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newstfionline · 4 years ago

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Headlines

Canada’s other health crisis (Washington Post) The novel coronavirus was on the march across Canada, but it was a different public health crisis that turned Shannon Krell’s world upside down. Her brother hadn’t shown up for work, which was unusual. She called the police to have someone check on the 46-year-old, but a friend arrived first and made the sad discovery. Ryan Krell had died of an accidental drug overdose—another life lost to a crisis that has killed more than 15,400 people in Canada since 2016. Their number has increased in the shadow of the coronavirus pandemic. British Columbia, the epicenter of the crisis, recorded its deadliest month in May—and then surpassed it in June. Nearly four times as many people in the province have died of a suspected overdose this year as have died of the coronavirus. Overdose deaths in the Yukon territory this year are double last year’s tally. Paramedics in the city of Saskatoon last month responded to a record weekly number of overdose calls.

Taller cubicles, one-way aisles: Office workers must adjust (AP) Bergmeyer, a design firm in Boston, has erected higher cubicles, told employees to wear masks when not at their desks and set up one-way aisles in the office that force people to walk the long way around to get to the kitchen or the bathroom. “The one-way paths take me a little out of the way, but it was easy to get used to,” said Stephanie Jones, an interior designer with the company. “It actually gives me the opportunity to see more people and say a quick hello when I might have just walked directly to my desk before.” Around the U.S., office workers sent home when the coronavirus took hold in March are returning to the world of cubicles and conference rooms and facing certain adjustments: masks, staggered shifts, spaced-apart desks, daily questions about their health, closed break rooms and sanitizer everywhere. Employers in some cases are requiring workers to come back to the office, but most, like Bergmeyer, are letting the employees decide what to do, at least for now. Some firms say the risks and precautions are worth it to boost productivity and move closer to normal.

Postal Crisis Ripples Across Nation as Election Looms (NYT) Each day, when Nick Casselli, the president of a Philadelphia postal workers union, sits down at his desk, his phone is full of alarmed messages about increasing delays in mail delivery. Mr. Casselli and his 1,600 members have been in a state of high alert since Louis DeJoy, a Republican megadonor and an ally of President Trump’s, took over as postmaster general in May. Overtime was eliminated, prompting backups. Seven mail-sorting machines were removed from a nearby processing center in West Philadelphia, causing further delays. Now, post offices are being told to open later and close during lunch. Similar accounts of slowdowns and curtailed service are emerging across the country as Mr. DeJoy pushes cost-cutting measures that he says are intended to overhaul an agency suffering billion-dollar losses. But as Mr. Trump rails almost daily against the service and delays clog the mail, voters and postal workers warn a crisis is building that could disenfranchise record numbers of Americans who will be casting ballots by mail in November because of the coronavirus outbreak. At risk are not just the ballots—and medical prescriptions and paychecks—of residents around the country, but also the reputation of the Postal Service as the most popular and perhaps the least politicized part of the federal government.

California power problems (NYT) A heat wave is scorching the Southwest and has forced intermittent power shut-offs in California. Thermometers are cracking 110 degrees Fahrenheit in some cities. Californians used so much electricity trying to stay cool Friday night that, for the first time in 19 years, the agency that oversees much of the state’s power grid shut off power to hundreds of thousands of customers for several hours to avoid a damaging overload. The National Weather Service issued an excessive heat warning for much of the West Coast. The sweltering heat comes as coronavirus cases are on the rise in California, creating a dilemma for those who could not stay cool at home.

Bald Eagle Sends Government Drone Into Lake Michigan (NYT) A squabble in the sky over Lake Michigan left one bald eagle victorious and one government drone mangled and sunken. Hunter King, a drone pilot at the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, was surveying an area of the lake near the state’s Upper Peninsula last month when the $950 drone started “twirling furiously” after it indicated that a propeller had been torn off. “When he looked up, the drone was gone, and an eagle was flying away,” said the department, whose name is abbreviated E.G.L.E. The department speculated that the eagle could have attacked because of a territorial dispute, because it was hungry “or maybe it did not like its name being misspelled.” Julia Ponder, executive director of the Raptor Center at the University of Minnesota, said that it was likely because the drone had encroached on the eagle’s territory. “They’re the king of the skies,” she said.

National Debt To Surpass $78 Trillion By 2028 (Forbes) The coronavirus pandemic pushed the government into the proverbial corner, prompting it to borrow heavily from the future to ward off a serious threat today. Without this intervention, the U.S. economy would be in a much worse recession or possibly even a depression. Even though borrowing excessively may have been the lesser of two evils, the burgeoning debt will have ramifications in the future. With the debt approaching $27 trillion, and projected to rise to $78 trillion by 2028, it will present significant challenges.

French government pushes for wider mask use (AP) After France recorded its highest one-day rise in virus infections since May, the government is pushing for wider mask use and tighter protections for migrant workers and in slaughterhouses. But France still plans to reopen schools nationwide in two weeks, and the labor minister says the government is determined to avoid a new nationwide lockdown that would further hobble the economy and threaten jobs. France’s infection count has resurged in recent weeks, blamed in part on people crisscrossing the country for weddings, family gatherings or annual summer vacations with friends. Britain reimposed quarantine measures Saturday for vacationers returning from France as a result.

Lukashenko under pressure as rival protests planned in Belarus capital (Reuters) Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko was under growing pressure on Sunday with rival protests due to converge on the capital a week after a contested presidential election that has thrown his country into turmoil. Lukashenko, in power for 26 years, has faced down a week of street demonstrations and refused demands for a re-run of an election protesters say was massively rigged to disguise the fact that he has lost public support. Often emotional in state TV appearances, the 65-year-old leader has alleged a foreign-backed plot to topple him. Russia, which has had a troubled relationship with Lukashenko, is watching closely as Belarus hosts pipelines that carry Russian energy exports to the West and is also viewed by Moscow as a buffer zone against NATO. The EU is gearing up to impose new sanctions on Belarus in response to a violent crackdown in which at least two protesters have been killed and thousands detained. Protesters show no signs of backing down.

Campus-based Thai protest movement extends reach to streets (AP) Anti-government protesters gathered in large numbers in Thailand’s capital on Sunday for a rally that suggested their movement’s strength may have extended beyond the college campuses where it has blossomed. Thousands of people assembled at Bangkok’s Democracy Monument, a traditional venue for political activities. Hundreds of police were also present, as well as a small contingent of royalists opposed to the protesters. There was no reliable estimate of the crowd size, though it appeared to be one of the biggest demonstrations in several years. The student-led movement has three core demands: holding new elections, amending the constitution and ending the intimidation of critics of the government. Thailand has experienced a successful coup roughly every six years on average since the army toppled the absolute monarchy in 1932 and replaced it with a constitutional monarchy. But it has been under military rule for much of the time since then.

10 killed in Somalia in extremist attack on Mogadishu hotel (AP) A Somali police officer says at least 10 people have been killed and more than a dozen others injured in an ongoing siege at a beachside hotel in Somalia’s capital where security forces are battling Islamic extremist gunmen who have invaded the building, Capt. Mohamed Hussein told The Associated Press that the attack started with a powerful car bomb which blew off the security gates to the Elite Hotel.

#headlines #news

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new2fivesauce · 5 years ago

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Please Don't Regret Me - 2. Hotel Management

Warnings: Mild cursing

Words: 3660

February 2018.

The day had finally come. 5SOS was going to announce their third album and their first single. Nelle was so proud of them. It was the first time in their career that they were actually fully satisfied in the way their album was being produced. Not that they didn’t love their first two albums, but something about this upcoming album was making them all anxious and excited for what was to come.

They were in Los Angeles today. Nelle hated Los Angeles; Luke had agreed with her when they had landed just that morning.

A large amount of people were bustling around the studio where the guys were going to go live to announce their upcoming track. Nelle caught Michael and Calum at the food table stuffing their faces. She checked her schedule on her phone and saw that they had missed lunch time.

A delay in their flight had thrown off Nelle's whole schedule and she was not happy about it. Usually in cases like this, she was able to make do, but something about California always threw her off.

“10 minutes till!” a deep voice called from somewhere. She rolled her eyes. There was nothing for her to do; not on days like this when the band had other people pick out their clothes and do their hair, pushing her out the way.

She stood in the corner of the room, where she had a good line of the green screen that had been put up. There was a sofa in front of it and two side tables. Microphones were being tested. Calum and Michael had been moved from the food table and some girls were rolling lint rollers over their clothes to get any crumbs off.

“Would you like a chair?” a voice came from Nelle's right. Turning to the figure, she realized it was just the guy in charge of all this. He was less than 6-feet, probably by an inch or so. He was tan with sandy blonde hair in a man bun. The man bun was not a good look, at least on him. She shook her head.

“No, thanks. I’m good standing. We had a long flight in from Home. Sitting is just gonna make my ass flat.” She stated. The guy laughed.

“You’re their assistant, right?”

Nelle nodded.

“Cool, cool, cool.” He started rambling, pulling out a small notepad from his back pocket. He droned on about meetings and video conferences, making sure that Nelle was getting it all down in her own planner.

Someone called five minutes and he still wasn’t done. Nelle tried her best to appear interested. She already knew all about this and how they were going to announce the future track and blah blah blah. She was beginning to feel uncomfortable when she felt like someone was looking at her. She nodded and smiled at this manager guy, who’s name turned out to be Josh, before maneuvering her eyes around the studio.

Her amber eyes met with some baby blues and her body signed in relief when Luke beckoned her over.

“If we're done here, Josh, my guys are needing me. One minute till, right?” she exclaimed, taking his hand and shaking it once before crossing the room to Luke and Ashton without looking back.

Ashton was smirking at her as she came up to them. His dimples on the left super prominent and his hazel eyes were sparking with mischief.

“Ash said you looked like you were drowning.” Luke said quietly, his eyes flickering over to where Josh was now boring someone else. Nelle snickered but thanked the gods for her guys looking out for her.

Ashton was about to comment but was then hastily taken away by one of the girls that had cleaned Calum and Michael. Luke jumped back at her brashness. He didn't liked being touched. It caused his anxiety to act up.

“Hey, it's okay.” Nelle cooed. She stood in front of the blond giant. “Inhale. Exhale.” She repeated this multiple times. She’d forgotten to make sure he’d taken his anxiety meds and was pretty sure he had forgotten too. There was just something about California. She shook her head and continued to soothe Luke down.

Luke did as he was told, closing his eyes to calm himself further down. He didn’t flinch when he felt Nelle's cold fingers brush his curls behind his ears. He’d been growing it out, deciding that it was time for a new look. New album, new style. Nelle hadn’t liked it at first and made sure he knew it, but he guessed she was okay with it now since he hadn’t heard a snide remark about it in days.

Nelle’s fingers trailed down and fixed the collar of the white button-down the stylists had picked for Luke. It was silk and she knew Luke was going to be itchy from it later. Sweating in silk made him irritant. She mentally added baby powder to her ever growing list of items the boys needed. She adjusted the buttons on the shirt as well, buttoning up an additional one so he wouldn’t be showing too much chest. She didn’t like this stylist team sexualizing the band, especially Luke as he had body confidence issues.

Luke opened his eyes as Nelle rubbed some wrinkles out of his shirt. She was lost in concentration, he could tell by her blank, glassy eyes. He gently grabbed her hands by the wrists and held them still between them.

“Thanks, babe.” He whispered to her before dropping her hands to her side. He stepped backwards with a sly smirk and wink before walking over to his bandmates.

Nelle stared after Luke in confusion. He never called her anything but Nelle.

Calum looked at Nelle through the full-length mirror of his hotel room. She was propped up against the headboard of his bed, flipping through the channels.

“…and then he says thanks babe. Like what the fuck? Calum… it was too weird. He… it’s LUKE!!”Nelle tossed the TV remote onto the bed, clearly frustrated. Calum furrowed his brows as he adjusted the belt to his pants. He took a step to admire his outfit. He nodded at himself and smiled to check his teeth.

“Has he been acting weird to you? Look…” Nelle held up her phone to her best friend. Calum neared the bed and tried to decipher what she was showing him.

“I don’t know what you’re trying to show me.” He admitted, staring at her phone and seeing a jumble of words that didn’t make any sense to him.

“Oh.” Nelle said sadly and then pulled her phone back from Calum’s face. “It’s a list of your medications. Luke’s anxiety meds changed last month. Do you think that’s got anything to do with… wait… he didn’t even take them today. Fuck.”

She rapidly texted Luke a reminder to take his medications as well as Michael. Michael responded with a thumbs-up emoji but Luke left her on Read.

“Nelle… I think you’re overthinking this whole… uhh… thing. Luke is just Luke and sure… maybe his pills got him acting a bit strange, but I wouldn’t read too much into it.” Calum declared.

Nelle considered what he said. She scoffed. Calum shook his head with a small chuckle.

“Are you sure you don't wanna go out with me and Ash?”

Nelle shook her head. “Nah. It's a quiet night in for me tonight.”

------

Nelle shuffled to the hotel room door as the knocking on the door went from short pauses to rapid urgent knocks. She tripped on her Nike slide as she tried to put it on. It contorted to her foot as soon as she unlocked the door and pulled it open. Her eyes went from looking at the middle of a chest and upwards to a boy’s face with blond curls and blue eyes.

“Uhh… you’re not room service.” Nelle mused. Luke cocked his head to the side, surprised not knowing what Nelle looked like once she retreated from her work day.

He’d never seen her not dressed up and tidy. Before him stood a girl with basically a rat’s nest on her head; he assumed this is why it was called The Messy Bun. Her amber eyes were behind a pair of black-rimmed glasses, and she was wearing gray sweats that hung low on her hips with a black Hanes tank. Luke quickly averted his eyes back to hers when he noticed her nipples and possibly a nipple piercing protruding through her thin shirt. He didn’t want her getting the wrong idea.

“Sorry.” He apologized, not really knowing if because he was not room service or because maybe he’d been caught eyeing her up and down. Nelle’s facial expression looked more serious than anything so he guessed that she hadn’t seen him gazing at her. “My thermostat in my room is not working.” He said with a shrug of his shoulders. He held up his room card key, marked with a purple smiley face sticker.

Nelle sighed heavily and slumped her shoulders.

“Are you sure?” she asked. Luke paused for a second before nodding his head. Nelle rolled her eyes. “Fuck… okay.” She looked down at her attire. “Let me just change and I’ll go downstairs and get you another room.”

She began to close her door, but Luke shot his hand out and stopped her from doing so. The truth was he couldn’t get her out of his head… not since their announcement of their new track. The way she’d pushed his hair back and the way her fingers had left hot lingering trails as she had fixed his shirt. That was hours ago, but he could still feel her touch. He didn’t understand these new emotions. Sure, Nelle was quite a looker and he had looked at her before… but something was different about her. Something now intrigued him and he needed to figure it out. Maybe four years later he was finally developing that crush that both Michael and Ashton had had when they had originally met her.

“Can’t I just stay here for the night?” he asked. This time it was her to tilt her head in confusion.

“In my room? You want to take my room?” she asked, her voice raising an octave.

“Not take it, just… can’t I bunk with you for the night? I mean, we’re leaving tomorrow, right?”

Nelle finally noticed Luke carrying his duffel bag. She kept all the guys’ main luggage in her room to coordinate outfits and usually only left them with their duffels that had their sleeping clothes and hygiene products.

“Where are the boys?” she asked. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Luke; he was an okay guy, but in all these years of touring and hotel living, they had never shared a room. Not even when they could only afford one room! In those days, he and one of the guys would sleep in the tour van/bus/vehicle. She was hoping to lead him to one of his mates rooms and not share a room.

“Well, you know where Michael is. Finding his flavor of the night.” Luke replied. “Ash and Cal went out for sushi or something, but I’m sure they’re gonna meet up with Mike afterwards. I would really just like a quiet night in, ya know?”

Nelle eyed Luke suspiciously. Luke knew she was looking for a reason to not let him in, so he crossed his eyes and stuck out his tongue. Nelle scoffed, but with a small smile, hesitantly pulled the door open to let in the giant.

Luke didn’t know what he was stepping into as he walked into Nelle’s room nervously. He expected for there to be more mess, but for handling four men’s luggage and her own, the room was basically spotless. It smelled of something familiarly sweet, almost like red Pop Rocks. Luke didn’t realize it at the time, but Calum also used the same Bath and Body Works Watermelon Lemonade lotion as Nelle.

Nelle walked past him after shutting the door. She had an assortment of stuff laid out on the king bed and she pulled everything to one side to make room for Luke. She plopped a pillow down the middle.

“My side.” She indicted with her hand the side of the bed where she moved all her things. “Your side.” She waved over the now blank space of bed. Luke nodded obediently and dropped his bag on the floor where his side was. He was already dressed for comfort in basketball shorts and a regular t-shirt, so he plopped himself where Nelle told him to be. He leaned back on the headboard of the bed, crossed his feet, and didn’t know whether to make conversation or not, so stared at what Nelle had playing on the TV.

“Brooklyn Nine-Nine? You watch this?” Luke questioned after a couple seconds of watching and realizing who the characters were on the screen.

Nelle looked up from her laptop. She was in the same position as Luke, but her computer in her lap. She pushed her glasses up her nose some and smiled at the TV.

“Yeah, it’s my favorite show. I got Michael into it” she stated before going back to what she was doing. Luke shot her a small smile but slowly let it drop when he saw that she wasn’t even looking at him.

She was working furiously on her laptop. Coloring coding items on an Excel spreadsheet and then switching screens to type on a word document and then watching some lanky man in a sweater vest and back again. She’d occasionally push her glasses up her nose and scrunch her face up when something across her screen went wrong.

Luke tried to figure out what she was up to but couldn’t make up all the jumble on her screen and pushed out his mind that Nelle was a very pretty girl. He was about to ask her what she was working on when there was a tap on the door. Nelle looked up from her screen.

“Now that should be room service.” She stated. She looked at Luke expectantly. He pointed at himself.

“You want me to get it?” he questioned as another light tapping was heard. She nodded. “Uhh, okay? Sure…”

He slowly raised himself from the bed and dashed to the door. Nelle went back to concentrating on her work, but was quickly interrupted by what sounded like silverware tinging and crashing down on something metal.

“Holy shit…” an unfamiliar, kind of raspy voice said. “I mean… crap. I’m not supposed to curse at work.”

Luke chuckled and said hi.

“I can’t believe I'm delivering room service to Luke fucking Hemmings. This. Is. The. Best. Day. Ever.” Nelle heard the girl say. Her stomach suddenly grumbled and she silently wished that the interaction would quickly finish.

Luke chatted with the girl for a bit and just as Nelle thought he was going to close the door and bring in the food, she heard him ask “Do you want to take a pic real quick?”

“Oh my God!! Yes! I would love to but since this is a high profile hotel and lots of famous people stay here, we are not allowed to have our phones on us while on shift. Thanks for asking. Enjoy your meal.”

“Whoa… hold on though.”

Luke rolled in the food cart and stopped it at the foot of the bed. Nelle looked at him annoyed, not because he was interacting at a fan but because she hadn’t eaten all day and she could already be halfway into her grilled cheese that she ordered thirty minutes ago.

“Nelle! Do you have the Polaroid camera?” Luke asked her and was heading towards the corner of the room where she had all the luggage and bags. She jumped up the bed quickly.

“Do not touch anything.” She reprimanded him and he quickly stepped back with his hands in the air. She rummaged through her daily backpack and pulled out a mint green Fujifilm camera. It was covered in stickers that the boys had placed on it during their years of touring. She checked the little counter on the back.

“Girl’s in luck. There’s two more left of this cartridge.”

Luke beamed at Nelle. “Do you mind?”

Nelle rolled her eyes, only wanting to be eating her dinner, but she reluctantly walked behind Luke to the door of her room.

The girl was still there waiting on pins and needles. She was about 18 or 19 with tan skin and long black hair pulled back into a pony tail. She was wearing the hotel uniform but her feet were clad in a pair of Converse.

When Nelle came into the girl’s view, her eyes quickly flickered between the singer and assistant. Luke noticed it quickly.

“Uh, this is Nelle. She’s the band’s assistant.” Luke clarified. The girl nodded excitedly.

“No, yeah, I know! Hi!” she turned her attention to Nelle. “I'm Steph. I love you! I mean… you are a style icon and I follow you on social media. You’re great. You make those sweatpants look good, I mean… ugh. I’m blabbing now.” She giggled.

Nelle thanked her with a wide smile. Luke looked so confused. This girl was drooling over Nelle and all he got was a smile. Nelle quickly took a picture of Steph and Luke and then Steph insisted on taking one with Nelle instead of another with Luke.

“Don’t worry, I'm not allowed to say anything about celebrities in the building until after they checkout.” Steph assured them as they stood in the doorway of Nelle's room. Once they bid each other goodbye, Nelle slipped around Luke and went straight to the food cart that was beckoning her.

---

The room was dark but for the TV that was lowly playing Juno. It was the movie Luke and Nelle had finally agreed on watching after binging a season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine and splitting the room service that Nelle had ordered.

Nelle was curled into her pillows, dozing off as she watched Ellen Page on screen. Luke was in and out of sleep. His body now taking a bit over half the bed. His left arm was stretched over the pillow barrier Nelle had put up and his hand was mindlessly playing with the drawstring on Nelle’s sweatpants. Nelle wasn’t bothered with it though. She was too tired. Calum’s I wouldn’t read too much into it kept ringing in her head.

Her eyes had closed for a couple minutes when the sudden loud ringing of her hotel room phone went off. Nelle jumped as did Luke. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard an actual phone ring. Nelle sat up and picked up the receiver.

Luke tried to listen to the conversation but kept getting distracted by Nelle’s face. She looked exhausted. She slumped her shoulders as she hung up the phone. She stood up from the bed and pulled what looked like one of Calum’s hoodies over her head and body. Luke eyed her curiously as she grabbed something from one of the bags.

“I'll be back.” She whispered and then left without explaining anything.

---

Luke was wide awake now. He kept looking at the red numbers on the digital clock to the television. She’d been gone five, ten, fifteen, twenty, now twenty five minutes. He was becoming uneasy and he couldn’t sleep knowing that she was not in the room. It was almost two AM. Where could she had gone?

Thirty minutes passed and he thought about looking for her but before he could sit up the door card reader beeped and then the door opened. Luke heard the locking of the door and then Nelle walked in, kicking off her slides and pulling off her hoodie. Her shirt rode up a bit and Luke caught a flash of the bare skin of her stomach and a belly button piercing before Nelle pulled her tank down. She saw Luke was still awake as she made her way back to her side of the bed.

“Where’d you go?” Luke asked, pulling the comforter over her body as she adjusted herself back into the position she’d been in before she had left. Her eyes closed for a moment before answering.

“Had to get Cal and Ash from the lobby. They are fucked up.” She stifled a yawn. Luke suddenly felt annoyed and slightly angered. He glanced at the clock across the room. 2:36 am.

“Is that in your job description?” Luke asked. Nelle shrugged her shoulders.

“My job is to assist and I was assisting on getting them to their rooms.” She nonchalantly told him. This riled Luke up more.

“I don’t think you should have gone to get them. They’re over 20 and fully capable of going to bed themselves.”

This caused Nelle to laugh.

“I don’t exactly have a 9 to 5 job, Luke… and besides, you saying that kinda makes you a hypocrite. I can’t tell you how many times I've had to get your drunk ass from a hotel lobby or answer your late night texts and calls and have to pick you up like I’m your personal uber. It’s whatever. Let’s go to sleep.” Nelle let out another yawn and reached down by her knee where the remote to the TV was.

Luke stewed in her words but found it hard to let it go. He wanted to go off on her, but she turned off the television and the room was suddenly dark. Luke couldn’t see her beautiful, weird amber eyes anymore or her pretty hair or her light freckles across her nose and cheeks.

“You deserve better.” Luke whispered to her, hoping for her to still be awake. And she was because she whispered back.

“Yeah… maybe I'll quit one day, baby. ”

#5 seconds of summer #5sos #luke hemming imagines #luke hemmings #calum hood #ashton irwin #michael clifford #please dont regret me #5 second of summer imagines

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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Shoot Them in the Legs, Trump Suggested: Inside His Border War https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/us/politics/trump-border-wars.html

Shoot Them in the Legs, Trump Suggested: Inside His Border War(Trump is nothing more than a thug and wannabe mobster. 🤢🤬🤬🤬)

By Michael D. Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis | Published Oct. 1, 2019 Updated 7:19 p.m. ET | New York Times | Posted October 1, 2019 |

WASHINGTON — The Oval Office meeting this past March began, as so many had, with President Trump fuming about migrants. But this time he had a solution. As White House advisers listened astonished, he ordered them to shut down the entire 2,000-mile border with Mexico — by noon the next day.

The advisers feared the president’s edict would trap American tourists in Mexico, strand children at schools on both sides of the border and create an economic meltdown in two countries. Yet they also knew how much the president’s zeal to stop immigration had sent him lurching for solutions, one more extreme than the next.

Privately, the president had often talked about fortifying a border wall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators, prompting aides to seek a cost estimate. He wanted the wall electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh. After publicly suggesting that soldiers shoot migrants if they threw rocks, the president backed off when his staff told him that was illegal. But later in a meeting, aides recalled, he suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down. That’s not allowed either, they told him.

“The president was frustrated and I think he took that moment to hit the reset button,” said Thomas D. Homan, who had served as Mr. Trump’s acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, recalling that week in March. “The president wanted it to be fixed quickly.”

Mr. Trump’s order to close the border was a decision point that touched off a frenzied week of presidential rages, round-the-clock staff panic and far more White House turmoil than was known at the time. By the end of the week, the seat-of-the-pants president had backed off his threat but had retaliated with the beginning of a purge of the aides who had tried to contain him.

Today, as Mr. Trump is surrounded by advisers less willing to stand up to him, his threat to seal off the country from a flood of immigrants remains active. “I have absolute power to shut down the border,” he said in an interview this summer with The New York Times.

This article is based on interviews with more than a dozen White House and administration officials directly involved in the events of that week in March. They were granted anonymity to describe sensitive conversations with the president and top officials in the government.

In the Oval Office that March afternoon, a 30-minute meeting extended to more than two hours as Mr. Trump’s team tried desperately to placate him.

“You are making me look like an idiot!” Mr. Trump shouted, adding in a profanity, as multiple officials in the room described it. “I ran on this. It’s my issue.”

Among those in the room were Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary at the time; Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state; Kevin K. McAleenan, the Customs and Border Protection chief at the time; and Stephen Miller, the White House aide who, more than anyone, had orchestrated Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda. Mick Mulvaney, the acting chief of staff was also there, along with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and other senior staff.

Ms. Nielsen, a former aide to George W. Bush brought into the department by John F. Kelly, the president’s former chief of staff, was in a perilous position. She had always been viewed with suspicion by the president, who told aides she was “a Bushie,” and part of the “deep state” who once contributed to a group that supported Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign.

Mr. Trump had routinely berated Ms. Nielsen as ineffective and, worse — at least in his mind — not tough-looking enough. “Lou Dobbs hates you, Ann Coulter hates you, you’re making me look bad,” Mr. Trump would tell her, referring to the Fox Business Network host and the conservative commentator.

The happiest he had been with Ms. Nielsen was a few months earlier, when American border agents had fired tear gas into Mexico to try to stop migrants from crossing into the United States. Human rights organizations condemned the move, but Mr. Trump loved it. More often, though, she drew the president’s scorn.

That March day, he was furious at Mr. Pompeo, too, for having cut a deal with Mexico to allow the United States to reject some asylum seekers — a plan Mr. Trump said was clearly failing.

A complete shutdown of the border, Mr. Trump said, was the only way.

Ms. Nielsen had tried reasoning with the president on many occasions. When she stood up to him during a cabinet meeting the previous spring, he excoriated her and she almost resigned.

Now, she tried again to reason with him.

We can close the border, she told the president, but it’s not going to fix anything. People will still be permitted to claim asylum.

But Mr. Trump was unmoved. Even Mr. Kushner, who had developed relationships with Mexican officials and now sided with Ms. Nielsen, could not get through to him.

“All you care about is your friends in Mexico,” the president snapped, according to people in the room. “I’ve had it. I want it done at noon tomorrow.”

The Start of an Overhaul

The president’s advisers left the meeting in a near panic.

Every year more than $200 billion worth of American exports flow across the Mexican border. Closing it would wreak havoc on American farmers and automakers, among many others. Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, said in an interview at the time that a border shutdown would have “a potentially catastrophic economic impact on our country.”

That night, White House advisers succeeded in convincing the president to give them a reprieve, but only for a week, until the following Friday. That gave them very little time to change the president’s mind.

They started by pressuring their Mexican counterparts to rapidly increase apprehensions of migrants. Mr. Kushner and others in the West Wing showered the president with emails proving that the Mexicans had already started apprehending more migrants before they could enter the United States.

White House advisers encouraged a stream of corporate executives, Republican lawmakers and officials from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to tell Mr. Trump how damaging a border closure would be.

Mr. Miller, meanwhile, saw an opportunity.

It was his view that the president needed to completely overhaul the Homeland Security Department and get rid of senior officials who he believed were thwarting efforts to block immigrants. Although many were the president’s handpicked aides, Mr. Miller told him they had become part of the problem by constantly citing legal hurdles.

Ms. Nielsen, who regularly found herself telling Mr. Trump why he couldn’t have what he wanted, was an obvious target. When the president demanded “flat black” paint on his border wall, she said it would cost an additional $1 million per mile. When he ordered wall construction sped up, she said they needed permission from property owners. Take the land, Mr. Trump would say, and let them sue us.

When Ms. Nielsen tried to get him to focus on something other than the border, the president grew impatient. During a briefing on the need for new legal authority to take down drones, Mr. Trump cut her off midsentence.

“Kirstjen, you didn’t hear me the first time, honey,” Mr. Trump said, according to two people familiar with the conversation. “Shoot ’em down. Sweetheart, just shoot ’em out of the sky, O.K.?”

But the problem went deeper than Ms. Nielsen, Mr. Miller believed. L. Francis Cissna, the head of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services until earlier this year, regularly pushed back on Mr. Miller’s demand for a “culture change” at the agency, where Mr. Miller believed asylum officers were bleeding hearts, too quick to extend protections to immigrants.

They needed to start with the opposite point of view, Mr. Miller told him, and start turning people away.

John Mitnick, the homeland security general counsel who often raised legal concerns about Mr. Trump’s immigration policies, was also on Mr. Miller’s blacklist. Mr. Miller had also turned against Ronald D. Vitiello, a top official at Customs and Border Protection whom the president had nominated to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

By midweek, the campaign to change Mr. Trump’s mind about closing the border seemed to be working.

Maybe there’s another way to do this, the president told Ms. Nielsen. How about if I impose tariffs on the Mexicans, or threaten to impose tariffs? Tariffs are great.

But the staff worried that his retreat would only be temporary. The president never really let go of his obsessions.

They were right. On a trip to California late in the week, Mr. Trump turned to Mr. McAleenan, the Customs and Border Protection chief, with a new idea: He wanted him to stop letting migrants cross the border at all, with no exceptions. If you get into any trouble for it, Mr. Trump told him, I’ll pardon you.

The Turning Point

Once on the ground, Mr. Trump met up with Ms. Nielsen and worked a room filled with Border Patrol agents. Start turning away migrants at the border, he told them. My message to you is, keep them all out, the president said. Every single one of them. The country is full.

After the president left the room, Mr. McAleenan told the agents to ignore the president. You absolutely do not have the authority to stop processing migrants altogether, he warned.

As she and her staff flew back to Washington that Friday evening, Ms. Nielsen called the president. She knew he was angry with her.

“Sir, I know you’re really frustrated,” she told him. The president invited her to meet with him on Sunday in the White House residence.

Ms. Nielsen knew that Miller wanted her out, so she spent the flight huddled with aides on a strategy for getting control of the border, a Hail Mary pass. She called it the “Six C’s” — Congress, Courts, Communications, Countries, Criminals, Cartels.

Unbeknown to her, Ms. Nielsen’s staff started work on her letter of resignation.

When Ms. Nielsen presented her plan to Mr. Trump at the White House, he dismissed it and told her what he really needed was a cement wall.

“Sir,” she said, “I literally don’t think that’s even possible.” They couldn’t build that now even if it would work, which it wouldn’t, Ms. Nielsen told him. The designs for steel barriers had long since been finalized, the contracts bid and signed.

The president responded that it was time for her to go, Mr. Trump recalled later. “Kirstjen, I want to make a change,” he said.

The president said he would wait a week to announce her resignation, to leave time for a transition. But before Ms. Nielsen had left the White House that day, the word was leaking out. By evening, Mr. Trump was tweeting about it.

“Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen will be leaving her position,” Trump wrote, “and I would like to thank her for her service.”

The dismissal was a turning point for Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda, the start of the purge that ushered in a team that embraced Mr. Miller’s policies.

Mr. Trump quickly dismissed Claire M. Grady, the homeland security under secretary, and moved Mr. McAleenan to take Ms. Nielsen’s old job. Within two months, Mr. Cissna was out as well, replaced by Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, a former Virginia attorney general and an immigration hard-liner.

On Aug. 12, Mr. Cuccinelli announced that the government would deny green cards for immigrants deemed likely to become “public charges.” Nine days later, Mr. McAleenan announced regulations to allow immigrant families to be detained indefinitely.

In the months since the purge, the president has repeated his threat of placing tariffs on Mexico to spur aggressive enforcement at the border. Mr. McAleenan and Mr. Cuccinelli have embraced restrictive asylum rules. And the Pentagon approved shifting $3.6 billion to build the wall.

Mr. Trump has continued to face resistance in the courts and public outrage about his immigration agenda. But the people who tried to restrain him have largely been replaced.

In the interview with The Times this past summer, Mr. Trump said he had seriously considered sealing the border during March, but acknowledged that doing so would have been “very severe.”

“The problem you have with the laws the way they are, we can have 100,000 of our soldiers standing up there — they can’t do a thing,” Mr. Trump said ruefully.

This article is adapted from “Border Wars: Inside Trump’s Assault on Immigration,” to be published by Simon & Schuster on Oct. 8.

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hannahgoestomars · 6 years ago

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2018 year in review

This year feels like it has been long. So, so long. It’s been a good year, I think, filled with a lot of great things. But also hard. And I feel very, very tired. Still, here’s the roundup:

It’s been just over a year since I moved to California. Since my 2017 roundup, I found my own apartment in Pasadena, filled it with furniture, and did the very grown-up thing of buying a car, a old silver Toyota Prius that I’ve named Mae. I knew since I found out I’d be moving out here last year that I’d need a car for living in the LA area, and having it has been exceptionally freeing. I can go visit other areas like Burbank or downtown LA without too much trouble, I can offer people rides, I can be a bit spontaneous with what I want to do. I can go on road trips! Such as taking the Thanksgiving weekend to go on an epic drive up to Sacramento and along the route of the Pony Express through to Fort Churchill in Nevada. That was a lot of fun.

The ruins of Fort Churchill. I promise to do Thanksgiving properly another time!!

Work at Caltech has been good - I’ve finally finished the two papers hanging over from my PhD, and have had the opportunity to get my teeth into new projects. In between the never-ending cycle of writing telescope proposals and conference talks, of course. It’s a lot of hard work, but I’m enjoying myself, and I’ve landed in a really good group that I get on well with.

Very soon after moving out to Pasadena, I found and joined an excellent church called All Saints. It felt long past time for me to find a church where I can be every part of myself and be welcomed and loved for it, not despite it. I’ve thrown myself into it gleefully - I joined a choir, took part in a book club, got involved in the LGBTQ ministry, and recorded a podcast on pronouns. I love this church dearly and I feel incredibly fortunate to have found it. Here, I am thriving.

As far as Mars One is concerned, it’s been another quiet year. There have been some rumblings concerning investments, but otherwise we continue to wait for Mars One to be ready to take the next steps. An impatient part of me wants everything to hurry up and happen, but none of this is quick or easy. I’ve just got to keep on trucking - to be ready for when things start to happen again, but also give thought to what I want to spend this part of my life doing. I don’t know yet if I’ll even still be in the same country this time next year, although I hope so.

Still, outside of Mars One itself, I’ve been leaning into my interest in religion in space this year - I wrote a post about Ilan Ramon on the 15th anniversary of the Columbia disaster, and I gave a talk (paper; video) at the Mars Society Convention in Pasadena. That was a lot of fun to attend - I learned a bunch of interesting things and it was great to meet other Mars enthusiasts. And in broader Mars news, the biggest thing is probably the launch and successful landing of the Insight lander - I drove up with fellow candidates Sergii and Jay-Mee to see it launch back in May, and it landed without hitch in November. Congratulations to the team, and I look forward to the science that comes out of it! Also, SpaceX performed its first launch of the Falcon Heavy back in February, which was a joy to watch - landing the two side boosters near simultaneously, and sending a Starman out into the Solar System.

Godspeed, Starman, wherever you are now.

The wider world continues to be stressful. It was very interesting to be in the USA during the midterms, and watch it unfold around me even if I didn’t get a say in anything myself. All things considered, the results did give me a sense of hope that the tide of awful in the States is beginning to turn. On the other hand, watching Brexit unfold from a distance has been chaotic and frightening. It feels like everything is incredibly unpredictable, changing from day to day, and I’m very worried for the future, especially on behalf of my friends living in the country. The year was rounded off by the Gatwick drone crisis, which unfolded in a manner beyond satire - to my relief, though, I was at least able to get back into the country for Christmas and New Year (which I have spent with my family, and my Durham friends respectively).

In the process of settling into a new country and having to make new friends from scratch, a lot of my spare time has been spent at home or on solo trips out to various places. Most days, though, I’m just very tired, so it’s been a good year for flopping onto the sofa and watching TV. Good job there’s been a lot of great TV to watch - highlights for me include Anne With An E, Altered Carbon, The Good Place, and the entirety of Person of Interest which was excellent binge material. Kids cartoons are also a good staple for when I come in from work and just want to wind down, and I’ve very much enjoyed the Voltron and She-Ra remakes on Netflix. I got back onto the Doctor Who bandwagon I fell off a few years ago, which took me over to Burbank where I found a weekly watch-along and after-show, which was a lot of fun (and got me out of the house!) I have not yet got around to finding a LARP game over in LA, but I did play a wuxia-inspired event when I was back in the UK over the summer. Hopefully this year I’ll get myself a little more involved again.

Revolutionary firebrand, champion of the people, wielder of ridiculous giant fans: Eternal Service Tin!

One positive development is that I’ve done a lot of writing this year. I’ve enjoyed doing creative writing ever since I was a kid, but this past year I’ve really decided to put time into it. I’m not at a point where I have stories to share widely right now, but I am looking to work towards getting things to a point where I can submit them for publication, and it’s very satisfying to look over what I’ve done over the year.

Looking back at my last roundup and not-quite-resolutions, I mentioned driving. If 2017 was the year of learning to drive and be comfortable with it, 2018 was the year of it becoming normal and even enjoyable. LA traffic no longer intimidates me, and my aforementioned road trip found me actively enjoying traversing the landscape of America while listening through my podcast backlog (Alice Isn’t Dead is fantastic solo road trip listening). I definitely want to keep exploring while I am out here, for however long that is.

I also mentioned keeping an eye on my mental health. This has been a year out of my comfort zone, living on a new continent, taking a step up in the work expected of me, getting involved in things and exploring - and I like my life right now but it is stressful. Keeping on top of the news does nothing to help that stress either. I spend an awful lot of time being very tired. I need to remind myself that resting and not doing much is not necessarily a problem. And those tired times have been really helped by having writing to work on over the year, even if just in little chunks. Still, while it’s been a good year for me in a lot of ways, it’s not been an easy one. This coming year, I hope to keep looking after myself.

Thanks once again for following along with me. I’m feeling quite tired again today, and I have a feeling that 2019 is going to be very tough. I wish us all the strength to face the upcoming year head-on!

#year in review

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russell7887 · 2 years ago

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everydayanth · 6 years ago

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We are currently relating too hard to this video....

Moving around the country has brought different perspectives of this kind of “do or die until you die” mentality. In Southern California, when I talked about blogging and writing, I got a generic nod of understanding, in the Midwest, I got a confused but encouraging “oh.. how do you make money?” and so far in New England, I’ve gotten “oh, wow, good for you, we need more creative people,” as people drone out to the rhythm of the train or their own footsteps. They talk about commuting a few hours a day like it’s no big deal and to have a nice place to come home to is going to cost you, but even more so to have a car to get there. But when it comes to Jake and his research startup, there is only one pace - as fast as possible. And that leaves little time for recovery or sorting out other personal problems without the money to pay someone else to figure it out. It’s driving us insane with expectations that have little benefit and zero positive impact on our personal or professional lives.

What is it that we value so much in society that is better than the individual experience? How did we so unevenly distribute our lives and our financial-social stratigraphy? What is important to us, and is this a response to our cultural immortality?

We all know we’re going to die some day, it’s a fact of life. But we are so far removed from actual death in Westernized cultures, it seems, that we put it on TV as entertainment. Murder and mystery and zombie-disease outbreaks and suicide are hot topics, but they are also real. So at what point did we begin to ignore death and sweep it under the rug and tell stories about it around campfires like we were infallible?

Is it gruesome to ask what your experiences with death are? In my personal experience, I seem to have more than most people, but I find it keeps me living honestly, keeps me closer in the sight of the important things and willing to easily sacrifice the things the world tells me I need.

So, what are you working for? Is it enough? Should it be? Does your understanding line up with your friends? Your culture? Is death a thing you’ve come to terms with? Do you actively ignore it? How do these topics (death, overwork, dreams and goals, social views) impact your understanding of yourself?

And, a sensitive question tumbling around in my head, personally: when you ask yourself if your life is “worth it,” are you seeking ways of making it more fulfilling, or is that a task that takes too much energy, so you’ve begun seeking how to make it stop? And what do you do when it doesn’t?

This isn’t just about stress management and life choices anymore. It seems like a conflict of interests built into the fabric of our economy - the needs of society outweigh the needs of the individual, and therefore the individual suffers - but at a distance that we don’t see even in ourselves, no matter how passionate we are about our jobs. But if we take a step back to look at our own lives, we must then look at those around us. We want cheaper phones, therefore sweatshop workers get paid nothing; society wants research, so Jake’s putting in 90hr weeks. If I pull him away and say enough, am I not then obligated to look around at the others and say enough for them too, to shell out cash I don’t have for a phone I don’t need (arguably)?

Our current social and economic environment is not kind to selflessness. We admire it as a trait of the rich, because it seems they are the only ones who can afford it. And maybe that’s why local is becoming so important - neighborhoods are identifying themselves in cities all across America. They are demanding self-sustained local grocery stores and cafes, schools and emergency services, businesses that they know, people they know. Because it’s near impossible not to be selfish and survive right now, but if we surround ourselves with friends, neighbors, people who are caring for us, whom we care about and are invested in, then maybe at the end of that 80-90hr work week, we can still impact lives, still have purpose and meaning beyond survival. We can be selfish and we can share with those who will return the favor, because we don’t trust the society or economy as a whole to do so.

What do we need to do more than just survive?

#startup #moving #overwork #millennial culture #death #society #anthropology #everyday anthropology #introspection #self reflection #entertainment #media #stories #goals #dreams #life #survival

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maybeyoumissthisf-kingpost · 3 years ago

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Biggest world events in 2020

So 2020 is about to end with a lot of remarkable events, but I'm not sure if it's optimistic or not, let alone pessimistic. When I was a child, I often heard my grandparents tell me about the difficulties in the past, how they lived hard in the past so that today we can have enough food and warm clothes. Heartbroken. I admire the old people so much. However, suddenly looking back at what happened in the past year 2020, I tapped my forehead and thought… and then unconsciously patted my thigh with pleasure because finally, I also had something to later "converse" with my children and grandchildren that I had How can we survive this year of calamity?

World events in 2020 to tell later on

The year 2020 has passed, gently leaving the Wuhan flu epidemic to continue raging with the strong rise of the global "cholera" pandemic. The public went crazy watching the politicians "go to solve" the crazy political affairs. People praising the smell, people pouting and criticizing. Meanwhile, the media invited the Weasel Foxes to play the game of hiding cats 💩 to hide their "hunter" nature. Faced with that gray prospect, suffering humanity raised its face to the sky and asked God, what could be more tragic? At the end of the year, God looked down and said, "Biden!" then banged on the table and cursed at the father who crossed his face.

Sorry for the rambling, but I like to sarcastic before I get to the post. Because rarely have the opportunity to experience with readers on the last day of the year. Here are some notable events in 2020 of the world that I would like to share again.

1. Wildfires in Australia and California (USA)

2020 witnessed two intense wildfires in Australia and California (USA). In Australia alone, it can be said that this is the most fierce wildfire disaster in the country's history, when forest fires continuously lasted from December 2019 to 2020 and destroyed nearly 20 million hectares of forest. , displaced thousands of people and killed at least 34 people.

Taking this opportunity, "radical" suffragettes immediately sounded the alarm about climate change, that global warming is the cause of forest fires, despite the fact that the number of fires Forest occurrence is much less this year than the average in previous years, according to the European Union's (EU) Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service (CAMS). I think climate change also knows how to "distinct regions" because it only chooses forests in capitalist countries to burn, not other countries.

2. The US killed Iranian general Qasem Soleimani

On January 3, 2020, amid rising tensions between the United States and Iran, the United States carried out a drone strike on a convoy near Baghdad International Airport that was carrying some The passengers included Quds Force commander of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Major General Qasem Soleimani and Iraqi People's Mobilization Forces (PMF/PMU) commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, and soldiers. senior officials of the two sides.

From the scene images, Soleimani's body was identified by the ring he wore on his finger and the sausage bar (100% meat) that fell off but was still intact. At the same time, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps also confirmed the death of General Soleimani.

3. Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan Markle abandon the British Royal Family

Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan shocked the Queen in particular, and the world in general, when they announced they were relinquishing their status as senior members of the British Royal Family on January 8. Royal officials fear this will seriously damage the monarchy's future. It is interesting that while the world views this as an important political event, only Vietnamese people approach it as a showbitch comedy.

4. Wuhan flu (aka COVID-19)

On January 9, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced about a deadly virus that appeared in Wuhan, China. In just a few months, the virus has spread rapidly globally to more than 20 million people and caused at least 750,000 deaths. However, thanks to the relentless efforts of WHO Director-General Tedros and the effective support of the media, the Wuhan flu (Wuhan Virus) finally succeeded in… in turn changing the name Wuhan flu. into Coronavirus, 2019-nCoV, COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2. Currently, this Wuhan Virus has many new strains, it is expected that the new name may be COVID-19 Pro or COVID-19 Pro Max.

5. Impeaching President Donald Trump

President Donald Trump faced an impeachment trial in January initiated by Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, with the aim of removing his presidency in January 2020. Democrats have repeatedly accused Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani of abusing their power to press the Ukrainian government to investigate the corruption scandal of Hunter Biden, son of Joe Biden. According to the indictment, Mr. Trump (probably) committed bribery by asking for political favors in exchange for official action.

Finally, President Donald Trump was acquitted on February 5 due to the lack of evidence of impeachment.

6. Stock market wobbles in 2020

The Wuhan pandemic not only caused heavy loss of life, but also greatly affected the world economy. Many countries were forced to close down (lockdown), causing a serious decline in consumption. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 2997 points as investors panicked about the impact of the continued spread of the coronavirus, a record since 1987.

7. Oil prices went negative for the first time in history

Also because of the Wuhan flu, the US WTI oil price for the first time in history fell to a negative level on April 20, with a selling price of -37.63 USD/barrel. That is, the seller must pay the buyer. Fortunately, that ridiculous thing did not happen in Vietnam, people at that time only had to fill up with gasoline at a "stable" price of about 16,000 VND per liter.

8. Black Lives Matter protest for George Floyd

In fact, Black Lives Matter protests are still as common as usual in the US, but the case of the black brother George Floyd died after being pinned down by the police, along with the viral saying "I can't breathe" (I can't breathe). breathe) has sparked a wave of powerful protests and riots across the United States to demand an end to police brutality and anti-racism. That movement was enthusiastically supported by the left everywhere, with Biden's knees on all fronts in memory of this "national hero".

However, the death of George Floyd was later revealed that he did not die of asphyxiation, and also that "no life-threatening injuries were identified at the autopsy of George Floyd". In addition, the cadaver nasal swab was tested and determined that George Floyd was positive for the Wuhan virus (which often makes it difficult for the victim to breathe). At the same time, the black man was also found to be positive for many other banned substances and drugs.

The video of the police arresting George Floyd was also posted and showed that this young man was accused of using fake bills, being drunk, showing signs of being high and opposing the police many times when he was arrested.

9. Joe Biden Becomes Democratic Presidential Candidate

Joe Biden officially defeated more than 20 other Democratic candidates (including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren) to become the 2020 presidential candidate.

10. Twitter hacked by a 17-year-old

A young weitei-age in Florida, named Graham Clark, has successfully hacked the Twitter accounts of famous political figures, artists and businessmen - including Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Kanye West - to commit bitcoin fraud.

11. Explosions in Lebanon in 2020

A massive explosion at the port city of Beirut occurred on August 4 due to the accidental detonation of 2750 tons of ammonium nitrate, equivalent to 1200 tons of TNT, which was confiscated by the state from the abandoned ship MV Rhosus and stored at port for six years without any precautions. The explosion killed 190 people and injured thousands more.

12. Kamala Harris Selected as Democratic Vice Presidential Candidate

On August 11, Biden announced he had selected California Senator Kamala Harris as a co-conspirator in the office of president. Thereby Harris became the first black and Asian woman to serve as Vice President. Many predicted that Ms. Harris could become the legitimate president of the United States when Biden once said he would cede his presidency in case his health was not guaranteed. That belief was further strengthened when two days ago, on December 29, Biden continued to "confoundly" call Harris the President-elect of the United States.

13. Ruth Bader Ginsburg passes away

United States Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on September 18 at the age of 87. Amy Coney Barrett was later appointed to take the place of former Judge Ginsburg. Mrs. Barrett was an outstanding jurist, a pious person and known as a woman of traditional values. Barrett's appointment strengthens the Supreme Court's constitutional majority (6-3). Currently, the new Supreme Court Justice is only 49 years old (born in 1972), so she is facing the opportunity to influence US law for decades to come. It can be said that this is such a big political shift that it may have a deeper impact than the outcome of the 2020 US Presidential election.

14. President Donald Trump infected with Wuhan virus

President Trump announced on October 2 that he and first lady Melania Trump had tested positive for the Wuhan virus. He was hospitalized for three days at Walter Reed National Army Medical Center before being discharged to continue his recovery at the White House.

15. Joe Biden becomes US president on suspicion of election fraud

Joe Biden can be said to have almost become the 46th President of the United States with a questionable victory in Pennsylvania, among many other battleground states. Thereby ending one of the most controversial elections in American history.

16. Successful trial of Wuhan flu vaccine

The first Americans were vaccinated against the Wuhan virus on December 14 after the US Food and Drug Administration (US FDA) approved the emergency use of Pfizer's COVID-19 shot on December 14. The second US vaccine, developed by Moderna, was approved by the FDA a week later on December 18. The emergence of two vaccines, developed in less than 12 months. one year, which is considered one of the greatest scientific achievements in human history, proving the leading role of the United States on the world map of science and technology.

17. President Donald Trump becomes the most respected person in America

According to a new survey published on December 29 by Gallup (a consulting and data company, specializing in global surveys), US President Donald Trump for the first time surpassed former President Barack Obama to become the first US President to become the US President. The most respected man for the American people. Notably, up to 60% of people were satisfied with the way Mr. Trump handled the epidemic. This position was previously held by Obama continuously for 12 years.

Meanwhile, President-elect with the highest popular vote Joe Biden received only 6% of the support (one-third of Trump), reflecting the opposite of the current election results. Looking at it, if one had any conscience left, they would definitely question the last election.

All credit goes to trantuansang.com.

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stoweboyd · 7 years ago

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Work Futures Daily - AI is Everywhere

But there is no agreement on the impact of AI-driven automation

2018-04-03 Beacon NY — AI is finding it's way into every conceivable niche it seems. Australian conservationists are employing drones to track sharks, and emplying AI to identify Great White and other large and toothy sharks. The goal is to head off dangerous interactions with the giant beasts. Simialr projects are going on in Cape Town and California, too.

Meanwhile, Equinix is predicting customer churn with AI, in the section below.

Has AI intruded into your work or extracurricular activities? Let me know, if so, here.

…

On Artificial Intelligence For Customer Prediction

Data center company Equinix has created an app to determine the likelihood of customer churn for its clients:

For its prediction model, a team of Equinix data scientists looked at roughly 70 attributes that could contribute to customer churn, such as how many times a customer logs into a customer portal or placed an order over a certain time period, or whether power consumption increased or decreased. Using a deep neural network, the team built a model that predicts the likelihood of customer churn over a 30-, 60- or 90-day period and says whether each customer is a high, medium or low churn risk.

[…]

In its first iteration, it predicted churn with 50% to 60% accuracy when compared to actual churn data. After months of testing and refining, it now is close to 90% accuracy.

The model runs about once every two weeks and provides and spits out the probability that each customer account might churn, along with potential reasons why. That information is fed into the company’s Salesforce.com Inc. system so sales reps can see it while working with Equinix’s roughly 9,800 customers.

“Before, customers would churn because they didn’t hear from reps,” Mr. Wagle said. “That behavior is changing.”

Just as important for a skeptical user community, they had to provide a raitonale for the churn prediction:

The biggest challenge was figuring out how to explain the model’s decision-making process.

[...]

Now, alongside the risk score, a table shows sales reps reasons that might explain the risk, such as a decrease in power consumption or an extended period without using the customer portal.

Notably, Equinix declined to explain how the technical team derived the rationale from the neural network used.

On Predicting the Impact of Automation

There seems to be little convergence on estimates for the impact of AI and Automation on jobs. The MIT Technology Review has collated a table:

Predictions are all over the place, no convergence, not even on the fundamental question of whether more jobs will be created versus destroyed.

Erin Winick of MIT Technology Review states,

In short, although these predictions are made by dozens of global experts in economics and technology, no one seems to be on the same page. There is really only one meaningful conclusion: we have no idea how many jobs will actually be lost to the march of technological progress.

On Unions

Unions are having a real resurgence in the US, as a bottom-up radicalization of teachers, long denied pay wage increases and confronted by attempts to cut benefits, have walked out, often surprising — or turning against — their union 'leaders'.

Dana Goldstein reported on 2 April,

Thousands of teachers in Oklahoma and Kentucky walked off the job Monday morning, shutting down school districts as they protested cuts in pay, benefits and school funding in a movement that has spread rapidly since igniting in West Virginia this year.

In Oklahoma City, protesting teachers ringed the Capitol, chanting, “No funding, no future!” Katrina Ruff, a local teacher, carried a sign that read, “Thanks to West Virginia.”

“They gave us the guts to stand up for ourselves,” she said.

The walkouts and rallies in Republican-dominated states, mainly organized by ordinary teachers on Facebook, have caught lawmakers and sometimes the teachers’ own labor unions flat-footed. And they are occurring in states and districts with important midterm races in November, suggesting that thousands of teachers, with their pent-up rage over years of pay freezes and budget cuts, are set to become a powerful political force this fall.

The next red state to join the protest movement could be Arizona, where there is an open Senate seat and where thousands of teachers gathered in Phoenix last week to demand a 20 percent pay raise and more funding for schools.

The growing fervor suggests that labor activism has taken on a new, grass-roots form.

[...]

Lily Eskelsen García, president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, called the movement an “education spring.”

“This is the civics lesson of our time,” she said. “The politicians on both sides of the aisle are rubbing the sleep out of their eyes.”

Note that this is taking place in states where the teachers' unions are barred by law from compelling workers to pay dues, weakening them financially.

…

Meanwhile, in France, Emmanuel Macron's efforts to strip benefits from railway workers has led to the long-anticipated protests:

A strike at railway operator SNCF began Monday evening and will run through Thursday morning, with only one in every eight long-distance trains running and one-in-five shorter regional trips due to depart on Tuesday. Roughly half of RER commuter trains to Paris are running. Eurostar, which runs service between London and Paris, canceled five trains today in each direction, or about one-third of the trains it would run on a normal Tuesday.

Unions say half of SNCF workers are striking, including 77 percent of train drivers. SNCF advised passengers to postpone trips, and television stations showed footage of near empty train stations.

[...]

The strikes are the latest in a series of disruptions that started last month and also involve energy and garbage collection companies, as well as students protesting changes at state-backed universities. Demonstrations across the country have already caused severe disruption in commuter trains and school shutdowns.

Labor unions plan their biggest protest against changes at SNCF, the indebted national railroad, where Macron plans to deny future hires the job security, early retirement and special pensions of existing workers, while opening up train lines to competition. There are 36 days of strikes planned at the train operator over the coming months.

Taking on the railway company’s 74,000 workers will be tough for Macron, after he pushed through a liberalization of France’s labor code and cut taxes on capital in his first year in office. Next, he’s planning to overhaul jobless benefits, simplify France’s retirement systems and streamline parliamentary procedures.

France is deeply divided: 46% say the strike is justified, 53% say it isn't. With the work stoppages likely to be two days out of every five, those numbers could shift: but which way?

Question or comment? (Can be private, or public: your choice. I occasionally publish public comments or questions.)

Follow me on Twitter.

More media, politics, and social commentary on stoweboyd.com, including bio.

#unions #ai #automation #emmanuel macron #strikes #teachers #equinix #Work Futures Daily

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sarahfama · 7 years ago

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Theoretically, students can make it through all four-plus years of college without ever setting foot in the library. But why on earth would you want to do that?

Libraries are awesome, and the J. Paul Leonard Library at San Francisco State University has some particularly cool features that can significantly improve your student experience.

8. No Laptop? No worries.

Murphy’s Law says that “anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” I’ve had students lose laptops on buses and trains, and leave laptops hundreds of miles away while visiting family over breaks. I’ve had students whose homes and cars were broken into, their laptops stolen. I’ve had students whose computers unexpectedly crashed, bricked, and fried.

Losing your laptop sucks. (Especially if you forgot to back up your work. Always back up your work. Use Google Drive or Dropbox or even just email your latest draft to yourself whenever you make major additions or alterations.)

When Murphy’s Law bites you in the hard drive, stay calm and library on. You can visit one of the library’s several computer labs or even check out a laptop for anywhere from four hours to thirty days, allowing you to retrieve all those assignments and keep going — because you backed up your work.

7. Google-fu failing you? Library research assistance to the rescue!

…And I mean literally failing you. If you aren’t using any sources for your college writing assignments beyond what you can scrounge up in basic web searches, you’re going to start having a very hard time very quickly.

At first, doing research in academic databases (much less the actual stacks of academic books and journals) may seem intimidating; it’s like trying to find your way in a country where you may not speak the language and you’re unfamiliar with the local customs.

Like the quaint British custom of “not being completely goddamn oblivious”

You know the stereotype of the “ugly American” tourist who just stomps around shouting louder in English at people who don’t speak it, and who complains that they don’t do things in Oslo/Cairo/Chiang Mai/La Paz the way they do in Muskogee? Using basic web searches when you should be doing academic research isn’t nearly as gauche, but it is a symptom of a cultural adjustment — to an important part of academic culture.

Happily, the world is a pretty friendly place, and when you ask for help politely (even if you “ask” mostly via gestures and a few badly mispronounced phrases), you’ll find that people are usually enthusiastic about introducing newcomers to their culture. At the library, they’re almost aggressively happy to help: you can instant message, call, text, email, watch videos, use web-based how-to guides, drop in, or even make an appointment to work with a subject librarian to get in-depth research consultation.

It’s like a personal tour guide, a butler, and a concierge got together and had a magical library baby who lives to help you. Start seeing the sights — you’ve got the intellectual world at your fingertips.

6. Find some Silence in the Library

No, Whovians, not that Silence in the Library.

Which is a good thing, because I would be less excited about sending you to the library if I felt there was a chance you’d be eaten by invisible microscopic alien piranhas hiding in the shadows.

But did you know that the SFSU library has multiple spaces set aside for quiet study? Because sometimes you’re trying to study with friends or at home, but the noise starts to drive you crazy until you just can’t take the yapping and the snapping and the tapping and you just want to leap up and shout —

But you can escape those distractions in a quiet study space.

Thanks, library!

5. Get your group project going full steam in a group meeting space.

I know a great joke about group projects (and by “great” I mean terrible):

At my funeral, I want everyone who I’ve ever been in a group project with to be a pallbearer, so they can let me down one last time.

Group projects can be…challenging. The library doesn’t check out cattle prods (as far as I know) so there may be very little you can do if your group members aren’t very motivated; nor do they offer drones mounted with tracking devices and tranquilizer darts (again, as far as I know — you’re welcome to inquire further), so if a group member goes totally AWOL there’s not much you can do to pull them back into a productive orbit.

What the library does offer are a number of handy meeting spaces, including reservable group study rooms with whiteboards, wifi connections, and everything you need to collaborate with two to twelve of your favorite people.

4. Ran out of ink at home? J. Paul Leonard has your back.

It’s the moment every college student dreads: you’re printing out a major assignment worth what feels like 160% of your grade, and page one prints out looking…faded. Page two? Barely legible. At page three, your printer hacks out a final consumptive cough and the ink dies completely, leaving you with a dozen blank pages that should have been filled with your scintillating argument about the causes of the Boer War.

In this moment, you hate your printer. You want to destroy your printer and all that it represents!

But don’t go full Office Space on it yet. You’ve got a deadline to meet!

Hurry — grab your laptop or email/upload your final draft where you can easily access it, and run, don’t walk, to the library. You can print there.

One caveat: don’t expect to be able to waltz in and out in minutes, at least not during peak times of year such as midterms and finals. You will not be the only person whose printer gave up the ghost, and there are also plenty of people who use the library printers as their regular printing method.

Plan ahead and give yourself plenty of time to print before assignments are due — and if Murphy’s Law kicks in and literally everything goes wrong, contact your instructor as soon as things start to go pear-shaped, attach the assignment to an email to show them you completed it before the deadline, and ask if you can get an extension on the paper copy.

3. Fuel up on coffee at Peet’s.

Some of us need our coffee in the morning. By which I mean throughout the morning, in a continuous infusion. And then again in the afternoon, as a pick-me-up. None in the evening, of course, unless it’s a shot of espresso over ice cream — or unless we need to be up late working on a project.

I could really use a coffee right now.

Because it would have been silly to ask people to walk the hundred or so yards to the nearest coffee shop in the student center, there’s a Peet’s inside the Library, in a kiosk in the middle of the first floor.

In theory, this makes getting coffee incredibly quick and convenient. In practice? Give yourself plenty of time to get your fix delicious beverage, since at peak times the line at Peet’s can extend most of the way through the lobby.

Pictured: The line at Peet’s during finals.

2. Snag great deals at the used bookstore.

Channel your inner Belle and pick up your next book at the booksale room on the first floor (in room 120 A, near the book drop). Although small, the Friends of the Library bookstore seems to turn over its inventory frequently — and the books are so cheap, it’s easy to splurge without hurting your pocketbook.

If you’re trying to stock up more texts relevant to your major or intended major, this is the bookstore for you; I suspect a lot of the donations here come from professors cleaning out their offices, as you can frequently spot insane deals on older editions of textbooks and scholarly works.

1. Oh yeah, and the library is also a library!

So you can also find articles and check out books. For free!

You aren’t even limited to the SFSU library’s collection. If you need a book and it’s not available at SFSU, you can almost certainly get it through the inter-library loan service CSU+ or iLLiad.

Once you’ve followed the advice above and learned how to use some of the library’s research tools, you can search for articles from the comfort of your own home using the online databases.

The library also has an amazing collection of films, music, theses written by former students, and archival materials. Heck, the library even contains another library. The Sutro Library, on the fifth and sixth floors, is a California State Library and has a massive genealogy collection, as well as a massive selection of rare items (including a selection of Shakespeare Folios) and publications.

So what are you waiting for? Go live it up at the library.

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Level up your SFSU Library game with these 8 tips Theoretically, students can make it through all four-plus years of college without ever setting foot in the library.

#gifs #illustrated #library #research #student skills #tips

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cathrynstreich · 5 years ago

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The Real Estate Office of the Future

(Above) Rudy L. Kusuma, President & CEO, Your Home Sold Guaranteed Realty

Your Home Sold Guaranteed Realty Sets Out to Chart a New Course

Rudy L. Kusuma learned early on that the standard approach to the real estate business was not the way to win. The traditional tactic of filling the funnel through cold calling and door knocking wasn’t his style.

“I was failing at prospecting and stumbled on this idea of reverse prospecting,” he explains.

And with a strategy focused on attracting customers instead of chasing them, Kusuma started the top-ranking Team Nuvision in 2008, and, this month, embarks as his own brokerage, Your Home Sold Guaranteed Realty, where he plans to bring his team success formula to agents throughout Los Angeles and, eventually, the entire state.

Here’s why Kusuma believes he’s onto a model and a philosophy that just might change the real estate industry for good.

Maria Patterson: Rudy, please begin by telling us a bit about your background and how you first got into the real estate business. Rudy L. Kusuma: Sure. I used to sell door-to-door promotional items, and one of my clients was a real estate broker. He told me I could be really good at real estate, so I got my license in 2007.

MP: Were real estate sales a lot different? What did you learn early on? RK: As soon as I got my license, my broker told me that the first thing you do is prospecting: cold calling and door knocking. But I was struggling with cold calling, and it wasn’t successful for me. I thought, “Maybe my voice doesn’t sound good over the phone,” so I tried door knocking. The only difference with door knocking was that now people were mad at me face-to-face! That’s when I first realized that there was a problem in this business. Most real estate agents spend 70-80 percent of their time prospecting, but normal businesses are not this way.

MP: So how did you come up with a different approach? RK: Back in 2007, I started to figure out how to attract customers to me instead of chasing them. I was failing at prospecting and stumbled on this idea of reverse prospecting. I started hosting Cashflow game nights based on the book “Rich Dad Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki. Every time people came to the office to play, I would always ask them, “How many are thinking about buying or selling?” By doing that, I would pick up three, four or five new clients. So instead of cold calling, I hosted the Cashflow game nights and created an investors’ club that taught people how to invest in real estate. By the end of my first month, I had picked up 20-25 clients.

MP: You then formed a team right away, correct? RK: That’s right. I realized most agents were just busy looking for clients, whereas I suddenly had more clients than I could handle. In 2008, when I was working in a Coldwell Banker office, I asked the other agents if they wanted to partner up with me, and they all said yes. So, my first team was started by accident out of necessity.

MP: 2008 was an interesting time to be ramping up in real estate! RK: Yes, in 2008 the market crashed. I looked around me, and even though people were not doing well, they were still talking about cold calling and the “long run.” For me, I had no “long run.” I had to pay bills now. I was a brand-new agent and my second baby had just been born. I couldn’t be thinking about doing branding and long-term campaigns. My long run was 60 days, not 20 years from now. So for me, it was about direct response marketing where you create compelling offers so that prospects chase you. And business continued to grow. My first year in 2008, my team in the Coldwell Banker office became No. 1 in the office. We then moved to RE/MAX, and for the past five years, our team has been the No. 1 team in RE/MAX.

MP: Talk about the evolution of your team. RK: We started in 2008 as Team Nuvision. We focus on only one thing: generating buyers and sellers. We have about 2,000 buyers and sellers calling us each month. We operate on the same principle of reverse prospecting—using radio, billboards, direct mail, etc., so that people are calling us. We sold 550 homes last year, and we do not do any prospecting, cold calling or door knocking.

MP: How is the team structured? RK: We have more than 17 people on the team. We have a marketing and media department, and a general administrative staff that inputs all inquiries into our CRM. We have an inside sales team who then follows up with inquiries to check on their timing and motivation. If they find out someone is moving in the next 3-6 months, they book an appointment with our outside sales team. If they’re not ready, they go to our customer service team. Our outside sales team uses my buyer’s and listing presentations. We’re not a franchise, but it’s a blueprint—a duplication of a system that works, instead of 10 different agents using 10 different listing systems.

Rudy L. Kusuma (front center) and members of his Outside Sales Agents department.

MP: How would you say your team differs from other real estate teams out there? RK: The term “team” has been abused so much. Just because you’re under the same roof doesn’t make you a team. When we talk about a team, we mean that each individual person has a specific role in the transaction. We have been perfecting this model since 2007 to make sure it works.

MP: And now you have made the big step to turn your team into its own company. Why did you make this move? RK: Yes, we have left RE/MAX and just launched Your Home Sold Guaranteed Realty. I felt there was a problem in the traditional brand model, no matter what brand you’re talking about. For example, McDonald’s teaches you how to cook a hamburger. That’s why, wherever you go, you know that when you have a McDonald’s hamburger, it’s going to taste the same. However, in the real estate industry, in general, the system is broken, because at the end of the day, after all the shiny objects, each individual agent is still responsible for their own business. And the problem with that, just like me in 2007, comes down to the fact that it’s not humanly possible for an individual agent to do everything that needs to be done to be successful.

Our team system, however, redefines the job of the real estate agent. In our new company, we are going to focus on growing and developing real estate sales teams, and help as many real estate agents as possible grow and develop their own teams. We want to change how the real estate industry works.

The Your Home Sold Guaranteed Realty model focuses on one thing, says Rudy L. Kusuma: generating buyers and sellers

MP: Will you base your company around the strategy of reverse prospecting? RK: Yes. On our team, because there is no prospecting, we are focused on only one thing: servicing the client. We are teaching real estate agents how not to rely on the MLS, but, instead, how to set, negotiate and collect their own buyer’s agent fees so that they can show a buyer all the homes that meet their criteria, not just some of them. I believe that in the near future, buyer’s agents’ commissions on the MLS will go to zero, and everyone will have to negotiate their own fee. But no one is teaching the real estate agent how to do that. We are.

MP: How do you plan on attracting agents to your firm? RK: My introduction to agents is that we are the only company that books you a face-to-face buyer or listing appointment. That’s our uniqueness. Leads are useless. The same lead goes to 20 people. We are the only company to focus on helping real estate agents grow. Our vision is to be the best place to work, buy and sell real estate in the state of California. We hope to have 50 teams in the next 12 months.

MP: Given your team model, what role will new recruits play in your company? RK: Generally, there will be two types of agents. Some will join as outside sales agents, some as team leaders who want to build their own successful team. Usually, this is someone who is the No. 1 agent at their firm, and they’ve hit a plateau. I know the struggle because I was there. Right now, they’re a one-man show. They have no time for their family, health is usually an issue, and it’s just a matter of time before the machine breaks down. We will teach them how to leverage themselves with people and with technology.

MP: How will you help agents succeed in an increasingly competitive market? RK: The real estate agent commission is under attack. The consumer is looking at the agent and asking, “What value are you bringing?” If your value proposition is that you’re just a nice guy, you will be eliminated. If the machine can do what you do, you should be worried because, one day, you will be replaced.

Our asset is training on how to do something the machine cannot do: negotiate. We give buyers access to homes they can’t find online. When you’re selling a house, instead of giving sellers a For Sale sign or drone photos, through our CRM, we give them a pool of 45,000 prospective buyers. Using AI, we do a search-and-match analysis, so we know which prospects are most likely to buy your home. Then we call all of those prospective buyers. Sellers hire us because we have already done all the work for them. Because we already have the buyers.

MP: So how will Your Home Sold Guaranteed Realty stand apart from other real estate firms? RK: The relationship between a broker and an agent today is often like a landlord and a tenant. We are the only company to teach real estate agents to grow and develop their own teams. You have to add value as a broker, and that’s what we will do. We’re teaching real estate agents to build their own system.

MP: Rudy, beyond your new firm, your M.O. has been all about teaching others, as evidenced by your seminars, videos, etc. Why is sharing knowledge so important to you? RK: I was born and raised in Indonesia. My family never had money and never talked about money. My mom always focused on education, and paid for the education of myself and my four siblings. People can take everything away from you, but no one can take away knowledge and education. That was programmed into me since I was small.

In 2007, I saw a problem in this business. I could’ve kept that a secret, but that’s not my personality. I believe in the law of generosity: Whatever you want in life, give it away…including time and money. I believe we can change the world if each individual, team or agent has a cause. So every person who joins my company, as a requirement, has to choose a non-profit to give to. For example, last year, we were the No. 1 fundraising office for Children’s Hospital in LA.

You must understand that your business is designed for others and you’re a channel of that. The more you add value for people, the more money you will make per transaction. Focus on adding more value than the machine can offer; otherwise, we’re looking at the commoditization of the industry. Income will continue to go down if we fight over who has the fastest technology.

For more information, please visit www.YourHomeSoldGuaranteedInc.com or call (626) 789-0159.

Maria Patterson is RISMedia’s executive editor. Email her your real estate news ideas at [email protected].

The post The Real Estate Office of the Future appeared first on RISMedia.

The Real Estate Office of the Future published first on https://thegardenresidences.tumblr.com/

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courtneytincher · 6 years ago

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Palmer Luckey’s Secretive Defense Company Is Booming Under Trump

Photo Illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast / Photos GettyAs many tech giants grow skittish about cashing in on the surveillance boom, one company helmed by an industry iconoclast seems custom-built for Big Brother.For Anduril Industries, scanning the California desert alongside border agents or helping drones home in on targets isn’t toxic—it isn’t even controversial. That mostly has to do with the company’s founder, Palmer Luckey. The 26-year-old is best known as the designer of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset that shepherded the futuristic technology into the mainstream. In 2014, Luckey sold his 100-person virtual reality company to Facebook for $3 billion. Luckey was reportedly forced out of Facebook in early 2017 after The Daily Beast revealed that he was bankrolling an unofficial pro-Trump group dedicated to “shitposting” and circulating anti-Clinton memes. It only took a few months for the boyish, ever-Hawaiian shirt clad near-billionaire to launch his second act, a defense company called Anduril Industries. Prone to references to fantasy worlds and role-playing games, Luckey named his new project after a mythical sword from The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Tellingly, the weapon’s other name is the “Flame of the West.” With Oculus, Luckey turned science fiction into affordable hardware. With Anduril, he’d port those innovations over into the defense sector, fusing affordable hardware and machine learning to create a border and battlefield surveillance suite that the federal government couldn’t resist. Two years ago, Anduril was little more than a placeholder website with a casting call for “dedicated, and patriotic engineers.” But with a handful of contracts in its cap and some friends in high places, Luckey’s AI-powered defense experiment has established itself as an up-and-comer in the scrum for federal business. Anduril is still small—a fraction of the size of a Lockheed or a Raytheon, say—but it has quickly grown to employ close to 100 people, moving into a 155,000-square-foot headquarters in Irvine, California, where it can comfortably double in size.And far from shying away from politics post-Facebook, Luckey leaned into the MAGA-friendly ideology—donating big money to pro-Trump outfits, and meeting with Trump cabinet officials, all while his company quietly picks up military contracts and expands its work with border patrol.In a recent Reddit thread Luckey defended his new company’s business model: “Of the things people might find divisive about me, this should be near the bottom of the list.” Palmer LuckeyAnduril/Twitter BIG BORDER BUSINESSWhen Trump’s vision of a “big, beautiful wall” ran into the costly, inefficient realities of a contiguous physical partition along the southern U.S. border, high-tech surveillance solutions emerged as a viable next best thing. In 2017, Luckey worked with Rep. Will Hurd (R-TX) on cost estimates for legislation to push a virtual border wall into consideration. As part of that collaboration, Hurd introduced Luckey to a rancher in his Texas border district who agreed to let the young company test drive three of its portable sentry towers on his private land. (On Thursday, the 41-year-old tech-savvy Congressman announced that he would not seek re-election “in order to pursue opportunities… to solve problems at the nexus between technology and national security.”)Anduril bills itself as an “AI product company” specializing in hardware and software for national defense. Its hallmark product, called Lattice, is a modular surveillance setup comprising drones, “Lattice Sensor Towers,” and software that autonomously identifies potential targets. As it demonstrated in two live pilot programs at the U.S. Southern border last year, the system can detect a human presence and push alerts to Customs and Border Protection agents in real time.Now, the company is expanding its reach. Anduril is currently working on a new pilot program with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to test “cold weather variations” of its high-tech surveillance system capable of running reliably outside the hot, dry climate of states along the U.S. border with Mexico. That program consists of two limited trials, one in Vermont and one in Montana. The pilots were pursued by the agency’s innovation team, which explores new technologies for guarding U.S. borders and will “determine the efficacy and applicability of the technology to northern border challenges,” according to CBP. While the northern U.S. border sees far less activity outside of designated border crossing sites, it does span some terrain even more remote and challenging than the arid stretches that line the southwest states. The U.S.-Mexico border makes headlines for its divisive role in American immigration policy, but the line dividing the U.S. and Canada is actually five times as long. Anduril may also be shopping its technology to the other side of the border. In May, Luckey represented Anduril at a Toronto event advertised as part of an official trade delegation to Canada. When asked if Anduril’s business in Canada was purely aspirational or actually in the works, the company declined to comment. Anduril’s border work was previously limited to a CBP pilot near San Diego and some unofficial testing at a private ranch outside of El Paso. The San Diego program began with only four towers in the agency’s San Diego Sector and over time expanded over time to 14. Now, with the pilot program successfully ended, those 14 towers remain operational. The company has also turned its unofficial deployment in Texas into a formal relationship. The agency recently bought 18 additional Anduril-made towers and plans to deploy them later this year. That installation is not part of a pilot program. “Like any company, CBP’s future relationship with Anduril will be subject to fair and open competition, the company’s ability to deliver relevant technology, available funding, and a variety of other factors,” CBP told The Daily Beast.Beyond its border-watching sentry towers, Anduril also makes its own heli-drone, a sort of miniaturized helicopter that can stay airborne for long periods. Those drones, known as Lattice Ghosts, are capable of stealth flight and flying in formation over large swaths of land or sea for anything from “anti-cartel operations to stealth observation.”An Anduril sentry tower with one of the company's heli-dronesAnduril GAMER GOD GOES TO WASHINGTON Anduril is a curious company to have grown out of the West Coast tech scene—and a sign of the times. Luckey might still refuse to wear closed-toed shoes, but he’s reinvented himself within Anduril’s hyper-patriotic, veteran-friendly image. Luckey has smartly made efforts to surround himself with serious military types who blend in with the close-cropped national security crowd. The company has quickly built its operation out in Washington D.C., recruiting former Senate Armed Services Committee staff director Christian Brose late last year to serve as the company’s head of strategy. As the Intercept previously reported, that hire helped get Anduril into the National Armaments Consortium, a nonprofit that connects defense companies with military contracts.“The company’s existed a year, and they already have systems that have been built and fielded right now,” Brose told Defense News around the time of his hiring. “This isn’t the classic play, ‘Give us billions of dollars and 10 years, and we’ll promise we’ll build you something.’ They have developed systems, and they’re going out and solving problems with them.”Anduril also picked up Scott Sanders, a former intelligence and special operations officer for the Marine Corps, to lead operations. By late 2018, Sanders was demoing Anduril’s hardware and software surveillance system for Marines at Camp Pendleton. Less than a year later, the company sealed the deal on a $13.5 million contract with the Marine Corps to secure bases in Japan, Arizona, and Hawaii, surrounding each with a “virtual ‘digital fortress.’” With two co-founders from Oculus and four from Palantir, tech’s biggest defense success story, Anduril’s early hires have been key to its quick expansion. One of those was Trae Stephens, a former Palantir engineer and current partner at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, who joined Trump’s transition team through Thiel.AndurilAnduril’s leadership represents a blend of political leanings, even if Palmer Luckey’s politics are quite a bit louder. The company’s co-founder and COO Matt Grimm in particular is an active Democratic donor, with donations to Hillary Clinton, Beto O’Rourke, ActBlue, and Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign more recently. Co-founder and CEO Brian Schimpf donates to Democrats, too, including Henry Cuellar, a co-sponsor of Hurd’s SMART Wall Act bill in late 2018. Christian Brose represents the traditional Republican wing within the company, having worked under the late Sen. John McCain. Given his work with Trump and Thiel, Stephens has shown a willingness to work with leaders whose politics are more closely aligned with Luckey’s own. Next to Thiel, Luckey is probably Trump’s most high-profile booster in the tech world, even if he was excommunicated from its mainstream. SIX DEGREES OF TRUMPLuckey has described himself as “fiscally conservative, pro-freedom, little-L libertarian, and big-R Republican.” Regularly donning wigs and candy-colored anime garb, Luckey might be the only military contractor who’s active on the cosplay circuit. Reportedly a longtime Trump fan, converted after reading The Art of The Deal, Luckey donated $100,000 to Trump’s inaugural committee. He was spotted last month at a Trump 2020 fundraiser put on by Donald Trump Jr. and his girlfriend, former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle. While his political choices and some of his company may have previously placed him outside of Silicon Valley’s establishment politics—the Trump administration’s embrace of fringey, irreverent far-right idealogues helpfully opened some doors. In 2017, for example, Luckey discussed his border wall tech with Trump’s Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke in a face-to-face partially arranged by Chuck C. Johnson, a former Breitbart reporter who was permanently banned from Twitter for threatening to “take out” Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson. During Anduril’s earliest days, Luckey also met with former Trump strategist and Breitbart editor Steve Bannon, another figure from the political edges who found his way to the center in 2016. Luckey, described as a “proud nationalist” by former Oculus friend John Carmack, has evoked ominous language with echoes of Trump’s own on the issue of the border.“If I could wave a magic wand, the United States would have perfect border security and arms wide open to everyone who believes in American values,” Luckey said in a tweet. “Murderous gangs that terrorize communities across North America don’t fit the bill, and I hope we can erase them from existence.”Luckey added that his views are “mainstream libertarian as it gets” and that in spite of his business in border security he is “a big fan of immigration.” In any online scrap over Anduril’s border business, he’s quick to draw a distinction between the concept of “border security” and policies around immigration that shape realities—and technologies—at the U.S. border.While his departure from Facebook also coincided with the end of the Zenimax trial, in which the Oculus founder defended himself against allegations that his virtual reality empire was built on stolen trade secrets, Luckey’s tendency to live his right-leaning, irreverent politics out loud within Facebook’s tepidly liberal leadership culture led to the events that made the axe come down.“I contributed $10,000 to Nimble America because I thought the organization had fresh ideas on how to communicate with young voters,” Luckey said in a Facebook post at the time, claiming that he actually planned to cast his vote for Gary Johnson. The Wall Street Journal later reported that Luckey’s public support for the third-party candidate was a facet of Facebook’s PR strategy foisted on him by executives at the company. TECH UNDER THE MICROSCOPEThe tide of public opinion has turned against the tech industry in recent years. After the revelations of Russian interference in the 2016 election and a concurrent wave of heightened sensitivity for privacy, the sector is no longer viewed as an optimistic hub filling the near-future with consequence-free innovation.That shift in public perception coupled with new activist energy within the tech workforce means that tech companies are facing a new level of scrutiny on their government defense deals, when previously they might have guiltlessly enjoyed federal cash infusions. Those deals have also grown out of the government’s increased comfort with maturing tech companies capable of handling sensitive contracts and jumping through certification hoops. When Google came under fire and backed away from the Pentagon’s controversial Project Maven contract, developing AI that can help drones autonomously home in on potential targets, Anduril stepped in. Amazon stayed the course under similar pressure, batting away internal dissent about the Pentagon’s whopping $10 billion cloud computing project for Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, better known as “JEDI.”After Microsoft landed a $480 million Army contract for its HoloLens augmented reality goggles late last year, a cluster of Microsoft employees protested. “While the company has previously licensed tech to the U.S. military, it has never crossed the line into weapons development,” they wrote. “With this contract, it does.”Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella defended the work in an interview with CNN. “We made a principled decision that we’re not going to withhold technology from institutions that we have elected in democracies to protect the freedoms we enjoy,” Nadella said.Last month, Luckey spelled out Anduril’s own uncomplicated attitude toward military work in an interview with CNBC. “What I am glad of is that Microsoft and Amazon are both willing to do this contract in the first place. There’s a lot of U.S. tech companies that have been pulling out on the D.O.D,” Luckey said. He went on to criticize Google for withdrawing from Pentagon’s $10 billion JEDI contract over internal backlash around ethical concerns.“I’m mostly just glad that Amazon and Microsoft are still in there fighting this… they are willing to work with the military,” Luckey said. “I think we could use a lot more of that and I would love to see even more companies in the mix.”With a president shredding his office’s long-held traditions while obsessing over slowing immigration to a trickle, maybe it’s no surprise that a boyish gamer demi-god in a Hawaiian shirt could reinvent himself as a serious security contractor keen to lock down borders around the world.In June, Anduril entered into a relationship with the UK Royal Navy through its NavyX tech accelerator. “The artificial intelligence and [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] systems from Anduril are game changing technologies for the Royal Marines Future Commando Force,” Royal Navy Chief Technology Officer Dan Cheesman said.Recently, Luckey has hinted at the company’s interest in deploying its border surveillance system to the Irish border, where Brexit has reignited historical tensions along what would become the only land border between the UK and the EU. A soldier tries the company's VR system for controlling its hardware AndurilAnduril believes that its technology is modular and versatile enough t0 be applied well beyond the military sector. While its AI-powered towers have mostly been implemented to secure borders, the company is in conversation about providing tech to other industries, like securing power grids and oil and gas facilities.What’s more, the company has signaled its interest in applying its AR and VR expertise to “real-time battlefield awareness for soldiers”— a chance it might get after landing a piece of the drone-centric Project Maven contract. The company is also interested in providing tech to aid soldiers on the ground. “Imagine if the Nazis had been the first people to make practical nuclear weapons. Imagine if the Russians had been the first people to make practical nuclear weapons,” Luckey told CNBC last month. If America’s top scientists and technologists steered clear of that technology due to ethical concerns, Luckey argued that we’d be in “a very different world today.”“It would not be the world that we’re in right now—and it would be a lot worse.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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Florida’s Panama City, Torn Apart By Hurricane Michael, Now Managed By Retired 2-Star Army General

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Florida’s Panama City, torn apart by Hurricane Michael, now managed by 2-star Army general

By Frank Miles | Fox News

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Panama City manager Mark McQueen standing near an area destroyed by Hurricane Michael in Panama City, Fla. The retired two-star general started his new job two weeks before the storm. (AP Photo/Tamara Lush)

Maj. Gen. Mark McQueen had no sooner retired from the Army — after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan — and started his job as city manager in Florida’s Panama City when it was slammed by a category 4 hurricane.

Hurricane Michael became the most devastating storm to hit Florida in decades. Almost all of Panama City’s water, sewer, electric and cell services were wiped out.

Despite McQueen having no municipal experience and having been on the job only two weeks, city leaders said the two-star general is exactly the man they need for the long recovery ahead.

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“I believe the Lord sent him,” Panama City Commissioner Billy Rader said. “God knew this was going to happen before we did.”

McQueen, 58, was a rare choice when commissioners picked him out of a candidate pool of 80 people, and not just because his experience was from the military.

When McQueen accepted the job six months ago, he asked the commission for a grace period to wrap up his military service and end his a civilian job as a church’s business administrator. There was another pressing matter, too.

“There was a gentleman who needed a kidney,” he said casually.

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That’s right. In the last four months, McQueen has retired from the military, started a new job, helped coordinate one of the largest hurricane responses since Katrina, and donated a kidney — to a stranger.

In August, he donated his left kidney to a man at his church, and took a few weeks to recover. The man who received the kidney is doing well.

When McQueen accepted the job last spring, he talked about his need to be a servant for his community, not being mediocre and quitting, but leaving a mark at doing great things.

“What am I going to do for the second half of the game, the game of my life to contribute, to give back, to secure victory, to get the win?” he told the Panama City News Herald. “I want to commit myself to that life of continuing to be a service leader, to being one who is giving back to the community. I am standing before you today not only because of the great opportunities I have had in my civilian career but also my military, and I was able to have that military career right here in Panama City and become a senior leader in the United States Army because of the investment this community made in me. It’s my time to give back to this community.”

McQueen came to Panama City in 1988 for a job at a community college. He met his wife there, and they raised their two children in Panama City. Over the years, he rose in the ranks of the military, from officer to Special Operations Command, to his final assignment as commanding general of the 108th Training Command headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. There, he commanded some 7,000 soldiers. One of their tasks was to repair Baghdad’s infrastructure.

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Another, more recent assignment was to help orchestrate the emergency response to Hurricane Florence on Sept. 14. He missed a recent city commission meeting because of that.

On Sept. 24, he marked his first day on the job, and outlined to the local paper what he wanted to accomplish in his first 120 days.

GOOD SAMARITAN AIMS TO SAVE LIFELONG CHURCH FROM FLOODING

He spoke of looking “down and in” and “up and out” to set the framework for a long-term strategic plan. He mentioned five-year goals and a long-term vision that stretched toward 2050.

All that lasted approximately two weeks.

When Hurricane Michael bore down on Florida’s Panhandle, he ordered an evacuation for parts of the city and unrolled his Army bed mat and camouflage blanket in the corner of the police chief’s office. As the eyewall of the monster storm passed over the city, the police station’s roof threatened to lift. Water trickled into the building.

When the storm passed, he surveyed the damage in this city of 40,000 people. Ninety percent of all the power poles were down. One of the two wastewater treatment plants was inoperable. Cellphones weren’t working. The city’s lush tree canopy was in splinters, covering roads and homes.

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“This is Baghdad with trees,” he said. “One hundred percent collapse of infrastructure.”

His own home wasn’t damaged — “only a few roof tiles” — which allowed him to pour all of his focus into the city.

Now, more than two weeks since the storm, he’s still sleeping in the chief’s office, but took a day to fly to Washington, D.C.

His retirement ceremony from the military was Friday.

SMALL TOWN RALLIES IN SUPPORT OF AMERICAN FLAG MURAL

It was his first day off since before the storm.

After, he plans to return to Panama City and pull on his combat boots for the long haul.

He knows he has his work cut out for him. Tens of thousands of homes are unlivable, and in a city where 75 percent of the schoolchildren get free or reduced price lunch, it will be a challenge to find affordable housing — or any housing at all — for the needy.

Said McQueen: “I’m going to rebuild the economic engine of the city. We’re going to work the problem, and create a solution.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Frank Miles is a reporter and editor covering geopolitics, military, crime, technology and sports for FoxNews.com. His email is [email protected].