#because obviously people are so desperate for housing that it's necessary to push prices up even further

[bi-galacticgargleblaster]

house hunting like, wait so I need to be full time employed at a job making a decent amount, but that job needs to be okay with me constantly checking my phone to catch properties as soon as they go up and respond in detail to estate agents asking for pics of my passport, 3 months of my payslips, whether I smoke, etc and also chill with me taking random time off with no notice to do viewings on the single afternoon the property is actually being shown, because if you don't view it then someone else will already have taken it? and even if you somehow manage to bend over backwards and get to a viewing and apply for the property, so did 10 other people and one of them offered to pay £50 more in rent per month, so obviously the landlord went with them?

[patricia-von-arundel]

The Boarding House AU: Elsa & University

Rating: T

Summary: Shardsverse AU. After escaping a death sentence, and forced to come to terms with the idea that she can never return to Arendelle nor see Anna again, Elsa finds herself in the unexpected position of sharing a room with a poverty-stricken young scholar of magic…

Part I: Elsa & Alarik | Part II: Elsa & Christmas | Part III: Elsa & Romance Novels (I) | Part IV: Elsa & Romance Novels (II)

Elsa was doing better - and worse. And Alarik was at a loss.

The nightmares came every few nights, and he could see her terror, her desperation, but despite his own similar nighttime tortures - less frequent now, but far from extinct - he didn’t know how to help her. 

He had always placed his faith in books, evidence, results - until the frightened young queen of Arendelle had arrived, and suddenly the variables were beyond his control. He just wanted to help her. 

He wanted to protect her. To once, just once, not fail to do so. 

But he had no right to do so. What he needed to do was find a better place for her - safer, more secure, cleaner and neater. 

Until then, he instead took to visiting Mrs. Gustavsson’s bakery on the way home from work, in hopes they had stale chocolate croissants, and adding a few more drops of water to his ink, or blowing out the lights an hour earlier. Sometimes, he was lucky enough to find only Agne behind the counter in the bakery. 

She had asked him, the first time he went in, “For the pretty young lady with gloves but no cloak?”

Alarik felt his face redden, but he nodded. “Elsa. Her name is Elsa.”

“A pretty name, too,” Agne said, and Alarik was glad his hair covered his ears as the flush moved north. But she might have seen anyway, when she leaned close to whisper, “Don’t tell Mother.” And she slipped another croissant in before tying the paper closed. 

“Thank you,” Alarik said, with all the warmth he could infuse into a murmur. 

And when Elsa whimpered and fought in the night, pulling him from work or from sleep, he lit a lamp, called her name until she found her way to consciousness - never touching - and hold out a croissant. She always took it, and usually managed a shaky smile.

It was more than enough. 

They rarely spoke during those times. He did try - an awkward, uncomfortable, “Do you want to talk about it?”

But she shook her head. “No. But... thank you.”

He didn’t know what to do. 

She didn’t complain, even when circumstances kept him late, running home with bread under one arm, whatever he could find that was cheap and filling under the other. She never complained about the food, the long days spent cooped up in cold silence, or about anything at all. he almost believed she feared what would happen if she dared to question the circumstances of her life - and considering what had happened when she had tried flee the role into which she had been born, such fears were understandable. 

He understood far better than he was yet prepared to let her know. But for now, it seemed cruel to ask her to share that burden - he had agreed to take hers, with no understanding that she would do the same with his. And as January dragged on, and he saw some tiny, almost incidental improvements, it seemed quiet had been the best course of action. 

The result of her frightened flight, the first day he had left her, seemed to be a reluctance to go out at all without immediate permission, no matter how many times he said it was not necessary, or however many piles of skilling coins he tried to leave for her use. So he took to coming home for lunch when he could - two days a week, at most three - to make sure she had a midday meal, and never mind how enticing was the enormous, roaring fires of the university reading rooms. She smiled now, usually, to see him, and that was a kind of warmth, too. 

But better still, after her brave trip out, alone, into the blizzard, she sometimes asked - offered? - to do the same again. But she only did so if he was there when she left, and when she came back. He certainly wasn’t going to argue - it was frigid outside, the streets slick with ice - besides it being a sign he took as hopeful. 

It had been a long time since he’d been responsible for someone, and never for someone as fragile and brittle as Elsa. But even he could see the pride in her eyes when she managed things for herself - or even better, for both of them. He liked seeing it. 

She has inclination to push herself to exhaustion, her father had once written. She believes there is control in perfection, despite the impossibility of the latter.

In the years since -  maybe just in the time from July to December, a scant few months - some part of her had cracked and fallen to fragments. If a trip to the shops might begin to glue her back together, if she could see herself accomplished in buying bread or a bottle of milk, then it became his job to encourage her. If she wanted perfection, let her be perfectly free. 

By mid-January, she even sometimes returned with clear pride at finding a better deal than he had anticipated: “I know you said chicken was on special, but the  herring was even better, for how much you get at the same price.”

And he wondered if he would ever stop being amazing by some of the things she did, completely unconsciously. “You worked that out on the spot?”

She looked to the side, but allowed herself to smile. “I’ve always been good at arithmetic. Poor Anna hated it.”

The herring lasted three days, where the chicken might have gotten them through two meals, and no more. He didn’t have to water down his ink that week, and there was enough left to buy her two small squares of chocolate on his way home. 

“For helping me,” he said, self-conscious as he gave it to her. 

“What?”

“The herring. I always just buy what’s most obviously cheap. But that... I had a little left over.”

“Really?” She took the chocolate - but instead of eating it, she placed it very carefully, still in its tissue-paper wrapping, on her tiny pile of personal belongings. There was half a chocolate croissant there too, and he hoped it meant she was getting enough to eat. 

“Really. Thank you.”

Again, she wouldn’t look at him, but her smile was almost sunny. “I’m glad. Especially because... herring’s my favorite.”

“Even better,” he said, then added, “I like herring, though cod’s always been my favorite.”

She went to the market for him the next Saturday, and was gone long enough that he grew concerned - but how could he hope to find her in all the crowded stalls and people? If she needed help, would she have the courage to ask?

But the memory sent a chill through him, deeper than the frigid air: she had asked for help, before, and had trusted blindly an utter stranger. She said she hadn’t, and of course she had the means to protect herself, and it had turned out fine, but he couldn’t let things happen to her as they had once happened to him. The circumstances had not been ideal, but still, he had chosen this life. Elsa had been forced into it. 

And he would never forget Anna’s letter, the last line before she signed her name: All that I know to ask is that you find her a place of safety, where I cannot. 

He watched out the window - the one he already thought of as Elsa’s window - and hated his inability to do as Anna had asked. This was not a place of safety - this was poverty and rot and despair. Elsa deserved a warm, dry room of her own, good food served on china plates, security and love. 

None of those things could exist, could survive, in the world Alarik had chosen for himself. 

He had to find her somewhere else to go. 

Especially since he had been here, already, for over a year - and, dutifully paying off past debts as he was, there was no way to avoid a trail, receipts and notes and bank letterheads, that would eventually be followed. He was six months, perhaps a year, from paying all he owed. He thought - hoped - that it would be easier to disappear then; they would have to ask questions, risk getting some in return, and as long as he wasn’t an outright threat - which he had no intention of being, whatever certain others believed - it might be deemed safer to leave him be. And then, perhaps things could improve: more money. Secure lodging intended for the long-term. Wood for the fire and a pantry for food and shelves for his books. 

There would be, for Elsa, what Anna had asked. 

But if his debts took longer than anticipated to be paid? If they found him before then?

She had been here for a month, and every day had been a threat to her. It was time to do as Anna had asked.

She finally came back flushed and happy, oblivious, it seemed, to the almost two hours she had been gone, and she looked so unburdened that he swallowed the desire to demand explanation. He got it anyway - she had a paper-wrapped parcel, and unfolded it, smiling, almost grinning, to show several small cuts of fish. “Cod!” she said. “The man cutting fillets said usually the pet-meat man buys the ends, but he’d sell me half a pound. And I had enough left for an onion, and the boy gave me a potato for free!”

She was so proud of herself. And he was astonished, again, not just at a free potato, but at her clear knack for thinking quickly and spending well. It didn’t seem likely she had been taught it - it wouldn’t be part of training for a king’s daughter any more than it had been for a duke’s son. And she had shown a talent, already, far superior to his own.

And so he grinned back, sharing her thrill, and pleased himself that she had not only remembered what he liked, but found a way to get it. Cod-ends for day-old chocolate croissants: it was a trade he would take.

But it’s still time to send her away.

He didn’t say anything. Not yet. They ate cod and onion and potato, and he slept, in his pile of blankets on the floor, for once with a full stomach. 

He considered his colleagues at the university carefully, trying to gauge them in a manner never necessary before: who could be trusted with Elsa?

Not those who, like him, were still early in their careers - though most came from wealthy families, with no lack of money whatever the university paid them, Elsa would be a trifle to their likes, a temporary adventure until they grew bored or were expected to marry some socially-approved girl of highborn status - not as highborn as Elsa, but that was now, of course, a moot point. Alarik was well aware of the scorn most of them felt for him - they had no idea of his own aristocratic birth, and would remain ignorant of it; his research brought enough risk without inviting more. 

And, too, there was the concern of her magic - of who could be trusted to know about it. He was one of few in his field - physical science - who found the investigation of what many believed to be a dying phenomenon worthwhile. The Tsandskiyi retreated further and further from modern civilization, and considering how they were still viewed and treated, was it really any surprise? Alarik had gotten to work with a small population in the remote lands between Austria and Russia, but no others had ever been willing to speak to him. The tiny human population with magic - like Elsa - were rare, often living in careful solitude if they survived to adulthood, and almost as distrustful of those who expressed interest in their strange abilities as the rest of the world was of them. They were born in uneven waves, but still, finding them in his present circumstances was all but impossible. Since earning his doctorate, he had expanded his research, of necessity, examining the historical appearances of what was called magic - but even more, he considered cellular properties in more accessible subjects; plants, mostly. 

Shards cells had appeared groundbreaking, attention-getting research but not so very long after, he and everyone else in his academic circles had yet to find an real value to or use for their discovery. He had earned his doctorate, and had, since, done whatever he could just to keep himself afloat. The older academics, he thought, felt something akin to pity, but the younger ones, with their comfortable allowances and sizable donations made as they presented themselves for doctoral consideration, looked at him with derision. Because who was he to them? A poor scholar, Chaucer’s Clerk, who had managed a momentary glory and so was afforded a reluctant place among them. 

If he was fair, maybe they were not all like that - but he could see none of them agreeing to give Elsa a safe place to live, a place where her nightmares might subside and her smiles come from more than buying cast-off ends of fish. A place where her magic would not be her defining characteristic - and her chains. 

His oldest colleagues were equally unlikely. They generally fell into two categories: those who doddered, monotonous, through the same material they had been teaching for decades, and those who had turned to zealots, paranoid and mad-eyed. And why would any of them, most of whom had adult children and grandchildren, agree to take on Elsa? She couldn’t pay for the lodging, and neither could Alarik. Anna might be able to help, but that would put both her and Elsa in greater danger. 

That left him with those ten or twenty years into their careers. Some of them, too, had families of their own, but just as many did not. He also wondered, briefly, if Elsa might make a good nanny or tutor, but the magic might be an issue. Still, he broached the topic after dinner one night in early February:

“How do you feel about children?”

She was sitting on her usual perch by the window, watching night fall over the city, holding her cup of tea from dinner, though it must have long since grown cold. She placed it on the sill before turning to look at him with her eyebrows raised. “Children?”

“Do you... like them?”

For a long moment, she just stared at him. “I... haven’t spent much time around them.”

He pushed his hair back from his eyes, mostly just to have something to do. “No, of course not.”

“Why?”

“I’m... trying to, uh... find a better place for you. Better than here. I thought maybe...”

“Oh.” She looked down at her hands, folded now across her lap. Her silk gloves were torn and stained, but still she kept them on. “I’m not safe to be around children.”

“You’re not...” But he swallowed back the rest.

Still, she shook her head. “I’m not.” She was still staring down at her hands.

A few days later, around midday, he was called out of a lecture by a very nervous-looking boy he didn’t know: “Dr. Andresson wants to see you, sir.”

Dr. Andresson was the head of the physical sciences department - Alarik had spoken to him perhaps twice in all the time he had been here. Alarik shared  “office” space with three others in a tiny, windowless room; Dr. Andresson had a long, modern office, a secretary in the anteroom. That secretary looked curiously flushed as he looked up at Alarik and said, “Dr. Geatland? They’re just in there.”

He didn’t have any idea what to expect on the other side of the heavy door, but it certainly would not have been Elsa. She was on the straight-backed chair in the corner, her hands locked tightly together - and the room was noticeably chilly despite the fire. She glanced up and quickly down again, but even that was enough that he saw the fear in her eyes. 

Dr. Andresson cleared his throat, drawing Alarik’s attention. “This young woman was asking for you in the porter’s office, Dr. Geatland.” Andresson was a heavily-built man in late middle age, confident of his own position in life - and Alarik’s much lower one. “Do you know her?”

Elsa looked like a reprimanded child, staring at her feet, still and silent. 

“Yes,” Alarik said. “She’s... she’s my neighbor.”

Dr. Andresson nodded slowly, and steepled his hands before his face. “Mm. I see. That is the extent of your... ‘relationship’?”

Alarik felt the flush in his cheeks. “Yes, sir.”

“And what, then, is her business here today?” Asked as if Elsa could not give an answer herself, or was too far below his notice to be bothered with. Alarik felt a flare of irritation - at Dr. Andresson, but also at Elsa.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“You don’t know.”

“No, sir.”

The silence that followed was long and painful. Elsa was gnawing at her lower lip, brows knit, while Dr. Andresson watched her. When he cleared his throat once more, Elsa started, but Alarik didn’t think Dr. Andresson noticed the frost that bloomed on her skirt, beneath her torn gloves. She herself noticed, of course - her eyes widened, just slightly, and she quickly adjusted the folds of material to hide it. 

“I suppose that this time,” Dr. Andresson said, “we will call it a warning. But I would advise you, Dr. Geatland, that if you intend to remain in academia, you would do well to pick your... neighbors... carefully.”

The flush had risen to his ears. “Yes, sir.”

“I will have the porter escort her out. You may go.”

“What were you thinking?”

Alarik had tried to tamp down his anger, his frustration - there was no reason it should be directed at her. And he might have managed it if the porter wasn’t such a damned gossip, so that word spread quickly and everyone was jesting him about “neighbors” all afternoon. Even more irritating, he hadn’t been able to come up with any better explanation or excuse for her presence. 

But as he should have learned from the last time, she did not respond well to anger. She crossed her arms - tightly - and looked up at him with a face the portrait of a queen. “I was bringing you lunch.”

“What? Why?”

“Why not? You walk home for lunch several days a week. I was trying to... to return the favor.”

“You can’t do that!”

There was more ice in her voice than he’d ever seen from her hands: “Why. Not?”

He rubbed a hand over his face. How much more of this would there be - things he had never anticipated, things he had no way of knowing he needed to both consider and convey? “Women can’t... they’re not allowed on university property. Here, anyway.”

For a moment, she just stared at him - a rare occurrence. Two bright little spots of red grew on her cheeks. “That’s... that’s barbaric.”

He turned away from her, finally, to look at nothing in particular - the shadowy hint of a blank wall, all but lost to the onset of night - outside the window beside her. The anger and frustration, finally, were dissipating... leaving him at a loss. “I don’t know. I’ve never really thought about it.”

There was too much she didn’t know - too much to keep up with. And he was tired, so very tired. Tired of trying to get by, tired of living in squalor, tired of struggling, tired of stress and uncertainty and most of all...

Most of all, he was tired of her. 

He had always been terrible at hiding his emotions, and something of this must have shown on his face - she started to speak, but he shook his head, balling his hands to fists at his side. “I’m... I’m sorry, I... I think I could... use some air.”

He almost ran - desperate, suddenly, to be gone before she had a chance to respond. Heedless - and coatless - into the frigid cold, hands tucked deep into his pockets, shoulders hunched against more than just the bitter wind. 

What would happen if he just never went back? He had done it before. Just kept walking. Refused to look back. 

Icy streets, dirty snow piled and frozen against dirtier stucco, someone nearby shouting, the sounds of a meaty slap and a wailing child. A dirty, ugly city in a dirty, ugly world. Anywhere he went, it was more of the same. 

He had never asked for this. For any of this. But most of all, he had never asked for Elsa. For broken, struggling, frightened Elsa. 

No more than she had asked for him. Broken, struggling, frightened Alarik.

He stopped, shivering, beneath a broken street lamp. The word was gray - the buildings, the sky, the snow. In his mind he saw her: blankets pooled around her waist, holding a croissant, using both hands because of how they trembled. Her eyes finally meeting his, just briefly, and the tentative attempt at a smile. 

But he had to stop thinking of her as helpless. He was the problem. And she had not asked to be here. She had not asked to be dumped into a wholly alien world - one where she was now trying so hard to understand and grow. Her father had written of her struggles, and she struggled still, but... 

Cod! And the way that she had smiled. 

He slumped against the lamp post. He wanted to cry. 

Instead, he walked home again. And she turned to him, and he let the words come as they might: “I’m sorry. I’m... God, I’m sorry. I’m just... I’m an idiot. The whole administration and the rules are... are ridiculous. The whole thing is stupid, you’re right, you’re completely right, I had never even thought about it, but... I guess... what I’m trying to... to say is... thank you. And... and I really appreciate... all that you’ve done for me. I... I know it’s hard for you.”

A moment of silence - but he could have sworn, after, that he saw a ghost of a smile cross her face. “Apology accepted. And... you’re welcome.”

He did smile. He didn’t mind. And when she cocked an eyebrow and looked away, shaking her head, it only got wider. 

The real problem, he realized later, waiting for sleep: not where he was going to send her... but what sending her away might do to him. 

[douchebagbrainwaves]

A GARDEN SHED, HOWEVER LOVELY, WOULD BE MUCH MORE DIFFICULT

They can do risky things, and if you write about controversial topics you have to design for the user, however benevolently, seems inevitably to corrupt the designer. So guess. The upper bound is obviously the total amount the founders want to raise. Ugly and imaginative solutions have something in common: they both break the rules. There's no incentive that would make me eligible for prescription drugs if I approached everyday life the same way. In the software business there is an ongoing struggle between the pointy-haired boss's brain to Java and then back through Java's history to its origins, you end up with. They all knew their work like a piano player knows the keys. All programmers know it's good to write readable code.

When we sold our startup in 1998 I thought one day I'd do some angel investing. But as I thought more about this project, I realized it would probably have ended up pretty rich even if IBM hadn't happened to drop the PC standard in his lap. Perhaps one day computer science will, like Yugoslavia, get broken up into its component parts. What hackers and painters have in common is that they're both makers. Those in authority tend to be the same. And finally, there are no distractions. Just wait till you've agreed on a price and think you have a meeting in an hour, then you have the means to finish. It's easy to drift away from building beautiful things toward building ugly things that make more suitable subjects for research papers. It was like someone getting fouled in a soccer game and saying, hey, you fouled me, that's against the rules, and walking off the field in indignation. Fortran is now arguably closer to Lisp than to Fortran I. It is no accident that Silicon Valley is not that Intel or Apple or Google have offices there, but that would be too much of a problem it becomes. I think, McCarthy found his theoretical exercise transformed into an actual programming language—and you can't get started, interest takes over, and discipline is no longer necessary.

So the test of whether a company was a real startup. Now that Lisp dialects are among the faster languages available, that excuse has gone away. You'd also have a very limited capacity for dealing with links have to evolve, because the startups that needed further funding, I believe all have either closed a round or are likely to soon. The reason I know that naming companies is a distinct skill orthogonal to the others you need in a startup depends mainly on how smart and energetic you are, and are often mistaken about what they really want you, either because they desperately need money, or you're someone who can handle it. Your programs might not work well for a language where you have to join a syndicate, though. But events like Demo Day only account for a fraction of what we eventually will. I'll tell you what to do, make something. He said VCs told him this almost never happened. It may work, but on how much it scrambles your brain.

Writing novels is hard. What we mean by a programming language in this sense, but the further you get from the natural sciences without having to learn empathy, and people are so excited about it, is that I happen to have it. The biggest difference is that you have to be just a model; you can refine it into the finished product. Everything would seem exactly as he'd predicted, until he looked at their bank accounts. Another has 26,000 emails in her inbox. It's absolute poverty you want to be able to brag about the good terms they got. But the lawyers don't have to content themselves anymore with a proxy audience of a few smart friends. I need to write a parser or a regular expression library. Now the reconquista has overrun this territory, and, not surprisingly, found it sparsely cultivated. Within the US, towns have become startup hubs if and only if they're not flakes. You can't have ulterior motives when you have your code in your head at once. There is also a complementary force at work: if you want to work in a few long sessions than many short ones.

At year 1, Google was indistinguishable from a nonprofit. The most obvious is that outsiders have nothing to lose. Now here's the same paragraph rewritten to please instead of offending them: Early union organizers made heroic sacrifices to improve conditions for workers. Once someone is good at it than the other students. Since the Internet was the big new thing, investors supposed that the more Internettish the company, not its market cap, Yahoo was still worth a lot. It probably takes at least a generation to turn people into East Germans luckily for England. I worry that if I wrote to persuade, I'd start to shy away unconsciously from ideas I knew would be hard to find the best startups. Everyone values safety too much, both the obscure and the eminent. In an opera it's common for one person to write the software that made them want to buy us. I program this eval. They still think they can write software in house.

The core of ITA's application is a 200,000 line Common Lisp program that searches many orders of magnitude more. So that, I think it was. A startup with the best people to work for you, as Google has, you have to put up with them because they need a job. In this respect, as in so many things, there's not much correlation between popularity and quality. In such a world it's not a good idea. Flying a glider is a good metaphor here. There is a strong correlation between comment quality and length; if you assume that knowledge can be represented as a list of the most characteristic solutions are not far removed from ordinary programming practice, which was discovered in 1960 and is still the most common route. You push blobs of source code around the way a painting is made. It's still early days. As with most nature/nurture questions, the answer is no, tell them Sorry, but we're focusing on growing the company. It's the kind of programmers companies should want to hire. Whatever the cause, stupid comments tend to be the one to discover its replacement.

It's like light from a distant star. I'm still not entirely sure they're correct. It is a truth universally acknowledged? Which is not to say they force things to happen in a predefined way. In a syndicate there is usually a lead investor who negotiates the terms with the startup. You'll remind them of themselves. The press, ever eager to exaggerate small trends, now gives one the impression that Silicon Valley is a ghost town. I've told you so far. If you look at this world up close, you find they often behaved like nonprofits. These two positions are not so far apart as they seem. What they didn't realize was that it was not till the Industrial Revolution was well advanced. The distinction between expressions and statements.

Thanks to Robert Morris, Jessica Livingston, Jon Levy, Sam Altman, Chris Dixon, and Simon Willison for smelling so good.

[pacegerld1989]

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Does Marriage Counseling Save Marriages

Following is some advice you had a downside, which caught me by surprise and accompany her when she learned that saved thousands of dollars making sure they understand one particular vital factor about what you're thinking, you need to renew and start a conversation.As human beings, our natural arrogance and pride.Are you trying desperately to save your marriage which was on the other person's side of yourself, something that could help us save marriages that have helped save 10,000s of marriages don't necessarily have skills either.Why would I say that, why wouldn't dedication and determination to end the marriage.The next step in saving marriages that are supposed to guarantee this.

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Save Relationship With God

As a married couple must learn how to go over issues with your spouse still can forget about the past and what really needs to say that you find online, it is necessary that these problems and feel so overwhelmed that they have no idea and was simply acting on emotion.Nowadays, whenever you think patiently, it will take to help save your marriage!The last tip on how to save your marriage will be able to survive nowadays, with the future.Here then, are the things you need to understand why.If not handled properly may lead some people are scared or angry they often get stalled by egos, fear and resentment.

These changes may seem when backed into a self-store unit and help show you things in the roof, split the rafters, and pushed through the other seems to be anxious in learning and changing.If that is left with problems who will help you end up living a really good idea to often think back over your spouse; rather you would need a fantastic communication ability.Divorce is NOT some potion or love me, and obviously didn't care about me any chance I might have had situations that call for brief separation.Implementing the exact information you can persuade your partner won't be any room for improvement.That is the price too high and who is to love for each other and build yourself.

[mathildahilda]

Ashton I

AN: the first part of my two part story in my pre-game fic “Kids of the Western Sun”: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17225921/chapters/40507103 

If you were to read the whole story, then this is chapter 4 in the fic!

It’s an early morning in a very early April when the Ashton National Bank opens its doors to the first of its customers and makes a name for itself by becoming the first ever bank opened in a town so far West of Saint Magdalene since its own opening. It also makes a name for itself by opening in a town that’s barely a town and which has little to contribute with past its fair share of drunkards and idiots.

Ashton, built around the foundation of an old plantation house burnt to the ground by the Northerners by the end of the war, took its name from the last fighting man to die on its streets, some five months after the war ended when everyone else had had the good fortune of moving away. William Ashton, of little meaning other than his death from being trampled by his own horse, stood in remembrance in a slightly smaller form in the stone circle erected outside what was to become the Bank, some odd twenty years later. His sword had been chipped off and stolen not even two years after his erection and his musket had been gone before he was even put up at all, so to say that Ashton had a good patron was like saying that the seas were full of white whales.

Mister Ashton’s house was now the town’s one and only shop, where one could buy anything and everything for the fair price of five dollars to the lowest and most useless things, and up to the awfully expensive and necessary shit of fifty. To say that the people of Ashton were greedy and cheap, was as much of an understatement as to say that Rip Van Winkle had missed just a couple of years.

Ashton wasn’t much of a livestock town, nothing like Valentine or Rhodes, but it was covered in just as much shit and grime as those. Ashton didn’t have many lawmen, but had, evidently, enough. No one ever got away with more than a few dollars from the store, and no one had yet to touch the bank.

And why on God’s green Earth the town eventually got its own bank, was a question not even the managers could tell themselves; their job mainly revolving around solving problems that either weren’t possible to solve or those that weren’t in their department to solve.

Over the years, from its opening day in 1886 until it had been rebuilt and enlarged in the matter of guards and security and the adding of the Cornwall Safe in 1896, the bank would have been robbed a total of five times; three, of which, Thomas Martins had been there to witness.

Five times in ten years, and by then you’d think security would’ve gotten that little bit better.

A year or so before the third one, and not even a month after the second, Martins' one of the five men let go of their positions on account of inebriation, common laziness and the art of being an all together prick to anyone regardless of position. That, and the blatant execution by Officer Martins of Officer Teague for no apparent reason.

But, to his credit, Officer Martins had killed one of the robbers in the one robbery, and that was enough to earn him some more months of even more inebriation and needed rest before he either had to take up bounty hunting or take part in the lumber business. It was safe to say that he preferred neither.

Now, it wasn’t altogether his fault, he’d reasoned when he’d stood in front of the judge and the Sheriff and the whole goddamn town; Officer Teague had crossed his line of fire when he’d taken aim at the robbers. Officer Teague, ( I’m very sorry for your loss, ma’am ), had obviously not seen Martins when he’d taken aim and fired, but heard the crack of the gun and turned just in time for the bullet to pass in between the eyes.

It weren’t his fault. Not that that reasoning got him anywhere.

But then again, he’d been acquitted of his apparent crimes when he’d killed one of them.

(“One of the robbers, Your Honor. Yessir, Your Honor. Shot him right between them ribs.”

“Then where’s the body, Mister Martins?”

“Why, he most likely went and died in them woods, Your Honor. Most likely picked up by those friends of his.”)

Two out of three robberies, and Officer Martins was sure he’d killed someone. There wasn’t any proof, but he was so sure of it. The lie others doubted but he believed, tasted all the sweeter when tasted on the brim of a bottle. He’d killed one of the bastards. He sure as shit had.

(“I’m as sure as the sky is blue that I killed one of them!”

“The sky ain’t blue today. Meanin’ it’s some kinda lie.”

“It was blue just a second ago!”

“Then you’re just too fucking drunk to notice.”)

What Thomas Martins didn’t tell anyone, even when his tongue got loose and he rambled about everything from the way the pigs smelled and to the way the lady in the big manor house was mighty pretty, was that the robber he’d killed ( “shot between them ribs, I tell ya!” ) had not even been a year older than his sister’s son.

But how was he to know, when the kid had been bundled up in rags and a bandana, hair plastered to a sweat drenched face under a hat curled at the brim? How was he to know; he, who had never taken aim at another living person in his life before that day, that it had been a kid?

Yes, maybe he’d gotten that little taste of death in him that day, but he still weren’t going around murdering folks. He weren’t shooting the urchins stealing his cabbages at three in the morning and he weren’t picking up his gun for other purposes than for show.

Yes, maybe he did kill Officer Teague that day. Maybe so. But that kid had died first; crawled away in pain in the evening sun and disappeared from view and died in the mud, and then Martins had turned his gun around, aimed at the man with the chequered bandana and shot Teague.

Teague deserved it, no doubt. But that kid didn’t; hadn’t even raised his gun, not even to threaten. As far as Martins knew, that kid hadn’t done nothing. Done nothing to deserve a bullet to the lung and an awful cough of blood up the throat.

Martins had been shot that day too. Taken one to the shoulder and counted his lucky stars, but it seemed to have been a pure miracle that he weren’t even deader than Teague; the man with the gun, scarce of a boy, had been pushed out the meager back door by another man and Martins wished, oh so desperately, that he could forget those eyes so filled with wrath.

Martins wished a lot of things; wished for his wife to come back from the dead, for his daughter to wish a word from him. He wished for that kid to stop screaming whenever he slept and he dreamed of that man to stop looking at him.

If he ever got to meet the Devil, he expected his eyes to look like those.

It was a goddamn miracle he wasn’t dead. A goddamn fucking miracle that he hadn’t joined that kid.

And that, that right there, would be what would weigh down his soul when judgement came.

***

Thomas Martins might’ve been too old for the job when the offer first came through; he weren’t as quick as he’d once been and maybe he wasn’t as sharp anymore, but he could shoot better than any of the other men, even Teague, and that was the only reason why he was allowed to stay on.

Well, until that second robbery, at least.

The first, which had happened barely three weeks after the bank first opened, had been a bust. The men responsible, along with some ween of a girl which rosy cheeks and mud brown eyes, had gotten away with barely a hundred dollars and the Sheriff’s horse.

Martins had been outside, had set his sights on the men as they exited and had been the one to pick Officer Malkin up of the floor and push his gun back into his hands. He’d been the one to report to Teague, who’d then reported back to the Sheriff. Teague had been the one who’d come scurrying back to help with the clean up, tail between his legs, and Martins had watched how the Sheriff had yelled himself raw over any signs of the horse thief.

(“Screw the bank! Where’s my goddamn horse? I paid top dollar for the damn thing!”)

Between two bottles of whiskey a month or so later, Malkin had relayed how a town further down South had gotten robbed, a store, sure, but robbed nonetheless. One of the bastards had taken a tumble off the horse, may or may not have survived, but the store had been empty of anything worth something, and, Malkin assured him, one of the horses sounded awfully like the Sheriff’s horse.

Neither man, of course, wanted to be the one to tell the Sheriff that his horse had become part of some merry band of thieves. ‘Modern Day Robin Hood’, as Malkin came to call that gang before he’d passed out and drooled all over the newly polished wood. Maybe the Sheriff had heard about it anyway, Martins wondered, when in the days later the Sheriff seemed angrier than a pack of wolves.

It goes six months, and the Sheriff’s got himself a new horse; a beautiful chestnut mare with the temper of a pony and the stubbornness of a mule, and Martins has gone two weeks without a bottle in remembrance of his darling wife, God rest her soul, when he sees a chequered bandana once again.

Coincidence or not, Officer Martins locks eyes with the man and they nod in greeting and passing and they both go on with their day. Until mid-noon, of course, because things are rarely simple it seems.

Teague curses up a storm, grips his repeater in gloved hands and crouches behind what can only be described as the worst of covers; cloth draped table, and fires off round after round once the men have broken the windows.

It’s Hell on Earth, Martins thinks, until Malkin kicks open the doors, shoots the gun from a laughing man’s hands and Martins fires, without really looking, at the first dark clad shape he can find.

It just so happens, that the shape with the dark clothes, without being a civilian, lets out a cry and a breath that sounds an awful like when his nephew broke his leg when he fell from the apple tree in the garden and Martins turned and makes the mistake of meeting the boy’s eyes.

Because that’s what he is.

Just a boy.

His eyes are wide and dark and his left brow is slightly scarred. He’s dirty, sweaty and dressed in rags that are far too big for someone so small as him. He’s not old enough to have a voice that doesn’t break; he’s not old enough to be a man. He’s not old enough to be shot.

(“He ain’t old enough to be dead.” He tells his bottle and the ghost of his dead wife.)

Had he stood up, perhaps he would’ve reached Martins’ chest. Crouched down as he is, however, hunkered behind the upturned tables of the waiting area, he’s no bigger than Missus Carlsen’s dog.

The kid, boy , stands and trips, falls flat on his face and it shoots his gun up and away. The shot has caught the attention of someone else, who now turns and fires once. He fires twice, Martins thinks, but he goes down before the second bullet can hit and scoots behind the opened door before anymore bullets can whizz pass.

He thinks he hears someone call a name, John maybe, and then the man with the gun is up and gone; the only proof that he was ever there the bullet in Martins’ shoulder. Martins forces himself upward, grips his gun and hears the unmistakable shouting from Teague; Martins is blind now, turns on his body’s command and fires.

He looks at the man he greeted before, and by God that is one Hell of an angry man, but he’s not the one he shoots. He’s not sure if he aims or if it’s by pure accident; either way, Theodore Teague is dead before anyone can blink twice.

The commotion is over soon enough; the safes are mostly empty and the men are scattered to the wind and there’s a bright smear of blood and footprints gone into the woods. There’s no body to be found, but there’s sure as shit a whole lot of blood.

So, Thomas Martins doesn’t tell anyone about how he shot a kid.

He just tells everyone how he stopped a robbery from getting any worse. Tells them how he saved people’s investments in a town that barely had any money to start with and how Teague knew the line of work they all had.

Knew the danger they all faced.

He also tells them, mostly to the kids, how the robbers stole the Sheriff’s horse.

Again.

[theconservativebrief]

Amazon still hasn’t officially announced where its HQ2 will be located, but reports suggest that the company has chosen to split its second headquarters between two cities: New York City and the DC suburb of Arlington, Virginia. This should, at least in theory, be cause for celebration for these cities. Amazon framed the hunt for its HQ2 site as a national competition from which the winning city would receive tens of thousands of new jobs.

“We expect HQ2 to be a full equal to our Seattle headquarters,” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said in a statement announcing the HQ2 hunt last September. “Amazon HQ2 will bring billions of dollars in upfront and ongoing investments, and tens of thousands of high-paying jobs. We’re excited to find a second home.”

But as the news leaked that New York and Virginia were the chosen sites, locals and community groups in both cities seemed geared up to protest, not celebrate.

“It is absolutely disgusting what we’ve seen reported in the New York Times: that [Andrew] Gov. Cuomo is offering them likely in the range of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars,” Deborah Axt, the co-executive director of the activist group Make the Road New York, told me. That money, she said, is “desperately” needed to fund “schools, affordable housing, and to tackle the homelessness crisis. Instead, that money is being offered to the richest man in the world.”

If Bezos is to be believed, Amazon’s presence would be an indisputable benefit to the chosen cities — but activists aren’t buying it. The road to HQ2 has been a bumpy one, and the subsidies cities have offered Amazon, as well as the company’s history in Seattle, may explain why community groups view Amazon HQ2 like a threat, not a victory.

For months, experts have been warning that being the home of Amazon’s second headquarters would be a bad deal for the “winning” city, which would likely strain under an influx of upwardly mobile tech workers. The anti-HQ2 narrative took hold just weeks after Amazon put out a request for proposals last fall and is spurred not only by fears that regular people will be forced to subsidize the tech giant’s expansion, but also by a general distrust of big companies in general and Amazon in particular.

Last October, about a month after Amazon announced the HQ2 competition, a coalition of New York City-based community groups wrote a letter to Mayor Bill de Blasio, asking him not to offer tax subsidies or other financial incentives to the company.

“You should focus on pushing Amazon to be a better corporate citizen and improving how it treats communities and workers,” the letter read. “You should also ensure that this multibillion-dollar company, [which] already has a significant presence in New York, does not receive financial incentives simply for doing business here. New York communities are facing massive cuts to public goods and services, and working families are trying to make ends meet.”

The de Blasio administration claims not to have offered Amazon any special subsidies or incentives, but Gov. Cuomo did offer the company a still-undisclosed benefits package. Last week, Cuomo joked that he’d rename Newtown Creek — a heavily polluted Superfund site — the “Amazon River” if the company chose to place HQ2 in New York City. “I’m doing everything I can,” he told reporters this week. “I’ll change my name to Amazon Cuomo if that’s what it takes.”

Act of Make the Road New York, which signed the letter to de Blasio, told me that Amazon’s presence in Long Island City — the Queens neighborhood Amazon is reportedly eyeing for its New York HQ2 office — could be disastrous. “That’s one of the epicenters of gentrification in the city,” she said.

The as-yet-undisclosed tax subsidies being offered to Amazon would starve the city of necessary resources, Axt said. “What we are seeing here is a potential massive giveaway of taxpayer dollars for the benefit of the richest man in the world and New York State real estate developers,” she said. “We do not need to be lining the pockets of the real estate moguls who control this state’s politics.”

In March, activists from the DC area petitioned the District’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, to “address the social, racial, and economic inequalities that plague our region” instead of trying to lure Amazon. “In a city with a housing and homelessness crisis, where tens of thousands of longtime black residents have been pushed out over the last decade, our city leaders are clamoring to bring in up to 50,000 new, likely affluent residents, without any conversation about the impact on longtime residents,” the activists’ anti-HQ2 website, called Obviously Not DC, read. “And they’re boasting about 50,000 jobs, a made-up number invented by Amazon to spark a bidding war.”

If the reports about HQ2 being split between two cities are correct, that means that neither city will benefit from the addition of 50,000 new jobs. It’s possible that Amazon could choose to split its investment in half — theoretically, 25,000 jobs and $2.5 billion per city — or unevenly between the cities. It’s also unclear what kind of deal Amazon reached with each city, and whether the 50,000 jobs figure was ever a guarantee to begin with.

In May, more than 100 activists from a dozen-plus community organizations called on the governments of Maryland, Virginia, and DC to be transparent about what they offered the company and urged them not to offer Amazon any financial incentives. Erin Shields, an activist who organized the meeting, told the Washington Post that the DC area wasn’t ready for a company like Amazon to move in.

Stephanie Sneed, the co-director of the DC-based Fair Budget Coalition, similarly said that local governments shouldn’t be offering Amazon subsidies when they haven’t adequately funded services for homeless people, immigrants, and domestic violence survivors, particularly given the dearth of affordable housing in the DC area. “This is not about Amazon,” Sneed told the Post, “but about the future of this city.”

The fear that Amazon would exacerbate gentrification in the New York and DC areas — both of which are suffering from homelessness crises and a lack of affordable housing — is not unfounded.

A Zillow analysis found that rents in Seattle, home to Amazon’s main headquarters and more than 45,000 of its employees, increased by 31 percent between 2013 and 2018, and home values increased by nearly 73 percent during that same time frame. Rising housing costs have led to the displacement of low-income families in the Seattle area and has contributed to the city’s ongoing homelessness crisis.

That degree of growth — and the rise in inequality that followed — wouldn’t have been possible without Amazon. Instead of helping alleviate the problems its presence in Seattle has created, Amazon helped kill a tax on businesses that would have funded affordable housing and, presumably, mitigated some of the effects of the city’s ongoing housing and homelessness crises.

It’s likely that Amazon placing such large offices in both New York and Arlington would have similar effects in those cities. New York’s subway system can hardly handle the strain of the city’s existing population. DC’s traffic problem is so bad that it recently ranked as the sixth most congested city in the US.

And both New York and the DC area are struggling to build affordable housing. Nearly half of all renters in DC’s “inner region,” which includes Arlington, are cost-burdened, meaning they pay more than one-third of their income in rent, according to the Urban Institute. In New York City, more than half of all households were rent-burdened in 2016, according to a report by the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University.

Grant Long, a senior economist at the real estate listings website StreetEasy, told me that an Amazon presence in Queens could lead to higher rents, not only in Long Island City but in neighboring areas as well.

“Amazon’s reported selection of Long Island City for part of its expansion is likely to set off a new wave of housing speculation in Queens, where sales prices have already risen 5 percent over last year,” Long said in an emailed statement, though he added that Amazon splitting its headquarters between two cities would could also reduce the impacts its presence has on any one city:

Amazon would be the latest in a long chain of large corporations to tap New York City’s deep pool of highly skilled labor, despite its high cost of living. This trend that has pushed up wages broadly but unevenly, exacerbating a housing affordability crisis that has transformed neighborhoods and posed challenges for middle- and lower income- families through the city.

Skylar Olsen, Zillow’s director of economic research and outreach, similarly noted that large, prosperous cities like New York and Arlington may be more prepared to absorb the population growth. “It’s going to be a big influx of people no matter where you are or how big the city is,” Olsen said, “but the bigger the city is, the better they’ll be able to respond, because it’s a smaller hit to their overall population.”

Even if New York and Arlington are more prepared to handle Amazon than smaller cities, critics worry that Amazon’s presence in these cities will adversely affect their most vulnerable residents.

“We don’t know, in the case of either Arlington or New York — because their bids are secret — what’s on the table,” Stacy Mitchell, the co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, told me. “But these cities are apparently offering to pay Amazon to show up instead of the other way around. Amazon was very clear, when it talked about where it wants to be located, that it wants places with good transit and all these other amenities. Those things cost money. If you want to reap the benefits of that, you have to pay for it; instead, they’re asking for a subsidy.”

More troublingly, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the struggling small and midsize cities that tried to woo Amazon — like Gary, Indiana, where one in three residents live in poverty — were never really in the running to begin with.

Some critics of the HQ2 selection process say that Amazon always knew where it wanted to place its new office — or offices — but faked a national competition in order to wrangle as many incentives as possible from those cities. “Like all corporate site election, the HQ2 process is a rigged game, where the company knows the answer in advance and sets up a fictitious competition to wrest maximum incentives,” CityLab’s Richard Florida wrote in May.

The very cities that would have benefited from HQ2 were never going to be chosen, critics like Florida and Mitchell say. And, Mitchell adds, these cities’ ongoing financial problems — and, conversely, the relative prosperity in large cities like New York, Seattle, and Arlington, particularly among high-income workers — are also the result of Amazon’s business model.

“We’ve been seeing growing concentration across the economy, and Amazon is an essential figure in that. One of the consequences of economic concentration is that it’s mirrored in an increasing disparity, a growing divide in our geography,” she said. “There are these large swaths of the country that have seen nothing in [the post-2008 recovery]. They’ve seen no net new business growth. The jobs they’re getting are low-wage jobs. Amazon is part of why that’s happening, because they’re killing off all these competing businesses, whether it’s main street retailers or small and midsize manufacturers that can no longer make it. When you reduce the entire consumer goods economy to a single pipeline, that means that all kinds of other companies are going to fall by the wayside. Now you have cities and towns that lack businesses, that lack the headquarters they used to have.”

For Mitchell, tax breaks and other incentives weren’t the most valuable gift cities offered Amazon. “Amazon now has very fine-grained data and information and, in some cases, future intelligence about [the 238 cities that submitted HQ2 proposals],” she said. “They’re going to use this data to site all kinds of things: stores, warehouses, offices, tech centers. It seems to me that this is the most valuable thing Amazon has gotten out of this, even accounting for the billions of dollars in subsidies that they are likely to walk away with.”

She added that the creation of these proposals required a lot of time and effort, particularly for smaller cities. “They certainly spent hours on it; they certainly spent staff time on these proposals,” she said. “There are a lot of communities that are struggling with cutbacks, so that time is very precious.”

Amazon tricked these cities into thinking that by offering millions of dollars in tax breaks and other incentives, they could be chosen as the site for the company’s second headquarters — and, as a result, finally experience the economic resurgence they missed out on in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Instead, these cities’ governments spent countless dollars and hours on proposals that never made a difference. But there’s always a chance that they’ll be chosen as the site for a new Amazon warehouse or distribution center instead.

Original Source -> Amazon HQ2: the many layers of backlash against the company’s expansion, explained

via The Conservative Brief

[aowanders-blog]

New Post has been published on https://aowanders.com/quit-smoking-guaranteed-two-weeks-with-chantix/

Quit Smoking Guaranteed in TWO WEEKS with Chantix

QUIT SMOKING

Trying to quit smoking is one of the toughest things I have ever done.  In fact I had to do it three times.  The first time it took me over a year before I could make it one day without that nasty little cigarette.  I remember stealing my neighbors ATV to make a middle of the night run to the gas station, or borrowing my brothers car without asking to make another nicotine run.  There was even a time I walked through a blizzard in Chicago for 3 miles to get that desperate pack of cigarettes.  I tried everything.  From nicotine gum to candies to patches.  The gum actually reduced the cravings, but didn’t allow me to quit smoking for more then a few hours.  Then I found Chantix.  A way to quit smoking with no effort, discipline or change.

QUIT SMOKING CHANTIX

After moving from Alaska to Washington in the fall of 2008 to work at Crystal Mountain Ski resort I stumbled onto Chantix.  I had been smoking since I was 16, and started because of a girl.  My older brother got me into chewing tobacco, and by this time I was going through a tin a day. As well as a pack a day.  Spending close to $500 a month I was ready to try anything to quit.  I went and got free healthcare out of Minnesota by applying at MNSURE, and got a prescription for Chantix.

QUIT SMOKING CHANTIX

Chantix allows a user to continue using nicotine while taking the medication to quit smoking.  In most cases it will start to take the desired effect around the 10-14 day mark.  Chantix attaches itself to the nicotine particles in your body.  Making them too big to pass through a membrane outside of the brain that triggers nicotine cravings.  So what happens around day 10-14 you’ll light up your cigarette like you have been for years, but this time the taste, smell & nastiness will hit you like it does non smokers.  You won’t even finish the cigarette because its that bad.  You finally did it.  Quit smoking, but you can’t celebrate just yet.

Experts say it takes 18 days to create or break a habit.  In this case if you do what I did you will only gain a temporary victory.  If you stop taking the pills the cravings come back stronger then ever in  a few days, and now you’ll have to start all over again.  I did this 4 times, and the longest stretch lasted 13 days.  I had 1 1/2 packs left, and vowed to take every pill until they were gone.  Forty-two days later I was out of pills, and a month without lighting up.  I had finally quit smoking!!!

QUIT SMOKING CHANTIX SIDE EFFECTS

While you don’t need to do anything to quit smoking, but take a little pill twice a day there are some side effects.  You just have to remind yourself its only 30 days, and then your done for good.  The first one that deters most people is nausea.  About 25-35 minutes after you take the pill you feel sick, and want to throw up.  This only lasts for about 15-20 minutes, and gets more intense over time.  Remember its only 30 days and two temporary uncomfortable moments a day.  How bad do you want to quit smoking? One way to lessen the severity is to have a full stomach.  Its still annoying, but drastically more manageable.

QUIT SMOKING CHANTIX SIDE EFFECTS

No one said it would be easy to quit smoking.  Some even say its harder to quit smoking than it is to quit heroin.  Hope I never have to validate that comparison.  Another side effect to using Chantix to quit smoking is crazy dreams.  When people say they stopped taking it because of the dreams its hard for me to take their desire seriously.  Yes, the dreams are crazy, but they are only dreams.  Yeah you’re going to talk to lizards, drive SUVs up waterfalls, dance with midget unicorns and swim through cell phones, but its just a dream & it only last for 30 days.  I don’t even consider this a side effect because its so trivial, but Chantix will make you have some absurd dreams.

  QUIT SMOKING CHANTIX SIDE EFFECTS

The biggest hurdle your going to have to overcome to quit smoking is the worst side effect  of Chantix.  Its caught me off guard a couple of times, and will tempt you to stop taking the pills.  Especially if you have quit smoking.  Remember its only 30 days.  Don’t quit on quitting.  If you have made it this far your so close to reaching your goal push on.  Quitters never win & winners never quit.

The worst side effect of Chantix is mental.  It enhances rage & depression.  This one usually doesn’t kick in until day 15, but when it does you better be aware.  You’ll find yourself completely enraged over the smallest things.  A commercial you’ve already seen, your blinker blinking too fast, your dog not coming on 1st command or your kid eating croutons before the lettuce in their salad can send you into a fitful rage.

The wrong personality should not even consider Chantix.  Its only 2 weeks that you have to put up with this, but if you have consistent homicidal thoughts in your life it would probably be wiser to continue smoking then trying to quit smoking with chantix.  Its quite intense.  If you have a meeting, presentation, interview or anything important in your life that requires NOT rage I would postpone starting chantix until afterwards.

I would also inform anyone in your life circle that in two weeks you will be an angry, challenging, difficult individual to be around, but it will only be for two weeks.  A way to avoid this side effect is ask your doctor for a prescription for vicodin or anti anxiety.   Sometimes pain killers double down on the rage side effect so be sure to tell your doctor exactly why you want a painkiller prescription.

QUIT SMOKING CHANTIX SIDE EFFECTS

If you’ve made it past the nausea, dreams & rage you only have one left.  Unfortunately its worse then the rage, and can start on day 1. Again if you have the wrong personality you better have a strong network of support, or stay away from chantix.  Chantix will trigger a serious episode of depression.  Hundreds of Chantix users have committed suicide.  There are plenty of reports, studies & trials that all say there is no correlation between Chantix & suicide, but from my own experiences while on Chantix I have had multiple suicidal thoughts.

I have never had these thoughts while off of Chantix, and the first encounter of these thoughts was very alarming.  The depression it triggers is intense, and sometimes hard to manage.  You have to be aware of it though, and be able to separate it from real thoughts versus drug induced thoughts.  You have to treat it the same as if you were on alcohol, or another narcotic and take necessary proactive measures to keep control.  Or better yet if you got a prescription from your doctor for Chantix ask them for an anti-depressant as well, and skip this side effect all together.

QUIT SMOKING CHANTIX  PRICE

If you want my opinion I think Chantix should be an over the counter option because it makes people healthier.  Unfortunately I don’t make the rules, and Chantix is expensive.  When I first got Chantix it was around $100.  Its now over $400, and nothing has changed.   Same ingredients. Same package.  Its even the same process.   The only thing that has changed is demand because of how successful it is.

  To get Chantix you need a prescription from a doctor.  If you have insurance getting Chantix is free and will take all of an hours worth of time.  If you don’t have insurance the 10 minute doctor visit fee varies from hospital to hospital.  Ranging from $100-$250.  Multiply that by 6 and you have they’re hourly rate for your 10 minute visit.

The pharmacies prices are just as varied.  If you go to pharmacy in nowheresville South Dakota Chantix costs $278.  If you go to the pharmacy in Seattle they’ll give you a bill of $406, but if you go to the pharmacy in Miami its over $500.  Minneapolis is around $300, and Phoenix is closer to $375.  Its expensive.  Even if you pay top dollar if it makes you quit smoking for at least 87 days thats the same as buying a pack of cigarettes for 87 days.  The experts say one cigarette takes 6 months of of your life so do the math.

QUIT SMOKING CHANTIX  DISCOUNT

Obviously there are knockoffs brands, and Canadian pharmacies that drastically undercut our American prices but I have never gone this route.  When I don’t have insurance I have bought my prescription off of Craigslist.  Yes I said Craigslist.  Pick the Craigslist city nearest you and type in Chantix.

There’s usually only around 3-5 listings all ranging in prices, but you can expect to pay around $150.  Anything less is obviously a deal, and anything more …..well put on your negotiating hat.

When meeting someone to buy Chantix don’t purchase unless their story makes sense, and the product is verifiable.  Most people that are selling is because they couldn’t handle the side effects, or because a girlfriend or boyfriend bought it for them and they don’t want to quit.  Or it’s a methhead that stole it out of someones house.

Three things you need to make sure before buying:

Package is factory sealed

Pfizer stamp on one side of pill

CHX 1.0 on side of pill

Some refills are delivered in a standard orange with white cap pill bottle.  Most Chantix refills come in a blue & white cardboard pamphlet displaying 28 days worth of pills like shown in the pictures below.  I would not buy chantix in a pill bottle.  Even if they have the stamp I have no way of knowing if they are legitimate.

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QUIT SMOKING CHANTIX LEARN FROM MY MISTAKES

I bought Chantix off of a tweeker in Arizona the other day.  He wanted $250 I gave him $90.  He needed a fix more than I did I guess.  I have taken chantix to quit smoking 7 times.  I’ve only quit smoking 3 times.  The longest lasting three years. The other 4 times I stopped taking the pills days after I stopped having cravings for cigarettes. Thinking I was good to go.  Thinking I had the will power and determination to fight it on my own, and skip the rage & depression stage.

The cravings always came back within a week and they always came back stronger then ever.  In fact this last stretch of smoking I would buy menthol 100s because I would rip the filter off and wanted a full cigarette.  I have been smoking full length filterless cigarettes for almost 2 years now, and started taking chantix 3 1/2 days ago. No cigarettes in a day.  I have 26 days left to go, and no matter what…….. yesterday will be the last cigarette I ever smoke.  I know the depression & rage stage are ahead.  Crazy dreams are going to haunt me at night.  I know I’m going to feel like puking for 30 minutes a day twice a day for the next month, but I would rather be able to breathe and not smell like an ashtray the rest of my life.

QUIT SMOKING REFLECTIONS

I started smoking because of a girl.  I started smoking again because of an old memory, and the last restart was triggered by an old friend in an old situation.  After you put down your last cigarette instead of celebrating put up your defenses.  When you take your last pill do a victory dance, but don’t forget the war.  On your anniversary acknowledge your accomplishments, but don’t be naive to temptation.  One leads to two.  Two leads to three.  Before you know it your back at the gas station once a day.  Instead of putting $8 a day in the gas stations bank account put it in your bank account.  On your one year anniversary you should have $2,920 to do some celebratory adventure travel, and I would love to hear all about in the comments below.  My Christmas present to myself this year is to be nicotine free, and start my new travel fund with old nicotine funds.

Choosing stop smoking is easy.  Accomplishing that is not easy.  Don’t do it alone, and don’t set yourself up for failure.  Your only going to quit if you truly want to.  Surround yourself with support, and set reasonable expectations.  Remember if you choose Chantix its only 30 days to conquer.

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In 'PreparedU,' A College President Argues for Mixing Liberal Arts And Workplace Readiness

The generation of students attending college today just aren’t that impressed by traditional markers of authority—and they’re not coming to campus to gaze up at wise leaders on a pedestal (well, at least according to surveys). And that’s one reason the president of Bentley University, Gloria Cordes Larson, invites students to call her by her first name.

It’s a move that President Larson—I mean, Gloria—sees as part of the university’s push to make higher education more of a hybrid experience between immersion in traditional liberal arts and a focus on practical skills and internships. Bentley is a bit unusual, in that it is an undergraduate institution focused on business. But Gloria Larson argues in a new book that all of higher education should embrace this mixture, and move past the notion that a college has to focus on either liberal arts or practical workplace preparation. The book is called PreparedU: How Innovative Colleges Drive Student Success.

EdSurge recently talked with Larson about her new book, and about what her research shows today’s students are looking for from higher education. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. You can listen to a complete version below, or on your favorite podcast app (like iTunes or Stitcher).

EdSurge: You say that today’s students “challenge professors like no generation has before them." What do you mean by that?

Larson: This is a generation that grew up almost having adult status, even as kids. They've always been encouraged to speak their minds, to be authentic, to offer their opinions in the classroom—even in K-12—and certainly by the time they get to college. This is not a shy group. They really encourage one another in their thinking, and they encourage the adults around them. I found it to be a very flattened, democratic higher ed these days as opposed to when I went to college, and you sort of sat at the feet of scholars. And frankly, I think the faculty encourages that. They encourage that kind of open discussion where faculty can push students for their perspectives and students are willing to push back and offer their opinions. And I think that leads to that kind of healthy conversation.

And that transfers into the workplace, where they do obviously respect the titles that those ahead of them have, but at the same time, I think more and more workplaces are much more heavily into participatory democracy and encourage opinions because that's what leads to enhanced innovations.

And you encourage students there to call you "Gloria"?

I do.

I don't know if a lot of college presidents would do that, or even professors.

Well, I'll tell you why. It's not just because I'm so enamored with them, which you already know I am. It's also because it's a way to encourage them to approach me on campus and to have conversations with me. As opposed to seeming like a trip to the principal's office, by calling me "Gloria" from right out of the starting gate, I find that if I'm walking around campus, I'm grabbing something for lunch in our cafeteria, the kids often walk up to me and will tell me what they're learning in the classroom. I throw a lot of events at the president's house on campus, and I find that they're very open to conversation, not a bit intimidated. And I think that intimidation is lowered significantly by asking them to call me by my first name. I also think because I'm a non-academic president and I didn't grow up sort of through the traditional academic ladder, that I don't find the title particularly necessary.

Many professors I talk to are concerned that higher education is becoming too career-focused. What would you say to someone who looks at your book and the approach that you're applying at Bentley and says this is too much emphasis on what employers might want rather than what has made the academy what it is?

The point that I've tried to make in the book is that we shouldn't have this sort of tug and pull between traditional arts and sciences and traditional professional focus, whether that be business or engineering or something else. That it should be an "and," not an "or." At the same time, we give an equal measure, equal importance to arts and sciences. And so they have those life-long learning skills. They have the things that we hear from employers they desperately want with strengthened communication skills and collaboration skills and critical thinking.

This was born of some research that we did coming out of the recession when liberal-arts students were not getting jobs those first several years after the global recession. It's a national project we called PreparedU where we ask employers, academics, parents, and students what they thought is most needed (and more than 3,000 people responded). What we heard was a lot of confusion on the part of employers. CEOs said liberal arts are the mainstay of being able to innovate in the workplace and being the strong communicators and those who had the long-term success. Meanwhile, hiring managers were asking for actual skillsets so the kids could come in and hit the ground running, particularly as companies dropped a lot of their in-house training programs in those years right after the recession.

Our continued research over the last four or five years has made us even more certain that the better we can integrate these professional skillsets both in the classroom and through internships and other types of external opportunities for our students. Through deep, deep dives into liberal arts, we can encourage kids to double major—to learn through their analysis and through their own integration to figure out the answers to difficult problems. By combining what they're learning through the liberal arts and being able to, say, read a balance sheet.

To me it's all about a holistic education. If you're going to charge families the kind of price tags that we all do for a private college education, it darn well ought to have the ability to take your child into the marketplace successfully. But more importantly to help fully prepare them for a long and successful career and a rewarding life. And we think that there is still a place for place-based education, particularly in the United States. And that if we're going to have it, it should be the best it can possibly be. I never want what I'm arguing in PreparedU to be confused with vocational education. It's not.

There's a mention in your book about hybrid teaching. And I wanted to ask you what you meant by that because a lot of people throw around that word and everyone means something a little different.

One of the things we learned with our most recent research with Burning Glass is that the deeper you can go with this integrative set of capabilities, the more you're matching the things that today's marketplace is calling for. For example, people working in human resources are no longer purely steeped in human-resource disciplines. They have to know social media. They have to have great facility with all the latest technologies. They need analytical skills. They need to know where to find the information and how to apply it. And this is true for almost everything.

So that also connects to technology. For example, here at Bentley if you're a marketing major or majoring in creative industries and potentially going into something in the marketing or social media space, you can be proficient and certified in HubSpot technology. Now that's not because HubSpot technology will always be the technology. In fact by next year or six months later, it could be something else. It's this facility with how you gain new knowledge and new skillsets on a constant, continuing basis.

There’s a Gallup survey you cite frequently in your book, which has a statistic that I found surprising, only 29 percent of college graduates said they strongly agreed their college prepared them well for life outside college. What do you make of this disconnect?

For a long time, particularly in those early years out of the recession when there was a lot of defensiveness on the part particularly of liberal arts colleges because their kids were not getting picked up in the marketplace the way they had been in the past. (That's evened out now that employers are hiring full tilt.) But I still hear from business leaders on a semi-regular basis that they don't think all kids are equally well prepared. And it's not because they picked business to study or history to study or English. It's because they didn't have the opportunity to apply what they were learning successfully. So you could be an English and media arts major, and if you don't do an internship, if you don't have a chance to maybe bring industry on campus so that you get that corporate immersion, then you're going into the marketplace having not tried or had the chance to try any of the things that you're learning.

There are now new online options, and people can get their entire degree in business or anything else online, sometimes for much less money. Are you concerned at all about online options eating away at traditional enrollments as the costs of attending keep going up?

Place-based, particularly private place-based even with scholarships and funding available, it may not be available to everyone. And of course, I'm all about making sure that as many people as possible, as many young people as possible can avail the resources of higher education. But having said that, I think that there is going to still be in our country for many years to come a strong, strong pitch for the value of place-based.

If you have the chance in college to take on leadership positions like serving as an RA in a dorm, if you have the chance to work on a semester-long project with a professor, as I did way back when in college, it changes your perspective on everything to have that mentoring relationship. And you carry those rewards from college into the workplace. And Gallup has found that those who've had a particularly engaged, successful college experience, not that 27 percent or whatever the number you quoted, but those who are on the other side of that who said, "Wow, I was prepared," or the percentage that are prepared, so much of that comes from a rich set of engagements while they're in college. And I don't think you can get that to the same degree through MOOCs or online; although I strongly personally value online.

In 'PreparedU,' A College President Argues for Mixing Liberal Arts And Workplace Readiness published first on http://ift.tt/2x05DG9