Quotes About Efficiency

His attitude to the clutter of daily life was of a piece with his strategy for dealing with social demands. Unless you are kicking yourself once a month for throwing something away, you are not throwing enough away, he said. Everything that didn't seem to Amos obviously important he chucked, and thus what he saved acquired the interest of objects that have survived a pitiless culling.

He had little patience for the mystical, spiritual approach of computer programming.

Wall Street bond trading desks, staffed by people making seven figures a year, set out o coax from the brain-dead guys making high five figures the highest possible ratings for the worst possible loans. They performed the task with Ivy League thoroughness and efficiency.

a thousand people don't build anything; if you need to build something really complicated really fast, you hire fifty of the smartest people you can find.

What is remarkable about his study is that it respects all of Japan's sacred cows–that the rock core of the city won't be much affected, that people will respond as humanely and efficiently as they do in government reports, that no important officials will perish, that skyscrapers will stand–and still it predicts Armageddon.

that have become more productive. In 1950, the average cow yielded 5,300 pounds of milk. In 2016, the average cow yielded 23,000 pounds of milk. A Wisconsin Holstein recently yielded nearly 75,000 pounds of milk in a year, which amounts to roughly 24 gallons a day. Her name is Gigi. You can thank her later.

Chris, you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves.

She said working for the government, you need to imagine you are tied down, Gulliver-style. And if you want to even wiggle your big toe, first you need to ask permission. And that if you can imagine that and still imagine getting things done, you'll get things done.

How a switch made by Cisco compared to a switch made by Juniper.

The programmers decided the steps everyone on board Hyperion would need to take to do everything from dimming the lights to raising the sails.

Did I think I was doing God's work?" he said later. "No. But I did think market efficiency was something important for the economy.

The simple reason Goldman wasn't making much of the big money now being made in the stock market was that the stock market had become a war of robots, and Goldman's robots were slow.

The Germans. They will always do the job they are given no matter what.

An afternoon can fly by or it can take 5 hours. Like you probably do, I productively fill the gaps that most people leave as dead time. My drive to be productive probably cost me my first marriage and a few days ago almost cost me my fiancée. Before I went to college the military had this "we do more before 9am than most people do all day" and I used to think and I do more than the military.

If the highly paid, publicly scrutinized employees of a business that had existed since the 1860s could be misunderstood by their market, who couldn't be? If the market for baseball players was inefficient, what market couldn't be? If a fresh analytical approach had led to the discovery of new knowledge in baseball, was there any sphere of human activity in which it might not do the same?

the utilitarians. They were interested only in the computer's crude and brutish ability to impose its will on the world around it.

No one seemed to be exploring the most efficient and least disruptive ways to remove people from social networks.

No longer were the prices of ordinary mortgage bonds allowed to roam inefficiently, for they were now linked to the CMO market, in much the same way that flour is linked to the market for bread. Fair value for CMOs (the finished product) implied a fair value for conventional mortgage bonds (the raw materials).

In the middle of the Civil War, Lincoln had decided it was time to make U.S. agriculture more efficient: each person not needed on the farm was another person freed up to do something else. That's why the Department of Agriculture was created in the first place, as a vast science lab.

By early 1996 Americans were spending $1.5 trillion a year on their health care and about a third of that was pure waste. Much of the waste could be avoided simply by eliminating the paperwork.

nurse at a VA hospital in Topeka, Kansas, had the bright idea of using bar codes on patients and medications to match them up

It was also possible to back out from the box scores the pace at which various college teams played—how often they went up and down the court. Adjusting a college player's stats for his team's pace of play was telling. Points and rebounds meant one thing when the team took 150 shots a game and something different when it took just 75. Just adjusting for pace gave you a clearer picture of what any given player had accomplished than the conventional view did.

The storage capacity of the average human brain is two-hundred and fifty-six exabytes. However, the average adult human only uses approximately one billionth of that storage space effectively. This means my knowledge capacity is approximately three thousand trillion times that of your average human.

These plants have discovered that they can attract pollinators by offering them a small shot of caffeine; even better, that caffeine has been shown to sharpen the memories of bees, making them more faithful, efficient, and hardworking pollinators. Pretty much what caffeine does for us.