#reduction

This we had to endure with a serious reduction in the price of goods - added to this early in the ensuing spring our glost oven fell while firing doing us considerable damage and rendering it necessary to build a new one. ↗

— John Hawley

#build #considerable #damage #doing #early

...I believe there is a legitimate aim of transcendence that is more modest and perhaps more realistic. We may not be able to rule out the skeptical possibility, and we may not be able to ground our normal capacity for understanding on something in which we can have even greater confidence; but it may still be possible to show how we can reasonably retain our natural confidence in the exercise of understanding, in spite of the apparent contingencies of our nature and formation. The hope is not to discover a foundation that makes our knowledge unassailably secure but to find a way of understanding ourselves that is not radically self-undermining, and that does not require us to deny the obvious. The aim would be to offer a plausible picture of how we fit into the world. Even in this more modest enterprise both theism and naturalistic reductionism fall short. Theism does not offer a sufficiently substantial explanation of our capacities, and naturalism does not offer a sufficiently reassuring one. ↗

— Thomas Nagel

#radically-self-undermining #skeptical #nature

Every effort needs to be made to try and offset the costs of Katrina and Rita by reductions in other government programs, especially those that are wasteful, duplicative and ineffective. ↗

— Ben Bernanke

#effort #especially #every #government #government programs

This assumes an upward revision of the European Budget, which is precisely what Jacques Chirac refuses to do. On the contrary, he has demanded a reduction. ↗

— Laurent Fabius

#budget #chirac #contrary #demanded #european

Although economists have studied the sensitivity of import and export volumes to changes in the exchange rate, there is still much uncertainty about just how much the dollar must change to bring about any given reduction in our trade deficit. ↗

— Martin Feldstein

#although #any #bring #change #changes

A sagging economy, a soaring national debt, and an increasingly restive Congress pushed Obama to order troop reductions that are both deeper and faster than recommended by his military commanders. ↗

— Ron Fournier

#commanders #congress #debt #deeper #economy

The calculative exactness of practical life which the money economy has brought about corresponds to the ideal of natural science: to transform the world by mathematical formulas. Only money economy has filled the days of so many people with weighing, calculating, with numerical determinations, with a reduction of qualitative values to quantitative ones. ↗

— Georg Simmel

#money #reductionism #life

The ideal of the 11th/17th century physicists was to be able to explain all physical reality in terms of the movement of atoms. This idea was extended by people like Descartes who saw the human body itself as nothing but a machine. Chemists tried to study chemical reaction in this light and reduce chemistry to a form of physics, and biologists tried to reduce their science to simply chemical reactions and then finally to the movement of physical particles. The idea of reductionsm which is innate to modern science and which was only fortified by the tehory of evolution could be described as the reduction fo the spirit to the psyche, the psyche to biological activity, life to lifeless matter and lifeless matter to purely quantitative particles or bundles of energy whose movements can be measured and quantified. ↗

— Seyyed Hossein Nasr

#life

But the debt limit obviously is something that needs to and will be passed. That is not inconsistent with a process and a belief that we have to get significant deficit reduction. ↗

— David Plouffe

#debt #debt limit #deficit #deficit reduction #get

I believe compassion to be one of the few things we can practice that will bring immediate and long-term happiness to our lives. I’m not talking about the short-term gratification of pleasures like sex, drugs or gambling (though I’m not knocking them), but something that will bring true and lasting happiness. The kind that sticks. ↗

— Dalai Lama XIV

#happiness #harm-reduction #talking