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Chaos kings : how Wall Street traders make billions in the new age of crisis / by Patterson, Scott,1969-author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."Written by a veteran Wall Street Journal reporter, this is a fascinating deep dive into the world of billion-dollar traders and high-stakes crisis predictors who strive to turn extreme events into financial windfalls. There's no doubt that our world has gotten more extreme. Pandemics, climate change, superpower rivalries, cyberattacks, political radicalization--virtually, everywhere we look there is mayhem bearing down on us, putting trillions of assets at risk. And at least two factions have formed around how to respond. In Chaos Kings, Scott Patterson depicts how one faction, led by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, bestselling author of The Black Swan, believes humans can never see the big disaster coming. In their view, extreme events--so-called Black Swans--while inevitable, will always catch us by surprise. In 2007, Taleb's longtime collaborator, Mark Spitznagel, launched the Universa hedge fund, which would go on to make billions protecting investors against unforeseen chaos in the market. A second faction, which relies on complex formulas, believes looming chaos can be detected. Chief among these risk prognosticators is Didier Sornette, a colorful French mathematician who enjoys riding his motorcycle at speeds in excess of 170 miles per hour. When Sornette looks out from what he calls his Financial Crisis Observatory in Zurich, Switzerland, what he sees are Dragon Kings--punishing events that are unlikely to occur but have probabilities that can be predicted ... and defended against. Which faction is right? All of our financial futures may depend on the answer."--
Subjects: Business cycles.; Economic forecasting.; Finance; Financial crises.; Forecasting.; Investments.; Stockbrokers.; Uncertainty (Information theory);
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Climate change for dummies / by May, Elizabeth,author.; Caron, Zoë,author.; Kidder, John,author.;
Subjects: Climatic changes; Climatic changes; Global warming.; Human beings; Human ecology;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Traffic : genius, rivalry, and delusion in the billion-dollar race to go viral / by Smith, Ben(Journalist),author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."The origin story of the Age of Disinformation: the candid inside tale of two online media rivals, Jonah Peretti of HuffPost and Buzzfeed and Nick Denton of Gawker Media, whose delirious pursuit of attention at scale in the first two decades of the 21st century helped release the dark forces that would overtake the internet and American society. If attention is the new oil, Ben Smith's Traffic is the story of the time between the first gusher and the impact of climate change. The curtain opens in Soho in the early 2000's, in that brief moment after the first dotcom crash and before Google, Apple, and Facebook exploded, when it seemed that New York City rather than Silicon Valley might become tech's center of gravity. There, within a few square blocks, Nick Denton's merry band of nihilists at his growing Gawker empire and Jonah Peretti's sunnier crew at HuffPost and Buzzfeed were building the foundations of click-bait media. It was tech's age of innocence: the old establishment might have been discredited by the Iraq War, but digital news would facilitate the spread of truth. Progressive activists were first to the scene, and for a while it seemed they were the scene. After all, didn't they get Barack Obama elected? Ben Smith, who would go on to earn a controversial reputation as Buzzfeed's editor-in-chief, was either there or talked to everyone who was, and in his trademark fashion, he chronicles it all with marvelous lucidity scored with dark wit, sparing no one--and certainly not himself. Denton and Gawker were seen at the time as the black hats, but in Smith's hands the story is much more nuanced: yes, Denton's ideology of radical transparency was problematic, but at least he had an ideology. Jonah Peretti survived long after Denton's Gawker perished because his focus on clicks was relentlessly content-agnostic. But as with the proverbial sorcerer's apprentice, unintended consequences began to gain momentum. At the heart of Traffic is one of the great ironies of our time: the internet, which was going to help the left remake the world in its image, has become the motive force of right populism. As Smith and his colleagues and rivals thought they were inventing digital media, other figures, flickering around the margins of their story, had different designs. People like Steve Bannon and Andrew Breitbart and Gavin McInnes and Chris Poole, the creator of 4chan, all seemed like minor characters in the narrative in which Nick and Jonah and crew were the stars. By 2020, any reasonable observer might wonder if the opposite wasn't the case. To understand how we got here, Traffic is essential and enthralling reading"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Personal narratives.; Denton, Nicholas.; Peretti, Jonah.; Digital media; Internet industry; News Web sites;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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All that glitters : a story of friendship, fraud, and fine art / by Whitfield, Orlando,author.;
"A dazzling insider look at the contemporary art world and the meteoric rise and fall of the seductive, charismatic, utterly amoral young, American art dealer, Inigo Philbrick, told through the eyes of his former partner and set in London, New York, Miami and Vanuatu Orlando Whitfield and Inigo Philbrick met in 2006 at Goldsmiths University where, though total opposites, they became best friends. By 2007, they were art dealing together having formed I&O Fine Art and two years later, upon graduation, were looking for a gallery space. While they continued to work together, Inigo was also taking on work for the prestigious London Gallery, White Cube. Orlando would set up his own gallery with a partner and watch as Inigo quickly immersed himself in a world of private jets, lavish trips, and close multimillion-dollar deals for major clients. To those who did not know, Inigo seemed a brilliant art world hotshot. But underneath the extravagant façade, his complicated financial schemes were unraveling. Monthly interest installments of $150k were left unpaid; calls were dodged; letters from auction houses faked. With debt, lawsuits, and court summons piling up, Inigo went into an inescapable tailspin of lies and subterfuge. By 2019, things had spiraled enough out of control for Inigo to flee to the remote island of Vanuatu, 300 miles off Fiji. There, in 2020, he was arrested by US Marshals and flown to Guam where he was arraigned in a military court and eventually moved to Brooklyn where he was denied bail and sentenced to seven years in prison for over $86 million in fraud. This unique, shocking, and page-turning story is compulsively readable as it sweeps you up in both adventure and downfall. A close-up of two very young players in the contemporary art world who would each pay a big price, in very different ways, make it an irresistible cautionary tale"--
Subjects: Biographies.; True crime stories.; Personal narratives.; Philbrick, Inigo.; Whitfield, Orlando.; Art and society; Art dealers; Art; Fraud;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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The upstarts : how Uber, Airbnb, and the killer companies of the New Silicon Valley are changing the world / by Stone, Brad,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Subjects: Kalanick, Travis.; Chesky, Brian.; Airbnb (Firm); New business enterprises.; Technological innovations.; Economics; Entrepreneurship; Information technology; Information technology;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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The carbon bubble / by Rubin, Jeff,1954-author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Subjects: Climatic changes; Energy policy; Industrial priorities; Petroleum industry and trade;
Available copies: 0 / Total copies: 1
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Wilful blindness : how a network of narcos, tycoons and CCP agents infiltrated the West / by Cooper, Sam,author.; Burton, Charles,writer of foreword.;
Includes bibliographical references.In 1982 three of the most powerful men in Asia met in Hong Kong. That day they would decide how Hong Kong would be handed over to the CCP and how Chinese business tycoons Henry Fok and Li Ka-Shing would help Deng Xiaoping realize the CCP's domestic and global ambitions. That meeting would not only change Vancouver but the world. In 'Wilful Blindness', Sam Cooper reveals how BC government officials were aware of and potentially complicit in the resulting dirty money laundering scandal. Cooper is an award-winning Canadian journalist based in Ottawa, ON, cited as one of Canadas top investigative reporters.
Subjects: Criminal investigation; Law enforcement; Organized crime; Transnational crime; Money laundering; Organized crime;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Don't be evil : how big tech betrayed its founding principles and all of us / by Foroohar, Rana,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."A penetrating indictment of how today's largest tech companies are hijacking our data, our livelihoods, our social fabric, and our minds-from an acclaimed Financial Times columnist and CNN analyst. Rana Foroohar tells the story of how Big Tech lost its soul-and ate our lunch. Through her skilled reporting and unparalleled access-won through nearly thirty years covering business and technology-she shows the true extent to which behemoths like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon are monetizing both our data and our attention, without us seeing a penny of those exorbitant profits. Finally, Foroohar lays out a plan for how we can resist, by creating a framework that fosters innovation while also protecting us from the dark side of digital technology"--
Subjects: Business and politics; Corporate power; Information technology; Internet industry;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Castaway mountain : love and loss among the wastepickers of Mumbai / by Roy, Saumya,1978-author.;
Includes bibliographical references.Told through the life of Farzana, a ragpicker living on Deonar, the legendary garbage mountain found at the edge of Mumbai, 'Castaway Mountain' is an unforgettable love story that shines a light on the global problem of overconsumption. Book Club.
Subjects: Plastic scrap; Poor; Ragpickers; Ragpickers; Slums; Refuse and refuse disposal;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Nature's mutiny : how the little Ice Age of the long seventeenth century transformed the West and shaped the present / by Blom, Philipp,1970-author,translator.; translation of:Blom, Philipp,1970-Welt aus den Angeln.English.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."An illuminating work of environmental history that chronicles the great climate crisis of the 1600s, which transformed the social and political fabric of Europe. Although hints of a crisis appeared as early as the 1570s, the temperature by the end of the sixteenth century plummeted so drastically that Mediterranean harbors were covered with ice, birds literally dropped out of the sky, and "frost fairs" were erected on a frozen Thames--with kiosks, taverns, and even brothels that become a semi-permanent part of the city. Recounting the deep legacy and far-ranging consequences of this "Little Ice Age," acclaimed historian Philipp Blom reveals how the European landscape had suddenly, but ineradicably, changed by the mid-seventeenth century. While apocalyptic weather patterns destroyed entire harvests and incited mass migrations, they gave rise to the growth of European cities, the emergence of early capitalism, and the vigorous stirrings of the Enlightenment. A timely examination of how a society responds to profound and unexpected change, Nature's Mutiny will transform the way we think about climate change in the twenty-first century and beyond."--
Subjects: Climatic changes; Climatic changes; Glacial climates.; Climatic changes;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Results 81 to 90 of 153 | « previous |