#have it revert to just the old variable rate

[sinni-ok-sessi]

fuckin. finally got round to applying for a water meter after a year of going, 'yeah yeah, I'll get to it eventually, it probably won't make that much difference'

yeah, so the estimate they gave me would be. uh. half my current bill. FFS.

[mxvladdy]

Forgotten Affections: Mammon

Here is Part Two of @marymaryroo 's request!

This one used more of my True forms ideas so if you want some more contexts here is Mammon's Link

Hope you like!

Magic is a beautiful and powerful thing. It permeates the Devildom like an eternal fog. For the residents, it is as common as breathing. From the strongest of their kind down to the lowest inhabitants, it is integral to their culture and daily life. Mistakes and accidents happen daily with young and old alike learning or experimenting. Magical rebounds and mishaps mean very little to them, especially the brothers. From the Celestial Realms down, they have seen it all.

Sometimes they forget that to you, magic can be a volatile and dangerous.

Part Two of Three: Mammon

TW: Gore and slight body horror

His plans are not stupid. No matter what his brothers thought or said. He was always calculating, always thinking and scheming. Sometimes his plans were fast and spontaneous, some do get the better of him. But risks were always a part of the games he plays. The hazards are just as an addictive high as the rewards he strove for. Mammon knew his plans could go sideways, but he never cared. When he failed he just would try again. Variables changed on a dime and he knew how to handle that. Life moves fast but he always moves faster. Until he couldn’t.

The plan this time was foolproof. Everything had been in place, or so he thought. He ran a tight ship with his informants and an even tighter ship with his court. He anticipated everything. He just can never predict you.

You weren’t supposed to be here. Why were you here! You should have been at school!

Of course, the witches saw you as a threat. They thought he was trying to underhand them once again. They weren’t wrong obviously. But he would never put you in harm's way to get what he wanted. Seeing you here startles him, startles all of them. While the shock of your face showing up where it didn’t belong slows his reaction time, it increases the witches. Their spells move with blinding speed, out-pacing him by mere seconds as he tries to get to you. The spells hit you with a wet crunch, flinging you across the room. He watches in horror as your body flops like a marionette cut from it’s strings. He catches you scooping you up to his chest before hitting the concert hard. He skids along the cold warehouse floor hiss when his heat cracks hard on the metal of a stack of crates.

It hurt, but he couldn’t give less of a damn. He didn’t give a shit about the black blood trickling from his brow or the crack in his beloved glasses. He had one thing on his mind, you. You were still and loose in his arms. He saw no blood, but something wasn’t right. His pact is alight with pain, flaring and itching as he panics something wasn’t right with his master and his pact couldn’t locate it.

The next few moments in time freeze around him as he moves faster than he ever has in his life. The city and realm are brief flashes in his mind's eyes as he blinks, he just had to keep you safe. He takes you to the only place he knows you will be safe. It was the safest place in the kingdom for him, and it would be for you too.

The cave is cold. An eternal shadow coats every part of the large cavern, it had been a while since he had visited his hoard. His greatest treasure now sleeps in his bedroom and shines more brightly than even his most precious stones. Yet, now you were as cold as the jewels he once coveted. He doesn’t remember shedding his human skin but he doesn’t care using his many mismatched and uneven wigs to move you to his nest.

He tucks you into the silks and wool sheets lining his bed. Bending closer he nuzzles your arm. His many broken and scarred beaks picked up on the fetid odor of tainted magic seeping from your pores. He can’t place all the damage done to you but it is more than he knew what to do with. He was no practiced healer like Asmodeus or learned in medicine like Satan. No, he didn’t have that, but he was yours, and you were his to protect. So he does what he can through his pact, leeching some of the poison from your body into his. Getting comfortable beside you he shuffles you closer into the remaining soft down feathers on his belly. This close he can feel your frail heartbeat.

The hours move on and you still do not stir. He hates himself for this. How could he be so useless? You trust him, he was your first man he was supposed to be better than this. In this moment Mammon regrets every class he ever ditched and the class he slept through in the Celestial realms. He was never good with magic but perhaps if he had just paid attention he might have been able to help you better right now. Whatever toxins the combination of spells had embedded you rolled in his stomachs mixing with his guilt. He takes it all powering through so you could rest.

You stir sometime in the wee hours of the morning, of what day he doesn’t know and he doesn’t care. His many eyes never leave you as you wake. “Mammon?” You slur, mind still groggy with sleep and the residual effects of whatever it was that hit you. He clicks his many beaks asynchronously in delight, the chatter of bone on bone is raucous.

Beside himself, he turns back to his human form in a dizzying blur of feathers and gold light. “Babe!” He snatches you up kissing every bit of your skin he can find. “I am so sorry. I fucked up-you weren’t supposed to be there. How in the hells did you find me?” He pulls back to make eye contact with you. Your eyes are wide with shock. “What’s the matter? Why are ya lookin’ at me like that?”

You looked confused, eyes darting around you as you clutch the furs and blankets closer to your bare chest. “Mammon. What...what’s going on? Where am I?” You glance down at yourself seeing how battered and bruised you were. You look at him, the confusion now replaced with unadulterated terror. “Mammon...what did you do?”

“Ti?” He shakes his head momentarily, losing his grip on your shared tongue. “Babe-I don’t understand.” He tries to touch you. You push away, scrambling back and tumbling from his nest. Mammon hears your heart rate pick up, hammering like a helpless beast when it knows it's cornered. But where was the threat? You were safe here, tucked away with him. He feels numb, disbelief locking his jaw and tightening his shoulders.

You couldn’t think he was the threat...right?

“C-come on,” He blinks back tears. “This ain’t funny. Don’t you remember me?” He reaches out for you beckoning for you to come back to his nest. There is an odd and sharp twinge in his pact and he hisses. You mark weights him down, locking him in place from coming any closer to your trembling form. You were stopping him from comforting you. You were scared of him.

“Mammon.” You shudder holding the blankets close and back away till your back hit the rough stone wall. “You’re scaring me.”

“An’ your scaring me! You promised not to play cruel jokes on me.” His head bobbles inhumanely, sapphire and gold eyes glowing in the low moon light.

He smells the sour tang of sweat blooming on your skin, his sense locking on the bob of your throat. He mimics the dry clicking of it as you try to swallow enough spit to speak. “When did I do that?” You croak. He rears his head back. The words strike him hard. You curl away from his screeching arms raised for a blow that he would never do.

“Date? You, us!” He barks, voice coming sharper and shriller in desperation. “Our late night drives? Us...movie nights alone at the theater. Just last night?” He implores searching your gaze for something. Anything!

You shake your head clutching your brow. “I’m sorry, I don’t...” His caw of rage rattles his chest. His many heads emerge again to echo his cries. He shakes them in disbelief. “Mammon! Listen to me, please! Just-just take us home-”

“No!” You flinch back, spit coating your upraised arms. “You are my human!” Mammon’s eyes flash in warning. If you didn’t remember him then the others could try to take you away from him. He would never let you go. Your scream of terror is swept up in a flurry of wings and plumage as he disappears back into the night.

He doesn’t return home to the House. He takes flight and heads east, the winds and forest coming alive with the sounds of his legion taking to the sky with him. Search. Find. He orders images of the coven and what they did to you flashes in his mind to his murder. Those mages did this, and they would fix this. He travels on the wind ignoring the searing pain of your mark. You are calling him to return, ordering him to. The pain only fuels his desire to hunt.

He will have to be fast, for your sake. While his cave had plenty of fresh water and food for you he knew you. You were that spark in the night, that shock to the system that kept him going. You help him keep his head up high. You would try to get down from his nest, or try the other brothers before long.

His council found the witches one by one, picking off the weaker members while leaving the elder witches to him. He barrels through the punishment of breaking a pacts to extract whatever he could from them before his talons find their throats. The kills got more and more savage as each hunt turns up nothing.

On the fifth day of his hunting, Lucifer finds him. His world turns into a blur of black mist and boney fingers as his brother throws him violently from the gurgling body of his last victim. Empty eye sockets bore into Mammon's dazed faces. “Where…” Lucifer opens his broken maw, jaw creaking as his voice gurgles out. Mammon ignores him screeching and clawing at the hand pinning him to the floor. The fingers begin to close slowly, choking off his air until he is forced to revert to his other form, dark chest gasping for air. “Wheerrree…” Black smoke fills his lungs, the cold radiating off of Lucifer’s exposed bone burns his skin.

Mammon hisses back, throwing caution to the wind and landing a quick kick to his brother’s deteriorating nasal bone. “Mine!” He groans, head filling with static. “They are mine...even if they don’t remember me.” The fingers around his throat loosen before pulling back. Mammon coughs holding his throat as he struggles to his knees. “You can’t have them.” He wipes his face, cleaning off blood and tears. Devil’s when did he start crying?

“Mammon.” Lucifer tries again, flowing closer. “No one wants to take them away. I want to make sure they are safe.” Safe? Of course they were safe! The Great Mammon was watching over them, there was nowhere safer. Right? But there was safety in numbers too, what was a murder of crows or a flock of night creatures if they did not stick together. Mammon pushes his palms hard into his eyes till light spots of color irrupted behind his eyelids.

Clarity and exhaustion caught up to him all at once. “I messed up. I messed up so bad, μέντορας.” He looks at the corpse of the last witch. They were the final witness to what had happened the night he got you hurt. His last chance to help you is gone, splattered across the pavement. “Λυπάμαι. Λυπάμαι, αδελφός.” The dam breaks, all the suffering, and confusion of the past week overwhelms him in that moment, robbing him of coherent thought.

Warm human hands grip his shoulders squeezing him tight to center him. “Calm yourself. Remember how I taught you?” he nods, grimy head bobbing through a hiccup. “Good-good. In through your nose and out your mouth. Yes, just like that. Again.” Once punishing hands now wrap around him surrounding him in a sea of black silk and soft hair. It is of little comfort to him now, but Mammon feels the invisible hands clutching his hearts loosen. Lucifer does too and brings his brother out of the crook of his neck to look him over. “I want to help both of you. But, I need to know what is going on.”

To say Lucifer was displeased was an understatement. He couldn’t fault Mammon for his outburst, while he could not say he would do the same he understood what fragile hearts his sibling has. Mammon would never intentionally harm you, but as he pleads his case Lucifer began to worry more and more for your well-being. Mammon wasn’t going back to check on you, that was very clear by the pattern of violence he had marked around the eastern prefecture. Mammon’s recklessness had the potential to get you hurt, and he could not have that.

“Take me to them.” Lucifer raises, helping Mammon up from his knees.

“Can’t.”

“Mammon.” His patience grows thin.

“I can’t,” Mammon repeats himself, firmer this time. The magic he placed on his nest was the last that he had. Having a demon as strong as his brother coming in would break the barrier beyond his repair. “I swear to you I will bring them back, now, back to the house. Just please...I can’t take you.”

Lucifer sighs but relents. Mammon doesn’t swear often if not at all. With care Lucifer takes the back of Mammon’s head and brings his forehead to touch his. “Promise?” Mammon coos softly showing his neck in submission. “Thank you, now go retrieve them. I will clean up this mess.”

Mammon returns to his nest to find you sleeping again. You were clothed and freshly bathed, bits of food nearby and used cutlery at your side. He doesn’t approach fearful of how you would react after last time. He kicks a pile of gold by the side of you instead. You react immediately, lurching up in bed. Something shiny glints in your hand and he laughs. The silver dagger gleams in his direction. “Mammon?” You blink in the low light squinting hard to make out his form. “Is that you?”

“Of course,” He steps closer, arms relaxed at his side. “No one else can come up here, you know. Or, I guess you did at one point.” You lower the knife but keep your eyes trained on him still hesitant.

“Are you ok?” Getting a better look at him you frown. He was a mess, disheveled and grungy. Dark viscous matter cling to his once vibrant white hair clumping it and sticking to the hard edges of his face. You didn’t want to know what it was, but you had your suspicions.

“Yes.” He said, tone clipped and stressed. “Come on, let’s get you back.” He holds out a grimy hand to you.

You look at it. “Are we really?” With how he left you you weren’t sure if this was a trap or not. For all his boisterous claims and vibrato you never thought he would actually go through with anything. Now you weren’t sure.

Mammon nods, waiting for you to make up your mind. You take his hand after a few minutes of contemplation. Your touch was so familiar yet foreign all at once. It was as warm and soft as he remembered it to be, but that was it. You were hesitant with your touch, fingers barely resting in his scabbed and scarred over palm. “What happened?” You turn his hand over seeing how the cuts and bruises continued.

“Nothing.” Nothing of worth any way. “Come, Lucifer is waiting for us.” That makes you pick up your pace and it chafes him.

When you both land in the outside garden of the house Mammon let’s you go. Rushing over to Lucifer’s side, you almost use him as a shield between the two of you. You grab at his brother’s pressed suit jacket asking a rapid fire slew of questions. Mammon relaxes only a fraction noting how Lucifer has yet to touch you out of respect for him.

Lucifer let’s you run out of steam before speaking. “I believe I know what has happened but let’s get you checked out first, and Mammon.” He looks over to his hunched brother. “Go wash up. I’ll be with you as soon as I can.” Dismissed, Mammon slinks off to his room without a fight and empty handed.

With a clean bill of health, minus the apparent memory loss you sit in Diavolo’s office nursing a cup of tea. You look at your companions on either side of you. You, Solomon, and Lucifer sit on Dia’s large couch while the prince paces in front of you. The latter shaking with rage.

“I’m not mad.” You say again looking at the men around you. Mad wasn’t the right word for the feelings you have right now. You were angry at the situation and how Mammon handled it, yeah. But now you were more confused and fearful for his sake. Even if you didn’t recall the particulars of your relationship, what you did remember was a warm and friendly mix of emotions and companionship. He had always been a good friend and steadfast ally after the initial rocky start. Could you have been more? Something blooms in your chest.

“Irregardless,” Dia turns to you, face grim. “He put you in immediate danger and then abducted you. If Lucifer hadn’t tracked him down you still would be missing.” You nod your mouth closing on a rebuttal. He wasn’t wrong. “And,” He continues. “This matter now has more repercussions then just you and your lost memories I’m afraid.”

“That’s right.” Solomon butts in. “The covens are in an uproar. Seats have been usurped and the power imbalance now is reaching dangerous degrees. They want blood.”

Diavolo scoffs, cursing low in infernal. “Mammon needs to be reprimanded, Lucifer.”

Lucifer stiffens next to you. You hear the soft creaking of his leather gloves as he clenches his fists tight. “Is this not enough?” He leans forward imploringly. “Let me handle his punishment. You know I am fair with it.”

“He wiped out the entire East coven. This will take years for me to handle diplomatically. The council of Magi wants justice, and I cannot blame them. Mammon broke contracts and peace agreements.”

His words go over your head but the implications were very clear. “I’m so sorry.” You bow low in your seat. This was your fault. You should have taken a brother with you to retrieve Mammon that night. While trapped in Mammon’s treasure trove you had plenty of time to go over that night’s events and try to figure out why Mammon had said those things to you.

You remember that day clearly. Going to classes, turning in homework and rounding up the brother’s before they got into mischief. You run down that night the best you can too. You remember texting the group that you would bring Mammon home in time for the last meeting of the day, then the burning sensation of spells hitting you and bright flashes of light before waking up next to him in his nest. You remember him, but those nights he told you about and his feelings he shared with you were gone. Nothing there but black space.

Solomon’s hand on your shoulder breaks your musing. “This isn’t your fault. I’m sure we can settle this out over time.” The two demons in the room nod, faces unreadable. With that Solomon nods, getting to his feet. “I believe the time for humans in the room is over, shall I escort you home, or would you like to stay at Purgatory?”

“Home please.” The week's events land heavy on your shoulders. You wanted to sleep in your bed surrounded by familiar comforts. “I’m over this demon shit.” Solomon doesn’t even try to hide his snort.

“There is never a dull moment with you around, huh?” He chuckles, combing a hand through his hair once he gets to the front door. You shoot him an exasperated look. “Relax. I promise we will get this all set to rights...if that is what you wish.”

“I have a choice?”

Solomon raises a pale brow. “Yes. I do believe I can fix this with enough time and preparation. While Mammon had the right idea going to find the root of the problem and there for the spell, he did it all ass backwards. Once I get in contact with the spirits of those he murdered I believe I can get you back together again. You do want that don’t you?”

Did you?

The question perplexes you while you crawl into bed. Did you want something that you didn’t even know you had? The Mammon that had greeted you when you woke up was like nothing you could remember and had planted a seed of doubt within you. What about him had you fall for him in the first place? Would you remember all of this if Solomon was able to fix it? Could this break in your memory change how you felt for him? Ugh-why was magic always so difficult…

You are left to your own devices for a while allowed to stay in from work and school while you recover. The brothers dote over you in their own ways, all expertly navigating around any question you had about Mammon’s whereabouts. Only Beel gave you any useful information.

“He’s...working off his debt.” Cryptic, but at least you knew he was alive. With the brother’s all being tight lipped you took matters into your own hands. Your phone was gone, no doubt shattered on the floor of the warehouse when you fell. You should have had a new one by now, but Lucifer seemed to be hiding it from you like Mammon.

The door to Mammon’s room is sealed tight, no handle or seam to be found. The loud hum of magic radiates from the door making it impossible for you to open. Even his seat at the council was empty. So much secrecy, you were beginning to believe you were being punished as well.

Good thing you were too pig headed to care.

Cornering Lucifer wasn’t as hard as you expected it to be. He very well could have been waiting for you to jump him by this point. He looked tired and drained, his mark, like Mammon’s, was dark and silent on your skin. “You’ve been avoiding me.”

“Yes. Though, as you can see, I’ve grown tired of it.” He waves at himself leaning on the wall just outside of the kitchens. “What do you want?”

“Why can’t I find anything?”

“Any what?”

“If I was dating Mammon wouldn’t there be, I don’t know evidence of it?” There was nothing in your room, and you couldn’t get into Mammon’s. The other’s had been of no help. It was gone, as if by magic. “Is this your doing?”

Lucifer pinches his brow with a grimace. “Yes, and no. Mammon asked me to.”

“What! Why?”

“He heard what Solomon said to you. That you are unsure if you want those memories back. This is your out.” A gift as Mammon likes to think of it, the last one Mammon can give you. Even if it kills him, his brother still thinks of your comforts.

“Don’t I get a choice?” Lucifer snorts eyeing you.

“It is one of the very few strategic advantages of being human. Have you made one?”

Yes? No? “Well, I would like to make an educated one! I can’t do that if I can’t even see Mammon now can I? I’m clear headed now.”

Lucifer chortles rummaging in his pocket. “Please, the fact that you picked Mammon as the object of your affection clearly shows me you have never thought clearly a day in your life.” He drops something in your hand before turning. “The magic of the door is gone. Just-please be gentle with him. The council has not been kind.” He gives you a final small smile. “You two were happy together, you know.” He leaves you with your new phone in an empty hallway.

You clutch the small device close to your chest, eyes riveted to the screen. Lucifer had backed everything up. Your contacts, calendar dates, assignments, and pictures. You click on your photo gallery. Oh, there were so many pictures of the two of you together. For a moment you hate the you grinning up through the screen. Mammon’s arms wrap around you, his face nestle in your hair as you glow under his attention. He looked serene, eyes closed with a blissful smile peeking out through your locks. The next few photos were very much the same, little dates and windows into a life you wanted to remember. The next few you took were candid photos. Him asleep on his couch stretched out and snoring or in the kitchen trying to do something, and failing.

It was so different from the Mammon you remember and the one you saw so briefly in the cave. Deep down your heart hurts for him, out of sympathy or the echoes of your lost love you weren’t sure, but you wanted that life from the pictures again. You reach his door with a new reinvigorated fire in your belly. You could do this. Mammon would never fall for someone indecisive.

The door opens as quiet as a whisper into a dark room. Stepping in you hold your breath, ears hyper aware of just how dark this place was. You don’t think you’ve ever seen this place without lights on. Mammon didn’t like the dark all that much. The room was quiet too, except for an eerie wet gurgle. “Mammon?”

“Leave.” Deeper into the room a massive black shape moves. “Shouldn’t be here.” You turn to the shape, arms outstretched to guide you through the pitch. “Don’t-” Several large luminous gold eyes lock with you. They are weary and apprehensive. You push forward till your hands touch some feathers and…

“You’re bleeding.”

“It’s fine.” Like hell it was. Ignoring his protest and the slick feel of his blood on your hands you grab for your phone.

“Oh Mammon.” Your stomach twists. In the bright little of your little flashlight you can see only a small bit of his side, but it was shiny with fresh blood, feathers broken and limp from where hands had yanked at them. “Who?”

“The Rite of Equivalency.” A head turns to follow your fingers. He hisses, the feel of your fingers stroking along a raw gash under his upper set of wings burns. “Pound for pound of flesh for that which I took.” His beaks click, sore and irritated, they had not been gentle with their gathering today. His body was worth a lot to witches. His feathers and beak shavings were valuable in potions and on the market. It was the most lenient punishment Lucifer could broker, even if it did literally cost him a limb or two. Your hand goes still on his side, he can feel your small fingers trembling on his hind leg.

“Mammon-this is monstrous.”

The crow chortles swiveling his heads to look at you. “Are we not monsters?” He tries to joke, uncomfortable with your gentle touch now. “Hey- no...please don’t cry.” He sees tears clinging to your eyelashes, your lower lip quivering. He opens a wing to try to wrap it around you but stops gasping in pain. His side was like a live wire, healing bones burning under his thin skin while they mended. He is so tired.

You pick up on his discomfort and move away wiping at your tears. This wasn’t about you right now. “I came to talk about...us and what you overheard between Solomon and I,” His heart rate picks up.

“Lucifer put you up to this.” It wasn’t a question but a simple statement of fact. He had hoped-

You shook your head, brushing his side. “He gave me the option by opening the door, but I wanted to do this. To see you again and talk.” Talk, and get his side of the story, to fill in the pieces of the puzzle until you could get them back yourself. You pull up a few pictures and turn the screen to him. “I want to go back to this. I think I liked being yours.”

[letterboxd]

Yes, SXSW, Yes.

Of all the film festivals in the world, SXSW has the highest annual number of Letterboxd members in attendance. (Shout out to the Austin Film Society, whose members are O.G. Letterboxd fans.)

With the festival having just wrapped up, we’ve stalked your ranked lists, reviews and ratings to boldly announce an official top 10 of narrative features that had world premieres at SXSW 2019.

(For comparison, see last year’s top 10, featuring several films that went on to have a decent shelf-life, including A Quiet Place and Thunder Road, which is finally rolling out to cinemas in the UK, NZ and Australia over the next few months.)

Without further ado, and with on-the-ground audience reportage from our West Coast correspondent Dominic Corry, we present our Top 10 SXSW Premieres for 2019:

Booksmart Directed by Olivia Wilde

Unquestionably the most talked about film of the festival, Olivia Wilde’s directorial debut, based on a script that has been floating around for a while (it appeared on the Black List, a list of the hottest unproduced screenplays in Hollywood, in 2009), seemed to absolutely, happily destroy its audience. According to Elle, the coming-of-age tale is “a whipsmart and genuinely heartwarming film”, while also being “vulgar and obscene in nature”.

Booksmart was one of two well received SXSW films (alongside Good Boys) for which Superbad (2007) is a clear touchstone. Close observers will note that Beanie Feldstein, who stars in Booksmart alongside Kaitlyn Dever (and is one of our Lady Bird faves), is Superbad star Jonah Hill’s sister.

Us Directed by Jordan Peele

SXSW’s reputation as a taste-maker for genre films was recognized this year by Jordan Peele, who selected it as the launch pad for his eagerly anticipated follow-up to the phenomenon that was 2017’s Get Out. Letterboxd member Tasha Robinson says the film is “arguably scarier” than Get Out, while David Ehrlich counters that the film is “a lot funnier than it is frightening—a horror movie for a world in which real life is scary enough on its own”.

The Peanut Butter Falcon Directed by Tyler Nilson, Michael Schwartz / Winner: Narrative Spotlight Audience Award

Shia LaBeouf, who’s having a hell of a year so far, co-stars in this Mark Twain-referencing drama as a minor outlaw/crab fisherman attempting to help Zak (Zack Gottsagen), a man with Down syndrome, get to a wrestling academy after the latter absconds from the nursing home where he lives. Tom Grey called it “a touching, charming and nice little film to watch, with strong performances and a lovely relationship between Shia LaBeouf and Zack Gottsagen”.

The Art of Self-Defense Written and directed by Riley Stearns

Stearns’ heavily stylized follow-up to 2014’s Faults stars Jesse Eisenberg as a meek office drone who gets mugged and seeks self-empowerment guidance from a karate sensei named… Sensei (a revelatory Alessandro Nivola). Guaranteed, if not outright designed, to be divisive, it combines deathly dark humor with unexpected jolts of violence while examining the extremes of modern masculinity. Your Letterboxd correspondent is still getting his head around this one. Jacob Knight perhaps said it best when he wrote the following: “Cobra Kai got wild after they let Yorgos Lanthimos start directing episodes”. We spoke to Stearns about the film at SXSW—keep an eye out for that interview closer to the film’s general release.

Alice Directed by Josephine Mackerras / Winner: Narrative Feature Grand Jury Award

Mackerras’ French-language film took the top narrative prize at SXSW, and it’s being praised for its honest depiction of a woman who turns to prostitution after her husband’s addiction to escorts leaves her and her child penniless. Garrett McDowell says the film “offers an acute examination of a motherhood as well as systemic and social gender disparity”.

Yes, God, Yes Written and directed by Karen Maine

Karen Maine has expanded her 2017 short film of the same title into a feature-length “massive home run”, according to Kelley. “It’s quick-witted and hysterical and infuriating and all-too-relatable for an incalculable amount of people.”

Villains Directed by Dan Berk, Robert Olsen

Maika Monroe (It Follows) and Bill Skarsgård (revealing a very different side to the one he showcased as Pennywise in It) star in this twisty thriller as a pair of young criminals on the run who get in over their heads when seeking refuge in a seemingly normal suburban home. For Jack, it was “the biggest surprise of the fest—witty, entertaining and surprisingly heartfelt”. Elle called it “a truly stylish and sleek caper dramedy”. Stay tuned for an interview with directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, right here, very soon.

Extra Ordinary Directed by Mike Ahern, Enda Loughman

This Irish comedy starring Maeve Higgins (and Will Forte as… a satanist) “powers on with such confidence and vision and never breaks it for anything”, according to Andrew. “Taika Waititi meets Yorgos Lanthimos,” writes Griffin.

Saint Frances Directed by Alex Thompson / Winner: Narrative Feature Audience Award

Like Alice, a fellow winner in the Narrative Feature section, Saint Frances seeks to portray the societal pressures faced by women that often go unacknowledged in cinema. Kelly O’Sullivan (who also wrote the film) stars as Bridget, who accepts a job nannying the titular six-year-old (Ramona Edith-Williams) after undergoing an abortion. “Delightful, even when melancholic. Ramona Edith-Williams is a star in the making,” writes Andy.

Boyz in the Wood Directed by Ninian Doff / Winner: Midnighters Audience Award

Teenage boys on a hike in the Scottish Highlands come under perilous threat in this SXSW favorite that Leon Brill calls “a fun romp through the highlands with a little bit of horror for sport”. William Lindus adds: “The laughs are great, the drug trip sequences are bonkers, and the characters surprisingly endearing”. Josh H must also be recognized for his characterization of the film as “The Hills Have Ayes”.

Honorable mentions

Seth Rogen/Charlize Theron rom-com Long Shot, the Seth Rogen-produced ‘Superbad for 12-year-olds’ Good Boys, and Harmony Korine’s The Beach Bum, in which Matthew McConnaughey reverts to his early-2000s persona, all received positive notices at the fest, which is famous for the generosity of its comedy audiences.

Most divisive

At the time of writing, Daniel Isn’t Real, which sounds like a combination of Drop Dead Fred and American Psycho, had received the widest spectrum of ratings and reviews, which excites us. “As much of a mind bender as they come… H.P. Lovecraft would be proud” writes SlasherReviews. “Some interesting effects and a cool use of color in the cinematography but boy were there a whole bunch of lens flares,” adds Nick. Daniel Isn’t Real won the Excellence in Poster Design award at the SXSW Film Awards (designed by the legendary Jock from 4twenty).

How we picked

Because the number of Letterboxd members who were a) at SXSW, b) managed to get to multiple screenings, and c) rated and/or reviewed those films was variable, we compiled this list based on world premiere status, ratings, reviews, tags, appearances in lists, awards received and general noise (on social media and elsewhere) from our community.

[leandrolavater7-blog]

Checklist Of Music Kinds

Nation music has seen its share of loss in 2018. Rated 5.0 out of 5 by JT#Jon from succeeds in its objective Does exactly what it got down to do - explains the differences in Digital Music genres and provides you strategies & ideas. Recommended. Positive, Jake and Elwood's soul covers (most famously, of Solomon Burke's ‘Everyone Wants Anyone To Love') are karaoke-esque at occasions - but this John Landis-directed comedy caper is propelled by a real reverence for black America's musical past; hence the cameos from Cab Calloway, James Brown and Ray Charles. Battle hardened within the golf equipment of Hamburg, the fab four reworked from squeaky-clean pop sweethearts to rock monsters during the course of their profession, and produced a few of the best music ever made alongside the best way. They constantly pushed boundaries, took their sound to locations you'd by no means think attainable and along with pioneering producer George Martin used the studio as an instrument in contrast to ever earlier than. Their story and their music is famous, and you just can't look past them as the best British rock band of all time. A form of American roots music with its own roots in the English, Irish and Scottish conventional music of immigrants from the British Isles (particularly the Scots-Irish immigrants of Appalachia), www.audio-transcoder.com as well as the music of rural African-People, jazz, and blues. Like jazz, bluegrass is performed with each melody instrument switching off, taking part in the melody in turn while the others revert to backing; this is in contrast to outdated-time music, wherein all devices play the melody collectively or one instrument carried the lead throughout whereas the others present accompaniment.

With help from Elevate wrist-based heart charge technology3, vívoactive 3 Music lets you monitor key points of your fitness and stress to point out how your physique responds beneath numerous circumstances. For instance, it's capable of estimate your VO2 max and fitness age, essential indicators of your physical health that can typically improve over time with common train. It also tracks your coronary heart charge variability (HRV), which is used to calculate and monitor your stress degree. vívoactive 3 Music could make you aware when physical or emotional sources trigger your stress stage to rise so you'll find a method to relieve the strain.

Listening to your favorite music can actually reduce stress and offer you extra energy, since you're utilizing actively offering your thoughts with pleasure. I also feel that all types of musical bits similar to beat, chord development, timbre, quantity, stereoshape, sound quality and many others. play a part in how the music influences me. This 1941 essay is probably the most accessible place to begin reading Adorno on widespread music. Plex helps playback of virtually any music file format, together with lossless sorts like FLAC. Regardless of what number of tracks you've got, you'll be able to play them wherever you go. The range and diversity of Queen's music is sort of unmatched in the rock world, most popular music genre 2017 uk a fact proved to astonishing diploma by the wide selection of artists that carried out at the 1992 Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert following the singer's death. Broadway stars rubbed shoulders with rock legends, metalheads and pop heroes, and all people was capable of finding a fantastic Queen music that match their style perfectly. The night was capped by George Michael's take on this music, as 72,000 followers take part for the refrain. Soukous is dance music from the Congo Basin in Africa. It began in the 1960s earlier than changing into well-liked in France in the course of the Nineteen Eighties. The easiest way of describing it is as a better tempo model of rumba. The chart beneath plots genres over time (oldest to youngest genres), exhibiting the common age of death of popular musicians by style and gender in opposition to life expectancy (LE) for US males and females born in the identical 12 months. Uncover the laborious-hitting kinds of at this time, akin to Dubstep or Brostep. This realm of genres tend to get a little rough comparatively. No method on the earth ought to symphonic steel be so low. Have you ever ever heard Nightwish? They are my favourite band on the planet! Their lyrics are awe-inspiring, and their music is phenomenal. I refuse to consider that symphonic metallic is hated this a lot in the world. Critically, in case you are searching for a style of music that really has bands which are gifted, and never utilizing computers to modify their music, symphonic metal is perfect! This ought to be in the #1 spot. It undoubtedly is in my world. By the way, I've been a symphonic steel and Nightwish fan since I was 6 years previous. First heard Storytime, from Nightwish, and was immediately hooked. But I am unable to imagine nobody likes this amazing style of music.

The creation, efficiency, significance, and even the definition of music differ based on culture and social context. Indeed, throughout historical past, some new forms or kinds of music have been criticized as "not being music", together with Beethoven 's Grosse Fuge string quartet in 1825, 3 early jazz in the beginning of the 1900s four and hardcore punk within the 1980s. 5 There are a lot of varieties of music, including fashionable music , conventional music , art music , music written for religious ceremonies and work songs similar to chanteys Music ranges from strictly organized compositions-corresponding to Classical music symphonies from the 1700s and 1800s, by way of to spontaneously played improvisational music resembling jazz , and avant-garde styles of chance-primarily based modern music from the 20th and 21st centuries.

Indie Music: Do you like searching for out obscure bands and indie artists? Followers of the indie style are usually introverted, intellectual, and artistic. According to researchers, they also are usually less hardworking and fewer light. Passivity, anxiousness, and low vanity are different widespread persona characteristics. mento-reggae , as elements of each Jamaican music have been mixed. Some middle interval mento LPs were fairly bland, resembling " Yellow Bird " by the promisingly named Jamaica Duke and the Mento Swingers, and the aforementioned Wrigglers LP. The great majority of the recordings from the center period have been of old mento songs, with sundry other covers. Just about none of the songs on these LPs seem to have been written throughout this era.

[tech-battery]

This Smartwatch Has a Baffling Price

Your average smartwatch brand usually puts out at least two types of watches: a premium flagship smartwatch, and a more cost-conscious alternative with about 75% of the flagship’s features. Samsung does it (Galaxy Watch 3 and the Galaxy Watch Active2), Fitbit does it (Fitbit Sense and Versa 3), and now with the Apple Watch SE, Apple has also gotten on board. So it’s not really surprising that Huami, a company that pumps out a lot of surprisingly stylish and affordable smartwatches, is also looking to do the same with the Zepp E, which is far more premium than the company’s other offerings.

If you aren’t familiar with Huami, let’s rewind a little. Huami is the parent company of Amazfit, which makes wearables like the Bip S. It also partnered with Timex for its Ironman GPS R300 and the Metropolitan R smartwatches. In general, it’s known for budget smartwatches that deliver a lot of functionality at a very attractive price point. I was more or less expecting the same from the Zepp E, but what I got was a watch that delivered budget functionality at a price that didn’t make sense.

The Zepp E costs $250, and to be fair, it’s a nice-looking watch. It comes in two variations: a round version, which I reviewed, and a square one that looks like an Apple Watch knock-off. I’ve spilled a ton of words on why Apple Watch clones need to die, so we’ll skip past that one, but the round version is quite sleek on the wrist. The 1.28-inch AMOLED display is crisp and easy to read notifications on. Colors are bright, and while you can see some pixelation if you squint, I never felt it was so bad that it detracted from watch faces or text. It’s also only 9mm thick, which is thinner than most flagship smartwatches out there. (The Apple Watch, for instance, is 10.4mm.) Huami describes it as “3D curved bezel-less glass” and while that’s marketing schlock, I will say it does look and feel like it belongs on a premium watch. I didn’t love the texture of the “moon gray” leather band they sent me, but it looked chic with the gold case and, for once, wasn’t pink.

But while the design seems like it would belie a premium watch, the features are lacking compared to other watches in this price range.

The Zepp E has a couple of features that other premium smartwatches have, such as an on-demand SpO2 app—much like the one on the Series 6 and the Galaxy Watch 3—and stress-tracking. It also offers continuous heart rate-monitoring and the typical sensors we’ve come to expect from smartwatches, like an accelerometer and ambient light sensor. You also get sleep-tracking, an estimated seven days of battery life, and with 5 ATM of water resistance, it’s safe for swimming. What you don’t get is NFC payments, built-in GPS, digital assistant, or cellular connectivity. I wouldn’t necessarily expect all of those things on a sub-$300 smartwatch. The Fitbit Versa 3, for instance, may not have cellular capability, but it does get you Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, built-in GPS, Fitbit Pay, and SpO2 monitoring for $230. The Apple Watch SE starts at $280, but you get Apple Pay, Siri, built-in GPS, and you can upgrade to a cellular model. The Samsung Galaxy Active2 also starts at $280, also has a cellular version, Bixby, Samsung Pay, and adds ECG. When you consider how much you can get for under $300, the Zepp E’s feature set feels a bit incomplete. The advanced features the Zepp E does have—an SpO2 app and stress-tracking—feel sort of tacked on, and lack some of the context provided on other, competing smartwatches.

That’s a shame because, for the most part, the Zepp E is a good, basic smartwatch.

For notifications, I found the Zepp E was pretty capable, though you’ll have to manually configure which alerts you receive in the Zepp app, under the Zepp E’s individual settings. That’s not uncommon—you have to do it for Fitbits, too—and personally, I like that you have more control over what does or doesn’t make your wrist buzz. It lacks a built-in music player, which isn’t the worst thing. You can control your music over Bluetooth, but if you want Spotify or Pandora on your wrist, you’re out of luck here.

In terms of interface, the Zepp E is similar to Wear OS. You basically swipe left and right to view widgets for things like weather and activity, and you can press the button on the right side to access a scrolling menu for your apps. Swipes were easily registered, and thankfully, I didn’t experience any latency.

The battery on the Zepp E is pretty solid. I got about 6-7 days of typical use on a single charge without the always-on display enabled. With it on, I got about three days, but to be fair, I logged more than two hours of activity-tracking during that time. Connected GPS doesn’t drain the battery as fast as built-in GPS does, but I had a setting toggled on to increase how often the Zepp took heart rate measurements during recorded exercise. That would also deplete the battery faster than on days with lighter activity. Depending on the options you choose for how often the watch measures your heart rate and how often you exercise, your mileage may vary.

The Zepp app is also decent, though not as slick as some other smartwatch apps. You can see basic tiles with information like heart rate, workouts, and sleep score in an easily understood layout. But it’s not what I’d call perfect. There are some wonky translations here and there, but nothing that’s incomprehensible. For non-metric users, there are times where the Zepp app will revert to metric units even if you have your settings on Imperial. For example, in my outdoor running activities, my split times are per kilometer even though I’m tracking my distance in miles. (I wish I was running 6'24" per mile, but alas, that’s my pace per kilometer.) And while you can view your long-term data, it’s not presented in an intuitive way in the app. For instance, to see all my workout records, I can’t just hit the activity tile. I have to tap the teeny menu that says All Records in the upper right corner of the tile, which is simple enough once you know where it is, but I tripped up enough times that it was annoying.

The Zepp E is best when it comes to health-tracking, but you’re not really getting anything here that you can’t get elsewhere. Sleep-tracking was accurate compared to my Oura Ring; both consistently logged the same hours slept per night, gave me similar sleep quality scores every night, and roughly corresponded when it came to sleep stages. Unlike the Bip S, the Zepp E also correctly noted when I woke up in the middle of the night. The Zepp E also has a beta “sleep breathing quality” metric, but I didn’t consider it particularly useful, because the description didn’t really explain how it was measured or what it meant for my overall health. I assume the feature relies on the SpO2 sensor, because that’s what other smartwatches use to give comparable analysis, but again, it wasn’t explained in the app, and the tips for improving were things you could easily Google: don’t drink before sleeping, lose weight, and exercise more.

Activity-tracking was also decent. The Zepp E doesn’t have built-in GPS, which means it relies on your phone. That’s disappointing in the sense that phone-free runs aren’t an option if you want accuracy. When running with my phone, the Zepp E reported distances that were generally within 0.5 miles of the MapMyRun app. For instance, on a 3.1-mile run logged by my phone, the Zepp E reported 3.08 miles and the Apple Watch SE recorded 2.98 miles. This was roughly the same for the seven test runs and the two test walks I did with the Zepp E, Apple Watch, and my phone. There was, however, one exception. During one test run, the Zepp E failed to find GPS—which was odd given my phone was on me—and logged a 3.06-mile run as 2.29 miles. That is just wildly incorrect and makes me think if you did leave your phone at home or if you’re a treadmill runner, you might get wonky results.

Heart rate-tracking, however, was more reliable. The Zepp E was generally within 5 beats per minute of both the Apple Watch SE and my Polar H10 chest strap. That said, during my runs, I noticed the occasional lag when it came to reporting my heart rate. I’d lift my wrist and it’d take a second for my metrics to update. Not a huge deal, just kind of annoying if you’re the type that frequently checks in mid-run.

I tested the SpO2 app against the Samsung Galaxy Watch 3 and my partner’s Apple Watch Series 6. They all gave me similar numbers (96%, 95%, and 96%), and are equally annoying in that you have to sit really still to get measurements. There’s no real flashy feature that utilizes SpO2 sensor yet, so the fact the Zepp E has it is sort of...useless. In the app itself, there’s no real context of how your SpO2 results relate to the rest of your health. There is a short explanation about how it can be used to monitor respiration, but no context for why you might care about that. In the app, it’s buried in several menus and not easily accessible from the home screen. It’d be one thing if it was factored into a recovery or “readiness” score, but that’s nowhere to be found.

In the same vein, I didn’t really get much out of its stress-tracking. In a week, my stress levels, which are based on my heart rate variability measurements, ranged from 11-96. Meaning, sometimes I was very chill and sometimes I was extremely not chill. I can tell you that without a smartwatch, and this feature didn’t help me understand my HRV any better. Like the SpO2 app, stress-tracking is also buried in a secondary menu, and it would be extremely easy to miss completely if you didn’t know it was there. For what it’s worth, the Fitbit Sense also tracks stress, but in a much more holistic, meaningful way.

One thing the Zepp E does have going for it is the PAI metric. Old Mio users might be familiar with it, as that’s where it comes from. (Huami acquired Mio in 2018.) For the uninitiated, PAI stands for Personal Activity Intelligence, and it’s a score that tries to simplify whether you’re getting the appropriate amount of activity per week—sort of like Fitbit’s Active Zone Minutes. The idea is to have 100 PAI over a 7-day period, and how many PAI you’re awarded for an activity is supposedly personalized based on your demographic data. It’s a bit hokey, but as far as metrics go, it’s a more useful measure than just going off steps alone. That said, you’d get this from any Huami wearable. The Bip S also uses it, so it’s not as if this is specific to the Zepp E.

That’s the problem with the Zepp E. You’re effectively paying $250 for a nice design and multi-day battery life. It’s not that the Zepp is a bad watch. It’s that you can get that and more for a similar price elsewhere. While I prefer the size of the Zepp E’s display, the Samsung Galaxy Active 2 is the better overall value given the wider feature set, especially if you like pretty, round watches. If you don’t mind square displays, the Apple Watch SE and Fitbit Versa 3 are more feature-rich, aren’t hideous, and are around the same price. Even Huami makes pretty compelling alternatives with the Amazfit GTS and GTR, which cost around $130 on Amazon and have built-in GPS.

If the Zepp E wants to be a premium smartwatch, it needs to at least have built-in GPS, NFC payments, or something to set it apart from budget watches. That could have been SpO2 and stress-tracking, but in both cases I found these seemingly premium features to be half-assed, and they weren’t meaningfully featured in the Zepp app’s health dashboard. For basic fitness-tracking and design, hybrid analog watches deliver the same kind of connected GPS-tracking and metrics, and they’re often less than $200. Many are also quite fetching on the wrist.

The Zepp E has budget features in a premium body. If you can find it on sale for under $200 (ideally $180 or under), I’d say the Zepp E is a watch you should consider. But at full price? Honey, you can do better.

[pierrehardy]

COVID-19 x Trade-Offs

This article focuses on the numerous trade-offs we face today due to the Covid-19 pandemic. As usual, the article itself is concise and to the point, but I will leave references which can also be some sort of reading list for you. This time around, I also included some appendices for more detailed explanations of some parts. 

TL;DR

The current situation is forcing doctors to make tough decisions which can be as difficult as deciding which patients will live and which patients will die. This can weigh heavy on the doctors who have to do this a lot on a daily basis. 

If you were wondering which is better at saving more lives: lockdown vs no lockdown, the answer is yes lockdown. 

If you were wondering which is better economically in the long term: lockdown vs no lockdown, the answer is still yes lockdown. 

Through models, we expect a second wave of infections once the lockdown is lifted. So intuitively, the ideal situation is to wait for the first wave to die down and give hospitals a bit of time to prepare for the second wave before lifting.

After all this mess is done, we need to help the losers of the tradeoffs we had to make, most especially those who suffered economically due to the lockdown. These are mostly the unemployed, which is forecasted to shoot through levels worse than the 2008 financial crisis.

This article is divided into two main parts: first, we will talk about the two main kinds of trade-offs we have to deal with (medically and economically) and  what they imply. Second, I will examine America’s handling of the crisis and what we can learn and imply from it.

Medical Trade-Offs

The concept of a triage was first conceptualized by a French military surgeon named Dominique-Jean Larrey [1]. It was a system of segregating and prioritizing medical attention and resources to wounded troops with the highest chance of survival. It is necessary but can feel hard hearted.  

Doctors are doing the same thing right now considering the surge of patients and the lack of supplies. [2] Imagine you have two patients in need of a ventilator but you only have one, the decision on who to give it to usually flows like this:

First rule of thumb is to give the supplies to the person with the highest chance of survival. 

If both have an equal chance, give it to the person who is more likely to live longer once recovered. [3]

These decisions had to be made by doctors everyday and at quantities big enough to break them down emotionally. These choices are further complicated by certain realities relating to Covid-19, of which I will highlight three:

Ventilators are necessary when combating a severe case of the virus. 

Ventilators are tough on the body. Frail and old bodies cannot sustain the stress from a ventilator for more than 3 weeks. 

Patients on a ventilator truly need it and when taken away from them, they will die within minutes. [3] 

These realities can lead to decisions devastating to morale. For example, if a young patient arrives and is in need of a ventilator, under the triage rule of thumbs, it is better to take a ventilator being used by an older patient and transfer it to the young because: 1) the young has more chances of surviving the virus, 2) the young has more chances of surviving the stress of the ventilator, and 3) the young, once recovered, will live a longer life. While ethically reasonable, it is burdensome to basically kill the older patient. [4]

Economic Trade-Offs

It can feel wrong to discuss economics when there’s thousands of people dying from the pandemic out there. However, the very fact that the numbers are that high is the very reason why it is necessary. To manage and fight an enemy with this scale, we need to strategize. 

The main trade-off economically is in knowing which is worse: the cure or the problem; the cure being putting everything in lockdown and the economy is in a coma. To keep it fair, we will look at two scenarios: 1) no lockdown, versus 2) with a lockdown. To understand the rationale behind the pros and cons, I delved into one of the most common epidemiological models (the SEIR model) in Appendix A.

No lockdown. 

PROS

The pandemic would’ve been over sooner. 

The economy would’ve kept going.

CONS

1 million more people will die (number based on America. This is 458% more than the worst estimate with a lockdown). [20]

Lockdown. 

PROS

A 78% reduction in deaths. [20]

CONS

A second wave of infection is expected once the lockdown is lifted.

The economy is in a coma.

Looking at the pros and cons, it’s clear that the amount of lives saved is enough to convince that “yes lockdown” is a better option. But even if you crunch the numbers and calculate the lifetime cost to the economy of losing that many people, it still shows that “yes lockdown” is a better option. The calculations for this is detailed in Appendix B. 

But one crucial note: there’ll be a duration wherein the lockdown will do more harm than good. Next question: then what? Let’s break that down into three questions, all with differing scenarios and time frames. 

When do we lift the lockdown?

Since we are expecting a second wave, it would make sense to lift it once the first wave (what we are experiencing right now) dies down. Preferably, we should also give hospitals a bit more time after the first wave to prepare their medical facilities for the incoming second wave. 

What if that takes too long? 

In an ideal world, we want the first wave done, for hospitals to be prepared for the second wave, and a better treatment for the virus to be developed before opening society again. However, we need to acknowledge the nightmare scenario. What if none of those conditions are met and we are locked down for too long? When that happens, a lockdown will start to do more harm than good.

Societal cohesion will decrease. [9]

Mental health will decrease. [9][10]

The economy has been put to sleep for too long that skills, innovation, and investments would be stalled and would decay. This can become detrimental for the search of a vaccine or cure. [11]

What to do when this happens? Honestly, not sure. 

What do we do after all this mess?

After everything, we have to help all the losers of the trade-offs mentioned so far. One is the young since they will be carrying the burden of paying off all the massive debt accrued during this crisis. Another are the unemployed, which is surging at the moment as companies had to lay off workers due to the shutting of businesses. The unemployment rate is estimated to skyrocket at around 15%-30% in America, depending on who is estimating. [12][13][14] Notice in figure 6 that it is expected to be worse than the 2008 financial crisis.

Figure 6

This can go two ways: historically, shocks brought on by a crisis will rebound quickly and sharply. However this time, experts expect the rebound to be slower since people will stay cautious for a while before reverting to the norm, which they estimate to be by 2023. [15]

Probably, the biggest loser is the combination of the two: the young and unemployed, usually the new graduates. Just like the author of this article.

America and the COVID-19

At the time of writing, New York is the epicenter of the disease and is in the brink of hospitals reaching its limit. To lend a hand, the USNS Comfort (Figure 7) has arrived to relieve New York of some patients. [15] This floating hospital has a capacity of 1000 patients and is one of two. The other giant floating hospital, the USNS Mercy, has been deployed to California. [17]

Figure 7 [16]

Figure 8 and 9 shows forecasts from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) for New York, California, and Virginia. [18] The dashed lines in figure 8 shows the estimated needs for an ICU (blue is the lower estimate, yellow is the mean estimate, red is the high estimate) while the green line shows how many ICU beds are in each state. Three things to note. First, the needs for an ICU bed in New York and Virginia are predicted to exceed capacity. Second, the outbreak is predicted to be not as bad as New York. Third, as seen in Virginia, their outbreak is to last and spread out until May, implying not all places in America will be infected at the same time.  The pro is that if it’s spread out, the virus is easier to combat. The con is that this will put the economy on hold for longer.

Figure 8

Figure 9

But the thing about America is that it is very decentralized: the good job of one state can be ruined by the spillover effects of the bad job made by another. One example of bad governance is by the governor of Florida. The gov has been more concerned with politicking and appeasing Trump more than actually protecting the state, which has a high population for the elderly. The governor refused to close beaches to spring breakers (See figure 10) despite the threat of the virus. [19] Currently, Florida has 15.7k cases of the virus. Now that Trump has changed his tone and called on governors to be the frontline of this pandemic, the blame can be shifted too easily and it’s not going to look good on Florida’s governor.

Figure 10. Julio Cortez / AP.

Appendix A: SEIR Model

Figure 1

Figure one shows the most basic SEIR model (and the only version I am willing to learn and understand. Disclaimer: I am not an epidemiologist), named so for its four main variables. The S variable is the number of people Susceptible to the disease (which is usually the whole population). Variable E is called Exposed, which is how much was exposed to the virus. Variable I means Infectious, which is how much of the population incubated the disease and started becoming infectious. Finally, the R variable stands for Recovered which is when a patient recovers and develops immunity from the disease. Strangely though, those who die also get lumped under R. Beta represents how contagious the virus is, sigma represents the incubation period, and gamma is the rate at which people recover (or die). At any point in time, all of this should add up to 1, as they’re all about the ratio of the population in a particular state. As one may notice, these values seem to be calculated backwards, starting from the fatality of the disease. [5]

Figure 2

Figure two shows the typical trajectory of the base SEIR model [5], which should be similar to how Covid-19 would progress if there was no lockdown. Figure 3, taken from a study in The Lancet [6], runs a simulation on a model that seems to be similar to the SEIR model but with a lockdown. Note the green line, containing the rather famous “flatten the curve” call to action. More interestingly, note the blue line which shows two humps, representing the first and second wave of the disease. From this model, experts expect a second wave after the lockdown is lifted.

Figure 3

Appendix B: Economic Benefits of Social Distancing

The aforementioned calculation was made by University of Chicago’s Michael Greenstone and Vishan Nigam [7]. They calculated the net benefit of the lives saved through social distancing and putting a monetary figure by using the US Government’s Value of Statistical Life (VSL). Figure 4 shows the formula used.

Figure 4

In the formula, Rjdirect is the proportion of the population directly saved by social distancing and Rjoverflow is the proportion of the population indirectly saved by social distancing by preventing the overcrowding of hospitals and lowering the chances of being denied ICU beds and ventilators. These calculations were based on the work of Ferguson et al (there were 31 authors) [8]. Figure 5 shows the age adjusted calculations of the total economic benefit of social distancing to society. The final value is totalled on the lower right corner of the table, which is almost $8 trillion dollars. This is about 42% of America’s current GDP. This gain outweighs any negative economic impact brought on by social distancing even in the long term. 

Figure 5

References

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triage 

[2]https://www.wamda.com/2020/04/age-triage 

[3]https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/04/02/the-tough-ethical-decisions-doctors-face-with-covid-19 

[4]https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/aca-architect-ezekiel-emanuel-on-coronavirus-triage-ethics.html 

[5]https://www.idmod.org/docs/hiv/model-seir.html 

[6]https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2820%2930567-5 

[7]https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/BFI_WP_202026.pdf 

[8]https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/77482/8/2020-03-16-COVID19-Report-9.pdf 

[9]https://theconversation.com/cabin-fever-australia-must-prepare-for-the-social-and-psychological-impacts-of-a-coronavirus-lockdown-133353 

[10]https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2020/04/08/coronavirus-lockdown-is-taking-a-toll-on-mental-health-especially-womens-study-finds/ 

[11]https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/04/02/covid-19-presents-stark-choices-between-life-death-and-the-economy 

[12]Data from https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE, visualizations created through PowerBI. 

[13] Data from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-31/goldman-sees-even-deeper-u-s-contraction-in-second-quarter, visualizations created through PowerBI. 

[14] Data from https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2020/march/back-envelope-estimates-next-quarters-unemployment-rate , visualizations created through PowerBI. 

[15]https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/03/jobs-may-not-come-totally-back-for-years-all-depending-on-how-small-businesses-weather-this-storm.html 

[16] Photo of USNS Comfort taken from Reddit, posted by u/anders1318.

[17]https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-29/usns-mercy-accepting-first-patients 

[18] Data from https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america, visualizations created through PowerBI.

[19]https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/coronavirus-comes-spring-break-locals-close-florida-beaches-after-governor-n1163741 

[20]https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/04/04/the-hard-choices-covid-policymakers-face 

[donovansidh143-blog]

Exactly how to Select the Right Steel Roofing System Shade: Consumer Overview 2020

Steel Roof Covering Rates

How much is a metal roof for a 1500 sq ft house?

But some steel shingle manufacturers offer do-it-yourself systems that cost about the same as an installed asphalt roof for those who want to learn how to instal a metal roof on their own. These systems aren't attached to a frame, but instead install directly on the old roof.

Way too much standing water on stainless-steel can work as an electrolyte and create galvanic deterioration of the metal. This suggests that roof and wall flashings, as well as rain gutter joints, will certainly be weather-tight with a firm connection.

Make sure that a breathable synthetic underlayment is installed underneath the metal roof covering. -- It's a roof underneath the roof, plus it enables your roof covering deck to breathe. Upkeep is actually a non-issue with metal roof coverings, as for the color is concerned. You can clean with a garden hose pipe the following day if you like if a lot of birds determine to poop on your roof covering one day.

Whether you're putting a roof covering on a brand-new home, or your existing roofing calls for a complete transformation, there are lots of products available. Yet regardless of what roof covering style you have, metal roofscan be an attractive alternative due http://markets.siliconinvestor.com/siliconinvestor/news/read/39484254/ to their durability, marginal upkeep, as well as energy effectiveness. Standing joint metal roofs cost $4 to $4.50 per square foot for the materials with the ordinary homeowner paying concerning $10 per square foot for both products and also labor installment. Among one of the most popular steel roof covering installment approaches, standing joint roof covering has actually raised joints where each metal roof covering panel attaches to the following as well as creates the weathertight seal.

With traditional roofing selections, there is a fourth reason that attic room ventilation can be handy; excellent attic ventilation can help boost tile life. By keeping rooftop temperature levels a little bit cooler, shingle life can be protected. This benefit does not actually have an effect on roofing materials like steel, floor tile, as well as slate which are unaffected by heats. When the sunlight stops striking a roofing directly, the lightest material will shed its warm fastest. As soon as the sun quits shining on a metal roofing system, it promptly reverts to the exact same temperature as the bordering air.

While there are many variables that factor into figuring out the rate, zinc roofing can set you back anywhere from $600 to $900 per roof square.

This kind of roof is installed in huge sheets with joints that are raised as well as sealed securely with each other to withstand water.

Metal is additionally resistant to impact, so even a hail storm does not always lead to a new roofing.

Get in touch with your municipality/HOA prior to you buy-- just like any adjustment to the outside of your home, you could go against regional HOA statutes by setting up a steel roof.

Properly measure the spacing of furring strips for a metal roofing system to further decrease condensation.

Research studies have also revealed that light weight aluminum can function great in seaside locations with high rains and seawater spray problems. Aluminum performs much better in seaside settings than Galvalume or various other steel products. Communications with Other Materials-- Galvalume performs best when not touching other materials, such as iron, copper, concrete, bricking, and also dealt with lumber (decks). Contact with or galvanic reactions to these materials can lead to quicker deterioration or complete failing of the Galvalume roofing panels.

Putting Up Timber Stripping Under a Tin Roofing.

The price of metal arrays from an ordinary per square foot cost of $1.60 for Galvalume to $22.50 for copper. Service providers will consider the thickness of the steel utilized-- it's harder to deal with hefty materials that don't reduce conveniently.

Light Weight Aluminum Roof Price

It's frequently said that zinc roof is the "forget and install regarding it" alternative to steel roof. Aluminum is just one of the most preferred and also primary steels worldwide, primarily because of its use in the tinned drink sector.

[simonfady405-blog]

Crucial Strategies For Delivering Successful Seo Campaign

Methods for productive Website positioning: Tracking

Before you start your SEO campaign Make sure you put into practice an excellent Net stats offer that permits you to determine what internet search engine spiders are viewing your website, what keywords and phrases are referring essentially the most traffic to your internet site, and how many hits/web page views you're having. Establish good designTo get the very best online search engine visibility World wide web designers should really Keep to the five basis policies of Website design which states that Web page need to be: Very easy to go through; Straightforward to navigate; Easy to find; Reliable in-structure and layout; Fast to download; produce productive Title tag over the web site arguably the most important rating variable for successful all-natural Search engine optimisation would be the title denoted from the – title – tags on HTML. This title is considered Major text by the major search engines that means that each one the search engines report this text and put sizeable price on it. It is crucial as it is the 1st text shown while in the search results for a hyperlink to your internet site.

Like a basic rule a descriptive title should be five to youtube backlinks ten terms for each web page or 69 to seventy five people. Physique textual content on your webpage you should generally goal to possess a healthy volume of descriptive physique textual content to elucidate what the web page is about, don’t count on the title with the site. You need to intention to possess your search phrase while in the textual content as much as you could, with it even now currently being at ease to read through. This is recognized as search phrase density. All search engines like google consider phrases at the top on the webpage, above the fold as much more essential in price than the remainder of the web site Domain along with the URL, putting crucial-words and phrases in the area may have some weighting from the success of your respective organic Website positioning. The reasoning is that the terms or phrases matching the words you typed in a query are highlighted any time you watch the search results. This is known as lookup-expression highlighting or time period highlighting. Take note; For those who will acquire and make use of a URL that may have presently been employed previously, it can be value even though examining the background with the URL.

H1, Bold, Italics. You ought to have your main keywords once in an H1 tag, as soon as in bold and after that when in ITALICS, this should show the search engine crawler that these are very important text/phrases for the site, so subsequently the crawler will make the idea the keyword phrases are essential to get a customer. Anchor textAnchor textual content is what we contact text hyperlinks. You must generally try out and possess all textual content links as descriptive keywords and phrases. When a spider follows the hyperlink to your website page it ought to have an comprehension of the material. Anchor text is a good way of improving upon your rankings on aggressive search phrases. Create fresh new information, Google loves new information. They may have a fairly new spider termed freshbot, it crawls the web everyday on the lookout for new/current pages and sites. It can then list the site at the top in their index for that web-sites keyword phrases. It is going to keep there for a couple of days, Should the website page was just an updated Variation of what's currently in the effects it is going to revert again to your previous Variation and drop back to it’s old posture, Should the website page is new then it can drop fully within the index, right up until the http://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch/?action=click&contentCollection&region=TopBar&WT.nav=searchWidget&module=SearchSubmit&pgtype=Homepage#/seo subsequent complete update when it should really have a permanent position in the outcome.

Linking top quality exterior back links to your site. Websites with high-quality credible backlinks pointing into them gain extra acceptance than websites with low high quality inbound links. It is actually rumoured that Googles sites approximately 60% of its weighting on excellent of bash external back links. Post the foundation webpage to all the most important engines like google on the web: Google, Yahoo, Bing. It is going to get them a while right up until they crawl your site totally but be patient. There are lots of directories on the net, obtain just one that fits the concept of your website and submit the root URL, all over again this might acquire some time but Wait and see, It will likely be worth it.

[mikemortgage]

‘The gold was never there’: A miner’s reserves evaporate amid battle with former CEO

When geologists speak about how deposits of precious metal form in the earth, they reference changes that can take place over hundreds of millions of years.

This spring, investors in Toronto-based Guyana Goldfields Inc. experienced geologic time at a significantly faster pace: One morning in March, they held shares in a company sitting on nearly four million ounces of contained gold at its Aurora mine; and, by the end of the day, that number had declined by about 1.5 million ounces.

The sudden evaporation of more than one million ounces of contained gold from the company’s “proven and probable mineral reserve estimate” garnered immediate attention, and the company’s share price has declined 30 per cent since then. Even in an industry known to be high-risk, the reduction raised eyebrows, in part because numerous securities laws govern how companies devise and communicate their reserve estimates.

Guyana Goldfields founder among dissidents threatening court action ahead of board vote

‘A sitting duck’: Guyana Goldfields’ founder frets miner has become takeover target, launches proxy battle

Gold miners set to loosen death grip on spending as caution eases

With about $158 million in market capitalization and a single mine in Guyana, the company’s small size has meant it often escapes attention. But it is currently in the midst of a proxy battle with its former chief executive Patrick Sheridan, who is seeking to replace the board with his own slate of nominees. In fighting back, the board has shunted blame onto Sheridan and making a rare critique rather than a defence of the model for its own resource and reserve estimates, calling it flawed and biased.

“The gold was never there — the new resource model has shown us that,” Scott Caldwell, chief executive and a director, told the Financial Post on Monday.

Caldwell blamed the flaws in the old model for the Aurora mine on “aggressive assumptions,” which he said repeatedly were based on a 2012 model developed when Sheridan was chief executive.

Specifically, he said it forecast that ore from a part of the mine known as Rory’s Knoll contained more than three grams of gold per ton. But last fall, the company started hitting ore that only contained around two grams of gold per ton.

Sheridan, in turn, says the recent changes to the resource model are actually a ruse to distract from the company’s poor operational performance. Last July, it admitted to falling behind on its planned mining rate and had reverted to processing low-grade stockpiles.

“The report is designed to mask their failed performance last year,” he said, adding that he commissioned an independent study of the new resource model, and argued that the company had reviewed its resource model multiple times since 2012.

“We still firmly believe that the problems last year in terms of failing to hit production were the result of poor mining performance rather than the reserve,” he said in an interview in March.

Such estimates are supposed to help investors compare one deposit to another. Beginning at least in the late 1990s, the Canadian Institute of Mining developed a set of rules on how publicly listed Canadian companies can report on their resource and reserves, which eventually became law.

Still, industry experts say geology is an art as much as it is a science, and the rules are subject to enough variables, from the prevailing price of gold to assumptions about costs and recovery, that opinions about any particular deposit can often vary between geologists and over time.

Glenn Mullan, a geologist and the immediate past president of the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada, said models of geological deposits aren’t simple and reach different conclusions based on what data is used and available and the assumptions made.

“You always have to rely on management,” said Mullan. “You can always hire an independent consultant, but the ones you need to hold accountable and rely on are the management.”

Guyana Goldfields’ mine had operated for around three years when the company decided to review it. Caldwell, who joined the board in 2012 and took over as CEO in May 2013, led the company the entire time and worked with the old model for years.

Still, he said Sheridan, who was executive chairman until July, “hindered” efforts to understand the mine site geology.

“It was one of the principle reasons that Mr. Sheridan was terminated,” said Caldwell.

Records indicate that the company had increased its mineral reserves through feasibility studies and updates to its life of mine plan, but it says it never drilled any new holes and thus never updated its underlying model. Asked about his own level of responsibility, Caldwell said he handled operations, not exploration, and had raised questions about the model but could not recall when.

Nonetheless, in October, after encountering problems at the mine and when Sheridan resigned as a director on the board, Guyana Goldfields announced an outside company would review what it now calls “the flawed original Sheridan Resource Model.”

Released in late March, the company said the new model applies a better understanding of the geology and the grades, as well other factors.

It reduced the estimated gold reserves by 27 per cent in tonnes, average grade (meaning the amount of gold per tonne) by eight per cent and ounces of gold by 43 per cent.

Graham Farquharson, president of the Strathcona Mineral Services Ltd. and a veteran geologist often credited with helping expose the Bre-X Minerals’ Indonesia project as a fraud in the late 1990s, said it’s not necessarily unusual for a resource model to change over time as a mine operates, but changes shouldn’t come as a surprise if a mine has been operating for years.

“One would have thought there would be indications during that period that the model needed updating,” he said.

Investors, of course, will have to decide whether to trust management on May 22 when they vote on whether to re-elect Caldwell and the board or choose Sheridan’s nominees — in which he is not included.

Investors may also look at other factors, including details about trades, related-party transactions and management of the company’s office in Guyana that came out this week in a management information circular.

In the document, filed on Sedar, the company accused Sheridan of violating its insider trading policy and selling Guyana Goldfields shares in June 2018 just before the poor second quarter production results were released and the stock dropped. It also accuses him of selling company assets to companies he owned or had invested in. Together, the company said the transactions earned him millions of dollars.

Sheridan said all his trades were approved, and that he did not know second quarter production would be affected. The related party transactions were also appropriately disclosed, and approved by independent committees, he said.

“I’m kind of surprised that’s all these guys can come up with,” Sheridan said.

• Email: gfriedman@nationalpost.com | Twitter: GabeFriedz

from Financial Post http://bit.ly/2GzFeTh via IFTTT Blogger Mortgage Tumblr Mortgage Evernote Mortgage Wordpress Mortgage href="https://www.diigo.com/user/gelsi11">Diigo Mortgage

[flauntpage]

The (Relatively) New Lineups We Can’t Wait to See

One of the great pleasures heading into every NBA season is generated by the new. From watching marquee free agents, draft picks, and trade acquisitions blend into an unfamiliar environment to closely observing how fixed cores will avoid an obsolete fate. Anticipation builds because change is constant, and nobody really knows what's going to happen until they take the floor.

Five-man lineups don't provide the clearest barometer, but they do help clarify how each team is choosing to adapt, whether their goal is to stay on top or climb the league's mountain. Here's a look at several different units that hold relevance heading into the 2018-19 season. Some are more obvious than others, but all of them deserve your attention.

Kyrie Irving, Jaylen Brown, Jayson Tatum, Gordon Hayward, Al Horford

They’ve looked rough in the preseason—the Indiana Pacers and Chicago Bulls were the only two teams with a worse offensive rating—but of all the iterations in Boston, this exact grouping was built to dominate today's NBA with a comfortable foothold in its future. At worst, this is Death Lineup karaoke, with Horford as an older, calmer, better shooting/less nimble version of Draymond Green, Irving’s offensive wizardry hoisting the entire franchise to a higher level, and three interchangeable stars (either in the making or cemented) on the wing.

They can switch just about everywhere on the defensive end (a quality that’s especially helpful when the game spurts into open-court chaos) with five players who can create their own shot against opposing teams that try and defend them the same way. Everyone can shoot. Everyone can pass. Everyone has either made an All-Star team or has the potential to do so for years to come. We only saw this unit play five minutes last season. This year, the Celtics will only go so far as it can take them.

Chris Paul, James Harden, Eric Gordon, P.J. Tucker, Clint Capela

Much has been made about Houston's ostensible stumble through a momentous offseason. The loss of Trevor Ariza and Luc Richard Mbah a Moute (two ideal complementary pieces), the addition of a teetering Carmelo Anthony, and associate head coach Jeff Bzdelik’s sudden retirement gave birth to a meditation on Houston’s staying power as a juggernaut. Most, if not all, of the discussion is little more than concern trolling.

At the end of the day, Houston will open the 2018-19 season with five of its most important players back from a 65-win team that could’ve/should’ve won it all. This particular group isn’t new, but it might as well be: Paul, Harden, Gordon, Tucker, and Capela have only registered 24 minutes. (In the 45 possessions they logged during the playoffs, Houston outscored its opponents by 15.6 points per 100 possessions.) The Rockets may blow this to bits with a mid-season blockbuster trade that includes one of these key contributors (likely Gordon and/or Tucker), but if they keep it together there won’t be a more effective or complementary collection of talent found in any one unit outside Golden State (and maybe Boston).

There are four back-breaking three-point shooters—two of whom double as first-ballot Hall of Famers and all-galaxy playmakers—surrounding a rim-rolling paint protector who gets notably better every year. In the final five minutes of a close game, how do you stifle this offense? Seriously. How do you attack a committed and disciplined defense that switches everything with above-average pieces at just about every position? Sure, they’re a little small—Ariza’s absence hurts most here—but all of them play larger and stronger than their height, thriving inside a system that emboldens them to behave like running lava.

Last season’s Rockets were one of the best teams to ever fall short of a title. In year two of the Paul-Harden era, they may be even better when it counts the most.

Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, Kevin Durant, Draymond Green, DeMarcus Cousins

Deep analysis isn’t required here. Given the stakes, relevance, and staggering aesthetics, anyone not interested in seeing how Boogie Cousins (however healthy) fits in with the most impressive foursome in NBA history might as well quit the NBA for good.

Victor Oladipo, Tyreke Evans, Bojan Bogdanovic, Domas Sabonis, Myles Turner

My first thought was to have Thaddeus Young in for Sabonis, not knowing if Nate McMillan could find someone for his third-year big to defend in the last five minutes of a close game. But Young isn’t a good enough outside shooter to tilt the scale in his favor, so Sabonis gets the nod for being a superior passer who can really squeeze a defense from the post. Good luck out-rebounding the Pacers when this group is on the floor. It’s unclear how many teams will be able to combat Indy’s sheer size on either end when this lineup is on the floor.

Beyond having two centers share the frontcourt, what's most intriguing here is the absence of any one "true" point guard. Instead, Oladipo and Evans will complement each another on both ends, toggling back and forth as capable playmakers who can finish at the rim, knock down a pull-up three, and run an effective pick-and-roll with either Sabonis or Turner.

Oladipo is the breakout star and franchise jewel, coming off a season in which he won Most Improved Player and made an All-Star, All-NBA, and All-Defensive team. But let’s back up and examine Evans for a second. What a variable. Take a look at how his numbers compared to Oladipo’s last season. According to Synergy Sports, Evans ranked in the 86th percentile as a pick-and-roll ball handler and the 83rd percentile in isolation, doing his best on a Grizzlies team that was headed nowhere. Life will be even easier in Indiana, especially in this unit, where he may be the third (or even fourth) option. It’s hard to find a better spot for Evans at this point in his career.

Elsewhere, last season Bogdanovic made over 40 percent of his threes and posted a 60.5 True Shooting percentage (both career highs), while Turner is already one of the league’s most intriguing young bigs, a shot-blocking madman who can roll or pop. Bogdanovic will likely regress, but if he can at worst remain static while three others (especially Oladipo) display some growth, this unit will be a nightmare.

Dennis Smith Jr., Wesley Matthews, Luka Doncic, Harrison Barnes, DeAndre Jordan

This obviously won’t be seen until Barnes returns from his hamstring injury, but it could be worth the wait. The Mavericks have Dirk Nowitzki, but elsewhere they are fledgling. Smith Jr. and Doncic are the future. Barnes, Jordan, and Matthews are each within a few seasons of their respective primes. Together, they possess a dynamism that’s been missing from every lineup Dallas has put on the floor in over a decade.

If Jordan gobbles everything from the glass, can stay healthy, and still suck help defenders off the three-point line on hard dives towards the rim, so many of Smith Jr. and Doncic’s growing pains will fall into a safety net. If Barnes, in a contract year, doesn’t hijack the offense and lets part of his game selflessly revert back to the space it occupied in Golden State (this is wishful thinking but not out of line within the context of this unit), Carlisle’s system can be more fluid. And through it all, if Matthews can (hopefully) hold it all together as a grizzled veteran with the team's lowest night-to-night variance, there's no reason why this lineup can't close tight games and post a positive point differential.

Some of this logic requires a leap of faith, for sure. And so much of it is inspired by Doncic’s preseason highlight reel. But even if they aren't great, you won't want to miss them.

Reggie Jackson, Luke Kennard, Stanley Johnson, Blake Griffin, Andre Drummond

There’s a certain amount of nostalgic charm attached to a lineup like this. It features a jaunty point guard who’s supported by a sniper at the two and covered by an athletic wing, with a robust, true-number-one-option at power forward beside a mountainous center tasked with anchoring the defense. On the surface it screams old school, and that's why there are so many reasons to hate it. These five players were all in Detroit last season, but played just about zero minutes at the same time (only four possessions, per Cleaning the Glass). Aside from poor health, the reason why is obvious: There’s not nearly enough spacing or anything close to a defined pecking order on the offensive end, while exploiting them on defense shouldn’t be too hard, given their inflexibility.

But Drummond added a new dimension to his game last year. Stan Van Gundy placed him higher on the floor and let him showcase a passing ability that boosted his assist rate up to 14 percent—more than the sum of his previous three years combined!). Meanwhile, Griffin is uniquely dominant when healthy. Nobody his size rivals his vision or ball-handling ability. It helps form a frontcourt tandem that may be able to do more than tread water when accompanied by the right pieces.

It’s unclear if Detroit has those pieces, but Johnson is still only 22 years old, with the girth and quickness to defend four positions in a pinch. Jackson is two years removed from life as a slightly above-average point guard, and Kennard is the one cast member who can loosen up the floor when he doesn't have the ball. I don’t necessarily think this group will exceed its modest expectations, but the ceiling is higher than people think, especially with Dwane Casey at head coach, able to coagulate a defense that’s already good but can stand to be better.

Rajon Rondo, Lonzo Ball, Josh Hart, Brandon Ingram, LeBron James

This is the exact opposite of the group seen above, with a degree of unconventionality that's both breathtaking and hardly a surprise to anyone who’s watched the NBA evolve over the past six years. I don’t know if it will be good, or if Luke Walton will even be willing to utilize Rondo and Ball at the same time—in tight space with no true center and only one recognizable spot-up threat—but please check your pulse if you're not curious to see how it'd do.

Why not experiment and see how far Einstein-level basketball IQ and absurd talent can take you? LeBron at the five isn’t a new concept, but as the league continues to downsize—a trend no other player is more responsible for—he’s positioned to take advantage in lineups that surround him with players who can see segments of the game develop before they actually do. They turn a defense's crack into a calamitous breach with next-level anticipation. Between LeBron, Rondo, and Ball, it's hard to think of another group that's ever unleashed so many innovative passers at the same time.

Hart and Ingram are here to enjoy it all, from beyond the arc and against awkward closeouts. Outside shooting is an issue throughout L.A.'s roster, but this group will invent ways to make it a non-issue—if they get a chance to play.

Kyle Lowry, Fred VanVleet, OG Anunoby, Kawhi Leonard, Pascal Siakam

As is the case for so many different teams, we don’t really know what Toronto’s best five is right now. But as NBA teams start to favor mischievous off-the-bounce slashers over 3-and-D statues, VanVleet has to be on the floor over Danny Green. A case can be made for Dorell Wright's wingspan in that spot, but Siakam, Lowry, Leonard, and Anunoby are more than enough to make this defense one of the league's best.

There's almost too much to like here. Leonard is at the four, with a mobile, 7'3" wingspan at center. Anunoby can't be left alone in the corner while Lowry and VanVleet wreak all sorts of havoc wherever they are. Picture an inverted pick-and-roll, with Leonard dribbling the ball as Lowry races up to blindside his man with a screen. How the hell do you guard that, with Siakam in the dunker's spot and deadly shooting along the perimeter? Few teams can. The Raptors are going to be so much fun.

The (Relatively) New Lineups We Can’t Wait to See published first on https://footballhighlightseurope.tumblr.com/

[zeroviraluniverse-blog]

The best projectors 2018: 10 projectors to consider for your home cinema

Visit Now - http://zeroviral.com/the-best-projectors-2018-10-projectors-to-consider-for-your-home-cinema/

The best projectors 2018: 10 projectors to consider for your home cinema

Best Projector Buying Guide: Welcome to TechRadar’s guide to the best home cinema projectors – featuring both 4K and HD models. 

If you want your home entertainment super-sized – and trust us, you do – you’re going to need a great projector. Whether you want to splash Blu-ray movies across a large white wall, magnify your gaming experience, or want to throw photographs or slides from a mobile device onto a 100-inch plus screen, a home cinema projector should be your first choice of display.

To help bring the big-screen home we’ve tested some of the top models of home cinema projector. They range from budget-oriented HD beamers right up to cinema-grade 4K Ultra HD models; the surprisingly affordable to reassuringly expensive. The days of fuzzy old school projectors are thankfully long gone.

With HD now ubiquitous, you can get great results from 1080p source material. And as more Ultra HD content becomes available from media streamers like the new Amazon Fire TV and the Nvidia Shield, as well as the upcoming Ultra HD Blu-ray revolution, the future’s looking great.

Looking for something a little more … affordable? Don’t miss our guide to the best projector deals that gets updated each and every month!

1. Sony VPL-VW300ES

“This 4K SXRD projector just refuses to put a foot wrong.”

Projection system: SXRD | Resolutions: 4096 x 2160 | Brightness: 1,500 lumens | Video inputs: 2x HDMI 2.0 (1x HDCP 2.2), 1x S-Video, 1x VGA | Dimensions: 496 x 195 x 464mm

Fast response times

Excellent upscaling

Very high price

Huge

For that proper cinematic feel it’s hard to beat a big screen projector, especially one that’s capable of filling a wall with 4K images.

First, there’s great colour and black levels, whatever the ambient light levels. Secondly, awesome Reality Creation tech that brings out Maximum detail from native 4K sources, Blu-ray and even DVD. Thirdly, the exemplary Bright Cinema and Cinema Film 1 & 2 presets and, finally, the hugely flexible optical zoom/lens shift options that make set-up a cinch.

If you’ve got the money, the space and the 4K source, the VPL-VW300ES is a shoe-in to become the centrepiece of your next home cinema.

Read the full review: Sony VPL-VW300ES

2. Optoma HD39Darbee Special Edition

“An all-round crowd-pleaser”

Projection system: DLP | Resolutions: 1920 x 1080 | Brightness: 3,500 lumens | Video inputs: 2x HDMI (1x MHL) | Dimensions: 314 x 224 x 114mm

Console-friendly low input lag

Razor-sharp DLP images

Black level is inevitably limited

Can be a bit noisy

Even in the company of excellent competition, the Optoma HD39Darbee is a high-value crowd-pleaser. It’s not always possible to satisfy movie fans and gamers, but this model scores more than it misses. It’s an effective gaming display, does a fine job with films and is bright enough to make your next sporting event a real social occasion.

That said, the Darbee technology can be a bit polarizing. In case you’re unfamiliar with it, Darbee processing applies variable picture enhancements to create a snappier image: It bumps brightness , adds extra edge emphasis for more detailed images and pumps up colors. It’s the equivalent of a sugar rush for your favorite films and TV shows.

We don’t mind admitting it leaves us a little conflicted. Sometimes we like it, other times we don’t, it rather depends what we’re watching. Cartoony games and anime all benefit from higher color saturation, dramas on Blu-ray less so.

Still, if you like eye candy, it’s definitely worth having on board.

Read the full review: Optoma HD39Darbee

3. BenQ W1070+

“Full HD images that impress even in ambient light make BenQ’s latest a bargain beamer for all seasons.”

Projection system: DLP | Resolutions: 1920 x 1080 | Brightness: 2,200 lumens | Video inputs: 2x HDMI (1x MHL), 1x RCA, 1x Component, 1x VGA | Dimensions: 312 x 104 x 244mm

Clean, detailed Full HD

Bright enough for daylight

Judder

Lacks convenient lens shift

There was a time when a decent home cinema-grade projection system would have cost well north of £1,000, and take-up a considerable amount of space too.

Edging ever closer to the plummeting price of a decent flatscreen TV, the BenQ W1070+ DLP projector offers enough brightness to be used in daylight as well as the all-important Full HD resolution.

If you’re wondering whether to take the plunge and make a projector your go-to display for films and games, the W1070+ is a certainly bold and bright enough – and easily one of the best value entry-level projectors around.

Read the full review: BenQ W1070+

4. Optoma UHD60

“Rewriting the 4K HDR projector rule book.”

Projection system: DLP | Resolutions: 4096 x 2160 | Brightness: 1,800 lumens | Video inputs: 2x HDMI | Dimensions: 495.6 x 195.3 x 463.6 mm

Incredible price for 4K

Sharp, bright pictures

Surprisingly effective HDR mode

Slightly high input lag

They may have taken their own sweet time getting here, but 4K projectors using DLP technology are finally starting to arrive. Colours, in particular, look much more vibrant and rich in saturation, immediately making the image look more solid, three dimensional and natural, as well as more flat-out beautiful. Plus, while it’s becoming easier almost daily to find native 4K content to feed the UHD60, if you do find yourself having to revert to HD Blu-ray on occasion again the UHD60’s got your back. Its HD to 4K upscaling, for starters, is pretty much exemplary, adding plenty of detail and crispness without excessively exaggerating noise or introducing overt colour errors. 

Read the full review: Optoma UHD60

5. LG PH450UG Minibeam Projector

“LG’s minibeam projector is a great way to bring big screen entertainment to smaller spaces.”

Projection system: DLP | Resolutions: 1280 x 720 | Brightness: 450 lumens | Video inputs: 1x HDMI (MHL) | Dimensions: 5.2 x 3.2 x 7.9 inches

Form factor is a winner

Runs cool and quiet

720p resolution

Limited motion resolution

If you want big screen home entertainment but don’t have the space, or funds for a large flatpanel TV or home cinema projector, then LG’s DLP LED Minibeam PH450UG Ultra Short Throw (UST) could be the answer. 

It needs only a dozen centimetres or so to cast a huge image onto a white wall or screen and, even better, it’s also ridiculously compact and relatively affordable at $650 (£529, around AU$864). 

There is a catch of course: The PH450UG has a resolution of just 720p. If you need more, LG has the PF1000U, a slightly larger 1080p UST model, that sells for $1,399 (£999). There are other projectors in this price range capable of 1080p – like the class-leading BenQ HT670 – but if you’re committed to the small form factor, the PH450UG is the way to go.

Read the full review: LG PH450UG Minibeam Projector

6. Epson EH-LS10000

“4K Enhancement, a mathematical fudge or remarkable innovation? Definitely the latter.”

Projection system: 3LCD laser | Resolutions: 1920 x 1080 | Brightness: 1,500 lumens | Video inputs: 1x HDMI 1.4, 1x HDMI 2.0 (HDCP 2.2), 1x Composite, 1x Component, 1x VGA | Dimensions: 550 x 225 x 553mm

Eye-popping colour

Convincing black levels

Huge physical size

High price tag

The Epson EH-LS10000 is an excellent home cinema projector. Blistering black levels, great colours, a huge amount of convenience features and some nifty frame interpolation help produce some of the most fluid, colourful and realistic Full HD images from any projector out there.

However, there’s no getting away from the fact that even with the awesome power of Epson’s 4K Enhancement feature – which really does work – the native 4K trickery of the Sony VPL-VW300ES, available for exactly the same price, means that the slightly less detailed Epson EH-LS10000 must take a back seat, at least for now.

Read the full review: Epson EH-LS10000

7. Optoma HD142X

Optoma’s HD142X from 2016 is a solid runner-up

Projection system: DLP | Resolutions: 1920 x 1080 | Brightness: 3,000 lumens | Video inputs: 1x HDMI 1.4a, 1x S-Video, 2x VGA, 1x Composite, 1x DVI-D | Dimensions: 386 x 162 x 280mm

Full 1080p image quality

23,000:1 contrast ratio

Only two HDMI ports

For those who think that home cinema is an occasional luxury that is just not affordable or practical, the ultra-affordable HD142X is serious food for thought. 

Despite its lean price tag, it has a full 1080p (1920 x 1080) resolution, 3,000 ANSI lumens of brightness, 23,000:1 high contrast ratio and built-in 10-watt speakers. It even supports 3D video to boot. 

Optoma says that the lamp life for the HD142X is somewhere in the ballpark of 8,000 hours – and claims that it would last around 10 years if you watched a two-hour movie every single day. Input-wise the HD141X offers 2 x HDMI (1.4a 3D support) + MHL v1.2, perfect for hooking up a PS4 or 3D Blu-ray player. 

Read the full review: Optoma HD142X

8. BenQ TH670

This is the best cheap projector we could find.

Projection system: DLP | Resolutions: 1920 x 1080 | Brightness: 2,000 lumens | Video inputs: Composite Video In x 1, Component Video In x 1, HDMI x 3 | Dimensions: 380.5 x 121.7 x 277 mm‎

1080p resolution

10-watt speaker

Not a ton of input lag

Contrast ratio could be better

We’re pretty big fans of the affordable BenQ TH670. It might not be the top of the line from the highly lauded projector manufacturer, but it strikes the perfect balance of price to performance to be worth an audition in your living room.

The TH670 has a Full 1080p (1920×1080) resolution, 3,000 ANSI lumens of brightness, 10,000:1 high contrast ratio and built-in speakers. Those speakers could be a hair bit more powerful, but for the price it’s hard to complain too much. The projector is capable of images spanning from 60 to 120 inches across and its lamp is rated for 4,000 – 10,000 hours depending on which modes you primarily use. Input-wise it offers Computer in (D-sub 15pin) x 2 (Share with component), Composite Video in (RCA) x 1 and HDMI. Win! 

9. Optoma HD27

“Midway though the Movie of the Week, you’ll struggle to remember that the HD27 is a cut-price beamer.”

Projection system: DLP | Resolutions: 1920 x 1080 | Brightness: 3,200 lumens | Video inputs: 2x HDMI (1x MHL) | Dimensions: 315 x 114 x 224mm

Excellent Full HD performance

Vibrant colour fidelity

Doesn’t do a deep black

Awful onboard audio system

Midway though the Movie of the Week, you’ll struggle to remember that the HD27 is a cut-price beamer – its images have genuine cinematic appeal. It’s also tremendous as a gaming display: Hook up a PS4 or Xbox One, find a big white wall large and giant screen theatrics can be yours. 

While you can get better performing projectors, you’ll pay significantly more and will probably struggle to match the convenient form factor. The HD27 may not represent the leading edge of tech, but it is at the cutting-edge of fun.

Read the full review: Optoma HD27

10. Acer H5380BD

“Bringing up the rear is Acer’s entry-level H5380BD”

Projection system: DLP | Resolutions: 1920 x 1080 | Brightness: 3,200 ANSI Lumens | Video inputs: 2x HDMI 1.4, 1x Composite, 1x RGB input, 1x Video out | Dimensions: 362 x 109 x 231mm

17,000:1 contrast ratio

3,000 lumens of brightness

1280 x 720 native resolution

2-watt speakers

At one time, Acer’s H5380BD was king of the world with its 1280 x 720 resolution and 2-watt speakers. But now there’s a new king in town rocking 10-watts of audio prowess and Full HD. That doesn’t mean you need to relegate Acer’s entry-level home theater projector to the dustbin, however, it’s still plenty capable for most folks looking for something cheap. 

The H5380BD has a 720p (1280 x 720) resolution and puts out 3,000 ANSI lumens of brightness. It has a 17,000:1 contrast ratio, and 2-watt speakers. That said, the projector is capable of images spanning from 300 inches across and its lamp is rated for 4,000 – 10,000 hours depending on which modes you primarily use. Input-wise it offers HDMI, Composite Video, S-Video and two VGA ports.

[latriceduke]

Ranking the best weight loss programs of 2017

Weight loss programs can be useful systems to help people stick to a healthy diet routine.

Having a system you can follow that gives you guidelines for diet, exercise, or both is incredibly helpful when it comes to shedding excess body fat, and the right weight loss program will help improve your fitness and overall health as well.

With weight loss being such a hot topic, there’s an almost unlimited number of weight loss programs to choose from, but only some of them are worth your time. Here are the ten best weight loss programs you can join.

1. Jenny Craig

Among commercial weight loss plans reviewed by independent scientists, Jenny Craig is the top performer. Compared to a standard nutrition counseling program (the “control group” for weight loss studies), people who do Jenny Craig lose 4.9% more weight.

Part of the reason for this advantage is probably the personal consultant you talk to weekly to make sure you’re staying on target to meet your goals.

2. Mayo Clinic Diet

The Mayo Clinic diet comes backed with the support of one of the top medical centers in the world. The diet program, based on the book of the same name, is centered around eating lots of fruit and vegetables, combined with whole grains.

There’s a two-week intensive start to the plan, which helps you lose up to six to ten pounds, then you’ll lose about a pound or two per week until you’ve reached your target weight.

3. Weight Watchers

You’d think an old standby like Weight Watchers would be behind the times, but the research shows it is actually pretty competitive. With weight loss rates of 2.6% better than a typical nutrition and activity program, the points-based system the plan uses doesn’t make any foods off-limits.

This makes it easy to follow, but if you have health issues like metabolic syndrome, you might need a different plan that cuts back on sugars and refined carbs.

4. HRM Program

If you want to lose a lot of weight fast, the HRM program is the way to go. It’s a pretty restrictive diet, which has benefits and drawbacks.

The upside is that you can lose over 4% more weight in a short period of time on this plan, but not everyone is able to stick with it in the long run–it performs worse when studies look at the long-term results.

5. Atkins Diet

The Atkins Diet was one of the original low-carb diets to gain popularity. According to independent scientific research, studies vary on its efficacy: depending on which one you look at, the benefits range from a meager 0.1 to a respectable 2.9% improvement in weight lost compared to standard nutritional counseling.

One drawback, according to a meta-analysis of weight loss programs, is an increased rate of constipation among Atkins Diet adherents (1).

6. South Beach Diet

The South Beach Diet has been around for almost 15 years, but evidence for its efficacy is still missing. There have been a few studies on the South Beach Diet, but they were all poor-quality, so it’s difficult to assess the strength of the program. The approach of avoiding sugars and refined carbohydrates, and favoring whole grains and fibers, is a solid one, though.

7. Zone Diet

The Zone Diet takes a low-carb approach to weight loss and combines this approach with a frequent-eating strategy to keep the body feeling full and prevent food cravings.

One study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that it outperformed the Atkins Diet and Weight Watchers over the course of a year, but other research on its efficacy is lacking (2).

8. Flat Belly Diet

Despite its fad-diet name, the Flat Belly Diet takes a very sound nutritional approach. It’s based off a mediterranean diet pattern, involving healthy fats, lots of fruits and vegetables, and almost no red meat.

What’s less clear is whether it’s effective at keeping people to stick to the program. There isn’t any good data on how effective it actually is.

9. Nutrisystem

Nutrisystem focuses on small portions and frequent meals to make its weight loss program work. Like other non-restrictive weight loss programs, its main weakness is that it may not help you address metabolic issues related to overconsumption of sugars and refined carbohydrates–it’s very possible to be skinny and metabolically unhealthy.

10. Whole30 Diet

The Whole30 diet is paleo on steroids.  It recommends eliminating sugar, grains, legumes, dairy, soy, and alcohol completely from your diet for a month.

This will almost certainly be effective, since it will force you to eat pretty much only meat, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and eggs. The real question is whether you can maintain such an aggressive diet indefinitely. Adherence to this program is low, which is why it ends up at the bottom of the rankings.

Weight loss program benefits and side effects

Weight loss programs can help jump-start people to change their diet. Obesity rates are growing at a tremendous rate, and the health problems that are associated with it are increasing as well. The scientific literature makes one thing very clear: most people are unsuccessful when it comes to weight loss.

A group of experts commissioned by the National Health Institutes in 2015 described the dismal state of self-directed weight loss (3). Most often, weight lost during a diet is regained within six to nine months after the program finishes. People tend to revert back to their initial habits, and regain all the weight they lost.

Benefits

A better solution than a haphazard self-directed diet and exercise program is a regimented program that provides guidelines on how to enforce a more systematic change in your lifestyle and break the old habits that led you to become overweight in the first place. This is where weight loss programs come in.

A systematic review of commercial weight loss programs published in 2016 in the Annals of Internal Medicine by researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine described the potential benefits of weight loss programs (4).

According to the authors, a wide range of studies support the efficacy of commercial weight loss intervention programs, though the programs vary in their short and long-term success.

Two key variables to look at with a weight loss program are the initial weight lost and the long-term results one to two years after the program starts.

Initial weight loss is primarily a function of the amount of caloric restriction that a program imposes, so an intensive program like HRM Program or Optifast, both of which involve fairly strong caloric intake restriction, can produce substantial weight losses in the short term.  

The benefits can be up to 4% greater weight loss when compared to a standard nutritional counseling program. The question with these is whether you can sustain the results long-term.

Unfortunately, many weight loss programs don’t have the necessary long-term follow-up studies yet to definitively prove their efficacy, but research is ongoing.

As an example, commercial programs like weight watchers and Jenny Craig result in losses from 2.6 (Weight Watchers) to 4.9% (Jenny Craig) greater than standard counseling, which functions as the “control group” in the studies that examine the efficacy of weight loss programs.

Long-term weight loss appears to be more of a function of lifestyle choices than specific food choices. One study on people in the National Weight Control Registry, a large group of people who have lost significant amounts of weight and kept it off for at least five years, found that key weight maintenance behaviors include a consistent diet pattern, not skipping breakfast, and exercising at least an hour per day (5).

All of these are additional reasons to follow a weight loss program consistently versus trying to “wing it,” only to revert back to your usual habits later.

Regardless of how it happens, the direct benefits of weight loss are numerous. Even relatively modest amounts of weight loss can result in positive health benefits. According to a review study by D.J. Goldstein at Indiana University School of Medicine, even if you only lose less than 10% of your body weight, you can see a substantial improvement in markers associated with chronic disease (6).

Goldstein’s study examined several weight-loss studies on obese individuals, and found that modest amounts of weight loss were able to improve blood sugar control, lower cholesterol, and lower blood pressure.

These blood markers are all risk factors for cardiovascular disease and type two diabetes, which are each responsible for a huge number of deaths every year.

Among studies that directly measured longevity (i.e. life expectancy), modest weight losses resulted in a significant increase in longevity when comparing people who lost a modest amount of weight to people who did not lose weight. This lends further support for the theory that even a little bit of lost weight can go a long ways towards improving your health.

Weight loss even appears to be more effective than exercise when it comes to improving your health, at least among people who are already overweight.

One study published in 1995 compared an aerobic exercise program to a weight loss program in overweight men at risk for cardiovascular disease. The men who lost weight had a greater improvement in their risk factors for cardiovascular disease (such as their cholesterol levels and blood sugar levels) than the aerobic exercise group (7).

This should underscore the importance of sticking to a weight loss program.  If you’ve put on some pounds, you can’t just exercise your way to better health.  You need to lose the weight, too.

Side Effects

One advantage of a commercial weight loss program is that you mitigate your risk of side effects when compared with a diet cobbled together yourself.  There’s a lot that can go wrong in a diet; if you restrict your food intake too severely, you’ll be missing out on vital micronutrients or your macronutrient balance can get thrown off.  In contrast, if you are too lax, you won’t end up losing much weight.

When you restrict your caloric intake, or cut out specific food groups, you do run the risk of having nutritional deficiencies, especially when it comes to micronutrients. Cutting out fatty foods, for example, could have the inadvertent effect of causing your omega-3 fatty acid intake to plummet, which could increase your long-term risk for cardiovascular disease (8).

More acute nutritional deficiencies can be a problem as well. Considerable wisdom can be gained in this regard from extreme cases–patients who have had gastric bypass surgery and lost large amounts of weight as a result of their substantial decrease in caloric intake.

According to a medical report by Dr. Jacqueline Alvarez-Leite, nutritional deficiencies in iron, calcium, vitamin D, and vitamin B12 are all commonly encountered in bariatric surgery patients, and the deficiency is often proportional to the amount of weight lost (9).

Because these deficiencies are due in part to lower food intake, it’s logical to infer that a restrictive weight loss program might present similar risks.

Fortunately, reputable weight loss programs have nutritionists on staff to ensure that the diets that they recomend contain the necessary micronutrients you need.

Nevertheless, it’s still something you should keep in mind. A daily multivitamin, or a targeted supplementation plan that includes these nutrients, should be sufficient to combat this problem.

Recap

If you want the best possible shot to lose weight and improve your health, you should choose a well-regarded weight loss program and stick to it.

Following a regimented program will help you lose more weight, maintain your weight loss, and avoid any short-term or long-term adverse effects from suboptimal nutritional intake, like increased risks for chronic disease or nutritional deficiencies.

Different programs have different strengths: depending on whether you want rapid and effective weight loss or a more patient approach that has a better chance of maintaining its effects a year or two down the road, you might find a different “best” program for you.

Regardless of what you choose, the most important point is to stick with it to the best of your ability. This is the best way to ensure your weight doesn’t creep back up.

https://bodynutrition.org/weight-loss-programs/ http://bodynutritionorg.blogspot.com/2017/10/ranking-best-weight-loss-programs-of.html

[omcik-blog]

New Post has been published on OmCik

New Post has been published on http://omcik.com/americans-are-dying-younger-saving-corporations-billions/

Americans Are Dying Younger, Saving Corporations Billions

(Image: Thinkstock)

Steady improvements in American life expectancy have stalled, and more Americans are dying at younger ages. But for companies straining under the burden of their pension obligations, the distressing trend could have a grim upside: If people don’t end up living as long as they were projected to just a few years ago, their employers ultimately won’t have to pay them as much in pension and other lifelong retirement benefits.

(Related: Budget Surgeons Might Harvest Your Clients’ Lifespan)

In 2015, the American death rate—the age-adjusted share of Americans dying—rose slightly for the first time since 1999. And over the last two years, at least 12 large companies, from Verizon to General Motors, have said recent slips in mortality improvement have led them to reduce their estimates for how much they could owe retirees by upward of a combined $9.7 billion, according to a Bloomberg analysis of company filings. “Revised assumptions indicating a shortened longevity,” for instance, led Lockheed Martin to adjust its estimated retirement obligations downward by a total of about $1.6 billion for 2015 and 2016, it said in its most recent annual report.

Mortality trends are only a small piece of the calculation companies make when estimating what they’ll owe retirees, and indeed, other factors actually led Lockheed’s pension obligations to rise last year. Variables such as asset returns, salary levels, and health care costs can cause big swings in what companies expect to pay retirees. The fact that people are dying slightly younger won’t cure corporate America’s pension woes—but the fact that companies are taking it into account shows just how serious the shift in America’s mortality trends is.

It’s not just corporate pensions, either; the shift also affects Social Security, the government’s program for retirees. The most recent data available “show continued mortality reductions that are generally smaller than those projected,” according to a July report from the program’s chief actuary. Longevity gains fell short of what was projected in last year’s report, leading to a slight improvement in the program’s financial outlook.

“Historically, mortality rates annually have tended to come down year-over-year,” says R. Dale Hall, managing director of research at the Society of Actuaries. The professional association compiles mortality data that many private pension plans use in their projections. “There really has been a little bit of slowdown in mortality improvement in the United States,” Hall says.

Absent a war or an epidemic, it’s unusual and alarming for life expectancies in developed countries to stop improving, let alone to worsen. “Mortality is sort of the tip of the iceberg,” says Laudan Aron, a demographer and senior fellow at the Urban Institute. “It really is a reflection of a lot of underlying conditions of life.” The falling trajectory of American life expectancies, especially when compared to those in some other wealthy countries, should be “as urgent a national issue as any other that’s on our national agenda,” she says.

Actuaries use two main factors to project death rates into the future: They start with current mortality levels—the percentages of people who die at a given age—and then make predictions about how those percentages might change with developments such as new medical treatments or changes to smoking or obesity rates. For instance, the widespread prescribing of cholesterol-lowering statins in the 1990s was “a huge driver of mortality improvement,” says Eric Keener, senior partner and chief actuary at Aon’s U.S. retirement practice. If medical science produces new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease or cancer, they could have similar effects.

Death rates for Americans over the age of 50 have improved, on average, by 1% each year since 1950, according to an analysis by the Society of Actuaries, though there’s a lot of variation in any given year. From 2000 to 2009, that long-term trend seemed to be accelerating, with annual improvements of 1.5 to 2%—but then those gains stalled. From 2010 to 2014, death rates were only improving by about half a% per year.

In 1970, a 65-year-old American could expect to live another 15.2 years on average, until just past their 80th birthday. By 2010, a 65-year-old could expect to live to 84.

But the increases have slowed down since then. Life expectancy at 65 rose by just about four months between 2010 and 2015—half the improvement recorded between 2005 and 2010.

In 2014, the Society of Actuaries updated its baseline mortality tables for the first time since 2000 to reflect significant gains in life expectancies seen through 2008—a major revision that predicted future improvements based partly on that trend. That led many companies, expecting their retired employees to live longer and longer, to revise their estimates of pension obligations upward.

But as it turned out, those assumptions were too optimistic about how fast death rates would keep improving. Updates in the last two years, based on more recent mortality data, have pulled down companies’ estimates of what they’ll owe future retirees. The 2016 update would lower pension obligations by about 1.5% to 2%, all else being equal, according to the Society of Actuaries report. (The group draws on data from the Social Security Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.)

And because accurate death records take a long time for the government to compile, the revised estimates published in 2016 incorporated mortality data only through 2014. The picture for 2015 looks bleaker still: The overall U.S. death rate increased that year, the CDC has since reported.

It’s still unclear exactly how Americans’ waning life-expectancy gains will mean for public-sector pension obligations, but the effect will likely be similar. The Society of Actuaries’ tables are designed for private-sector retirement plans; the group is still working on an update for public-employee pensions.

There’s no simple answer for why longevity gains are slowing. For years, economists and public health experts have been trying to ascertain what’s behind America’s troubling death trends, among them a rise in death rates for certain demographic groups. A much-discussed 2015 paper suggested that mortality was rising for middle-aged white Americans, citing suicides, drug overdoses, and alcohol, collectively sometimes referred to as “deaths of despair.” Women have been particularly affected.

While overall mortality rates are influenced by deaths from infancy to old age, pension payouts primarily reflect how long people survive after retirement. But looking just at people over 65, the death rate worsened in 2015 for that group as well, according to a July report published by the Society of Actuaries. That was the first reversal for retirement-age Americans since 1999.

“That’s actually rather remarkable,” says Keener, the Aon actuary. “Even in the previous years, you’ve seen a slower degree of improvement for the pensioners, but you haven’t seen a decline in life expectancy.”

The broader trend isn’t unique to the U.S. A July publication from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries in the United Kingdom found that the U.S., Canada, and Britain have all experienced similarly slowing gains since 2011. That report suggested the combination of the recession and cuts to social safety-net programs may have played a role. “These signs should be taken as warnings that worsened health care, behaviour and environment can reverse decades of success in health and longevity,” wrote Joseph Lu, chair of the Institute’s mortality research committee.

Changes to life expectancy in the U.K. could cut 310 billion pounds from British private-sector pension obligations, or 15% of the total liability, PwC estimated in May, although other actuaries have called that figure “relatively extreme.”

The question actuaries can’t yet answer is whether the slowdown is a short-term blip or a more permanent shift. If mortality improved by 1% a year for most of the past 70 years, might the U.S. revert to that soon? Or, Keener asks, “is this really a new reality that we’re living in?”

— Read Americans Are Dying Faster (Millennials, Too) on ThinkAdvisor

[lyncnews]

Sonus announced the SWe Lite at Ignite in the US late last year and we’ve been anxiously awaiting its arrival. Well, IT’S HERE!

The SWe Lite is the “Software Edition” of Sonus’ well-established Enterprise-grade Session Border Controllers, the SBC 1000 and SBC 2000.

I’m particularly impressed with the look and feel. At a quick glance it’s indistinguishable from a 1k or 2k:

The GA build supports up to 100 SIP calls, 25 transcoded or encrypted sessions and a call setup rate of 10 calls per second. It’s a faithful port of the SBC we’re familiar with, so includes the bulk of the features we’ve come to rely on for years including the powerful AD integration & the invaluable real-time channel monitor (shown above).

Notably absent is inbuilt Music On Hold, although we’re assured that’s coming soon. Check out the datasheet or the page “Functional Differences Between SBC Edge and SBC SWe Lite” for more of the engineering and feature specifics.

Sonus is letting an “unlicenced” SWe Lite carry up to 5 ordinary SIP calls or 3 encrypted/transcoded calls – more on that below. In the screen-grab above I’ve established 3 calls successfully over TLS to Skype for Business and a failed fourth call attempt is what generated the “Failed to acquire licence” you can see in the Alarm View.

Installation

I found my installation deviated from the online Installation Guide for Hyper-V, so I thought I’d document the process I followed with the GA build in my Lab. Here it’s going onto my Dell R720xd running Hyper-V Server 2012 R2.

Keen readers may note that some of the time-stamps in the attached jump around a little. The steps below were captured over almost a week of testing and plenty of different builds of VM in order to document all the options – and an annoying do-over where I was bitten by the requirement to separate Admin and Media NICs (see Notes below) & fluffed the swapover.

Login to the Partner portal and raise a request to download the SWe Lite, which ships as a pre-packaged virtual machine. In my case I downloaded “SWeLite-Hyper-V-release.6.1.0.build87”.

Copy this to your Hyper-V host.

Unzip it to a utility folder. We’ll be importing this machine and copying it to a new location as part of that process, so it doesn’t particularly matter where you place it in this step.

Browse to the Install folder therein and unzip the “SBCSWeLite-HyperV.zip” file. I unzipped it to the same folder. If you have any experience with Hyper-V, this structure will look familiar:

From here you have two choices to import the VM: if you’re old-skool, continue with the next step, but if you’d prefer to P$ this up a little, jump to step 15.

Launch Hyper-V Manager and select Import Virtual Machine.

Navigate to the “Virtual Machines” folder from Step 4 and click Next:

Next:

Select “Copy the virtual machine (create a new unique ID)” and click Next:

Accept the default or select “Store the machine in a different location” and nominate your preferred locations. All mine live in their own folders under E:Hyper-V

Here I’ve chosen to place the VHD in the same location as the above:

If you’re happy with all the settings, click Finish:

The import will take place and the wizard will close:

Jump to Step 16.

If you want to import the machine using PowerShell, I did it in 2 commands to save some typing. I centralise each Virtual Machine, its snapshots and VHDs all in the same folder, and to save specifying the same thing 4 times, I used a variable. Note that the poorly-named “-path” value needs to include the XML file as well – not just the path to it. Auto-complete is your friend there – tab your way to the file:

PS D:> $NewVMPath = "e:Hyper-VSWELite-GA" PS D:> Import-Vm -path "D:SWeLite-Hyper-V-release.6.1.0.build87InstallSBCSWeLite-hypervVirtual Machines56CE3CC2-D8B5-4673-9857 -BCAB33E4F6AD.XML" -Copy -GenerateNewId -VhdDestinationPath $NewVMPath -VirtualMachinePath $NewVMPath -SnapshotFilePath $NewVMPath -SmartPagingFilePath $NewVMPath -verbose

Back at the Hyper-V Manager you’ll find a new VM called “SBCSWeLite”. I’ve already re-named it to add a “GA” suffix:

Right-click the VM & select Settings. You’ll see it defaults to 1CPU and 1G RAM:

The Sonus install guide requires you to set static MAC addresses for all the NICs. I suspect this is for licencing reasons, and as it’s not relevant for me in my Lab, I’m going to break from the guidelines and stick with the Dynamic ones assigned by Hyper-V. If you’re going to be running this SBC in Production, please change all these NICs to Static MAC addresses. If you possess System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SC-VMM), it will let you create and manage a pool of static MAC addresses.

The first of the 5 NICs is dedicated to Admin, and the rest are reserved for Media. In the Lab I’m going to Administer it via my DMZ, and keep all my Media on the Internal network, while the final three I’ll leave “not connected”:

(I realise my NIC config here is a little “unconventional”, but sadly the SWeLite doesn’t support Admin and Media on the same network, and I only have two networks in my Hyper-V server).

Click OK to return to the Virtual Machines view.

Double-click the machine’s name to launch a console window, then the click the aqua-coloured start button (or Action / Start if you prefer). Press return to Boot to “Partition1”, or just wait for it to timeout and boot automatically:

In my Lab the SBC doesn’t like my DHCP servers, so at this step it fails to get an IP address for the Admin NIC. If you’re similarly-afflicted, you WON’T see an Admin IP as highlighted here:

If you DON’T see an IP address here, skip to Step 24.

If you *do* receive an Admin IP address above you might be tempted to jump to the browser and start configuring it, but I recommend against it. Here’s why: if you do browse to the UI you’ll hit the Initial SBC Setup wizard, as familiar users will be expecting, and this new warning message:

“It is recommended to login to the shell as ‘netconfig’ user to map the network interfaces before initial setup”.

As you’ve not yet mapped the application’s network interfaces back to the ‘virtual hardware’ layer, the SBC shows you all 5 NICs it’s capable of running. In my Lab I only want to use one for Admin and one for Media, so I want to suppress the other three.

Skip to step 25.

No IP? Welcome to the club. I guess yours might look like mine, where it comes to a halt at “System Health Monitor: spawned daemon with PID…”:

Press return in the virtual machine window to be prompted to login:

The login is “netconfig” and “Config!”.

Set a new password for “netconfig” as prompted, then configure the Admin IP address (if you didn’t get one from DHCP or want to change what you were offered):

Respond “Y” when asked to configure interface mapping and then respond to the each of the prompts by typing in the interface names from the ever-shrinking list of options. In this screen-grab I set “mgt0” as my Admin NIC and “pkt0” as my sole NIC for media, <Return> past the others and then finish with “y” to apply the changes:

Done! Now you can sign in from the browser and continue the config from the Initial Setup Wizard:

Note the “IP Address” section now only shows 2 NICs, compared to the 5 in the image back in Step 23.

(I like how the SBC nowadays highlights changed values with a blue border around the element).

Click OK to submit the changes and login to your new SWe Lite!

TADA!

You’re not done here yet though. Whilst the SWe Lite *is* going to include free SIP and transcoding licences, they’re not there automatically. If you’ve been around the SBC (pka “UX”) family for a while you might recollect they have “Base” and “Features” licences. The requirement for a free-standing Base licence was removed back in 4.1.1 days on the 1k & 2k platforms, however the SWe Lite has reverted (at least at GA) to needing both licence types loaded. What you’re seeing here is an SBC devoid of any licencing at all:

“This SWe Lite Instance is currently not licensed.”

For the time being the licencing process is a manual one, although that’s expected to change. Capture the “SWe Lite ID” from the System / Overview screen and send it to your local Sonus distributor or support contact:

You’ll receive a “Base” licence as a semi-legible XML file (rather than the previous blob of characters), but you still paste it into the same place in the UI:

Click Decode and Apply. Don’t be freaked that the licence appears to leave everything disabled – you’re confusing the difference between the Base Licence and a Features Licence, and the “free” calls licences that come in the Base aren’t visible here:

When you return to the “Current Licenses” view it’s better (when compared to Step 32) but still may concern you. Don’t – you now have a Base licence and several previously absent options have now materialised in the UI. You’ll also now be able to make calls through the SBC:

From here the configuration process is no different from a physical SBC. Config shortcuts include the ability to import a partial config – limited to another SWeLite at the moment – and the various Easy Setup Wizards.

Notes

I absolutely LOVE that the free version of the SBC includes SIP, registration and transcoding in the Base licence. I see the SWe Lite going into Labs, and pre-Prod test environments everywhere.

Kudos also to Sonus for not restricting the SWe Lite by mandating Hosts with specific advanced hardware or boutique configurations that might be mutually-exclusive with other Virtuals.

1G RAM and 1 CPU core for 25 encrypted calls is a great starting position. It will be interesting to see how this scales as the product matures.

Don’t let the limit of 25 transcoded/encrypted calls at GA discourage you from going into production – that’s its low-ball starting position from which it is absolutely going to grow. Have a word to Sonus and run two SWe Lite (or more?) instances on the same host to double the call-carrying capacity until the unit’s stand-alone throughput meets your requirements. (I acknowledge that this might not be compatible with some carriers’ SIP offerings).

The “Easy Config Wizard” won’t show in Tasks / Easy Config Wizard without a Base licence, so if you only see Certificates there, check you didn’t skip the Licencing steps above:

It’s not yet possible to import a .tar file from an SBC1k or 2k to the SWe Lite, so the migration process from physical to virtual will still involve some re-typing. I’ve tested and confirmed you can import Transformation Tables & SIP Message Rules from the other platforms, and I expect the same will apply to Passthrough Auth imports:

As you would expect of a virtual device like this, it’s able to log internally and also save packet captures locally (like the 2k).

The Admin NIC can’t be on the same network as any of its media NICs, and you’ll receive an error if you try to change them. I’d really like to see this resolved as it’s a major break from convention with its stablemates:

The backup file format is essentially the same as for the 1k & 2k, so the current version of my “Convert-SonusSbcConfigToWord.ps1” script (v6.1A at the time of writing) will still create a DOCX or PDF of the config in an easy-to-view format. I’ll get working on some minor tweaks and customisations for the SWe Lite next…

Summary

I think Sonus has done a fantastic job porting the 1k & 2k devices to a virtual platform, reinvigorating its highly-regarded SBC for centralised Data Centre deployments where rack-space is either not an option or prohibitively expensive.

I’m comforted that the GA build is significantly improved over the Alpha & Beta versions I was able to trial, and I expect Sonus will capitalise on its follow-the-sun global TAC operation to minimise the impact on customers of any issues that arise.

At Generation-e we have customers queuing up to get the SWe Lite in production, so keep an eye out here or on Twitter for any tips and traps we encounter along the way.

I’ve not seen (or asked about) pricing so I can’t comment on how the SWe Lite sits compared to its stablemates or the competition.

References

Check out Luca’s “Sonus SWe Lite Step-by-Step Setup” for VMware

Static MAC addresses: KB2804678–Cannot Exceed 256 Dynamic MAC Addresses By Default On Hyper-V Host

Credits

Thanks to Anup @ Sonus in Sydney for his help with my testing and Lab build, and to the rest of the Sonus team for envisaging and delivering on a much-sought-after addition to the product family.

Revision History

13th March 2017. This is the initial post. 13th March 2017. Added Luca’s review to References.

  – G.

[flauntpage]

The (Relatively) New Lineups We Can’t Wait to See

One of the great pleasures heading into every NBA season is generated by the new. From watching marquee free agents, draft picks, and trade acquisitions blend into an unfamiliar environment to closely observing how fixed cores will avoid an obsolete fate. Anticipation builds because change is constant, and nobody really knows what's going to happen until they take the floor.

Five-man lineups don't provide the clearest barometer, but they do help clarify how each team is choosing to adapt, whether their goal is to stay on top or climb the league's mountain. Here's a look at several different units that hold relevance heading into the 2018-19 season. Some are more obvious than others, but all of them deserve your attention.

Kyrie Irving, Jaylen Brown, Jayson Tatum, Gordon Hayward, Al Horford

They’ve looked rough in the preseason—the Indiana Pacers and Chicago Bulls were the only two teams with a worse offensive rating—but of all the iterations in Boston, this exact grouping was built to dominate today's NBA with a comfortable foothold in its future. At worst, this is Death Lineup karaoke, with Horford as an older, calmer, better shooting/less nimble version of Draymond Green, Irving’s offensive wizardry hoisting the entire franchise to a higher level, and three interchangeable stars (either in the making or cemented) on the wing.

They can switch just about everywhere on the defensive end (a quality that’s especially helpful when the game spurts into open-court chaos) with five players who can create their own shot against opposing teams that try and defend them the same way. Everyone can shoot. Everyone can pass. Everyone has either made an All-Star team or has the potential to do so for years to come. We only saw this unit play five minutes last season. This year, the Celtics will only go so far as it can take them.

Chris Paul, James Harden, Eric Gordon, P.J. Tucker, Clint Capela

Much has been made about Houston's ostensible stumble through a momentous offseason. The loss of Trevor Ariza and Luc Richard Mbah a Moute (two ideal complementary pieces), the addition of a teetering Carmelo Anthony, and associate head coach Jeff Bzdelik’s sudden retirement gave birth to a meditation on Houston’s staying power as a juggernaut. Most, if not all, of the discussion is little more than concern trolling.

At the end of the day, Houston will open the 2018-19 season with five of its most important players back from a 65-win team that could’ve/should’ve won it all. This particular group isn’t new, but it might as well be: Paul, Harden, Gordon, Tucker, and Capela have only registered 24 minutes. (In the 45 possessions they logged during the playoffs, Houston outscored its opponents by 15.6 points per 100 possessions.) The Rockets may blow this to bits with a mid-season blockbuster trade that includes one of these key contributors (likely Gordon and/or Tucker), but if they keep it together there won’t be a more effective or complementary collection of talent found in any one unit outside Golden State (and maybe Boston).

There are four back-breaking three-point shooters—two of whom double as first-ballot Hall of Famers and all-galaxy playmakers—surrounding a rim-rolling paint protector who gets notably better every year. In the final five minutes of a close game, how do you stifle this offense? Seriously. How do you attack a committed and disciplined defense that switches everything with above-average pieces at just about every position? Sure, they’re a little small—Ariza’s absence hurts most here—but all of them play larger and stronger than their height, thriving inside a system that emboldens them to behave like running lava.

Last season’s Rockets were one of the best teams to ever fall short of a title. In year two of the Paul-Harden era, they may be even better when it counts the most.

Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, Kevin Durant, Draymond Green, DeMarcus Cousins

Deep analysis isn’t required here. Given the stakes, relevance, and staggering aesthetics, anyone not interested in seeing how Boogie Cousins (however healthy) fits in with the most impressive foursome in NBA history might as well quit the NBA for good.

Victor Oladipo, Tyreke Evans, Bojan Bogdanovic, Domas Sabonis, Myles Turner

My first thought was to have Thaddeus Young in for Sabonis, not knowing if Nate McMillan could find someone for his third-year big to defend in the last five minutes of a close game. But Young isn’t a good enough outside shooter to tilt the scale in his favor, so Sabonis gets the nod for being a superior passer who can really squeeze a defense from the post. Good luck out-rebounding the Pacers when this group is on the floor. It’s unclear how many teams will be able to combat Indy’s sheer size on either end when this lineup is on the floor.

Beyond having two centers share the frontcourt, what's most intriguing here is the absence of any one "true" point guard. Instead, Oladipo and Evans will complement each another on both ends, toggling back and forth as capable playmakers who can finish at the rim, knock down a pull-up three, and run an effective pick-and-roll with either Sabonis or Turner.

Oladipo is the breakout star and franchise jewel, coming off a season in which he won Most Improved Player and made an All-Star, All-NBA, and All-Defensive team. But let’s back up and examine Evans for a second. What a variable. Take a look at how his numbers compared to Oladipo’s last season. According to Synergy Sports, Evans ranked in the 86th percentile as a pick-and-roll ball handler and the 83rd percentile in isolation, doing his best on a Grizzlies team that was headed nowhere. Life will be even easier in Indiana, especially in this unit, where he may be the third (or even fourth) option. It’s hard to find a better spot for Evans at this point in his career.

Elsewhere, last season Bogdanovic made over 40 percent of his threes and posted a 60.5 True Shooting percentage (both career highs), while Turner is already one of the league’s most intriguing young bigs, a shot-blocking madman who can roll or pop. Bogdanovic will likely regress, but if he can at worst remain static while three others (especially Oladipo) display some growth, this unit will be a nightmare.

Dennis Smith Jr., Wesley Matthews, Luka Doncic, Harrison Barnes, DeAndre Jordan

This obviously won’t be seen until Barnes returns from his hamstring injury, but it could be worth the wait. The Mavericks have Dirk Nowitzki, but elsewhere they are fledgling. Smith Jr. and Doncic are the future. Barnes, Jordan, and Matthews are each within a few seasons of their respective primes. Together, they possess a dynamism that’s been missing from every lineup Dallas has put on the floor in over a decade.

If Jordan gobbles everything from the glass, can stay healthy, and still suck help defenders off the three-point line on hard dives towards the rim, so many of Smith Jr. and Doncic’s growing pains will fall into a safety net. If Barnes, in a contract year, doesn’t hijack the offense and lets part of his game selflessly revert back to the space it occupied in Golden State (this is wishful thinking but not out of line within the context of this unit), Carlisle’s system can be more fluid. And through it all, if Matthews can (hopefully) hold it all together as a grizzled veteran with the team's lowest night-to-night variance, there's no reason why this lineup can't close tight games and post a positive point differential.

Some of this logic requires a leap of faith, for sure. And so much of it is inspired by Doncic’s preseason highlight reel. But even if they aren't great, you won't want to miss them.

Reggie Jackson, Luke Kennard, Stanley Johnson, Blake Griffin, Andre Drummond

There’s a certain amount of nostalgic charm attached to a lineup like this. It features a jaunty point guard who’s supported by a sniper at the two and covered by an athletic wing, with a robust, true-number-one-option at power forward beside a mountainous center tasked with anchoring the defense. On the surface it screams old school, and that's why there are so many reasons to hate it. These five players were all in Detroit last season, but played just about zero minutes at the same time (only four possessions, per Cleaning the Glass). Aside from poor health, the reason why is obvious: There’s not nearly enough spacing or anything close to a defined pecking order on the offensive end, while exploiting them on defense shouldn’t be too hard, given their inflexibility.

But Drummond added a new dimension to his game last year. Stan Van Gundy placed him higher on the floor and let him showcase a passing ability that boosted his assist rate up to 14 percent—more than the sum of his previous three years combined!). Meanwhile, Griffin is uniquely dominant when healthy. Nobody his size rivals his vision or ball-handling ability. It helps form a frontcourt tandem that may be able to do more than tread water when accompanied by the right pieces.

It’s unclear if Detroit has those pieces, but Johnson is still only 22 years old, with the girth and quickness to defend four positions in a pinch. Jackson is two years removed from life as a slightly above-average point guard, and Kennard is the one cast member who can loosen up the floor when he doesn't have the ball. I don’t necessarily think this group will exceed its modest expectations, but the ceiling is higher than people think, especially with Dwane Casey at head coach, able to coagulate a defense that’s already good but can stand to be better.

Rajon Rondo, Lonzo Ball, Josh Hart, Brandon Ingram, LeBron James

This is the exact opposite of the group seen above, with a degree of unconventionality that's both breathtaking and hardly a surprise to anyone who’s watched the NBA evolve over the past six years. I don’t know if it will be good, or if Luke Walton will even be willing to utilize Rondo and Ball at the same time—in tight space with no true center and only one recognizable spot-up threat—but please check your pulse if you're not curious to see how it'd do.

Why not experiment and see how far Einstein-level basketball IQ and absurd talent can take you? LeBron at the five isn’t a new concept, but as the league continues to downsize—a trend no other player is more responsible for—he’s positioned to take advantage in lineups that surround him with players who can see segments of the game develop before they actually do. They turn a defense's crack into a calamitous breach with next-level anticipation. Between LeBron, Rondo, and Ball, it's hard to think of another group that's ever unleashed so many innovative passers at the same time.

Hart and Ingram are here to enjoy it all, from beyond the arc and against awkward closeouts. Outside shooting is an issue throughout L.A.'s roster, but this group will invent ways to make it a non-issue—if they get a chance to play.

Kyle Lowry, Fred VanVleet, OG Anunoby, Kawhi Leonard, Pascal Siakam

As is the case for so many different teams, we don’t really know what Toronto’s best five is right now. But as NBA teams start to favor mischievous off-the-bounce slashers over 3-and-D statues, VanVleet has to be on the floor over Danny Green. A case can be made for Dorell Wright's wingspan in that spot, but Siakam, Lowry, Leonard, and Anunoby are more than enough to make this defense one of the league's best.

There's almost too much to like here. Leonard is at the four, with a mobile, 7'3" wingspan at center. Anunoby can't be left alone in the corner while Lowry and VanVleet wreak all sorts of havoc wherever they are. Picture an inverted pick-and-roll, with Leonard dribbling the ball as Lowry races up to blindside his man with a screen. How the hell do you guard that, with Siakam in the dunker's spot and deadly shooting along the perimeter? Few teams can. The Raptors are going to be so much fun.

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