#i feel bad for the individuals and not so much the company and execs

[artemis-entreri]

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but can you please post links to your review of Lolth's Warrior? I love your reviews and can't find your Lolth's Warrior one. Thanks!

[[ Greetings!

Not a dumb question at all! ^_^ The reason that you can't find it is because it doesn't exist. XD In fact, I still haven't read the book yet, and I don't know when/if I will. I'm thinking that this is a good thing, as apparently even among the most diehard Drizzt fans there have been some very negative reactions to Lolth's Warrior, more so than ever.

If you follow me, you've probably noticed a significant drop in my activity. I've been greatly enjoying investing my time in other things, which is something I've been wanting to do for a while now but my brain wouldn't stop being hung up over these characters. It's no secret that I've been tired of Salvatore's BS for a long time, but I was too invested in the characters to be able to move on.

I think what finally helped me flip the switch is WotC investing a shitload of money to make Drizzt products, especially with whitewashed Artemis even though it's 2023. With the context of them also giving the excuse that they couldn't pay the other creatives who worked on their setting at market standard rates in the past along with their actions with the OGL earlier in the year, well, suffice to say that while I haven't respected Salvatore for a long time I did respect WotC, however after everything that happened this year, that has changed. I'm not sure how much WotC execs are responsible for the recent mass lay-offs, which in itself is really bad, but the fact that Mike Mearls was finally let go doesn't really help WotC's case for me because it only serves as a reminder of how Mearls wasn't fired earlier for assisting his sex abuser friend (he was instead quietly shuffled to the video games division for a while). When Mearls returned to the D&D division, about half a dozen female D&D staffers quit at the same time. This says to me that WotC cares more about a male sex abuser supporter than they do about all those female members of their staff, and it makes me question whether they care about women and oppressed groups in general. I've really started to question how much hypocrisy is present in their making a huge show of being LGBT+ inclusive; recent D&D products do indeed include a lot of LGBT+ representation, but how much of that is due to Jeremy Crawford having to fight to get it in there each time? How could WotC continue to march in Pride parades with pomp and circumstance while allowing the Mearls incident to have transpired?

When the OGL snafu happened, a friend made the comment that WotC may have had its ups and downs in the past but overall was generally viewed in a positive light by many, but that the OGL fiasco has probably bankrupted them from a "good will" perspective for a while. This is basically where I'm at with the company now. I still care a great deal about Ed Greenwood and the authors who penned the works that led me to fall in love with the world so hard, and while I still play D&D and care about FR, I'm at a point where I feel like WotC has demonstrated a clear lack of regard for their own Drizzt franchise, so much so that they don't even bother to get basic facts about one of its primary characters correct. As such, what's the point in me continuing to care? While I also don't care about how WotC feels about me as an individual fan, I've long been distasteful of how dismissive they are of their most dedicated fans, the ones who have spent hundreds of thousands of unpaid hours curating the (in)consistencies of their universe that they themselves can't be bothered to maintain. I can understand the reasons for WotC actively instructing their creatives to not use the FR Wiki, but it's painfully obvious that those creatives including Salvatore still use it to keep their facts straight because there is no comparable official resource for them internally with the company itself. Furthermore, the stuff that WotC is continuing to do suggest that they have no intention to change that, quite the opposite in fact. It was quite eyebrow-raising when WotC compared their D&D franchise to the Marvel universe, because what makes the Marvel universe so compelling and successful is the very self-consistency that WotC is trying to do away with in D&D. A big part of the reason why Marvel movies are loved is because it's the same characters that recur, and you never know if a character from a different movie will show up in the movie you're currently watching, but it's always a delight when they do. And, of course, it's so epic when all of those storylines across many different movies all come together and culminate in truly astounding ways. Despite the usage of an infinite multiverse in Marvel, there's this big sense of consistency, which is what makes the franchise so impressive and compelling. Marvel's world is everything that D&D's is not, at least in D&D's current iteration. Even though many different stories across a shared world is part of the draw of FR for me, I don't need D&D to be like Marvel, however because WotC made that comparison of the current D&D world to the Marvel world, I can't help but feel like WotC is more talk than action. I'm not at all saying that D&D isn't a quality product, it's just for me the shine of WotC is no longer there.

I think the biggest indicator for me that I was ready to shift my focus was my lukewarm reception of Baldur's Gate 3. It is everything that I hoped for and more for a current generation Forgotten Realms/D&D video game, and yet I was just ok about it. Here is FINALLY something that I spent so many years dreaming about, getting more and more hungry for it following the flops of Sword Coast Legends and the Dark Alliance reboot, but when it finally happened, I was just ok about it. It's a fantastic game and 110% deserving of its awards and its huge fan acclamation, and yet I was just ok about it. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed the game, but I can't see myself playing it again.

I'm still happy to help and support the people in this fandom, be it by answering lore questions, suggesting novels to read, pointing the way to resources, or with more serious matters. I don't know how much new content I'll make though, I've got a bunch of WIPs in terms of art and writing, as well as miscellaneous drafts containing information about the world, but I don't know if I'll ever feel like finishing them/polishing them up to post. It's very freeing to no longer feel compelled to read each new Drizzt book because the drop in quality with each new installment has really been immense, and I'm a lot happier not spending those hours consuming really badly-written media. I do feel bad for no longer providing for those who want to know what's happening in the newer books but don't feel like reading them and who want to know a non-sycophantic summary of them, but hey, maybe someone will step up and fill in the summaries for the books. I'm not really sure why none of the diehard Drizzt/Salvatore super fans have undertaken the task since Hero. Wikis are editable by anyone, but the Wiki staff do try to make sure that everything is objective and factual.

If you're trying to find my old stuff, I'm sorry that my tags are kind of all over the place, I never got around to organizing them better. 😅 I *think* I've reblogged all of my LoD art to my otp-jartemis sideblog, but now that I look at it I see that's probably not the case. If you like my art though and want to continue seeing it even if it's not in this fandom, it'll be on my non-fandom specific blog: sno4wy.tumblr.com

This isn't goodbye, as I'll still be here now and then, I just won't be as invested, which is honestly a really great feeling. :> ]]

[thessalian]

Thess vs Marketing Execs

When I’m having a particularly bad day and really need to get my mind off something, I have a little trick, and I have Tumblr to thank for it.

I mean, you look at a lot of media by a lot of the big individuals and a lot of what you find is fairly formulaic stuff. Some of it’s good. Some of it’s bad. But all of it is very clearly micromanaged by a bunch of executives looking at a spreadsheet and saying, “This is what The Young People want. This is what will make us money”.

The problem for them is that their whole model’s out of date, and has been since the internet. Once upon a time, they could reinforce the formula through the only way we The Young People ever got to hear about anything new that we might like - radio, TV, magazines. And then the internet came along and you could type something into a search engine and find the official site ... but also a lot of fan-made sites by people who were into it which often pointed to the other things they were into. Yeah, those sites were cringe, often badly coded on Geocities ... but we got a bigger window to the world than most companies wanted us to have, because they wanted to control what consumers thought was cool as much as possible and suddenly people were just ... sharing what random shit they thought was cool, and people were getting into those things rather than just jumping on The Next Big Thing.

Thing is, even when we got into the social media space, The Almighty Algorithm allowed MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter to reinforce the formula. Tumblr, on the other hand ... we’ve called it a lot of things. The Last Wild Frontier of the Internet; the whale carcass that sinks to the abyssopelagic zone of the internet to feed the deep-dwellers there, all kinds of weird analogies. Fact is that it’s just never been that level of profitable. The algorithm attempts never worked here. The format’s wrong for it, and people use it for things that just aren’t profitable in that way. And yeah, we celebrate fandoms, but we also create new ones, beautiful and impermanent as soap bubbles, for the most random fucking shit.

So sometimes, when I’m feeling particularly grumpy and need to start thinking about something else for my sanity, I imagine a marketing team assigned to monitor Tumblr, reporting back to their team lead, and the team lead asks, “...What are they obsessing about this week?” Just because I love the mental image of what happens when the answer is something like, “Sea shanties, The Cask of Amontillado, and this guy who sold substandard copper a couple of milennia ago”. Imagine a marketing department who lives to tick the boxes on a marketing spreadsheet trying to find some way of making bank on something like “Out Of Touch Thursday”. Or trying to figure out what exactly The Young People are trying to say about the viability and direction of the Star Wars franchise in the wake of “Live Slug Reaction” memes.

Seriously, next time you’re depressed or angry, just look at whatever weird and wacky bullshit is on your Tumblr at the moment and imagine someone trying to explain it to a marketing exec. We don’t feel like we have a lot of power in the grand scheme of things, but by the gods we can frustrate people who want to make us little more than a demographic to which to sell shit.

[literaticat]

So....PRH buying S&S. everyone online says this is bad. How bad is it? How soon is it bad?

Well. Consolidation is never, like, GREAT. More publishing houses is better than fewer, for lots of reasons. (While this will probably NOT make a “monopoly” as many people claim... it will make a MegaPublisher, which has its downsides.) But I hope that people who are reading twitter threads claiming CATASTROPHE will take a beat and remain calm. I am. 

Potentially Good Things:

* PRH is not new at this. The reality is, they are very good at their business. The sale, if the PRH merger is anything to go by, will likely take at least a year to complete, possibly more in the age of COVID. They will be slow and methodical with any transition -- most affected first will be things like warehousing and other back-end stuff that will have no affect on authors. 

* Bertelsmann, the parent company of PRH, is not a publicly held company -- they are owned by one family. This is a good thing. They don’t have shareholders they are beholden to, which would mean things like “soulless liquidation” might be in the cards. 

* S&S is a publishing house with a great history, and they are currently doing great business. And execs expressed the desire for S&S to retain its core identity -- so if, again, Penguin and RH becoming PRH is our history lesson, that is what will happen. Hopefully that means little further change to imprints, etc. (See below for potential downside)

* Being a MegaPublisher means that, potentially, they will be able to have the heft to counter the truly shitty practices of A**zon.

Potentially Bad Things: 

* There MAY be some layoffs at some point in this process. Simon actually already consolidated some imprints and had some layoffs earlier this year, and more might happen in the future - but let’s be real, that kind of thing happens WITHOUT a merger, too, clearly, so...

* Generally speaking, a robust publishing ecosystem includes LOTS of publishers. So, like, a Mega-Publisher might have terms that agents and authors don’t find agreeable, and we might have a hard time fighting them, because like... if they are the ones interested, where are you gonna go? But...  for authors, your agents are aware of the potential problems, and will be vigilant about protecting your interests, so don’t borrow trouble.

* As agents, we can submit books to both Penguin and RH simultaneously, but they don’t bid against each other in an auction scenario. So, if that holds for S&S, the fine part is, that’s the same number of places we can SEND submissions, but the sucky thing is, if they all wanted to buy a book, they wouldn’t bid against each other. So, that potentially drives down the advance a book at auction might get. This, again, feels like a bridge to cross when we get to it.

I’m certain that there are more bad things -- AND more good things! -- that will be revealed about all this in the fullness of time. And who knows, maybe the sale won’t even go through for any number of reasons. Maybe the investigation process WILL find that the company would be too much of the market share to work. There is little that we, as individuals, as authors, as agents, etc, can do about this. It’s way out of our hands. So take a deep breath.

As of right now, they are saying Business As Usual, and I have no immediate reason to doubt it. Keep calm and carry on.

[overgosh]

So it’s after BlizzCon.

Some thoughts, because there are some posts that have popped up on my dash that make my blood boil:

On the Hearthstone Tournament Situation:

For its treatment of Blitzchung and the twitch casters, Activision Blizzard was completely in the wrong.

It was inappropriate for Blitzchung and the twitch casters to use the platform that way, as it would be if any other political statement was announced (whether divisive or not). It is completely reasonable for a penalty to be given, but not in the manner that it was.

Activision Blizzard’s corporate executives royally fucked up, and will continue to not serve the best interest of its userbase when it comes to making money and continuing to be a behemoth corporation. All statements have been strictly based on PR and have not been suitable apologies or plans of action for improvement.

On Fake Diversity Which Has Somehow Become The New “Forced Diversity”:

While it is great for marketing and for shitty apologies to fall back on their ideals using Overwatch’s diversity and Blizzard’s tenets, AND that certainly is a selling point that they will, of course, use to sell their game to people:

The idea that Activision Blizzard’s corporate executives are trying to bait LGBT people and POC into forgetting their misdeeds by adding LGBT people and POC into the game is totally bizarre... For so many reasons. For so long there hasn’t been representation because it “doesn’t sell” or “appeal to the masses”, especially for the types of games that Blizzard produces. The implication that Tracer having a picture of Emily on the dashboard and Sojourn arriving were solely added to soothe the controversy are so wildly absurd in terms of the timeline of reality itself and straight up common sense. 

Overwatch specifically has admirable goals of diversity. Sometimes the team does a damn good job, and sometimes (often) they mess up. If there’s an actual solid foundation and evidence about how the exec’s insidious use of “diversity points” are being used to manipulate the public while not contributing anything meaningful to the landscape of video games, I’d love to hear it. There is a LOT to unpack here, but that’s my brief point on it.

Oh also, for fuck’s sake - of course China has censored the LGBT content in Overwatch. That’s not an Evil Blizzard Machination -- China pushes through censorship for all kinds of media content that’s not considered “decent”, which as you may remember as an example included the LGBT relationships in Steven Universe (namely, Ruby and Sapphire). Using the same logic, that would imply that Steven Universe’s LGBT themes were included for diversity points. It’s.... There’s lots of problems with Blizzard, y’all, that one doesn’t quite hold up.

On “People Are So Quick To Forgive Blizzard”:

Some people are, yes. There are folks who fully believe J Allen Brack’s statement(s) in their entirety.

Other people didn’t really care either way in the first place, and just want content.

Some have decided that based the actions after the initial incident (the penalty reduction, as well as not stifling or turning away hosts that spoke out against the incident, and also not interfering or silencing the protests at BlizzCon) that they are taking a stance anywhere in the middle of this situation. They may be excited for game content created by incredible people, including diversity that they have been asking for for literal years.

People are not so simple as to be put into one bucket. This is a huge leap of logic I keep seeing pop up on social media. Being excited about a revelation from Blizzcon doesn’t equate to forgiving the company.

On “How can people support an evil company?”:

We have to deal with late stage capitalism, so unfortunately we can’t avoid supporting corporations while living in society. This one sucks ass, guys. We live in a time where global superpowers are so interconnected that foreign influence affects everything we do, and the simple act of impulse buying a candy bar from the grocery store check-out may have just been a teeny contribution to slave labor (hi, Nestle). It’s positively overwhelming. On that note:

Other behemoth companies such as Apple and Google are also causing significant damage to the same freedoms, many related to the same Hong Kong issues and much more. SO:

Use your voice to do good, and use this revelation about the actions of a small group of people at the very top of this video game company to make a difference. Screaming at tumblr users for being “sheeple” for being enthusiastic about dark-skinned and lesbian heroes as though shutting that down will solve the problem is a really horrendous missing of the point. There is still good that can (and does!!) come out of Blizzard, like the realization of the success of a diverse cast of human characters. As we all say time and time again: representation is important. We fight for the message that Blizzard champions to not ring hollow, so use your voice. The employees at Blizzard sure did. And speaking of:

The devs and artists working at Blizzard are not Activision Blizzard’s corporate executives. In an industry as unforgiving and volatile as games (Remember when Activision laid off 800 people after a record-breaking, successful financial year?), they’ve worked their asses off for years for this. They’re regular-ass working people who actually have a say in the story and how the game is developed. You can love the story. You can love the characters, love the games, and STILL hate the corporation. You are a complex individual, just like this world we live in. You are welcome to find where the scale for you tips. If it’s not worth it for you to support Activision Blizzard, then that’s a battle that you are fighting. If you choose to be an activist like many hosts, casters and content creators who speak up while still covering Blizzard content, great. If you choose to boycott, great. If you choose to share information to others about the issues, great. The world is far too complicated to judge on a “GOOD” and “BAD” polarity, unlike the method of thought this site (and yes, others as well) tends to proliferate. So if anyone tries to put you into a black and white box, know that there is no such thing.

Finally:

On “I feel so helpless about Hong Kong. How can I help?”

https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/cv0ws4/how_can_you_help_hong_kong_protests_from_abroad/

This Reddit user has compiled a list of Hong Kong protest resources. This includes a Blacklist and Whitelist if you are someone who is interested in cutting ties or supporting companies based on their reaction to the HK protests.

[per-ineptia-ad-astra]

starhearth: episode five

Second Month of Spring, Day 5-6

Early in the morning, while the last of the rain from the day before is still petering out, the explorer who promised to trade us some cricket golems returns.

[ID: A screenshot of a notification box titled ‘The explorer returns!’ The text inside the box reads, “The explorer returns!--I’m back! It looks like you’ve made me the 5 Wooden Window Frame I asked for. Are you still interested in 2 Autonomous Cricket Golem in exchange? I assure you, they are more useful than any normal person at carrying things!”]

Once activated, the two little golems quickly go to work picking up items and moving them to the stockpiles. These guys will be very helpful to us. As more and more of the villagers become crafters or warriors and spend most of their time focused on that, there are fewer and fewer people to do the necessary work of just hauling stuff from one place to another. The cricket golems will help pick up the slack.

[ID: A screenshot of the item stockpile, containing animal pelts, bones, strips of rawhide and blocks of wood, as the two golems pick up items from the stockpile. The golems are dark gray and rectangular in shape, with four stubby legs, small square gray heads, two glowing yellow eyes, and two glowing rectangular antennae.]

More good news: we’ve got enough food and networth to pick up another villager.

Now, I realize that you may have increasingly been thinking, as this game continues to progress, “uh, where the hell is SPOCK? you’ve literally included LESLIE in your roster before SPOCK? what are you even doing here” or something along those lines. Well, you can rest assured I did not forget about Spock. The reason I haven’t made him a villager yet comes down to one simple thing: I had no absolutely no idea what to do with him. There is no position available to the Hearthlings that even remotely corresponds to ‘science officer’. Herbalist, maybe, at a stretch—but there are multiple characters who fit that job better by virtue of being actual medical professionals. I thought about making him a warrior of some kind, since Spock takes out a fair amount of foes throughout the series, but that didn’t seem to fit him very well. Spock’s not a warrior at heart. He’s just a guy who’s willing to nerve pinch a bad guy or two if the situation calls for it.

But of course, we’ve gotta have Spock in here somewhere. So in the end, after much deliberation, I decided...to make him a Weaver. Weavers are a crafting class that refine fibers and animal pelts into thread, leather and cloth, which can then be used either by the Weaver to make clothes that provide various benefits to Hearthlings, or by other crafters to make things like bows and armor.

My reasoning for this? Spock’s fabulous sense of fashion. That’s it. That’s literally it.

[ID: A screenshot of Spock’s Character Info window, which shows that his mood is content, his stats are 6 Mind, 5 Body and 4 Spirit, his class is Worker, he has the trait ‘Night Owl’--represented by a crescent moon icon—and his mood is being improved by the ‘Pioneering Spirit’ buff. Below, Spock’s portrait is seen in the information box at the bottom of the screen, showing him to be a white Hearthling with brown eyes, short square black hair, and thick black eyebrows.]

Spock has an impressive stat spread—6 Mind, 5 Body and 4 Spirit—and the trait Night Owl. You might remember that Kirk also has this trait; it makes the Hearthling stay up later at night and wake up later in the day. So Kirk and Spock can keep each other company. As it should be.

The character appearance options aren’t exactly equipped to make Vulcans, so the best I can do is give Spock some really big eyebrows. Unfortunately, a strange graphical glitch results in those eyebrows floating in the air next to his head instead of remaining on his face as eyebrows usually do.

[ID: A screenshot of Spock the Hearthling running over the grass with his eyebrows floating at the right height, but to the right of his head instead of on it.]

my god, those NBC execs were right all along! his eyebrows are demonic!

Well...it’ll probably sort itself out.

Meanwhile, McCoy needs to build himself a cauldron so he can craft potions. This requires a bit of stone. Once we start mining for ore, we’ll have more stone than we know what to do with, but for the moment we’re fresh out. Luckily there are some boulders standing out in the fields around the village, so McCoy goes out to break those down for stone. Apparently he doesn’t much feel like picking it up afterward, though, because he just kind of stands there while a cricket golem comes to collect the stone instead.

[ID: A screenshot of McCoy standing in the grass staring at the stockpile and doing nothing, while behind him a cricket golem picks up a block of stone.]

what? did you not get your coffee today?

Once the stone is in the stockpile, though, McCoy—begrudgingly, I assume—goes to craft a cauldron out of it, and begins brewing some potions. A few energy potions made from the ad hoc little herb garden will make everyone move a bit faster for a while, which hopefully will speed up production of the tavern.

[ID: A screenshot of McCoy bending over a bubbling cauldron next to his workstation in the grass. The information box below describes him as ‘crafting energy tonic.’]

Uhura has befriended another rabbit, this one named March. I really hope March and Thumpy don’t breed, because if we get into a Trouble With Tribbles situation I don’t think my CPU will be able to handle it.

[ID: A screenshot of the camp with a small rabbit sitting next to the empty hearth, while Kirk patrols nearby and McCoy gets something from the stockpile in the background.]

Night Owl Spock stays up to finish putting the roof on the tavern after everyone else has gone to bed. He’s not completely alone, though; he’s got his eyebrows to accompany him.

[ID: Spock walking across the roof of the tavern in the dark, eyebrows still hovering next to his head.]

The next morning is warm but a bit rainy. With the tavern itself completed, all that’s left is to place all the windows and doors. Everyone chips in to help.

[ID: A screenshot of several villagers walking across the grass towards the tavern, each carrying a door or window. Rand is selected in the information box below, which says she is ‘placing Wooden Door.’]

Some more Entlings attack...or rather, they try to, but they’re up on the cliffs surrounding the town to the north, and can’t get down. So they just kind of stand there angrily for a while before wandering off again.

[ID: A shot from the front of the tavern, showing four Entlings standing on the cliff some distance in the background.]

The tavern is finally finished, and everyone takes a moment to celebrate.

[ID: A screenshot of McCoy, Rand, Chapel, Leslie, Spock, Chekov, and Scotty all standing in front of the tavern with their hands in the air as confetti and clouds of dust fly up from the completed building.]

There’s not much time to stand around, though—now that the building is complete, it’s time to start moving things into it. Eventually we’ll make individual houses for people and use the tavern as, well, a tavern, but for the moment it’s more pressing to just get everyone under a roof, so the beds are moved into what’s theoretically the tavern pantry. Well, almost all the beds. One of them can’t be moved for a while, because Kirk is sleeping in it.

[ID: A screenshot of Kirk passed out in the one remaining bed next to the berry bushes.]

The berry bushes and herb garden are also moved over to be closer to the tavern, and the outside storepiles decommissioned in favor of moving all our supplies into some more neatly organized boxes inside. Scotty queues up some more storage boxes as well as a few more beds to support the growing population, but he needs wood to make them, and building the tavern has used up our whole supply of it. So a few people are sent to cut down some trees. Just cutting down the trees growing nearby has given us enough wood so far, but that’s not going to be a sustainable solution forever. We’re going to need an orchard for wood, so a few acorns are also planted out back to get that started.

One of the felled trees drops a bee’s nest. This is actually a good thing—a Herbalist can collect the bees and put them in a hive which will supply honey. McCoy is sent to go pick up the bees, but he decides he’d rather get a drink instead.

[ID: A screenshot of the field behind the tavern, mostly cleared but with a couple of tree stumps in the corner. One of the stumps has a swarming bee’s nest on the ground next to it. McCoy is running away from the stump, and the information box below says that he is ‘getting a drink.’]

Yeah I can’t really say I blame him.

[beierwalls2-blog]

How you can Deal with Samsung Universe S4 Wi-fi Problems

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In Duel and Difficulty mode, you also need to win 2 opportunities but this is actually more difficult considering that you have to adhere to some guidelines. If you possess a complication along with iOS 10, allow our team recognize on Twitter as well as our experts'll perform our best in order to help, and also we'll tell you how you can resolve exactly on all of them this page. The pope went on to claim girls did a lot of various other points much better in comparison to males", stressing just what has actually been referred to as the womanly measurement of the congregation". The research mentions that once women acquire a product, be it a smart device, tablet computer, laptop computer or even television, they become massive customers. Regardless of the reason, the voices from females - as well as their designers' deep-rooted ideas from modern-day femininity - are leading the AI outpost. Opportunity Detector phone help was certainly not beneficial, telling me I would be actually demanded for service technician sees multiple opportunities, considering that the World wide web operated alright throughout the day, when they could emerge to diagnose the complication. You could contend to hell and back over just what sort of company Sony or even creators for the PS4 are actually, but the fact stays the very same: there were actually no women presenters as well as this wasn't for a lack of possessing females execs. The problem fixing/ item progression framework explained in this publication is actually exceptional. Even if you didn't possess individual notification transformed on to begin with this option must take care of the problem. If among the current changes you discover one howevers Windows 10 Installment along with the information Mistakes, there's no doubt, there've been concerns. Cell connection passed away as well as Contact I.D. quit working for thousands of consumers worldwide. The strike starts at 1pm, with the ceasing from all job and exclusive tasks, complied with through a march gathering together on the principal Plaza de Mayo area in Buenos Aires. Having actually functioned in the software program field for Twenty Years, as well as several years from computer experience in the past--- I do not would like to invest my time needing to deal with the concerns that bad developers developed - maybe as a new SV marketing strategy to compel a brand new investment. Informative appearance a the mystery from the presence of a loving The lord in a planet filled with going through. A recent research coming from Cass Company College, the Educational institution of Warwick and also the Educational institution from Wisconsin reveals that females ask for wage climbs equally as frequently as males yet males are actually 25% very likely in order to get a salary increase when they talk to. The prospective answer to that trouble is necessary to save the Trisolarians as well as to win the activity. An assistance for each other while their daily lives are breaking down and also they are also certainly there for the renewal as powerful females. Select the row that reveals disk capability for options to verify information as well as attempt to repair structural concerns.

[ebizworldwide]

Meet The Top 30 Social Salespeople In The World

" Never ever underestimate the desire of people and also companies for the standing quo," Enterprise 2.0 writer Andrew McAfee alerted businesses. Individuals are naturally resistant to alter, and while that's not always a bad thing, I have actually experienced my reasonable share of individuals resistant to the massive modifications and also possibilities that social media sites is producing in business as well as the workplace.

Salespeople, in particular, seem to have a set of guidelines and also values that they are determined regarding adhering to, which appears a bit counterintuitive to me, considered that today's purchasers complete some 70 percent of their acquisitions before consulting with a sales agent. Those aware acknowledge that social media supplies talented salespeople the ability to obtain to understand today's purchasers much better compared to ever in the past. These unique abilities are important for Human Resources as well as Ability Management pros to be aware of.

My own experiences with hesitant salesmen are supported by research from KiteDesk, an intelligent prospecting as well as social selling system company, which tells the tale of a market on the cusp of huge change. Apparently, much less compared to fifty percent of frontline salesmen are making use of social media sites for prospecting, checking discussions, communicating with consumers or collecting intelligence. Meaning, most of salespeople are disregarding social in order to help them linked to, and also involve intelligently with, buyers.

With this in mind, KiteDesk commissioned influencer advertising firm Evolve!, Inc. to research the ideal and brightest in social sales, in order to offer salesmen all set accessibility to individuals who do social selling well. Their research study, conducted in 2014, discovered the 30 most prominent social salespeople online back then:

I've collected five lessons from these leading social salespeople of 2014 to assist those who are still terrified of the transformative powers of social networks take steps towards ending up being much more effective, effective social sales professionals.

Lesson 1: Satisfy your leads on the networks they actually use

To join the rankings of these guiding social sellers, you have actually reached make use of the tools available to you to attach with potential customers where they get on social networks. Koka Sexton, Senior Social Advertising and marketing Supervisor at Linkedin, says: " Look at any of the possibility's social networks accounts, like Twitter, LinkedIn, as well as possibly their blog site. Throughout the purchasing cycle, don't rely only on e-mail and also the phone to stay linked. Involve individuals with social media sites too to make sure you are covering them from all sides."  

Lesson 2: "Socially surround" leads making use of all the tools at your disposal

Millennials, Gen X and also Gen Y experts, are currently customers. "Also if they are not utilizing social networks as a place to get involved, they matured on social media networks and also are definitely affected by it," claimed Green Leads Chief Executive Officer and CMO Mike Damphousse. "We exercise a technique called 'social border' where we use several resources of social networks as well as on the internet advertising and marketing on social networks to affect as well as acquire knowledge about a possibility. As soon as we feel they have been completely affected, we involve them individually." Social sales evangelist and also business owner Jill Rowley has actually understood the art as well as scientific research of utilizing social media networks purposefully to locate, hear, relate to, get in touch with, involve as well as enhance a prospective buyer, the acquiring board and their ball of impact. She explained: "I will connect on LinkedIn, adhere to on Twitter, RT and/or favorite a tweet. I will certainly identify whom my purchaser trust funds and gains from and also I'll #SociallySurround them too. I take advantage of the method of 'I see you tweeted about Jay Baer's incredible bookYoutility, did you happen to also check out Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook by Gary Vaynerchuk?' I make use of Google alerts thoroughly to track mentions of both my potential buyers and also consumers. I wish to stay involved with my consumers due to the fact that they are my better resource of leads, referrals and ADVOCACY!"  

Lesson 3: Not all social media is produced equivalent - choose your networks carefully

Front line sales people recognize that peers making use of social to offer are leading the pack. But getting them to in fact engage or study on social networks before a sales telephone call is testing because it's so time extensive. "A lot so," included Jeb Blount, CEO at SalesGravy, "that I have enjoyed salespeople invest incredible amounts of unproductive time on websites like LinkedIn with nothing to show for it. Sales managers fire salespeople that don't offer. It does not take salespeople long to obtain an idea about where they need to be investing their time." Jeb sees the illiteracy -the know exactly how to get the most effective return on their time financial investment -and an absence of user friendly, at-your-finger-tips tools that supply intelligence for lead generation, prospecting, and also engagement as both most significant impediments to social marketing throughout an organization. 

Lesson 4: Obtain your rulers on board

Sales instructor and also writer Shane Gibson includes one more obstacle to social sales adoption: c-suite execs. "Executives that come from another age of advertising and marketing, communications as well as leadership ... don't understand the worth of equipping entire groups to be social communicators - they just see the threat or they outright see it as an obligation."

Lesson 5: Procedure and also hype your success stories

So exactly how do you get rid of these barriers? According to Sean Burke, Chief Revenue Police officer of KiteDesk, "The divine grail to social sales fostering within an organization is a mix of evangelizing success tales and also the capability to track the reach, effectiveness and business influences that social marketing supplies." The Leading 30 social salespeople of 2014 were culled from a checklist of greater than 500 social sales evangelists, which was vetted and also racked up utilizing an exclusive formula that thought about things like engagement, social impact, popularity among experts and also more. You can take an appearance on top ONE HUNDRED social sales specialists on KiteDesk's blog to get more information from the social selling pros.

[shearssheep47-blog]

Purposes Of Functional Efficiency

Goals Of Functional Performance

#toc background: #f9f9f9;border: 1px solid #aaa;display: table;margin-bottom: 1em;padding: 1em;width: 350px; .toctitle font-weight: 700;text-align: center;

Content

Professional Driving Capability

Whizrt: Substitute Smart Cybersecurity Red Team

Include Your Contact Details The Proper Way

The Kind Of Security Guards

Security Vs. Presence

Expert Driving Capability

The duties of security personnel in the United States are expanding in extent. For instance, a fad is the increasing use private security to support services formerly given by authorities departments. James F. Priest addresses substantive legal and public law issues which straight or indirectly associate with the stipulation of security solutions. These can be demonstrated by the logic of alternative or additional service providers.

The use of exclusive authorities has certain allure because home or local business owner can straight acquire for public security services, thus supplying welcome alleviation for metropolitan budget plans. Ultimately, exclusive authorities features can be versatile, depending upon the monetary, organizational, political, and conditions of the client. Alberta and also Ontario ban making use of the term Security Police officer, which has been in widespread usage in the United States for many decades. Current modifications to the act have actually likewise presented constraints on uniform and automobile colours and markings to make personal security personnel clearly distinctive from police employees. Some sources feel that several of these restrictions are implemented to please the Canadian Police Association.

Whizrt: Substitute Intelligent Cybersecurity Red Team

What are types of objectives?

Security guards at schools may stop and question students as long as the detentions are not arbitrary or intended to harass, the California Supreme Court decided unanimously Monday. The ruling will substantially broaden the power of security guards to detain students, legal experts said.

In 2013, because of a high variety of rapes as well as fierce robberies, the city of Oslo (Oslo Kommune) hired a private security company (Metro Garda) to patrol the downtown immigrant areas. This patrol had a positive effect, as well as the city has, along with Metro Garda police officers, currently hired their very own policemans called Bymiljøetaten (City environment dep). The districts in Norway are not allowed to develop their own "cops". The only police force in Norway is the federal authorities (politi). Gatekeeper are typically uniformed to represent their lawful authority to secure. personal property.

What are the 12 qualities of security?

Example of good career objective statement as an answer: “I believe long terms goals are achieved when we break them into smaller achievable goals. My short term goal is to get a job in an organization that is progressive and performance driven.

Virginia also permits gatekeeper to go to extra 40 hours of training to become accredited as Conservators of the Tranquility (Special Cops) for the company employing them. Such vouched policemans are likewise permitted using sirens and traffic signals. All placements require State Cops and FBI history checks. Along with normal "vektere" there likewise is a special branch for "Ordensvakter" that generally function as baby bouncers or security at performances as well as comparable sorts of events.

In New York State, as an example, unarmed security personnel call for eight hours of pre-assignment training and 16 hours on-the-job training. Equipped gatekeeper need an extra 47 hrs of firearms training before they can carry a tool, with an added eight hours annually.

What are the qualities of a good security guard?

Security objectives are goals and constraints that affect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your data and application. The objectives, once created, can be used to direct all the subsequent security activities that you perform.

Ordensvakter have to go through an additional week of training to learn strategies on exactly how to manage intoxicated individuals and also people on numerous medications. They likewise learn about the alcohol legislations of Norway (which are rather stringent). The authorities in the local cops district have to approve each Ordensvakt. These unique guidelines arose after events in the 1990s when bouncers had a bad track record, particularly in Oslo, for being harsh as well as as well ruthless with people. Back then, the authorities had no control over who worked as bouncers.

In addition, usual object-oriented layout patterns planned to stop customers of a user interface from accessing execution information can likewise be used to avoid harmful code from accessing sensitive sources.

First, the recipient should get the general public trick of the begetter.

Security is impacted by preventing things from getting references to various other challenge which they ought to not have accessibility.

Overridden security-- is readily available when a state-based ACL is overriding object-based security, or when the administrator sets a hand-operated override on the object.

There are an increasing number of job opportunities for security experts operating in the UK. Gatekeeper normally function internal for a company or expert organisation.

Include Your Call Details The Right Way

The authorities permitted to security guards differ by country and also subnational jurisdiction. An affordable degree of created English is likewise more effective as security officers are required to create brief reports every so often. Some individuals might want to work for contractors or security representatives. In this case the officer will be continually transforming his or her place of work.

In this circumstance you will call for a Security Sector Authority (SIA) front-line licence. This is usually offered after finishing a training program; visit the SIA site for more information. The NLRB ruled that as an associate of the CIO, the board was indirectly associated with production unions and consequently disqualified for certification under the new constraints. The committee was then compelled to totally take out from the CIO and also start the independent United Plant Guard Workers of America. By the 1990s, this union had actually evolved to consist of numerous other kinds of security officers as well as transformed its name to the SPFPA.

Specialized VIP security personnel services as well as business remain in high need as well as are defined by their capability to shield celebrities and execs throughout times of agitation. There is objectbeveiliging marked difference between individuals doing the responsibilities traditionally related to watchmen and persons who take a much more energetic duty in shielding individuals as well as building. The former, typically called "guards", are taught the concept "observe as well as report", are minimally trained, as well as not anticipated to manage the general public or face wrongdoers. On the various other hand, some security officers, youths, particularly, utilize the job as an useful experience to make use of in applying to police.

After the federal government carried out training and also required police-issued ID cards for bouncers the problems have been lowered. The authorities of Oslo report that Ordensvakter are currently helping the cops identify criminal offenses that or else would not be reported.

How do you describe your career objective?

When it comes to safety the person who is at risk for injury must be aware of the hazard and what can be done to control the hazard and prevent injury. This is one of the three E's of safety: Evaluation, Education, and Enforcement.

In some states, companies are creating innovation to improve exclusive security. Making use of behavior analysis, computer systems can spot threats quicker with less errors in reasoning. Making use of specific algorithms, a computer system can currently spot aggressive and protective body movement, which triggers a sharp to security or correct authorities relying on the occasion. These systems can additionally track slides as well as drops, theft and also various other occasions generally experienced in corporate America.

[chadwickreese]

Chadwick Reese | Transport and Logistics - Valuable Tips For Consumers to Get one of the most From Their Sales Reps.

My objective is for this short article to offer a double function: 1) Bridge the void in between customer-sales representative communications in the work environment. 2) Help Customers get the most out of their partnership with their Sales person.

 All of us know the number of publications are written nowadays on Sales success. There are many, the titles begin to obscure. "How to Add Value to Your Client's Day", "Sales 101" as well as my perpetuity favored "The Richest Guy In Babylon." Our society is geared in the direction of industrialism, as well as considering that there are so many books that can assist a salesperson to become better at their trade as well as increase their revenue, then all one has to do is head to the regional bookstore as well as purchase then use- if only it was that simple. It's a fact that if a sales representative wants to take the effort and buy their success, there are a myriad of sources offered to them. But I made a decision to take a totally different strategy to creating this post for a few different reasons.

  We as salespeople are trained that "the client's are constantly best", as well as to be "subservient" to our client's demands. Phrases such as, "What can I do to earn your service?" "Right here's my mobile phone, residence phone, as well as even my better half's phone if you require to find me." I downplay this however Salespeople, you know it's true. We often tend to overdo it when it comes to completing to catch service with the pleasantries and the "butt-kissing.".

  During this past Xmas I had actually received Xmas cards from a few of my customers. They were nothing fancy, but you might feel how heart felt they were, and the idea behind them appeared. I believed to myself, I would certainly do anything for these clients since they absolutely value the job that I put in. I recognize that it's our work to offer the supreme service to our clients, and to be positive, rather than responsive to their requirements, however, for a client to recognize our initiative means a great deal. What I have actually found, from over 20 years of experience in the Transport industry, is that client's that reveal their appreciation and want to deal with their Account Exec's tend to have a much better service connection with the supplier.

Chadwick Reese

 My hope is that this write-up would certainly be gotten by clients, the people that we offer to, as well as have this info put on the means they do business. I would not want to bet on this taking place anytime soon, because generally, clients are set in their ways. They have been ruined by us, the sales representatives, because for each 1 consumer that approves this information, there will certainly be 100's that laugh at it. I have directly remained in situations where in a Provider had the opportunity to "collaborate with" a customer on dealing with a concern, yet decided not to- based solely on the fact that they really did not like the clients attitude. So currently the normal response to this from a consumer's viewpoint is "So what, I'll simply most likely to another supplier." This might be true, however after a while the variety of high quality business starts decreasing, and also the customer goes to a delay. Below I have actually provided 7 helpful tips clients can make use of to try to develop a far better relationship with their sales associate:.

  Endorsements- Sales Reps can utilize this for their business building. Ask your sales associate to prepare one for you beforehand to ensure that you don't need to hang out thinking about what to say.

  Referrals- Similar to testimonies, this might be really advantageous to the sales representative, and also aid them develop their book of business. I just advocate providing recommendations to the sales associate if, and also just if, they have actually gained it.

  Pay Your Bills- This is very evident. Vendors enjoy it when consumers pay their expenses on schedule, and this is a sure way to remain in a positive light. Customers who are paying their bills within terms are not just uncommon these days, however LOVED by the suppliers. Customers that pay late, or not at all have a tendency not to get the "favors" that they may require one day.

  Sincerity- I recognize this may sound a little disparaging initially glimpse, however I believe among the most significant points that can be developed between a vendor-client relationships is honesty. For the sales rep, if you can be easy with the customer, without having a hidden agenda, I think this action will certainly be compensated after the connection has developed as well as matured. For the customer, if you assume the Provider can be doing better let them know, yet a lot more especially be described in your criticism. Any excellent Sales Agent will be happy to receive positive efficiency based objection.

  Do Not Always Ask For Favors- Clients have a tendency to wear their supports from their Service providers before the partnership truly starts. Consumers, keep those supports in your back pockets up until you truly need them. Carriers do make psychological notes of these favors, believe me, and also when you most need it they will certainly quit. I have actually seen this to many times in my career, and also normally this finishes in a bad break up.

  Stability- Just like for sincerity, a customer should demand this from his salesperson, however in return they must likewise reciprocate this as well. This characteristic is simply a great life lesson, whether we are talking business, household, good friends; it just makes good plain sense, to be a stand-up individual.

  Constant Behavior- I know that company and life can be rough, and also everybody has their oblique points, however I have actually seen numerous times wherein a customer will lash out at their salesman as a result of them( client) having a negative day. It's very important to avoid poor language, as well as to not obtain your day on your rep. Find various other means to air vent out your stress such as, the fitness center, yoga exercise, analysis, however remain a larger person and a true specialist, as well as do not catch life's stress, particularly towards your Sales Rep.

  Earl White is a National Account Manager, with One Quit Logistics a Third Party Logistics business based out of Watsonville, Ca. He has actually been in Sales for over 15 years and also works with several sales reps to help them gain far better footing when it concerns the evasive technique of dealing with clients. He delights in being able to pass on a number of the abilities he has gained from Leading Salesperson in the Sector.

[elevenhoursinfront-blog]

14th September 2017

Steve woke up the moment the alarm went off and left the room. Weird for him, but I presumed he was going to wet himself. He usually plays of his phone for 15 minutes and then goes for a wee. He came back after 10 minutes and he had made us both a coffee! What a lovely surprise. Neither of us have had a hot drink since we were in Tasmania. We got ready for work and jumped in the van. I took my GoPro in to take some photos and videos. I wanted to make a really good film in the shed and I've planned what filming I need to take. It's going to take the rest of my time here to make it, but it'll be worth it. It'll keep me busy! I took a few photos of some people as we were waiting for the bell to start. I was at the back with Maggie and we found out that we only had 2.5 trailers to do. We normally complete 26 trailers per day so we should be done within an hour or so. It just goes to show how fast we work. There are around 60 tree bunches on each trailer. There are are 8 hands to each tree bunch and a singular hand has about 20 bananas on. Noah worked out that in his 3 months of working at the banana farm, he would've seen 9 million individual bananas, roughly. Any way, back to where I was actually going with that. We should be finished today by the first break which means a long weekend again. I can't hide my excitement to be off but I'm sad about losing money. I'm not sure what we'll do if our days keep getting shorter. I was working away and I was so hyper. Really, really hyper. Maggie and I were singing along to songs stupidly, splashing each other with water, having a great laugh. Time went by so quickly. I was messing about with my GoPro with Cait and Mitch too. I filmed them being stupid, I filmed the shit shoot to show how many bananas are thrown away. I also put the GoPro into one of my banana boxes to go through the machine - don't worry though Dad, Cait was well aware and got it out before it was sent away. Mitchel took my GoPro too and did some funny films. I had a great morning. We finished packing the bananas after about 1-2 hours. I got started on the cleaning whilst the two other belts finished. Top belt always finished first. We did a big clean, a really big clean which became boring after a while. There's so many of us girls that the jobs run out pretty quickly. It was 0950 when we all stopped, went to the break area and waited for the bell to go. I went around taking pictures and filming Steve doing some cleaning as that's a rare sight. He ended up turning the industrial hose on at me so I was absolutely soaked. My feet started to foam like fairy up liquid. At the start of our shifts, we have to go through a metal tray type thing of liquid and chemicals that stops us bringing in any diseases that could harm the bananas. That's why I started foaming. The bell went and we had our lunch. April, one of the older ladies that works there, told me that we weren't going home now. We were staying to help Jenny outside for a little while. I was dead excited - outside! Finally. It's like a prisoner getting to leave the cell. I told the girls and made sure everyone of us put factor 50 sun cream on. Vicki got us as many hats as she could find too. The bell went for work again and I was very excited. We all lined up outside and waited for the actual outside staff to leave so we could go. We walked about 5 minutes, not even that to the first paddock. It was the closest one to the shed. Jenny put us all into pairs, female with male. I was put with Maggie's Matt and Steve was put with Maggie. We were given a massive knife that was almost like a machete and was told to get on with it. We had to go to each individual tree, untie the banana bag and take it off, then pull the string down and put them into separate bags. One bag for bags and the other for string. The paddock is 400m long and the trees are pretty much on top of each other. Matt and I got into the swing of it fairly quickly. He would untie the knot as I couldn't reach them and I would pull the bag off the bananas and put them into the bag. I was carrying the bags and he would carry the knife. The knife would be to cut the bunch down should it be too high for Matt to untie which wasn't too often because he's quite tall. We took about an hour to do the whole line which went really fast. We were in the sun and I was loving it. I desperately needed my water though and you don't have the hands to carry it around with you. No wonder the guys pass out. Once we finished the first line, we walked back to get water which was strange for Jenny. She just said "go have a water break". Jenny is all about hard graft. Matt said to Steve that he was worried because we were basically chopping down perfectly fine bananas to rot into the ground. This paddock was only planted last year. How strange. We did another line (of trees, not cocaine) before Jenny said we were heading back. We were told we'd be finished helping the odd job by 1230. I was happy, I really enjoyed being outside. I wish I could work outside permanently. I might say something to Vicki should the opportunity arise but it's a bit too far down the line. We all got back to the shed and sat in the break area. We have to wait for Vicki to come out and say you can go home before just leaving. There could be more work that’s needed. We waited for about 10 minutes and most of the staff turned up, waiting around. Steve and I saw Blayde and little Matt who were on holiday this week. We knew then that something was not right. We asked why they were here and Blayde said his mum said he had to come in (Vicki). Oh god. What was happening? Were we losing our jobs? What was going on? We all started to worry, saying that what would we do if we were to lose our jobs. We saw the big staff in the office upstairs through the window. We waited about 20 minutes before Graham, the owner came out. He stood on the bench and said "There's just no easy way to say this so I'm just going to say it. We are closing the farm, as of today. We've tried for two long years to get this working but we can't." He started to cry. He carried on saying "I want to thank you all for your hard work and I'm so, sorry. There's too many bananas in Australia and the market is no longer there". Everyone was silent. Completely silent. Someone said "Thank you Graham". I started to clap and everyone joined in. People started to cry, including me. Vicki and Jenny were in absolute pieces. Their whole lives have just stopped. Tristan, our supervisor from the Philippians could not stop crying. He was on sponsorship to provide money for his whole family back home. Anthony, the outside supervisor, just stood up and walked out. Got in his car and left. He didn't say a single word. I don't blame him. Supervisors had the right to know beforehand, the company should've had the respect to tell the exec staff first. Give them notice what was going on. The big managers had meetings with their financial advisers who said on Friday evening to cut their losses and shut. Vicki and Jenny found out on their lunch time, as casual chat, that they were losing their jobs on Thursday. Vicki had to leave the shed because she couldn't face anyone. She drove the buggy into the paddocks and spent the afternoon crying. She has a house to pay for, she's 49 years old and she only gets 8 weeks redundancy pay. Jenny is well off so money isn't her problem, her house is paid off. It's her family business though so it's heartbreaking for them. I was shocked. I didn't know what to think. Vicki stood up and said "We will call your names out individually and you can come and collect your letter, if you don’t have one, come and see me after". We got our letters which contained our final payslip, a letter of contract termination and a final tax summary for taxback/visa purposes. Those that didn’t have their letter, were getting their second year visa granted by the owners. They were only doing it for those who had 1-2 weeks left of working which is completely fair and I’m so pleased they did that. They would have to wait for their payslips to be processed next week to show that they did their 3 months.

We started to say our goodbyes to staff and eventually left. Gobsmacked. I couldn't stop crying. What were we going to do now? Our plan was completely ruined. We drove the other hostel home and pulled up outside ours. The guys at the hostel came walking out with cold beers to help the mood as they found out which was nice. I couldn't help but feel sorry for the full time staff. People who's lives were just completely ruined. Bills for homes and children that have to be paid. They had been fired on the spot, with no warning or help. I saw many men crying because they couldn't support themselves or their family anymore. It's an awful situation. In fact, awful isn't the word to even describe it. I rang the Seafarm the moment I got back and the man told me to go in to fill in the application form. The waiting list would be about 4 weeks which is far too long for me but any options I have is better than none. We jumped in the van straight away and drove to the farm. We got the forms and they told us to bring them back tomorrow. On the way back to the hostel, I jumped out at one of the cafes called Annie's Kitchen to see whether they were hiring. They said they were quiet at the moment, maybe in a months time.

The problem is, Cardwell is going to go downhill now. Backpackers bring in so much money the whole town because of the banana farm. The farm was the only reason we came to this small little town and now nobody will come. Leonie was panicking because she relies on backpacker money for her income. She said she's going to have to get another job now. She reckons things will be closed down after a while. It's going to have a bad domino affect throughout the whole town which is absolutely crazy. Steve and I got showered and sat in the room. We were just silent. I didn't know what to say, I didn't know what to say. I started to cry and Steve laid there with me. He said that we'd write today off and talk about it tomorrow. I felt sorry for us and everyone else at the same time. We went outside after a while and sat chatting to everyone. We were all in a pity-party. We were talking about it for hours. I text my family and told them the news but they weren't awake yet. Steve started to feel hungry so he went to the kitchen to make us dinner. He wanted to make us chicken curry pasta which I've never heard of before. Steve said his mum used to make it and that it was nice so I went with it. He bought it down whilst we were chatting still and we ate away. It was nice to be fair. It would've been better with a different curry sauce. It was Ciar, Matt, Caiome and Bines last night tonight so we were all meant to be going to the pub for a drink at happy hour. None of us were feeling up to it really but we had to go. We left around 1700 and walked the 5 minutes down the road to Yasi. It was shut but the owner came out and said we could sit in the garden as the inside had been hired out for a private fishing event. Fishing is so big here. We chilled for an hour or two. Steve and I got one beer each which was $4.50. I didn't want to buy anything because we no longer had a drink but Steve's an avid spender. I wanted to FaceTime my Dad so we left earlier than everyone else. We got called boring and what not, as we always do. Last Saturday, Ciar came over to me in the entertainment room when we were all drinking and she said "You don't have friends because you're always in your room". If I'm honest, I was hurt. I don't want those types of 'friends' if they make me feel like rubbish for not doing something everyone else is doing. Yes, I'm actually a fairly boring person and I do enjoy chilling in my room of an evening after work. Whatever. I called Dad whilst he was eating his porridge. He asked what our plan was, which we don't have. At all. The call ended fairly quickly and Steve and I went outside. We chatted to people. The majority were still down. I spoke to Cait the most. She and I are the most devastated. We waited for everyone to come back from the pub and then we went to the entertainment room. Everyone was enjoying a good few drinks as it was probably going to be the last time with people here... We played a drinking game called Arrogance. You have one cup and you pour a bit of your drink in. The player next to you will flip a coin. Heads or tails - you guess. You get it right, you pass the cup on. You get it wrong, you drink. Eventually, our cup was filled with beer, cider, goon and peppermint tea (thank you Harriet). That got people fairly drunk and before you know it, we were up on the benches dancing and laughing away. The boys were on the grass playing "see who can kick the ball through the window first". Steve won! He shot it in first which was great because the game had been going on for ages. Luckily, the window was smashed a few weeks beforehand so none of the lads could do it this time. The drinking, laughs and what not continued. Steve and I didn't really drink much. Scrap that - I just asked him and he said he was drunk. I didn't realise. I didn't really drink much, in fact, I wasn't even tipsy in the slightest. I was still very deflated after the words longest, most rubbish day ever. I kept wondering when my bad luck streak would end... Bines had a go at kicking the football through the gap in the window and ended up kicking his trainer onto the roof. Bad idea for someone who was leaving in the morning. We had to get the trainer down and luckily Nick was able to get it. Cahoime wanted to try but she was very drunk. We weren't letting anyone too drunk climb up on the roof. The trainer was saved and the night carried on. I went to bed around 2330. Steve stayed up but he joined me after about half an hour. We fell asleep straight away. Thank God, the day is finally over.

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Marvel Cinematic Universe review

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is one of the biggest and most ambitious franchises ever made. While not the first franchise ever to attempt a shared universe, it is definitely the one that codified how to pull them off in the modern day, and it has proven to be an incredible, unbelievable success. I mean, as good as Iron Man was, no one ever truly expected the little Nick Fury cameo at the end to ever be anything more than a neat little mythology gag. And yet, here we are, nearly a decade later, with it being the highest grossing franchise in cinematic history and with it containing some of the very best superhero films ever made.

Of course, there being fifteen movies so far, and with more on the way, it would be an enormous task to review them all individually… so, to celebrate the impending release of Spider-Man: Homecoming, I will be doing a similar thing as I did to the View Askiewniverse and touching upon each of the Marvel films thus far released. However, for the Guardians of the Galaxy films, Civil War, and Doctor Strange, I will keep things brief, as my reviews of them are still new enough to accurately reflect my opinions (Age of Ultron is not so lucky here).

There is no better place to start than the start, so let’s lok at the film that began it all: Iron Man. It is the tale of egotistical millionaire Tony Stark and how, after a brush with death that had him kidnapped by terrorists and crippled, he decided to change for the better and don a robot suit so he could protect the world from devastation. One of his big goals is to clean up the mess his company has made in the world, which not everyone likes, particularly Obadiah Stane.

This movie is probably most well known for resurrecting the career of Robert Downey, Jr. after he struggled for years with addiction and had a downward spiral. This is a truly triumphant return, and his negative experiences definitely helped him out with this role of a self-destructive playboy who realizes he should dedicate himself to a better cause. RDJ truly captures what his character is and what he should be, and thanks to his performance, he not only saved his career, he saved the character as well, who had not exactly been popular due to the recent Civil War event in the comics and his unnecessarily extreme actions therein. It’s a twofold saving, and boy is it a blast!

One part of the film that is not often talked about is the villain, Obadiah Stane, who is played by Jeff “The Dude” Bridges. As the very first Marvel supervillain, he does leave a bit of an impression with his  exclamation of how Tony built his first Iron Man suit IN A CAVE! WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS! He eventually suits up in a gigantic mech suit, and becomes the typical “Evil version of the hero” that we’ve all come to know and love… but, to be fair to him, he was the first one. As far as “Evil version of the hero”-type villains go, Obadiah Stane is enjoyable and memorable. He was originally planned to have a “never found the body” situation going on at the end of the film, hinting he could eventually return, but as it’s not in the final cut, we kinda have to assume that this was part of the annoying “kill the cool villain” trend the movies would follow for years.

This movie has a reputation as being one of the greatest superhero movies ever made, and it really isn’t undeserved. This film has kickass action, great characters, intriguing foreshadowing that actually payed off, and yet it still works easily as a standalone. This right here is how superhero films should be made, but the fact that so many later superhero films, including later MCU films and the DCEU films prior to Wonder Woman, decided to focus on cramming in so much crap that requires you to watch previous and later films to understand them, it seems not many got the memo. Franchise building isn’t always bad guys, but take notes; work on being good on your own first.

The Incredible Hulk is next up on the list, and this is one of the most obscure films in the MCU. NOBODY talks about this movie. I’d understand if people thought Mark Ruffalo was the first Hulk in the MCU; this movie is hardly ever referenced even in later films, all its plot threads seem to have been dropped, and it took until Civil War for one of its characters to reappear. For the life of me, I’ll never understand why; this movie is a fantastic example of worldbuilding while still remaining a solid standalone film. The plot is relatively simple: Bruce Banner wants to be left alone so he can cure himself, but after accidentally poisoning a man with his blood after it got into some soda (you read that right), General Ross and Emil Blonsky are on his trail; for those not in the know, Blonsky becomes one of Hulk’s most famous foes, Abomination.

Edward Norton is Bruce Banner here, and you can tell he really is a fan of the comics, because he does an excellent job; he apparently did a lot of uncredited rewriting and even directed some of his own scenes. William Hurt as Ross is also perfect, which of course is helped by the fact that Hurt is a big fan of Hulk. Then of course there’s Liv Tyler as Betty Ross, and she’s actually one of the better love interests in the MCU, to the point where it’s honestly offensive she hasn’t reappeared and instead has been replaced with Black Widow of all people as Bruce’s love interest.

The movie has solid action and a solid final fight, with Abomination being a pretty good “Evil version of the hero” villain. He’s not spectacular or anything, but he’s definitely threatening and pretty cool. So how then did this become such an obscure film in one of the biggest franchises? I imagine part of the problem is being screwed over by Universal, who owns the distribution rights for Hulk solo films. This movie just couldn’t be followed up, and so Hulk is relegated to ensemble casts. This leaves a lot of the characters in limbo, which includes Abomination and Leader (who had his origin shown in the film). And this is a real shame, because like I said, there’s some great worldbuilding here; the super-soldier serum is mentioned, there’s Stark weaponry, and in an alternate opening with the Hulk running through the arctic we get a glimpse of the frozen Captain America. Honestly, I think aside from the issue with the film rights, the fact that this movie can mostly be described as “Solid” is the reason why it has faded from the public consciousness; it lacks the OOMPH so many of the later films and even Iron Man before it had, and nowadays aside from looking for all the foreshadowing it’s hard to watch and care about these characters who will never show up again. It’s a damn good movie in my eyes, but I can see why it is relegated to a footnote in the MCU.

Next up is Iron Man 2. Fuck this movie. I fucking hate this movie with every fiber of my being. It is an awful, bloated, unfocused, cluttered, and disrespectful mess of the film. This film is a fucking travesty in every single regard, except perhaps casting Don Cheadle as James Rhodes. The plot deals with the fallout of Tony outing himself in the last movie, with industrialist Justin Hammer breathing down his neck as congressional hearings try and force him to share his tech. There’s also a pissed off Russian named  Ivan Vanko who wants to get vengeance on him, oh yeah and Black Widow is also unceremoniously stuffed into the film alongside Nick Fury so this can basically act as a trailer for the upcoming movie about the Avengers. This was due to executive meddling, to the point where jon Favreau didn’t direct the third Iron Man. Marvel had bad problems with executive meddling in their early days.

This movie fucking offends me. First off, they waste Mickey Rourke as the villain Whiplash; Mickey Rourke was pissed with the execs making his character into a cartoonish villain when he was trying to play him as a human, an anti-villain… and so he proceeded to spew vitriol at everyone involved, meaning even if Whiplash survived it’s unlikely he’ll be back. So we wasted the one interesting villain, and who are we left with? Justin fucking Hammer, one of the most unfunny, annoying cunts in comic book movie history. He is easily one of the worst superhero movie villains ever made; he’s annoying, he’s cloying, and he sucks away screentime that could have been devoted to Whiplash. He’s an absolute waste of a villain.

Then we have Tony’s “Demon in a Bottle” arc, the arc where his rampant alcoholism threatens to ruin his life. This is a tragic part of the character, and the film was going to delve deeper into it. And hey, this would have been great! RDJ could add a lot to such an emotional arc due to his own experiences! Guess what they do instead?

They play Tony’s alcoholism for laughs. Have I mentioned I fucking hate this movie?

This movie sucks ass. It’s fucking awful and feels like a shitty trailer for better movies, which is exacerbated by how shoehorned in Black Widow and Fury are. The movie is a bloated, disgusting mess, crushed by bad decisions and executive meddling. It is easily the worst movie in the entire MCU, but believe me it has some competition… which I’ll get to soon enough.

After that travesty, we have Thor. Thor I can best describe as being a precursor to Wonder Woman in a lot of ways, which is reflected in the story to an extent: it’s about a god – er, or an ALIEN – who is banished by his father after being a disobedient shit. He gets sent on down to Earth, while his half-brother Loki plots and schemes back on Asgard. Okay, so it’s not entirely like Wonder Woman, but still, there are similarities.

The biggest similarity is probably Chris Hemsworth as Thor, who exudes a childlike, boyish charm as Thor when he is down on Earth among the mortals. It’s not the same charm Diana has in Wonder Woman, but it’s not wholly dissimilar. Their origins too, as mighty gods who go to live among mortals and fight alongside them, is likewise similar. Of course, there are big differences too: the biggest one is while Wonder Woman surrounds herself with a cool human supporting cast, Thor surrounds himself with one of the worst fucking supporting casts I’ve ever seen. Special mention must go to the cliically unfunny Kat Dennings, who sucks the joy out of every scene she’s in with her relentlessly awful attempts at humor. Natalie Portman is a bland, flat love interest who has almost no chemistry with Thor, a nd the old scientist guy is so generic I forgot his name. This is a damn shame, because his supporting cast on Asgard was fantastic, with Heimdall getting special mention for being an utter badass guardian played by Idris Elba. I’d much rather watch the cosmic adventures of Thor and his Asgardian buddies than him pal around with boring humans, but ah well.

Still, at least we have a cool villain this time around. Loki is pretty interesting, and Tom Hiddleston does an excellent job with him. He would only get better and more entertaining in later films, but this was solid groundwork to establish him. Hilariously, Roger Ebert hated this film and had this to say in his review: “The standards for comic book superhero movies have been established by Superman, The Dark Knight, Spider-Man 2 and Iron Man. In that company Thor is pitiful. Consider even the comparable villains (Lex Luthor, the Joker, Doc Ock and Obadiah Stane). Memories of all four come instantly to mind. Will you be thinking of Loki six minutes after this movie is over?" This is just one of the most hilariously ironic reviews I’ve ever seen, as Loki has come to be one of the best and most memorable Marvel villains (mostly due to the fact he doesn’t die).

Overall, I feel like this movie suffers from the same thing The Incredible Hulk did; it’s a darn good movie with a lot of value that also works as a standalone film, but it’s easy to see it as exceedingly average due to its faults. At least this movie got followed up… though… eh. We’ll get there soon enough. As it stands, Thor is a good if not great film that establishes Thor well enough.

Next up is one of my personal favorites, Captain America: The First Avenger. I love me some pulpy 1940s style two-fisted tales, and this delivers that fun in spades. Sometimes you just wanna see a handsome blonde man punch Nazis in the face, and boy does this film deliver. The story tells the tale of how wimpy but strong-hearted Steve Rogers goes from a scrawny little man into the gorgeous beefcake American hero that is Captain America, and how he fought against Red Skull and HYDRA.

This movie has a lot of silly Golden Age elements to it that would not work in any other context other than the most patriotic superhero’s first big movie. The biggest, of course, being Cap himself. He’s a character that is really hard to pull off… and yet, Chris Evans did it, and perfectly so. I’ll let this excerpt from TVTropes’s YMMV page for the movie speak for itself:

“It's always an issue to adapt Captain America to any medium, because a character who is actually living up to his own principles of righteousness can far too easily come off as straight-out Narm, and by all rights that's exactly what this film should be. But somehow it comes out as a genuine, heartwarming, awesome, tear-jerking, triumphal ode to true patriotism and human goodness instead, a feat that should have been impossible outside the Golden Age of Hollywood. The writers, director, and Chris Evans deserve a lot of credit for striking the right tone with Cap: The Herois a trope that's almost never played straight anymore, without veering into self-parody or coming off as self-righteous.”

I really could not have summed it up better myself.

Now, let us talk about the villain, Red Skull, who is played by a deliciously hammy Hugo Weaving. Hugo Weaving is an actor I love in nearly everything, because he always brings exactly what is needed, and boy does he do that here. He’s sick, depraved, truly evil, and just oh so delightfully hammy. The man is basically if M. Bison as played by Raul Julia was in a Marvel film, and that I think is the highest compliment you can give a hammy villain. The best part: While he is defeated in the end, his use of the Cosmic Cube seems to imply he could survive, leaving him open to return. The bad news: he hasn’t appeared since, and for years after, Hugo Weaving took a very negative attitude to the role, implying he only did it for money… until a 2016 interview showed he had softened considerably, and thought the role was awesome. Please Marvel. Bring this man back. We need more of his evil Nazi hamminess, especially since you fucking wasted Baron Strucker (we’ll get to that soon enough).

If I’m gonna criticize anything here, it’s gonna be the Howling Commandos. As a point of comparison, let us bring up Wonder Woman again; she too assembled a multi-national ragtag group of misfits, and all of them had plenty of character and development, and to top it off, it’s pretty obvious they were meant to be a substitute for the Commandos. But despite they, they’re actually BETTER, as the Howling Commandos barely have any presence at all in this film. I couldn’t tell you a single thing they did. They’re dull wastes of character space, and it’s a shame.

Still, overall, the movie is fantastic pulpy fun, and it ends on the biggest tearjerker of Phase 1. It’s a pretty simple film, and at times it can seem corny and silly, but like I said in Wonder Woman, it’s all part of the charm of these optimistic superhero films that harken back to the Golden Age. And hey, I find it hard to give a movie that subtly implies Indiana Jones is canon in the Marvel universe anything but two thumbs up.

Finally, after all the buildup, we come to the big conclusion of Phase 1: The Avengers. And after all the buildup, all the development, was it worth the wait? HELL FUCKING YES IT WAS WORTH THE WAIT! This movie kicks a whole lot of ass, and is one of the biggest, best, and flashiest superhero films ever made. This is the film where Thor, Cap, Iron Man, Hulk, Hawkeye, and Black Widow all unite to take down Loki and his alien army before they destroy the world; how much cooler does it get?

The movie’s greatest strength is just the sheer spectacle of it all; this kind of film was unheard of. Who would have thought a movie like this would exist when Iron Man first came out? Seeing all these huge actors as heroes onscreen together, fighting against Loki… it’s just amazing. The writing and humor here is actually really on point, which can be jarring after seeing the much denser and wackier dialogue of Age of Ultron; it makes one wonder if the execs forced Joss Whedon to add more humor to that film. All these pieces are in place, and it is just a joy to see them come together.

Even better, it’s not totally required to watch every movie before to understand all of the characters; the film does a pretty good job of establishing everyone. Sure, it HELPS, but you can get a feel for each one of the heroes just from this film. It especially helps with Bruce, since it’s Mark Ruffalo now in the role and no one really remembered Hulk’s one MCU solo outing anyway. Speaking of which, Mark Ruffalo is a highlight of the film; he’s the best Bruce Banner yet by far, and his Hulk is the best yet scene in film.

If there are any criticisms to go around, it’s that Cap doesn’t get to do as much, and a lot of the badass normal heroes kind of get shafted. Sure Cap, Widow, and Hawkeye do some cool shit, but it’s Hulk, Thor, and Iron Man who pull of the big, flashy, exciting moments in the big final fight. I get that you gotta make Hulk cool considering his lackluster past films, but do ya gotta steal Cap’s thunder to do it?

Overall though, The Avengers still holds up as a great, exciting superhero extravaganza and one of the best crossover films ever made, and it’s definitely one of the best MCU offerings. It has its flaws, but the sheer excitement and comic book joy of the film shine through, making it a must-see experience.

Phase 1 ended on such a high note… how do we kick off Phase 3? With another shitty Iron Man sequel, of course! To be totally fair, this movie is a hell of a lot better than Iron Man 2… but a lot of things are better than that, so it isn’t saying much. This time Tony Stark has the bright idea of antagonizing a terrorist organization known as the Ten Rings and their leader, the Mandarin. This backfires, and soon Tony is uncovering evil plots and shit.

This movie fucks up badly, especially in the villain department. Most of the enemy mooks are people injected with Extremis, a drug that gives them powers… the problem is, most of these mooks are disabled military vets who are now willingly and gleefully acting out terrorist attacks on their fellow Americans, up to and including a plot to assassinate the president. Look, I get sometimes it’s dumb to read into things in movies too much, but there’s really no way I can read this that isn’t pretty fucked.

As if that isn’t bad enough, we come to the issue with the Mandarin… and shockingly, it’s not about race or the “Yellow peril” origins of the character. For most of the movie, we are led to believe the Mandarin is played by Ben Kingsley, and he does an absolutely excellent job at making the Mandarin menacing, chilling, hammy, and intimidating all at once. He’s the perfect modern update of the villain… and sadly, he is not actually the Mandarin. He is an actor named Trevor Slattery. Slattery still manages to be one of the bright spots of the movie… something that does not extend to the true villain Killian, played by Guy Pearce. He’s an extremely boring, generic, and forgettable foe, and his claims that he is in fact the real Mandarin opened so many plotholes it’s no wonder they had in development a short where the real Mandarin sends out pissed off enforcers to call bullshit on his and Trevor’s schemes.

There’s just not much to recommend here. The movie is just a dull slog with a few bright spots here and there, and even the ending is bullshit with Tony seeming like he’s giving up superheroics for good… and then by his next appearance he’s back to being a hero with a new set of armor even though all his suits were destroyed in this movie. This one just sucks, though not as bad as the second one; there’s at least a bit more to like here.

And now we go from bad to worse, for we land on Thor: The Dark World, which is an incredibly awful movie. The plot involves evil elves invading Asgard looking for a magic MacGuffin to do things and… look, the only reason anyone bothered with this fucking movie is because Loki is in it, and by god, the forty minutes he’s in it are just fantastic and funny. His interactions with Thor are nothing short of hilarious, and the fact he actually comes out on top in this movie is intriguing. Props to the film for that at least.

Too bad the film sucks in nearly every other conceivable way. The major focus on the human characters is the worst of all; Natalie Portman is given a disproportionately large amount of screentime and hogs the plot, and Kat Dennings is back and as relentlessly unfunny as ever. She is like a cancerous tumor on an already foul film. And as if the humans aren’t bad and obnoxious enough, we have the villain, Malekith the Accursed, a dark elf who has some of the most generic and boring motives ever despite looking absolutely cool. He is one of the worst comic book movie villains ever, hands down, and it’s such a shame because he’s played by the usually amazing Christopher Eccleston. To say that he was wasted here is a crass understatement.

There’s not much else to say here; this is an awful, shitty movie. The saving graces are Loki’s screentime and maybe the final battle, but even that is interjected with some unfunny humor, and the lack of a solid villain really drags the film down. This film is utter crap, but at least there’s a bit to recommend here, which is more than I can say for Iron Man 2.

Well we’ve got two strikes down, so this is Marvel’s last swing… can they save their asses? I mean, this is a sequel, to Captain America: The First Avenger of all things, this couldn’t possibly be that good, right?

WRONG.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is not only one of the very best films in the entire MCU, it is one of the greatest superhero movies ever made, and probably the greatest adaptation of Metal Gear Solid we’ll ever get. I’m not kidding, everything’s there: a genetically modified super soldier fighting against a shadowy conspiracy that wants to use a giant war machine to attack the world’s population, all the while fighting a crazy cyborg version of their best friend. Also there’s a fight in an elevator and an evil AI that has been manipulating the world from behind the scenes. If you can’t already tell, I fucking love this movie.

A big plus is that this is less straight-up superhero action for the most part, and more an action thriller. This lets Steve use his badass super soldier skills to their fullest extent against armies of armed mooks. Even more amazingly, this movie does a good job at making Black Widow likable and interesting, and she has very good chemistry with Steve. Best of all, though, is the introduction of Anthony Mackie as Falcon, Cap’s new best buddy and a badass hero in his own right who helps solve this big HYDRA conspiracy. And despite his limited screentime, Sebastian Stan makes an impression as the incredible, unstoppable, hardcore titular Winter Soldier, AKA Bucky Barnes, Cap’s long-lost friend.

This movie is the one all Marvel sequels would be judged by afterwards. Well, for a while at least; this movie’s own sequel managed to top it somehow. But yes, this movie is absolutely fucking fantastic, a modern classic of the superhero genre, and one of the best Marvel sequels ever made. Not bad, especially since unlike Iron Man or Thor the original movie is not the biggest or most critically acclaimed Marvel film (Though t still got a mostly positive reception). The fact it managed to produce a sequel superior to the first while Thor and Iron Man’s sequels ended up being shit is nothing short of impressive.

After this movie came Guardians of the Galaxy, which I reviewed recently on Michael After Midnight. Needless to say, it’s an amazing film, akin to a modern-day Star Wars, and I truly love it… though at this point, I fully admit its sequel is far superior. If you want a general idea of my thoughts on the film, just click the link there.

So how do you follow up two incredibly epic game-changing movies? With an Avengers sequel! Joss Whedon is back, the cast is all here, what could possibly go wrong?

A whole fucking lot.

This movie had tons of executive meddling, so much it drove Whedon nuts. But executive meddling can’t take all the blame for the shoddy script and the piss-poor mishandling of characters. One of my biggest regrets is saying this was one of the better MCU films in my review; it most definitely is not. But on the other hand, unlike the Iron Man sequels or Thor: The Dark World, there really is a lot of genuinely good stuff in this movie. Look at the plot: Tony, desperate to keep the world safe, creates an AI that ends up going rogue… that AI being Ultron. Now they gotta stop this AI before it wipes out humanity. There’s a lot of good potential in this story! But sadly, this potential is not fully realized.

Let me talk about the good stuff first. The big draw is the action setpieces, which are a bit more spectacular than before… or they would be the big draw, but since the story is so messy, it’s hard to care too much. At least there’s more action scenes. The REAL draw here is  this stretch of time where the Avengers are at Hawkeye’s cabin; this lets all of the characters interact with each other in a close space, and see how everyone plays off each other. It’s absolutely fantastic, and it’s a shame the whole movie isn’t as tightly written as these scenes. Hell, they manage to make Black Widow, who tends to be a dull and uninteresting character, more human with a bit of tragic backstory.

The new characters here are fascinating as well; Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch, Ulysses Klaue, Vision… all of these characters are pretty interesting and cool. In concept, at least. While Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver get a solid amount of screentime since they’re working for Ultron for most of the film before switching sides, by the film’s end Quicksilver is killed. Vision only appears immediately before the final fight, Klaue is just a cameo (albeit a really good one) to set up Black Panther… none of these characters really feel organically added, they feel crammed in to set up future films, leading to Age of Ultron feeling like a trailer for better movies to come.

Look at the original Avengers movie; you could jump into that from just about anywhere in your Marvel viewing experience and get it, and they don’t throw too much new at you. Here, they’re flinging all sorts of new shit at you that you pretty much NEED to watch the other movies to really get this one. Hell, and even that doesn’t help too much, since there are still things like Thor’s weird, nonsensical vision and Bruce and Natasha’s out of nowhere romance.

Of course, the absolute worst part of this film is the absolutely horrendous script. It’s not entirely bad, but there are lines like “She’s weird and he runs fast” (describing Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, respectively) and Black Widow going “Beep beep” while she rides through a crowd and Tony’s infamous “prima noctis” joke… the movie is just so dense with garbage writing like this that it’s impossible to take seriously and it deflates the tension when it constantly happens in battles. Now, there are still some good and genuinely funny moments, like when Vision lifts the hammer or Klaue’s entire scene, but there’s plenty of cringe inducing stuff that proves when it comes to Whedon’s writing, lightning DOES strike twice… do you want to know what happens when Whedon’s writing is hit by lightning? The same thing that happens to everything else.

Now, finally, let’s talk about the villains… oh, sorry, VILLAIN, they decide to anticlimactically kill Baron Strucker offscreen after the opening, so no point in discussing him! Ultron is the biggest saving grace of the film… as well as yet another example of Marvel getting rid of their most interesting villains. Ultron has solid motives, an interesting plan, and with more fleshing out could have served as an incredible reoccuring antagonist… so of course he is blown up by the end of the film, because his name isn’t Loki. HOWEVER, everything is ambiguous enough that he could realistically return; guy had to hide a backup somewhere, yeah? James Spader did such a good job at making Ultron both creepy and charismatic it would be a crime to not use his talents again, though since Marvel isn’t exactly begging Hugo Weaving to be Red Skull again at the moment, I won’t hold my breath. What makes this a bit more bitter is that, overall, Ultron was the best villain in all of Phase 2.

Age of Ultron is a film that can only be described as messy. Honestly? I’d say it’s a bit worse than Iron Man 3. That film may not be very good, but at least it was a bit more focused and the humor didn’t clog every single action scene and they didn’t try and cram fifty new characters to act as teasers for better movies into the plot. This film actually has a lot in common with Batman v Superman; the story is cluttered and unfocused and choked by the tone of the rest of the film, there are superfluous cameos and character insertions that are advertising better films to come, and obviously both are lukewarm superhero crossover films. Age of Ultron has a better villain, however, while Batman v Superman has much better fight scenes, and also Batman doesn’t make an awkward and forced rape joke so that’s good. In all honesty, I’d rather watch Batman v Superman over this; that movie may be dark and dour, but I can handle grim and gritty more than I can handle horribly painful and unfunny jokes ruining most every action scene. Age of Ultron is a seriously mediocre movie, and it’s just so depressing after how good the original Avengers film was… what a note to end Phase 2 on…

...Ha! Psyche! There’s still another movie, bitches! Here comes motherfucking Ant-Man to save the day! Whoever could have thought that Ant-Man of all characters would redeem Phase 2 by delivering a quirky, genuinely funny action-crime thriller? This story has Scott Lang, a former robber who is trying to go straight for the sake of his daughter, get roped in to becoming Ant-Man after breaking and entering into Hank Pym’s house. Ant-Man has to steal research from Pym’s former company before the new, corrupt owner Darren Cross abuses the research.

So this film has great setup, and it’s a refreshing change of pace for the most part. The film is mainly about the training to become Ant-Man and the heist itself, leading to a bit of a different tone from the usual superhero film. Yes, of course there’s a big fight with a supervillain at the end, but it’s so quirky and hilarious that it still fits the tone of the rest of the film. That’s another great quality this film has; it’s quirky and humorous while not being obnoxiously so like the last film. A great addition is one of Scott Lang’s sidekicks, Luis, an incredibly enthusiastic criminal with quite bit of hidden depths and an impressive skill for telling stories.

But even more impressive than the quirkiness and the interesting change of pace from other superhero films is just how this movie takes things and makes you like them, things no one would ever expect to like. Hank Pym for example; Pym has long been a subject of ridicule among comic fans, mostly due to an infamous moment where he hit his wife Janet. After this movie and Michael Douglas’s powerful and moving performance in scenes such as when he talks about how his wife died… well, those “Wifebeater Hank Pym” jokes can go the way of most of the MCU’s villains. Douglas did an excellent job at making Hank a character with flaws who is still sympathetic. And if that’s not enough at how this movie makes you love things you’d never expect to, well, this film just may make you cry over the death of an ant. No, I’m not kidding.

Now, if there’s one thing I can really criticize here, it’s the villain. Darren Cross/Yellowjacket is not bad by any means, but like a lot of MCU villains he falls into the trap of having the same superpowers as the hero, which is frankly an overplayed concept. Look at the great villains of the MCU like Loki, Ultron, or Ego; all of them had powers that gave them an edge or were noticeably different from the heroes they fought. Cross shrinks just like Ant-Man does, just like Obadiah Stane had a giant robot suit, Abomination was a big roaring monster, and Kaecilius was a powerful wizard. None of these villains are really bad per se, but still. At least that final fight is incredible, with the concept of two men with shrinking powers played for all it c an be played for and so many great comedic moments coming from it.

Ant-Man totally makes up for how lackluster and unfunny Age of Ultron was. It’s genuinely funny without clogging every scene with jokes, the action is utilized excellently, the protagonists are all likable and enjoyable, and the film feels a lot more fun and fresh than anyone would expect. This is definitely one of the most shocking success stories of the MCU, but that success is nothing less than well-deserved.

And now we enter into Phase 3, and as I have reviewed all the films, I will link to their reviews.

First up is Civil War, the third Captain America film, and the movie that Age of Ultron should have been. It still does bring in some new blood, but they feel far less forced and more organically woven into the plot. The jokes and the action are all great, and the villain is actually interesting. Click here to see what I thought of it, and also what I thought of Batman v Superman (I may have to re-review that movie as well…).

Next up is Doctor Strange, which holds the distinction of perhaps being the most visually impressive superhero film ever made. The trippy visuals really help to make the film, and Benedict Cumberbatch puts in an excellent performance, as does Mads Mikkelson, who redeems what would otherwise be a flat villain. Click here for the full review of the movie.

Then we have the most recent of the bunch, my favorite film of all time, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. I won’t say anything here, just click the link for the full review.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is constantly growing and expanding, creating new and fascinating stories that their characters can inhabit. These films are some of the only modern superhero films that truly embrace their comic book roots and play them for all they’re worth. Coming up soon are films such as Thor: Ragnarok, Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War, Ant-Man & The Wasp, Captain Marvel, and untitled Avengers, Doctor Strange, and Spider-Man sequels as well as volume three of the Guardians of the Galaxy story. We can only hope that, upon their release, I have wonderful things to say about them. But considering the high quality of most of the movies here, especially as time went on… I don’t think there’s any reason to be afraid. Marvel’s the king of superhero cinema right now, and I see no signs they’ll be giving up that crown any time soon.

[ncmagroup]

by Dale Dupree

  Everyone seems to be an expert these days on getting referrals. It seems that every blog on the block right now has an article on how to ask for referrals or build a referral program.

Too bad most of them lack any actual luster.

A solid referral program is not built on a foundation of getting. It’s the reward you naturally receive for giving everything you’ve got to the business relationship you are developing with your prospect or client.

It is about interrupting the normal and traditional patterns of your buyer and creating a new experience that has a bigger picture focus.

Below, I’ll share some advanced strategies for building a referral program… how to ask for referrals… who to ask… and more. And it all starts with something I call the Referral Machine.

What Is a Referral Machine

A referral program usually refers to a system for generating quality leads from satisfied clients. Lots of businesses have this type of program. But honestly, not many are doing it well.

Which is why, in this article, I’m going to give you a better way to ask for referrals — a system I call the Referral Machine.

With this machine, you can earn hundreds of thousands of dollars of business. And you can do it while building lasting relationships with leaders in your industry.

But it’s important to understand…

This machine isn’t an automated email sequence or follow-up process. In my system, you, the rep, are the referral machine.

Sure, your company has a stake in the process. Your ability to get referrals depends largely on the products and services they offer and how well those products serve your clients.

But the real value is YOU, not some system that works behind the scenes.

Keep reading to see the entire concept fleshed out, including how to earn a referral, who the players are, and everything you need to know.

4 Ways to Successfully Win Referral Business

The Referral Machine

Referrals From Face-to-Face

Referrals Through Fellowship and Friends

Inception Referrals

Build Your Referral Machine

How do you build a referral program? First things first, how does your client feel about your organization?

The strategy behind creating your Referral Machine starts with a very happy end-user who doubles as your point of contact at any particular firm.

That being the case, you need to have a high-level conversation with them about your products/services and get feedback on how well they’ve been working for the client to date.

To get this kind of feedback, I like to use the 1–5 Method. This is as simple as asking:

“On a scale of 1–5, how would you rate our performance?”

Please note the most effective way to present this is on a very warm and welcoming printed marketing piece or an online survey that you can take them through one-on-one.

Something like this.

My recommendation is to find 4–5 categories that measure your client’s satisfaction — areas where, if you’re doing your job right, should give you straight-5s.

Of course, the number of categories depends on the product you sell. Think intentionally when putting this together. The purpose of this is to show full transparency and communicate to the client that you want to know if anything is wrong… because you are about to ask for a referral!!

If they give you low marks, get to work! Earn their trust by fixing any existing problems and you will earn referrals like never before.

However, if you get high marks from the client, you will have the opportunity to ask them the following question right on the spot.

“Would you be willing to refer me to other businesses in your network based on your high level of satisfaction?”

It’s pretty much a no brainer for your client to just say yes.

Your job then is to turn their verbal agreement into an ACTUAL referral. And for that, I recommend you use another printed piece you can give the client on the spot.

Put it on your letterhead so your contact information and brand logo are clearly visible.

On the top half of the page, put the numbers 1–5. For each, provide two fields labeled, “Contact Name” and “Contact Number” or “Friend’s Name” and “Friend’s Number.”

On the bottom of the page, put “Referral Machine” with an image that suggests the variety of rewards you will give your client for passing along a referral.

Something like this.

  This is supposed to be a fun experience for your prospect, so play around with the design of this piece. Make it interactive for your client!

Tell the client that it’s not your intention to TAKE. You are looking to REWARD them when a referral pans out.

There are a few things you can do here. Consider giving the client…

a referral of their own from you

a gift card to Starbucks to show your appreciation

a month of free service on the product they’re subscribed to

Get creative and keep skin in the game!

How to Get Referrals from Face to Face

Do not underestimate the power of networking groups! There are so many good ones out there.

Traditionally, at an in-person networking group, you find nothing but other sales professionals, a few small business owners (such as electrical contractors or handymen) and every MLM profession on the face of planet earth (IE: Amway, Juice Plus, etc.).

The problem here is that most of these people have the same mindset — that going to these types of events should yield them business directly with the membership. That is not the right way to approach these events!

Your goal isn’t to get business, but to find referral partners. Create an army of salespeople who help you get referrals. In return, you can get referrals for their business. Done right, they’ll leave the event excited about promoting your products to their business contacts, friends, family, and so forth.

I like using the internet to find these groups.

Search for “Networking Group *insert city you work in*” Click through the results that show up first on your search engine.

If you are a Millennial, search for “Young Professional Networking Group *insert city you work in*” and go meet some other hustlers out there trying to build their network.

Is it really that simple?

Yes! At one of these events, I met an individual who provided me with over $200,000.00 in sales revenue over the span of the 4 years we passed business back and forth.

Here are some other ways to get referrals through face-to-face networking…

Invite your current customer base to these networking groups. Then introduce them to other professionals who can help them grow their business.

Or host your own networking groups. Invite all your clients and introduce them to one other. This is a powerful option that will result in long-term relationships with your clients. It will also help you get referrals that will continue to grow your business.

How to Get Referrals Through Fellowship

This approach is satisfying to the soul. It will help you take your clients, prospects, and referral partners to a whole new level alongside you.

Here’s how it works…

Clean off the deck, sweep the pool, and invite your business connections to the house to meet your family, meet your friends, and enjoy fellowship with one another. This gives you a natural and healthy way to build long-lasting relationships with your business connections.

In fellowship events like this, you can still talk business. Chat about goals, community, and accomplishments in order to get to know your clients better and to help them understand your long-term outlook.

Don’t want to invite people to your home? No problem!

Have everyone meet you at a local park or the local coffee shop. These types of venues are happy to accommodate “community events.”

Another idea is to pick a local charity and get these same groups of people together to serve. Spend time with underprivileged kids, clean the beaches, help a family in need. There are a ton of options here.

This concept is all about humanizing the business relationships you are cultivating and focusing more on impact than anything else. It is about breathing life into your community, clients, and prospects alike. As a bonus, it will help you build your referral machine and give you a natural way to ask for referrals.

How to Create Inception Referrals

This is an idea that is coming out in my upcoming book, Tales of The Copier Warrior: A Sales Rebellion. The concept is this: The decision-maker, C-level exec, or Owner of a firm you are serving can actually be a TERRITORY within your TERRITORY.

Leonardo Dicaprio as hell, right?!

Essentially, you don’t need to sell this individual anything, ever. You just need them to open doors for you.

I once met a decision-maker who told me HE LOVED my marketing and my cold call approach — but he would never buy from me. Then, he told me he wanted to get lunch because, as he put it, “I think I can help you grow your business.”

At that point, I became extremely intrigued!

After our initial meeting, this individual had me out to all his big events, invited me to private dinners, even took me to sporting events with his friends and introduced me to some of my LARGEST sales ever.

From this point on, I actively looked for mutually beneficial referral relationships to help me with cold outreach — especially if my prospect was “all set” and did not need my products or services.

You see, the C-Level Executive at a business you are serving is most likely well connected. You can either be a vendor (and nothing more) or become a valuable member of their network.

Hint…

You will always just be a vendor if you do not approach this individual from a unique perspective and work to earn trust and credibility with them.

I recommend using interrupt marketing techniques in order to get on another level with them.

Remember, most “founders” and C-Level Execs had a dream, just like you, once upon a time before they built their success. Mirror the “founder” mindset and the same behavior they used to build their business. That will help them see you as a peer.

For Inception Referrals to work, you need to tap into the unique emotional drive that propels your contact.

Whether they are your client or just a referral partner, they have an entire territory that you can tap into and gain warm introductions through.

Take your game up a notch.

It’s Not for the Weak of Heart

To sum it all up, this is how top sales producers get referrals.

Not just any referrals. High-quality referrals that generate sales.

But these types of referrals only go to salespeople who are willing to sacrifice time and energy to cultivate a next-level relationship with the people they serve or are acquainted with in the community.

To review:

Create your Referral Machine (the marketing tools that will help you gain referrals and earn more respect with your clients).

Get out in your community and serve!

Build more meaningful relationships with your business contacts.

Find the right kind of networking events and get face to face with your community.

Cold call for referrals!

Find the territory within your territory.

This is a selfless approach where you are constantly GIVING in order to GAIN.

It is the heart of a servant leader and the attitude of someone who is not focused on instant gratification. Rather, it is the type of sales rep that one day becomes a Legend.

  Go to our website:   www.ncmalliance.com

Why The Sales World Sucks at Earning Referral Business and How You Can Change The Game by Dale Dupree Everyone seems to be an expert these days on getting referrals. It seems that every blog on the block right now has an article on how to ask for referrals or build a referral program.

[asfeedin]

Here’s who is winning (and losing) during Q1 earnings seasons so far

The Street was bracing for a mixed earnings season. While the impact of the coronavirus has, in many cases, been immediate and dire, corporate earnings for the first quarter are on a lag. “Two-plus of the three months were pretty decent,” says Charles Schwab chief investment strategist Liz Ann Sonders, making earnings for the quarter as a whole “not terribly relevant.”

So far, roughly half of companies have reported. According to a Refinitiv note on Wednesday, there have been 90 negative EPS preannouncements issued by S&P 500 companies, versus 42 positive ones. But much like the GDP report for the first quarter, which came in at -4.8%, first-quarter earnings won’t “tell you all that much about the depth and scope of the impact of the lockdowns,” suggests LPL Financial equity strategist Jeff Buchbinder.

Most estimates show that year-over-year earnings growth for the quarter is down about 15% or 16%, and BofA Global Research noted on Wednesday that based on actual values and the latest consensus estimates, “[year-over-year] revenue growth [is] –0.5%.” For those who have already reported, earnings and sales growth came in “10.9% and 0.4% weaker than expected at the start of the season, respectively, while earnings growth ex-financials has surprised to the upside by 2.5%,” according to BofA research.

But the picture is extremely murky, given the unprecedented business shutdown. According to BofA Global Research on Monday, about 100 companies in the S&P 500 suspended guidance. Yet a large portion of companies in the S&P 500 haven’t been issuing quarterly guidance for a while, even pre-coronavirus, and Schwab’s Sonders suggests the slew of companies withdrawing or not issuing guidance now will only accelerate that trend even after the crisis is largely over.

Instead of guidance numbers, “what I think is most important to try to glean from commentary on calls is what the more macro implications are,” Sonders tells Fortune. Alternatively, she suggests taking note of “What does your balance sheet look like? Do you have cash flows to stay afloat for x period of time? Have you started to lay workers off? If you have, are they furloughed or permanent layoffs? Have you taken government assistance?”

Meanwhile, LPL’s Buchbinder is not suggesting investors look on the sunny side. In fact, he believes investors should watch for “credible downside risk estimates” from companies.

��Investors are looking for comfort: How bad is this going to get in the second quarter?” he says. “The big question, though, is where’s the trough? The companies that can give people an idea of where that trough is are going to perform better.” So far, it’s the big tech names that are doing just that, he says.

Looking back, full-year 2020 earnings estimates were close to $180 earnings per share to start the year. Now, the most optimistic projections are $132. Both Sonders and Buchbinder think those earnings estimates need to come down further still (Sonders estimates it will be around $100 when all is said and done).

Yet perhaps more than ever, strategists note there’s a big gap between winners and losers, and the first-quarter earnings season only emphasizes the “stock-pickers market” we’re in, says Buchbinder.

Winners

Tech has obviously been hot, even before the coronavirus. But now, Sonders suggests there is even “more dispersion in terms of the prospects for individual companies, even within the same sector.”

A couple standouts?

Microsoft surprised the Street on Wednesday, beating earnings per share estimates of 1.26, reporting 1.40. Revenue, meanwhile, topped $35 billion (also above expectations), driven in part by the company’s strong cloud business. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives wrote that the “[work from home] and COVID-19 environment [is] another catalyst driving Azure/Office 365 growth,” as Azure revenue growth was “robust” at 59%. The analyst also raised his price target from $210 to $220 per share.

Another tech name that (happily) surprised investors on Wednesday was Facebook. The company posted revenues of $17.7 billion (versus the $17.4 billion estimate), up almost 18% from the first quarter of 2019, and saw 2.6 billion monthly active users (higher than expected). Yet in comments that are starting to sound very familiar to analysts this season, Facebook’s CFO David Wehner told CNBC that “[the] outlook is really uncertain. We have a really cautious outlook on how things are going to develop.” 

Of course, Tesla was a stock many investors had their eye on, having traded up over 200% in the past year. The Elon Musk–led company managed to post a profit in the first quarter at $16 million, also reporting 1.24 adjusted earnings per share versus an estimated loss of 0.36 earnings per share. Yet Tesla also had negative free cash flow of $895 million—jeopardizing its previously stated goal of getting free cash-flow positive for 2020.

Alphabet missed earnings estimates, reporting $9.87 per share, but beat revenue estimates, reporting $41.2 billion on Tuesday—up 13% from the previous year. Yet investors were somewhat encouraged that, despite a drop in ad revenue in March, execs told analysts, “Based on our estimates from the end of March through last week for Search, we haven’t seen further deterioration in the percentage of year-on-year revenue declines” in April.

For the Street, Twitter’s earnings fell somewhere between a win and a loss: The company beat earnings estimates, reporting earnings of 0.11 per share versus the 0.10 estimate on Thursday before market open, but the stock quickly traded down some 7% by midday on discouraging remarks about a slowdown in advertising revenue. While the company eked out an earnings beat, Twitter also didn’t provide guidance for the second quarter, and is suspending full-year guidance.

Even hotly anticipated Amazon earnings fell into a vein similar to Twitter’s: The coronavirus staple stock missed estimates on earnings but beat revenue expectations, posting $75.5 billion. Investors were dismayed after markets closed on Thursday, trading the stock down around 5% in after-hours trading, after the company announced it plans to spend its entire estimated $4 billion operating profit in the second quarter on coronavirus-related expenses. Yet cloud computing and online shopping were bright spots for Amazon, as the company saw Amazon Web Services revenue top $10 billion. “COVID’s impact accelerates the secular shift to e-commerce [U.S. e-commerce represents 12% of retail sales], and Amazon is well positioned to continue taking share,” Oppenheimer analysts wrote on Monday.

Losers

LPL’s Buchbinder suggests that “essentially all of the [overall earnings] misses came from the big banks” this time around.

JPMorgan kicked off its first-quarter earnings with a largely disappointing show, reporting earnings per share of 0.78 cents, missing the 1.84 estimate, while profits dove 69%. One ominous point was the bank’s $6.8 billion reserved for loan loss provisions. Perhaps the only bright spot was the bank’s record trading division revenue, up 32% to $7.2 billion.

Wells Fargo also disappointed, posting earnings per share of just 0.1 cent, versus a 0.33 cent estimate. The bank set aside some $3.1 billion for loan losses as well.

Bank of America hasn’t fared much better, reporting a first-quarter profit decline of 45% to $1.79 billion for its consumer banking business. The bank reported EPS of 0.40 cents a share, versus 0.46 cent estimates. Of note, loan losses would only mount this year, potentially continuing into 2021, CFO Paul Donofrio told analysts. To boot, the bank also set $3.6 billion aside for loan-loss reserves for the quarter, in line with peers JPMorgan and Wells Fargo.

One company feeling the brunt of global shutdowns is McDonald’s. The company reported that earnings fell 17% in the first quarter, missing estimates. The global fast-food chain also withdrew its 2020 outlook and long-term forecast, issued back in February, owing to the uncertainty surrounding the evolving coronavirus environment worldwide.

McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski warned analysts: “We expect the second quarter as a whole to be significantly worse than what we experienced for the full month of March.”

Given the way projections are heading overall, he’ll certainly have company.

More must-read finance coverage from Fortune:

—Latest round of unemployment claims puts real jobless rate near Great Depression peak —Buccaneers of the basin: The fall of fracking—and the future of oil —Cybercriminals adapt to the coronavirus faster than the A.I. cops hunting them —3 ways COVID-19 impacted Microsoft’s latest earnings —Inside the chaotic rollout of the SBA’s PPP loan plan —Listen to Leadership Next, a Fortune podcast examining the evolving role of CEOs —WATCH: Why the banks were ready for the financial impact of the coronavirus

Subscribe to Fortune’s Bull Sheet for no-nonsense finance news and analysis daily.

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Tags: 2020 earnings, alphabet earnings, bank earnings, coronavirus, coronavirus earnings, earnings, earnings season, facebook earnings, Heres, Losing, microsoft earnings, Q1, Q1 earnings, Seasons, winning

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[smartchurchblog-blog]

The 3 Fundamental Aspects Essential For a Church to Grow

There exists within practically all companies, or absolutely those worth their grain of salt, a need to expand. We reside in a world of growth.

  Think about on your own today as well as on your own at birth. Each day from the get go there has actually been development. Cells replicate regularly. Your kids ... they grow! Every little thing expands or it dies.

  Priests, more than any individual, desire to see the people they lead grow emotionally. Priests recognize that if individuals are expanding mentally and enough of them do so, the church will certainly grow numerically.

  There are 3 elements fundamental to any church's development. Please know that having any or all of these components in place does not guarantee development. Nonetheless, not having all 3 in place will guarantee the church will certainly not expand.

  If you are in an established church, one that has been around 25 years or more, you need to plan on an extensive time period of bringing these components to the center of your foundation. Do not anticipate that you can review this write-up, most likely to the board following week, the personnel the following week, and also have these in place by the very first of the month. This is meticulous job, yet it is the work the senior leader of any kind of excellent church need to do to construct an effective ministry.

  Please note that in all these aspects the personnel word is "excellent." All churches have these elements. However, in far too many churches the components are refrained well. That is tough to approve, but you must offer a vital eye to each of these and identify the level of "great" for each.

  1. Good preaching. Let's speak initial concerning your very own preaching. This makes a great deal of pastors anxious and also highlights instabilities in others. I am not recommending you need to be Billy Graham. I am stating, nevertheless, that the preaching originating from your pulpit has to be great. You need to be an ongoing student of teaching. Listen to excellent preachers. Discover the art and also craft of teaching. Pray hard, prepare hard, and teach hard. The teaching need to be excellent.

  It is clear from basically all the studies I check out that the non-believer these days is wide-open to listening to the truth from God's Word. The exact same visibility that exists for all kind of negative faith as well as spiritual searches is open to good biblical preaching. Do not back down to declarations like, "The preaching actually doesn't matter, it's the other programs of the church." Incorrect! Study and also pray to preach well.

  2. Good songs. The music at the church you offer does not have to be Hillsong however it need to be good. It has to be great. It is critical that those that come into your church see that you comprehend the society, and like it or not, good songs is central to our society today. One of the most likely team to think about a change and involve the church is the under 40 group. Their world is full of superior music. It is your work to make the songs at church the most effective it can be.

  I comprehend the restrictions of churches in the quality of musicians readily available for Sunday morning solutions. I also observe that in even more situations than not, the elderly pastor hesitates to place assumptions on artists due to the fact that dealing with musicians can occasionally be an obstacle. Nevertheless, when challenging those with gifts in music to be the best they can possibly be, the elderly pastor in fact plays to their wish for quality. Don't work out! Opt for the best in your challenge of them.

  3. Good ministry to children. This is where a great deal of us mistake. Understand, no flannelgraphs! There is ministry to youngsters and afterwards there is GOOD ministry to kids. Kids are technology savvy and also you require to be that great as well as much better to capture and hold their focus. Be clever and be excellent in your ministry to kids.

  Believe me, when a young family members sees the church, it indicates little that you are Baptist, Methodist, Independent, AG, or Open Holy bible. You and I have heard it from young moms and dads for several years, "What do you have for my kids?" When you have children weeping because their parents have come to choose them up FROM the youngsters's' ministry and not crying to head to the kids's ministry you are well on your way to having in location among the greatest and also most ignored elements of church development, excellent ministry to youngsters.

Church Giving

Noticeably missing from this checklist of three are two things. Let me address them for you.

  Initially, ministry to youth is not included. Why is that? The solution is initial points initially. Youngsters come prior to youth. Churches around the nation do it in reverse. When a church begins to grow, the very first team person they typically hire is the young people priest. If they were to truly do it right, it must be the children's pastor.

  I am amazed at the number of churches I discover that have good young people ministries yet rotten kids's ministries. It is apparent that gradually the young people ministry is never being feed solid incoming sixth as well as 7th due to the fact that they come from such bad children's ministries. Poor ministry begets poor ministry. Never ever undervalue what God can do in building your church through the hearts of children who then come to be young people.

  The other evidently missing out on piece is that of discipleship. I would certainly suggest that, as a matter of fact, discipleship is not missing. Discipleship starts in the pulpit. You ought to do not hesitate to communicate to those that really feel the church does refrain from doing sufficient in disciplining believers that the discipleship begins on Sunday morning in the pulpit and then emanates from there.

  Bear in mind, placing these aspects in place will require time. If you remain in a recognized church, it is going to chat a long period of time; certainly months and most likely years. Nevertheless, when you have good preaching, excellent music, as well as good ministry to children in place you will certainly have the structure in position to expand an excellent church. Likewise remember, there will be a lot of job in advance of you when the structure is laid. Without the strong structure, nevertheless, little that is built will certainly stand up to the examination of time.

  I expect what God will certainly do in the ministry of the church you lead as these three components are strengthened with time.

  Penis Hardy is the Founder and also Head Of State of The Hardy Group, an Exec Consulting firm for senior pastors of churches. Whatever yet preaching is his motif. Handling the stuff that keeps you up in the evening is his focus.

  Dick brings a wealth of experience to the table for priests when handling the tough concerns of the church about growth, company, management, administration, and also modification. His solution as Administrative Priest at 2 huge churches and as Vice President at a front runner partisan Bible college makes him a source your church will want to keep. Dick is additionally offered to act as a speaker on this subject and much more.

[theofficepolitics]

How Corporations Manipulate Employees

https://thepowermoves.com/corporate-lies/

This Is How Companies Manipulate Employees (W/ Examples)

Corporations lie and manipulate.

HR lies and manipulates.

And your boss lies and manipulate.

But The Power Moves is on your side. And this article blows the whistle on corporate manipulation, HR lies and bosses’ machinations.

Contents [show]

#1. Employees Matter

This is the most common and most pervasive corporate lie.

There is no HR department in the world that wouldn’t tell you that employees matter. But that doesn’t make it any truer.

Why It’s a Corporate Lie

It’s not employees who matter, it’s the output of the employees that matters (Dan Rust, 2016). Big difference.

Remove the output and the employee becomes a cost. And then you will see how much you really “matter”.

There almost seems a connection between how menial a job is and how much hot air HR spouts about “talent” and “employees’ satisfaction”.

As a student, I had a brief stint in Infosys BPO, and if there is such a thing as “monkey job”, that’s BPO (BPO stands for “business process outsourcing”). And I have never heard as much crap about employees’ talent and skills since my BPO monkey days.

The funniest thing though? The number of people who actually believed the HR lies.

Corporate Manipulation Explained

We all have in-built mechanisms for “social accounting” (law of social exchange) and for reciprocation (Cialdini, 1984).

If the company can make us feel like they care for us, then we must reciprocate to rebalance the account.

And just like that, with a few empty slogans and some discount vouchers, companies turn 9 to 5 captives into happy and loyal corporate flunkies.

The Example: Ray Kroc & McDonald

Ray Krok famously said that your business is only as good as the people you hire. Which, on average, makes sense. Yet, coming from Kroc, it’s the perfect example of how manipulative corporations really are.

This also taken from McDonald’s mission and values:

We provide opportunity, nurture talent, develop leaders and reward achievement.

Of course, facts tell a very different story. McDonald lost countless lawsuits for wage theft and university researches prove that fast food workers earn so little that many of them depend on government welfare to survive (which is the equivalent of saying that taxpayers are subsidizing McDonald’s labor).

There is one McDonald initiative that deserves a special note though. I think the guys at corporate McDonald wanted to take the above Kroc’s quote literally. But instead of elevating their hires to the high-quality company they wanted, they lowered McDonald’s communication to the low wages they offer. And in a colossal brain fart, they offered the following tips to help their minimum wage employees make ends meet:

Return unopened purchases

Break food into pieces to feel fuller

Quit complaining or you only raise your stress hormones’ levels

What a great employer: first gives you a job and then teaches you how to survive with it.

#2. We’re A Team

This is so pervasive that most people even fail to see its manipulative side.

After all, teamwork is important for the success of corporations and individuals alike. But there is a trade-off between the two.

And those who can see the dual nature of the teamwork best position themselves to win the career contest.

Why It’s a Corporate Lie

Albeit there are many good reasons to be team players, there are also many good reasons to be selfish (for more on “public good games” read Thaler, 2015).

But you can’t do well socially by being openly selfish, and that’s why many people fail to realize the deeper truth of the “we’re a team manipulation”.

This is the complete description of team-work for the more astute Machiavellian player:

We’re a team… Of selfish individuals who must hide their selfish drives with teamwork appearances

The most successful political operators indeed play a bit for the team, pretend to play a lot for the team… And they mostly maximize their own interest.

And look at this quote to see that’s not even morally objectionable:

Here is the caveat: the “organizational objective” are, of course, Andrew Carnegie’s objective. And the same is true for every business owner.

When Team Culture Masks Abuse

When the “team culture” is taken to the extreme it can be used as justification to abuse the individual.

The miners complain about dangerous working conditions? It’s not good for the whole Rio Tinto, fire them. The unionists complain of wages too low to live? Not good for Carnegie’s steel company, hire the goons to break the strike.

Ray Dalio also takes an extreme “team first” position in his acclaimed “Principles“, where he basically says that:

What’s good for the whole is good –Ray Dalio

Yet here is the caveat: Ray Dalio is the owner of that whole, which makes him a slightly biased source.

Owners are inherently biased towards the whole because they own the whole.

And what’s good for the whole is not necessarily good for you. As a matter of fact, this “team first” value could easily justify cruelty and abuse towards the individuals (ie.: this class of citizen is bad for the whole: eliminate them).

Here is the same law re-written from a more cynical point of view:

What’s good for the whole is good for the owner –The Power Moves

Corporate Manipulation Explained

Group selection is controversial in evolutionary psychology (Pinker, 2012) but, from an organizational point of view, it’s fair to assume that groups with selfless individuals outperform groups where individuals pursue more selfish strategies (Sloan, 2007).

And that’s exactly what organizations angle for when they impose team values.

The manipulation of the teamwork value is to remove the selfish incentives which might be good for the individual but which are bad for the company.

Organizations with 100% selfless individuals increase the organization’s overall returns. The whole -and the owner- wins, but it’s all to be seen whether or not the individual also benefits from a selfless strategy.

The question then becomes whether the corporation will be nice enough to return the favor and share the spoils. But often, it’s a very small trickle.

Example: Howard Schulz & Starbucks

My favorite example of the team manipulation is Howard Schulz, founder of Starbucks and author of “Onward“.

In “Onward” Schulz makes a big show of loving his people.

Schulz was in so much pain for having to fire his beloved staffers. You know, for Howard they were family.

Yet, he did do fire a whole bunch of them. And then did it again.

#3. We’re A Dream Team

In the overzealous efforts of celebrating victories and hiding defeats management loves to gush how great the team has done.

And people love it too: everyone wants to be a dream player part of a dream team.

Why It’s a Corporate Lie

The “we’re so great” corporate BS is common. Yet dream teams are, by definition, a minority.

Simple math then tells us that most execs are lying with the “great team talk”.

But why would you listen to condescending execs? Here is a quick litmus test:

It’s only a dream team if everyone’s on a dream salary

If you are at around market salary, then you’re a pawn (or, at least, HR used manipulative negotiation techniques for your salary).

Corporate Manipulation Explained

Research has proven that attribution is a highly effective technique to improve performance (Miller, 1975).

That means that people tend to rise to the level of expectations, so so it pays off for the owners to build people up (also read Carnegie’s classic “How to Win Friends and Influence People“).

The Example: Pixar & Ed Catmull

Ed Catmull is the former CEO of Pixar and author of Creativity Inc.

Catmull prided himself on having institutionalized creativity. His job, he said, was to hire the best talent and remove the barriers to creativity.

I quote him:

What is the point of hiring smart people if you don’t empower them to fix what’s broken?

Probably Catmull didn’t think his employees’ salary needed any fixing and he took it upon himself to ensure their wages stayed below market value.

Catmull insists he did it for the “long term good of the company”. What a real leader!

Jesse: This isn’t a family! This is a prison! You’re a liar and a bully!

Jesse in Toy Story 3 might have as well addressed his creators’ CEO.

#4. We’re A Family

This is the advanced manipulation level of “we’re a team” and you can see it more often in early-stage startups.

Shared values, field trips, drinking together and, of course, “changing the world together”.

Part of the “we’re a family manipulation” include:

Using inclusive names for low-level employees (ie.: “partners” for baristas in Starbucks and “associates” for Walmart)

Management’s big show of openness (ie.: open door policies)

Informal attires and titles (“ninja”, “hacker”, “customer happiness”)

BTW, about the latter, if you want to test start-up open-mindedness, try to go to work with a suit and see what happens.

Why It’s a Corporate Lie

You can change titles, clothes or keep your door open, but the fundamentals dynamics of power don’t change. And the power dynamics in companies have nothing in common with families.

One above all: bosses fire employees. Families don’t fire family members.

Corporate Manipulation Explained

The manipulation here arches back to evolutionary psychology: we are all hardwired to break our backs for our families (Robert Wright, 1994).

And that’s what corporations are trying to do: entice in their (disposable) employees the same level of belonging that they have for their families.

Of course, the biggest beneficiaries of this games are owners, CEOs and company leaders. As a rule of thumb, the higher the manager, the bigger his incentive to play the family card (and the more likely it is that it’s all a big lie).

Example: Peter Thiel & Mafia

It’s probably not a coincidence that the mafia calls itself “la famiglia” in an effort to evoke a superior sense of belonging from its members.

And, somewhat misguidedly, Peter Thiel in “Zero to One” recommends founders to seek a culture that resembles a cult or a mafia.

Remember this: when an owner says the organization comes first, they are telling you that you are expendable.

So watch out for those “family” talk because family-first organizations require lots of sacrificial lambs on the altar of profit.

#5. We Wanna Change The World

In the era of “Start With WHY” nobody is out to win and succeed. Nobody wants the limelight because of their narcissistic tendencies.

And God forbid if any entrepreneur wants to make money.

No, today everyone wants to change the world or, in millennia’s parlance, “want to make an impact”.

Why It’s a Corporate Lie

This is so widespread today that it’s either we all turned into transcendental creatures… Or someone is lying.

Tai Lopez, for example, wants to help people (and not finance his fetish for sportscars). And even Elizabeth Holmes, the fraudster CEO of Theranos, said that it’s not about the money but the vision.

Corporate Manipulation Explained

Solid psychology research tells us that intrinsic motivators like higher goals and ideals can drive people more powerfully than extrinsic motivators such as money and benefits (Daniel Pink, 2011).

That’s great news for employers, who are now all busy concocting grand visions to help the world.

It seems to work especially well millennials, a generation packed with well-meaning simpletons who seek to “make a positive impact” (what does that even mean?).

What a win-win! Stephen Covey would be proud. The employers win. And the manipulated employees feel like they’ve won.

The Example: Bill Gates & Microsoft

Bill Gates vision was that of a “PC in every desk and in every home” to make the world more productive.

And today Bill Gates cures diseases to make the world a better place with his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

I am grateful for Gates’ work, but it’s rare that you will meet any dominant business leader who’s not ruthless and cunning. And Gates is no exception.

Several memoirs of business leaders who competed against Microsoft (like Ben Horowitz) show how Bill Gates went out of his way to squash his competitors. And he certainly fell out of the law when he settled for Microsoft’s abuse of monopoly power.

And, like pretty much all corporations, he does his best to avoid taxes:

If someone’s gonna cure malaria, Gates wants to make sure it’s him and not the government.

#6. “It’s Not About Me, The Owner”

“It’s about you, guys”.

You will see the self-effacing manipulation with very charismatic or very powerful founders who tend to hog all the attention.

What they do then is to play the self-effacing game to avoid being branded like the power-hungry and narcissist individuals they probably are.

There are two types of self-effacing manipulation:

“it’s not about me, it’s about the vision”

“it’s not about me, it’s about the people”

Why It’s a CEO Lie

People who become CEOs and work all the time are usually highly driven to succeed, win and dominate.

Sure, some of them also have a vision which includes others, but it all starts with the self.

Elizabeth Holmes, our example of self-effacing business leader, wrote at 9 years old she wanted to discover “something that mankind didn’t think it was possible to do”. That’s not the behavioral cue of modesty. That’s the cue of unbridled personal ambition.

Corporate Manipulation Explained

The self-effacing manipulator aims at becoming a transcendental type of leader.

Indeed the archetypes of the self-effacing leaders are often found in pro-social religions. Jesus Christ was a self-effacing leader who not only sought no (apparent) credit but literally carried the cross for all his disciples.

How can we not love the leaders that do it all for us? They almost seem to good to be true.

Well, turns out, some are too good to be true!

Similar self-effacing figures in popular folklore are Robin Hood, Don Quixote and Che Guevara who, on paper, fought for the people.

Example: Theranos & Elizabeth Holmes

Listen to how Holmes self-effaces:

Elizabeth Holmes: We have a belief system that it is not about us or about technology but about giving people a basic right

Little later people found out that Holmes defrauded not only investors and partners, but also the patients whom she so touchingly wanted to help.

If you have read “Bad Blood“, then you know that Holmes was possibly a sociopath or psychopath. Yet the deeper question here is: is she an exception or is she just the most blatant example?

#7. We Care About The Environment

In this day and age, it’s not about the shareholders anymore. It’s all about stakeholders and society at large.

Here are the stakeholders:

Employees

Customers

Society

Environment

The last one is particularly popular today. Even fossil fuel companies joined the (green) party:

Corporate Manipulation Explained

Companies care about profits. And since these days showing an environment-friendly facade helps to sell well, companies have adapted.

Needless to say, that facade is often more marketing than facts.

As this European Commission study shows, 60% of shoppers prefer to buy environment-friendly products, but corporate information is so misleading that, I quote:

European consumers are not able to make an informed choice (of what’s real or fake environment-friendly).

Where Is The Manipulation

Same as consumers, employees want to feel like they are good and caring human beings. Cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957) then dictates that working for unethical companies would make them feel bad.

So companies feed employees just what they want to hear (ie.: the goody-good ethical hypocrisy).

Example: Phil Knight & Nike

Phil Knight in his memoirs “Shoe Dog” says that he rented sweatshops “just like any other business did”.

And then he adds that they went after him because Nike provided a better target. Which is the equivalent of saying:

Everyone was a POS so I thought it was OK to be a POS and now everyone is on my case becuase I’m famous

Knight is a bit reminiscent of “I was just following orders” there.

In “Shoe Dog” Phil Knight also prided himself of treating his sponsor athletes “like real people” and not as a conduit to earn more. Nice! We could have only wished he gave the same respect to the kids in the sweatshops.

#8. We Are Driven By Values

Every single company today lists values and beliefs. And they always sound so good and inspiring, don’t they?

Why It’s a Corporate Lie

An organization is an inanimate construct, it has no values in and on itself.

The values you read are either the ones that the founder liked most -which rarely means he embodies them himself- or the values he believes better serve the business.

So values are either there because the founder wishes he had them, or because they’re good for the bottom line.

Corporate Manipulation Explained

The famous Maslow’s hierarchy of needs shows that when our most basic needs are met we all strive for higher ideals.

Company’s values appeal to our higher selves and have three objectives:

Feed the hypocrisy to make employees feel good

Nudging people towards pro-social behavior which are good for the organization

Seek to increase the feeling of homogeneity among members.

The last one is interesting. If we believe we share similar values, it means we’re alike. And since we like people who are like us (Cialdini, 1984), you become a better team player (again, good for the corporation).

Case Study: Goldman Sachs

Goldman Sachs, the most successful, competitive and (in)famous Wall Street investment bank lists among its core values“integrity”, “honesty” and ” putting their clients’ interests first”.

How surprising to find out that Goldman’s bankers internally referred to clients as “muppets”. How even more surprising that a few years prior Goldman Sachs settled a 550 million fine with SEC regulators for, in fact, swindling their clients with the cr@ppy subprime CDOs which fueled the financial crisis.

What Machiavellian Bankers Show Us

Goldman Sachs employees’ survey shows that none of the employees picked transparency and integrity as the highest value and they all picked “teamwork and winning”. Nice move to put “teamwork” next to “winning” LOL (“How to Lie With Statistics“, anyone?).

GS shows that in an environment of selfish Machiavellis people know the rule:

Pay lip service to the higher ideals and focus on amassing resources.

#9. We Win Together – Or Lose Together

Businesses love to talk up and celebrate “team victories”.

And often you win and lose together, that’s true.

But the consequences of wins and losses look very different for owners, CEOs, and employees.

Why It’s a Corporate Lie

When the team loses the CEO gets a golden handshake and you get the sack.

When the “team” wins, the big shareholders get the cash and you get a pat on the back, a pittance and a useless corporate party that will steal even more of your personal time.

Corporate Manipulation Explained

Much social psychology research shows that men become more risk-seeking and prone to rioting when they feel like they are not given an equal chance in life (Hopkins, 2013).

But people on top don’t like unrest and risk-taking men and they’d rather have an obedient and submissive workforce.

When they say you all win together, they are trying to pre-emptively stave off all thoughts of unfairness to make you feel you’re all on the same boat.

Example: Walmart & Sam Walton

Sam Walton was a ruthless money-grubber. Until, he says in his memoirs “Made in America“, he had a revelation while traveling in England.

Walton decided Walmart would consider its employees as associates and would let them part of the company’s success through stock-sharing options.

Wow! How nice what Walton says.

Critics, who also have facts on their side, are not nearly as celebratory. Walmart paid 352 million to settle 63 lawsuits over wages, including forcing employees to work off the clock.

And Walmart employees are so poorly compensated that the state of California alone pays them $86 million a year in financial subsidies and food stamps.

Maybe money can’t buy you love, but Walmart employee’s stock options can’t even buy you food.

#10. Us (Good) VS Them (Bad)

The outgroup manipulation is most obvious in military units and dictatorships the whole world over, but company leaders are no strangers to it.

It consists of depicting the competitors (outgroup) as “bad”, “unfair” or “undeserving” and us (ingroup) as “good”, “just” and “deserving of victory”.

Corporate Manipulation Explained

A world where evil is 100% evil and good is 100% good would be a much simpler world. But unluckily, we don’t live in that world (Baumeister, 2010).

And of course, the implied game here is that by “winning” you restore the world to what’s just and fair.

But guess what? The owner profits from that new world order. While chances are that you get zilch when the company’s market share increases to N.2 instead of N.3.

Where Is The Manipulation

The ingroup-outgroup is a well-known sociological principle (see Tajfel, 1970) and this is how corporations gain by creating this social dynamic:

With a hostile outgroup, people feel a bigger sense of belonging

With the competitive mindset derived from ingroup/outgroup, employees will work harder

The worse you frame the competitors, the easier to justify unethical, immoral and violent actions

Example: Jocko Willink & US Military

Number 3 above is why you see the “enemy mindset” so obviously in the military.

Here is what Leif Babin, co-author of Extreme Ownership, says about the “Iraqi insurgents” (italic is mine):

Our snipers killed a lot of bad guys and received many well-deserved accolades for it

“Bad guys”, says the officer from the invading army.

It might not be a coincidence that business-speak borrows so much military jargon, and I recommend you reject that “bad enemies” frame at all times.

A Note On The Danger of Social Identities

Ingroup – Outgroup lead to social identities, such as people defining themselves not as individuals but as groups.

I find social identities potentially toxic and dangerous as they are major drivers behind jingoism, hooliganism, wars and general aggression and unneeded hatred.

I will cut it short here, but the potential toxicity of social identities is why I always invite in my reviews to reject:

Tribalist ideologies (“Tribe“, “The Way of Men“);

Misogynist ideologies pitching men against women (Toxic masculinity)

Toxic feminist ideologies pitching women against men (“The Power of The Pussy“, “Lean In” etc.)

Sometimes the most pro-social stance you can adopt is through a massive dose of individualism. –The Power Moves

#11. Appeals To Higher Ideals

The advanced level of the “values manipulation” are the appeals to higher and abstract ideals.

Appeals to higher ideals on more fragile minds can even lead to self-sacrifice and death. You can see these more often in more extreme organizations such as military, sects, hate groups, etc.

Higher ideals include:

Unity & brotherhood

Honor

Loyalty

Motherland

Why It’s a Corporate Lie

Don’t even make me start on this. In corporations, you work overtime for… For what exactly?

In the military, you give your life for an ideal and your family -or mangled you- gets a badge in exchange.

What a great deal.

But hey, you sacrifice yourself knowing that somewhere there is someone who handsomely profited from your sacrifice.

Corporate Manipulation Explained

There are two types of higher ideals manipulation:

Leveraging people’s tendencies to believe in mystic or religious promises of after-death (Charles Manson, Bin Laden etc.)

Leveraging evolutionary tendencies to defend the group (discussed earlier)

It might not be a coincidence that countries and ships’ names have female names. So, you know, it’s easier to inebriate young men into giving their lives to protect “their” women (yeah, sure…).

Case Study: Best-Selling Navy SEALs

Examples of higher ideals can often be seen in all organizations that require big sacrifices from their team members.

The bigger the sacrifice, the bigger the ideals (and the ougroup, see above).

Writes Jocko Willink in “The Dichotomy of Leadership“:

The wounded SEAL’s grip on my hand tightened and he pulled me in (…). Not scared (..) that he might lose his leg. Only concerned he might have to leave our task unit.

Task Unit Bruiser. Our task unit. Our Lives.

This was a man. This was a true friend -a brother-. This was a hero. Young, brave, and more concerned for his friends than for his own life.

There you go. This guy about to lose his leg doesn’t even have a name. That’s how much he mattered. But hey, now his name is “hero”.

But you only need to put a wider lens to see a much different story of this “hero” and the great team he got a bullet for.

How about the “hero” being part of an invading force which some professional propagandist span as a “war for freedom”? And the team he got a bullet for as the fat cats getting rich on his behalf in the oil and arms’ industries?

#12. Appeals To Death-Defying Goals

Some of the most powerful values one can summon are transcendental.

Appeals to eternity leverage our unconscious wish of transcending the psychical world, contributing to something eternal. Few are frank enough to admit it because, unconsciously, they know how narcissistic that would sound. But death-defying values are all about “being remembered forever”.

The “making an impact” that we saw earlier is an example of an appeal to eternity. When we “make an impact” we leave a mark in the world and in the universe. And we keep living on.

Some appeals to eternity are:

“Changing the world”

Disrupting

“Moonshots” (see popular speaker Peter Diamandis)

Anything that’s “never been done before”

Working on the “biggest / most advanced” project etc.

Why It’s a Corporate Lie

I can tell you with almost complete certainty that no human being will ever be remembered forever.

And the idea of “changing the world” is ludicrous. The world changes anyway, and any changes are nothing but transitions.

In short, the goal of “being remembered forever” is not only aggressively narcissistic, but it’s also plain stupid.

And no, that’s not sad. Quite the opposite: it’s empowering and liberating (and it helps you break free of manipulative leaders).

Corporate Manipulation Explained

We are the only animals on this planet who are aware of our own mortality. That must impact our psychology and behavior somehow, and terror management theory is a branch of social psychology researching exactly that.

TMT has received its fair share of criticism, but it has passed laboratory scrutiny (Burke et al., 2010) and it’s solid science.

TMT It postulates that the conflict between self-preservation and our cognition of death pushes us to unconsciously pursue values, ideals, and goals that make us transcend the physical realm.

Burkeman in “The Antidote” says that people primed with subtle reminders of death:

Prefer charismatic leaders (Cohen et al., 2014)

Supports group-affirming values (Cohen et al., 2005)

Seek stronger punishments for “culturally amoral” (Rosenblatt, 1989)

There you have it: seek a charismatic leader, defend the group and punish outsiders. The definition of a sect.

And that’s what why conservative leaders also leverage the fear of physical harm and death: it rallies the troops behind the (supposedly) strong and charismatic politicians (Bush the Vietnam war’s skirter in military uniform, anyone?).

These are all behaviors that corporations would be happy with. Act like a sect, follow the leader and give your all… For eternity -and for the founders’ more physical income-.

TMT theory has been used to explain the birth and persistence of religions. And that’s why, in many ways, No Logo author Naomi Klein was quite right and prescient when she said that the best brands are the new religions (brain scans confirmed it too, eventually).

Example: Steve Jobs & Elon Musk

Steve Jobs was the master of this corporate manipulation.

Everything about Jobs was about “changing the world”, “making an impact” and “putting a dent in the universe” (he actually said that).

By reflection, people who joined Apple as employees were also part of that “universe dent”. They also “changed the world” and they all put in their (futile) claim to eternity.

Elon Musk also leverages appeals to eternity. The whole spiel on “making us an interplanetary species” is a big moonshot at “making history”. And people really get stupid trying to join Musk’s team. That’s the power of the charismatic, death-defying leader.

Do All Business Leaders Lie?

So the answer to this one is “the vast majority lies, yes”. But that doesn’t really tell us anything because the very human nature of maximizing one’s own returns lead most humans to be natural manipulators (Wright, “The Moral Animal“).

Better questions would be:

Do corporations take manipulations to a higher level?

By their own very organized structure and by virtue of the people they tend to attract to leadership roles, corporations do indeed manipulate much better and much more effectively than individuals.

Do all corporations abuse employees?

This is an easy one to answer: no, not all businesses abuse employees.

At least not beyond what most people would consider a “fair” and “non-abusive” exchange.

However, many do. And many more will try unless you stay vigilant.

Should employees be wary of their own organizations?

There is a natural, opposing duality in the relationship between organizations and employees.

Both can be better off cooperating with a fair 50/50 split fo the pie.

But, like in a public goods game, either one -but not both- can be much better off by taking more of the pie and short-changing everyone else.

The human tendency is to always take a bit more and give a bit less,  without exaggerating too much (see various experiments of ultimatum games). But some bad apples, of course, will try to take much more and give much less.

Employees must be aware of this potentially adversarial relationship.

Do leaders roles go to the worst of humans?

No, not necessarily.

Driven men are the men who move the world forward. Without them, we’d be still stuck in stone-age. We need driven people.

But there is definitely a dark side to it which entails the potential for abuse.

A case could be made that powerful business roles attract personalities that are most likely to centralize power, hog resources and do anything that’s needed to reach their goal (including trampling employees).

George Simon, Author of  the wonderful “In Sheep’s Clothing” says:

CEOs like who they are and are comfortable with their behavior patterns and how they act. Even though their behavior might bother others a lot. (…) CEOs are undetered by adverse consequences or societal condemnation.

And indeed Travis Bradberry‘s data shows that emotional intelligence increases in mid-level managers but decreases with execs and CEOs.

This all might point to an even deeper question: is it even moral to work for corporations?

The Morality of Corporations Over Individuals

This is what we gleaned so far:

Many CEOs care little about others

Yet corporate manipulation is about getting individuals to forego their self-interest for the group

Let’s be clear about something: getting people to care more about the group can be a very good thing. It’s, after all, the basis of our societies. It’s also the basis of transformational leadership (Burns, 1978) and it can be used for good also in corporations.

But it can also be used for dark and/or purely selfish reasons without any benefit for the individual.

Whether it’s used for good or of the founders’ personal gains hinges on how the leaders reward the individuals for foregoing the self in favor of the organization. I don’t know the specifics of your company and it’s your responsibility to judge your own company.

And I underline “responsibility”.

So take a hard look. What’s behind your company’s slogans and values?

And don’t forget to contribute

Finally, lemme clarify that this article is not an encouragement to expect a salary without giving back.

Expecting strangers to care for you without giving back is the definition of free-loading -and one of the worst examples of entitlement mentality-.

My recommendation is that you focus on giving while critically observing your work environment and assertively demanding a fair balance of give and take.

If you don’t see a fair environment or if your fair demands are not met, then consider you might be doing something better with your time.

SUMMARY

Organizations have a tendency to manipulate employees into dropping their selfish interests in favor of the group’s interest.

That’s not always necessarily wrong.

But it’s usually the case that the company gains by promoting pro-social behavior while the employee does not always gain in equal measure.

This article encourages you to critically assess your company and to look at the reality of things beyond corporate lies and HR manipulations.

[chaj]

via grafana.com

Bloomberg is best known as a media company with its news destination site, its award-winning magazine Bloomberg Businessweek, and its daily 24-7 social media program, Tic Toc, on Twitter.

But the main product for the 38-year-old company is actually Bloomberg Terminal, a software system that aggregates real-time market data and delivers financial news to more than 325,000 subscribers around the world. The enterprise premium service handles about 120 billion (that’s billion) pieces of data from financial markets daily, 2 million stories from its news division and affiliates, and a messaging network (think “Instant Bloomberg”) that fields 1 billion messages.

“With all this, people seem to notice when it doesn’t work,” said Stig Sorenson, Head of Production Visibility Group at Bloomberg. “We have had a few outages that were high profile, so about three years ago we decided to embark on a journey where we took telemetry a bit more seriously.”

Since 2015, Bloomberg’s central telemetry team has been growing steadily – and the same could be said for its influence within the company. Today, “we’re storing 5 million data points a second and running over 2,500 rules on our metrics stream,” said Software Developer Sean Hanson during his talk at GrafanaCon 2019 in Los Angeles. “We also do a bit more on the log side with about 100 terabytes of raw log data a day and a lot of legacy log rules.”

Their most impressive feat, however, was rallying 5,500 engineers around streamlining their monitoring systems. “It’s a hard problem when you have a lot of independent users and a lot of teams,” Hanson admitted. “For a lot of users, monitoring is not a priority … So we try to give them as much as we can without them actually having to do something.”

Here’s how the telemetry team embarked on their “safari of stability” by solving three key problems within their infrastructure.

1. Centralizing Data

Historically Bloomberg isolated software so that outages only affected a small subset of customers. Teams would get an alert about a sub-failure and evaluate their individual products, utilizing their own data sources and their own telemetry stack.

However, working in silos led to issues when there was either an unforeseen single point of failure or when the alerts would snowball into multiple failures.

With teams working in isolation, “the outage would linger until it got bad enough that someone from the outside, either on our environment support team or a high-level manager, would be like, ‘Hey, I think you might all be working on the same problem independently,’” said Hanson. “Then the teams would piece together all of the individual data to track down a root cause.”

The telemetry team’s first step to stem this problem was to deploy agents to as many machines as possible to collect system metrics – file system, operating system, etc. – as well as each machine’s process tables. The telemetry team also worked with key infrastructure teams to gain insight into system frameworks within individual services, queues, or databases.

The goal was to centralize the data and provide a broader picture of the operating infrastructure at any given time. The Head of Engineering now has high-level system health dashboards in place to monitor outages. “Once we provided all of these displays, we were able to narrow down the pieces of data that could help triage outages as they happened or prevent them if we could alert on them,” said Hanson.

The Grafana dashboards also became valued assets throughout the organization, from high-level execs such as Sorenson who want a monitoring overview, to developers who want drill-down links on all the panels, to programmers who extract insights through a query API for more complex analysis.

“We have one place that users go to, to configure everything for their metrics, logs, alerts, Grafana folders, and distributed traces” said Hanson.

More importantly, the team automated processes to implement SRE best practices moving forward. Firm-wide rules around CPU, memory, file system storage, and service frameworks “take effect as soon as users create a new service or spin up a new machine,” said Hanson. Plus, because they are hooked into the machine-building process now, “even the machine creation process can publish its own metrics and report failures.”

2. Unifying Alerts

Prior to the formation of the telemetry team, Bloomberg had various systems that created different notifications.

Now, not only are alerts centralized. A link is served with every alert that shows correlation – what happened around the same time on the same set of machines or for the same basic rule – so teams can quickly detect whether it is an isolated incident or a problem with their software.

“All of the alerts we generate have a similar look and feel and a base set of information that we require which include our remediation plan,” said Hanson. “Every alert that comes out should have an action or a call to action available to you right at the top.”

In the case of tags, the team enforces tag key registration, not tag values, to ensure that when users try to register PIDs or timestamps as tag keys, they are alerted that they are off-base.

“We really wanted it to be easy to do the right thing, hard to do the wrong thing, but still possible to do something non-standard that we decide is sane,” added Hanson. “We designed our APIs to try to facilitate this.”

Recently the team has taken the initiative to meet with cross-functional teams “to talk about use cases and guide people to pre-built solutions where they exist or teach them how to use existing tools to build on top of,” said Hanson. “If there’s a really good use case or if we see it a lot, we just build it into our system so that people don’t have to even think about it. They just get it.”

3. Simplifying Queries

Bloomberg’s dashboards live in one “massive” Grafana instance that provides templates and uses the same query language and API as Graphite.

As users adapted to using the metrics, “we had growing dimensionality where users really want to drill down a lot into their data,” said Hanson. “So they want to keep adding more tags or labels, and some of the frameworks like Kubernetes cause a lot of transient time series to come around.”

In other words, more time series means more RAM. So this is where MetricTank came into play.

With MetricTank’s pattern-based pruning rules in the index and pattern-based retention rules, “we came up with a Goldilocks approach where users could pick their favorite flavor from three,” said Hanson. “If they want aggregate data for 10 years of trend analysis, they can pick longer lived. Or if they want advanced drilldowns, they can do that, but they don’t get the data for as long … We let the users pick, we apply it as a tag, and MetricTank does the rest.”

One snag the team hit with MetricTank came after releasing their query API to users for programmatic access. Problems came up for “[users] making a lot of queries sequentially or for users using the tag-based auto-complete in Grafana,” said Hanson. “When you get two-, three-, five-second lag on auto-complete, it’s pretty frustrating and noticeable. The more beta users that came onto the query API, the slower it got, until we had a daily report that took two days to run.”

Working closely with the Grafana team, the Bloomberg team implemented speculative querying which issues redundant queries to other replicas when slow peers were detected. This reduced the run time for daily reports down to four hours. “We also implemented native functions in MetricTank which prevented proxying through Graphite Web,” explained Hanson. “After that, we are now down to an hour and a half for our daily report. So there’s really not much more we can optimize there without actually trying to optimize the report itself.”

So What’s Next?

Improving dashboard discoverability is the next item on the Bloomberg Telemetry punch list.

Bloomberg currently has more than 3,500 dashboards in more than 500 folders, and there are many generic dashboards that prove to be popular and copied internally. But while imitation is the best form of flattery, it’s a poor form of organization.

Dashboards get copied repeatedly with names that are barely distinguishable from the next to the point that it’s hard to organically surface the original dashboards within the system. “People were only finding them by being linked through tickets,” said Hanson.

While folders and permission settings help limit access and editing rights to key dashboards, it didn’t solve the issue of rampant dashboard copies appearing in the system. So Bloomberg again reached out to Grafana Labs for a solution.

Together, the teams are working to enhance the auto-complete function. “This would allow us to search for keywords, descriptions, or even maybe metric names or tag labels inside the queries, which would be great,” said Hanson.

The goal is for Bloomberg’s telemetry team to “score” dashboards based on popularity with a custom weighting system. They are hoping to develop functions such as tagging dashboards “official” vs. “experimental” so users know which ones are more reliable compared to others.

Another big project: Meta tags, a seamless and cost-effective way to add metadata, is also in the works.

In creating a sustainable monitoring infrastructure, “starting with some good open source technology gets you a big step up,” said Hanson. “But since you didn’t build it, it might not work for you right off the bat. So we can’t be afraid to jump in and improve the product for yourself and the wider community.”

After all, “investing in telemetry pays dividends,” said Hanson, “which is my obligatory financial joke I save for the very end.”

For more from GrafanaCon 2019, check out all the talks on YouTube.