#but as it follows the january is the first time mentioned right after charlie compares tommy to his mother in s2

[normalbrothers]

s02ep02 | s05ep04

"His mother, who committed suicide by throwing herself into a canal, is kind of a spectre who is very much the subtext of Tommy."- Anthony Byrne

[garc-i-a]

Why JATP Is Taking a While to Get Officially Renewed

Thought I would put my thoughts into words on the renewal situation. We know that the show was released on Netflix on September 10, 2020. As of today, it has been 242 days (10 May 2021). Julie and the Phantoms was released under Netflix Family, marking it as a children’s show on the streaming service. It was released in the middle of the second wave of the coronavirus (in the US) that has swept the world over. The show was created by Kenny Ortega, legendary choreographer and director.

To start off, we have to acknowledge that we ARE in a pandemic. Due to that, things have been touch and go in so many industries. That includes the TV/Film industry as well. The US and Canada, the two countries involved in making the show, have to follow the rules and laws related to COVID regardless of what people in the industry want. With that, we have to pay attention to what is going on with the pandemic to know how to go about filming. 

As of right now, Canada still has closed borders from the US to nonessential travel. To get into Canada as a foreigner you have to be going for a specific reason and follow all the Covid related travel rules. To read more about this, you can go to canada.ca and type in for traveling during the pandemic. Not to mention that for a lot of areas in Canada, they are still essentially in lockdown because of the now rising numbers in the country. Charlie’s home province of New Brunswick is still pretty restricted. 

Regarding vaccinations, although the United States has been slowly getting people vaccinated, Canada has had issues with getting vaccinations and don’t nearly have as many vaccinated. It is only just a few days ago that New Brunswick started administering vaccinations in the last few days. The vaccinations are only for people who are 50+ who fall into specific medical condition guidelines. For British Columbia, where the show is filmed, vaccines started getting administered the third week of April. It is believed there is a chance of getting all* adults vaccinated by mid June. My source for this information is from a native New Brunswicker and a CTV News article.

For the cast, getting vaccinated is paramount. Owen is already vaccinated. Madison’s dad is also vaccinated so it is likely she is as well or part way there. Now for people who are NOT vaccinated yet, most vaccines are administered in two doses. The doses are done about three weeks apart (I am partially vaccinated and my first dose was already done and second is next week). This knowledge is important as people need to be aware of the timing of these things. The amount of time between vaccines and for everyone in the cast and crew is essential for everything to go smoothly with filming.

One of the big things that I have seen a lot is the outrage at other shows on Netflix being renewed before Julie and the Phantoms. There is a two fold answer to this. To start off, we have to remember that because of this pandemic, things take longer to process to be extra diligent and that more money is be used to cover for reconstructions and accommodations due to Covid. Knowing these two things, let’s delve into the renewals of other shows.

Some of the other shows that have been renewed are Fate: The Winx Saga, Bridgerton, Ginny and Georgia, and Emily in Paris. The big difference between these shows and Julie and the Phantoms is the fact they are not in the Netflix Family category. They are considered content for adults or young adults. Netflix has different rules on their shows that are put out on the regular platform versus the family section. Netflix Family rarely posts when a show is renewed so far from its premiere date for the next season. So in that respect, Julie and the Phantoms wouldn’t be given a huge announcement for the next season’s renewal if it follows the pattern of Netflix Family’s marketing.

Tying into this the matter of where the rest of the shows are filmed and the backing behind them in regards to production. The Winx show and Bridgerton are filmed in the UK, Ginny and Georgia is filmed in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and Emily in Paris is filmed on location in France. The reason that this matters is because these places have different rules for working during this pandemic, the vaccinations levels, and the threat of getting sick from Covid. These shows are also connected to larger properties or influential individuals*. Vancouver is a popular city to film in, of course, but it has been dealing with an uptick in cases as well as in a different province than Ginny and Georgia, and as such has their own rules. We cannot take into the likes of Riverdale or other shows that are filming right now in Vancouver. Lots of these shows were renewed and set to film already when the pandemic hit. They do not factor into things.

The last part of this is the production costs for making the show. As mentioned before, Vancouver is a popular city to film in. Due to the pandemic, it costs more to film because the need to have extra precautions, regular Covid testing, and etc. We know that there were shows that were initially renewed by Netflix but then canceled after the fact. The reason for this is that Netflix likely realized the cost to produce the shows would be too much and not in the best interest of the cast, crew, and any companies involved in the middle of such a huge reaching pandemic.

Compared to other shows in the Netflix Family section, Julie and the Phantoms has a high production level. I did some research on the Netflix originals in the section and the shows on there are either very low budget or have a backing from a franchise/company (ex. Baby Boss, Fast and Furious, Jurassic Park). Julie and the Phantoms does not have that. It is not connected to an established franchise or a large company. It is simply made by the likes of Kenny Ortega who does not skimp on anything in his productions. Kenny has stated that he is not willing to let the grandness of the show suffer because of the pandemic. The show has many crowd scenes and dancing sequences that require a lot of people. The show won’t be what it is without this. Based on this, we know that Netflix wants to be absolutely sure they can go forth with filming before announcing a renewal.

And there you guys go. All the information that I looked into and checked for this piece. I hope this helps many people understand what is going on why it is taking longer for the show to get renewed. It is not that Netflix doesn’t want to renew it. It is a matter of HOW and WHEN. If that makes sense. If you have any questions about what I wrote, you can leave a comment or DM me.

all*- Some individuals may not wish to be vaccinated

influential individuals*- There are people connected to some of the shows that have a standing within the media and the finances or awards to warrant being a part of the show or it being made at all.

Amendment

I was informed by my source in New Brunswick that vaccines have been administered since January but the qualification for who is eligible for the vaccines can change from week to week.

Amendment 2

Reuters has reported that children aged 12-15 are able to start getting the vaccine today (13 May 2021). So that means that Jadah and Sonny (15 and 13, respectively) will be fully vaccinated by the middle of June.

Amendment 3

A few days ago a local upstate New York newspaper wrote about Canada starting the process of opening up borders again. The process is in the beginning stages so there is no announced date(s) on the border reopening but it is in the works.

Amendment 4

A show called Firefly Lane has been renewed for a season 2. This is important because Firefly Lane is filmed in the same area of British Columbia as Julie and the Phantoms. British Columbia is getting better in regards to vaccinations and so this proves good news of a season 2 announcement for Julie and the Phantoms.

Amendment 5

It was reported on 21 or 22 June 2021 that Canada will relax quarantine rules for vaccinated Canadian citizens, permanent residents, and foreign nationals for essential work. This new system will go into effect 5 June 2021. If you are fully vaccinated and pass rules set by the government, you will NOT have to abide by the hotel quarantine steps when entering the country. That means that the JATP cast and crew can get to filming right away instead of quarantining beforehand. To read more about this: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.lonelyplanet.com/amp/articles/canada-border-reopening

Amendment 6

On Charlie’s live yesterday (28 June 2021), Madison said that she got the second dose of the vaccine earlier in the day. In 14 days, she will be good to go on going out and such. Hopefully Jadah and Sonny have gotten at least their first dose. Gets us closer to being able to have the cast and crew together for the show.

Amendment 7

The National Law Review published an article on 2 July 2021 saying that fully vaccinated individuals will be able to travel between Canada and the US on 21 July or possibly sooner. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he wants 75% of Canadians to be fully vaccinated before allowing the border to be opened. With current numbers, it is believed this will be achieved in a few weeks time.

Amendment 8

The New York Times just reported that fully vaccinated Americans could be allowed into Canada by mid August and that people from other countries could be allowed to enter by September.

Amendment 9

It was just reported about two hours ago that Canada will allow vaccinated Americans in on 9 August. That is exactly 3 weeks from now on a Monday. Now all we have to focus on is protocols for safety while in Vancouver while filming.

[stark-raving-madd]

“look at your little boy now, are you proud?”

It wasn’t a good day.

Then again, it hasn’t been a good day for a while. Not since…her. Not since she left.

When Charlie died, Jason felt a part of himself die along with her.

Liam’s death shook him as well, leaving him trembling and gasping for anything, anything that could give him solace for the loss of his closest friends.

Society? It moved on from their deaths, as if it never even happened. Charlie and Liam’s names stopped leaving peoples mouths mere days after they occurred. After only a few days, everyone in the district returned to routine as usual. The world continued to move.

Hell, the only mention the media even gave to them was over the intercom; “The search for the students of the Armstrong Officer’s Academy, Charlie Rivers and Liam O’Neal, has been called off. Both went missing on December 27th, on their way to the Callisto Labor Camp, and as of today, January 31st, both students have been declared deceased by the government of Junta. Both of them were gone much too soon, with their service to mankind only a few days away. We give our condolences to their families and friends. Good day.”

The voice sounded so monotone, so uncaring about these two children who died before their lives truly began.

Jason almost screamed. Willow did scream. She broke down, right in front of everyone, clinging to Jason and Riley with all of her strength, hissing at everyone who dared come near them. It took several other students to drag her off of them, towards the nurses office.

Riley looked numb. And it terrified Jason. Riley never looked like that. He always had some kind of expression on his face, whether it be one of his many masks, or that stupid shit-eating grin.

But now? He looked way too still. Then, he wordlessly moved from his seat, and followed in the direction of the nurse. Jason didn’t follow. He didn’t move an inch.

The teachers didn’t dwell on their deaths. The only semblance of remorse shown was the usual speech they gave whenever a student in their district died. Mr. Ramirez barely blinked, despite knowing Charlie and Liam since they were in diapers.

When he returned home, Jason went straight to his room, feeling like if he didn’t he would collapse on the floor in dry heaves. His eyes misted over, his lips began to quiver, until the dam finally let loose. He didn’t leave his room for the rest of the day.

Riley didn’t do much better, although to anyone who doesn’t know him, it looked like he barely cared. Mere days after their deaths, he was out and about again like usual, without even a change in routine. But anyone looked close enough, they could see the anguish in his eyes.

Willow…didn’t do much better either. For weeks, she didn’t even leave her room. Barricaded herself in, and anyone who passed by her house could hear the faint sounds of a young girl’s sobs. Liam’s death had destroyed her, leaving her a mere shell of who she once was. A husk.

Charlie's grandfather? The poor man had already lost his son so long ago. Losing his granddaughter broke him. Broke his mind just like the rest of his body.

Five years passed, Jason is now twenty-one years old and still wasn’t doing much better. He was a general now, of many other brothers and sisters in the military police and so his mind was often on other things now. He even had a new sense of pride. He was finally contributing to humanity’s development. He finally was useful to Junta (Not that he wasn’t before, but the small jobs he did as a student was nothing compared to stopping riots and such).

But he still couldn’t help but feel affected by their deaths. His appetite never fully recovered, and drinking had become a normal staple of his life. Of course, Riley was there to make sure he didn’t die of his own depression. Always there to make sure Jason didn’t push himself to the brink, to make sure he was able to get out of bed in the morning. Riley worked underneath him now, and was more older and mature, but he still acted like a rat.

Today was just like any other day. Jason woke up, checked into work, did some patrolling, gave out some orders, ate and drank with Riley, the usual. At least, it was. But when Jason decided to take a look around a roundabout on his own, separating from the rest of his patrol, his eyes met a familiar shade of honey brown eyes and a freckled face that reminded him of stars strewn about the night sky.

“Jason?” The person uttered, astonished. Her voice was familiar. She was donned in clothing unfamiliar to Jason. It dawned on him that she was wearing rebel clothing. “What-what are you doing here?!”

Jason felt his heart drop to the pits of his stomach as it dawned on him who he was staring at.

“Charlie?”

(My first time posting writing for one of my paracosms! I did struggle a bit writing this, as this isn’t my best piece of writing, but I hope you like it!)

[ericvick]

Boston opening up as Walsh follows route out

As Boston looks back again on one particular calendar year considering the fact that the first COVID-19 scenario was declared in the town, Mayor Marty Walsh on Monday cited a ongoing advancement in COVID numbers and the metropolis formally moved ahead into Phase 3, Step 1 on the state’s reopening program.

The 3rd period of the reopening technique will allow enterprises like movie theaters, gyms, and indoor fitness centers to open up up shop once again. Walsh reported the city has taken a “very careful approach” when it comes to reopening the financial system.

“In recent weeks, we have seen some improvements in our COVID figures. That’s why we are shifting into Period 3, Step 1 currently,” he reported.

Boston was reclassified very last Thursday in the state’s COVID-19 assessment method from higher to moderate threat, with a 57.2 day-to-day incidence charge for each 100,000 people about the final 14 days. The metropolis had beforehand noted a 71.7 day by day incidence fee.

“So which is definitely also encouraging news as we move forward listed here. But we require to carry on to keep vigilant,” the mayor explained.

Boston noted 230 new verified cases and eight fatalities on Friday which brought the city’s overall cumulative circumstance rely to just in excess of 52,000. For the 7 days ending on Jan. 24, Walsh reported there was an common of 4,969 folks analyzed every day, down 8 percent from the previous week.

The regular range of constructive checks each day was 375, down 10 percent compared to the 7 days right before. The city’s neighborhood positivity price rested at 6.8 percent, down from 7.2 p.c the former week.

“We’ve experienced a number of months now in a row listed here of declining quantities as far as positivity fees for COVID-19. Around the last two weeks, it is really down 1.6 percent in whole. So which is also superior to see improvements in those people neighborhood figures,” Walsh mentioned at a Monday press convention at Faneuil Hall.

Citing bettering COVID-associated numbers, Walsh declared in late January the city’s approach to shift into Section 3, Step 1. While the go-forward offers clearance to a assortment of businesses to open up yet again, it retains in position a 25 % capability limit.

And as Massachusetts people look ahead to observing Tom Brady enjoy his very first Tremendous Bowl without the need of the Patriots, Walsh discouraged persons from accumulating with people outside of their have household.

“I know that there is some enjoyment in Boston about that Super Bowl so we want you to be quite mindful about that,” he mentioned. “We also want to make positive tests is component of your schedule.”

The start out of the COVID-19 pandemic can be measured in a selection of means but in Boston, people are seeking again at Feb. 1, 2020., when the Section of Community Health introduced that a 20-yr-outdated person attending UMass Boston had analyzed favourable for the virus right after returning from Wuhan, China.

The circumstance in Boston was only the eighth infection claimed in the United States at the time.

At the time, DPH said they have been creating an Incident Command Framework to help facilitate the dissemination of info from federal and state officers to stakeholders in Massachusetts. The office also introduced a COVID-precise website and scheduled phone calls with other health and fitness treatment officials and local boards of overall health.

Not prolonged following the very first scenario was discovered, Biogen held a enterprise convention at the Extended Wharf Marriott that was later tied to around 200,000 COVID-19 cases. And, in mid-March, Gov. Charlie Baker, soon after slicing his family holiday to Utah shorter, declared a point out of unexpected emergency — which is however in outcome now — that gave the governor wide govt authority to aid the state’s response to the pandemic.

“None of us experienced any concept what to anticipate a calendar year in the past. The pandemic has turned our city and our environment upside down. Dwelling with this virus has not been easy for any one,” Walsh claimed Monday. “Primarily it can be tough for the communities who have now confronted the deepest historic disparities and health and economic outcomes and absolutely everyone has experienced to make sacrifices.”

Searching towards the potential, Walsh mentioned the new Biden Administration is a husband or wife in Washington “who is fully commited to serving to towns and states conquer this virus.” The U.S. Senate options to keep a listening to later this week to take into account President Joe Biden’s nomination of Walsh as labor secretary.

“We have started the system of healing and we are gonna get by this jointly,” Walsh reported.

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[sunshineweb]

The Risks of Speculating During Rising Markets

It was sometime during late 1999 through early 2000, near the peak of the dot-com bubble, the legendary George Soros and his hedge-fund team were working on how to prepare for the inevitable sell-off in technology stocks.

The man in charge of Soros’ high profile technology funds was Stanley Druckenmiller – one of the best-performing hedge fund managers of all time, till date – and he was busy warning his team that the sell-off could be near and could be brutal.

As the markets soared further in March 2000, Druckenmiller was quoted as saying, “I don’t like this market. I think we should probably lighten up.” Soros himself would regularly warn his team that tech stocks were a bubble set to burst.

Despite this, when the sell-off finally did begin in mid-March 2000, Soros Fund Management wasn’t ready for it. His funds were still loaded with high-tech and biotech stocks. Just in five days, starting 15th March, Soros’s flagship Quantum Fund saw what had been a 2% year-to-date gain turn into an 11% loss. By the end of April, the Quantum Fund was down 22% since the start of the year, and the smaller Quota Fund was down 32%.

Post that, in April 2000, Soros said at a conference, “Maybe I don’t understand the market. Maybe the music has stopped, but people are still dancing.”

Same month, at another conference, Druckenmiller confessed, “It would have been nice to go out on top, like Michael Jordan. But I overplayed my hand.”

Here is how Druckenmiller summarized his experience of 2000 in an interview late last year (Nov. 2013) –

I bought the top of the tech market in March of 2000 [after quickly making money in the same space in mid-late 1999] in an emotional fit I had because I couldn’t stand the fact that it was going up so much and it violated every rule I learned in 25 years.

I bought the tech market very well in mid-1999 and sold everything out in January and was sitting pretty; and I had two internal managers who were making about 5% a day and I just couldn’t stand it. And I put billions of dollars in within hours of the top. And, boy, did I get killed the next couple months.

How to Get Killed at the Top, the Newton Way Let’s cut across to the middle of 1720 in Great Britain. Sir Isaac Newton – the inventor of calculus (the branch of mathematics that describes change over time), and the man who framed the laws of motion and set physics on its modern trajectory, put a sizable chunk of his personal fortune into shares of the South Sea Company.

The company had then pursued a new and increasingly risky banking deal – and as insiders began to talk up the trading profits (that turned out fictitious) the company expected from another venture, the stock began to leap, starting January 1720.

The bubble burst that September. Newton lost 90% of his stake, which was a large portion of his total net worth.

Here is how MIT professor Thomas Levinson described Newton’s and South Sea’s antics in a 2009 article…

Newton…made his first investment in the South Sea issue early, in 1713, and held it for several years, marking a modest paper profit. He held on through early 1720…That got the desired result, a sudden leap in stock prices. Starting at £128 in January, the price for South Sea securities rose to £175 in February and then £330 in March.

…Newton sold in April, content with his (quite spectacular) gains to date. But then, between April and June, share prices tripled, reaching over £1,000…which is precisely when he could stand it no longer.

Having “lost” two-thirds of his potential gain, Newton bought again at the very top and bought more after a slight decline in July.

The South Sea stock price held up through August 1720, and then the bubble led by over-expectations of huge returns was pricked in September.

…South Sea share prices collapsed to roughly their pre-bubble level. Newton’s losses totalled as much as £20,000, between $4 million and $5 million in 21st century terms…It was a terrific blow for Newton.

What Brought Druckenmiller and Newton Down? You know the answer, I believe.

Most people get in during rising markets, or when bubbles are building up because they desire to earn money fast because they are envious of seeing others doing so.

“If he could make money fast in stocks,” one would normally ask during such times, “So why couldn’t I?”

If geniuses like Druckenmiller and Newton couldn’t stand to watch as others made money, and they carried on with full knowledge that they were purely speculating (re-read Druckenmiller’s confession mentioned above), what chance do we non-geniuses have to survive a bubble and its subsequent and certain burst?

The Real Tragedy of Our Life Charlie Munger says…

If you are comfortably rich and someone else is getting richer faster than you by, for example, investing in risky stocks, so what? Someone will always be getting richer faster than you. This is not a tragedy.

You see, the real tragedy of our life is not that someone else is getting richer or healthier than us, but that he is getting there faster than us.

Another tragedy is that when we fall into this comparison trap, it’s hard to stop.

Look at fund managers. Most of them have similar stocks in their portfolios, and most still claim to have the skills to outperform others.

Read stock forums. Most of them are filled with the noise of people comparing their portfolios with others’.

Why do you think any mention of “5 stocks to buy” or “best stocks to buy now” raises your brain’s antennae? This is because you want to compare those best stocks to your existing portfolio and buy whatever you don’t have already.

This habit of unintelligently buying things because someone else is making fast money on them comes to the fore when the markets have been rising for some time.

Here is what Citigroup’s boss Chuck Prince said to a newspaper in July 2007, shortly before the subprime bubble burst…

When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.

So, even as people know that things are not right around them, they keep dancing to the bubble’s music because everyone else is dancing and making merry.

After all, not dancing to the rising market’s tune is same as underperforming. Isn’t it terrible to sit quietly, doing nothing, when some people are predicting the Sensex to touch six-figures soon, and others are dancing to their tunes? Of course, it’s terrible!

But if you can’t ignore and avoid the temptation that comes from watching other people get rich due to a sharp rise in stock prices, it’s best to know sooner than later that that’s often a path to destruction.

You can “get killed”, like Druckenmiller in 2000 and Newton 280 years prior to that.

Of course, like Druckenmiller did so perfectly, no one can predict when the sell-off is near and how bad it could get, but it’s very important to learn from what Druckenmiller didn’t do – listen to his gut instead of following the herd.

That, I believe, is one of the best lessons you can learn on how and why not to speculate, especially when all others are speculating.

Getting Rich Vs Staying Rich Morgan Housel of Collaborative Fund has written a wonderful article on getting rich versus staying rich, where he suggested how getting rich can be the biggest impediment to staying rich…

It goes like this. The more successful you are at something, the more convinced you become that you’re doing it right. The more convinced you are that you’re doing it right, the less open you are to change. The less open you are to change, the more likely you are to tripping in a world that changes all the time.

There are a million ways to get rich. But there’s only one way to stay rich: Humility, often to the point of paranoia. The irony is that few things squash humility like getting rich in the first place.

A couple of years ago, I attended a lecture from the legendary Howard Marks, where he talked about these points on the subject of ‘humility’ –

Very few investors have the nerve to say, “I don’t know.” But that’s how you build integrity in your investment process.

If you start with “I don’t know,” then you are unlikely to act so boldly as to get into trouble.

Our business is full of people who got famous for being right once in a row.

One of the reasons why the future is unknowable is randomness. Events often fail to materialize as we think they should. Improbable things happen all the time.

Anytime you think you know something others don’t, you should examine the basis. Ask yourself – Who doesn’t know better? Why should I be privy to exceptional information? How do I know this that nobody else knows? Am I really that smart, or am I just wrong? Am I certain that I am right and everyone else is wrong? If it’s an advice from some else, ask – Why would somebody give me potentially valuable information? And why would he give it to me? And why is he still working for a living if he knows the future so well? I am always skeptical of people who will tell you the future for five dollars.

The concept of market efficiency – that price of each asset accurately reflects its underlying intrinsic value, or that the market price is fair – must not be ignored. You can know something and it’s possible to know more than others. But the going in presumption should be that everybody is well-informed, and if you think you know something they don’t, you should be able to express the reason for that. It’s not easy because everyone is trying just as hard as you are.

In dealing with a complex adaptive system that the stock market is, humility is your best protection. Being tentative in your decision making, changing your mind when the facts change, diversifying adequately and not going around boasting about your recent successes are all signs of such humility.

However, when we’re repeatedly or massively successful – like Druckenmiller and Newton – we’re tempted to believe that we’ve found the formula for success and are no longer subject to human fallibility. This is devastating, especially in a world that is continually changing, and where every right idea is eventually the wrong one.

Beware the Madness After the South Sea disaster, Newton could not bear to hear the phrase “South Sea” mentioned in his presence. But just once he admitted that while he knew how to predict the motions of the cosmos, he could not calculate the madness of the people.

We still can’t, so please be very careful…especially because we are passing through a rising market.

Also Read: 1. Speculating In Bubbles With Stan Druckenmiller And Sir Isaac Newton 2. Even a Genius Can Get Suckered

The post The Risks of Speculating During Rising Markets appeared first on Safal Niveshak.

The Risks of Speculating During Rising Markets published first on https://mbploans.tumblr.com/

[mcguireprater6-blog]

LTC Core WalletWhat is Litecoin? Litecoin brands itself being an open source, peer-to-peer cryptocurrency that allows fast and near-zero bills in between anyone, anyplace in the world. It was developed in October in 2011 by means of an ex-Google plus ex-Coinbase engineer, Charlie Shelter, as an alternative in order to Bitcoin. He wished to create a cryptocurrency that may fix some of the issues experienced by Bitcoin, such as deal times, excessive transaction fees, and focused mining pools. He / she furthermore wanted to help larger-scale adoption by folks in addition to businesses. Litecoin may be used by way of individuals to make buying inside the real world extra easily than most some other cryptocurrencies because it is supported by a growing number of wallets and crypto debit cards. Litecoin features also produced progress with the merchant side because they have recently been expanding their point-of-sale payment entry and banking services to make it easier for merchants in order to take Litecoin as a new type of payment. The Litecoin circle has decent consumption. On average, Litecoin processes all around twenty, 000 to thirty, 1000 on-chain deals a new day. The chart below shows often the utilization involving the Litecoin community intended for the past two many years: Litecoin vs . Bitcoin Considering that Litecoin was developed using Bitcoin�s code (it was initially a fork of the Bitcoin) with near-identical features, it is sometimes compared with Bitcoin. The key dissimilarities will be highlighted below: Hashing algorithm: Both Litecoin together with Bitcoin use proof-of-work like it is consensus algorithm, however , Litecoin uses a different hashing algorithm � scrypt rather of Secure Hash Modus operandi (SHA) 256. Scrypt is somewhat more memory-intensive than a criteria that is not memory-hard. It is because processes are manage inside parallel with scrypt as opposed to serially with SHA-256, so when a new result, scrypt needs more memory. A single of the benefits associated with working with scrypt is having a new network that is even more attainable and democratized. For you to be competitive, miners can attain extra memory instead connected with getting to obtain specialized application-specific integrated brake lines (ASICs) as is the case using Bitcoin. This means the fact that in theory, regular men and women can become miners using Litecoin, whereas concentrated exploration pools / ASIC flowers already dominate the Bitcoin mining. Transaction fees: Deals on Litecoin are drastically cheaper than Bitcoin. Since September 24, 2018, the regular transaction fee for Bitcoin was $0. 434 versus $0. 0483 for Litecoin, making Bitcoin 9 times more high-priced. At typically the maximum on December twenty two, 2017, average daily Bitcoin financial transaction fees surpassed $55 while Litecoin fees have been solely $0. 931. Full velocity: Litecoin is designed in order to be 4x faster in comparison with Bitcoin as average mass confirmation times are 2 . not 5 minutes, instead involving 10 minutes. Present: Litecoin has some sort of overall offer of 84 million money, compared with 21 zillion coins for Bitcoin. Brief summary stand comparing Bitcoin plus Litecoin: Key Features Proof-of-work: Litecoin uses proof-of-work, which usually is some sort of consensus procedure that is dependent on a difficult computational activity in order to secure the network via malicious stars. Miners be competitive to fix the task the speediest and are rewarded consequently. (For a lot more information, see our own write-up �What is Proof of Job? �) Scrypt: While mentioned above, Litecoin employs the particular scrypt hashing formula. Segregated Witness (SegWit): SegWit enhanced the block sizing limit of Litecoin via you MB to some MB by means of removing signature data (i. e. often the �segregated� part) a transaction whilst guaranteeing the transaction is usually still safe and secure (i. age. the �witness� part). SegWit allows to get increased transaction result together with permits other capabilities plus programs, such as often the Lightning Network, MAST, Confidential Transactions, and Schnorr Signatures, to get implemented. Key Breakthrough Litecoin is an start source project plus it is source code can be looked at the following: https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin August 2012: Litecoin was formally introduced in GitHub and the system goes live shortly following. Nov 2013: Litecoin attained a market cap of $1 billion initially. December 2013: Litecoin v0. 8. 6. 1 premiered. This was initially some sort of significant release using some sort of number of changes, including popular wallet attributes like Coin Control, speedier approval, faster propagation, etc . Present cards 2014: Litecoin budget for Android was officially unveiled. April 2014: Typically the beta of Electrum, a Litecoin wallet, was launched. 06 2015: Litecoin v0. 12. 2. 2 was published and represented often the official launching version associated with Litecoin Key. This was some sort of significant launch, plus was the technical similar of Bitcoin v0. 15. minimal payments Major changes consist of watch-only wallet support, more rapidly blockchain synchronization, improved placing your signature to safety, new utility software, and so forth January 2017: Litecoin Main v0. 13. a couple of premiered, a major launching with a amount of method level improvements, code optimizations, the ability to spin out various soft forks at once, etc . Segwit was activated upon testnet. May 2017: Litecoin activated SegWit and done the particular first payment transaction for the Lightning Network with often the transfer executed in beneath one second. August 2017: Litecoin Core v0. 16. 2 premiered. This was a good major variation release with new features, several bug fixes, and several effectiveness improvements (e. g. quicker sync and original block download times). May possibly 2018: Litecoin Core v0. 16. 0 was introduced, a major release the fact that given full support intended for segwit in its pocket and user interfaces. For more details and regarding upcoming technical updates, make sure you check out Litecoin�s official blog at https://blog.litecoin.org. Download the Free Checklist intended for Crushing ICOs! This is actually the guideline that help me personally see the most promising ICOs! CLICK HERE TO PICK UP THE FREE GUIDE > > Future Growth Following the activation of SegWit, Charlie Lee acquired spoken about adding features such because Super Network, MAST, Discreet Purchases, and Schnorr Autographs, however , no roadmap offers been given yet. Inside fact, all the recommended upgrades are features from other blockchain and not special to help Litecoin. Most associated with the upgrades are being developed on Bitcoin since well. In the 2018 Litecoin Summit, Charlie Even offers presented his metrics of achievement for Litecoin: (1) circle security, (2) market increased, (3) exchange fluid, (4) merchant support, in addition to (5) currency usage. Consequently, we feel the future innovations will target improving these kind of metrics. Token Economics Litecoin currently has a block encourage of 30 LTC per block. Halving occurs each 840, 500 blocks (approximately every several years) based mostly on a prohibit time of 2. 5 minutes therefore the block reward is expected to drop to 10. your five LTC in around July 2019. The distributing offer is currently fifty eight, 544, 952 (as regarding August 1, 2018); this particular determine will gradually maximize towards the total supply involving 84 thousand LTC at some point in the mid-2100s after which no new gold coins will be minted. Group Often the Litecoin Foundation can be a non-profit organization that supports the development of Litecoin. The idea is made up of four persons on the Plank connected with Directors (see below) as well as other film fans, coders and volunteers. The particular Litecoin Foundation works with the Litecoin Core development team, which usually contains designers behind typically the Litecoin venture, and provides them all economical support. The biographies associated with the key people right behind Litecoin are summarized down below: Charlie Lee, Founder connected with Litecoin, and Managing Representative of the Litecoin Foundation � He was recently the Representative of Architectural at Coinbase where this individual worked for 4 several years. Before that, he or she performed at Google regarding 6th years as a new Application Engineer on a lot of assignments including YouTube Mobile, Chrome OS and Google Play Games. Prior positions include More mature Software Engineer at Guidewire Software and Software Engineer at Kana Communications. They obtained his Master�s education in Computer system Science coming from M. I. T. within 2000. Xinxi Wang, Litecoin Foundation Movie director � Xinyi Wang was one associated with the Beginning Member regarding the Litecoin Basis plus is one of the developers powering Litecoin Central. He is likewise typically the Founder and BOSS regarding Coinut Exchange, a new Singapore-based cryptocurrency trading platform which was established in December 2013. He or she obtained his Bachelor�s degree in Computer Science from the Harbin Institute associated with Engineering in 2009 and his Ph. Litecoin Core Wallet inside Computer Science from State University of Singapore throughout 2014. Franklyn Richards, Litecoin Foundation Director ~ Franklyn Richards was one of several Launching an online business with Users of the Litecoin Base and currently works Litecoin. com. He is the COO of Zulu Republic, a good blockchain new venture that should create a ecosystem associated with digital programs built around the Ethereum blockchain. Zing Yang, Litecoin Basis Director � Zest Yg has been a new Movie director of the Litecoin Base since May 2018 in addition to was previously with BlockAsset Efforts, a blockchain-focused VC organization, from Economy is shown for you to May possibly 2018. Prior Litecoin QT Wallet include Associate Movie director of Purchases at Temasek plus Home and Co-Founder regarding Greenergy Global on Biomax Solutions. She acquired the girl Bachelor�s degree in Company Administration from Singapore Administration University in 2007. Evaluation Strengths Community � Acquiring started out this year and the years to come, Litecoin is among the older and a lot mature blockchain tasks and has built a new great area. Looking on typically the number of members about the respective subreddits, Litecoin�s community is only behind Bitcoin and Ethereum. Litecoin can make good progress inside terms of merchant use with point of purchase, merchant settlement gateways together with banking services by means of Coingate, Coinpayments, Coinify, Coinbase Commerce, Gocoin, Paybear, etc . Owing to it has the similarity with Bitcoin with the main passcode being essentially the same, Litecoin could most likely piggyback from r & d discoveries achieved by the Bitcoin community. Weaknesses Because the idea is a fork of Bitcoin, Litecoin does not necessarily need unique and/or excellent functions compared to different blockchains. Quite a few consider Litecoin as a test out system of Bitcoin plus as a result, a lot of updates signing up to Litecoin will in addition be implemented inside of Bitcoin as well (SegWit can be an example). Whilst this would insert features to Litecoin that will this otherwise would likely not delight in, it furthermore makes the idea less most likely to have superior characteristics one of a kind only to Litecoin, making the idea difficult for you to standout. As a store of value, Litecoin drops guiding Bitcoin significantly inside terms of financial transaction volume and brand acknowledgement, without any major differentiating functions. As a good medium regarding exchange, Litecoin had a advantage against Bitcoin inside the early years since it has faster confirmation moment, although the newer generation blockchains are even quicker. The power Litecoin has vs the newer blockchains will be in merchant ownership. Part 2 solutions have been designed which arguably is much better to get small purchases due to privacy and speed. Lightning Market, which was launched before in 2018, already possesses over 3, 600 systems. Should it become prosperous, paying having Litecoin will be even significantly less compelling.

Litecoin is supported by the Litecoin Foundation which usually does not have a wide range of solutions (see their latest economic statements: https://litecoin-foundation.org/2018/07/unaudited-financial-statements-2018-05. Bottom line General Rating: B We have now a neutral view on Litecoin because when Litecoin likes a large community helping often the coin, there will be no technical features special to this. Having stable coins and coating two solutions becoming more and even more well-known, Litecoin�s price proposition to be a sound method of alternate diminishes. In Litecoin QT Windows Wallet that Litecoin is successful in upgrading certain features, those functions will be burned to help Bitcoin soon, much like exactly how SegWit was completed. In the event the upgrade neglects, it would negatively impact the particular cryptocurrency. Consequently, going in advance, most of us think Litecoin would not include any important unique benefits that may differentiate itself from the other cryptocurrencies.

[papermoonloveslucy]

Lucy Gets Caught Up in the Draft

S5;E9 ~ November 14, 1966

Synopsis

Lucy Carmichael gets an induction letter for a “Lou C” Carmichael telling her to report for military duty. While Mr. Mooney is trying to get it straightened out, a drill sergeant puts Lucy through the paces rather than ignore protocol.  

Regular Cast

Lucille Ball (Lucy Carmichael), Gale Gordon (Theodore J. Mooney)

Mary Jane Croft (Mary Jane Lewis) does not appear in this episode, but Lucy does have a telephone conversation with her. 

Guest Cast

Clark Howat (Army Lieutenant Howat) was known for playing sobering law enforcement officials as well as military, doctors and politicos. He was a member of Jack Webb's stock company and had a recurring role as Webb's police captain on "Dragnet."  This marks his only appearance with Lucille Ball.

Although the character's surname is not spoken aloud, it is written on his office door.

Herb Vigran (Major Cooper, the Doctor) played Jule, Ricky Ricardo’s music agent on two episodes of “I Love Lucy” in addition to playing movie publicist Hal Sparks in “Lucy is Envious” (ILL S3;23). He was seen in the Lucy-Desi film The Long, Long Trailer. This is the last of his six episodes of “The Lucy Show.” He played doctors in four of them!  A month after this episode, he made his second of four appearances on “Gomer Pyle: USMC” with Jim Nabors.  

Although the character's surname and rank are not spoken aloud, it is written on his office door.  

Harry Hickox (Marine Drill Sergeant) was best known for playing anvil salesman Charlie Cowell in the 1962 film The Music Man. He also played a Sergeant named King on “No Time for Sergeants” (1964-65). When not playing sergeants, he specialized in sheriffs. He will do three episodes of “Here's Lucy,” all as policemen, once as a sergeant!    

Ben Gage (Marine Lieutenant) was once married to Hollywood swimming starlet Esther Williams. His first screen appearance was as an uncredited swimmer in her 1954 film Dangerous When Wet. Their names were mentioned as attending Lucy and Ricky's Mocambo anniversary party in “Hollywood Anniversary” (ILL S4;E23, below). 

They couple divorced in 1959. This is the first of Gage's two “Lucy Show” appearances. He will next play a policeman in “Lucy and Sid Caesar” (S6;E23).  

Jim Nabors (“Gomer Pyle”) was a square-jawed and amiable singer and actor born in 1930 in Alabama. He started playing Gomer Pyle on “The Andy Griffith Show” in 1962, which followed “The Lucy Show” on CBS prime time and was filmed on the Desilu backlot. In 1964 his character was spun off into his own series “Gomer Pyle: USMC” with Gomer enlisting in the US Marines. The series continued until 1969, although Nabors sometimes played the character in TV specials and reunions. In 2013, the 82-year-old Nabors married his life partner of 38 years, retired firefighter Stan Cadwallader. He died in 2017 at age 87.

Nabors enters at the very end of the episode, but does not state his name nor is he listed in the final credits. The gag depends on the TV viewing audience having seen “Gomer Pyle: USMC.”  

Sid Gould (Joe, the Postman) made more than 45 appearances on “The Lucy Show,” all as background characters. He also did 40 episodes of “Here’s Lucy.” Gould (born Sydney Greenfader) was Lucille Ball’s cousin by marriage to Gary Morton.

Marine Sergeant Pierce (who demonstrates the rifle drill) and eight male background performers play the other recruits and are not listed in the credits. 

The final draft of this script was dated June 15, 1966. The episode was filmed on August 11, 1966. It is sometimes referred to by the title “Lucy Gets Caught in the Draft” (no “Up”) which could infer she was feeling a “draft” from an open door or window, not that she was conscripted into military service.  

From 1940 until 1973, during both peacetime and periods of conflict, men were drafted to fill vacancies in the United States Armed Forces that could not be filled through voluntary means. The draft ended when the US moved to an all-volunteer military force. However, the Selective Service System remains in place as a contingency plan; all male civilians between the ages of 18 and 25 are required to register so that a draft can be readily resumed if needed. Women have never had to register for the US draft, although a 2016 bill came close to making it a requirement.

Lucy Carmichael has already served her country, as a WAVE in the US Navy during World War II. This fact was often mentioned back in Danfield, but hasn't been discussed at all in California.  

Gale Gordon gets some tepid entrance applause from the studio audience.

Mr. Mooney buys Lucy a sandwich that costs thirty five cents (around $2.80 in today, adjusting for inflation). Lucy's manicure cost $2 plus a fifty cent tip!  That would be nearly $20 today.

This is the first mention of Lucy's son since his appearance in “Lucy the Choirmaster” (S4;E14), more than a year earlier.  At the end of the episode, Mr. Mooney notes that Lucy is exempt from the draft because she has two children. Her daughter, Chris Carmichael, however, has not been mentioned by name since season 4 when Lucy said she was attending college in Northern California.

Mr. Mooney brags that he was an officer in the last war. In “Lucy and the Submarine” (S5;E2) he also brags about his military experience, but we later learned that he was a Navy housing officer stationed outside of Wichita. 

Lucy compares Mr. Mooney to Simon Legree, the tyrannical slave owner in the Harriet Beacher Stowe's 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. The book was previously referenced in “Lucy and the Countess Lose Weight” (S3;E21) and “Lucy is Her Own Lawyer” (S2;E23).

Most of the humor in the episode comes from Lucy being a female in a male-oriented environment like the US military (circa 1966). When the doctor first sees Lucy, he infers that she may be a man in a dress, a tactic that some used in order to be classified as homosexual or transvestite, which was then considered an instant “4-F” (rejection) from military service. The best example of this ploy (although he was not successful) was the character of Klinger (played by Jamie Farr, above) on TV's “M*A*S*H.” Farr had guest starred on “Lucy, the Rain Goddess” (S4;E15).  

In the TV universe, this Gomer Pyle crossover brings the loop of shows filmed at Desilu full circle:

Lucy Ricardo would meet Danny Williams (Danny Thomas) and his TV family on an episode of “The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour”; 

Danny Williams drives through Mayberry and meets Sheriff Taylor, which spawns “The Andy Griffith Show”; 

“The Andy Griffith Show” is where the Gomer Pyle (Jim Neighbors) character began before getting his own show; 

and now Gomer, although unnamed and uncredited, turns up on “The Lucy Show,” although here she is Lucy Carmichael, not Lucy Ricardo (even though both women share the maiden name McGillacuddy). 

The upshot of all of this is that Lucy Ricardo and Lucy Carmichael both exist in the same world. Ponder that, fans!

Jim Nabors' cameo as Gomer Pyle is similar to the way “Here's Lucy” presents a cameo by Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden from “The Honeymooners” in “Lucy Meets Jack Benny” (HL S1;E2): 

Both arrive at the end of the episode, 

Do not give their names, 

Play a recognizable TV character dressed in their character's costumes from the show, 

And get laughs based on viewers having watched their TV shows!  

Callbacks!

The plot of this episode is similar to 1951's “Drafted” (ILL S1;E11), where Lucy Ricardo reads a letter from the Army that Ricky is to report to Fort Dix. Lucy thinks he has been drafted, but he is simply going there to entertain. Like many early episodes of “I Love Lucy,” this plot is almost identical to “George Is Drafted,” a January 1951 episode of Lucy’s radio show (co-starring Gale Gordon) “My Favorite Husband.”

In “Lucy Meets Orson Welles” (ILL S6;E3) Welles calls Lucy “the Princess Loo Cee” during his magic act, another homonym of Lucy.  

Lucy Carmichael previously wore fatigues in “Lucy and the Military Academy” (S2;E10) where she went undercover as a male soldier in order to visit her son. She also faced an obstacle course consisting of a tire step, landing net climb, and a tunnel crawl. Naturally, Lucy has trouble with every one of them in both episodes. 

In this episode, the tunnel crawl is made out of wire and present on the course, but is not attempted by the recruits. Coincidentally, both episodes begin with Sid Gould playing a mailman delivering a letter from Lucy's son in Military School.

Blooper Alerts!

What’s In A Name? When Lucy receives a letter from her son in the beginning of this episode, she calls him 'Jimmy' instead of correctly calling him 'Jerry.' According to Geoffrey Mark Fidelman's The Lucy Book, when Lucille Ball was handed the script for the first time, she complained that they had used the wrong name. She was reminded that it was 'Jimmy' Garrett who played 'Jerry' Carmichael. Ball still insisted that she was right and (picking their battles, probably) the crew left the reference as 'Jimmy.' However it came about, it certainly is one of the biggest mistakes of the series.

Hair & Make-Up! Although Lucy was at first mistaken for a man during the episode, her hair wasn't cut nearly as short as the other recruits and she still wears her thick eyelashes.

Period of Adjustment! In clarifying the name error to the Doctor, Lucy says the letter was meant for “Lou period C period.” Why would there be a period after “Lou”?  

Say It Again! If Lucille Ball thought another actor's line was not heard due to loud audience laughter, she would say “What did you say?” to cue them to repeat it, which is just what she does with Jim Nabors' only line.  

His Reputation Precedes Him! When Nabors announces he is Lucy Carmichael's replacement, Lucy laughs and says to the Drill Sergeant “Good luck, buddy!” and the Sergeant rolls his eyes in dismay. They both seem to know who the new soldier is and his reputation for being a screw-up. But how?  

“Lucy Gets Caught Up in the Draft” rates 3 Paper Hearts out of 5

[news-mashable-yahoopartner-blog]

Everywhere you look there’s a massive Trump bump

Everywhere you look, there's the Trump Bump.

What's the Trump Bump? It's the fresh rise of activism, it's the traffic jumps for online news outlets and it's the pumped-up entertainment industry that we have seen in the month following President Donald Trump's inauguration. 

SEE ALSO: An orange alligator exists and people are calling it 'Trumpigator'

If you've been wondering how wide Trump's reach actually is and how many industries have been impacted, here are all the things blessed or cursed by the mighty Trump bump.

Subscriptions to the 'failing' New York Times

Every time Trump hates on media outlets like the New York Times, CNN and NBC News, they get another click. The president's attention means that more people are signing up to get information from these and other trustworthy news sources. In the weeks after Trump's election, the Times saw its paid subscribers reach 2.5 million, per Politico. 

Reuters reported Thursday that this past quarter the Times added a record 276,000 new digital subscribers. The Wall Street Journal scored 113,000 new digital subscribers, while the Financial Times' digital subscriptions rose 6 percent.

The failing @nytimes talks about anonymous sources and meetings that never happened. Their reporting is fiction. The media protects Hillary!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 14, 2016

Conservative news outlet Breitbart has shot up the charts since Trump became president. This Alexa web traffic data shows the huge jump.

Image: alexa

CNN, which has been covering practically every moment of the new Trump administration, also saw an Donald Trump boost. The company reported "historical records," with the day after the election as the cable news outlet website's "most trafficked day ever" with 483 million page views.

Protests (it's the new brunch)

The resistance is growing. Whether it's bodega strikes, a massive Women's March, airport rallies, a Day Without Immigrants and tech company walk-outs, protesting and exercising your first amendment right is becoming an everyday thing.

Wikipedia has been tracking anti-Trump protests around the U.S. and world since Election Day and into Trump's presidency. More than two dozen demonstrations have been tracked since Jan. 20, not including the huge turn out around the world for the Women's March. Several big marches are still coming up: A Day Without Women, March for Science, and Tax Day.

"Protest is the New Brunch" at 10:30am #LGBTQ solidarity rally in #Seattle. Join #NoDAPL protest Broadway #WellsFargo noon @RefuseFascism pic.twitter.com/JWM95kC3gV

— Margo Heights (@eyes2future) February 11, 2017

Hate spike

Sadly, social activism isn't the only thing getting a boost this election season. Hateful speech and violence against minorities, immigrants, Muslims, women and more has become more prevalent. In the week and a half after Trump won the election, the Southern Poverty Law Center tracked a hefty 867 hate crimes. 

That's a huge chunk in a short amount of time compared to the number of total hate crimes in a year. In 2015, there were 5,850 hate incidents reported the entire year, according to the FBI. In just the week and a half after Trump's win nearly 15 percent of the year's total hate incidents were reported. 

Saturday Night Live ratings

With Trump in office, SNL sketches and cold opens are featuring a lot more of Trump and his team. Melissa McCarthy's Sean Spicer impression along with Alec Baldwin's Trump impersonation is quite the winning combination. The Feb. 11 show brought in the best ratings in six years at 16 million viewers. When Trump was on the show in 2015 his episode reached only 9.3 million viewers.

For other late night shows, covering Trump has also been a boon. Stephen Colbert's Late Show has rocketed to the top in February after trailing behind the Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. For two weeks straight, Colbert has pulled in more than 3 million viewers, up from an average of 2.68 million viewers a week in December, according to Nielsen numbers. Colbert's new perch on the top coincides with more coverage of Trump, with the show digging into the president and his decisions. 

Pink Yarn

After the Women's March, pink cat ear "pussyhats" have become a de facto uniform for the resistance fighting against a Trump administration and the president's policies. 

Ahead of the march, finding pink yarn to join in on the popular Pussyhat Project was a struggle. For the upcoming "Day Without Women," pink yarn will no doubt become a scarce commodity once again. Get in early.

Pussy strikes back.

Image: AP Photo/Elaine Thompson

Books about our likely dystopian future

Amazon can barely keep up with the demand for certain books. 1984 and the Handmaid's Tale were both unexpected popular sellers in the weeks since Trump took office, with the George Orwell classic sold out online at one point. A San Francisco bookstore was even giving away free copies of the dystopian reads.

Trump might not be a big reader, but his 1987 book The Art of the Deal is back in best-seller territory following his big election win. Just this week the book is No. 80 on Amazon's best sellers list for books. Back when Trump announced his candidacy in July 2015 it was way back at No. 1,128. CNN reported the book was No. 1 on Amazon's Entrepreneurship list at the end of 2016.

Donald Trump's Art of the Deal is back at the top of the charts 30 years later.

Image: Charlie Neibergall/AP/REX/Shutterstock

The stock market

The stock market and beyond is having its Trump moment too. The Dow Jones, Nasdaq and S&P are at record highs since the election. Markets are up 10 percent since the election. 

Even private prison stocks have jumped since Trump won. Stocks for the two biggest private prison companies, CoreCivic and Geo Group, are up 140 percent and 98 percent, respectively, according to CNN. Trump had promised during his campaign to keep contracts with private facilities even after the U.S. Department of Justice said these types of prisons were problematic for inmate safety. Last week, the new Attorney General Jeff Sessions agreed. Private prisons: 1. Prisoner rights: 0.

One other business that benefitted from Trump's meddling: Nordstrom. More recently the department store chain saw a small stock bump presumably led by the anti-Trump movement after the president went after the store for dropping his daughter Ivanka's fashion line. Following what many saw as a conflict of interest with Trump targeting the retailer, Nordstrom was met with a flurry of support. 

After Trump’s tweet on Feb. 8, Nordstrom stock jumped from a high of $44.54 to $46.07 the next day. In the days and weeks since, the price has creeped up and stayed up. Almost three weeks after the tweet, Nordstrom is now at $47.86.

My daughter Ivanka has been treated so unfairly by @Nordstrom. She is a great person — always pushing me to do the right thing! Terrible!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 8, 2017

This whole "Trump tweets about a company" keeps happening so much that there are now apps to alert you when Trump mentions a company — for better or worse. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Motors and Toyota are just some of the companies that have gotten the Trump treatment. In Boeing's case this meant a huge drop: within an hour of Trump's tweet, the company's value dropped $4 billion — with a "b."

Slovenian tourism

With our model-turned-first lady hailing from the eastern European country of Slovenia, it's no surprise her home country is becoming a destination. Even her small hometown is seeing the benefits of a Trump presidency. According to the Slovenian Tourist Board, American tourism has jumped 11 percent in the past year. Thanks, Melania.

Welcome to Sevnica, Slovenia!

Image: AP Photo/Darko Bandic

Trump's wallet

Isn't it convenient when your presidency directly affects your family business? Trump's "Winter White House" in Florida saw membership prices double following his inauguration. The initial fee for a Mar-a-Lago membership is now at $200,000. So much for any chance of him actually divesting from his business. 

Even more egregiously, Trump Hotels have a plan for nationwide expansion, which would triple the number of his hotels around the country.

Donations for days

The ACLU has seen donations coming in fast and furious. After Trump's executive order came down limiting travel for refugees and immigrants, donations to the ACLU were through the roof. The organization raised as much money in the last weekend of January, which followed travel ban, as they did in all previous years. That's more than $24 million in a few days.

Update: the @ACLU just ran the numbers again. Spokesman says the group received 356,306 online donations totaling $24,164,691 this weekend.

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) January 30, 2017

As Trump continues to threaten to defund Planned Parenthood, financial support has been coming into that organization as well. Especially helpful is the long list of celebrity pleas asking for support for the health care organization. Celebs, including Katy Perry who donated $10,000, are using Twitter to encourage donations. Indie singer Halsey promised $1 to the organization for every retweet. She ended up giving $100,000.  

Lyft riders

Inadvertently, Trump's short-lived travel ban gave ride-hailing app Lyft a boost. It's competitor Uber got caught up in a PR nightmare during a taxi strike at JFK International Airport. Once #DeleteUber started trending, Lyft was the unexpected benefactor of Trump's controversial policies. This Lyft chart from App Annie shows how just a whisper of Trump can sway app rankings. Notice that Trump bump at the end of January when the ban was first introduced.

Lyft's app rankings sine Trump's inauguration are up and away.

Image: app annie

The Trump bump is not just relegated to a preponderance of red Make America Great Again hats. It's found in book sales, the Dow Jones, ride-hailing apps and social activism. Trump is actually everywhere.

BONUS: Trump claims drugs are cheaper than candy, Americans collectively facepalm

[nrip]

How Could Digital Tools Help Fight Against Anti-Vaccination?

Anti-vaccination movements lure increasingly more people into skipping potentially life-saving immunization against infectious diseases, such as measles, mumps, or rubella, highly impairing herd immunity for entire communities. Social media platforms could restrict the reach of anti-vax messages, groups, and activities, with algorithms recommending tailor-made content and health apps providing information about vaccinations. Here’s our collection of the most recent steps and digital tools supporting the fight against anti-vaccination and its believers.

300 percent increase in measles globally

In a widely shared social media post from around two years ago, a person planning to travel with their toddler mentioned having heard that certain airline companies vaccinate people through the air conditioning system. The person was reaching out to seek additional information on which airlines were doing this. Now, you can laugh or feel terrible about a message that is wrong on many levels (starting with the absolutely zero availability of airborne vaccines), the fact is that fake news and conspiracy theories around vaccination are thriving – and this unfortunately already shows in the statistics.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has raised alarm over a 300 percent increase in the case of measles globally in the first quarter of 2019 compared with last year, and it declared vaccination hesitancy as one of its ten most important threats to global health. So far this year, 170 countries have reported 112,163 measles cases to the WHO, while in April 2018, 163 countries reported 28,124 cases.

The disease has made a comeback in both the developed and the developing world for different reasons. Measles cases in Europe are at a 20-year high, and 72 children and vulnerable adults died of it in 2018, twice as many as a year before. New York City’s mayor declared a public health emergency in parts of Brooklyn in April 2019, after a measles outbreak emerged in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, where some had resisted vaccination on religious grounds. The WHO said that the most dramatic rise in cases – a 700-percent increase compared with last year – has been reported on the African continent, which has weaker vaccination coverage than other regions.

Source: www.medium.com

Skepticism is as infectious as a disease

Although lack of access to vaccination and religious reasons add to the causes of vaccination hesitancy, the biggest problem is lately the global spread of the anti-vaccination movement fueled by various celebrities, anti-establishment politicians and political movements, and social media platforms. One of the loudest anti-vaccine voices and presenter of an assumed (though completely false and scientifically absolutely not supported) link between vaccines and autism is actress Jenny McCarthy. But Jim Carrey, Selma Blair, Kirstie Alley or Charlie Sheen have all expressed views either against vaccination itself or the idea of mandatory vaccination.

While the phenomenon of skepticism towards vaccination or medicine in general is not new, it’s recurring with a newly found resilience. As an example from the past, we could mention the refusal of numerous British parents to vaccinate their children in the 1970s and 1980s against whooping cough or pertussis, in response to the publication of a report in 1974 that credited 36 negative neurological reactions to the whole-cell pertussis vaccine. This caused a decrease in the pertussis vaccine uptake in the UK from 81% in 1974 to 31% in 1980, eventually resulting in a pertussis outbreak in the UK, putting severe strain and pressure on the National Health System.

It seems that the toll of infectious diseases on human life, such as that of measles, mumps, and rubella, has already been largely erased from the collective memory of humankind. Parallelly, the rise of fake news and conspiracy theories about the greediness of vaccine manufacturing companies and the fear of the potential harm that vaccines allegedly cause has taken over significant space in the public discourse. Not to mention emphasizing the rights of the individual to decide for themselves and the fight to revoke compulsory vaccination. The latter is potentially even more harmful, as it damages herd immunity.

Source: www.labblog.uofmhealth.org

Access to the right information empowers – access to the wrong one can make you die

Contrary to the false claims of fake news and conspiracy theories, the WHO estimates that vaccination is one of the most cost-effective ways of avoiding disease: it currently prevents 2-3 million deaths a year, and a further 1.5 million could be avoided if global coverage of vaccinations improved. With those impressive numbers in mind, how come the anti-vaccination movement has become so strong?

As mentioned before, one of the reasons might be the forgetfulness of human communities with regards to the consequences of infectious diseases, or the ‘invisibility’ of some of the vaccine preventable diseases. Yet another significant reason and at the same time a unique feature of the latest anti-vaccination uptake is the fast and easy spread of misinformation on new media platforms. In January, a report published by the Royal Society for Public Health found that half of all parents with small children have been exposed to misinformation about vaccines on social media.“Anti-vaxx” groups target the parents of new babies, posting stories that claim babies have died or have been harmed by vaccination. A US group called Stop Mandatory Vaccination, run by Larry Cook, was censured by the UK’s advertising watchdog in November over a paid-for Facebook post, following a complaint by the mother of a young baby in the UK. The problem is so widespread that EU health commissioner Vytenis Andriukaitis has warned against the peddling of “fake news” about vaccine safety.

These viral messages work just as political propaganda, and it’s also not surprising that some of the most vocal opponents prove to be populist politicians such as Donald Trump or Marine Le Pen in France. The key is in the repetition of such messages: if you listen to a negative message several times over a longer period, it sticks with you and may influence your attitude no matter what you rationally think. In an age when the problem is not the access to health information anymore but rather that most people have to face a data overflow, finding the right piece of knowledge will be the biggest challenge – as the ‘right’ information will make you empowered but fake information might get you into serious health trouble.

Source: www.wired.com

Social media to the rescue?

That’s why the appropriate assessment of online information and the role of social media giants in restricting space for the spread of such message is becoming crucial in clamping down anti-vaxxers. The former necessitates the education of internet users about how to evaluate online medical information (here is our guide to it), while the second requires a systemic response from such companies as Facebook, YouTube or Amazon.

Zuckerberg’s company is the number one hotbed of misleading health information. As it has been facing a lot of criticism, in August 2018, Facebook deleted dozens of pages dedicated to fringe or holistic medicine in an apparent crackdown on pseudoscience. As the measure was clearly not enough, in March 2019, Facebook announced that it will no longer allow anti-vax messages to be promoted through ads or recommendations, and will make it less prominent in search results. The social network will not take down anti-vaccine posts entirely, however. The company also said it was exploring ways to give users more context about vaccines from “expert organizations.”

Other platforms are increasing their efforts, too. Pinterest, a digital platform popular with parents, took an unusual step to crack down on the proliferation of anti-vaccination propaganda in February 2019. It tweaked its search bar – if you type “vaccine” or “anti-vax”, nothing will pop up. A month later, Amazon yanked at least five anti-vaccination documentaries questioning the safety of vaccines from its Prime Video streaming platform. Moreover, GoFundMe announced in March 2019 that it has banned anti-vaxxer campaigns collecting money for spreading misinformation.

Still, we believe that YouTube, Facebook, or Google should not only make anti-vax messages disappear, but they should also be pushing for even better visibility of ‘vaccination advocates’ or influencers at the expense of accounts spreading misinformation or outright fake news. As the WHO says, health workers, especially those embedded in communities, remain the most trusted advisors and influencers of vaccination decisions, and they must be supported to provide trusted, credible information on vaccines. This could only happen with knowledge bases, such as Google, Facebook, or YouTube pushing back online anti-vaccination propaganda with efficient measures – thus we expect them to step up their game even more in the coming months.

Source: www.wsj.com

With algorithms, VR and Siri against anti-vaxxers

How can digital health tools outside the realm of communication and social media platforms help? Well, there are quite a few ways to bring health technology into the fight against anti-vaxxers, but we have a couple of ideas for the developers, too.

Sophisticated algorithms could play a role in addressing vaccine hesitancy. Just as Amazon and Netflix are adept at suggesting products and movies that ‘people like you’ might enjoy, health systems could build individually tailored messages most likely to resonate with individuals.

Alternatively, innovative solutions could provide new opportunities to inform those at risk that they should be vaccinated, for example through reminders via SMS alerts and dedicated health apps. For example, VaccApp has been designed to help parents keep track of vaccinations. Devised by the Vienna Vaccine Safety Initiative, the app covers 25 vaccines, including those on the routine immunisation schedule, vaccines recommended for particular population sub-groups, and travel vaccines. Voice assistants, such as Siri or Amazon Alexa could also be pulled into the fight in the future. Not only could they help with the easy scheduling of vaccinations and keeping the vaccination diaries up-to-date, but they could also potentially “talk” about the benefits of the step with users.

Some other innovations might mitigate the discomfort that children feel when getting vaccinated. In a study of 244 children at Sansum Clinic locations in Santa Barbara and Lompoc, California, roughly half of the children were given virtual reality goggles to view ocean scenes while getting their seasonal flu shot. Parents reported that their sons and daughters experienced 48 percent less pain and 52 percent less fear, and the clinicians mentioned even higher numbers – 75 percent less pain and 71 percent less fear. The Hermes Pardini Laboratories’ VR Vaccine campaign battled children’s fear of taking vaccine shots wonderfully. Children could immerse themselves in the virtual world of a lively cartoon where they can feel like superheroes building a shield against monsters by getting the “Fire Fruit” – the actual shot in reality.

[deadcactuswalking]

Every Snoop Dogg & Pharrell Hit Song Reviewed, Part 1 (BLAST TO THE PAST)

Fo-shizzle, dizzle. It’s the big Neptizzle with the Snoopy D-O-double-jizzle! Name a better duo. I bet you millions that you can’t. I’d explain to you who these guys are, but don’t kid yourself, you know who they are, even if you’ve never heard a song by them (which is equally impossible). Both Snoop and Pharrell have transcended the music at this point and are worldwide personalities, starring in television, film and overall just being essential to pop culture. I cannot imagine a world without Calvin Cordozar Broadus, Jr.

Snoop and Pharrell were very close in the 2000s, specially the early and mid-2000s, when Pharrell’s group, the Neptunes, were massive hitmakers, producing tracks for JAY-Z, Pusha T, Kelis, Beyoncé, Justin Timberlake and more, including, of course, Snoop Dogg. Their funkier R&B-infused pop stylings were perfect for Snoop Dogg’s move from a “gangsta” image to a more soulful “pimp” image, sort of following 50 Cent’s footsteps as he shook the world with his debut album. Snoop’s gone through many phases and has had many companions throughout the decades he’s been active, but Master P, Wiz Khalifa and even Dr. Dre can never stack up to Pharrell and the Neptunes, who provided Snoop with some of his best material ever... which I’m surprised didn’t chart as well as I assumed in the US. I mean, Pharrell was everywhere, but I guess Snoop didn’t catch on as well as I thought excluding a few choice cuts. That’s beside the point. Welcome to BLAST TO THE PAST.

BLAST TO THE PAST: All Snoop Dogg & Pharrell Hits Reviewed

Yep, today, I’m reviewing all of the known and credited Snoop Dogg and Pharrell collaborations to chart on the Hot 100. The criteria is simple: it has to have Snoop Dogg performing with Pharrell or the Neptunes either performing or producing the track – and this had to be clear and credited work. I’m not looking into musical history to find all the tracks Pharrell has ghostwritten for Snoop, or how he provides ad-libs on a Dr. Dre deep cut. These are just the hits from the Dogg and Skateboard P. Before we get into this, however, let’s answer a couple questions you may be wondering.

How many of these songs are there?

To my surprise, there’s only six – and that’s including a feature. Yeah, to my surprise, only six of these tracks ever hit the Hot 100... and that is NOT including songs released by Snoop on Star Trak, the Neptunes’ record label, which he signed to in 2004, and left years later. That would be a bit much to ask, since Snoop is a superstar and he was under this label for a long time; I’d run out of both time and simply things to talk about... although I would have loved to talk about their 2010s collaboration “Peaches N Cream” that sadly never charted.

Why are you doing this?

Well, first of all: I love both of these guys. Snoop Dogg and Pharrell have made a lot of my favourite hip-hop tracks throughout the years, and they’re also icons, so I figured it’d be interesting to look at some of their history together.

Oh, and also because they’re still both charting and making hits in 2018. Yep, in fact, Snoop Dogg’s charting right now – at #63 on the Hot 100 as I write this is comedian Lil Duval’s “Smile  (Living My Best Life)”, featuring Ball Greezy and Snoop Dogg. That’s insane for him, nearly 50 charting songs into his career, and countless other songs, television appearances and three decades of being a worldwide star, he’s still writing hit songs with up-and-coming artists. Same could be said with Pharrell, actually, as he had his own hit song earlier this year, “Lemon” featuring Rihanna, and back in 2013 and 2014, was bigger than he ever was. These guys have some pretty impressive longevity, and I kind of wanted to honour that. So, enough of me rambling. Let’s start with the first ever charting song from the duo...

#1 – “From tha Chuuuch to da Palace” – Snoop Dogg

Hot 100 Peak: #77 | Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs Peak: #23

This is “From tha Chuuuch to da Palace”, released on October 15th, 2002, written by Snoop, Pharrell and... R. Kelly. Well, then.

Produced by the Neptunes and featuring uncredited vocals from Pharrell, this was the lead single to Snoop’s sixth album, Paid tha Cost to be da Bo$$, released in 2002, that I actually own on CD, funnily enough. This album was a step in the right direction from reinventing his image after the No Limit Records era, as he signed to Priority and hooked up with the Neptunes, Just Blaze, Ludacris and more to establish a poppier form of his typical brand of relaxed gangsta rap. The now-platinum-certified album sold 174,000 copies in its first week – and this success was assisted by not only a controversy involving the final track “Pimp Slapp’d” but also the two singles that were released to promote the record. This first hit only peaked at #77, but, trust me – it probably had its fair share of MTV play considering the very well-directed and humorous video that may seem a bit dated now, but back when these types of humorous skits were more of a focal point in music videos, this was cool, alright? What about the song, though? How does that hold up today? Well, I’ll tell you what’s “fo’ shizzle” – this is a banger of a track, although it’s not the best way to introduce yourself to Pharrell’s works with Snoop, because this is more of a Timbaland beat than a Neptunes one. Sure, there are some elements of Neptunes, like Pharrell’s catchy hook, but theheavy synth-work and gang vocals typical of late 2000s Timbaland beats are here to stay for the whole of the song (and, yes, it does get old by the end)... however, all that does is prove how forward-thinking the Neptunes were, especially since this wasn’t exactly the style people digged in 2002, to my knowledge, and it wasn’t exactly an exclusively Timbaland style; Pharrell’s always loved his over-the-top electronics, but it’s kind of an outlier when you compare it to everything else these guys made together. Is that a bad thing? No, not necessarily, Snoop has enough charisma to carry the verses, and I love his comically-strained vocal interpolation of “Contagion” by Ron Isley in the first verse, as well as Pharrell taking the role of Bill Gates in the third, but, man, the synths are overbearing and really get grating by the end of the four minutes. Oh, and that bridge is kind of mind-numbing as well, the back-to-back repetition from Snoop and Pharrell feels like it goes on forever. Sorry, guys, it’s not awful, but this is not the best first impression. Do you know what is, however?

#2 – “Beautiful” – Snoop Dogg featuring Pharrell and Uncle Charlie Wilson

Hot 100 Peak: #6 | Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs Peak: #3

Now, what a classic this song is. This was Snoop’s first top 10 hit since 1994, and won the Neptunes a Grammy for Producer of the Year. It’s a relatively long song at nearly five minutes but it delivers enough throughout the whole runtime to make it not feel like a slog, probably because it was written by the Neptunes, who are fantastic songwriters as well as producers. The single was released on January 21st, 2003, accompanying a video set in Brazil with a dope tribal drum interlude... and,yes, the video is still very beneficial to the song’s success, at least in my eyes. It probably helped it reach the top 10, but the main reason I think it adds to the song (other than the drum solo) is that it features Snoop ogling a young woman. I know what you’re thinking, oh, it’s just a typical rap music video, but the clip and even the chorus, which is beautifully sung by Pharrell and absolute legend Charlie Wilson (whose voice is heavenly), is intentionally misleading. It tricks the listener to think it’s just a song about wanting to do it with some girls in a club or picking up a woman he finds attractive, or whatever, but it’s actually a bit less straightforward, because in the liner notes of the album and single, the song is claimed to be ���written in response to Snoop’s love for his daughter”. So, yeah, while people like Rap Critic have bashed on some of the lines for seeming somewhat strange in the context of picking up a girl...

Little cutie, looking like a student

Hurry up and finish so we can watch Clueless (oh!)

...but most of this is legitimately sweet interaction from Snoop with his daughter, although it still doesn’t explain this line.

The girl want to do it, I just might do it / Hit her up with some pimp-pimp fluid

If anything, it just makes it seem worse... wait, no, it makes pretty much EVERYTHING worse.

Little cutie, looking like a student / Long hair with your big fat booty

Mommy, don’t worry, I won’t abuse it

We just blow ‘dro and keep the flow moving

Let’s just ignore the liner notes that imply he has an immorally and illegally close relationship with his weed-smoking daughter that he roofied in the first verse... that R. Kelly credit is starting to make sense. Okay, so if it’s just the hook that’s about his daughter, that’s fine, and hell, even if it’s just about Snoop’s lady, it makes some lines even sweeter.

When I see my baby-boo, sh**, I get foolish / Smack a n**** that tries to pursue it

I smack up the world if they’re rude to you

Hit her up with some pimp-pimp fluid

Okay, so, maybe not that last one but my point is that Snoop’s bars are cute for the most part, which fits the smooth, funky and soulful beat, full of energetic ad-libs from Pharrell and an incredibly catchy tropical guitar-riff and some occasional glimmers of a synth melody. Oh, and don’t get me started on that bridge, because, oh, the bridge is a chorus in itself. Charlie, albeit sounding somewhat compressed, harmonises smoothly with Pharrell until a sweet hand-clap section that fades out into an outro, and, oh, I can’t even describe it in words. Listen to this song, it will make your day. There are a lot of songs about beautiful girls – “Beautiful Girls” by Sean Kingston is mediocre and mentions suicide (just beautiful), “Beautiful” by Bazzi and Camila Cabello is dull and dreary, with some awful performance, while this song? It just works. It pulls it off with little to no effort... yet it’s not even the best song here.

#3

Don’t tell me what I’m not, just because I drops it like it’s hot – Positive K, “Ain’t No Crime”

Now—now—now—now—now, after you back it up, then stop / Then – wha—wha—what? – drop—drop it like it’s hot – Lil Wayne, “Back that Azz Up”

Stick their arm in a car window, drop it like it’s hot – DJ Clark Kent, “Cashmere Thoughts”

Pop, and stop, and drop it like it’s hot – DJ Quik, “Sexuality”

“Drop it like it’s hot” is the gangsta-rap “Hakuna Matata”, and I’m not even sure what that means myself, but who cares? By September 2004, we were heading into the crunk boom and the title of Snoop and Pharrell’s next collaboration had even been uttered in Big Momma’s House, but they made it fresh. This is Billboard’s top rap song of the 2000s, the 350th most popular song of all time, and more importantly, one of the best songs of all time.

#3 – “Drop it Like it’s Hot” – Snoop Dogg featuring Pharrell

Hot 100 Peak: #1 | Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs Peak: #1

Now THIS is the classic I was excited to talk about, Snoop Dogg’s first of three #1s and Pharrell’s second of five. This two-times platinum-certified track was the lead single from the Dogg’s 2004 effort, R&G (Rhythm & Gangsta): The Masterpiece, and ushered in a new wave and attitude to hip-hop production (no wonder people comment “2018 and this still pure fire” with a bunch of emojis, because it fits into the current climate of hip-hop so well). Yep, you can thank the trap you’re listening to right now and the crunk you may have grown up with to the Neptunes’ minimalistic beat which implements only the voice, the keyboards and a drum machine, as well as subtle samples from Laid Back’s synthpop hit “White Horse”. Tongue-clicking makes up most of the slick beat here, with some fun falsetto vocals from Pharrell in the intro where he just repeats “Snoop” twice for optimal effect. Oh, and that keyboard line is iconic, with the hook being as catchy as Snoop ever could write. This song constantly gets in my head even when I really don’t want it do, it’s pretty incredible how with so little, they’ve got so many hooks here: the actual hook, the repetitive drum beat, the “Snooooop” vocals, the keyboard melody, and even the verses, which are full of memorable quips and lines, which I think reach maximum-izzle by the end of the second verse.

I can exercise you, this can be your phys. ed / Cheat on your man, ma, that’s how you get a-hizz-ead – Pharrell

So don’t change the dizzle, turn it up a little / I got a living room full of fine dime-brizzles / Waitin’ on the pizzle, the dizzle and the chizzle / G’s to the bizzack – now, ladies, here we gizzo – Snoop Dogg

I have no idea what these words mean but they sound awesome.

Oh, and there’s more attention to detail than you think there would actually be in this simple brag-rap song, apart from the genius production (that makes sure the “Snoop” vocals go from the left channel to the right channel when wearing headphones, and adds sound effects according to the lyrics like the four extra percussion hits before a ding when Pharrell mentions “four seconds” and the record scratch when Snoop mentions a DJ), with the bars being classic Snoop and surprisingly great (and oddly sexual) from Pharrell. Here are some highlights:

I’m a nice dude, with some nice dreams / See these ice cubes? See these Ice Creams? - Pharrell

He’s picking up a girl and saying “look at my jewellery and shoes”, right? Well, yes, but he’s also mentioning a relatively obscure Cheech & Chong film called Nice Dreams in which they pretend to be ice cream vendors. Do you know what the best thing about this line, though? It’s that it follows this part of the hook:

And I roll the best weed, ‘cause I got it goin’ on – Snoop Dogg

In that film, they sell weed instead of ice cream. Doesn’t everything just fit together so perfectly?

That’s whiter than what’s spilling down your throat – Pharrell

Yeah, sure, it’s about his ice supposedly being as white as his semen, but in the video, the background is completely white, so it’s likely that they were thinking about the video before the song was even written, or the video was inspired by this line. If so, that’s such a nice touch. Hell, I would say Pharrell does better than Snoop if not for this line:

Oh, you got a gun, so you wanna pop back? AK-47, now, n****, stop that! – Snoop Dogg

So effortlessly, without even trying to sound intimidating, I’m scared of Snoop, but that’s not even the intention – it’s more of a comedic talk-down to what they would consider a “fake gangsta”, and even that sounds great in the chill, relaxed flow that they both have, staying calm and collected like their wordplay is nothing. I could write a full-length review on this bonafide classic banger of a hip-hop song, and really one of the best out there, proving Pharrell and Snoop to be some of the best to ever do it... oh, and there’s punchlines that only work in text form, which is bloody hilarious.

The big bo$$ Dogg, yeah, I had to do that

And that’s the end to the first part of Every Snoop Dogg and Pharrell Hit Song Reviewed. Hopefully the second part will be coming next week, with REVIEWING THE CHARTS tomorrow. Thank you for reading and see ya!

[cryptobully-blog]

Litecoin (LTC) Smart Contracts Could Be Seeing a Surge With the Use of Abra App – The independent republic

http://cryptobully.com/litecoin-ltc-smart-contracts-could-be-seeing-a-surge-with-the-use-of-abra-app-the-independent-republic/

Litecoin (LTC) Smart Contracts Could Be Seeing a Surge With the Use of Abra App – The independent republic

Litecoin (LTC)  – Most of the times we hear a lot of noise around Litecoin (LTC). Something completely unfair, due to the various functionalities and use cases this crypto-platform gives. In 2017 this platform made significant price gains after SegWit was successfully activated. Their founder, Charlie Lee, recently announced on his tweeter that a mobile wallet- Abra- will be using Smart contracts running on Litecoin’s network. We will now take a look on all the aspects of this smart contract integration and how it can add value both to the Abra app and Litecoin network at the same time.

The Growth of Litecoin’s Network

In the beginning of 2017, Litecoin’s platform was at a value of $5, but I guess when the taste of growth got into it they did not want to stop. On the 19th of December they reached their all time high of $366 and currently, although it went down like all the other cryptocurrencies, it’s trading at $161, but at least we can see it Is stable since it didn’t go lower than the $100 mark when the crash happened. This is over 3000% growth in 15 months. Growth that has to be attributed to the return of Charlie Lee to the “Litecoin Foundation”.

Lee has almost all the credit in making Litecoin’s network reach this level of acceptance, adoption and success. Prior to returning to Litecoin’s network, which was stagnating in development, he was working has a Director of Engineering at Coinbase and after he returned, Litecoin’s network started to evolve at a fast pace. Return that not only brought improvement to the development but it also increased the adoption rate among crypto users.

Litecoin is way faster, with 2,5 minutes block times, while Bitcoin’s is 10 minutes and also the mining fees are low compared to Bitcoin. So, at the end of the day, Litecoin proves to have a big number of advantages when compared to Bitcoin, especially if it is being used as a payment system.

Good relations are very important

Charlie Lee already mentioned that the relationship of Litecoin(LTC) and Bitcoin as Silver to Gold and that both networks have complemented each other in order to adopt new technologies and grow side by side. After Bitcoin, Litecoin is considered by many to be the most secure network, due to the strength of its network and the abundant hash power.

We have seen that, 2017 was a huge step towards success for both of this Networks since SegWit was activated in both of them, which enabled a smoother collaboration between them. At the same time, the Lightning network, built on top of a blockchain platform, can be used in both Litecoin(LTC) and Bitcoin. Although, SegWit must be enabled, for Lightening network to work properly. Enabling SegWit and Lightning network, together, the payment systems turn cheaper, faster and more efficient. 

Keeping the Development as first objective

For Charlie Lee, the increase of usage, adoption and volume are more important than the price or market cap. For him, the growth in price is not has important has the growth in usage. Because, he explained that the price automatically follows if the usage is high.

To emphasize his belief, he announced that he sold all his coins so that any accusations about market manipulation turned invalid and to turn his focus 100% to the development.

For those asking, I care very little about marketcap rank. I care more about the chart on the left (# transactions) than the chart on the right (price). The Litecoin team and I are focused on the chart on the left. People need to actually use Litecoin. The price will follow. 📈 pic.twitter.com/MWemSjYKF8

— Charlie Lee [LTC] (@SatoshiLite) January 4, 2018

The integration of Litecoin in Abra

So, that is it, smart contracts will be used by Abra on Litecoin’s network in about 2 weeks. Litecoin’s network was chosen over Bitcoin Cash and other crypto-platforms, due to the fact that it has a more stable price and better network security. This is the objective: make Abra app protocol function on Litecoin’s network as a smart contract and enable the trade of other currencies in the app.

How will this work?

20 cryptocurrencies and 50 fiat currencies are allowed to use on the Abra app. Which allows the users to trade crypto-fiat, fiat-crypto and crypto-crypto pairs. The app doesn’t allow the purchase of a particular cryptocurrency directly. It only lets you invest in LTC and afterwards gives you access to other cryptocurrencies, using a smart contract incorporated on Abra.

So, first you invest on LTC, then it will lock up the LTC at the market price of the coin you desire to trade. If that coin triples in value, you can sign and get back the profits on LTC to your wallet. Basically, you never own the coin you are trading, you just get exposure to price change of owning that coin.

 The reason why Litecoin’s Network was chosen

Litecoin is considered to be less secure than Bitcoin, but it gives the user other advantages like lower fees and faster transactions.

Abra also chose Litecoin’s network over Bitcoin Cash or any other network because of their security and scalability features. But also, because we never find in this network crazy changes of value in transaction fees, which is very important to keep a crypto-platform trustworthy.

Bellow you can see another Charlie Lee tweet on this matter:

Abra chose Litecoin over Bitcoin Cash because of Litecoin’s better security and its adherence to Bitcoin’s scalability roadmap. 🐔🚀 #flappening https://t.co/ZtwLUfI1yx

— Charlie Lee [LTC] (@SatoshiLite) March 16, 2018

This are amazing news for Litecoin’s network. Accepting an exchange on their network, while other coins struggle to be accepted on exchanges.

Litecoin

[thrashermaxey]

Ramblings: Teams To Target, Injured Goalie Dilemmas, plus more…

Teams to target, injured goalies, plus more…

Hi everyone, it’s Ian pinch-hitting for Steve tonight.

In a matchup of two of the league’s hottest scorers, one was able to keep his white-hot streak intact, while the other saw his long-time streak end.

Patrik Laine scored goal number 39, giving him eight goals over his past four games and 14 goals over his past ten games. Laine was already hot when Paul Stastny joined the Jets, but he has cranked the volume even higher since Stastny’s acquisition. This is a match made in heaven for both players, as Stastny now has six points over his last five games and is suddenly a must-own in fantasy leagues. The third man on that line (Nikolaj Ehlers) also has six points over his last five games, as well as 12 points over his last 10 games.

Unfortunately for his fantasy owners who have been able to count on at least one point per game for quite a while, Taylor Hall’s personal point streak ended at 26 games. How great has it been? Hall scored 22 points over his previous 15 games played. Or to put it another way:  

New Jersey Devils scoring leaders this season:

Nico Hischier – 41 Taylor Hall's last 26 games – 38 Taylor Hall's first 36 games – 36 Jesper Bratt – 34 Kyle Palmieri – 33

— Dimitri Filipovic (@DimFilipovic) March 7, 2018

*

I posted this the other night, getting some reaction from the Twitterverse:  

So if Tuukka Rask and Ben Bishop and Antti Raanta are the goalies on one of your fantasy teams, what do you do?

— Ian Gooding (@Ian_Gooding) March 6, 2018

So here’s an update on my injured goaltending tales of woe. I added Craig Anderson and was able to wait it out with Rask, who returned on Thursday night. So I ended up with three goalies I could start: Rask, Anderson, and Charlie Lindgren. Fortunately I made the right call and started Rask and Anderson over Lindgren. I can probably get by with those three goalies for now, although I’m not super confident in Lindgren and I dropped Anderson from another team last week.

On that other team, two of my three goalies suddenly became unavailable on Monday: Antti Raanta (who I added when I dropped Anderson) and Sergei Bobrovsky. Needless to say, I was sweating because this is the week before my fantasy playoffs start and I haven’t clinched a playoff spot yet (although I am currently holding one). And my other goalie is Jaroslav Halak! It appears that Bob could start tonight (Friday), as he was able to suit up as the backup on Thursday. As well, I was able to add Darcy Kuemper and start him on Wednesday against the Canucks, picking up a victory in the process. So I’m feeling a little more settled with this team as well.

Speaking of which, don’t sleep on the Coyotes as a team that could help your fantasy squad down the stretch. At this point they have as many games left as the Bruins, Panthers, and Senators (16), which is the most of all teams. If you’re not sold on adding Raanta or Kuemper (both of whom I added to this team over the past week), keep in mind that the Yotes are 9-2-2 over the past 30 days. So their place in the standings is a bit misleading compared to the team that they are now, just because of their awful start.

Here’s a couple Coyotes to target: Derek Stepan has 13 points over his last 14 games. He’s still unowned in over two-thirds of Yahoo leagues. Clayton Keller is more likely to be owned (nearly half of Yahoo leagues). He has 13 points over his last 13 games and can play all three forward positions in Yahoo leagues, so he might be useful if you can find him.

*

Not long after I dropped Thomas Vanek after a very uneventful first few games with the Blue Jackets, he scored twice on eight shots on goal and earned a plus-3 rating on Thursday. My prediction on Vanek has been incorrect in that he is not on the Jackets’ first-unit power play. Vanek was held without a point and had taken just four shots on goal in his first four games with his new team.

Seth Jones had a similar game on Thursday, scoring a goal and adding two assists on seven shots on goal in nearly 24 minutes of icetime. Jones has eclipsed Zach Werenski as the defenseman of choice for the Blue Jackets, pushing the higher-drafted Werenski to the second-unit power play. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if this reverses itself next season, if not perhaps sooner.

The Jackets’ top-unit power play on Thursday consisted of Jones and the following forwards:

60%        PP           ATKINSON,CAM – DUBOIS,PIERRE-LUC – PANARIN,ARTEMI – WENNBERG,ALEXANDER

Werenski was able to slip in a little bit of time on the first-unit power play, as his power-play goal was assisted by Jones and Dubois. The Jackets’ power play is 30th in the NHL and went 1-for-5 on Thursday, so expect John Tortorella to continue to keep it in a state of flux while they fight for a playoff spot.

*

With an assist on Thursday, Mark Stone extended his point streak to ten games. He has 15 points over that stretch, but surprisingly only two of those points are goals.

Although his contract is constantly mentioned as one of the worst in the league ($7.25 million for four more seasons after this one), Stone’s current linemate Bobby Ryan entered Thursday’s game with eight points over his last seven games. He was held without a point on Thursday, but the Sens’ high number of games remaining (see above) makes Ryan not as bad a player to target late-season as you might think.

*

Because of Reilly Smith’s upper-body injury, Tomas Tatar was moved up to the Golden Knights’ top line with Jonathan Marchessault and William Karlsson just in time for his first meeting with the Red Wings since they traded him at the deadline. But it was the third line that did all the scoring for VGK, as Cody Eakin and Alex Tuch each scored two goals on Thursday.

Shutout shoutout to Marc-Andre Fleury, who made 28 saves.

*

It seems as if every Tampa Bay Lightning forward has been worth owning on fantasy teams as one time or another this season. The latest is Anthony Cirelli, who scored a goal and added two assists with a plus-3 on Thursday. Since his callup from the AHL, Cirelli has five points (2g-3a) in just four games. Cirelli hasn’t really lined up with any high-level Bolts (Alex Killorn and Adam Erne were his linemates on Thursday), so I wouldn’t get too excited about him… yet. He has some pedigree, though, as you may remember him from Canada’s World Junior team last season.  

With a goal and two assists and a plus-3 of his own, Ryan Spooner now has ten points (2g-8a) in just six games as a Ranger. Do you think he likes it there so far? Spooner was held without a point in his previous two games, but has multiple points in the other four. Spooner’s Ranger breakout has helped the recent fantasy value of linemate Kevin Hayes (six points over his last six games).

*

Roberto Luongo’s 40-save shutout was his second of the season and 75th of his career. Since his return from injury, he has made James Reimer obsolete. The Panthers’ recent success has a lot to do with Luongo, who has seven wins and a 2.31 GAA and .934 SV% in the nine games since his return.

Nick Bjugstad scored again, giving him ten points (5g-5a) over his past eight games. Bjugstad was at the top of my list of potential adds this week for my Sportsnet piece Finding Fantasy Value.

With three helpers and a plus-3 on Thursday, Keith Yandle has seven assists and a plus-5 over his past four games. Since February 1, Shayne Gostisbehere is the only defenseman that has more assists than Yandle (15 assists in 16 games). Needless to say, Yandle has been a big help to teams in the fantasy playoffs and should continue to be a major asset given the Panthers’ favorable schedule.

The addition of Yandle last season was thought to have hurt Aaron Ekblad’s fantasy value, as Ekblad was held to just 21 points with a minus-23. But Ekblad has rebounded nicely with 29 points in 65 games, including assists in five of his last six games. Coincidentally, Ekblad and Yandle are regular even-strength defense partners.

*

Is Pekka Rinne in the discussion for comeback player of the year? The Predators’ win streak is now at ten games, while Rinne is on a personal eight-game win streak. I’ll admit I didn’t target him thinking that age was catching up to him and Juuse Saros would grab an increased number of starts. But at the moment, is there any goalie that you would feel more confident in a playoff pool right now than Rinne?

With another two goals on Thursday, Rickard Rakell is red hot with eight goals over his last five games.

*

One goalie I’ve seen dropped in one of my leagues recently is Jake Allen, who was called on to start on Thursday after Carter Hutton was scratched at the last moment with an injury. Allen was solid, stopping 34 of 35 shots he faced. Allen hasn’t earned a win in a month and hasn’t been great, but he hasn’t received any kind of run support from his offense.  

Blues have scored one goal in Jake Allen's past eight periods in goal

— Tom Timmermann (@tomtimm) March 9, 2018

Entering the third period, in San Jose, Jake Allen had gone 276 minutes 39 seconds without a lead by the Blues.

— Jim Thomas (@jthom1) March 9, 2018

Let’s just say as the Blues fall out of the playoff race, some of Allen’s teammates aren’t bringing it right now. I’m pointing the finger at you, Brayden Schenn. Normally Schenn is a multicategory beast, but the offense has dried up (no goals and two assists in his last seven games). Same with Alex Steen (no goals and two assists in his last eight games).

Schenn was the player I targeted in multiple leagues this season for his multicategory value and where I could draft him. I hadn’t thought about this until now, but now I’m wondering whether it’s worth my while to keep him in my shallower single-season league. Since January 30, Schenn has basically been average with just three goals and seven points in 16 games. It’s been a great run but it’s starting to fizzle, so it wouldn’t be inconceivable to drop him if you need to do everything possible to keep your fantasy season alive.

*

For more fantasy hockey information, you can follow me on Twitter @Ian_Gooding.

  from All About Sports https://dobberhockey.com/hockey-rambling/ramblings-teams-to-target-injured-goalie-dilemmas-plus-more/

[chemdrykawarthas-blog]

NDP Leadership 2017: The Rebel Yell Of Charlie Angus

Their round faces and bright brown eyes dot the bookshelves of Charlie Angus' Parliament Hill office.

The Northern Ontario MP knows each of their names, where they were from, and how they died. Most are from his TimminsJames Bay riding.

Courtney Koostachin of Attawapiskat died of a rare cancer, probably from the benzenes that contaminate her school's grounds.

Sheridan Hookimaw, 13, died by suicide. She lived in a two-bedroom, mould-infested house with 20 relatives in Attawapiskat, suffered several health problems, and was being bullied at school.

Sylvain Noel of Timmins died of cancer.

Trina Martin died in house fire in Kashechewan, a community that had no fire truck or fire-fighting equipment.

Christine Ellison of Wahgoshig First Nation died by suicide.

So did Chantel Fox and Jolynn Winter, both 12, from Wapekeka First Nation.

Months before the pair's January deaths, Ottawa had denied emergency funds for the Wapekeka First Nations to address a suicide pact it discovered among its youth. The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal later found that the federal government had acted so slowly in responding to Indigenous health-care needs that it had squandered "any chance of preventing" the tragedy.

Then, there is Shannen Koostachin, who died after a car accident outside of New Liskeard where she was attending high school. Koostachin lived with Angus and his family for a year while she studied.

A passionate advocate for the right to quality education for First Nations children living on reserves, she began a campaign that drew national attention. After her death, Angus continued "Shannen's Dream" to end chronic underfunding of Indigenous education; it culminated in a parliamentary motion and a new school in Attawapiskat. Koostachin's fight is the subject of one of Angus' seven books: Children of the Broken Treaty: Canada's Lost Promise and One Girl's Dream.

These boys and girls are some of the people Angus is best known for fighting for. Their struggles and their communities' struggles for clean drinking water, safe housing conditions, and access to education are the images that come immediately to mind when Angus' name is mentioned, former MP Libby Davies noted Friday in endorsing him for the party's leadership.

"I landed with Charlie because, well, he has this common touch, and smile, and fierceness that draws me along the political path ahead of us," she said.

Angus is not your typical MP. The former punk rocker-turned journalist-turned activist likes to note in his campaign material that he didn't own a suit until Jack Layton - the revered late leader of the NDP - asked him to join the party.

He bought one, for $100, and then ran and won a seat in 2004. That's when he became the voice of a blue-collar, rural, largely Indigenous riding that "had been abandoned by the insiders in Ottawa."

Having sat out the 2012 leadership contest to replace Layton (he backed a friend, Ottawa MP Paul Dewar), Angus said that he joined the race this time because the party needs an authentic voice.

"To me, the fundamental issue of our time is that more and more people are tuned out of politics. They don't believe that politicians speak for them," he said in an interview on HuffPost Canada's politics podcast, Follow-Up. "More and more people feel they are being written off the political and economic map ....

"I really believe the 2019 [election] will be [fought] over the question of who is the authentic voice for Canada, and that's where New Democrats have to place ourselves."

Listen to Follow-Up podcast: The Rebel Yell Of Charlie Angus

Angus is known as that MP who vigorously defends his people and his positions. He is partisan and isn't afraid to throw barbs, from calling Trudeau "Trump's poodle" to telling New Democrats he would have no trouble defeating a Liberal government, even if it meant giving the Conservatives power.

"I didn't get into politics to carry the plates of the Liberal dinner," he told New Democrats at the party's Saskatoon debate this summer.

He is passionate. He speaks plainly. And instead of getting into the weeds of policy, he tells stories about the people he is fighting for.

Matt Dub, a Quebec MP who is staying neutral in the race, said Angus brings something to the race that a lot of people can appreciate: "A more human side."

Angus' campaign prefers a simpler slogan: "I've got your back."

* * *

Charles Joseph Angus was born on Nov. 14, 1962, in Timmins, Ont. He was named after both his paternal grandfather, Charlie Angus, who died on the shop floor at the Hollinger gold mine six months before his birth, and his maternal grandfather, Joseph MacNeil, who broke his back underground at the McIntyre gold mine.

Angus was the second child. Kathleen, his oldest sister by a year, died this August. They have two younger siblings, Mary and Michael.

They all shared a house with their parents and paternal grandmother.

"It was a typical dwelling in Timmins, Ontario - a cramped, poorly insulated house built for the families of miners. My parents were born into such housing and probably thought they would die in such housing," he recounted in an article in "Compass: A Jesuit Journal" in 1997.

Money was tight and, as children of miners, university had been out of reach for his parents. Angus' father, John, left school at 16 or 17, on the advice of a math teacher who believed he could be spared working in the mines. Instead, he joined a brokerage office selling penny stock - work that Angus compares to working the local lottery system.

His mother, Anne-Marie, left school at 15 to work as a telephone operator. She took correspondence courses at night and became a secretary.

In 1964, the Kidd Creek mine, the biggest base-metal deposit in the world, was established outside of town. As luck would have it, Angus wrote, his father was friends with the crew that mapped out the primarily copper and zinc ore body, and he invested what little savings the family had into the mine.

"It was a good move. To celebrate, we moved into a new split-level modern home."

His father invested the rest of his earnings in a university education. At age 40, he went back to school, and became an economics professor at Seneca College, giving the family a "legitimate toehold into the middle class." They moved to Toronto in 1973, when Angus was 11.

Musical childhood

Angus describes his childhood as one fuelled by traditional music and sing-alongs.

The Angus were Scottish. The MacNeils were from Cape Breton. Both sides of the family loved music and kitchen parties.

On Saturday nights, Joseph MacNeil would host ceilidhs at their house in the Italian "Moneta" district of Timmins. The neighbours - francophones, Italians, and countless Scots and Cape Bretoners - would come over with food, Angus recounted.

"The deal was, we could stay up as long as we could keep singing. I learned all the old Scottish, Irish and Cape Breton songs."

That tradition followed them to Toronto. "It still forms the central event of any family get-together. At my recent sister's funeral, we sang in the church, sang at the grave site and then went back to my brother's, where we sang a long list of Celtic songs."

His paternal grandmother also followed the family to Toronto. It was "Granny Angus" who took Angus under her wing and taught him everything about politics.

"[She] was radicalized and traumatized by the First World War. She told vivid stories of the trenches and the wholesale slaughter of the young men from her tenement neighbourhood. 'You must always watch out for politicians who send boys to die,' she used to lecture me.

"She was a gifted storyteller and had developed tough working-class politics. She liked a good scrap. She was so worried about me going to school in Timmins as a little boy that she taught me how to box. Her uncle had been a bare-fisted boxer on the docks of Dundee. Turns out I wasn't much for the physical fights of schoolyard existence, but I learned how to use my wit and facility with language to survive the school yard."

Clash album was 'ticket out'

Angus hated Toronto. He vividly recalls the 12-hour bus ride from their beautiful home in Timmins to a small row house in Scarborough where seven family members would now live on top of each other.

"For my parents, our new home was just a more modern version of the housing they had grown up in. For my siblings and me, however, it was a major shock."

It was very loud in the house and then, when Angus was 15, he discovered his first Clash album.

"That was my ticket out. Because [of] the punk movement, suddenly there was colour in the world of beige and black and white, and it made me think, you know, maybe it is possible to just do something completely different."

He formed a punk band with a neighbourhood friend, Andrew Cash, and made a plan to quit school and go on the road. At 18, one year shy of graduation, Angus and Cash began touring with their band, L'etranger, a tribute to Albert Camus' novella.

"We were young intellectuals," he explained. They toured with the Dead Kennedys, Billy Idol, Violent Femmes.

They organized youth movements, participated in projects such as "Rock Against Racism, speaking out against the neo-Nazi movement. They sang to protest against apartheid in South Africa. They were rockers with a social conscience.

At the end of August 1982, Angus met Brit Griffin, a university student from Edmonton who had come to one of his shows. Sparks flew. They moved in together three months later, and married three years after that. "We are best pals," he said of his wife of more than 30 years.

In 1985, after three albums with L'etranger, Angus quit the band and opened a Catholic Worker house for the homeless in Toronto's east end.

He and Griffin were inspired by the story of Dorothy Day, a Catholic social justice advocate. "We dealt with men coming out of prison, runaways, refugees, drug and alcohol addictions. We had no background. No experience and no money. But we managed to raise the funds to put a down payment down and ran the house for five years until we moved up north."

In a Hill Times article soon after his first election, Angus recalled being robbed 10 times when he ran the house and having a man once threaten to murder him. "Every time we were robbed, the money would miraculously appear," he told the Canadian Catholic News.

While in Toronto, Angus joined another band, the Juno-nominated Grievous Angels, with whom he still performs occasionally today.

In 1990, Angus and Griffin moved to Cobalt in northern Ontario, "just as all the mines were shutting down, and the grocery store was shutting down, and the French school was shutting down, and everyone was saying it was a dying mining town, and said, 'Well, here we are.'"

By then, they had two daughters: Mariah, born in 1988, and Siobhan, who arrived that year. Lola followed in 1998.

They moved up north for "an adventure," Angus told HuffPost. "To raise our kids in a different place. And we fell in love with Cobalt. It is a wild, different place."

First, he worked as a chimney sweep and a roofer, despite being terrified of heights. Then, he and Griffin built barns.

"Then I decided I didn't want to do that, so we started a magazine. And so we ran the magazine for about 10 years and I became a journalist."

In 1995, the couple started the bi-monthly HighGrader magazine, devoted to Northern Ontario stories. A year later, they wrote a book about the struggles of the working-class community they now called home: We Lived a Life and Then Some: The Life, Death and Life of a Mining Town.

Angus went to work as a freelance journalist for the CBC and TV Ontario. "And then I ran the blockade on the Adams mine, and that was it. I was done. I was done on TV. I was done on CBC. [They] fired me that day."

In 1999, Angus started covering a proposal to dump Toronto's garbage and toxic waste in the closed-down Adams Mine near Kirkland Lake, Ont. He became a key organizer in stopping the project, which many feared would contaminate the area's groundwater.

The intense fight against the Progressive Conservative government of Mike Harris, who had amended environmental assessment legislation to help greenlight the project, taught him a number of "street lessons."

"I learned how to investigate. I learned how to study the opposition really well. We hired a private eye to follow Mike Harris to a meeting in a big Italian restaurant in North Toronto. Photographed all licence plates to find out who was at the meeting with him. And then we released it to the media," he said, laughing. He wrote about his experience in another book, the critically acclaimed Unlikely Radicals: The Story of the Adams Mine Dump War.

Blacklisted from traditional news outlets, Angus went to work with the Timiskaming First Nation on their land claim project. Then the Algonquins of Barriere Lake hired him as their negotiator in talks with Quebec's Parti Qubcois government in their battles to protect their territory.

I learned how to study the opposition really well.Charlie Angus

All the while, he was leading protests, manning roadblocks, and using HighGrader to mount opposition to the Adams Mine project.

In 2004, the proposal was finally dropped and the garbage ended up going to Michigan.

"The lesson I learned," he said, "is that we won those bottles because we built community. Bringing farmers and First Nation people together. Bringing blue-collar workers and urban environmentalists. Like, people who'd never work together .... I learned how to build on the smarts that ordinary people have."

It was during the Adams Mine protest that Angus met Layton.

"Jack kept asking me to run."

Eventually, Angus relented.

Angus has been frequently cited as one of the best and most effective members of Parliament. Soon after he was first elected, he helped expose the water crisis in Kashechewan First Nation. In 2005, he received national attention when, in the middle of the same-sex debate, the Roman Catholic diocese in Timmins threatened to deny him communion for supporting the Liberals' legislation.

"I never did go back to the parish ... but I have been welcome everywhere else," Angus told Power & Influence magazine earlier this year.

He won his seat in 2006, 2008, 2011 and 2015. After the NDP's disappointing third-place finish in the last election, Angus was one of the first MPs calling for a rethink.

"We have to start a complete rebuilding of the party, the brand and our identity," he told The Globe and Mail back in 2015.

Now, Angus is running on a platform to do just that.

"I don't believe status quo is good enough with our party, and I think we really need to have a vision, to talk about why we exist and where we're going," he told HuffPost.

"If we made one huge mistake in 2015, it was a belief that that it was our time. It's never your time. It's only your time if you make it your time. I think we were a little too careful."

The party became very centralized in Ottawa, he said, and very bureaucratic.

"We lost touch with our grassroots, and if there's a difference between the social democratic party and the other parties, it's [that] we really have to always be very tuned in to the grassroots, to the ordinary members, and we lost that."

The 2016 election of Donald Trump in the United States was a wake-up call, he said. He doesn't want to cede ground to "political arsonists on the right," he added, but blue-collar workers and the working class need an advocate who is in tuned with their priorities.

"The danger for the New Democratic Party is, you know, we love our policy and we love the latest issues and that, but back home, people are struggling to get by, their kids can't pay for their university, people who once had secured work are being downsized to permanent part-time and permanent contract work, and they're saying 'yes, so what do you guys have to offer?'

"I think I'm the person who can bridge the gap between the northern blue collar, the industrial blue collar, plus a lot of urban young people who are almost creating their own economy because they don't have the the possibility of permanent work ....

"I want to be a leader of a party that's fiery and feisty but also offering solutions to move us forward," he added.

Some of his key proposals include:

Reinvest a $4-billion surplus from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation into housing needs across the country (co-op projects, affordable housing rentals, new social housing)

A new national low-income housing benefit to provide low-income Canadians with financial assistance towards rent in non-subsidized buildings. He also pledges to end homelessness.

An Indigenous children's ombudsperson who can initiate investigations, respond to complaints and compel the federal government to act

A full audit of the Indigenous Affairs department and Health Canada's indigenous programs. Shift decision-making powers to Indigenous communities.

Legislative national caps on greenhouse gas emissions and a national carbon budget council that would advise the government on what those caps should be.

A new Crown corporation to help fund green infrastructure that would replace the Liberals' infrastructure bank.

During the leadership race, Angus has been criticized for not clearly stating where he stands on the Kinder Morgan pipeline. He has raised concerns about the approval of the project but hasn't said he opposes it. He told New Democrats at a debate in Vancouver that he is concerned about the transition away from heavy crude and what it means for those employed in the sector.

"How do we do that without just simply laying off 60,000 workers overnight, because that's not going to get us to our goal ... either," he said.

On another flash point, Quebec's Bill 62 - proposed legislation that would prevent women wearing the niqab or burqa from both providing and accessing government services - Angus has also walked a fine line.

He's "very wary of trusting politicians to tell women how to dress. Politicians will exploit these issues, exploit fears, exploit examples that are very, very rare to strike up fear." At the same time, he's sensitive to Quebec's experience of secularism arising from the province's Quiet Revolution.

"As national leader, I will certainly express my concern, but I also want to participate with progressive movements in Quebec," he said about any opposition that might build towards the legislation. "Let's see what these solutions are, and let's make sure that they are Charter-compliant," he said.

Angus said he's unsure why challenger Guy Caron, the lone Quebec MP in the race, decided to make it a leadership issue.

"We do respect the jurisdiction of Quebec, but Quebec respects the jurisdiction of the courts, and all laws have to be compliant with the Bill of Rights and the Charter," he said.

Of course, the province can always decide to invoke the notwithstanding clause.

'Leaders have to be bridge builders'

This week, Quebec NDP MP Pierre Nantel wrote an open letter saying the new NDP leader needs to respect the will of the National Assembly. The proposition Layton made to social progressives in Quebec when he asked them to join the New Democrats was based on that understanding, he told reporters gathered in Hamilton, Ont. for the party caucus and leadership showcase.

"I think it's important to recognize [that,] yes, Quebec went through a lot of trauma under the church, and, hey, I know what that's like," Angus said, referring to his troubles with his local parish. "I'm hopeful that the conversation in Quebec will play out in a way that is respectful of minority rights. And not using minority women for blaming for fear, and now that's my one concern and that's where I'll speak up.

"... Leaders have to stand up, and leaders have to be bridge builders. That's a huge responsibility, and that's something I'm trying to do in my campaign."

[fusionfitter-blog]

Must See Tv Shows On Netflix

Best TV Shows on Netflix Right Now Scattered one of the better TV shows on Netflix are more and more of the streaming platform’s own unique sequence. Watching Television on Netflix has gotten better and better as the support continues to add to its amazing catalog of network and cable collection, not to mention the proliferation of flashy Netflix originals. In truth, the organization that invested its formative years in order to to see movies has since become to the world’s major enabler of binge-watching. Our listing of the finest TV shows on Netflix is here to assist you find the next Television series to devour, and we’ve appeared through the enormous catalog (USA only, sorry) to find these recommendations.

Master of None

Creators: Aziz Ansari Stars: Aziz Ansari Eric Wareheim Kelvin Yu Bobby Cannavale Premiered: 2015 The extended-awaited second time of Aziz Ansari’s masterful Master of N-One begins by having an homage to Bi Cycle Burglars and ends having a nod to The Graduate. In between are beautifully nuanced episodes as Ansari’s Dev Shah tries to navigate his love life and his job. Even when the display goes the conventional sitcom route—the will-they-or-won’t-they romance of Dev as well as the engaged Francesca (Alessandra Mastronardi)—the dialogue and interactions are decidedly not conventional. They talk like real folks perhaps not ones produced in a writer’s room. “New York, I Adore You,”which stepped from the primary characters to showcase the lively diversity of the town and “Thanksgiving,”which chronicled Dev’s childhood friend Denise (Lena Waithe) being released to her family, are easily the time high lights. The display is fun to observe, emotionally satisfying and thought provoking. Unlike any such thing else on television, Learn of N One is not only one of the better shows of Netflix, but perhaps one of the most of the most important in a long, lengthy time.

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

Creator: Rob McElhenney Stars: Glenn Howerton, Charlie Day, Rob McElhenney, Kaitlin Olson Network: FX The idea behind Sunny is simple yet brilliant—bring together the most narcissistic and cruel figures imaginable and let them wreak havoc on the planet. Dennis, Dee, Mac, Charlie, and Frank all run Patty’s Pub together, though that endeavor never seems to keep them occupied for lengthy. The group hatches one scheme after another, to entertain themselves. “The D.E.N.N.I.S. System,” for example, is Dennis’ foolproof method for manipulating women’s emotions so that they’ll love him. To provide you with an idea of the way that it operates, the strategic acronym starts with “Demonstrate value”and ends with “Separate entirely.”

Judging Amy

Lost

Creators: J.J. Abrams, Jeffrey Lieber, Damon Lindelof Stars: Matthew Fox, Evangeline Lilly, Naveen Andrews, Michael Emerson, Terry O’Quinn, Josh Holloway, Jorge Garcia, Yunjin Kim, Daniel Dae Kim Network: ABC When J.J. Abrams first marooned his plane-crash survivors on a remote island, no one realized the show’s name was a double entendre: It took crowd-sourced blogs to make feeling of all the hidden clues, relevant connections, time shifts and intertwined storylines, and every season has provided u-s significantly more questions than answers. But there’s some thing refreshing in regards to a Network-tv show that trusts the mental rigor of its audience in the place of dumbing every-thing down to the lowest common denominator. Sometimes it’s great to be a little misplaced.

Cheers

Creator: James Burrows, Glen Charles, Les Charles Stars: Ted Danson, Shelley Long, Kirstie Alley, Rhea Perlman, Nicholas Colasanto, John Ratzenberger, Woody Harrelson, Kelsey Grammer, George Wendt Network: NBC It was mo-Re than a bar where everyone knows your title. It was a life-style. Cheers rarely left the confines of the bar, but was able to weave slapstick comedy, romance and drama into the 11 seasons it was to the air. It started as the worst-rated series (74 out of 74) but climbed its way to the best 10 during the third-season. Two casting modifications couldn’t even slow it down. The ensemble forged all won awards in performing, in addition to the present winning four Outstanding Comedy Sequence awards. Unlike many sitcoms that touch on social issues that were seri ous, the show never felt like an afterschool special. Everything was done with superior humor.

The West Wing

Creator: Aaron Sorkin Stars: Allison Janney, John Spencer, Bradley Whitford, Martin Sheen, Janel Moloney, Richard Schiff, Dulé Hill, NiCole Robinson, Melissa Fitzgerald, Rob Low E Stockard Channing Kris Murphy, Timothy Davis -Reed Network: NBC Television’s quintessential political drama started in the Clinton era, soldiered on through Bush and 9/11, and ended in the earliest times of the Age of Obama. Weirdly, the show’s political climate was more secure than actuality itself. And maybe that was its attractiveness. The West Wing showed us government maybe not as it was, but as it could be—a White House operate by quippy, tireless, big-hearted public servants who believed in governing with decency. President Josiah Bartlet would give any of his real life counterparts an operate for their money.

Mad Men

Creator: Matthew Weiner Stars: Jon Hamm, Elisabeth Moss, Vincent Kartheiser, January Jones, Christina Hendricks, Bryan Batt, Michael Gladis Rich Sommer John Slattery Network: AMC Look, you don’t need us to tell you that Mad Males is is among the the one of the biggest TV dramas of all time; you've the complete Internet for that, and frankly, that’s time you may be spending watching more Mad Guys. But with his tale of 1960s (and eventually, early ‘70s) ad men and women and the American Dream, Matthew Weiner has done something really extraordinary: proven that there’s drama in everyday activity. Unlike almost every other TV drama, this one doesn’t offer with cops, doctors or lawyers; there aren't any mafia dons or drug lords going down in a hail of bullets. It’s just a bunch of folks functioning together in an office, attempting to push forward and navigate perhaps one of the most of the most compelling decades in American background. Sure, it’s glamorous and brilliantly written, as well as the fact that Elisabeth Moss never won an Emmy for this is legal, but ultimately, it’s oddly relatable, and that’s what fantastic Television is supposed to do—show us ourselves.

Stranger Things

Creators: The Duffer Brothers Stars: Winona Ryder, David Harbour Millie Bobby Brown, Gaten Matarazzo Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Cara Buono Network: Netflix The only query viewers tend to inquire about concerning the standard of Netflix’s Stranger Issues isn’t “Is this a fantastically entertaining show?”but “Does it matter the show is s O homage-large?”Our take: No. Since springing into the cultural consciousness instantly with its to produce month ago, Stranger Points has been hailed as a revival of old-school sci-fi, horror and ‘80s nostalgia that's far mo Re successful and immediately gripping than most other examples of its ilk. The influences are far too deeply ingrained to independently checklist, although imagery evoking Amblin-era Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper films drips from not quite every body. Using a stellar forged of child actors and lots of different characters whose hidden strategies we desperately want to see explored, Stranger Issues hits every notice essential to motivate a weekend- Netflix binge. As queries now swirl about the course of Time Two, following the first season’s explosive summary, we’re all hoping that the sam-e team of characters will be able to re-conjure the chilling, heart-pumping magic of a perfectly constructed eight-episode sequence. Please, TV gods: Don’t permit Stranger Points go all Correct Detective on-US.

Orange is the New Black

Creator: Jenji Kohan Stars: Taylor Schilling, Laura Prepon, Michael J. Jason Biggs, Harney, Michelle Hurst, Kate Mulgrew Network: Netflix Orange is the New Black is perfectly suited for the Netflix shipping method, if only since it could have been agonizing to wait a week for a new episode. But there’s more; the construct felt cinematic and compared to your average display, and I couldn’t help but feel that the all-at once re-lease plane freed the creators to make some thing less episodic and more free-flowing. Taylor Schilling stars as Piper Chapman, a lady living a content modern life when her past rears up abruptly to tackle her from behind; ten years earlier, she was briefly a drug mule for her lover Alex Vause (the superb Laura Prepon), and when Vause needed to plea her sentence down, she threw in the towel Piper. The tale is centered on the real life activities of Piper Kerman, whose book of the same title was the inspiration, but but you the screen model is miles better. Schilling is the motor that drives the plot, and her odd mixture of natural serenity combined together with the growing rage and desperation in the late change her life has has brought strikes the perfect tone for life inside the women’s prison. Within the first few episodes, prison is handled like a nearly-quirky novelty she’ll need to experience for 15 months, as well as the wisest option director Jenji Kohan made (and there are many) was to heighten the stakes so that what begins as an off kilter journey soon assumes the severe proportions prison lifestyle demands. And as great as Prepon and Schilling are together, the cast is so universally outstanding that it beggars belief. You can find too several characters who make gold making use of their constrained screen time to mention individually, but suffice it to say that there’s enough comedy, pathos and tragedy here for several shows. The reality that they fit s O efficiently in to one makes OITNB a triumph that is defining .

The Civil War

Creators: Ken Burns, Ric Burns, Geoffrey C. Ward Stars:: Sam Waterston, Julie Harris, Jason Robards, Morgan Freeman, Garrison Keilor Studs Terkel Network: PBS First aired in the fall of 1990, Ken Burns’ pioneering docu-series attracted a now-unthinkable 40 million viewers on the span of five nights, and re-established the Civil War as the central hinge of American history. This alone is no mean feat; include the series’ profound aesthetic impact, in the pans and zooms that enliven its archival pictures (now called “the Ken Burns effect”) to the use of well-known actors to give voice to the era’s letters and diaries, and The Civil War emerges among the the most essential works of non-fiction ever to air on American television. One might dangereux its interpretation of activities, in certain Burns’ choice to paper over the sabotage of Radical Reconstruction and only the more optimistic narrative of re-unification, but the elegiac note on which it concludes never fails to bring tears to my eyes. “History isn't ‘was,’ it’s ‘is,’”the historian Barbara J. Fields remarks, as a piano taps out its lonesome rendition of “My Region, ‘Tis of Thee.”“The Civil War is, in the present as well as in the past.”

[heliosfinance]

Why Not to Speculate During Bull Markets: Lessons from Newton and Druckenmiller

It was sometime during late 1999 through early 2000, near the peak of the dot-com bubble, the legendary George Soros and his hedge-fund team were working on how to prepare for the inevitable sell-off in technology stocks.

The man in charge of Soros’ high profile technology funds was Stanley Druckenmiller – one of the best-performing hedge fund managers of all time, till date – and he was busy warning his team that the sell-off could be near and could be brutal.

As the markets soared further in March 2000, Druckenmiller was quoted as saying, “I don’t like this market. I think we should probably lighten up.” Soros himself would regularly warn his team that tech stocks were a bubble set to burst.

Despite this, when the sell-off finally did begin in mid-March 2000, Soros Fund Management wasn’t ready for it. His funds were still loaded with high-tech and biotech stocks. Just in five days, starting 15th March, Soros’s flagship Quantum Fund saw what had been a 2% year-to-date gain turn into an 11% loss. By the end of April, the Quantum Fund was down 22% since the start of the year, and the smaller Quota Fund was down 32%.

Post that, in April 2000, Soros said at a conference, “Maybe I don’t understand the market. Maybe the music has stopped, but people are still dancing.”

Same month, at another conference, Druckenmiller confessed, “It would have been nice to go out on top, like Michael Jordan. But I overplayed my hand.”

Here is how Druckenmiller summarized his experience of 2000 in an interview late last year (Nov. 2013) –

I bought the top of the tech market in March of 2000 [after quickly making money in the same space in mid-late 1999] in an emotional fit I had because I couldn’t stand the fact that it was going up so much and it violated every rule I learned in 25 years.

I bought the tech market very well in mid-1999 and sold everything out in January and was sitting pretty; and I had two internal managers who were making about 5% a day and I just couldn’t stand it. And I put billions of dollars in within hours of the top. And, boy, did I get killed the next couple months.

How to Get Killed at the Top, the Newton Way Let’s cut across to the middle of 1720 in Great Britain. Sir Isaac Newton – the inventor of calculus (the branch of mathematics that describes change over time), and the man who framed the laws of motion and set physics on its modern trajectory, put a sizable chunk of his personal fortune into shares of the South Sea Company.

The company had then pursued a new and increasingly risky banking deal – and as insiders began to talk up the trading profits (that turned out fictitious) the company expected from another venture, the stock began to leap, starting January 1720.

The bubble burst that September. Newton lost 90% of his stake, which was a large portion of his total net worth.

Here is how MIT professor Thomas Levinson described Newton’s and South Sea’s antics in a 2009 article…

Newton…made his first investment in the South Sea issue early, in 1713, and held it for several years, marking a modest paper profit. He held on through early 1720…That got the desired result, a sudden leap in stock prices. Starting at £128 in January, the price for South Sea securities rose to £175 in February and then £330 in March.

…Newton sold in April, content with his (quite spectacular) gains to date. But then, between April and June, share prices tripled, reaching over £1,000…which is precisely when he could stand it no longer.

Having “lost” two-thirds of his potential gain, Newton bought again at the very top and bought more after a slight decline in July.

The South Sea stock price held up through August 1720, and then the bubble led by over-expectations of huge returns was pricked in September.

…South Sea share prices collapsed to roughly their pre-bubble level. Newton’s losses totalled as much as £20,000, between $4 million and $5 million in 21st century terms…It was a terrific blow for Newton.

What Brought Druckenmiller and Newton Down? You know the answer, I believe.

During bull markets, or when bubbles are building up, most people come to the stock market because they desire to earn money fast because they are envious of seeing others doing so.

“If he could make money fast in stocks,” one would normally ask during such times, “So why couldn’t I?”

If geniuses like Druckenmiller and Newton couldn’t stand to watch as others made money, and they carried on with full knowledge that they were purely speculating (re-read Druckenmiller’s confession mentioned above), what chance do we non-geniuses have to survive a bubble and its subsequent and certain burst?

The Real Tragedy of Our Life Charlie Munger says…

If you are comfortably rich and someone else is getting richer faster than you by, for example, investing in risky stocks, so what? Someone will always be getting richer faster than you. This is not a tragedy.

You see, the real tragedy of our life is not that someone else is getting richer or healthier than us, but that he is getting there faster than us.

Another tragedy is that when we fall into this comparison trap, it’s hard to stop.

Look at fund managers. Most of them have similar stocks in their portfolios, and most still claim to have the skills to outperform others.

Read stock forums. Most of them are filled with the noise of people comparing their portfolios with others’.

Why do you think any mention of “5 stocks to buy” or “best stocks to buy now” raises your brain’s antennae? This is because you want to compare those best stocks to your existing portfolio and buy whatever you don’t have already.

This habit of unintelligently buying things because someone else is making fast money on them comes to the fore when the markets have been rising for some time.

Here is what Citigroup’s boss Chuck Prince said to a newspaper in July 2007, shortly before the subprime bubble burst…

When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.

So, even as people know that things are not right around them, they keep dancing to the bubble’s music because everyone else is dancing and making merry.

After all, not dancing to the rising market’s tune is same as underperforming. Isn’t it terrible to sit quietly, doing nothing, when some people are predicting the Sensex to touch six-figures soon, and others are dancing to their tunes? Of course, it’s terrible!

But if you can’t ignore and avoid the temptation that comes from watching other people get rich due to a sharp rise in stock prices, it’s best to know sooner than later that that’s often a path to destruction.

You can “get killed”, like Druckenmiller in 2000 and Newton 280 years prior to that.

Of course, like Druckenmiller did so perfectly, no one can predict when the sell-off is near and how bad it could get, but it’s very important to learn from what Druckenmiller didn’t do – listen to his gut instead of following the herd.

That, I believe, is one of the best lessons you can learn on how and why not to speculate, especially when all others are speculating.

Getting Rich Vs Staying Rich Morgan Housel of Collaborative Fund recently wrote a wonderful article on getting rich versus staying rich, where he suggested how getting rich can be the biggest impediment to staying rich…

It goes like this. The more successful you are at something, the more convinced you become that you’re doing it right. The more convinced you are that you’re doing it right, the less open you are to change. The less open you are to change, the more likely you are to tripping in a world that changes all the time.

There are a million ways to get rich. But there’s only one way to stay rich: Humility, often to the point of paranoia. The irony is that few things squash humility like getting rich in the first place.

I recently attended a lecture from the legendary Howard Marks, where he talked about these points on the subject of ‘humility’ –

Very few investors have the nerve to say, “I don’t know.” But that’s how you build integrity in your investment process.

If you start with “I don’t know,” then you are unlikely to act so boldly as to get into trouble.

Our business is full of people who got famous for being right once in a row.

One of the reasons why the future is unknowable is randomness. Events often fail to materialize as we think they should. Improbable things happen all the time.

Anytime you think you know something others don’t, you should examine the basis. Ask yourself – Who doesn’t know better? Why should I be privy to exceptional information? How do I know this that nobody else knows? Am I really that smart, or am I just wrong? Am I certain that I am right and everyone else is wrong? If it’s an advice from some else, ask – Why would somebody give me potentially valuable information? And why would he give it to me? And why is he still working for a living if he knows the future so well? I am always skeptical of people who will tell you the future for five dollars.

The concept of market efficiency – that price of each asset accurately reflects its underlying intrinsic value, or that the market price is fair – must not be ignored. You can know something and it’s possible to know more than others. But the going in presumption should be that everybody is well-informed, and if you think you know something they don’t, you should be able to express the reason for that. It’s not easy because everyone is trying just as hard as you are.

In dealing with a complex system that the stock market is, humility is your best protection. Being tentative in your decision making, changing your mind when the facts change, diversifying adequately and not going around boasting about your recent successes are all signs of such humility.

However, when we’re repeatedly or massively successful – like Druckenmiller and Newton – we’re tempted to believe that we’ve found the formula for success and are no longer subject to human fallibility. This is devastating, especially in a world that is continually changing, and where every right idea is eventually the wrong one.

Beware the Madness After the South Sea disaster, Newton could not bear to hear the phrase “South Sea” mentioned in his presence. But just once he admitted that while he knew how to predict the motions of the cosmos, he could not calculate the madness of the people.

We still can’t, so please be very careful…especially because we are passing through a bull market.

Also Read: 1. Speculating In Bubbles With Stan Druckenmiller And Sir Isaac Newton 2. Even a Genius Can Get Suckered

The post Why Not to Speculate During Bull Markets: Lessons from Newton and Druckenmiller appeared first on Safal Niveshak.

Why Not to Speculate During Bull Markets: Lessons from Newton and Druckenmiller published first on http://ift.tt/2ljLF4B

[viralhottopics]

Donald Trump is making a lot of things very popular

Trump has spurred so many strikes, walkouts, protests and demonstrations.

Image: Vicky Leta/mashable

Everywhere you look, there’s the Trump Bump.

What’s the Trump Bump? It’s the fresh rise of activism, it’s the traffic jumps for online news outlets and it’s the pumped-up entertainment industry that we have seen in the month following President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

SEE ALSO: An orange alligator exists and people are calling it ‘Trumpigator’

If you’ve been wondering how wide Trump’s reach actually is and how many industries have been impacted, here are all the things blessed or cursed by the mighty Trump bump.

Subscriptions to the ‘failing’ New York Times

Every time Trump hates on media outlets like the New York Times, CNN and NBC News, they get another click. The president’s attention means that more people are signing up to get information from these and other trustworthy news sources. In the weeks after Trump’s election, the Times saw its paid subscribers reach 2.5 million, per Politico.

Reuters reported Thursday that this past quarter the Times added a record 276,000 new digital subscribers. The Wall Street Journal scored 113,000 new digital subscribers, while the Financial Times’ digital subscriptions rose 6 percent.

The failing @nytimes talks about anonymous sources and meetings that never happened. Their reporting is fiction. The media protects Hillary!

Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 14, 2016

Conservative news outlet Breitbart has shot up the charts since Trump became president. This Alexa web traffic data shows the huge jump.

Image: alexa

CNN, which has been covering practically every moment of the new Trump administration, also saw an Donald Trump boost. The company reported “historical records,” with the day after the election as the cable news outlet website’s “most trafficked day ever” with 483 million page views.

Protests (it’s the new brunch)

The resistance is growing. Whether it’s bodega strikes, a massive Women’s March, airport rallies, a Day Without Immigrants and tech company walk-outs, protesting and exercising your first amendment right is becoming an everyday thing.

Wikipedia has been tracking anti-Trump protests around the U.S. and world since Election Day and into Trump’s presidency. More than two dozen demonstrations have been tracked since Jan. 20, not including the huge turn out around the world for the Women’s March. Several big marches are still coming up: A Day Without Women, March for Science, and Tax Day.

“Protest is the New Brunch” at 10:30am #LGBTQ solidarity rally in #Seattle. Join #NoDAPL protest Broadway #WellsFargo noon @RefuseFascism http://pic.twitter.com/JWM95kC3gV

Margo Heights (@eyes2future) February 11, 2017

Hate spike

Sadly, social activism isn’t the only thing getting a boost this election season. Hateful speech and violence against minorities, immigrants, Muslims, women and more has become more prevalent. In the week and a half after Trump won the election, the Southern Poverty Law Center tracked a hefty 867 hate crimes.

That’s a huge chunk in a short amount of time compared to the number of total hate crimes in a year. In 2015, there were 5,850 hate incidents reported the entire year, according to the FBI. In just the week and a half after Trump’s win nearly 15 percent of the year’s total hate incidents were reported.

Saturday Night Live ratings

With Trump in office, SNL sketches and cold opens are featuring a lot more of Trump and his team. Melissa McCarthy’s Sean Spicer impression along with Alec Baldwin’s Trump impersonation is quite the winning combination. The Feb. 11 show brought in the best ratings in six years at 16 million viewers. When Trump was on the show in 2015 his episode reached only 9.3 million viewers.

For other late night shows, covering Trump has also been a boon. Stephen Colbert’s Late Show has rocketed to the top in February after trailing behind the Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. For two weeks straight, Colbert has pulled in more than 3 million viewers, up from an average of 2.68 million viewers a week in December, according to Nielsen numbers. Colbert’s new perch on the top coincides with more coverage of Trump, with the show digging into the president and his decisions.

Pink Yarn

After the Women’s March, pink cat ear “pussyhats” have become a de facto uniform for the resistance fighting against a Trump administration and the president’s policies.

Ahead of the march, finding pink yarn to join in on the popular Pussyhat Project was a struggle. For the upcoming “Day Without Women,” pink yarn will no doubt become a scarce commodity once again. Get in early.

Pussy strikes back.

Image: AP Photo/Elaine Thompson

Books about our likely dystopian future

Amazon can barely keep up with the demand for certain books. 1984 and the Handmaid’s Tale were both unexpected popular sellers in the weeks since Trump took office, with the George Orwell classic sold out online at one point. A San Francisco bookstore was even giving away free copies of the dystopian reads.

Trump might not be a big reader, but his 1987 book The Art of the Deal is back in best-seller territory following his big election win. Just this week the book is No. 80 on Amazon’s best sellers list for books. Back when Trump announced his candidacy in July 2015 it was way back at No. 1,128. CNN reported the book was No. 1 on Amazon’s Entrepreneurship list at the end of 2016.

Donald Trump’s Art of the Deal is back at the top of the charts 30 years later.

Image: Charlie Neibergall/AP/REX/Shutterstock

The stock market

The stock market and beyond is having its Trump moment too. The Dow Jones, Nasdaq and S&P are at record highs since the election. Markets are up 10 percent since the election.

Even private prison stocks have jumped since Trump won. Stocks for the two biggest private prison companies, CoreCivic and Geo Group, are up 140 percent and 98 percent, respectively, according to CNN. Trump had promised during his campaign to keep contracts with private facilities even after the U.S. Department of Justice said these types of prisons were problematic for inmate safety. Last week, the new Attorney General Jeff Sessions agreed. Private prisons: 1. Prisoner rights: 0.

One other business that benefitted from Trump’s meddling: Nordstrom. More recently the department store chain saw a small stock bump presumably led by the anti-Trump movement after the president went after the store for dropping his daughter Ivanka’s fashion line. Following what many saw as a conflict of interest with Trump targeting the retailer, Nordstrom was met with a flurry of support.

After Trumps tweet on Feb. 8, Nordstrom stock jumped from a high of $44.54 to $46.07 the next day. In the days and weeks since, the price has creeped up and stayed up. Almost three weeks after the tweet, Nordstrom is now at $47.86.

My daughter Ivanka has been treated so unfairly by @Nordstrom. She is a great person always pushing me to do the right thing! Terrible!

Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 8, 2017

This whole “Trump tweets about a company” keeps happening so much that there are now apps to alert you when Trump mentions a company for better or worse. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Motors and Toyota are just some of the companies that have gotten the Trump treatment. In Boeing’s case this meant a huge drop: within an hour of Trump’s tweet, the company’s value dropped $4 billion with a “b.”

Slovenian tourism

With our model-turned-first lady hailing from the eastern European country of Slovenia, it’s no surprise her home country is becoming a destination. Even her small hometown is seeing the benefits of a Trump presidency. According to the Slovenian Tourist Board, American tourism has jumped 11 percent in the past year. Thanks, Melania.

Welcome to Sevnica, Slovenia!

Image: AP Photo/Darko Bandic

Trump’s wallet

Isn’t it convenient when your presidency directly affects your family business? Trump’s “Winter White House” in Florida saw membership prices double following his inauguration. The initial fee for a Mar-a-Lago membership is now at $200,000. So much for any chance of him actually divesting from his business.

Even more egregiously, Trump Hotels have a plan for nationwide expansion, which would triple the number of his hotels around the country.

Donations for days

The ACLU has seen donations coming in fast and furious. After Trump’s executive order came down limiting travel for refugees and immigrants, donations to the ACLU were through the roof. The organization raised as much money in the last weekend of January, which followed travel ban, as they did in all previous years. That’s more than $24 million in a few days.

Update: the @ACLU just ran the numbers again. Spokesman says the group received 356,306 online donations totaling $24,164,691 this weekend.

Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) January 30, 2017

As Trump continues to threaten to defund Planned Parenthood, financial support has been coming into that organization as well. Especially helpful is the long list of celebrity pleas asking for support for the health care organization. Celebs, including Katy Perry who donated $10,000, are using Twitter to encourage donations. Indie singer Halsey promised $1 to the organization for every retweet. She ended up giving $100,000.

Lyft riders

Inadvertently, Trump’s short-lived travel ban gave ride-hailing app Lyft a boost. It’s competitor Uber got caught up in a PR nightmare during a taxi strike at JFK International Airport. Once #DeleteUber started trending, Lyft was the unexpected benefactor of Trump’s controversial policies. This Lyft chart from App Annie shows how just a whisper of Trump can sway app rankings. Notice that Trump bump at the end of January when the ban was first introduced.

Lyft’s app rankings sine Trump’s inauguration are up and away.

Image: app annie

The Trump bump is not just relegated to a preponderance of red Make America Great Again hats. It’s found in book sales, the Dow Jones, ride-hailing apps and social activism. Trump is actually everywhere.

BONUS: Trump claims drugs are cheaper than candy, Americans collectively facepalm

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