Word: bit
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...life, the reader can relax too. And if he lapses into clichés on occasion (he adores his daughters "madly, deeply, truly"), at other times his word choice attains a chilling precision, as when he describes the two girls on the date of their premature birth: "They weighed a bit more than a kilo, a term of art in our current context." Carr and the girls' mother had used crack during her pregnancy--he had just handed her a pipe when her water broke--and it is both horrifying and apt to hear the babies quantified on the same scale...
...worthy causes if they want. But the choice should be theirs. It was argued in reply back then that social responsibility benefits the bottom line because it makes the corporation look good, thereby attracting more customers and better employees. Gates makes a similar argument. But this reasoning is a bit circular: if creative capitalism makes good business sense, then corporations deserve no special praise for practicing it. If it carries a real cost to stockholders, then Friedman has a point...
...excellent: there is growing interest, especially among young people, in helping the world's poorest. Even the most troglodytic corporation is feeling pressure to be green (and to pretend, at least, to be excited about it). The parade of corporate scandals continues, and capitalism's need for a bit of image repair continues alongside. It's a perfect moment for the biggest corporate titan of all time to turn his attention to problems that software can't solve...
...Paulson, 62, came to the job with a bit of Washington experience, dating to the Nixon White House. He had just spent seven years running Goldman Sachs, the current cream of Wall Street firms (and also the place that prepared Robert Rubin for his successful 1990s tenure at Treasury). But the key to understanding Paulson's approach is that he spent the bulk of his career not as a manager but as an investment banker. What a good investment banker does is build relationships - chiefly with the CEOs of companies whose business he is courting, but also with anybody else...
...fossil fuels like oil and coal. You may not remember this plan, because Gore's political consultants decided it didn't "test" well. It has now been revived by Obama, who has been logging a lot of phone time with Gore. But Obama has changed the emphasis a bit to promote "green collar" job development, like programs to retrofit public buildings to conserve energy. Obama also has a new take on traditional infrastructure spending, designed to limit cronyism: a $6 billion-per-year federal infrastructure bank, where loans to states and localities would have to be approved by a bipartisan...