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covid-19cleaningservices · 4 years

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Russia Approves Coronavirus Vaccine Before Completing Tests

MOSCOW — Russia has become the first country in the world to approve a vaccine for the coronavirus, President Vladimir V. Putin announced on Tuesday, though global health authorities say the vaccine has yet to complete critical, late-stage clinical trials to determine its safety and effectiveness.

Mr. Putin, who told a cabinet meeting on Tuesday morning that the vaccine “works effectively enough,” said that his own daughter had taken it. And in a congratulatory note to the nation, he thanked the scientists who developed the vaccine for “this first, very important step for our country, and generally for the whole world.”

The major powers are locked in a global race for a vaccine that President Trump, Mr. Putin and China’s president, Xi Jinping, are treating as a proxy war for their personal leadership and competing national systems. The United States, with an effort called Operation Warp Speed, and China have poured billions into the pursuit, and health officials worry that Russia is trying to snatch a victory by cutting corners.

By skipping large-scale clinical trials, the Russian dash for a vaccine has raised widespread concern that it is circumventing vital steps — and potentially endangering people — in order to score global propaganda points.

Russia’s vaccine sped through early monkey and human trials with apparent success. But Moscow was cautioned just last week by the World Health Organization not to stray from the usual methods of testing a vaccine for safety and efficacy.

Beyond that, the United States, Canadian and British governments have all accused Russian state hackers of trying to steal vaccine research. Russian officials have denied the accusations, and say their vaccine is based on a design developed years ago by Russian scientists to counter the Ebola virus.

A vaccine is seen as the most likely avenue for defeating the novel coronavirus and alleviating a worldwide health crisis that has killed at least 734,900 people and decimated national economies. Western regulators have said repeatedly that they do not expect a vaccine to become widely available before the end of the year at the earliest.

Around the world, more than 30 vaccines — out of a total of more than 165 under development — are now in various stages of human trials. Currently, eight vaccines have entered the final phase of mass human testing, including ones produced by Moderna in the United States, Oxford University and AstraZeneca in Britain and several Chinese companies.

Some of those Chinese companies have been accused of cutting corners themselves. One offered the vaccine to employees at the national oil company, while another has teamed up with the People’s Liberation Army to conduct human trials.

In Russia, the minister of health, Mikhail Murashko, has said the country will begin a mass vaccination campaign in the fall, and said on Tuesday that it would start with teachers and medical workers this month.

The governor of Texas says virus cases are still too numerous to warrant reopening. Emerging clusters at U.S. schools and on high school teams raise concerns about wider community spread. ‘It’s really risky.’ Russia approving a vaccine before it completed Phase 3 tests prompts alarm from experts.

In Moscow, the announcement was greeted with a mixture of national pride and nagging doubts by Russians who have been schooled by experience to treat such boasts with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Lidiya Ivleva, 70, a retired nurse out for a walk in a Moscow park Tuesday afternoon, embodied both sentiments. While calling the vaccine “a great achievement” for Russian scientists, she said she would not rush to get it herself because of the “hasty” testing.

“Those who fear the pandemic more will take it first, and good for them,” she said. If in a year or so it is clearly shown to be safe, she said, then she will reconsider.

Vaccines generally go through three stages of human testing before being approved for widespread use. The first two phases test the vaccine on relatively small groups of people to see if it causes harm and stimulates the immune system. The last phase, known as Phase 3, compares the vaccine to a placebo in tens of thousands of people.

The Russian scientific body that developed the vaccine, the Gamaleya Institute, has yet to conduct Phase 3 trials.

That final phase, however, is the only way to know with statistical certainty whether a vaccine can prevent an infection, and how effective it is. And because it tests a much larger group of people, a Phase 3 trial can also detect more subtle adverse effects of a vaccine that earlier trials could not.

Experts warn that, among other things, a faulty vaccine could actually render those inoculated more vulnerable to severe forms of Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, a potential disaster that can be ruled out only through extensive testing on human volunteers.

Image“It works effectively enough, forms a stable immunity and I repeat, it has gone through all necessary tests,” President Vladimir V. Putin said. “It works effectively enough, forms a stable immunity and I repeat, it has gone through all necessary tests,” President Vladimir V. Putin said.Credit...Aleksey Nikolskyi/Sputnik, via Reuters The Russian vaccine uses two strains of adenovirus that typically cause mild colds in humans. Scientists genetically modified them to cause infected cells to make proteins from the spike of the new coronavirus, officials have said.

The approach is similar to the one used in a vaccine developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca that is now undergoing Phase III tests in Britain, Brazil and South Africa.

The W.H.O. is in close contact with the Russian authorities and discussing proper procedures, Tarik Jasarevic, a spokesman for the organization, told reporters in Geneva on Tuesday. But he emphasized that obtaining the organization’s seal of approval would require “rigorous review of safety and efficacy data” derived from clinical trials.

The Russian Ministry of Health did not respond to detailed written questions sent last week about human trials and research into potentially harmful side effects.

CORONAVIRUS SCHOOLS BRIEFING: How is the pandemic reshaping education? Get the latest news and tips as students go back to school. Sign Up The Gamaleya Institute developed the Russian vaccine using a human cell line first cultured in 1973 — the same line used in the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. Like a number of other cell lines used in medical research and vaccine manufacturing, it began with cells taken from an aborted fetus, raising objections from abortion opponents that may come into sharper focus if the vaccine is used widely.

Russia’s announcement of a potential vaccine well ahead of the Western timeline of the end of the year could provide a welcome respite for Mr. Putin from a string of bad news.

Over the past year he has seen a steady decline in his approval ratings, which had soared to more than 80 percent after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Now, with Russian troops bogged down in Syria and Libya, foreign adventures have lost their appeal for most Russians.

Mr. Putin has also stumbled in domestic affairs. He was uncharacteristically passive in the spring as Russia erupted into one of the world’s hot spots for the coronavirus pandemic. And he has had no answers for the economic malaise enveloping the country, as the pandemic has flattened prices for oil and other natural resources that are the main engine of the Russian economy.

Russia has already used the vaccine race as a propaganda tool, even in the absence of published scientific evidence to support its claims as the front-runner. The vaccine, for example, was branded Sputnik V, recalling the Soviet Union’s launch of a first satellite, beating the United States.

For the last several months, state television has promoted the idea that Russia is leading the competition. In May, it reported that the first person in the world to be vaccinated against the virus was a Russian researcher who had injected himself even before monkey trials had been completed.

Russia also tested the vaccine on soldiers, raising concerns about consent, though the Ministry of Defense said that all the soldiers had volunteered.

Kirill Dmitriev, the head of a government-controlled fund that invested in the vaccine, denied in a conference call with journalists on Tuesday that Russia had cut corners on testing, or that it had stolen intellectual property to get ahead.

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megacircuit9universe · 4 years

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Superstition

SAT SEP 26 2020

Everything hopeful that I wrote in the last entry, two days ago, has come under heavy fire... from the left.

Not that anybody reads this blog. They don’t.

Rather, it’s a kind of survival instinct to beat back complacency. Don’t think for one second Biden has this in the bag, because if we do... not enough people will vote, and he’ll lose!

And I get it!.. We all remember 2016, when Clinton lost, because Democrats were overconfident, so many of those who weren’t super happy with her getting the nomination, either stayed home, or voted for a third party candidate, to symbolicly protest the two bad options we had in Trump and Hillary.

Nobody want’s a repeat of that in 2020.

But I feel like there’s a different shade of danger in getting too superstitious about Trump’s 2016 win.

A lot of factors were at play that year, as they are this year... from voter suppression tactics, to social engineering campaigns by Russia, being waged on Facebook and Twitter, to overconfidence, to apathy... but the one factor that was not at play, either that year, or this year... is magic.

I know I’ve speculated a lot about how all the Trumps on all the timelines managed to weasle their way into the Presidency at some point, between 2000 and 2028... and that on all of them, it’s a disaster... but...

...He doesn’t get into power by magic. It’s because of the state of the Republican party, here in the turn of he century... and the birth of the internet, with all the upheval that has brought about.

The GOP was getting pretty scary back when W Bush was elected. That was not a normal transition of power. Peaceful, yes... but highly abnormal. Bush basically declared his own victory, and then... acting with extreme confidence... Sued Gore to concede, before the last of the votes were... re-counted, in that situation... for just a few counties in Florida.

The Supreme Court backed him up... not on any valid legal argument... but on his confidence, and the endorsement of Fox News.

Confidence matters!

And it doesn’t just matter... the Supreme Court has already set the legal precident that... when the Presidency is up for debate... confidence is decisive.

And we were just lucky, in 2000... that it was W... and not Trump... but... W was still a huge nightmare President. He used 9/11 as the excuse to do a lot of terrible things, including torture. He sent our brothers and sisters in the national guard, and the U.S. Military into a pointless war in Iraq.

He, and his congressional cohorts, also squandered the historic budget surplus Clinton had given us... so badly... and lifted so many regulations on wall street... that by the end of his second term, we were plunging into a depression.

The housing market collapsed first... the first time property values had deflated since the end of WW2, and they weren’t just deflating, they were falling over a cliff. And then the banking collapse began, in October of 2008... threatening to destroy civilization. Look it up. It was fucking serious.

Now, W never fantasized about serving a third term, or being President forever...

...but the GOP of 2000-2008 would’ve backed him up, if he had fantasized about dictatorship. They were already that hell bent on world domination (hence the unilateral war in Iraq).

Trump is not magical.

He’s the product of an already corrupt GOP, who, was just waiting for the right idiot.

Bush was not stupid enough... must go stupider! Bush was not racist enough, or angry enough... must go full racist! Must go full anger!

And that should have failed.... but now we had smart phones... and Twitter. Never forget that Trump has been our first and only Twitter President.

He and his cronies, both in Moscow, and NYC, took full advantage of a moment in social media history... when it was still brand new, and all the rage... just hitting it’s first peak in popularity... with a population that was still very naive to it’s potential dangers.

Good timing? Yes. All predators have good timing.

Ruthlessly cunning? Yes. All predators are cunning and ruthless.

Magic? No!

Before the invasion of Normandy... did they say, Nobody jynx this by thinking we’re gonna win! Stop being so confident, Charmichael! You’re gonna make everything worse than it already is! Knock wood!

No.

They took a thorough assessment of the situation, and the enemy, and, with their best men, came up with a compitent plan... then threw everything they had at the bastards... crazy duck boats, delivering mass produced tanks and jeeps, and fully loaded soldiers... and numbers. They knew they had the numbers.

And it was a hard battle, and the casualties were high, but they won.

Those U.S. D-Day casualties, by the way?.. 2,811.

We’ve crossed the 200,000 mark, for U.S. Casualties of Covid19, in just seven months... at the hands of a madman, backed by a corrupt party, who will resort to anything to stay in power.

This is not the time to get superstitious.

And that goes for this mentality... about it being the worst year in history... that’s been going on since early 2016, long before anybody thought Trump could ever win. Back in early 2016, it was simply the deaths of beloved icons such as Prince, and David Bowie, that made everybody complain that it was the worst year ever.

It wasn’t as happy a year as 2015! Waaaaah!

That mentality has not changed. 2017 was the worst year ever. 2018 was too. As was 2019... such a horrible year. And when Covid came along in early 2020... Well! This really takes the cake!

And there is a defensive advantage, to growing cynical, and refusing to be surprised by more bad news, however terrible... and calling it out, and laughing in it’s face.

But that advantage is blunted, if you get too superstitious... in this case... assuming every day and month of every year is going to be worse and worse than the last, because it’s just fated to be so... and only losers hope.

No.

We are in a very dark hour, I’ll grant you that.

From climate change, digging in its talons around the planet, and promising to deliver much worse, on the regular, for centuries... and a Caronavirus that just won’t go away, because American fools can’t get the concept, and don’t have the decency to give a shit... to Trump, threatening to plunge the United States into a fascist nightmare, from which the nation may not recover without a civil war that sparks World War 3.

It’s not looking super great.

But the future is not inevitable... as any time traveler would be happy to preach.

Just as any move they make, can have drastic effects on the timeline... so does any move you make... especially in a dark historical hour like this.

I still firmly believe, that Trump will not succeed in his bid to hold on to power. He’ll be defeated, and he’ll be forced out, by January 20th.

We have the numbers... and the brains... and the resources... to get this done.

All we need now, is the certitude... and fortitude.

Lose the superstition!

I’m going to bed.

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easyfoodnetwork · 4 years

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King Arthur Flour’s Baking Hotline Has Never Been Busier — and the Questions Are Getting Personal

Efired/Shutterstock

During quarantine, the bakers who staff the hotline are providing baking — and emotional — support

On March 14, COVID-19 was declared a national emergency in the U.S., hand sanitizer profiteers made headlines, and states had yet to issue stay-at-home orders. It was also Pi Day — that is, the date 3/14, which is often cheekily observed by baking or eating pie. The date stands out to Martina Pochop because she’s a baker and because when she went to work the next day, she noticed a flood of new calls and emails. Popchop works as a baker support specialist at King Arthur Flour’s Norwich, Vermont headquarters, and part of her job is answering calls on the company’s Baker’s Hotline, a number anyone can call for advice on their doughs and batters. “It was literally overnight,” she says. “Everything just started tumbling down an endless path in search of flour.”

King Arthur Flour quietly launched its Baker’s Hotline in 1993. While it may not be as well known as the Butterball Turkey Talk Line, it displays a level of homespun commitment not seen in other culinary help lines. The Baker’s Hotline is staffed by 15 people who answer calls and emails for eight to 12 hours a day, 357 days a year. Most have culinary degrees and worked as professional bakers, chocolatiers, and chefs before coming to King Arthur, where they generally work in education, recipe-developing, or product-testing roles in addition to answering the hotline. They’ve picked up the phone so many times that many can recite their opening line as if in their sleep: baker support specialist Maggie Perry recently answered a call from her child’s pediatrician with, “Hi, this is Maggie at King Arthur.”

The holidays and summer (baking contest season) tend to be busy for the Baker’s Hotline, but those pale in comparison to the pandemic. In April, queries to the King Arthur hotline surpassed the four busiest weeks over the winter holidays, with a total of 10,406 calls and 7,740 emails, requiring six additional bakers working in other departments to step in and answer emails. It hasn’t let up: King Arthur’s staff has experienced unrelenting call volumes for three months, and during this time, the hotline has become a magnet for lonely, anxious human behavior and lots of questions about sourdough.

The baker support specialists have seen a few patterns emerge. Before the pandemic, most calls came from regular bakers on the older side, with some “frequent fliers” who called mostly just to chat. But in March, they started hearing from more beginner bakers who couldn’t easily ask family members for advice about old recipes or about the difference between all-purpose and bread flour — sometimes it was because they’d recently lost someone, other times because they lived far away and couldn’t reach them by phone. Perry also noticed that once schools shut down, parents started calling about homeschool baking projects. “[Baking is] one of those magical things. It’s science, it’s math,” she says. And more people were asking about finicky projects like pâte à choux or macarons, recipes whose long timelines newly appealed to those working from home or looking for weekend time-sucks.

As grocery store shortages went beyond sanitizer and toilet paper, calls about ingredient substitutions flooded the hotline. When grocery stores ran low on bread, people called in to ask for recipe suggestions, solutions to rising issues, and once, if it was possible to bake bread on a grill because it was too hot to turn on the oven. Callers looking for a challenge tried out sourdough, “which, for people who have never baked before, is quite an adventure, to say the least,” Pochop says. There were more calls about cookies, but ones baked with alternative flours, since all-purpose was scarce.

More time and fewer options at the grocery store have indeed made baking more popular than ever, and King Arthur’s sales have gone up as much as 600 percent accordingly (as have hits to its website). But it’s not the only thing driving thousands more callers to the Baker’s Hotline. According to Pochop, who has been with the company since 2017, “in the last couple of months, people have seemed the most lonely.”

Baked goods in particular are so often tied up with nostalgia and relationships; people seem especially anxious about messing up recipes that their loved ones usually made, or just want to talk to someone — anyone — about how much a recipe means to them. A caller may technically be asking about how to halve a recipe, but what they really want to talk about is how they’d usually make a full recipe to share with their grandchildren. “You can’t actually give them everything that they need,” Perry says. “You can just let them know that you’re there and that a lot of other people are calling with the same feelings.”

“We hear from people who just don’t know who else to call.”

King Arthur baker specialist and customer support shift lead Amanda Schlarbaum recently spoke to a woman who broke down crying after asking a yeast-related question. Her parents lived far away and she didn’t know when she’d see them again. “She was like, ‘I can’t even believe I’m crying over bread.’ And I’m like, you know, that’s where we all are right now.” The caller ended up spending $55 to send her parents a homemade loaf.

In retrospect, the Baker’s Hotline was primed to be a source of comfort during quarantine. King Arthur has a reputation for its teaching culture; its resources are notably beginner-friendly and easygoing. “If you have a process you’ve successfully followed before, then hey, stick with it. Or try this one and compare. All good,” PJ Hamel writes in the company’s oft-recommended primer on sourdough starter. On King Arthur’s social media platforms, bakers have always felt comfortable posting panicked photos of explosively large doughs or asking extremely specific questions. And when bakers tag @kingarthurflour in photos of their finished products, the company responds like an enthusiastic friend. “What a lovely bundt, Marilyn!” reads a reply to one user’s tweeted creation. “Pairing ingredients and recipes is like putting two partners together for a dance. Will they fluidly tango? Your stunning Kaiser Rolls clearly answer that question!” the company replied on Facebook when a baker paired King Arthur’s bread flour with a Cook’s Illustrated recipe.

Hotline staffers are armed with all of King Arthur’s online resources and cookbooks, as well as fat binders of their own creation filled with handwritten notes on questions that have been asked before. And they’re game for questions that extend outside the baking realm. In late April, Schlarbaum picked up the phone to a stranger who wanted to know how much extra sauce she should make if she’d bought an extra pound of oxtail. “She was so nonchalant about it,” Schlarbaum says. As Easter in quarantine approached, Pochop received a few questions about ham and potatoes.

Even non-baking questions are usually culinary in nature, so if they can, the staffers try to answer them. After all, imagine you can’t leave your house, see your more cooking-inclined family, or even get through to most customer service lines — but there is one line that promises, seven days a week, to connect you with an actual human who will earnestly try to help you out, no matter how specific your problem. “On a daily basis we hear from people who just don’t know who else to call and they saw our number on the bag of flour that they have in their hand,” says Popchop.

As unprecedented as the volume of calls has been recently, the questions are the same as they’ve always been, just modified by the constraints of a global crisis. People still call about wedding cakes, but they’re making a miniature version because the couple is celebrating without family and friends. Schlarbaum called fellow hotline staffers to discuss a mascarpone filling for her own quarantine birthday cake. People are baking to relieve stress, just as they always have done, only now the stress and the baking have increased tenfold: “You’re looking for something that you can accomplish,” Perry says. “You’re looking for something that feels good and can take care of other people.”

People are maybe a little more emotional if their buttercream isn’t mixing properly, but Schlarbaum jumps into therapist mode, advising deep breaths and walking away for 15 minutes. “I tell them when I make buttercream, I’ve ruined it every single time.” Most calls end with a relieved baker and sometimes a few extra minutes of chatting, just because the caller doesn’t want to hang up yet.

“Right now, people are bored and anxieties are running high,” Schlarbaum says, “and I think people just need someone to be like, ‘No, no, the bread will be fine. Just let it rise another half an hour. It’ll be okay.’”

Erin Berger is a freelance writer and former culture editor at Outside magazine, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/30LRITh https://ift.tt/2YBPpjg

Efired/Shutterstock

During quarantine, the bakers who staff the hotline are providing baking — and emotional — support

“We hear from people who just don’t know who else to call.”

Erin Berger is a freelance writer and former culture editor at Outside magazine, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/30LRITh via Blogger https://ift.tt/3cYKRsk

#Blogger #cooking #Eater #food #recipes

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turkiyeecom · 5 years

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When migrants arrived in droves, this poor New Mexico city opened its arms

Breaking News EmailsGet breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.SUBSCRIBEJune 18, 2019, 9:24 PM UTCBy Cynthia McFadden, Christine Romo, Julia Ainsley and Kenzi Abou-SabeDEMING, N.M. — Along a barren county fairground in this sleepy desert city sits a nondescript building that illustrates the depths of the nation's migrant crisis — and the heights to which small town America can rise.Over the last several weeks, U.S. authorities, unable to house a surge of asylum-seekers at the border, have dropped off thousands of immigrants in this city, one of the poorest municipalities in one of the nation's poorest states.The migrants, mostly Central American families, have arrived by the busloads to find a shelter that has become the focal point of tiny Deming.The fire department has set up shop at the shelter's intake facility to help deal with crises. Volunteers show up in droves to lend a hand. And some churchgoers have even gone so far as to open up their homes to the migrants.Dealing with a crush of new arrivals without federal assistance, this city of 14,000 is marshaling all of its resources to cope with the crushing weight placed on its shoulders, local officials say."It's been one of the best things I've done as a firefighter in all my career," said Deming Fire Department Chief Raul Mercado.Deming is not the only city in America grappling with a weekly deluge of undocumented immigrants left at bus station depots and elsewhere by the federal government.Since the number of immigrant families seeking asylum reached record highs earlier this year, the Department of Homeland Security has begun busing or flying immigrants from areas on the border where they enter to other towns deemed able to accommodate the overflowing populations. For example, Del Rio, Texas, and San Diego have also begun taking in immigrants who arrive in the Rio Grande Valley.Migrant families are housed at the Deming shelter until they can be bused or flown to an American sponsoring them while they await an asylum hearing, usually after no more than two days at the facility."The phrase we like to use is, it's an unfunded federal mandate that's been placed upon our state," said Cullen Combs, the emergency manager in nearby Dona Ana County, New Mexico."I have a lot of personal thoughts about it, but when I see a mother with a child who's having a seizure because they have a 103 temperature, that's going to hit you," Combs said. "And that's something that, we as Americans, we're just, we're going to have an outpouring of being able to help these folks."Last week, a month after Deming first began receiving the migrants, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, sued the directors of DHS, ICE and Border Patrol for what she called the federal government's "indiscriminate practice of releasing migrants in communities in the state's borderland area."Grisham is seeking reimbursement for the emergency funding New Mexico has given governments in Deming and Las Cruces, as well as an injunction forcing the Trump administration to abide by the Safe Release policy.Migrants sit on a cot inside a shelter at the Southwestern New Mexico State Fairgrounds in Deming, New Mexico on May 27, 2019.Adria Malcolm / Reuters fileUnder the Safe Release policy, which had been used since the Obama administration during surges in border crossings, asylum-seekers were processed by immigration officials and — if they passed an initial screening where they demonstrated "credible fear" of returning home — released to family, friends or nonprofits in the U.S. to await their asylum hearings. The Trump administration ended Safe Release last October, and earlier this year, amid record numbers of migrants seeking asylum, began simply releasing migrants in various cities like Deming.A spokesman for Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the DHS division that manages the Border Patrol, said the releases are a "last resort" and only done when the number of immigrants apprehended in an area in a day exceeds the bed space in border stations and immigrant detention centers.Roughly 24 hours after the first busload of immigrants was dropped off at a Deming McDonald's on Mother's Day, the town had turned an empty building on the county fairgrounds into a migrant shelter, filled wall to wall with green cots, and growing piles of donated diapers, toiletries, and clothing for the migrants who often arrive hungry and weeks from their last shower."We're really good at this," said Chris Brice, who runs the shelter and also serves as Deming's jail warden and assistant county manager.The city is spending about $15,000 a day to accommodate the migrants, Brice said."We don't even discuss the politics of it here," Brice added. "It's what we do or they would be out there on the street trying to find their own way. And that's unacceptable to everybody."The support has come from a wide variety of sources in Deming, from local churches and NGOs, to individual volunteers."I was asleep already on Mother's Day. And then a family came to the house, knocked on the door," recalled the Rev. Manuel Ibarra, the priest at St. Ann's Church in Deming. "It was a family from Guatemala, and they were asking for shelter."Ibarra's church has housed 300 migrants since that first day in May. On average, the church takes in 85 people each week.Since the influx began in mid-May, the shelter on the county fairgrounds has become the unofficial home of Deming's EMTs, firefighters, and police department.Mercado and his team turned the dilapidated World War II airplane hangar that serves as the migrant processing facility into their new office. "The first day chief and I got called out to come out, we just came by ourselves thinking, 'Well, we can knock this out,'" Mercado said. "And we saw the amount of people and we were like, 'Holy s---' Then we called back and had everybody come out and help us."A WWII hangar is being used as a shelter and processing center for migrants being released by U.S. Border Patrol in Deming, New Mexico on May 27, 2019.Adria Malcolm / Reuters file"Make no mistake, it's labor intensive," said Fire Battalion Chief Edgar Davalos, "but the whole thing is we've still got to treat them like human beings, because that's what they are. They're here legally and they're human beings, and we're going to make them as comfortable until they finish their journey as we can."The deluge of migrants prompted the international humanitarian group Save the Children to come to Deming and set up a "child-friendly space" at the city's migrant shelter. It's the only emergency humanitarian operation Save the Children has ever set up in the U.S. that wasn't in response to a natural disaster.The group is also working with local law enforcement to spot and support children who've been trafficked or are facing trauma, leveraging their years of experience providing assistance in disaster situations."They've been away from their home. They've been in detention. They don't know where they're going," said Jennifer Garner, the actress and Save the Children board member who was touring the shelter on the day NBC News visited."They don't speak English. They've been ill. They've gone without baths, without food, without medical care, but they're here, happy to hear me butcher 'Goodnight Moon' because they're children."The support Save the Children provides is multipronged, but entirely funded by private donation.Project manager Barbara Ammirati said the organization provides a wide range of resources — including medical supplies, hygiene kits and plush toys — as well as information to help them cope with their changing environments."Information so that children aren't frightened," Ammirati said. "They've never been in a bus station before, they've never been in an airport before."For Betsy, a mother of two from Honduras, the child-friendly space set up by Ammirati's team was a respite for her children, ages 2 and 7.Betsy said she was fleeing an impossible situation at home. "Lately the narcotraffickers have taken over the country, and they want us to distribute drugs for them. We refused, so they killed my brother," she said. "I'm just asking for an opportunity for my children. I don't want them to be killed."Betsy and 16 of her immediate family members began the journey from Honduras over two months ago, often struggling to find food and shelter along the way. Only Betsy, her husband and their children made it to the shelter in Deming. Betsy's 12-year-old sister and Betsy's mother, a diabetic, were separated and detained in El Paso after the family crossed the border into the U.S..On the day NBC News spoke to Betsy, she was booked on an afternoon bus to Miami where her brother, her sponsor in the U.S., would give her a place to stay.Just hours before her bus was scheduled to leave Deming, Betsy still hadn't been able to contact her mother in the El Paso detention center. Neither of the women had working phones or any way to get in touch.In March, the number of border crossings by undocumented immigrants, the vast majority of them Central Americans seeking asylum, topped 100,000. Last month, more than 140,000 crossed, overwhelming CBP officers and agents whose job it is to process immigrants and either send them to immigrant detention or release them with a court date, according to government data.Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) Tyler G. Massey ties a migrant child's shoe at a shelter in Deming, New Mexico on May 27, 2019.Adria Malcolm / Reuters fileOfficials in Deming and neighboring towns have been told to expect a continued flow of immigrants for months to come."I've heard 18 to 24 months. But that's a joke, too, because everybody points to the election cycle as when this big fix is going to happen," Brice said.In a statement, CBP spokesman Roger Maier said, "CBP has no timeline for the continued need to release family units because apprehension levels cannot be predicted.""Releases in excess of NGO capacity will be conducted at local transportation hubs during operating hours and NGOs are advised to help facilitate travel to the families' intended destinations," Maier added, using an abbreviation for nongovernmental organization.CBP has been cracking down on immigrants who falsely claim the child they bring across the border is theirs. Because a federal court settlement prohibits children from being detained for longer than 20 days, DHS says adults are motivated to travel with children because they, too, will be released.According to a spokesman for the agency, 4,800 people, or 1.4 percent of those claiming to be part of a family, have been deemed fraudulent since October 2018. That figure includes children traveling with their parents who are later determined to be over 18, and those whose grandparents claim to be their parents.Brice, the jail warden-turned-shelter operator, said the migrants arriving in Deming have included mothers who pulled off astounding feats in aid of their children."We had a mom who had a paraplegic daughter — 12-year-old daughter — who carried her literally with her arms," Brice said.Brice said there have been few complaints from the community since the first week. "We can do this indefinitely, provided we have funding to do it indefinitely," he said.But for Brice, who spent two decades in the Navy, Deming's lack of funds isn't the town's only problem. "Usually we have a mission," Brice said, referring to military-style operations."We go out there, you set things up, you get rid of the water. You do whatever, but there's an endgame in mind. This is the problem: We don't have an endgame in mind. This is indefinite."Cynthia McFaddenCynthia McFadden is the senior legal and investigative correspondent for NBC News.Christine RomoChristine Romo is a senior enterprise producer at NBC News.Julia AinsleyJulia Ainsley is a correspondent covering the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice for the NBC News Investigative Unit.Kenzi Abou-SabeKenzi Abou-Sabe is an associate producer with the NBC News Investigative Unit.Merritt Enright contributed. Read More Read the full article

#arrived #Migrants

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ourmrmel · 5 years

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Mel Feller MPA, MHR, illustrates Building an Accountability Structure in Business

Mel is the President/Founder of Mel Feller Seminars with Coaching for Success 360, Inc. and Mel Feller Coaching. Mel Feller is an Innovator and Business Leader. Mel Feller currently maintains an office in Texas. Mel is currently an MBA Candidate.

Building a culture of accountability within an organization is a key element to making a business sustainable over a long period. Not surprisingly, all high-performing organizations are moving toward more empowerment, enlightenment and creating a culture of accountability.

So what is accountability? To some, it is something you make people do, as in “making people accountable.” However, as long as you think accountability can be purchased, mandated, or motivated, you are trapped in trying to create high accountability in a low-accountability culture.

So let us consider what accountability is, and how we can create an organizational culture that encourages it.

By definition, accountability is being answerable or responsible for something. Accountability opens the door to ownership – not necessarily financial ownership, but certainly emotional ownership, where someone acknowledges they are responsible for some aspect of the organization.

Accountability is not something you “make” people do – it has to be chosen or accepted by people within your organization. People must “buy into” being accountable and responsible. For many, this is a new, unfamiliar way to work. Most importantly: individual purpose and meaning come from assuming responsibility and accepting accountability.

With accountability comes a measure of discipline. Accountability is the opposite of permissiveness. Holding people accountable is really about the distribution of power and choice. When people have more choice, they are more responsible. When they become more responsible, they can have more freedom. That is what building a culture of accountability is all about.

So, how do you build a culture of accountability?

First, you stop doing things that undermine accountability—stop overseeing, legislating and micromanaging. Realize the power of reflective questioning, conversations, and collaborations.

Companies that can clearly identify, articulate, and execute their strategic goals are well positioned to be able to create a culture of accountability. In order to effectively achieve these goals, companies must measure and manage actual business performance against these goals in a highly coordinated manner.

A six-step framework to build a culture of accountability is to:

1. Decide what’s Important (develop an authentic mission, vision, values, strategic position)

2. Set Goals That Lead (planning that includes measures, targets, projects)

3. Align Systems (streamline processes and resources so everything supports the goals)

4. Execute the Plan (each employee’s plans and activities support the goals)

5. Solve Problems innovatively (get to root causes quicker, make more informed decisions)

6. Develop Leadership (step back, assess results, develop leadership from within)

Building a culture of accountability requires not only a framework or a systematic methodology based on proven best practices. It also requires technologies that make the framework practical to use and implement on a daily, weekly, monthly quarterly and annual basis. In addition, it takes an outside coach or strategic advisor to help you along the way to make it “stick” – to make it last. Finally, it takes an organization that is ready and able to accept accountability, the ownership and the freedom that comes with the new responsibility mindset.

One thing I have learned (the hard way) from founding a rapidly growing company is without ownership and accountability you literally cannot grow your business. In fact, without employee ownership and accountability, your business is dying.

Ownership offers the freedom for employees to deliver results. It is about them taking initiative and responsibility for their work. Where there is an opportunity to take initiative or bring ideas forward, it happens. Best of all, employees that rate high on taking ownership think like leaders.

Accountability is the other side of ownership. It is about following through and delivering on everything you own. True accountability is key, because there is an exponential impact (a detrimental one) to a team when one person cannot make timelines or complete work as expected.

When a team exhibits both ownership and accountability, a high-trust environment is created, and you will see the makings of a high-performance team.

Not only does ownership and accountability create higher performance, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management also indicates it results in improved competency, commitment to work, increased employee morale and work satisfaction. It is also known to improve creativity and innovation because employees are more invested in the organization’s future.

However, according to AMA Enterprise, there is significant lack of accountability on the part of employees. In fact, 21 percent of respondents stated that unaccountable employees make up 30 to 50 percent of their workforce.

How to Create a Culture of Accountability and Ownership

Clearly, accountability and ownership are important. So, what can leaders do to create a culture of accountability that influences employees to take responsibility over their work? Here are five ways to instill a culture of accountability:

Make ownership and accountability a lived value.

Do not just ask yourself how you can get accountability and ownership in the workplace — make employees live it! Living values and communicating values are very different. I have found that the easiest way to embed these as values in your team is to start with goals and metrics.

Provide everyone on your team with their own meaningful goals and measurable metrics that align with the company’s. Clear goals drive many important behaviors, including accountability. Without good measurable goals and clear timelines, it is almost impossible to effectively enforce accountability.

Another important aspect of good goals is how the help define what does not get focus. Often accountability suffers when too many commitments get made. Goals need to be achievable and priorities must always align with these goals. This allows employees to prioritize their work easily, for example, “Which task contributes to my goals?” Objectives and key results (OKRs) allow us to focus on our priorities, create clarity and accountability.

Draw a box and let the employee own what goes on inside it.

Similar to commander’s intent, establish expectations by defining what the end goal is and the results you are looking to achieve. Highlight these goals to your employees, without prescribing how to achieve them.

Demonstrate that you trust employees by allowing them to figure out the course on their own. If you instill trust in them to get it done, you will empower them to succeed and take responsibility over the outcome.

They will also find the work more rewarding, which contributes to their taking ownership over tasks. Goal-oriented employees are comfortable working autonomously and require little oversight from manager and leaders. This leads us to the next point:

There is no such thing as half delegating.

Micromanaging leads to resentment, stifles initiative and makes employees feel like a simple cog in someone else’s wheel. The compulsion for you to micromanage results from a lack of trust in employees, teaching them that they should seek constant guidance and check-in often, even when they feel like they are on track. It is also very difficult to take ownership over someone else’s playbook.

Give your employees an opportunity to problem-solve on their own rather than doing it for them. Productive employees are high performing because they are proactive about identifying and solving problems.

Explain why their box even exists in the first place.

Do your employees understand how their work contributes to the organization’s success? When leaders were asked this question as part of the 2013 study by AMA Enterprise, the results were staggering. More than half of the leaders questioned said that only 49 percent of employees fully understand the extent that their responsibilities contribute to the organization’s success.

Remember that box you drew for your employee? If you do not connect it to organizational success, an employee does not get a clear picture of the purpose of their job. Communicating how they directly cascade towards the organization’s future success gives employees not only a sense of meaning and impact but also information that will allow them to improve the organization.

This goes beyond the metrics and outputs and into the “why” of the organization and team.

Become an active listener and let them make their box better.

If employees are taking ownership of their work, it is your job to help them do a better job, faster. You become their coach, not their manager.

Creating a company culture that encourages employees to express themselves and share ideas with you is not easy, but listening is the first step. Listening shows that their opinions matter to the business. Let them propose a plan to you, and work with them, if needed, to make it happen. Active listening also means explaining to the core when something is a “yes,” versus “no,” versus “a not now.”

Workplace accountability and taking ownership is all about acknowledging what is on the line for your team and using it to motivate employees to achieve their goals. It is a simple, human-based and very effective approach to avoid organizational mistakes and to improve overall performance.

Accountability and organizational change come through a new set of conversations. You can start having these conversations in your organization. Do not wait - start today!

Mel Feller, MPA, MHR, is a well-known real estate, business consultant, personal development consultant and speaker, specializing in performance, productivity, and profits. Mel is the President/Founder of Mel Feller Seminars with Coaching for Success 360, Inc. and Mel Feller Coaching, a real estate and business specific coaching company. His three books for real estate professionals are systems on how to become an exceptional sales performer. His four books in Business and Government Grants are ways to leverage and increase your business Success in both time and money! His book on Personal Development “Lies that Will Sabotage Your Success”. Mel Feller is in Texas.

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hellomynameiseril · 4 years

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Ten questions Voice

But when compared to reputation of DeFi, Tone of voice has made little progress, but there are numerous doubts. Including me, I have a lot of queries about Tone of voice, and in the past year, Voice hasn't resolved the queries in my own mind. These questions are expressed in the next 10 points: 01 When will Tone of voice go live? Let's start with the timeline of Tone of voice events: In June 2019, Block.one announced the start of Voice; In February 2020, Tone of voice released a beta version; In July 2020, Tone of voice will be open to the planet; In the first quarter of 2021, Voice is tentatively scheduled to release the state version of the App... On the surface, Voice has been developed step-by-step. But for those who have been watching Voice this year, our experience will not appear to be so orderly. The reasons are the following: 1. How many occasions do you wish to contact "The wolf will be coming"? I don't know how many people are like me. Previously yr, they thought "Tone of voice will be released soon" many times, but it has not been released yet. The moment such news came out, the state attitude was possibly ambiguous, or waited until the topic was fermented to a certain degree before approaching forward to produce a clarification. Although I am aware that Tone of voice, as a highly anticipated project, needs to constantly get rid of quite a few news to generate hot topics through the two-year development cycle. As a loyal EOS enthusiast, I can't help but believe that Tone of voice shouts "The wolf is coming" more often, which is a bit consuming enthusiast expectations. 2. "Toothpaste squeeze" marketing method Take Voice's July 4th update: If the reading through permission is only open on July 4, unregistered people nevertheless cannot register and cannot participate, please make it clear, don't add a few phrases of "details restriction" following the hot fry.

This behavior is really like a crayfish shop with a banner of "50% off today" hung downstairs in my own house. When I questioned a good friend to eat out excitedly, the merchant informed you: Sorry, it's 50% off peanuts! 3. Does Voice create us wait too much time? Officials have clearly stated that the state version of Tone of voice will be launched in the first quarter of 2021. We can not say that there surely is nothing incorrect with using 2 yrs to polish the boutique social platform, but we carry out believe that two yrs is really a bit long. When this time is long, the popularity of EOS will drop noticeable to the naked eye; the expected worth of Voice may also drop noticeable to the naked eyesight. Furthermore, from June 2019 to July 2020, this year roughly, almost occupied 2/3 of the development time officially disclosed by Tone of voice, but so far as we see Tone of voice, there seems to be no obvious bright spot. It's been less than per year since the official version premiered. Will Voice bring us some highlights in the next 1/3 of that time period? Hard to state. But as the steadfast EOS holder, I am still ready to think that good things are hard to come by and give the Voice group full trust.

02 Is Voice playing hunger marketing I'm not sure if Voice is doing hunger marketing, but I believe everyone is really starving for Voice's authorized accounts. Because we are able to clearly feel Voice's handle over the number of registered accounts: Last year, there were few users who authorized through Tone of voice. We can understand it as a regional restriction, but based on the latest official information: Although Voice began to open worldwide registration on August 15th, not really everyone can register-only after receiving invitations from registered users are eligible to register for Voice. This is like hunger marketing! More community customers have got bold guesses: If the state launch of "the number of invitations per registered user is limited", then I am afraid that a Tone of voice invitation code will be hyped by the marketplace.

03 KYC disputes and policy supervision Anyone who has watched the Tone of voice promo knows: Different from centralized social media, Voice expectations to utilize decentralized features to protect user privacy whilst truly using the right to speak in its own hands. However, Voice includes a KYC mechanism that violates the principle of decentralization, so we have to worry about privacy leakage once again. In response, BB's response was: ** ** Only your name and nationality will be recorded on the chain, some other sensitive information will not. But will Block.one get the user's private information? Will there be any threat of Block.one leaking user privacy information? However, some people state that the introduction of KYC is really a regulatory requirement to a certain degree, and we've also seen the initiatives of Block.one for Tone of voice "compliance": Last year, Block. one recognized a fine from the US SEC. The SEC furthermore granted Block. one an important exemption. Block. one will not be restricted by certain existing rules. But supervision is also contrary to the theory of decentralization. Although I usually think that "there is no complete decentralization on earth," I also think that social systems do require a certain degree of regulatory measures. But however, I still care about Voice, an equal, free, and decentralized platform: Will compliance with "regulation" come at the expense of fairness brought about by decentralization, thereby harming the interests of ordinary customers? I think this is also one of the things that Voice hasn't yet clear.

04 Is the Voice pass really fair? The disadvantages of Steem are: 1. The proliferation of robots, readers' wool celebration rampant; 2. The older authors hold an organization, like each other and comment to get income, brand-new authors hardly ever have a possibility. In reaction to this, Tone of voice has produced improvements: 1. Introduce KYC to remove fake accounts; 2. Modify the weight. The excess weight of the likes of viewpoint leaders on Tone of voice is the same as that of common people. As for the Voice pass, the currently known details includes: 1. You will get Tone of voice tokens by posting, liking and other procedures on Tone of voice, and high-quality content material producers/KOLs can get more Tone of voice tokens; 2. You may make your posts appear in a far more prominent position by paying Tone of voice tokens; 3. Whenever someone pays more Tone of voice than you, your article will move lower, and the original Tone of voice tokens used may also be returned. In addition, you can even get additional Tone of voice, which encourages you to speak louder than before. Check it out once.

This appears to avoid Steem's problem, but don't forget: Voice tokens are tradable. This raises another concern: Can We spend money to buy a lot of Tone of voice and place my posts on top? In this manner, if Tone of voice really develops right into a huge traffic pool, is the news I saw on Tone of voice also the consequence of capital operation? In reaction to this, perhaps Tone of voice includes a better design yet to be announced.

05 How can Voice's spending budget of hundreds of millions of bucks be used? Originally, there is you don't need to tell users how a team would spend money. But Block.one is different. As the parent corporation of EOS and retains 100 million EOS in its hands, its every shift will more or less affect the development of EOS, so we care about Block.one's cash. flower. Currently, Block.you have invested US$150 million in Tone of voice make it possible for it to use independently from Block.one. The US$150 million includes US$100 million in cash and US$50 million in intellectual property assets. Furthermore, Block.one purchased the domain title voice.com for People$30 million. It could be seen that the investment decision is high. But looking at Voice's official Twitter, you can find only 4869 enthusiasts, and the promo video released on July 4th is thought to have already been watched by everyone, and the level is not really very high.

However, marketing expenses are only section of Voice's investment, technology may account for the bulk, and after all, Voice hasn't officially launched. When BM chose to be a social platform, it must also remember that EOS's strong user base may divert Voice. Upon this point, I am not very worried.

06 If Tone of voice is successful So how exactly does EOS load millions of users Someone calculated a merchant account: Block.one invested 150 million U.S. bucks for Voice. Based on the customer acquisition cost of 100 yuan per KYC user on the web, Voice can easily reach the million user level. But may EOS performance carry millions of users? Although the performance of EOS can be called the best, the scene of network paralysis caused by EIDOS mining half a year ago continues to be vivid, and many people are questioning whether the EOS network can support the operation of Voice.

Some people say: The dApp on the EOS chain can pay for the CPU for users, and Tone of voice is backed by Block.one, so there is no need to worry about resource issues. However, as we described at the beginning of the article, Voice is really a dApp template on EOS chain meticulously created by Block.one, which can provide a reference for some other dApp projects. Not every dApp developer gets the strong power of Block.one. From the viewpoint of paying customers for CPU, is the cost of dApp development on the EOS chain too much? Consequently, achieving technological breakthroughs and improving the functionality of the general public chain are what really matters.

07 Can Tone of voice out from the circle Anyone who has seen the Tone of voice page can easily see that Tone of voice isn't just limited to blockchain socialization, but addresses all areas of life such as sports, tradition, and tourism.

Individuals who think Tone of voice can be out from the circle have the next reasons: 1. Voice is the second period for BM to choose the social track, which avoids several Steem problems; 2. Blockchain has three natural benefits: DeFi, interpersonal, and games. Tone of voice belongs to interpersonal; 3. Voice offers a free EOS account for each registered user, which greatly reduces the threshold for use; 4. As a blockchain social platform, Voice's vision nevertheless solves the pain points of many centralized social platform users. However, this will depend on whether the official version of Voice may convert these benefits well.

08 Experience school or even technology flow Although it includes a lot of advantages, the knowledge of using Voice is also very important. Being out from the circle implies that an individual base is large, but technologies is quite abstract after all, in fact it is difficult for everyone to comprehend the technical logic behind the product. Therefore, the product experience is very important. But when compared to already very mature Facebook, Twitter, etc., we've not seen too many highlights from the presently released Tone of voice beta. Even Tone of voice product visions such as decentralization, openness and transparency, rejection of control reviews and manipulation caused by bogus accounts are difficult for users to seriously feel. Whether Voice may attract numerous users is without a doubt yet to be known.

09 If Tone of voice is unsuccessful Does EOS have other big techniques to release Asking this issue isn't to end up being optimistic about Tone of voice, but after all, we must pay attention to one in the event. While looking towards Voice, we are able to carefully recall the entire 2020: Aside from Voice, perhaps you have heard some other hot information of EOS that has caused widespread conversation in the community? This is simply not a good thing, because provided that there is prosperity, there will be a hundred flowers blooming: Voice can be a dApp template created by Block.one on the EOS community chain, but EOS cannot only have this template. Moreover, everyone's anticipations for Tone of voice are high. Nearly 80% of EOS hotspots are created by Voice. If the excellence of Tone of voice does not meet up with everyone's anticipations, how can Block.one stabilize everyone's confidence in EOS?

When may Chinese customers use Voice This question is my biggest concern. I as soon as thought that Tone of voice attached great significance to the Chinese marketplace. In the end, in EOS, the influence of the Chinese market lies there; In the end, Voice nevertheless relied on EOS to attract traffic in the first stage. And, just as the cover up of the beaming Twitter personal homepage, BB, in the last yr of the Rat, who dares to state he doesn't worth the Chinese marketplace?

But excluding quite a few "scientific online" customers, the Chinese marketplace is definitely blocked by Tone of voice at present. Although you can find regulatory reasons, past knowledge tells us: The sooner you enter the overall game, the greater the bonus you love. I wish that when the state version of Tone of voice is released in the first quarter of 2021, we will be treated equally.

#earn bitcoin playing games #how to play crypto #crypto mining game #eosbet #oasisdex #how to earn free cryptocurrency

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day0one · 4 years

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How Trump Killed Tens of Thousands of Americans 3 hrs ago

On July 17, President Donald Trump sat for a Fox News interview at the White House. At the time, nearly 140,000 Americans were dead from the novel coronavirus. The interviewer, Chris Wallace, showed Trump a video clip in which Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned of a difficult fall and winter ahead. Trump dismissed the warning. He scoffed that experts had misjudged the virus all along. “Everybody thought this summer it would go away,” said Trump. “They used to say the heat, the heat was good for it and it really knocks it out, remember? So they got that one wrong.”

Trump’s account was completely backward. Redfield and other U.S. public health officials had never promised that heat would knock out the virus. In fact, they had cautioned against that assumption. The person who had held out the false promise of a warm-weather reprieve, again and again, was Trump. And he hadn’t gotten the idea from any of his medical advisers. He had gotten it from Xi Jinping, the president of China, in a phone call in February.

The phone call, the talking points Trump picked up from it, and his subsequent attempts to cover up his alliance with Xi are part of deep betrayal. The story the president now tells—that he “built the greatest economy in history,” that China blindsided him by unleashing the virus, and that Trump saved millions of lives by mobilizing America to defeat it—is a lie. Trump collaborated with Xi, concealed the threat, impeded the U.S. government’s response, silenced those who sought to warn the public, and pushed states to take risks that escalated the tragedy. He’s personally responsible for tens of thousands of deaths.

This isn’t speculation. All the evidence is in the public record. But the truth, unlike Trump’s false narrative, is scattered in different places. It’s in emails, leaks, interviews, hearings, scientific reports, and the president’s stray remarks. This article puts those fragments together. It documents Trump’s interference or negligence in every stage of the government’s failure: preparation, mobilization, public communication, testing, mitigation, and reopening.

Trump has always been malignant and incompetent. As president, he has coasted on economic growth, narrowly averted crises of his own making, and corrupted the government in ways that many Americans could ignore. But in the pandemic, his vices—venality, dishonesty, self-absorption, dereliction, heedlessness—turned deadly. They produced lies, misjudgments, and destructive interventions that multiplied the carnage. The coronavirus debacle isn’t, as Trump protests, an “artificial problem” that spoiled his presidency. It’s the fulfillment of everything he is.

Trump never prepared for a pandemic. For years, he had multiple warnings—briefings, reports, simulations, intelligence assessments—that a crisis such as this one was likely and that the government wasn’t ready for it. In April, he admitted that he was informed of the risks: “I always knew that pandemics are one of the worst things that could happen.” But when the virus arrived, the federal government was still ill-equipped to deal with it. According to Trump, “We had no ventilators. We had no testing. We had nothing.”

That’s an exaggeration. But it’s true that the stockpile of pandemic supplies was depleted and that the government’s system for producing virus tests wasn’t designed for such heavy demand. So why, for the first three years of his presidency, did Trump do nothing about it? He often brags that he spent $2 trillion to beef up the military. But he squeezed the budget for pandemics, disbanded the federal team in charge of protecting the country from biological threats, and stripped down the Beijing office of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Trump has been asked several times to explain these decisions. He has given two answers. One is that he wanted to save money. “Some of the people we cut, they haven’t been used for many, many years,” he said in February. “If we have a need, we can get them very quickly. … I’m a businessperson. I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them.”

His second answer is that he had other priorities. In March, at a Fox News town hall, Bret Baier asked Trump why he hadn’t updated the test production system. “I’m thinking about a lot of other things, too, like trade,” Trump replied. “I’m not thinking about this.” In May, ABC’s David Muir asked him, “What did you do when you became president to restock those cupboards that you say were bare?” Trump gave the same answer: “I have a lot of things going on.”

Trump prepared for war, not for a virus. He wagered that if a pandemic broke out, he could pull together the resources to contain it quickly. He was wrong. But that was just the first of many mistakes.

In early January, Trump was warned about a deadly new virus in China. He was also told that the Chinese government was understating the outbreak. (See this timeline for a detailed chronology of what Trump knew and when he knew it.) This was inconvenient because Trump was about to sign a lucrative trade deal with Beijing. “We have a great relationship with China right now, so I don’t want to speak badly of anyone,” Trump told Laura Ingraham in a Fox News interview on Jan. 10. He added that he was looking forward to a second deal with Xi. When Ingraham asked about China’s violations of human rights, Trump begged off. “I’m riding a fine line because we’re making … great trade deals,” he pleaded.

Trump signed the deal on Jan. 15. He lauded Xi and said previous American presidents, not Xi, were at fault for past troubles between the two countries. Three days later, Alex Azar, Trump’s secretary of health and human services, phoned him with an update on the spread of the novel coronavirus. On Jan. 21, the CDC announced the first infection in the United States. Two of the government’s top health officials—Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases—said the virus was beginning to circulate around the world.

Trump would later claim that he saw from the outset how grim the situation was. That was clear, he recalled, in the “initial numbers coming out from China.” But at the time, he told Americans everything was fine. “We’re in great shape,” he assured Maria Bartiromo in a Fox Business interview on Jan. 22. “China’s in good shape, too.” He preferred to talk about trade instead. “The China deal is amazing, and we’ll be starting Phase Two very soon,” he said. On CNBC, Joe Kernen asked Trump whether there were any “worries about a pandemic.” “No, not at all,” the president replied. “We have it totally under control.” When Kernen asked whether the Chinese were telling the whole truth about the virus, Trump said they were. “I have a great relationship with President Xi,” he boasted. “We just signed probably the biggest deal ever made.”

The crisis in China grew. In late January, Trump’s medical advisers agreed with his national security team that he should suspend travel from China to the United States. But Trump resisted. He had spent months cultivating a relationship with Xi and securing the trade deal. He was counting on China to buy American goods and boost the U.S. economy, thereby helping him win reelection. He had said this to Xi explicitly, in a conversation witnessed by then-National Security Adviser John Bolton. Trump also worried that a travel ban would scare the stock market. But by the end of the month, airlines were halting flights to China anyway. On Jan. 31, Trump gave in.

His advisers knew the ban would only buy time. They wanted to use that time to fortify America. But Trump had no such plans. On Feb. 1, he recorded a Super Bowl interview with Sean Hannity. Hannity pointed out that the number of known infections in the United States had risen to eight, and he asked Trump whether he was worried. The president brushed him off. “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China,” said Trump. That was false: Thanks to loopholes in the ban, the coronavirus strain that would engulf Washington state arrived from China about two weeks later. But at the time of the interview, the ban hadn’t even taken effect. The important thing, to Trump, was that he had announced the ban. He was less interested in solving the problem than in looking as though he had solved it. And in the weeks to come, he would argue that the ban had made other protective measures unnecessary.

There were three logical steps to consider after suspending travel from China. The first was suspending travel from Europe. By Jan. 21, Trump’s advisers knew the virus was in France. By Jan. 31, they knew it had reached Italy, Germany, Finland, and the United Kingdom. From conversations with European governments, they also knew that these governments, apart from Italy, weren’t going to block travel from China. And they were directly informed that the flow of passengers from Europe to the United States far exceeded the normal flow of passengers from China to the United States. Trump’s deputy national security adviser, Matthew Pottinger, pleaded for a ban on travel from Europe, but other advisers said this would hurt the economy in an election year. Trump, persuaded by Pottinger’s opponents, refused to go along.

Not until March 11, six weeks after blocking travel from China, did Trump take similar action against Europe. In a televised address, he acknowledged that travelers from Europe had brought the disease to America. Two months later, based on genetic and epidemiological analyses, the CDC would confirm that Trump’s action had come too late because people arriving from Europe—nearly 2 million of them in February, hundreds of whom were infected—had already accelerated the spread of the virus in the United States.

The second step was to gear up production of masks, ventilators, and other medical supplies. In early February, trade adviser Peter Navarro, biomedical research director Rick Bright, and other officials warned of impending shortages of these supplies. Azar would later claim that during this time, everyone in the administration was pleading for more equipment. But when Azar requested $4 billion to stock up, the White House refused. Trump dismissed the outcry for masks and ridiculed Democrats for “forcing money” on him to buy supplies. “They say, ‘Oh, he should do more,’ ” the president scoffed in an interview on Feb. 28. “There’s nothing more you can do.”

The third and most important step was to test the population to see whether the virus was spreading domestically. That was the policy of South Korea, the global leader in case detection. Like the United States, South Korea had identified its first case on Jan. 20. But from there, the two countries diverged. By Feb. 3 South Korea had expanded its testing program, and by Feb. 27 it was checking samples from more than 10,000 people a day. The U.S. program, hampered by malfunctions and bureaucratic conflict, was nowhere near that. By mid-February, it was testing only about 100 samples a day. As a result, few infections were being detected.

Fauci saw this as a grave vulnerability. From Feb. 14 to March 11, he warned in a dozen hearings, forums, and interviews that the virus might be spreading “under the radar.” But Trump wasn’t interested. He liked having a low infection count—he bragged about it at rallies—and he understood that the official count would stay low if people weren’t tested. Trump had been briefed on the testing situation since late January and knew test production was delayed. But he insisted that “anybody that wants a test can get a test” and that “the tests are all perfect.” Later, he brushed off the delay in test production and said it had been “quickly remedied.” He complained that additional tests, by exposing additional cases, made him “look bad.”

To keep the numbers low, Trump was willing to risk lives. He figured that infections didn’t count if they were offshore, so he tried to prevent infected Americans from setting foot on American soil. In mid-February, even as he refused to bar Europeans from entering the United States, he exploded in anger when more than a dozen infected Americans were allowed to return from Japan. “I hated to do it, statistically,” he told Hannity. “You know, is it going to look bad?” In March, he opposed a decision to let passengers off a cruise ship in California. “I’d rather have the people stay” offshore, he explained, “because I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship.”

When the spread of the virus in the United States could no longer be denied, Trump called it the “invisible enemy.” But Trump had kept it invisible. The CDC would later acknowledge that due to woefully insufficient testing, the overwhelming majority of infections had gone undiagnosed. Models would show that by mid-February, there were hundreds of undetected infections in the United States for every known case. By the end of the month, there were thousands.

Trump didn’t just ignore warnings. He suppressed them. When Azar briefed him about the virus in January, Trump called him an “alarmist” and told him to stop panicking. When Navarro submitted a memo about the oncoming pandemic, Trump said he shouldn’t have put his words in writing. As the stock market rose in February, Trump discouraged aides from saying anything about the virus that might scare investors.

The president now casts himself as a victim of Chinese deception. In reality, he collaborated with Xi to deceive both the Chinese public and the American public. For weeks after he was briefed on the situation in China, including the fact that Beijing was downplaying the crisis, Trump continued to deny that the Chinese government was hiding anything. He implied that American experts had been welcomed in China and could vouch for Beijing’s information, which—as he would acknowledge months later—wasn’t true. On Twitter, Trump wrote tributes worthy of Chinese state propaganda. “Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation,” he proclaimed.

On Feb. 10, just before a rally in New Hampshire, Trump told Fox News host Trish Regan that the Chinese “have everything under control. … We’re working with them. You know, we just sent some of our best people over there.” Then Trump walked onstage and exploited the political payoff of his deal with Xi. “Last month, we signed a groundbreaking trade agreement with China that will defeat so many of our opponents,” he boasted. He told the crowd that he had spoken with Xi and that the virus situation would “work out fine.” “By April,” he explained, “in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.”

Trump didn’t tell the crowd that he had heard this theory from Xi. But that’s what the record indicates. There’s no evidence of Trump peddling the warm-weather theory prior to Feb. 7, when he had an overnight phone call with Xi. Immediately after that call, Trump began to promote the idea. Later, he mentioned that Xi had said it. When Fauci, Messonnier, Azar, and Redfield were asked about the theory, they all said it was an unwise assumption, since the virus was new. The American president, against the judgment of his public health officials, was feeding American citizens a false assurance passed to him by the Chinese president.

Three days after the rally in New Hampshire, Trump defended China’s censorship of information about the virus. In a radio interview, Geraldo Rivera asked him, “Did the Chinese tell the truth about this?” Trump, in reply, suggested that he would have done what Xi had done. “I think they want to put the best face on it,” he said. “If you were running it … you wouldn’t want to run out to the world and go crazy and start saying whatever it is, ’cause you don’t want to create a panic.” Weeks later, Trump would also excuse Chinese disinformation about the virus, telling Fox News viewers that “every country does it.”

Trump envied Xi. He wished he could control what Americans heard and thought, the way Xi could control China’s government and media. But Trump didn’t have authoritarian powers, and some of his subordinates wouldn’t shut up. As the virus moved from country to country, Fauci, Redfield, and Azar began to acknowledge that it would soon overtake the United States. On Feb. 25, when Messonnier said Americans should prepare for school and workplace closures, the stock market plunged. Trump, in a rage, called Azar and threatened to fire Messonnier. The next day, the president seized control of the administration’s press briefings on the virus.

On Feb. 26, shortly before Trump held his first briefing, aides gave him bad news: The CDC had just confirmed the first U.S. infection that couldn’t be traced to foreign travel. That meant the virus was spreading undetected. But when Trump took the podium, he didn’t mention what he had just been told. Instead, he assured the public that infections in the United States were “going down, not up” and that the case count “within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.” He predicted that America wouldn’t “ever be anywhere near” having to close schools or distribute more masks, since “our borders are very controlled.” When a reporter pointed out that the United States had tested fewer than 500 people, while South Korea had tested tens of thousands, Trump shot back, “We’re testing everybody that we need to test. And we’re finding very little problem.”

Trump’s eruption brought his subordinates into line. Shortly after the president’s angry call to Azar, Redfield told Congress that “our containment strategy has been quite successful.” At her next briefing, for the first time, Messonnier praised Trump by name. She parroted his talking points: that the United States had “acted incredibly quickly, before most other countries” and had “aggressively controlled our borders.” Azar, in testimony before the House, went further. When he was asked to explain the discord between Trump and his medical advisers, the health secretary argued that Americans, like citizens of China, needed to be soothed. The president, Azar explained, was “trying to calm” the populace because, as “we see in China, panic can be as big of an enemy as [the] virus.”

Having cowed his health officials, Trump next went after the press. He told Americans to ignore news reports about the virus. On Feb. 26 and Feb. 27, Trump denounced CNN and MSNBC for “panicking markets” by making the crisis “look as bad as possible.” He dismissed their reports as “fake” and tweeted, “USA in great shape!” At a rally in South Carolina on Feb. 28, he accused the press of “hysteria,” called criticism of his virus policies a “hoax,” and insisted that only 15 Americans were infected. Weeks later, he would tell the public not to believe U.S. media reports about Chinese propaganda, either.

In the three weeks after his Feb. 26 crackdown on his subordinates, Trump opposed or obstructed every response to the crisis. Doctors were pleading for virus tests and other equipment. Without enough tests to sample the population or screen people with symptoms, the virus was spreading invisibly. Fauci was desperate to accelerate the production and distribution of tests, but Trump said it wasn’t necessary. On a March 6 visit to the CDC, the president argued that instead of “going out and proactively looking to see where there’s a problem,” it was better to “find out those areas just by sitting back and waiting.” A proactive CDC testing program, lacking presidential support, never got off the ground. Nor did a separate national testing plan—organized by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner—which was supposed to be presented for Trump’s approval but, for unknown reasons, was never announced.

Trump also refused to invoke the Defense Production Act, which could have accelerated the manufacture of masks, gloves, ventilators, and other emergency equipment. In January, HHS had begun to plan for use of the DPA, and in early February, some members of Congress suggested it might be needed. But Trump declined to use it until the end of March. When he was asked why, he said that governors, not the president, were responsible for emergency supplies and that telling “companies what to do” might upset the “business community.”

The president’s most decisive contribution to the death toll was his resistance to public health measures known as “mitigation”: social distancing, school and workplace closures, and cancellations of large gatherings. Messonnier and others had warned since early February that Americans needed to prepare for such measures. On Feb. 24, Trump’s health advisers decided it was time to act. But they couldn’t get a meeting with Trump, because he was off to India to discuss another trade deal. When he returned, he blew up at Messonnier for talking about closing schools and offices. The meeting to discuss mitigation was canceled.

Mitigation required leadership. The president needed to tell Americans that the crisis was urgent and that life had to change. Instead, he told them everything was fine. On March 2, he held another rally, this time in North Carolina. Before the rally, a TV interviewer asked him whether he was taking more precautions because of the virus. “Probably not so much,” Trump replied. “I just shook hands with a whole lot of people back there.” The next day, he said it was safe to travel across the country, since “there’s only one hot spot.” On March 5, at a Fox News town hall, he repeated, “I shake anybody’s hand now. I’m proud of it.” On March 6, visiting the CDC, he was asked about the risks of packing people together at rallies. “It doesn’t bother me at all,” he said.

As schools and businesses began to close, Trump pushed back. On March 4, he dismissed a question about further closures, insisting that only “a very small number” of Americans were infected. On March 9, he tweeted that the virus had hardly killed anyone and that even in bad flu seasons, “nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on.” Italy locked down its population, the NBA suspended its season, and states began to postpone elections. But through the middle of March, as advisers urged the president to endorse mitigation, he stood his ground. Finally, as the stock market continued to fall, Trump’s business friends agreed that it was time to yield. On March 16, he announced mitigation guidelines.

By then, the number of confirmed infections in the United States had surged past 4,000. But that was a fraction of the real number. The CDC would later calculate that in the three weeks from “late February to early March, the number of U.S. COVID-19 cases increased more than 1,000-fold.” And researchers at Columbia University would find that the final two-week delay in mitigation, from March 1 to March 15, had multiplied the U.S. death toll by a factor of six. By May 3, the price of that delay was more than 50,000 lives.

On March 23, a week after he announced the mitigation guidelines, Trump began pushing to rescind them. “We have to open our country,” he demanded. He batted away questions about the opinions of his medical advisers. “If it were up to the doctors, they may say, ‘Let’s keep it shut down,’ ” he shrugged. But “you can’t do that with a country, especially the No. 1 economy.” The next day, the stock market soared, and Trump took credit. Investors “see that we want to get our country open as soon as possible,” he crowed.

Trump fixated on the market and the election. In more than a dozen tweets, briefings, and interviews, he explicitly connected his chances of reelection to the speed at which schools and businesses reopened. (Trump focused on schools only after he was told that they were crucial to resuming commerce.) The longer it took, he warned, the better Democrats would do in the election. In April, he applauded states that opened early and hectored states that kept businesses closed. In June, he told workers in Maine, “You’re missing a lot of money.” “Why isn’t your governor opening up your state?” he asked them.

Trump pushed states to reopen businesses even where, under criteria laid out by his health officials, it wasn’t safe to do so. He called for “pressure” and endorsed lawsuits against governors who resisted. He issued an executive order to keep meat-processing plants open, despite thousands of infections among plant employees. He ordered the CDC to publish rules allowing churches to reopen, and he vowed to “override any governor” who kept them closed. In April, he made the CDC withdraw an indefinite ban on cruises, which had spread the virus. In July, he pressed the agency to loosen its guidelines for reopening schools.

He continued to suppress warnings. In April, he claimed that doctors who reported shortages of supplies were faking it. When an acting inspector general released a report that showed supplies were inadequate, Trump dismissed the report and replaced her. When a Navy captain wrote a letter seeking help for his infected crew, Trump endorsed the captain’s demotion. The letter “shows weakness,” he said. “We don’t want to have letter-writing campaigns where the fake news finds a letter or gets a leak.”

Having argued in March against testing, Trump now complained that doctors were testing too many people. He said tests, by revealing infections, made him “look bad.” When Fauci and Deborah Birx, the response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said more tests were needed, Trump openly contradicted them. In July, he claimed that 99 percent of coronavirus infections were “totally harmless”—which wasn’t true—and that the testing system, by detecting these infections, was “working too well.”

Fauci, Birx, Redfield, and other health officials pointed out that mitigation was working. They argued against premature resumption of in-person social activities, noting that the virus wasn’t under control and might roar back. Trump publicly overruled them, tried to discredit them, and pressured them to disavow their words. To block Fauci from disputing Trump’s assurances that the virus was “going away,” the White House barred him from doing most TV interviews. In June, when Fauci said resuming professional football would be risky, Trump rebuked him. “Informed Dr. Fauci this morning that he has nothing to do with NFL Football,” the president tweeted.

Trump interfered with every part of the government’s response. He told governors that testing for the virus was their job, not his. When they asked for help in getting supplies, he told them to “get ’em yourself.” He refused, out of pique, to speak to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or to some governors whose states were overrun by the virus. He told Vice President Mike Pence not to speak to them, either. He refused to consult former presidents, calling them failures and saying he had nothing to learn from them.

Trump didn’t just get in the way. He made things worse. He demanded that Wisconsin hold elections in early April, which coincided with dozens of infections among voters and poll workers. (Some researchers later found correlations between infections and voting in that election; others didn’t.) He forced West Point to summon cadets, 15 of whom were infected, back to campus to attend his commencement speech in June. He suggested that the virus could be killed by injecting disinfectants. He persistently urged Americans to take hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug, despite research that found it was ineffective against the coronavirus and in some cases could be dangerous. Trump dismissed the research as “phony.”

The simplest way to control the virus was to wear face coverings. But instead of encouraging this precaution, Trump ridiculed masks. He said they could cause infections, and he applauded people who spurned them. Polls taken in late May, as the virus began to spread across the Sun Belt, indicated that Trump’s scorn was suppressing mask use. A Morning Consult survey found that the top predictor of non-use of masks, among dozens of factors tested, was support for Trump. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey found that people who seldom or never wore masks were 12 times more likely to support Trump than to support his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden. Some scientific models imply that Trump’s suppression of mask use may have contributed to hundreds, if not thousands, of deaths.

On June 10, Trump announced that he would resume holding political rallies. He targeted four states: Florida, Texas, Arizona, and Oklahoma. The point of the rallies, he explained, wasn’t just to boost his campaign but to signal that it was time to “open up our country” and “get back to business.” When reporters raised the possibility that he might spread the virus by drawing crowds indoors, he accused them of “trying to Covid Shame us on our big Rallies.”

Despite being warned that infections in Oklahoma were surging, Trump proceeds with a rally at a Tulsa arena on June 20. To encourage social distance, the arena’s managers put “Do Not Sit Here” stickers on alternate seats. The Trump campaign removed the stickers. Trump also refused to wear a mask at the rally—few people in the crowd did, either—and in his speech, he bragged about continuing to shake children’s hands. Two weeks later, Tulsa broke its record for daily infections, and the city’s health director said the rally was partly to blame. Former presidential candidate Herman Cain attended the rally, tested positive for the virus days afterward, and died at the end of July.

At the rally, Trump complained that health care workers were finding too many infections by testing people for the virus. He said he had told “my people” to “slow the testing down, please.” Aides insisted that the president was joking. But on June 22, in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, he said he was only half-joking. He affirmed, this time seriously, that he had told “my people” that testing was largely frivolous and bad for America’s image. Weeks later, officials involved in negotiations on Capitol Hill disclosed that the administration, against the wishes of Senate Republicans, was trying to block funding for virus tests.

Two days after the Tulsa rally, an interviewer asked Trump whether he was putting lives at risk “by continuing to hold these indoor events.” Trump brushed off the question: “I’m not worried about it. No, not at all.” The next day, June 23, the president staged another largely mask-free rally, this time in a church in Arizona, where a statewide outbreak was underway. Days later, Secret Service agents and a speaker at the Arizona rally tested positive for the virus. On June 28, Trump urged people to attend another rally, this time featuring Pence, at a Dallas church where five choir and orchestra members had tested positive.

In his interview with Wallace, which aired July 19, Trump conceded nothing. He called Fauci an alarmist and repeated that the virus would “disappear.” He excoriated governors for “not allowing me to have rallies” and accused them of keeping businesses closed to hurt him in the election. He claimed that “masks cause problems” and said people should feel free not to wear them. He threatened to defund schools unless they resumed in-class instruction. As to the rising number of infections, Trump scoffed that “many of those cases shouldn’t even be cases,” since they would “heal automatically.” By testing so many people, he groused, health care workers were “creating trouble for the fake news to come along and say, ‘Oh, we have more cases.’ ”

Since that interview, Trump has attacked and belittled his medical advisers. He lashed out at Birx for acknowledging the ongoing spread of the virus. He retweeted a false claim that Fauci was suppressing hydroxychloroquine “to perpetuate Covid deaths to hurt Trump.” When Fauci told Congress that infections had increased due to insufficient mitigation, Trump rebuked him and blamed the surge on increased testing. And when Dave Portnoy, a wealthy Trump supporter, complained that his stocks tanked every time Fauci called for mitigation, Trump assured Portnoy that the doctor’s pleas would go nowhere. “He’d like to see [the economy] closed up for a couple of years,” Trump said of Fauci. “But that’s OK because I’m president. So I say, ‘I appreciate your opinion. Now somebody give me another opinion.’ ”

It’s hard to believe a president could be this callous and corrupt. It’s hard to believe one person could get so many things wrong or do so much damage. But that’s what happened. Trump knew we weren’t ready for a pandemic, but he didn’t prepare. He knew China was hiding the extent of the crisis, but he joined in the cover-up. He knew the virus was spreading in the United States, but he said it was vanishing. He knew we wouldn’t find it without more tests, but he said we didn’t need them. He delayed mitigation. He derided masks. He tried to silence anyone who told the truth. And in the face of multiple warnings, he pushed the country back open, reigniting the spread of the disease.

Now Trump asks us to reelect him. “We had the greatest economy in the history of the world,” he told Fox News on Wednesday. “Then we got hit with the plague from China.” But now, he promised, “We’re building it again.” In Trump’s story, the virus is a foreign intrusion, an unpleasant interlude, a stroke of bad luck. But when you stand back and look at the full extent of his role in the catastrophe, it’s amazing how lucky we were. For three years, we survived the most ruthless, reckless, dishonest president in American history. Then our luck ran out.

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easyfoodnetwork · 4 years

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Efired/Shutterstock During quarantine, the bakers who staff the hotline are providing baking — and emotional — support On March 14, COVID-19 was declared a national emergency in the U.S., hand sanitizer profiteers made headlines, and states had yet to issue stay-at-home orders. It was also Pi Day — that is, the date 3/14, which is often cheekily observed by baking or eating pie. The date stands out to Martina Pochop because she’s a baker and because when she went to work the next day, she noticed a flood of new calls and emails. Popchop works as a baker support specialist at King Arthur Flour’s Norwich, Vermont headquarters, and part of her job is answering calls on the company’s Baker’s Hotline, a number anyone can call for advice on their doughs and batters. “It was literally overnight,” she says. “Everything just started tumbling down an endless path in search of flour.” King Arthur Flour quietly launched its Baker’s Hotline in 1993. While it may not be as well known as the Butterball Turkey Talk Line, it displays a level of homespun commitment not seen in other culinary help lines. The Baker’s Hotline is staffed by 15 people who answer calls and emails for eight to 12 hours a day, 357 days a year. Most have culinary degrees and worked as professional bakers, chocolatiers, and chefs before coming to King Arthur, where they generally work in education, recipe-developing, or product-testing roles in addition to answering the hotline. They’ve picked up the phone so many times that many can recite their opening line as if in their sleep: baker support specialist Maggie Perry recently answered a call from her child’s pediatrician with, “Hi, this is Maggie at King Arthur.” The holidays and summer (baking contest season) tend to be busy for the Baker’s Hotline, but those pale in comparison to the pandemic. In April, queries to the King Arthur hotline surpassed the four busiest weeks over the winter holidays, with a total of 10,406 calls and 7,740 emails, requiring six additional bakers working in other departments to step in and answer emails. It hasn’t let up: King Arthur’s staff has experienced unrelenting call volumes for three months, and during this time, the hotline has become a magnet for lonely, anxious human behavior and lots of questions about sourdough. The baker support specialists have seen a few patterns emerge. Before the pandemic, most calls came from regular bakers on the older side, with some “frequent fliers” who called mostly just to chat. But in March, they started hearing from more beginner bakers who couldn’t easily ask family members for advice about old recipes or about the difference between all-purpose and bread flour — sometimes it was because they’d recently lost someone, other times because they lived far away and couldn’t reach them by phone. Perry also noticed that once schools shut down, parents started calling about homeschool baking projects. “[Baking is] one of those magical things. It’s science, it’s math,” she says. And more people were asking about finicky projects like pâte à choux or macarons, recipes whose long timelines newly appealed to those working from home or looking for weekend time-sucks. As grocery store shortages went beyond sanitizer and toilet paper, calls about ingredient substitutions flooded the hotline. When grocery stores ran low on bread, people called in to ask for recipe suggestions, solutions to rising issues, and once, if it was possible to bake bread on a grill because it was too hot to turn on the oven. Callers looking for a challenge tried out sourdough, “which, for people who have never baked before, is quite an adventure, to say the least,” Pochop says. There were more calls about cookies, but ones baked with alternative flours, since all-purpose was scarce. More time and fewer options at the grocery store have indeed made baking more popular than ever, and King Arthur’s sales have gone up as much as 600 percent accordingly (as have hits to its website). But it’s not the only thing driving thousands more callers to the Baker’s Hotline. According to Pochop, who has been with the company since 2017, “in the last couple of months, people have seemed the most lonely.” Baked goods in particular are so often tied up with nostalgia and relationships; people seem especially anxious about messing up recipes that their loved ones usually made, or just want to talk to someone — anyone — about how much a recipe means to them. A caller may technically be asking about how to halve a recipe, but what they really want to talk about is how they’d usually make a full recipe to share with their grandchildren. “You can’t actually give them everything that they need,” Perry says. “You can just let them know that you’re there and that a lot of other people are calling with the same feelings.” “We hear from people who just don’t know who else to call.” King Arthur baker specialist and customer support shift lead Amanda Schlarbaum recently spoke to a woman who broke down crying after asking a yeast-related question. Her parents lived far away and she didn’t know when she’d see them again. “She was like, ‘I can’t even believe I’m crying over bread.’ And I’m like, you know, that’s where we all are right now.” The caller ended up spending $55 to send her parents a homemade loaf. In retrospect, the Baker’s Hotline was primed to be a source of comfort during quarantine. King Arthur has a reputation for its teaching culture; its resources are notably beginner-friendly and easygoing. “If you have a process you’ve successfully followed before, then hey, stick with it. Or try this one and compare. All good,” PJ Hamel writes in the company’s oft-recommended primer on sourdough starter. On King Arthur’s social media platforms, bakers have always felt comfortable posting panicked photos of explosively large doughs or asking extremely specific questions. And when bakers tag @kingarthurflour in photos of their finished products, the company responds like an enthusiastic friend. “What a lovely bundt, Marilyn!” reads a reply to one user’s tweeted creation. “Pairing ingredients and recipes is like putting two partners together for a dance. Will they fluidly tango? Your stunning Kaiser Rolls clearly answer that question!” the company replied on Facebook when a baker paired King Arthur’s bread flour with a Cook’s Illustrated recipe. Hotline staffers are armed with all of King Arthur’s online resources and cookbooks, as well as fat binders of their own creation filled with handwritten notes on questions that have been asked before. And they’re game for questions that extend outside the baking realm. In late April, Schlarbaum picked up the phone to a stranger who wanted to know how much extra sauce she should make if she’d bought an extra pound of oxtail. “She was so nonchalant about it,” Schlarbaum says. As Easter in quarantine approached, Pochop received a few questions about ham and potatoes. Even non-baking questions are usually culinary in nature, so if they can, the staffers try to answer them. After all, imagine you can’t leave your house, see your more cooking-inclined family, or even get through to most customer service lines — but there is one line that promises, seven days a week, to connect you with an actual human who will earnestly try to help you out, no matter how specific your problem. “On a daily basis we hear from people who just don’t know who else to call and they saw our number on the bag of flour that they have in their hand,” says Popchop. As unprecedented as the volume of calls has been recently, the questions are the same as they’ve always been, just modified by the constraints of a global crisis. People still call about wedding cakes, but they’re making a miniature version because the couple is celebrating without family and friends. Schlarbaum called fellow hotline staffers to discuss a mascarpone filling for her own quarantine birthday cake. People are baking to relieve stress, just as they always have done, only now the stress and the baking have increased tenfold: “You’re looking for something that you can accomplish,” Perry says. “You’re looking for something that feels good and can take care of other people.” People are maybe a little more emotional if their buttercream isn’t mixing properly, but Schlarbaum jumps into therapist mode, advising deep breaths and walking away for 15 minutes. “I tell them when I make buttercream, I’ve ruined it every single time.” Most calls end with a relieved baker and sometimes a few extra minutes of chatting, just because the caller doesn’t want to hang up yet. “Right now, people are bored and anxieties are running high,” Schlarbaum says, “and I think people just need someone to be like, ‘No, no, the bread will be fine. Just let it rise another half an hour. It’ll be okay.’” Erin Berger is a freelance writer and former culture editor at Outside magazine, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. from Eater - All https://ift.tt/30LRITh

http://easyfoodnetwork.blogspot.com/2020/06/king-arthur-flours-baking-hotline-has.html

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remembermemorablememories · 5 years

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Sunday, January 13, 2019

post #370

main points:

- brunch with sheena at IHOP

- finish booking seattle and chicago trip with jwoos

- two NY app reviews

- looking around at other local smash tourneys

- dinner with dad and sheena

- help dad clean up / set up the kitchen a bit for renovations / 7 minute workout

- find resources for how to learn chinese through watching TV shows and found a viki, a site with an insanely useful learning tool!!

- help sheena with her AP lang essay

today i:

- woke up at 10am. i felt really exhausted and passed out shortly after and woke up again to my alarm at 11am. i chilled out in bed for a bit and finished up typing friday’s blog post. it snowed like an inch last night :o dad had already woken up to shovel the snow and he and mom had cleaned up most of the kitchen cabinets and made some space for the garage to move the old counters into. they had also added plastic covering for stuff in the living room like TV and couch

- went to get brunch with sheena at IHOP. we spent a while trying to figure out where to go and we just settled with IHOP lmaoo. dad gave us the last two dunkin donuts so he could recycle the box. we left and got there around 1pm and got a table for 2

- we both got a breakfast sampler. she upped her pancakes to strawberry bananas but i stuck with the normal buttermilk. i usually get a french toast combo but i was feeling something more salty so i got the sampler. it was p good

- came back home around 2:30pm and finished booking the seattle plane back home and the seattle airbnb with jwoos. we figured out what we were gonna do and the timeline and then booked everything over messenger and then we were done :D

watched an excellent video on the benefits of college from johnny harris, the guy from vox

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYjBxxm0lmM

- i did two NY app reviews and also just kind of browsed around the local smash community website. trying to see if there were any other tourneys nearby. there’s one happening next tuesday and it’s like a 40-50 minute drive from me. idk if it’s worth it cause the event doesn’t seem to have too many people showing... at least on the fb event

- ate dinner with sheena and dad around 7pm. we were pretty hungry and mom went to go pick up grandma and grandpa from the airport to take them to their place in philly. we started eating and had some beef + potato, beef tender and some veggies. it was part of the stuff dad was preparing from yesterday cause we won’t be able to use the kitchen much starting tomorrow. it was a pretty good meal. dad talked a bit about the soviet union and communist china with rations for foods. and how they used potatoes a lot. each family in china, even if you had the money to pay for food, could only get a certain amount. which is wild... like a set amount of rice per family, set amount of meat. it didn’t matter how many people were in your family... people would starve. mom came home halfway through us eating and also joined in on eating. then she went to take a shower and sheena went upstairs to do homework. dad talked to me a bit about the government shutdown and then materialism / spending money in a capitalist society like the U.S. vs in asian countries like china

then we packed up the dishes. he stored the foods and i washed the dishes. then i helped him put up a plastic curtain thing from one side of the kitchen into the open front door area so that it would block out dust from the renovations

- i did a 7 minute workout with sheena in mom’s room. dad reminded us to do it :p mom was on her phone on the couch chilling while we did it LOL. we had to do it in their room cause the living room’s taken up by all the new cabinets that’ll be installed

- i spent some time online trying to find a way to learn chinese by watching TV because i really want to learn it well (finally). my dad suggested it and so did many people on the internet from what i saw before. i came back to a fluentu blog post that suggested a few TV shows to watch, starting with chinese dramas. i tried to watch a chinese drama but it was kind of hard to understand with chinese speaking and chinese subtitles... i was like... i need a way to understand what they’re actually saying

so i thought maybe the solution was to get more guided videos. and i went back to the fluentu site. i found it before and tried a free trial. i signed up for another free trial and realized why i stopped using it. though they have a good approach to learning, the selection is a bit limited. i was hoping for more full length TV shows but they had mostly short 3 minute commercials. it was cool that i could select vocabulary/subtitles to save them for later to learn. they also had double chinese subtitle and english subtitles. i was like “that’s handy”

i watched a paper marriage commercial. then i tried to watch a TED talk and i realized that reading just the english subs might actually be all i needed. so i found a chinese drama with english subtitles on viki and watched the first 3 minutes. it actually wasn’t too bad. but i feel like i still needed chinese subs to understand the english equivalent of what they were saying... so i needed double subtitles

i found some reddit threads where people asked and a few people pointed to downloading different tools that can display multiple subtitles. then someone said viki had a learning mode that was built into the web player... i was like... whaaaaat??

i looked up viki learning and there it was: a chinese and english double subbed list of 30 chinese drama TV shows. i spent some time finding one that i thought i might actually enjoy watching. then i started the first 10 minutes of it and was so impressed. it had the same features as fluentu. i could click on the vocabulary in the subtitles to understand what it meant, while also getting the english equivalent. and it was all 100% free??? without even needing to make an account?? BLASPHEMY!! i was wonderfully surprised. what an amazing site. my dad also came to check in on sheena and me and i showed him the site and he was also impressed. good job viki team :D

i watched the first 10 minutes but then had to stop cause sheena needed some help with her lang paper :p she was writing the refutation and concession paragraphs for a paper about creativity classes and whether they should exist or not. she needed help with examples for her argument and i gave her some ideas and worked with her for 20-30 minutes

- took a long shower around 11:30-12

- sheena needed some more help with the concession + refutation points. she needed to come up with a concession example/conclusion so i helped her out until 1:40am, where she finally finished and printed it out. she went to sleep :p she gotta go to school early tomorrow. the grind begins again

- i’m writing this at 2:29am i’m gonna brush my teeth and sleep

#post #normal #january #2019 #family #chinese #language

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joannaarobinson · 6 years

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Day in the Life | Katie Thompson

Welcome to our “Day in the Life” series! We feature wedding and event planners from around the world with many different levels of experience. If you would like to be featured, download our questionnaire here and email your responses and photos to [email protected]. We are excited to feature Mexico wedding planner Katie Thompson today!

Name: Katie Thompson

Business Name & Location: Wanderlust Weddings Baja, Los Cabos, Mexico

Years Working in the Event Industry: 14 years

Years Owning Your Event Planning Business: 10 years

Website: www.wanderlustweddingsbaja.com

Business Facebook Page: Baja Wedding Planner

Instagram: @bajaweddingplanner

What is your typical day like?

When I don’t have an event, I love to relax in the morning by doing CrossFit, hiking in the desert, taking the dogs on a beach walk, and swimming in my pool. After that, about 11 a.m., I hit it hard! It’s time to sit down at my computer and get the work done.

Because I live in Cabo San Lucas, where everyone else comes to vacation and party, it can be a bit difficult sometimes to pull myself away from the beach, the food, and the fun! But I always have so much to do, so Cabo for me is more about work than the good times.

During the week, I work on social media, promotions, marketing, and writing my blog. I also spend time connecting with my clients via email and phone. I spend quite a bit of time doing paperwork, updating wedding budgets, invoicing, and creating wedding and event timelines. I take the time to manage the tasks related to running a planning business as well.

I make time to visit new and old venues where I can take pictures, get updates on the venue properties, and make new contacts. This reinforces for me how gorgeous our little part of the world is and that Los Cabo is definitely a destination wedding paradise.

How did you get started in the industry?

It’s actually a funny story! Like many others here in Cabo, I came here on vacation in 2004 and really never left. My family (husband & 3 kids) and I sold our house in California, bought a beachfront lot a bit north of Cabo, lived in a trailer on the property, and put our kids in school in a small town called Todos Santos.

Then, we looked at each other and said, “Well, one of us has to work. One of us has to take care of the kids. Whoever gets a job first will work.” There is a small local newspaper here called the GringoGazette that had an ad for a commission-only job for a Wedding Coordinator for a small American-owned wedding company in Cabo. I applied (buying an interview outfit at a department store on my way to the interview as I’d been living in my bathing suit for months), and it’s been wedding planning for me ever since!

I worked for this company for 4 years, planning and coordinating about 50 weddings a year. I also started my planning company, Dazzle ‘Em Event Design. When the company I was working for closed, I expanded my event planning business to include the ever-growing and beautiful Todos Santos/Pescadero area, about an hour north of Cabo. I have re-branded and re-named my company, Wanderlust Weddings Baja, to better reflect my client base and the way I view my business and the type of weddings I create.

What inspires you?

Los Cabos inspires me! Living in Mexico inspires me. The beach, the sunset, the views, the crashing waves, the Mexican people, the stunning resorts, and wedding venues here inspire me.

It is vibrant and gorgeous everywhere I look – cacti, palm treas, bouganvillea, bright colors, aqua ocean water, palapa roofs, mariachi music drifting down the street. There is a reason Mexican destination weddings are so popular…the spirit of love is everywhere.

I am inspired by the architecture and landscaping everywhere I look – rustic, colonial, modern, sleek.

I am a Pinterest fiend, and I do need to keep up with U.S. wedding industry trends, as all of my clients are American and have American aesthetics as well.

What are your favorite online resources for your business?

I use the wedding planning program, Planning Pod, to keep my events organized and up-to-date. I love that I can share specific parts of the program with my clients so we can share information that way. The program also includes a wedding website and an RSVP collection link so this is an easy way to plan menus, food counts for BEOs, and seating plans.

I love to recommend The Man Registry because sometimes the grooms get overlooked and they have great ideas and wants and needs too.

I also love Dropbox and the ease with which I can share everything (especially photos!). And of course, Instagram and Facebook.

Aside from wedding and event planning, how do you spend your time?

My children are now grown and living back in the U.S. so I have more free time now. I schedule my business so that my husband and I can travel during the slow season here. No one wants an outdoor beach wedding during a hurricane!

We recently traveled to Amsterdam, New York City, New Zealand and Australia, San Miguel de Allende, and Alaska. We also camp and surf all up and down the Baja. Our next big trip will be an overland camping trip through Africa. We also rent casitas on our property here in Los Cabos and we think running the rental business is fun and interesting! We meet people from all over the world who want to explore the Baja.

Katie, thank you so much for taking the time to share your story and a day in your life. If you are an event planner and would like to be featured, download our questionnaire today and email it to us along with a photo. If you aren’t sure about being featured, take a few minutes to read how it can help your business.

SaveSave

from Event Planning Essentials https://plannerslounge.com/day-in-the-life-katie-thompson/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

#event organizer

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judeblenews-blog · 6 years

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Google has a big advantage over Facebook in a crisis

There are bad bugs, and there are worse bugs. But until this week, there had never been a bug that killed a social network. Then the Wall Street Journal reported that a glitch had exposed private Google+ profile information to third-party developers between 2015 until earlier this year. A few hours later, the network — which once claimed 135 million users — was dead. For most of its seven years, Google’s effort to build a Facebook-style social network served mostly as a punchline. The company regularly touted suspiciously massive user numbers, but aside from a few pockets of enthusiasts, Google+ never managed to find a place in people’s lives the way Gmail, YouTube, or other Google services did. Google attempted to reinvent Plus several times, most recently as a kind of modern spin on message boards. And one part of Plus, which focused on helping you organize your photos, thrived once it spun out into a separate service. But mostly it was a wild goose chase — the most prominent example of Google��s many failed attempts to build a true social network. And it will be forever remembered as the social network that shut down over a security glitch — one that it didn’t tell us about until it was discovered by journalists. Why didn’t Google fess up at the time? Here’s what it told the Journal: In weighing whether to disclose the incident, the company considered “whether we could accurately identify the users to inform, whether there was any evidence of misuse, and whether there were any actions a developer or user could take in response,” he said. “None of these thresholds were met here.” As my colleague Russell Brandom notes in a good piece, this wasn’t a “breach” in the legal sense of the word. There are good reasons not to require companies to issue a public disclosure every time they find a simple vulnerability, without any evidence that it was exploited. (Chief among them: it can incentivize them to stop looking so hard.) Still: After Facebook’s painful fall from grace, the legal and the cybersecurity arguments seem almost beside the point. The contract between tech companies and their users feels more fragile than ever, and stories like this one stretch it even thinner. The concern is less about a breach of information than a breach of trust. Something went wrong, and Google didn’t tell anyone. Absent the Journal reporting, it’s not clear it ever would have. It’s hard to avoid the uncomfortable, unanswerable question: what else isn’t it telling us? Google will likely pay a price for this data exposure. (Probably in Euros.) State attorneys general are have taken an interest. US Sen. Mark Warner, D-VA, called the cover-up “pretty outrageous.” And yet Google seemed to shrug off all those worries on stage Tuesday, when its executives appeared to announce the company’s fall hardware lineup. There was a new phone, a tablet, and a competitor to the Echo Show and Facebook Portal that distinguishes itself by omitting a camera. There was no discussion of Google+. That speaks to how dramatically the company has shifted since its social network was born — and why, despite their similar advertising businesses, Google and Facebook occupy such different places in consumers’ minds. Google has focused consistently on being a utility. It builds powerful services that don’t require an understanding of your family structure or your friend relationships. Google Maps iterates constantly in search of the perfect commute; Gmail adds automatic replies to speed up your inbox; Google Photos absorbs all the pictures on your phone and uses machine learning to understand their contents and make them searchable. Google gives us sincerely new and useful things. And so, when we learn that it has exposed our data inadvertently, we might be more likely to give it a pass. At Facebook, on the other hand, the prime directive is still user growth. The company talks about a shift to foster more “meaningful” connections, but in practice this simply means growing different parts of its product suite. Facebook is useful, but it is useful mainly in the way that a phone book is useful, and after you have reached a certain number of friends that usefulness plateaus. Its biggest hit products in recent years — Instagram and WhatsApp — have been acquisitions. The new features it adds are often imported from other social networks. Its News Feed is essentially an entertainment product, but as a mirror for our times, it is often more distressing than entertaining. It gives us less, we like it less, we trust it less. I’m oversimplifying, of course. But I once spoke with someone had worked at both Google and Facebook who described the difference between how those two companies are perceived in exactly those terms. Sometimes a company misses the boat on a trend, and regrets it forever. In the case of Google+, I suspect many executives wish the company had simply avoided building a true social network altogether. David Byttow, who worked on the project and is now at Snap, put it this way: “As a tech lead and an original founding member of Google+, my only thought on Google sunsetting it is... FINALLY.”

Democracy

Researchers: No Evidence That Russia Is Messing With Campaign 2018—Yet Here’s a great story from Kevin Poulsen and Spencer Ackerman that asks: why hasn’t Russia made more obvious attempts to interfere in the midterm elections? Today the troll factory is using a mix of surviving accounts and new ones to do what it’s always done, spread fake news and fan division on Twitter, said Ryan Fox, a former NSA official now serving as COO of the smear-fighting startup New Knowledge. It’s also sneaking back onto Facebook, which discovered and deleted a fresh batch of fraudulent IRA-linked profiles and group pages in July. So far, though, none of the accounts are doing anything special for the election. “Lately, it’s been Kavanaugh all day, all the time,” said Fox. “My assessment of the situation is they’re having to reconstitute. I also would assume that because most of their accounts were taken down that they don’t have the same robustness available,” Fox said.The indicted Russian businessman who funded the IRA is now pouring resources into a new venture called USA Really, a Russian site dedicated to pushing anti-American propaganda. Unlike the IRA’s deceptive websites and Facebook groups, USA Really doesn’t disguise itself as a domestic U.S. entity, and it has real people on its masthead. In the short term, that makes it less effective at influencing Americans, but it also makes the site harder to target with a rational social media policy. Fox thinks that model is the future of Russia’s information operations. “They’re out in the open now,” said Fox. “You can’t just call them out as Russian bots. You have to get into a debate about who counts as a journalist.” Trump Campaign Aide Requested Online Manipulation Plans From Israeli Intelligence Firm Mark Mazzetti, Ronen Bergman, David D. Kirkpatrick and Maggie Haberman have the tale of how Rick Gates, a top Trump campaign official, requested proposals from an Israeli company to create fake digital identities as part of its campaign strategy: The campaign official, Rick Gates, sought one proposal to use bogus personas to target and sway 5,000 delegates to the 2016 Republican National Convention by attacking Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Mr. Trump’s main opponent at the time. Another proposal describes opposition research and “complementary intelligence activities” about Mrs. Clinton and people close to her, according to copies of the proposals obtained by the New York Times and interviews with four people involved in creating the documents. Leaked Transcript of Private Meeting Contradicts Google’s Official Story on China Ben Gomes runs search for Google. Publicly, he has called Project Dragonfly “an exploration.” But privately, he wanted it completed “as soon as possible,” Ryan Gallagher reports, in a damning new story based on a transcript of Gomes’ comments to his team. Gomes, who joined Google in 1999 and is one of the key engineers behind the company’s search engine, said he hoped the censored Chinese version of the platform could be launched within six and nine months, but it could be sooner. “This is a world none of us have ever lived in before,” he said. “So I feel like we shouldn’t put too much definite into the timeline.” Google Drops Out of Pentagon’s $10 Billion Cloud Competition In the midst of a small-scale employee revolt over Project Dragonfly, Google decided not to compete for the Pentagon’s cloud-computing contract, Naomi Nix reports: “We are not bidding on the JEDI contract because first, we couldn’t be assured that it would align with our AI Principles,“ a Google spokesman said in a statement. “And second, we determined that there were portions of the contract that were out of scope with our current government certifications.” No One Knows How Bad Fake News Is On WhatsApp, But If Brazil’s Election Is Any Indication, It’s Bad Ryan Broderick travels to Sao Paulo to try to understand how the electorate is using WhatsApp: WhatsApp is also a nightmare for fact-checkers. Nieman Lab called it a “black box of viral misinformation.” Brazil’s political activists, especially on the far right, have been extremely aggressive about using it to organize. Last year, Movimento Brasil Livre (MBL), or “Free Brazil Movement,” a right-wing pro-Bolsonaro youth movement, was the subject of an investigation by one of the country’s biggest papers, which reported from inside one of their WhatsApp groups. The paper discovered that MBL was using WhatsApp groups like “MBL merchants” or “MBL lawyers” to spread their content — including rumors and fake news. BuzzFeed News has reached out to MBL for comment. #ElectionWatch: Claims of Electronic Voting Fraud Circulate in Brazil Ahead of Brazil’s presidential election on October 7 vote, false narratives about electronic voting fraud have spiked and deepened mistrust as citizens head to the polls. The narrative has been… A Thriving Chat Startup Braces For The Alt-Right Joe Bernstein checks in on the alt-right chat rooms on Discord: In a Discord chat server called “/pol/Nation” — named for the controversial 4chan imageboard — more than 3,000 users participate in a rolling multimedia chat extravaganza of Hitler memes, white nationalist revisionist history, and computer game strategy. And in a voice-over-IP chatroom within the server, users keep up a steady chatter about the same subjects. It’s like a cutting-edge, venture-backed version of its namesake; 4chan on steroids.

Elsewhere

Facebook will soon rely on Instagram for the majority of its ad revenue growth The next time Facebook does something to smother Instagram and you find yourself asking why, remember these data points: Last quarter, Instagram generated an estimated $2 billion, or about 15 percent, of Facebook’s $13 billion in ad revenue, according to estimates from Andy Hargreaves, a research analyst with KeyBanc Capital Markets. Hargreaves expects Instagram to grow to about 30 percent of Facebook’s ad revenue in two years, as well as nearly 70 percent of the company’s new revenue by 2020 — driving the majority of Facebook’s growth. Video Swells to 25% of US Digital Ad Spending According to eMarketer’s latest ad spending forecast, video will grow nearly 30 percent, to $27.82 billion, of which Facebook and Instagram are expected to capture nearly one quarter. Snap is ‘Quickly Running Out of Money,’ Analyst Says Snap Inc. “is quickly running out of money” and may need to raise capital by the middle of next year, according to one analyst: In order to reach Chief Executive Officer Evan Spiegel’s goal of profitability in 2019, Snap would need to grow “massively faster” than expected and cut costs aggressively, analyst Michael Nathanson wrote. He expects a loss of more than $1.5 billion in 2019 as Snap looks to rebuild its user base. Beware the viral Facebook hoax that’s tricking people into thinking their account was hacked There’s a new copy/paste hoax making the rounds on Facebook: Snopes, the fact-checking site, explains that the hoax appears to reference fears about “cloned” Facebook accounts, where would-be scammers copy the name, profile picture, and basic information from a real account to create a second, nearly identical account on Facebook. Then, they send a bunch of friend requests to the original account’s friend list, to try to scam the person’s unsuspecting friends into granting access to their personal information by accepting the request. A Facebook spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the company had “heard that some people are seeing posts or messages about accounts being cloned on Facebook,” messages that they likened to a chain letter or email. Although account cloning is a real thing, the volume of messages spreading across Facebook don’t reflect any actual spike in cloned accounts on the service WeChat Rival Removed From Apple App Store in China ($) Amid a broader and somewhat mysterious app crackdown in China, Bullet Messenger, a Chinese messaging app that surged in popularity in the past few months, is no longer available in Apple’s App Store, Juro Osawa reports. How Gym Selfies Are Quietly Changing the Way We Work Out Today in the increasingly popular genre of “Instagram changes everything” stories: the gym. The gym selfie, experts say, is more than just a visual brag or photo-driven pep talk. Social media is fundamentally changing the way we work out—and the way we see ourselves in the mirror. In a recent study, professors Tricia Burke and Stephen Rains found that individuals who saw more workout posts in their feeds were more likely to feel concerned about their own bodies, especially if the posts came from a person they felt looked similar to them. This means that even a passive scroll through Instagram can be more about stoking self-consciousness, in oneself and in others, than providing motivation—and that we internalize these lessons more easily than we think. “If people become preoccupied with their weight, that could manifest itself in less healthy ways,” Burke told me.

Launches

Instagram is using AI to detect bullying in photos and captions Can you really detect a phenomenon as abstract as bullying using artificial intelligence? Instagram says it can now: Interestingly, Instagram says it’s not just analyzing photos captions to identify bullying, but also the photo itself. Speaking to The Verge, a spokesperson gave the example of the AI looking for split-screen images as an example of potential bullying, as one person might be negatively compared to another. What other factors the AI will look for though isn’t clear. That might be a good idea considering that when Facebook announced it would scan memes using AI, people immediately started thinking of ways to get around such filters. Along with the new filters, Instagram is also launching a “kindness camera effect,” which sounds like it’s a way to spread a positive message as a method to boost user engagement. While using the rear camera, the effects fill the screen with an overlay of “kind comments in many languages.” Switch to your front-facing camera, and you get a shimmer of hearts and a polite encouragement to “tag a friend you want to support.” Instagram now supports third-party authentication apps on Android Instagram previously rolled out support for third-party authentication apps like Authy on iOS. Today, it brought that feature to Android. Meredith is developing 10 original shows for Instagram’s IGTV Here’s a win for IGTV: magazine publisher Meredith is developing a slate of 10 original series for Instagram’s 3-month-old experimental vertical TV app, the first of which will premiere later this year. Facebook Workplace adds algorithmic feed, Safety Check and enhanced chat The most interesting nugget in this Josh Constine update on Workplace from its first-ever user conference: while more than 30,000 organizations are customers, Facebook hasn’t updated that number in a year. It suggests that the product has been slow to catch on during a trying year for the parent company. The 5 biggest announcements from the Google Pixel 3 event Google launched many new things today, including a phone, a tablet, and a competitor to the Facebook Portal and Echo Show that is most notable for its lack of a camera. Read about the biggest announcements here. Google rebrands AR stickers as Playground and adds new animations Playmoji is the new name for Google’s augmented reality stickers, which will be familiar to any Snapchat user: Initially announced last fall as AR Stickers, these virtual animations were similar to the lenses and filters that Snapchat popularized a few years back. But a key difference is that these are entirely in 3D and are deployed with a much smarter sense of spatial and object recognition, thanks to Google’s advances in artificial intelligence. Google launched Strangers Things stickers, as well as a pack for Star Wars during The Last Jedi theatrical run late last year. In the new Playmoji packs, Google lets you pick from a selection of cartoony pets, visual and interactive signs, comic strip-style sports animations, and anthropomorphic weather effects:

Takes

Facebook Isn’t Sorry — It Just Wants Your Data Charlie Warzel says that Facebook Portal is only explicable in the context of Americans’ apathetic view toward their own privacy: It’s also further confirmation that Facebook isn’t particularly sorry for its privacy failures — despite a recent apology tour that included an expensive “don’t worry, we got this” mini-documentary, full-page apology ads in major papers, and COO Sheryl Sandberg saying things like, “We have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can’t, we don’t deserve it.” Worse, it belies the idea that Facebook has any real desire to reckon with the structural issues that obviously undergird its continued privacy missteps. But more troubling still is what a product like Portal says about us, Facebook’s users: We don’t care enough about our privacy to quit it. Facebook, are you kidding? Taylor Hatmaker is similarly agog at Portal: It stands to reason that if Facebook cannot reliably secure its flagship product — Facebook itself — then the company should not be trusted with experimental forays into wildly different products, i.e. physical ones. Securing a software platform that serves 2.23 billion users is an extremely challenging task, and adding hardware to that equation just complicates existing concerns. You don’t have to know the technical ins and outs of security to make secure choices. Trust is leverage — demand that it be earned. If a product doesn’t pass the smell test, trust that feeling. Throw it out. Better yet, don’t invite it onto your kitchen counter to begin with.

And finally ...

#HimToo mom inspires infinite ‘this is MY son’ memes and a rare Reverse Milkshake Duck Navy veteran Pieter Hanson became a Twitter sensation on Monday night, after his mother tweeted a photo of him in his dress uniform claiming Hanson was “afraid to go on solo dates,” because of “the current climate of false sexual allegations.” Hanson created a legendary Twitter handle — @thatwasmymom — and in a literally perfect first tweet, disavowed her comments and claimed himself an ally of women in their struggle for equality. Pieter — call me.

Talk to me

Send me tips, comments, questions, and your best-ever Google+ post: [email protected]. Via: Theverge Read the full article

#News

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handandbanner · 6 years

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What if McCain was not a hero and civility is not important? Our anti-colonial struggle for hearts and minds

I'm thinking about the colonial war on hearts and minds that seems to be waged constantly and the psychological impact on regular people who want to practice telling truth in public. In recent days I observed that even people in my shared spaces who are supportive of anti-colonial values participated in naming McCain as a “war hero”. There are things that are difficult I imagine about how to reflect on a life soon after death. Those grieving personally may have a different set considerations and responsibilities to tend to in private mourning than the responsibilities we have in the stories we tell in public about the public career and contributions of public lives - truth has to be possible. Even as we reflect on the giants of liberation movements who sacrificed life and freedom in the freedom struggle of oppressed people, we have a responsibility to pay attention to issues like patriarchy and misogyny, and point out the problematic in Nelson, Martin or Malcom as examples of towering figures, who especially in two of those cases were largely silent and complicit in the erasure and I would argue oppression of Black women within the liberation struggle and in their private lives. We do not look for perfect leaders, but we do need to be able to tell the truth about what it is that people’s public lives were about and I would argue that the measure of goodness in public life is tied to the impact of one’s actions on “the least of these” or the most vulnerable. There might be many ways to talk about a man who enthusiastically participates in a campaign to burn scores of villagers alive and later takes public office and exhibits good manners while championing aggressive disastrous war interventions. People might say for example, that he is “not Trump-like” (because of the manners) and apparently judging from the eulogies and for those still desperately trying to salvage a crumbling globally imposed perception of American moral leadership, it matters very much that there is somebody out there, a high-ranking public servant, but anybody really, any white man in politics with power and a globally recognizable name, who is “not Trump-like” and can take up a week’s cycle of headlines. But should we give in to the idea that being “not-Trump” is worthy of valorization we will be succumbing once again the historical white-patriarchal ever falling standards of what it means to be good and decent in this world.

Artist: Carrie Mae Weems

We seldom have a way of quantifying the harm and trauma of lies as a historical and everyday component of colonial harm. I think it's because when people are being killed, and being stolen from, being lied to feels like the lesser of the three constant evils of empire. Today global Indigenous movements are looking at what it means to decolonize institutions of learning as spaces where knowledge is produced and disseminated and spaces where minds are developed. BIPOC students around the world are resisting having to learn in spaces where the images and names of white male perpetrators and architects of colonial genocide, enslavement and oppression have been upheld for decades and even centuries. An example is the white supremacist Cecil Rhodes’ statue that South African students mobilized to have removed at the University of Cape Town in the #RhodesMustMall movement that later spread to Oxford University where his statue still stands. As well as being an explicit white supremacist who called for global domination of the Anglo-Saxon race as the “first-race”, Rhodes’ legacy of racist public policy in Southern Africa included land acts that facilitated the violent dispossession and resource extraction that devastated Indigenous Black African communities as well as set the path towards the racist Apartheid regime. It would require a lot of space to discus all the ways that the dehumanizing aggression of Rhodes still impact communities today. Same can be said of the legacy of slave-owner Isaac Royal who the Harvard School of Law’s #RoyalMustFall movement sought to raise awareness about or Canada’s John A. Macdonald and Wilfrid Laurier, whose names and images are also upheld in institutions of learning. While the work of quantifying and documenting the harm that these men have perpetrated on whole cultures and communities around the world is still ongoing, part of the work that impacted communities have been left with is having to address dominant false narratives that have upheld these men as heroes. This work for those who are forced to or choose to take it up has a cost associated with it that ranges from emotional and psychological suffering, to economic suffering due to loss of status as students or employment opportunities, to political imprisonment. We also know that historically the work of undoing lies has cost people their lives.

Artist: Carrie Mae Weems

What I have learned about the ongoing colonial project, is that the enactment of false narratives, just like the killing and the theft, is not just a historic practice but a constant assault. There are false narratives that are birthed constantly, and the empire seems to have more resources for narrative production that continues to wage war on the hearts and minds in all of our communities form the earliest age possible and we are all vulnerable. I am also observing that false narratives are often introduced into the public consciousness in ways that are palatable and subtle and provide tension resolution.

With all of these in mind it was disturbing to me to watch in the last couple of weeks for people who would usually be aligned with anti-colonial values, describe John McCain as a “war hero” in what seemed to be an attempt to hold up an alternative-to-Trump version of white male leadership.

Most would agree that the Trump Age is marked by elevated tension and crisis. Not just for targeted communities who are suffering and dying but also in a different way for white people with colonially attained socio-economic privilege around the world. With new levels of public discourse about racism and white-supremacy, as well as what I would describe as instances of both eruptive and reflective previously repressed and suppressed expressions of BIPOC colonial trauma, white people whose privileged false identities depended on the silence of BIPOC, are having to come to terms with identity displacement. The conditions are ripe not just for the production of false narratives but also for a high-social-demand for lies, there is a market for it. People invested in oppression want to be told that who they are culturally and historically are not what the stories that BIPOC trauma are telling every day.

We also know that whatever its original meanings, the concept of civility has evolved in the Western world as a historical tool for constructing social conditions that make a particular kind of duplicity acceptable. Fundamentally and strongly oppositional realities, not just minor contractions, but realities that cannot co-exist without rendering each other meaningless are held up as possible. An example would be the rapist, slave-owning “gentleman”. It is important for empire to create a new “virtue” because age-old recognizable concepts like love and justice will never be ultimately sustainable under empire. But civility provides an opportunity for subscribers to engage the human need to be good and virtuous by living out a value that is created by and in service of the empire alone.

Maybe it did not seem like a significant contradiction to talk about McCain as a “war hero” for those who are sympathetic to anti-colonial liberation movements in the past week. What could it have looked like for those privately grieving to acknowledge McCain’s humanity and for the truth to also be told in public about the Vietnam War? Does the truth matter? Can McCain be a “war hero” today and Dr. Martin Luther King be a moral leader a few months later in January during annual memorializing rituals, on the same timelines?

Before his death, MLK denounced the Vietnam War as criminal and an expression of American colonialism, shortly after he was assassinated. McCain at the same time in history was on an aerial mission called Operation Rolling Thunder that killed at least 50,000 civilians and that was just one mission. These are mostly villagers. There is documentation of McCain complaining that the target list provided to aerial bombers was “too restrictive”. The bombing attacks by the U.S on South-East Asia were so brutal and severe, the bombing in villages is said to exceed all bombs dropped by all sides involved in World War II. This was time in history when white men who relished in murder would do things just because they could, the documented transcripts from “bombing missions” support this view. The severity of the attacks would trouble the hearts of a population involved in their own freedom struggle within the America empire, so that Black leaders of faith, members of the Black church, the Black Muslim community and all Black-Liberation traditions made resisting the war a primary focus of their own struggle that was finally making some gains. By speaking out against the war in Vietnam, Black American movement leaders experienced increased backlash and persecution become primary targets of American domestic terror campaigns.

There are implications for choosing to tell the story of McCain’s public life as a lesson in civility, as has been the practice with figures such as Obama and others. It sounds virtuous and it meets a need for some members of the dominant culture but there is more at stake. There is a day that telling the fuller story of 20th century American colonialism will be part of the day to day work of surviving cultures around the world. And it may be that having to dismantle the narrative of McCain as a “war hero” that we passively contribute to today, in the future will cost recovering cultures their health, wellness or liberty.

Students in various parts of the world today that seek to tell the true story and dismantle false narratives about colonizers have faced a growing backlash. The movement to decolonize campuses in Canada was met with a counter-movement that is working to centre white supremacy and promote explicit discourse that dehumanizes BIPOC communities under the guise of free speech. Decolonized learning empowers students to draw attention to and transform curriculums that exclude the histories and realities of their communities. The struggle to decolonize learning is a struggle for space to shape the minds and hearts of BIPOC students and allies in away that will allow them to effectively serve and give back to their recovering cultures and societies. The counter movements led by the so-called “alt-right/far-right white supremacist” groups are responses that seek to maintain institutions of learning as part of the capitalist projects that uphold global white supremacy. It is no surprise that relationships are being built between leaders of these movements and politicians who are hostile to racial and social justice. These past few days in Ontario the Ford government has mandated that all higher-learning institutions put in place “free-speech policies” by January of 2019 or risk losing public funding. These “free speech policies” so far are being used to provide mobilizing platform to explicit views that call for racist and violent policies against marginalized groups and communities around the world. Even so, the work of telling the truth about our collective histories and decolonizing spaces of learning continues, because many students around the world believe that legacies of colonizers must fall as we continue to struggle towards upholding the truth about the past and working our future liberation.

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survisinc · 6 years

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Working with Freelancers 2018: Forging a Win-Win Relationship

According to some estimates, the number of Freelancers1 (or “Independent workers” as they are also called) in the U.S. has ballooned from 30.1 million to 40.9 million between 2011 and 2017. That’s an increase of over 35% in just 6 years…and the trend continues to grow. And the freelancing phenomena isn’t just restricted to the U.S. or Canada – it’s global. A research report shows that, between 2004 and 2013, Europe’s2 dependence on Freelancers has grown at an even faster rate – 45% - than the U.S. From Auto CAD designs of prototype drones, to recipe books, business plans and web designing, Freelancers are being used to do it all. And it’s not just mom-and-pop shops and Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) that are using Freelance talent. Large multinationals and Blue-Chip giants are increasingly embracing freelancing talent. The “Gig economy” is encouraging businesses, both small and large, looking to source talented individuals, to increasingly turn to Freelancers to staff their teams. However, it takes a certain kind of discipline, as an “employer”, to work with Freelancers. If you are new to the world of using Freelancers, here’s what you should know to forge a win-win freelancing partnership.

TIP: Don’t look at Freelancers as “just contractors”. Instead, to really have a fruitful, long-term relationship, structure your relationship as a partnership rather than an employment contract

Why Freelancers

Why? Because they offer the ideal balance between not wanting to ramp-up full-time headcount, while finding people with just the right skills. According to one research report3 , the ranks of Freelancers in the U.S. workforce is growing 3-times faster than the “regular” workforce. Here’s why you might want to consider supplementing your existing team with talented Freelancers:

They are relatively easy to find – if you know where to look

Most Freelancers come “pre-loaded” with the skills you need – that cuts down on your training costs

Many Freelancers bring a diverse set of other experiences (because they may have worked with your competitors or other organizations in your industry) – which further enhances the value they’ll add to your team

Since they aren’t full-time employees, it’s a great way to reduce your costs – you’ll save on HR costs like benefits and overtime

Freelancers usually come with all the tools, technologies and equipment needed to do the job – you won’t need to provide any of that, like you would for most full-time resources

It’s also a great way to manage your own margins – Freelancing contracts usually are fixed-cost undertakings. You know exactly how much it will cost you BEFORE you start a project

The best of breed Freelancers are self-managed professionals – which means you don’t have to spend inordinate amounts of time managing/micro-managing them

The best thing about using Freelancers is that you don’t need to replace your existing workforce with contractors. Instead, the best practice model is to supplement/augment full-time work forces with Freelancers, to ensure companies continue to “refresh” the skills and knowledge of their in-house teams.

TIP: To find out if Freelancers are a good idea for your business, start out by working on a few non-business-critical projects first. Once you’re comfortable with the idea of using them, you can expand your portfolio of freelancer-aided projects

Being a Great Client

If you care to do a web search, you’ll likely find dozens (if not hundreds) of articles on how to be a great Freelancer, or how to find clients as a Freelancer. However, there’s scant material on what it takes to be a good client to a Freelancer. As a business owner, you can easily go out and hire a Freelancer (we’ll tell you where to find them later in this post). But you’ll add even more value to your relationships if you can effectively manage your Freelancer relationships to produce that win-win outcome you (and your Freelancing partners) are looking for. The following tips are meant to help business owners, who plan to use Freelancers, become better clients:

a) Starting the search: If you are new to working with Freelancers, you’re probably wondering: Where do I start? Well, start by going where Freelancers congregate – online! Your best bet would be to start your search at freelancing platforms like UpWork.Com, Freelancer.com or TextBroker.Com. Here are some things to watch out for when choosing where to find Freelancers:

Look for a platform that’s been around for more than a year or two

Make sure they offer freelancing services in line with what you need – hourly, fixed-rate or hybrid of the two

Check out the platform to ensure they offer trustworthy payment modes – secure banking, credible 3rd-party transfers (PayPal)

Find out if they offer Escrow payments to safeguard you against “fly by night” Freelancers

Make sure the site rates and ranks their Freelancers, so you can choose the best-of-best amongst them

TIP: It might be a good idea to work with more than one freelancing platform. Be mindful though that many Freelancers are also members of multiple platforms. You need to consider that when putting out Job Descriptions on multiple sites

b) Making your needs known: You really can’t be a good client if you don’t tell your Freelancer what it is that you need them to do for you. The Job Description is the vehicle through which you achieve that. To make sure your needs are known, ensure you cover the following:

WHO: Be as specific as you can about the skills and experience you want in the Freelancer you are looking to hire

WHAT: Provide a detailed description of job that you want performed. If the task is environment-specific (Policies and Procedures manual for the Health Care industry; Web development supporting CSS3; Macros for Excel 2016, ECMAScript 2017), make sure you spell that out in your Job Description

HOW: Deliverables must be provided to you in a certain form, so you need to convey that. If it’s a Microsoft Word 2010+ document you are expecting – say so. If you also want a PDF and Txt format, make that known

WHY: Many prospective employers of freelance talent think that the “Why” is unimportant. Not true! Sometimes, if you mention why you need a particular task done, and what you intend to use the deliverable for, you’ll be surprised at how much “free advice” a Freelancer can give you about alternate solutions. Some of that feedback can not only be creative, but it might even be a cheaper alternate to what you are proposing

TIP: To find the best Freelancers and attract high-quality responses to your Job Ads, keep your postings short and succinct. Most platforms allow you to provide backup documentation that contains the details of your requirements

c) Workflow: Since most Freelancers will work remotely, it is good practice (at least initially) to enforce a specific work flow. For instance:

If this is a project to produce some technical documentation, you may first wish to validate if they understood what you require of them. You could therefore insist upon a workflow as follows: Bullet-points before outlines; Outlines before Drafts; Drafts before final

Most Freelancers are open to redoing work that the client feels requires some improvement. However, it’s always good practice to establish the number of edits/revisions expected at the outset

You also need to discuss how you wish references and attributions dealt with. In most instances, Freelancers will include references to their research in a way that they do with other clients – only to be told such form isn’t acceptable. A good client will however spell that out in advance: End Notes or Footnotes. In-text links, or links as comments etc.

If your freelancer-provided deliverables include images and graphics, you need to spell out what types of graphics are acceptable (Freeware? Creative Commons Images? Self Created?). A good client will also provide guidelines on graphics use: Format (JPEG, PNG, BMP etc.), Resolution, and location in the deliverable

Rules around document sharing, file naming and common folders (on cloud or shared drives) should also be agreed in advance

Once your relationship is cemented, many of these workflow restrictions may be relaxed. By then, hopefully, your Freelancers will know exactly how you work, and will be finely attuned to delivering to your expectations.

d) Managing expectations: Clients often “assume” that their relationship with the Freelancer is temporary and contractual in nature. However, many longer-term Freelance relationships evolve into more permanent employment opportunities. A good client leaves no doubt what his/her expectations about the working relationship are.

Make sure prospective applicants know exactly what they are getting into – an hourly or fixed-fee contract, with specific deliverables. There should be no confusion about them being part-time or short-term employees – if that’s not what your expectations are. You might have to deal with too many legal challenges if that misconception arises!

TIP: If you plan on making regular/extended use of Freelancers, it might be a good idea to let them know what you expect in terms of commitments from them – Days per week? Hours per day? Number of deliverables per month?

e) Laying down the rules: Make sure you specify timelines, quality parameters, consequences for plagiarism and copyright infringements.

If you plan on using online plagiarism checkers (CopyScape, quetext, Plagiarisma), make sure they know about it, and know which tools they need to build their content to satisfy

Not all content validation tools work to the same set of rules. Make sure you lay down the law about what score is acceptable, and what is unacceptable (90%, 100%, 10 errors/flags per 10,000 words)

If you use SEO scoring tools, like those available at Moz or Yoast, to check for content – make sure they know about it upfront

A good client never ambushes his/her Freelance partners with rules and tools after the fact. Making everyone aware of the rules in advance, ensures that Freelancers don’t unnecessarily spend (unpaid) time and effort re-tooling their deliverables. It also ensures that clients get high-quality deliverables the first time!

TIP: Specifying the rules of the game in advance might result in some “push back” from Freelancers used to working in certain ways. However, it helps them understand what you will be looking for at the outset. That’s a key ingredient for a win-win relationship

f) Communication protocols: Good clients don’t just assume a Freelancer will communicate in line with “what’s expected”. What your version of reasonable communication might be, could be vastly different from what the Freelancer practices with his/her other clients.

Make Freelancers understand how you wish to communicate (email, text, Skype, phone calls, Messenger etc.)

Let them know when they should be available (Pacific Time, Eastern Standard, Mountain Time, GMT), and for what duration

Don’t provide ambiguous response time guidelines – be very clear: Don’t say “at your earliest”, say instead “Within the next 4 hours”

Half the challenges of working with freelancing professionals come from lack of/poor communication. To be a good client, you must ensure you have flexible, but clearly defined, communication protocols in place.

g) Penalties: To be a good client, you have to empathize with your Freelancer – making allowances for occasional errors and omissions. However, if you intend to penalize a Freelancer for any mistakes or lapses, you need to make sure they understand the exact nature of such penalties:

Deducting payment from the agreed-upon fee

Withholding payment for longer duration, until the errors/omissions have been addressed

Demanding future rate discounts, on follow-up assignments, for less than expected quality delivered

If penalties are brought up subsequent to a deliverable being provided, Freelancers are apt to believe that you, as their client, are trying to short-change them. A good client will never want to leave that impression.

TIP: Beware – if you haven’t discussed penalties in advance, and try to withhold payment in the absence of such discussions, Freelancers could initiate arbitration procedures (which some platforms provide for) to recover amounts withheld

h) Payment terms: One of the biggest points of contention, between client and freelancers, is payment. Being a good client often means paying what the Freelancer is worth. However, “worth” is often subjective, and could get lost in the muddle of negotiations. As a good client:

Make sure the rate is clearly defined

Be sure everyone understands which currency payment is being proposed (US dollar Vs Canadian dollar, or Euros, Bitcoin Vs eWallet)

Ensure the terms of the engagement, hourly, deliverable-based, installment-based, are understood

Clearly outline payment schedules

Agree to payment modes that are accessible to the Freelancer (PayPal Vs Paydirekt; or Direct bank transfers Vs Monegram)

Clarify who will pay money transfer/payment platform fees

TIP: A word of caution: Many freelancing platforms do not allow/encourage payments being made or received outside of their forums (they usually receive a fee from Freelancers, Clients and Financial institutions). A good client will never encourage/force Freelancers to break the rules.

i) Feedback and references: Every Freelancer that you end up working with, covets one thing: Great references and feedback from clients. And they will do everything possible to ensure you, as their client, provide them such feedback. It is therefore in your best interest to use that “craving” to your advantage.

Make sure upfront, that Freelancers know exactly what your standards of “client satisfaction” are, so that they can strive throughout the engagement to meet (or even exceed!) them. It would be unfair to grade/rate Freelancers after-the-fact, if they don’t know what the grading scheme is at the outset of a project.

Conversely, a good client will be mindful of the overall impression he/she leaves with the Freelancer. Some freelancing platforms also provide freelancers the opportunity to rate their client. If you wish to remain a client in good standing on that platform, it is therefore in your interest to make sure you receive good feedback and references from your freelancers.

j) Collaboration tools: Even though you may be working through a freelancing platform, that doesn’t mean that you’ll have all the tools built-in to coordinate, cooperate and manage your Freelancers. You might more effectively empower your freelancing team by using other 3rd-party (mostly FREE) collaboration tools, including:

Skype – for voice and video calls, group meetings, chat sessions

Google’s G-Suite – to collaborate on creating document, spreadsheet and presentations, as well as building central repositories (cloud-drives) for project deliverables

Dropbox – for storing, sharing and exchanging documents, videos and other large-format digital files

Scribblar – to brainstorm (whiteboard-style) with a geographically dispersed team

Trello – to manage multi-team task lists and assign individual tasks to a team of Freelancers

TIP: Before you offer to use any of these tools, it’s important to check if the freelancing platform you are using has any rules against such usage. Some platforms have native features in place, and they may penalize their users for making use of 3rd-party tools.

Most importantly though, as part of being a great client, you should check with the Freelancer if he/she is comfortable using such tools. Many freelancers do not like to download tools, or to share personal details required when installing many of the tools mentioned.

Making Freelancing Work

As someone considering working with them, these few tips will hopefully put you on the path to forging win-win relationships with Freelancers. It all comes down to you realizing the need to create value (for yourself) through them. And to do that, you need to empower them with everything they need to succeed.

According to a recent survey4 , Freelancers know exactly what it is that they are looking for in a “good” client. They want someone that:

Values their work (97% respondents)

Allows them freedom to control how they work (95%); and

Allows them to control their schedule (94%)

If you keep the guidelines provided in this blog in mind, you too could become a client-of-choice for all Freelancers you work with.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/elainepofeldt/2018/02/24/why-big-company-freelancing-may-soon-get-a-lot-easier/2/#719a820f613e

[2] https://magazine.startus.cc/freelancers-startups-changing-workforce/

[3] http://spendmatters.com/2018/03/29/enterprises-and-their-freelancers-what-does-upworks-recent-study-tell-us/

[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/elainepofeldt/2018/02/24/why-big-company-freelancing-may-soon-get-a-lot-easier/2/#719a820f613e

from Survis Posts https://survis.com/posts/working-with-freelancers-2018-forging-a-win-win-relationship

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newestbalance · 6 years

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Kim Says He��d End North Korea Nuclear Pursuit for U.S. Truce

But skeptics warned that North Korea previously made similar pledges of denuclearization on numerous occasions, with little or no intention of abiding by them. Mr. Kim’s friendly gestures, they said, could turn out to be nothing more than empty promises aimed at lifting sanctions on his isolated country.

A South Korean government spokesman, Yoon Young-chan, provided remarkable details of a summit meeting the two Korean heads of state held on Friday, when Mr. Kim made history by becoming the first North Korean leader to set foot in the South.

“I know the Americans are inherently disposed against us, but when they talk with us, they will see that I am not the kind of person who would shoot nuclear weapons to the south, over the Pacific or at the United States,” Mr. Kim told Mr. Moon, according to Mr. Yoon’s account.

It was another in a series of startling statements by Mr. Kim, whose country threatened to do exactly those things during the height of nuclear tensions last year.

Mr. Kim’s apparent willingness to negotiate away his nuclear arsenal was revealed just as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke for the first time about a “good conversation” he had with Mr. Kim during his secret visit to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, over Easter weekend.

Mr. Pompeo told ABC News in a broadcast on Sunday that the Trump administration’s objective was “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization” with North Korea, and that Mr. Kim was prepared to “lay out a map that would help us achieve” denuclearization.

“We had an extensive conversation on the hardest issues that face our two countries,” Mr. Pompeo said. “I had a clear mission statement from President Trump. When I left, Kim Jong-un understood the mission exactly as I described it today.”

Continue reading the main story

But Mr. Bolton, a longtime critic of past diplomacy with North Korea, expressed skepticism on Sunday, recalling past moments that looked hopeful. Those would include a commitment by Pyongyang in the 1990s to give up its nuclear program and the destruction of a nuclear power cooling tower in 2008 as part of a similar promise.

“We want to see real commitment,” he said on “Face the Nation” on CBS. “We don’t want to see propaganda from North Korea. We’ve seen words. We’ve seen words so far.”

Asked about North Korea’s insistence on a promise by the United States not to invade, Mr. Bolton noted that was an old demand that had been rolled out on other occasions. “We’ve heard this before,” he said. “The North Korean propaganda playbook is an infinitely rich resource.”

Mr. Trump sees the potential for a historic deal with Mr. Kim, “a breakthrough nobody would have imagined a few months ago,” Mr. Bolton told Fox News on Sunday, but his administration is not “starry eyed about what may happen here.”

“I think it is going to happen; the dates and the places are still under discussion,” he said. “I think the president is eager to do it as soon as possible.”

On Friday, Mr. Kim and Mr. Moon signed a joint declaration recognizing “a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula” and “complete denuclearization” as a common goal of the two Koreas. But during the summit events, some of which were broadcast live around the world, Mr. Kim never publicly renounced his nuclear weapons.

Even in the additional details released on Sunday by South Korean officials, Mr. Kim appeared to hedge his bets, indicating that denuclearizing his country could be a long process that required multiple rounds of negotiations and steps to build trust. But he laid out a vague idea of what his impoverished country would demand in return for giving up its nuclear weapons.

“If we meet often and build trust with the United States, and if an end to the war and nonaggression are promised, why would we live in difficulty with nuclear weapons?” Mr. Kim was quoted as saying by South Korean officials.

Mr. Moon briefed Mr. Trump on the meeting during a call on Saturday, telling him that Mr. Kim had said that he and Mr. Trump could “get along well,” to which Mr. Trump responded that he “looked forward” to their meeting.

Continue reading the main story

On Sunday, Mr. Moon also spoke with the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, to relay Mr. Kim’s willingness to open dialogue with Tokyo, which is threatened by the North’s nuclear weapons and missile development.

The peacemaking comments stand in stark contrast to previous remarks and actions by Mr. Kim, who drove the Peninsula close to the brink of war last year by undertaking a series of missile and nuclear tests.

He suddenly switched to diplomatic overtures this year, extending an offer to meet Mr. Trump, which, surprisingly, was accepted. A week ago, Mr. Kim announced an end to all nuclear and long-range missile tests and the closing of the nuclear test site in mountainous Punggye-ri, in northeast North Korea.

In the meeting on Friday, Mr. Kim and Mr. Moon also agreed to start talks this year with Washington to negotiate a peace treaty to formally end the 1950-53 Korean War, one of the key security guarantees that the North has long demanded.

But North Korea has so far offered no timeline for dismantling its nuclear weapons and facilities. Nor has it clarified how it defines a “nuclear-free Korean Peninsula,” and especially whether that means a withdrawal or significant reconfiguration of American troops based in South Korea, as it has demanded before.

Even before Mr. Moon met with Mr. Kim, South Korean officials said any joint statement was bound to be vague on the terms of denuclearization because Mr. Kim would try to settle critical issues directly with Washington.

If Mr. Kim intends to win a peace treaty, diplomatic recognition and billions of dollars in economic aid from Washington and its allies, as South Korean officials hope he does, trading away his nuclear arsenal is his biggest bargaining chip. He cannot reveal his hand too soon, South Korean officials said.

Skeptics fear that Mr. Kim does not really intend to give up his nuclear weapons and is merely trying to soften his image, escape sanctions and make it more difficult for Mr. Trump to continue to threaten military action. But South Korean officials argue that Mr. Kim is sincere in trading his nuclear weapons for a promise to end hostilities and get Washington’s help to improve his country’s economy.

Continue reading the main story

North Korea’s promise to invite outsiders to Punggye-ri reflected “Mr. Kim’s determination to actively and pre-emptively deal with the process of verifying denuclearization,” Mr. Yoon said.

In another conciliatory gesture toward South Korea, Mr. Kim made his own pledge of nonaggression toward the South.

“I am determined not to repeat the painful history of the Korean War. As the same nation living on the same land, we should never shed blood again,” he told Mr. Moon, according to Mr. Yoon.

Mr. Kim even vowed to readjust his country’s clock to match the time zone in South Korea, which with the rest of the region run 30 minutes ahead of the North’s.

“When I was sitting in the waiting room, I saw two clocks on the wall, one of the Seoul time and the other of the Pyongyang time, and I felt bad about it,” Mr. Kim was quoted as telling Mr. Moon. “Why don’t we reunify our clocks first?”

Continue reading the main story

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