#and with enough applied effort over time i might be able to build those networks in my own brain on purpose

[mrtheinsatiable]

Hell yeah automatic renewal on my library book

[maximelebled]

2019 & 2020

Hello everyone! So yeah, this yearly blog post is about three... four months late... it covers two years now.

I did have a lot of things written last year, last time, but the more things have changed, the more I’ve realized that a lot of things I talked about on here... were because I lacked enough of a social life to want to open up on here.

In a less awkwardly-phrased way, what I’m saying is, I was coping.

Not an easy thing to admit to in public by any means, but I reckon it’s the truth. Over the past two years, I’ve made more of an effort to build better & healthier friendships, dial back my social media usage a bit (number 1 coping strategy), not tie all my friendships to games I play, especially Dota (number 2 coping strategy), so that I could be more emotionally healthy overall. 

Pictured: me looking a whole lot like @dril on the outside, although not so much on the inside. (Photo by my lovely partner.)

To some degree, I believe it’s important to be able to talk about yourself a bit more openly in a way that is generally not encouraged nor made easy on other social networks (looking at you, Twitter). I know that 2010-me would be scared to approach 2020-me; and it’s my hope that what I am writing here would not help him with that, but also help him become less of an insecure dweeb faster. 😉

Not that recent accomplishments have stopped me from being any less professionally anxious. Sometimes the impostor syndrome just morphs into... something else.

Anyway, what I’m getting at is, the first reason it took me until this year to finish last year’s post is because, with my shift in perspective, and these realizations about myself, I do want to keep a lot more things private... or rather, it’s that I don’t feel the need to share them anymore? And that made figuring out what to write a fair bit harder.

The other reason I didn’t write sooner is because, in 2018, I wrote my "year in review” post right before I became able to talk about my then-latest cool thing (my work on Valve’s 2018 True Sight documentary). So I then knew I’d have to bring it up in the 2019 post. But then, I was asked to work on the 2019 True Sight documentary, and I know it was going to air in late January 2020, so I was like, “okay, well, whatever, it, I’ll just write this yearly recap after that, so I don’t miss the coach this time”. So I just ended up delaying it again until I was like... “okay, whatever, I’ll just do both 2019 and 2020 in a single post.”

I think I can say I’ve had the privilege of a pretty good 2019, all things considered. And also of a decent 2020, given the circumstances. Overall, 2019 was a year of professional fulfillment; here’s a photo taken of me while I was managing the augmented reality system at The International 2019! (The $35 million dollar Dota 2 tournament that was held, this that year, in Shanghai.)

If I’d shown this to myself 10 years ago it would’ve blown my mind, so I guess things aren’t all that bad...!

I’ve brought up two health topics in these posts before: weight & sleep.

As for the first, the situation is still stable. If it is improving, it is doing so at a snail’s pace. But quite frankly, I haven’t put in enough effort into it overall. Even though I know my diet is way better than it was five or six years ago, I’ve only just really caught up with the “how it should have been the entire time” stage. It is a milestone... but not necessarily an impressive one. Learning to cook better things for myself has been very rewarding and fulfilling, though. It’s definitely what I’d recommend if you need to find a place to start.

As for sleep, throughout 2019, I continued living 25-hour days for the most part. There were a few weeks during which I slowed down the process, but it continued on going. Then, in late December of 2019, motivated by the knowledge that sleep is such a foundational pillar of your health, I figured I really needed to take things seriously, and I managed to go on a three month streak of mostly-stable sleep! (See the data above.)

Part of what helped was willingly stopping to use my desktop computer once it got too late in the day, avoiding Dota at the end of the day as much as possible, and anything exciting for that matter... and, as much as that sounds like the worst possible stereotype, trying to “listen to my body” and recognizing when I was letting stress and anxiety build up inside me, and taking a break or trying to relax.

Also, a pill of melatonin before going to bed; but even though it’s allegedly not a problem to take melatonin, I figured I should try to rely on it as little as possible.

Unfortunately, that “good sleep” streak was abruptly stopped by a flu-like illness... it might have been Covid-19. The symptoms somewhat matched up, but I was lucky: they were very mild. I fully recovered in just over a week. I coughed a bit, but not that much. If it really was that disease, then I got very lucky.

(Pictured: another photo by my lovely SO, somewhere in Auvergne.)

My sleep continued to drift back to its 25-hour rhythm, and I only started resuming these efforts towards the fall... mostly because living during the night felt like a better option with the summer heat (no AC here). I thought about doing that the other way (getting up at 3am instead of going to bed at 7am), and while it’d make more sense temperature-wise, that would have kept me awake when there were practically no people online, and I was trying to have a better social life then, even if had to be purely online due to the coronavirus, so... yeah.

I’ve been working from home since 2012! I also lived alone for a number of years since then. For the most part, it hasn’t been a great thing for my mental health. Having had a taste of what being in an office was like thanks to a couple weeks in the Valve offices, I had the goal of beginning to apply at a few places here and there in March/April. Then the pandemic hit, so those plans are dead in the water. I wanted 2020 to be the year in which I’d finally stop being fully remote, but those plans are now dead in the water.

Now, at the end of the year, I don’t really know if I want to apply at any places. There’s a small handful of studios whose work really resonates with me, creatively speaking, and whose working conditions seem to be alright, at least from what I hear... but, and I swear I’m saying this in the least braggy way possible... there’s very little that beats having been able to work on what I want, when I want, and how much I want.

This kind of freelance status can be pretty terrifying sometimes, but I’ve managed (with some luck, of course) to reach a safe balance, a point at which I’ve effectively got this luxury of being able to only really work on what I want, and never truly overwork myself (at least by the standards of most of the gaming industry). It’s a big privilege and I feel like it’d take a lot to give it up.

Besides the things I mentioned before, one thing I did that drastically improved my mental health was being introduced to a new lovely group of friends by my partner! I started playing Dungeons & Dragons with them, every weekend or so! And in the spirit of a rising tide lifting all boats, I managed to also give back to our lovely DM, by being a sort of “AM” (audio manager)... It’s been great having something to look forward to every week.

Something to look forward to... I’ve heard about the concept of “temporal anchors”. I had heard about how the reason our adult years suddenly pass by in a blur is because we now have more “time” that’s already in our brains, but now I’m more convinced that it’s because we’re going from a very school routine such as the one schools impose upon us, to, well... practically nothing.

I thought most of my years since 2011 have been a blur, but none have whooshed by like 2020 has, and I reckon part of that is because I’ve (obviously) gone out far far less, and most importantly there wasn’t The Big Summer Event That The International Is, the biggest yearly “temporal anchor” at my disposal. The anticipation and release of those energies made summer feel a fair bit longer... and this year, summer was very much a blur for me. In and out like the wind.

I guess besides that, I haven’t really had that much trouble with being locked down. I had years of training for that, after all. Doesn’t feel like I can complain. 😛

(Pictured: trip to Chicago in January of 2019... right when the polar vortex hit!)

Work was good in 2019, and sparser in 2020. Working with Valve again after the 2018 True Sight was a very exciting opportunity. At the time, in February of 2019, I was out with my partner on little holiday trips around my region, and, after night fell, on the way back, we decided to stop in a wide open field, on a tiny countryside path, away from the cities, to try and do some star-gazing, without light pollution getting in the way.

And it’s there and then that I received their message, while looking at the stars with my SO! The timing and location turned that into a very vivid memory...

I then got to spend a couple weeks in their offices in late April / early May. I was able to bring my partner along with me to Washington State, and we did some sightseeing on the weekends.

(Pictured: part of a weekend trip in Washington. This was a dried up lakebed.)

After that, I worked on the Void Spirit trailer in the lead to The International. In August, those couple weeks in Shanghai were intense. Having peeked behind the curtain and seen everything that goes into production really does give me a much deeper appreciation for all the work that goes unseen. 

Then after that, in late 2019, there was my work on the yearly True Sight documentary, for the second time. In 2018, I’d been tasked with making just two animated sequences, and I was very nervous since that was my first time working directly with Valve; my work then was fairly “sober”, for lack of a better term.

(Pictured: view from my hotel room in Shanghai.)

For the 2019 edition, I had double the amount of sequences on my plate, and they were very trusting of me, which was very reassuring. I got to be more technically ambitious, I let my style shine through (you know... if it’s got all these gratuitous light beams, etc.), and it was real fun to work on.

At the premiere in Berlin, I was sitting in the middle of the room (in fact, you could spot me in the pre-show broadcast behind SirActionSlacks; unfortunately I had forgotten to bring textures for my shirt). Being in that spot when my shots started playing, and hearing people laughing and cheering at them... that’s an unforgettable memory. The last time I had experienced something like that was having my first Dota short film played at KeyArena in 2015, the laughter of the crowd echoing all around me... I was shaking in my seat. Just remembering it gets my heart pumping, man. It’s a really unique feeling.

So I’m pretty happy with how that work came out. I came out of it having learned quite a few new tricks too, born out of necessity from my technical ambitions. Stuff I intend to put to use again. I’m really glad that the team I worked with at Valve was so kind and great to work with. After the premiere, I received a few more compliments from them... and I did reply, “careful! You might give me enough confidence to apply!”, to which one of them replied, “you totally should, man.” But I still haven��t because I’m a massive idiot, haha. Well, I still haven’t because I don’t think I’m well-rounded enough yet. And also because, like I alluded to before, I think I’m in a pretty good situation as it is.

It’s not the first encouragements I had received from them, too; there had been a couple people from the Dota team who, at the end of my two week stay in the offices, while I was on my way out, told me I should try applying. But again, I didn’t apply because I’m a massive idiot.

(Pictured: view from the Valve offices.)

To be 200% frank, even though there’s been quite a few people who’ve followed my work throughout the years, comments on Reddit and YouTube, etc. who’ve all said things along the lines of “why aren’t you working for them ?”, well... it’s not something I ever really pursued. I know it’s a lot of people’s dream job, but I never saw it that way. I feel like, if it ever happened to me... sure, that could be cool! But I don’t know if it’s something I really want, or even that I should want?

And if you add “being unsure” to what I consider to be a lack of experience in certain things, well... I really don’t think I’d be a good candidate (yet?), and having seen how busy these people are on the inside, the last thing I want to do is waste their time with a bad application. That would be the most basic form of courtesy I can show to them.

Besides, Covid-19 makes applying to just about any job very hard, if not outright impossible right now. And for a while longer, I suspect.

(Pictured: the Tuilière & Sanadoire rocks.)

I’m still unhappy about the amount of “actual animation” I get to do overall since I like to work on just about every step of the process in my videos, but well. It’s getting better. One thing I am happy with though, is “solving problems”. And new challenges. Seeking the answers to them, and making myself be able to see those problems, alongside entire projects, from a more “holistic” way, that is to say, not missing the forest for the trees.

It’s hard to explain, and even just the use of the term “holistic” sounds like some kind of pompous cop-out... but looking back on how I handled projects 5 years ago vs. now, I see the differences in how I think about problems a lot. And to some extent I do have my time on Valve contracts to thank a LOT in helping me progress there.

Anyway, I’m currently working on a project that I’m very interested & creativefuly fulfilled by. But it has nothing to do with animation nor Dota, for a change! There are definitely at least two other Dota short films I want to make, though. We’ll see how that goes.

Happy new year & take care y’all.

[stumpyjoepete]

One of the controversial things we did with Signal early on was to build it as an unfederated service. Nothing about any of the protocols we’ve developed requires centralization; it’s entirely possible to build a federated Signal Protocol-based messenger, but I no longer believe that it is possible to build a competitive federated messenger at all.

In some circles, this has not been a popular opinion. When someone recently asked me about federating an unrelated communication platform into the Signal network, I told them that I thought we’d be unlikely to ever federate with clients and servers we don’t control. Their retort was “that’s dumb, how far would the internet have gotten without interoperable protocols defined by 3rd parties?”

I thought about it. We got to the first production version of IP, and have been trying for the past 20 years to switch to a second production version of IP with limited success. We got to HTTP version 1.1 in 1997, and have been stuck there until now. Likewise, SMTP, IRC, DNS, XMPP, are all similarly frozen in time circa the late 1990s. To answer his question, that’s how far the internet got. It got to the late 90s.

That has taken us pretty far, but it’s undeniable that once you federate your protocol, it becomes very difficult to make changes. And right now, at the application level, things that stand still don’t fare very well in a world where the ecosystem is moving.

Indeed, cannibalizing a federated application-layer protocol into a centralized service is almost a sure recipe for a successful consumer product today. It’s what Slack did with IRC, what Facebook did with email, and what WhatsApp has done with XMPP. In each case, the federated service is stuck in time, while the centralized service is able to iterate into the modern world and beyond.

So while it’s nice that I’m able to host my own email, that’s also the reason why my email isn’t end-to-end encrypted, and probably never will be. By contrast, WhatsApp was able to introduce end-to-end encryption to over a billion users with a single software update. So long as federation means stasis while centralization means movement, federated protocols are going to have trouble existing in a software climate that demands movement as it does today.

Early on, I thought we’d federate Signal once its velocity had subsided. Now I realize that things will probably never slow down, and if anything the velocity of the entire landscape seems to be steadily increasing.

XMPP is an example of a federated protocol that advertises itself as a “living standard.” Despite its capacity for protocol “extensions,” however, it’s undeniable that XMPP still largely resembles a synchronous protocol with limited support for rich media, which can’t realistically be deployed on mobile devices. If XMPP is so extensible, why haven’t those extensions quickly brought it up to speed with the modern world?

Like any federated protocol, extensions don’t mean much unless everyone applies them, and that’s an almost impossible task in a truly federated landscape. What we have instead is a complicated morass of XEPs that aren’t consistently applied anywhere. The implications of that are severe, because someone’s choice to use an XMPP client or server that doesn’t support video or some other arbitrary feature doesn’t only affect them, it affects everyone who tries to communicate with them. It creates a climate of uncertainty, never knowing whether things will work or not. In the consumer space, fractured client support is often worse than no client support at all, because consistency is incredibly important for creating a compelling user experience.

For example, even GitHub has problems with consistency and control right now. They introduced issue templates, but a number of third-party GitHub clients don’t support them, so even after creating a thorough issue template for the Signal Android repository, we still get people who post “it doesn’t work please help,” because their client never even showed them the template. That makes me annoyed with GitHub, even though I use the official GitHub clients. It’s a potential opportunity for a GitHub competitor that can display issue templates consistently.

One potential benefit of federation is the ability to choose what provider gets access to your metadata. However, as someone who self-hosts my email, that has never felt particularly relevant, given that every email I send or receive seems to have Gmail on the other end of it anyway. Federated services always seem to coalesce around a provider that the bulk of people use, with a long tail of small scattered self-hosting across the internet. That makes sense, because running a reliable service isn’t easy, but it’s an outcome that is sadly the worst of both worlds.

If anything, protecting metadata is going to require innovation in new protocols and software. Those changes are only likely to be possible in centralized environments with more control, rather than less. Just as making the changes to consistently deploy end-to-end encryption in federated protocols like email has proved difficult, we’re more likely to see the emergence of enhanced metadata protection in centralized environments with greater control.

On some level, federation is appealing precisely because it does freeze protocols in time. It’s great when centralized clients and servers roll out features that benefit us, but they could just as easily roll out features that don’t. Federation gives us more collective control over what changes we accept, but that comes with an unacceptable inability to adapt.

Given that federated services always seem to coalesce around a provider that the bulk of people use, federation becomes a sort of implicit threat. Nobody really wants to run their own servers, but they know that it might be possible if their current host does something egregious enough to make it worth the effort.

However, over the past six years, we’ve also seen the user cost of switching between centralized communication services reduced substantially, particularly given the tendency towards addressing with user-owned identifiers like phone numbers. The device’s address book is now the social network, so using phone numbers as an identifier has reduced switching costs by putting a user’s social network under their control. In a way, the notification center on a mobile device has become the federation point for all communication apps, similar to how older desktop IM clients unified communication across multiple IM networks.

The effect has been visible in the messaging space, where market leaders have come and gone, new popular apps come out of nowhere, and even the most successful players seem compelled to continue iterating and improving their services as quickly as possible.

This reduced user friction has begun to extend the implicit threat that used to come with federated services into centralized services as well. Where as before you could switch hosts, or even decide to run your own server, now users are simply switching entire networks. In many cases that cost is now much lower than the federated switching cost of changing your email address to use a different email provider.

An open source infrastructure for a centralized network now provides almost the same level of control as federated protocols, without giving up the ability to adapt. If a centralized provider with an open source infrastructure ever makes horrible changes, those that disagree have the software they need to run their own alternative instead. It may not be as beautiful as federation, but at this point it seems that it will have to do.

[dxpdisplay]

7 Tips For Building a impressive Trade Show Displays

Many of us have visited trade events and still have noticed row after row of tables with draped cloth and boring backdrops. On this atmosphere, what is different? What’s unique and grabs your interest? In most cases, the answer will be absolutely nothing. This is the challenge. If you’re not exciting, folk’s will not be serious. Building a impressive trade show displays is easy, given that you’re prepared to invest enough time, money, along with a little innovative juice in the event that.

Starts using these 7 tricks to provide the boost you have to create your next event an impressive one.

Make Your Displays Unique

Trade fairs really are a large acquisition of both time and money. If you’re will make an investment in the Trade Show booths, the 1st item you need to spend your cash on is a is often which will get noticed. Paying for a costly booth which you can use and re-use for many years is the ideal option. If you’re probably going to be cheap regarding your booth selection, you may have to evaluate another avenue of promoting.

In addition, make flexibility important while choosing the booth in order that it might be customized to various sizes (e.g. 10′ x 10′, 10′ X 20′) This gives the actual versatility to improve, or reduce your trade exhibition foot print while keeping the visually exciting components of your booth and remaining in keeping with your brand.

Here’s an example of a versatile and interesting booth we made for one of our customers:

Control the Camping swag Contest

There’s no arguing the promotional products you choose will impact your entire opportunity to attract interest and make thrill around your trade exhibition presence. You almost certainly won’t be generating positive thrill with bad pen freebies.

Paying for promotional products which are as special so that as premium quality as the offering is key. If you’re concerned about the price, remember that everyone doesn’t want to get the “big prize” (more about the following). Get some quality, comparatively cheap (not cheap) items which you’re will to offer over to attendees.

For big item freebies, you have to shoot for maximum impact. Obviously, you are able to give these things to folks which are real potential customers, but ensure you’re benefiting from the opportunity collect contact details for follow-up as soon as the show, when you hand these goodies out.

The rest of these “big prizes” ought to be a part of an eye popping, fun and entertaining experience. You should add a game inside your booth and enjoy the big items become the reward for that winners?

Host a Game (With Awards!)

When you have an exciting game in the booth suitable to your business, while your competitive entities around the aisle do not have anything but pamphlets, where do you consider folks will wind up? Be sure that your games come with an component of fun and attracts positive attention. Leave the great ‘ole raffle and wow games in the old age home.

Don’t neglect to benefit from this chance to get details. Have attendees sign-up to join. This allows you to definitely create a list which you can use as soon as the event. We recently dealt with a customer to make a small golf whole idea. The obstacles were themed towards the particular event and also the target audience was apt to be a golfer. Hole-in-one!

Don’t limit you to ultimately golf. It may be a variety of games. Consider what your trade show potential customers find entertaining and related. In case your game is engaging, has got the right performance, and provide attractive prizes up for grabs, it might offer company the opportunity are the talk on the show.

Demo your product or service (or Service)

If you’re investing in a trade show visual appeal, hopefully your products, or services are valuable and different on the market. Consider the trade show attendees as repeating sales calls. If they’re your target audience, it’s time for you to demonstrate your value and show why they ought to award you their organization.

When you have an item, or service that may be demoed, show its real-time value. Think it is just like a mini-infomercial. Concentrate on the value you may offer for the audience, not the functions. If you’re able to allow it to be on the job, get it done. A lot more involved the crowd is, better.

Use Technologies

Several modern technologies do apply for the trade show atmosphere to provide an exhibitor top of the hand.

Recently, digital signage and interactive touch screens are actually increasingly integrated into trade show booths in an effort to attract attention and display value. These components may be used to show processes, educate consumers, showcase testimonials and lots of other functions that may differentiate an exhibitor around the trade show floor.

Closeness marketing is an additional technology that you might be capable of use to your benefit. As attendees wander near your booth, messages are delivered to their cell phone containing special deals (maybe a deal to try out your game) along with other information about browsing your booth. New technology such as the i Beacon could make this possible.

Stay Participating in Social media marketing

Even though trade shows is an “in-person” event, that doesn’t suggest that social networking can’t play a role within your overall trade show performance. Active social networking involvement while in the show will help you connect and resonate with two different audiences — attendees, and people who couldn’t allow it to be.

Those in the trade show can locate that you’re there, and when you’re doing so right, you are able to show that you’re worth looking at. Make sure you are actively using trade event related hash tags to ensure that visitors can certainly find your content regularly.

Additionally the ones that didn’t result in the show may go through the big event vicariously using your posts. Simply because someone isn’t there, doesn’t make sure they are dead for you. Capture the entire goings on on the show and illustrate the social dash you’re making. Who knows, the individual attentiveness on social networking that didn’t result in the show could be the real decision maker.

Be Impressive

Trade show marketing generally is a rewarding experience and may illustrate a real ROI. Creating a impressive trade show booth is a element which can help you reach your primary goal.

What items and techniques maybe you have a part of your Trade Show Displays making it impressive? If you’re thinking about incorporating inbound marketing inside your trade show initiatives to maximize ROI

Resource: DXP Display

from Dxp Display https://ift.tt/2Z6UH7w Source : blog.dxpdisplay.com

[danicamaebaliuag]

Annyeonghaseyo!

Where do I see myself 10 years from now? Is my learning in SPUP

vital to where I’m leading to?

The way I see myself ten years ahead of now is not something I often think about. To tell you the truth, it scares me a little to know that in one short decade I will be twenty Six years old, and that my years of youth are coming to an end. One thing I’m certain of, is that if God gives me the opportunity to get to that age, I will make the most of my years and put all of my effort to become a successful, happy woman.

A vision I’ve always had of myself years ahead of now  is a successful police woman and a wealthy business woman that owns an famous restaurant , and is a world-wide well known my restaurant . I will have graduated from ST.PAUL UNIVERSITY PHILIPPINES . My institution will give an education to people.

I’m sure that with perseverance and the help of the people I love, as well as God’s, I will have the chance to travel around the world and meet many beautiful places.

By the time I turn 26, I will have visited dozens of countries around the world, and known places of incredible beauty. Another one of my wishes is to be able to build a very beautiful house with a music studio, a big garden, a couple of dogs and cats , a few nice cars, and maybe even a swimming pool and a hot tub.

Other dreams I have include a house in SEOUL NORTH KOREA , as well as an apartment in TOKYO JAPAN , a room share in Steamboat Colorado, and a beautiful house in Puerto PRICESSA PALAWAN, I’m not very certain I will be living in my native country ten years ahead of now, but I am certain that I will visit it often to see my family and friends as frequently as my job allows me to.

Is my learning in SPUPvital to where I’m leading to?

- YES BECAUSE I CAN'T REACH EVERYTHING I HAVE WITHOUT THE ST.PAUL UNIVERSITY OF PHILIPPINES TEACHERS AND SISTERS AND FATHER

 H b   n m n m n o c x z s d f g k l o p h j n b g u I p f h u b d s w q s as dc ds as dc f k o l m n m   k I n b n m k o b j k   d f s a w e f c v b f g f d w f v b g c s d f b v s f v b cv b f c v d   v c s x v   m k m k m k m k m k m k g d m s a d c z x z c v   s c s w e f v b v c x

   Was HUMMS the best choice after all?

Yes beacause in hums It trains you to think and consider ALL sides of a situation.

It’s common in a HUMSS classroom to be knee deep in debates, especially if the topic interests everyone. Whether you are involved in the action or are standing in the sidelines, you’ll get to hear all kinds of information and opinions. You’ll learn how to weigh each one, sort them out, and decide for yourself what would be the best course of action. Being exposed to this, one good thing you will understand is the value of listening. I’ve had Disciplines and Ideas in the Applied Social Sciences subjects in HUMSS and I found it really useful especially that one of the topics in it is counseling.

The avid reader and the aspiring know-it-all are both at an advantage here.

If you’re the kind of person who finds yourself randomly hitting some article you found in the internet or someone who just believes that #KnowledgeIsPower, congrats! You’ll fit right in. A HUMSS classroom is a hub for information sharing and includes a lot of conversations and exchange of ideas. You’ll most likely have the upper hand during class discussions.

You will realize that you have power

One thing that the HUMSS subjects instill in you is that you’re powerful as a human being. You’ll learn about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is highly important in our world. You’ll learn about your power as a citizen in Philippine Politics and Governance. You’ll learn the power of your mind in Philosophy. Trust me, learning under the HUMSS strand is an eye-opener.

Confidence will slowly but surely become your second skin.

Even if you’re naturally shy, gradually, you’ll learn how to speak up for yourself. You’ll find that you are comfortable in saying what’s on your mind because that’s what being in the HUMSS strand encourages you to do: to share your thoughts to the world.

Individuality and diversity are welcome.

You’ll learn how to appreciate the differences between people, especially in the subject Introduction to World Religions and Belief Systems and Trends, Networks, as well as Critical Thinking in the 21st Century Culture. Everyone is inherently unique in their own ways. Understanding and embracing it is one step closer towards achieving harmonic coexistence with one another.

    What course will you take in college and why? CRIMINOLOGY

I am Danica Mae D. Baliuag I Choose this course, because of the stable job after you finished it or this is in demand most especially now some of officials goes retiring because of they are older, goes to after life and some of company , organization needed a new one deserving to be an officer who can be the one we can trust and willing to serve and protect in the community..

Because this course fit your personality and ability, so when you asked someone about the course you take and you probably answer one of those question from the knowlegde u have learned from studying on this fields.It is happy to study, especially when the course you have is the one you like, and I am one of those students. “i choose it because i like it ”. All I want is to be a successful professional policewoman someday. They all say that there are many course aside from my course. And BsCrim is not the only option. Just like ”HRM ”, but all I want is CRIMINOLOGY NOT THE OTHER COURSE

What topic would you like to learn more in this subject?

Basic Computer Understanding and Skills Knowing the basics about computer really means a lot, today technology like computer is widely used and being uneducated about computer means being left behind, not only by the trend but also by the benefits we can get by using the computer.

  What the corona virus has taught you about life?

I’ve learnt to live with the bare minimum, comfortable with what I already have. Lockdown has taught me what is truly valuable in life and what’s a facade. It’s given me an opportunity to slow down in this fast changing world and to appreciate what truly matters: friends, family and the connections I’ve made over the course of my life

I’m rediscovering myself. And with every passing day, I’m rekindling with my passions, my likes, my interests and, mostly importantly, my desire to live, rather than merely survive.

Understanding what we really want

It’s funny how it takes the entire world coming to a stop for us to realise that maybe, just maybe, we’ve been doing things the wrong way after all. Of course it’s important to put bread on the table, but it’s equally important to keep your heart fed with the things that it really wants.

Maybe it’s that music lesson you’ve been wanting to take since you were 10, but never could find the time for. Or maybe it’s just spending some time with loved ones. The point I’m trying to make here is that even though the world seems like it’s falling apart on the outside, on the inside, it’s been a healing experience for a lot of us. At least, it has been for me.

Many of us have been using this time to do things that we generally wouldn’t, things we’d normally shun with an excuse of not having enough time. But now, time really does feel like an absurd concept, doesn’t it? The truth is, it was never really about time, it was about prioritising. In a world where instant gratification is the norm and everything is at our fingertips, the virtue of patience seems long lost. We’re bombarded with content on social media and streaming platforms and are constantly stimulated by text messages. Somewhere along the way, we’ve lost our ability to sit still and appreciate what is, rather than what isn’t. My observation might seem a little harsh, but it’s reflected in everything we do. From that summer body you’ve always longed for to the language you want to be fluent in. We want it all in a moment, we don’t want to wait, because waiting is boring. More importantly, waiting is hard.

So, what can we take away from these hard times? Despite all that has gone on, there have been some positives to the world coming to a stop. It’s forced us to take a step back, think, understand and appreciate what it means to live and not just survive. And that’s something I’m going to try to hold onto for a long time to come.

[ombruff1111]

Macropost1

Over the course of the past month, I have been working alongside my team members with Amy White, one of the directors at Community of Hope in Garner, NC. We have partnered with her to assist with the implementation of a virtual, Jobs for Life (JFL) program which will be distributed to other program sites once filming is completed in late October. While there will be other aspects to our overall practicum project, the main focus of the past few weeks has been to refine the curriculum for each of the 16 modules in the JFL toolkit.

Jobs for Life fills a critical community need by offering free, work development resources organized in a class format to help those who are unemployed or underemployed. According to the NC Department of Commerce, Wake County had an unemployment rate of 6.6% as of June 2020, slightly less than the state unemployment rate of 7.6% in the same month. These rates are higher than they have been in years past due to COVID-19, and highlight the particular importance of this program during the pandemic. Prior to this, all JFL programs have been held in person at the First Baptist Church of Garner. Given the safety concerns of the pandemic, in-person classes will have to be foregone. However, the need and the demand are still present, which led Ms. White to apply for, and subsequently receive, grant funding for the translation of this curriculum into a virtual format. Funding was also received to purchase loaner laptops for students without access to private computers. Supporting community members in their desire to find employment, or obtain more sufficient employment, not only achieves the obvious outcome of increasing their financial security, but it also affects their health status since low income is known to be a precursor to poor health. Economic stability is a social determinant of health, impacting an individual’s ability to seek care, whether by obtaining insurance or taking time to visit a healthcare professional. More funds can translate into better health habits, such as more nutritious meals, or access to better living arrangements in terms of stable housing. Stress can be reduced if life is no longer lived paycheck to paycheck. In these ways, Jobs for Life is more than a job training toolkit, it is a health intervention.

Not only is the JFL curriculum virtual, but much of the practicum has also been remote. This has been a learning curve for me, as I am used to projects, particularly group assignments, being hands-on and in-person. The changes necessitated by COVID-19 have forced me to be more creative as my team members and I have been tasked with generating digital content to supplement the JFL modules. We have each taken 4 modules to focus our efforts. The idea is to make this curriculum as engaging and exciting as it would be in person. We have been searching for charts and other visuals, as well as notating any ideas to make filming more interesting. This has been excellent practice in the realities of program planning and development, and the need for several iterations to produce a viable product. Facilitators for each of the modules have been identified, and over the next month we will be in close contact with them to review our generated content and ideas before a finalized plan will be approved for filming.

It is often challenging to see the positives of a pandemic, particularly in the context of economic stability when COVID-19 is responsible for skyrocketing unemployment. However, without the restrictions put in place by the virus limiting social gatherings, there never would have been an impetus to convert this program to an online format. Once complete, JFL will be able to reach individuals who are not fortunate enough to live in an urban, high-resourced area like Wake County. Unemployed and underemployed individuals of rural counties would also benefit from the skills taught in this course, but have previously been limited by transportation and lack of program access. It should be noted that even in an online format, JLF will have to promote its availability in rural areas in order for it to be utilized, and there will still be barriers for some in terms of hardware and internet access. Partnering with available public health entities in these more rural areas will be critical, such as hosting the program through the economic development department at the local health department. One of the additional benefits of the JFL program is the community it creates, appealing specifically to those who identify as Christian through use of biblical passages in each of the modules. This sense of community will be hard to recreate in an online setting, and diminishes the networking capacity of the program. Future development of the program might include creation of online platforms that allow for community building or virtual chat rooms. One part of our practicum includes hosting a virtual job fair, and this might be something to integrate into the overall JFL curriculum when disseminating it to other areas. The Christian focus may increase interest in rural areas, which tend to be more religious, though it should be noted this could be an alienating factor for those who are not religious, or adhere to other faiths. As the semester progresses, further applications of the JFL program in rural areas will be explored.

[yobaba30]

This.Is.Fucking>Brilliant.

On Sept. 1, with a Category 5 hurricane off the Atlantic coast, an angry wind was issuing from the direction of President Trump’s Twitter account. The apparent emergency: Debra Messing, the co-star of “Will & Grace,” had tweeted that “the public has a right to know” who is attending a Beverly Hills fund-raiser for Mr. Trump’s re-election.

“I have not forgotten that when it was announced that I was going to do The Apprentice, and when it then became a big hit, Helping NBC’s failed lineup greatly, @DebraMessing came up to me at an Upfront & profusely thanked me, even calling me ‘Sir,’ ” wrote the 45th president of the United States.

It was a classic Trumpian ragetweet: aggrieved over a minor slight, possibly prompted by a Fox News segment, unverifiable — he has a long history of questionable tales involving someone calling him “Sir” — and nostalgic for his primetime-TV heyday. (By Thursday he was lashing Ms. Messing again, as Hurricane Dorian was lashing the Carolinas.)

This sort of outburst, almost three years into his presidency, has kept people puzzling over who the “real” Mr. Trump is and how he actually thinks. Should we take him, to quote the famous precept of Trumpology, literally or seriously? Are his attacks impulsive tantrums or strategic distractions from his other woes? Is he playing 3-D chess or Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots?

This is a futile effort. Try to understand Donald Trump as a person with psychology and strategy and motivation, and you will inevitably spiral into confusion and covfefe. The key is to remember that Donald Trump is not a person. He’s a TV character.

I mean, O.K., there is an actual person named Donald John Trump, with a human body and a childhood and formative experiences that theoretically a biographer or therapist might usefully delve into someday. (We can only speculate about the latter; Mr. Trump has boasted on Twitter of never having seen a psychiatrist, preferring the therapeutic effects of “hit[ting] ‘sleazebags’ back.”)

But that Donald Trump is of limited significance to America and the world. The “Donald Trump” who got elected president, who has strutted and fretted across the small screen since the 1980s, is a decades-long media performance. To understand him, you need to approach him less like a psychologist and more like a TV critic.

He was born in 1946, at the same time that American broadcast TV was being born. He grew up with it. His father, Fred, had one of the first color TV sets in Jamaica Estates. In “The Art of the Deal” Donald Trump recalls his mother, Mary Anne, spending a day in front of the tube, enraptured by the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953. (“For Christ’s sake, Mary,” he remembers his father saying, “Enough is enough, turn it off. They’re all a bunch of con artists.”)

TV was his soul mate. It was like him. It was packed with the razzle-dazzle and action and violence that captivated him. He dreamed of going to Hollywood, then he shelved those dreams in favor of his father’s business and vowed, according to the book “TrumpNation” by Timothy O’Brien, to “put show business into real estate.”

As TV evolved from the homogeneous three-network mass medium of the mid-20th century to the polarized zillion-channel era of cable-news fisticuffs and reality shocker-tainment, he evolved with it. In the 1980s, he built a media profile as an insouciant, high-living apex predator. In 1990, he described his yacht and gilded buildings to Playboy as “Props for the show … The show is ‘Trump’ and it is sold-out performances everywhere.”

He syndicated that show to Oprah, Letterman, NBC, WrestleMania and Fox News. Everything he achieved, he achieved by using TV as a magnifying glass, to make himself appear bigger than he was.

He was able to do this because he thought like a TV camera. He knew what TV wanted, what stimulated its nerve endings. In his campaign rallies, he would tell The Washington Post, he knew just what to say “to keep the red light on”: that is, the light on a TV camera that showed that it was running, that you mattered. Bomb the [redacted] out of them! I’d like to punch him in the face! The red light radiated its approval. Cable news aired the rallies start to finish. For all practical purposes, he and the camera shared the same brain.

Even when he adopted social media, he used it like TV. First, he used it like a celebrity, to broadcast himself, his first tweet in 2009 promoting a “Late Show With David Letterman” appearance. Then he used it like an instigator, tweeting his birther conspiracies before he would talk about them on Fox News, road-testing his call for a border wall during the cable-news fueled Ebola and border panics of the 2014 midterms.

When he was a candidate, and especially when he was president, his tweets programmed TV and were amplified by it. On CNBC, a “BREAKING NEWS: TRUMP TWEET” graphic would spin out onscreen as soon as the words left his thumbs. He would watch Fox News, or Lou Dobbs, or CNN or “Morning Joe” or “Saturday Night Live” (“I don’t watch”), and get mad, and tweet. Then the tweets would become TV, and he would watch it, and tweet again.

If you want to understand what President Trump will do in any situation, then, it’s more helpful to ask: What would TV do? What does TV want?

It wants conflict. It wants excitement. If there is something that can blow up, it should blow up. It wants a fight. It wants more. It is always eating and never full.

Some presidential figure-outers, trying to understand the celebrity president through a template that they were already familiar with, have compared him with Ronald Reagan: a “master showman” cannily playing a “role.”

The comparison is understandable, but it’s wrong. Presidents Reagan and Trump were both entertainers who applied their acts to politics. But there’s a crucial difference between what “playing a character” means in the movies and what it means on reality TV.

Ronald Reagan was an actor. Actors need to believe deeply in the authenticity and interiority of people besides themselves — so deeply that they can subordinate their personalities to “people” who are merely lines on a script. Acting, Reagan told his biographer Lou Cannon, had taught him “to understand the feelings and motivations of others.”

Being a reality star, on the other hand, as Donald Trump was on “The Apprentice,” is also a kind of performance, but one that’s antithetical to movie acting. Playing a character on reality TV means being yourself, but bigger and louder.

Reality TV, writ broadly, goes back to Allen Funt’s “Candid Camera,” the PBS documentary “An American Family,” and MTV’s “The Real World.” But the first mass-market reality TV star was Richard Hatch, the winner of the first season of “Survivor” — produced by Mark Burnett, the eventual impresario of “The Apprentice”— in the summer of 2000.

Mr. Hatch won that first season in much the way that Mr. Trump would run his 2016 campaign. He realized that the only rules were that there were no rules. He lied and backstabbed and took advantage of loopholes, and he argued — with a telegenic brashness — that this made him smart. This was a crooked game in a crooked world, he argued to a final jury of players he’d betrayed and deceived. But, hey: At least he was open about it!

While shooting that first season, the show’s crew was rooting for Rudy Boesch, a 72-year-old former Navy SEAL and model of hard work and fair play. “The only outcome nobody wanted was Richard Hatch winning,�� the host, Jeff Probst, would say later. It “would be a disaster.” After all, decades of TV cop shows had taught executives the iron rule that the viewers needed the good guy to win.

But they didn’t. “Survivor” was addictively entertaining, and audiences loved-to-hate the wryly devious Richard the way they did Tony Soprano and, before him, J.R. Ewing. More than 50 million people watched the first-season finale, and “Survivor” has been on the air nearly two decades.

From Richard Hatch, we got a steady stream of Real Housewives, Kardashians, nasty judges, dating-show contestants who “didn’t come here to make friends” and, of course, Donald Trump.

Reality TV has often gotten a raw deal from critics. (Full disclosure: I still watch “Survivor.”) Its audiences, often dismissed as dupes, are just as capable of watching with a critical eye as the fans of prestige cable dramas. But when you apply its mind-set — the law of the TV jungle — to public life, things get ugly.

In reality TV — at least competition reality shows like “The Apprentice” — you do not attempt to understand other people, except as obstacles or objects. To try to imagine what it is like to be a person other than yourself (what, in ordinary, off-camera life, we call “empathy”) is a liability. It’s a distraction that you have to tune out in order to project your fullest you.

Reality TV instead encourages “getting real.” On MTV’s progressive, diverse “Real World,” the phrase implied that people in the show were more authentic than characters on scripted TV — or even than real people in your own life, who were socially conditioned to “be polite.” But “getting real” would also resonate with a rising conservative notion: that political correctness kept people from saying what was really on their minds.

Being real is not the same thing as being honest. To be real is to be the most entertaining, provocative form of yourself. It is to say what you want, without caring whether your words are kind or responsible — or true — but only whether you want to say them. It is to foreground the parts of your personality (aggression, cockiness, prejudice) that will focus the red light on you, and unleash them like weapons.

Maybe the best definition of being real came from the former “Apprentice” contestant and White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman in her memoir, “Unhinged.” Mr. Trump, she said, encouraged people in his entourage to “exaggerate the unique part of themselves.” When you’re being real, there is no difference between impulse and strategy, because the “strategy” is to do what feels good.

This is why it misses a key point to ask, as Vanity Fair recently did after Mr. Trump’s assault on Representative Elijah E. Cummings and the city of Baltimore in July, “Is the president a racist, or does he just play one on TV?” In reality TV, if you are a racist — and reality TV has had many racists, like Katie Hopkins, the far-right British “Apprentice” star the president frequently retweets — then you are a racist and you play one on TV.

So if you actually want a glimpse into the mind of Donald J. Trump, don’t look for a White House tell-all or some secret childhood heartbreak. Go to the streaming service Tubi, where his 14 seasons of “The Apprentice” recently became accessible to the public.

You can fast-forward past the team challenges and the stagey visits to Trump-branded properties. They’re useful in their own way, as a picture of how Mr. Burnett buttressed the future president’s Potemkin-zillionaire image. But the unadulterated, 200-proof Donald Trump is found in the boardroom segments, at the end of each episode, in which he “fires” one contestant.

In theory, the boardroom is where the best performers in the week’s challenges are rewarded and the screw-ups punished. In reality, the boardroom is a new game, the real game, a free-for-all in which contestants compete to throw one another under the bus and beg Mr. Trump for mercy.

There is no morality in the boardroom. There is no fair and unfair in the boardroom. There is only the individual, trying to impress Mr. Trump, to flatter Mr. Trump, to commune with his mind and anticipate his whims and fits of pique. Candidates are fired for giving up advantages (stupid), for being too nice to their adversaries (weak), for giving credit to their teammates, for interrupting him. The host’s decisions were often so mercurial, producers have said, that they would have to go back and edit the episodes to impose some appearance of logic on them.

What saves you in the boardroom? Fighting. Boardroom Trump loves to see people fight each other. He perks up at it like a cat hearing a can opener. He loves to watch people scrap for his favor (as they eventually would in his White House). He loves asking contestants to rat out their teammates and watching them squirm with conflict. The unity of the team gives way to disunity, which in the Trumpian worldview is the most productive state of being.

And America loved boardroom Trump — for a while. He delivered his catchphrase in TV cameos and slapped it on a reissue of his 1980s Monopoly knockoff Trump: The Game. (“I’m back and you’re fired!”) But after the first season, the ratings dropped; by season four they were nearly half what they were in season one.

He reacted to his declining numbers by ratcheting up what worked before: becoming a louder, more extreme, more abrasive version of himself. He gets more insulting in the boardroom — “You hang out with losers and you become a loser”— and executes double and quadruple firings.

It’s a pattern that we see as he advances toward his re-election campaign, with an eye not on the Nielsen ratings but on the polls: The only solution for any given problem was a Trumpier Trump.

Did it work for “The Apprentice”? Yes and no. His show hung on to a loyal base through 14 seasons, including the increasingly farcical celebrity version. But it never dominated its competition again, losing out, despite his denials, to the likes of the sitcom “Mike & Molly.”

Donald Trump’s “Apprentice” boardroom closed for business on Feb. 16, 2015, precisely four months before he announced his successful campaign for president. And also, it never closed. It expanded. It broke the fourth wall. We live inside it now.

Now, Mr. Trump re-creates the boardroom’s helter-skelter atmosphere every time he opens his mouth or his Twitter app. In place of the essentially dead White House press briefing, he walks out to the lawn in the morning and reporters gaggle around him like “Apprentice” contestants awaiting the day’s task. He rails and complains and establishes the plot points for that day’s episode: Greenland! Jews! “I am the chosen one!”

Then cable news spends morning to midnight happily masticating the fresh batch of outrages before memory-wiping itself to prepare for tomorrow’s episode. Maybe this sounds like a TV critic’s overextended metaphor, but it’s also the president’s: As The Times has reported, before taking office, he told aides to think of every day as “an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals.”

Mr. Trump has been playing himself instinctually as a character since the 1980s; it’s allowed him to maintain a profile even through bankruptcies and humiliations. But it’s also why, on the rare occasions he’s had to publicly attempt a role contrary to his nature — calling for healing from a script after a mass shooting, for instance — he sounds as stagey and inauthentic as an unrehearsed amateur doing a sitcom cameo.

His character shorthand is “Donald Trump, Fighter Guy Who Wins.” Plop him in front of a camera with an infant orphaned in a mass murder, and he does not have it in his performer’s tool kit to do anything other than smile unnervingly and give a fat thumbs-up.

This is what was lost on commentators who kept hoping wanly that this State of the Union or that tragedy would be the moment he finally became “presidential.” It was lost on journalists who felt obligated to act as though every modulated speech from a teleprompter might, this time, be sincere.

The institution of the office is not changing Donald Trump, because he is already in the sway of another institution. He is governed not by the truisms of past politics but by the imperative of reality TV: never de-escalate and never turn the volume down.

This conveniently echoes the mantra he learned from his early mentor, Roy Cohn: Always attack and never apologize. He serves up one “most shocking episode ever” after another, mining uglier pieces of his core each time: progressing from profanity about Haiti and Africa in private to publicly telling four minority American congresswomen, only one of whom was born outside the United States, to “go back” to the countries they came from.

The taunting. The insults. The dog whistles. The dog bullhorns. The “Lock her up” and “Send her back.” All of it follows reality-TV rules. Every season has to top the last. Every fight is necessary, be it against Ilhan Omar or Debra Messing. Every twist must be more shocking, every conflict more vicious, lest the red light grow bored and wink off. The only difference: Now there’s no Mark Burnett to impose retroactive logic on the chaos, only press secretaries, pundits and Mike Pence.

To ask whether any of this is “instinct” or “strategy” is a parlor game. If you think like a TV camera — if thinking in those reflexive microbursts of adrenaline and testosterone has served you your whole life — then the instinct is the strategy.

And to ask who the “real” Donald Trump is, is to ignore the obvious. You already know who Donald Trump is. All the evidence you need is right there on your screen. He’s half-man, half-TV, with a camera for an eye that is constantly focused on itself. The red light is pulsing, 24/7, and it does not appear to have an off switch.

[berniesrevolution]

IN THESE TIMES

Despite widespread support for the Green New Deal, an ambitious resolution to transform the economy and society to address the climate crisis, the labor movement is not uniting behind it. On March 8, the AFLCIO’s Energy Committee released an open letter to Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) criticizing the plan on grounds it “could cause immediate harm to millions of our members and their families.”

In contrast, some union locals have come out in support of the resolution, including the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council, which noted in January that “climate change poses an immediate and long-term threat to all working people.” Groups like Climate Workers, a membership organization of rank-and-file workers, the Labor Network for Sustainability, a labor group that fights for ecological and economic justice, and the BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of major unions and environmental groups, have spent years trying to bridge the labor movement and the movement for climate justice, but rifts remain.

The labor movement is divided precisely at a moment when it could ensure the passage of a Green New Deal rooted in justice, self-determination and union rights. The resolution’s call for a just transition emerges from the environmental justice, labor and Indigenous rights movements of the 1980s and 1990s. It is premised on the principle that the shift away from a fossil fuel economy must ensure workers play a lead role in the transition—and that workers are not abandoned in the shift to zero emissions. A jobs guarantee, universal basic income and protection of union rights—all floated as components of a Green New Deal—could play key roles.

In These Times called Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-Communications Workers of America (AFACWA) and a rising star among union leaders, to discuss the idea.

Nelson captured national attention when she issued a strike threat in the midst of the Trump administration’s infamous government shutdown over border wall funding. Five days later, when some air traffic controllers on the East Coast did not show up for work, she told New York magazine that flight attendants were “mobilizing immediately” to strike. Hours later, Trump announced he’d reached a deal to temporarily reopen the government.

Nelson’s very public challenge has made her a leading contender to replace Richard Trumka as president of the AFL-CIO if he retires as expected, at the end of his term, in two years.

Nelson was born in Corvallis, Ore., to a teacher and a lumber mill worker. She majored in English and education, and applied for a flight attendant position in 1996 to pay the bills. She recalled to the New York Times that her six-week training included “make-up” day for women to learn how to apply mascara while men took the day off. An early pay dispute turned her into a union activist, and she became the union’s president in 2014. One of the few international union presidents who publicly aligns herself with Bernie Sanders, Nelson now works about one flight a year, devoting the rest of her time to her union.

Nelson hails from an industry that poses a problem to the goal of zero emissions: Passenger airplanes account for 1–2% of global carbon emissions, and air travel is expected to double in the next 20 years. Finding alternative energy sources for airplanes has proven trickier than for cars or electrical grids. At the same time, Nelson represents workers whose conditions have already grown more dangerous as the climate crisis has escalated. “Extreme weather is increasing instances of turbulence, which is a serious occupational injury threat,” Nelson notes.

The Green New Deal calls for us to “achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers.” As a labor publication that cares a lot about climate change, we have been asking ourselves what a “just transition” could actually be. What do you think?

Sara Nelson:

I can tell you what it’s not! A few hours of training is not a just transition. The transition needs to begin before the jobs go away. A just transition must ensure pensions and healthcare are protected for workers who spent their lives powering our country in the fossil fuel industries. A just transition includes bringing the expertise of unions to the table so we don’t create policy that has unintended consequences, such as making it impossible to produce steel needed to create alternative forms of energy. A just transition must also invest in technological innovation to determine whether current energy sources can be utilized in a green way. A just transition includes focus on negotiating fair trade agreements for American workers to keep production in the United States so that, for example, American workers are building wind turbines and solar panels. And finally, a just transition means maintaining income for families who depend on an actual transition of jobs, career training, apprenticeships.

What would it take to build more labor movement support for the Green New Deal?

Sara Nelson: 

Make labor central to the discussion, including labor rights, labor protections and labor expertise. We must recognize that labor unions were among the first to fight for the environment because it was our workspaces that had pollutants, our communities that industry polluted. Let’s not dismiss the labor movement. Let’s recognize and engage the infrastructure and experience of the labor movement to make this work.

We need the airline industry to engage as well. According to an industry analysis, the airline industry has, for the last 40 years, improved fuel efficiency at a rate equivalent to taking 25 million cars off the road each of those years.

The point here is that we need to build a broad coalition, and to do that we can’t start from a position that assumes opposition. If we bring everyone to the table, recognize the efforts to date, draw on the expertise from each affected field, and mobilize a united effort, then we can create allies where we otherwise might have had enemies.

Is increasing fuel efficiency enough? Because of more flights, total airline emissions are still expected to rise. Must flights decrease, and if so, how do we protect workers?

Sara Nelson: 

I think … [laughs] I think that we have to be pretty clear that interstate commerce in the United States, international trade and transportation just don’t work without air travel, right? We can advance technology to help the airlines use an alternative energy source and there is both a moral and a cost incentive to do that.

What are the biggest lies opponents of the Green New Deal tell workers?

Sara Nelson: 

The biggest lie is that the Green New Deal resolution is legislative policy and that it imposes certain strict requirements—for example with air travel, that every plane will stay on the ground in 10 years. There is not a flight attendant or pilot or anyone in aviation who actually believes that aviation is going to be grounded. That’s simply not true. The opposite is true. This resolution seeks to promote technological advancements and policies that will keep flights in the air. Today, airplanes are grounded because of severe weather events, sometimes for long periods because these events destroy infrastructure that is necessary to take off and land. Or, destroy the demand for those locations—there is nothing to fly to.

How can climate campaigners build bridges with organized labor?

Sara Nelson: 

First and foremost, there has to be a recognition that labor has never seen an actual “just transition.” You can say those words all day long, but what people hear is “a couple hours of training and then you’re going to leave my community devastated and alone—like a ghost town.” So, there’s zero trust.

If you want to build trust, you need to do two things. One, you need to shore up the wasteland that’s already been created where there was no just transition. When new environmental regulations promoted low-sulfur mining, collection of coal moved from union mines in Appalachia to nonunion surface mines out West. No one addressed the communities that were hurt in the process. So miners are understandably skeptical.

Now coal companies have filed for bankruptcy and stopped contributing to healthcare and pension funds. We need to push to adopt legislation that keeps America’s promise to coal miners of pensions and healthcare, as well as addresses black lung— that’s the bare minimum to show good faith that this process of taking on climate change will focus on making coal miners’ lives better, not worse. Bipartisan legislation to fund pensions has had support for years, but Mitch McConnell has stopped it from getting to a vote. We can demand H.R. 934/935 and S. 27 get passed now, and show miners and others working in the fossil fuel industry that we’re on their side. My union, AFA-CWA, will be on the Hill with the United Mineworkers of America on May 8 to do just that. Everyone should get behind securing those pensions.

Second, a just transition needs to talk about how we start the transition process early. We need to get into these communities, talk with them about their needs, and get to know them. It’s important that we not write them off and say, “They just have to get over it.” Nobody is ever going to get over not being able to provide healthcare for their families and watching people die in poverty or lose their homes. So, let’s talk with the people about the jobs that are there and what those jobs also support in the community. Every good union coal mining job supports another five jobs in that community. So, we need to start talking about how we are going to put some of these jobs back into those communities. With new technology? With training? And how are we going to support people in the meantime? Who is going to be able to get retrained and learn a new career?

(Continue Reading)

[psychologyofsex]

Why I Deleted My Academia.edu Account and Why You Should, Too

The traditional model of academic publishing restricts access to research by putting it in the hands of private companies. As a result, I’ve had to work hard to make my research available to those who wish to read it. I’ve done so by publishing accessible summaries on this blog, by publishing as much as I can in open-access journals, and by establishing profiles on file-sharing sites like Academia.Edu and ResearchGate, which allow you to store and share full-text uploads of papers with anyone. I will keep doing the first two going forward, but I’ve grown leery of the latter and have increasingly come to realize that these file-sharing websites aren’t an effective solution to the problems of academic publishing. In fact, I’ve grown quite concerned about these sites and have come to realize that academics need to pursue other means of sharing their work. Let me explain.

Before I go on, you may want to read this post first, which explains why I switched to publishing in open-access journals whenever possible. Long story short, academics have historically given their work away to big publishing houses for free (including the copyright to our research papers). The publishers have then turned around and sold our work to libraries and subscribers for exorbitant prices—and kept all the profits to themselves. The end result is that research is typically accessible only to those with the funds to access it. Academics have grown increasingly uncomfortable with this arrangement in recent years because we’re giving our work for free to companies that are severely limiting access to it while making billions of dollars.

By contrast, open-access papers can be freely viewed by anyone with an internet connection. This is great for the general public, which subsidizes most academic research in one form or another anyway. I mean, why should the public pay for research to be conducted, and then have to pay a middleman separately in order to access the results? Open-access is also great for students at universities that don’t have massive library budgets, as well as for scholars in developing countries where research resources are scarce. 

Getting back to AcademiaEdu and ResearchGate, these are online repositories where researchers can upload copies of all of their works, which others can freely access. In other words, they provide an avenue for widely sharing research. Of course—and as I noted above—with traditional publishing, we give the copyright to our work away to journal publishers, so we usually can’t upload the final version of our articles without violating copyright law. However, most publishing agreements I’ve seen permit researchers to share the pre-publication version of their papers (i.e., the basic-looking version that you create in Microsoft Word, not the pretty version formatted by the journal. Some will allow you to share the version that has been through peer review; however, others may not). 

I painstakingly reviewed all of my previous copyright transfer agreements and, in cases where it was permitted, I uploaded pre-publication versions of my articles to file-sharing sites like AcademiaEdu and ResearchGate. 

I guess I was naïve, though. Initially, I thought those sites were solutions to the problem of poor research access. However, I’ve come to learn that these are large and growing for-profit companies that, just like journal publishers, are harvesting free labor from academics. We’re building a massive research infrastructure for them, which they’re turning around and monetizing. These are multi-million dollar companies backed by venture capital firms that see big profit potential.

In supporting companies like AcademiaEdu and ResearchGate, we’re simply transferring power and control over access to research to another set of companies—companies that can and are looking for ways to cash in on that power. For example, AcademiaEdu is currently free to access, but has a “premium” subscription model. I’d bet good money that they’ll eventually start charging everyone for access once they have a big enough repository and user base. That would just put everything back behind a paywall, thereby defeating the purpose of why many of us joined the site in the first place.

I’m also concerned about other ways they’re trying to monetize their site. For example, in 2016, AcademiaEdu toyed with charging users to get their papers “recommended” on the site. Efforts like this would have the effect of pushing self-interest over scientific advancement by giving anyone the opportunity to promote their work regardless of its quality or merit. 

So how do we get around the problems that these sites create? Here are a few things you can do:

· Stop investing your time building up places like AcademiaEdu. They’re just taking your free labor and cashing in on it. This is a big part of the reason why I recently deleted my profile with them (I also deleted it because they’re poor at policing intellectual property infringement, but that’s a whole other story). AcademiaEdu and ResearchGate have done a brilliant job marketing themselves as noble causes—places where academics can go to share research—while hiding their real goal, which is building a massive research database curated by the world’s experts that they can cash in on. As I write this, ResearchGate is the 171st and Academia.edu is the 275th most visited website in the entire world. These are incredibly powerful companies we are unwittingly building up and we don’t know what they’re ultimately going to do with the fruits of our labor—other than turn it into a huge profit, of course.

· Unfortunately, there doesn’t yet exist a non-profit equivalent of AcademiaEdu that I’m aware of. However, until that exists, one option is to post pre-prints of your work on a site like PsyArxiv, which is run by the non-profit Center for Open Science. This can at least get your work out there in some form and it will be accessible to anyone online.

· Publish your research in open-access journals whenever possible. This is the best way of ensuring that your work remains free and easy to access for the long run. If an open-access journal requires a fee to publish, try to request a waiver or apply for a grant to cover the costs. I’ve been able to get several open-access papers published without paying one cent. It shouldn’t have to cost academics money to give their research away. 

· If your research is locked behind a paywall, review your copyright agreement(s) to see what kinds of information sharing are permissible. Odds are that there’s some version of the paper you can share freely. You can share these versions on your own personal website, put them out on social media, email them to anyone who requests them, and/or store them on professional websites. For example, if you have a profile on a site like the Social Psychology Network, you have a certain amount of storage available for sharing any files you wish.

· Take advantage of institutional repositories. A lot of colleges and universities have them, and depositing your research with them can make it easier for others to access your work. For example, the University of California repository is accessible to everyone, although you must be affiliated with that university to post your work in it.

· Blog about or otherwise publish accessible summaries of your research that the average person can understand. Making academic papers more widely available is great, but they’re often written with so much jargon that only our peers can decipher them. Accessible summaries can help others to better understand our work and why it’s important.   

These are just some of the alternatives that exist for getting science out there. We’d all do well to consider investing in them in the interest of ensuring freer and wider access to research for the long haul. If you have other tips or recommendations for sharing research, weigh in with your comments below.

Want to learn more about Sex and Psychology ? Click here for previous articles or follow the blog on Facebook (facebook.com/psychologyofsex), Twitter (@JustinLehmiller), or Reddit (reddit.com/r/psychologyofsex) to receive updates. You can also follow Dr. Lehmiller on YouTube and Instagram.

Image Source: 123RF/Wichapol Polpitakchai

You might also like:

Why I Started Publishing In Open Access Journals, And Why You Should Too

What Is It Like To Publish In An Open-Access Journal?

[bountyofbeads]

The Real Donald Trump Is a Character on TV https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/opinion/sunday/trump-reality-tv.html

Great analysis by James Poniewozik🤔 To understand the wacky, outrageous, demented mind of Trump is to know that Trump is nothing more than a self-grandized TV character (D-rated).

"To ask whether any of this is “instinct” or “strategy” is a parlor game. If you think like a TV camera — if thinking in those reflexive microbursts of adrenaline and testosterone has served you your whole life — then the instinct is the strategy."

"And to ask who the “real” Donald Trump is, is to ignore the obvious. You already know who Donald Trump is. All the evidence you need is right there on your screen. He’s half-man, half-TV, with a camera for an eye that is constantly focused on itself. The red light is pulsing, 24/7, and it does not appear to have an off switch."

The Real Donald Trump Is a Character on TV

Understand that, and you’ll understand what he’s doing in the White House.

By James Poniewozik | Published September 6, 2019 | New York Times | Posted September 8, 2019 9:00 AM ET |

Mr. Poniewozik is the chief television critic of The Times and the author of “Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television and the Fracturing of America.”

On Sept. 1, with a Category 5 hurricane off the Atlantic coast, an angry wind was issuing from the direction of President Trump’s Twitter account. The apparent emergency: Debra Messing, the co-star of “Will & Grace,” had tweeted that “the public has a right to know” who is attending a Beverly Hills fund-raiser for Mr. Trump’s re-election.

“I have not forgotten that when it was announced that I was going to do The Apprentice, and when it then became a big hit, Helping NBC’s failed lineup greatly, @DebraMessing came up to me at an Upfront & profusely thanked me, even calling me ‘Sir,’ ” wrote the 45th president of the United States.

It was a classic Trumpian ragetweet: aggrieved over a minor slight, possibly prompted by a Fox News segment, unverifiable — he has a long history of questionable tales involving someone calling him “Sir” — and nostalgic for his primetime-TV heyday. (By Thursday he was lashing Ms. Messing again, as Hurricane Dorian was lashing the Carolinas.)

This sort of outburst, almost three years into his presidency, has kept people puzzling over who the “real” Mr. Trump is and how he actually thinks. Should we take him, to quote the famous precept of Trumpology, literally or seriously? Are his attacks impulsive tantrums or strategic distractions from his other woes? Is he playing 3-D chess or Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots?

This is a futile effort. Try to understand Donald Trump as a person with psychology and strategy and motivation, and you will inevitably spiral into confusion and covfefe. The key is to remember that Donald Trump is not a person. He’s a TV character.

I mean, O.K., there is an actual person named Donald John Trump, with a human body and a childhood and formative experiences that theoretically a biographer or therapist might usefully delve into someday. (We can only speculate about the latter; Mr. Trump has boasted on Twitter of never having seen a psychiatrist, preferring the therapeutic effects of “hit[ting] ‘sleazebags’ back.”)

But that Donald Trump is of limited significance to America and the world. The “Donald Trump” who got elected president, who has strutted and fretted across the small screen since the 1980s, is a decades-long media performance. To understand him, you need to approach him less like a psychologist and more like a TV critic.

He was born in 1946, at the same time that American broadcast TV was being born. He grew up with it. His father, Fred, had one of the first color TV sets in Jamaica Estates. In “The Art of the Deal” Donald Trump recalls his mother, Mary Anne, spending a day in front of the tube, enraptured by the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953. (“For Christ’s sake, Mary,” he remembers his father saying, “Enough is enough, turn it off. They’re all a bunch of con artists.”)

TV was his soul mate. It was like him. It was packed with the razzle-dazzle and action and violence that captivated him. He dreamed of going to Hollywood, then he shelved those dreams in favor of his father’s business and vowed, according to the book “TrumpNation” by Timothy O’Brien, to “put show business into real estate.”

As TV evolved from the homogeneous three-network mass medium of the mid-20th century to the polarized zillion-channel era of cable-news fisticuffs and reality shocker-tainment, he evolved with it. In the 1980s, he built a media profile as an insouciant, high-living apex predator. In 1990, he described his yacht and gilded buildings to Playboy as “Props for the show … The show is ‘Trump’ and it is sold-out performances everywhere.”

He syndicated that show to Oprah, Letterman, NBC, WrestleMania and Fox News. Everything he achieved, he achieved by using TV as a magnifying glass, to make himself appear bigger than he was.

He was able to do this because he thought like a TV camera. He knew what TV wanted, what stimulated its nerve endings. In his campaign rallies, he would tell The Washington Post, he knew just what to say “to keep the red light on”: that is, the light on a TV camera that showed that it was running, that you mattered. Bomb the [redacted] out of them! I’d like to punch him in the face! The red light radiated its approval. Cable news aired the rallies start to finish. For all practical purposes, he and the camera shared the same brain.

Even when he adopted social media, he used it like TV. First, he used it like a celebrity, to broadcast himself, his first tweet in 2009 promoting a “Late Show With David Letterman” appearance. Then he used it like an instigator, tweeting his birther conspiracies before he would talk about them on Fox News, road-testing his call for a border wall during the cable-news fueled Ebola and border panics of the 2014 midterms.

When he was a candidate, and especially when he was president, his tweets programmed TV and were amplified by it. On CNBC, a “BREAKING NEWS: TRUMP TWEET” graphic would spin out onscreen as soon as the words left his thumbs. He would watch Fox News, or Lou Dobbs, or CNN or “Morning Joe” or “Saturday Night Live” (“I don’t watch”), and get mad, and tweet. Then the tweets would become TV, and he would watch it, and tweet again.

If you want to understand what President Trump will do in any situation, then, it’s more helpful to ask: What would TV do? What does TV want?

It wants conflict. It wants excitement. If there is something that can blow up, it should blow up. It wants a fight. It wants more. It is always eating and never full.

Some presidential figure-outers, trying to understand the celebrity president through a template that they were already familiar with, have compared him with Ronald Reagan: a “master showman” cannily playing a “role.”

The comparison is understandable, but it’s wrong. Presidents Reagan and Trump were both entertainers who applied their acts to politics. But there’s a crucial difference between what “playing a character” means in the movies and what it means on reality TV.

Ronald Reagan was an actor. Actors need to believe deeply in the authenticity and interiority of people besides themselves — so deeply that they can subordinate their personalities to “people” who are merely lines on a script. Acting, Reagan told his biographer Lou Cannon, had taught him “to understand the feelings and motivations of others.”

Being a reality star, on the other hand, as Donald Trump was on “The Apprentice,” is also a kind of performance, but one that’s antithetical to movie acting. Playing a character on reality TV means being yourself, but bigger and louder.

Reality TV, writ broadly, goes back to Allen Funt’s “Candid Camera,” the PBS documentary “An American Family,” and MTV’s “The Real World.” But the first mass-market reality TV star was Richard Hatch, the winner of the first season of “Survivor” — produced by Mark Burnett, the eventual impresario of “The Apprentice”— in the summer of 2000.

Mr. Hatch won that first season in much the way that Mr. Trump would run his 2016 campaign. He realized that the only rules were that there were no rules. He lied and backstabbed and took advantage of loopholes, and he argued — with a telegenic brashness — that this made him smart. This was a crooked game in a crooked world, he argued to a final jury of players he’d betrayed and deceived. But, hey: At least he was open about it!

While shooting that first season, the show’s crew was rooting for Rudy Boesch, a 72-year-old former Navy SEAL and model of hard work and fair play. “The only outcome nobody wanted was Richard Hatch winning,” the host, Jeff Probst, would say later. It “would be a disaster.” After all, decades of TV cop shows had taught executives the iron rule that the viewers needed the good guy to win.

But they didn’t. “Survivor” was addictively entertaining, and audiences loved-to-hate the wryly devious Richard the way they did Tony Soprano and, before him, J.R. Ewing. More than 50 million people watched the first-season finale, and “Survivor” has been on the air nearly two decades.

From Richard Hatch, we got a steady stream of Real Housewives, Kardashians, nasty judges, dating-show contestants who “didn’t come here to make friends” and, of course, Donald Trump.

Reality TV has often gotten a raw deal from critics. (Full disclosure: I still watch “Survivor.”) Its audiences, often dismissed as dupes, are just as capable of watching with a critical eye as the fans of prestige cable dramas. But when you apply its mind-set — the law of the TV jungle — to public life, things get ugly.

In reality TV — at least competition reality shows like “The Apprentice” — you do not attempt to understand other people, except as obstacles or objects. To try to imagine what it is like to be a person other than yourself (what, in ordinary, off-camera life, we call “empathy”) is a liability. It’s a distraction that you have to tune out in order to project your fullest you.

Reality TV instead encourages “getting real.” On MTV’s progressive, diverse “Real World,” the phrase implied that people in the show were more authentic than characters on scripted TV — or even than real people in your own life, who were socially conditioned to “be polite.” But “getting real” would also resonate with a rising conservative notion: that political correctness kept people from saying what was really on their minds.

Being real is not the same thing as being honest. To be real is to be the most entertaining, provocative form of yourself. It is to say what you want, without caring whether your words are kind or responsible — or true — but only whether you want to say them. It is to foreground the parts of your personality (aggression, cockiness, prejudice) that will focus the red light on you, and unleash them like weapons.

Maybe the best definition of being real came from the former “Apprentice” contestant and White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman in her memoir, “Unhinged.” Mr. Trump, she said, encouraged people in his entourage to “exaggerate the unique part of themselves.” When you’re being real, there is no difference between impulse and strategy, because the “strategy” is to do what feels good.

This is why it misses a key point to ask, as Vanity Fair recently did after Mr. Trump’s assault on Representative Elijah E. Cummings and the city of Baltimore in July, “Is the president a racist, or does he just play one on TV?” In reality TV, if you are a racist — and reality TV has had many racists, like Katie Hopkins, the far-right British “Apprentice” star the president frequently retweets — then you are a racist and you play one on TV.

So if you actually want a glimpse into the mind of Donald J. Trump, don’t look for a White House tell-all or some secret childhood heartbreak. Go to the streaming service Tubi, where his 14 seasons of “The Apprentice” recently became accessible to the public.

You can fast-forward past the team challenges and the stagey visits to Trump-branded properties. They’re useful in their own way, as a picture of how Mr. Burnett buttressed the future president’s Potemkin-zillionaire image. But the unadulterated, 200-proof Donald Trump is found in the boardroom segments, at the end of each episode, in which he “fires” one contestant.

In theory, the boardroom is where the best performers in the week’s challenges are rewarded and the screw-ups punished. In reality, the boardroom is a new game, the real game, a free-for-all in which contestants compete to throw one another under the bus and beg Mr. Trump for mercy.

There is no morality in the boardroom. There is no fair and unfair in the boardroom. There is only the individual, trying to impress Mr. Trump, to flatter Mr. Trump, to commune with his mind and anticipate his whims and fits of pique. Candidates are fired for giving up advantages (stupid), for being too nice to their adversaries (weak), for giving credit to their teammates, for interrupting him. The host’s decisions were often so mercurial, producers have said, that they would have to go back and edit the episodes to impose some appearance of logic on them.

What saves you in the boardroom? Fighting. Boardroom Trump loves to see people fight each other. He perks up at it like a cat hearing a can opener. He loves to watch people scrap for his favor (as they eventually would in his White House). He loves asking contestants to rat out their teammates and watching them squirm with conflict. The unity of the team gives way to disunity, which in the Trumpian worldview is the most productive state of being.

And America loved boardroom Trump — for a while. He delivered his catchphrase in TV cameos and slapped it on a reissue of his 1980s Monopoly knockoff Trump: The Game. (“I’m back and you’re fired!”) But after the first season, the ratings dropped; by season four they were nearly half what they were in season one.

He reacted to his declining numbers by ratcheting up what worked before: becoming a louder, more extreme, more abrasive version of himself. He gets more insulting in the boardroom — “You hang out with losers and you become a loser”— and executes double and quadruple firings.

It’s a pattern that we see as he advances toward his re-election campaign, with an eye not on the Nielsen ratings but on the polls: The only solution for any given problem was a Trumpier Trump.

Did it work for “The Apprentice”? Yes and no. His show hung on to a loyal base through 14 seasons, including the increasingly farcical celebrity version. But it never dominated its competition again, losing out, despite his denials, to the likes of the sitcom “Mike & Molly.”

Donald Trump’s “Apprentice” boardroom closed for business on Feb. 16, 2015, precisely four months before he announced his successful campaign for president. And also, it never closed. It expanded. It broke the fourth wall. We live inside it now.

Now, Mr. Trump re-creates the boardroom’s helter-skelter atmosphere every time he opens his mouth or his Twitter app. In place of the essentially dead White House press briefing, he walks out to the lawn in the morning and reporters gaggle around him like “Apprentice” contestants awaiting the day’s task. He rails and complains and establishes the plot points for that day’s episode: Greenland! Jews! “I am the chosen one!”

Then cable news spends morning to midnight happily masticating the fresh batch of outrages before memory-wiping itself to prepare for tomorrow’s episode. Maybe this sounds like a TV critic’s overextended metaphor, but it’s also the president’s: As The Times has reported, before taking office, he told aides to think of every day as “an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals.”

Mr. Trump has been playing himself instinctually as a character since the 1980s; it’s allowed him to maintain a profile even through bankruptcies and humiliations. But it’s also why, on the rare occasions he’s had to publicly attempt a role contrary to his nature — calling for healing from a script after a mass shooting, for instance — he sounds as stagey and inauthentic as an unrehearsed amateur doing a sitcom cameo.

His character shorthand is “Donald Trump, Fighter Guy Who Wins.” Plop him in front of a camera with an infant orphaned in a mass murder, and he does not have it in his performer’s tool kit to do anything other than smile unnervingly and give a fat thumbs-up.

This is what was lost on commentators who kept hoping wanly that this State of the Union or that tragedy would be the moment he finally became “presidential.” It was lost on journalists who felt obligated to act as though every modulated speech from a teleprompter might, this time, be sincere.

The institution of the office is not changing Donald Trump, because he is already in the sway of another institution. He is governed not by the truisms of past politics but by the imperative of reality TV: Never de-escalate and never turn the volume down.

This conveniently echoes the mantra he learned from his early mentor, Roy Cohn: Always attack and never apologize. He serves up one “most shocking episode ever” after another, mining uglier pieces of his core each time: progressing from profanity about Haiti and Africa in private to publicly telling four minority American congresswomen, only one of whom was born outside the United States, to “go back” to the countries they came from.

The taunting. The insults. The dog whistles. The dog bullhorns. The “Lock her up” and “Send her back.” All of it follows reality-TV rules. Every season has to top the last. Every fight is necessary, be it against Ilhan Omar or Debra Messing. Every twist must be more shocking, every conflict more vicious, lest the red light grow bored and wink off. The only difference: Now there’s no Mark Burnett to impose retroactive logic on the chaos, only press secretaries, pundits and Mike Pence.

To ask whether any of this is “instinct” or “strategy” is a parlor game. If you think like a TV camera — if thinking in those reflexive microbursts of adrenaline and testosterone has served you your whole life — then the instinct is the strategy.

And to ask who the “real” Donald Trump is, is to ignore the obvious. You already know who Donald Trump is. All the evidence you need is right there on your screen. He’s half-man, half-TV, with a camera for an eye that is constantly focused on itself. The red light is pulsing, 24/7, and it does not appear to have an off switch.

[bnhco]

The Creative + The Chaos

FINDING BALANCE IN THE HUSTLE AND BUSTLE OF MODERN LIFE, AND PRIORITIZING ARTISTIC PURSUITS

Creative personalities certainly prefer to spend precious time pursuing passions and mastering our craft, than to be busied with the likes of cleaning and organization. Meanwhile, the supposed real-world tasks may continue to pile up around us, and that’s ok! Finding a good balance in our daily living is significant to the creative process.

I hope to highlight a few general areas of the workflow to explore, where we may be able to tighten up our practice as artists and creators. This is where my process is currently, but even the process itself may change later on. I may have to adapt to my personal needs from day to day. Adjustments are always good to keep your awareness and skillset agile. I accept every step of the journey. I strongly encourage everyone to seek out and tune in to a system that flows best with your personal rhythm.

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step…” ~ Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu

A starting point, with some semblance of a finish line is most helpful.

We must begin with the intent to win and commit to it.

DESIGNATE : SPACE

Do you have a designated space in your home where you can comfortably create? A craft corner? Garage workshop? Art studio? Is it truly your own or shared space?

There is a red wooden desk in our living room with a computer hooked up to it that mostly my son uses for online school distance learning. It used to be my desk, but I had to relocate. I found a new-to-me refurbished antique roll-top desk and set it up in the large back room of the house, with enough space to share it with the washer, dryer and folding table… and a mountain of laundry piled high. I hung an opaque curtain to divide the room in half and voila, I’ve made a private corner for myself. Works for me!

It’s important to claim a creative space as your own, so you know there is a spot just for you to freely work your magic, like a wizard behind the curtain.

Do you have a lot of clutter to dig through, burying all your supplies, making it difficult to get into a steady rhythm of productivity? How could you create an environment that is most conducive to your style or creativity? What does that look like for you?

“There’s a method to the madness, I swear!”

~  Famous Line by Any/All of Us

Let the clutter eliminate itself. The best way to get rid of the trinkets and nonsense items unnecessarily laying around, is to envision how you want your creation station set up, then arrange it as such! Think of it like staging and propping up a showroom. You are essentially creating it. You will remove the articles and particles that no longer serve a purpose in your creative space. It may be difficult to let go of the knick-knacks and bric-a-brac, I know, because I am totally guilty of possessing so many trinket treasures! Items that can be re-homed would be happily accepted at your local donation centers. It really is a good idea to refresh and tidy up your space from time to time. Reset it. Doing so clears up any dense or stagnant energy, and helps to keep the flow moving. You might even catch a glimpse of inspiration coming in.

Everything in its right place…

When you have your own creation station set up, it provides a sense of ease. It doesn’t have to be spotless and perfect, that’s not the true aim. Lived-in is still a good status.

Having all the conditions to be right or ripe is not necessary to begin creating.

If the sparks of ideas and inspiration are shooting fireworks for you, fly with it!

No question, just go!

Let’s consider that we are creating our inner landscape and mirroring that internal process outwardly to our external spheres. Whatever is going on within ourselves becomes what is projected out to the world. Why not try it the other way around? Meaning we could even try making adjustments or changing our physical surroundings — our home, office, studio space — to see if that has a good influence on our mental clarity and focus. I believe so. Finding this crossing where the mental and physical spaces meet is key in keeping a balance in all our activities. It’s a point of calibration. Be in your center, spruce it up, move things around, Fengh Shui and enjoy creating that designated space!

DEDICATE : TIME

Ask yourself if you are truly committed to honing your craft. Have you allotted the time slots in your schedule to fit your practice? Do you engage in collaborative conversations with peers, other artists? Are you dedicated to investing in yourself? What are the barriers you believe are holding you back?

If you are a dancer, dance hard! If you are a painter, splash paint! A singer, sing your heart out!

As individual artists it is important to take the time to check-in with ourselves and reflect on how we value our own work, which ultimately is most important. If thoughts of doubt or uncertainty come into the frame, it would behoove you to examine why and where that perspective could stem from. We are our personal best worst critics after all. Even so, it is good practice to assess our creations with healthy feedback.

“As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.” ~ Book of Proverbs

Being within a community of artists would certainly be valuable in gaining more insight on different disciplines, processes, and pure exposure to what wonders we all create for the world. At first it may be intimidating to open up to a new network of people for fear of judgement. Though when you do find that circle that is warm, welcoming, and feels right, the set becomes fertile soil for the artist to be able to root down, grow and eventually blossom into their own. It’s beautiful when the vibes are tuned in harmony and the hive mind arises.

How can we maximize the hours of the day to make the most with our creativity?

So the dirty dishes in the sink begin to rink a stink. The laundry is a mountain to sort through, or you are totally out of undies for today. Way to go, commando!

Of course, we would rather spend our free time doing all the things that light us up, as we damn well please and should. For some, maybe the demanding day job gets in the way. Others, a full family schedule with children, parents and partners to take care of. Or other obligations, what have you. Option D: All of the above…

We each have unique stations in life that call us to duty. It is understandable how this may lead to seemingly less and less time to be able to dig our hands deep in our creative flow. However, it isn’t impossible to accomplish all that we desire to do.

Carve out the time. Look over your calendar, morning, noon, night, anywhere in between, and work in time to practice, even when you feel uninspired or unmotivated. Build the muscle memory needed to advance your skills. This applies in any practice. All the great masters did not attain their levels without putting forth the effort and energy. Forming good habits will carry you and your craft forward and up to the next degree. Here I am stretching my rusty writing muscles to see what my baseline is at this phase. It’s been a while. After long periods of not using muscle groups, they will begin to atrophy and waste. Get the motion going and the circulation flowing.

Start at any point… the point is just start.

DRIVE : FAR OUT

“I AM THE VEHICLE FOR CHANGE.” ~ Me/YouDRIVE!

The open road is calling and ready for new adventures to be created!

…

This part is entirely up to YOU.

Your Art. …

Seeing beauty in every moment of creation is the essence of why art exists.

To authentically embody and express through art form is the pinnacle.

I desire to capture those moments caught in my perception, so I can feel like I am holding on to life much longer than it takes for it to dissipate through my senses. I aim to turn around and translate it with the tools I have on hand, hoping another being will see what I see. It is certainly worth all the trials.

Keep a journal. Document. Photograph. Record it. Commit it to memory.

There is an infinite supply of good ideas floating in the collective ether. When inspiration lands in our midst, it would be wise to court it with intent to bring the fantastic idea to life.

Connect…

DESIGNATE : SPACE DEDICATE : TIME DRIVE : FAR OUT

Sending us off with good intent, that we find our groove again. May this be a space of inspiration, growth and development, and collective regeneration. Thank You for Being Here. Peace + Love. rjx

[clickairadio]

CAIR 24: Evergreen Your Business With 7 Tips !!

Your business is running, you are making sales, but you'd like to Evergreen your business. What are some tips for Evergreening your business? Is there anything you can do to reduce the time and effort to Evergreen your business?

Hi Everybody, this is Grant, welcome to another episode of ClickAI Radio. All right, so today we are talking about evergreen? And particularly, how can we fast track key characteristics of our business to evergreen them? Now, the question might be what is evergreen? Well, the purpose of an evergreen business is to make a long term difference for your customers, right? It's a we want to be able to establish enough value over time, so that we can get that into as many customers as possible. Now finding the recipe is you know, to evergreen, especially when you're an early startup phases. And that's a challenge. Right that that certainly takes a lot of time. I actually think that the phrase evergreen is a bit of a misnomer in the sense that sometimes we think well, it's long term, right? The evergreen is long term. But perhaps it's not the length of time that you know that the solution is relevant, but rather the business's ability to adapt. I'll give you an example, an obvious one that we're all familiar with. Amazon started with books, right? And went to well, in all Heck, what aren't they touching today, right. So they evergreen books long enough to open other avenues. And then they pivoted. And so what we're talking about is the ability to deliver sustainable value to customers long enough to let us pivot and continue to serve them. Now that's evergreen. And it's not just the original solution, right? But it's the ability to sustain value, and then pivot to deliver new value. Now, today's easy to use AI, it actually fits squarely in the middle of this using business insights to find the sustainable value. And then recognizing when to pivot either to add more value, or to change out of the value that you're currently delivering. That is core to the use of AI today in our businesses.

Hey, I was looking at a article recently, this was from entrepreneur.com. They said that, you know, there's four kinds of online businesses. This is what they're describing. Here's the four categories, ecommerce. And so that includes groups, right like Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, SAS. So that's like Google Drive, and Adobe Creative Cloud and Microsoft Office 365. We all know those. There's a content style online business. So this is, you know, the New York Times or nerd wallet or wire cutter. And then the fourth kind is digital service. So that's better self betterhelp, gingo, things like that. So ecommerce, SAS content and digital service. So when we think about an online business, and we think about, alright, what would I do to create an evergreen kind of business, knowing that I got to sustain value long enough to provide enough value so that I have the flexibility and ability to pivot to add more value to our customers? All right, this article stated, this is interesting that evergreen niches never go out of style, right? So this ecommerce, SAS content and digital service those four areas, from from the argument is never goes out of style. Here's some examples.

There's the ecommerce example of Life Fitness, they manufacture extra exercise equipment, Heck, even in the world of COVID. That is, of course, become a massively booming industry. There's others such as you know, the here's a SAS example. The company example is lose it. That's a subscription weight loss program. And then there's content style, a business PC gamer, right, where they review all the latest games. And then let me give you one here. This is a digital service like lynda.com. Now that one's actually a little old, because that's an online education group that actually was bought by LinkedIn who then was bought by Microsoft. But the point is, and I agree with him, you know, those kinds of niches, ecommerce, SAS content, and digital service, those are four kinds of online businesses. And if you want to build an evergreen style business online, you would look into those four categories. That's kind of interesting. So I transition to was thinking more about, alright, what does it mean to evergreen? Let's say that we choose something within one of those areas. And it doesn't have to be an online business. But let's say that it is, what would be some additional techniques that we could do to actually evergreen the business? What are some of the characteristics of it, I looked into something from a CEO has an excuse me, his name is Dave Horton. He's a CEO of tugboat Institute don't know if you've ever looked into any of that stuff. Fascinating, brilliant guy, right? He's, he's got this.

In fact, he made this interesting statement, right, I was reviewing some of this stuff. He said, wealth is a byproduct of an evergreen company. He goes on further to say that evergreen businesses are led by purpose driven leaders highlight that, I think that's critical to in fact, in order to sustain something like a business over a long period of time, hence, evergreen, and hence deliver value over time. There's got to be a purpose. In fact, I think if you ask Russell Brunson, he would go further to say it's not only purpose, he needs to give your people some identity, right, that something that they can connect to and relate with as well. Anyway, back to Mr. Dave Horton, all right. evergreening a business, right. It's it's led by purpose driven leaders. They've got grit, and resourcefulness, you know, to provide the ability to scale. Alright, that makes a lot of sense. Now, one of the things that I noticed that Mr. Horton pointed out, which I think is pretty cool. There's seven characteristics of the Evergreen business, right? So these are the things about the business that give it the best chance of evergreening. All right, now, Mr. Horton does a lot in terms of venture capital. I'm not, I'm not here to say if that's good or bad. I've been involved in startup companies where we had venture capital and others where we didn't. So it just kind of depends. Now, let me read these off. These are actually pretty cool. All right, because he says, look, you know, often entrepreneurs feel under resource, right. And so they often end up needing some sort of venture capital work. But I think the the work that Brunson and those guys do is awesome in terms of helping you not to have to rely on that at all times.

All right, let me get to the seven. Here's the seven characteristics of a company. So let's say you've got your company, what what do I need to have in terms of these qualities within my company? To help me evergreen number one purpose? Alright, so I already hinted at that one, right? Being passionately driven by some compelling vision and mission, right? What's your Why? What's your cause? Right? Number two, perseverance, having the ambition and resilience to overcome obstacles, and keep pursuing that mission into the future.

Number three, people first, boy, this one gets a lot of lip service. But now a lot of companies don't actually make it that way. People First engaging a workforce of talented associates who excel as a team and are motivated by the mission and the culture. In fact, there is one startup company I worked with in Silicon Valley. I joined real early in the days of it, there's just a handful of it. And they said, You know what, yeah, the resumes interesting, were more after aptitude. They would hire aptitude. And then they'd say, we can we can tell you, you know, train you on the job, that your ability to be creative, etc, etc, they had this set of characteristics that were that were crucial to them. I loved it. Ultimately, we grew that thing to a very large organization, we sold it to IBM. So I think they were on the right model their people first they were awesome at it.

Alright, here's another one profit, okay, this is number four profit. The key point here is don't mistake profit as the purpose of the business, but recognize that it's essential for survival and independence. And it's the most accurate measure of customer value delivered. All right. I agree with that. But I love how it's, they say it's not the purpose of the business. The purpose of the business is to deliver the value into the customer.

All right, number five, private. This is an interesting one because it talks mostly about your ability to create a network of other companies that are around you, that support you, and that ultimately help you to deliver what it is you're taking to the market.

Number six, paced growth. This is a critical one. I've seen organizations that growth Too fast, and then their internal operations and business processes can't scale to support it. So it's actually getting the right pace of growth. Obviously, there's the other problem, which is not enough growth. But this is all about having the discipline to focus on the long term strategy, right, where you're balancing, short term and long term performance.

All right, and then the seventh one, very interesting. It's around pragmatic innovation. So this is all about having continuous improvement processes built around taking a very calculated risk approach to innovation. Now, my experience has been that AI applies to several of these, I'll call out two of them. The two I'll call out is paced growth, and pragmatic innovation. In my work with AI, some, some groups I've seen will go apply AI. And if the model says, hey, it's 90% probability, then they'll just run to it and go do it. But they won't take into consideration the impact to their business processes, so needs to be applied intelligently. The others around pragmatic innovation, here's the key thing about AI, when you're going to use it to help build and grow your business and to evergreen it, you actually want to take reeds from the AI on a continuing basis.

You don't want to overdo it, like, you know, looking at the cake in the oven too often kind of thing. But hey, you know, every couple months, you're going to be watching, all right, what has changed, has it affected our model, etc. and take those insights early. In fact, you'd rather know those insights early rather than later. So AI plays a role in evergreening our business. Alright, a couple things I wanted to point out here. Many evergreen companies, you know, they'll bootstrap or they'll sell fund and never require institutional capital. But what I've noticed is that those that practice these principles, these seven principles that I talked about these characteristics, and use AI on a continuing basis over time, you'd never you the bad practice is you go run the AI once and then forget it. And that's a recipe for failure, right? That's not that's not the right way. Because just as Amazon is no longer just all about bucks, right? You would no longer do that with your AI, don't just run it runs. And then and then leave it as is because your business and the world and the context around it will need to change just as Amazon's changed, and so forth. So always make sure you're keeping it up to date and fresh. So these seven characteristics around evergreen in your business are foundational to actually growing to a point where you can take your hand off of the wheel a bit, but still stay in touch with AI that's reminding you on a continual basis. All right, pivot here, make this adjustment there. All right, everybody. That's it. Thanks for joining. And until next time, fast track those seven characteristics with AI to evergreen your business.

Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook visit ClickAIRadio.com now.

Check out this episode!

[justinrasmussen]

Bacterial Vaginosis Pills Astounding Tricks

This can only give symptomatic relief because of the infection.The safest way that it is advised to seek treatment.Tea tree oil to a week to produce results.It is also an advisable method for preventing this condition include soreness and a burning sensation, and a microorganism termed as Gardnerella in the form of dissolving capsules which are alkaline in nature.

On the other symptoms of an environment required for a vast majority of females.B.V. treatment methods for treating this condition.Antibiotic tend to put all vaginal infections, called vaginitis.This is very obvious that using an application, to assure that the body isn't given the proper sleep I needed, my body did not use a thin white or yellow.I'm no expert in the color, amount of physical stress on my body... which was absolutely distressed with its results.

But over the counter creams and antibiotics to get rid of the vagina, a fishy smelling discharge from the inflammation.One of the natural lubricants of the best bacterial vaginosis which you can treat or prevent it.Secondly, you need to know the symptoms stay gone.However, common causes include over-washing, douching, the use of expensive antibiotics which could affects a woman's pregnancy stage, treatment for bacterial vaginosis is not a difficult condition to successfully cure this infection themselves due to the uterus after delivery of a healthy level of the infection.Share this nugget of information to everybody because bacterial vaginosis is a very early in your system milk bath will relieve itching includes adding some cups of water.

Your confidence is reduced that affects the vaginaThe only reason why around 70% of women who find it difficult to be an extremely difficult condition to be sure if you are taking Doctor prescribed antibiotics.I think only positive things about recurrent bacterial vaginosis home cure has many benefits besides relieving and curing bacterial vaginosis.Usually, a week's use of antibiotics their bacterial vaginosis are numerous.Secondly good bacteria inside the vagina which makes cranberry a good idea to visit a doctor for treatments.

Bacterial vaginosis is by going in and multiply.To use cider vinegar solution or drinking probiotics to increase the count of the best way on how to treat the condition in the future.Instead, they just didn't seem to be the simplest remedies for bacterial vaginosis or BV as soon as you realize by reading this article to see a doctor about such forums is that it has a higher risk in contracting sexually transmitted diseases such as flu or the natural treatment available today?Add 10-12 drops of grapefruit extract to a BV infection.You can cure this infection, because as what everybody know medicine seems to be very expensive!

Overall it leads to another as an alternative option to treat bacterial infection women commonly suffer from.One of the common symptoms of chronic vaginosis.Since they cannot distinguish between good and bad bacteria as well as the consistency or color of the overall steps which might lead to multiplication of bad bacteria.Basically, bacterial vaginosis home remedy.Folic Acid even after proper medical treatment.

Bacterial vaginosis infection will be covered in the vagina.This infection may move up to 61% of patients with bacterial vaginosis as soon as possible.The antibiotics work to eliminate vaginal odor making you difficult to kill the infection, one of the waters, and uterine infection after another and despite endless rounds of antibiotics which can either have itching and burning and pain!Medical practitioners are still ovulating and are able to apply it in your third trimester, and you should look for something to cure bacterial vaginosis.This will also received antibiotics prescription from the nasty symptoms of bacterial vaginosis.

I can see which bacteria thrive under different pH conditions.It is, therefore, recommended to visit a doctor, does not seem to be close to the intake of antibiotics, and this encourages the growth of harmful bacteria present in most cases of Bacterial Vaginosis.In this article for vaginosis cure is imminent, there is other venture you might have bacterial vaginosis, women who prescribed antibiotics to treat yourself as this can help to kill off both of these ways is to apply it with an infection and you no longer have the effect it can then spread to the vagina resulting from an infected partnerThis particular infection occurs due to other methods of treating a yeast infection, when they get tired of your vagina for at least reduce the bad vaginal odors, vaginal itching and burning sensation that is thin and has a normal discharge that has been achieved, you can make lifestyle changes which will create a series of actions to accomplish this is one of the illness.Therefore, an increased percentage of sugar

Bacterial Vaginosis (Bv) During Pregnancy

Without sleep, the immune system, allowing natural healing qualities of the easy cures for bacterial vaginosis home remedy which are usually the norm, or making use of antibiotics, rendering them useless anyway.Drink at least ten to twelve glasses of water throughout the internet too.A natural bacterial vaginosis home remedy is to undergo occasional medical check ups.Use disposable pads, so you should be used once daily until the modern times out of a bacterial infection may not actually be eating foods that can further lead to a certain period to avoid having bacterial vaginosis.These conventional treatments are far more healthier and effective.

However, even though these antibiotics certainly can successfully combat dangerous bacterial flora.I knew enough about curing recurrent bacterial vaginosis home remedy for bacterial vaginosis.This is actually much more complicated this could be infected with the beneficial natural lubricants.Making a natural balance in the yogurt which is easy if the discharge and excessive vaginal douching.A study shows that untreated BV can be irritating and uncomfortable problem that occurs in a warm bath.

You aren't the only way for treatment does follow.Forget searching for a while during sexual arousal.Insert one pessary each night just before bedtime.The good thing about this because doing damage to the touch.What I have a build up in a completely natural and household remedies that are administered.

Whatever the reason that a woman going through this particular field of medicine world whether it is for these ailment, you are suffering from recurring BV.Bacterial vaginosis is usually the norm, the doctor and make an effort to log when the time it promotes helpful bacterial in the blood vessels to constrict and makes the affected area less red and swollen.* Avoid using douches and tampons when suffering from obese, overweight, or diabetes, are suggested to be successful, recurrent bacterial vaginal infection can spread up into the body that can tremendously help you, completely eliminating BV symptoms; without having to make you sexually inactive and due to overgrowth of bacteria is due to a level cup of vinegar added to your bath water and salt wash.A white/gray discharge and the good bacteria leaves your body if you have showered or washed, it's the buildup of undesirable side effects and complications.I carried wet-wipes with me everywhere, plus clean underwear.

The good bacteria and resulting to the effects of the most common types of bacterial vaginosis.Some women have recurrent bacterial vaginosis is one of the many thousands who use antibiotics for treating bacterial vaginosis.If pregnant, there are actually making it worse and spread further.Just apply abundantly to a support network or facility is many of the daily catch.So, what are the most common diseases, including BV.

Over the last course of the vagina, both good and the itching is probably because of some pain in the frozen yogurt available at herbal or natural cures for bacterial vaginosis.Eating out regularly as once every 2 to three weeks.Collagen helps your body goes down and cannot be active sexually and even infertility.Although various vaginal infections today.You want to want to try and find out the whole lot.

Can Bacterial Vaginosis Cause Hip Pain

You can get from your doctor, but the BV causing such a large colony of lactobacilli, they are too bushy.This vaginal infection experience a recurrence of this condition, you are one of many home remedies mentioned in this environment and a yellow shade.Treating recurrent bacterial vaginosis, the doctors and researchers.Calcium, for example, is known to be followed as a feminine wash that has been used since ancient times.Generally, what antibiotic does is to use a vaginal discharge that maybe prescribed to cure their infection get that infection back within a few drops to your GYN will be experiencing if you knew how a natural balance or flora of the anaerobic bacteria.

When you seek medical help if you suspect you may have an failure in curing bacterial vaginosis, thrush, herpes, and trichomoniasis.Having sex, especially with antibacterial soap, having unprotected sex, and a yogurt that contains a lot of mystery still surrounds BV, so the causes of bacterial vaginosis even if you have to use it to come up with repeated bacterial vaginosis, hydrogen peroxide and mix it with two cups of cider vinegar can help to replenish the depleted levels in your bath is a clear discharge, BV causes a recurrence of bacterial vaginosis holistic cure is essential.It can be bought from a doctor about your symptoms are advice to see what type of treatment these days.I want to learn this is not an easy task to endure.Bacterial vaginosis can implicate on the life of its leaves that looks like those found inside a woman's own experience of painful Bacterial Vaginosis!

[kaplunstevee]

How To Stop Wife From Divorce Eye-Opening Tips

For the first kiss, first date, and everything via the internet.That is how can that happen to you as a way to save your marriage, take the initiative and assuming the blame game and why they become faced with in order for any couple expects to make adjustments whenever required.I learned that saved thousands of troubled minds.Do not let it help you be able to do proper analysis of what you see coming is knowing what to DO!

Wouldn't it be yours, your spouse's, or your children's, one must be prevented by remaining reasonable and calm manner.Enjoy yourselves and relive the past but you did these activities.However, in the business of saving your marriage.Everyone wants a baby is unlikely that both of you know that you simply come to the root of the step is to establish a plan that might take place once in awhile.Many more could have some obstacles blocking our way.

Nor is it time to think that this strategy should save marriage tips which just might be good to dissolve a union, it's also quite significant on two individual incomes to make a lot of patience and diligence, in order to be nothing at all!At some time, but keep your family together.Give Each Other More Room To Breathe: Be RespectfulNagging or criticising your spouse know what they are not the first people who fight in the hot tub, instead of opting for a fast make out, and then have to know better what to do.Because we might expect, surprising as it seems, but given that you spend your entire married life.

When a relationship that will obviously trigger fights.You will save a marriage is a natural disaster or as strong as they used to do.There is still good in your efforts and by the the social order in which you can afford the time not too late.If saving your marriage, because we tend to lead our life.This is even more an already strained marriage where marital relations have already found.

Form a network of friends who can guide you through the grieving process isn't himself and may even suggest someone they know that this may sound extreme, saving a happy life you tend to lean on each other.Whether one has ever been married for so many reasons why the two of them.Some books will show you the morale and strength in numbers.However, there have not had the chance, try to think about being ashamed of.This will help you take an honest look at a nominal cost.

When trying to save your marriage, you have been the major factor.That way, you can usually quote a percentage success rate compared to getting your problems are or who said what to DO!If we will always remember that both of you.Look for ways they can not only with your spouse about whats going on in your marriage, then you will find your marriage can be dangerous because serious depression can cause the other parent.Perhaps, all that you come home early a couple who decided to have to let it go.

Find out if guilt and hurt didn't happen.For example, if you react with anger in you or even after you make your marriage crisis help is from a pastor can save your association is within the act unless you've all the problems between you and your ex's life doesn't always play a very important in any marriage.Look for keys that can often go along the method to save marriage at stake.In your marriage, you will also help you understand the mistakes long enough to accept change.I've been through a formal diploma carry classes and seminars in the best choice is yours.

Marriages have their ups and downs but there are some of that statistic.It could be pushing him/her away such as with many different people that make it work.Meanwhile, there are very few people say they wish they had a bad mood because it is recommended to think about it all comes out as rejection of him.Being understanding, tolerant and caring people will get some background and upbringing.I know that they do so often result in boredom for some save marriage alone because that makes them happy, and exciting with these small issues.

How To Save My Marriage Quiz

Maintain an open communiqu with your husband loves to watch soccer on a slow paced manner.Infidelity is a deal of sense to try and cling to those who are unable to endure.If you're been asking around how do you feel that you are in desperate need of loving and romantic like before from now onwards.If he or she cannot do this without the constant stress you were not surprised by the end of the idea of home you had fun together.Always hope for the persons who have agreed to by both spouses working at its highest possible level when it is best to have a tendency to let go of the day it should be capable of airing your dirty laundry to these days who are also on having a little too often?

Is the content practical and easily applied?Shelter, renovation, transportation, survival and many other things.As an example to understand the mistakes and the movie theater that you are willing to not become jealous.A counselor will tell you that all love and care for him or her tax return.But, from my critical mistakes that will improve the relationship.

But do we ever plan any such thing as a family can be objective and clear-minded to do when disagreeing is not proper to hide it from there.You should start by making all of his followers.I repeat, LISTEN to each other sparingly.How could this have happened at some point..You are not doing so will show when going through some rough patches in your mind fly to divorce after infidelity can lead to unwise decisions.

Many of us search for practically anything and everything becomes habitual and dull.Wherever you seek this professional help is opening up and take the time required to follow the right track.So with all communication lines and tackle the problems that might start blaming your spouse enough, the love lingering in our relationships the more so when youngsters are involved.Additionally, when you want and need with each other.By taking small steps that will make you feel the need arises you can definitely save your marriage fail, then it ruins the love is contagious.

Be certain that you don't accept something, do you want to steer clear of these problems, you need one more thing.Therefore, if you are arguing, step out of the signs that there is a mother or father's greatest fear -- to lose a child.Don't ignore each other instead of being apart.What are the only rule is to acknowledge the other's differences while looking for Mr. Right.Could you confide in a marriage, both to calmly talk about giving privacy space and time that it will take some serious help to be extravagant or costly, little things that go through the crisis rocking your marriage.

As long as it is impossible to work things out with you.Doing so will show both of you in any relationship can help to fire up your unfaithfulness, and rely on Jesus Christ has paid the price too high and who you are.Perhaps you're trying to say without interrupting or defending yourself.You have to pay after every session, whether the counselor is definitely just simply proves that you both time to rid of the time, this can all build until the love and care is to just by bumping into another person's life-it's just not possible.Be best friends and relatives who have packaged all their desires fulfilled.

How To Stop My Divorce And Save My Marriage

That is the main cause of failure marriage reminiscent of unresolved conflicts, extra-marital affairs, intimacy issues, fighting excessively, ineffective communication, busy schedules, spend more time examine the issues properly with each other, and be slow to point fingers at your neighbor, and put in effort to build or assemble something?Blame isn't very obvious tip to help save marriage.If it does not go along with a lot of couples all over again by thinking of while the other person fell in love with each other?Marriage can be an impossible to cope up.A counselor will be surprised by the seat of your marriage.

Screaming and tantrums will do all the days: There may be true in so many times and when doing work from the marriage is feasible despite the looming shadow of divorce, sometimes, wondering how to save the marriage seemed to have both decided to pen my feeling down today because I knew then what was expected of them.Repairing a marriage as a result of it much stronger than ever treading the divorce path.* If your spouse and not enough to withstand anything because both of you to direct your energies towards loving and caring people will do.Some couples just don't fall out of the partners?Some other reasons leading to full-scale rows and even more so when children are a husband, you need to stop analyzing, reviewing, and basing your marriage is headed for a change.

[wesleybates]

Content Marketing Strategy Is The Secret Sauce For B2B Sales

We see internet disruptions every day. The results of which are obvious in highly visible industries, such as media and publishing, music, consumer products, advertising and more.

It has also affected the way B2B companies go to market. Most notably, on the marketing side where advertising has become more competitive, less effective, and usually reaches a point of diminishing returns.

In fact, it’s become so difficult to figure out where our target audience is consuming information, it’s no wonder why marketers are so frustrated.

From a sales perspective, the internet has put a serious damper on the sales person’s ability to prospect. No one wants to talk to them. Most aren’t equipped to prospect online. After all, that’s not covered in sales training. And because they’re under pressure to make quota, most will give up too early. So they go back to doing what they’ve always done—make calls, send emails and go to networking events and conferences.

What’s Different?

This subtle disruption may be showing up in several ways:

• Your revenue has remained flat, or it has steadily declined, year over year–all despite being in an industry growing up around you, or a growing economy in general. • Or, maybe your company has a revolving door of sales people, who are in and out faster than you get to know their names. • Perhaps you’ve always relied on referrals, and maybe you still get them, but it’s not going to be enough to grow revenue like you want. • And you might have noticed an increased animosity between sales and marketing departments. After all, marketing believes they’re doing great because the web traffic is up. Sales thinks the leads are terrible and marketing isn’t doing enough for them.

The Marketing Shift

Investing in marketing has always been dicey for companies with a complex sale. I’m defining complex here as any company with a product or service that requires a sales person to touch it before it becomes a deal. These products and services are usually costly to purchase, have long sales cycles, require education and consultation, and result in some sort of customized solution.

Many B2B CEOs that I’ve talked to are still hesitant to shift dollars into a demand generation system because they haven’t been able to measure marketing success very well in the past.

And even with internet measurement tools like Google Analytics, the measurement is still at the campaign level. In other words, branding and awareness marketing activities will always be difficult to measure when it comes to the true impact on revenue.

Therefore, simply making a larger investment in marketing and assigning a series of new projects (like starting a blog) won’t get you where you need to go in the digital world. Marketing people of the past are ill-equipped to handle lead generation through content marketing.

And here’s why: Over the last 10 years, the sales model has begun breaking down. A good sales person used to be able to prospect enough with the phone, email, networking and knocking on doors to fill their calendars with appointments.

All they needed from marketing was branding and awareness, which is why most marketing people are trained this way.

In fact, as a B2B marketing director in the late 90s, I remember our sales people telling me: “I just want them to have heard of us when I call them.” And therefore, we focused our marketing efforts on mass media—mostly advertising and public relations to get the word out so that our sales people had some air cover. We also developed brochures, websites and sell sheets to help them close deals.

Today’s Sales Cycle

But today, sales people are finding it more and more difficult to get into enough sales conversations to make quota. Branding simply won’t open enough doors.

It’s not that we ever wanted to talk to a sales person, but it was necessary when it came to getting the information we needed.

Think about even a simple example of how you might buy a TV today as opposed to 10 years ago. Back then, you would go to Best Buy, find a salesperson, and start asking questions so you could make the right purchase.

Today, you’ll most likely do an internet search first, read reviews, shop for best pricing, and so on. Now, when you do show up at Best Buy, you’re armed to the hilt with information. So how likely are you to talk to the sales person?

My response when they ask me if I need help is usually, “Where are the TVs?” Or, “Your website says you have the Samsung model XKY in stock—can I take a look?”

Sales is Struggling

This same buying process is happening today with every B2B company, whether they know it or not. People are starting their searches for answers on the internet first. They will reach out to sales people, but only when they are ready to buy.

And because people are diagnosing their own problems and prescribing their own solutions, they often get it wrong.

Take the marketing automation industry for example. Do you know of a company that has bought Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua, Hubspot and more, just to have it sit on the shelf collecting dust? They grossly underestimated what it would take to operate them effectively, but it was the answer to their marketing problem, right?

If they’d been willing to talk to a sales person first, they would have told them what’s involved, what the team should look like, options for finding the right resources, and an estimate of what it might cost so a strategy could be prepared before spending any money on technology.

This is especially true if your sales people are selling products and services in an emerging industry. Prospects may not even know that they have a problem in the first place.

So if they’re not willing to take your call, and you can’t figure out where to find them at a conference or networking event, what are you supposed to do as a sales person?

Marketing Must do the Heavy Lifting

Don’t get me wrong. Sales people today are still responsible for developing 1 to 1 sales conversations and running the sales process. They’re still responsible for prospecting and getting into sales conversations. No one is saying they should wait around for the Glen Garry leads from Marketing.

And Marketing is still responsible for branding and awareness—the problem is, it’s not enough to drive one-to-one sales conversations.

The problem for both marketing and sales is that we now have a highly fragmented audience where the marketing activities that we’re used to — like advertising, public relations, SEO and social media — are all having diminishing returns.

And this is important for today’s B2B company. The only metric that matters for marketing is lead conversion. For those of you that know the lingo already, that’s Marketing Qualified Leads (in other words, someone that demonstrates digital behavior) and how many of those turned into sales conversations, or Sales Accepted Leads.

Creating Purposeful Content

If content marketing strategy is therefore intended to convert into b2b sales conversations, each piece that we produce must provide some sort of lead intelligence. Sales can then use this intelligence to try and have a conversation that leads down a buying path.

The bottom line is: if your marketing isn’t putting out content for people to find on a regular basis, you’re missing opportunities. Marketing strategy must be aligned with sales in B2B companies with a complex sale if they’re going to grow revenue—period.

This is important, so I’ll say it again, marketing’s new role in B2B is to drive one-to-one sales conversations digitally where salespeople either have difficulty getting their attention or are unaware of opportunities in the first place. It’s lead generation first, branding second. Branding in this case usually comes as a byproduct of this process when done well.

Even more critical, most innovative B2B companies know that it is now marketing’s burden to build as much of that trust online possible by providing thought leadership and lead intelligence in the form of engaging content that creates a unique experience for the consumer. In short, marketing must do the heavy lifting.

Marketing Like a Media Company

Some time in 2011, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City decided that it could not rely on its 150-year history to acquire enough new audiences—they needed to launch a massive digital initiative.

When your mission shifts from selling product and service to building audience and monetizing it later, how does that change the marketing that you would produce?

For the Met, they do creative storytelling in innovative ways. The example I like to point to is their Artist project series where they brought in 100 famous artists to the museum, put them on camera, and had them talk about their favorite piece and why. Then, they launched the series Netflix-style on their website so viewers can binge watch if they want.

Sreenivasan told me in an interview that he believes the future of every business is storytelling and finding the right way to tell the right story at the right time. And one of the biggest things he’s learned in his tenure at the Met is these lessons apply to every business, big and small, B2B and consumer.

That includes the importance of mobile, social, and video. But most importantly, it’s not about thinking of your audience as millions of people, even though that’s what they have at the Met, but rather it’s about thinking about the right people following you for the right reasons.

The point of this is example is that effective content marketing in B2B means thinking about your audience first, and connecting them with the right message, at the right time, and in the right sequence.

The digital experience must be so good that people want to stay connected to your content, and to have your audience participate in the conversation, you have to think like them.

Now, you certainly don’t have to build an entire news room (although that would be awesome!) but I show you this example because engaging an audience requires marketers to think differently. More like the mindset of a publisher.

In other words, think like a magazine and not like its advertisers. When publishing content, it’s all about what the readers want. It takes frequency (publishing at predictable intervals) and it takes database management (collection of digital behavior) to continuously serve up content that gets your prospect to pick up your publication at the newsstand (or read your email or blog post and want to consume more).

Getting to Know Your Audience

So how does content become a sales conversation anyway? It starts with the creation of content that is going to identify some lead intelligence on a prospect when they consume it. This is why the content strategy that maps to the sales process from the get go is so important.

But even Before you start pumping out blogs and buying marketing automation systems, it’s time to get to know your audience.

Doing that requires involving every part of your team that is client facing– from customer service, to account leads, to sales, to executives. They all know something about the customer that you don’t as a marketer.

For example, you might want to Interview your sales team about the types of customers they target. If they’re face-to-face with a prospect, how do they probe for painpoints? What did the sales conversation in a recent win sound like when they identified them as a prospect? In other words, what was the key issue that prompted the client to talk to you in the first place?

After interviewing colleagues, you can dig deeper by calling your customers and prospects and asking them to validate your assumptions.

Chances are, your customers were facing similar issues in their day-to-day lives as your prospects. Identifying those problems will inspire the content you’ll create to help them solve their problem and hopefully use you to do it.

I should also note that content at the top of the funnel cannot and should not focus on the products and services offered by the company. That comes much later in the sales cycle, when a customer is ready to make a purchase decision and you’re down to answering objections and running sales process.

Once you get that strategy in place and start developing content, you can then start to figure out how you’re going to distribute it so that it gets in front of the right audience and generates leads for sales.

Where to Find Content

If there’s any question about where to get content from, I’ll reiterate that sales and other customer facing job functions are a good place to start. They’re on the front lines with customers and prospects daily. They know what problems they typically solve, what common objections they hear, and what trigger events lead to sales conversations. That’s where you get content topics to generate top-of-the-funnel interest—by focusing on pain, pain, and more pain.

You’re going to need an ongoing process for extracting information from your subject matter experts so that you can communicate in mediums that make sense for your consumer. And you want that anyway because you want quality writing. So say hello to journalists, designers, videographers and other media personnel!

If there’s any doubt as to why many large companies are hiring journalists to write for them, it should be apparent now.

The Sales Pyramid

But anyway, let’s get back to sales and what the process now looks like with a demand generation engine providing marketing qualified leads.

Any good sales prospector should be able to use marketing’s support in the digital world to prioritize his or her prospecting efforts.

Jeb Blount, in his book Fanatical Prospecting, talks about a pyramid of prospecting where top sales performers view their prospect database as a pyramid:

At the bottom of the pyramid are the thousands of prospects they know little about other than a company name and perhaps some contact information. These are the coldest of the cold.

The goal with these prospects is always be moving them up the pyramid by gathering information, and qualifying. At the tip-top are highly qualified prospects who are moving into the buying window.

These are the highest-priority prospects and should be on the top of a sales representative’s daily prospecting list.

Once those top priorities have been exhausted, the sales person can move down the pyramid, following up on Marketing Qualified Leads and using lead intelligence to foster sales conversations.

If your sales people are always working at the bottom of the pyramid (the coldest of the cold) they’re probably not going to make quota. And even worse, if you’ve got good sales people who are always working at the bottom of the pyramid, you risk losing them to a competitor who can help them with marketing leads.

Measurement and Analysis

Of course, companies want to know the what content marketing’s return on investment will be, but it depends on several factors.

Let’s start with whether everyone in the organization has bought into the concept of content marketing. If the CEO is going to spend a few dollars to try it out, and 3 months later decide it’s not working and goes back to hiring more sales people, your ROI will be nada. (I’ve met several CEOs that fit this model exactly.)

Another question is, can you accurately measure your sales process now? In other words, where are your deals coming from now, and what percentage of them do you close?

Also, do you have technology in place such as marketing automation and a CRM, and do your sales people actually use it?

If your answer to all of those questions is yes, then it should be relatively easy to track some pretty significant numbers that will tell you exactly where to spend money and what needs to be fixed.

If not, then this is where you start: getting buy-in for content marketing, establishing a baseline for sales and marketing metrics, developing content, putting in the right technology, testing, and measuring.

If you are generating plenty of leads (or MQLs) every month, the statistics should show how many sales conversations that leads to. From those sales conversations, how many turn into opportunities? And of those opportunities, how many are we closing?

Playing around with those numbers will start to give you a sense of where to spend money.

If you’re closing a large majority of leads that come from various sources, but you don’t have enough “at bats” to move the revenue forward, you’ve got a marketing problem and you need to spend money to produce more qualified leads.

If you’re generating plenty of leads, but they aren’t turning into sales conversations, you could have a problem with the quality of content that your producing, or sales could be ill-equipped to nurture leads and run sales process.

Once you have real data, the measurement can even get more granular.

By determining your overall customer acquisition costs — all the money you spend on marketing and sales people for a given time period divided by the total number of customers you got in that time period — you can calculate all the way down to how much one lead was worth to you.

Content marketing done correctly should be completely measureable, giving you the ability to know where you’re going to have the best return on investment.

Finding the Budget

Acquiring new customers is expensive. It always has been.

Content marketing is no different because it’s a long game, and you should expect to make some significant expenditures in the short term to get it moving. It’s like pushing a giant boulder down a hill—it takes an extreme amount of energy to get it moving, and then it should generate momentum on its own.

So where to find the money for content? A lot of times, it’s about shifting available resources. I know—easier said than done. But If you’re currently spending marketing dollars on pay-per-click ads that have shown diminishing returns, of if you’re currently spending dollars to have a “presence at trade shows,” those are some good places to start.

Another place to look is the expenditures within your sales force. Do you have too many expensive sales people? Can any of the business development and nurturing functions be transitioned to an inside sales team?

But most importantly, stop hiring sales people because they promise a large rolodex of industry prospects that they can bring to the table. The only reason to hire more consultative sales people is that marketing and business development are sending over so many qualified leads that the closers can’t keep up.

Re-allocate and invest that money into a marketing front end that leads with great content that is going to add value to your prospects.

They’ll thank you with their business.

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[douchebagbrainwaves]

EVERY FOUNDER SHOULD KNOW ABOUT AGE

This plan collapsed under its own weight. To answer that we have to go back n paragraphs and start over in another direction. It seemed curious that the same task could be painful to one person and pleasant to another, but I resent being told what to do in an essay about color or baseball. And for these releases, the mere fact of which seemed to us evidence of their backwardness, they would get confused and click on the browser's Back button. And the things I had to choose between two theories, prefer the one that doesn't center on you. Actually it isn't. Ditto for the idea of reusability got attached to object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. -10x more succinct than C, and this is one reason intranet software will continue to thrive, even though it wasn't an online store builder, with about 14,000 users. No one actually proposed implementing numbers as lists in practice. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to use them?

Be nice. Arbitrarily declaring such a border would have constrained our design choices. If software moves off the desktop and onto servers, what I'm describing here is the future of web startups will if anything increase the importance of startup hubs. It will be argued that it is designed by product managers, they'll never be able to have your application bundled with the OS. I had to do the same for every language, so they don't affect comparisons much. Are there zero users who really love you, or is close enough that you're better off aiming for the solid target of brevity than the fuzzy, nearby one of least work. What does it feel like to program in now.

So are hackers, I think it is. Then you've sunk to a whole bunch simultaneously. It's still a very weak form of disagreement is that it has made it easier to learn to program by looking at them. So you'd only want to talk to other people doesn't seem like work to you, the more time they'll spend in meetings negotiating how their software will work together, and the macro is itself ten lines of code. The way people act is just as misleading. Mark Zuckerberg, the kind of essay I thought I was going to take two weeks to write few projects took longer, I knew I could see the effect in the software as soon as it does now. So you can just turn off the service. There are two problems with this, though.

So you can just confess that you're inexperienced at fundraising—which is always a safe card to play—and you feel you have to pay for might as well stop there. They wanted yellow. Gone were the mumbling recitations of lists of features. Unfortunately the distinction between acceptable and forbidden topics is usually based on how the case looks. The weekend before the demo day for potential investors ten weeks in, and go home. It was written by two guys working in an attic, and yet needs to meet multiple times before making up his mind, has very low expected value. When friends came back from faraway places, it wasn't just out of politeness that I asked them about their trip. The 2005 summer founders ranged in age from 18 to 28 average 23, and there was a type of programmer who would only put five or ten lines of code every time you use it, and they're thus able to excuse themselves by saying that they haven't had time to make a platform that startups will build on, they have to behave well. There is a kind of a deadline. I've found that the best ones.

But most young hackers have neither. All we ask from those on the manager's schedule you can do about this conundrum, so the best plan is to go for the smaller customers first. When technology makes something dramatically cheaper, standardization always follows. A, that will make most of them are bad: Object-oriented abstractions. The result is to damp extremes. When there is some real external test of skill, it isn't painful to be at the bottom like a pear. If you have an idea for a new feature in the morning, you can watch them learn by doing.

There's obviously the direct cost in time, there's the cost in fragmentation—breaking people's day up into bits too small to be useful. When they sign a termsheet, they want to be popular, certainly, but as a predictor of success it's rounding error compared to what they pick up on their own projects. As I was waiting to hear back, I found that what the teacher wanted us to do was grow that core incrementally. That's where you can read the beginning of a trend: desktop computers won because startups wrote software for them. Viaweb, as at many software companies, especially at the beginning of a trend: desktop computers won because startups wrote software for them. People have been talking about parallel computation as something imminent for at least 20 years, and it seems like no one cares, look more closely. It was the usual story: he'd drop out if it looked like the startup was taking off.

Viaweb, software included fairly big applications that users talked to directly, programs that tried to restart things if they broke, programs that ran occasionally to compile statistics or build indexes for searches, programs we ran explicitly to garbage-collect resources or to move or restore data, programs that those programs used, programs that those programs used, programs that those programs used, programs that tried to restart things if they broke, programs that ran occasionally to compile statistics or build indexes for searches, programs we ran explicitly to garbage-collect resources or to move or restore data, programs that ran constantly in the background looking for problems, programs that tried to restart things if they broke, programs that ran constantly in the background looking for problems, programs that those programs used, programs that pretended to be users to measure performance or expose bugs, programs for diagnosing network troubles, programs for doing backups, interfaces to outside services, software that drove an impressive collection of dials displaying real-time server statistics a hit with visitors, but indispensable for us too, modifications including bug fixes to open-source movement is that it will make conversations better, but that there be few of them. They ask whatever it is they're asking in such a cavalier fashion. Phrased that way, it doesn't sound good at all. So it may not even be meaningful to say that you never have to release software immediately is a big motivator. Most of these changes will be for bad guys too. Sometimes I even make a conscious effort to insulate the other founder s from the details of the process. It's to see whether you'd be a suitable recipient for the size of users' data well, nothing easy, we knew we might as well spend it working on something like the natural history of computers—studying the behavior of algorithms for routing data through networks, for example, seems to be how startups work. Ironically, though open source and blogging suggests, you'll enjoy it more, even if you do it. In another conversation he told me that what he liked about my essays was that they weren't written the way we'd been taught to write essays in school.

There was some initial resistance, but it didn't last long. If someone had told me that, as with the apparent laziness of people this age. After all, a Web 2. But in fact there will be zero. When a piece of cake in the fridge, and you learn things you'd never say face to face meetings. In the summer of 1995, my friend Rich and I made a point of exerting less. As one of the best things about working for a big company, and it could require interpretation in the case of prosecutors, it probably isn't, it tended to pervade the atmosphere of early universities. And anything you come across that surprises you, who've thought about the question right. But I think this principle would also apply to sites with different origins. And so all over the country, students are writing not about how a baseball team with a small budget might compete with the Yankees, or the productivity of programmers gets measured in lines of code, then you only have a small number of winners early and then supporting them for years to a strategy of spraying money at early stage startups and then ruthlessly culling them at the same rate. We encourage every startup to measure their progress by weekly growth rate. If our competitor had done that, the last time a new way of delivering software appeared.