Quotes About Public

This was yet another consequence of turning Wall Street partnerships into public corporations: It turned them into objects of speculation. It was no longer the social and economic relevance of a bank that rendered it too big to fail, but the number of side bets that had been made upon it.

The moment Salomon Brothers demonstrated the potential gains to be had from turning an investment bank into a public corporation and leveraging its balance sheet with exotic risks, the psychological foundations of Wall Street shifted, from trust to blind faith. No investment bank owned by its employees would have leveraged itself 35:1, or bought and held $50 billion in mezzanine CDOs.

It was an argument about the precautionary principle v. the scientist's desire not to make a mistake, coupled with risk aversion that was all too characteristic of public health bureaucrats. It was literally driving Carter nuts.

Communicable diseases were the diseases that created crises.

No one wanted to get in a fight with Amos, said the psychologist Irv Beaterman. Not in public. I only once ever say anyone do it. It was this philosopher at a conference. He gets up to give his talk. He's going to challenge heuristics. Amos was there. When he finished talking, Amos got up to rebut. It was like an ISIS beheading but with humour.

The CDC did many things. It published learned papers on health crises, after the fact. It managed, very carefully, public perception of itself. But when the shooting started, it leapt into the nearest hole, while others took fire.

He learned that there were more than one hundred thousand K–12 schools in the country, with fifty million children in them. Twenty-five million rode a bus to school. "I thought, Holy crap, half the kids in the U.S. hop on a school bus." There were seventy thousand buses in the entire U.S. public transportation system, but five hundred thousand school buses. On an average day, school buses carried twice as many people as the entire U.S. public transportation system.

Eighteen months after Netscape was created, and before it had made a dime, Netscape sold shares in itself to the public. On the first day of trading the price of those shares rose from $12 apiece to $48. Three months later it was at $140. It was one of the most successful share offerings in the history of the U.S. stock markets, and possibly the most famous.

The Greek public health-care system spends far more on supplies than the European average—and it is not uncommon, several Greeks tell me, to see nurses and doctors leaving the job with their arms filled with paper towels and diapers and whatever else they can plunder from the supply closets.

There was the CDC way of doing things," she said. "It was vaccinate and isolate. And this wasn't that.

Allan confined himself to one investment decision: whether to buy shares in a new company when it went public.

Josh instead found himself trying to save Americans from their public-health system.

she was struck by how private American forces of mercy were straining to offset America's public agents of cruelty.

Cities that intervened immediately after the arrival of the virus experienced far less disease and death.

The U.S. stock market was now a class system, rooted in speed, of haves and have-nots. The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that a nanosecond had value. The haves enjoyed a perfect view of the market; the have-nots never saw the market at all. What had once been the world's most public, most democratic, financial market had become, in spirit, something more like a private viewing of a stolen work of art.

The enemy was a virus. The enemy's chief weapon was rapid and random mutation. It might well necessitate big changes of strategy, and these were bound to be viewed by the public as signs of ineptitude, and the president would need to seem to be the one to rescue these situations rather than be rescued from them.

he came to see there was nothing arbitrary or capricious about the Trump administration's attitude toward public data. Under each act of data suppression usually lay a narrow commercial motive: a gun lobbyist, a coal company, a poultry company.

We don't really celebrate the accomplishments of government employees. They exist in our society to take the blame.

including those circumstances where social distancing measures, limitations on gatherings or quarantine authority may be an appropriate public health intervention.

If I'm a Trump person I'm going to assume the people in charge of the nuclear weapons are sufficiently alive to the risks around them that they don't need Rick Perry's help. After all, the only thing Trump had to say publicly about Rick Perry during the campaign was that he "should be forced to take an IQ test" and that "he put glasses on so people think he's smart.

The year is 194-. What? For a second I forget. But I know the month and the day. One day after we heard the bombs were dropped in Japan, so it feels like the end of the world. From now on I believe the personal will forever be at war with the public. If we can rationalize this we can rationalize anything.

Although it sees the world through much the same ideological lens as do corporate and government elites, the press must occasionally report some of the unpleasantness of life, if only to maintain its credibility with a public that is not always willing to buy the far-right line. On those occasions, rightists complain bitterly about a left bias.

In sum, the myth of a self-reliant, free-market, trickle-down economy is just that, a myth. In almost every enterprise, government provides business with supports, protections, and opportunities for private gain at public expense.

Reforms that advance the conditions of life for the general public are not as materially intractable or as dependent on capital resources as we have been led to believe. There is no great mystery to building a health clinic, or carrying out programs for food rationing, land redistribution, literacy, jobs, and housing. Such tasks are well within the capacity of any state—if there is the political will and a mobilization of popular class power.