#but i do think. as being 'inclusive' has become a clear marketing strategy then these companies | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ghooostbaby · 3 years

Text

deeeep dive into why and how wei wuxian and lan wangji love each other, complete each other, are the inverse reflection of each other’s deeply hidden internal selves mirrored through the other’s external self, lan wangji’s inner wildness that he has to conceal and protect recognizing and loving wei wuxian’s outer wildness, wei wuxian’s deep, fuddy-duddy morality and values that he conceals with an elaborate subterfuge of jokes, mischief, and bravado, seeing and loving in lan wangji the ability to say no that it was never safe for him to express directly, “between you and me there is no need for thank you and sorry”

oh and a slight diversion midway through into a manifesto on WEI WUXIAN IS NOT INSECURE the whole story is about a society where being liked is ESSENTIAL for survival and it is actually completely perilous not to be liked, and his “people pleasing” is a skill and tool for his survival especially as an orphan and proven to be a necessary one when he stops doing it and STOPS SURVIVING

after the cut discussing the very interesting dynamics of consent in general in the novel, but not going into the consensual non-consent kink stuff till the last paragraph if you need to avoid for any reason.

I've been thinking about how Lan WangJi sees in Wei WuXian the exterior, unfettered expression of the wildness Lan WangJi holds in him and protects with rigid codes of conduct, propriety and outward dignity.

I have had this sense that these two are mirrors, either one reflecting the hidden, interior (and unallowed) self of the other. but it seemed more clear from Lan WangJi's side, especially knowing about his history with his mother and the spicy side that emerges when he drinks and in the extras.

I also - just... the way this whole story shows how romantic love is truly this longing for your self, to become yourself, to become the thing you're not allowed to be, seeing in that person the expression of whatever it is you can't become and longing for it, protecting it, joining with it as closely as you can without ever being able to let it live inside your own body.

On the surface it seems a lot more difficult for Wei WuXian to find a piece of his soul in Lan Wangji. I think its a bit too simplistic to see whatever draws Wei WuXian to Lan Wangji as a reverse-psychology sort of craving of acceptance from the only one who won't give it, pushing and pushing against this impenetrable boundary that he needs to break to feel assurance that no matter what he can make anyone accept him.

And he is SO drawn - in a mind boggling way, in the teenage flashbacks Lan WangJi rudely and aggressively throws him off over and over and Wei WuXian cannot keep away! Even when he talks about how boring Lan WangJi is, he never stops trying to be around him and talk to him.

I've seen discussions of the way Wei WuXian has always relied on the goodwill of others to survive, and that his placating of others to survive is a character flaw. Although that seems only halfway true.

As a young child he didn't have anyone's goodwill for a while and he survived, and it seems like he can always find a way to survive from whatever means and sometimes very limited resources he has at his disposal. Doing what he has to do to become powerful enough to survive losing his core and being thrown into the burial mounds slowly costs him the goodwill of everyone around him - and what happens to him as a result shows how much placation was a truly necessary for someone without the protection of biological/hereditary family bonds.

(Don’t get me started on how his loss of his golden core and his development of demonic cultivation to give himself power by ‘unnatural methods’ through the use of a musical instrument is a metaphor for disability and the way ableist society sees the use of accessibility devices and tools. Actually please DO get my started haha.)

Wei WuXian is so charismatic and seems very used to getting what he wants and needs on the strength of that. He pushes a lot of boundaries and seems pretty confident and flexibly prepared to handle the consequences, whether beatings or harsh words. But he does work so hard to make others feel good, good with him, good with themselves.

When he is in the cave with Lan WangJi, Wei WuXian is described as "like one who forgets all past pain as soon as the wound heals". He can't resist coming up beside Lan WangJi and talking to him again and again after every time Lan WangJi pushes him off, only finally staying away when Lan WangJi bites him (and he still keeps trying to talk to him after a little bit!) and then calls him an awful person (!!! Bad Wangji! :(((( ). In the end, when Lan WangJi (very minimally) discloses what happened to his sect and his father, and even cries, because of all the defences/assaults Lan WangJi has put up Wei WuXian can't do anything or say anything to help and feels miserable.

Lan WangJi just absolutely refuses to allow Wei WuXian to take care of him - and I began to wonder maybe that’s what Wei WuXian actually really likes about him? Why he is unable to resist coming up to Lan WangJi again and again? Maybe because Lan WangJi refuses to let Wei WuXian appease him. He’s not trying to crack Lan WangJi to get to this impenetrable place of approval and acceptance. In a way he can’t quite understand, Lan WangJi is a respite for Wei WuXian from the constant work to be the one who pleases.

And how different this is to how Wei WuXian is (or has to be) with Jiang Cheng when he wakes up in Lotus Pier after the cave. Jiang Cheng gets so down and really really needs Wei WuXian to do what he does so well (and wasn’t allowed to do with Lan WangJi) - chasing Jiang Cheng down while being injured and reassuring him about all his insecurities about his father's acceptance and becoming a sect leader and Wei WuXian's own abilities excelling his - and at first Jiang Cheng is pushing him away, but he really does need Wei WuXian to do all this to feel better.

Wei WuXian is described as not wanting to be lonely, and not wanting to see other people unhappy, and he keeps trying to push and pull with whatever he has to not be lonely and lift the mood for those around him. I don't think it's a kind of codependency or insecurity. It’s not that Wei WuXian is afraid to say no, in fact I would say he doesn't do anything he doesn't want to do, but he must always do it creatively, with humour. Similarly to Nie Huaisang, he uses a persona of foolishness to give himself a covert agency.

I also think I'm writing this because I don't like seeing this discussed as a sad bean character flaw for him to always need to be liked - its a strategy, its a tool, its how he survives and excels. Doesn’t the whole story prove how essential being liked is to a human’s survival? And he is so so good at being liked, in making others happy, even when he is refusing to do what others want from him that he doesn't want to do, he does it in a way that deflects criticism, with a smiling bravado that never says what it truly means and has people writing him off as shameless or foolish or just endearing himself toward them despite themselves.

He is always at work really, with jokes and flattery or mischief and teasing, to get the resources he wants and needs. Case and point, when he makes a big coquettish show for mianmian, definitely not being "people pleasing" for her, but the group of girls around them all find it funny and cute and in the end she gives him a perfume sachet which ends up being a valuable resource for later. Or the time he outright tells Jiang Cheng that if you give the girls some lotus seeds they'll remember you and return the favour in the future. (Also notice how his interactions with girls seen as flirtatious are actually strategic resource-gathering acts.) These are the skills he has developed to meet his own needs. (THIS IS NOT A CHARACTER FLAW. I REPEAT.) He takes what he needs and steals from the Lotus Pier markets knowing it'll be paid for, he lives like he never know when his next windfall will come from so he'll take what he can when he can find it. Like Jiang Fengmian said, if there is no guarantee of a meal in the future then today's meal should still be enjoyed. It’s how Wei WuXian said to Nie Huaisang at Cloud Recesses, you have to find ways to make your own fun out of whatever you have. So he gets kicked out of class, goes fishing, gets alcohol, he pursues his own pleasure. He actually is quite insistent of his own agency and right to choose, he just can never directly say no.

And that little detail that Wei WuXian always tucks coins into his clothes just in case, that makes him able to buy food when he and Jiang Cheng are on the run... breaks my heart and reveals so much about the way Wei WuXian is constantly at work on ensuring his own survival and never takes for granted whether he is safe (he knows he never is).

I've seen some people talking about Wei WuXian sacrificing so much for his brother and sister out of a need to be accepted out of a chronic sense of insecurity. But isn’t this just true? Doesn't he live in a world where being accepted is absolutely essential for survival? Doesn’t this whole story show the cruelty of a social system based on networks of hereditary/biological family that closes out and scapegoats any outsiders, and that without biological family connections that can enclose around you, you can never truly be safe if not constantly working to earn acceptance? (And then beautifully ends with the way a gay romantic relationship that queers marriage/family/etc disrupts all this and creates safety and inclusion for Wei WuXian without needing a normative family.) (AKA romantic love does not resolve some internal personal problem in Wei WuXian but disrupts and refuses and rebels against the problem of SOCIETY.) (*breathes heavily*)

And that’s why Lan WangJi is magnetizing to Wei WuXian. Lan WangJi is always saying no. Although what Lan WangJi sees in Wei WuXian is an exterior wildness, Wei WuXian is not really out of control so much as he is playing and caring and supplicating and showing off and pleasing people to get the resources and the acceptance he needs to live his life. He has firm values and desires that he can never outwardly state, only creatively spinning plates to distract and deflect while he refuses what goes against his values, protects who he cares for, or takes what he needs to in order to survive/thrive. Lan WangJi embodies an exterior of resoluteness and direct agency that Wei WuXian doesn't have the luxury of. And he's so drawn to him for his ability to repeatedly say no, to refuse to get along, or make others laugh, make other people happy, but just simply follow what he thinks is right.

Wei WuXian’s outward wild movement protects an inward stillness. He is an exterior of people-pleasing around an interior of refusal. He is an exterior of youthful rebellion around an interior of unflinching morality. He sees in Lan WangJi the outward expression of his stillness, his morality, his resistance that he can't express, that he's had to protect.

FYI after the cut gets more into the dynamics of consent in the story, and the last paragraph directly talks about consensual non-consent kink play in wangxian’s relationship.

When Wei WuXian is with Lan WangJi, there is no work to be done. Lan WangJi cannot be swayed by him, and so there's no point vying for resources or favors. Lan WangJi will either give him everything or refuse him everything based on who he is, it does not matter what Wei WuXian does and he can't do anything that will change Lan WangJi’s mind. Someone he literally can't win over. After the resurrection, they are often in an adorable tug of war, where Wei WuXian tries to take care of Lan WangJi, while Lan WangJi won't allow him to but demands to care of Wei WuXian right back. Actually, Lan WangJi insists that Wei WuXian take everything he wants or needs from him and is even angry when he doesn't take or when Wei WuXian tries to offer a gesture in return, even something as simple as a thank you Lan WangJi won't accept. It’s kind of adorable how frustrated Wei WuXian is in doing this thing he's learned that he needs to do, and just... so confused by Lan WangJi, and has to find a way to please this person who aggressively refuses to be pleased and is ONLY pleased by Wei WuXian being pleased.

(Not to mention the way Wei WuXian delights in finding that Lan WangJi can’t say what he wants, and they have sort of these chaotic cohesive both-being-so-pleased-by-working-hard-to-please each-other moments where Wei WuXian is letting Lan WangJi please him by finding out what pleases Lan WangJi and giving it to him.)

The wildness Lan WangJi had always hidden within himself is something he sees as just as dangerous as Wei WuXian thinks of his desire to refuse. He saw his mother be socially alienated, shunned, and eventually die because of her wildness. His ability to survive in the world, aka to be accepted by his family, is contingent on him being able to control this inner wildness. From a young age (re: Phoenix Mountain kiss) he could only understand his sexual desires for Wei WuXian as something repulsive or dangerous that had to be repressed and controlled, and that the only way he could imagine his desires as possible was as non-consensual. His secret gay desires were never available to him as anything but something monstrous.

Importantly, it’s not like everyone else other than Lan WangJi are all vampires cruelly demanding Wei WuXian’s constant sacrifice. Wei WuXian is always vibrantly, charismatically offering so much, before anyone has asked. It’s Wei WuXian who creates this kind of relationship for himself again and again. It’s Lan WangJi who simply refuses - he refuses to charmed, to be cared for. And so in the end Lan WangJi becomes the one person who Wei WuXian feels doesn't need anything from him. When he says he's eating the corpse's fruit to save Lan WangJi money and Lan WangJi says that will never be necessary. Or when Wei WuXian asks what toy he should win for Lan WangJi at the market game, and Lan WangJi says anything Wei WuXian gets will be the one he wants. (XD stahhhhp it’s too sweet !!!) He really just wants Wei WuXian to be, to exist, to spend his life discovering his own desires and allow Lan WangJi to help satisfy them, he doesn't want anything from Wei WuXian other than him living - happy and safe.

It takes someone like Lan WangJi to refuse Wei WuXian’s aggressive generosity, it’s definitely not an easy thing to say no to Wei WuXian, dazzling or annoying people so chaotically before they even realize there’s something to say no to. The sacrifice he gives to Jiang Cheng, he never even offers a choice - and perhaps it would have been too much for Jiang Cheng to accept if he had the chance.

Lan WangJi’s statement "Between us there is no need for thank you and sorry" seems like one of the most important sentences in the novel, and you can’t help but noticed the way “sorry” and “thank you” is littered meaningfully through the book. What is owed, what the characters owe to each other, the give and take, touches every part of the story (down to wangxian's erotic explorations!).

When Jiang Cheng talks to Wei WuXian at the Guanyin temple he makes a lot of contradictory statements about what Wei WuXian owes, what he was given, what he took, what he (Wei WuXian still) is owed in return. Wei WuXian, according to Jiang Cheng, took everything from the Jiang clan, and paid them back with their deaths. The Jiang clan give him his life when they took him in, and he owed Jiang Cheng service for the rest of his life as the right hand to the sect leader, that’s what Wei WuXian had promised anyway. At the same time, Wei WuXian sacrificed everything (his golden core) to Jiang Cheng, by giving everything he was taking one more thing - Jiang Cheng’s right to even be angry at him. Jiang Cheng had taken everything from Wei WuXian. Everything that happened around Wei WuXian after could be said to be because of the loss of his golden core, which Jiang Cheng might be said to be responsible for. But he never asked for it, maybe he never would have wanted it. He wishes Wei WuXian told him, but Jiang Cheng never told Wei WuXian his golden core was melted while he was sacrificing himself to save Wei WuXian. He wants Wei wuxian to say sorry, but that makes him feel pathetic. And Jiang Cheng says sorry too. It’s a mess of paradoxes, and in the end somehow it seems like the scales are balanced in the most hollow, dismal way.

What is owed, what is given, what is taken ... Wei WuXian has never been part of a family. He has always had to say thank you and sorry for everything he's taken. Wei WuXian himself admits that he used "thank you" as a way to enforce distance between himself and Lan WangJi. Lan WangJi's point i think is that they belong to each other, Wei WuXian is his, and he is Wei WuXian's, unconditionally. The way that Jiang Cheng speaks of him in the Guanyin temple (admittedly I read a fan translation and this is very nuanced, related to slight variations of grammar), even when Jiang Cheng clearly is so broken by the loss of Wei WuXian from his life, he talks about Wei WuXian as an outsider. It is what MY family gave to YOU, never what you took from our family. But at one point Wei WuXian was part of their family - but he takes too much, and becomes an ex-disciple, not a brother. Wei WuXian’s inclusion as a Jiang was always conditional.

Even when Wen Qing and Wen Ning leave him to go take the blame for qiongqing path they tell him "thank you and sorry", drawing a line between them and him, so he doesn’t even belong to these people who he sacrificed everything for. The way Wei WuXian acted when he was younger, he was always keenly aware of this - he always knew that he didn’t belong to anyone, no one is going to protect him unconditionally. And after first escaping the Burial Mounds, he is done pretending. When Lan WangJi warns him about what a demonic cultivation path will do to his heart, Wei WuXian replies: “After all, on the topic of how my heart is, what could other people know about it? Why should other people care about it?” He is done pleasing. Nothing has changed really, he still belongs to no one and is alone, but now he is angry about it, and instead of saying thank you and sorry he is going to become too powerful to be at anyone's mercy. And then we see in the story afterward what happens to people who don't say thank you and sorry.

The whole point I think is the impossibility of choice, the impossibility of consent in this society. If he didn't forgo the behaviour his social acceptance was conditional on, he wouldn't have survived the burial mounds. But once he becomes powerful enough to survive and get revenge on the Wens, he is socially outcast. Except he was already outcast from the beginning.

And so how do Wei WuXian and Lan WangJi find a way through all that to a life together where all their desires are possible, where Wei WuXian can say no while also being pleasing (safe) to others, and Lan WangJi can indulge in his wild desires while still being good? The answer is kinky sex!

It is kind of miraculous and beautiful how Wei WuXian finds a way to say no, while simultaneously pleasing Lan WangJi, giving pleasure, while taking it, saying no, and knowing his refusal is not just tolerated, but gives Lan WangJi pleasure, knowing Lan wangji and knowing the painful belief Lan WangJi holds within that his desires are unacceptable and unspeakable, and that Wei WuXian can take care of Lan Wangji in a secret little way and please him and give everything to him by craving this wildness in Lan WangJi while at the same time he gets to say no again and again , and it won't push Lan WangJi away, he can refuse everything while at the same time be totally pleasing and thus safe, and also for Lan WangJi, Wei WuXian's pleasure at saying "no" while still being held onto, that he genuinely wants to be fucked even while begging Lan WangJi to stop (and the many ways he does give his consent for this throughout, especially their first time), allows Lan WangJi the ecstatic feeling that this idea that his sexual desires are only possible through force are not just something his lover forgives him for but something his lover is SO turned on by, and that he has consent for his fantasies of non-consent, Wei WuXian has the same fantasies from the other side, he is doing what he is supposed to while doing what he shouldn't, and actually these monstrous feelings in him allow him to take care of Wei WuXian in a way that he needs - that they both need - and all these impulses that are so wrong with Wei WuXian become very right and a way to do good. And they are just both so perfect and perfect for each other and I love them and I am so happy for them to have a long kinky life together.

#wangxian #mdzs #mdzs meta #holds wei wuxian close and murmurs into his hair 'no one knows you like i know you baby'

1K notes · View notes

aion-rsa · 3 years

Text

Do Shadow and Bone & Six of Crows Work as One Story?

https://ift.tt/3dL3rrm

This SHADOW AND BONE feature contains spoilers for Season 1.

Though Netflix’s new fantasy series Shadow and Bone is based on the bestselling Grishaverse novels of author Leigh Bardugo, it’s not a straightforward adaptation of the book series that shares its name. In addition to the Shadow and Bone trilogy, the series also incorporates elements from Six of Crows, a duology that is set in the same world, but focused on a very different set of characters.

Set two years after the events of Shadow and Bone, Six of Crows is a dramatic heist story set in a different country (Kerch) and starring a set of characters who really don’t take part in the events of the first trilogy. Until now. Shadow and Bone attempts to create what are essentially prequel storylines for the major characters of Six of Crows: criminal mastermind Kaz Brekker, assassin Inej Ghafa, gunslinger Jesper Fahey, and spy Nina Zenik.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

How these figures would fit into the series’ existing storyline of the discovery of a legendary Sun Summoner with the power to destroy the Shadow Fold was a question that every book fan was wondering prior to the series debut. And now that Shadow and Bone is here, it’s time to dig into whether this fusion of these two separate-but-related series worked or not.

Den of Geek editor Kayti Burt and Den of Geek contributor Lacy Baugher dig into the specifics of the good, the bad, and the somewhere in between when it comes to incorporating the Six of Crows characters into Shadow and Bone. Welcome to our discussion, and feel free to share your own thoughts in the comments below…

Question: Going into this series, what did you think about Netflix’s choice to integrate Six of Crows into Shadow and Bone? Did you think it would work?

Kayti: As someone who has only read the first book in the Shadow and Bone series and neither of the Six of Crows duology, I was intrigued.

As a viewer of adaptation, I tend to hold my opinions until I’ve at least seen the trailer and… well, the first teaser (which is the only trailer I watched before binging the screeners) didn’t give much away. That being said, there’s nothing that frustrates me more than an adaptation that is overly faithful to the plot without being faithful to the tone, characters, and themes of the source material, so I think I am much more tolerant of major plot changes when it comes to adaptation than the average viewer?

Lacy: I will admit that I was extremely apprehensive about it. I mean, I get the impetus to combine both sets of characters into a single story if only to allow Six of Crows fans the chance to see favorites like Kaz and Jesper onscreen. (There are no guarantees that Shadow and Bone would be successful enough to even get a second season, let alone a sequel/spin-off about a completely different cast, after all.)

But the thing is, Six of Crows is a very different story from Shadow and Bone – from setting and characters, to the time it takes place. (It’s actually set two full years after the events in the final Shadow and Bone novel, Ruin and Rising.) Furthermore, it’s also a very different kind of story. Six of Crows is very much a heist drama and one that’s not concerned so much with things like love triangles or larger Ravkan politics. And the characters are, of necessity, much darker and more morally gray than Alina and her friends. I worried that the two worlds of these stories wouldn’t mesh well, or that there simply wouldn’t be anything for the Six of Crows crew to do.

Kayti: Yeah, these are such valid concerns! Even as someone who had never read Six of Crows, I knew that these series, while set in the same world, were doing very different things.

Reading your response, Lacy, I also think I saw it as a way to incorporate the more popular Six of Crows material into the slightly less popular Shadow and Bone, which did make me a bit nervous, as it seemed to be a marketing decision more than a story one. That being said, with good storytellers, those two motivations do not have to be mutually exclusive!

Question: Now that you’ve seen the show, what do you think works with the strategy?

Lacy: Shadow and Bone does, I think, pull off the inclusion of the Six of Crows crew fairly well. Much better than I expected it to if I’m honest.

There are certainly problems – for the first four episodes, it generally feels like the Crows cast exists in an entirely different show that has very little to do with the stuff happening in Os Alta. Shadow and Bone is also generally terrible as a series at drawing any sort of distinctions about what makes life in Kerch different from that in Ravka and how that might have shaped these people.

But the character work is honestly great, and the addition of this Six of Crows prequel plot adds some really interesting layers to Inej and Jesper especially. The show is really clear that the latter obviously has Grisha power in a way that the books are not, and Kit Young steals almost every scene he’s in. (Milo the goat! I cannot! Protect him!)

I also love the way that the show fleshes out Inej, both in terms of her past and how the overhanging threat of returning to the Menagerie impacts her choices, as well as the way her religious beliefs shape who she is. (There’s something honestly wonderful about the fact that she gets to meet and know Alina, who is – and will become even more fully – revered as a saint by her faith, and I just love that for her.)

Kayti: I agree! For the first half of the season, I wasn’t sure if it worked, and I do think that has something to do with the weakness of setting in this adaptation. For parallel storylines to work well, they need to have a strong sense of world-building. In that way, even if there aren’t explicit plot or character connections between the two (or more!) storylines, then each storyline still adds something to the other(s) by virtue of telling us something about the larger world they share. Game of Thrones did this famously well, as does The Expanse. In Shadow and Bone, the articulation of setting is one of the adaptation’s weakest elements—the world and its cultures don’t truly feel real or lived in to me—and I think that hurts the integration of these two book series.

That being said, once the characters and plot collide in the second half of the season, this integration works incredibly well for me. I loved the final episode for so many reasons, but one of the big ones was for how integral the Six of Crows characters (or at least Jesper, Inej, and Kaz) felt to this climax—I mean, Inej throws a dagger into The Darkling! By the end of this season, it didn’t matter to me that the world-building didn’t quite work because I was so invested in these characters. (And I loved the Inej/Alina stuff, as well.)

And then, of course, we have Nina and Matthias off on their own, little subplot, giving me the Jon Snow/Ygritte vibes. Again, this subplot picked up steam for me. At the beginning, I didn’t know why we should care, but these actors really brought their “A” game when it came to their Enemies to Friends to (Almost) Lovers journey, complete with There Is Only One Bed and Huddling For Warmth. I never stood a chance.

Lacy: There is Only One Bed!!! Truly, the best romantic trope there is. Heart eyes emoji.

You’re really right about Shadow and Bone and how it articulates setting. On some level, the fact that the Shadow Fold is the most fully realized location in the show makes a lot of sense – it’s huge, monstrous, and terrifying. But this focus has the downside of making almost everywhere else look and seem exactly the same. (I really would like to know how many viewers didn’t/haven’t yet realized that Kerch is an entirely separate country with different laws about Grisha.)

The utter destruction of the West Ravkan city of Novokribirsk at the end of the season is supposed to be really shocking and underline how depraved the Darkling is, but I don’t think it hits as hard as it should – part of the reason is that the show has plenty of other opportunities to show us the Darkling’s flaws, but it’s also because there’s no real attempt to give West Ravka any real sense of place or identity.

Shadow and Bone Ending Explained: The Stag, Sun Summoner, and Black Heretic

By Lacy Baugher

Shadow & Bone: Ranking the Ships

By Kayti Burt and 1 other

Question: What do you think doesn’t work?

Kayti: I think that some of the supporting characters from Shadow and Bone get lost in the shuffle here, as does the Ravka world-building, and I think that is partially because we spend so much time with the Six of Crows gang. There’s nothing to say that, even if Six of Crows hadn’t been incorporated into this adaptation, we would have had more Os Alta or that more would have been better. In both the source material and the adaptation, the Os Alta stuff feels perfunctory rather than inspired. I would have loved to see the adaptation breathe new life into it, similar to what they did with Mal in the translation, who is a much fuller character in the Netflix series than he is in the book.

Lacy: Kaz Brekker, unfortunately. I mean, I think part of this is because there are aspects of who Kaz is and what he’s been through that you just can’t find out right now because of the story that’s still to come in Six of Crows and how that all plays into things there.

This is probably the right decision, but it has the really annoying side effect of making Kaz the least interesting character in Shadow and Bone for me. And if you’ve read the books, you know that’s the furthest thing from the truth. But here, Kaz is basically just a dude with a cool walking stick who’s kind of super into Inej for some reason and hates a man named Pekka Rollins. There’s almost no sense of who he is on his own terms or why he behaves the way he does.

Kayti: As someone who has yet to read Six of Crows, the degree of mystery around Kaz’s character worked for me. The character performance was strong enough that, even though I wanted answers about his backstory now, it felt more in a “I am getting what I need, not what I want” sort of viewing experience—though I get how this could be different if you already know and love his character.

As a non-book reader, I love the tension of not knowing what the heck is up with Kaz because it seems so in line with who he is as a character—jaded, angry, and prone to pushing people away. Of course, if he didn’t have enough sense to be friends (or whatever) with Inej and Jesper, I probably wouldn’t have as much time for his bullshit. The fact that these two seem to vouch for him as a person worth standing by goes a long way for me, and makes his character all the more intriguing.

Question: Do you foresee any problems with this strategy moving forward?

Lacy: Where do they go from here? The end of Shadow and Bone Season 1 sort of puts all the pieces in place for what feels like it’s about to become the first novel in the Six of Crows series. The Crows gang is on a boat heading back to Ketterdam, Nina is on the same ship with them, clearly about to join their crew with her own Matthias-related agenda. Alina and Mal are heading off on their own journey, which will take them on a completely different path. (Both figuratively and literally speaking.)

Is Shadow and Bone just going to move up the timeline of Six of Crows and put the rest of that story as a sort of B plot to the elements of Siege and Storm that will inevitably drive any Season 2? Season 1 successfully managed to use these characters by basically inventing a backstory for them that wasn’t present anywhere else. (Though it should be noted that Nina’s does come from the books.) I’m not sure that I think they can successfully do that again. But if they do adapt Six of Crows, how does that story fit here – especially if it means they can’t easily cross back into the main narrative?

I’m nervous, is what I’m saying. But the show has pleasantly surprised me thus far, so I live in hope.

Kayti: As someone who hasn’t read the books, I am blissfully ignorant, though, as our two main groups of characters are heading in different directions (both figuratively and literally, as you say, Lacy), I’m not sure what Season 2 is going to look like. Are these characters going to be in completely different stories? Because that doesn’t sound like the best idea. Or is the world-changing stakes of The Darkling and his pet shadows big enough that it will pull all of our main characters in?

Whatever happens in terms of the Shadow and Bone/Six of Crows division, I am very excited to see Nina and Matthias fully engage with Inej, Jesper, and Kaz. Maybe they will spend Season 2 together, with the events of the Six of Crows plot, and come back together somehow with Alina & co. for Season 3?

Lacy: You know, I actually don’t mind that idea at all – sort of letting everyone be free to do their own specific series-mandated things next season and then come back together again in Season 3. Because I think what bugs me is the idea that we might have been sort of gifted this really nifty blending of the book narratives and then have it taken away with nary a mention again. (I also just really want Nina to meet Alina, sue me.)

The more I think about it, the more I don’t necessarily see why we couldn’t have some of the Six of Crows plot here – yes, technically it takes place later on, chronologically speaking, but the show itself has already moved up the timeline of Matthias’ impending imprisonment in Hellgate, which is a big initial mission the Crows crew has to sort of undertake. I don’t think he deserves to stay in prison for what is essentially two more books before they get him out. Maybe that’s a place Season 2 can easily start.

The World of Shadow and Bone Explained

By Kayti Burt

Shadow and Bone Review: Netflix Adaptation Brings the Magic

By Lacy Baugher

Question: Final thoughts.

Kayti: I can’t get over how well this integration worked for me in the second half of the season. This isn’t Stan Lee popping up as a random member of the First Army; Inej, Kaz, and Jesper are the ones to drive Alina out of the palace, and they get to be a small part of that final fight with The Darkling (while not taking away from Alina’s agency and power in that climax). Then, we get a family campfire at the end of the season that straight-up feels like fanfiction (which coming from me is not a dismissal, but rather the ultimate compliment).

Lacy: I can’t wait to really see Nina incorporated with the rest of the Six of Crows cast. She spends most of this season off in her own storyline, which is necessary and gives us a lot of great moments (Nina + Matthias 4-ever), but I am very much looking forward to seeing her friendship with Inej develop.

Also, if we’re going to keep the Six of Crows crew around for any sort of Season 2, which I think they’ll want to do to some extent, I really hope we spend some serious time in Ketterdam, exploring what Kerch is like and how it’s different from Ravka and Fjerda. The Ketterdam set looks amazing and we should get some use out of it.

Kayti: Yes to more Kerch! I am hoping that what we saw in Season 1 was just the tip of the iceberg for what they have planned in terms of the culture and world and that Ketterdam feels more lived-in in Season 2. Overall, the season finale definitely left me eager for more. More than after watching the first episode, after watching the eighth episode, I felt like this story was just getting started.

Looking back on this first season, I think one of the reasons why this show works so well is because it isn’t just a “Chosen One” narrative, and I think that is because it incorporates the Six of Crows’ heist-driven structure. The heist is, by its nature, an ensemble story, while the YA “Chosen One” structure is usually a first-person narrative, which doesn’t always translate so well to the screen. In addition to its amazing characters, this multiple POV, non-Chosen One sensibility is the most important thing Six of Crows brings to Shadow and Bone, and I don’t know if the adaptation would work half as well without it.

The post Do Shadow and Bone & Six of Crows Work as One Story? appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3dOW6He

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

0 notes

charlieharry1 · 4 years

Text

Getting geared up for the general information protection regulation

The affect team were inundated with requests from clients, buddies and companions over the previous few weeks as the general records safety law (gdpr) cut-off date looms. In this weblog Digital Marketing Agencies in London post, i don’t intend to provide felony recommendation, but more of a technique i’d suggest you recollect on your corporation. As with any new laws, the precedent from case law has not but been set, so what’s presently taken into consideration “best practice” (in april 2020) won't be the case months from now. We grouped some of the extra normal questions and have offered up our fine (non-felony) recommendation below;cookies if ‘legitimate hobby’ exists, certainly note this in your privateness coverage, no similarly consent required. If ‘legitimate interest’ does not exist, you want explicit consent. Either way, record this to your privacy policy. Bureaucracy if ‘valid interest’ exists, or records is being collected out of contractual necessity (i. E. To finish a cart buy), no further consent is needed. If ‘legitimate hobby’ does now not exist (i. E. Robotically signing someone as much as a advertising e-newsletter once they entire a shape), specific consent is required. Keep in mind the purpose of a form – a publication subscription shape doesn’t want separate advertising consent, as that’s its cause, but a e-newsletter subscription on a “create an account” form does as that’s a separate motive. Website / crm statistics you have to set an expiry date for any records you shop – you cannot maintain it indefinitely. You must have a plan in area for dealing with any facts breach. You need to be able to expose the information concern what facts you preserve on them, and be capable of get rid of it at their request. You may save enough records after removal to make certain you do now not contact them once more, i. E. An e-mail deal with on a suppression list. Privateness coverage a must for all businesses documenting their compliance with gdpr and other laws.

This document will country your business information at the side of the way to communicate along with your information protection officer. This informs records subjects what you do with their statistics and how they could access or do away with it. Audience lists and client fit information you are the information processor, the advertising and marketing platform is the statistics controller, so the onus is at the controller to attain consent, and on the way to use the facts in step with that consent. If importing information units for custom suits and so on, you want to have amassed that information in a gdpr compliant manner — beneath a felony basis, which can consist of ‘legitimate pastimes’. E mail marketing lists use double decide in to make sure consent and the gdpr deadline as a very good reason to cleanse your lists now. Any lists you purchase ought to have been collected in a gdpr compliant manner. Inner strategies report all information storage, flows, inputs and outputs. . Teach staff on records protection. Be organized for a information breach with a clear plan. In this publish

we’ve addressed major angles of thinking with admire to cookies; cookie notices and the specified changes to cookie guidelines. The requirement for internet site cookie notices is extensively unchanged due to the fact that its felony requirement began in may additionally 2012, however its uptake has been low, inconsistent and now not actively enforced. Except a cookie is a purposeful cookie (consisting of to replace a buying basket or hit upon which usa a tourist is browsing from), consent is required to area it. A few organizations search for a effective decide-in to setting cookies and a few display handiest notifications in their presence. The gdpr mentions cookies most effective once in the modern-day literature (recital 30), and classes them as personal statistics in which they may be blended with specific identifiers or server records that could then discover someone. Cookies classed as non-public statistics (consisting of as logged in cookies or patron identification cookies) can be processed either with consent or under a “valid interest” under the gdpr. The gdpr offers us the potential to manner statistics under a “legitimate interest” whilst;

the processing isn't required by way of law however is of a clear gain to you or others;

there’s a restricted privateness effect at the person;

the character must moderately count on you to use their records in that way; and

you cannot, or do no longer want to, deliver the man or woman complete prematurely control (i. E. Consent) or bother them with disruptive consent requests whilst they're unlikely to item to the processing. A number of huge agencies are in reality already processing at least useful and advertising analytics cookies under this “valid hobby” method and it could be that that is the route the majority of businesses will select to take. If you are collecting any records under valid interests then make sure to encompass this in full for your privateness policy. To conform, at present, many websites are not placing for my part identifiable information in cookies on preliminary web page loads. They they display a clear message or opt-in form depending on their preference, whereby cookies are then set after consent. Till we see better examples of implementation, or case regulation to set the expectancies further, the complete industry is being led by way of this “first-class practice”. For the ones agencies currently with out a cookie policy, it’s in reality really useful to generate one from a reliable template, and then to audit and write up the beginning and purpose of each cookie set by way of your website within the policy. Similarly, ecu law offers statistics subjects the right to be forgotten, so site visitors should be able to withdraw consent simply as without problems as they gave consent. Wherein viable, signpost your clients to suitable locations to disable marketing and advertising and marketing carriers from 0. 33 events and additionally make certain your internet site honors “do now not track” browser requests. Paperwork

internet site paperwork throughout a internet site frequently serve a large number of functions – from advertising automation and publication subscriptions to simple one-time contact forms. This spectrum is mirrored via the requirements under the gdpr to benefit express advertising consent from your customers whilst they're filling them out. Any statistics you collect from a form should be processed lawfully. There are three relevant lawful bases, and you have to determine which is maximum relevant for your shape information:

consent. If a shape handiest collects non-public facts to conclude a agreement, inclusive of in a checkout shape, no action is important to make it gdpr compliant because the facts is processed as a contractual necessity. As a substitute, if a form carries out moves which might be fairly expected, inclusive of a contact shape sending an e-mail to your commercial enterprise and recording the shape data in a crm machine, it's far likely that the information is processed with a valid hobby (inclusive of to perform advertising and marketing activities). If that is the case, your privacy policy need to document this. If there is neither a contractual necessity or a legitimate interest, consent will be required. As an example, a user wouldn’t fairly anticipate a contact form to signal them as much as weekly marketing emails, so consent, inside the form of a tick container which the user have to undoubtedly tick, would be required. It’s also properly practice to get e mail information thru a double decide-in affirmation which all properly e-mail platform providers will provide. In case you want to market in your lapsed or previous clients, you need both express consent or a terrific argument below legitimate pursuits, and once more those should be unique to your privateness coverage. For pre-gdpr records, recollect how the statistics was amassed. If it changed into gathered in a way similar with your gdpr-compliant strategies (marketing company double opt-in, for instance), you then is probably inside the clear. The safest course for masking your lower back for preceding records wherein you're unsure as to whether or not it become collected according with gdpr is to ask for consent previous to can also twenty fifth and cleanse your lists before this date for records for that you do now not have consent. If you go down the consent direction, make certain you have got a log of the consent (i. E double choose in date) to your statistics. Storing records on your website or crm

if private information is to be saved, then you must keep in mind what the average consumer may count on you to do with it. You cannot shop this records indefinitely so an expiry records ought to be determined. If it's miles to be stored then this must also be sincerely defined to your privacy policy, at the side of instructions on how a information difficulty may also carry out a statistics access request and/or request its everlasting deletion. With gdpr, transparency is prime. If there is a information breach, you will want to alert the ico who will then probable look at your employer to test for compliance. A minimum of, there are six gdpr data safety ideas which you must adhere to, which the ico has laid out here. If at gift you are not storing information in a relaxed crm, then this have to be a key attention going ahead, as there are plenty of gdpr and other great motives for doing so;

centralised lead garage,

managed lead get entry to,

availability and simplicity of website integrations,

ease of appending advertising source/medium information,

typical stepped forward facts excellent, and

simpler gdpr compliance via method

if you obtain website leads thru email most effective, it’s first-class education to permanently delete those as soon as you have got handled them or moved them to a greater at ease carrier, like a crm. If you can not exchange this technique, element it in your privateness policy under a valid hobby or gain consent on the factor of facts introduction – and hold a document of this consent date. To save digging round on your e-mail inboxes and website databases, it’s worth the funding of a crm to make sure destiny information subject get admission to requests are painless. Privacy policy

cookie and privateness rules are sometimes intertwined, although the real requirement beneath the gdpr regulation is your privateness coverage. Your privateness coverage is one of the most important public going through documents you will need to create to reap gdpr compliance as this information to your customers and customers what you save and for a way long, in addition to how they'll carry out a statistics get admission to request. Privacy regulations might also take some of paperwork and be primarily based on a number of templates, however the ico have helpfully created a tick list, which if accompanied, will make sure you’re compliant come may 25th. Get right of entry to the ico checklist here. As with many legal documents, complexity grows with the size and complexity of your business, so in case you recognize you save data in silos throughout your corporations, for exclusive purposes, then it’s simply well worth looking for prison advice to make certain each eventuality is blanketed. Audience lists and customer healthy data

maximum advertisers in 2020 could be processing audience data thru massive aggregate information controllers/processors like google analytics, adwords or facebook ads for the reason of remarketing and retargeting. The marketing giants, led by using facebook and google, have currently asked customers to verify their consent for the usage of non-public records to form marketing alternatives (this turned into required on facebook, for instance) because of this the facts they're “controlling” is amassed in a gdpr compliant way. Advertisers are then information processors in this relationship, as facebook explains in addition on its gdpr advisory page right here. This covers the usage of tracking scripts and tracking pixels as the individual customers could have consented to offering this data to the controllers and it’s the controller, now not the advertiser, who's using that facts within their platform to operate the advertising characteristic. Advertisers can continue to submit additional records to those controllers via the usage of “custom audiences” or “purchaser fit” records sets via appointing them as a records processor — for which you need a legal foundation to achieve this. Again, this relies upon to your personal legal interpretation of valid interest vs. The requirement for consent for sharing this statistics and this can nearly usually come again to the method wherein the records become accumulated in the first area and the expectations of an affordable/common client. Email advertising lists

e-mail marketing has been ruled inside the united kingdom by way of separate rules considering the fact that 2003. The gdpr does now not alternate the requirements drastically, however once more affirms the need to gather “freely given, particular, informed and unambiguous consent” for the collection and storage of personal statistics (article 32). Therefore, if you have been amassing statistics below a double decide-in method and your customers or customers are waiting for to obtain advertising messages from you, you could already be absolutely compliant. Your particular moves for full gdpr compliance may additionally range but so that it will decide this, you have to first audit the geographic unfold of your email marketing database (looking for all eu member country international locations) and make sure you have a clear audit trail of double decide-ins, suitable marketing consent and importantly a method for consumers to without difficulty withdraw their consent. Importantly, the gdpr rules applies to all data whether or not it was amassed before or after the may additionally 25th cut-off date, so this complete audit method is vital for compliance. It’s nevertheless possible to purchase electronic mail advertising lists from professional providers after the gdpr cut-off date however quite a few care ought to be taken to make certain listing records changed into collected in a gdpr compliant way. Your duty to allow the easy withdrawal of consent still applies. Additionally – it’s well worth bearing in thoughts that just because purchased lists can be compliant, they will no longer be the exceptional direction ahead for advertising efforts and your e-mail marketing approach; as many electronic mail carrier providers have advised for some time — simply because it’s felony doesn’t imply it’s nice to your commercial enterprise. For simple programs, like an e mail publication signup, you should make certain that customers undergo a double choose-in manner and save the date in their consent to acquire your e-mail marketing messages. Double opt-in isn't always required, however it is a accessible manner of recording the date of consent — all correct email companies and crms will provide this. For extra complicated uses, or whilst there are more than one effects associated with the action – as an instance developing an account and subscribing to a publication, separate consent is required for sending customers advertising messages (privacy and electronic communications rules will exist alongside the gdpr). Inner strategies

Read Also:- Google clears that it is not slowing crawling sites because of Covid-19

apart from making technical adjustments in your website or internal software program, the most important burden created by using the gdpr is the inner procedures you'll need to comply with after the may additionally 25th closing date. The uk ico have released a easy infographic tick list which may be discovered right here to get you started so this is a great starting point. You have to make your team of workers privy to some key modifications to statistics processing and storage – namely;

the proper to be forgotten

statistics difficulty get admission to request rights of data subjects

facts portability

facts breach reporting responsibilities

go-border statistics processing prohibitions

you have to additionally be addressing a lot of these new worries with a brand new privacy policy in addition to updating your cookie coverage to make sure cookie statistics is transparent. Your privacy coverage must nation the usage of cookies and digital advertising monitoring offerings you’re using and detail how customers can opt out of this. If you do now not yet use a crm for marketing and income purposes, however as a substitute rely upon (for instance) an e mail inbox for dealing with enquiries, it's miles truely well worth considering this now. There are plenty of easy, unfastened, integration answers to be had to get you began. A crm will make sure safe garage, permissioned access, and easy deletion/removal of facts not less than. You must create a file in coaching for use ought to you be within the unlucky position of reporting a information breach. The ico offer a checklist to get you started out here. Internally you should map the information flows inside and out of your employer, together with the facts stores if you want to create a information audit/map. This useful workout will pick out everlasting data stores, in addition to insecure or much less premier processing/controlling strategies. For every, check your gdpr compliance. Without a doubt placed, as a controller, you want to:

make sure you manner the information lawfully,

make certain you have a privacy policy in place, and

exhibit compliance with policies thru your audits and documentation

in case you are best a processor, you have to:

ensure you're appearing within the bounds of what your facts controller allows you to do. In case you are storing records in any manner which isn’t absolutely secure, then you definately have to address this at once. As with every new regulation, we look forward to case regulation developing a extra subtle “satisfactory exercise” for some extra trivial sme problems indexed above. However till then, appearing lawfully and being prudent is your first-class wager. For any complexities now not extensively mentioned in this put up, separate criminal advice can be required. If you have any queries, check out my colleague jamie’s blog post gdpr: an action plan for corporations and entrepreneurs.

>>>28. Your virtual possibility: insights for entrepreneurs and enterprise proprietors

growing a commercial enterprise without a digital advertising and marketing method is like jumping out of a aircraft with out a parachute – it’s just not going to paintings. But knowing where to apply advertising and marketing price range and efforts can be a assignment. Much like identifying the satisfactory parachute to get you competently to the floor, entrepreneurs want to review the variety of options available to pick those which might be most probable to help them acquire their goals, in the framework of ways their enterprise works, who they’re attempting to talk to and the position in their marketplace. We have been thrilled to host a workshop in which our virtual marketing professionals shared their pointers and recommendation for corporations investing in digital advertising and looking for the subsequent way to sculpt their techniques for max impact. You’ll discover the slides from our speakers right here. For more bespoke advice to assist your business supercharge its digital marketing strategies, get in contact with our crew nowadays. The today's updates affecting seek marketing

pete jovetic opened the event with a precis of those things affecting digital marketers today:

the trendy updates affecting seek advertising

search engine optimization exceptional exercise for growing online agencies

sean burton, search engine optimization strategist at affect, took to the degree to share his tips for agencies across the seo journey. For those simply beginning out, basic pointers and recommendation for search engine optimization foundations furnished essential first steps, whilst extra advanced marketers will had been able to evaluation their personal foundations and begin considering extra complicated approaches to boost their search visibility:

research greater about our search engine optimization offerings. Getting more bang on your greenback in percent advertising and marketing

lauren capon, senior % government at influence, talked our target audience thru the big opportunity, and plenty of nuances, of paid advertising and marketing on-line. In a digital landscape in which ‘pay to play’ appears ever greater ordinary, the range of ways to increase your attain via shrewd paid marketing is growing:

learn extra about our percent services. Developing sales via conversion charge optimisation (cro)

our very last speaker changed into edd wilson, search engine optimization strategist and cro expert at impression. Getting site visitors to your website is simplest the first step, and as superior Digital Marketing Companies in Leeds marketers will recognize, it’s converting that visitors that may be the biggest venture – specifically in extra competitive markets: research extra approximately our cro services. A huge thanks to anyone who attended. Look out for more events from affect, coming quickly.

#digital marketing companies leeds

1 note · View note

housebeleren · 5 years

Text

Throne of Eldraine New Commander Cards

Alright, now that we’ve gone through all the Legendary creatures from Throne of Eldraine, time for all the other cards that might make a splash in Commander. I love this part.

This may seem like a weird pick, but there are honestly a bunch of Voltron commanders that might be interested in this. I can definitely see it in Sram, Tuvasa, and Bruna builds as ways to go really big really fast. You need some form of evasion, but there are plenty of ways to do that in those decks. But that’s a lot more action than most draft Uncommons get.

Charming Prince, aside from looking like he’s about to drop dead from Cholera or something (seriously dude, that ghostly pallor is not a good look), is a surprising amount of utility for a 2 drop. Early in the game, the Scry 2 ability is going to smooth out your draws, and later on, he’s all about the flicker to reuse ETBs. I could see him in more casual Brago, Roon, or Chulane builds. But are there casual Brago or Chulane builds anymore? Unlikely.

More restrictive Oblivion Ring effects aren’t usually something I’m in the market for, but decks that care about Artifacts may be into it. The first one that comes to mind is something like Sharuum the Hegemon or something, and there could be others. Probably not powerful enough for Breya, and Alela has access to better options that are Enchantments.

Hushwing Gryff variants see a fair amount of play, and this one also shuts off death triggers, which is a significant upgrade, because it hoses two strategies instead of just one. It doesn’t have the Flash to surprise your opponents, but the added utility is probably worth it for decks that want to hate.

Board WIpes are always welcome, and this one has the added utility of coming attached to a large creature after the fact. The best place for this will be in decks that have lots of ways to return the creature to hand so you can set up loops clearing the board, or in decks with lots of Giants so you can break parity. Kalemne comes to mind as a great home for this.

True Love’s Kiss has a lot of competition, most notably Crush Contraband and Return to Dust at the same CMC. I think which one you want depends a lot on your metagame. If you face lots of decks that are heavy on the Artifacts & Enchantments, you may want the ones that can hit multiple targets. If you just need the occasional spot removal, getting the card draw might be better. I also like this a lot for Taigam, Ojutai Master decks, since cantrips are extra useful there.

The Magic Mirror is is a rework of Mind Unbound, a card I’ve never played and probably never will. However, in a deck with lots of Instants & Sorceries, you can get this down for as little as 3 mana, which is way more palatable. If you can back this up with counterspells to keep it alive a few turns, it’ll become pretty potent pretty fast. I can picture it, is what I’m saying.

Honestly, I’m pretty big on Midnight Clock. I think a lot of people forget that this is a mana rock, and it doesn’t even come into play tapped, so the floor is pretty high right off the bat for heavy Blue decks. Plus, the counters get put on this on EVERY upkeep, not just your own, so it only needs to survive a couple turns before you get a personal Timetwister out of it. I’m not saying it’s an autoinclude or new format staple or anything, but I would definitely be willing to try it out.

Efficient, flexible removal at its best. Epic Downfall will hit just about anything you want it to hit, other than a Gaddoc Teeg or something. I expect lots of decks to be looking to throw this into the mix of spot removal.

Foulmire Knight isn’t going to go into every deck, but it’s certainly a contender for Zombie tribal, since he comes with card draw attached. Plus, lots of such decks have tons of ways to retrieve him from the graveyard, so you can get extra utility. I’m putting him directly in my Gisa & Geralf deck, because a fun quirk of their ability is that you can cast the Profane Insight half from your graveyard, even though only on your turn, so you lose the Instant-speed fun. Other decks that could be interested are Varina and The Scarab God.

Literally everything I said about Foulmire Knight above applies to Murderous Rider as well, except more so. Having a Zombie stapled to a Hero’s Downfall is incredible, and generally a clear upgrade, since the life loss is so negligible. The one kink (well, I shouldn’t presume he only has one) of this guy is that he tucks himself on death, which is a bit unfortunate but probably necessary to avoid him being ridiculous. HOWever, there are some fun things there. First, his death trigger goes on the stack, and can be responded to. So, that means the following:

If it’s your turn when the Rider dies, you can cast Swift End from your graveyard with Gisa & Geralf.

You can exile the Rider and one other card from your ‘yard to Varina in response, and get a Zombie token, which is kinda her thing.

You can get him back to your hand by activating Phyrexian Reclamation or similar with his trigger on the stack.

So yeah, there’s some fun to be had here.

Revenge of Ravens bears a lot of similarity to other cards we’ve seen before, like Blood Reckoning and Marchesa’s Decree, most of which see very little play. But this one has one important upgrade, and that’s the fact that it gains you a life. As a result, it has extra utility in decks that care about lifegain triggers such as Oloro and Karlov builds, both of which love their pillow-forting. I doubt it’ll see much play, but could be a niche inclusion in decks like those.

Tutors are great, and this is one of the most unique tutor effects we’ve seen in a long time. They key to this card revolves around breaking parity so your opponents don’t get to take advantage of it. The first way that came to mind for me was to include this in Aminatou, the Fateshifter builds, since she can just flicker it back to your side of the board after activating it. Which seems... gross and awesome at the same time. (I totally put it in my Aminatou build immediately.) Other possible options are Breya, who can sacrifice it in response to its ability, or in decks with cards like Ashiok, Dream Render or Stranglehold, so they just can’t use it. On a really jank note, if you have an Ob Nixilis, Unshackled deck, this is a funny inclusion that punishes whoever you give it to.

Voltron decks with Red will be interested in Embercleave. So... Zurgo Helmsmasher comes to mind, assuming you’re not going full-on Worldslayer combo. I could also see it in decks like Saskia and things like that. Probably not a major player, but potential for decks that want to go aggressive.

The clause that you can only cast one more spell after this is unfortunate, but it could still be a reasonable inclusion in mono Red decks like either version of Neheb (the Eternal or Dreadhorde Champion) that want to go big burn. Also, if you have a 7 CMC mono Red general like, Drakuseth, Maw of Flames, this seems like an auto-include. I mean, you need all the help you can get if you built a Drakuseth deck, so...

Now, hear me out. Looters/Rummagers are great in certain builds, and Merchant of the Vale is unique in two ways. First, he’s got a one shot effect tacked on as an Adventure, which is some added flexibility. But second, he’s actually the only Rummaging creature in mono Red that doesn’t require tapping. Seriously. That means in some big Red Mana decks (like the aforementioned Nehebs), you can rummage to your heart’s content with all the mana you generate to dump into this. Not saying he’s great, but saying he’s worth consideration if you’re in the market for mana sinks in mono Red.

Obviously, the dream is to cast this off Irencrag Feat, but even if you don’t, this could be a reasonable inclusion for mono Red big Mana decks. (I’m sensing a theme with these last few cards.) Dealing 21 damage is no joke, and I could even see this in some versions of Vial Smasher that focus on big mana production. Again, most decks probably won’t want it, but the ones that do will make good use of it.

There’s no shortage of ramp spells, and for 3 mana we’re accustomed to fetching 2 lands (see: Kodama’s Reach & Cultivate). That said, this one has some advantages. First, the land it fetches comes into play untapped, which is a nice little bit of utility, especially if you can follow it up with a one drop mana dork immediately after. But it also has a Rubblehulk tacked on for the late game, which is a totally viable win condition in some decks. Would I trade Rubblehulk’s Bloodrush ability for Beanstalk Giant’s ramp? For most decks, abso-fucking-lutely. And this one is mono-Green, so it can go into way more decks. I’d consider it for certain builds of Kynaios & Tiro, Chulane, Azusa, and a variety of other big-mana decks that thrive on versatility.

The Great Henge is expensive, but will be amazing once it resolves. It adds mana, it draws cards, and it buffs up every creature you land, which is a ton of action. And if you can reliably get this down to 5 mana, you’re in great shape. Big Green Stompy decks like Ghalta will be super into this, and I can also see if for +1/+1 counter decks like Ezuri, Claw of Progress, since those often get big/big with ease.

While the Transformation doesn’t have the target flexibility of Song of the Dryads, it’s a pretty effective way to deal with annoying Commanders or problematic creatures, and the card draw on ETB is a nice touch. It’s a fun little pairing with Estrid’s Invocation, so keep that in mind if you’re playing Bantchantress or some such nonsense.

I don’t know what deck wants this, and I honestly don’t really want to know, because it seems ridiculous. But returning stuff straight from the graveyard to play is always a strong move, and buying back a pile of Artifacts in something like Sharuum or Breya is probably a game ending play. The non-Aura line of text makes it a little less appealing for Enchantment builds, since most of the best one are heavy in Auras. Still, I’m sure it will find some homes and be a lot of fun (for at least one person) when it resolves.

Also, somewhere on Twitter (don’t remember where, unfortunately), someone said that this card should be called “Manse Dance Revolution,” and that is absolutely correct.

Drown in the Loch is versatile removal at a very reasonable cost. All it asks is that your opponents have cards in their graveyards, which is super easy in EDH. The funny part is, this honestly gets stronger the more competitive your metagame, since competitive builds will have Fetchlands and early interaction, plus their average CMC is much lower, so you’ll more frequently have targets. In mill decks like Mirko Vosk or Phenax, you are always running this, and I’d consider it in just about any Blue/Black based deck.

Green has some better engines to draw cards, but as a quick burst, 5 for 5 is a pretty awesome rate. Plus, I like that the card has some protection against flipping a few lands by at least letting you play an extra one, so worst case it’s an Explosive Vegetation. I’d definitely run this in Wort, the Raidmother decks, because conspiring this to flip 10 cards, then immediately dropping two more lands seems like a solid way to set up a game-ending turn. And if you’re building Gruul in general, it seems like something to consider.

I couldn’t not mention Nessie here. 6 mana is a lot, but he has a pile of abilities for that 6 mana, and Flash lets him come down at end of turn, so he’s more likely to resolve. In a way, it reminds me of Pearl Lake Ancient, another card I occasionally run as a WTF element in my decks to catch people off guard. They’re both giant serpents, they both have Flash, and they’re both resilient recursive threats. You definitely don’t want to use Nessie’s sacrifice abilities too much, but they’ll be handy if you’re flooded. Plus, he’s got incidental Graveyard hate tacked on, which is actually my favorite little secret of his, so I especially like him in decks with lots of Wheels (Nekusar says “HI!”), as something you can discard for value, then activate to remove problematic cards your opponents may want to recover from their ‘yards.

3-cost Mana Rocks are never the competitive option, especially when they only produce one color at a time. But 3-cost Mana Rocks with a team-wide pump attached is worth a second look. Mono-color go-wide decks will be interested in this for sure, as well as 2 color decks that consistently produce tokens of a single color, like Alela or Kykar.

Okay, before I start on this card, I’d just like to say that a lot of the lands in this set are highly playable. Basically all of the Castle cycle are playable, especially Castles Vantress, Locthwain, and Garenbrig. Also, Fabled Passage is phenomenal tech for multicolored decks, and is such an obvious staple, it’s not worth writing about.

Of the Common Land cycle, however, there is one that stands above all the rest. Yes, Witch’s Cottage is basically a better Mortuary Mire in heavy Black decks, so some places will run it. But the big news is Mystic Sanctuary. This card is such the hotness for mono Blue decks and a few others of note. First of all, the potential to combo this with Time Warps is off the charts. I literally cannot imagine not running this in God-Eternal Kefnet decks, because the synergy is so strong setting up your next draw. And lastly, I’m putting it in my Aminatou the Fateshifter build (which runs both the aforementioned cards), because putting expensive spells back on top of your deck is kinda what that whole deck is about. Plus, she can flicker it, which is some stupid-level combo right there.

Brawl Deck Cards for Commander

Okay, that’s it for the main set. Now we get to the cards from the four Brawl decks that have potential for the big time.

Mace of the Valiant is an interesting one. It’s a Voltron card that wants lots of little creatures to enter the battlefield. That makes it a little paradoxical, but I think there are probably homes for it. Two of the obvious ones are the decks it came in, Alela and Syr Gwyn, but there are certainly others. There’s potential in several generals who have fallen out of favor, such as Rafiq of the Many and basically any of the mono-White cats, like Kemba, Kha Regent, who seems preemptively designed specifically for this card. (Seriously, if any of y’all run Kemba decks and haven’t put this in yet, what are you even doing?)

Shimmer Dragon is too obvious, but therefore I have to mention it. This will be a format staple for years to come, since Blue-based Artifact decks have always been popular. Yes, it’s expensive, but once it comes out, drawing your deck in short order will be absolutely trivial. Urza decks will love this. Oops, all my mana rocks and constructs are also card draw! Seems good.

Chittering Witch seems fun, if a little on the casual side. But she doesn’t cost much, and her ability is a pretty reasonable way to snipe down problematic threats as you need. In decks with tons of sac fodder, you could definitely do worse. Endrek Sahr comes to mind as a fun combo piece with this.

This is definitely more on the casual side, but Red needs more options, and Embereth Skyblazer has some potential. Pumping up your entire team for +3/+0 on each attack can be brutal, and it gets especially interesting in decks that involve multiple combats, like Aurelia the Warleader, or that increase damage dealt, like Gisela, Blade of Goldnight. In short, this is actually a Boros card.

Steelbane Hydra seems really good, especially in big mana decks (Azusa, Gitrog, Kruphix, Nikya, I could go on...) or in decks that can add +1/+1 counters to him (Atraxa, Marath, Vorel, Ezuri, Ghave, I could go on...). In other words, there are all kinds of homes for this guy, plus: TURTLE HYDRA!

He’s so cute.

Now, I’ll readily admit that my opinion of Thorn Mammoth may be skewed by the fact that it is absolutely stupid good in 1v1 Brawl. It obviously gets worse in multiplayer and in bigger card pools. But, that said, there are times when this card could absolutely own the board. My particular dream would be to cast an Avenger of Zendikar and Heroic Intervention with this guy out, and just build my own Plague Wind. Because that sounds fun, if a little jank. But seriously, Green can find ways to make this good, and can certainly find ways to cast it.

Obviously, Knight’s Charge belongs in one type of deck, and that deck is Knights tribal. And in that deck, this will be the best card in your deck. So whether you’re running Syr Gwyn or Aryel, Knight of Windgrace or motherfucking Morophon Knights for some reason, then you’ll run this and you’ll like it.

Okay, Tome of Legends is a card that nobody asked for, but here it is and if your commander is all about coming down quickly and going sideways, then here’s a card for them. So... I guess... Captain Lannery Storm, we found a card for you?

Aaaaaand last but definitely first, we have this gem. Arcane Signet. The card that made Commander players everywhere lose their collective shit and buy out every copy of every Brawl deck, jacking prices up to the sky. Way to go us! (Seriously though, I’m totally part of this problem and I fully admit it.)

Well, after many sobering hours of reflection pondering our addiction and the general meaninglessness of the pieces of cardboard we spend literal thousands of dollars on, and hence, the meaninglessness of life itself, we started slotting these babies into decks and forgot all about that nonsense. Because yes, truly, this card is great, and you should always run it.

And if they don’t reprint this in literally every Commander and Brawl product ever printed going forward, so help me...

I’m fine. I swear.

So yeah. That’s it. All the cards from Throne of Eldraine for Commander. There... sure are a lot of them, aren’t there? It’s like Wizards is thinking about majorly pushing this format or something... :)

#MtG #mtg commander

1 note · View note

is6621 · 5 years

Text

Battle of the Band’s... Music Streaming Services by Emily Gabree

This week, Spotify announced that the company has filed an antitrust complaint to the European Commission against Apple. Spotify makes some pretty substantial charges against Apple, alleging that their App Store policies are a way for the tech behemoth to stifle competition in the market, and that these policies are far and above just a cost of doing business on Apple’s platform.

Spotify Chief Executive Officer, Daniel Ek, states in a post on the company’s website that the complaint asks the European Commission to focus on three main areas: (1) Whether apps can compete fairly on Apple’s platform, (2) Whether consumers are "locked-in" to Apple’s platform and payment system, and (3) Whether app stores impose unfair limits on marketing, promotions and communication with users.

This is not the first time Apple has drawn criticism from app makers because it draws a fee of up to 30% of apps sold in the App Store. However, most developers have accepted this setup in order to leverage Apple’s secure platform and reach the millions of iPhone users globally. Therefore, this lawsuit is a pretty big deal - proving that companies are finally willing to step up to the fruit. Let’s break down both sides.

Spotify:

One of the biggest complaints that Spotify has against Apple’s App Store policies is the 30% revenue share that Apple requires apps to pay if digital goods or services are purchased in the app using Apple’s secure payment system. Spotify believes that this is a “tax” that they are incurring because their app competes with Apple Music. In fact, the company has gone so far to say that once Apple launched their music app and became a direct competitor, Apple had an incentive to disadvantage Spotify (and other rival services) through frequent and extreme restrictions and policy changes.

In his post, Daniel Ek claims, “What initially felt like a mutually beneficial partnership, increasingly felt very one-sided. Apple’s conduct stands apart from that of such rival app-store operators (i.e. Google) for being particularly exploitative and punitive, with the ultimate costs passed on to customers who may get stuck with less competition and choice.”

The key difference between Apple’s App store and others is not the revenue sharing itself – which based on what I could find seems to be fairly consistent across Google, Apple, and Android. Instead, it’s based on how users of the apps actually make purchases. Apple requires apps to use their payment system and bans apps from linking to outside payment sites. While Apple claims this is for user security, Spotify claims this is leading to systematic unfairness across their platform.

Spotify doubled down on their allegations, launching a website called “Time To Play Fair” on the same day they announced the lawsuit. This site outlines a timeline, as well as Spotify’s perspective on how Apple mistreats companies that compete with Apple products in the App Store.

App Store sales have become a crucial part of Apple’s revenue model. Yahoo finance estimates that roughly 12% of Apple’s 2019 fiscal year gross profits could come from their App Store. This is also a clear part of Apple’s strategy going forward, as customers are no longer upgrading their phones at the same annual pace as previously seen. Additionally, Bloomberg forecasts that the app economy is expected to grow from $82B in 2018 to $157B by 2022. Therefore, Spotify’s lawsuit is a direct shot at the company’s long term strategy.

Apple:

Yesterday, Apple fired back. The company posted an official statement on their website disputing not just Spotify’s accusation that Apple unfairly charges only apps that compete with their products, but also Spotify’s claim that Apple is blocking access to products and updates within Spotify’s app itself. Apple highlights that the company has approved and distributed over 200 app updates requested by Spotify. They also claim to have only requested adjustments when they felt that Spotify was trying to circumvent the rules that every other app follows.

Apple believes that Spotify’s motivations are not focused on the customer, but instead driven by financial motivations. Within their address, Apple states, “After using the App Store for years to dramatically grow their business, Spotify seeks to keep all the benefits of the App Store ecosystem, including the substantial revenue that they draw from the App Store’s customers, without making any contributions to that marketplace. At the same time, they distribute the music you love while making ever-smaller contributions to the artists, musicians and songwriters who create it – even going so far as to take these creators to court”

In Apple’s response, we learn that 84% of the apps in the Apple App store do not pay anything to Apple when users download or use the app. For those apps that do pay, the revenue share is 30% in the first year, and 15% in subsequent years. This was built by design, and the rules outlined in their reply apply to all – not just apps that compete with Apple products. Daniel Ek insists in his post that Spotify does not want “special treatment”, rather the company wants a “consistent set of fair rules and restrictions”. While it appears that Spotify is getting the same treatment as other apps that meet certain rules laid out by Apple, the focus here will likely be on the word “fair”.

Apple claims that it’s revenue share is in exchange for connecting a third-party’s services to its users, using the App Store billing system, and its developer tools that allow Spotify to build its iPhone and iPad applications. However, what is actually fair in this scenario? Should Apple require apps to use their payment system? How does that requirement impact customers either positively or negatively? These are all questions that EU regulators will be faced with then going through the anti-trust lawsuit. All of this could also become intensified at the end of March when Apple is expected to announce new content services.

Regulators:

This comes at a time when agencies and politicians in the US and UK are also taking a microscope to antitrust laws and the tech industry. EU regulators have continuously showed concern about how much technology platforms control online, and how they may rig the game to their own advantage. Though the cases are slightly different, regulators in Europe recently ruled that Google’s inclusion of the Chrome browser pre-installed on Android devices gave it an unfair advantage. This could pose a significant risk to Apple’s App Store future if similar issues are deemed to be taking place by the EU Commission.

Regulators within the US have also called on Apple to level the playing field. Though Apple has been a minor point of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s focus to break up big tech, she did point directly to how Apple products compete in their iOS store. "Apple, you’ve got to break it apart from their App Store. It’s got to be one or the other. Either they run the platform or they play in the store. They don’t get to do both at the same time," Warren told The Verge in a recent interview.

What does IS6621 think? Which company has the best legal and ethical case? Is Apple not playing by the rules? Or does Spotify just not like the rules?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-13/apple-faces-spotify-antitrust-complaint-to-eu-over-app-store

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/spotify-apple-app-store-164634805.html

https://9to5mac.com/2019/03/13/its-time-to-play-fair/

https://timetoplayfair.com/the-case/

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/03/addressing-spotifys-claims/

#IS6621 Apple Spotify

3 notes · View notes

ninewheels · 5 years

Photo

All right, let’s do some Wild Guessing and Drastically Over-Reading this fucking poster because I’ve had an ambien and this is just the kind of person I am.

So, the gradual build of information has led to this as our core cast for Endgame: the Original Six Avengers (this being their swan song, as a group and for most of them as individuals too probably), Rhodey, Nebula, Rocket, and Scott--all the headliners who survived the snap--plus Carol.

Toward the end of the trailer we see Steve, Tony, Nat, Clint, Nebula, Rhodey, and Scott in those white suits, presumably designed for travel in the Quantum Realm based on their similarity to Hank’s suit from Ant-Man and the Wasp, and based on the fact that their party now has a member (Scott) who knows about the Quantum Realm, previously established to be very wibbly-wobbly and timey-wimey, and therefore possibly useful for our heroes’ almost-certain plan, to save the day by going back in time to stop the snap from happening in the first place. (There’s a million little bits of evidence hinting that it’s time travel, I won’t talk about all the sources.) We don’t see Thor, Bruce/Hulk, and Rocket in those suits, but toybox art leaks reveal all three of them suited up, so we know that happens at some point. We don’t see Carol in that scene at all, and there’s no photo evidence of her putting on a Quantum Suit, so maybe she’s getting through the Quantum Realm with her cosmic space radiation powers, or maybe she’s just not going. Either way, the other 10 characters are suited up and ready to go on some mission that we don’t see any of because, as was mentioned months ago by Feige, the marketing for this film is restricting itself mostly to footage from the first 15 minutes of the film; if we accept the informed guess that the main plot of the film will be the Avengers traveling through space and time to find a way to stop Thanos before the snap happens, the more concrete cut-off point could just be the end of the first act, when the mission actually begins. However exactly it shakes out, it seems pretty certain that this is our core team. That’s our current Avengers lineup, featuring Special Guest Star Party Member Carol to some extent or another.

This is reinforced by the poster. The characters featured on this poster are those 11 heroes, Thanos himself... and one other conspicuous inclusion: Okoye. The original poster featured her on it, but did not list Danai Gurira’s name at the top, an oddity that Marvel was quick to remedy when people started protesting. But for my part, I’m still wondering what it means that she gets to be on the poster, even though only the 12 obvious leads got credited above the title at first. Could her inclusion be a nod to the fact that she is one of only two supporting characters to be shown surviving the snap at the end of Infinity War? It’s just her and M’Baku, although I would not personally think much of him in this context as he is a decidedly less important character than Okoye in the grand scheme of the MCU.

While on the first draft of this poster Danai Gurira’s name was not at the top, it was (and is) listed in the credits at the bottom of the poster. See for yourself: Danai Gurira, Benedict Wong, Jon Favreau, then it lists Bradley Cooper as Rocket, and then “with Gwyneth Paltrow” right before “with Josh Brolin”. First of all, note than Josh Brolin still has the “with” billing he had on the Infinity War poster (where Chris Pratt got the “and” for some baffling reason). Aside from brief archive footage shots from Infinity War of Sam and Wanda dusting away, the characters who have been dusted have been completely absent from marketing so far. Though it’s far from a secret that the dusted characters are going to come back and appear in some form in this film, I think the idea that the marketing is sticking to the first act of the film might be more than just “no footage from after a certain timestamp”, it might actually be an overall philosophy that guides details of what appears on the posters.

Side note: I firmly believe that this film will end with everyone dusted in Infinity War coming back to life in exchange for the sacrifice of some (maybe many) of the surviving characters, based on who Marvel is ready to put to rest for good and willing to let die as opposed to retire from superhero-ing. I subsequently firmly believe that the first portion of the end credits will not only list the actors listed on the poster, but also restore to their Infinity War billing all of the actors whose characters got dusted last time, as a symbolic thing.

Okoye is definitely alive at the end of Infinity War. I’m gonna guess that Shuri is dead because if she isn’t, then Shuri is Queen of Wakanda, and that’s a plot point Marvel doesn’t want to bring up only for it to become a glorified easter egg in a film about completely different things. Meanwhile, Shuri being dead means there is no clear heir to the throne of Wakanda, putting the country in disarray, adding to the Darkest Timeline vibe that Endgame is starting with, and also giving Okoye a pretty compelling reason to not leave Wakanda to help the gang on their mission. Not that I ever thought she was going to be a part of the team, but the question now is why is she important enough to get her face on the poster as a thirteenth-wheel? And why are Pepper, Happy, and Wong important enough to have their actors listed after the headliners in the bottom credits? Could it be that they and Okoye are the only supporting characters still alive in post-snap world? Pepper, Wong, and Okoye would be the only other surviving major characters from Infinity War, and Happy wasn’t in Infinity War but he’s been around a lot since the beginning of the MCU, so he’s still relevant enough. Maybe that’s all there is to it. Maybe these are simply the only other major characters we’re going to see before whatever story cut-off point they’ve picked to dictate the marketing strategy. I definitely don’t think all four are all going to have a lot of screen-time or much to do. That still leaves the mystery of why, out of those four, Okoye was singled out to be on the poster. The most logical theory is also the most boring and cynical, which is that they wanted to add some variety to a mostly-male, almost all-white cast ensemble, and picked the only WOC left for the optics. That said, I would like to think there is a real reason for her to be up there based on the content of her role in the film. I’d like to think Okoye’s going to do at least one plot-relevant thing, but damned if I can figure out what it is. After all, whether Shuri is alive or not, I cannot see her abandoning her post at Wakanda. Maybe she’ll have a beefed up role on the other end of the film when they (will probably) have to revisit the Battle of Wakanda to keep Thanos from snapping.

Final note: I know I’m not the first person to point this out, but this is the first time that Mark Ruffalo has gotten to have his own real face on a main poster. He got a character single for the first Avengers with his own face on it, but every appearance he’s made on the primary poster for a given film has been in Hulk form. As far as I see it, this could be either a case of “let Mark show his real face because this is his last time” OR “Mark has to show his real face because Hulk doesn’t show up until later in the movie”.

#Marvel #Avengers #Avengers Endgame #Endgame #MCU

1 note · View note

theoptimisticpatriot · 3 years

Text

England and the Union

Professor John Denham – written evidence (FGU0027)

House of Lords Constitution Committee

Inquiry into the Future Governance of the UK

I am the Director of the Centre for English Identity and Politics at the University of Southampton. I was MP for Southampton Itchen from 1992-2015 and the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government from 2009-2010. (In that capacity I laid the orders creating the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, the first combined authority). My published work includes a study of Labour’s approach to the governance of England (in Governing England, British Academy, 2018). I am also a Founder and Director of the Southern Policy Centre.

The focus of the Centre for English Identity and Politics is on the relationship between national identity and political choices, and on the governance of England and the union. In the past twenty years English, British and combined identities have taken on a political salience with, for example ,‘English not British’ voters voting heavily Leave and ‘British not English’ voters tending to vote Remain. National identity is also a good predictor of attitudes towards English governance and the union.

The Southern Policy Centre is an independent think tank for central southern England. The SPC has delivered research, reports and events on devolution and regional policy since 2014 and has argued that any local devolution proposals should reflect a coherent regional strategy.

Summary

England’s place in and relationship to the Union is rarely directly addressed. But many of the tensions within the Union stem from the conflation of the government of England and the government of the Union. The failure to delineate the two has serious consequences that have become more apparent since the establishment of the devolved administrations:

The Union government is perceived as confusing English interests with those of the Union and pursuing them irrespective of the wishes of other parts of the Union

England has been left without a coherent machinery of national government, any national democratic institutions, and as the most centralised nation in Europe

By separating the government of England from that of the Union it will be possible to:

Ensure that the Union can find a shared purpose for the 21st century,

Ensure coherent governance of the Union as a whole with powers exercised at appropriate levels

Enable relationships between the parts of the Union to be placed on a more transparent and robust basis

End the confusion between English interests and Union interests

Provide England with both a clear machinery of government and radical devolution

Create a national forum in which England’s future can be shaped

Radical and ambitious change brings many complex challenges. Constitutional reform should be conceived as a process of ‘strategic incrementalism’ in which successive individual reforms move the Union and the nations in the desired direction.

The purpose of the Union

While the Union is underpinned by much shared history, shared experience and personal relationships talk of ‘saving’ the Union can imply that the Union’s value lies in its historic role as a British state.

The 21st century case for the Union should be that its component parts can achieve shared aims – such as the transition to zero carbon economy, building a post-Brexit economy, and a more prosperous and inclusive society - more effectively together than separately. Such shared aims will require a Union in which power is distributed between the Union, the nations and the localities. This will create centres of autonomous and legitimate power, exercised by different political actors, and in which coordination and cooperation will be more important than any ability to govern from the centre. This is not how the Union currently works.

The dominance of the Union by England

UK devolution was both necessary and desirable but the underlying assumption that no further changes were needed to the governance of England or the Union was deeply flawed. This view still dominates much current thinking. The terms of reference of the recent Dunlop[1] Review, for example, made no reference to England.

England’s position within the Union has been discussed since Home Rule debates of the late 19th century. The received wisdom, endorsed by the Kilbrandon Report in 1973 was that, given its disproportionate size, wealth and power, allowing England a democratic or political nationhood would dominate and thus destabilise the Union.

This view formed before UK devolution and the experience of devolved administrations. Twenty years of devolution have actually served to make England’s size and influence more rather than less explicit. Its weight is no longer concealed within a Union government but made more obvious by it. In the eyes of many, particularly outside England, the Union is synonymous with a London centric Union state that has been unable to respond to the realities of devolution, and a government with Anglo-centric priorities which rest largely on electoral support in England.

The effect of the current asymmetric constitution is to give England an obvious and disproportionate impact on the United Kingdom government.

The UK Government

Education, health and social care, local government and many other areas of domestic policy are now devolved. In England they remain the responsibility of the Union government. As a consequence, the UK Cabinet now includes many members whose responsibilities lie exclusively in England. Those with equivalent responsibilities in the devolved administrations have no representation in the Union government. (Other members of the Cabinet have remits that only cover England and Wales, and others have significantly greater responsibility in England than the rest of the Union.) This institutionalises a fundamental imbalance between the representation of England within the Union government and that of the devolved nations.

A public manifestation of this came at the beginning of the pandemic when politicians, civil servants, and the London based UK media were often imprecise about whether UK ministerial announcements applied to the whole UK or, as was often the case, England alone.

Relationships across the Union

Reports and statements by senior civil servants[2], academics the first Minister of Wales[3], and the Dunlop Report have all confirmed the weakness of mechanisms for intra-government coordination within the Union at both political and civil service level. Civil servants and Union ministers have variously ignored developments within the devolved administrations, acted as though devolution has not occurred, or sought to intervene in policy areas that are formally devolved.

The mechanisms that formally exist for intra-government coordination have only been used inconsistently. In discussions with other nations, the Union is frequently represented by UK Ministers who are also expected to represent English interests. Intra-governmental mechanisms do not guarantee devolved nations the right to ensure their views are taken into account. Court rulings have confirmed the limited power of the Sewell Conventions.

The devolved administrations in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland have all criticised Union government decisions on, for example, the Northern Ireland protocol and the Internal Market Bill that conflicted with their views on the best interests of the future of the Union[4]. The perception that the Union government reflects an English view of the future of the Union under Brexit has been damaging to the cohesion of the Union.

These attitudes and practices are deeply embedded in the culture of Westminster and Whitehall. They stem directly from the conflation of the Union government with the government of England, and the dominance of a London-centric view of both. The cumulative impact is to sustain a Union in which the UK government reflects an English view of what is best for the Union.

Divergent politics

The devolution process did not anticipate that the politics of the different parts of the Union would diverge as significantly as they have. In the last three general elections, the British nations have been contested by different parties, often on different issues, and different parties have ‘won’ in each. The alignment between the Ulster Unionists and the SDLP in Northern Ireland and the Conservative and Labour parties has weakened with the rise of the DUP and Sinn Fein.

The current Union government is elected overwhelmingly in England but unable to win in the other nations. In contrast with the 1980s, however, it is not obvious that any single British party will be able to form a Union-wide majority government in the foreseeable future. The decline in ‘British politics’ in the sense of politics being contested across the British nations by the same parties and around essentially the same issues has highlighted the tension created by a Union government whose legitimacy rests almost entirely in England.

Fiscal fairness and solidarity

The Barnett formula is widely seen as unfair, providing an over generous settlement to Scotland, underfunding Wales, and proving English localities with no guarantee of a fair share of national or Union funding. The conflation of the Union government and the government of England reduces the political incentive to create a new formula based on Union wide principles and suppresses debate about fair funding for England.

England within the Union[5]

It might be assumed that the current asymmetric devolution must work to England’s advantage. In practice it leads to a poor system of governance of England itself. The Westminster and Whitehall culture that has marginalised and undermined the devolved administrations is also reflected in the Union state’s approach to England. The Union states variously ignores, marginalises or seeks to intervene in England’s local democratic structures. As a consequence, England is over-centralised, has no national machinery of government, and no clear system of ministerial or executive accountability. England lacks any national democratic forum or institutions.

England as a nation is largely marginalised in political and official debate. England itself is rarely named in announcement by ministers or opposition politicians who normally refer vaguely to ‘the country’ or misleadingly to ‘Britain’.

Machinery of government

The Union still operates as though the United Kingdom were a single unitary state in which England had no separate presence, a state of affairs that has not existed for 20 years.

Twenty years after devolution no clear machinery of government coordinates national policy across England. England has no First Minister, Secretary of State or permanent Cabinet committee. Despite the large areas of domestic policy that are ‘England only’ the Union state does not assess the cumulative impact of these policies nor provide the coordination that is essential between them.

National democracy

England has no national democratic forum of English MPs that can provide a crucible for debate about the state and future of the nation. The obscure and bureaucratic procedures of English Votes for English Laws (EVEL) have not given England a national voice, nor do they ensure that laws that apply only in England are made entirely by MPs elected from England. This is in stark contrast to the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Senedd and Northern Ireland Assembly.

While the great majority of Westminster MPs are from English constituencies, the Westminster Parliament does not function as a national parliament for England. Ministers are accountable to the Union parliament, but no mechanisms provide for direct accountability to English MPs for English policy, or to assess the condition and future of England as a whole.

The centralisation of England

In the absence of a defined machinery of English government there is no coherent government from which powers can be devolved England. The patchwork of inconsistent and arbitrary measures which have passed for devolution stem directly from England’s government by the Union and the centralised Union state’s disinterest in England as a nation.

England is the most centralised nation in Europe (measured by the extent to which sub-national bodies have control over both the raising and spending of resources). It has become more centralised since UK devolution with, for example, the removal of much of school education from local government control. The impact of austerity fell disproportionately on England’s local government. Together with the rising costs of social care the financial pressures have underlined how little control England’s localities have over their own resources.

Over the past twenty years the extent to which regional structures , cities, combined mayoral authorities or ‘levelling up’ areas have been allowed additional resources or autonomy has been strictly limited in size and scope. Local ‘deals’ have been highly conditional on Union government approval. English ‘devolution’ has been described as a process of ‘elite co-option’[6] which aims to secure local implementation of Whitehall priorities.

The centralist and London centric approach to government towards both England’s localities and the devolved administrations that is manifested by the Union state means radical and systemic devolution of power within England is unlikely as long as England is governed by the Union government.

[My evidence the PACAC Select Committee on the future of devolution in England can be accessed here and may be regarded as an appendix to this submission]

English public sentiment[7]

English public opinion is not as clearly pro-Union as might be expected. While only a minority would support independence around half are at best ambivalent about whether Scotland leaves the Union. A majority of English residents think that England has distinct interests within the Union and want political parties to defend those interests.

There is relatively little public debate about England’s governance and opinion polling needs to be treated with caution. However, for over 20 years a settled majority of English residents have supported the principle that MPs from outside England should be excluded from making English legislation. More residents support than oppose a separate parliament for England but many express no preference. In all polling, support for national measures (such as EVEL or a Parliament) is significantly greater than for devolution to regional assemblies

Notwithstanding the preference for English legislation and policy to be made at national level there is broad support for the devolution of the delivery of services to democratic local bodies.

England and the future of the Union

Future reform of England’s position within the Union should have three aims:

To constraint the ability of England or an English based government to act on behalf of the Union as a whole

To provide England with a national democracy and machinery of government equivalent to that in the other nations

To challenge and transform the culture and practice of the current Union state to support a genuine Union of nations.

To do this it will be necessary to separate the government of England from that of the Union, establish new mechanisms for determining Union-wide policy, and place relationships between the nations and the Union on a new formal and statutory basis.

No reform can alter England’s size and weight relative to other parts of the Union. A Union of consent will depend on the balances of power, influence and finance that will always need to be struck between its component parts. Union reform will bring these trade-offs into a transparent and open process. Reforming England’s position within the Union will enable the 21st century Union to be based on clear principles:

The right of each nation to determine its own domestic policy within the Union, based on the principle of popular sovereignty

Separation between the domestic governance of each nation and the governance of the Union

Placing the relationships between the nations and between the nations and the Union on a statutory basis

Guaranteeing the rights of each nation within the Union and providing robust mechanisms for coordination across the Union

Fiscal solidarity and fairness across the Union

Subsidiarity with the Union and within each part of the Union

Strategic incrementalism

It is unlikely that all the institutional, legal, political and financial consequences of implementing these principles could be accomplished in one single constitutional reform . Identifying the principles of reform allows a process of ‘strategic incrementalism’. This process would see the adoption, over time, of individual measures which move the nations and Union towards the full implementation of the principles. Each measure would be justifiable in its own right and as necessary, be allowed to ‘bed down’ and able to shape the next stage of reform.

Incremental changes have occurred ever since the initial UK devolution. These changes have lacked any consistency underlying principles or sense of strategic direction. A new approach is required

English institutions and the governance of England

A first step to create a machinery of English government would establish a Cabinet Committee for England, led by a Secretary of State and supported by Whitehall reorganisation.

A case can be made for a free-standing parliament, but both popular opinion and an incremental approach would suggest that evolving Westminster into a dual-mandate parliament – in which English only business is conducted by English MPs sitting alone - would be the easiest (and cheapest) first step. It would provide a democratic English national forum and legislature.

It can be anticipated that reforms to the machinery of government and Westminster might well lead towards the appointment of a First Minister for England, and clearer accountability of English ministers to English MPs. Support for a parliament for England might grow. But these outcomes do not need to be determined now, and the processes could evolve over time.

Similarly, the replacement of Westminster sovereignty by popular national sovereignty should be seen as process rather than a single event, continuing an evolution that began in practice (if not in principle) with the establishment of the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and the Northern Ireland Peace Process.

Relationships between the Union government and the nations

The first priority should be to place the relationship between the nations and the Union government on a statutory footing. Robust mechanisms for the resolution of disputes between the nations and the Union government should be put in place. Mechanisms for improving coordination should be overhauled. England should be separately represented in intra-government discussions, perhaps by the Secretary of State for England.

As the machinery of government for England develops, the UK Cabinet should comprise only ministers with UK wide responsibilities, together with the formal representation of the first ministers of the devolved administrations. In the longer term more formal agreement will be need on the determination of policy on the key Union issues of macro-economic policy, defence and security, trade and foreign policy and fiscal fairness and solidarity.

In the short-term, a UK Senate could be created to represent all four parts of the nation, the UK government, and local government in all parts of the Union. While there is a case for the simultaneous abolition of the House of Lords, this could be delayed ensuring a smooth transition to new working practices in the Commons.

Fiscal fairness and solidarity

Fiscal solidarity and fairness requires a UK wide funding formula, based on local need, and from which local and national budgets can be constructed. Moving from the current Barnett formula will be a lengthy process that will not only depend on outcomes but on political trust and solidarity across the Union. In the short term the priority should be to address the most obvious current underfunding of Wales and of some English regions.

The illusion of English regionalism

Proposals for a Federation of the Nations and Regions have been made by a number of organisations and individuals including, most recently, in the contest for leadership of the Labour Party[8]. Although there is little detail available, the proposed Federation appears to involve enhanced devolution for the devolved nations and Northern Ireland, and devolution within England. English local government would be represented in a UK Senate comprising Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland and the UK government. However, England would continue to be governed by the Union government, it would have no machinery of government, no national forum and no national representation within the Union.

Devolution within England cannot be regarded as an alternative to delineating the government of England at national level. It would be impractical, undesirable and deeply unpopular to divide England into mini-statelets with their own legislature. England is too densely populated and inter-connected to have, for example, seven or nine different higher education fees structures, or NHS and social care regimes. Without legislative devolution, England’s law will remain the responsibility of the Union parliament and its national government will be the Union government. No representation of English mayors or regional bodies in a UK Senate would provide England with comparable representation to that of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland by their First Ministers, and the UK by the Prime Minister.

Administrative and executive devolution within England, although highly desirable in its own right, will not resolve any of the problems arising from the conflation of the Union and England’s governments. England’s weight within the Union government would continue to distort Union priorities.

Conclusion

The separation of the government of England from that of the Union is the single most important reform in re-establishing a robust and shared Union that can prosper in the 21st century.

30/04/2021

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-dunlop-review-into-uk-government-union-capability

[2] https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/publications/union-crossroads/

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/mar/04/wales-mark-drakeford-says-remote-boris-johnson-is-putting-union-at-risk

[4] https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/research/publications/resist-reform-or-re-run-short-and-long-term-reflections-scotland-and

[5] See, for example, Denham, Gallagher and others in ‘Governing England’ British Academy, 2018

[6] See for example

[7] See for example ‘Englishness’, Henderson and Wyn Jones, 2021; Curtice in ‘Governing England’ ibid; BBC/YouGov 2018 and CEIP 2019, available from soton.ac.uk/ceip

[8] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jan/26/rebecca-long-bailey-calls-for-greater-powers-for-scotland-and-wales

0 notes

earaercircular · 3 years

Text

'The ban on washing cars with tap water was just a foretaste'

Pieter Loose stood on the highest Alpine peaks, built a bamboo village in Brazil and took part in the World Rafting Championships in Bosnia. Now he shows off his water technology company Ekopak on the Brussels stock exchange. “Let us also try to become world champions in water recycling.”

Pieter Loose pulls his leg as he receives us. A muscle tear in the calf, the result of an hour of padel. These will be difficult weeks for the man in his thirties, without sports. "I'm a bit hyperkinetic. I need sports to recharge.'” He usually does that on the mountain bike. He covers 10,000 kilometres every year, with tours in Patagonia, Africa, Greece, the Dolomites. And sometimes rides of 5,000 altimeters per day. Suffering. “But for me this is pure holiday: crawling on my bike in the morning and just follow the GPS.”

Loose talks rather quietly and monotonously. Yet he is brimming with enthusiasm. "I've always had a big mouth and I've always been ambitious. But I never dared to think that my company would ever be listed on the stock exchange.” At the end of March, his water treatment company Ekopak[1], supported by main shareholder Marc Coucke, raised 50 million euros and it is now worth about 240 million euros. It is the temporary highlight in Loose's course. With Ekopak, he surfs along with water recycling technology on the realization that we are depleting our water reserves.

He paid "a few millions" for Ekopak. “It was a small, local company at the time, with a lot of knowledge. I put more ambition into it. The ball is rolling now. My dreams become reality. That gives me power.”

The company has been building container installations for many years to produce ultrapure water for chemical, pharmaceutical, textile and food companies, among others. “Compare it to a descaler for the city water in your home, to protect your taps. But we go much further." “For customers who produce high-pressure steam, the entire Mendeleev table has to be removed, otherwise those elements will affect the steam boilers,” explains Loose. “Every customer requires a different degree of purity. For cooling water, water to clean machines, water for chemical processes.”

While until recently Ekopak treated groundwater and drinking water, today - after thorough research - it starts from waste water at the companies themselves. “A technical challenge, but future-proof,” says Loose. In addition, he launched the WAAS (Water-as-a-Service) concept, whereby Ekopak not only builds installations, but also finances and operates them and invoices the customer per drop of water. This should result in unprecedented revenue and profit growth in the coming years. “We have turned a sustainable product into a sustainable business model.”

What is the driving force behind Ekopak's growth?

Loose: "Long ago, investments were made in a network to provide everyone with clean drinking water. Industrial companies have joined the same network. That was the most obvious solution. But the situation has become completely out of balance: factories today use billions of liters of drinking water per hour. This used water is subsequently treated in a biological water treatment plant to be discharged into streams and rivers. It flows to the sea and you lose it. Consequently we have to install desalination plants at the sea side that consume a lot of energy to pump the water inland again. That is not future-proof, and companies are increasingly interested in that.”

How serious are companies about this?

Loose: “Twenty years ago you had Greenpeace with a slogan like 'better a hole in my T-shirt than a hole in the ozone layer”. But that's where it stopped. Now a tipping point has been reached. Companies set themselves concrete targets for energy, CO2 and water use. This is important to attract investors, subsidies and staff. The dominoes are falling, and that's a good thing. Climate change is real.” “The water supply is under pressure. Companies are not only afraid of a blackout, but also of a blue out. We've already had a foretaste of bans on using tap water to wash cars and fill swimming pools, and bans for farmers on pumping water from streams and rivers in certain regions. Water has a value like oil. We never thought about that. But the awareness that there are limits is growing at a rapid pace. We feel that. We keeps us occupied.”

How bad is the water scarcity in Flanders?

Loose: "Very. There is plenty of rain, but because it is a densely populated and paved area, the rain disappears into the sewers instead of seeping into the ground. Moreover, we have an economy with water-intensive sectors: food, textiles, pharmaceuticals, chemicals. In the OECD ranking, we are at the very bottom for the amount of water available per person, behind southern countries such as Spain and Italy. That also offers opportunities. We are forced to find a solution: Belgium will educate the world when it comes to rational use of water. That creates companies like Ekopak. We also intend to score internationally with that knowledge.”

Is the industry the main culprit?

Loose: "I'm not saying that. There is also agriculture. And in families at home, only 10 percent of drinking water is used for drinking. We still flush our toilets en masse with drinking water instead of rainwater. But our focus is on industry, which uses a quarter of drinking water in the northern region of Belgium. If we could reduce that, we are taking a big step forward.”

What is the role of politics in the water problem?

Loose: “Everyone is aware of the issues. The Blue Deal of Flanders[2] proving it. Money is earmarked for buffer basins and more wet nature, or for reductions in leakage losses, and so on. Mandatory water audits are introduced at companies and linked to environmental and expansion permits and subsidies. It is being examined whether companies can inject any surplus of recycled drinking water into the network against payment. It wouldn't surprise me either that there will be a limit on applications for which you can use drinking water or groundwater in industry, comparable to measures for your swimming pool.”

How important is the IPO in the growth plan?

Loose: 'It is crucial to roll out the Water-as-a-Service strategy. We will not only build the small water factories at the customers' premises, but will also operate and pre-finance them. This requires money: from 100,000 to 10 million euros per installation, depending on the flow rate and quality. We invoice per drop for a period of ten years or longer. We decrease the customer’s worries. And while tap water is becoming more and more expensive, our price is 20 to 40 percent lower. We therefore also strengthen their competitiveness. That makes companies bend in our direction more quickly. In this way we can tackle the water problem at an accelerated pace.” “The IPO also generates more than just money. It gives you more body when negotiating long-term contracts with multinationals. We are now approaching them as a listed company, no longer as 'that SME from Tielt with a skilled CEO'.'

Do you already have customers for that new concept?

Loose: “Eight projects are up and running, among others at the chemical companies Eastman[3], the copper film producer Circuitfoil[4] in Luxembourg and the vegetable processor Darta[5]. An installation has been started up at the pharmaceutical company Takeda[6] in Lessines to reuse 600 million litres of waste water. That's the equivalent of 18,000 people's water use, which means all of Lessen. We actually connect an entire city to the water network in one go. I also see many small and good initiatives, such as trucks collecting construction site water. But what we realize is of a different order. We are going fast, and sustainability knows no bounds. We also go abroad. Takeda wants to roll out our technology in its factories worldwide.”

You have now lost control of Ekopak. Is that difficult?

Loose: "The opportunity we now have to move forward gives me more satisfaction than the idea of being one hundred percent owner of a small company from which you are not getting the most out of it."

Source

JAN DE SCHAMPHELAERE, Ekopak-topman Pieter Loose: 'Het verbod om auto's te wassen met leidingwater was slechts een voorsmaakje' in: De Tijd, 24-07-2021,

https://www.tijd.be/ondernemen/technologie/ekopak-topman-pieter-loose-het-verbod-om-auto-s-te-wassen-met-leidingwater-was-slechts-een-voorsmaakje/10321369.html

[1] https://ekopak.be/en/sustainability/ [2] With the Blue Deal, the Government of Flanders is increasing its efforts in the fight against water scarcity and drought. With this deal, it wants to tackle the drought problem in a structural way, with an increased deployment of resources and the correct instruments, with the involvement of industry and farmers as part of the solution and with a clear exemplary role for the Flemish regional and other governments in Belgium. The Flemish Decree on Integrated Water Policy is officially approved in July 2003 (Belgium Law Gazette, 14.11.03). This decree is the juridical implementation of the European Water Framework Directive and the Floods Directive in Flemish law. https://www.integraalwaterbeleid.be/en [3] Founded in 1920, Eastman is a global specialty materials company that produces a broad range of products found in items people use every day. With the purpose of enhancing the quality of life in a material way, Eastman works with customers to deliver innovative products and solutions while maintaining a commitment to safety and sustainability. The company's innovation-driven growth model takes advantage of world-class technology platforms, deep customer engagement, and differentiated application development to grow its leading positions in attractive end-markets such as transportation, building and construction, and consumables. As a globally inclusive and diverse company, Eastman employs approximately 14,500 people around the world and serves customers in more than 100 countries. The company had 2020 revenues of approximately $8.5 billion and is headquartered in Kingsport, Tennessee, USA. The chemical company has 2 plants in the Ghent harbor in Belgium. https://www.eastman.com/pages/home.aspx. [4] Circuitfoil develops; Produces and markets high-quality copper foil, while constantly ensuring a safe and healthy environment in its plants, processes and products. rom its corporate headquarters in Luxembourg, Europe, the company distributes and markets its large range of products through a wide network of service centers and sales companies to customers worldwide. https://www.circuitfoil.com/company/profile/ [5] d’Arta is a Belgian family company founded in 1988 that has grown into a global player in the development, processing and commercialisation of fresh frozen products such as vegetables, fruits, herbs and ready-made (side) dishes. It employs more than 900 people and export our products to more than 100 countries. https://www.darta.com/en [6] Takeda is one of the 10 largest pharmaceutical companies in Belgium. Takeda’s presence in Belgium is reinforced by its global manufacturing site in Lessines. This Takeda site has over 18,000 m² of building surface and operates 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. It is a flexible plant for purification and a packaging center for immunology and hematology products, covering a total geographical span of over 80 countries worldwide. In total, more than 1000 professionals work for Takeda in Belgium, making us a top 5 employer in the pharmaceutical industry. https://www.takeda.com/en-be/who-we-are/contact-us/

#circular economy #water recycling #water management

1 note · View note

360digitmg-dataanalyticscourse · 3 years

Text

How To Study Data Science

Here are the 10 finest data science bootcamps that will assist professionals turn out to be a profitable data scientist in 2021. It is critical that a data scientist have the ability to work with unstructured data. Unstructured data is undefined content material that does not match into database tables. Examples include movies, weblog posts, customer reviews, social media posts, video feeds, audio etc.

Career alternatives in data have exponentially grown in the recent few years. Companies are eager to seize data and derive insights from it due to the technological developments we're seeing. Accessibility of the info right now might help to reap a number of advantages organizations from it. Because of this purpose, corporations are not shying away from offering elevated data scientist salaries in India. Companies are throwing big salaries at these having expertise to tackle the positions of Data Analysts, Scientists, Engineers, and so forth. There are more than 2.3 million open jobs asking for analytics skills. This program has been strategically designed to organize college students for the analytics field by constructing a strong theoretical basis and applying it to actual-world business issues.

But Data Science tasks are increasingly typically developed for manufacturing methods, for example, as a microservice in a bigger software program. Data Science is a competitive field, and people are shortly building increasingly abilities and expertise.

You will achieve new expertise to design and maintain huge data ecosystems. To managers and recruiters that you've got the mandatory abilities they need in a data scientist. Hence, it offers an associate-degree and a specialist level which is extra advanced. So, coming to the most trending discussion for aspiring data scientists, that's, the data science certifications which are able to assist them to get hired. Below is the record of finest data science certifications with their cost and expiration. As we all know, the data scientist profession is among the hottest jobs in IT. What’s extra, it’s the most effective job you can get, according to data from Glassdoor.

As an data scientist, you have to know how to create a storyline around the data to make it easy for anyone to know. For instance, presenting a desk of data just isn't as efficient as sharing the insights from those data in a storytelling format. Using storytelling will allow you to properly talk your findings to your employers. Companies searching for a powerful data scientist are on the lookout for someone who can clearly and fluently translate their technical findings to a non-technical group, such as the Marketing or Sales departments. Check out our recent flash survey for more info on communication abilities for quantitative professionals. No doubt you’ve seen this phrase in all places recently, especially as it pertains to data scientists.

The cause for that is that data collection, data cleaning and processing is turning into very common these days as corporations need data to gather market and buyer data. Industries are buzzing about Big Data, and organizations are looking for hires with these in-demand, short-in-supply abilities. Improving your data analytics data right now means extra alternative—and more cash—for you sooner or later.

And which means demand for data scientists and associated positions may also go up. According to Peter Bailis, CEO of Sisu and co-principal investigator of the Stanford DAWN project, the job prospects for would-be data scientists are strong. No matter how you narrow it, data science is still a profitable area with plenty of opportunity, which is why universities proceed to add data science packages to their curriculums. According to data science training, there are more than 830 separate data science packages being provided from about 500 universities all over the world.

Though much of the mathematical heavy lifting is done by computer systems, understanding what makes this potential is crucial. Data scientists are tasked with figuring out what questions to pose, and how to make computers answer them. Therefore, the need for data scientists to have an excellent foundation in math is obvious. Understanding ideas like irrational and rational numbers assist data scientists write environment friendly and correct code. Software runs all the necessary statistical checks these days, however an data scientist nonetheless must possess the statistical sensibility to know which to take a look at to run when and the way to interpret the outcomes. Six Sigma are nice instruments to help data scientists and teams clear up actual world data science problems. The unique objectives, necessities and limitations of each industry outline every step that a data scientist takes.

Want to become a Data Scientist however never thought enterprise data is important? To turn out to be a good Data Scientist, you have to know your industry inside and out. You need to have a solid understanding of what business problems your company is making an attempt to unravel to be able to work in the direction of solving them by leveraging data in new and other ways. You need to be proficient in SQL as a Data Scientist that you can access the data easily in addition to work on it SQL can provide you deep insights into a database relying on your query. It also has concise instructions that can assist you to save lots of time and lessen the quantity of programming you should perform for tough queries.

Having a data science diploma in your resume may assist you to get a job. However, getting one usually takes years and costs tens if not tons of of thousands of dollars. I used it to retailer worth data, and thus realized 10x as much as I would have by just studying syntax. More importantly, should you’re not actively applying what you study, your research received it puts you together to do precise data science work. I can’t fully explain how immensely demotivating it's to be given a huge list of sources with none context. It’s akin to a teacher handing you a stack of textbooks and saying “learn all of those.” I struggled with this strategy when I was in school. If I had started studying data science this fashion, I by no means would have saved going.

None of those tasks could ever, by any stretch of the imagination, be thought-about simple. But the work that data scientists do is important for a business sector that more and more depends on huge data to drive efficiency.

A Masters of data science training is the preferred diploma supplied, it says, whereas about 135 schools supply data science packages on-line. We can’t stress enough how important are Python and R for the data science area in 2020. However, their strengths are their flaws, in terms of huge corporations. Python and R are each open supply frameworks that can be buggy or not well documented, in contrast to properly-established languages corresponding to MATLAB or C. One potential rationalization is that corporations don’t always understand the data scientist position properly.

Regardless of which ideas you choose to pursue, nonetheless, a basic understanding of statistics and statistical thinking is an absolute must-have for skilled data scientists. Python is the programming language to beat within the data science world.

In order to be efficient as a data scientist, people want to be able to perceive the info. Data scientists act as a bridge between complex, uninterpretable raw data and precise folks. Though cleansing, processing and analyzing data are important steps within the data science pipeline, this work is useless without efficient communication. Dave Holtz points out on the 360DigiTMG weblog, that the “data scientist” job title encompasses a wide range of positions, which may demand vastly completely different abilities from candidates.

So study SQL as it'll allow you to in understanding relational databases and add another feather to your cap as a Data Scientist. You shall be doing software improvement, data management, utility testing, and so on. as a Data Scientist. In common, Python and R are essentially the most commonly used languages for this objective. A Data Scientist creates predictive models and performs custom evaluation on the data in accordance with company necessities. This data science course hyderabad has varied steps together with data extraction, exploration, visualization, and so forth. that require data of varied instruments and abilities. So let’s see the exhausting abilities that a Data Scientist should have to achieve success. Well, in today’s occasions that is someone who's multi-talented, works onerous, and is ready to go the additional mile.

In the long run, although, I suppose studying R is also very helpful since many statistics/ML textbooks use R for examples and workout routines. In truth, both books I talked about firstly use R, and until someone interprets everything to Python and posts it to Github, you gain the full advantage of the book. Created by Andrew Ng, maker of the well-known Stanford Machine Learning course, this is one of the highest rated data science programs on the internet. This course series is for these excited about understanding and dealing with neural networks in Python. Python is used on this data science course hyderabad , and there’s many lectures going by way of the intricacies of the various data science libraries to work through real-world, fascinating problems. This is one of the solely data science programs around that truly touches on each a part of the data science course of. The inclusion of probability and statistics courses makes this series from MIT a very properly-rounded curriculum for with the ability to understand data intuitively.

Holtz’s publication identifies 4 types of data scientist jobs and breaks down which skills are most significant for each. The expertise required of a data scientist may be sliced and diced in different ways. 360DigiTMG – 360DigiTMG hosts data science competitions the place you possibly can follow, hone your expertise with messy, actual world data, and sort out actual business problems. Employers take Kaggle rankings significantly, as they can be seen as related, hands-on project work.

For more information

360DigiTMG - Data Analytics, Data Science Course Training Hyderabad

Address - 2-56/2/19, 3rd floor,, Vijaya towers, near Meridian school,, Ayyappa Society Rd, Madhapur,, Hyderabad, Telangana 500081

099899 94319

https://g.page/Best-Data-Science

0 notes

mybarricades · 6 years

Text

A Poetics of the Ungovernable / The Grapevine Telegraph

A Poetics of the Ungovernable

In the seven years since the Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street movement took the world by storm, contemporary poetry in the English speaking world has become notably more engaged in exploring the links between poetry and revolution. A string of conferences, online correspondences, new presses and journals have emerged and developed into what can be indexed as a new poetry movement [i]. Branded by signifiers such as ‘politically committed poetry’, ‘militant poetics’ and/ or ‘post-crisis poetics’, this current of thought foregrounds the importance of questions concerning gender, anti-racist and anti-capitalist struggle in the work of art. Of note are publications that deal with the social role of the poet in political struggle [ii], the aesthetic of neoliberal or deindustrialized capitalism [iii], and relations within poetry communities themselves. In this vein, the present study is a critical evaluation of both the obstacles to radical artistic practice as well as an illustration of an artistic practice beyond those obstacles.

While much of the writing pertaining to this new school of poetics has been insightful, it has tended to favor capitalism as the exclusive site of politics. Capitalism is treated as a monolithic absolute: a totalizing system to which no outside can possibly exist until society has been purged of all waged labor and the value form has been defeated once and for all. A case in point is the debate between British poet/ theorist Keston Sutherland and Oakland based poet/ theorist Joshua Clover [iv]. In discussing the merits of revolutionary artistic production, this particular discussion focuses almost exclusively on readings of Marx’s Das Kapital. What merits re-evaluation in this schema is the confinement of the political to the sphere of the market. Unfortunately, the present study does not have the space to expound on these two authors’ complex understandings of global capitalism. It suffices to make a succinct point: in creating such a grand schema of the capitalist system and its implications, much of the writing pertaining to this new poetry movement has tended to neglect the themes of governmentality in diagnosing the contemporary global political horizon. The present study hopes to make a contribution to this emergent current of poetic thought through a study of artistic practice and governmentality.

Governmentality is a term coined by Michel Foucault to describe the diffuse and manifold ways in which power permeates the social fabric. Governmentality, or the various ‘arts of government’ have not been fully thought out in their relationship to art and aesthetics. As a result, conversations about the relationship between politics and aesthetics have tended to become limited to discussions of aesthetics and economics (conceived of as strictly capitalism). In other words, these discussions have neglected the distinction between economics and economy conceived as Oikonomia; that is, the art and skill of managing and administering life and death in the polis with the aim of governing the population as efficiently as possible. Like artistic practice, an art of government is the implementation of a certain technique used for composition (of a work of art or of a society). While Marxist thinkers tend to limit their thinking of politics to the market, Foucault’s work shows how the laws of the market are in many ways derived from the laws of the household (the Oikos). The household is an important site where the behavior of individuals takes on a political dimension. Indoctrinating individuals with rigorous moral codes, regulating the minutae of their behaviors and molding their habits is a primary step to getting them to accept the discipline of the market. Foucault remarks “Government begins to want to take responsibility for people’s conduct, to conduct people, then from then on we see revolts of conduct.”[v] Foucault’s work on governmentality provides a promising analysis on forms of control and power which, I argue, may have eclipsed that of capitalism in our contemporary political landscape. The present study contends that the question of aesthesis – of sensory perception – is one such form of control. To be clear: governmentality is an art, and aesthetics is one of the many disciplines it utilizes for control. The fields of design, art and aesthetics are essential components of governance in contemporary Western societies like the USA.

Regardless of said limitations to their thinking, these Marxist poets and critics make decisive critiques of radical artistic production. For example, in a collective statement issued by poets and theorists from Oakland, the authors “point to culture’s political malleability as a concept and its usefulness in preserving existing hierarchies of power.”[vi] Joshua Clover likewise writes “Poetry has no autonomous existence prior to the material life structured by the capitalist relation.”[vii] According to Clover, poetry is unable to extricate itself from its origins in capitalist society and is thus incapable of challenging capitalism. Regardless of whether the sentiment contained therein is radical or not, artistic production is very easily co-opted by the global capitalist system. I believe these remarks and their skepticism of culture to be correct. One need only look at the way the once-revolutionary sentiments that emerged in the 60’s and 70’s as a part of the counter-culture movement in America have been transformed into some of the most heinous faces of the global capitalist empire. Whole Foods, once conceived of as a healthy vegetarian alternative to grocery store chains has been bought out by Amazon. To govern a society is to re-appropriate revolt or resistance back into society, thereby making society immune to all that is outside or opposed to it.

That these counter-culture movements were co-opted is not the only critique that has been leveled against the prospects of radical cultural practice. Some of the most compelling academic research in the humanities in recent years has come from theorists like Frank B. Wilderson, who theorizes similar themes pertaining to culture and society in their relationship to race. In an important essay titled Gramsci’s Black Marx, Wilderson contends that when cultural institutions emerging from within civil society make a bid to restructure society for the better by being more inclusive, they only end up elaborating the positionality of exclusion from society faced by black bodies. According to Wilderson, the strategy of the Gramscian schema is to strive to take over institutions within civil society (such as education), use them to gain hegemonic power and create a movement against capitalism from within society itself. Civil society and its organs “represent a terrain to be occupied, assumed, and appropriated in a pedagogic project of transforming ‘common sense’ into ‘good sense.’”[viii] Wilderson’s point is that using cultural or educational institutions to ‘enlighten’ society is a gesture that is insufficiently universal insofar as black bodies are not conceived of as being part of American society. A maneuver of enlightenment is therefore inadequately antagonistic towards the foundations of civil society and represents only a slight modification that would leave apparatuses of racial domination intact.

“Civil society is the terrain where hegemony is produced, contested, mapped. And the invitation to participate in hegemony’s gestures of influence, leadership, and consent is not extended to the black subject. We live in the world, but exist outside of civil society.”[ix]

Wilderson’s claim that the black body exists outside of civil society is based on the constituent role slavery played in the foundation of American society. Black bodies are the exception that prove the rule: all men can only be created equal insofar as some men are enslaved, auctioned off in markets, and killed with impunity. It is from the “incoherence of black death [that] America generates the coherence of white life.”[x]

The import of Wilderson’s analysis for this study is that it points to a realm of power relations that are pre-political. Just as it was necessary to recalibrate the site of politics in Marxist thinking to elucidate how power operates on the conduct of individuals, Wilderson displaces the site of politics from civil society to a zone of absolute dereliction. The political rights extended to members of civil society are not available to black bodies. As a result, Wilderson claims that black bodies are faced with a gratuitous violence that is qualitatively different from the violence faced by non-black subjects that do have access to civil society and its institutions. Wilderson’s point is that if a radical cultural practice were to emerge that was capable of changing society, it would leave the relations of racial violence that undergird society largely unaffected.

These two critiques – one Marxist and one relating to race – point to a common obstacle for radical cultural production: a radical cultural practice must ruthlessly criticize and maintain a degree of separation from institutions like capitalism and civil society that provide access to normative subjectivity. The present study is an attempt to sketch out how what I will term an otherwise could emerge; that is, a radical cultural practice that would not contribute to the consolidation of existing power relations. To this end, a study of art and its relationship to governmentality will provide not only a more nuanced critique of power relations, it will also elucidate the ways in which art is a privileged sphere for thinking about the possibilities of an otherwise. If there is an art of government there is just as surely an art of becoming ungovernable. After diagnosing first the issues of governmentality and then how art and aesthetics are tools for governmentality, I will turn to the work of poets Anne Boyer and Fred Moten. The work of these two poets will be used to elaborate what I will call an ungovernable poetics. I do not wish for their work to be read as textual evidence of the correctness of a specific philosophical theory. Instead I hope to let poetry speak in a place where philosophy must remain silent. If philosophy and theory can help us diagnose the challenges of governmentality, perhaps poetry can provide us with some valuable coordinates for thinking an artistic practice beyond civil society and governmentality, for thinking an otherwise.

GOVERNMENTALITY, OIKONOMIA, DISPOTIF

In his lecture series Security, Territory, Population, Foucault locates governmentality’s emergence in Western Europe as early as the 16th century. This new conception of government emerged at the historical juncture of two moments: the dismantling of the feudal system and the Protestant Reformation. On the one hand, the rise and centralization of the capitalist state and on the other hand, religious dissidence. In both cases, disputes arose over “who would actually have the right to govern men” [xi] or which forms of power were fit to lead the population towards a desirable end (be it ‘the good life’ for politics, or salvation for the church). As capitalism and the Reformation gained influence, they formed incipient polities whose influence quickly rivaled that of Feudalism and the Catholic Church. Foucault claims that what sets these new forms of power apart from their predecessors was their development of an ‘art’ of government, what Foucault will term governmentality. Foucault provides a succinct definition of the term:

“By ‘governmentality’ I understand the ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific, albeit very complex, power that has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its major technical instrument.”[xii] Governmentality is the composition of a consistent and well-ordered society as an ensemble of the aforementioned heterogeneous elements. This ‘art of government’ is nothing like the direct application of a rigid dogma found in religious texts or political treatises, nor is it simply “a matter of imposing law on men” [xiii] as is characteristic of the exercise of sovereignty or discipline. Governmentality is a knowledge or skill, a savior-faire that is flexible and can be applied in diverse scenarios. It is as much concerned with each scenario in its singularity as with the relation that joins the individual scenarios together. Foucault uses the analogy of a weaver, joining the various individual threads to form a fabric.

Foucault’s second point about governmentality is that it “has political economy as its mode of knowledge.” Foucault uses the term ‘economy’ in the sense of Oikonomia, that is, the laws of managing the household. As Foucault tells it, governing a polis required that one be able to govern himself (according to principles of morality) as well as govern his home (his oikos, according to the principles of Oikonomia, economy). Only one who demonstrated an aptitude for managing first his personal conduct and then his oikos could be trusted to govern the population. In the Western tradition dating back to Aristotle, managing the household was done primarily by property owning men managing the lives of women and slaves. The lives of the latter two were not considered to have any political dimension, but only a biological function. Women and slaves were not subjects of the polis, they were objects of management, which is why neither women nor slaves were allowed to partake in Athenian democracy.[xiv] ‘Economic’ relations are thus relations concerned solely with procuring the essentials needed to reproduce the biological life of those excluded from the sphere of democracy and political life. They concern relations of power that are pre-political, indeed these relations ensure the possibility of politics at all.

Foucault points to governmentality as a way of applying the principles of household management – of oikonomia – to every sphere of society. He remarks:

“To govern a state will thus mean the application of economy, the establishment of an economy, at the level of the state as a whole, that is to say, exercising supervision and control over its inhabitants, wealth, and the conduct of all and each, as attentive as that of a father’s over his household and goods.”[xv]

What is relevant for this study is that power relations take the form of an Oikonomia: that is, a multifarious set of tactics for conducting the tiniest minutae of both each individual agent as well as the social fabric as a whole. The question of how these tactics are enforced on the population corresponds with Foucault’s third claim about governmentality. These tactics of government are carried out primarily by a series of security apparatuses. Foucault defines the apparatus (dispostif) in an interview from 1977 as “a heterogeneous set of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements.”[xvi] Apparatuses are the normative infrastructures that organize society in a certain way, to “structure the field of possible action.”[xvii] The task of the dispotif is primarily to create a subject from the human. Once a human life has been created as a subject, the apparatus seeks to dispose those subjects towards certain things, to create within them a certain disposition. The objects and services we interact with daily, such as smart phones, Amazon Go or the freeways we drive on are all designed to conduct us towards particular websites, products or even parts of the city. Our interaction with these objects is intended to instill obedience while leaving us a small menu of choices usually referred to as ‘freedom’. It is precisely this obedience, the subject’s willful correspondence with the apparatus of government that provides security for the state. As one commentator on Foucault, Arne de Boever puts it, “A government is secure when the population, through the ways in which life is organized, guarantees the continuation of power.”[xviii]

CRISIS OF THE SENSES

Within the larger context of governmentality’s relationship not just to art but also to the field of aesthetics, our present political horizon requires more elucidation. My wager is that 9/11 was a watershed moment marking the ascendancy of paradigms of governance characterized by crisis (whether economic, humanitarian, environmental) and the state of exception. With instability becoming a threat to society, security is of utmost concern. This claim corresponds with Foucault’s claim about the proliferation of security apparatuses throughout the social fabric. With these specific innovations in governance occurring in the wake of 9/11, so too have innovations been made in human sensory perception. A founding assumption of crisis governance is that human beings behave predictably and are easier to control when in a state of crisis, fear, or shock. This assumption has a pedigree in Norbert Wiener’s enemy pilots, in the cybernetic image of thought.[xix] After World War II, this current of thought and research occasioned the introduction of new information and communication technologies into the fabric of Western society at a scale deserving the title of a second industrial revolution. Funded by the military as well as by the CIA, hereafter “government [became] a study of perception, of communication and decisions.”[xx] The way we see, the forms of reasoning we use, how we listen and decipher information: these are not just the natural impulses of the eye, the brain or the ear. For example, an entire pedagogy of seeing was needed to teach human beings to cope with, sort through and make sense of the inundations of data that came with the introduction of information and communication technologies. Bernard Stiegler has called this conditioning of our senses an aesthetic conditioning. Of interest for this study is that crisis governance has made an explicit project of crafting the human senses anew. Indeed, governmentality is a mode of perception itself.

The French philosopher Bernard Stiegler offers one of the most compelling accounts of how aesthetics has been utilized as a form of control in the 20th century. Stiegler’s work, specifically in ‘On Symbolic Misery’ investigates how “after the Second World War, advertising began to target consciousness as an available resource.”[xxi] Stielger refers to the emergence of advertising, mass marketing, and propaganda as new fields of study for government in 20th century America. He points to Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays as the figure who primarily took interest in the way people’s subconscious drives could be trained or conditioned to make them desire new products. Stiegler writes “the aesthetic became an object of systematic and industrial exploitation, with the exclusive and hegemonic aim, in Gramsci’s sense, of developing the markets of consumption.”[xxii] Governments and corporations began to “develop an aesthetic particularly well adapted to audiovisual media, which refunctionalized the aesthetic dimension of the individual according to the interests of industrial development, causing him to adopt the behaviors of consumerism.”[xxiii] Aesthetics in this schema is a way of fostering the libidinal energy of a population and channeling that energy back into the hegemonic culture itself. All human activity, sensory perception, and bodies become the targets of exploitation. A radical artistic practice must recognize and resist the ways art and aesthetics are bound up with the colonization of the senses.

GARMENTS AGAINST WOMEN

Anne Boyer’s 2015 Garments Against Women is a hybrid work of prose poetry that investigates what is at stake in the production of poetry and by extension, what is at stake in living. Garments Against Women addresses both the material obstacles to writing literature as well as the philosophical questions of how to write as she says “a literature [that] is not coyly against literature, but sincerely against it.”[xxiv] The book details many different kinds of poems and poetics, including the poetics of information society (online social media), the poetics of capitalism (accounting), and the literature of the culture industry (advertising). In doing so, she aims to discern which kinds of literature and which poetics are suitable for her and which are weapons used against her. Boyer’s work asks how a truly free and creative act can emerge when all activity, including creative labor is subsumed by the culture industry. But Boyer is no fatalist. She lists the modes of being, the actions, moments and rhythms that escape capture, that refuse the neat amalgamation of the subject with the apparatus of government. Boyer always searches for the remainder that cannot be captured, such as the daydream one has while at work. The kinds of labor, writing, even information in Boyer’s book contain within them a suspension of the world as it is as well as traces of another plane of existence, an otherwise.

In the book’s opening poem “The Animal Model of Inescapable Shock”, Boyer uses the analogy of a mouse being “dragged across the electric grid”[xxv] in a science experiment to initiate us into some of the book’s most pressing themes. The science experiment is carried out in a laboratory, to which she adds “how is Capital not the infinite laboratory called ‘conditions?”[xxvi] The conditions, in other words that “her misery requires.”[xxvii] Boyer says an animal that is shocked will “manifest deep attachment to whoever has shocked her.”[xxviii] Even though being dragged across an electrified grid produces pain and suffering, the animal that has been shocked is likely to return to the electric grid. She writes: “The animal model of shock explains why lovers stay with those who don’t love them, the poor serve the rich, soldiers continue to fight and other confused, arousing things.”[xxix] How is it that things that are so terrible, monstrous, evil, disgusting are also in some ways attractive to us? From the outset, Boyer raises the questions of libidinal investment in the conditions that create misery. In this particular poem, a mouse is shocked by a science experiment. There is a relation of violence or domination being played out, but it is one that the mouse learns to prefer. The animal is aroused by the cycle of shock and returns to it freely, of its own accord. In this model, freedom is nothing more than an effect calculated by the scientists in advance to optimize the laboratory’s experiment, its smooth functioning. It’s all a part of the plan. A subject that believes itself to be free is more likely to be complicit in domination than one who feels they are being coerced into it.

Having begun with the shock and misery induced by “informative forms of torture”[xxx] like science, the next poem in the book “The Innocent Question” veers to themes of information and happiness. This section of the book reads like a daydream, with the narrative voice recalling emails with friends, musings on a book from a thrift store, and eventually the narrator’s sickness. Boyer claims literature is to blame for her sickness. She vows to abandon it. What kind of literature might this be that makes a poet sick? Boyer claims it is a literature “when literature is like the world of monsters is the production of culture is I hate culture is the world of wealthy women and men.”[xxxi] Boyer points to the ways that hegemonic cultural institutions are complicit with or at least bound up with the poverty and discrimination faced by marginalized peoples. In another poem called “A Woman Shopping” Boyer gives an example of literature being used in such a way. She writes:

“I will soon write a long, sad book called A Woman Shopping. It will be a book about what we are required to do and also what we are hated for doing. . . This book will be a book also about the history of literature and literature’s uses against women.[xxxii]

What kind of literature is being used against women? One example Boyer provides is advertising and the “decadently feminized marketplace.”[xxxiii] In an economy that uses culture, art, aesthetics and creative activity as a way to extend its power, literature itself risks becoming a further condition of misery. Creation, like freedom, is not an emancipatory act by default.

The poem “The Open Book” gives an example of another one of capitalism’s favorite kind of literature: accounting, and its attendant poetics: transparency. Accounting is something all businesses must do if they are to compete in the market. It allows for the regulation of commerce and the management of business in such a way to ensure that profit can be depended on. But according to Anne Boyer, it also describes how humans’ desires and wills are colonized.

“It’s only necessary to make a transparent account if it’s necessary to have accounting, and it’s only necessary to have accounting in the service of a profitable outcome. To account in the service of profit is to assume the desirability of profit. The individual doing the accounting is, like who or what she serves, also assumed to be in the service of profit, as profit is assumed to be desirable, and if she is in the service of profit, it’s assumed she would like to profit also, and that what she would do if there were no transparency is cause herself to profit.”[xxxiv]

This poem uses the effect of long, circuitous sentences, one of Gertrude Stein’s classic literary signatures, to make the matter being talked about seem absurd, to parody it. She locates a paradox at the heart of the ideal of profit: “It’s a requirement of the idea of the ‘transparent account’ that someone should steal as an affirmation of the desirability of profit.”[xxxv] A worker devoted to their company’s profit must, by extension be devoted to profit herself. The perfect worker is one who “behav[es] as a small replication of the order of business itself.”[xxxvi] Yet if the business trains the worker to value profit, then the worker might value profit so much that they begin to steal it from their boss. Like the woman shopping, the worker is required to desire profit and at the same time is liable to punishment if they desire it too much. Accounting and transparency are the ways of regulating this problem. But there is more to transparency than just bookkeeping or numbers. Boyer says transparency is not about having “‘nothing to hide’: it is ‘something to show’ – a performance, for the order of business, that her desires are in accord with its.”[xxxvii] A worker (the example used in this poem) is required to perform – that is to behave – in order to prove that they are dedicated to their job. The more openly they display their loyalty to the company, the better. A subject that is open and transparent, whose habits can be tracked on social media, whose desires and preferences are clearly expressed is also a subject whose laws of operation are fully knowable and ultimately entirely programmable. The economy becomes a despotic form of control over human activity. What the workplace and the market cannot tolerate is that emotions and desires of subjects are opaque or indiscernible to its mode of rationality. Creation, freedom, yes even resistance can be used to enhance the functioning of systems of control. Opacity is a form of radical exteriority to this double bind.

If transparency is the mode of veracity that makes sure a particular situation accords with externally imposed criteria like profitability, Boyer says “there is another veracity that includes conspiracy, corners, shadows, slantwise, evasion, unsayingness, negation, and under-the-beds.”[xxxviii] Conspiring to do otherwise, the obscurity of shadows, the poetry of Emily Dickinson’s truth told slantwise, even silence and hiding all suggest a zone of indistinction between blind submission and active resistance. I would argue that these modes of resistance are remarkably similar to what Foucault has termed “forms of resistance to power as conducting.”[xxxix] This list of ‘counter-conduct’ are forms of resistance that may not be clearly visible; they might at times require naming to be felt, seen or understood. It is the wager of this study that these modes of acting (acts of creation, poesis) contribute to the composition of what poets understand to be a parallel reality. Anne Boyer writes “When something was imagined, it was experienced – with sensations and sentiments vivid as any other.”[xl] Boyer’s poetic practice subverts the existing world while simultaneously composing another plane of consistency with its own mode of perception, its own structure of experience. This other plane of consistency makes up the parallel reality. This plane must constantly outmaneuver and ward off the operations of governmentality which incessantly try to re-appropriate subversion to serve its own ends. As a consequence, whatever contributes to this plane of consistency – be it actions, songs, attitudes, beliefs, habits, gestures, architecture, language – must always operate in ways to prioritize its imperceptibility to and its separation from dominant modes of perception like governmentality. As a result of this need for imperceptibility, this parallel world cannot be pointed to as a concrete thing in the world. To gesture towards this other dimension is to exercise what Diane di Prima called “the courage of the tenuous: the willingness to speak of what can’t be proved.”[xli] In contrast to transparency, for which truth is inextricably bound with what can be proven, the poetic truth di Prima speaks of is not reducible to scientific fact or information. This plane is not willfully vague or opaque, esoteric or idealist, nor is it simply ‘the unknown’. On the contrary it requires keen familiarity and precise sensitivity, extraordinary vision and a certain care with which one makes or unmakes the world around them. Di Prima assigns the elucidation of this mystical dimension as a poetic task.

Based on what we have surveyed thus far, I contend that the kind of writing the author of Garments Against Women does prefer is the kind of writing that is an act of resistance. The premises for writing as an act of resistance require an initial investigation of the ways one’s own desires are bound up with conditions of oppression. After this investigation, ways must be found to subvert the various institutions, traditions, and normative patterns that regulate or modulate human activity into statistically calculable behaviors. A radical artistic practice is one that is primarily destructive rather than creative. It subverts dominant modes of thought, canons and literary conventions that only serve the cultural elite. In their stead, writing as resistance incessantly tries to articulate an otherwise.

A brief analysis of another of Anne Boyer’s poems, “Not Writing” will serve as a conducive example of what writing as resistance looks like. This poem enumerates all of the things Boyer has to do that aren’t writing literature. Errands, work, shopping, responding to emails, social obligations, the general maintenance and care of the self, sex, enjoyment and entertainment are among the myriad of things that are not-writing. By way of the negative, the poem lists all the obstacles to writing in order to arrive at a definition of what writing – poeisis – might be.

“There are years, days, hours, minutes, weeks, moments and other measures of time spent in the production of ‘not writing’. Not writing is working, and when not working at paid work working at unpaid work like caring for others and when not at unpaid work like caring, caring also for a human body.”[xlii]

In Boyer’s characterization, not-writing is categorized primarily as a temporal matter. Not-writing is the hours of lives, the unquantifiable sum of human energy squandered on work. But not-writing is just as much the acts of care that maintain the bodies made ill by work and also, made ill by literature. Writing for Boyer must always be stolen away from this temporal flow. Just as the worker’s strike in the 20th century halted production, Boyer conceives of writing as a suspension of the flow of capitalist time. One of the only positive examples of writing given in the poem is that of dreaming. Dreams “are more like writing than not writing in that they are not intruded upon in their moments by the necessities of all the paid work, care work, social expectations, romantic love or talking to people.”[xliii] In this schema, writing is not reducible to petty self-expression; it is a form of resistance to the hyper accelerated flow of time that dominates the cadence of society.

Writing for Boyer is perhaps a privileged example of the fate of human activity when it is modulated by governmentality. Through the act of writing, Boyer explores the multiplicity of modes of acting that knit together the space and time for the otherwise; she sews a garment that would compliment a body that refused to be governed. The space of this otherwise is hidden from plain visibility, its time stolen. The existence of this plane suggests that the world is contingent, that things could be otherwise since other worlds already exist. Garments Against Women describes a world open human intervention despite the omnipresence of confinement and calculability. Boyer demonstrates that the mindless execution of tasks that constitute human behavior can be resisted. Stealing, destroying, playing, hacking, parodying, and most importantly, imagining are ways of acting that carry within them a suspension of the world as it is, that don’t lapse into pure execution. “To do, or almost do, to begin but refuse, to rehearse some doing but never act, to appear to do but do another thing entirely.”[xliv] These thresholds between acting and executing are no use to the forces of governance, but their effects are real for one who wishes to imagine another world.

Poetics of the Undercommons

The poet and theorist Fred Moten’s essay A Poetics of the Undercommons is in part a response to the work of Frank B. Wilderson. While Wilderson’s work is often associated with the Afro-Pessimist school of thought, Moten considers himself to be optimistic. As mentioned at the beginning of this study, Wilderson’s representational schema places black bodies outside of the sphere of civil society. While the two claims have radically different meanings, Wilderson, like Di Prima and Boyer, also partitions off different planes of experience that correspond with different bodies. Moten remarks “Wilderson will insist that ‘The black man is not.’”[xlv] The black body represents an object with none of the claims to normative subjectivity granted to members of civil society. Moten agrees with Wilderson that in the context of white American civil society, black bodies are reduced to objects, to things. Taking off from there, Moten’s work asks what it means to carry on with black study in the face of Wilderson’s tough and rigorous claim without lapsing into despair or indignation at having one’s being reduced to the status of an object. Moten claims that to extend subjectivity to blackness by offering black bodies incorporation into civil society is not desirable. As Foucault’s work on governmentality tells us, the creation of a subject, of a population and of society is the result of a process of subjecting individuals to governmental apparatuses of control. To become a subject means to be rendered docile, calculable and obedient by governmental apparatuses.

Moten’s work thinks the possibility of abandoning any desire or attempt to claim the types of normative subjectivity that correspond with said schema. Aside from rendering subjects obedient, the process of being integrated into and even becoming a subject of that society (a citizen) does not necessarily nullify one’s condition of exclusion from that very society. One can think of the way Saidiya Hartman’s harrowing study of American history in her book Scenes of Subjection describes how the long process of freeing slaves and granting them rights, allowing them to access institutions of civil society like democracy has done little to redress the horrors of the legacy of chattel slavery, or change the status of black bodies as killable objects. Moten comments, in a similar manner that “This is the form that integration takes, where integration must be understood as segregation’s trick, its ruse.”[xlvi] As the countless police shootings that occur in America with nearly universal impunity never cease to demonstrate, black life is still exterior to white civil society.

Rather than disavowing the correlation of blackness with the status of an object (what Moten calls thingliness) or argue for the transformation of thingliness into subjectivity, Moten decides to investigate this thingliness itself, which he also calls nothingness. Moten investigates the status of being nothing in relation to civil society, of being a thing. He aims to “claim thingliness [while] at the same time [being] involved in fighting the imposition of thingliness.”[xlvii] A claim to thingliness necessitates the rejection of the humanist schema. He writes

“The emergence of a specific kind of humanism, of a particular notion of man as opposed to things, which moreover presupposes man’s dominion over the things of the earth – that very tendency to want to distinguish man and thing … [out] of a desire for reaching after human dignity … turns out to replicate the very distancing of man and thing that helps to justify racial enslavement in the first place.[xlviii]”

Humanity is always a scored category. Insofar as one can define the human, one can also define who is less-than-human (who is 3/5ths a human being), who is more-than-human (the sovereign figure), and what is not human (the animal, the object). To abandon humanism requires one to dwell in nothingness and elaborate a form of life that escapes the confines of subjectivity, a mode of sociality that escapes the confines society. Moten says that rejecting normative subjectivity “has to do with what it means to have a time and place in this world and maybe potentially in another world.”[xlix] I want to take Moten up on the possibility of existing “potentially in another world.”

Just as Anne Boyer’s work conjures up another plane of existence where the structuring time and space of society are subverted, Moten’s concept of the undercommons is an attempt to think a modality of being that takes the shape of flight, of constant escape from capture by governance. To this end, it gestures towards the creation of a different way of building a collective reality. I quote Moten at length:

“The undercommons is primarily characterized by the everyday practice of working and making in a (per)version of that old Greek sense of poeisis. It is a social poetics: a constant process where people make things and make one another or, to be more precise, where inseparable differences are continually made. They make the sociality in which they live and often that sociality in which they live is conceived of, in relative terms, as nothing, as something nobody would want or care about. But those of us who try to keep faith and maintain some relation to this poetics of the undercommons know that this nothingness is not emptiness.”[l]

What is crucial in this passage, and what takes us adrift from theory and back towards poetry is the emphasis on invention and creation. The creation of new modes of being that are incalculable, ungovernable, that constantly out-maneuver power relations is given as an antidote to the creation of a divine plan for the government of human beings. “Knowledge of freedom is in the invention of escape,”[li] Moten writes in another essay called Blackness and Governance. The understanding of poetry as poeisis, as the creative act par excellence is what gives art a privileged place in mapping out the contours of a world to come.

Conclusion

In this essay, I have laid out the major obstacles confronting revolutionary cultural production as it relates to contemporary poetry in the context of a post-Occupy society. I began by tracing out the way Marxist poets and theorists as well as Frank B. Wilderson problematize culture and its relationship to society. On the one hand, even cultural works with radical content are co-opted by institutions to consolidate power relations. On the other hand, society is not an adequately universal framework for understanding how power relations play out. Not everybody who is included in the schema of society is actually a part of said society. In both instances, cultural production must find a way to be subversive towards institutions that provide access to normative subjectivity. To see the ways power operates outside of the boundaries of society, as well as to amend an understanding of the relationship between aesthetics and politics, I have laid out some of Foucault’s main claims about governmentality. Governmentality is a nominative for the diffuse and heterogeneous ‘arts’ of crafting and composing a society. In addition to drawing attention to the ways creating a society is analogous to the creating a work of art, Foucault’s work allows us to think of the concept economy in an important way. Economy designates those power relations pertaining to the management of bodies that are denied a political function in the context of civil society. To reiterate Wilderson’s point, within the context of civil society, there are some bodies that are considered subjects with rights and a voice, and there are other bodies that are conceived of as objects of management and disposal. Economic relations are concerned with regulating and administering the biological life of some in order to provide access to political life for others.

In a society whose modus operandi is crisis – security becomes a main concern. Whenever a disorder arises in society, there needs to be ample communication within society to make sure that governance can ameliorate the problem. To this end, our society is flooded with technological apparatuses that both provide information about the population and render the population calculable, docile and obedient. With this bulk of digital and technological infrastructure corresponds a very specific mode of perception. As it turns out, the most obedient subjects are those that consider themselves to be free. Governmental apparatuses create a scenario in which subjects, through their own choosing, reproduce themselves as miniature replicas of the economic system.

Art and aesthetics are important apparatuses of government used to generate human interest and investment in society. The field of aesthesis, of sense perception becomes an important site of control and management. Anne Boyer’s work showed us how that perception can be subverted, rejected and how in its stead a mode of perception could emerge that would be geared towards imagining radical coordinates for an otherwise. After elucidating the ways power forms the individual and what resistance thereto might look like, Fred Moten’s work was used as a register to spell out a form of sociality. How can individuals inhabiting ‘another world’ compose something that wouldn’t be ‘society’ and would escape capture by institutions? What form would that take and how would it articulate itself if it wanted to constantly ward off incorporation into the Sisyphean operation of the governmental machine? An ungovernable poetics describes the ways in which we continually fashion a perception, a vision that enables us to ward off management and control, to think beyond governmentality. Rimbaud, the poet of the Paris Commune famously wrote “The poet makes himself a seer by a radical derangement of all the senses.” The ability to see, to visualize an otherwise is an essential step towards creating investment in a future worth living in. Not to change society, but to abandon it, to build something else entirely.

The Grapevine Telegraph

THX Börinsel @waywarddrift (twitter)

30 notes · View notes

itsrahulpradeepposts · 3 years

Text

Is AI to be widely used in surveillance post-Chinese attacks? What is the scope of AI in the future?

In the year 2020 due to the global pandemic situation because of COVID-19, Artificial Intelligence is going to be the most ghastly growing job at this time because work has to be done on laptops and computers, so one can do it by just staying at home. If you are looking for a career in artificial intelligence, I would say you are on the correct path.

Today, we find artificial intelligence (AI) in self-sufficient vehicles, clinical applications, web search tools, remote helpers, and picture acknowledgment. Despite the fact that in many states there is no “genuine” AI yet and that it will take numerous years to make a genuine AI application, the potential for this innovation is evident.

Since 2015, AI and machine learning has become some portion of our regular day to day existence and are right now a well-known slogan in numerous applications. Man-made consciousness and profound learning advances are coming out of the shadows of building labs and military applications and finding their way into business security organizations.

A few people anticipate that AI should in the long run become a distinct advantage in observation arrangements. Artificial intelligence frameworks can investigate immense measures of information, which obviously is profitable when you have to survey long stretches of observation pictures. This kind of framework could likewise be modified to let you know in what course the item is moving and whether there is more than one article.

Artificial intelligence is the demonstration of re-enacting any educated errand. A basic segment of AI is machine learning (ML) and once in a while, the two articulations are utilized conversely. Artificial intelligence utilizes calculations to experience information, gain from it, and afterward make forecasts.

The global spread of AI surveillance technology

There are significant issues that must be tended to before surveillance observation frameworks can be received all-inclusive. First of all, would they say they are good with existing information assurance enactment? The progressing stir about whether facial acknowledgment penetrates GDPR and the way that a security analyst had the option to get to a Chinese database containing a large number of records, without entering a secret word recommends that a few nations despite everything have far to go on this front.

At last, as this technology is so flexible, it’s probably not going to disappear at any point in the near future. Governments will probably proceed to overhaul and improve their frameworks in the coming years, maybe guaranteeing that they help forestall psychological oppressor assaults by distinguishing dubious personal conduct standards sometimes before an episode can occur. Regardless of whether the innovation will be as compelling is not yet clear, in any case.

Is AI to be widely used in surveillance post-Chinese attacks?

Once the global pandemic is over, threats are not going to go away forever. Our soldiers will always be on the border protecting our country so that we could sleep in our homes safely. So, today we are here to discuss about Artificial intelligence surveillance technology that will be helpful for our soldier’s security purposes.

Artificial intelligence opportunities in surveillance technology are spreading at a quicker rate to a more extensive scope of nations than specialists have normally comprehended. In any event, seventy-five out of 176 nations universally are effectively utilizing AI advancements for reconnaissance purposes.

A surveillance arrangement with or without AI is seldom an off-the-rack arrangement since each business and each reason is special. Understanding the basic role of the framework and how the recording, in the long run, may be utilized is basic. Also, picture ease of use must be accomplished if the framework has been adjusted to the particular states of the premises and if it’s appropriately kept up.

To succeed, the essential spotlight can’t be on the innovation, however consistently on the arrangement of a specific use case. Just as a major aspect of a total and all around planned arrangement, where human skill has considered a wide range of contemplations, would AI be able to offer incredible open doors inside surveillance?

China is a significant driver of AI surveillance around the world. There is a solid connection between a nation’s military consumptions and an administration’s utilization of AI surveillance frameworks. Forty of the world’s best fifty military spending nations (in light of combined military uses) likewise use AI surveillance technology.

How and where to learn Artificial intelligence?

Artificial intelligence skills are required to make an AI job dealing with surveillance technology. Not just in the surveillance field, AI is a vast field that deals with AI in digital marketing, AI in healthcare, AI in stock, and many more.

If you want to build a career in Artificial intelligence, there are many free online courses available online that one can consider to learn and master AI and machine learning. E-learning has always been very easy and sufficient as one can excess their online class from anywhere all around the world. This online study provides a great learning AI course with a certificate that will help you in future to get jobs.

Apart from just AI courses, many other machine learning and artificial intelligence courses are also available that will help you achieve your goal of becoming an AI surveillance technician.

What is the scope of AI in the future?

Sophia, an AI Robot, is an example and it is the quintessential case of this. The fate of artificial intelligence is dim. In any case, passing by the limits of progress AI has been making, it is clear AI will penetrate each circle of our life. Recorded underneath are the various manners by which AI can change later on.

Digital Security

The future use of AI in cyber-security will guarantee in controlling programmers. The rate of cybercrime is an issue that has been heightening as the years progressed. It costs endeavors in terms of the brand picture just as material expense. Charge card fraudery is one of the most pervasive cybercrimes. In spite of there being location procedures, they despite everything end up being insufficient in checking programmers. Simulated intelligence can carry a noteworthy change to this. Novel AI strategies like Recurrent Neural Networks can distinguish fraudery in the starting stages itself.

Quality of the data

Picture ease of use is as consistently of the best significance. Without “crude material” as far as top-notch film and video, an AI framework can’t dissect anything. A functioning domain with trees blowing in the breeze, or an individual conveying something that the AI system thinks about unpredictable, can trigger numerous bogus alerts. In this way, the AI can be utilized to generally decide how applicable an episode is and afterward alert an individual who at that point chooses the reaction.

Face Recognition

The dispatch of iPhone X with face recognition highlight was a stage towards AI future. In the upcoming years, iPhone fans and users may be open to their mobile phones by upgrading the front camera to some next level. Confirming individual substance isn’t the main utilization of facial acknowledgment as there are many more features to it. The government’s safety and security system powers utilize this component to find crooks and recognize its residents. Later on, facial recognition can go past the whole physical structure to an enthusiastic investigation. For instance, it may get conceivable to distinguish whether an individual is pushed or irate.

Data Analysis

One of the ways in which AI will bring profit to the business is in the field of Data Analysis. Artificial intelligence would have the option to see designs in data that normal human intelligence can’t. This empowers businesses’ to focus on the correct clients for the item. The most important case to keep in mind is the association between IBM and Fluid. Liquid, a computerized retail company uses Watson an AI made by IBM for the sagacious item will provide suggestions to its clients.

Various Jobs

Mechanical Process Automation is the use of AI and machine learning to computerize rule-based undertakings. It will help one to concentrate on most of the basic parts of their activity while leaving the normal points of view to machines. Computerization can extend from information passage to finish process mechanization. The compass of AI is additionally expected to cover occupations that are unsafe or wellbeing dangerous like bomb dispersion and welding.

Emotions Bots

Tech has progressed as far as Emotional Quotient. Virtual assistant Siri, Cortana, and Alexa show how the degree to which AI fathoms human language. They can comprehend the importance of setting and making keen decisions. In 2015, a friendly robot called, ‘Pepper’ went discounted. Here all of the underlying 1000 units were sold inside a moment. In general, thinking about this, the chance of passionate bots may turn into reality later on.

Conclusion

Taking everything into account, the AI system has grown rapidly over the previous years and shows extraordinary potential inside the field of surveillance, yet lamentably, open familiarity with these abilities despite everything has the best approach. With Milestone’s open stage reconciliation, you can get to the most recent AI surveillance technology and redo your reconnaissance arrangements.

#artificial intelligence #ai #eLearning #online course #online learning

0 notes

perfectirishgifts · 4 years

Text

Sustainability Can Be Powered By Technology Innovation

New Post has been published on https://perfectirishgifts.com/sustainability-can-be-powered-by-technology-innovation/

Sustainability Can Be Powered By Technology Innovation

With the COVID crisis in full effect, many white collar workers are working from home and … [] collaborating in new and different ways. One of the major tech brands that has enabled this transformation is SAP.

Technology has the ability to significantly impact the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as well as improve work/life balance, enable commerce and so much more. With the COVID crisis in full effect, many white collar workers are working from home and collaborating in new and different ways. One of the major tech brands that has enabled this transformation is SAP.

Brands are at the center of much of the change we are feeling, focused on bringing innovation and sustainability strategies together to make change fit into new business models and frameworks.

In an effort to better understand SAP’s purpose strategy and how it connects to their business model I spoke to Vivek Bapat SVP of Purpose and Brand Experience Marketing at SAP.

Jeff Fromm: How are you using sustainability clients and innovation to bring positive change to people, communities and the planet?

Vivek Bapat: The way that we look at sustainability is that it’s a major component of our purpose and vision, which is to help the world run better and improve people’s lives. One of the things that we have done is we have paid a great amount of attention to making sure that from a purpose and sustainability point of view, we are engaging with the world, both as exemplars of sustainability, which means that we embrace sustainability in all of the right forms within our own

business practices, but that we also are engaging with our customers as enablers of their sustainability and purpose initiatives. We feel like we have a dual role to play. And in both of these roles it is important that we do so with authenticity and credibility in the way that we engage, whether it’s through our products, services, people or partnerships that we create through our brand engagements Through our brand and any relationships and partnerships that we create.

Fromm: How are you connecting your purpose to the SDGs and then ultimately, how do you connect that to your internal culture?

Bapat: The purpose of the company at the highest levels is to help the world run better and improve people’s lives. So that’s the top level architecture, that is at the top of the house. The next level is the defined roles where we see sustainability both as an exemplar and enabler. The third level is to define specifically which areas or themes we can impact in the most authentic, credible way both as enablers and exemplars. Those 5 big themes are:

Climate Action

Circular Economy

Equality for All

Social and Inclusive Entrepreneurship

Building a Skilled and Inclusive Workforce

We’ve used the SDGs as the vehicle to come up with the strategy because they are well understood internally as well as, externally to our partner ecosystem. While the themes relate to 8 specific SDGs, we believe that by impacting these SDG’s directly, we indirectly uplift and add value to all of the 17 SDG’s. Finally, we map each of these themes to our products, our people, our programs, and our partner ecosystem. In this way, what we’ve laid out is a very clear architecture that connects right from the top levels of a brand position around purpose, right into the products, the core of the business, the customer relationships, the partnerships and our employees as well.

We’ve laid out an architecture on connecting the dots between purpose and

activation of purpose across everything that we do. This standardized architecture based on the UN SDG’s gives us a common language to converse and engage globally with our customers, partners, and ecosystem at scale.

Fromm: What’s the flywheel between internal culture, the purpose of running the world better, the SDGs you focused on? How does that help you maintain a profit in a healthy way?

Bapat: Purpose is not just a slogan. And it isn’t a brand campaign. In order for purpose to become part of culture, it has to be connected back to the core values of not just the company, but the personal values of the employees themselves It’s no longer enough to say, “yes, I’m passionate about certain topics.” We believe strongly that purpose has to guide decision-making and cascade to at every level of the company… which is printed on the walls of the hallways of your company. It’s not a brand campaign. Between aspiration and action, there’s a pretty substantial gap I think that you have to really look into and solve for. SAP has been on the purpose journey for several decades and we are quite mature in our thinking in terms of purpose and activating purpose authentically across the board. When we do an employee survey every year, we ask companies how much they believe in SAP’s approach on purpose and sustainability. Year over year, this is one of the highest areas where all employees agree that this is something that they are committed to and passionate about.

Last year when we did this survey for instance, the number was as high as 93% of employees who said they believe in SAP’s cause on purpose and sustainability. It’s really connected deeply into the personal values of employees within the company. As a company that is represented in 180 different countries where we have about 130 different nationalities, this is the one unifying thing across all of the employees of the company. There’s a deep belief system at the grassroots level of the company, which is supported by the top leadership of the company.

And as you can imagine, these are typically decisions that are extremely hard

decisions to make. For instance, what is the position that you take on a particular issue related to let’s say gender equality? What is the position that you take as a company that’s based on social issues or climate action? These are big, tough, heavy problems and questions to be answered, and I believe that this is where having a clearly defined purpose and a set of personal values that is embedded across all employees of the company and leaders enables decision making. Once you have that at scale, that’s when it becomes part of culture and it becomes part of budget.

Fromm: How do companies and corporate leaders look at purpose from a profitability perspective?

Bapat: The major issue of the moment is whether purpose Is this something that you’re just doing in order to enhance your brand reputation or is this really something that is core to your everyday business – including the products, the services, the customer and the employee engagement. Making it core to the business eliminates the false choices that companies have faced with for decades – that purpose and profit are somehow diametrically opposed. When purpose is core to the business, the opportunity is to full align both profit and purpose into a single direction. At the macro level, this shift is being felt across the board – hence the clear mandate from global business leaders to move from shareholder to stakeholder capitalism.

We’ve also seen a lot of investment funding going into companies who have a very strong position on sustainability. We have an entire new generation who are entering the workforce and care a lot about this. If you’re a company that wants to retain these employees or serve these employees as customers, this is a huge topic. I think the question of why it’s important has been answered. The question now is, what are companies going to do about it and is it connected to profitability? We did a study actually with Oxford Economics, where we looked at 3000 companies across the world. What we found was that close to two thirds of the companies had a formal statement and they were piloting certain initiatives within this particular arena of purpose and sustainability within their businesses. Of that 66%, only 12% had really fully fleshed out the implementation of those pilots. There’s a big gap that we believe that we can address through SAP with our customer set, where we can help them close those gaps. And out of that set, there was only 6% of companies who were really seen as leaders on fully embracing the potential of purpose as part of their core practices.

The way that we look at it is we are running close to 88% of the world’s supply chains at the moment. We are in pretty much every industry, whether it’s manufacturing or consumer goods or energy or transportation out there. And we have a huge opportunity to impact the business processes, the supply chain operations, the employee engagement, the customer relationships, the financial reporting, the procurement of these customers to help them actually incorporate purpose into their core business practices. That’s where we see the opportunity.

For questions about this interview please contact Jeff at [email protected]

From CMO Network in Perfectirishgifts

0 notes