#<- HEAVY paraphrasing but those are the general points he made like 2 or 3 times

[softichill]

Attempted to throw together a bingo card for the first part of the finale? I'm not super great at these fjsbgksng

[felassan]

Jon Renish (Foundation Technical Director @ BioWare, working on DA4) recently did a Twitch stream where he played through some DAO. Although he works on DA, this is his first time playing through DAO. He’s playing through it looking at random details from a dev perspective as he’s currently working on DA4 and therefore wants to know more about the previous games.

On the stream he mentioned some tidbits on the development of DA4. There were also some insights and anecdotes about the development of DAO and similar. It’s a 3 hour stream so I collected them here in case that’s of use to anyone (for example not everyone can watch streams which don’t have subtitles/captions). The stream is a fun/interesting watch though, so if you’re curious or able to watch I recc doing so. 😊 The rest of this post is under a cut for length.

Please note that there’s some paraphrasing on my part, this is not a transcript.  There are also some additions from another dev who featured on the stream to give some commentary. The stream also contains more snippets that at times I couldn’t make out (I tried my best!).

(There is a mention of Cullen’s VA in the text below.)

DA4

Jon said he can talk about things about DA4 that aren’t “consumer-facing”, but he can’t say anything about the game that would be consumer-facing but which isn’t already publicly available. There are several reasons for this. One, that’s not his job, there are people whose job this is and they let each other do their respective roles. Two, BW are a publicly-traded company, so if he said something that could affect that that would be insider trading. Three, they’re not done making DA4 yet, so if he said that they have added [x] to the game and people got all excited about that or pre-ordered on that basis, but [x] ended up being cut, people would be like ‘BioWare lied to us’, when it’s just that things changed during the course of development, as is often the case

He’s glad that fans are excited for the game but notes that fan expectations are always double-edged. It can be really tough as some people started ‘playing’ the game in their heads as soon as they heard of it. That’s fine, he loves that, but he hopes that peoples’ expectations don’t turn into requirements. Clearly BW have alluded to certain characters, like Solas, being in the game, but some fans say things like “If [say] Morrigan isn’t in the game, then, rahhh!” Y’know, there’s a lot of talk about how certain characters have to be in the game, and yeah.

On characters which are quantum (i.e. characters which can die or which can have similar end-states as death in previous games): their being quantum makes it really hard for the devs to work with those characters in subsequent games. The devs naturally aren’t going to put as much effort into characters which could have died previously. A character can have had an amazing appearance throughout/role in a previous game, but if there is a risk of something happening to them and of them being removed [effectively] from the plot, it just doesn’t make sense to have them as a major character in a subsequent game. If a character can, say, sacrifice themselves in some glorious ending, the devs have to make sure that if they use them again, in worldstates where the character didn’t do that, the character is kind of ‘muted’, as the devs don’t want to disrespect the players who made a different choice

A comment in chat expressed a wish for Shale in DA4. Jon’s response is that he has no idea on that front

Bugs don’t come out of crunch, they come out of development in general. Crunch does impact on the quality of a game though. In recent years BW are always really trying to reduce crunch, they’re currently working really hard to bring it down. The best way of doing that is by controlling scope. As creatives it’s tough to balance wanting to make great stuff and be industry-leading with the desire to constantly do extra passes over things they’ve created like the audio, art etc. Their biggest enemy is time, other ways of reducing crunch or time spent in general include iterating tools to make often-repeated processes as time-efficient as possible

I think the following was an observation on the industry in general as opposed to a BW-specific/-exclusive comment: he thinks that as a result of this sort of thing [working to reduce crunch], a lot of games are going to have to be smaller and a lot more focused in scope i.e. the devs will have to focus on hitting the key selling points of that particular game/series as hard as they can, and cut down on branching out sideways/wide on a bunch of random other stuff

Jon doesn’t personally engage in character creators in games, but he knows that for some players that expression is worth a lot of time and focus. BW want to be industry-leading in this kind of stuff as it’s something which is interesting/key/integral to their games

In a way BW have made their own nest of problems what with every DA game being so different to the previous one. Still, he notes that each game has a staunch fanbase that says that their particular favorite game is the best one in the series

He doesn’t want people who think that DA4 isn’t what they want to buy it and be upset - there are so many other great games out there! BW are going to make the game they’re going to make - if some people like it, that’s great, and if some people don’t, that’s cool. Sometimes waiting until reviews are out and/or really seeing beforehand if a game is something that you want [has things/features in it that you want] prior to getting it - as opposed to jumping right in or pre-ordering - is a good idea. Fans don’t always know what they want, but they do know what they like - these are 2 different things

He hopes that whatever they ship for DA4, people go “I enjoyed this experience”, and that then, if there’s additional content for it down the road, people can decide, “do I want this further content?”

On hair: BW are using the new hair technology in the latest version of the Frostbite engine, so they’ll see what they can do! This was said in response to a comment about the hair in the latest FIFA games (as EA make FIFA)

A comment in chat asked about a flying mechanic (griffons). Jon’s response is that flying is such a heavy gameplay mechanic that you can’t put it in a game without everything in the game being built about it (see Anthem)

Relating to the above comment, in DA4 mounted combat would be cool but then they’d have to make the game ‘around’ mounted combat and make the mounted combat feature meaningful

On the underwater concept art: it should not be interpreted as a promise of gameplay. BW have amazing artists who sit down for a couple weeks while they’re in early production and just draw loads and loads of all kinds of stuff. Concept art is like a moodboard or Pinterest board. Elsewhere in the stream he advised, take all the concept art together like a mosaic and ask, ‘what is the overall theme[s] here?’, and to zoom out from individual details. [This stuff echoes PW’s word on concept art]

BW don’t generally write things or the choices as bleak as the choices in DAO were anymore. This is a conscious choice on their part, they want their game to be fun [note: this was said when the side quest in Orzammar where the Warden has the option of convincing a dwarven mother to abandon her young baby to die was being played through. It seems to refer to intensively grimdark choices/beats of this kind]

I think this was more of a general comment on games: SSDs (solid state drives) mean that players will see shorter elevator rides (Mass Effect - was this a reference to the remaster?) and fewer switchback corridors (those are actually loading zones). Generally, these are going to change mechanically the time it takes to do stuff in games

The devs have lots of features on their backlog that they’d like to offer players but each will ofc involve implementation and subsequent maintenance, and each one that is chosen to add is being chosen over something else. And sometimes, it’s hard for them to tell if [x] feature or [y] feature would be better to add to the game

They’re about to work on a giant feature (a pure tooling feature, something that isn’t consumer-facing) that is probably going to take ~2 staff years of effort [I think “staff effort” includes multiple staff working concurrently, so 2 years of staff effort doesn’t = 2 years of time chronologically] to get done in the next few months. They’re investing all this effort across the people working on it because they don’t want their artists and designers etc to have to deal with the problem that it’s going to solve anymore. I’m not sure what this feature is but elsewhere in the stream they referred to tooling and automation and gave the example of, the better your tooling is, the fewer times you have to manually set the camera for a human vs elf vs dwarf position, for dynamically-generated [cinematic?] content and for the first pass to be automated (if this is the case, less time is spent/wasted on redoing it and manually touching it up) [see last bullet point in this section]

He doesn’t know how big DA4 is going to be but said “let’s ballpark and say like most games it’ll be somewhere between 70 and 100 GB”

If we kept our Wardens as the PC throughout all 3 games, at the end they would be so powerful that it’d be a bit like “Let’s just do [thing], I’ve killed gods before, whatever”. He thinks it’s good that they have fresh characters each time in DA in order to reset that power level. Some people want more Commander Shepard in the next Mass Effect and he feels like, ‘what else could you possibly want / what else could that character possibly do after 3 games?’

When asked how much freedom he/they have now to focus on next gen, he said that there’s actually almost no difference on that front. The problems never change. They now have better renderers, better ray-tracing, better graphics cards etc, but they have always made DA games for high- and low-spec PCs, so it’s actually about gameplay systems. The freedom isn’t power-based and them getting access to more cores and more RAM generally isn’t going to change how the games are played. The games still have to be made for hard drives on PC. Dev creativity matters more than power here. The challenge of building a BW game is more about/from managing loads of different plotstates, loads of different art pieces, etc

On the title situation (two): names are the last thing they worry about because names have to go through legal before being approved. Every name, including character names, has to be checked in case it’s a famous person, or associated with something bad, or offensive in a different language due to localization etc

They don’t do face scans of people with big beards

There was also a bit about changes/developments to/in the cinematic design process and associated tooling [?] but I found it too hard to follow sorry >< This bit of commentary begins at timestamp ~ 1:52:45 and continues til ~ 2:00:05 [keep listening through the bit where they pause for a cutscene]

General BW

There’s currently ~350 staff in Edmonton, ~200 in Austin and more elsewhere

He notes that DA games sell pretty well, but relative to EA games in general, they’re a drop in the bucket compared to FIFA

DAI

5% of players of DAI never created a character [Q: does this refer to people who just used the default appearances/presets with no editing, or people who only played multiplayer?]

The mounts don’t actually go faster than running, this is an illusion

I think they said it has 55,000 lines of dialogue. [I’m pretty sure I remember devs elsewhere saying it has 80,000 lines of dialogue]

One of the companions had to have their name changed during development because of legal/translation reasons. It sounds like the original name sounded too close to something offensive

DA2

Back when DA2 was internally code-named “Nug Storm”: this was at the beginning when it was pitched to the team on a set of slides. The image on the slide for that pitch had devil horns, a metal hand and no flesh, it was just made out of fire and flames

DAO

The engine DAO is made on is the third engine that they tried for it during development. [David Gaider has gone into the DAO engine stuff some on Summerfall’s series of DAO playthrough streams]

The cracks on the cracked eluvian asset are modelled after the crack on the Tardis in Doctor Who from around that time, as at the time some devs had been talking about Doctor Who a lot. A dev actually added this factoid to DAO’s entry on TV Tropes but someone else (evidently not a DA dev) came by and deleted it saying that it was too much of a stretch x)

Before the game had its name there was an HTML script that randomly generated possible titles for consideration, it adds verbs and nouns together e.g. “Grim Dark”. One of the craziest possibilities that it once generated that the devs always remember is "Bone Wind”

One of the portraits that’s used for decoration around the world in-game (it’s of a bearded human man) is actually of a specific BW staff member

He played through Stone Prisoner, where Wilhelm’s son Matthias gives exposition in the cellar. Matthias is voiced by GE and this had been pointed out to Jon earlier on. Jon: “I don’t think that character’s voice acting was super strong there”

On the in-game area towards the end of Stone Prisoner: Outdoor areas in games are large and one of the things needed for them is streaming, so different chunks can be ‘streamed in’. There’s a tower [?], and technically the top of the tower was made an outdoor level so that sky stuff could be there, though it didn’t really need to be. The person that made it an outdoor level chose the very smallest chunk size for the terrain mesh, which determines how fine of a streaming they do. So when playing, every time you moved like 4 meters, the game would stream out 50-100 chunks behind you and the same in front of you (this is the bubble around the player of what actually exists). Because it was so small, it was constantly thrashing the CPU and disc to do all the loading. The devs were like “this isn’t going to work”, but they barely had any time. The solution: they made a new level that was outdoor and copied all the sunlight and other settings, but with the largest chunk size. They copy-pasted the entire level from one to the other. The problem with that many chunks then is that there was a giant expanse of flat terrain sticking out of the middle of the tower. They didn’t know if the story was going to involve shots of the outside of the tower for this sequence or not, so they took the terrain deformation tool and bundled all the terrain vertices at the bottom of the tower in a giant clump. So to this day there’s a mess of vertices and twisted terrain at the bottom of the final level that probably no-one has ever seen [not sure though if this anecdote is in reference to a place in that DLC or somewhere elsewhere in the game?]

There were also some tidbits on Anthem, however I didn’t note them down (sorry).

If you think I misheard or misunderstood anything from this stream please let me know and I will edit/fix it. :) 

(Thankyou to some of my friends who explained a tech detail from this to me.)

[source]  <-- current rewatch link

[numbah34]

A Happy Holiday season to all! This year, I’m bringing the PIE.

I hope you’ve saved room for a little additional speculation, because this is a little something I’ve been working on for about 10 days now, and I think it’s gonna be delicious.

*ahem.* Food metaphors aside, here we go:

In order to hypothesize about the true endgames, I’m going to pull from some quotes, explore the definition of “endgame,” and reference some potential evidence that season 8 provided for us.

*Before you continue reading, it is important to note that this is a meta about Plance/Pidgance/Flirtyrobot/26-other-ship-names-I’m-not-listing-them-all, or the relationship between Pidge and Lance. If this particular ship is not your cup of tea, please do not feel obligated to read further, but still have a lovely day!*

When we use the term “endgame”, we tend to define it as the ultimate relationship one or more characters ends up in by the end of the series. Ideally, we like our endgames to be confirmed by canon, but, if they are not and there hasn’t been anything shown to directly refute it, we can often be happy in believing that our faves will get together after the final curtain. Headcanon to fill the gaps, etc, etc.

Plance, however, is a different story. In fact, it is my assertion that they are, in fact, each other’s endgame, as they are surrounded by an incredible amount of evidence to support such a statement, both by canon in-show, in-comic, and in-book, and by answers provided by showrunners and cast alike. Let’s break it down:

1. Lance will end up with someone he needs; what he thought he wanted is not what he needed. (Can I take a moment to complain here a little? I feel like everytime someone asked about ships, they asked in regard to Lance. Did no one ever ask about Pidge and if she would have an endgame? I’m just saying. That would have been helpful information.) I won’t spend a lot of time on this quote, as it has been broken down in just about every plance meta you can find from early on. I will add: throughout the series, Lance has been shown to be the paladin who tries to use humor to lighten heavy situations. If he can crack a joke about it, the others might not laugh, but the mood will become a little less dire. Humor tends to breed hope in those times. Pidge appropriately labeled him as a goofball, I believe not because she thought he was ridiculous, but because she honestly appreciated his humor and his desire to have fun. While Pidge would, many times, roll her eyes at Lance’s jokes, Allura never laughed at them. She would generally look cross, or glare at him, whenever he would try; for example, when he tried to get her to laugh by pretending to read what he was going to say off his hand, and... it did not go over well. And he had to switch tactics and offer comforting words instead. This seemed to be a common theme over their interactions. He was never able to fully be himself around her.

2. Lance will be someone’s first choice. ...And I would assume that would mean that the someone in question would actually want to choose to spend time around him. Let’s be clear about something: at no point, even in their dating relationship, was Lance Allura’s first choice. Just from season 8: when he finally asked her out, she was ready to turn him down so she could go watch a comatose, unresponsive Altean who actively tried to kill them (a different spin on the “I can’t, I have to wash my hair...”), until Romelle and Hunk peer pressured her into it, not by recommending Lance’s finer points but by telling her she needed to relax (Hunk seriously what kind of wingman are you); if there was an option between Lance and the Alteans, she would pick the Alteans every time; she reminded Lance so many times that he couldn’t possibly understand what she was going through that I was about to turn it into a drinking game; on Clear Day, she could have taken that time to go have fun and relax with him, but instead she chose to stay on the ship with the dark probably evil entity that she eerily mentioned was trying to talk to her, WHAT were you THINKING, Allura, you could have been having fun with your friends and taking your mind off things that way! There was NO ONE THERE TO HELP YOU!; when the entity was picking people to try to convince her to release it, it only picked Lance for a hot second before moving on to Lotor; every time we saw Lotor/something representing Lotor in the same scene as Allura, she had a much more emotional response than she ever did for Lance; when she took the entity in and introduced the dangerous plan, his voice was the one she did not want to listen to (and we start seeing some cracks in the ship, too, as he becomes irritated not only that she would endanger herself like this, but also because his thoughts and concerns DO NOT MATTER TO HER); every time he would tell her he loved her, she would question him, or remain silent, until the end when it just felt hollow.

Pidge, meanwhile... well, we’ve catalogued in metas from s1-s7 how she would choose to be around him, from Space Mall to the Feud, etc., and season 8 did not actually short us on Pidge continuing to choose Lance. It started in the first episode, when she found out Lance had asked out Allura. At that point, her choices regarding him involved what she thought would make him happy. Sometimes, that meant doing things like giving up a game they could have enjoyed together or spending her time at the Clear Day carnival earning tickets to get something [actually sparkly] to take back to Allura instead of for herself, and sometimes that meant backing off and giving them space. I’ll touch more on that point in a moment (and you’ll see why that is, in fact, a pun), so stay tuned.

3. Allura will not have an endgame. I’m paraphrasing a bit here, but I believe there was a quote from one of the various interviews floating out there about Allura not having a definite endgame. (I could be wrong, and if I am, please let me know!) Well... that’s not wrong. Allura did not have an endgame, because her character did not make it to the end of the show (which, btw, I’m still sad about. She is an amazing character, and I wanted nothing but a happy ending for her. This season did not end up making me a fan of A//urance, but that is not ever how I would have wanted that ship to end, either.).

4. Lance will have an endgame. I’ll say it again. Allura was not Lance’s endgame. While she may have given him marks (I don’t think for a second she made him Altean, more like gave him a glowy little quintessence tattoo), she was not with him at the end of the show.

So. Who was Lance’s endgame, then? I am absolutely certain, without them having outright confirmed it, that Pidge was Lance’s endgame.

While we might have gotten very few Pidge and Lance interactions in season 8, the ones we got and the ones that were missing are telling. I mentioned in point #2 that Pidge backed off and gave Allura and Lance space while they were dating; at first, I found that frustrating, because I love Lance & Pidge interactions. But... I would have found it even more frustrating if they had continued while Lance was dating someone else. (That would have reeked of Pidge trying to steal Lance from Allura, and there is nothing in Pidge’s character arc about her trying to split people up; if anything, her arc of trying to reunite her family has made her more of a unifying character.) For 7 seasons previous, we find several instances of Lance being in Pidge’s personal space, sometimes even resting his arm across her back, and her allowing him into her personal bubble. But, while Lance and Allura are dating, he and Pidge do not touch. They continue to be framed together in some scenes, and Clear Day really underlined how, when they are around each other, they come alive. They bring out the best in each other in ways you don’t see in their interactions with the other characters. But I digress. For our final canonical evidence clues, let’s take a look at the final scenes in the last episode.

For the vast majority of the series, comics included, Lance and Pidge follow each other in the narrative. We see this again, as we move from a scene where Pidge is excitedly leaving to meet her friends, to a scene where Lance is giving a little school group talk to some little Alteans about how neat Princess Allura was (aside: let’s not begrudge him that, please, because she was really great, and you don’t have to have dated her to recognize that. She loved all her found family, Lance was just the one to receive markings). As he is looking up at Allura’s statue, a wormhole opens and the green lion comes through, drawing his attention to the lion and its pilot. The smile spread across his face is the one we have grown to associate with Lance, and he just looks more himself.

In the epilogue photos, we learn that Pidge and her family are on earth, training up the next group of legendary defenders. We also learn that Lance is on earth, living and working on his family’s farm. Some things to pay attention to:

1. They are both doing work that honors Allura’s memory and sacrifice. Allura had said in the Feud that Pidge and her family would be the most likely to be able to continue her father’s legacy, which was a very important thing to Allura’s character. Lance, apart from giving the occasional field trip talk, is growing juniberries, a flower Allura had once thought extinct, and that she associated heavily with Altea and Altean culture. He might not have understood alchemy, or other parts of their culture, but Lance and his family are farmers, and they do understand plants; this is something he can do that honors her memory. I’m going to emphasize that, when you lose someone you love, you do find yourself doing things to honor their memory; it does not, however, mean that you are miserable for the rest of your life.

2. They are both on Earth. Hunk, Keith, and Shiro are all off doing their own thing, Coran is on Altea (or the Atlas? Was the epilogue specific about what he was up to?), but Pidge and Lance are still in close proximity with each other. Further, Lance’s farm is cultivating a flower that only one botanist from the Garrison figured out how to grow and care for, and that botanist happens to be Pidge’s mom. Not to mention Lance still has Kaltenecker... And, in more than one publication, he talks about getting together with Pidge to play video games. All I’m saying is, they have plausible reasons for visiting each other more frequently.

3. Finally, let’s take a look at the last photos, because I noticed something odd:

In the first picture, it looks like everyone had finished crowding in for the picture, and Lance once again has an arm draped on Pidge (they are finally touching again!), and Pidge is leaning closer to him (hello angling, my old friend). Then you get to the second shot, and… Lance is doing something odd with his hand. You could almost think it was a gesture, but it looks to me more like he was in the middle of reaching to put his hand directly on Pidge’s shoulder. It even looks a little less focused, like he was moving when the picture was snapped. I mean, if he’s not… then what the actual heck is he doing?

Also, the color of those glasses Pidge is wearing... I know, I know, color reaching, but still. And, as this post pointed out, if you check out Chuchule’s tail, he is making a little heart shape in both pictures.

To conclude: while they did not explicitly state it, after 8 seasons of evidence of growth, there is a strong implication that Pidge and Lance are each other’s endgame. We might not have gotten to watch it happen, but... my plance are in bloom. How about yours?

[millennial-review]

Do we have any hope to survive next 12 years?

The next 12 years? I think so. It’s the 88 after that I’m really concerned about. And this is like a very pessimistic case I’m about to make, I don’t think it’s the most likely outcome, but I think either path I lay out below are far more possible than people appreciate. The last 65 years are a historic anomaly and while I like to think humanity as a whole is beyond global conflict or decades long widespread unrest of the sort that’s plagued people for centuries, I think that’s probably not reality. If you listen to basically any talk Noam Chomsky has given in the last 3 years or so, he pretty constantly highlights the fact humanity has only had nuclear weapons in a capacity that can destroy the planet for 65 years or so. Less than a lifetime. And we’re slowly careening towards catastrophic climate outcomes that will fundamentally endanger and reshape human life across the globe. Add to that the increasingly reactionary politics all around the globe (represented by the Tea Party/Trump in the Republicans, Brexit, figures like Marie Le Penn, Bolsonaro in Brazil, parties like the National Front in Germany) makes fighting either trend far less likely and actually exacerbates them and makes bad outcomes even more likely. The next 12 years are obviously hugely important for staving off either of those trends and creating the structures and institutions required to combat them. Global Conflict (AKA Please God No World War III)

I think people living in the Post World War II world order really under value how peaceful historically speaking the last 70 years or so have been and how artificial and human constructed that peace really is.  After World War II there was a VERY deliberate effort to create political/economic structures that prevented World War I and World War II level conflicts. And if you look at the major wars 1950 onward, those structures have done a pretty good job. Just looking at the conflicts the United States has participated in since then and their relative casualties, I think you can make the case those structures have prevented a World War III level conflict for decades. Largely by preventing various other countries from getting involved when conflicts do arise. Because the economic and political ties that connect even potential adversaries (think China/United States) make it really difficult to justify armed conflict. Even when a country might be justified or otherwise want to interfere (think the United States in the Ukraine when Putin invaded, or Russia in Syria when the United States upped their presence). A lot of those reactionary parties I listed above want to actively deconstruct many of the institutions which have integrated the world in a way that makes dragging bigger more powerful friends into any given conflict a lot less likely and prevents the larger more powerful countries from engaging directly. Somewhere in the ball park of 50 to 80 MILLION people died in World War II. Somewhere in the ball park of 15 to 20 MILLION people died in World War I.Those numbers include civilians. Around 2.5 million people died in Korea.Around 1.3 million people died in Vietnam. Around 6,000 people died in the first Gulf War.Around 100,000 people died in Afghanistan/Iraq since 2001. If you graphed out the relative number of casualties basically every country on the planet has experienced since World War II, you see a similar decline. With exceptions for really bad domestic conflicts, like the Chinese revolution (which is obviously global on some level). Also, obviously 2.5 million people in Korea is still an atrocity and armed conflict should always be avoided at all costs in my opinion, but if it goes there 2.5 million people is a lot better than 15 million, or 50 million. I just point this out to say, these structures have prevented MASSIVE conflicts from occurring by connecting the world in a way that tips the balance of pros/cons of armed conflict in such a way it makes it not worth it. That’s not a given. And for the first time popular political movements across the globe want to deconstruct these structures. The parties above are very skeptical of the EU. They’re very skeptical of trade agreements (the modern way to integrate the economic interests of various countries). China is increasingly threatening America/Western Europe economic hegemony which will create it’s own problems outside just a general unwillingness to come to the table in the same way other allies do. And we’ve never experienced a world where these structures don’t exist and nuclear powers start rubbing each other the wrong way. There is a case to be made that nuclear weapons are the cause of the phenomena I’ve described above and not these post World War II institutions. I think that’s plausible, but I also think those institutions create a much needed cushion that prevents conflicts from escalating and if conflicts escalate to a point that nuclear war becomes a valid option, it’s not going to be two bombs on two cities in one country, it’s going to be Fallout IRL sorts of bombs. That’s Noam Chomsky’s case roughly paraphrased here. But I find it fairly compelling. Again, it doesn’t seem like a happen in the next 12 years sort of thing, but it is the sort of thing that what happens in the next 12 years plays a huge role in determining how likely some of these things are to occur. 

Climate Change (AKA We’re Doomed) Climate Change is one of those things that I genuinely think we might reach a point 50 years or so from now when our grandkids are going to ask us why we weren’t out blowing up pipelines and shit. If you could talk to your great great great grandparents and ask them why they weren’t ardent abolitionists, organizing on the underground railroad, you probably would. I really think Climate Change is a human extinction (or RADICAL change in quality of life) sort of thing and we hardly even treat it as a pressing issue. Let alone treat it as the clearest source of future global unrest for the next hundred years or so.Genuinely, the science is pretty settled, it’s a thing, it’s catastrophic, we’re on the path to some of the worse outcomes, and there’s really no reason to think our political institutions (especially globally) are prepared to fight this sort of trend. And I say globally because this is a global issue and even the most developed economies can barely get their shit together enough to make meaningful steps toward renewables. How are people in the United States going to tell half a billion people in India that coal powered energy is wrong? And where are we going to find the political will to change the United States energy infrastructure fundamentally? Let alone find the political will to do it in India, or any number of other places. Modern economies developed on fossil fuels and changing to renewables is going to be a heavy lift. It’s outrageous to expect developing economies all around the world to just skip fossil fuels, the infrastructure is there, it’s cheaper, and their people need access to energy and the modern life it provides more than anyone on the planet. That’s my biggest worry. There are literally billions of people who aspire to live the life a modern economy built on fossil fuels can provide and the countries developed enough to help them make the leap into renewables won’t even make that leap themselves. Let alone do so in the next few decades, let alone help those countries make that leap in the next few decades. That’s what makes this seem so hopeless to me. Here in the United States there are vague policy debates about carbon taxes, and how to spend that revenue to get the most climate bang for your buck, and various other policy initiviates that might help stave off Climate Change. In really ambitious circles there are discussions of all electric transport fleets (trucking mostly). Lab grown meats and a fundamental shift to more sustainable agriculture. And this is all stuff we needed to start doing GLOBALLY, not just here in the United States, about 2 decades ago. The IPCC says we need to limit warming to 2 degrees celsius to avoid worse outcomes. We’re on track to hit 5 plus and there’s really no clear consensus on what that means, outside it’s going to be bad. Catastrophic weather events will increase. We’re already seeing storms like Hurricane Maria regularly. There are massive forest fires destroying the Western United States, in November (for the third year in a row). Ice caps are melting even faster than anyone predicted, making the Arctic more easily passable during warmer months and likely almost completely ice free within the decade.  The mass extinction event the world is currently experiencing isn’t going to get any better. Large swaths of the planets plants and animals will disappear. Global conflict from food and water shortages will increase. Migration and the xenophobia that flows from it will become more common place. Domestic political issues flowing from all the above will increase. I think Climate Change is going to fundamentally change the planet, it’s going to fundamentally change humanity’s relationship with the planet, and there is going to be “creation of the printing press” level human conflicts that flow from that. I could add a paragraph or ten about how both the things above increase the likelihood of authoritarian regimes and just speed up the cycle I’ve kind of laid out, but I’ve put off studying by writing all this for too long already, so maybe more on that later. 

[douchebagbrainwaves]

EVERY FOUNDER SHOULD KNOW ABOUT RATE

In a startup, there's a period of rapid growth. If you make violins, and none of the local farmers wants one, how will you eat?1 One of the best programmers won't work for you.2 Like the time the power went off in Cambridge for about six hours, and you'll probably find that writing it all down gives you more ideas about what to do. Wealth has been getting created and destroyed but on balance, created for all of human history. In an efficient market, the number of startups that kept trying to raise $250k.3 The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. We had office chairs so cheap that the arms all fell off.4 Inexperienced founders read about famous startups doing what was type A fundraising.5 And the misleading ways of investors combine horribly with the wishful thinking of inexperienced founders. It's hard to spend a fortune without noticing.6 What's different about successful founders is that they get paid by getting their capital back, ideally after the startup IPOs, or failing that when it's acquired.

If you ever end up running a company, the work you do is averaged together with a small group. The market price is less than the inconvenience of signing an NDA.7 It's too complicated for a third party to act as an intermediary between developer and user. Not at all. So I bought it, for the first time as an adult. Someone who is a good idea to use famous rich people as examples, because the people I worked with were some of my best friends. Startups pass that test because although they're appallingly risky, the returns when they do succeed are so high. By not hiring people. It's a good thing for the world if people who wanted to get staffed up as soon as possible, as if you couldn't get anything done unless there was someone with the corresponding job title.

If you're presenting at a Demo Day, and partly because the company is clearly succeeding, raise one or more founders focusing on the company right now, which is the one in which founders who need money knock on doors seeking it, knowing that we needed to raise more. Startups can be destroyed by this. It's hard like lifting a heavy weight, and hard like solving a puzzle. Meet such investors last if at all. Even Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Gordon Moore. And wishful thinking founders are happy to meet them half way. Prices are so much higher now that if you can. The problem with this article is not just that it originated in a PR firm $16,000 a month.8

But if I have to choose between two theories, prefer the one that doesn't center on you. A startup is a small company that takes on a hard technical problem.9 Nearly all companies exist to do something internally, like talk to their partners, or investigate some issue?10 That's big company thinking. When I see a startup with young founders that is fabulously successful at fundraising, you can tell them that you'd be happy to later, when you're fundraising, but that didn't prevent him from joining their ranks.11 Investing bypasses those alarms.12 Your niche both protects and defines you.13 At least we know now what it would look like.

Startups can be destroyed by this. The acceleration of productivity we see in Silicon Valley is that you are already working as hard as this though.14 And yet there's a lot of them were crap, but I bought it, but there won't be many of them. Ideally you want between two and four founders.15 A barbershop serves customers in person, and few will travel far for a haircut. Indeed, you can think of does: CEOs, movie stars, hedge fund managers, and so on. Most good hackers have unbearable personalities, could we stand to have them around? It's also obvious to programmers that wealth is something that's made, rather than the median, you can take their word for it.

So if you're developing technology for money, you're probably going to have to think without interruption. Paraphrased for the Web, this becomes get all the users, and the latter is huge the former should be too.16 What it amounts to, economically, is compressing your working life into a few years ago. I can't think of a financial advisor who put all his client's assets into one volatile stock? Almost everyone needs their hair cut. Most startups that raise money do it more than once.17 It's easy to measure how much revenue they generate, and they're usually paid a percentage of their profits? Have multiple plans.18

The weak point of the top reporters is not laziness, but vanity. Even colocating servers seemed too risky, considering how often things went wrong with them. The recipe was the same curve.19 He's a former CEO and also a corporate lawyer, so he gave us a lot more play in it.20 No, it turns out. The first was the rule of law. If you don't know for sure they will, and the only ways to acquire these rapidly were by inheritance, marriage, conquest, or confiscation.21 In a technology startup, which most startups are, the less pressure they feel to act smart. Aim for cool and cheap, not expensive and impressive. But I think it will later be worth, but it's certainly the right way to write software for a startup, though: because you have to do something you'd like to raise $500k, it's better to say initially that you're raising $250k doesn't limit you to raising that much.

It would not be so useful if it delivered your dinner to a random location in central Asia. Together they were able to withstand the local feudal lord. Most startups that fail do it because they don't give customers what they want. Our greatest PR coup was a two-step process. But most of those weren't truly smart, so our third test was largely a restatement of the first things he'll ask is, how hard would this be for someone else to execute.22 Underestimate how much you want an investor influence your estimate of how much they want you.23 Yahoo's market cap then was already in the billions, and they also have more brand to preserve. Startups, like mosquitos, tend to be concentrated around fundraising. The best thing to measure the growth rate of is revenue. But the similarities feel greater than the differences. A round, because VCs would never go for it. Fortunately reporters liked us.

Notes

It will seem like a month grew at 1% a week for 19 years, but no doubt often are, but it's hard to say. So if you were going to need common sense when interpreting it. No one wants to see famous startup founders, if you have to be doomed. At least, as I know, the underlying cause is usually slow growth or excessive spending rather than ones they capture.

A preliminary result, comparisons of programming languages either take the line? The solution to that knowledge was to become one of them, and when given the freedom to experiment in disastrous ways, but it's also a good chance that a skilled vine-dresser was worth it, so buildings are traditionally seen as temporary; there is money. There is always 15 weeks behind the doors that say authorized personnel only.

9999 and. The word suggests an undifferentiated slurry, but even there people tend to get great people.

Peter, Why Are We Getting a Divorce?

In any case, 20th century. And especially about what other people who interrupt you. The closest we got to the company's expense by selling them overpriced components. The real danger is that they were regarded as 'just' even after the Physics in the cover.

For example, if you do it mostly on your board, consisting of two founders and investors are also the golden age of tax avoidance. So if you're not convinced that what you're doing. Indiana University Bloomington 1868-1970.

Eric Horvitz. But that oversimplifies his role. But what he means by long shots are people whose applications are perfect in every way, because it reads as a single project is a great founder is always room for another.

There will be inversely proportional to the point where it does, the LPs who invest in a company tuned to exploit it. And even then your restrictions would have gone into the star it was wiser for them, initially, were ways to avoid collisions in.

Not linearly of course. Lecuyer, Christophe, Making Silicon Valley like the one hand paying Milton the compliment of an extensive biography, and the Origins of Europe, Cornell University Press, 1973, p.

The continuing popularity of religion is the most visible index of that. Hypothesis: A company will be very promising, because they want both. According to a partner from someone they respect. The founders want to lead.

Users may love you but these supposedly local seed firms always find is that the lack of transparency. Wufoo was based in Tampa and they were actually getting physically taller. So it is to fork off separate processes to deal with slaps, but I think this is a case of heirs, rather than for any particular truths you'll learn.

What you're looking for something that flows from some central tap. There were several other reasons, the number of spams that have bad ideas is to make a lot would be in the US News list tells us is what we do the equivalent thing for founders; if there were no strong central governments. Till then they had to for some students to get to go to grad school in the middle of the things you sell.

Part of the world wars to say incendiary things, which parents would still want their kids to them. If you freak out when people make investment decisions well when they set up grant programs to encourage startups, you will fail. In the average reader that they function as the average startup.

When you had small corpora. If anyone wants. But so many trade publications nominally have a significant cause, and partly because companies don't. The existence of people who get rich by creating wealth—wealth that, go talk to corp dev is to fork off separate processes to deal with the definition of important problems includes only those on the subject of wealth for society.

You should probably fix.

What we call metaphysics Aristotle called first philosophy. She was always good at squeezing money out of just Japanese.

In practice it's more like a little if the value of understanding per se, it's because other places, like storytellers, must have seemed an outlying data point that could start this way, without becoming a Texas oilman was not just the location of the USSR offers a better education.

8%, Linux 11. Digg is Slashdot with voting instead of uebfgbsb. Decimus Eros Merula, paid 50,000 people or so, or a community, or a community, or invent relativity.

The VCs recapitalize the company does well and the company's PR people worked hard to predict startup outcomes in which those considered more elegant consistently came out shorter perhaps after being macroexpanded or compiled. Hypothesis: Any plan in which income is doled out by solving his own problems. What I'm claiming with the government. The threshold may be a product manager about problems integrating the Korean version of Word 13.

And since there are no discrimination laws about starting businesses.

Possible exception: It's hard for us now to appreciate how important it is. Norton, 2012. But that was actively maintained would be rolling in their heads for someone to do it right. As I was a strong local component and b I'm satisfied if I could pick them, not an efficient market in this respect as so many people's eyes.

Though if you know the combination of circumstances: court decisions striking down state anti-dilution provisions, even if the students did well they would probably be a sufficient condition. They thought most programming would be a sufficient condition. Two customer support people tied for first prize with entries I still shiver to recall.

There are lots of search engines are so dull and artificial that by the PR firm. The Harmless People and The Old Way.

[whiskeyandwildfire]

Benford’s Law

Today I was watching a show called “Connected”, where the host spends several episodes jet-setting around the world to interview people about how certain things are...intertwined...The episodes are titled “Surveillance, Poop, Dust, Digits, Clouds, and Nukes” 

Whereas I’m sure some of those sound more gripping than the others, the one that struck me tonight was “Digits” where host Latif Nasser explores the theory of “Benford’s Law” as it relates to...well, everything! 

What is Benford’s Law? 

During the 1930s, a physicist named Dr. Frank Benford examined the frequency of certain numbers appearing as initial digits in lists of "natural" numbers. Benford divided all the information into two categories “ "natural" and "non-natural" numbers. 

Natural numbers are those numbers that are not ordered in a particular numbering scheme and are not generated from a random number system. 

For example, most accounts payable files will be populated by dollar values that are natural numbers. (See Lisa) 

On the other hand, Social Security numbers and telephone numbers “ non-natural numbers “ are designed systematically to convey information that restricts the natural nature of the number. 

SOURCE HERE

What I take from this statement is that Governments are actually aware of the danger of the predictability of “random” numerical lists and are counteracting this by specifically designing the pattern to the point even that it’s useless to anyone analyzing it. This source continues to say, 

“Without the aid of a computer, Benford examined first-digit frequencies of 20 lists covering 20,299 observations of natural numbers. His lists covered data such as street numbers of scientists listed in an edition of American Men of Science, the numbers contained in the articles of one issue of Reader’s Digest, and such natural phenomena as the surface areas of lakes and molecular weights. 

Benford discovered that the distribution of the initial digits in natural numbers is not random but rather follows a predictable pattern, which is now known by his name. Benford derived a formula to predict the appearance of the initial digit in any table of natural numbers. The expected occurrence for the first digit is...”

This is where they lose me. Math...especially fake math that uses letters instead of numbers...has never been my strong suit. Even the move from Philosophy 101 to 102, from Theory into Critical Thinking and Formulas was too much from me. Something about a disconnect in my brain between considering, and calculating. Between Creativity and clarity. 

The simplest “Benford’s Law for Dummies” summary that I can make from all of this is summarized by the one thing we know for sure about it. In lists of natural numbers it should be around 11 percent likelihood that a sequence will begin with any given digit (1-9) when in fact it is around 30% likely that a sequence will begin with a 1.

Not only that, but it then becomes 30% likely that the next number in the sequence will be a larger number than 1. 

Why is this important, Sean? 

In the words of (No first name) Newman, from Seinfeld : 

“When you control the mail you control...information”

To paraphrase so it fits my argument I’ll say : 

“When you control information you control...the future” 

And ninja beats bear making all things right once again in the world. (See Inside Joke) 

Why this natural phenomena of probability is important and how it is relevant to my current work is because when you are testing a large group of people on a controversial topic, say “Mindfulness as a cure for cancer” you must also have a process for sussing out fraud. 

Let’s look at this chart depicting the rate of new cancer cases in 2017: 

The rates are the numbers out of 100,000 people who developed or died from cancer each year.SUMMARY

In the following maps, the U.S. states are divided into groups based on the rates at which people developed or died from cancer in 2013, the most recent year for which incidence data are available.

The rates are the numbers out of 100,000 people who developed or died from cancer each year.

Incidence Rates by State The number of people who get cancer is called cancer incidence. In the United States, the rate of getting cancer varies from state to state.

*Rates are per 100,000 and are age-adjusted to the 2000 U.S. standard population.

‡Rates are not shown if the state did not meet USCS publication criteria or if the state did not submit data to CDC.

†Source: U.S. Cancer Statistics Working Group. United States Cancer Statistics: 1999–2013 Incidence and Mortality Web-based Report. Atlanta (GA): Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and National Cancer Institute; 2016. Available at: http://www.cdc.gov/uscs.

Death Rates by State Rates of dying from cancer also vary from state to state.

*Rates are per 100,000 and are age-adjusted to the 2000 U.S. standard population.

†Source: U.S. Cancer Statistics Working Group. United States Cancer Statistics: 1999–2013 Incidence and Mortality Web-based Report. Atlanta (GA): Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and National Cancer Institute; 2016. Available at: http://www.cdc.gov/uscs.

Source: https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/dcpc/data/state.htm

NOTE: There is also a load of metadata I’ve yet to sift through just to make this point, but one factor to this chart that interested me is that states were not required to provide racial information for new cases so we may have no clue how cancer disproportionately infects BIPOC. 

Applying Benford’s Law

So if we run all of this data through some Benford simulations and it triggers a response signifying fraud (Other larger numbers occurring more often than lower numbers in sequence) We as researchers can go in and press the issue. 

Let’s look at another chart. 

And just to compare, here’s that first one again. 

So now...if I can predict voter trends per state (and able to account for fraud) and if I can predict new cancer rates by state (and able to account for fraud) then surely I can prove that the states who have more republican voters also have a higher likelihood of being infected. I don’t know about you, but that seems like reason enough to look at some of my own behaviors. In the about chart in fact, the only states that don’t follow this theory are: 

Florida -  (Remember this is a chart depicting NEW cases of cancer, not existing. History of electoral fraud)  

Utah and Arizona (both relatively low electoral votes to begin with and it seems like what those 3 states have in common is that they’re top states to retire in) 

Michigan (A swing state in the election that shall not be named and a victim of voter suppression in heavily black populated neighborhoods) 

and

New York State - This is a state where I would press for more information. The state and it’s 29 electoral votes went to Clinton and yet has the most reported cases per 100,000 people for the year. 

What does THIS mean?

Easy...voting republican gives you cancer. Not just any cancer, brand NEW cancer. 

Well, not exactly. However...comparisons like this one can be speculated on hilariously and the data sets tested for fraud by applying Benford’s law so that if I were to taking testing data from the Bethlehem water department looking for the rising level of chromium-6 and how that number relates to new cases of cancer in the Lehigh valley (breast cancer being the most prevalent) and was able to back this up by testing for fraud then people could start taking a real look at this data to hopefully make changes to how we treat our planet. Here’s a quick quote from 2016 : 

The levels in groundwater in the Lehigh Valley — ranging from an average of 0.64 parts per billion in Allentown to 0.024 parts per billion in Pennsylvania American's Bangor water system — are far below the lowest legal limit for the heavy metal in the United Sates, the 10 parts per billion set by California in 2014.

"The fact that these levels are what they are means we should keep an eye on them," Carvan said. "They are not yet at the level where they should cause any concern for the average person."

Water systems with chromium-6 present in concentrations above 1 part per billion might pose some risk to people with compromised immune systems, he said, but even that is minimal. None of the Lehigh Valley's water suppliers had values that high.

"Our numbers are very low," said Ed Boscola, director of the Bethlehem Department of Water and Sewer, where the average level of chromium-6 was 0.066 parts per billion. "I couldn't say what is or is not a good number, but relative to what California's limit is we are well below that."

https://www.mcall.com/business/mc-erin-brockovich-pollutant-in-local-water-2-20160923-story.html

The fact is, these levels raise and lower and are more likely to rise in an area like Bethlehem because of the steel stacks, rust, and natural mineral deposits coming through our pipes. 

Does this magic fraud test apply anywhere else? 

Education! See the deal is with the funding for extra curricular education programs drying up since forever is that the money isn’t really gone, we just need a smarter way to get ahold of it.

My proposal is that we start the process of thinking about our Arts Education programs as Holistic (Whole Body) Healing programs and using data (and asking our friend Benford if that data is chill) to write for Health Org grants, developing partnerships toward the goal of venture philanthropy (application or redirection of principles of traditional venture capital financing to achieve philanthropic endeavors) , and flatten the curve of new cancer cases (A bajillion dollar a year industry) 

HOW??

I can only do so much in one post, but one step that we could take in the Arts Education department is developing better systems to test (And maybe we have them and I haven’t been made aware) a few different things : 

Students long term overall physical health (based on absences, parent reports, etc) 

Students long term overall emotional health (based on scheduled check ins from trained therapists, absences, and overall engagement in their own development) 

Students exposure to the arts post YPL or other arts programming (based on follow up interviews, periodically.) 

Now

Do we have to wait 60 years to collect even this first round of data and start writing for grants? Not really. Why? Because, probability. (And, you guessed it, Benford) As long as we can say that we have the means of testing through a lifetime and can predict within reason the decrease of new cancer cases and can predict within reason the positive health (physical and emotional) benefits of Holistic arts healing then the law of attraction will bring the funding and support our way.  

[bnrobertson1]

THOUGHTS ON “THE IRISHMAN” (BRNR #26)

My introduction to the peerless works of Martin Scorsese began as a quest for something somewhat different: softcore pornography. I was 12ish and while my dad never ponied up for the Cinemax/ HBO package, for some reason we kind of got Cinemax, or at least its static-filled approximation, on our living room TV. For an internet-less pre-teen disastrously crashing into puberty, this Cable company mix-up taught me the importance of enjoying life’s happy accidents.

Here’s how it worked: with my parents asleep and me left to my groaningly embarrassing druthers, I would pray to whatever deity sent me the scrambled Cinemax signal to also hook a bruh up with some tastefully shot augmented bosoms-focused programming. Mind you, this was before a Channel Guide let you know what you were watching, so sometimes you just had to approach watching like fishing, hoping that whatever this fuzz was would shape into someone getting freaky-deaky, and soon.

It was on one of these prideful nights that I encountered something I at first hoped was a Red Shoe Diaries episode starring the guy from No Escape*. He was with one of the crooks of Home Alone, someone who looked familiar but whose name escaped me, and some less-than-handsome guy who appeared to be wearing a really bad toupee. They were walking to a car and saying “fuck.” A lot. Then, after entering the car, the Home Alone actor nonchalantly shoved an icepick into the Toupee Guy’s head, afterwards commenting something along the lines of “Maybe that’ll shut him the fuck up.”

*A Ray Liotta-starring vehicle I TREASURED growing up, mostly due to its innovative violence.

I didn’t know I was watching Goodfellas, but I knew I was mesmerized. It was violent, it was funny, it moved quickly, it did pushed buttons in my nervous system I didn’t know existed. It somehow made the sting of not watching Shannon Tweed dry-hump a decorated general evaporate. Goodfellas simply crackled with life, even when almost indecipherable due to the static-filled presentation. There was a brute, beautiful honesty to it that the things I was getting exposed to simply lacked. My perception of what art was obliterated and resurrected in the course of about 45 minutes.

Flash forward roughly 24 years. The Irishman, Scorsese’s newest highly anticipated mob drama, hits theaters in a culture far from the one that greeted Casino or The Departed. Instead of the automatic praise that usually greeted Scorsese, a new environment questioned his cinematic contributions mostly due to the lack of representation of (a) minorities and (b) women. While some of these criticisms are fair if a little silly*, the simmering became a raging fire after Scorsese commented on his inability to connect to the movies of the Marvel Universe**.  

*It’s a bit like saying Te-Nehisi Coates hasn’t developed a full voice because he hasn’t written a Jane Austen-esque romp through Victorian England. Or that Lou Reed’s status as legend is flawed because he never released a yodeling album. Artists are allowed to have focus. It’s OK.  

**My only thought about the Scorsese vs. Marvel debate, as someone who quite likes a lot of the Marvel movies: They’re algorithms (albeit very fun ones), and Scorsese is 100% right. I also hope the people who are breathlessly defending Disney against America’s best filmmaker will one day have enough clarity to see that siding with an imagination-torching corporation against an independent artist just sucks.    

The most concise review* I can give of The Irishman is this: it’s the Scorsese mafia movie that pretends the Rolling Stones never existed. In fact, he seems to go out of his way to not mention them in one scene where De Niro’s narrator comments on Jimmy Hoffa’s popularity rivaling that of Elvis and the Beatles. While Casino and Goodfellas never approves of the mafiaso lifestyle**, it does show its appeal with slick music, dialogue, costumes, cinematography, actors, etc. Those films, especially Casino, have operatic narratives, clearly connecting them to millennia-old Roman myths.    

*I already failed. I realize this.

**This part seems lost on a lot of Scorsese haters. Joe Pesci’s Nicky Santoro is beaten to death after watching his brother suffer the same fate, and his Tommy DeVito is shot in the back in the head- does that really seem like a glorification of a lifestyle?

The Irishman is less indebted to Rock n’ Roll and epics as the Catholic church, or more specifically, Catholic guilt. This guilt weighs heavy on every frame. And this dive into Christitan scruples goes than the top-line perspective of “that’s bad and should be punished and that’s good and should be praised” of some of his other mob epics. There is no shooting of guns in handbags after truck hijacking. Or close-ups of hands in general. There is a hand-stomping scene, but it’s depicted in such a matter-of-fact way it is obviously not a heralded act*. The soon-to-be-curriculum cab demolition scene is scored by an ominous, brooding soundtrack, not the coked-up WHEES of Mick Jagger (or Harry Nilsson for that matter**). Instead, Scorsese’s focus is on bigger, more abstract themes, such as impermanence and the point of existence itself - questions that are frankly terrifying because the answers do not exist, much less reassure/ satisfy.

*Speaking of the hand stomp, many point to this and some of the stranger looking faces as flaws of the film. I’d argue that one of the film’s biggest themes is the fallibility of memory. It’s a striking juxtaposition to put your current self in the past, yet we all do it naturally. I also realize I’m a huge nut when it comes to Scorsese and maybe twisting myself crooked to defend all of his techniques.

**Maybe the best scene in all of film? 

The Irishman often feels like a mea culpa- a heart-felt apology for any damage Scorsese’s more flamboyant films may have done to the culture at large. The amazing thing about the film is how well Scorsese seemed to predict criticism without merely sycophantically answering it. You say my films don’t feature women enough? Well how about a film where the main actress has about 7 words*? That’s not to say the film is a preachy drag because it’s anything but. It’s still funny (sometime riotously so) and moves insanely quickly for a film 30 minutes longer than Casino. The acting is superb, as is the strikingly methodical editing. The first 2/3 of the movie feels like a Goodfellas or Departed- the last third, especially after the climax, feels paced like his Catholic meditation, Silence. “It is What is It is,” the film’s quasi-mantra, nicely sums up its feelings on impermanence, something that will probably affect us all, even Marty.

*It’s almost like Anna Paquin knows that the number of lines and contribution to a film are not always directly related.

But trying to paraphrase- or comment on- what The Irishman is trying to say is really missing the point. It’s a uniquely cinematic work that speaks a cinematic language. Written words are not suitable to mine its deeper meanings, only experiencing it, and meditating on it, does.

I could go on and on about the voluminous excellence of this film. Simply put, I love it. It does feel like ol’ Marty won’t be making anymore, but what a fucking fantastic way to bow out of the genre he revolutionized. He’s made five better than anybody else (Francis Ford Coppola excluded- kind of). And he ended it with such a reflective, brilliant exclamation point, he might have just proved himself the exception to the whole “impermanence” thing.

But while I’ll defend the intellectual merits of his works ‘til the day I can’t, I’ll always associate Scorsese with pornography. A little forbidden, a little dangerous, but capable of reveal orgasmic- and embarrassing- truths to those willing to forgo the comfort of societal norms and allow themselves to be illuminated by the flame of unflinching honesty. Grade: A++

[noxetcaligo]

091: Stolen Goods

Adriana worked hard on the new yawning record of the entire police station. The last shift had been long and far too paperwork heavy. She had forgotten what a luxury it meant to have an own desk with a - functioning - computer all to herself. As one of the uniformed officers she had to be quick or wait until the others finished writing up their reports. She had always been too nice with her colleagues, no matter the team or division she was working with.

Another yawn and she realised that the inspector doing the morning briefing had fallen silent and was instead drilling a very icy glance into her skull. She immediately rubbed her ear, pinching the earlobe between thumb and index finger. “Apologies, guv.” She said but he wasn’t satisfied yet. “If your Royal Highness from the CID could do us the incredible honour and refresh our equally tired brains about the signs of fraudulent activities taking place...,” he sneered with glee.

She got to her feet and suppressed a smirk. Of all topics he could have thrown at her to make a tit out of herself in front of everyone, he picked the one she had been working at for the better part of three years. This was going to be a home match. The trick was to not let anyone know.

Standing in front of her team mates, most of them already grinning in anticipation of her failure, she made sure to let her glance flit around the room, never looking at anything or anyone for longer than a few seconds. A shit liar but a good actress. It helped to go through the rules, laws and paragraphs she had force fed to her memory. By the time the inspector impatiently cleared his throat and said “Well...” she had made up her mind how to start her discourse.

“Since you didn’t specify the matter further, guv, I will assume you were referring to the Fraud Act 2006 in general or perhaps even had Section 115 (2) (b), in mind which, as you surely know, refers to the Representation People Act 1983 regarding Undue Influence - Abduction, Duress and Fraud. But given that there hadn’t been any news recently about a case of that nature, I will stick to the aforementioned Fraud Act 2006. There are several sections that would be interesting to discuss. For example Section 3 - Failing to Disclosure Information. Section 7 - Making or supplying articles for use in Fraud or, a personal favourite, Section 4 - Abuse of Position.” It was like putting on old, well worn shoes that still fitted her feet.

She didn’t ride this bicycle in a while but she still knew how to do it. The next twenty minutes she showed the inspector that messing around with -or underestimating - DS Shaw wasn’t a good idea. Her team mates received a brief training in Fraud and there eyes widened in surprise. The change in their attitude towards her was tangible. She was standing her ground and earned their respect.

The inspector turned red like a lobster of the course of her speech, starting at his collar and climbing its way up over his cheeks to his hairline. Everyone appreciates when Karma gets to work in that way. Especially when it comes to bossy superiors. He made her stop talking during one of those rare moments when she took a deeper breath. “Thank you, Four-Twelve. I think that was informative enough for the time being.” Adriana returned to her seat and he was able to continue with the schedule as planned.

She got teamed up with PC Hector Patel. He looked world weary with his heavy eyelids and the slight discontent line around his mouth that became a default expression over the years. Patel sported a five-o-clock shadow at barely seven in the morning. She liked him for his rough- and- ready conduct towards what life and especially work tended to throw at him. She had thought of herself as a seasoned police officer but the shifts spent in Patel’s company debunked her and turned her into a greenhorn again.

“So...” She started and Patel knew he was in for getting grilled again. His younger colleague was a well of curiosity. ‘More’, he thought, ‘like  a geyser’. Questions bubbled out of her without a warning in advance; apart from the ‘So’- opener.

At a few occasions in the past - when they hadn’t known each other like they did now - she started with ‘Can I ask you a question?’ which struck Hector as unusual for a CID officer. The ones he got to know over the years, had proven themselves selfish, arrogant and better-than-you in their general approach of anyone, uniformed colleagues like himself included.

She was too soft for this, he thought and watched her from the corner of his eyes. “Shoot.”

“Why Local Intelligence Officer?” She asked immediately without further ado. Another trait he liked in her. She seldom beats around the bush and goes straight to the point. “I have a trustworthy face.” Patel joked but kept his expression deadpan. He knew it would confuse her. Adriana blinked and studied his face. Not that trustworthy but it was impossible to tell him that. “It was a joke, Jello.” He didn’t look at her but kept his eyes on the path ahead of them. They were patrolling Maidstone Estate on foot and it could be fatal to get distracted - a lesson he learnt the hard way, a month long sick leave and a scar on his lower back included. “Oh.” Adriana said and looked at her feet for a moment. Patel chuckled.

Maidstone Estate was, like so many others of its kind, a hotbed for crime in general but gained a sad fame for being an ideal place for drug dealings in dimensions that made every officer working for vice going teary eyed and getting wet pants. Drugs, prostitutes, stolen goods in large quantities and varieties. Patel recalled one time he got a tipped off by a scrawny little woman about a ring of people who sold babies to desperate couples. When he got the tip this business had been going on for at least three years.

“Isn’t that frustrating?” Adriana asked, frowning. “Three years. It’s... a long time.” Patel nodded in response. “It always feels like being  three steps behind all the time. As if we are all working too slow.” Adriana bit her bottom lip. “Then again, she found the balls to approach me. With people selling babies... It's best not to tangle with those folks. Or piss them off.”

“And that’s why you agreed to being LIO?”

“Yes. I like them trusting me despite the uniform and being on the other side of the fence, if you get what I mean. It’s a good feeling when they come to you with all their stories, worries and those tip offs.” Patel concluded and turned around a corner into the next small alleyway between two houses.

The Estate had been a prestige project back in the days and the architect and urban planner tried to make it look worth the money they got for it. But an estate is an estate and will never cease to be anything else. Adriana was mulling over Patel’s words when he held her back with one arm and pointed in the direction ahead of them, gesturing with the flick of his wrist to the right indicating a dimly lit entrance. The light came from the hallway. The outer light bulb long since smashed in and no one could be bothered to replace it. There wasn’t much sense in it anyway. It would have been destroyed faster than anyone could say ‘flash’. Adriana squinted. A shadow was moving from the door to a car and back again, checking the surroundings for observers. Adriana wondered if their hi vis jackets were that dirty or the shadow figure just too nervous - or high - to notice two coppers standing a mere ten metres away from them, staring.

“Now that’s interesting.” Patel whispered and  sought cover in another house entrance. A dog started to bark. “Aren’t we going to check what they are on about?” Adriana asked. “In a bit.” She frowned at the reply. “Why are we wai…” Her colleague interrupted her. “Because if that is who I suspect it is, chances are that they are better armed than the two of us together. And when they get nervous, I don’t want to be the reason for that AND in close proximity to them.” Adriana tilted her head. “Nervous trigger finger.” Patel added and inclined his head to speak via Airwave to the CAD operator while Adriana kept her eyes on the shadow figure. “Patel…” She tugged his sleeve. “Patel…” Hector tried to make her stop. “Patel! He’s leaving!”

“Shit… did you get the number plate?” The question earned him a glance and a sour smile. She passed the information on to the operator. The vehicle was most likely stolen but it has been one of those unwritten rules of policing that every number plate will be run through the database. “Time to check the facilities.” Patel shook his head. “We are two and have no idea how many crooks are in there. This is an E call so we can wait a while for back up.” A while turned out to be 28 minutes during which Adriana sighed several times, paced and shuffled her feet. “Section 17, Patel.” Her colleague sighed at the whiney tone in her voice. “We aren’t here to bend the rules, Shaw.” She pulled a face and stepped closer to the entrance, pushing the door open. It was hanging in its hinges looking like it had already given up on everything.

“Which flat do they usually use?” Patel stepped closer to pull her back from the hallway. “The second door on the ri….wait, you can’t go in there.” He grabbed thin air when he reached for her arm. Adriana already stepped as close to the door in question as possible. “I can hear something.”

“Shaw…” Patel felt like dealing with a child, impatience snuck in his voice. “I’m not making this up to get things done my way. Listen!” She stepped aside to make room for him. Patel leant in, almost touching the door with the side of his face. It was faint but Adriana was right. “Holy…” Patel said under his breath and stared at his younger colleague. “You have damn good ears. Section 17 it is after all.” “To save life or limb.” Adriana remarked in addition, quoting the paraphrase. They stood and listened for a further sound; a further confirmation that acting was necessary and could no longer be postponed. A low whine emerged, nearly inaudible if the surroundings hadn’t been so quiet. The average inhabitant of Maidstone Estate didn’t rise from their bed before noon or was already back in their drug induced stupor. Very few had a job and from those the number holding a ‘legal occupation’ were even smaller. “A baby?” Patel whispered without expecting a reply from Adriana. Instead he made her step aside. “Wait…” she whispered as he made efforts to kick in the door. “Try the door handle.” She nodded at the item in question. “Serious?” He asked. “Yes. Easier and quieter. If it doesn’t budge you can still be Rambo.” Adriana grinned and put on her black leather gloves.  

Standing inside the flat Patel threw a look back over his shoulder. “I still can’t believe it. Who in the world leaves a door unlocked? Here?” Adriana grinned at his disappointment about not having been able to show off his door kicking in skills. “Someone who feels really safe.” She clicked on her torch. Despite the morning light finding its way through the window the place remained dim and too full of shadows. It reminded her of the vault in which the van Gogh had been resting on its easel. At least, she thought and let the beam of the torch glide over surfaces and into corners, it doesn’t smell of raw meat. “I can’t believe those scoundrels. And what’s that stench?” “Not a dead person.” Adriana wrinkled her nose. It was a familiar mixture but she couldn’t remember it in this intensity.

“Cat piss!” She blurted out and Patel jumped - at least the light beam of his torch did. “Jesus Shaw… “ Her reply was a snigger. “It smells of cat piss.” “Yeah, I got you the first time, along with that heart attack.” He grumbled and continued to inspect the place. It was crammed with flat screen televisions, the boxes Patel peeked into filled with mobile phones: Samsung, iphones in all shapes and colours. “Jello… we got ourselves a jackpot.” Adriana hissed to shut her colleague up. “I mean this place is full of stolen goods. Have you seen the bicycles in the corner? And the piles of laptops? They are crazy to hoard that stuff here in those amounts.”

“Be quiet for a second, please.” She asked and stood very quiet and with her head tilted. The noise came from the second room the flat consisted of besides the small kitchenette and the bathroom. Adriana moved closer to the alleged bedroom and pushed the door open with the torch, avoiding for several reasons to touch anything if she didn’t have to. The stench intensified. She coughed. “Gosh… “ The beam caught something. “Hello? Is anybody in here? I’m a police officer.” She automatically tried to breath through her mouth. Behind her Patel had to cough as well. “What is it, Jello?” He pressed the air from his lungs resembling an asthmatic beagle. Adriana stepped closer to the corner and crouched down to retrieve the suspicious cardboard box. When Patel’s light beam brushed her face he could see her smile in this entranced way that more than once made Patel’s alarm bells shrill. “What. Is. It?” Blue and red lights flashed over the façades of the houses that seemed to lean in whispering to each other and sharing news and the first conspiracy theories. Police photographers busied themselves inside the flat and outside, working on a meticulous documentation. Patel stood next to a patrol car watching the brouhaha. In the opened door to the back seats Adriana sat hunched on the edge, a box cradled in her lap. The inspector now in charge of the investigation stalked over to them. “What’s she got there?” He addressed Patel. Typical, Adriana thought and didn’t let Patel answer on her behalf: “Stolen Goods, guv.” From the box a pointy eared head poked out, joined by a second one not a second after. The first kitten stated a feeble ‘meow’ and disappeared again. The second grey tabby cat tried to climb out of the box. “Hey, you scoundrel.” Hector Patel saw to putting the kitten back to its sibling. Back in the warmth and safety of Stoke Newington police station Adriana chewed on her bottom lip. She had already signed for her new adoptees - three kittens in a cardboard box, saved from a flat that had served as storage space for one of the most notorious burglar gangs Hackney had on offer - and was waiting for her colleague to bid him farewell. Her last shift as uniformed officer ended with a bang or better: a bust. She grinned at her own thoughts when PC Hector Patel appeared from the office of their guv’nor. “All done, Shaw. You are free.” He gave a crooked smile. “There is one thing, Patel.” She said and picked up one of the kittens from the box. “When I started working here for Fraud,” Patel had to smirk. That explained her vast knowledge from earlier that morning, “I was very keen on getting this station a cat. I was convinced that it would be of benefit for everyone coming here. Be it voluntarily or not. My superiors back then were against it and I was too naive, easily impressed and shy to push the matter further.” She handed him the kitten and stuffed an envelope into one of the front pockets of his vest. “I’ll pass this on to you now. But you get to have a cat and your task now is to organise who takes care of what to make the life of Stoke Newington Police Station’s Station cat a nice one.” Patel, shocked and flattered at the same time, looked down at the yawning fluff ball in his hands. “Copy that, Skip.” She hugged him carefully, minding kitten and box between them. “I’ll see you, Patel. Thank you for all the things you taught me. It was good working together with you.” Her smile was genuine and sad. She hated goodbyes. When DS Shaw had vanished around the corner, Patel lifted the kitten to look at it on eye-level. “You and me now, hu, Jello?”

[samuelfields]

How The Rich Get Richer: Strategies For Competing In A Rigged Game

Making money is like playing a competitive sport. You train hard all your life for those moments on the battlefield where you win all the spoils or go home empty-handed. You console yourself after a loss for having tried your best, but eventually, you realize the game is rigged.

For the past 10 years, I’ve played USTA league tennis. It’s a great way to stay in shape, meet new folks, and keep the competitive juices firing. Everyone needs to balance mental activity with physical activity if they want to stay healthy.

For the past four years, minus one year off due to the birth of my son, I’ve played at the 5.0 level. It’s a treacherous level filled with ex-college players and even ex-pros. Few have a beer gut and everyone has at least one weapon, be it a cannon serve or a heavy topspin forehand.

Battling Against The Odds

USTA Rating Distribution. 1% are rated 5.0

I really enjoyed playing 5.0 level tennis my first year (2015). It felt like I had joined a new fraternity of men I never played with or against before. I joined a team of newly promoted 5.0s and high-level 4.5s and we relished just playing against high-level players, not concerning ourselves with victory.

During the second year, I no longer had as much fun because the experience wasn’t new anymore. In fact, the experience started getting old because I kept losing. It didn’t feel fair to match up with a 4.5 partner or a borderline 5.0 player like myself and battle against two veteran high level 5.0 opponents over and over again.

After following a 2-3 season with a dismal 1-7 season I thought surely the USTA would bump me down to 4.5, but it did not. The USTA said that because I lost some very close matches with a 4.5 partner against two veteran 5.0 players, those losses actually helped boost my rating.

During the 2018 season at 5.0, I realized there was no hope of ever getting ahead playing on a public park team unless I made some drastic changes. I was getting older, slower, and sustaining more injured.

Here are three reasons why I was looking into a black hole:

If you are an elite player, you will be recruited by a private club. They will give you a discounted rate, sometimes wave the initiation fee, and certainly fast track your membership. The public teams from public parks will have no chance of ever recruiting you because they have nothing special to offer.

Once the private club has some elite players, it becomes easier to recruit even more elite players to its team because similar-level players want to play with other similar-level players and create a social network. Meanwhile, public park players either don’t have the money or the connections to join a private club and are stuck playing with whoever joins that year.

Private club players develop a familiarity with each other’s games because they tend to be long-term members. Having a strong chemistry is huge in doubles. Public park players are always rotating doubles partners because the team is open for anyone to join.

This year, I was excited to play against an opponent I had lost to 5-7, 6-7 in a two-hour match a couple of years earlier. He had played for UVA, a national collegiate powerhouse. His partner was an ex-Harvard player.

But this year, I partnered with a 54-year-old guy whom I never played with before. Like me, he didn’t play D1 college tennis. And my UVA opponent partnered with not a 5.0 rated player, but a 5.5 rated player who was once ranked 500 in the world!

Talk about a stacked game. We lost 3-6, 1-6.

From these three points, you can see how there is almost no way the middle class, let alone the poor can fairly compete on an even playing field. What is required to get ahead is a tremendous amount of luck and hard work. No surprise.

But besides luck and hard work, let’s look at some other strategies to help you compete against the rich in a rigged system.

How To Compete In A Rigged Game

1) Sandbag your abilities. Sandbagging in recreational sports is commonplace. People purposefully throw games so they don’t get bumped up. By playing at a level below your real ability, you can win more. It’s great to see how far your abilities can take you, but after reaching your peak potential, you may want to swallow your pride and move back down.

One of the keys to getting ahead at work is to consistently over-deliver on expectations. The way to consistently over-deliver is to realistically under-promise what you can deliver. You must act a little dumb to get ahead. This way, you’ll always be able to surprise on the upside.

The same phenomenon happens when a publicly traded company reports quarterly earnings. After 20 consecutive quarters of beating analyst estimates, analysts are either complete dumb asses, the company is just truly amazing, or the company has mastered the art of sandbagging.  Sandbagging is important because stocks get crushed when they miss analyst estimate and tend to outperform when they beat.

2) Directly ask for help. One of the most insightful commentaries that have come out of an Asian Coalition suing Harvard for racial discrimination is what an Ivy league university admissions officer revealed. She said, and I paraphrase, “Out of all my years working at XYZ university, not once did I get an e-mail or a phone call from a special connection advocating for a potential Asian applicant. Whereas I was always fielding favors for other applicant races.”

In other words, stop believing that meritocracy alone gets you to the promised land! Swallow your pride and be bold enough to ask someone important who you’ve worked with for help and a favor. Self-advocate. Sell to others why you are worth fighting for. Don’t be so modest. If you don’t call in the favors, you are at a huge disadvantage to anybody who does.

Find a balance between offense (active self-promotion) and defense (letting your merit speak for itself). Take Financial Samurai for example. Oftentimes I believe my content is good enough to get recognized by larger outlets, so I don’t bother promoting my work. Yet, I’m frequently passed over. What a mistake to be so passive all these years. Instead, I need to pitch my work because I’m one of the few who actually has a financial background writing about personal finance.

3) Befriend the unicorns. While applying to a pre-school for my son, I learned that there were spots for only four non-sibling kids out of 300+ applicants. In other words, my boy has less than a 1% chance of getting in. We have zero expectations. But, we can improve our chances by going to fundraising events, befriending board members, trustees and so forth.

The rich aren’t evil people. Just like everybody else, they want what’s best for themselves and their children. Make an effort to get to know them by asking for introductions, be proactive about meeting up, and say yes to social events, especially ones that are for good causes. No matter what your socioeconomic background, someone is connected somehow to someone who might be able to help.

Seldom do people ask for help outside their circles. Make it a point to try and help that someone first before asking for anything. I found the best way to befriend rich and powerful people is by sharing a common interest. In my case, that interest is tennis.

4) Blaze your own trail. Sometimes the game is so stacked against you that you have no choice but to take all the risk by doing your own thing. I knew that my chances of getting promoted to Managing Director were slim working out of a satellite office. Hence, I decided to leave work and go straight to the top as the CEO of my own company. Succeed or fail, it would be all my doing.

If you are from humble beginnings, one of the greatest gifts you have is that you don’t have much to lose. Why do you think there are so many immigrant success stories in America?  If you already come from a wealthy family, there’s too much downside to doing anything other than becoming a doctor, financier, lawyer, techie, or consultant working for someone else. Then again, once your family is super rich, you can really shoot for the moon.

4) Marry into wealth. You can either work hard for your money, or you can marry into wealth. I used to think this was an utterly BS strategy, but now that I’m older, I see the merits of finding companionship with someone who can provide all the comforts in the world. It can get very tiring being a sole income provider.

If you can’t afford to attend a rich private school for undergrad our your MBA, then the next best thing is to hang around in the same circles as the wealthy. Finding love is a numbers game. The more you can put yourself in a situation to meet a wealthy person, the higher your chance of finding a wealthy lifelong partner.

We know that wealthier people buy groceries at Wholefoods instead of at Safeway. Wealthier people tend to shop at Nieman Marcus than at JC Penny’s. They go to the opera, the ballet, and to galas. They tend to play golf. Here in San Francisco, you might want to just hang around at one of the many Facebook, Google, and Apple shuttle stops to start up a random conversation about how to generate more fake news revenue.

It feels amazing building your own wealth. But all the people I know who married into wealth don’t seem to mind flying private one bit.

Recognize All That’s Unfair In This World And Proceed

Do I wish I was 6’6″ with a 145 mph serve? Only when I’m playing tennis. Otherwise, sitting in a car or on a long flight would be a PITA. I’m happy with my 5’10” frame, but recognize in order to compete effectively, I’ve got to train harder and eat better than someone with more physical advantages.

As the world gets richer, you will encounter more scenarios where your peers have had everything given to them. It’s not their fault. Parents can’t help but want the world for their kids. You can either get extremely jealous about their good fortune, or you can learn to accept reality, befriend them, and see if you can create some magic together.

Work on your merits, but don’t be embarrassed to ask for help from those who can.

Related: The Top 1% Net Worth Levels By Age Group

Readers, what are some of the ways that you’re working on to catch up, match, or surpass the rich? Does it bother you that the game seems so rigged? If you’re wondering about my tennis, I’m hoping to get bumped down to 4.5 for next season. I have too much pride to join my club’s 5.0 team and partner with ringers. Winning is fun, but it’s 10X more satisfying to win as an underdog. 

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[mcjoelcain]

How The Rich Get Richer: Strategies For Competing In A Rigged Game

Making money is like playing a competitive sport. You train hard all your life for those moments on the battlefield where you win all the spoils or go home empty-handed. You console yourself after a loss for having tried your best, but eventually, you realize the game is rigged.

For the past 10 years, I’ve played USTA league tennis. It’s a great way to stay in shape, meet new folks, and keep the competitive juices firing. Everyone needs to balance mental activity with physical activity if they want to stay healthy.

For the past four years, minus one year off due to the birth of my son, I’ve played at the 5.0 level. It’s a treacherous level filled with ex-college players and even ex-pros. Few have a beer gut and everyone has at least one weapon, be it a cannon serve or a heavy topspin forehand.

Battling Against The Odds

USTA Rating Distribution. 1% are rated 5.0

I really enjoyed playing 5.0 level tennis my first year (2015). It felt like I had joined a new fraternity of men I never played with or against before. I joined a team of newly promoted 5.0s and high-level 4.5s and we relished just playing against high-level players, not concerning ourselves with victory.

During the second year, I no longer had as much fun because the experience wasn’t new anymore. In fact, the experience started getting old because I kept losing. It didn’t feel fair to match up with a 4.5 partner or a borderline 5.0 player like myself and battle against two veteran high level 5.0 opponents over and over again.

After following a 2-3 season with a dismal 1-7 season I thought surely the USTA would bump me down to 4.5, but it did not. The USTA said that because I lost some very close matches with a 4.5 partner against two veteran 5.0 players, those losses actually helped boost my rating.

During the 2018 season at 5.0, I realized there was no hope of ever getting ahead playing on a public park team unless I made some drastic changes. I was getting older, slower, and sustaining more injured.

Here are three reasons why I was looking into a black hole:

If you are an elite player, you will be recruited by a private club. They will give you a discounted rate, sometimes wave the initiation fee, and certainly fast track your membership. The public teams from public parks will have no chance of ever recruiting you because they have nothing special to offer.

Once the private club has some elite players, it becomes easier to recruit even more elite players to its team because similar-level players want to play with other similar-level players and create a social network. Meanwhile, public park players either don’t have the money or the connections to join a private club and are stuck playing with whoever joins that year.

Private club players develop a familiarity with each other’s games because they tend to be long-term members. Having a strong chemistry is huge in doubles. Public park players are always rotating doubles partners because the team is open for anyone to join.

This year, I was excited to play against an opponent I had lost to 5-7, 6-7 in a two-hour match a couple of years earlier. He had played for UVA, a national collegiate powerhouse. His partner was an ex-Harvard player.

But this year, I partnered with a 54-year-old guy whom I never played with before. Like me, he didn’t play D1 college tennis. And my UVA opponent partnered with not a 5.0 rated player, but a 5.5 rated player who was once ranked 500 in the world!

Talk about a stacked game. We lost 3-6, 1-6.

From these three points, you can see how there is almost no way the middle class, let alone the poor can fairly compete on an even playing field. What is required to get ahead is a tremendous amount of luck and hard work. No surprise.

But besides luck and hard work, let’s look at some other strategies to help you compete against the rich in a rigged system.

How To Compete In A Rigged Game

1) Sandbag your abilities. Sandbagging in recreational sports is commonplace. People purposefully throw games so they don’t get bumped up. By playing at a level below your real ability, you can win more. It’s great to see how far your abilities can take you, but after reaching your peak potential, you may want to swallow your pride and move back down.

One of the keys to getting ahead at work is to consistently over-deliver on expectations. The way to consistently over-deliver is to realistically under-promise what you can deliver. You must act a little dumb to get ahead. This way, you’ll always be able to surprise on the upside.

The same phenomenon happens when a publicly traded company reports quarterly earnings. After 20 consecutive quarters of beating analyst estimates, analysts are either complete dumb asses, the company is just truly amazing, or the company has mastered the art of sandbagging.  Sandbagging is important because stocks get crushed when they miss analyst estimate and tend to outperform when they beat.

2) Directly ask for help. One of the most insightful commentaries that have come out of an Asian Coalition suing Harvard for racial discrimination is what an Ivy league university admissions officer revealed. She said, and I paraphrase, “Out of all my years working at XYZ university, not once did I get an e-mail or a phone call from a special connection advocating for a potential Asian applicant. Whereas I was always fielding favors for other applicant races.”

In other words, stop believing that meritocracy alone gets you to the promised land! Swallow your pride and be bold enough to ask someone important who you’ve worked with for help and a favor. Self-advocate. Sell to others why you are worth fighting for. Don’t be so modest. If you don’t call in the favors, you are at a huge disadvantage to anybody who does.

Find a balance between offense (active self-promotion) and defense (letting your merit speak for itself). Take Financial Samurai for example. Oftentimes I believe my content is good enough to get recognized by larger outlets, so I don’t bother promoting my work. Yet, I’m frequently passed over. What a mistake to be so passive all these years. Instead, I need to pitch my work because I’m one of the few who actually has a financial background writing about personal finance.

3) Befriend the unicorns. While applying to a pre-school for my son, I learned that there were spots for only four non-sibling kids out of 300+ applicants. In other words, my boy has less than a 1% chance of getting in. We have zero expectations. But, we can improve our chances by going to fundraising events, befriending board members, trustees and so forth.

The rich aren’t evil people. Just like everybody else, they want what’s best for themselves and their children. Make an effort to get to know them by asking for introductions, be proactive about meeting up, and say yes to social events, especially ones that are for good causes. No matter what your socioeconomic background, someone is connected somehow to someone who might be able to help.

Seldom do people ask for help outside their circles. Make it a point to try and help that someone first before asking for anything. I found the best way to befriend rich and powerful people is by sharing a common interest. In my case, that interest is tennis.

4) Blaze your own trail. Sometimes the game is so stacked against you that you have no choice but to take all the risk by doing your own thing. I knew that my chances of getting promoted to Managing Director were slim working out of a satellite office. Hence, I decided to leave work and go straight to the top as the CEO of my own company. Succeed or fail, it would be all my doing.

If you are from humble beginnings, one of the greatest gifts you have is that you don’t have much to lose. Why do you think there are so many immigrant success stories in America?  If you already come from a wealthy family, there’s too much downside to doing anything other than becoming a doctor, financier, lawyer, techie, or consultant working for someone else. Then again, once your family is super rich, you can really shoot for the moon.

4) Marry into wealth. You can either work hard for your money, or you can marry into wealth. I used to think this was an utterly BS strategy, but now that I’m older, I see the merits of finding companionship with someone who can provide all the comforts in the world. It can get very tiring being a sole income provider.

If you can’t afford to attend a rich private school for undergrad our your MBA, then the next best thing is to hang around in the same circles as the wealthy. Finding love is a numbers game. The more you can put yourself in a situation to meet a wealthy person, the higher your chance of finding a wealthy lifelong partner.

We know that wealthier people buy groceries at Wholefoods instead of at Safeway. Wealthier people tend to shop at Nieman Marcus than at JC Penny’s. They go to the opera, the ballet, and to galas. They tend to play golf. Here in San Francisco, you might want to just hang around at one of the many Facebook, Google, and Apple shuttle stops to start up a random conversation about how to generate more fake news revenue.

It feels amazing building your own wealth. But all the people I know who married into wealth don’t seem to mind flying private one bit.

Recognize All That’s Unfair In This World And Proceed

Do I wish I was 6’6″ with a 145 mph serve? Only when I’m playing tennis. Otherwise, sitting in a car or on a long flight would be a PITA. I’m happy with my 5’10” frame, but recognize in order to compete effectively, I’ve got to train harder and eat better than someone with more physical advantages.

As the world gets richer, you will encounter more scenarios where your peers have had everything given to them. It’s not their fault. Parents can’t help but want the world for their kids. You can either get extremely jealous about their good fortune, or you can learn to accept reality, befriend them, and see if you can create some magic together.

Work on your merits, but don’t be embarrassed to ask for help from those who can.

Related: The Top 1% Net Worth Levels By Age Group

Readers, what are some of the ways that you’re working on to catch up, match, or surpass the rich? Does it bother you that the game seems so rigged? If you’re wondering about my tennis, I’m hoping to get bumped down to 4.5 for next season. I have too much pride to join my club’s 5.0 team and partner with ringers. Winning is fun, but it’s 10X more satisfying to win as an underdog. 

https://www.financialsamurai.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/How-the-rich-get-richer.m4a

The post How The Rich Get Richer: Strategies For Competing In A Rigged Game appeared first on Financial Samurai.

from Money https://www.financialsamurai.com/how-the-rich-get-richer-strategies-for-competing-in-a-rigged-game/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[ronaldmrashid]

How The Rich Get Richer: Strategies For Competing In A Rigged Game

Making money is like playing a competitive sport. You train hard all your life for those moments on the battlefield where you win all the spoils or go home empty-handed. You console yourself after a loss for having tried your best, but eventually, you realize the game is rigged.

For the past 10 years, I’ve played USTA league tennis. It’s a great way to stay in shape, meet new folks, and keep the competitive juices firing. Everyone needs to balance mental activity with physical activity if they want to stay healthy.

For the past four years, minus one year off due to the birth of my son, I’ve played at the 5.0 level. It’s a treacherous level filled with ex-college players and even ex-pros. Few have a beer gut and everyone has at least one weapon, be it a cannon serve or a heavy topspin forehand.

Battling Against The Odds

USTA Rating Distribution. 1% are rated 5.0

I really enjoyed playing 5.0 level tennis my first year (2015). It felt like I had joined a new fraternity of men I never played with or against before. I joined a team of newly promoted 5.0s and high-level 4.5s and we relished just playing against high-level players, not concerning ourselves with victory.

During the second year, I no longer had as much fun because the experience wasn’t new anymore. In fact, the experience started getting old because I kept losing. It didn’t feel fair to match up with a 4.5 partner or a borderline 5.0 player like myself and battle against two veteran high level 5.0 opponents over and over again.

After following a 2-3 season with a dismal 1-7 season I thought surely the USTA would bump me down to 4.5, but it did not. The USTA said that because I lost some very close matches with a 4.5 partner against two veteran 5.0 players, those losses actually helped boost my rating.

During the 2018 season at 5.0, I realized there was no hope of ever getting ahead playing on a public park team unless I made some drastic changes. I was getting older, slower, and sustaining more injured.

Here are three reasons why I was looking into a black hole:

If you are an elite player, you will be recruited by a private club. They will give you a discounted rate, sometimes wave the initiation fee, and certainly fast track your membership. The public teams from public parks will have no chance of ever recruiting you because they have nothing special to offer.

Once the private club has some elite players, it becomes easier to recruit even more elite players to its team because similar-level players want to play with other similar-level players and create a social network. Meanwhile, public park players either don’t have the money or the connections to join a private club and are stuck playing with whoever joins that year.

Private club players develop a familiarity with each other’s games because they tend to be long-term members. Having a strong chemistry is huge in doubles. Public park players are always rotating doubles partners because the team is open for anyone to join.

This year, I was excited to play against an opponent I had lost to 5-7, 6-7 in a two-hour match a couple of years earlier. He had played for UVA, a national collegiate powerhouse. His partner was an ex-Harvard player.

But this year, I partnered with a 54-year-old guy whom I never played with before. Like me, he didn’t play D1 college tennis. And my UVA opponent partnered with not a 5.0 rated player, but a 5.5 rated player who was once ranked 500 in the world!

Talk about a stacked game. We lost 3-6, 1-6.

From these three points, you can see how there is almost no way the middle class, let alone the poor can fairly compete on an even playing field. What is required to get ahead is a tremendous amount of luck and hard work. No surprise.

But besides luck and hard work, let’s look at some other strategies to help you compete against the rich in a rigged system.

How To Compete In A Rigged Game

1) Sandbag your abilities. Sandbagging in recreational sports is commonplace. People purposefully throw games so they don’t get bumped up. By playing at a level below your real ability, you can win more. It’s great to see how far your abilities can take you, but after reaching your peak potential, you may want to swallow your pride and move back down.

One of the keys to getting ahead at work is to consistently over-deliver on expectations. The way to consistently over-deliver is to realistically under-promise what you can deliver. You must act a little dumb to get ahead. This way, you’ll always be able to surprise on the upside.

The same phenomenon happens when a publicly traded company reports quarterly earnings. After 20 consecutive quarters of beating analyst estimates, analysts are either complete dumb asses, the company is just truly amazing, or the company has mastered the art of sandbagging.  Sandbagging is important because stocks get crushed when they miss analyst estimate and tend to outperform when they beat.

2) Directly ask for help. One of the most insightful commentaries that have come out of an Asian Coalition suing Harvard for racial discrimination is what an Ivy league university admissions officer revealed. She said, and I paraphrase, “Out of all my years working at XYZ university, not once did I get an e-mail or a phone call from a special connection advocating for a potential Asian applicant. Whereas I was always fielding favors for other applicant races.”

In other words, stop believing that meritocracy alone gets you to the promised land! Swallow your pride and be bold enough to ask someone important who you’ve worked with for help and a favor. Self-advocate. Sell to others why you are worth fighting for. Don’t be so modest. If you don’t call in the favors, you are at a huge disadvantage to anybody who does.

Find a balance between offense (active self-promotion) and defense (letting your merit speak for itself). Take Financial Samurai for example. Oftentimes I believe my content is good enough to get recognized by larger outlets, so I don’t bother promoting my work. Yet, I’m frequently passed over. What a mistake to be so passive all these years. Instead, I need to pitch my work because I’m one of the few who actually has a financial background writing about personal finance.

3) Befriend the unicorns. While applying to a pre-school for my son, I learned that there were spots for only four non-sibling kids out of 300+ applicants. In other words, my boy has less than a 1% chance of getting in. We have zero expectations. But, we can improve our chances by going to fundraising events, befriending board members, trustees and so forth.

The rich aren’t evil people. Just like everybody else, they want what’s best for themselves and their children. Make an effort to get to know them by asking for introductions, be proactive about meeting up, and say yes to social events, especially ones that are for good causes. No matter what your socioeconomic background, someone is connected somehow to someone who might be able to help.

Seldom do people ask for help outside their circles. Make it a point to try and help that someone first before asking for anything. I found the best way to befriend rich and powerful people is by sharing a common interest. In my case, that interest is tennis.

4) Blaze your own trail. Sometimes the game is so stacked against you that you have no choice but to take all the risk by doing your own thing. I knew that my chances of getting promoted to Managing Director were slim working out of a satellite office. Hence, I decided to leave work and go straight to the top as the CEO of my own company. Succeed or fail, it would be all my doing.

If you are from humble beginnings, one of the greatest gifts you have is that you don’t have much to lose. Why do you think there are so many immigrant success stories in America?  If you already come from a wealthy family, there’s too much downside to doing anything other than becoming a doctor, financier, lawyer, techie, or consultant working for someone else. Then again, once your family is super rich, you can really shoot for the moon.

4) Marry into wealth. You can either work hard for your money, or you can marry into wealth. I used to think this was an utterly BS strategy, but now that I’m older, I see the merits of finding companionship with someone who can provide all the comforts in the world. It can get very tiring being a sole income provider.

If you can’t afford to attend a rich private school for undergrad our your MBA, then the next best thing is to hang around in the same circles as the wealthy. Finding love is a numbers game. The more you can put yourself in a situation to meet a wealthy person, the higher your chance of finding a wealthy lifelong partner.

We know that wealthier people buy groceries at Wholefoods instead of at Safeway. Wealthier people tend to shop at Nieman Marcus than at JC Penny’s. They go to the opera, the ballet, and to galas. They tend to play golf. Here in San Francisco, you might want to just hang around at one of the many Facebook, Google, and Apple shuttle stops to start up a random conversation about how to generate more fake news revenue.

It feels amazing building your own wealth. But all the people I know who married into wealth don’t seem to mind flying private one bit.

Recognize All That’s Unfair In This World And Proceed

Do I wish I was 6’6″ with a 145 mph serve? Only when I’m playing tennis. Otherwise, sitting in a car or on a long flight would be a PITA. I’m happy with my 5’10” frame, but recognize in order to compete effectively, I’ve got to train harder and eat better than someone with more physical advantages.

As the world gets richer, you will encounter more scenarios where your peers have had everything given to them. It’s not their fault. Parents can’t help but want the world for their kids. You can either get extremely jealous about their good fortune, or you can learn to accept reality, befriend them, and see if you can create some magic together.

Work on your merits, but don’t be embarrassed to ask for help from those who can.

Related: The Top 1% Net Worth Levels By Age Group

Readers, what are some of the ways that you’re working on to catch up, match, or surpass the rich? Does it bother you that the game seems so rigged? If you’re wondering about my tennis, I’m hoping to get bumped down to 4.5 for next season. I have too much pride to join my club’s 5.0 team and partner with ringers. Winning is fun, but it’s 10X more satisfying to win as an underdog. 

https://www.financialsamurai.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/How-the-rich-get-richer.m4a

The post How The Rich Get Richer: Strategies For Competing In A Rigged Game appeared first on Financial Samurai.

from https://www.financialsamurai.com/how-the-rich-get-richer-strategies-for-competing-in-a-rigged-game/

[thepathtaken]

Not Just a “Walk in the Park”!

            Gardiner Basin/Sixty Lakes Basin Backpack                                             (Kings Canyon National Park)

 (July 24, 2018)  Gardiner Basin/Sixty Lakes Backpack-Day 0

“If China had been endowed with a well-placed mountain range like that of the southern Sierra Nevada, its Great Wall would not have been necessary.”  Eric Blehm, The Last Season

Ah!  The Sierra Nevada.  My favorite place to go.  Earlier this year, my friend Richard Templeton suggested we backpack to Gardiner Basin.  He has hiked extensively since a kid and the Gardiner Basin was his Dad’s favorite location. He thinks he backpacked there at about age 16, but is unclear on the details.  With this suggestion, I looked at maps and online trip reports and decided that this was something we could do.  The old USGS quad maps have a trail leading from Charlotte Lake, up over Gardiner Pass, into Gardiner Basin and ending at Upper Gardiner Lake.  It looked like from there, it would be a relatively easy hike over Sixty Lakes Basin Col, into Sixty Lakes Basin and out via the PCT/JMT over Glenn and Kearsarge Passes. Trip reports I read indicated that the trail was unmaintained, and while traces may still be seen, it was pretty much non-existent.  Yet, others had done this route and did not indicate extreme difficulties, and I was eager to try an off-trail adventure, so the trip was on. Richard of course was a participant, as was Anna Peterson, Marietta Gray, and Pat Shearer.

After work on Tuesday, I drove up to Independence, CA and then up to Onion Valley. We all met up there and stayed at a lovely walk-in campsite at Onion Valley Campground.  Reservations were not that difficult to get just a few weeks earlier, probably since it was a weekday.  It had rained earlier in the day, but the night was quiet and clear.  We had the sound of a creek rushing by to lull us to sleep.  This was the first time I had ever stayed at this location (elevation 9190 feet) and it’s a great place to stay the night before for any hike heading up Kearsarge Pass.  “The mountains are calling” and we are ready to go! 

(July 25, 2018)  Gardiner Basin/Sixty Lakes Backpack-Day 1 (Wednesday)

“One step at a time is good walking.”  Chinese Proverb 

“That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.” Friedrich Nietzsche

After the obligatory “start of hike” picture, we started on the trail at 7:30 am and headed up towards Kearsarge Pass, 4.7 miles and 2645 feet higher (elevation 11,835 feet).  The hike up Kearsarge Pass is not too bad, the grade is moderate, but the pass faces east and one gets the full sun exposure right away and it gets hot early on. There are a number of lakes that you pass on your way up:

—Little Pothole Lake

—Gilbert Lake

—Flower Lake (hidden and not visible from the trail)

—Heart Lake (you can look down on this lake from one of the many switchbacks), 

—and lastly Big Pothole Lake. 

We all made it up the pass, some a bit faster than others, but our packs were heavy and it was a bit of a slog.

After a short break at the top of the pass, 

we then hiked down to the lovely Kearsarge Lakes, and stayed at the second of the lower Kearsarge Lakes.  These are heavily used lakes/campsites, but it was not too crowded in the middle of the week and the sites were nice.  Rain was threatening as we descended the pass and we had brief thunder and some sprinkles that held off just until we all got our tents up.   Mileage for the day was 6.2 miles.

Anna had some mild altitude issues and struggled with the uphill, but with getting a little lower in elevation and a little help from Jack Daniel she was fine.

Quote of the day from the comforts of camp—by Anna— "if I could just skip the hiking part, I'd be fine. This is the good life!" 

(July 26, 2018)  Gardiner Basin/Sixty Lakes Backpack-Day 2 (Thursday)

“Off the beaten track is the real world.”  Isabella Bird, as quoted by Jacki Hill-Murphy in Adventuresses: Rediscovering Daring Voyages into the Unknown

Leaving Kearsarge Lakes we hiked slightly downhill, 

past Bullfrog lake to the junction of the JMT/PCT.  

We then hiked a steep uphill 1/2 mile section to the junction of the Charlotte Lake trail.  I’ve never previously been down to Charlotte Lake, so the scenery was all new for me.  This section was lovely, through forest down to Charlotte Lake at 10,370 feet.  

[looking down on Charlotte Lake]

We took a long break for a snack and swim.  For me, swimming in a mountain lake is the good life!  

 We then headed on the next part of our journey which was heading toward Gardiner Pass.  At this point we would be leaving all official trail. As I mentioned earlier, this trail is not maintained.  Based on previous trip reports that I had read, I was unsure if we would find any trail or not.  For the most of this first part we actually did find some trail, some faint, but mostly there. 

[here the going was not too bad]

[and you can see a little bit of the old trail]

But after a while, the trail seemed less distinct, or divided and seemed to go lower than we wanted.  

[looking toward Charlotte Dome in the distance]

The occasional cairn (duck) started appearing...but who knows who put it there and if it accurately indicates where the trail is/was.

There were obstacles on the trail. 

At this point there was a lot of manzanita, and it was a lot easier to follow some trail than bushwhacking through the manzanita.

We were heading for a camp near a stream, but when we got to the stream, it was obvious that we were about 400 feet lower than we wanted to be and that we had probably been following a use trail for those going to climb Charlotte Dome.  The solution:  hike straight up through the brush and try to get to the elevation we needed to be. This was a hard, calf-burning climb to a bench with a few campsites next to the creek.  Still no sign of a trail.  This climb up the hillside was pretty steep, on somewhat loose terrain—sometimes it was one step forward, half a step back.  It was definitely out of some of our group’s comfort zone, but there really was no other option unless we were to backtrack.  

Rain threatened and sprinkled a bit just as we got into camp, but soon stopped.  Richard started complaining about the lack of mosquitoes!  In the mosquito department they were almost non-existent for the whole trip which was wonderful as I’m definitely not a fan.  I didn’t get even one bite on the whole trip, although we did see a very few mosquitoes later on!  6.3 miles today. 

(July 27, 2018)  Gardiner Basin/Sixty Lakes Backpack-Day 3 (Friday)

“You came here to do something hard.  That’s the whole point.  It wouldn’t be an adventure if it didn’t challenge you.”  Charlotte Austin   http://www.staywildmagazine.com/news/2016/11/1/the-rules-of-adventure

From our camp, we started uphill in the morning, somewhat paralleling the creek in the hopes of meeting back up with the actual trail, but no such luck.  We knew we were heading toward Gardiner Pass and just proceeded in the general direction.  

We crossed through an extensive avalanche debris field so maybe that was where the trail went.  

In any case, we slowly worked our way up to the pass, finally finding some intermittent ducks (cairns) that made steep short switchbacks.  We continued on up to the obvious top, and worked our way a little to the east of the actual pass where the route down was easier. 

[looking back]

The view of the lakes ahead was gorgeous.  

For those of you who know Marietta, she left a little bit of Tony there at the top of Gardiner Pass.  We don’t know if Tony ever was at this spot, but he did extensive hiking in the Sierras throughout his life and he would have loved this spot.  

Quote of the day from Marietta (paraphrase):  “Well, I can cross that pass off my bucket list…not that it was ever on my bucket list!”

There was steep, but present trail down from the pass

 and we slowly worked our way down. 

[looking back at the pass]

We passed many lakes,

[Anna took a tumble/roll and we had to help her up!  We all fell at least once, but no one was hurt.]

stopping at one unnamed lake for lunch and a swim. 

We continued down, sometimes on visible trail, sometimes not... 

...and eventually made it down to the largest lake in the series (Lk 9530) for camp. We only hiked approximately 3.5 miles today! Crazy short distance...but it was hard hiking and we felt like we had hiked 10 or more miles. 

After setting up camp, we had another refreshing swim.  Richard went fishing and came through with 7 trout.  Friday night fish fry—so very delicious!

  (July 28, 2018)  Gardiner Basin/Sixty Lakes Backpack-Day 4 (Saturday)

“Adventure is an overused word: it’s a conceit, a privilege, a contradiction. We’re collectively obsessed with it, because it puts us into situations where there are consequences instead of rules, where we can’t use Google to solve our problems, where we do hard things. Real adventure is painful. It’s terrible. It’s perfect.”   http://www.staywildmagazine.com/news/2016/11/1/the-rules-of-adventure

 We left camp and hiked off trail up a short ridge...

...and then a very, very steep down to Gardiner Creek. 

Again there was a hint of a trail as we started, but this soon fizzled and we just went down.  

The next part of the hike was to find and “follow” the old trail which crossed the creek for awhile and then recrossed back.  The reason it crossed the creek was that there was cliff on the near side, and theoretically no way around.  

We found a log crossing with rushing water a fair ways down so the “butt scoot maneuver” was the preferred mode of crossing for most of us.  

We did not find the “trail creek crossing”, and for the whole time we were on the west side of the creek, we never found any trail.  There was thick undergrowth of manzanita and buckthorn...

...and dense aspen thickets.  By GPS location, we were “on the trail”, but it certainly wasn’t apparent on the ground. At one point we needed to cross a tributary creek, but the aspen growth was so dense that we struggled to get through.  We looked higher and lower, but there was no good place to cross or get through.  It’s hard to describe how difficult this section was, but it was very difficult.  

Richard was in the lead, and once we got through the thick vegetation, after putting our hands and feet in all kinds of places, (at 9800 feet, no less), Richard tells us to watch out for the large rattlesnake!  They are usually not at that high of elevation.  Fortunately we didn't come across him as we were bushwhacking and we did not get close enough for a serious encounter.  

Once we crossed back to the east side...it had taken us 4 hours to go just a couple of miles, we met another group of hikers, the first we had seen in a couple of days.  They had stayed on the east side and had a much better time.  Apparently there was a way around that did not involve what we went through.  Not sure how much exposure this route had though.  Pretty sure it had to be a better route than what we did!

 We then climbed, sometimes on trail, sometimes following ducks up to a creek crossing where we had lunch.  Skies were hazy with smoke, presumably from Yosemite to the north.  We could smell the smoke a little, but it wasn’t bad.  

After lunch it was more climbing, more route finding, more duck following... 

...and more exhaustion.  

We finally made it to the heart shaped, smaller of the Lower Gardiner Lakes and had a nice evening.  We had a nice swim and were all in bed early!  We were exhausted, but only did 5.25 miles today. 

Quotes of the day:  

from Anna:  “ I don’t know enough English words to describe how hard this hike is.  I don’t even know enough Chinese words to say how hard this hike is!”  

from Marietta:  “I knew this hike was off trail, but I was thinking that meant strolling through meadows!”.   [kind of like the above photo--but this was only 1% of our off-trail travel!]

(July 29, 2018)  Gardiner Basin/Sixty Lakes Backpack-Day 5 (Sunday)

“There’s all sorts of walking—from heading out across the desert in a straight line to a sinuous weaving through undergrowth.  Descending rocky ridges and talus slopes is a specialty in itself.  It is an irregular dancing—always shifting—step of walk on slabs and scree. The breath and eye are always following this uneven rhythm.  It is never paced or clocklike, but flexing—little jumps—sidestep—going for the well seen place to put a foot on a rock, hit flat, move on—zigzagging along and all deliberate.  The alert eye looking ahead, picking the footholds to come, while never missing the step of the moment.  The body-mind is so at one with this rough world that it makes these moves effortlessly once it has had a bit of practice.  The mountain keeps up with the mountain.  The landscape can become both ritual and medication.”  Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild

Leaving the Lower Gardiner Lakes, we hiked uphill, gradually working our way up to Upper Gardiner Lake. 

We passed a couple of smaller lakes

and continued to climb

[looking back at Lower Gardiner Lakes]

and then arrived at Upper Gardiner Lake.  This is a large, somewhat stark, but beautiful lake. 

I had read that we needed to keep to the east and north of the lake (left side of above photo) and work our way around the talus near the shore to the base of our climb up class 2 Sixty Lakes Basin Col.  As I looked at the lakeshore from a distance, it looked really sketchy, like there was no flat place to walk and you could fall into the lake. 

But as we got going, it was not as bad as it looked.  It wasn’t as steep as it appeared and there were large stable talus boulders that we had to scramble over.  I actually enjoyed this section once I realized it wasn’t too hard.  I’m not sure everyone had that same feeling though!   It took us about an hour to get to the other side of the lake.  

At that time, it was time to stop and “smell the roses" or in our case take a quick dip in the lake.  Can’t pass up a lake when one is hot and tired!  So refreshing.

 Next was the climb across more talus the whole way up Sixty Lakes Basin Col.  This was not easy.  

We were unsure if there was a better route,

but we just worked our way up and after another hour or so, we were up at the top.  

[looking down into Sixty Lakes Basisin] 

The view from the top is always great!  

After lunch, we headed down. The down side of Sixty Lakes Basin Col was a little easier (but not without some challenges) 

with longer granite ledges and only some talus.  It was quite a ways down though and we were looking forward to camp at Long Lake (Lake 10,840) which we could see.  

 Once down near Long Lake, there is a cliff on the west side that we had to go up and around.  We first crossed the inflow of Long Lake just above some falls and then followed a use trail up and up over this rocky outcropping.  This much up at the end of the day was not fun, but it wasn’t too bad.  We went back down to the lake and set up camp at the north end of Long Lake.  Total mileage for the day was 3.75 miles. Again very low mileage, but it sure didn’t feel that way!  

(July 30, 2018)  Gardiner Basin/Sixty Lakes Backpack-Day 6 (Monday)

There is Pleasure in the Pathless Woods, by Lord Byron

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar: I love not man the less, but Nature more, From these our interviews, in which I steal From all I may be, or have been before, To mingle with the Universe, and feel What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.”

 [early morning view of Long Lake]

There may be pleasure in the pathless woods, but after 4 days of pathless mountainous travel, there is real pleasure in getting back on the trail!  I mean REAL PLEASURE!  The rest of our hike would be on trail and everyone was extremely grateful for that.  

We hiked past a few of the sixty lakes in Sixty Lakes Basin. 

I don't know if there are actually sixty lakes in this basin or not, but we saw or hiked past at least 10 of them, all lovely.  

We climbed, on trail, gradually up 1200 feet out of Sixty Lakes Basin and were then treated to amazing views of Rae Lakes in the morning light.  The pictures due not do the view justice.  I had been to Rae Lakes before, but never from this vantage point and never having seen them look so beautiful.  

We then descended down to Rae Lakes at 10,538 elevation, having hiked 4.7 miles for the day and arriving at 10:30 am.  

We were due for an easy day and we swam and rested and relaxed for the rest of the day. It clouded up in the afternoon and rained for about 30 minutes.

(July 31, 2018)  Gardiner Basin/Sixty Lakes Backpack-Day 7 (Tuesday)

“Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets’ towers …where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you—beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.” Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

And may you just have trails!  (I can’t emphasize this enough--being on a trail is just so much easier.  We enjoyed this hike up to this point, but the off-trail, cross-country travel was definitely much, much tougher.)  

This morning’s hike was to get up Glen Pass, elevation 11,978 ft.,1.9 miles from Rae Lakes and with 1440 feet of elevation gain.  

[looking back towards Rae Lakes]

It’s a long steady climb up Glen Pass, but not terrible, and we all made it up just fine. 

[looking down onto Charlotte Lake] 

[looking back at Charlotte Dome; back from where we had been a few days ago]

From there, we hiked back down to the Charlotte Lake junction, and then over to Kearsarge Lakes for our last night out. It again clouded up in the early afternoon and we were treated to actual hail and rainstorm in the last mile before camp.  It ended up raining off and on for a couple of hours, but then cleared up for the evening.

(August 1, 2018)  Gardiner Basin/Sixty Lakes Backpack-Day 8 (Wednesday)

“Backpacking forces one, by necessity, to walk the balance line, the edge of the sword, between disciplined deprivation and hedonistic gratification: a tiring, sweat-soaking day ends with a plunge into a cool stream; an arduous, lung-bursting climb is followed by a magnificent panoramic sweeping view; and there is the continuous contrast between life on the trail and civilized pleasures—a warm meal, a hot shower, clean dry clothes.  It is by walking this line between sacrifice and satisfaction that one finds fulfillment.” Robert Browne, The Appalachian Trail

We decided on an early start up Kearsarge Pass and out as we were all eager for a shower, clean clothes, and real food.  From this direction it is just a little over a mile and not quite 1000 feet of gain.  We were all up to the top of the pass within 1 hour.  For the first part of the 4.7 miles down to Onion Valley, the trail is an easy grade and with no steps and it almost feels like you can fly down the mountain.  Certainly we were moving briskly!  We made it down by about 10 AM; some of us rinsed off in the stream and changed clothes. Then it was off to Lone Pine for lunch at the Alabama Hills Café and then the drive back home. 

Trip Summary: The scenery was awesome, the company was the best, but the hiking was hard and the consensus was that this was the hardest backpack that any of us had ever done!  All and all an amazing adventure and a wonderful trip.

[dorothydelgadillo]

Writing Tips From Journalism, Aristotle, & of Course, Childish Gambino

Real-life mad man, Howard Gossage is quoted saying, “people don’t read advertising, they read what interests them. Sometimes, it’s an ad.”

I think the Socrates of San Francisco was being a bit generous — it’s usually not an ad.

Then again, Gossage wasn’t fighting for the attention of consumers with ad blockers, instant notifications, and millions of terabytes of media at their fingertips.     

However, in the era of branded content and inbound marketing, his point is more prophetic than ever.  

When we write copy, we aren’t competing with other copy — we are competing with our persona’s favorite publications, television shows, social feeds, movies, and music.

We are competing with everything they would rather consume than what we just wrote to promote our businesses.

Now, I know you’ve heard this before. You get it. There is more content than ever and we need to write better copy if we want to stand out -- but we are failing, marketers.

Most content kinda sucks -- and it’s a shame.

Because when done right, content marketing can spur incredible business growth.   

4 Non-Marketing Sources of Inspiration

I want to acknowledge that there is a ton of great marketing-specific content advice out there.

IMPACT’s very own Marcus Sheridan wrote a book called “They Ask, You Answer” that is one of my favorites and I highly recommend content guru Ann Handley’s “Everybody Writes” (See her at IMPACT live 18’).

Lessons from the golden age of copywriting also remain relevant.

The classic formula “create the problem, agitate the problem, and solve the problem” isn’t going out of style (I’m using it for this post) and you should always kill feature-heavy copy to highlight benefits.  

But those two paragraphs are the last in this post that will mention advice specific to marketing or advertising.

Great copywriting can and should draw inspiration from divergent sources.

I firmly believe if we want to create business-changing content, we need to take a hard look at what our personas are consuming instead of our blogs, social posts, and landing pages.

These are 4 non-marketing forms of media that helped me learn to write better copy.

1. Journalism

In his hallmark writing how-to “On Writing Well,” William Zinsser wrote, “The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn’t induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead.”

Readers Follow the Lede

Long before the goldfish attention spans of today’s web readers, journalists understood an article lives or dies with the lead (or “lede” if you want to be old-timey).  

A lead is the first 20 or 25 words of any article and how journalists hook their audience.

Leads can be as simple as a straight news lead that provides the reader a summary of all the most important facts.

This is commonly done for breaking news, like this example from today’s New York Times:  

“A California man suspected of accessing and defacing numerous military, government and business websites, including that of West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center and the New York City Comptroller’s Office, was arrested Thursday on computer fraud charges.”

Although, in feature stories or non-hard news, journalists often employ other types of leads that may inspire you to write better introductions.   

One such type is an anecdotal lead that uses narrative to draw you in.

Here’s a narrative lead from a 2006 pulitzer prize winning article written by Andrea Elliot in the New York Times:

“The young Egyptian professional could pass for any New York bachelor.

Dressed in a crisp polo shirt and swathed in cologne, he races his Nissan Maxima through the rain-slicked streets of Manhattan, late for a date with a tall brunette. At red lights, he fusses with his hair.

What sets the bachelor apart from other young men on the make is the chaperone sitting next to him — a tall, bearded man in a white robe and stiff embroidered hat.”

What makes this lead so strong is that it introduces the main tension of the story, that this young Egyptian bachelor must reconcile modern dating rituals with those of his traditional beliefs, without explicitly telling you all the summary facts.

It draws you in. You can’t help but want to keep reading.

When you’re writing meta descriptions, think of leads. What are the 300 characters you can write that will leave your audience with no choice but to click for more?

For some of your content, particularly educational content, that may mean the straight facts. Other content may be better teased with tension-filled narrative arcs.

Avoid Cliches & Jargon

Now, before any journalists call me out, I know my lead for this post is the much-maligned quote — but I like to think all rules are made to be broken.  

If there is anything else editors hate, it’s cliches. Avoid them like the plague (yes, I did that on purpose).

In marketing, think ____ is dead, or ____ is king. No one really believes SEO is dead anymore and we get that content is king.

Also, eliminate all jargon.

We may say things like leverage, ten thousand foot view, and thought leader to each other, but our audience doesn’t. All jargon does is alienate them and demonstrate what a hard time we have talking like humans about our profession.

Don’t Ask “Yes or No” Questions          

Another truism from journalists that may help sharpen your writing is Betteridge’s law.

Betteridge’s law states that any headline that asks a question can probably be answered no. It is designed to bring attention to the fact that if a journalist is using a question, it probably means they are trying to over sell what is in fact a pretty dull payoff.

If you were breaking the story that cancer has been cured, you wouldn’t write, “Have we found the cure for cancer?” You would simply write, “Cancer cured.”  

Keep Betteridge’s law in mind when you are writing headlines or page titles. Otherwise, you risk alienating your audience with clickbait that only lets them know they shouldn’t click again.

The Inverted Pyramid

And last, but not least, always remember the inverted pyramid.

Relevant for almost all media writing, the inverted pyramid states that the most important information in any article comes first, followed by gradually less important information throughout the story.   

Don’t bury your lead or the most interesting thing about your content. Journalists are hard wired to use the inverted pyramid to give their stories structure and ensure that even if someone doesn’t make it to the end, they’ve gotten all that really matters.

The same should be true of your marketing content.  

Think about that the next time you are writing a web page. If 50% of your users aren’t scrolling past the fold, is your hero copy communicating all that they really need to know?

2. Fiction

If we want our marketing content to resonate, it needs to tell a story.

An actual story. Something that moves from A to B to C to D, that has internal or external conflict, tension, closure, or hell, even a lack of closure.

To tell better stories, we need to recognize when one is right in front of us. For that, I will defer to master sci-fi author, Kurt Vonnegut (“Slaughterhouse five” is his most known work).     

During his anthropology graduate studies at the University of Chicago, Vonnegut noticed that the Bible’s New Testament and the enduring folk tale Cinderella followed nearly the same shape.

He posited that the “shapes” of the stories a culture holds most valuable reveal things about that culture, and submitted his findings for his master’s thesis.

While his professors rejected the thesis (because “it was so simple and looked like too much fun”), Vonnegut considered the shapes his “prettiest contribution to culture.”

I’ll let him explain:

Credit: Maya Eilam 

These story shapes are everywhere.

Almost every episode of every sitcom uses “man in a hole.” Our favorite lovable cast of weirdos gets into a pickle, then they get out of it.

I would argue that the classic copywriting formula “create the problem...” is just the “man in a hole” story shape.   

Rom-coms are always the “boy meets girl” shape — star-crossed lovers find each other, then lose each other, but luckily love’s eternal power always conquers all in the last five minutes.   

Forget Cinderella — “Rocky,” “The Karate Kid,” and most sports movies always steal her shape.

Think about how you structure your marketing and sales stories.

Is it like this?

This is the way things are, now let me tell you why they will be a million times better.

We only tell our audience why our product or service is the greatest thing that anybody has ever conceived with no tension or conflict, but this doesn’t make your message persuasive -- it makes it sound like BS.

We cannot be afraid to introduce points of tension and conflict into our content.

People love stories because they love struggles that mirror their own. Human existence is a binary struggle between the way things are and the way we want them to be.

Effective copy can and should mirror this.    

Or as I’ve heard Marcus Sheridan say (and I’m paraphrasing), “your content shouldn’t be just about the good, but also the bad and the ugly.”

Say the ugly that your competition is too scared to.

Explain who shouldn’t  buy your product or service.      

It takes guts, but you’ll wind up with better leads, more satisfied customers, and less churn.   

3. Speechwriting

Aristotle taught his students that if they wanted to persuade an audience, they had to use three rhetorical appeals.

Logos or logical appeals. These are supporting details and facts that bolster your point or argument (i.e. social proof, references, etc.). When I share all the ways Vonnegut’s story shapes work in popular media, I am making a logical appeal to convince you that you should try it with your content.     

Ethos or ethical appeals. These speak to your credibility to deliver that message. Extrinsic ethical appeals speak to your experience — I’ve driven results for clients with copywriting, so I feel credible to write about it. Intrinsic appeals are how well you deliver your message — if you think my writing sucks, you aren’t going to trust any of my writing advice.      

Pathos or pathetic appeals. This is very different from our interpretation of the word pathetic. These appeals speak to the emotions of the audience. I started this article strongly implying that your content may suck to appeal to your emotions of fear, “am I leaving money on the table because I’m not communicating my message well?” Instead, I may have actually appealed to your emotion of hate, “will this pompous marketer get off his high horse,” If so, thank you for hate-reading this long.    

The world’s best speakers intrinsically use these appeals to hold attention, earn trust, and ultimately, inspire action.   

Hours after Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed, Robert Kennedy stood on the bed of a pickup truck in Indianapolis to announce the news to a predominately African American crowd.

Despite concerns from campaign advisors about his safety, he delivered an improvised speech that is widely considered to be one of the most poignant addresses of modern politics.  

This speech has taught me more about copywriting and rhetorical appeals than any other. I will resist the urge to go line-by-line but share select passages that highlight Aristotle’s appeals.  

Logos

“For those of you who are black — considering the evidence there evidently is that there were white people who were responsible — you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization — black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.”

RFK is making a logical appeal. MLK stood for peace and nonviolence — to respond as a country to his violent end with violence is to betray the compassion and love he preached.  

Ethos

“For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.”

To show the audience he understands their pain, Kennedy evokes the loss he felt when his brother John was killed by an assassin's bullet. His call “to go beyond these rather difficult times” doesn’t ring hollow because he too has struggled to move beyond deep despair.

Pathos

"My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: 'In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.'"

While nearly every line of RFK’s speech has an emotional appeal, it’s hard for anyone reading this beautiful passage not to feel universal human truths and emotions. We all try to forget pain, that one day, against our will, becomes perspective.   

Kennedy is not merely using rhetorical appeals, but also rhetorical devices. These tools, developed by Greek masters of persuasion, are tried and true messaging techniques.

We are all familiar with metaphors -- Abraham Lincoln once said a political adversary, "dived down deeper into the sea of knowledge and come up drier than any other man he knew.” -- But there are many other devices that you may or may not be familiar with that can level up your copywriting.

To keep it in the Kennedy family, JFK loved rhetorical devices. Think "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." This is called antimetabole, and it’s a reversal of repeated words or phrases for effect.

Another, “let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate” -- This is called chiasmus and it’s a repetition of words and phrases in reverse order for effect.  

If you want to try rhetorical devices to be more persuasive in your copywriting, here’s a list of 50.

4. Songwriting

There are few forms of art or media that evoke as visceral a reaction as music.

Songs that mean something to us stick to our souls. They become defining parts of who we are.  

How many times do you hear a song and almost feel like you’ve stepped in a time machine to the first time that song meant something to you?

Because the experience is so personal, it is also wildly subjective from one person to the next.

A skilled songwriter creates this thing that is very personal to them and then releases it into the world to be interpreted.

Sort of like what we do as marketers, right?  While everything filters through the lens of a brand’s needs and objectives, there are bits of us in all the creative and strategy we do, but I think, as marketers, we can learn a lot from how songwriters are able to create very personal works of art that somehow become universal.  

When writing marketing and advertising copy, it’s so easy to try to create something universal.

No matter how much we keep our personas in mind, I think we all fight a voice in our heads that wants the copy or content to work for everyone. We don’t want to alienate anyone.  

Great songwriters, however, understand all they can share is the truth of the story in their head and the more personal and specific they are, the more it gets at fundamental human truths.

As of writing this article, less than a week after it was released, the video for Childish Gambino’s “This is America” has 75 million views.   

A still from Childish Gambino's "This is America" music video. (source)

For the sake of simplicity, the song basically has an A and a B part.

The A part is upbeat, has lots of melody, and jubilant singing buoyed by a choir of voices. The instrumentation includes gentle guitar, a danceable drum loop, and percussion.

The B part is dark and uncomfortable. There is no longer singing but Gambino now rapping with ad-libbed voices stabbing in rough vocalizations.

The instrumentation becomes something in the vein of southern trap hip-hop. There is bassy synths and the drum loop adds sub-divided hi-hats (they stay in the A part after the first B part).

Lyrically, the song is sparse.

The A parts are pretty much “We just wanna party, party just for you, we just want the money, money just for you (yeah)” or Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh, tell somebody, you go tell somebody, Grandma told me, get your money, black man (get your money).”

The B parts are always “This is America, don’t catch you slippin’ up” repeated before simple phrases like “look how I'm geekin' out (hey), I'm so fitted (I'm so fitted, woo), I'm on Gucci (I'm on Gucci), I'm so pretty (yeah, yeah).  

There isn’t much to it, right? Relatively simple lyrics over only 2 alternating musical themes --so why does the video have 75 million views?

Why is it seemingly the biggest pop culture moment that has happened in recent memory? Why is every news outlet and publisher trying to interpret, analyze, and discuss its significance?

The answer lies with Ernest Hemingway, who called his style of writing “the Iceberg theory.”

It’s a minimalist style that focuses on surface elements without explicitly discussing underlying themes. He believed the deeper meaning of a story (in this case, a song) should hide under the surface (like most of an iceberg), but be implicitly understood.  

There is an adage in copywriting, that much like Hemingway’s 6 word story on a napkin, probably never happened, but persists because it contains an important lesson.

Legend says that famous ad tycoon David Ogilvy was walking down the street when he saw a homeless man with the sign, “I am blind, please help.”

He didn’t give him money, but rewrote the sign. When he walked by later, the man’s cup was overflowing. The sign now read, “It is spring, and I am blind.”

By adding “it is spring” Ogilvy gave everyone walking by the opportunity to attach their own connotations, experiences, and stories about spring to the sign.

That is what Gambino did.

Childish Gambino’s song has 75 million views because the imagery in the video and his SNL performance show a glimpse of what is under the iceberg of those simple A and B parts.

A still from Childish Gambino's "This is America" music video. (source)

The parts are suddenly exposed as a pointed narrative about his experiences as an African American. The juxtaposed sections take on entirely new meaning as a critique of the dissonance between the perception and reality of his experiences, and how pop culture distracts us from turmoil.  

He is communicating a very specific and personal truth with “This is America,” but its simplicity leaves enough below the iceberg’s surface for everyone to bring their individual perceptions of our country’s current political turmoil to their experience with the song.

It’s an uncomfortable, but profound song and video that speaks to a very universal discomfort happening in America right now.

Excuse the Cliche, But: Think Outside-of-the-Box

  Don’t write generic marketing copy and content.

The next time you write copy, ask yourself, “is this an ad, or is it interesting?”

from Web Developers World https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/writing-tips-from-journalism-aristotle-childish-gambino

[isaacscrawford]

Pharma’s (Big) Data Problem

By DAVID SHAYWITZ, MD

British Essayist CP Snow, the author of 1959’s “The Two  Cultures and the Scientific Revolution” talk at Cambridge University

Despite (some might say, because of) a raft of new biological methods, pharma R&D has struggled with its EROOM problem, the fact that the cost of successfully developing a new drug, including the cost of failures, has been relentlessly increasing, rather than decreasing, over time (EROOM is Moore spelled backwards, as in Moore’s Law, describing the rapid pace of technology improvement over time).

Given the impact of technology in so many other areas, the question many are now asking is whether technology could do its thing in pharma, and make drug development faster, cheaper, and better.

Many major pharmas believe the answer has to be yes, and have invested in some version of a by-now familiar data initiative aimed at aggregating and organizing internal data, supplementing this with available public data, and overlaying this with a set of analytical tools that will help the many data scientists these pharmas are urgently hiring to extract insights and accelerate research.

A bevy of established companies and consultancies, including Deloitte, Accenture, BCG, and McKinsey, are championing some version of this vision, along with a number of younger companies, including Silicon Valley powerhouse Palantir, and startups like Datavant.

Two significant challenges associated with this vision are:

(1) How do you achieve it?

(2) Will it actually work?

These are each enormous unknowns with which the entire industry is currently wrestling.

Organizing Pharma Data

“Every biomedical organization has their data spread across multiple data stores, and the real work to be done is curating it into a form that can be cross-analyzed,” Anthony Philippakis, Chief Data Officer of the Broad Institute, explained to me. “The challenge that life science organizations face is not so much analyzing their data, but rather organizing it.”

He adds, “As we think about making precision medicine a reality, I think it is much more likely that we will fail because of the challenges of data sharing and data curation, rather than the challenges of scalability or analytics.”

Philippakis has championed a concept he and his colleagues call a “data biosphere,” an ecosystem that “contains modular and interoperable components that can be assembled into diverse data environments.” Philippakis argues, “It is crazy to think that any one group can create a data platform that will satisfy the needs of all groups across all geographies. We need modular and interoperable services that result in an ecosystem of activity.” (See also this 2012 Atlantic piece.)

Leveraging Organized Data

As many biopharma companies invest significant treasure and time in collecting and organizing their data — an inordinately heavy lift — the question is: will it be worth it? Will having a huge amount of organized data radically change how pharma companies discover and develop drugs?

That’s the idea, certainly, if not the expectation – but we should take such predictions with a grain of salt. As Economist reporter Natasha Loder reminded us recently on twitter, analysts in 1997 predicted new techniques – including “things like ‘bioinformatics’ and ‘rational drug design’ are likely to have a huge effect on the drug industry,” radically accelerating development time and doubling the success rate of late-phase trials. More than twenty years later, we’ve seen that these techniques are certainly powerful – yet unfortunately, they’ve not (yet?) cracked the nut of drug development.

Even so, there seems to be a pervasive sense that once the required internal and external data are cobbled together, R&D-altering insights will follow. How?

This is the pharma data version of the famous South Park underpants gnome story, where the business plan is roughly:

Step 1: Collect lots of data

Step 2:

Step 3: Insight and efficiency!

At least, this seems to be how the investment is viewed from the R&D trenches (as I recently discussed), where drug developers are vaguely aware of institutional data efforts, work that for the most part hasn’t yet really impacted how most drug development teams go about their jobs.

From the C-suite, though, Step 2 is “data science,” and the plan of many pharmas, to paraphrase Matt Damon in The Martian, is to collect a ton of information and then data science the heck of out it.

Aren’t Pharma’s Already All About Data And Science?

What exactly is this much-celebrated “data science,” and how is it different from what pharmas are already doing? After all, quantitatively analyzing data is already a central part of pharma R&D, and has been for quite some time.

One of the best answers I’ve heard is from UCSF’s Atul Butte, who told me,

“In general, most computational/informatics folks are viewed as service providers, and they are really not shown all the data available within a company.  To be blunt, they [i.e. pharmas] should be empowering computational folks to come up with ideas and hypotheses using their own internal data (and outside public data), and running experiments to test those ideas.”

Harvard professor Zak Kohane agrees. “Biomedical informaticians and clinical investigators often view each other as intellectual peasants providing rote/mechanical services.”

The problem Butte and Kohane are pointing out in that in most pharmas, drug development is driven by bench scientists (in preclinical development), and by clinical investigators (once a product enters human studies). A lot of analyses are performed, but in relatively stereotypical or predefined ways, trying to answer specific questions posed by bench or clinical scientists. Ideally, those doing this analysis work in close partnership with those leading drug development, but I suspect very few of these statisticians and analysts believe they’re driving the bus.

What Butte and Kohane are arguing for is at some level a radical change; it’s the suggestion that if you let savvy data scientists loose on a reasonable amount of data, and let them figure out what to ask, they will come up with insights by asking questions others in the organization might not have thought of. (There are obviously parallels here to the “research parasite” debate of 2016, another tussle between clinical investigators and data scientists.)

Complicating matters is the deep disconnect between those expert in traditional domains of drug discovery, and those expert in data science. As Kohane observes, “What is best is one brain (multidisciplinary team second best) capable of a nimble back and forth between questions, hypothesis testing and analyses,” echoing a very similar assertion Calico Chief Computing Officer Daphne Koller recently made on our Tech Tonics podcast (episode here).

Resolution?

The fascinating question is how all this gets resolved. At many biopharmas today, drug development teams toil pretty much as they always have, while data groups collect and assemble both data and talent, in relative isolation. It is a tale of two cultures worthy of C.P. Snow.

It’s not clear to me, or to anyone, how this story ends, but pragmatically, a key step has got to be meaningful contributions from data scientists – novel insights from select, aggregated datasets that are too important for a pharma R&D organization to ignore. Inevitably, these insights will be from the integration of some datasets, but not all possible datasets, and it’s interesting to contemplate which datasets will be most informative. Which do you – should you — start with to try to generate a quick, meaningful win?

There are two categories of positive outcomes I can foresee. First, a small company will figure out how to effectively leverage a group of datasets, and use this insight to successfully generate either a molecule or an approach (to clinical trial recruiting, say) that pharmas would be keen to access. Second, a large company might figure out how to solve the culture problem, and find a way to help traditional drug developers and eager data scientists work together effectively, and in particular learn the sorts of questions and approaches relevant to each domain. This seems incredibly difficult to pull off in pharma companies, which tend to be extremely territorial by nature – but imagine the great outcome achievable for both the company that figures this out, as well as for the patients who would benefit from the novel insights such a collaborative team might generate.

Article source:The Health Care Blog

[tsqdance]

It’s no secret that electronic music can be incredibly popular during times of recession due to how inexpensive it generally is to create it. As a result of computers being used as instruments for creation, there’s been a wave of young bedroom artists that have been able to create and distribute and perform their art in such a way that had previously been impossible due to lack of capital. Instrumental hip-hop producers like Clams Casino, Friendzone, and Star Slinger caught a bunch of people’s attention in the early 2010′s with beats co-opted by big name rappers, and now young guys and girls in their homes are making no budget beats whose heart and style rival some of the best known producers in the game, and no one knows about them outside of those of us who know how to dig. Nearing the end of the decade, we have several lesser known veins of emotional trap-influenced music, offshoots like sadboys and vaportrap, and the thirst for the union between dark hard bass-heavy percussion and emotional ambience doesn’t seem to be slaked. One such purveyor of that general vibe is Brant Hunter. His project is named Feels, he has a handful of releases under his belt, and he reached out to me with some thoughts on his experience.

1. What is the story behind the moniker "Feels"?

I started the moniker “Feels” in early 2012 or so, as an alternate moniker to my then current one, “Stelliform”. Stelliform was an ambient / drone project of mine, and once beats started to infiltrate my music, I knew it was different enough to warrant having an alternate name. There isn’t very much behind the name itself. Back when I came up with it, “Feels” was, and still is, my favorite album by Animal Collective; Which is a band I will probably cherish forever, even if they’ve never truly influenced the sound of the project that was named after it. I must also touch base on the fact that prior to the name choice, I didn’t know “feels” was a fairly popular meme at the time.

2. How would you describe your own music?

I try not to. I definitely like to hear how other people hear the music, because I know their thoughts probably don’t quite match how I think it sounds. It’s gone through quite a few changes over the years, but if I had to describe some of the traits that have stayed the same, I would have to say that It’s always atmospheric, and a bit repetitive. With Feels, it’s always been made with the idea that maybe a rapper or vocalist would use the tracks as instrumentals for their project, so most of the tracks might feel minimal or maybe even a little incomplete, but I definitely try to put enough in there to have them stand up on their own too, ya know?

Feels - Original Fake

3. What are your greatest influences (artists, experiences, weather, etc.)?

Something that really influenced me after I read it and I think about a lot, is the story of how Yasunori Mitsuda composed the music for Super Nintendo game, Chrono Trigger. To paraphrase, he was unhappy with the position he was working in at Square as a sound effects engineer, and wanted to be a composer for the company. He demanded for his boss to let him compose, which he was then assigned to be the sole composer on Chrono Trigger. He worked himself to the point of passing out on a nightly basis, frequently waking up with new ideas for the score. He worked himself to the point of developing stomach ulcers, leading him to be hospitalized, and having another composer have to step in and finish for him. Whenever I don’t feel motivated to make music, (Which is more and more it seems), I always think about Mitsuda, and how he made things happen for himself, and how nothing else mattered to him except his art.

Chrono Trigger OST - End Theme

As far as personal experiences, my influences can easily be traced back to a few particular sources from my childhood. I usually tell people David Wise’s score to Donkey Kong Country 2 on Super specifically is and always will be the thing that keeps me pursuing a life involved in music. Everything about that music evokes every kind of emotion in me. Anyone who has played that game as a kid will know what I mean. My other influences come from scattered memories of being younger, and my music is a medium to try and replicate those feelings I had. Like playing Crash Bandicoot 2 for the first time in a Blockbuster; Watching Goosebumps on tv and seeing all the commercials and PSAs; Being with my parents in various department stores in the late nineties.

Donkey Kong Country 2 OST - Hot Head Bop

A countless number of different artists have actually impacted the sound of my music through their influence. So much so, that I even named one of my Stelliform compilations, “Impressions”, as a reference to me thinking that most of my songs were me just doing impressions or renditions of my favorite artists. To name drop some of the big ones though, they would be: Machinedrum, Daniel Lopatin, FRIENDZONE, Clams Casino, Autechre, James Ferraro, Andy Stott, Vangelis, and definitely a few others that I’m missing atm.

FRIENDZONE - Chuch

4. What is your opinion on the ever-changing structure of independent music?

That’s a heavy question, and one that I don’t have a definite answer on. I guess it’s just been hard for me to keep up with the politics of it. As far as it affects me, I guess it makes me feel like I have a maybe slightly higher chance of getting somewhere with my music, as the current structure provides a more versatile platform for artists like myself to find an audience, however niche the music might be. There are certainly a lot more options out there to get yourself into a better position, such as crowd funding and Youtube channels, but I do feel that it creates a serious lack of emphasis put on the quality of the music, and a lot more focus on the less important things, or, what I see as less important, like ones commitment to networking, aesthetic choices, or simply how engaging you can be to your audience.

5. Does making music pay the bills? Is it more of a dedicated hobby?

Unfortunately, music doesn’t and hasn’t ever paid the bills. Though it is my absolute goal to make that become a reality. As it stands, music can only be considered a hobby for me, because I think one of the descriptors of being a professional is making money from your craft. The biggest obstacle for me to overcome right now is answering the questions that I pose to myself, “Who can I market my music to, and where can I find the appropriate circumstances to create jobs from it?” I’m considering my options, but unfortunately I don’t really know how to elevate things into the next stage.

6. What do you do for a living, and do you like it?

I’m a server and manager at a chain breakfast restaurant. This is what pays the bills for me, and has allowed me to fund all my music gear expenses. Do I like it? No. I mean, maybe I used to, and day to day I get through it just fine, but now I feel that my time there is time that could be better used elsewhere, and as life piles more and more things onto me, it seems less and less likely that it is something that can sustain me much farther. I really have no fall back, and naively enough, I would always sort of hold on hope that music could maybe take me somewhere.

7. What are some other things you enjoy about life besides art?

I’ve always loved video games; I’ve been collecting games for a long time, too. Mostly Playstation 1 era and Super Nintendo, but I’m also into modern console games; my favorites being Rocket league and Star Wars Battlefront. I’m big into streetwear and vintage clothing as well. I’m always wearing brands like Raised By Wolves, Champion, Starter, Supreme, etc. I’m also a big hockey fan, and watch a game on TV every night that I can. The New York Rangers are my favorite team. Other than that, I’m usually watching shows with my girlfriend or playing LEGO and Playmobil with my kids.

8. As a known music fan, what are some of best musical experiences you have had with other people's music?

My favorite records are always my favorite because I’ve had some sort of memorable moment attached to them. Whether that means I found them at the right time in my life, or maybe they opened my eyes to something. For example, when The National’s album “Trouble Will Find Me” came out, it was shortly after my first child was born, and I can vividly remember walking him back and fourth in my first apartment singing along to the record, trying to get him to sleep. I’ll always remember that. I’ll always remember the first time I heard “The Glow Pt. 2” by The Microphones, and how I was devastated by the way I could hear Phil Elverum’s teenage heartbreak. “Instrumentals” by Clams Casino is a record that changed my life in the way that I saw music. He so efficiently combined ambient sounds with hip hop beats, opening up an entire world of music to me, which together with FRIENDZONE’s “Collection 1”, I totally credit to the creation of Feels.

The Microphones - The Moon

9. Also, what are some of the most memorable moments for you in your own musical journey?

My favorite moments in music actually come from when I played with my good friend in his music project, at the time called “Sea Glasses”. It was just him and I, and we would mostly just practice in his parents house and play various live shows around Halifax. We had a lot of good times, playing everything from cd stores to festivals. We opened up for Julie Doiron at the Halifax Pop Explosion; We were heckled at a dive of a bar by a guy that looked like Axl Rose; We even held our own show in the middle of a snowstorm to a crowd that consisted of mostly only the other bands that were playing. I thought his music was incredible, and it was criminal how overlooked his tunes were in this city. He ended up moving to another province to go to school, and I’ve failed to find anything else quite like the dynamic that we had.

Sea Glasses Bandcamp