and eye-opening book makes the case that protecting humanity's future is the central challenge of our time. If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Our species could survive for billions of years - enough time to end disease, poverty, and injustice, and to flourish in ways unimaginable today. But this vast future is at risk. With the advent of nuclear weapons, humanity entered a new age, where we face existential catastrophes - those from which we could never come back. Since then, these dangers have only multiplied, from climate change to engineered pathogens and artificial intelligence. If we do not act fast to reach a place of safety, it will soon be too late. Drawing on over a decade of research, The Precipice explores the cutting-edge science behind the risks we face. It puts them in the context of the greater story of humanity: showing how ending these risks is among the most pressing moral issues of our time. And it points the way forward, to the actions and strategies that can safeguard humanity. An Oxford philosopher committed to putting ideas into action, Toby Ord has advised the US National Intelligence Council, the UK Prime Minister's Office, and the World Bank on the biggest questions facing humanity. In The Precipice, he offers a startling reassessment of human history, the future we are failing to protect, and the steps we must take to ensure that our generation is not the last. "A book that seems made for the present moment." —New Yorker