EVERY January, Madison Avenue gets into the betterment business, unleashing a flood of advertising that seeks to take advantage of the impulses among consumers at the start of a new year to improve themselves.
Teri and I were gathering heartbreaking knowledge that had no application whatsoever in the outside world and was of no interest to anyone but us: the runners ran dully along into their betterment; people revelled in the banality of habit; the torturer's horse kept scratching its innocent behind on a tree.
The company also has a SmartDeposit feature that harvests cash from bank accounts into their Betterment accounts.
From a better way to save, Betterment has evolved into a better way to manage investments across an entire portfolio using aggregation tools to monitor and manage an individual's financial wealth.
System of a Down, an Armenian-American quartet from Los Angeles, has done well with symbols of history; it wrote an enraged song about the Armenian genocide of 1915, though if you changed a few words the song could have been a typical Pantera tune, with outsiderness expanding into self-betterment and finally vengeance.
Of course, this paradigm makes provision for cooperative behavior in repeat play interaction, but such outcomes emerge out of reward and threat possibilities, that channel the self-interest into longer term betterment over time.
Since the end of apartheid and the establishment of black rule almost a decade ago, the government has made it a central objective to turn the mines into engines of economic betterment for more of the black majority, as they have been for many in the white minority.
Is being thrust into the spotlight for the betterment of humanity the clan's latest curse?
The profits from the photographs (inmates pay $1 each plus tax) funneled nearly $2,800 into the prison's Inmate Betterment Fund last year.
As happened with many bright young men in late imperial Russia, Stalin's aspirations for betterment got deflected into the revolutionary movement.
