Join 📚 Roger's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what roger's read, .
Yet the Russian Federation—Russia—still looms over the newly independent states. It sprawls across the map, encompassing eleven time zones from Europe in the west to the tip of the Chukotka Peninsula in the Far East, just sixty miles across the Bering Strait from Alaska. Its population is only half that of the Soviet Union, and in 2019, its economy was only slightly larger than Spain’s—although Spain has only a third of the population and ceased being a great power in the eighteenth century. Yet Russia still has formidable accoutrements of power. It has scale. It has a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons and missiles and considerable cyber skills. It has the determination to project itself on the world stage. And it has natural resources—particularly vast amounts of oil and gas that underpin its place in the world.
The New Map
Daniel Yergin
Don’t assume the need for practice privacy will go away the better you get. Consider what the great composer Igor Stravinsky wrote in his autobiography: My family and I were quartered in a hotel in which it was impossible for me to compose. I was anxious, therefore, to find a piano some place where I could work in peace. I have never been able to compose unless sure that no one could hear me. A music dealer...provided me with a sort of lumber room full of empty Chocolat Suchard packing cases, which opened on to a chicken run.2 That practice room wasn’t quite what Stravinsky was looking for, and he soon found another that suited him. Keep looking for a practice space that works for you. The benefit of a shed of your own is that you get to explore sound without annoying anybody or feeling self-conscious. No matter how good you get, the exploration of sound is endless. Aural privacy will help you explore sound more thoroughly, and will save others from having to participate in your explorations.
The Practice of Practice
Jonathan Harnum
Perhaps WorldCom benefited the most from employing EBITDA because with its creative capitalization of $11 billion in ordinary expenses, its EBITDA looked even better because those capital expenses were not part of the computation. Not only were the innovators cooking the books, there was a double boiler going: there were no ordinary expenses, and capital expenses did not count under EBITDA.
The Seven Signs of Ethical Collapse
Marianne M. Jennings
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise