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berniesrevolution · 5 years ago

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Food coops, housing coops, credit unions, and other such institutions are sometimes referred to as the “solidarity economy.” How do these institutions relate to working-class power? Do they offer working-class people some shelter or respite from capitalism? Do they perhaps even “create the new world in the shell of the old”? Nick Driedger and Eric Dirnbach, two veteran members of many institutions of the solidarity economy, debate these points.

Eric: We all noticed this recent article about the campaign for “postal banking,” where United States Postal Service branches would offer much-needed banking services for folks who lack access to bank accounts. The USPS actually used to do this up until the 1960s, and other countries still have it. This would obviously be helpful for many low-income people, who are forced to pay high fees at check cashing stores, and of course Wall Street banks hate the idea because they don’t want the competition. Unfortunately, according to the article, the national credit union association allied with the banks to lobby against it, which was news to me.

Now, I��m a member of a credit union and a fan of the concept. Financial institutions owned and run by their members are a great alternative to handing over our money to the standard, capitalist banks and increasing their power over us. Credit unions are in principle more accountable to their members and their communities, and have policies that are much more progressive than banks. And yet they took this bad stance against postal banking, deciding to protect their turf, just like the capitalists.

This reminded me of the recent Organizing Work exposé about bad labor practices and union-busting at a number of food cooperatives. I’m also a fan of food coops and have been a member of several, and those practices are extremely disappointing. Another problematic example is the Mondragon coop network in Spain, which I think is really impressive, but also incorporates a second-class tier of international workers who are not member-owners and who have even gone on strike against the coop.

Overall, these are examples of “solidarity economy” organizations behaving like capitalist enterprises. The solidarity economy can be described as a network of organizations and practices like worker coops, housing coops, community land trusts, food coops, credit unions, time banks, community gardens and other entities that are alternatives to capitalist businesses. A segment of the left, and I would include myself here, believes one strategy (along with others like union organizing) to help transition beyond capitalism is to grow this economy in opposition to capitalist practices and prefigure the better socialist world that we want. A hundred years ago they called this idea the “Cooperative Commonwealth.” But these examples of bad, non-solidarity politics undermine that ideal.

Nick: In the article you mention, we see an example of an arm of the United States government being called on to provide a new public service. The City of Cleveland specifically called on the United States Postal Service to provide banking services through post office outlets. These calls are also coming from grassroots campaigns among postal workers’ unions in the USA and Canada, who want the government to expand services, better serve rural communities and undercut payday loan companies, which are often the only way for many working people to cash their paycheques, at exorbitant rates.

I am a member of four different consumer cooperative businesses, and had my first job at one of them. The United Farmers of Alberta is an institution where I live. At one time, it was a political party, and for a number of years, a long time ago, it was the government of the province. I am a member and buy feed for my chickens and ducks there, and when I was sixteen they gave me my first job. It had benefits and clear hours and a job description. It paid head and shoulders above what most businesses in rural Alberta will pay a teenager.

I am also a member of my small town’s credit union. The manager of this credit union is a big player in the local United Conservative Party. I pay my insurance through The Cooperators Insurance. The manager of this coop was our New Democrat (social democratic party in Canada) representative in the provincial government that just fell in Alberta a couple of months ago. In the past, I have voted for left candidates for the board at Mountain Equipment Co-op (a camping supply consumer coop popular in Canada) who wanted to push for stronger ethical purchasing guidelines and support the cause of Palestinian rights.

Cooperatives in Western Canada are political and there is politics inside of them. They are often on their local chambers of commerce, and there is both a left wing inside the cooperative movement as well as a very strong right wing.

Where I live, coops are also a part of the local history. My family in a Saskatchewan farming community have worked for generations at a consumer cooperative simply called “The Co-op,” which provides groceries and fuel in many communities. In many rural communities in Western Canada, no one would have electricity if not for early rural cooperatives. Later, government services followed, like Alberta Government Telephones (which was privatized in the 1990s). Often coops would establish services that would be picked up as public services later. The words “Cooperative Commonwealth” have a deep resonance with people and a history here. Even a lot of conservatives consider the history of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (forerunner of the New Democratic Party) a history working people and farmers can be proud of on the prairies.

Eric: That is a fascinating history and I’d love to learn more about coops in rural areas. Clearly coops were organized over the years to meet the needs of rural residents. Agricultural supply and electrical coops are great examples of this. More modern examples are the internet service coops.

I’m more familiar with coops in an urban setting. I’ve lived in my housing coop in New York City for about ten years and was just elected to the board, so I’ve been thinking about this place a lot. Morningside Gardens, with almost 1,000 apartments in six buildings, was founded in 1957 and has a pretty rich history of cooperative activity, with many committees, clubs and other organizations formed. Folks started a cooperative workshop for woodworking and ceramics, a nursery school and a retirement service in the 1960s, which are all still running. The retirement service allows senior residents to age in-place and not have to move to a nursing home.

Members here have also been involved in community-issue organizing for decades, such as supporting local libraries, fighting for good subway and sanitation services, and campaigning for better local zoning to restrict luxury condos. Residents have formed several babysitting coops over the years. A theatre group was formed in the 1980s which still exists. In the last few years, several buildings have started a “Neighbors Helping Neighbors” mutual aid program, which is like an informal timebank where folks help each other with household tasks.

We had a food coop for over 30 years; that closed in the 1990s. I spent some time reading our old newsletters to learn about it and write up a history. The food coop members advocated for better consumer protection and product labeling laws in the 1960s and 1970s when the entire grocery industry was against more regulations. The coop also supported the United Farm Workers grape boycott and the Nestle baby formula boycott. In the 1960s, it started a credit union, which lasted for 15 years, so low-income members could have access to loans they couldn’t get at a bank. The coop also helped start at least two other food coops nearby, with funding and technical assistance. It made a small profit in most of its years and often returned a rebate to the members, thus keeping money in the community and out of the hands of a billionaire grocery boss. And it was a union shop. One of my neighbors worked as a bookkeeper there in the 1970s and 1980s and still gets the union pension today.

All this seems really positive to me and was enabled to a large extent by the cooperative setting. Of course, some of this activity could happen in a similarly-sized apartment complex of renters, owned and managed by a landlord, but a lot of it wouldn’t. Bosses and landlords monopolize power, decision-making and wealth. Workplace and tenant unions fight to expand worker and tenant power, of course, but ultimately the boss or landlord still owns the property and extracts the surplus value and rent. The process of people running their own key institutions requires a lot of volunteer work, but this cooperation I think builds skills and confidence and creates more opportunities and the desire to work together on other projects.

Now, I don’t want to overstate the situation here; this isn’t Full Communism. Of course there have always been folks who see it as just a nice place to live and are less engaged in its internal life and politics. And capitalism has intruded on our utopia. The coop was “limited-equity” for decades, meaning that apartments were priced at below market value to keep them affordable. This was because our coop originally received tax breaks and other assistance arising from the 1949 Housing Act, which was intended to create affordable housing (and has a complicated history). Then there was a contentious, long-running debate starting in the 1990s where a majority of residents voted to shift to market-rate pricing over time.

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#politics #the left #worker cooperatives #democratic socialism

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theculturedmarxist · 5 years ago

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Business news headlines recently bemoaned the incidence of “bond yield inversions” in a series of countries as the supposed harbinger of doom and destruction. Many working-class people were left scratching their heads about what on earth this all means. 10 years after the “Great Recession”, many could be forgiven for thinking that we have been living in permanent recession and things can’t get any worse. The reality is that, while things have not been good in most countries, things can also get far, far, worse. In this article, we will explain why.

What is a bond yield inversion, and why does it matter?

A bond is a term for the purchase of someone else’s debt. In other words, if you buy a bond, you are lending someone money (often a government or large corporation). Bonds are different from stocks, which give the owner a share of the profits of a company.

Bonds can be short term or long term. This refers to the amount of time that you have agreed to lend someone your money. In normal times, the longer the term, the higher the return. Say you lend someone money for 12 months, you might expect a two percent rate of return; but if you lend money for five or ten years you might demand a four or five percent rate. It is natural to demand a higher rate for a longer period because you are taking a higher risk over that time. The value of your loaned money could be eroded by inflation, or you could even lose the entire amount if a company goes bankrupt or if a government goes into default (refuses to pay). Another term for interest rate is “bond yield”. A “bond yield inversion” is the weird and dangerous phenomenon when interest rates on long-term loans are lower than short-term loans.

Why would interest rates for long-term debt become lower than short-term? This is another way of saying that life in the short term is far riskier than life in the long term (even when the risk of inflation and bankruptcy is factored in).

Imagine that you are a billionaire and are trying to figure out what to do with the mountains of cash you have screwed out of the workers (to use technical terminology). If capitalism seems to be doing well, you’ll invest this money in stocks to get a share of the profit made from exploiting workers. This is risky, but gives the best potential return. But if you think that there is going to be a slump, then you’ll pull your money out of the stock market before everybody else does the same and you lose millions when share values go down. Now our poor billionaire is looking for a place to put his or her money. They could buy a short-term bond, but that won’t help because they’ll get the money back right in the middle of the crisis. So their only option (apart from sitting on cash, or buying gold) is to buy long-term bonds.

The yield of the long-term bond is driven down when lots of people want to buy them. This is because bonds are sold using an auction-like process. A government may say, “I want to borrow $1 million at a one-percent rate, who is interested?” If nobody is interested, such as when nobody wants to buy Greek debt, then that government will have to raise the rate to attract more people. But if it is the government of Germany, and lots of people want to buy their debt at a yield of one percent, then perhaps they can offer only 0.5 per cent, or even zero percent, and still get the money they need.

Low long-term yields are a symptom of the fact that the capitalists have no faith in the capitalist system. Don’t bother listening to the paid propagandists of the bosses who say that the “free market economy” is the most efficient way of allocating resources; instead, watch what the moneybags actually do with their precious hoard. They care too much about protecting their ill-gotten gains to believe their own propaganda for a single second. They just want to keep their heads down and hope that by the time their long-term bond matures the crisis will have gone away. They don’t care about being productive, and they definitely have no interest in providing jobs for working-class people. They only care about their money.

The situation has gotten so out of control that there are even bonds with a negative yield! This means it costs money to lend money, and you get extra money for borrowing money. The logic being that, while the loaner will lose money, they’ll lose less money than if they invested elsewhere. This can seem crazy, but there is $16 trillion currently invested in these assets that are 100 percent guaranteed to lose money. One Danish bank even released a negative rate mortgage, where they gift you money to buy a home. The capitalist system is clearly inside out and upside down.

Historically, since the Second World War, every time the return on 10-year U.S. government bonds has gone below the U.S. two-year bonds, there has been a recession soon after. While it is possible for yields to be negative without being followed by a recession, pretty much every recession is preceded by this kind of behaviour.

Bourgeois confusion

However, if one looks for an explanation as to why a recession is coming there is much confusion. Liberal politicians are talking about the “Trump slump”, with the prospect of the U.S.-China trade war causing a global recession. In related terms, a no-deal “Boris Brexit” also would serve to place additional barriers in the way of free trade. Even the Hong Kong protests have made markets jittery, due to the possibility of the movement spreading, and the fact that Hong Kong is an important financial centre in its own right.

Right-wing populists like Donald Trump think they can win a trade war. This leaves the intelligent bourgeois aghast, as they have spent the last 80 years trying to expand trade and avoid protectionism. In their view, protectionism extended the 1929 stock market crash into the decade-long depression of the “Dirty Thirties”. They actually have a point here, as protectionism does strangle the capitalist economy. Tariff barriers and competitive devaluations mean that, instead of buying a more efficiently produced (and therefore cheaper) foreign good, you are forced to buy a more expensive and less efficiently produced domestic item. If you are the only one using protectionist measures, then you have successfully exported your unemployment to another country, but when everybody does it, then on average the entire world economy becomes less efficient. You have to do more work to get less stuff. This is why big business opposes trade wars and favours free trade.

The self-declared “community of nations” is complaining about Trump violating the “rules-based international order”. Does that mean workers should support these liberals against Trump? The “rules-based international order” promoted by countries such as Germany, France, and Canada is a euphemism. These pretty words to conceal a thief's bargain to share out the loot of exploiting the world working class. Trump, the biggest gangster, is merely trying to rewrite the terms of the deal in his own favour. Our opinion on this fight is the same as our opinion with regard to differences between the New York Mafia, the London Mob, and the Tokyo Yakuza.

But while there is potential for a trade war to exacerbate the coming slump, just as subprime debt worsened the 2008 slump, or the dot-com bubble in 2000, or the oil crisis in 1973, none of these precipitating factors really explain the cause of a recession. It has been more than 10 years since the last global downturn, one of the longest periods of growth in the history of capitalism, and generalised processes demand a generalised explanation. Possibly the best explanation for the root causes of capitalist crisis comes from the Communist Manifesto:

“In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them.”

Evidence of overproduction is wide and spreading. One key economic statistic that shows this is called “capacity utilization”. This measures how much of the productive potential of machinery and factories are actually in use to create commodities. Globally, this statistic has been in decline over the last 50 years. For example, in the USA, capacity utilization regularly surpassed 85 percent in the 1970s. However, after plunging to almost 65 percent during the last crisis, this figure hasn’t been able to recover. Now, between 20-25 percent of machinery sits idle even in a so-called “boom”. This waste of productive potential is an indictment of capitalism in the 21st century, which Marx and Engels explained back in Victorian times. Conversely, it also shows the potential of a society that produces for need instead of greed. Overnight we could increase output by 20 per cent merely by utilizing the existing productive forces. We would direct these resources to the genuine needs of the people, to end the housing crisis, build environmentally sustainable transit infrastructure, schools and hospitals, etc.

Another example of the crisis of overproduction are the mounting hoards of corporate “dead money”. Mark Carney, formerly the governor of the Bank of Canada, and now governor of the Bank of England, made headlines back in 2015 when he chided corporations for sitting on cash and not investing. This lack of investment led to stagnation in productivity. At the time, in Canada, dead money amounted to just under $700 billion. The bosses responded with indignation to this criticism from “one of their own”. They asked why they would invest in increasing productivity when there was a capacity utilisation crisis. Why spend money to produce more commodities when you can already make more commodities than the market can absorb? Carney quietly moved on, as did journalists, but the problem has not gone away.

Canadian “dead money” has ballooned by $65 billion per year to a total of $950 billion. These figures can be repeated in country after country. The billionaire class is acting like a dragon from a Tolkien novel, sitting on its jealously guarded pile of gold. But if the workers dare ask that this hoard be used for jobs, or homes, or education, they are met with smoke and fire. This is yet another glaring example of why humanity can no longer live with this monstrous system, which is completely incapable of advancing society and must be slain for the people to prosper.

The fundamental contradiction of capitalism is that the workers are not paid the full value of their labour. Therefore, the workers cannot buy back the items they have just produced. But while the consumption power of the working class is restricted by a whole series of factors, the individual capitalists continue planning production as if there are no such limitations. This inevitably leads the capitalist system into recurring crises of overproduction.

The capitalists can temporarily get around this in a number of ways. They can re-invest the surplus product in production. But doing this merely exacerbates the problem, as increased productivity in the long run, leads to more items being produced that the workers cannot buy. At the moment however as we have seen with the capacity utilisation and dead money crisis, corporations have stopped re-investing. The bosses can also export the surplus product, but again this builds up productive potential in other countries and re-creates the same crisis of overproduction. Now Trump’s trade war is shutting the door on this method of postponing a crisis. Finally, they can artificially boost the market by extending debt to workers, corporations, and governments. This can also work for a period, but eventually these debts must be repaid with interest. Again, the Communist Manifesto explains this clearly:

“And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.”

In 2009, governments bailed out the banks and massively increased debt. Now this debt remains—personal, corporate, and government—but a new crisis is coming. The capitalist class has utilised almost every tool at its disposal to avert another crisis. It has used up all of its escape routes and does not know what to do. It is desperately afraid of the social consequences of the “enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces” which would lead to massive layoffs and destitution. A decade ago, the bankrupt labour bureaucracy managed to encourage the workers to keep their heads down and not fight. But in the intervening period, the ideas of socialism have become popularised in a way not seen in generations. The political system in country after country is on the verge of collapse in this time of modest growth. Just imagine what will happen during a generalised slump.

One political commentator for the CBC said the following:

“We are in unknown territory, out past the ‘here be monsters’ sign. None of us has any idea how this will turn out, economists included. As we saw in 2008, the collateral damage when things start to go badly can be devastating. Personally, I have a bad feeling about it all.”

Theoretically speaking, there is no “final crisis” of capitalism. They will always find a route out, one way or another. But the capitalists have no idea where this route lies, and neither do we. One thing is clear, however: whichever way out they find, it will be at the expense of the workers and the poor. The bosses can no longer move society forward and stand at the edge of an abyss. We must build the forces that can create a socialist society as the only alternative to capitalist catastrophe.

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jeanjauthor · 5 years ago

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This.

Whole.

Thread.

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Thread unroller: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1231411476805672961.html

We have answers to the question "How do we pay for Medicare 4 All?" Some of them quite detailed. No one has managed to come up with an answer to "How do we afford not having it?" We as a nation literally cannot pay for healthcare. This is a huge ongoing crisis. The closest we can come to answering it is to pretend that, well, the fallout of individuals not being able to afford healthcare is limited to those individuals. This is a lie. It costs everyone. It drags the precious economy down. The person who goes bankrupt because of medical expenses and loses their house... that's a blow to the neighborhood they lived in. A bank has replaced a profitable asset (a mortgage) with a depreciating asset (an empty house). The family struggling to pay for healthcare is paying money into a system that doesn't actually produce anything except profit for the top. Take away that struggle, they are doing business with their neighbors. Ordering products. Buying services. Creating jobs! Defaulted medical bills (including from those much-exaggerated can't-refuse-anybody free ER visits that the right likes to pretend is the same as free healthcare) get passed onto everybody else, meaning we're already "socializing" costs, but inefficiently. ERs don't do routine preventative and diagnostic services or non-emergency treatment of chronic conditions, which means by the time someone winds up in an ER, the care they need is 1) more expensive and 2) less effective.

All of this is a huge drain on the stuff that the people gibbering about the terrible specter of socialism actually do care about: productivity! Consumer confidence! The freedom of the marketplace! Socialize the medical system and we will be paying less money for better outcomes. We're already spending more money on healthcare, collectively, than it would take to treat everyone for real. And for all that money, we get the worst healthcare in the so-called developed world. If we could be getting more while paying less, THE INVISIBLE HAND OF THE FREE MARKET demands that's what we do. Market economics dictates that we adopt socialized medicine. Anybody who disagrees doesn't actually care about what they're telling you they care about. "But people will have to wait for treatment!" They do already, sometimes until they die. "But there will be rationing." There already is rationing and it's killing people. "But the government will decide what treatment you get." Less so than for-profit insurance companies do now. Universal healthcare, free at point of service, paid for by public money, is the best deal we could take. We would pay less and get more. And it would make the "free market" freer by removing artificial constraints on things like job mobility. "Private industry is more efficient than the government." Efficient at what? For insurance companies, it's making money. This efficiency comes in the form of them taking more profit by charging more and providing less.

It's efficient *against us*.

Of course, replacing most of the concept of health insurance with a public institution will displace some jobs, and we should take care of the people affected by that but "socialism" is a better solution than propping up an industry that is robbing and killing us. Our concept of business ethics right now is that the main fiduciary duty of a company is to generate ever-growing profits for its stakeholders. This means a for-profit insurance company is doing wrong when it takes care of us. Its "job" is to take our money and keep it. Any money that an insurance company spends on paying for actual health care is regarded in the business world as a failure, with some failure being inevitable, but regrettable nonetheless. They will take more and give less, if they can get away with it. Now, the ideal of the free market is that if they jerk us around we can take our business elsewhere, but healthcare is so expensive and byzantine that most of us can't afford it, except when subsidized by an employer who has the benefit of negotiating in bulk on our behalf. But this leaves us in a pinch where if our employer isn't great we can't "vote our wallets" by leaving because we need the healthcare and if our healthcare (which we didn't get to pick directly) isn't great we can't "vote our wallets" because we need the paycheck.

In theory an employer offering bad healthcare benefits is a bad employer who should be "corrected" in the market by leaving their employ, but jobs aren't fungible, we can't just leave and go across the street to another employer with the same circumstances but better insurance. This makes the "free market" as it applies to health insurance NOT REALLY VERY FREE AT ALL.

Our nominal power to negotiate and force companies to compete for our business is severely constrained and diluted by circumstances. If a restaurant, movie studio, or video game company wants our business, it has to contend with the fact that we could stay home and feed or entertain ourselves in lots of other ways, on top of there being other restaurants and media companies. But the alternative to healthcare is stay home and administer home remedies and hope you don't die of an infected tooth or hangnail that spreads, or untreated cancer, or whatever. We aren't really "customers" with the same choice. So the fact that the consequences of voting our wallet and staying home means we might die and the fact that our negotiation ability is at a remove through our jobs (which, again, without which we might lose our ability to secure food and shelter and healthcare, and maybe die)... ...means that the vaunted competition that is supposed to make the free market efficient and fair just doesn't happen. It doesn't apply.

We are at the mercy of corporations who, again, are instructed by society that their highest good is separating us from our money. And it doesn't have to be this way! We could eliminate the whole predatory, unnecessary layer that is the for-profit health insurance complex and replace it with a public agency whose highest good is getting the most treatment for the least money. And at that point, multiple massive distortions of the "free market" disappear.

We gain more power to change jobs if another employer is offering us a better deal. Free market competition! Great, right? We've got more money that we can spend on things we want. We don't have people losing cars and houses and apartments and education plans and jobs because they had a medical emergency they couldn't pay for. We eliminate a lot of bankruptcies. Financial planning becomes more predictable. Consumer confidence goes up. Spending goes up.

Every business that is providing something people want benefits from the increased stability! Demand for basically everything rises! Jobs are created! Workers are less stressed and fearful and exhausted and so are working better! Where's the downside for "capitalism"? I'm a fan of the free market. I think customers benefit when companies compete for their money. I think companies benefit when workers compete for their money. But our for-profit healthcare system distorts this whole thing so badly that this is basically not happening now. If you like "capitalism" in the sense of a market-based economy where entities compete to trade what they have for what they want... a little "socialism" around the edges is a good thing, a necessary thing. If we could decouple our thinking in the business world from the current fiduciary duty we choose to imagine businesses owe, then "profit" becomes the reward for doing a good job at whatever the business does, and that's FINE. It's good, it's great, it's the ideal.

But we can't there as long as we're treating everything as though it's just another fungible option among many where people could freely vote their wallets. We can stay home from the movies if the options stink, go watch a play or a TV show. Can't do that with cancer treatment. Democratic socialism, social democracy... related and overlapping concepts, I'm not actually that interested in wanking over the distinctions. The point is, you can have social features on a market economy. And you can't have a market economy for long without them. In the competition that makes a market economy work, the reward for winning is also the means by which the game is played, which means each round is *less* competitive than the one that came before. Competition is a finite resource, which means it's unsustainable. The more that this competition extends into areas in which negotiation and competition are stifled, the faster the process by which the competition breaks down becomes until the "free market" becomes a fiefdom of company towns. And so the distortion caused by our for-profit healthcare industry is speeding up the demise of the free market. A public option would slow that down. Eliminating health insurance as it exists now and replacing it with some form of single payer system would go much further.

To make a long story short (TOO LATE!) - we can't afford to keep the health insurance industry around. Can't afford it. How do we pay for it? Nobody has an answer for that. We can figure out how to pay for Medicare 4 All, but not how to pay for health insurance. And while we're figuring out how to pay for healthcare under the private insurance model, we should ask... wait, what are we paying for? Mostly to prop up an industry whose goal is that we should continue paying them to exist. Literally no purpose. They produce nothing.

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tremendouspeachduck · 6 years ago

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The WHAT IS SOCIALISM Mystery Revealed

What do you think of NYC? I think of lunatic DEMs and Socialism

Propaganda: information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view. Does this Saul Alinsky rule make sense: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.

What about ---> “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.” Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog.

What about ---> “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.

creepy brainwashing techniques

Propaganda from CNN and others doing this at its finest, right? Aren’t these FCC and broadcasting law violations? DOJ where are you? send your email message to the DOJ and call them: Department Comment Line: 202-353-1555 and/or Department of Justice Main Switchboard: 202-514-2000

Site radio Act of 1927 and was established then came the Communications Act of 1934.

We need equal air time done with the same tone, right? Candidate time as well as different POV time.

I’m sure the Statue of Liberty wants no part of Socialism, right?

Watch Video

Socialism is a concept that individuals should not have ownership of land, capital (money), or industry, but rather the whole community collectively owns and controls property, goods, and production. Ideally, in this system all share equally in work and the fruits of their labor.

This sounds great, I admit. However, if you don’t own it, you’re not going to work or take care of it. Look at apartments that are turned into condos. When the apartments are rented, the renters don’t own the apartments. They are not likely to care if something gets broken and mistreated thus lowering the value, because it is not theirs. It is the landlords. It is his problem.

(Who cares, no skin off my nose?) However once the people buy the condos and it becomes their property, they now have a vested interest in keeping it in good shape. While they were renters they were living under Socialism (no ownership). Once they brought the condo, they became Capitalist. (ownership) and their thinking changed.

Under true Socialism or Communism, Steve Jobs could not have brought the parts for his prototype computer. If he knew that his hard work, would never allow him to make more money then his neighbor who spends his time watching mindless TV shows, why would he even bother to waste his time trying to invent something new and useful. Why not take it easy? Everybody else does. In Germany and France, union employees get months of paid vacation time. Take it easy, you’ll get paid!

Socialism and Communism kill the ‘will’ to work, competition, innovation and creativity. Why compete to work? You won’t make any more money. Why spend time innovating new ideas, or being creative, there won’t be anything in it for me. As a result they fail to provide goods and services for their citizens.

The Soviet Eastern Communist countries of the 20th century were noted for not having much goods and services for their citizens. Yet, the ruling class always had plenty of everything, and it was usually imported from capitalist countries. While we have rich people in America, we also have a large middle class, that live comfortable lives. Even many if not most poor people in America have refrigerators, TVs, and food on the table.

Venezuela and Greece have suffered tremendously under Socialism and all others like Sweden or Denmark gave up the concept years ago bc it doesn’t work.

Of course your brand of Communism would be different. lol Now about communism, under the Soviet Communist rule, the citizens are allowed to keep very little personal goods. Effectively the state takes all the business profits, and gives the workers ration cards to buy food, and clothing.

Other personal items such as TVs, radios, AC units are hard to come by, and are rationed out by the state, if you can prove you need them.

People who had lived in Communist Lithunia who wanted to move across town to another apartment to be closer to someone were prevented. The move had to be approved by the State, and it took them 10 years and lots of red tape for simply moving to another apartment! In the old Soviet Union the government paid the workers with ration cards, but the cards were only good in government control stores where there were few goods of poor quality.

So citizen did not feel compelled to work hard for so little. A common saying in the USSR was. “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”

HEAR the song about NYC - JZ & Alicia Keys

#youth #socialism #communism #foreign #politics

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l-in-c-future · 6 years ago

Link

A pair of Kazakh couple who returned to live in the oil capital city of Kazakhstan Atyau:

“We responded to the urging calling from our Kazakhstan President to return home about a decade ago. We made jokes that whether or not we lived in China, we still work for China’s petroleum State Owned Enterprises.”

They used to work for one of those SOEs in NE of Kazakhstan, yet the project had stopped. They have to find new jobs in the Western Kazakhstan. They didn’t know their work was related to the OROB until TV media from China came to shoot documentary.

They experienced that China did not provide many employment opportunities to local Kazakhs except those low skills and low technological levels jobs. China State Enterprises only hired their technical and engineering staff from China without demonstrating any intention to train up local people to acquire higher level and therefore higher paid jobs. China’s SOEs tend to bring their own teams of people in thousands to work in all infrastructure projects.

Increasing protests in capital city:

Increasing incidents of protests in Astana were noted as more and more people are frustrated and angry about their lands being leased to foreigners on very term long bases. They worried that their government would lease their lands to China. e.g. The Kazakhstan government had leased a piece of land to a China petroleum SOE for 5 years, China wanted another 25 years, local people don’t wanted to see this as a standard pattern.

“It can’t say that there is no benefits brought by foreigners but we have to be truly mutually benefited. Our government shouldn’t lease all the lands to foreigners for long term like 25 or 30 years but should renew the leases on say every 5 years. We should not allow massive influx of foreigners as well.”

“We are afraid because they, the number of Han Chinese influx, are too many, many local people don’t feel comfortable.”

“I don’t think everyone should only live on the Road and Belt.” “Even though there may be good policies intentions made by both governments, I don’t see any solid progress, we cannot sit here to wait in vain.”

A HK migrant (Chris) married to a Uyghur-Kazakh mixed family living in Kazakhstan for 20 years

“My wife’s maiden family don’t know what is One Road One Belt, China means daily needed goods sold in the markets for them. From time to time, I am being questioned that why the inconsistent standards of China made goods. I don’t think the poor quality China made goods has anything related to me but I am careful in choosing the goods.”

In the Eastern part of Kazakhstan where it bordered with China’s Xinjiang Province, the Uyghurs living at two sides of the borders belong to the same ethnic clan. They empathize their fellow ethnic members who suffer under China’s oppressive policies. Their impression about China is based on how China treats the Uyghurs. They don’t have good impression about China.

“The Uyghurs here resent Chinese Han people a lot. Many of my friends and neighbours frequently tell me how much they hate Chinese privately.They don’t understand why China always persecute their fellow ethnic members. Some years ago there were violent riots in Xinjiang, some Uyghurs who lived in the capital city here echoed their supporting voices as well. Even though people are separated by border lines, that don’t cut off their natural ethnic bonds.

China attempts to buy political and diplomatic supports from neighbouring Central Asian countries’ leaders to support, echo or even assist their highly oppressive policies against the Uyghurs to curb the Xinjiang independent movement through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. China tirelessly frame the ‘terrorists’ threats caused by the Uyghurs as an excuse to justify ethnic persecution.

Now with One Road One Belt, China pushes an economic card to buy or bait further sympathy from the neighbouring countries regarding its Uyghurs policies. While China may be able to orchestra deals with the elite leaders who were their former fellow communist leaders in the Soviet Union or who are governing similar authoritarian regimes like China, it is much harder to buy the hearts of local people, especially many of the ethnic people in Central Asian countries also have their fellow ethnic clan members living in Xinjiang. For example, Kazakhs is the second largest ethnic group population, following Uyghurs.

China doesn’t considerate the resentment coming from their neighbours who witnessed the drastic colonization by Han Chinese in Xinjiang in the past several decades had resulted in significant dilution and marginalization of the original demographic compositions. A result of putting them in very disadvantaged and discriminated positions. They share deeply the same worry and fear of what may happen to them in their own countries under China’s increasing dominating influences. Will their future will be a Xinjianization.

“Even though China has replaced Russia to become Kazakhstan’s major trading partner, the old political tie with Russia is still strong and close. Many Kazakhs consider this relationship superior to they have with China. Many of them have prejudice against China. Even though both Russia and China are communist country, Kazakhs perceived that those happened in Russia and in their country were through ‘genuine’ revolutions while the Communist Party in China gained power through civil war and power seizures.”

“I observe China is trying to increase its recognition and appraised from other countries through cultural exchange. What China thinks the Confucius and calligraphy as important essences of culture may not be equally seen by other people because every place, every nation, every tribe has their own unique beauties and goodness in their own historical and cultural heritages. If China only wants to spread its own culture to other people single sidedly with an aim to make others follow the China model, I don’t think it is a successful way. Cultural exchange should be conducted on equal basis.”

China tries to increase her ‘soft power’ through cultural exchanges but many times the “cultural exchanges” come with economic packages and the content of the ‘culture’ is dictated by the Communist Party’s pre-screened ideological views. It is not soft power, it is subtle indoctrination as co-product or by-product of China’s economic exports.

Cultural exchange students from Kazakhstan studying in HK

“We like to come back to HK if we can because HK is very different from China.”

“We do not hear of One Road and One Belt.”

Is it? How much longer HK can be still seen as having her competitive advantage in many foreigners’ eyes when China is increasingly squeezing and wiping out HK’s uniqueness through suffocating HK’s legitimate autonomy and screwing her freedom?

“Kazakhstan’s tertiary education places a lot of emphasis on science and technological training while ignoring human and social science education. In such background, it makes people not resisting China’s economic development driven China model. At the present, many Kazakhs cannot relate how freedom, human rights, and righteous to their daily life. But how about the future? Those students who study overseas who have seen a different society and different lifestyle in other places, they may think it is also something that can be feasible in Kazakhstan as well. They may voice out their demand to fight for a better society. When this happens, it depends on whether and how the Kazakhstan government can accommodate the new civil demands.”

No matter where people live, once they have seen a bigger better alternative world, it is hard to ask them to satisfy in a caged environment in long term. However, China is using all the means to control its overseas students. Even trying to mobilize them in extreme nationalistic behaviours in overseas or using them as extended limbs to intervene academic freedoms in the campuses and classrooms of overseas schools.

Does the so-called “China model” of ‘cultural exchange’ really heartfully facilitate young people in the Road and Belt countries to broaden their worldviews and life experiences or China wants to dupe its even more repressive remote-controlled citizens to other already authoritarian countries?

Is it just another means of China’s ‘soft bait’ to young people in other countries?

Vietnam

Projects in Vietnam had been halted or stopped when Sino-Vietnam relationship is tense.

“Some projects are suspended because of major industrial accidents, wages not paid to workers and other quality issues. The costs of construction had rocketed from USD 500 million to 800 million. We still don’t know when the sky rail would be completed. The budget exceeded portion will be topped up by Vietnam government, means being ultimately paid by the Vietnam taxpayers.” commented from Dong, a local Vietnamese policy analyst.

Many China capital companies offered very low prices to bid the infrastructure contracts by eying Vietnam’s high infrastructure needs but doesn’t have sufficient infrastructure development funds. There is a concern regarding the quality and safety standards of such cheap constructions.

“Vietnam is stuck in a paradox now.”

Apart from infrastructures, Vietnam is also heavily relying on China for her supply of daily goods. Some years ago, there was civil opinion discussing and debating how to escape from China.

“We should think how Vietnam can speeds up her own reform development and modernization. Instead of escaping from China, we should think how we can overcome and make ourselves better than China.”

#One Road One Belt #Vietnam #Kazakhstan

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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years ago

Text

HOW TO YAHOO

Work and life just get mixed together. They happen rarely till industrial times there were just speech, writing, and printing, but when they do, they do badly. 16804294 what 0. The intervening years have created a situation that is, as far as I know, without precedent: Apple is popular at the low end and the high end, but not powerful.1 And when the Mac appeared, it was like coming home. I felt like an immigrant from Eastern Europe arriving in America in 1900. And the days when VCs could wash angels out of the cap table are long gone.2 What you really want is to increase volume. Some are fit only for entry level jobs, but others are ready to rule the world if they can make money. Why should we care especially about civil liberties?3

Google has over 82 million unique users a month and annual revenues of about three billion dollars. The Achilles heel of successful companies is their inability to cannibalize themselves. I think one of the biggest startups almost didn't happen that there must be a valid one. This little thought experiment suggests a few of the disadvantages of insider projects: the selection of the wrong kind of people, I like to work with other good programmers. I sat down and calculated what I thought the price should be. What makes a good startup founder so dangerous is his willingness to endure infinite schleps. A position on the corporate ladder had a value analogous to the goodwill that is a very real element in the valuation of companies. Hard as this was to believe in the mid 20th century is not because they love finance but because they want to work on something interesting with people I like. I order something from an online store, and they know how much jobs suck. Microsoft, or even Google. And the first planes, and the handful of people who wish they'd gotten a regular job, and a startup that succeeds, it's going to consume at least three or four years. So one widely used trick, especially among illustrators, is to intentionally make a painting or drawing look like it had syntax.

Startups succeed by creating wealth. So all other things being equal, a painting with faces in it will interest people more than one without. It's the same with work. All three vertices now seem pretty dated. Any given person is dumber as a member of an audience is to give them what they need.4 If you start the kind of programmers companies should want to hire. But there is a deeper reason that hackers are alarmed by measures like copyrights and patents. There are two senses of the word troll.

You can see how great a hold taste is subjective and wanted to kill it once and for all.5 Why do great ideas come from the margin is simply that there's so much of a problem with options, it's that they reward slightly the wrong thing. As everyone knows, America plus tragedy equals the Civil War was about slavery; people would be confused otherwise; plus you can show a lot of bandwidth.6 Sure, you'll probably end up working at Microsoft, or even Google.7 Before Durer tried making engravings, no one took them very seriously. This was my reason for not starting a startup and you fall asleep in the middle of the range.8 And when you do, that core will be big, because it will be accepted even if its spam probability is above the threshold. But all art has to work on anything, and that's actually very valuable information.9 That was all it took to make the headers look innocent, but my guess is that it would be: just try hacking something together. Everyone was so cheerful and healthy and rich. It's harder to escape the influence of your own circumstances, but you can at least approach that by getting rid of the sources of error in your own life, and those that you decide, from afar, are going to want computers in their houses? Outsiders are not merely free but compelled to make things, like programmers and writers.10

That's what a lot of people who aren't.11 I'm told there are people getting rich by tricking consumers or lobbying the government for anti-competitive regulations or tax loopholes, then let's stop them.12 Hacking something together means deciding what to study in college. If startups become a cheap commodity, more people will be doing with computers in ten years, I think the cost of failure to increase the number of things you can just hack together keeps increasing. I'm surprised people still worry about this.13 Maybe this would have been better off; not only wouldn't these guys have broken anything, they'd have made less. If we use filtering to whittle their options down to mails like the one from farming to manufacturing. And it does seem to influence people when they can see their reputation in the eyes of their peers drain away after making an asshole remark. That phrase draws in most threads I've mentioned here.14 Within the US, without an undergraduate degree—but tests like this will matter less and less. I was in college the rule seemed to be synonymous with quiet, so I didn't do it. When Mark spoke at a YC dinner this winter he said he wasn't trying to start a startup.15

So a language that makes source code ugly is maddening to an exacting programmer, as clay full of lumps would be to try it. One of the most egregious spam indicators. Over time the two inevitably meet, but not ready yet for real work.16 So was the Apple I and Apple II in his apartment or his cube at HP. Fortunately, if startups get cheap to start, this conflict goes away, because founders can start them younger, when it's rational to take more risk, and can start more startups total in their careers. But as long as you made a graph of GNP per capita vs.17 There are two bad smelling words, color spammers love colored fonts and California which occurs in testimonials and also in menus in forms, but they weren't going to die if they didn't get their money.

He was a precise sort of guy, so he'd measured their productivity before and after. That phrase draws in most threads I've mentioned here. I used to be an obelisk will become a pyramid. 01 describe 0. First Round Capital found that among its portfolio companies, do startups with female founders outperformed those without by 63%. And lately hackers have sensed a change in the last ten years the Internet has the most effect.18 So about half the founders from that first summer, less than two years ago, are now rich, at least in your lifetime. But I don't know anything about business to start a startup is a lot of data about how they work. In a zero-sum, there are no external checks at all. Often users have second thoughts and delete such comments. Now, thanks to the Internet, SMTP email, HTTP the web, Google at year 1 is the limit of what they'd have produced.19 So if you're an outsider you should actively seek out contrarian projects.

Startups are perforce small, because they only get paid if they build the winner. But that's ok, because the Internet dissolves the two cornerstones of broadcast media: synchronicity and locality.20 For a while it annoyed me to hear myself described as some kind of answer.21 Boy was he good. But this is so important to hackers, they're especially sensitive to it. It was a place people went in search of something new. When a new medium arises that's powerful enough to win, and the first thing they learn is that the Internet is the primary medium. Some decided only hours before the deadline. In fact, it wasn't initially a startup idea.22 Eleven people manage to work together as if they were a rooted in your town and/or b so successful that VCs would fund them even if they had to move back to Canada and live in their parents' basements. You're not all playing a zero-sum game. I think he really wishes he'd listened.

Notes

Users may love you but these supposedly local seed firms. I call it ambient thought.

The ordering system was small. They also generally say they prefer great markets to great people.

The biggest exits are the numbers like the United States, have been lured into this sort of love is as blind as the investment community will tend to be on demand, and this was the least correlation between the Daddy Model that it would take up, but not in 1950 something one could reasonably be with children, we're probably fooling ourselves. Most people should not always tell this to users, however, is caring what random people thought of them, but its inspiration; the creation of wealth, not the sense that if they could then tell themselves that they violate current startup fashions. You're not one of the next three years, it will seem like I overstated the case, companies' market caps do eventually become a manager.

Some find they have to be on fewer boards at once is to the average Edwardian might well guess wrong.

And of course, but this advantage isn't as obvious because it looks great when a wolf appears, is this someone you want to measure that turns out to coincide with mathematicians' judgements. We think of ourselves as investors, even if the fix is at fault, since 95% of the magazine they'd accepted it for had disappeared.

Even college textbooks is unpleasant work, but different cultures react differently when things are from an interview, I'd appreciate hearing from you. Now we don't want to sell, or an electric power grid than without, real estate development, you now get to go deeper into the shape that matters here but the idea.

I have a competent startup lawyer handle the deal. Html.

Some of the things Julian gave us. Because the title associate has gotten a bad idea has been rewritten to suit present fashions, I'm guessing the next investor. The key to wasting time is distraction.

It is a qualitative difference in investors' attitudes.

But it could change what you're working on such an idea where there is some weakness in your classes as a high school football game that will sign up quickest and those are the only cause of poverty. He was off by only about 2%. Com.

I would be worth trying to meet people; I was there when it was worth about 30 billion. Of the remaining outcomes don't have enough equity left to motivate people by saying Real artists ship. 01. Beware too of the world, and the editor written in C and C, the most powerful men in Congress, Sam Altman wrote: My feeling with the same town, unless it was the fall of 2008 but no more unlikely than it was overvalued till you run through all the difference between us and the exercise of stock the VCs want it to be a startup in a in the field.

A preliminary result, comparisons of programming languages either take the hit.

In the beginning. It was revoltingly familiar to slip back into it. From?

Don't be fooled by the government to take math classes intended for math majors. No, but I think that's because delicious/popular. I remember about the right direction to be careful about security.

I don't think these are the only result is higher prices. But should you even be symbiotic, because you spent all your time working on is a fine sentence, though it's at least what they too were feeling in 1914 on the East Coast. If Xerox had used what they said.

That's one of the river among the largest of their name, but viewed from the late 1970s the movie Dawn of the corpora. Starting a company they'd pay a lot like intellectual bullshit. Josh Wilson came in to pick your brains.

001 negative effect on returns, like angel investors in startups. One year at Startup School David Heinemeier Hansson encouraged programmers who wanted to make Europe more entrepreneurial and more pervasive though.

The trustafarians' ancestors didn't get rich by buying their own itinerary through no-shop clause. I would take their customers.

If a company with benevolent aims is currently undervalued, because unions will exert political pressure to protect their hosts. Proceedings of AAAI-98 Workshop on Learning for Text Categorization. Because it was the reason it used a recent Business Week, 31 Jan 2005. It wouldn't cut their overall returns tenfold, because sometimes artists unconsciously use tricks by imitating art that would have.

The attitude of the things you're taught.

But it could change what you're doing.

Proceedings of AAAI-98 Workshop on Learning for Text Categorization. Structurally the idea upon have different needs from the DMV. I said that a shift in power to founders would actually increase the spammers' cost to reach a given audience by a central authority according to certain somewhat depressing rules many of which you ultimately need if you threatened a company with benevolent aims is currently undervalued, because any VC would think twice before crossing him. A few VCs have an edge over Silicon Valley.

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caitlinasinclair · 6 years ago

Text

Writing Sample: MDIA417

MDIA417: Creative Industries and Cultural Labour. Final Research Project.

Precarity and Sexual Harassment in the Creative Workplace

Precarity drives sexism and sexual assault towards women in the workforce, particularly women starting out in their fields. This occurs in most industries, but is particularly acute in creative industries. This research essay seeks to prove this thesis, through a critical analysis of both scholarly literature and popular media coverage incorporating conceptions of how and why precarity occurs and its impact and feminist theory of gendered power structures, with a special focus on how precarity particularly affects women. It will also make use of a case study of the #MeToo/Times Up movement, to display how precarity in the workforce and in individual’s private lives drives womens experiences of gendered relations of power and sexual harassment in the workplace, and explore how it may be negated in the future.

Workplace sexual harassment: an overview

The reported incidences of workplace sexual harassment by gender vary from study to study, but most conclude that women experience it in greater numbers. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) contends that between 25% and 85% of American women will experience workplace sexual harassment (Feldblum & Lipnic). It is difficult to more precisely gauge how many women experience sexual harassment in the workplace as many victims do not report instances of harassment, and my paper seeks to expand on the driving forces behind this. Women in precarious employment are more likely to be subject to a specific form of exploitation: sexual harassment by their colleagues, employers or more senior figures in their industry. This is neither wholly due to the gender or economic hierarchies present in the workplace, but a complex interplay between the two (Crain). As we have seen from the explosion of the #MeToo movement, many women in the creative industries who have been subject to sexual harassment earlier in their careers do not feel comfortable speaking out about it until they were firmly established in their fields. The Times Up legal fund for victims of sexual harassment in the workplace has indicated that the greatest represented industry in applications to the fund is the arts industry, from which 9% of the total applications are sourced (Corkery).

Literature Review

Precarity in the workforce

The creative industries are situated within the service and knowledge industry, and can most broadly be defined as including the arts and culture, entertainment and copyright, and information services industries (Flew). Workers in the creative industries exemplify precarity in the modern work force. Creative work is highly insecure, often low paid, and very competitive, with workers engaging in multiple consecutive and concurrent contract and temporary gigs, rather than permanent employment (Gill & Pratt). Working multiple jobs may mean longer working hours, but actual paid labour is not the only drain on creative workers time. Depending on which part of the creative industries one works in, staying up to date with industry advances and networking is crucial and often takes place out of hours, leading to more of the creative workers time being eaten up without financial recompense. Such insecure working conditions drive exploitation of workers who are then less likely to speak out against their exploitation for myriad reasons. Autonomous workers in temporary or contract work are used to constantly managing themselves and the jobs they may work in the future on top of their current jobs. This self management may lead workers to feel it is not worth risking their long term work prospects for only a short period of potentially better working conditions, fearing ruining their chances of having their contracts renewed in a competitive industry. Workers who have yet to establish themselves in the industry and ‘precogs’ -cognitive workers engaged in precarious labour conditions- (de Peuter) are willing to put up with highly exploitative working conditions, even working for free, rationalising their undervalued labour through the belief that it is a prerequisite to better working opportunities in the future.

Precarity at home

The precariat does not only experience precarity in their job (or jobs) but in their home life too. The chronic income instability that leads on from employment insecurity has several ill effects on an individual’s personal life, such as unstable living situations, food insecurity, and the associated health issues brought on by these conditions (Cochrane et al.) Insecure employment may affect the precariat’s ability to pay for housing, which is compounded in the creative industry whose workers are often concentrated in cities such as Los Angeles, San Fransisco, New York, and London (or Wellington!), cities that trend towards higher than average house prices and rental costs. This concentration is largely driven by local policy and the rise of the ‘creative city’ as regions look towards the creative industries as the logical next step after industrial and managerial capitalism to drive economic growth and competitiveness. (Florida, in Flew, Oakley). Much of the work in the creative industries can be highly transitory in nature (Screen Women’s Action Group, Anonymous in Curtin & Sanson), which leads workers to ‘follow the money’ rather than establishing a complete life in any one place. Following productions in this way may also erode worker’s work-life balance further, as not having a defined ‘home base’ of sorts means there is less of a distinction between work and home.

Precarity crossover and the social factory

Other autonomist Marxist scholars contest that precarity is not defined by its structuring of the worker’s work life or personal life, but as a mechanism of control that causes the two to bleed together, “requiring workers not to work all the time but to be constantly available for work” (Hardt & Negri, p. 146). Labour is no longer organised around a central factory, but dispersed out into society (Hardt & Negri, in Gill & Pratt). In the creative industries, informal networking outside of ‘standard’ working hours (if such a thing can exist in the social factory) may be perceived as necessary by precarious workers to survive in their chosen career path (Gill & Pratt). In relation to sexual harassment, the perceived compulsivity of informal networking meetings that often take place in settings traditionally not associated as work settings, such as restaurants and bars, by precarious female workers may make them feel obligated to put themselves in unsafe situations for the hopeful benefit of their careers. From the testimonies of Harvey Weinstein’s victims, this seemed to be his modus operandi (Farrow). New Zealand’s Screen Women’s Action Group identified “[t]he fluidity and merging of social events with work” (Screen Women’s Action Group, p. 2) as contributing factors to the prevalence of sexual harassment unique to the screen industry, listing events such as wrap parties, publicity tours, film festivals, and development work happening in private homes as examples.

Precarity and reporting of sexual harassment

The #MeToo movement has somewhat been characterised in popular media by well known and established actresses speaking out about sexual harassment and even assault they had experienced several years or decades ago, largely because the individuals whose stories are most heard are those with the platforms and agency to ensure they are heard. The challenge for #MeToo as it continues to grow is how the movement will enable the voices of those without access to the media, and protect those in precarious situations for whom speaking out bears greater consequences and potential sanctions (Zarkov & Davis). Because of this, I hypothesise that the actresses concerned’s precarious working situations were a driving force behind their choice to stay silent at the time. The period of time between alleged harassments and those who experienced them’s speaking out has led many outside of academia to question why these celebrities waited so long to talk about their harassment, especially in the case of Harvey Weinstein, whose behaviour has been outed as being an open secret in Hollywood for two decades. Indeed, a good deal of popular media coverage has focused on trying to answer that question (Towle, Williams, Farrow), most of which can be reduced down to one concept: power, and powerlessness. Feminist theory posits that workplace sexual harassment is driven more by an underlying desire to reinforce traditional gendered power structures than sexual gratification, which explains why women are dogged by workplace harassment even as they move up the ladder in their organisations (McLaughlin, Uggen & Blackstone). Thus, even women in management positions still experience precarity at work.

#MeToo as a case study emphasises workplace sexual harassment’s grounding in power dynamics, as those who feel they have little power (the precariat) remain silent until those they perceive to have power speak out and provide them with a platform to stand on. For example, the Screen Women’s Action Group reports that while hosting forums for women in the industry, a question they heard constantly was “how can we do anything when they are so all-powerful?” (Screen Women’s Action Group, p. 2). Reporting harassment also takes time and labour many in precarious living and working situations simply do not have, whether they are working multiple jobs or undertaking all the excess labour that comes with income insecurity, such as applying for assistance programs, or looking for/applying for new work (Cochrane et al).

Glamorisation of Creative Labour

Something that sets the creative industries apart from other industries is the glamorisation of its work. Creative industry work is reified as “‘cool’ jobs in ‘hot’ industries” (Neff, Wissinger, & Zukin). Because the work is perceived as providing more than just a wage to the worker, such as social currency and other ‘soft benefits’, like promises of future work, flexibility of labor, or self-actualisation and fulfilment, it can be construed as ‘lifestyle labour’, wherein the social and lifestyle benefits afforded by ‘cool’ work are accepted as supplements to reduced monetary compensation (Zendel). In addition, workers are made to feel as though they should be grateful for the opportunity to work in such ‘cool’ industries, and therefore can and should put up with bad working conditions, whether they be crushingly long hours, undervalued/under-compensated labour, or coworkers/bosses sexually harassing them. Workers in many industries are also increasingly being required by their employers to engage in more labour outside of normal working hours training themselves in new skills to keep up in their fields (Kotamraju, in Neff, Wissinger, & Zukin), which falls within the new category of labour posited by Neff, Wissinger, and Zukin: entrepreneurial labour. So not only is the work itself glorified, but also how it is conducted. The glorification of creative work is encouraged by local government institutions who seek to attract creative workers and grow their economies alongside their creative industries, supporting the image makeover of the starving artist “whose long-abiding vulnerability to occupational neglect is now magically transformed, under the new order of creativity, into a model of enterprising, risk-tolerant pluck” (Ross, p. 15). Meanwhile, the hordes of exploited digital labourers whose work is ‘freely given’ (Terranova) serve as a reminder to creative workers not to charge too much or ask too much of their employers (such as a fair wage or reasonable hours), as there are always more ‘passionate’ workers ready to take their place once their contract expires or their current gig is complete.

Another form of glorification of specifically creative work is the ‘do what you love’ (DWYL) ethos. DWYL suggests that only doing work that a worker loves and is passionate about doing can provide them with self-actualisation, which creates a necessary division between loveable and non-loveable work. The ethos is simply not applicable to workers in fields such as cleaning, whose labour is devalued in the process (Tokumitsu). Not only this, but for the myth of doing-what-you-love to remain plausible to the masses of creative workers who may be swayed by it, labour patterns that do not fit in with the reified image of flexible, enjoyable, and fulfilling creative work must be varnished over and neutralised, which is only too convenient for the elites seeking to minimise such labour anyway. As said by Tokumitsu, “the rise of DWYL demands active refusal to acknowledge work that doesn’t legitimize the ways in which the world’s political, business, and social leaders justify their own power” (Tokumitsu, p. 29). So, non-creative labour is devalued, and simultaneously the inglorious aspects of creative work are minimised; is it any wonder that precarious workers in the creative industries feel they have more to lose when they engage in actions that may threaten their jobs, and are willing to put up with worse working conditions?

Precarity and Women’s Labour

Women have been under-compensated for their labour since time immemorial, being traditionally expected to take on the role of nurturer of children and the family for little recompense. This has unfortunately, yet unsurprisingly, followed women into the workplace. One quantitative measure for this is the gender pay gap, which is particularly acute in the creative industries. In Australia (as of 2015), the gender pay gap across the board was 17.3% (Workplace Gender Equality Agency), compared with 32% for professional artists (Throsby & Petetskaya). In the US, the overall gender pay gap was 22% in 2017 (PayScale), compared with 32% in creative industries. Though that figure varies greatly amongst professions, from 54% for DJs/Musicians to 12% for cinematographers, across almost all factors and industries, male creatives are compensated better than their female counterparts (HoneyBook). Even higher education is insufficient for women in the creative industries to guarantee a fair income, as 24% of woman creatives earn under $5USD per hour (in other words, less than minimum wage) despite 73% holding bachelor degrees (ibid). In the United Kingdom, women employed in the cultural and creative industries earned on average £5800GBP less per year as of 2014 than otherwise-similar men net all controls (O'Brien, et al.). Other descriptors for the ‘ideal’ worker in the creative industries —flexible, grateful, obedient— are terms that coincide with a traditional conception of womanhood. Historically, two thirds of the casual, contingent, and part time labour force was filled by women, and presently women are almost twice as likely to work part time as men. Women also fill three quarters of unpaid internship positions, and industries that rely heavily on internships, such as fashion, media, and arts, tend to be highly feminised (Schwartz). Unpaid internships also tend to drive worker precarity as they replace paid positions and allow companies to skirt minimum wage and labour laws, a situation that is particularly acute in the creative industries (Shade & Jacobson).

As of yet, there is no study focusing particularly on how precarity in its various forms drives sexual harassment of women in the creative industries, and my paper seeks to fill this gap, making use of the large increase in creative women coming forward to tell their stories in the last year as a result of the #MeToo movement.

Methodology

My paper uses a comparative analysis of relevant scholarly texts, explicating on their core concepts and contrasting them with each other, and an analysis of popular/news media articles either written by or featuring interviews with women who have experienced sexual harassment while working in the creative industries, applying the theoretical concepts I have identified in the literature. I use the #MeToo/Times Up movements as a case study to prove the real world consequences of precarity on women’s lived experiences, focusing particularly on the statements made by women in the creative industries as part of the movement. This is because many of their statements speak to precarity as the driving force behind either their experiences of workplace harassment or their initial decision to stay silent about it. As literature on the #MeToo movement is currently scarce and currently predominantly focused on the American creative industries, I will predominantly be focussing on sexual harassment in an American context, while my discussion on precarity will be informed by more global literature.

Coverage in Popular Media

In the wake of #MeToo, numerous media outlets have released articles whose content predominantly consists of interviews with employees in the creative industries (Domanick, Farrow, King). Popular media coverage does not often identify the scholarly concepts present in academic literature, but it does provide a wealth of ‘real life’ examples through which such concepts can be further explicate and problematise them. The interviewee’s stories speak to industries driven by intense competition and financial pressures, staffed by freelance and casual workers operating in the gaps of labour protection laws, and compulsory attendance at alcohol heavy events and the subsequent consequences of alcohol driven lapses in inhibitions (Domanick). Even in the midst of #MeToo, when publicly coming forward about one’s harassment (particularly at the hands of a large industry figure) is arguably less risky than ever before, many who agreed to be interviewed about their experiences in the creative industries still did not want to be identified and spoke only on the condition of anonymity, fearing backlash could harm or even end their careers. One such woman is ‘Eve’, who works in the recording industry (at the time as an A&R scout), and dealt with sexual harassment from an executive of a large organisation in her industry —an organisation that she did not even work at at the time, but hoped to in her future.

“There was an innate feeling that if I were to tell him that I was offended, or set a boundary, that he would never call me again and just disappear back into the ether of the inner circle, and I would never see it again…He had big power in that job to change my life. I don't even know if I'd be where I am right now if I didn't have what he showed me.”

(‘Eve’, in Domanick)

Others stay silent because their harassers control resources they perceive as vital they have access to for the continued viability of their work providing means enough to survive, such as ‘Alice’ (pseudonym), at the time a freelance worker for an ‘up and coming’ podcast network:

"I was absolutely afraid that if I tried to do something in response to [the harassment] that my show would be dropped from the network, effectively killing off most of our listenership…I was also afraid of being alienated by the owner.”

(‘Alice’, in King)

‘Kate’ (pseudonym) a former freelance music writer blamed the precariousness of freelance writing as the main reason she did not inform her editor after being sexually assaulted before an interview with a well known artist, and said the job was “the reason I was able to meet people and get assignments” (in Domanick).

Actresses and victims of sexual harassment at the hands of Harvey Weinstein, Emily Nestor and Gabrielle Moss, spoke to the precarity of their positions and place within the film industry when explaining why they did not come forward about their experiences earlier.

“I was mostly just scared that no one would believe me, or that I would end up out of a job if I tried to prove it” —Gabrielle Moss

“I was very afraid of him. And I knew how well connected he was. And how if I pissed him off then I could never have a career in that industry.” —Emily Nestor

(Both in Farrow)

Many others said that their experiences of harassment made them reconsider their career path in the creative industries, such as freelance writer Natalie, who said her experience of sexual harassment at the hands of a senior writer at her first writing gig left her feeling “minimised”:

"I looked at this gig as affirmation that I was on the right track and could make it as a writer, and as soon as that first DM came in, I immediately felt objectified and disrespected.”

(Natalie, in King)

One difficulty in attempting to report sexual harassment is the lack of codes and regulations surrounding sexual harassment that actually cover many creative workers in their daily work life. Freelance and contract workers are often not covered by anti-harassment laws, and many do not have a sexual harassment clause in their contracts (Honeybook). The other major barrier to reporting sexual harassment is identifying what behaviour actually constitutes sexual harassment, which can be particularly difficult in the creative industry, where networking events are perceived as compulsory to sustaining and growing ones career, and often take place in informal settings where the appropriateness of behaviour can be hard to judge:

“When your business is relationships, there are so many grey areas…We know what the obvious things are, but what are the not obvious things? When does flirtation become harassment? There is no road map.”

(Anonymous former label publicist, in Domanick)

Findings and Analysis

The occurrence of sexual harassment in the creative industries is driven by multiple factors. While many women’s experiences of sexual harassment in the workplace are influenced by the precariousness of their employment, not all women who experience harassment are in precarious working situations. Thus it is important to also analyse the multi-faceted concept of power, who has and does not have it, and to incorporate feminist theory such as notions of gendered power structures in the workplace when investigating women’s experiences of workplace sexual harassment. Both scholarly and popular media literature on sexual harassment tend to fixate on power, but each has a slightly different conception of what power constitutes and how it is driven. The conceptions of power imbalances certainly seem to play a role in how workplace sexual harassment is enabled to both occur and perpetuate, as victims perceive their harassers as being too powerful for their actions to have any effect, as is the case for numerous victims of Harvey Weinstein and the women employed in the screen industry surveyed by the Screen Women’s Action Group. The women whose interviews I read felt the precarity of their situations acutely in the separation they felt from their harassers, describing them as belonging to an ‘inner circle’ or being untouchable, in direct contrast to their own situation within their industry, which they felt was easily erodible.

Work in the creative industries is heavily glorified, so workers are willing to put up with working conditions and labour compensation they would not accept in other, less ‘cool’ industries. This can mean that fringe benefits such as social currency are accepted in place of financial recompense, which feeds into the precarity experienced by low-waged workers in their home lives, such as unstable living situations and food instability. This glorification is closely tied to the ‘do what you love’ phenomenon, whose precursor was a conception of work as something that entirely subordinated pleasure (Sandoval). Of course by comparison work that can be marketed as ‘doing what you love’ appears to be a better choice of labour to engage in, as through the self-fulfilment ones labour produces they may state that their labour is also working for them. I would argue that the glorification of creative work is one of the main reasons why sexual harassment is such a major issue in the creative industries compared to other industries. Creative workers feel that they have more to lose risking their creative job or future in their industry than they would in other, less glamorous jobs, and industry elites are aware of this and able use it to their advantage, knowing that the combination of that and the precarious situations of their victims will protect them by minimising the chances that their victims will report them.

Creative work also often entails a good deal of self marketing. Because of this creatives are highly conscious of their image and seek to preserve it, making them less likely to engage in activities that may tarnish their reputation, such as coming forward about their sexual harassment and being branded ‘difficult’. Their image of their labour may also become highly personal, causing the lines between their labour and their personal identity to blur a great deal. The eradication of the divisions between work life and home life of the past has led workers —particularly workers ‘doing what they love’— to feel that their work is their life. This ideology can be seen in a quote from an anonymous victim of sexual harassment at the hands of Harvey Weinstein, on why they had not come forward about their experience: “If Harvey were to discover my identity, I’m worried that he could ruin my life” (Anonymous, in Farrow). The use of ‘life’ rather than ��career’ was likely not intentional, but it exemplifies how great an impact they perceive their job having on their life.

One survey focused on women in the creative industries’s experiences of workplace sexual harassment found that 54% of self-employed and freelance women (a common employment situation in the creative industries) reported being sexually harassed at least once in their careers, and 83% did not report their harassment to anyone. Perhaps more troublingly, of those that did choose to make a formal complaint, 51% reported having their complaints ignored (Honeybook). This echoes the sentiments of the women whose statements I found, as one of the reasons many who remained silent about the harassment they experienced gave for not speaking out was a feeling of hopelessness, as they did not believe that their harassers would face any consequences due to their coming forward. Even if they did want to come forward, for workers in many creative industries (such as the music industry) there is no formal governing body to set or uphold industry standards (Domanick). Numerous other creatives are not protected by workplace sexual harassment laws as their working arrangements do not demarcate them to be in a formal employer-employee relationship. This category includes a diverse grouping across the creative industries, including many freelance and contract workers like publicists, makeup artists, or digital artists, and interns. Some creative industries have unions with sexual harassment codes of conduct, but these can either be difficult to join, like the Make-Up Artists and Hair Stylists Guild of the IATSE, which has three methods for entry, each of which has conditions that are nigh impossible to satisfy (Anonymous in Curtin & Sanson); not very powerful, as is the case in New Zealand following the introduction of the Employment Relations (Film Production Work) Amendment Bill in 2010 (Cowlishaw), or hesitant to discipline their own members, particularly in cases of co-worker sexual harassment (Crain).

Earlier on in this essay I identified networking as being one of the clearest examples of labour disseminating out from traditional ‘work’ spaces to society at large (as discussed by Gill & Pratt). The precise nature of networking in informal spaces that lends it to being easily manipulated to perpetuate sexual harassment is that appropriate behaviour in such situations sits in a grey area, meaning that inappropriate behaviour that would be more clearly defined as harassment in an office setting with behavioural codes of conduct is more difficult to assert as being inappropriate. This makes it difficult for creative workers to assess whether their experiences actually constitute sexual harassment. The introduction of alcohol into the equation makes it even more difficult for creative workers to identify their experience as deliberate sexual harassment, or feel confident that they will be taken seriously or believed by their peers should they come forward. Unfortunately this is common as many networking events either take place in bars and restaurants where drinking is expected, and even industry events that do not take place in such venues generally still feature alcohol.

Conclusion

My research confirmed my hypothesis that precarity is a major factor in women’s experiences of workplace harassment. This is particularly acute in the creative industries, due to the extreme imbalances of power present, and because of the glamorisation of creative work, which is driven by concepts such as the ‘do what you love’ ethos, and the informal situations many aspects of creative work are conducted in, such as networking. Some of the limitations of the study included the quotes analysed being pulled from various existing interviews with workers in the creative industries rather than one homogenous study, so the responses I gathered were not in response to the same questions or from interviews conducted in a consistent manner, and may have some discrepancies because of this. However, I believe that this study provides a case for the hypothesis being accurate, so further, more in depth research over a greater period of time into women workers experiences of precarity in the creative industries is justified, in order to identify new ways of combating workplace sexual harassment in the creative industries in the hopes of reducing the high levels at which it is currently occurring.Works Cited

Anonymous. Anonymous, Makeup Artist. In Curtin, M. and Sanson, K. (Eds.) Voices of labor: creativity, craft, and conflict in global Hollywood. University of California Press: Oakland, 2017.

Cochrane, W. et al. A statistical portrait of the NZ precariat. Precarity : Uncertain, insecure and unequal lives in Aotearoa New Zealand. Eds. S. Groot, C. van Ommen, B. Masters-Awatere & N. Tassell-Matamua. 2017. 27-36.

Corkery, M. “Low-Paid Women Get Hollywood Money to File Harassment Suits.” The New York Times [New York]. 22 May 2018: Web.

Cowlishaw, S. “‘The Hobbit law’ - there and back again.” Newsroom. 30 Jan. 2018: Web.

Crain, M. Sex Discrimination as Collective Harm. The Sex of Class: Women Transforming American Labor. Ed. Dorothy Sue Cobble. New York: Cornell University Press, 2007. 99-116.

Creating Culture Change Around Sexual Harassment in the Screen Industry. Screen Women’s Action Group, 2018.

De Peuter, G. (2011). Creative Economy and Labor Precarity: A Contested Convergence. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 35(4), 417–425.

Domanick, A. “The Dollars and Desperation Silencing #MeToo in Music.” Noisey, 22 Mar. 2018.

Feldblum, C. & Lipnic, V. Select Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace. U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 2016.

Farrow, R. "From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories.” The New Yorker [New York]. 23 Oct. 2017: Web.

Flew, T. International models of creative industries policy. Creative Industries. London: Sage, 2012. 33-52.

Gill, R., & Pratt, A. In the Social Factory? Theory, Culture & Society, 25.7-8 (2008): 1-30.

Hardt, M., & Negri, A. Commonwealth. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009.

HoneyBook. 2017 Gender Pay Gap: Creative Economy Report. HoneyBook & Rising Tide, 2017.

HoneyBook. Sexual Harassment Report. HoneyBook & Rising Tide, 2018.

King, E. “How Freelancers Are Forced to Fend for Themselves Against Sexual Harassment” Broadly. 3 Nov. 2016: Web.

McLaughlin, H., Uggen, C., & Blackstone, A. Sexual Harassment, Workplace Authority, and the Paradox of Power. American Sociological Review, 77.4 (2012): 625–647.

Neff, G., Wissinger, E., & Zukin, S. Entrepreneurial Labor among Cultural Producers: “Cool” Jobs in “Hot” Industries, Social Semiotics, 15:3 (2005): 307-334.

Oakley, K. Include Us Out: Economic Development and Social Policy in the Creative Industries. Cultural Trends, 15.4, (2006): 255-273.

O’Brien, D., et al. “Are the Creative Industries Meritocratic? An Analysis of the 2014 British Labour Force Survey.” Cultural Trends, 25.2, (2016): 1–16.

PayScale. THE STATE OF THE Gender Pay Gap in 2018. Payscale.com, 2018.

Ross, A. Nice work if you can get it: the mercurial career of creative industries policy. Work Organisation, Labour & Globalisation, 1.1, (Winter 2006-7): 13-30.

Sandoval, M. From passionate labour to compassionate work: Cultural co-ops, do what you love and social change. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 21.2, (2017): 113 - 129

Schwartz, M. “Opportunity Costs: The True Price of Internships.” Dissent, 60.1, (Winter 2013): 41-45.

Shade, L., and Jacobson, J. Hungry for the job: gender, unpaid internships, and the creative industries. The Sociological Review, 63:S1, (2015): 188–205.

Throsby, D., and Petetskaya, K. Making Art Work: An economic study of professional artists in Australia. Australia Council for the Arts, 2017.

Tokumitsu, M. “In the Name of Love.” Slate. 16 Jan. 2014: Web.

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#writing sample

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keeganoocw778-blog · 6 years ago

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What's Holding Back The Tribute Acts Industry?

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14 Savvy Ways To Spend Leftover The Tribute Act Budget

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shenzhenblog · 6 years ago

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Q and A With 91-Year-Old Retiring Billionaire Lee Shau Kee

As Henderson Land Development Co.’s Lee Shau Kee steps down and hands the baton to his sons, here are a few of the 91-year-old billionaire’s views. Bloomberg asked Lee about property in real estate crazed Hong Kong, young people in the city today and his charity work.

On Hong Kong’s property market

Bloomberg: UBS Group AG said recently that Hong Kong property prices may rise for another decade. Do you agree with this view? What are your views on the outlook of Hong Kong property market? Will the Greater Bay Area be a big driver?

Lee: Hong Kong is a blessed haven. We have the support of mainland China, which is a very strong geographical advantage that is beneficial for property development. I am relatively positive about Hong Kong’s property prices. After all, “wealth comes with land.” The current market still enjoys substantial housing demand, mainly because the interest rate is quite low, and also because Chinese people like to have their own properties. Therefore, investments tend to gear toward properties. But we shall not neglect the risks too. The market is always subject to external economic factors. Buying home for one’s own use is not a problem. The most important thing is that they cut their coat according to their cloth.

Lee Shau-kee

Source: Henderson Land Development Co.

Bloomberg: How vulnerable is Hong Kong to a major property crash, given the lack of affordability and rising debt levels?

Lee: If the property market in Hong Kong were to collapse, then it would definitely be a huge blow to the local economy, because the relevant industries have contributed to a significant part of our GDP. Last year, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority said around 65% of the homeowners have paid their mortgages in full, not to mention the fact that local banks are all very conservative in their home mortgage policies, with some properties getting only a maximum of 50% mortgage.

Overall, those who choose to buy their properties do not usually have affordability problems. Moreover, the HKMA has always been vigilant against these risks and closely monitors the situation. When there is a need, there will be measures to rectify the situation. Therefore the current risk should not be high.

Demand for housing is huge is Hong Kong but it is not easy to buy a property here. In view of this, I have donated some land and properties that are to be redeveloped, to provide youth hostels and transitional housing projects. I hope this will alleviate housing problems that the city is facing right now, and to offer the much-needed accommodation to the families in need.

In the long run, we support the government’s housing policy to allocate more land to build homes. Developing the New Territories and renewal of older districts are options worth considering too.

Many people may know that I have always been supportive of urban renewal because renovating older properties is beneficial to the society. Not only does it bring a face lift to the community, it can also help deter illegal building works, and to prevent hazards that arise from the deterioration of buildings. Some of the buildings we redeveloped were built over 50 years ago, some even had structural problems and created safety issues in the community. Therefore, urban renewal benefits both the government and the people.

Bloomberg: What are your views on the current government’s land supply policy, for example, allocating more land to public housing and building artificial islands?

Lee: Increasing land supply is the ultimate solution to our housing problems. Each solution has its own pace, and timing is also a consideration. Doing it quickly is better than doing it slowly because the government could speed up its land supply. The government has the responsibility to take care of those unable to afford a home. Public housing is a safety net that ensures a stable and prosperous society. There should be a balance between private and public housing, and the government should be attentive toward the very strong demand for private housing. Developing land in the New Territories requires infrastructure including transportation and drainage system. It needs the government’s support and the process won’t be easy.

On young people in Hong Kong

Bloomberg: Do you have any advice to young people in Hong Kong who are worried about their financial future and are not able to afford an apartment?

Lee: I am always of the view that young people need our support. My advice for them would be:

It is important to work hard and not to be afraid of hardship. As the saying goes, “if you can endure hardship, you will be the best of men”

It is advisable for men not to choose a wrong profession, while the women need to be wise in choosing their husbands

If you are not financially secure, it is best not to get married too soon

One must work hard to get one’s first capital, and from then on learn how to generate more money with the capital

There is no linear relationship between getting rich and buying your property. Do not let a property limit your dream. One must know how to manage their finances well, and to be prudent in spending. That way, you can accumulate wealth.

Lee Shau-kee with his sons Martin Lee Ka-shing, left, and Peter Lee Ka-kit.

Source: Henderson Land Development Co.

Bloomberg: Henderson Land donated a site for Hong Kong’s biggest youth hostel and last year offered a site in Sham Shui Po for container homes for needy families. Would the company consider more similar projects going forward? If yes, what would they be?

Lee: Other than modular housing in Sham Shui Po, I have also done various projects to relieve housing demand, including donating land to build elderly care homes and youth hostels. We have refurbished old buildings that are pending redevelopment for transitional housing. These projects share the same principle, which is to maximize the use of existing land resources.

In 2013, I donated a piece of land in Yuen Long to the government for an elderly care home. I wish this would alleviate the lack of supply of places in elderly homes. As the elderly in need of care move to these homes, the public housing units they formerly occupied will be vacated, thus letting other families take up the space.

In 2015, I donated land to build youth hostels, so as to allow young people to secure affordable accommodation. That way, they can save money more easily for career development or home ownership. When they have the ability to move out, other people can get the same opportunity.

Whether it is modular housing or social housing, transitional housing shares the same objective, which is to offer support to those households who live in partitioned homes or homes in poor living conditions, and to help those who are still waiting for an allocation of public housing units.

Be it modular housing or refurbishment of old buildings, we are simply making use of sites or buildings that are pending redevelopment. I think that these projects can be effective in helping to maximize the potential of land resources, and to alleviate the housing demand for people in need. In this sense, it is worth doing. We have various projects pending urban redevelopment, and will continue to identify those that can be adapted for transitional housing.

On Hong Kong’s future

Bloomberg: What’s your take on Hong Kong’s future? Is Hong Kong’s competitiveness at risk given the rise of mainland cities? How should Hong Kong position itself going forward?

Lee: I have confidence in Hong Kong. Some time ago I said there are four factors for a good governance of Hong Kong: Economic development, improvement of livelihood, narrowing the wealth gap and creating social harmony. Hong Kong still enjoys a good business environment. The tax system is simple and the tax rate is attractive,” he said. “The comprehensive legal system and the cluster of talents enable Hong Kong to maintain its status as an international financial center. But I think Hong Kong must keep abreast and attract talents to maintain its competitiveness. We should not simply consider mainland cities our competitors. We can in fact cooperate with them because Hong Kong will be better if China develops well.

Lee Shau-kee feeds his fish.

Source: Henderson Land Development Co.

Bloomberg: At this point in time, what are your greatest fears or worries for Hong Kong’s future?

Lee: When I was young, I experienced the period of war and turmoil. Life was very hard back then, but I survived through the adversity and continued to build my career. Comparatively speaking, Hong Kong is already a paradise. I really have no fear nor worry.

Hong Kong is unique in many ways. The government has a surplus with good income that enables it to cater to the needs of the grassroots. Hong Kong is blessed for its excellent geographical location as an international hub for economics, finance and logistic. Like a Switzerland in Asia, Hong Kong’s future will get better and better, thanks to our own edge and fortune. It is something we should all cherish.

On China

Bloomberg: What’s the company’s expansion plan in China? Does recent China’s economic slowdown worry you?

Lee: Hong Kong and China are equally important for Henderson Land. We will continue to seek growth and room for development in both Hong Kong and China. That is also why we need two chairmen to perform their own duties.

On your legacy

Bloomberg: What would you have done differently if you had your time again? Personally and for your business.

Lee: If I could go back to the old days, I would go back to the days with Mr. Kwok Tak Seng and Mr. Fung King Hey when we — the “three musketeer” — worked together for business. At that time, we were able to divide up jobs among ourselves based on our strengths and we were happily associated as both teachers and friends. When we encountered problems, we would have a good discussion before coming up with a solution and shared our responsibilities accordingly.

Mr. Kwok was the most hardworking person I know. He would go to the construction site to monitor almost every day. Mr. Fung was a well connected man with extensive knowledge most suitable for the financial world. My expertise is in property sale, and I am able to judge the potential of the sites for project development. I gained not only a great sense of business achievement from working with them, but also a deep friendship that I have treasured my whole life. It was truly a regret our partnership did not last long for various reasons.

In the days after, I fought a lonely battle. I always told my sons they were lucky because they could discuss and give each other advice. Two heads are better than one. They have a much easier life than I did when building up Henderson Land.

Bloomberg: What are the different responsibilities and focus of your two sons as (to-be) joint chairmen of the company?

Lee: They have different personalities. Peter is flexible and Martin is practical. They have all along a good division of responsibilities. Peter mainly takes care of our China business and Martin takes care of the Hong Kong business. They have very good communication in all important matters and make joint decisions. For years I have stayed behind the scene and let them run the show. They have done very well with full marks. I am confident to pass them the baton.

Lee Shau-kee teaches Chinese calligraphy to his grandchildren.

Source: Henderson Land Development Co.

Bloomberg: How would you conclude your life as a businessman in a few words?

Lee: I have been lucky my whole life. I am grateful for the universe that offers me opportunities to develop my businesses. I do not have any expertise apart from working hard. Because the universe has treated me well, I felt that I must pay back to the society in return.

I think simply knowing how to make money should not be considered a success. It is equally important to know how to spend it well. And the best way to spend money is on charity.

Ancient Chinese saints advocated one to“be good as water and to carry the outer world with a breadth of character.” I hope I will get there one day.

Bloomberg: What are you planning to do after you step down as chairman? Are you planning to focus on your foundation or charity work? Will you continue to donate HK$1 billion annually whenever Hang Seng Index hits 30,000 points? Why did you make such a pledge in your biography?

Lee: I will step down as chairman but remain as a director. I will let my two sons — Peter and Martin — to handle the daily operation. I will still participate and offer my opinion in major matters. Aside from work, I hope I will have more time to enjoy family life, play with my grand kids and continue with my charity work.

I have 11 grand kids, including six boys and five girls aged between 3 and 30. They all honor me and love me so much. I enjoy spending more time with them — they make me feel young again. Sometimes they have little sense of family hierarchy and play tricks on me. I find it quite enjoyable since no one in my office would dare to play with me like that. I also hope that they could soon form their own families and have babies so I could have my grand-grand kids. I will be able to give out red packets again.

I once said that I would practice the money philosophy of Tao Zhugong, a Chinese ancient saint who advocated efficient spending. It is to be successful in generating wealth but also to be successful in spending it. Therefore, I look for charity projects that yield the highest returns in order to benefit the most number of people.

I believe in giving back to the society. Recycling and channeling the capital to good use will boost the economy and enhance livelihood. My philosophy in charity is the same as that of business: using a sprat to catch a herring. Through leveraging, a dollar invested could become 10 dollars, and that is how I define success. I would not waste money in places where they do not have good returns just for the sake of doing charity.

Fung King-hey, left, Kwok Tak-seng, center, and Lee Shau Kee.

Source: Henderson Land Development Co.

Our principle in charity is to benefit as many people as possible. Take the “Warmth Project Million Farmers Training Program” as an example, we provided vocational training to over 1 million farmers and 10,000 village doctors. That also benefited their families. I still find it worthwhile even after having donated over HK$400 million on this project already.

I am most interested in education and medical-related charity works, where I spend more time and efforts. Besides, Hong Kong, like other international cities, has relatively big wealth disparity. It is incumbent for the government, with the support of the community including the business sector, to do more to fight poverty. And everyone who has the ability should contribute too.

To alleviate poverty, I think we should start with education because it is the most important factor for social upward mobility. Most of my billions of donations went to education, which included 10 local universities in Hong Kong, Peking University, Tsinghua University, Fudan University and other foreign universities. In addition, I set up the Hong Kong Pei Hua Education Foundation 37 years ago for talent nurturing.

Charity should not be a one-off act. It should be persistent with no time nor money limit. We have been diligently seeking for the right projects that can benefit as many people as possible.

The instruction I gave to my sons was “make more, donate more.” While running the business well is essential, they must also continue my charity work in order to give back to the society.

— With assistance by Shawna Kwan

This post was originally posted on Bloomberg by Fion Li

Q and A With 91-Year-Old Retiring Billionaire Lee Shau Kee was originally published on Shenzhen Blog

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speedylandcollector · 5 years ago

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TOP 10 mistakes when opening a restaurant

Here are some mistakes that the beginning entrepreneurs make when opening a restaurant:

1. Spend all income

The weakness of beginning entrepreneurs, especially if things are going well from the very beginning. More than half of the newly made bankrupt are burned at this. There is an axiom: in business, there is no “own money”. There is only customer money and working capital. Money should always work, and the foodservice industry is no exception.

A brief example. A client comes to you and pays in advance for the corporate party. An inexperienced entrepreneur argues: “I was paid 50,000, of which 10,000 were food and alcohol, 15,000 were paid to staff, 10,000 were musicians and a presenter, but 15,000 were mine, I can dispose of them as you like.”

This is the first mistake. Until the client has received his product or service, this money is not yours. It is always necessary to consider force majeure: they turned off the electricity, the sanitary and epidemiological station arrived, the musicians did not have time to arrive on time, the fire in the kitchen or the client decided to postpone the date.

The task of a skilled restaurateur is to invest in your business, develop it, and not squeeze the last juices in the hope of temporary success. The average life span of a restaurant in Moscow, according to GVA Sawyer, is 3 years. Then its relevance fades along with the interest of solvent customers. Only a few restaurant concepts survive on the market for more than 4 years. In the regions, the situation is better, but still - no more than 5 years. Therefore, you must understand that you need to constantly improve your business and think ahead, and not immediately spend money on a whim.

2. Do not keep records

The first error often occurs against the background of the lack of any accounting in the institution. Do not neglect financial accounting! Until you see the real numbers, you will think that everything is in order, and then the first debts, interruptions in supplies or theft will appear.

Protect yourself from the very beginning - implement an automation system. Reporting time in a notebook is long gone. Accounting systems give many more opportunities: statistics, cash shifts, inventory, loyalty programs, etc. And cloud solutions like poster, implement it even easier. Any tablet or laptop turns into a cash register and terminal when a printer is connected to them. You can control the work from anywhere and at any time through the browser.

3. Do not delve into the work of the institution

A good owner should be aware of everything that happens in his establishment. A typical mistake when opening a restaurant is to rest on the laurels of the effectiveness of a sound strategy. No one disputes that strategy is important, but which of you will be a general if you have never been on the battlefield? You need to be able to command - your staff should know that you can check-in at any time or personally help during busy hours, as Dmitry Sikorsky, owner of the Bodega 2 Karla restaurant in Odessa, does: “If there are a lot of guests, and I'm online I see that the administrator and the waiter can’t cope - I myself can quickly come to help. ”

You should be known in person, not afraid to ask something. If you entrust all the work to an administrator or manager, then he will be for them the director, the owner of the institution. It is necessary to earn credibility, and without appearing at the workplace this is out of the question. Especially if you want to avoid collusion between employees and theft. You should also know what annoys your guests in the restaurant.

4. Do not pay attention to advertising

You might think that this is too obvious: no advertising - no customers. But, as practice shows, not everyone realizes the importance of promotion. A common mistake of restaurateurs is a lack of understanding of marketing and advertising technologies.

If you think that it will be enough to distribute flyers a couple of times at stops or in the subway, hang balls and put loud music on an opening day, then, unfortunately, this is not so. Have an interesting party with free drinks or big discounts, promotions - many people will come, but will they become your regular visitors?

Most likely not - such people are only interested in free food, short-term benefits, they are unlikely to drop in for a second time. Put on a show and set the bar high - you will disappoint in the future those guests who came only for such events.

There will be a small group of people who work or live near your establishment. The income from such visitors is usually enough only to go at least to zero and then not always. Much depends on the place. New establishments may open in your area that will lure these people.

Decide on your target audience and the main competitive advantage - what will set you apart from other institutions. Advertising should achieve its goal. Less unnecessary information and more meaning. The main questions that your advertising should answer: why your institution, how do you differ from the cafe opposite and how are you better? It is not enough to inform about your discovery, to show the interior and menu. It is necessary to come up with a story, put in meaning and a concept, and constantly develop it. More details on promotion tips are described in our other article.

5. Do not think through the menu

The problem for beginning restaurateurs is to take up the menu last or at the stage when the whole concept of the establishment is already embodied in the interior. Never start the selection of furniture, equipment and do not open a cafe or restaurant until you have a menu ready. At a minimum, you need to decide what your kitchen will be, the style of service in the institution. If you do not want to make such a mistake, be sure to read our article "How to Develop a Cafe, Restaurant Menu".

6. Low passability

Error with choosing a place for the institution. An obvious fact, but still, some novice restaurateurs get burned at this point. Patency - one of the most important criteria for choosing a location. A large flow of people in a shopping center or on the street where you want to open an institution significantly increases the likelihood of success for your business.

Our tip: Don't settle for super-low-cost friendly rental offers in remote areas or industrial areas. For example, in the territory of a closed factory or warehouse. Of course, you will significantly save on rent, but it is likely that you will not earn anything. Renting in good places is not just more expensive - you can earn much more there.

Your location should be consistent with the concept of the institution. For example, in poor, remote sleeping areas of the city, traffic will be high. But will they come to you? Tired residents after work are bought in stores and go home, not in a cafe. In such areas, even fast foods have a hard time. If you have a restaurant or cafe with high prices, then these people will definitely not become your customers. They will pass by your institution and may remember its name, will make appointments at the entrance, but this will not affect your income.

7. It is incorrect to determine CA

A mistake in determining your target audience and choosing the concept of the institution. For example, most of your acquaintances and friends love pizza, and so you decided to open a new pizzeria. This is a false feeling when you are sure that everyone thinks the same way as your surroundings. But you do not want to open an institution for them. You can not rely on the opinion of a dozen people and equate it with the opinion of the majority of residents of a certain area or even the whole city.

Take a closer look at this issue. Conduct market research or order a similar service from marketing consultants. They will show you statistics on establishments in your city, demand for various cuisines and growing trends. After you decide which concept will be more profitable for you to develop, you can go further.

8. Do not have reserve capital and do not close debts

Perhaps one of the few good tips from all business consultants. If you do not have a financial reserve for at least six months of rent, salaries and utility bills, then opening your own institution will be very risky. You need to be prepared for initial losses and work on mistakes, recover and move forward. If you have a very modest supply of money, then the very first setbacks can put you out of business. Is it worth it then to start? Perhaps it is better to revise the concept and make everything more modest but put aside the stock.

In addition to reserve capital, a novice restaurateur should take into account the increase in planned expenses. The easiest way is to multiply them by 2. For entrepreneurs who are already in the business for 3 to 5 years, this ratio will be at the level of 1.2-1.3. In order not to entertain oneself with illusions, the expected income can, on the contrary, be cut in 2 times.

9. Take relatives and friends into the business

Everyone knows about this, but for some reason they still make mistakes. The main problem of such partnerships is the lack of notarized conditions for cooperation. If you cannot influence any processes in the institution’s work, then you have incorrectly built a system of job responsibilities and restrictions.

If you control only part of the work processes, you need to clearly distinguish between areas and prescribe instructions. Otherwise, a big surprise will be waiting for you, when your relative partner or friend with whom you suddenly quarrel, decides to leave, and you have no idea how to run his part of the business. Before you start working in a partnership, ask yourself: “How will you share responsibilities and profits?”

Another point when you take relatives on staff. No concessions and nepotism - everyone should work on the principles of business relations. Any employee has the right to complain about your friends, and they are responsible for their mistakes along with everyone else. In this case, this will not be a problem. If you have something wrong, then we have bad news.

10. Do not plan expenses

Most novice restaurateurs rarely plan their expenses for more than 3 months in advance. They postpone the repair and purchase of new equipment at the last minute if they inherited the establishment. Imagine the situation: December corporate events suddenly come and your dishwasher breaks down or ventilation is clogged. This is not a vile accident and not the machinations of competitors, but simply a negligent attitude. If you pledge funds for the repair of working equipment, this will not be a surprise for you.

As a result, restaurateurs are often mistaken in raising prices, which will only exacerbate an already unenviable situation. After that, even those few visitors who have become accustomed to your new institution will stop coming to you. The pricing policy of a cafe or restaurant is a very delicate tool, and it will not save you from all financial troubles.

Read more!

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berniesrevolution · 6 years ago

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The city of hustlers got hustled. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the world’s richest man, is wealthy enough to write a ten-thousand-dollar check to every apartment nabber, Wall Street shouter, what-time-is-it-showtime subway dancer, part-time-student pension chaser, asylum-seeking stage actor, author-cum-barista, wrong-way delivery guy, business-call-conducting taxi driver—to each of the more than eight million people currently living in New York City. This week, though, when Bezos bestowed upon the city the dubious honor of becoming Amazon’s second “headquarters”—an honor it shares with two other cities, including its existing headquarters, in Seattle—it was New Yorkers who paid him. The city and state offered Amazon at least 1.5 billion dollars in tax breaks and other grants to settle in a place that has not, historically, struggled to attract newcomers. (“I really think this could be the thing that finally puts New York on the map,” James Corden joked.) When combined with existing incentives, Amazon might receive three billion dollars in breaks in New York alone, the equivalent of every city resident Venmoing $348 to Bezos.

Throughout a bidding process that saw dozens of cities vie to be the next location of a proposed hydra-headquarters, there were murmurs that Amazon might really just be looking for a regular office, and rebranding it a “headquarters” to corner those tax breaks. Those suspicions seemed validated when Amazon announced this week that its second headquarters would actually be two additional headquarters, one in Queens and one in Northern Virginia. (The company also announced plans to build a new Operations Center of Excellence in Nashville, which would employ five thousand people.)

In New York, the 1.2-billion-dollar tax break is based on Amazon’s commitment to generate twenty-five-thousand jobs, at an average annual salary of more than a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which would net the company a forty-eight-thousand-dollar tax credit per job created. As part of a scheme called pilot, which stands for Payment In Lieu Of Tax, Amazon has also committed to fund community infrastructure and to donate space “for a tech startup incubator and for use by artists and industrial businesses” as well as for a newly built public school. “I’ll change my name to Amazon Cuomo if that’s what it takes,” Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic governor, said during the bidding process. After the announcement, Mayor Bill de Blasio, a progressive Democrat whom one might expect to have gripes with Amazon’s brand of peeing-in-a-bottle capitalism, declared Amazon’s move “a giant step on our path to building an economy in New York City that leaves no one behind.”

New York’s leaders were not alone in their enthusiasm for Amazon. Some 238 entities—cities, states, two dozen different towns in Massachusetts, and a cluster of three businesswomen in Anchorage, Alaska—sent proposals to host Amazon’s second headquarters. Many of the bidders are understood to have shared proprietary data about their areas and plans, in addition to dangling tax incentives. “A key concept for understanding how Amazon operates is leverage,” Lina Khan, an academic fellow at Columbia Law School who has written extensively about Amazon, told me. “By running the search as a nationwide competition and receiving proposals from hundreds of cities, Amazon now has a database of information that gives it a further competitive advantage over rivals, as it’ll use this research to inform future expansion, and Amazon extracted the best deal through exercising its bargaining power over cities. The end outcome was to further enhance its dominance.”

It was the game-show quality of this bidding, the spectre of cash-starved governments begging to give money to a billionaire, that left some critics fuming. Richard Florida, the urban-studies theorist, told me that Amazon’s HQ2 competition “captures the zeitgeist of early 21st century American late capitalism.” He added, “The very idea that a trillion-dollar company run by the world’s richest man could run an American Idol auction on more than two hundred thirty cities across the United States (and Canada and Mexico) to extract data on sites and on incentives, and pick up a handy three billion dollars of taxpayer money in the process, is a sad statement of extreme corporate power in our time.”

Even as many of New York’s leading Democrats congratulated Amazon—and themselves—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the representative-elect of New York’s Fourteenth Congressional District, which spans parts of the Bronx and Queens, criticized the deal on Twitter. “The idea that [Amazon] will receive hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks at a time when our subway is crumbling and our communities need MORE investment, not less, is extremely concerning to residents here,” she wrote. If American politics weren’t already confusing enough, her statement caused the conservative National Review to run a headline that supported the view of a Democratic Socialist: “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Right about Amazon’s Corporate Welfare.”

Reached by telephone on Thursday, Ocasio-Cortez called the Amazon deal “dressed-up trickle-down economics.” “What we’re seeing here is a complete public cost for a private corporate benefit,” she told me. “When you give a three-billion-dollar tax break to the richest company in the world, that means that you’re giving up our schools. You’re giving up our infrastructure. You’re giving up our community development.” In other words, there is an opportunity cost to luring the world’s richest man by letting him free-ride on the public services that other New Yorkers must pay for—whether it’s the failing subway system, the troubled and segregated school system, or, as Ocasio-Cortez noted, critical renovations at public-housing complexes like Queensbridge, the largest in the United States, which will soon be down the street from Amazon’s New York headquarters. Last year, Ocasio-Cortez said, residents there “went without heat and hot water in the dead of winter.” Residents have experienced similar outages this year.

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #Amazon #Jeff Bezos #capitalism #late capitalism #New York City #New Yorker

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gabriellakirtonblog · 5 years ago

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The Fitness Industry Is Broken – A Story About Hope

Nobody could have predicted how it would happen.

Nobody saw the coronavirus pandemic shutting down the gyms and throwing tens of thousands of fitness professionals out of work.

But everybody knew something was wrong.

I saw it back in 2008, when I strained my hamstring playing hockey, and was forced off my feet for two weeks. I’d been a personal trainer for four years, working at a top gym with a full schedule. But in the fitness industry, if you can’t work, you don’t get paid.

If something as mundane as a hamstring injury could affect my income so drastically, how could personal training be a viable career? How can you bet on a business where success is contingent on nothing going wrong, when so many things can go wrong?

We’re good at building unbreakable bodies, but not unbreakable careers.

The strongest trainers in the gym are often powerless at work, subject to the whims of their clients and employers.

If anything keeps you or your clients out of the gym—from a family emergency to a global pandemic—you’re out of luck.

How could such a brittle business model survive?

The model was broken for trainers, clients, and gym owners

It’s not just the trainers who get hurt by this broken business model. It doesn’t work for clients or employers either.

Our job as trainers is to remove stress from our clients’ lives, not add to it.

And yet, we sell our services in strict blocks of 60 minutes, no matter the needs or goals of the individual. Doesn’t matter if the client is a detrained novice who would be best served with a 20- or 30-minute workout, or someone with more ambitious performance or physique goals who needs longer sessions.

We fill the beginner’s time with stretching or treadmill walking, or dumb stuff like triceps pushdowns. (Admit it. You’ve done this. I have too.)

“But I can really feel it working . . .”

And for that more advanced client, the one who wants to build muscle or train for a sport, we try to cram 75 minutes’ worth of training into that predetermined one-hour session.

We cut rest breaks too short, and turn strength or hypertrophy work into metabolic conditioning. Yes, they work hard, but it’s still a suboptimal workout for their goals.

And the client had better show up on time, because they’re paying the trainer no matter what fraction of the service they receive.

Consider one of my favorite clients back in the day. (I trained clients in person from 2006 to 2012.) He was a doctor, the head of the emergency department at a major hospital.

Was it fair to tell him he must show up precisely at 6 p.m.? Or if he has to cancel at the last minute (because, you know, things happen in the emergency room), he gets charged anyway?

Now consider gym owners. If the model serves anyone, you’d think they’d be the ones to benefit.

But most new gyms and studios go out of business within a year or two. A person who has the passion to open a gym rarely has the capital, business knowledge, or management skill to keep it open.

Gym goers expect a big, bright space filled with expensive cardio and weight machines, but they don’t want to pay high membership fees. If you open your gym in a relatively affluent area, where people can afford those fees, you’ll pay a lot more per square foot. But you’ll also have a lot of competition, which drives prices down.

Personal training used to be an expensive misuse of talent …

… and it’s time for this to end

Another problem, for both trainers and gym owners, is the need to turn a service like personal training into a lucrative revenue stream. The pressure to sell more sessions leads to high turnover and low morale.

The best trainers work the longest hours, from early morning to late evening, since that’s when clients want to be trained. They burn out and leave, while trainers who aren’t as good at sales get pushed out.

It’s an unfortunate and expensive misuse of talent.

But there’s a better way, one where everybody wins. It’s called online training. You’ve probably heard about it. Unfortunately, there’s a serious lack of understanding as to how it fits into the story.

When there’s an online component the clients get a better service, trainers make more money with better hours, and gym owners multiply their profit per square foot.

I’ve promoted online training since 2013, and I launched the Online Trainer Academy, the world’s first certification program for remote coaching, in 2016.

Online training isn’t about sipping Mai Tais on the beach with your feet up. It’s about resiliency. Online training is about building a fitness business where everybody wins because it allows fitness to dictate business.

I believed that before COVID-19 turned everything upside down. If it hadn’t been a virus, it would’ve been something else. Disruption was inevitable before, and will be again.

That’s why it’s imperative for fitness professionals to build a robust business model that can not only withstand tough times, but thrive in them.

Perhaps the most telling part is that everybody knew this to be true.

A tale of a broken gym owner who failed to act

Case in point: Several months ago, my company was contacted by a gym owner with more than a dozen locations. He wanted us to build an online training operation for his gyms.

It was a smart choice. The new revenue stream, with almost 100 percent profit, would’ve given him a significant advantage over his competitors.

But he turned down our proposal, deciding instead to open another very expensive gym in an extremely competitive market. The new location cost about six times the amount we proposed to set up and oversee his online training business.

COVID-19 forced him to temporarily shut down his gyms and lay off hundreds of employees. Last I saw, he was complaining on social media about how unfair the situation is, and how the government had better compensate him for the lost revenue.

I don’t say that with any malice. I really hope he comes out of this all right, and his employees can get back to work.

The crazy part about this story is how close he came to making the right call.

He understood how valuable online training could be for his business.

He knew a small investment could generate big returns.

But instead of acting on his vision for the future, he doubled down on his past by opening that new location. And it broke him.

I’ll never know why he made that choice. But I can guess.

One choice represented change. It didn’t matter that it was a cheaper option, with more upside and less downside. Change is hard. It goes against all our instincts to do something new and different when things are going well. Even if you know something isn’t quite right, it’s difficult to recognize your areas of vulnerability.

The other choice, the one with more cost, more risk, and less potential upside, represented continuity. No change.

And for a while, it seemed to work. Things were humming along until COVID-19 exposed his vulnerability.

When preparation meets opportunity – Rhonda’s story

Consider another example:

When her first granddaughter was born with physical challenges, Rhonda Dougherty James’ family was faced with a dilemma: Her daughter needed to return to work to keep her health insurance. But she couldn’t put her baby in daycare because of her health problems.

The solution was for James to fly back to St. Louis every week to take care of her granddaughter, and then fly home for the weekends.

If she’d opened that gym like she’d originally planned, or if all her income came from training clients in person, she wouldn’t have been able to keep working while she commuted.

But because she trained clients online, she was able to work with them from wherever she happened to be. She wrote programs in airports and shot Facebook Live videos in her daughter’s spare bedroom, sometimes with a stack of Pampers boxes visible in the corner.

She did that for a year, and then rented an apartment in St. Louis for another year. Now that her granddaughter is healthy and thriving, she’s back in Florida full time.

There was no way James could’ve prepared for that specific situation. But that’s not the point. The point is that online training gave her the flexibility to step up when her family needed her most.

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You can hear Rhonda tell the story in her own words here.

A story about hope

The fitness industry was long overdue for a course correction.

If it hadn’t been a pandemic, it would’ve been something else—something random and unexpected. And, like COVID-19, it would’ve been a catalytic event that exposed the vulnerabilities of our business model, forcing all of us to evolve.

It’s going to hurt. Good people with bad businesses will suffer. Some will come out better on the other end, but some won’t. That sucks.

But let’s be honest. Much of the fitness industry had been on cruise control for a long time.

It was bad, but not quite bad enough to force change. And this is why things were so broken.

Fortunately, we’re an industry that attracts strong people.

Not just physically strong, which is what we’re known for. We’re also strong-willed.

We persevere. That’s why we keep lifting while others watch Netflix.

We don’t complain when things hurt. We call it DOMS and celebrate it.

We thrive when we push ourselves outside our comfort zone.

What’s normal for us is too intense for most people.

Our industry is going to come out of this stronger and healthier. And our best people are going to thrive as a result.

Yes, it’s going to be difficult. Some businesses will shut down for good. The sudden loss of income will strain relationships, sometimes to the breaking point.

But it’s going to force everyone to stop gliding. To evolve. To change.

In the words of the esteemed Rocky Balboa:

“The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place and I don’t care how tough you are, it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.”

This pandemic is a wake-up call

During a time of quarantine and social distancing, online training is our only option. But it won’t be for long. When the gyms reopen, many trainers and gym owners will heed the lesson of COVID-19, and see online coaching as an essential part of their business.

Others will see the pandemic not just as a wake-up call, but as a sign that the industry is broken beyond repair, and it’s time to get out.

You know what? Both are fine, because both result in certainty. No more gliding along in a broken industry, complaining about how things should be, but not doing anything about it because things weren’t quite bad enough to force action.

The choice is yours: Will you step up, or step out?

The pandemic’s effects will be with us for a long time. Even after the threat recedes, it will take months, if not years, for people to return to their gyms en masse.

This kind of fear and discomfort doesn’t just go away. It’s going to be a long time before people shake hands and feel comfortable in crowds again.

I can’t say what the fitness industry will look like when things once again feel stable. But I guarantee it will never go back to how it was. There will be a new normal. And that’s okay, because the old normal was a broken fitness industry.

A lot of people will look back at this crazy time as the moment it all changed. I hope you’ll see it as a time when you were challenged in a way you could never have anticipated, but nonetheless rose to the challenge, levelled up, and evolved.

This is your chance to build a resilient and robust business. You’ve been forced to do what you’ve known you should have been doing all along: Add another income stream, one that allows you to make money while not having to be physically present.

Online training is what allows you to keep training clients when you’re stuck on the couch with a torn hamstring. Or when you have a family emergency that forces you to work from multiple locations, including airports and spare bedrooms. Or when the next crisis, whatever it is, makes all of us change the way we do business.

I, for one, am hopeful for what’s to come. I think it’s going to be beautiful. Because, after all, pressure makes diamonds.

And if you decide it’s time to start online training and learn the best model for delivery and sales, I wanted to now invite you to enroll in the Online Trainer Academy Certification.

We’ve just released Essentials, a more cost-effective version of our world-renowned certification course.

Regardless of whether or not you decide to join us, I hope you heed this call and step up. Our industry needs you now more than ever, and I can’t wait to see what happens.

The post The Fitness Industry Is Broken – A Story About Hope appeared first on The PTDC.

The Fitness Industry Is Broken – A Story About Hope published first on https://onezeroonesarms.tumblr.com/

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bettydgunter90 · 5 years ago

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Want To Invest In Farmland? You Need To See This First

Reading time: 5 minutes

Not long ago, I heard about a company called AcreTrader.

This is a real estate crowdfunding platform that invests in farmland throughout the United States and gives accredited investors the opportunity to diversify their money into assets outside of the stock market.

Even in the real estate world, farmland is a very different type of real estate asset. It doesn’t follow the same trends as the rest of the real estate market as a whole (e.g. – single-family houses, apartments, and other commercial buildings). In many ways, farmland operates in a world of its own, and values rise and fall based on the global supply and demand of farmland and food commodities (with a limited amount of farmland available and a growing number of mouths to feed worldwide).

Investing in farmland is a way to diversify, not just into real estate, but into a real estate class that isn’t controlled by the same type of volatility that affects most of the conventional real estate investments that people think of.

How AcreTrader Works

Similar to most crowdfunding platforms, AcreTrader offers a way for an individual accredited investor to invest in smaller chunks of a much larger property.

If you’ve ever wanted to own farmland, but you don’t have the capital, industry knowledge and risk tolerance to take down and ENTIRE 40+ acre parcel of farmland on your own, AcreTrader allows you to be one of several different investors that participates in the ownership of a property, with as little as $5,000.

REtipster provides real estate guidance — not tax or investment advice.

This article should not be interpreted as financial advice. Always seek the help of a licensed financial professional before taking action.

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As the video above explains, each farmland parcel is placed in its own legal entity and divided into shares that are sold through AcreTrader’s secure investor portal. Investors can buy shares and let AcreTrader handle the rest.

Click Here to Get Started!

Each shareholder should receive annual cash payments from the farmers renting the land (and ideally, the price of the land will grow over time as the value of farmland increases).

The Competitive Advantage of AcreTrader

As someone who spent many months trying to evaluate farmland as a legitimate investment option to pivot to, I can tell you that farmland investments come with a lot of challenges.

RELATED: Finding the Best Farmland Markets in the U.S.

I found that it’s significantly more difficult to find great deals on farmland compared to vacant, residential lots. Most farmland owners are farming it themselves and/or making a decent stream of income from it, so they have no real motivation to sell their property for a “dirt cheap” price.

There is also A LOT of due diligence required when buying a parcel of farmland. Everything from crop yield to flood zones to soil types to weather patterns (just to name a few things), there are all kinds of things that need to align in order to make a piece of farmland “good” for farming and sufficient to charge enough annual rent.

All this to say – the job of finding good deals and managing relationships with farms is made much, MUCH easier with an outfit like AcreTrader handling all of these tasks for you. Not to mention, you have the benefit of spreading out smaller investment amounts among several different farm projects, so you don’t have to put all of your eggs in one basket, so to speak.

What Kind of Returns to Expect?

Obviously, the return on any investment comes with no guarantees.

Anything you put your money into should only be done with the understanding that there is some element of risk and uncertainty involved.

That being said, AcreTrader offers plenty of data on their properties that you can take a closer look at before you decide to invest.

Some of the more notable things are:

Detailed Executive Summary, including plenty of maps, background information on the management team,

Comprehensive historical and project financials, including the past plantings and performance of the subject property.

Subscription Agreement: What you’ll be agreeing to as a shareholder in this investment.

Well Test and Water Right Information

LLC Operating Agreement and Articles of Organization

RELATED: The Beginner’s Guide to Farmland Due Diligence

If you’re an accountant or banker by trade (as I used to be), I think you’ll find more than enough reading material here to help you assess your level of comfort with each investment opportunity, and whether it’s a “go” or “no-go” for you personally.

Click Here to Get Started!

Why Invest With AcreTrader?

Most investors who choose to park their money with AcreTrader, do it for two key reasons.

Cashflow: Getting annual payments, generated from the cash rent paid by the farmer.

Appreciation: The increase in property value when the property is sold, 3 – 10 years after the original investment.

Comparatively speaking, farmland has lower volatility than most major asset classes.

While nobody has a crystal ball to predict the future, but it would be hard to fault an astute investor for parking at least some of their cash in this type of real estate asset.

Compared to Gold, the S&P 500, commercial real estate and AAA bonds, farmland has out-performed all of them.

And of course, the fact that farmland is a tangible, “real” asset (you can actually see and touch it) and is legitimately useful, some investors find an added sense of comfort with these attributes as well.

Is AcreTrader the Right Investment For You?

The goal of this article isn’t to convince you that AcreTrader is where you should put your money.

The purpose of this review is to simply make you aware of this investment option in the market.

Farmland brings a lot of unique value to the table, and if you’ve ever been interested in farmland investing, but perhaps (like me), you just didn’t have all the resources at your disposal to handle things like:

Finding the deals

Doing all the due diligence

Negotiating with the seller

Managing relationships with local farmers

Finding the right exit strategy

And everything in between

…AcreTrader could be your ticket to a new world of opportunity in the real estate business.

Click Here to Get Started!

Have you had any experience working with AcreTrader or any other crowdfunding platform? Let us know about your experience in the comments below!

The post Want To Invest In Farmland? You Need To See This First appeared first on REtipster.

from Real Estate Tips https://retipster.com/acretraderreview/

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ipsenipsen2-blog · 6 years ago

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Sofia Municipality's 2018 budget is currently BGN 1 433 billion, surpassing last year's budget by almost BGN 105 million. Sofia Municipality Projects Planned in Budget 2018, Amounting to Virtually BGN 1.5 Bln

50 percent will be funded by the London agency by the municipal funding of the British funds, and the other 50% is supplied by the business. The Agency employs about 150 individuals, who create projects of foreign entrepreneurs, education and tourism. In recent years, there is a clear trend towards constant development of earnings, in which BGN 184 million more have been supplied at the period from 2012 to 2017. Earnings for 2018 are BGN 661 million. Against this backdrop, the two main taxes paid from the citizens bring BGN 103.5 million from real estate tax and BGN 196 million in waste collection taxation, respectively, with which we fully fund street cleanup and waste treatment. This season Sofia Municipality budget includes a product of over BGN 71 million to instruction, continued Mayor Fandakova. Reconstruction with growth of existing buildings and 15 kindergartens should be completed, the work persists and as we've already started 7 of them. We are investing in the construction of new extensions into 11 schools as 5 of them will have new gyms. The Accelerator Start-up Sofia Programme intends to facilitate accelerated access to financing for advanced, start-up and social entrepreneurs around the territory of Sofia Municipality by encouraging them in creating and presenting well-substantiated proposals to potential investors and financing organizations, by raising their ability for efficient interaction with the banking industry and inviting them to develop and encourage innovative high value-added products and services. The investment in much far better road infrastructure and transportation continues, as they're put as key steps in the air quality management programme. We will invest over BGN 124 million in major reconstructions of boulevards and roads, building and repair of roads in the overhaul of bridge facilities and tramways. For https://council.sofia.bg/en_US/web/guest/postoianna-komisia-po-finansi-i-bjudjet/-/asset_publisher/VjfMSPK0sczL/content/s-vetnik-orlin-ivanov-aleksiev-vizitka , the capital for streets in the neighbourhoods will soon be allocated for major boulevards and roads. We'll invest 37 million in streets. Sofia budget 2018 has been BGN 1.556 billion, which is by BGN 200 million more than the first funding for 2017. navigate to this website had been embraced by the Sofia Municipal Council at a meeting on January 25th. London will provide the Sofia entrepreneurs, who want to operate in the capital with offices that are free of charge. Their meeting was about the agenda of the delegation, led by the Sofia Mayor Mrs. Yordanka Fandakova in London. After the meeting, the draft agreement to joint operations was prepared and is about also signed and to be discussed expert level. Therefore, it already falls in the"investment evaluations" group. This usually means that Sofia Municipality becomes an even more attractive location to channelling investment. Since it helps to entice more economical financial resources to the implementation of Sofia financing program Excellent rating is not simply a reference for investors, but also for the municipality and its citizens. The increase is appreciation for a job well done by the Mayor of the administration, Yordanka Fandakova and Sofia in preserving financial stability and degree of own earnings of Sofia Municipality. The basis of S & P Global Tests say that the condition of the city as an financial administrative and commercial center of Bulgaria is in service of Sofia rating. According to Standard & Poor's, this contributes to diversification and gives grounds for predicting sustainable economic growth of the market. The evaluation reflects the Agency's perspective of this municipality's extremely higher liquidity and decent budget flexibility, dependent on autonomy in revenue administration. The stable outlook is reflected in the expectations because of Bulgaria's rating (BBB- and - stable prognosis / A-3) and relies on the fact that Sofia's market is more powerful than the country average. Therefore, Standard & Poor's gave Sofia Municipality the maximum possible evaluation to get a bipartisan municipality that is equivalent to the one that was sovereign. Repairs are under way at 10 Faculties and 7 Kindergartens from the Krasna Vrabnitsa Polyana, Nadezhda and Ilinden districts. We are investing 42 million in electricity efficiency measures and overhauls at kindergartens and 26 colleges. The application procedure starts for the pilot programme of Sofia Municipality Accelerator Start-up Sofia "The funding of Sofia is among the most eloquent testimonies into the financial stability of this municipality, the good government of the municipal property and the municipal market", said Mayor Fandakova. Sofia obtained for the very first time an investment grade by the Standard & Poor's rating agency, that is reflected in a drop in the expense. Apart from the hard work, the steady growth is also on account of this confidence we get by the citizens and the European Commission". The priority jobs of Sofia municipality include contests for adaptation from renovation and environment of Sveta Nedelya square, and Zone 3 of this central urban district, and the region around the National Palace of Culture, in which Bulgaria monument's 1300 decades has been situated. Funds for the restoration of other pieces of Sofia Zoo are also planned. Sofia having a budget of BGN 1.5 billion to 2018 The metro remains our environmental and transport job, which currently saves 75 million tons of harmful emissions each year. With the conclusion of the next ray, the greenhouse gas emissions saved will be 90 million tons each year, and we anticipate a significant reduction in the traffic from the areas of its route. Of the systems have been substituted, the outside walls are all revived with insulation and other energy efficiency measures are being implemented too. The project involved company, both to the process and the repair functions. The Programme will provide social, startup and innovative entrepreneurs with mentoring, communicating and institutional assistance through consulting and educational activities and also providing access to community of connections workspace and surroundings. Beneficiaries will be prepared for the upcoming stages in their growth to attract partners and shareholders. Sofia Municipality Projects Planned at Budget 2018, Amounting to Nearly BGN 1.5 Bln Accelerator Start-up Sofia will offer help for projects that demonstrate, develop and/ or improve an innovative product (product or service) or process falling within the reach of the key thematic priorities of ISSS of Sofia. In that document by assisting in the registration of companies to the business London will undertake to give support to the Sofia business. "The SMPIA will provide exactly the exact identical special support into the London company, wishing to spend in Sofia", Danailov stated. He, together with the Deputy Chairman of the Capital Municipal Council and the Chairman of SMPIA's Supervisory Board -- Mr. Nikolay Stoynev, presented to their"London and Partners" coworkers, the opportunities for the development of the business in Sofia. London has concluded similar agreements with other towns, such as Lisbon, Paris, Tel Aviv, Los Angeles. Sofia municipality projects and priorities in the funding for 2018 are: Mayor Fandakova:"Our most important priorities stay - transport and transport infrastructure, education and energy efficiency along with the high priority that brings together virtually all major projects - ecology and cleaner environment and air." The implementation of this pilot stage will utilize the expertise of the Europe Programme to supply aid for endeavors of non-governmental organizations in addition to the expertise of the Sofia Development Association with the aid of innovation and digital technologies. A draft-agreement for joint operations between the Sofia Municipal Privatisation & Investment Agency /SMPIA/ and also the British Agency"London and Partners" This Year Sofia's Budget Includes BGN 71 mln. for Education "We've supplied over BGN 554 million to its capital program in 2018, at which 60% are funding accepted under the European applications. Our main priorities stay - transport and transport infrastructure, education and energy efficiency and the high priority that brings together virtually all major projects - ecology and cleaner environment and air", the mayor said. The pilot edition is going to be carried out in 2 integrated phases operating in parallel for a period up to four months - financing in the form of a competition-based grant programme totalling BGN 100 000 (a hundred thousand), employed by MGFSME and also the Europe Programme, and mentoring (consultancy) programme, implemented by SMPIA. On February 4, 2019, Sofia Municipality established a call Accelerator Start-up Sofia, within a pilot programme for social, start-up and advanced entrepreneurs. The Guidelines and the Application Form, as well as the Methodology for Assessment and Ranking of Projects, are printed on the Site. The quantity of the investment system is almost BGN 384 million, mainly from jobs approved and prepared by the municipality for European financing. The 2018 funding of Sofia Municipality is BGN 1 433 billion, exceeding last year's budget by nearly BGN 105 million. The growth is possible as a result of economic increase of the funds (40 percent of the country's GDP) as well as the enhanced taxes and charges revenue collection in the last few years. In 2018 Sofia municipality expects earnings to achieve 654 million. The funding of Sofia for 2018 is currently uploaded to the government's Open Data Portal This year, data on revenues, expenses and funding plan of Sofia is at a suitable viewing and downloading format. All Sofia Municipality budgets from 2012 onwards are seen on the portal and may be used for reports and analyses. Based on the demands of the Access to Public Information Act (APIA), public sector organizations are obliged to release public information they gather, make and keep within an open machine-readable format permitting for re-use. The next metro line is the greatest project in terms of construction -- about BGN 300 million, BGN 16 million being from the municipal funding. The remaining funds will be offered under European programs fix works of"Graf Ignatiev" str., including reconstruction of the tram route in accord with new technology along with"Slaveikov" square at the second half of the year. The fix works will complete 13 million. Repair works of other primary streets and boulevards in the city (such as Skobelev blvd., Todor Kableshkov blvd., the very first phase of the building of the oriental tangent from Botevgradsko shose blvd., etc.). Structure of new, as well as major repairs and energy efficiency of existing kindergartens and universities in the sum of over BGN 32 million. Support will be provided for developing new and expanding the activities of existing social ventures in connection with job through motivation and support of persons from groups and creation of suitable conditions for their professional integration into the sphere of economy. In four districts in Sofia we are modernizing kindergartens and 18 colleges. All works are being completed, in accordance with the approved program. Contracts for 8 institutions should be signed. This is what the Sofia Mayor Yordanka Fandakova commented, while inspecting the repairs, taking place in the 15thSecondary School - Adam Mickiewicz in the Nadezhda District, that is among the colleges, included in the project, financed by Operational Programme"Regions in Development". Dimitar Dimov.

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