337 products in Books

From the author of The BFG and Matilda! Willy Wonka's famous chocolate factory is opening at last! But only five lucky children will be allowed inside. And the winners are: Augustus Gloop, an enormously fat boy whose hobby is eating; Veruca Salt, a spoiled-rotten brat whose parents are wrapped around her little finger; Violet Beauregarde, a dim-witted gum-chewer with the fastest jaws around; Mike Teavee, a toy pistol-toting gangster-in-training who is obsessed with television; and Charlie Bucket, Our Hero, a boy who is honest and kind, brave and true, and good and ready for the wildest time of his life!

A Comprehensive Overview of the Past, Present, and Future of Money Broken Money explores the history of money through the lens of technology. Politics can affect things temporarily and locally, but technology is what drives things forward globally and permanently. The book's goal is for the reader to walk away with a deep understanding of money and monetary history, both in terms of theoretical foundations and in terms of practical implications. From shells to gold, from papyrus bills of exchange to central banks, and from the invention of the telegraph to the creation of Bitcoin, Lyn Alden walks the reader through the emergence of new technologies that have shaped what we use as money over the ages. And beyond that, Alden explores the concept of what money is at its very foundation to give the reader a framework to analyze and compare different types of monetary technologies and monetary theories. The book also takes a distinctively human look at how money impacts the lives of real people, and how new monetary technologies shape the power structures within society. In the modern era, energy abundance and technological enhancements have broadly improved human well-being, but the global monetary system has been slow to keep up. There are over 160 active currencies in the world, each with a local monopoly over its own country, and with little or no acceptance elsewhere. Many of them are rapidly diluted, which continually devalues the savings and the wages of the billions of people who live and work within those jurisdictions. Being born in the "wrong" country makes saving money far harder than it needs to be. Nigeria has a population of over 200 million people and has averaged 13% annualized inflation over the past decade. Egypt cut its currency in half relative to the dollar twice over the past decade, which instantly devalued the savings and wages of its 100 million citizens. Dozens of countries have experienced at least triple-digit year-over-year inflation within the past four decades, including Brazil that outright hyperinflated in the 1990s while it was the fifth most populous country in the world. Europe and Japan had $18 trillion worth of negative-yielding bonds in 2019, right before a wave of inflation wiped their purchasing power away. In 2021, the chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve dismissed the idea that the sharp rise in the money supply from the pandemic stimulus would lead to price inflation. By 2022, as major inflation emerged, the chairman rapidly changed his outlook and tightened monetary policy so quickly that it led to the failure of some of the largest banks in the country. How did we get to this point? Why isn't our money better than this in the 21st century? Broken Money answers these questions by examining the current mix of technology that has led to these limitations, and then explores emerging technologies that may be able to provide us with a monetary system that is fit for the modern era.

Become great at performing long-form improv! We skip the basics and get into advanced topics like: being truly present, being authentic, dealing with difficult performers, being actually funny (!) and the rarely discussed but essential skill of being healthy. "Will Hines was my first improv teacher. He's not an improv nut, but he is, you know? He has perspective. " - Ilana Glazer, Broad City "Will is one of those teachers that makes you feel like you have something special inside yourself- that you can possibly change the world. " - Abbi Jacobson, Broad City "Despite being a mild mannered man from Connecticut, it's fair to consider Will one of improv's war chiefs, or maybe witch doctors. I'm not sure. This analogy has run its course. " -Chris Gethard, The Chris Gethard Show "I haven't improvised in a loooong time, but Will Hines wrote a book that makes me want to. I'm tearing through it" - Rich Sommer, Mad Men, UCB improv team America "I read this book" - Shannon O'Neill, Artistic Director of UCB NY

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The complete four-book boxed set of the greatest fantasy epic of all time: The Lord of the Rings and its enchanting prequel, The Hobbit   When Thorin Oakenshield and his band of dwarves embark upon a dangerous quest to reclaim the hoard of gold stolen from them by the evil dragon Smaug, Gandalf the wizard suggests an unlikely accomplice: Bilbo Baggins, an unassuming Hobbit dwelling in peaceful Hobbiton. Along the way, the company faces trolls, goblins, giant spiders, and worse. But as they journey from the wonders of Rivendell to the terrors of Mirkwood and beyond, Bilbo will find that there is more to him than anyone—himself included—ever dreamed. Unexpected qualities of courage and cunning, and a love of adventure, propel Bilbo toward his great destiny . . . a destiny that waits in the dark caverns beneath the Misty Mountains, where a twisted creature known as Gollum jealously guards a precious magic ring.   This boxed set includes: THE HOBBIT THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING THE TWO TOWERS THE RETURN OF THE KING

Swarmwise (2013) is a tactical guide to changing the world using cost-efficient swarm methodology. It is a leadership handbook that outlines how the Swedish Pirate Party was able to beat the political competition on less than one percent of their budget, and shows how any cash- and time-strapped executive or manager can use swarm methodologies, whether the goal is business, social, or political. That organization, founded by one man without resources, has now spread to over 70 countries using the same cost-efficient swarm methods. Swarmwise will tell you what it takes to found a swarm of volunteers, to organize and energize it, and to lead it to success. The book doesn’t go into theoretical detail, psychology, or deep research papers. Rather, it is very hands-on leadership advice from pure experience – it covers everything from how you give instructions to new marketing assistants or activists about handing out flyers in the street, up to and including how you communicate with TV stations and organize hundreds of thousands of people in a coherent swarm. Above all, it focuses on the cost-efficiency of the swarm structure, and is a tactical instruction manual for anybody who wants to dropkick their competition completely – no matter whether their game is business, social, or political. A chapter overview of Swarmwise: Chapter 1 - Understanding the Swarm deals with the basic concepts of a swarm organization, and explains why the swarm is open and transparent. It introduces the concept of a cost-efficiency advantage of two orders of magnitude. In Chapter 2 - Launching Your Swarm, we learn that the published project plan must be tangible, credible, inclusive, and epic, and what that means in practice. Chapter 3 - Getting Your Swarm Organized gives tangible advice on how to organize a volunteer organization and why. We look at the dynamics of different group sizes and how to build a culture of trust. One of the more counterintuitive lessons is detailed in Chapter 4 - Control the Vision, but Never the Message. It explains how you need to use volunteers to translate your vision into messages that fit a specific social context, rather than using an one-size-fits-all slogan. A healthy dose of classic project management is found in Chapter 5 - Keep People's Eyes On Target, And Paint It Red Daily. We talk about metrics, choosing the right metrics, and causing self-organization to happen when you publish the right metrics to optimize. In Chapter 6 - Screw Democracy, We're on a Mission from God, we talk about conflict resolution mechanisms and how to optimize the swarm for speed, trust, and scalability. Chapter 7 - Surviving Growth Unlike Anything the MBAs Have Seen details how the swarm can grow by 200% in a week when some events play out, and how to handle such situations. One of the more advanced chapters, Chapter 8 - Using Social Dynamics To Their Potential goes into how we can tap into the long tail of people and effectively cross-use online and offline friendships to grow organically. Seeing how most organizations need to deal with TV, newspapers, and radio, there is also Chapter 9 - Managing Oldmedia that details everything from press release processes to TV crews. Finally, Chapter 10 - Beyond Success shares a bit of experience of what happens when you feel at the top of the world, and what to do then. "Your most valuable asset isn't your employees," I told the executive. "Your most valuable asset is the thousands of people who want to work for you for free, and you don't let them." The book can also be downloaded as a PDF from the author's website at http://falkvinge.net/books/.

“BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY.” —Time Volume 1 of the gripping epic masterpiece, Solzhenitsyn's chilling report of his arrest and interrogation, which exposed to the world the vast bureaucracy of secret police that haunted Soviet society. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum. “The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever leveled in modern times.” —George F. Kennan “It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century.” —David Remnick, The New Yorker “Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece. . . . The Gulag Archipelago helped create the world we live in today.” —Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag: A History, from the foreword

Bitcoin did not appear out of nowhere. For decades prior to Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention, a diverse group of computer scientists, privacy activists, and heterodox economists tried to create a digital form of money that could operate independently of government control. The Genesis Book tells the story of the people and projects that inspired the invention of the world’s first successful peer-to-peer electronic cash system. “The Genesis Book takes us on a century-long journey through the little-known stories of visionaries whose insights and innovations laid the foundation for the revolutionary creation of Bitcoin. From the economists who challenged conventional wisdom to cypherpunks who blazed new trails in privacy, Aaron van Wirdum meticulously weaves together a tapestry of technological triumphs, setbacks, and extraordinary breakthroughs. You'll be captivated by the anecdotes of individuals who dared to dream beyond the status quo, pushing the envelope to reshape the landscape of money itself.” — Jameson Lopp “Why is Bitcoin so different from its predecessors? This book sheds light on the *problems* which vexed smart, hardworking people in the pre-Bitcoin era. That is the right way to tell a technology story. All of the important problems are included, and they're all in the proper order. The best Bitcoin book yet written.” — Paul Sztorc “Until now you could find many books about Bitcoin, but none that covered its multifaceted cultural background in a complete, systematic, and elegant way. Aaron van Wirdum, already famous for his ability to accurately convey subtle technical matters to a generalist audience, just wrote it. A must-read if you want to understand where Bitcoin came from.” — Giacomo Zucco “I long suspected that van Wirdum was Bitcoin’s best historian, and this page-turner proves it. It’s a tour de force. The Genesis Book is a highly readable and essential history, revealing the many causal connections between Viennese Classical Liberalism, the Anglo-Saxon Cypherpunk movement, and the advent of Bitcoin. Whereas other books on the industry have tended to focus on headline-making entrepreneurs, van Wirdum has the technical chops to dig under the surface and correctly identify the brilliant figures who built the foundations on top of which the Bitcoin edifice was eventually engineered. Over the course of 16 dense chapters, The Genesis Book combines the kind of in-depth research and philosophical connections that one could only expect from an industry veteran (van Wirdum was one of the first writers to ever gain employment in the Bitcoin industry), with the engaging prose you’d look for in a respected periodical. One cannot understand Bitcoin without studying its extraordinary origins, and I’m thrilled this book exists to bring that knowledge to a wide audience.” — Tuur Demeester Aaron van Wirdum studied Journalism at the University of Applied Sciences Utrecht and Politics and Society in Historical Perspective at Utrecht University, where he adopted a focus on the historic influence of new technologies on societal structures. He discovered Bitcoin in 2013, and has been writing about the world’s first successful electronic cash project ever since. For most of these years, this was for Bitcoin Magazine: first as journalist, then as technical editor, and finally as editor-in-chief of the print edition. The Genesis Book is his first book.

The New York Times bestselling author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels draws on the latest data and new insights to challenge everything you thought you knew about the future of energy For over a decade, philosopher and energy expert Alex Epstein has predicted that any negative impacts of fossil fuel use on our climate will be outweighed by the unique benefits of fossil fuels to human flourishing--including their unrivaled ability to provide low-cost, reliable energy to billions of people around the world, especially the world’s poorest people. And contrary to what we hear from media “experts” about today’s “renewable revolution” and “climate emergency,” reality has proven Epstein right: * Fact: Fossil fuels are still the dominant source of energy around the world, and growing fast—while much-hyped renewables are causing skyrocketing electricity prices and increased blackouts. * Fact: Fossil-fueled development has brought global poverty to an all-time low. * Fact: While fossil fuels have contributed to the 1 degree of warming in the last 170 years, climate-related deaths are at all-time lows thanks to fossil-fueled development. What does the future hold? In Fossil Future, Epstein, applying his distinctive “human flourishing framework” to the latest evidence, comes to the shocking conclusion that the benefits of fossil fuels will continue to far outweigh their side effects—including climate impacts—for generations to come. The path to global human flourishing, Epstein argues, is a combination of using more fossil fuels, getting better at “climate mastery,” and establishing “energy freedom” policies that allow nuclear and other truly promising alternatives to reach their full long-term potential. Today’s pervasive claims of imminent climate catastrophe and imminent renewable energy dominance, Epstein shows, are based on what he calls the “anti-impact framework”—a set of faulty methods, false assumptions, and anti-human values that have caused the media’s designated experts to make wildly wrong predictions about fossil fuels, climate, and renewables for the last fifty years. Deeply researched and wide-ranging, this book will cause you to rethink everything you thought you knew about the future of our energy use, our environment, and our climate.

Data-science investigations have brought journalism into the 21st century, and—guided by The Intercept’s infosec expert Micah Lee— this book is your blueprint for uncovering hidden secrets in hacked datasets. Unlock the internet’s treasure trove of public interest data with Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations by Micah Lee, an investigative reporter and security engineer. This hands-on guide blends real-world techniques for researching large datasets with lessons on coding, data authentication, and digital security. All of this is spiced up with gripping stories from the front lines of investigative journalism. Dive into exposed datasets from a wide array of sources: the FBI, the DHS, police intelligence agencies, extremist groups like the Oath Keepers, and even a Russian ransomware gang. Lee’s own in-depth case studies on disinformation-peddling pandemic profiteers and neo-Nazi chatrooms serve as blueprints for your research. Gain practical skills in searching massive troves of data for keywords like “antifa” and pinpointing documents with newsworthy revelations. Get a crash course in Python to automate the analysis of millions of files. You will also learn how to: * Master encrypted messaging to safely communicate with whistleblowers. * Secure datasets over encrypted channels using Signal, Tor Browser, OnionShare, and SecureDrop. * Harvest data from the BlueLeaks collection of internal memos, financial records, and more from over 200 state, local, and federal agencies. * Probe leaked email archives about offshore detention centers and the Heritage Foundation. * Analyze metadata from videos of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, sourced from the Parler social network. We live in an age where hacking and whistleblowing can unearth secrets that alter history. Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations is your toolkit for uncovering new stories and hidden truths. Crack open your laptop, plug in a hard drive, and get ready to change history.

Allen Farrington and Sacha Meyers chart a crash course through the errors of modern economic theory and the world's broken fiat currency system with a hopeful destination: Bitcoin Is Venice. What if a global, digital, sound, open-source, programmable currency was monetizing from absolute zero? What might economies look like under a Bitcoin standard that pushes beyond Hernando de Soto’s abstraction of “capital” as "economic potential energy?" What might this new form of capital do to our current governing bodies? Can Bitcoin bring about a new global Renaissance? With Farrington and Meyers, the discussion is as revolutionary as the answers. "Entertaining and erudite, this is a manifesto for a more ethical monetary and financial system, for capitalism in its purest form and for 'number go up' technology. This book bridges the gap between the concept of an open-source sound money and the practical reality of an ethical and workable financial system." --Harris Irfan, author of Heaven’s Bankers “A great deep dive into how Bitcoin provides a transmission mechanism to a world of truth, freedom, and abundance.” --Jeff Booth, author of The Price of Tomorrow “Perhaps you found it surprising that a human rights advocate be asked to write the foreword to a book about finance and economics. But read the book, and you’ll understand why I’ve been tasked with preparing you for this journey. This isn’t simply about how money and finance work -- though you’ll learn a lot about that along the way -- it’s a book about how we can, and how we must, harness the power of Bitcoin to secure liberty in the electronic age.” --Alex Gladstein, Chief Strategy Officer, Human Rights Foundation All profits from Bitcoin is Venice are donated to the Human Rights Foundation. Allen Farrington is a regular contributor to Bitcoin Magazine. Read more of his insights on the world of finance and society at www.bitcoinmagazine.com.

Since ancient times we have been taught that we are not alone. We are not alone in our universe, nor are we alone here on our own planet. Aliens, Angels, & Demons takes us on a journey from the secret teachings about Inner Earth and Pre-Adamic civilized humanity to the many extraterrestrial races in outer space, their relationship to us (and to G-d), and our collective human future in dawning “messianic” times.Aliens, Angels & Demons looks at the teachings of the ancients alongside modern understandings, and insights. What we explore and discover is that the legends of old and the legends of today might very well be one and the same. More so, what is considered by many to be merely legend may indeed be something far greater; something very real and very relevant to us all.If you want to know what is out there, you might very well find your answers in here.

Frederick Bastiat dismantles Socialism, the Nanny State, the Welfare State, Pro-Business Cronyism, and all the other forms of government interference in people's lives. He destroys the perverse logic of the Do-Gooders who want to help one group or another because, somehow, it's the fair thing to do. Bastiat shows that the result of all this protection and benevolence is to make people poorer and less free. His lessons and logic are up to date and powerful. Amazingly, the book originally came out in 1850! The Law is a quick read for both the beginner and the neophyte... and one you'll choose to re-read.