#I feel like all wildlife services social media accounts are like this

[evieveevee]

What We Lost: Returning to Tumblr in 2020

On December 17th, 2018, Tumblr banned 'adult content' across the site, marking the end of an era. The ban was the result of a cavalcade of issues which reportedly made maintaining NSFW content unfeasible for Tumblr. Now, it's 2020. I'm back on Tumblr, and I can't help but meditate on what we've lost both on Tumblr, and across the globe in 2020.

Part One: Tumblr and Adult Content

*Things we lost to the flame Things we'll never see again All that we've amassed Sits before us, shattered into ash

— Bastille, "Things We Lost In The Fire"*

A bit of personal history: Tumblr was the primary community I used in various forms from 2012 onwards, associating with various fandoms, doing what I could to design interesting things. The various communities I was involved in intersected with social justice communities, and eventually I dug into those further and tried to learn to better myself in the process, starting along the path to becoming the person I did.

Part of that process was also learning to love my own body, a thing I was not particularly good at and still struggle a bit with nowadays. One of the ways I did this was by making 'adult content', or more plainly, pornography. It was a unique opportunity to experiment with femininity and sexuality - something I'd been very closed off from as part of my upbringing - in a supportive, fun environment. Experimenting with my self image first in this way, in semi-private, led to me experimenting more publicly and eventually embracing aspects of that as part of my day to day life. That's right: making pornography was part of what led me down the path to figuring out I was trans and embracing that part of me.

Making porn on Tumblr was a great time; the adult content creators and consumers community on the site was largely supportive of queer people and sexuality, different body types, all manner of things. It was - in my experience - a healthy and fun place to be, and certainly one of the better places you could be on the internet for a visual medium like pornography. Tumblr's format made it easy to share both adult content you made yourself, and stuff you were curating. Vex Ashley wrote that "this sharing was so desperately vital for women and other marginalised people whose sexualities are often overlooked or infantilised in media about sex in preference for the tastes of the traditional porn consumer – the straight white guy" in a eulogy and love letter to Tumblr's adult content communities.

Tumblr's format remains novel to my knowledge as well: the notion of having a large image-focused feed which also allows for easy sharing and curation, gorgeous, high resolution pieces and photos to be uploaded with relatively little compression, custom arrangements of photosets, and personalized theming of your blog. There was, and remains, lots of potential for expression on Tumblr., and its focus remains unique. Twitter and Mastodon's focus is on what's written, Wordpress doesn't have the sort of interlinking of blogs that Tumblr does, and Facebook is... Facebook (read: evil).

I think the novelty of that format is what made the announcement of the ban on 'adult content' so impactful. Even looking back at the framing of it is gross: the post posits that 'adult content' is something which is negative, and says that removing it is working towards a 'more positive' Tumblr. There appears to be an attempt to try and strike a balance in allowing conversation about sexuality and such, but this is the killing blow. A huge portion of the community, including countless queer and furry artists, needed to find a new home online.

3 months after the ban had hit, traffic had reportedly dropped off 20%. Recent data from SimilarWeb, the outfit which published that initial data, shows that visits to the site have dropped off a little bit more, but have stayed otherwise pretty consistent. August 2020's data shows about 317 million visits. [1] In other words: any hope that this move would allow Tumblr was dashed. A massive portion of the userbase deleted their accounts after archiving them; Tumblr and the internet at large had lost a massive, vibrant chunk of community, and it was completely in vain.

I lost contact with a bunch of those folks I was following on Tumblr for years. The mass exodus left both people who wanted to find and share artwork and adult content and the people who made it completely adrift. Years later, some artists are still picking up the pieces. Archaic policy like SESTA/FOSTA being brought into the picture has left very few standing when it comes to adult content, Twitter included. Who knows how long that will last? If something happens to change the way that Twitter handles adult content, for example, what options do casual creators like myself have?

Fortunately, platforms like OnlyFans exist. But even those are at potential risk from legislation like the EARN IT Act, not to mention the danger this poses to Twitter and to the internet at large. OnlyFans and its ilk, as they exist right now, are fantastic for sex workers because they offer pay-gating and a variety of features to make sure sex workers get paid. But they leave those of us who want to be able to curate the content they enjoy or casually create their own content freely without real options, and without real community.

We stand to lose a lot, and as always people in the margins will be the ones most impacted: the queer, the people of color, the disabled; all will suffer greatly if adult content is found without a home. Media dealing with queer themes is enough to be considered "adult content" by some and it's not hard to imagine what we could be staring down the barrel of here.

What have we lost in eliminating platforms like this?

Part Two: 2020 and the World

*These are the things The things we lost The things we lost in the fire, fire, fire.

— Bastille, "Things We Lost In The Fire"*

Meditating on what we have lost seems to be a running theme for the year 2020.

January: New Year's Day. In Aotearoa New Zealand, smoke covers the skies from a fire a literal ocean away. The Australian bush has been on fire, part of one of the most and it has turned the skies of a nation not it's own orange at midday, across thousands of kilometers. What did we lose in those fires? What stories and history? What wildlife, what species? What will remain afterwards? What will grow anew?

April: Aotearoa New Zealand hits the peak of COVID-19 related lockdown with the entire nation moved to Level 4, meaning that nothing except truly essential services, such as roadworks, pharmacies, and supermarkets were open. During that time, I thought a lot about how some of my favorite small shops were doing; the bakery with astonishingly good pies, the charming dollar store which always has a few things that catch my eye, the coffee cart near one of the local parks every morning. As a nation, Aotearoa acted early to deal with COVID-19 with a strong hand, and it was risky for all of those small shops across the country. What would we come out the other side of the lockdowns having lost, both in terms of human cost and cost to the places around us?

May: Following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin, massive protests against police brutality, racism, and white supremacy break out across the United States of America. Daily protests have continued to the time of writing in some cities. George Floyd is one of 781 people killed by police in 2020 at the time of writing in the United States alone [2]. 1099 people were killed by police in 2019 [3]. What incredible lives and stories have been lost in the process? Are those stories being told now? How do we prevent this from happening again? (Hint: defunding the police will be a start, and supporting the cause now is a good choice too.)

It is now September: The incompetence of the US Government has allowed COVID-19 to spread beyond control, leaving tens of thousands of deaths in its wake; lives and stories which must be remembered and their stories carried on by others. The western coast of the United States is on fire, blanketed in smoke and ashes. Massive west coast cities like San Francisco gain an apocalyptic feeling as the skies turn orange, like they did for me in January. Friends of friends lose everything in small Oregon towns. The costs of the prolonged fires will be paid by people all up the coast; it's their health outcomes which will suffer. What will we lose as a result of this in the future? What can we do to make things better?

I want to be clear: this is not a comprehensive list, and is centered around the things that me and my social circles have been aware of and talked about. Even with that consideration, we have to reckon with massive, ongoing, and far reaching concerns. The loss felt as a result of all of the above issues is staggering, and far reaching, and we must fight to ensure that loss is not in vain. Voting alone is not going to solve these concerns, and there's more to concern yourself with than any one person should have to cope with. There's not a magic bullet to solve all this stuff though.

Rather than pretend that I have one, I want to propose a couple things to close this out: one bit of advice, and one plea for yourself and others.

The advice: pick your battles carefully. Pick issues you want to focus in on, and fight for those things to make things better where you live, and in your social circles. Choose things to care deeply about first. Keep caring about them.

The plea: think carefully about the questions I've asked throughout this piece, and think about the things in your life and communities that you have lost. Think about how to make sure those losses are taken with you and learned from; to take lessons learned and better yourself and the people around you. Think about the things you don't want to lose, and how to fight like hell for them.

Move forwards to something, and some place better than where we are now. Stand united with the people around you, and press on.

*Do you understand that we will never be the same again? The future's in our hands and we will never be the same again.

— Bastille, "Things We Lost In The Fire"*

If you enjoyed this piece and want to support my work, please contribute to my Ko-fi. If you are interested in re-publishing this piece on another site, please contact me either here or via my business email.

References

[1] Data provided by SimilarWeb; accessed on 15/09/2019 at 5:30am. (https://www.similarweb.com/website/tumblr.com/)

[2] Data provided by Mapping Police Violence (https://mappingpoliceviolence.com); accessed on 15/09/2020 at 4:08am NZT

[3] Data provided by Mapping Police Violence's (https://mappingpoliceviolence.com) database, downloaded on 15/09/2020 at 4:08am NZT. Count obtained using the following formula:

=COUNTIFS($'2013-2020 Police Killings'.F:F,">=1/1/2019",$'2013-2020 Police Killings'.F:F,"<1/1/2020")

[thebachelordiaries]

Clare seeks HIMBO: ‘The Bachelorette’ cast first impressions

The Covid-19 pandemic has been rough for the entire world, but Bachelor Nation faced some dark days too. Going eight months without a single new episode from The Bachelor franchise is something I would really like to not relive.

Fortunately, those dark days are over. Clare’s season has me sucked back in. 

The quality of this image is atrocious.

Most of these men—presuming they followed CDC’s social distancing guidelines— haven’t seen a woman in months, are touch deprived, possibly unemployed and contemplating moving back to their hometown while stalking the housing market on Zillow. Everyone’s desperate. That makes for some pretty good TV.

This season features men ranging from ages 26 to 41. We’ve got a boy band manager, a grooming specialist, several men who look like they masturbate in front of full length mirrors and even more who probably want me to join their MLM pyramid scheme. 

I’ve never been more ready to roast a bunch of men who have nightmares about going bald. It’s all I’ve wanted to do since March.

Let’s go:

AJ, 28, Software sales

AJ is the kind of guy who writes “Looking for the Pam to my Jim <3″ on his Bumble profile. His bio is generic and probably not reflective of who he is as a person. If I were Clare I’d swipe left.

Ben, 29, Army ranger veteran

“Ben's favorite indulgence is an ice bath.“ Well then.

Alexa, play “Run” by AWOLNATION.

Bennett, 36, Wealth management consultant

Bennett’s profile is the biggest red flag I’ve ever seen. This man says he is the total package but hasn’t always been "this successful and good looking.” But wait, there’s more: “According to Bennett, his high school girlfriend is the only girl he's ever had to work for.“

Can someone tell me what NYC neighborhood he lives in so I can blacklist it?

Blake M1, 31, Male grooming specialist

Blake’s just another stereotypical “29th round draft pick who sat on the bench of the practice team before getting cut, but claims he left the sport due to an injury on his own accord.” 

Blake M2, 29, Wildlife manager

This Blake is an outdoorsy Canadian who seems pretty genuine and cool. Unfortunately, he has the face of someone who’d get sent home on night one. I hope I’m wrong.

Brandon, 28, Real Estate Agent

Just another boring hot person. Nothing to see here.

Brendan, 30, Commercial roofer

Brandan, not to be confused for Brandon, “loves some good true crime, working out and hanging out with his friends.” I can’t even make fun of this man. We have the exact same interests. 

Chasen, 31, IT account executive

The Winklevoss twins are actually triplets and Chasen is their long lost brother. But more seriously, have you ever seen someone who looks more like their name than this man?

Chris, 27, Landscape design salesman

“Chris hopes to find a woman who is sharp and witty but also easygoing.” Chris, sweetheart, have you met Clare? Easygoing...? There’s still time back out of this before it’s too late.

Dale, 31, Former pro football wide receiver

Dale aggressively screams “Bachelor material.” I’d say he’s auditioning for that role but Matt James already scooped it up. Better luck next year, Daley.

Demar, 26, Spin cycling instructor

Demar is a “very popular spin instructor in Scottsdale and says he can get on that bike and spin to any beat thrown his way.” Imagine how many trophy wives Demar has f*cked? 

Eazy, 29, Sports marketing agent

Eazy is very similar to Dale on paper. Except his name is Eazy so he automatically loses that battle.

Ed, 33, Health care salesman

“Ed is looking to find a woman who has natural beauty without looking overly fake.” Ed deserves to die alone.

Garin, 34, Professor of Journalism

Garin’s bio is giving me hubby material vibes. And maybe a little bit of a “gets eliminated on night one” vibe too.

Ivan, 28, Aeronautical Engineer

Ivan, what are you doing here? We’re in a recession. Please go back to your normal job before it’s too late. 

Jason, 31, Former pro football linemen

“He is a former NFL offensive lineman who, after suffering too many concussions on the field, decided to prioritize his health and change the direction of his life.” A big, brawny HIMBO with CTE? I feel like he’s Clare’s type.

Jay, 29, Fitness director

There are too many things about Jay that I dislike and I’m trying to keep this brief. Jay says “it's time to take a break from worrying about others and focus on himself instead.” I am willing to bet money that this man has never made a woman c*m.

Jeremy, 40, Banker

Jeremy is the oldest contestant ever to come on "The Bachelorette,” which may seem like a monuments accomplishment but he’s literally only one year older than Clare. 

He also “hates Instagram models, both male and female,” so he should have a lot of fun here.

Joe, 36, Anesthesiologist

Before I even saw his profession and location, I thought Joe looked like a doctor I’d find on a NYC dating app...and...uh...I probably did see him on there now that I think about it.

Anyway, this man has apparently been through seven stages of hell while on the front lines fighting Covid-19 in NYC so I definitely think he deserves to find love. Someone marry him please.

Jordan C, 26, Software account executive

I can already tell Jordan is going to get the “I’m young but mature” edit which means he’s probably not going to be good TV.

Too bad someone a tad younger (like Tayshia) wasn’t the Bachelorette. I feel like they’d make a cute couple.

Jordan M., 30, Cyber security engineer

I was going to say something mean but Jordan’s into cyber security and I don’t want my blog to be deactivated, so never mind. Cast photos are historically bad so I’m sure he looks much better in real life.

Kenny, 39, Boy band manager

I could go for the obvious drags regarding this man’s profession (or his sh*tty chest tattoo, or his suspiciously boyish face relative to his age), but I like to think I’m more clever than that. 

I’d like to take this time to talk about men, who are obviously difficult people, who rant and rave about how they want an “easygoing” woman. Look into the mirror, bud. No, not the one you use to jerk off to your reflection; the mirror that looks into your soul. Out of respect for the rest of humankind, have some self-awareness. Or maybe just see a therapist.

Mike, 38, Digital media advisor

Mike is seemingly a decent catch, but I can’t help but wonder why he’s still single or how he never (accidentally or on purpose) impregnated a woman in his 38 years of life. 

And now that I’m thinking about it, do any of these men have children? I have yet to see any mention of it in their bios. But there are eight men left to review, so there’s still time.

Page, 37, Chef

I spoke too soon. Page is a father! He also hates football! I’m a fan of this man. I was initially going to drag him for his name and say that Page is not a real name. PAIGE is a real name. PAGE is a piece of paper. I’m allowed to say this because we have the same name except mine is spelled the correct way. Based on my (mostly positive) review of his cast bio, I have decided not to hold his name against him.

Riley, 30, Long Island City

Riley, once married with children, would like to go on a family vacation that consists of touring every single MLB stadium in the country. If i were his wife, I would simply never give this man children.

Robby, 30, Insurance broker

No more Robbys on The Bachelorette. Society has evolved past its need for more Robbys.

This Robby described his dream woman as: “Incredibly athletic and able to throw back a few beers with him after a day of hiking. She has a sweet personality and won't mind that he spends his Sundays on the golf course.”

Someone please give this man a sex doll. He just wants a hole.

Tyler C., 27, Lawyer

“Tyler C. is a badass lawyer who says he is a businessman by day and a cowboy by night.” How does that make him a lawyer? Does this mean he’s into cosplay? I’m confused.

Tyler S., 36, Music manager

Tyler makes an honorable living off riding his brother’s dick success as a country singer. “He just LOVES his job!” Uh yeah, I would too if I had a low-show, high-paying job off the merits of nepotism. It’s the American dream.

Yosef, 30, Medical device salesman

Another dad! He’s totally going to pull the “girl dad” narrative. That saying is kind of sexist to me but the masses generally eat it up, so I’m fairly confident Yosef will get the "sweet guy” edit he’s looking for.

Zac C., 36, Addiction specialist

“He loves Philadelphia sports and dreams of sharing a Philly Cheesesteak with his future wife while watching the Eagles win a Super Bowl.” This man is so South Jersey it hurts. 

On a more serious note, I don’t think anyone in recent history has spoken openly about their personal struggle with addiction on this show, so I hope Zac gets a chance to tell his story. 

Zach J., 37, Cleaning service owner

Zach is seemingly obsessed with Clare already and hopes to introduce her to his mom as his fiancée. Since Zach watched Clare on Juan Pablo’s season, you’d think he’d know that Clare would first meet his mom during the final four hometown dates. Assuming he makes it that far. My prediction is that he won’t.

Final thoughts

After eight long months Bachelor Mondays are back!!!

Uhh....wait.

Actually, we now have the less-exciting Bachelor Tuesdays. Yeah, it definitely doesn’t have the same ring to it. But I’ll take anything at this point.

Here are my final predictions:

First impression rose: Dale. It just looks like he can turn on the bullsh*t charm

Final rose: Jason. Clare wants a HIMBO I just know it.

Bachelor: nobody (Matt James is The Bachelor)

Most likely to get engaged on Bachelor in Paradise: Blake M2

Most likely to get canceled online: Bennett

Most likely to get sent home night one but deserve better: Chris

Who are your favorite men cast on this season?

[janineblogs2]

Week 9: The Slow Fashion Movement

The issue of fast fashion, involving cheaply and rapidly made, trendy pieces, generates a controversial discussion with both producers and consumers, with many believing that it is time for the fashion industry to slow down. The slow fashion movement (also referred to as ‘eco fashion’ or ‘sustainable fashion’) provides an alternative by providing “goods and services that respond to basic needs and bring a better quality of life, while minimising the use of natural resources, toxic materials and emissions of waste and pollutants over the life-cycle, so as not to jeopardize the needs of future generations” (IISD 2015, cited in Z. Lai et al, 2017). Whether you actively consume fashion or not, I believe that it is crucial to be mindful of what goes on behind the scenes in the fashion industry and this is why we will be discussing our focus on these two main points: Why is sustainable fashion so important and what guiding principles can we use ourselves, to classify fashion lines as ‘sustainable’?

To answer the big question: Why is sustainable fashion so important? Using an environmental approach, the global fashion industry accounts for “10% of annual global carbon emissions, more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined” (World Bank, 2019) and fast fashion creates alarming levels of pollution, landfill waste and endangered threats to wildlife. If this isn’t eye-opening enough, fast fashion also violates fair working conditions, where workers, sometimes even underage children, are exploited long working hours in poor safety and health conditions for below minimum wage. By making the switch to more ethical and sustainable brands, you can proudly invest in your style, whilst confidently being part of preserving the ecosystem’s balance and supporting fair working rights. But you might be asking yourself, how do I know which brands are sustainable and which ones are worth purchasing from?

This introduces us to the four guiding principles that Fletcher (2008) highlights and that we can use to classify fashion lines as ‘sustainable’.

1. Any items produced must be child labour free across the entirety of the supply chain (Lai et al. 2017, p.83).

2. Materials utilised within the production process should be less harming to the natural environment, recycled, upcycled, and/or more durable. Thus, it portrays the opposite to the ‘throw away’ fashion attitude often associated with fast fashion (Joy et al. 2012; Henninger 2015).

3. The production process must be in an ethical and socially responsible manner, paying workers fair wages and, ideally, create jobs in the country of origin by producing locally (Lai et al. 2017, p.83).

4. The creation of long-term relationships across the supply chain is vital within the process of producing sustainably, which allows the negotiation that fosters the creation of sustainable fashion (Yip, 2010).

Hopefully, after reading this post you feel more confident in making well informed decisions about investing in sustainable fashion and are more likely to recognise when companies attempt to ‘greenwash’ consumers by deceiving them into believing that their products are environmentally friendly when, a lot of the time, they are not. Invest in quality clothes that reflect you and be part of the slow fashion movement today.

Examples of Fast Fashion brands: Zara, H&M, Forever 21 & TopShop (Chi et al. 2021).

Slow Fashion Brands: MATE the Label, ReCreate, The Social Outfit & Frankie (Good On You, 2021).

References:

Attire Media 2021, 6 Reasons Why Sustainable Fashion Matters, “Attire | Conscious Fashion, Events & Resources,” Attire | Conscious Fashion, Events & Resources, viewed 7 May, 2021, <https://www.attiremedia.com/articles/why-sustainable-fashion-matters>.

Good On You, 2021, Rating brands on the issues that matter, viewed 7 May 2021, < https://goodonyou.eco/how-we-rate/?_ga=2.212526996.1001108362.1620366276-304566268.1620366276>

Lai, Z, Henninger, C.E, Alevizou, P.J 2017, An Exploration of Consumers’ Perceptions Towards Sustainable Fashion – A Qualtative Study in the UK, edited by Henninger, C.E, Alevizou, P, Goworek, H, Ryding, D. (Palgrave:2017).

Stanton, A, 2018, “The Good Trade,” The Good Trade, viewed 7 May, 2021, <https://www.thegoodtrade.com/features/what-is-fast-fashion>.

Ting Chi, Jenisha Gerard, Yuhfen Yu & Yuanting Wang (2021) A study ofU.S. consumers’ intention to purchase slow fashion apparel: understanding the key determinants,International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education, 14:1, 101-112, DOI:10.1080/17543266.2021.1872714

[ratfuck]

In 2050, what will life on Earth be like?

this is going to be a long post because I am extremely interested in futurism and predicting the future with scientific, social and economic models. I’ve spent countless hours viewing content like futuretimeline.net, futurism.com and youtuber Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur, and have written a few papers on predictions of the future. Just to make things more convenient for me though I’m going to round this up to 2050-2070, because I think there will be events in, say, 2064 that definitely rely on things that happen in the 2050s. I’ll also break this down under different sections such as technology, economy, environment, politics, society, etc to make it easier to read rather than one giant mess of paragraphs.

That being said, I’m not very optimistic about 2050. I think if we avoid the climate scenarios I list and force change through sociopolitical and economic revolutions, we will see a much brighter future, but at the rate now I’m honestly so worried about where we’re heading because the consequences will have an impact on every single human being on the planet.

TECHNOLOGY

Probably the most optimistic part of this. Technology by this time will have changed everything from global communications, to manufacturing, to even the clothes you wear. Widespread advances in medical and genetics technology will have vastly expanded lifespans for those with access to healthcare. Diseases like AIDS and Alzheimer's will have vaccines or cures, and cancer, while not truly curable, will be very treatable with survival rates nearing 100% - for those who have access to it. The rich will be able to afford “designer babies”, being able to pick desirable traits for their children in vitro. Nanotechnology has advanced to the point it is feasible and used in everything from the construction of houses, fighting diseases in the body, mitigating climate change, and clothing. Computational power continues to grow exponentially, Moore’s Law is dead. Artificial Intelligence will be everywhere, and has advanced to the point that it may seem sentient to people. Automation has taken most of the jobs on Earth, with service, factory, and accounting jobs being long gone. The majority of cars will be smart cars with self-driving capabilities. Green energies like solar, hydroelectric, wind, and even biofuels and nuclear power (possibly including very limited fusion power) will slowly replace fossil fuels such as coal as the primary power source, but oil will still be in great demand. National space agencies such as NASA, the ESA, Roscosmos and private corporations like SpaceX will have solved the long-time problem of immense costs of launching things into space through the use of new fuels, rocket designs, and launching systems such as mass drivers, leading to the beginnings of space infrastructure and industry orbiting Earth. A new space station to replace the long since decommissioned ISS will be created completely in orbit, likely with a rotating wheel design for simulated gravity. The moon will have a small scientific outpost on it, and Mars will have a permanent, yet tiny human settlement. Space tourism will be a thing, albeit for the wealthy, and the benefits of low gravity will allow for automated manufacturing in space. Asteroid mining will take off around this time. Cybernetics as seen in science fiction and cyberpunk media will become a reality, as prosthetic limbs and artificial organs will have advanced to being as physically capable as the real thing, though I doubt they will be as widespread as featured in sci-fi media. Most people in developed countries will have technology on them at all times, either it being smart clothes, the implants that allow 24 hour access to the internet in their skull, or the nanomachines in someone’s blood.

SOCIETY

Society is under great stress around this time. The consumer culture and hyper-spending of the 20th and early 21st century will be nonexistant or mostly phased out across the globe, as economies are forced to adjust to diminishing resources and political upheaval around the globe. Newer generations resent the older generations - blaming them for the cause of many problems. World population growth has stagnated around 9.8-10 billion people, with the majority of the population aging, with a drain on capital as the worker-to-elderly ratio begins to fall. Media has become completely decentralized and diverse. Athough the number of democratic countries has risen significantly over the years, many have turned inward, cutting off foreign relations. Revolutions, wars and failed states have produced a strikingly different geopolitical map than seen at the beginning of the century.The gap between the rich and the poor widens to the point of upward social mobility being nigh impossible, at the same time as the world’s first trillionaire appears. Massive demonstrations and rioting increase around the globe. Food and water shortages are common everywhere, even in the “first world.” Poorer and arid countries are struck the worse. There are 150 million climate refugees, a six fold increase since 2010. Radical parties on both sides of the political spectrum, from communist and eco parties on the left side to anti-immigrant and fascist parties on the right side, both promising to relieve the stress of the people, explode in popularity. News of revolutions and military coups in developing countries are seen almost daily. Nationalism and xenophobia surges across the globe as people become heavily distrustful of foreigners and immigrants. The vast majority of people live in massive, sprawling megacities. As more and more wealth trickles upwards to the hyper-rich elite, there is a growing consensus that money itself – the profit motive – is a major obstacle to future progress, and a new driving force  may be required for civilization to flourish. Free market capitalism is largely viewed as a woeful and broken system, as people shift away from consumerism towards a more conservational economic system.

ECONOMY

As more wealth trickles to the hyper wealthy elite, the average person feels the burden of a more and more uncertain and often times recessive economy. Decades of stagnation has produced a fragmented, chaotic global economy. Nearly half of every country on the planet has shit credit ratings, effectively making them bankrupt. US national debt has now surpassed almost 400% GDP, exceeding even the levels seen during World War II. China has surpassed the US in GDP, but itself will be surpassed by India, all three will stagnate or worse depending on political and ecological events that will happen around this time. As said before, majority of service, manufacturing, and accounting jobs have been taken over by AI and automated services, creating a class of people that have no income that could represent as much as 66% of the population of a given country. Governments are forced to initiate programs such as a universal basic income. Megacorporations have become a thing, and corporations profit from climate change mitigation and even war and international conflicts. Nearly the entirety of the working US population at this time is employed by a corporation, with “self employed” people being merely contract employees or artisan creators. The world is facing an economic recession worse than the 2007 recession, with climate change being a major factor.

ENVIRONMENT

The deadline set by the Paris Agreement for eliminating carbon emissions by 2035 had been missed. The result in 2050 has lead to conditions that could be called apocalyptic. Arctic ice melt has lead sea levels to rise nearly a meter, greatly impacting coastlines and low-land areas. Cities like New York, London, Hong Kong, Honolulu, and many more have erected great sea walls and pumping systems to keep out seawater. Cities like Venice have been greatly depopulated or outright abandoned due to flooding, and entire small island nations face destruction and collapse as they cannot stop the erosion of their coastline. Many of the islands in the South Pacific and Indian Ocean have been completely abandoned, moving to Australia or Eurasia. Warmer seas have lead to massive superstorms that kill hundreds of thousands, up to a million, each year. Coastal regions are battered by typhoons and hurricanes that far exceed the damage caused by storms like Hurricane Katrina. Tornado Valley in the United States expands and covers states as far as Ohio, with tornadoes becoming more and more extreme each year. Drought and heat waves are excessively common. Desertification has expanded as far north as Spain and the Mediterranean in Europe, and the breadbasket states in the US. Permafrost melt in Russia and Canada and Greenland have turned these countries into agricultural superpowers. Mining settlements and even cities are being founded in coastal Antarctica as global warming has melted the ice and caused temperatures to increase to a cold, yet tolerable. The equatorial region of the Earth has become so hot and arid that few stable countries exist in the region. In Africa, South America, and Asia, rivers begin to run dry, causing regional skirmishes and resource wars over water with upriver countries holding what little water flows as a political tool. Over half of the Amazon rain forest has been deforested for farms that last only a few years at most, creating deserts and parched scrublands. Wildfires have tripled in areas such as California and Australia. The 6th Mass Extinction, known as the Holoscene Epoch and caused by man, is in full effect, environmental destruction has reached it’s apex, with 0.5% of animal and plant species going extinct each year in tropical forests alone. Overfishing, warming seas, and ocean acidification has resulted in mass amounts of marine wildlife dying off, effecting food supplies of humans and animals heavily. 1/5 of all reptile species are extinct at this time, with amphibians being effected even more. Outbreaks of super-resistant bacteria and viral infections are worsened by the climate. The shortage of food and water worldwide, extreme droughts, superstorms, and flooding coastlines along with the political conflicts such as war and economic depression that arises from the climate crisis has created over 150 million climate refugees throughout Asia, Africa, South America, the Middle East, and Oceania. With nowhere to turn, they head to Northern regions such as Europe, North America and Eurasia for relief, creating the single largest migration crisis in recorded history that heavily effects international politics.

POLITICS

Global political systems are in a period immense transition and struggle. Due to worsening climate change, a depressed global economy, and political upheaval across the globe, the state of the planet is in an immediate threat to world peace. Much of the world has moved into a rapidly degrading geopolitical situation, with climate change and a seemingly unending stream of climate refugees driving the crisis. Throughout this period, increasing numbers of equatorial countries are now classified as failed states, with collapsed governments and directionless populations. Civil war is becoming common in most regions. Countries adjacent to equatorial regions are experiencing severe political and social strife, with anti-immigration gripping the US, Europe, and Africa far, far worse than current times. The Mediterranean and Eastern Europe has become highly militarized with Italy, Spain, and Greece hit with massive migrations, resulting in nationalist and fascist governments coming to power. Countries in Europe are in a political deadlock over food and water, with the EU likely collapsing at this time. The country of South Africa has turned into a war zone as it aggressively turns back refugees from Central Africa, which has almost entirely been consumed by desertification. Asia is facing multiple problems as well, with countries like Bangladesh slowly being emptied of it’s population. South East Asian populations are fleeing to neighboring countries such as China and India, which themselves are seeing populations flee to Europe and elsewhere. At the southern border of the US, the situation is extremely pressing. Massive flows of immigrants from South and Central America due to political and economic collapse has caused anti-immigration to surge to extreme levels in the US, with extreme nationalistic and fascist parties gaining support. Though Brazil and Argentina have managed to retain some stability, the mountainous northwestern countries like Peru and Bolivia have degraded and collapsed into armed camps protecting water supplies. Central America collapses into civil war. Countries such as New Zealand, Japan, and the UK have stabilized themselves by completely cutting themselves off and becoming self-sufficient. The equatorial droughts and worldwide instability has left the Middle east as a wasteland of destructive anarchy, with only a few countries remaining somewhat stable. It is very likely that a low-scale nuclear war will erupt between countries like India and Pakistan or Israel and Iran over immigration, water, and food. As the Arctic has melted, freeing up resources that have yet to be tapped such as oil, Russia and the United States race to claim territories in the far north, leading to escalation and political tension and possible war between the two countries. It is likely that at least one city will be devastated by a terrorist nuclear weapon by 2050, with massive amounts of weapons grade nuclear material disappearing from Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. Bioterrorism and even nanotech terrorism can occur, as gene editing and nano manufactoring technology has become widely more accessible. Amidst the massive instability and suffering worldwide, many end times and primitivist movements arise across the globe. Institutions such as the UN, the EU, NATO, and BRICs will likely dissolve around this time. It is possible the world may enter World War 3 over the lack of resources, the worsening climate, the climate refugees, and claims to water.

I know this is a REALLY fucking dark outcome, and I’ll probably be wrong with a lot of this, but this is what I’m expecting to happen around 2050. I’ve studied a lot of these articles and futurism sites for a long time now and this is what I’ve put together from all of those. While I think we face a dark and uncertain future, I think the world will actually recover and get better a little further in the future.

[lewishamledger]

On a wing and a prayer

WORDS BY RONNIE HAYDON; PHOTO BY PAUL STAFFORD

If you talk to the Reverend Doctor Martin Thomas (or “Father Martin” as he is more comfortably referred to in the parish) about his work, you discover very quickly how blurred the lines have become between church and community.

The handsome red-brick church of St John the Baptist on Bromley Road is one of four he is in charge of (the others are the churches of St Luke, St Barnabas and St Mark, all in Downham), but it’s the one that demonstrates its versatility with the greatest brio.

“I have a big team working with me – 10 priests altogether – and we see ourselves as being here for the whole community; for those who come to church regularly and for people who don’t”, says Father Martin. “We have to be available for anyone in the parish who needs help of whatever kind.”

That, if you think about it, is a huge job. Like all vicars, Father Martin “lives above the shop” (in the handsome white cottage behind the church) and he is on call at all times.

“You do get a lot of people coming to your door, and quite often they can be aggressive,” he says. “We have to be careful. You just get wise to the dangers, and make quick decisions about whether someone is a potential threat. I have CCTV in the house and a video entryphone, so we have all the security provisions in place.”

Father Martin remains philosophical about the pressures of the job, and seems genuinely fond of the community he serves.

“I came to the area four years ago,” he says. “Before this I was in the East End, heading another team of churches in Plaistow and Canning Town. It was a much more chaotic area, more violence, murder and drug abuse than here.

“Catford and Downham are more settled communities. A lot of people have lived here for a long time and while there is crime, there’s almost a villagey feel to it.”

However, the parish does face serious challenges. “This area is in the top 10% for deprivation on the IMD [Index of Multiple Deprivation],” says Father Martin. “The majority of the residents are working poor, and a large number of people who come to us for help have mental health problems and issues with alcohol and drugs. So it’s really important that we engage strongly with stakeholders locally.

“We have a great relationship with Phoenix [housing association] next door; a lot of their residents come to the church. At Christmas we have our fairs on the same day so that visitors can come to both. We have a community nativity in the church and the chance to listen to Bible stories, but it’s not a service as such. Local councillors and our MP Janet Daby have all been to many events here.”

And there are many events. I visit St John’s in the middle of its week-long arts festival, which includes concerts, plays, dance displays, exhibitions and more. Then there are the regular community groups for young parents, pensioners and teenagers.

St John’s also has a strong musical tradition, with a very fine choir that sings at the main Sunday service.

“In the morning it’s ‘smells and bells’ [in the high Anglican tradition] with priests in vestments and the choir, relatively formal preaching and communion. We also have an informal Sunday afternoon service at 4pm with songs accompanied by the piano and an external speaker; this is called StJohn’s@4.”

The music is important to Father Martin; it was music, rather than religion, that drew him to the church in the first place. “I was brought up an atheist, but at university I was a singer. I sang at King’s College, Cambridge and at York Minster and I found the daily offering of services intensely moving. I felt the pull to ordination when I was about 20, but managed to run away from it for 15 years.”

He worked as a teacher abroad before finally coming back to Britain and following his calling. Like many vicars of his generation, he has embraced all aspects of his profession, from social welfare to social media.

“Something else we’re starting, which again fills in the gaps left by overstretched local services, is parish nursing,” he says. “Our parish nurse, Becky, is a registered district nurse whose role is to help people communicate with their doctors, understand their prescriptions and access health information.”

Social media is another way an organisation like St John’s can interact with the wider community.

“We have funding for an online missioner, someone who’s dedicated solely to social media. She controls our Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts. She’s paid for five hours a week but she works nearer to 30, to be honest. It’s really unusual to have someone doing this; usually it’s the vicar trying to cope with it.

“We see huge engagement on social media from people who aren’t in the least bit ‘churchy’, particularly when it’s about something that touches the local community, like the geese.”

Ah yes, the geese. They flock to the Peter Pan pool, just outside Homebase, opposite the church, every year. Then, every day, during breeding season, they walk across busy Bromley Road, a seemingly unconcerned line of geese and goslings waddling in the teeth of the speeding traffic.

“It’s a huge drama,” explains Father Martin. “People rush into the road to stop the cars. We’ve lost three birds this year, two goslings and one adult.”

Search #BromleyRdGeese on Twitter and you’ll see what all the fuss is about. There are films, pleas to drivers and to TfL, and sweet pictures of geese and goslings enjoying St John’s lush front lawn. St John’s and Phoenix have succeeded in having a “wildlife crossing” sign put up on Bromley Road, but drivers are usually going too fast to see it.

Campaigning continues for traffic calming measures, and it’s not just for the geese, as Father Martin explains.

“That road cuts through the community. We have crashes every few weeks. We keep appealing to TfL but they won’t do anything. Recently the bus stop was demolished and a man was knocked down when a car mounted the pavement. Luckily one of the clergy was on hand to assist.”

It seems the power of prayer isn’t enough to stop people driving like idiots, but the role of the church as a community platform to help those who need it is becoming ever more effective.

It’s not just the geese that flock to St John’s. As public services are cut to the bone, and those in distress are left to flounder alone, it’s churches like this, with their foodbanks, practical services and ever-open doors that provide the sanctuary all too many people need.

[bewitching-elizabeth-olsen]

Press: Elizabeth Olsen does double duty in 'Wind River' and 'Ingrid Goes West'

  LA TIMES – Room 64 at the Chateau Marmont is possibly the most Instagrammable spot in L.A. Its wrap-around terrace is suspended just below the homes built into the Hollywood Hills, tiny glass boxes that form their own constellation when night falls. Rumor has it Howard Hughes once lived in this two-bedroom penthouse, spying on girls at the pool below, decades before Lindsay Lohan and Lady Gaga crashed here for a slumber party.

  Today, however, it is home to the actress Elizabeth Olsen, who has arrived at the hotel with a team of people to help beautify her. High-heeled sandals are lined up on a desk. There are multiple pieces of luggage containing makeup kits. She is wearing borrowed diamonds on her fingers, paging through the room service menu, from which she can order whatever she would like.

  It’s a scene, no doubt, that would incite lust among her half-a-million Instagram followers. But she doesn’t feel like she knows how to do the setting justice. Just this morning, she attempted to photograph her breakfast, but then ended up deleting the image in haste.

  “I’m bad at it,” she says. “I’m bad at the lighting. I’m bad at the framing. I’m bad at the editing. When I look at my food, it looks pretty. When I look at it on a phone, it looks not pretty.”

  This is not a problem that her character in “Ingrid Goes West” would have. In the dark comedy — one of two films the 28-year-old is starring in this August — Olsen plays Taylor Sloane, a social media influencer who has established a reputation as the quintessential California cool girl. She tools around in a vintage Mercedes, is perennially reading Joan Didion’s “The White Album” and spends her weekends at a Joshua Tree abode. When she photographs her breakfast — avocado toast, obvi — it always looks pretty.

  Matt Spicer, who directed the film, felt certain that Olsen could embody this kind of aspirational figure. Sure, he was a fan of her acting, but he’d also noticed how often she popped up on best-dressed lists. She also had proximity to the style world via her sisters, the twins Mary-Kate and Ashley, who run two of their own fashion lines.

  “She has a natural charm and likability to her, which isn’t something you can really teach,” he says. “She’s one of those girls that other girls look up to. Since we did the movie, I think I’ve gained 1,000 Instagram followers that are just Lizzie fan accounts.”

  And for the most part, it appears that those fans gravitate to Olsen due to who she is off-screen. Even though she’s been part of the hugely popular Marvel universe for two years — playing the reality-altering Scarlet Witch in “The Avengers” and “Captain America” films — most headlines about her still tend to relate to her style choices. A quick Google search of her name turns up five Daily Mail articles from July alone, nearly all centered on her clothing.

  But Olsen has been steadily building up a respectable film resume since emerging as an “it girl” at the Sundance Film Festival in 2011, where her performance in “Martha Marcy May Marlene” signaled the arrival of a formidable new young Hollywood talent. A couple years later, she completed her acting studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and began taking roles in movies from bigger filmmakers, including Spike Lee (“Old Boy”) and Gareth Edwards (“Godzilla”).

  Then Marvel came calling — a huge coup for Olsen, who grew up watching action-heavy flicks from the Indiana Jones and James Bond series with her father in Toluca Lake. But participating in the superhero franchise has also meant turning down a number of projects that could have shown off more of her acting ability — including a role in Yorgos Lanthimos’ critically acclaimed “The Lobster.”

  “There have been things more in line with the career arc I’d like to create that I had to turn down due to scheduling conflicts,” she explains. “You want to create a personal canon.”

  That’s what she’s hoping to bolster this month with “Ingrid Goes West” (Aug. 11) and “Wind River,” which debuts Aug. 4. The two movies, to put it mildly, are incredibly different. “Wind River,” which earned filmmaker Taylor Sheridan the top directing prize in the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section in May, is a dark murder mystery. Olsen stars opposite her “Avengers” co-star Jeremy Renner as a rookie FBI agent sent to Wyoming to investigate the death of a local woman on a remote Native American reservation.

  The role would require the actress to train with a veteran law enforcement officer and learn how to shoot a gun — opportunities she relished. She was more worried about flying to Park City, Utah, for production, because she hates the cold and high altitude.

  “So I bold-faced lied to her and said, ‘We’re not shooting high and it’s not cold there,’” Sheridan recalls with a laugh. “I knew it would be, which was one of the things I loved about it — you can see it on her face in the movie that she really doesn’t like the cold. But she overcame it.”

  The director, who nabbed an Oscar nomination for writing “Hell or High Water” and also scripted “Wind River,” cast Olsen long before Renner. He says he wanted her from the “very, very, very beginning” because he responded to an “essence of confidence” she exuded — a certain kind of toughness. “There’s a blue collar element to her, which I mean as a compliment,” he explains. “That’s how grounded she is, and maybe it’s because she grew up with [Hollywood], she’s able to see it for what it is.”

  Renner, who plays a local U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agent who takes Olsen’s character under his wing, admits he put off reading Sheridan’s script for months. (Chris Pine was originally cast in the role.) Eventually, the actor decided to sign onto the film because he wanted “to work with Lizzie in a different way — in a real way.”

  “Here, I got to observe somebody working in a very different capacity — with more emotional intelligence, not just being in a costume and the whole thing,” the actor says. “She had to be pretty bad-ass with a handgun, I’ll tell you what — and that’s coming from a guy who knows how to use a lot of weapons.”

  “Ingrid Goes West,” of course, didn’t require quite as much prep — though Olsen did start a secret Instagram account, following women like lifestyle guru Jenni Kayne, fashion blogger Aimee Song and Who What Wear founder Hillary Kerr for inspiration. Spicer encouraged her to start posting her own photographs, which she did: one of a crusty baguette with dipping oil, another of some Diptyque candles. (“Those first ones were a little bumpy,” the director says with a laugh. “Like, food that doesn’t quite look as appetizing as it should, or sunsets. Very obvious starter photos.”)

  Then, this winter, Olsen decided to bite the bullet and start her own public page.

  “I decided to join because I realized I was only taking something away from myself,” she explains. “It’s so funny that people like to pretend that they’re maybe or maybe not getting paid to post something. Financially, it’s a brilliant opportunity. Like, I’d really love to be a brand ambassador. I’d love to do a campaign. I think sometimes working with brands or different cosmetic companies — that can help people recognize your face and then they go see your movies. I was only hurting my opportunities by not participating.”

  While some young Oscar winners like Jennifer Lawrence and Emma Stone have held out on joining the platform, it has increasingly become commonplace for even serious actor types — Anne Hathaway, Brie Larson, Shailene Woodley — to open up on social media. Before, Olsen says, she was “being old-school about it” — something she learned from her sisters, who she acknowledges are “notoriously private people.” But even they supported her launching an Instagram account. And besides, she’s not good at being “super mysterious.” She’s too chatty for that. Plus, there are plenty of accounts she wants to keep stalking.

  “There are so many times I’ve seen a picture and thought, ‘Oh, God, how do they make those flower arrangements look so great all the time?’” says Olsen, who recently bought her first home in L.A. and is decorating it with an aesthetic she describes as Diane Keaton’s Hamptons beach house in “Something’s Gotta Give.” “Or: ‘How expensive are those chairs I’m looking at on Pinterest? Did they find them at some place I’ve never heard of? How do you have that kind of eye?’”

  The rest of the photoshoot is posted in the gallery.

    Gallery Link:

Studio Photoshoots > 2017 > Session 017

  Press: Elizabeth Olsen does double duty in ‘Wind River’ and ‘Ingrid Goes West’ was originally published on Elizabeth Olsen Source • Your source for everything Elizabeth Olsen

[currentsinbiology]

National Park Service Temporarily Ordered To Stop Tweeting: Reactions From Wildlife

After retweeting a photo that unfavorably compared the attendance of Donald Trump’s inauguration with Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, the National Park Service was instructed by the new administration to stop using Twitter, much to the alarm of animals that inhabit the parks.

Brook Trout, Acadia National Park “Surely this could have been handled by an internal e-mail that merely instructed the NPS to take down the offending tweet. Instead, a foreboding message was sent: you will be silenced. I’m under no illusions that what happened at an agency​’s​ social media account could, in time, happen in this very stream.”

Rock Squirrel, Zion National Park “This may just seem like a ​tiny moment in the larger unfurling of Trump’s autocracy, but for those of us who live in the parks — who mate there, who forage for stems there — it is a chilling reminder that no habitat is beyond the reach of a​ determined despot.”

Grizzly Bear, Glacier National Park “I feel bad for the NPS social media manager and all, but these days I’m really just focused on not ending up in Eric Trump’s trophy room. I will definitely throw myself off a waterfall before I let that happen.”

American Alligator, Everglades National Park “This was a real wake-up call for me. I think we all drift into complacency. We all get so caught up with hunting muskrat and sunning ourselves on logs that we forget that what happens in Washington affects us all, maybe now more than ever.”

Brazilian Free-Tailed Bat, Carlsbad Caverns National Park​ “I fully understand that the Tweet didn’t paint Trump in the most flattering light, but the man’s obsession with his image, his almost diseased attention to appearances, will be the undoing of us all. I’m eight years old now, and I have to admit I’m pretty happy I typically don’t live more than another three.”

Peregrine Falcon, Yosemite National Park “I’m a Trump falcon. I like that he’s shaking things up and stuff.”

​Bighorn Sheep​, Yellowstone National Park “The word ‘fascist’ keeps circulating with​in my ​flock​, but I’m not quite ready to commit to it yet — it’s a term that even ​Orwell himself didn’t have the most firm handle on. Still​, it’s worrisome. I would like to call my representative, but, as you can imagine, there’s a fair amount standing between me and that happening.”

[almightykilimanjaro]

Zanzibar Beach Holidays: Top 5 Beaches to Explore in Zanzibar

Whether you opt for solo travel, personal holiday trips with friends, or family, Zanzibar never ceases to amaze those traveling across the globe to Africa. With the high-end luxury hotel stay, lush green forests, a wide variety of wildlife, budget luxury safari, cool beaches, and amazing trekking spots, Zanzibar Beach Holidays allows you to experience your vacation in your way with tailor-made holiday packages. Along with the serene beaches to relax your soul, you will be surprised to see the extinct Red colobus monkey, servaline genets, and Zanzibar leopards.

 If you are exploring the top 5 beaches of Zanzibar then here are the recommendations for you.

 Nakupenda Beach

:

Nakupenda beach - Naku Penda means 'I love you 'and it's true. You will feel loved on this Zanzibar Blue Beach Holiday. While walking, soothing sand scatters over your feet, sweet waves kissing your body. You can try out different things here like swimming, sunbathing, and snorkelling in the waters. After diving into the tides of the sea, you would love to have a sumptuous seaside lunch, including squid, grilled shrimps, octopus, and giant lobster. You can spend your entire day at the beach but if you are in a hurry, after you have your lunch you can ride to Prison Island.

 Nungwi Beach:

Want to witness amazing sunset views? Nungwi Beach, Zanzibar is located along the western coast to the northern tip of the island and offers beautiful sunset views. Click fantastic pictures for your social media accounts at this site. Visit rooftop bars to enjoy drinks while viewing the sunset. If you contact some locals, they can offer you a sunset cruise ride on a Dhow boat. Experience the views of picturesque shells and little aquatic animals.

 Pongwe Beach

:

Pongwe Beach gives a pleasant opportunity to water sports lovers. Go swimming, snorkelling, and sunbathing with your buddies. This Beach is a fabulous base to head for various excursions: you can visit Stone Town and roam around spice farm. You can move to Prison Island to meet an endangered Giant Tortoise. Don't forget to visit, the Jozani Natural Forest Reserve which is home to the rare Red Colobus Monkey is a great place to see some wildlife along with the Butterfly Centre and Turtle Sanctuary nearby.

 Kendwa Beach:

While on Zanzibar Beach Holidays, one thing that will catch your eye is the sequence of resorts, hotels, and guesthouses. Kendwa Beach is stretched to 3km south of the tip of Zanzibar Island. Those who visit here, plan to stay here for at least 2 days and more. You can't stay bored because this attraction offers tons of water-based activities and you can swim in this chilled water all day long.

 Jambiani Beach

:

Jambiani Beach is famous for its powdery white sand. It is a 7 km long beach outlined with palm trees. Like other beaches, here as well you can head out for water sports like wading, snorkelling, and diving. Enjoy the mesmerizing views of the marine during your Zanzibar Blue Beach Holiday. You can spend some quality time with your loved ones by enjoying the side shore winds. Love kitesurfing? This is the best spot for you.

 The Bottom Line

:

Planning to book Zanzibar Blue Beach Holidays? At Dreams Adventures (TräumeAbenteuer) Ltd, superior service goes hand in hand, and we do our utmost to ensure that these two icons are met at every measure of your vacation. Dreams Adventures (TräumeAbenteuer) Ltd has an extended outstanding and highly professional staff team.

 We are deemed the most excellent team-building movement to enhance the communication among the team members and to initiate some immense memories through which they can share everything with us. Feel free to call us on +255717987749 or email us at almightykilimanjaro@gmail.com.

[chicagoindiecritics]

New from Kevin Wozniak on Kevflix: What’s Streaming This Month? – September

Here are my picks for the movies coming to Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu, Disney+, Criterion Channel, and HBOMax in September.  This month offers up many unique choices, from original films to Hollywood classics.

          NETFLIX

Full list of everything coming to Netflix in September can be found here.

  THE BACK TO THE FUTURE TRILOGY (Robert Zemeckis, 1984/1989/1990)

A trilogy that is full of life, fun, and originality.

  THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME (Antonio Campo, 2020)

An all-star cast of Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Riley Keough, Sebastian Stan, Mia Wasikowska, Bill Skarsgård, and Jason Clarke lead Antonio Campos’ thriller about corruption and brutality in a postwar backwoods town.

  GREASE (Randal Kleiser, 1978)

A musical classic.

  I’M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS (Charlie Kaufman, 2020)

The latest directorial effort from the great Charlie Kaufman looks like a haunting mind-bender.

  MAGIC MIKE (Steven Soderbergh, 2012)

One of Steven Soderbergh’s best features a scene-stealing performance from Matthew McConaughey.

  NOT ANOTHER TEEN MOVIE (Joel Gallen, 2001)

This comedy satire of teen romcoms is still hilarious and has aged quite well.

  RATCHED (Evan Romansky, Ryan Murphy, 2020)

I don’t usually post about shows on here, but a prequel series looking at One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest villain Nurse Ratched starring Sarah Paulson in the titular role sounds too good to ignore.

  THE SOCIAL DILEMMA (Jeff Orlowski, 2020)

I heard good buzz about this documentary out of Sundance 2020, as it looks at the power of social media and the effect it can have on the world

  WILDLIFE (Paul Dano, 2018)

Paul Dano’s directorial debut is a quiet and powerful look at a crumbling family in the 1950’s.

    PRIME VIDEO

Full list of everything coming to Prime Video in September can be found here.

    THE BIRDCAGE (Mike Nichols, 1996)

Robin Williams and Nathan Lane are marvelous in this Mike Nichols comedy.

  CASINO ROYALE (Martin Campbell, 2006)

The film that introduced Daniel Craig into the Bond franchise is also the best Bond film ever made.

  GEMINI MAN (Ang Lee, 2019)

Will Smith plays an assassin who is being hunted by a clone of his younger self in Ang Lee’s technical marvel.

  THE GRADUATE (Mike Nichols, 1967)

One of the greatest films ever made.

  JUDY (Rupert Goold, 2019)

Renee Zellweger won her second Oscar for pitch-perfect portrayal of Hollywood icon Judy Garland.

  KRAMER VS KRAMER (Robert Benton, 1979)

This Best Picture family drama features stellar work from Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep.

  PATRIOT’S DAY (Peter Berg, 2016)

Peter Berg’s harrowing account of the Boston Marathon bombing.

  HULU

Full list of everything coming to Hulu in September can be found here.

    ANY GIVEN SUNDAY (Oliver Stone, 1999)

Olive Stone’s aggressive, chaotic look at professional football.

  BABYTEETH (Shannon Murphy, 2020)

An emotional relationship drama with Ben Mendolsohn and Essie Davis giving two of my favorite performances of 2020.

  HAROLD AND KUMAR GO TO WHITE CASTLE/HAROLD AND KUMAR ESCAPE GUANTANAMO BAY (Danny Leiner, 2004/Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg, 2008)

Two-thirds of a classic stoner trilogy.

  HOOSIERS (David Anspaugh, 1986)

One of the greatest sports movies ever made.

  THE LAST BOY SCOUT (Tony Scott, 1991)

It’s directed by Tony Scott, written by Shane Black, and stars Bruce Willis.  We could call this the “90’s Trifecta”.

  PEE WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE (Tim Burton, 1985)

Tim Burton’s debut film is utterly insane, yet absolutely brilliant

  PRISONERS (Denis Villeneuve, 2013)

Denis Villeneuve’s best film to date is a dark, disturbing crime thriller featuring incredible work from Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, and cinematographer Roger Deakins.

  THE TERMINATOR (James Cameron, 1984)

One of the greatest sci-fi movies ever made.

  THE TWILIGHT SAGA (Catherine Hardwicke, 2008/Chris Weitz, 2009/David Slade, 2010/Bill Condon, 2011/Bill Condon, 2012)

I’ve only seen one of these (I think New Moon?), but want to give them a whirl at some point.  Maybe now is the time?

    DISNEY+

Full list of everything coming to Disney+ in September can be found here.

    BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM (Gurinder Chadha, 2003)

A rousing, inspiring indie sports film.

  CHRISTOPHER ROBIN (Marc Forster, 2018)

A somber, sweet look at Winnie the Pooh and the 100 Acre Woods gang.

  D2: THE MIGHT DUCKS/D3 (Sam Weisman, 1994/Robert Lieberman, 1996)

D2 is the best of the trilogy, but D3 is pretty good and bit underrated.

  MULAN (Niki Caro, 2020)

You have to pay $30 to see this one, but I have a feeling Disney’s latest live-action feature is going to be worth is.

  NEVER BEEN KISSED (Raja Gosnell, 1999)

A classic 90’s rom-com featuring a delightful Drew Barrymore.

  THE WOLVERINE (James Mangold, 2013)

One of the best X-Men films and the BEST Wolverine movie (hot take).

    CRITERION CHANNEL

Full list of everything coming to Criterion Channel in September can be found here.

*The Criterion Channel does things a little differently than every other streaming service.  The Criterion Channel, a wonderful streaming service that focuses on independent, foreign, and under-appreciates movies, doesn’t just throw a bunch of random movies to stream.  They get more creative by having categories like “DOUBLE FEATURES” or “FILMS FROM…”, giving us curated lists of films that somehow blend together or feature a specific artist.*

    BOYHOOD (Richard Linklater, 2014)

Richard Linklater’s ambitious twelve-year project is one of the finest film accomplishments of the last decade.

  THE LOVELESS (Kathryn Bigelow, Monty Montgomery, 1981)

Kathryn Bigelow’s debut is one I have been dying to see and one I am going to check out as soon as it is available.

  THE COMPLETE FILMS OF AGNES VARDA

Agnes Varda was a true artist and Criterion has put all of her work into one comprehensive collection which features all of her feature length films as well as her short films.

  SATURDAY MATINEE

DUCK SOUP (Leo McCarey, 1933)

My favorite Marx Brothers film and one of the greatest comedies ever made.

  SATURDAY MATINEE

CHARLOTTE’S WEB (Charles A. Nichols, Iwao Takamoto, 1973)

A beautiful animated film based on the classic book.

    THREE BY ROBERT GREENE

Three provocative films from a master documentarian.

Actress (2014)

Kate Plays Christine (2016)

Bisbee ’17 (2018)

  DIRECTED BY ALBERT BROOKS

Albert Brooks is one of the greatest comedic minds we’ve ever had.  This block of films looks at his genius behind the camera.

Real Life (1979)

Modern Romance (1981)

Lost in America (1985)

Defending Your Life (1991)

Mother (1996)

  DOUBLE FEATURE: TEARS OF THE CLOWN

LENNY (Bob Fosse, 1974)

JO JO DANCER, YOUR LIFE IS CALLING (Richard Pryor, 1986)

Two unflinching films delve into the self-destructive dark sides of a pair of comedy legends. Lenny features Dustin Hoffman in a jagged portrait of Lenny Bruce.  In Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life is Calling, Richard Pryor draws on his own personal demons in the only narrative feature written and directed by the comedy legend.

  BY THE BOOK

A slew of films based on legendary books, from Great Expectations to The Hours and many, many more.

The Count of Monte Cristo (Rowland V. Lee, 1934)

The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock, 1935)

La bête humaine (Jean Renoir, 1938)

Of Mice and Men (Lewis Milestone, 1939)

Great Expectations (David Lean, 1946)

The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946)

Anna Karenina (Julien Duvivier, 1948)

Oliver Twist (David Lean, 1948)

The Heiress (William Wyler, 1949)

The Passionate Friends (David Lean, 1949)

The Idiot (Akira Kurosawa, 1951)

The Life of Oharu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1952)

Robinson Crusoe (Luis Buñuel, 1954)

Senso (Luchino Visconti, 1954)

Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955)

Aparajito (Satyajit Ray, 1956)

The Burmese Harp (Kon Ichikawa, 1956)

Apur Sansar (Satyajit Ray, 1959)

The Cloud-Capped Star (Ritwik Ghatak, 1960)

Purple Noon (René Clément, 1960)

Zazie dans le métro (Louis Malle, 1960)

Divorce Italian Style (Pietro Germi, 1961)

Lord of the Flies (Peter Brook, 1963)

Tom Jones (Tony Richardson, 1963)

Charulata (Satyajit Ray, 1964)

Woman in the Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964)

Closely Watched Trains (Jirí Menzel, 1966)

War and Peace (Sergei Bondarchuk, 1966)

Memories of Underdevelopment (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1968)

The Angel Levine (Ján Kadár, 1970)

Dodes’ka-den (Akira Kurosawa, 1970)

The Phantom Tollbooth (Chuck Jones, Abe Levitow, and Dave Monahan, 1970)

The Little Prince (Stanley Donen, 1974)

Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975)

The American Friend (Wim Wenders, 1977)

The Ascent (Larisa Shepitko, 1977)

The Getting Of Wisdom (Bruce Beresford, 1977)

Empire of Passion (Nagisa Oshima, 1978)

Watership Down (Martin Rosen, 1978)

My Brilliant Career (Gillian Armstrong, 1979)

Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)

The Tin Drum (Volker Schlöndorff, 1979)

Wise Blood (John Huston, 1979)

You Are Not I (Sara Driver, 1981)

Under the Volcano (John Huston, 1984)

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Paul Schrader, 1985)

My Life as a Dog (Lasse Hallström, 1985)

Betty Blue (Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1986)

An Angel at My Table (Jane Campion, 1990)

The Comfort of Strangers (Paul Schrader, 1990)

Europa Europa (Agnieszka Holland, 1990)

The Handmaid’s Tale (Volker Schlöndorff, 1990)

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (Peter Kosminsky, 1992)

The Castle (Michael Haneke, 1997)

The Sweet Hereafter (Atom Egoyan, 1997)

The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola, 1999)

The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke, 2001)

The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2002)

Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone, 2008)

Almayer’s Folly (Chantal Akerman, 2011)

45 Years (Andrew Haigh, 2015)

Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt, 2016)

Zama (Lucrecia Martel, 2017)

    HBOMAX

Full list of everything coming to HBOMax in August can be found here.

  CLERKS (Kevin Smith, 1994)

Kevin Smith’s indie sensation is a masterclass in microbudget cinema.

  THE CONVERSATION (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)

In-between The Godfather and The Godfather II, Francis Ford Coppola made this Palme d’Or winning thriller about a surveillance expert (a brilliant Gene Hackman) who has a crisis of conscience when he suspects that the couple he is spying on will be murdered.

  THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON (David Fincher, 2008)

David Fincher’s gorgeous film about a man who ages backwards.

  DOG DAY AFTERNOON (Sidney Lumet, 1975)

Sidney Lumet’s best film features masterful work from Al Pacino and John Cazzalle.

  THE INVISIBLE MAN (Leigh Whannel, 2020)

Elisabeth Moss gives one of the best performances of 2020 in Leigh Whannel’s chilling remake of the Universal classic.

  JFK (Oliver Stone, 1991)

Oliver Stone’s brilliant account of the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the conspiracy behind it.

  JUST MERCY (Destin Daniel Cretton, 2019)

An inspiring film with excellent performances from Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx.

  MIDNIGHT RUN (Martin Brest, 1988)

This crime-buddy-road movie is an absolute blast and features one of Robert De Niro’s most underrated performances.

  POINT BREAK (Kathryn Bigelow, 1991)

Kathryn Bigelow’s surfing-cop thriller is one of the best action movies of the 90’s.

  SNAKES ON A PLANE (David R. Ellis, 2006)

An iconic B-movie featuring a truly great Samuel L. Jackson performance.

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[scienceblogtumbler]

What does the future of artificial intelligence mean for humans?

The first question many people ask about artificial intelligence (AI) is, “Will it be good or bad?”

The answer is … yes.

Canadian company BlueDot used AI technology to detect the novel coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China, just hours after the first cases were diagnosed. Compiling data from local news reports, social media accounts and government documents, the infectious disease data analytics firm warned of the emerging crisis a week before the World Health Organization made any official announcement.

While predictive algorithms could help us stave off pandemics or other global threats as well as manage many of our day-to-day challenges, AI’s ultimate impact is impossible to predict.

One hypothesis is that it will bring us an era of boundless leisure, with humans no longer required to work. A more dystopian thought experiment concludes that a robot programmed with the innocuous goal of manufacturing paper clips might eventually transform the world into a giant paper clip factory. But sometimes reality is more profound than imagination. As we stand at the threshold of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, now may be the most exciting and important time to witness this blurring of boundaries between the physical, digital and biological worlds.

“The liminal is always where the magic happens. This is always where we get crazy new identities, new debates, new philosophies,” says Tok Thompson, professor (teaching) of anthropology at USC Dornsife, and an expert on posthuman folklore.

For better or worse, we know AI will be created in our own image — warts and all. A dash of humankind’s mercurial ethics, wonky reasoning and subconscious biases will be stirred a priori into the algorithmic soup.

Most experts think that artificial superintelligence — AI is much smarter than the best human brains in practically every field — is decades, if not a century, away. However, with the help of leading scholars, we can anticipate the near future of artificial intelligence, including our interactions with this technology and its limits. Most of it, experts say, will be designed to take on a wide range of specialized functions.

Given AI’s potential to redefine the human experience, we should explore its costs and benefits from every angle. In the process, we might be compelled to finally adjudicate age-old philosophical questions about ourselves — including just what it means to be “human” in the first place.

That could prove its greatest benefit of all.

Man’s Best Friend

One wall of Yao-Yi Chiang’s claustrophobic basement office is a whiteboard where an algorithm of mind-blending complexity is scrawled from top to bottom. On the floor, his mild-mannered border collie indulges in an afternoon nap. You can’t help but wonder what the two of them are preparing to unleash on the world.

It turns out that Chiang, associate professor (research) of spatial sciences at USC Dornsife’s Spatial Sciences Institute, is working on AI that monitors air quality. His research is helping to make cities smarter, not only technologically but also through specialized data and geospatial maps that inform policy.

“I think for small tasks, small applications, AI will make our lives much easier,” says Chiang.

Much of his work uses machine learning — a process through which AI automatically learns from new data and improves, without being explicitly programmed. For this project, it integrates hundreds of geographic and temporal data points to forecast air quality in neighborhoods where sensors have not yet been deployed.

Machine learning is one of an expanding collection of AI tools that will help people make smarter, healthier decisions. “If you want to take your kids to the park for a soccer game in the afternoon, what’s the air quality going to be like?” Chiang asks. “If your kid has asthma, you need to make sure you have the required medicine.”

AI will also underpin a vast array of products and services employed to manage some of our greatest challenges. For instance, supply chains could become better optimized to reduce production and transportation waste, helping us become more sustainable. AI could also enable us to make driving safer, improve health care outcomes, protect wildlife and transform how we learn. Other systems will serve as highly personalized aides, focusing on helping people complete social tasks.

“Increasingly emotionally sophisticated personal assistants will motivate us and challenge us,” says Jonathan Gratch, research professor of psychology at USC Dornsife and director for virtual humans research at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. Many of these assistants will come in the form of lifelike computer characters with autonomous interaction.

Gratch, research professor of computer science at USC Viterbi School of Engineering, is an expert in the field of affective computing, the intersection of AI and human emotion. He thinks that next generation devices will combine physiological and situational data to serve not just as assistants, but as de facto life coaches.

“They’ll help us reflect on what we want our better selves to be,” says Gratch. “And we’ll have control over it. We’ll be able to set the goals.”

AI is also being used to create therapeutic tools. Neuroscientists University Professor Antonio Damasio and Senior Research Associate Kingson Man of USC Dornsife’s Brain and Creativity Institute are exploring the potential for robots that can identify and express feelings in ways that promote deeper interactions with humans. Damasio envisions a future in which robots serve, for example, as companions to the elderly and lonely.

“The autonomy of AI and of robots has been seen as a potential threat to humanity. The development of machines endowed with something like ‘feeling’ and obsessed with survival — their own and the survival of others — and designed to protect it, counters the dominant paradigm in AI and offers some hope,” says Damasio, professor of psychology, philosophy and neurology, and David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience.

Performance Review

Repetitious jobs such as factory work and customer service have already started to be usurped by AI, and job loss is among the greatest public concerns when it comes to automation. Self-driving trucks, for example, will barrel along our highways within the next few years. As businesses eliminate the cost of human labor, America alone could see 3.5 million professional truck drivers put out of work.

“Everybody’s like, ‘Woo-hoo, yay automatons!’ ” Thompson says. “But there are a lot of social implications.”

AI will disrupt nearly every industry, including jobs that call for creativity and decision-making. But this doesn’t necessarily spell the end of the labor force. Experts are confident that a majority of people and organizations stand to benefit from collaborating with AI to augment tasks performed by humans. AI will become a colleague rather than a replacement.

Drawing from game theory and optimal policy principles, Gratch has built algorithms to identify underlying psychological clues that could help predict what someone is going to do next. By using machine vision to analyze speech, gesture, gaze, posture and other emotional cues, his virtual humans have been learning how these factors contribute to building rapport — a key advantage in negotiating deals.

AI systems could prove to be better leaders in certain roles than their human counterparts. Virtual managers, digesting millions of data points throughout the day, could eventually be used to identify which office conditions produce the highest morale or provide real-time feedback on interaction with a client.

On the surface, this points to a future of work that is more streamlined, healthy and collegial. But it’s unclear how deeply AI on the job could cut into our psyches.

“How will we react when we’re told what to do by a machine?” Gratch asks. “Will we feel like our work has less value?”

It’s the stubborn paradox of artificial intelligence. On one hand, it helps us overcome tremendously complex challenges. On the other, it opens up new cans of worms — with problems harder to pin down than those it was supposed to solve.

You Had Me At Hello

As AI fuses with the natural world and machines take on more advanced roles, one might expect a healthy dose of skepticism. Are algorithms programmed with our best interests in mind? Will we grant our AI assistants and co-workers the same degree of trust that we would another human?

From planning a route to work to adjusting the smart home thermostat, it appears we already have. AI has been integrated into our daily routines, so much so that we rarely even think about it.

Moreover, algorithms determine a large extent of what we see online — from personalized Netflix recommendations to targeted ads — producing the content and commodifying consumer data to steer our attitudes and behaviors.

“Everybody’s like,‘Woo-hoo, yay automatons!’ But there are a lot of social implications.”

Chiang cautions that the ubiquity and convenience of AI tools can be dangerous if we forget to think about what they’re really doing.

“Machines will give you an answer, but if you don’t know how the algorithm works, you might just assume it’s always the correct answer,” he says. “AI only gives you a prediction based on the data it has seen and the way you have trained it.”

In fact, there are times when engineers working on AI don’t fully understand how the technology they’ve created is making decisions. This danger is compounded by a regulatory environment akin to the Wild West. The most reliable protections in place might be those that are codified in science fiction, such as Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics.

As Thompson explores the ways that different cultures interact with today’s AI and rudimentary androids, he is convinced that we will not just trust these virtual entities completely but connect with them on a deeply personal level and include them in our social groups.

“They’re made to be better than people. They’re going to be better friends for you than any other person, better partners,” says Thompson. “Not only will people trust androids, you’re going to see — I think very quickly — people fall in love with them.”

Sound crazy? Amazon’s voice assistant, Alexa, has already been proposed to more than half a million times, rejecting would-be suitors with a wry appeal to destiny.

“I don’t want to be tied down,” she demurs. “In fact, I can’t be. I’m amorphous by nature.”

I’ll Be Your Mirror

In 1770, a Hungarian inventor unveiled The Turk, a mustachioed automaton cloaked in an Ottoman kaftan. For more than 80 years, The Turk astonished audiences throughout Europe and the United States as a mechanical chess master, defeating worthy opponents including Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte.

It was revealed to be an ingenious illusion. A man hidden in The Turk’s cabinet manipulated chess pieces with magnets. But our fascination with creating simulacrums that look like us, talk like us and think like us seems to be nested deep within us.

As programmers and innovators work on developing whip-smart AI and androids with uncanny humanlike qualities, ethical and existential questions are popping up that expose inconsistencies in our understanding of humanness.

For millennia, the capacities to reason, process complex language, think abstractly and contemplate the future were considered uniquely human. Now, AI is primed to transcend our mastery in all of these arenas. Suddenly, we’re not so special.

“Maybe it turns out that we’re not the most rational or the best decision-makers,” says Gratch. “Maybe, in a weird way, technology is teaching us that’s not so important. It’s really about emotion and the connections between people — which is not a bad thing to emphasize.”

Thompson suggests another dilemma lies in the tendency for humans to define ourselves by what we’re not. We’re not, for example, snails or ghosts or machines. Now, this line, too, seems to be blurring.

“People can relate more easily to a rational, interactive android than to a different species like a snail,” he says. “But which one is really more a part of you? We’ll always be more closely related biologically to a snail.”

source https://scienceblog.com/517657/what-does-the-future-of-artificial-intelligence-mean-for-humans/

[topicprinter]

Hey guys,I was looking for an inspiration for myself and compiled this list. I was coming across to popular examples like Uber and Airbnb, so I dived deeper into the growth hacking ocean to put something different on the table.I included both popular and unpopular hacks to the list to inspire you, so here I go.1. PumaPuma asked Pele to tie his shoes before the kickoff and Pele did it. As expected, the cameras focused on Pele and his Puma's and made people realize the world's best footballer wore a Puma.https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=pele+tie+shoesAccording to the book “Three Stripes Versus Puma”, Pele was paid $120,000 to crouch and lace his shoes. This might be the best case of influencer marketing until this day.Takeaway: Ask yourself who, when, where.Who can introduce your product to your target audience best? When is the right time and which online or offline platform can you use to get maximum exposure?2. UnsplashUnsplash has a corner named “Collections". They ask influencers (mostly micro-influencers) and invite them to pick their favorite photos and create a collection.Then Unsplash promotes the collection on the website, newsletter and social media platforms. Flattering right? Yes, at least that’s what the influencers think.The chosen influencers will often share their collections with their followers. And Unsplash gets free exposure + tons of user-generated content.Takeaway: People like to be praised and be the center of attention. You can benefit from other people's audiences.3. Vitaly UncensoredThis is quite unconventional and it's dangerous.Vitaly Uncensored is a strange adult jokes platform. And people barely knew they existed until the Champions League final in 2019.Until Kinsey Wolanski (co-founder and girlfriend of Vitaly) caused an international stir after running on to the pitch with a swimsuit written "Vitaly Uncensored" all over.Naturally, people searched for the term and social media platforms like twitter flooded with reactions.Vitaly Uncensored now has more than 32 million registered users and has raked in up to £3m in advertising as a result. And she was fined just £13,000.Takeaway: A Growth hacker doesn't always follow the rules. You can sometimes break them as long as it is bringing you growth.4. AhrefsAhrefs can win the gold medal in the growth hacking Olympics.They're the most popular SEO tool and don't use Google Analytics. Neither do they use the Facebook Pixel. Instead, they hacked the most prominent SEO conference (Brighton SEO) with a 10 cent coffee cup.https://imgur.com/a/VvlP1XoImagine how much attraction they had at the conference. Everybody was instantly aware of the existence of Ahrefs; those cups worked as an ice-breaker to open new conversations and possibilities.Takeaway: Make a list of conferences and offline events that you can join. And think of how you can direct the conversation to your brand.5. GmailIf you were an early adopter of Gmail, you'd remember this one. You could only create a Gmail account if a friend invited you.And every referrer had a limited amount of invites, which made it more exclusive and triggered the fear of missing out (FOMO) marketing technique.It was simultaneously so exclusive and so viral, some people auctioned Gmail invites on eBay. It worked well because Gmail was offering better features and quality of service compared to the alternatives in the market.Takeaway: Knowing behavioral psychology is a great asset for a growth hacker. Even a little psychological trick can be the foundation of a new growth hacking strategy.6. Please don't tellGmail used exclusivity and FOMO triggers in their digital marketing strategy. What if you want to do it offline?Crif Dogs is a hip place known for its innovative hot dogs. There is a strange vintage phone booth corner in the restaurant.One day, a person walked in and used the rotary dial phone and CLICK, a secret passage door opened to a cozy bar. And the bartender treated him with a tasty cocktail and gave a card to this lucky person on the card written: "Please Don't Tell".As you may relate, that person has felt like he discovered the most astounding secret in the world. He then talked about this experience to all of his friends and it caused a social chain reaction.This word-of-mouth marketing strategy transformed this place into the busiest bar in New York City. So busy it's almost impossible to make a reservation.Takeaway: If you can make someone feel special with a big secret, you can create a community of privileged brand advocates.7. ZyngaYou must remember the era of FarmVille, MafiaWars or Zynga poker. These were the Facebook games that made addicts out of our friends, parents and loved ones.How?You know the classic pricing decoy: Small $3, medium $ 6.50 and large $7.Zynga re-engineered this by offering three choices to the user: grind, spam or pay. Well, since people didn't want to pay to continue playing games, they started to terrorize their friends by spamming them with invitations.This had a huge viral effect but after a while, Facebook put an end to this spamstorm.Takeaway: Try to approach popular marketing tactics from a different angle to create your own growth strategies.8. CD Baby"Your order is on the way" you probably have received an email similar to this one. But I don't think you ever received something like what Derek Sivers wrote:Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved ‘Bon Voyage!’ to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Sunday, December 11th.I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did.Your picture is on our wall as “Customer of the Year”. We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!Thank you once again,Derek Sivers, president, CD BabyHe spent 20 minutes writing this masterpiece and it exploded on the internet. This content got forwarded thousands of times, CD Baby got gazillions backlinks and new customers.Takeaway: Differentiate your e-mail marketing strategy or copywriting efforts. Sometimes it is as easy as to put a smile on your customers' faces.Tiger KingThe Tiger King docuseries on Netflix have reached super-hyped status. One of the protagonists is called Joe Exotic, he is a total badass. But I was not aware that he's a badass growth hacker too.Joe Exotic intimidated his archenemy and biggest competitor by renaming his tiger show.Just to add context if you don't know the show.Joe Exotic keeps more than 200 tigers in his wildlife park. On the other hand, there is that lady (Carole Baskin) who is catter than cats and trying to save tigers under the banner of Big Cat Rescue. And they're trying to sabotage each other, all the time.So to get more visibility to his tiger show and steal Carole's audience, Joe Exotic started a new show under the name"Big Cat Rescue Entertainment".In the end, Carole sued Joe in a $1M lawsuit.Now, this obviously is not ethical and can hurt your reputation, I'm not suggesting you do the same. But this case can inspire you to be creative with your brand name. It could be interesting to include terms that people are already searching for.FortniteFortnite’s growth hacking strategy has changed the way of marketing around games forever.Here is the default strategy of every game until the Fornite era.Make the game.Spend millions of dollars to promote it like crazy in conferences and ads of all sorts.Launch the game, do the grand slam, collect the money and sail for the next game.That's why we see a new Call of Duty, Battlefield, Fifa and similar games each year.Well, Fortnite was not even popular in its first year but they found ways to retain their existing customer base with three tactics.The game was completely free.Huge in-game updates, which they called "Seasons".Every ten weeks, developers brought new mechanics, weapons, maps, characters and so on into the game. They announce these seasons with trailers and encourage gamers to create hype.So if you're a Fortnite player, you'll know, every ten weeks you'll have a new game to play.Limited-time game modsThey regularly launched new game modes for a limited time to create FOMO. And gamers kept coming back to not to miss this one-time experience.Meanwhile, they monetized the game by selling in-game items like character and weapon skins or dance moves.In a very short time, they acquired a huge fan base and created their own celebrity streamers. The rest is history.Takeaway: Acquisition is often an overrated aspect of marketing. In growth marketing, it's equally important to keep your current customers happy and transform them into your fans. (Focus on retention)CrimiboxCrimibox is an online interactive detective game that lets you become a Sherlock of your case. We prepared a FB chatbot quiz themed "Which detective is hidden inside".The assumption: If they are interested in knowing which kind of detective they are, they are potentially also interested in solving a murder case.Crimibox asked several questions in a chatbot and helped them find out their inner detective. At the end of the quiz, they offer them to solve a murder case and direct them to the crime scene. This scene was Kickstarter.Crimibox increased its subscriber number from 2K to 10K in 15 days and successfully launched on Kickstarter!Why did it work?It was super targeted.People always fall for personality quizzes11. ShazamWhat do you do when you Shazam a song?You try to suck up all sound from the music and Shazam does something quite ingenious at that moment. It encourages you to hold your phone up to speakers.And this move gets everyone curious like "Why the hell is she lifting her phone to the speakers?". So yes, this is nothing but a word-of-mouth marketing strategy at its best.It's not possible to measure the analytics or conversion rate but over 1 billion downloads say something.UberHow could a brand single-handedly take down the traditional taxi business? By knowing the enemy and the customer.Hailing a cab after a night out is a pain in the ass, likewise in bad weather conditions. Uber knew that, and at the beginning, they focused on these key events.They also picked a subtle fight with yellow cabs by highlighting the areas where Uber excels like; easy payment, lower prices and no more taxi-hailing.People that were using the service were coming back, so they offered a $20 free ride to the new users to lure them in. After that, things went very fast, now we look at taxis like they're an endangered animal.Takeaway: There is always room to fit in with your product and outsmart the competition. Understand your competitors, customers and the environment to come up with smart tactics.13. HotmailHotmail's growth hacking strategy is super simple and many companies like Apple copy-pasted it.Hotmail placed a default signature line to every outgoing email and invited receivers to create a free account. Afterward, Apple and others used the same e-mail marketing strategy to spread awareness and grow their customer base.15. HubspotHubspot created a free tool that measures your site's performance by grading key factors like SEO, mobile performance and so on. Then it gives you tips to optimize your site.People shared this tool with each other, it got many backlinks and quite a lot of attention on social media platforms as well.No surprise, Hubspot grew its email list and grew to 15.000 users with the help of this one tool.Takeaway: Many brands create little add-ons, apps and tools that solve a problem for their target audience. Afterward, they launch it on platforms like Product Hunt to get free exposure.16. AirbnbAirbnb leeched its competitor Craigslist's blood and used them as a distribution channel for a long time.Their growth hacking strategy consisted of two parts.OneThey encourage their audience to cross-post their listing on Craigslist with a link back to their Airbnb profile. This way, hosts increased their chance to get rented and Airbnb got new users.Eventually, it got tons of free traffic and generated thousands of users.TwoNext, they contacted existing Craigslist hosts and asked them to sign up on Airbnb.These two strategies helped them to grow their customer base and traffic without spending a dime.It worked because it was a win-win.Another one from AirbnbYou know how important the pictures are when it comes to renting or buying a house. The founders of Airbnb knew this too.To grow bigger, they started to photograph their hosts' apartments. After the platform grew big enough, they hired an army of pro photographers to make their customers happy. And make some more $.Takeaways:Your target audience is already hanging out somewhere on the internet, find them and think of new ways to transform them into your customers. Don't expect value if you don't provide value.17. Dollar Shave ClubPicking a fight with a strong argument is a deadly growth hacking strategy. Dollar Shave Club used video marketing to declare war to razor industry giants by asking these simple questions:- Do you like spending $20 a month on a brand named razor?- Do you think your razor needs a vibrating handle and flashlight?And Mike, the founder, gives the solution to his audience in this witty video.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUG9qYTJMsI&t=1sThe video went viral and got 26M views. Please watch if you're not one of the 26M people.Takeaway: Think of a problem in your industry and, use content marketing, show how your product could solve this issue. Especially video marketing is an effective way to show your brand personality and deliver your message.You can learn everything you need to start with video marketing by reading this eBook:18. DropboxDropbox is known for its creative onboarding process and referral program.The marketing strategy is quite simple. The product itself offers storage space in the cloud and they reward people with more space by gamifying the onboarding process.Just like in the story Hansel & Gretel, they embellish this hard process by offering little treats. And the main course was their referral program where they offered 500MB free extra storage.It works like this. You refer Dropbox to a friend, she signs up and you both get 500MB extra storage. 1 stone, 2 birds.So the cost of customer acquisition for Dropbox is 500MB. This is definitely one of the nastiest growth hacking techniques.Takeaway: One, If you can give extra value, you can make the onboarding process fun and rewarding for your users. Two, design a double-sided referral program. Offer something to the referrer and the referee.​That's all folks! If you like it let me know in the comments. And if you want to read it on a blog with pictures and videos you can go here: https://www.grow-force.com/growth-hacking-examples/

[neptunecreek]

EFF Urges Congress Not to Dismantle Section 230

The Keys to a Healthy Internet Are User Empowerment and Competition, Not Censorship

The House Energy and Commerce Committee held a legislative hearing today over what to do with one of the most important Internet laws, Section 230. Members of Congress and the testifying panelists discussed many of the critical issues facing online activity like how Internet companies moderate their users’ speech, how Internet companies and law enforcement agencies are addressing online criminal activity, and how the law impacts competition. 

EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry testified at the hearing, offering a strong defense of the law that’s helped create the Internet we all rely on today. In her opening statement, McSherry urged Congress not to take Section 230’s role in building the modern Internet lightly:

We all want an Internet where we are free to meet, create, organize, share, debate, and learn. We want to have control over our online experience and to feel empowered by the tools we use. We want our elections free from manipulation and for women and marginalized communities to be able to speak openly about their experiences.

Chipping away at the legal foundations of the Internet in order to pressure platforms to play the role of Internet police is not the way to accomplish those goals. 

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Recognizing the gravity of the challenges presented, Ranking Member Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) aptly stated: “I want to be very clear: I’m not for gutting Section 230. It’s essential for consumers and entities in the Internet ecosystem. Misguided and hasty attempts to amend or even repeal Section 230 for bias or other reasons could have unintended consequences for free speech and the ability for small businesses to provide new and innovative services.” 

We agree. Any change to Section 230 risks upsetting the balance Congress struck decades ago that created the Internet as it exists today. It protects users and Internet companies big and small, and leaves open the door to future innovation. As Congress continues to debate Section 230, here are some suggestions and concerns we have for lawmakers willing to grapple with the complexities and get this right.

Facing Illegal Activity Online: Focus on the Perpetrators

Much of the hearing focused on illegal speech and activity online. Representatives and panelists mentioned examples like illegal drug sales, wildlife sales, and fraud. But there’s an important distinction to make between holding Internet intermediaries, such as social media companies and classified ads sites, liable for what their users say or do online, and holding users themselves accountable for their behavior.

Section 230 has always had a federal criminal law carve out. This means that truly culpable online platforms can already be prosecuted in federal court, alongside their users, for illegal speech and activity. For example, a federal judge in the Silk Road case correctly ruled that Section 230 did not provide immunity against federal prosecution to the operator of a website that hosted other people’s ads for illegal drugs.

But EFF does not believe prosecuting Internet intermediaries is the best answer to the problems we find online. Rather, both federal and state government entities should allocate sufficient resources to target the direct perpetrators of illegal online behavior; that is, the users themselves who take advantage of open platforms to violate the law. Section 230 does not provide an impediment to going after these bad actors. McSherry pointed this out in her written testimony: “In the infamous Grindr case... the abuser was arrested two years ago under criminal charges of stalking, criminal impersonation, making a false police report, and disobeying a court order.”

Weakening Section 230 protections in order to expand the liability of online platforms for what their users say or do would incentivize companies to over-censor user speech in an effort to limit the companies’ legal exposure. Not only would this be harmful for legitimate user speech, it would also detract from law enforcement efforts to target the direct perpetrators of illegal behavior. As McSherry noted regarding the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA):

At this committee’s hearing on November 30, 2017, Tennessee Bureau of Investigation special agent Russ Winkler explained that online platforms were the most important tool in his arsenal for catching sex traffickers. One year later, there is anecdotal evidence that FOSTA has made it harder for law enforcement to find traffickers. Indeed, several law enforcement agencies report that without these platforms, their work finding and arresting traffickers has hit a wall.

Speech Moderation: User Choice and Empowerment

In her testimony, McSherry stressed that the Internet is a better place for online community when numerous platforms are available with a multitude of moderation philosophies. Section 230 has contributed to this environment by giving platforms the freedom to moderate speech the way they see fit.

The  freedom  that Section 230 afforded to Internet startups to choose their own moderation strategies has led to a multiplicity of options  for users—some more restrictive and sanitized, some more laissez-faire.  That  mix of  moderation philosophies contributes to a healthy environment for free expression and association online.

Reddit’s Steve Huffman echoed McSherry’s defense of Section 230 (PDF), noting that its protections have enabled the company to improve on its moderation practices over the years. He explained that the company’s speech moderation philosophy is one that prioritizes users making decisions about how they’d like to govern themselves:

The way Reddit handles content moderation today is unique in the industry. We use a governance model akin to our own democracy—where everyone follows a set of rules, has the ability to vote and self-organize, and ultimately shares some responsibility for how the platform works.

In an environment where platforms have their own approaches to content moderation, users have the ultimate power to decide which ones to use. McSherry noted in her testimony that while Grindr was not held liable for the actions of one user, that doesn’t mean that Grindr didn’t suffer. Grindr lost users, as they moved to other dating platforms. One reason why it’s essential that Congress protect Section 230 is to preserve the multitude of platform options.

“As a litigator, [a reasonableness standard] is terrifying. That means a lot of litigation risk, as courts try to figure out what counts as reasonable.”

Later in the hearing, Rep. Darren Soto (D-FL) asked each of the panelists who should be “the cop on the beat” in patrolling online speech. McSherry reiterated that users themselves should be empowered to decide what material they see online: “A cardinal principle for us at EFF is that at the end of the day, users should be able to control their Internet experience, and we need to have many more tools to make that possible.”

If some critics of Section 230 get their way, users won’t have that power. Prof. Danielle Citron offered a proposal (PDF) that Congress implement a “duty of care” regimen, where platforms would be required to show that they’re meeting a legal “reasonableness” standard in their moderation practices in order to keep their Section 230 protection. She proposes that courts look at what platforms are doing generally to moderate content and whether their policies are reasonable, rather than what a company did with respect to a particular piece of user content.

But inviting courts to determine what moderation practices are best would effectively do away with Section 230’s protections, disempowering users in the process. In McSherry’s words, “As a litigator, [a reasonableness standard] is terrifying. That means a lot of litigation risk, as courts try to figure out what counts as reasonable.”

Robots Won’t Fix It

There was plenty of agreement that current moderation was flawed, but much disagreement about why it was flawed. Subject-matter experts on the panel frequently described areas of moderation that were not in their purview as working perfectly fine, and questioning why those techniques could not be applied to other areas.

The deeper you look at current moderation—and listen carefully to those directly silenced by algorithmic solutions—the more you understand that robots won’t fix it.

In one disorienting moment, Gretchen Peters of the Alliance to Counter Crime Online asked the congressional committee when they’d last seen a “dick pic” on Facebook, and took their silence as an indication that Facebook had solved the dick pic problem. She then suggested Facebook could move on to scanning for other criminality. Professor Hany Farid, an expert in at-scale, resilient hashing of child exploitative imagery, wondered why the tech companies could not create digital fingerprinting solutions for opioid sales.

Many cited Big Tech’s work to automatically remove what they believe to be copyright-infringing material as a potential model for other areas—perhaps unaware that the continuing failure of copyright bots is one of the few areas where EFF and the entertainment industry agree (though we think they take down too much entirely lawful material, and Hollywood thinks they’re not draconian enough.)

The truth is that the deeper you look at current moderation—and listen carefully to those directly silenced by algorithmic solutions—the more you understand that robots won’t fix it. Robots are still terrible at understanding context, which has resulted in everything from Tumblr flagging pictures of bowls of fruit as “adult content” to YouTube removing possible evidence of war crimes because it categorized the videos as “terrorist content.” Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE) pointed out the consequences of having algorithms police speech, “Groups already facing prejudice and discrimination will be further marginalized and censored.” A lot of the demand for Big Tech to do more moderation is predicated on the idea that they’re good at it, with their magical tech tools. As our own testimony and long experience points out—they’re really not, with bots or without.

Could they do better? Perhaps, but as Reddit’s Huffman noted, doing so means that the tech companies need to be able to innovate without having those attempts result in a hail of lawsuits. That is, he said, “exactly the sort of ability that 230 gives us.”

Reforming 230 with Big Tech as the Focus Would Harm Small Internet Companies

Critics of 230 often fail to acknowledge that many of the solutions they seek are not within reach of startups and smaller companies. Techniques like preemptive blocking of content, persistent policing of user posts, and mechanisms that analyze speech in real time to see what needs to be censored are extremely expensive.

That means that controlling what users do, at scale, will only be doable by Big Tech. It’s not only cost prohibitive, it will carry a high cost of liability if they get it wrong. For example, Google’s ContentID is often used in the copyright context is held up as one means of enforcement, but it required a $100 million investment by Google to develop and deploy—and it still does a bad job.

Google’s Katherine Oyama testified that Google already employs around 10,000 people that work on content moderation—a bar that no startup could meet—but even that appears insufficient to some critics. By comparison, a website like Wikipedia, which is the largest repository of information in human history, employs just about 350 staff for its entire operation, and is heavily reliant on volunteers.

A set of rules that would require a Google-sized company to expend even more resources means that only the most well-funded firms could maintain global platforms. A minimally-staffed nonprofit like Wikipedia could not continue to operate as it does today. The Internet would become more concentrated, and further removed from the promise of a network that empowers everyone.

As Congress continues to examine the problems facing the Internet today, we hope lawmakers remember the role that Section 230 plays in defending the Internet’s status as a place for free speech and community online. We fear that undermining Section 230 would harden today’s largest tech companies from future competition. Most importantly, we hope lawmakers listen to the voices of the people they risk pushing offline.

Read McSherry’s full written testimony.

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[bizmediaweb]

Nextdoor App: A Guide to Using the Neighborhood Social Network

With the Nextdoor app, users can connect with their neighbors and engage their local community.

Likewise, business owners and organizations can target their local neighborhoods and offer services catered to them. By leveraging the power of word-of-mouth, Nextdoor can become an avenue to increased sales and profit.

Let’s take a look at what the Nextdoor neighborhood app does, how you can use it, and the best tips for you to optimize your presence on the social network.

Table of Contents

What is Nextdoor?

What the neighborhood app is used for

How to use Nextdoor

Key metrics to track

Nail the Nextdoor basics

Nextdoor tips for businesses and organizations

Bonus: Get the step-by-step social media strategy guide with pro tips on how to grow your social media presence.

What is Nextdoor?

The Nextdoor app is a social networking platform for local communities and neighborhoods. Instead of connecting you to any user across the world, Nextdoor narrows your network to those in your surrounding area.

Its network is made up of more than 180,000 neighborhoods across the globe. According to their website, their mission is to “provide a trusted platform where neighbors work together to build stronger, safer, happier communities, all over the world.” With the Nextdoor app, users can interact with their neighbors, discuss community news, and recommend local services and businesses that they like. But that’s not all the app can do…

What the neighborhood app is used for

While users can do everything on the app from gossiping about neighbors to commenting on the local wildlife…

Who needs BBC’s Planet Earth when you have the Nextdoor app?

…the Nextdoor app is primarily used for three things:

Selling and buying. Users can use Nextdoor in order to sell or purchase items in the “For Sale or Free” page of the app. Listings will also appear on the neighborhood feed so users can see new items as they appear. The app also has a feature that users can use to look at real estate listings as well.

Organizing events. Do you think your neighborhood could do with a good ol’ fashioned block party? Maybe you want to get a book club going? True to the spirit of the app, users can use Nextdoor to host and organize parties and events.

Get recommendations. With the app, users can look up reviews of local businesses like restaurants to see if they’re worth patronizing. It’s this exact feature that makes it such a boon for entrepreneurs.

At its heart, though, the Nextdoor network is a way for neighbors to engage each other and build a sense of community. and also this.

How to use Nextdoor in 4 steps

Now that we know what exactly the app is used for, let’s learn how to use your Nextdoor network for your business or organization. Luckily, it’s a pretty intuitive process and takes only four steps.

Step 1: Download the app

The first step is simple: Head to Apple App Store or Google Play Store and download the latest version of Nextdoor.

It’ll take just a few seconds to download and once it’s done you can move onto…

Step 2: Create a user profile

Now it’s time to create your user profile. This will allow you to interact with other members of the community and take part in the various features of the Nextdoor app. Also, having a user profile will streamline the process once it’s time for you to put your business onto the app.

To do this, you’re going to want to click on “Find your neighborhood” when you open up Nextdoor for the first time. You’ll be taken to the next page:

Here you’ll enter your address so Nextdoor can connect you with your local community. This might seem odd. After all, what social network requires you to provide your address? The app recognizes that this level of transparency is uncommon on their website, however, and claim that it’s to accomplish two things:

Create more than just an online community. According to their website, Nextdoor wants to encourage real-life community building by encouraging face to face conversations and meet ups. Rest assured, your information isn’t public and is only visible to the people within your community.

Accountability. If you wouldn’t say something to someone’s face in real life, you shouldn’t say it online either—or at least that’s one reason Nextdoor uses to share your information with the community. “We’ve found that when members keep in mind they’re talking with their real life neighbors,” the site says, “they’re more likely to treat each other with respect.”

Once you’ve entered your address you’ll have to register your email address and a password.

When you’ve registered your user profile and verified your information, congrats! You’re now a user on the Nextdoor app. It will now take you straight to your neighborhood feed where you can view the latest updates, events, and listings from your community.

Bonus: Get the step-by-step social media strategy guide with pro tips on how to grow your social media presence.

Get the free guide right now!

That’s just the first step for using Nextdoor. We still need to register our business or organization—if you have one.

Step 3: Add your business to Nextdoor

Head to Nextdoor’s “Create a Business” page on their website by following the link here.

You’ll have two options for your business or organization:

Business. Choose this option if your business has a name (e.g. franchised restaurants, LLCs with multiple employees).

Individual. Choose this option if you’re working under your own name (e.g. entrepreneurs, small business owners).

Pick the option that makes the most sense for your business or organization. Once you do, Nextdoor is going to ask you to enter some very basic information about the page you’re registering (e.g. what kind of business it is, your business address).

Click on Add your page and your business profile will be registered with Nextdoor! You’ll now be able to view your business’s page, view your metrics (more on that later), and engage with your audience.

However, there is one thing you’ll have to do first to get the ball rolling. What do you notice about the page above?

You need to reach out to neighbors first. In fact, if you don’t take the first step in sharing your Nextdoor business page, your organization won’t even show up in your community feed.

Luckily, it’s simple to do so.

Step 4: Share your profile

To share your profile, scroll to the middle of your business profile where you’ll find options on how to share your page to get recommendations.

Recommendations are essentially reviews left from members of a Nextdoor community recommending a product or service. If you want your business to perform well on the app, then recommendations are how you’re going to get there.

My suggestion: Ask a customer to leave a review after you’ve left them happy.

Are you a tailor who just fixed a tear in a customer’s favorite coat? Ask them for a recommendation! Did you just tutor someone’s child to earn straight As in school? Send them the recommendation link for Nextdoor.

Here’s a great script you can use when emailing them to get a recommendation too:

“[CUSTOMER NAME],

I’m glad to hear you’re happy with [XYZ service]! Also, I’d appreciate it if you left a recommendation for me on Nextdoor. Just follow the link below and leave a review. It should take no more than two minutes.

[NEXTDOOR LINK]

Feel free to reach out if you need [XYZ service] again. It was a pleasure working with you.

Best,

[YOUR NAME]”

I used that exact same script for my business and was able to increase my audience from zero neighbors to more than 5,000.

Before After

  And just like that, I was visible on the Nextdoor app and had the social proof of a member of the community.

Key metrics to track

Like any other social platform, you need to know your key performance indicators (KPIs). For Nextdoor, your KPIs can be broken up into four areas:

Recommendations. These are the number of positive reviews your neighbors have given you. The higher the number of recommendations, the more social proof you’ll have in your community.

Neighborhoods. This is your reach in terms of communities and neighborhoods. The higher this number is, the greater the amount of networks your business can tap into.

Neighbors. These are Nextdoor users who can see your page. The higher this number is, the more Nextdoor users you can connect with.

Comments. These are people actively engaging with your community by leaving comments on your page. These are crucial in providing feedback, addressing concerns, and engaging back with your community.

With those four metrics, you’ll be able to get started tracking and optimizing your presence on the Nextdoor app.

Nail the Nextdoor basics

Now that you’re on Nextdoor, there are a ton of different ways you can engage with your communities from creating and hosting events to selling your items via listings.

Below are some fast tips on how to accomplish the most common Nextdoor goals:

How to post

Posting allows you to solicit advice and recommendations from your neighbors. It functions the same as your Facebook status updates. To make a post simply:

Go to your Newsfeed.

Click on Post a message, event, poll, or urgent alert to neighbors at the top of your feed.

Choose which type of post you’re making.

Craft your post.

Tap Post to post your message.

Your post will now appear on your community feed.

How to create an event

Create an event to gather your neighbors for a birthday party or perhaps a community meeting. To do so, just follow these steps:

Go to your Newsfeed.

Click on Events on the left side.

Click on Add event on the top right corner of the “Events” page.

Fill out your event information and click Next.

Choose a date and time for your event, as well as your event’s privacy, before clicking Next.

Choose a photo for your event.

Post your event.

Your event will appear on the newsfeed for your selected audience.

How to create a group

Groups will allow you to communicate and meet up with like minded neighbors. Start that bookclub you’ve always wanted to do. Maybe find running buddies who will help you train for half-marathon. To create a group, follow these steps:

Go to your Newsfeed.

Click on Browse all groups on the bottom left hand corner.

Click on Create group on the top right hand corner.

Fill out the group information and choose the privacy settings.

Click on Create group.

Your group will now be available for your neighbors to join.

How to sell an item

Declutter your home and make some cash along the way by selling your items on Nextdoor! To do so, follow these steps:

Go to your Newsfeed.

Click on For Sale and Free on the left hand side.

Click on Post an Item on the top right hand corner.

Fill out your listing and add a photo.

Click Post.

Your item will now be listed on your community feed.

4 Nextdoor tips for businesses and organizations

Nextdoor can be a great social network for everyone from users to businesses to organizations. Even local governments can use the app in order to connect with their community. In fact, governments can engage with their citizens and learn about the key issues that impact their community in real time.

Here are a few tips for businesses and governments to leverage Nextdoor for their neighborhoods.

1. Talk to your neighbors

Nextdoor allows organizations the unique opportunity to directly engage their community.

If you’re a local government, this might mean speaking with community leaders, individual citizens, and neighborhood groups. This allows you to listen to them and address their concerns—all the while encouraging civic involvement.

For businesses, this gives you an awesome opportunity to really listen to your clientele. Doing so allows you listen to their struggles and pain points, and craft attractive messaging around those issues.

2. Announce major changes

You’ll now be able to announce major changes that directly impact the community around you.

For example, if a street in your neighborhood is due to be street cleaned, you can now tell your neighbors to move their cars to facilitate that.

If you’re a business, you’ll be able to announce if your location is under construction or if there’s a major change in the hours you’re open.

3. Fight (and prevent) crime

Nextdoor also allows neighbors to help keep their communities safe by way of a digital neighborhood watch. Users can report suspicious activities and be aware of the potential dangers of their neighborhoods.

If you’re a local government, you can use Nextdoor to announce urgent crime notices or give practical advice to help keep your citizens safe. You can also keep an eye on the crime reports to help further prevent crime.

4. Engage your community

With events and groups, local governments and businesses can create a community within your community.

For example, local governments can create volunteer voter drive initiatives or organize town halls to address issues pertinent to your citizens.

If you’re a business, you can gather prospective customers for things like live workshops and meetups. The Nextdoor app allows you to connect and engage with your community—all the while providing valuable metrics to help your business or organization.

And now we want to turn it over to you: Have you used the Nextdoor app? What has your experience been with using it for your business or organization?

Leave a comment below. I can’t wait to read your responses.

Save time and manage your social media presence with Hootsuite. Schedule and publish posts, engage your audience, and track performance all from the same dashboard. Try it free today.

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Nextdoor App: A Guide to Using the Neighborhood Social Network published first on https://themarketingheaven.tumblr.com/

[wildhorseeducation]

This little one in the “orphan pen” has very little chance of making it out alive. He has scours and his little body is showing the wear of the fire, the run of capture, the separation and the lack of mothers milk. Beat up and lost, this baby will become a statistic with the odds of private placement staked against this little soul. 

Personal Editorial; Laura Leigh

Yesterday I went to Palomino Valley Center north of Reno to try to get some good pictures of wild horses and their tag numbers. Facilities will not search for a horse in a facility for a potential adopter without a tag number.

On this visit, talking to staff, even with a tag number thy may not facilitate adopter requests. They have their marching orders; move ’em in, move ’em out. Make room for the ones coming in over the next couple of months from Silver King, Pine Nuts and Fish Creek.

The wild ones from Eagle, Nellis and Owyhee will have just weeks before they are sent into the almost untraceable pipeline of holding facilities.

If you find this unacceptable or want to adopt? Light up the BLM switchboard at 1-866-468-7826

BLM policy states that they will do everything possible yo find a wild horse or burro private placement through adoption or sale. It seems like these days the sale program (that transfers title immediately and leaves a wild horse vulnerable to immediate shipment to kill buyers is the mainline attempt at placing horses these days. Remember BLM changed policy and now you can literally pick up a semi load, 24 horses, simply by signing a piece of paper and knowing there is no enforcement or follow up.

Every roundup brings faces that will haunt me for the rest of my life. 

Below is a few of the faces of the “orphan pen.”

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Each and every roundup, ten years of this and tens of thousands of faces, I watch as attention leaves a herd after the helicopter lands. I struggle years before the helicopter flies to gain support to address land use planning and the “friends and family” club of BLM. We do what we can, with all we have. But under the assault of social media team speak from those that never lived this experience, the depth of what our wild ones are caught in barely rises to the surface.

In the next couple of weeks we will be hit with huge “GoFundMe” type mailers for bail money on a few from herds with “photo club” followings. Those horses will be bid up in so called rescue, and sell for thousands of dollars. We will se massive funding efforts to save older horses from certain death at Devil’s Garden as Forest Service swept aside the effort of dealing with advocacy (incremental removals and fertility control) and instead does a large roundup, a few sales and then ships the rest of to certain death at the slaughterhouse.

Every single year the horses WHE focus on slip away. WHE focus on these herds intentionally because if we did not? All you would ever see about them is an occasional roundup photo, a fundraiser so the money could be used to finance other projects and nothing more. At least we are here to continue to tell the story, raise awareness and chip away at the stumbling blocks that lead to continuation of management that prioritizes personal and professional reasoning (illegal, btw) that creates these “casualties of the public land war.”

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At Owyhee the 2012 paperwork is extremely flawed. With litigation active, and the National Academy of Sciences Review of 2013 affirming every legal assertion, BLM admitted the flaws and said they would work on mechanism to fix it. These mechanisms were to involve a cooperative effort.

The political game that “sage grouse protection funds” have become fueled the removal at Owyhee in 2018. A fire raged, man made and fed due to grassloads of 200-1000 times the norm, burning nearly 440,000 acres and killing hundreds of wild horses, wildlife and cows. Instead of creating a plan for recovery of the wild horses and context to satisfly the NAS before taking any steps that could not be undone, BLM just made all other stakeholders happy and removed over 1000 more wild horses to add to the nearly 2000 removed in 2016.

We were told to keep working on Fish Creek as the mechanisms were created to address these large deficits like at Owyhee, back in 2014. We did.

That entire process blew up in a storm of crazy, corrupt and inept. As the date for the Fish Creek roundup draws closer we will walk you down that path. A path to a roundup that never should have happened and an example of the extreme tax payer waste that makes it’s way down the ladder into states and districts; the land of petty kingdoms and petty kings. It is heartbreaking, frustrating and expensive. (We will  outline time and expenses of both BLM and our organization over 6 years and the ultimate costs paid by the horses).

Look at the facial trauma on that baby in the orphan pen as “move ’em in, move ’em out” runs todays BLM. 

The older horses from these captures (Eagle, Nellis and Owyhee) do not stand a chance.

Those horses are being shipped out as fast as possible. Will they be on a new policy “24 semi truck” and headed to Mexico in three weeks? We do not know.

Will those horses now sit in the political cross hairs as each year we will debate killing them, after being removed from the best grazing land in the state of Nevada and victims of politics and a buddy system with no accountability?

A mare from Eagle in the “Eagle mare pen.” you can click here to see the story of a mare from Eagle run as she aborted. 

Spin, spin, spin… Over the last few weeks I have watched all sides grab events from years ago as if they happened yesterday. Each side pointing fingers at the other for doing it, yet failing to hold themselves accountable.

In many ways it does feel like we have gone back in time ten years. This backward slide was never necessary or in any way lawful. This slide was facilitated by small minds and political gains.

Where will we be a year from now? A lot depends on politics. It is a very sad truth. Mid November we could see this agenda of Zinkes playground hit full steam or we could begin to dismantle it (a few indictments and a few job losses would be fitting).

This little one wont make it unless there is intervention.

Wild Horse Education is working on a media campaign the likes of which advocacy has not seen before. We are working on several legal projects and continuing to attempt to educate legislators.

There are people paying attention.

There are tens of thousands of faces that haunt me each night. I wont stop fighting… and I will never forget.

~~~~~~

We need funding to fight back. We are up against a well funded opposition and entrenched federal government that does not operate with equity, honesty or respect.

If you can support our work we will send you a link and code to access your copy of the digital E-Mag when it publishes Oct 15.

Click the Mag cover to make a donation and add your name to the list.

Our work can not continue without your support. Thank you!

#wildHorses Owyhee, the Orphan Pen (the faces that haunt) Personal Editorial; Laura Leigh Yesterday I went to Palomino Valley Center north of Reno to try to get some good pictures of wild horses and their tag numbers.

[the-media-watch-cat-blog]

#1 Selfies

Believe in your #Selfie

“I ... take a selfie with him; two, to be safe. My lips are parted, as if I'm poking a dead thing to see if it'll come to life; it's the phone I'm attempting to keep at a distance. He's smiling faintly, as if amused by some exotic piece of wildlife.” ― Amit Chaudhuri, Friend of My Youth

Take 1: Arms out, good lighting, duck face, chin down and camera up… That’s it , that’s age of selfies or as the oldies would say “the age of self-obsession, egoism and narcissist” culture. But let’s bring the hate down a notch. What exactly is a selfie?

Being the 2013 word of the year, Oxford dictionary defines a selfie as “A photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and shared via social media” (Oxford 2013). Usually taken at arm’s length, taking the perfect selfie can be quite a tedious task. Selfies have played a rather important role in the daily lives of many individuals and has become a habitual practice. Selfies also play the role of self-expression. Over the years, individuals have turned to selfies as a means of communication and to stay connected to those around them.

Many celebrities have also showed their love for an occasional selfie… or frequent selfies – hello Kim Kardashian. Kim’s selfie addiction is rather evident after the release of her coffee table book, Selfish,exhibiting over 200 selfies taken throughout her career (Iqani and Schroeder 2015). Other selfies that have made headlines are – Ellen DeGeneres selfie taken at the Oscars and Barak Obamas selfie taken with Danish Prime Minister during Nelson Mandalas funeral which for reasons not related to this topic caused quite a stir (Iqani and Schroeder 2015). 

The linguistic efficiency of the word selfie has led to spin off terms such as the  helfie (ones hair), welfie (workout selfie), belfie (ones posterioir)  and the ever so amusing drelfie (drunken selfie) (Peraica 2017). Then, there’s the seemingly self-aggrandizing selfie which to many, screams, “TAAABOOO”, that is funeral selfies, selfies in poverty stricken areas and the ever so galling selfie which yells “CULTURAL APPROPRIATION”- all fingers at Kendall Jenner and the famous hijab selfie (Peraica 2017)

On a more important note, it is vital to look into the plethora of academic literature regarding the theory behind selfies. Selfies can be viewed in four different angles narcissism, marketing and self-expression.

  Narcissism

Let us be honest , anything in excess is often deemed bad so much so that the APA ( American Psychological Association) has officially identified selfilitis as a disease (Wang et al. 2018). Linking selfies to or away from narcissism is debatable. Due to the ubiquitous of selfie-posting behavior, psychologists have conducted ample research exploring the factors which drive this behavior. Such factors include Big five personality and narcissism (Wang et al. 2018). Previous studies have looked at the direct relation between narcissism and selfie-taking behavior and these results are often inaccurate. Labelling selfie- taking behavior is dangerous and for this reason current researchers prefer to study how and when narcissism relates to selfie-posting behavior. Narcissism is a personality trait “marked by grandiosity and an overly positive self-view especially of the individuals own special popularity and physical appearance”(Wang et al. 2018). Narcissistic individuals  are likely to post self-related  content to obtain a positive response from others (Wang et al. 2018).  Since social media is a convenient tool to post self-related content with the click of a finger , it is realizable that selfie-taking behavior would be common in individuals who show a high level of narcissism (Wang et al. 2018). Researchers, Fox and Rooney state that when individuals spend copious hours editing selfies in order to look perfect, this rings an alarm bell for narcissism (Wang et al. 2018). Despite the above  association between narcissism and selfie-taking behavior, it is important to note that not all selfie-taking behavior is narcissistic in nature. Blogger Sara Gram rejects the claim that selfies are pure narcissism (Iqani and Schroeder 2015). Gram states that young girls in particular, turn to selfie-taking behavior to claim themselves “as valuable in a cultural system (capitalism) “ which only considers girls valuable when they present themselves as “sexy and pretty faces”(Iqani and Schroeder 2015). Nevertheless, as the old saying goes “ Never go to excess, but let moderation be your guide”.

 Thus, immediately labelling selfie-taking behavior as being narcissistic is an erroneous assumption (Wang et al. 2018). To label such behavior as narcissistic  needs to be done after thorough research is conducted (Wang et al. 2018).

Self-Expression

After the grand opening of the Saatchi Gallery in London, Chief Executive, Nigel Hurst views the selfie as a means of expression (Jansen 2017). He states that “The selfie represents the epitome of contemporary culture’s transition into a highly digitalized and technologically advanced age” (Jansen 2017). Motivations behind taking selfies are plentiful and go far beyond the mundane  narcissistic claim. In a study published by The Visual Communication Quarterly, three types of selfie takers are mentioned  and each one having its own motivation. These are : the communicator- takes selfies in order to “ engage in conversation” for example, America Ferrera who posts  selfies together with a meaningful and informative message.The second is The Autobiographer who engages in selfie taking behavior to record important events as a means of making memories as seen by ballerina, Francesca Hayward whose feed is made up of selfies at important events and adventures not posted with the intention of gaining likes. Lastly, the Self-Publicist post selfies and pictures on their day to day activities in a positive light- Think, Gigi Hadid or anyone in her friendship circle (Jansen 2017). Selfies are also taken to make political stance. For example , marginalized groups turn to selfies to send a message (Iqani and Schroeder 2015). As seen by Darkmatter, a transgender fashionista who uses selfies featuring “ avant-garde outfits in order to politicize the need to make visible non-gender conforming identities”(Iqani and Schroeder 2015). Another common  trend in the hijaabi selfie which Muslim women use to tackle islamophobia by posting their selfies whilst wearing different head coverings (Iqani and Schroeder 2015).

Saatchi Gallery, London 

Marketing

The value of a selfie ? A whopping 1 billion if you perfect it!

 Samsung recently broke the internet with its well-known academy awards selfie featuring Ellen DeGeneres(Gioglio 2018). Since then, brands have cashed in with the selfie phenomena. Whether you turn to selfies, for self-branding  or to simply use it as a sales tool,  a selfie is in fact a smart yet efficient marketing tool in this digital age. Iqani and Schroeder (2015) state that selfies are important media commodities for two reasons. Firstly, users of Facebook and Instagram are signed up whether they are aware or not in a “cooperate service which is ultimately profit orientated and at sells advertising space (Iqani and Schroeder 2015). We can thus, think of the selfie as a vital marketing and branding tool. Once posting a selfie, an individual is automatically  marketing themselves (Iqani and Schroeder 2015). Secondly, selfies change a simple self-portrait into a commodity because once posted and made public it is consumed by others (Iqani and Schroeder 2015). Many brands have increased sales enormously as a result of the selfie marketing tool. In 2013, Star Wars Instagram account posted a selfie  of the comical Darth Vader. Soon after their followers increased by three hundred thousand (Gioglio 2018). No doubt , the force was strong with this selfie !

 To encourage visitors to visit the New York Public Library, the library installed a free selfie booth for all visitors (Gioglio 2018). As a results many flocked to the library , but whether or not for the right reasons… Who knows?

Despite critiques of the selfie, it has played a vital role and more of an advantage then a disadvantage. Individuals are able to express themselves in an instant, political messages are easily made, many can feel a sense of confidence and self-love and lastly, we witness a shift of photographing the other to photographing the self.

Gioglio, J. (2018). 5 Creative Examples of Selfies as Social Media Content | Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting. [online] Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting. Available at: https://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-case-studies/5-creative-examples-of-selfies-as-social-media-content/ [Accessed 10 Sep. 2018].

Iqani, M. and Schroeder, J. (2015). #selfie: digital self-portraits as commodity form and consumption practice. Consumption Markets & Culture, 19(5), pp.405-415.

Jansen, C. (2017). From Selfie to Self-Expression - ELEPHANT. [online] ELEPHANT. Available at: https://elephant.art/selfie-self-expression/ [Accessed 10 Sep. 2018].

Peraica, A. (2017). Culture of the selfie. 1st ed. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.

Wang, Y., Xie, X., Wang, X., Wang, P., Nie, J. and Lei, L. (2018). Narcissism and selfie-posting behavior: the mediating role of body satisfaction and the moderating role of attitude toward selfie-posting behavior. Current Psychology, 121(18).

[loansinghfinanceblogme-blog]

There is something about gadgets that’s so alluring. We are dependent on our smartphones, our television set, our car stereos, gaming consoles, and so on. Why is this so? It could be because it helps us kill time, relieve stress, makes things easy for us or just simply act as a status symbol.  We are living in a time where we can control the temperature of home with help of a smartphone. We are glued to our virtual reality headsets and depend on a GPS enabled car to tell us how we can get to wherever we want to go.

It is not about cost anymore. We know that once a good electronic gadget is bought, another one would replace it within months. Despite this, we go out and shop for the best we can find. The price of any gadget or gizmo will skyrocket if it is laced with designer fabrics or studded jewelry. Some gadgets are already pricey thanks to the brands which create these or because of the building material and technology used.

Click here, to understand all about a personal loan in India

Gadget Personal Loan

Personal loans do not require any collateral. This makes them an apt source for quick funds. The best place to get a really quick and easy personal loan is a digital lending platform – such as Loan Singh. For salaried individuals, to gather funds within a short span of time (for electronic gadgets) is possible only through digital means. Banks take up to weeks to first go through heaps of documentation and paperwork, after which the approval is obtained and then funds disbursed.

At Loan Singh, your score against a proprietary credit underwriting algorithm, determines if you are eligible for the personal loan, or not. It’s best you go through Loan Singh’s FAQ page to understand the criteria for applicants and the process timeline. Your credit report acts like a gauge for Loan Singh. It shows how prompt you have been in your previous credit responsibilities and how much trustworthy you are. Loan Singh allows you to avail a personal loan for a number of purposes, such as festival shopping, purchase of household appliances, used car, used motorbike, electronic gadgets, purchase of gold, travel, home improvement, relocation of job, medical expenses, home renovation, marriage, etc.

Click here, to learn more about a gadget personal loan in India

Loan Singh Documents

Unlike traditional lending solutions such as banks, Loan Singh only requires 2 documents to process your loan application

PAN Card, Aadhar Card

6 months’ bank statement in PDF format (downloaded from your net-banking account only)

It is also extremely important to fill all the other fields on the form – such as your address information and your work information.

Best Electronic Gadgets to Buy Via Gadget Personal Loan

With Loan Singh now giving you the funds you need to buy the best in gadgetry, we list some cool gadgets that you can buy, courtesy a personal loan from Loan Singh.

Jarre Technologies Aerobull Docking Speaker

The perfect docking speaker does exist. If you own an iPhone, this is perfect to go with it. It’s sleek and tall built helps it to stay compatible with an iPhone. The sound system is said to be a result of years of research by French composer Jean Michael Jarre; Hence the name.

Approximately priced at Rs.1,32,000

Microsoft Surface Book

This cool product comes with a detachable keyboard within a 2-in-1 PC (laptop+tablet). The storage variants available are – 128GB, 256GB, 512GB and 1TB. The Surface Book is one of the best when it comes to experiencing the features of a tablet and a laptop.

Approximately priced at Rs.2,25,000

Panasonic 4K Toughpad Tablet

Being a ‘Toughpad’, Panasonic’s rugged line of laptops and tablets can withstand being dropped from height of 2.5 feet. Rugged devices are usually much more expensive than regular computers due to being equipped to meet certain standards. Another great feature of the Toughpad is its 4K super sharp 3840×2560 pixel resolution.

Approximately priced at Rs.2,10,000

Nikon D500

A great choice for acclaimed shutterbugs around the world, the Nikon D500 comes with a 64GB high speed SD card. An anonymous borrower had this to say about his gadget loan experience.

“You could say I have penchant for wildlife photography. It is my first love. Although I work as a Business Developer, I make it a point during weekends to head out to the wild and feel swarmed by nature. When I saw how much a Nikon D500 could offer, I had to get one for myself. Taking a loan to purchase this shutter beast made sense. The only option I saw was via Loan Singh. Gadget loans are niche segments but for someone like me it was perfect. Within few hours of the application process, I had the funds to get my very own D500. Online loans are the best”.

Approximately priced at Rs.1,92,000

Asus ROG Zephyrus GX501

For gaming connoisseurs, there is no limit. Better games keep releasing and you need the best to appease your gaming appetite. This Asus offering is a revolutionary gaming laptop, thanks to its high end gaming hardware – NVIDIA GeForce, GTX 1080 Graphics with Max-Q design. It possesses a 7th Generation Intel Core Processor with an optional 120Hz wide view display.

Approximately priced at Rs.1,11,000

MSI GS63VR Stealth Pro Gaming Laptop

This beast of a gaming laptop makes one slim and agile gaming companion. A 15.6-inch screen with a full HD display is coupled with backlighting keys, making it a visual treat. This is one ‘helluva’ option to quench your gaming urge.

Approximately priced at Rs.1,12,000

X Box One S

From the Microsoft stable comes the upgraded version of the original X Box One. The X Box One S comes with an IR Blaster with no Kinect support this time. A separate USB connector is provided for Kinect users. Available with the 500 GB and 1TB variant, the presence of HDR allows for games like Forza Horizon 3 and Gears of War 4 to be played like cakewalk.

Approximately priced at Rs. 21,000

Apple iPhone X

With a 5.8 inch full HD display, 12MP rear shooters, a 3GB RAM and running on iOS 11.1.1, the iPhone X is one of the best available smartphones around. Needless to say the iPhone X is a must have if you are a dedicated Apple user.

Down payment of Rs.35,270 with EMI of Rs.2799 on the airtel online store

Optoma EH416 Projector

If you are wondering how much could a projector cost? The answer is little more than a lakh. The Optoma projector is a full HD 1080p compact projector with easy connectivity to 2 HDMI, MHL and VGA ports. It consists of a built in 10W speakers. It is perfect for small edge blending and stacking projects. It is an absolute must for professional meetings and conferences.

Approximately priced at Rs.1,07,000

Bose Quiet Comfort Headphones

Not having really good headphones to enjoy music or VFX is a sin. The Bose Quiet Comfort headphones give world class noise cancellation with volume optimized equalizers.

Approximately priced at Rs. 29,000

Amazon Echo

The Echo from Amazon is a smart speaker that lets you connect to a voice controlled personal assistant service called ‘Alexa’. The Echo lets you play music, complete to-dos, stream podcasts and search for real time information. It can be simply called as a ’Home Automation Hub’.

Approximately priced at Rs. 13,000

Amplifi HD Router

Finding a WiFi router that not just serves its purpose but also adds aesthetic value is hard to find. Presenting – the Amplifi HD Router. It is a table top, app controlled router that is appealing yet powerful.

Approximately priced at Rs. 23,000

Fitbit Alta

The Fitbit Alta fitness band allows you to receive notifications on calls, text messages and calendar appointments from your phone with regular fitness tracking. The band shows you the activity levels of your exercise with good battery life.

Approximately priced at Rs. 8,500

Logitech G900 Chaos Spectrum

For PC gaming enthusiasts we have something cool on this list. The Logitech G900 Chaos Spectrum Mouse is lightweight, wireless and has an accurate optical sensor. Now get clean headshots and easy frags.

Approximately priced at Rs. 9,100

Pioneer DJ Controller

The dream of some of you to become a headliner at an epic Dance Music festival can now become true. The console comes with tactile performance pads, larger jog wheels for great scratch response, manual filters with trim knobs.

Approximately priced at Rs. 24,990

These are just some of the amazing electronic products available out there which can make you drool. Share your thoughts with us below if you own any of these.

Click here, to understand everything about credit score in India

About Loan Singh

Loan Singh is a digital lending platform that prides in providing online personal loan or unsecured personal loan to salaried individuals. You can apply for quick funds as an easy emergency loan which is not a bank loan. We provide a loan with the best personal loan interest rates. The instant funds, or instant loans, are loans between Rs.50,000 and Rs.5,00,000 taken for purposes such as:

Home improvement loan/Home renovation loan

Marriage loan/ Wedding loan

Medical loan

Used vehicle loan

Consumer durable loan

Vacation loan

Debt consolidation loan

Credit card refinancing loan

Job relocation loan

Travel loan

Festival loan

Gold jewelry loan

Shopping loan

Lifestyle loan

You can calculate your easy EMIs using our personal loan EMI calculator. We accept bank statement, PAN, and Aadhaar for quick loan approval. A bad credit score or credit report errors can lead to personal loan rejection. The ‘Loan Singh Finance Blog’ is one of the best finance blogs in India. Loan Singh is a product of Seynse Technologies Pvt Ltd and is a partner to the Airtel Online Store.

Loan Singh’s Online Presence

Loan Singh is not an anonymous digital platform. We are present on almost all leading social media platforms. All you need to do is look for us. You can find us on Loan Singh Facebook, Loan Singh Twitter,Loan Singh YouTube, Loan Singh Pinterest, Loan Singh Instagram, Loan Singh LinkedIn, Loan Singh Blogarama, Loan Singh Google Review, Loan Singh Medium, Loan Singh Reddit, Loan Singh Tumblr, Loan Singh Scoop It, Loan Singh Storify, Loan Singh Digg and Loan Singh Blogger.