competition

Be careful... any time you find yourself defining the "winner" as someone other than the agent who is currently smiling from on top of a giant heap of utility.

In each case, the relative cost of postponing the purchase for buyer and seller determines the intensity of competition between the [past and future] selves of the seller. If the buyer has a lower cost of postponing the purchase (delay, making do with an interior model) than the seller (inventory, staff salaries) the buyer has the bargaining power.

Be careful... any time you find yourself defining the "winner" as someone other than the agent who is currently smiling from on top of a giant heap of utility

Homo economicus was surreptitiously taken as the emblem and analogue for all living beings. A mechanistic anthropomorphism has gained currency. Bacteria are imagined to mimic "economic" behavior and to engage in internecine competition for the scarce oxygen available in their environment. A cosmic struggle among ever more complex forms of life has become the anthropic foundational myth of the scientific age.

Everyday that I procrastinate, everyday that I sit stagnant in fear, everyday that I fail to better myself, someone else out there with the same goals and dreams as me is doing the exact opposite.

The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

Let us compete with ourselves, not with others.

As these contrasts show, capitalism has undergone enormous changes in the last two and a half centuries. While some of Smith__ basic principles remain valid, they do so only at very general levels.For example, competition among profit-seeking firms may still be the key driving force of capitalism, as in Smith__ scheme. But it is not between small, anonymous firms which, accepting consumer tastes, fight it out by increasing the efficiency in the use of given technology. Today, competition is among huge multinational companies, with the ability not only to influence prices but to redefine technologies in a short span of time (think about the battle between Apple and Samsung) and to manipulate consumer tastes through brand-image building and advertising.

Competition is often conflated with capitalism, but they are not at all the same. Capitalism involves private ownership of the means of production and distribution, but the word implies nothing about the way in which privately owned firms do business. Capitalism is perfectly compatible with a society in which a powerful state doles out favors to private monopolies, protects some enterprises from others, or even sets the prices privately owned firms may charge for their products. Indeed, while capitalists tend to praise the virtues of competition, many of them would just as soon avoid it.

I think of the friendships I've strained, the generosity I've exploited, the bridges I've torched. Do as the heavens have done, forget your evil; with them, forgive yourself. There may be hope for me yet.

If after giving it all that you possibly can, you do lose to the competition, then they really deserve the win.

Two things compel me to move. First, the fear of being alone. I don__ want to be alone here. Second, the aching need to beat Blake in any way.

Our teens are embedded in a culture driven by competition and perfectionism, where success is defined by status, performance and their appearance.

Google, you fucking ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off. Grand theft. I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple__ $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I__ going to destroy Android, because it__ a stolen product. I__ willing to go thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death, because they know they are guilty. Outside of Search, Google__ products__ndroid, Google Docs__re shit. [Steve Jobs]

Oftentimes winning can become an addiction, whether good or bad, to the point where you would rather lose it all before you lose at all.

A job interview is a competition won by those who are qualified the most, and, those who are willing to be payed the least.

In the technological world...it is no longer a question of dominating nature or society in order to be more free or more happy, but of mastery for mastery's sake, of domination for the sake of domination. Why? For no end, precisely, or rather: because it is quite simply impossible to do otherwise, given the nature of societies entirely governed by competition, by the absolute imperative to 'advance or perish'.

She transcends her sport, which is what any sport needs...And she does it while smiling the whole time. It's kind of a joke, but then again it's not, especially if you're a male pro trailing in her wake. To have this woman in the middle of such a suffer fest out there crushing people and smiling all the way...