#my last job handed these out as credit application incentives

[suppuration]

i should have known something was off when management once made the intern bake me a cake for winning a credit contest. there were a lot of off-keel things like this over the years, including coupons for extra breaks with tons of rules on how to use them, but... the cake. seriously

[leviathangourmet]

Renaissance education is the foundation of the modern university system. It was based on the concept of the Universal Man or Uomo Universale. As mankind was the ultimate creation of God, it was man’s job to reach his maximum by continual self-improvement. This idea led to the notion that men should try to embrace all knowledge and develop their own capacities as fully as possible. To be a Renaissance man, one must develop his knowledge base as well as his craft.  Perhaps no person embodies this concept more than Renaissance artist, scientist, and inventor Leonardo da Vinci. In Leonardo, a duality of the mind and hands is found. Out of this ideal, the university and the journeyman education are born.   Yet, rather than striving for this unity of the mind and the body, the education system has juxtaposed these two disciplines in competition with one another.

The modern workforce demands a college degree.  Visit any job recruitment board and you will find it a prerequisite for getting in front of a hiring manager. From the time that students are in secondary school, it is hammered into them that they are either on a college preparatory curriculum track or a vocational curriculum track.  And there is a stigma associated with the vocational track as lesser-than, and for those who can’t muster the academic rigor of the college preparatory curriculum. Real or perceived, this association places a disproportionate amount of value on the college degree. This imbalance of value serves to both distort the job market, as well as to lessen the value of the college degree itself.  As stated in another piece on meritocracy, it is rarity that gives something value. When college degrees become commonplace, they impede one’s ability to differentiate from all other job applicants.

Before the creation of the Stafford Education Loan program in 1965, fewer than ten percent of U.S. adults had a bachelors-level or higher college degree.  As of 2019, that number eclipsed thirty-five percent.   When you factor in only those who comprise the labor base, that number likely rises even more as the lesser-educated labor base retires or exits the workforce.  While one might view this as a net positive for society, it does come with some very real drawbacks.  First, as mentioned prior it devalues the ability of the degree to provide a competitive edge in job placement. Second, guaranteed government funds have served as a cash cow to the public university system that creates perverse incentives for expansion and recruitment.  As such, the cost of a higher education degree has sharply outpaced inflation.

In 1960 a student could work part-time on a $1 per hour minimum wage and afford to pay tuition, room, and board at my alma mater, the University of Georgia. That same student could work the same part-time minimum-wage job, and still come up more than $10,000 short of their financial obligations today.  The student’s only option is to either take on loans or get a scholarship to make up the difference.  And this debt trend in pursuit of higher education is pervasive nationwide. Student loan debt eclipsed personal credit card debt in 2019, and on average people with student loan debt have seventy-five percent less net worth than those without it. For the university’s part, they have utilized these funds to invest more than a billion dollars in expansion over the last decade.

Contrasted with this higher-debt college degree is the vocational or trade diploma. Just as the college-educated labor base grows in the wake of a retiring workforce, the vocational and skilled labor base shrinks as students are discouraged from entry and fail to replace an outgoing workforce.  On my career training path, I studied for a year at the local technical college that hosted dual enrollment courses with the local university.  One such course was an entry-level economics course that was simulcast from the university to the technical school.   Throughout the course, the instructor alluded to the emerging U.S. economy as a white-collar economy and noted that the labor base would need to retrain for desk jobs.  This was quite the statement to broadcast into a technical college.  And further down my career path in graduate school ten years later, it was commonplace for the program director to allude to an enormous higher-education bubble and discourage the university degree in lieu of skilled labor.

Skilled vocational labor has seen a limited but renewed focus by proponents such as "Dirty Jobs" television personality Mike Rowe and his organization, Mike Rowe Works.  Shining a spotlight on the value of vocational trades and their low-debt, low-barrier-to-entry is a necessary counterbalance to the pervasive belief that a college degree should be a requisite for employment. It’s not just the low barrier-to-entry that makes skilled labor an attractive pursuit, the high demand for this labor creates extremely competitive wages. The entry-level hourly rate for a pipefitter is around $22 per hour, which is $5 per hour more than the equivalent entry-level teacher’s salary with a four-year degree. With twenty years of experience, the average teacher’s salary rises to just over $59,000 per year, while the average seasoned pipefitter eclipses $78,000 per year. While there are trade-offs not mentioned here, the average teacher will enter the workforce with significantly more student debt.

Tangible benefits like wages and demand are not the only attractive qualities of skilled labor. There are very real and intangible benefits of it, such as the value of personal production.  Renaissance philosophers believed that men were made in the mold of a creative God; we create because God Created. There is a very real fulfillment that arises from the act of creation, and it is no coincidence that the Bible begins with Creation. Observe craftsmen upon completion of a project as they scrutinize their work and you will witness the picture of a Creative God, who on the seventh day marveled in fulfillment of His Creation.  Vocational training is neither lesser than a college degree nor contrary to a fulfilling career. There is a valid argument to be made that skilled labor is the perfection of a whole person, and our Renaissance predecessors believed that.

[tradecryotocurrency]

What Is Bitcoin Mining?

Chances are you hear the phrase “bitcoin mining” and your mind begins to wander to the Western fantasy of pickaxes, dirt and striking it rich. As it turns out, that analogy isn’t too far off.

Bitcoin mining is performed by high-powered computers that solve complex computational math problems; these problems are so complex that they cannot be solved by hand and are complicated enough to tax even incredibly powerful computers.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Bitcoin mining is the process of creating new bitcoin by solving a computational puzzle.

Bitcoin mining is necessary to maintain the ledger of transactions upon which bitcoin is based.

Miners have become very sophisticated over the last several years using complex machinery to speed up mining operations.

The result of bitcoin mining is twofold. First, when computers solve these complex math problems on the bitcoin network, they produce new bitcoin (not unlike when a mining operation extracts gold from the ground). And second, by solving computational math problems, bitcoin miners make the bitcoin payment network trustworthy and secure by verifying its transaction information.

When someone sends bitcoin anywhere, it's called a transaction. Transactions made in-store or online are documented by banks, point-of-sale systems, and physical receipts. Bitcoin miners achieve the same thing by clumping transactions together in “blocks” and adding them to a public record called the “blockchain.” Nodes then maintain records of those blocks so that they can be verified into the future.

When bitcoin miners add a new block of transactions to the blockchain, part of their job is to make sure that those transactions are accurate. In particular, bitcoin miners make sure that bitcoin is not being duplicated, a unique quirk of digital currencies called “double-spending.” With printed currencies, counterfeiting is always an issue. But generally, once you spend $20 at the store, that bill is in the clerk’s hands. With digital currency, however, it's a different story.

Digital information can be reproduced relatively easily, so with Bitcoin and other digital currencies, there is a risk that a spender can make a copy of their bitcoin and send it to another party while still holding onto the original.1

Special Considerations

Rewarding Bitcoin Miners

With as many as 300,000 purchases and sales occurring in a single day, verifying each of those transactions can be a lot of work for miners.2 As compensation for their efforts, miners are awarded bitcoin whenever they add a new block of transactions to the blockchain.

The amount of new bitcoin released with each mined block is called the "block reward." The block reward is halved every 210,000 blocks (or roughly every 4 years). In 2009, it was 50. In 2013, it was 25, in 2018 it was 12.5, and in May of 2020, it was halved to 6.25.

Bitcoin successfully halved its mining reward—from 12.5 to 6.25—for the third time on May 11th, 2020.

This system will continue until around 2140.3 At that point, miners will be rewarded with fees for processing transactions that network users will pay. These fees ensure that miners still have the incentive to mine and keep the network going. The idea is that competition for these fees will cause them to remain low after halvings are finished.

These halvings reduce the rate at which new coins are created and, thus, lower the available supply. This can cause some implications for investors, as other assets with low supply—like gold—can have high demand and push prices higher. At this rate of halving, the total number of bitcoin in circulation will reach a limit of 21 million, making the currency entirely finite and potentially more valuable over time.3

El Salvador made Bitcoin legal tender on June 9, 2021.4 It is the first country to do so. The cryptocurrency can be used for any transaction where the business can accept it. The U.S. dollar continues to be El Salvador’s primary currency.

Verifying Bitcoin Transactions

In order for bitcoin miners to actually earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things have to occur. First, they must verify one megabyte (MB) worth of transactions, which can theoretically be as small as one transaction but are more often several thousand, depending on how much data each transaction stores.

Second, in order to add a block of transactions to the blockchain, miners must solve a complex computational math problem, also called a "proof of work." What they're actually doing is trying to come up with a 64-digit hexadecimal number, called a "hash," that is less than or equal to the target hash. Basically, a miner's computer spits out hashes at different rates—megahashes per second (MH/s), gigahashes per second (GH/s), or terahashes per second (TH/s)—depending on the unit, guessing all possible 64-digit numbers until they arrive at a solution. In other words, it's a gamble.

The difficulty level of the most recent block as of August 2020 is more than 16 trillion. That is, the chance of a computer producing a hash below the target is 1 in 16 trillion. To put that in perspective, you are about 44,500 times more likely to win the Powerball jackpot with a single lottery ticket than you are to pick the correct hash on a single try. Fortunately, mining computer systems spit out many hash possibilities. Nonetheless, mining for bitcoin requires massive amounts of energy and sophisticated computing operations.

The difficulty level is adjusted every 2016 blocks, or roughly every 2 weeks, with the goal of keeping rates of mining constant.5 That is, the more miners there are competing for a solution, the more difficult the problem will become. The opposite is also true. If computational power is taken off of the network, the difficulty adjusts downward to make mining easier.

Bitcoin Mining Analogy

Say I tell three friends that I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 100, and I write that number on a piece of paper and seal it in an envelope. My friends don't have to guess the exact number, they just have to be the first person to guess any number that is less than or equal to the number I am thinking of. And there is no limit to how many guesses they get.

Let's say I'm thinking of the number 19. If Friend A guesses 21, they lose because 21>19. If Friend B guesses 16 and Friend C guesses 12, then they've both theoretically arrived at viable answers, because 16<19 and 12<19. There is no 'extra credit' for Friend B, even though B's answer was closer to the target answer of 19.

Now imagine that I pose the 'guess what number I'm thinking of' question, but I'm not asking just three friends, and I'm not thinking of a number between 1 and 100. Rather, I'm asking millions of would-be miners and I'm thinking of a 64-digit hexadecimal number. Now you see that it's going to be extremely hard to guess the right answer.

Not only do bitcoin miners have to come up with the right hash, but they also have to be the first to do it.

Because bitcoin mining is essentially guesswork, arriving at the right answer before another miner has almost everything to do with how fast your computer can produce hashes. Just a decade ago, bitcoin mining could be performed competitively on normal desktop computers. Over time, however, miners realized that graphics cards commonly used for video games were more effective and they began to dominate the game. In 2013, bitcoin miners started to use computers designed specifically for mining cryptocurrency as efficiently as possible, called Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC). These can run from several hundred dollars to tens of thousands but their efficiency in mining Bitcoin is superior.

Today, bitcoin mining is so competitive that it can only be done profitably with the most up-to-date ASICs. When using desktop computers, GPUs, or older models of ASICs, the cost of energy consumption actually exceeds the revenue generated. Even with the newest unit at your disposal, one computer is rarely enough to compete with what miners call "mining pools."

A mining pool is a group of miners who combine their computing power and split the mined bitcoin between participants. A disproportionately large number of blocks are mined by pools rather than by individual miners. Mining pools and companies have represented large percentages of bitcoin's computing power.

Bitcoin vs. Traditional Currencies

Consumers tend to trust printed currencies. That’s because the U.S. dollar is backed by a central bank of the U.S., called the Federal Reserve. In addition to a host of other responsibilities, the Federal Reserve regulates the production of new money, and the federal government prosecutes the use of counterfeit currency.6 7

Even digital payments using the U.S. dollar are backed by a central authority. When you make an online purchase using your debit or credit card, for example, that transaction is processed by a payment processing company (such as Mastercard or Visa). In addition to recording your transaction history, those companies verify that transactions are not fraudulent, which is one reason your debit or credit card may be suspended while traveling.

Bitcoin, on the other hand, is not regulated by a central authority. Instead, bitcoin is backed by millions of computers across the world called “nodes.” This network of computers performs the same function as the Federal Reserve, Visa, and Mastercard, but with a few key differences. Nodes store information about prior transactions and help to verify their authenticity. Unlike those central authorities, however, bitcoin nodes are spread out across the world and record transaction data in a public list that can be accessed by anyone.

History of Bitcoin Mining

Between 1 in 16 trillion odds, scaling difficulty levels, and the massive network of users verifying transactions, one block of transactions is verified roughly every 10 minutes.5 But it’s important to remember that 10 minutes is a goal, not a rule.

The bitcoin network is currently processing just under four transactions per second as of August 2020, with transactions being logged in the blockchain every 10 minutes.8 For comparison, Visa can process somewhere around 65,000 transactions per second.9 As the network of bitcoin users continues to grow, however, the number of transactions made in 10 minutes will eventually exceed the number of transactions that can be processed in 10 minutes. At that point, waiting times for transactions will begin and continue to get longer, unless a change is made to the bitcoin protocol.

This issue at the heart of the bitcoin protocol is known as “scaling.” While bitcoin miners generally agree that something must be done to address scaling, there is less consensus about how to do it. There have been two major solutions proposed to address the scaling problem. Developers have suggested either (1) creating a secondary "off-chain" layer to Bitcoin that would allow for faster transactions that can be verified by the blockchain later, or (2) increasing the number of transactions that each block can store. With less data to verify per block, the Solution 1 would make transactions faster and cheaper for miners. Solution 2 would deal with scaling by allowing for more information to be processed every 10 minutes by increasing block size.

In July 2017, bitcoin miners and mining companies representing roughly 80% to 90% of the network’s computing power voted to incorporate a program that would decrease the amount of data needed to verify each block.

The program that miners voted to add to the bitcoin protocol is called a segregated witness, or SegWit. This term is an amalgamation of Segregated, meaning “to separate,” and Witness, which refers to “signatures on a bitcoin transaction.” Segregated Witness, then, means to separate transaction signatures from a block — and attach them as an extended block. While adding a single program to the bitcoin protocol may not seem like much in the way of a solution, signature data has been estimated to account for up to 65% of the data processed in each block of transactions.

Less than a month later in August 2017, a group of miners and developers initiated a hard fork, leaving the bitcoin network to create a new currency using the same codebase as bitcoin. Although this group agreed with the need for a solution to scaling, they worried that adopting segregated witness technology would not fully address the scaling problem.

Instead, they went with Solution 2. The resulting currency, called “bitcoin cash,” increased the blocksize to 8 MB in order to accelerate the verification process to allow a performance of around 2 million transactions per day. On August 16, 2020, Bitcoin Cash was valued at about $302 to Bitcoin’s roughly $11,800.

[tyreesellers13]

Leasing Vs Buying Your Car

High credit on credit car leasing websites bills would be your credit card limit, current balance will likely be what are obligated to pay to that specific lender and minimum payment is what that lender is reporting as your minimum liability. Another often-referred to advantage is a lot of to bother about car vehicle. The manufacturer picks up the tabs, in order to bring car into the dealership more often, knowing you'll not have expend a penny. Hear a weird clicking sound from the engine? A car owner might try to disregard it, rationalizing this with the idea that the car drives fine. But hey, if you can get it fixed for free, have to? Transferring a franchise is compared to transferring a lease. Actually the lease and franchise agreement feel and read the identical way. Read the franchise agreement and under important components such as hidden costs, transfer, training, and remodeling, and the franchise cost. Know what kind of support to expect from the franchisor. Lease terms -- A two-year nissan long island will possess a higher monthly cost than three-year rent. A four-year lease will be lower still, however additionally means you'll end up keeping difficulties longer than perhaps identify. Find out your tolerance for monthly payments and factor in how often you here are a few new automobile. The worker would "assess my ought to have." Then get me to be for your car that experienced in stock on the lot. Then I'd should go and play with it. Then negotiate on a price. Fill out a credit application. Sign the paperwork inside the Finance and Insurance practice. All the while they attempted to trade me additional add-ons towards car--paint protection, under coating, and extended warranty. May-July: Incentives begin to enhance nissan long island as we head 1 model year in August. Days are long and weather good to dealers get often of floor traffic. Tiny graduate and require transportation for jobs. As a worthy consumer you need to know the vehicle loan value if you're just on the verge of avail your vehicle loan. Your condition with the economy note even a second hand car appears to be be expensive merchandise. By using these circumstances people are aiming at getting better deals in car payday loans. Monthly Payment - the amount should your monthly payment be? Be certain that an individual thought of your budget carefully. It is very essential you having a realistic monthly payment which suits your spending plan. Make sure that the volume of you have set for monthly payment of not your your first car does not exceed 20% of the entire monthly income. There are a involving websites the can use the affordability calculator to obtain a out what your payment will be depending from the purchase price, interest rate, length of loan and down bill. This calculator will not demonstrate end up getting you can afford, around the will also allow anyone to control the figures when negotiating using a dealer. There are thousands of car financers available every state. Is certainly important to find the choice available for you which serve your interest best using your present financial circumstances. Home interest rates vary among various financers and more efficiently the loan term and payment work loads. When you register for a car loan, look out not exclusively for the payment but also at the total cost of the loan. Depending along at the brand and model of one's car need to start to the dealership to have new copies made. Sometimes additional keys or transponders will over ride and mess increase cars home alarm system which can at times void the warranty. Whenever are leasing your car you may want nissan long island to get hold of your dealer for details. When looking to buy a second hand car, need to specific that auto parts and auto parts are great condition. Will probably want to test drive auto first, in the is easy enough. Also, you should find out as almost as much as you can about a brief of the vehicle. When could it have been made? Merely the driver and did they maintain the car in good condition? How many miles may have on face value? How much money does it take to fill up a tank of gas in auto? When was the last oil confirm? You want to get these things out a person know what we are driving around. Do not want end up being left with any disclosure. You will be able to afford a much more costly vehicle if you lease instead of if you buy, because with a lease you're only paying to pay a part of the cost for the vehicle, compared to paying to obtain the event. The ingredients that will be counted against you that wont be best auto lease deals as part of your credit file are contractual obligations towards government or payments by court order, such as child handle. Before anyone make a plunge, devote some time to calculate your income, expenses, and thereafter analyze whether you should be able a car leasing websites finance. You in addition be avail easy online loan package. Study current market and compare the deals available.

[devingarner1-blog]

HRIS to serve people, not only HR

A couple of years ago, attending a HRIS event may be boring boring. Not because the matter was not interesting but because it was so conservative that we had very little occasions to be impressed. But it was logical. As we’re speaking about the future of HR, of its practices and tools (a never-ending story), touching the core of a function that’s conservative by nature and duty, we should not fall in the exact opposite of what used to prevail. Yes, the society changed. Employees changed. Yes, expectations changed. Yes HR in 2020 will have very little in common with today’s HR and maybe it will even get a new name. However the basics (core-hr, comp & ben, compliance….) are here to stay. A business can innovate and fail today on many emerging subjects that will be the new normal tomorrow but when it comes to such legacy sides of the HR function, failure is not an option. Refusing to see the coming evolutions is dangerous but getting rid of everything that’s been done so far is at least as dangerous. Digital transformation is not a matter of “OR” but a matter of “AND”. This raises many questions for un function that is usually seen as a cost, often under-staffed and that’s asked to do even more : make the existing work perfectly while innovating for the future). Here’s a quick overview of what I learned at HRTechWorld 2016 Paris, in last october. HR vendors address the end user To catch the big trends, I started by having a look at the exhibition hall. As many others I’m convinced that HR will get “consumerized” over time and that HRIS will move from being a back office solution to a front office one. The question was : “is it starting to happen ?”. I started with the startups hall because if the market starts a move, it’s going to start there, legacy vendors needing more time to make a turn. It was early in the morning and I thought I was at the wrong place. Three expressos later I had to admit I was at HRTech and not at any marketing solutions conference. As a matter of fact the discourses, catch lines and triggers were exactly those used in other industries. It’s not about talking HR with HR users anymore but services delivered to the employee. The back-office becomes a front office, the employee a customer and what is sold is a benefit for the end user that will result in a benefit for the HR Team. The message is “we’ll offer a service to your employees, they will love it, you will get the credit”. Or, in other word, “stop being the interface between your internal clients and your systems, keep your time to do what you’re irreplaceable at”. It’s not only about managing human resources but also about bringing services to humans. From managing human resources to delivering services to humans So let’s have a look at the legacy vendors. They don’t have the chance to be able to focus only on new services and leave the legacy side of HR to others. They must excel at legacy HR and not be too far behind innovators at the same time. Surprisingly they have exactly the same discourse as the young disruptors. Either about core-hr or new services, everything is driven by the end user experience, who’s not an HR user anymore. I appreciated how UIs have been improved : most of them have understood that it’s possible to be serious without being boring or repellent. In short : • consumerization : end users are clients that expect to seen in the workplace the same services and tools they use in the consumer world. • from back to front office : many tools that used to be in hand of HR people are now in the end of the end user. • empowerment : self-service / on demand solutions and services. • Experience :it’s a matter of service, satisfaction, even pleasure. The days were people had to use poorly designed solutions under duress are over. Some examples. Hello Talent, from Talentsoft, allow anyone to manage its own recruitment ecosystem and candidate pool. The uberization of recruitment ? The Oracle HR Portal is as nice looking as a nice ecommerce platform : everything is designed for user experience, from interface to services. It also includes “Well Being” and “Health” applications (employees can connect their personal device, compare, organize challenges…just as they do in their personal lives). Oracle also had a lot to say about the future of bots in HR (what will be the theme of a future post). On the IBM booth it was more about putting cognitive computing (and Watson) at work to support HR Processes (and the year before we talked about how they used solutions designed for the customer experience to improve the candidate experience). And among the “big ones”  was Benify : comp&ben made easy with an employee centric approach. The CHRO of a large business I talked with confirmed my impression : “we used to build HR processes to make the job of HR easier by making employee’s life complicated. We need to rebalance : HR processed designed for the employee that will lower the HR Workload“. Hence the need for new solutions to support them. HR have been a very technical job for a long time and this is not going to change, no matter what some say. But their scope will become wider and new profiles that have very little in common with today’s HR professional will be needed. This is a very short overview of the global trends. To sum everything up, let’s have a look at what the HR Trends expert says : Josh Bersin. The HRIS market reinvents itself Bersin shared the conclusions of the study he just published with Deloitte. The starting point is easy to understand : the way we work is changing, people are changing and businesses are learning to deal with it. It’s becoming every day harder to manage this new normal with the HR solutions and practices that have been used so far. What changes, from my opinion, is that, until recently, tools were a barrier to transformation (or an easy excuse for not transforming) while, today, technology is available, making HR face their own responsibility. When the need exists, the solution is available, and nothing happens, technology is not the problem anymore. Bersin identifies 9 big trends. 1°) Performance measurement : based on actual achievements, team work, more qualitative, real time and based on many sources (manager, peers…) 2°) Real time engagement measurement :businesses want to know the pulse of their organization in real time. It may take man forms (surveys, answer “how was your week” weekly) and the goal is to capture employee’s feeling as often as possible, to get their feedback, to help them and help the organization. It complements performance measurement systems. 3°) The boom of “people analytics” : it took time but RH are beginning to hire data analysts. The purpose is not to do reporting but have tools to solve problems instead of just providing reports. Later the goal is to build predictive systems to anticipate, build the right process and policies, set incentives and indicators that will make sense. Expected benefits : better recruitment and career management, less tunover, build teams instead of just adding people, improved innovation and collaboration… 4°) The learning revolution : learning is, with flexible work, the major concern for the new generations that know they’ll have to learn continuously to stay employable. Learning will become more personal, granular, autonomous, what requires new platforms and formats. Learning must become easy to consume and the Learning Management Systems will become Learning Experience Systems.   5°) The new recruiting landscape : better sourcing (with data),development of HR Marketing practices, candidate experience. 6°) Workforce management: It’s not anymore about managing employees that all have a full time job. Workforce management must include new forms of work, employees doing flexible work or the “on demand” workers of the gig economy. 7°) HR and team management tools will merge : employees are being equipped with tools helping them to organize their work in a fluid way. Talents self organize out of talent management systems and if HR don’t find their place in the flow of work their added value will decrease. 8°) Wellness and fitness :healthy employees deliver more and cost less. Well being and fitness now have some weight in HR programs (even if it depends on the country culture) and, what’s new, fitness apps are now a part of HR systems. It’s not about measuring their health and behaviors in an intrusive way but to create in the workplace the same collective and motivating environments we all know in our personal lives. Help employee to self-evaluate, start challenges with their colleagues, between departments… One more approach that will enrich performance and engagement systems. 10°) Towards  Digital HR  : a new generation of HR systems is coming. It will leverage robots and AI, be self service, directly usable by the employee for its needs and its own development. HRIS for a better work life? Everything show that HRIS will be more focused on the “employee-client” in the future, will be designed as much for employees than for HR. It will eventually mean that a large part of the HR to employee relationship will be “frontalized��� so HR will be able to reallocate their resources to other tasks. I love the way Bersin explains that : “Apps that make work life better”. But I think there’s a mistake we should cautiously avoid to make. Either regarding to this matter or employee experience, most businesses think the substance of work and the work environment. In other words businesses used to improve the work environment to make employee forget the substance of work was terrible. The work was hard, complicated by nature ou because of the organization and, on the other side, employees were provided with benefits and services to make the whole acceptable. Work environment and substance will merge What I think “work life” should mean is the entirety of life at work. So it includes the day-to-day work, operations, processes that connect the business and the employee, things that directly benefit to them employee and indirectly to the business. This is where the biggest change is.

[deniscollins]

This Plan Pays to Avoid Layoffs. Why Don’t More Employers Use It?

Of the nearly 30 million people receiving unemployment benefits, only 309,000 — 1 percent — are getting them through a shared work program. Work sharing allows employers to keep and retain talent, so when things improve companies still have these employees and allows the employees to pay their bills. If you were a business owner, would you implement a work share program: (1) Yes, (2) No? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

Linda Petersen remembers when the housing market collapsed in 2008 and she was faced with having to lay off most of the people she worked with at her land title and escrow company in Washington State.

As it turned out, there was another option: a little-known and rarely used state unemployment insurance program that subsidizes the wages of workers who are kept on the payroll with reduced hours instead of laid off.

“Oh, my goodness, yes, it saved us,” said Ms. Petersen, the chief financial officer of Land Title Company of Kitsap County. The program — known as work sharing — “allows us to keep and retain that talent, so when things tick back up, we’ve still got them, and it allows them to pay their bills and stick with us through the hard times.”

For the first time in 10 years, the Land Title Company recently took advantage of the state’s work sharing program — this time to supplement the income of employees at high risk of complications from Covid-19 and unable to go to the office after the coronavirus outbreak.

“I am definitely a big fan,” Ms. Petersen said.

She isn’t the only one. Work sharing programs are extraordinarily popular among economists, Republican and Democratic policymakers, employers and workers — at least those who have heard of them. The problem is that few have, even though economists say work sharing is one of the best ways to strengthen the labor market during a downturn.

Of the nearly 30 million people receiving unemployment benefits, only 309,000 — 1 percent — are getting them through a shared work program.

Congress sweetened the program’s appeal during the pandemic, promising as part of the CARES Act that the federal government would pick up the cost from the states through the end of the year, without an overall cap, but nearly half of all states still don’t have such a program.

“I’m sick of this being the ‘best kept secret,’” Suzan LeVine, commissioner of Washington’s Employment Security Department, said of the program, officially titled short-time compensation. “It is the diamond in the rough of the unemployment benefits system.”

Work sharing is widely credited with saving jobs and easing the pain and severity of economic downturns. But while popular in Germany and other advanced industrial countries, such programs have had trouble gaining traction in the United States, where job protection laws are comparatively weak and layoffs are a ready solution when revenues drop. States aren’t required to offer short-time compensation, and many choose not to devote the resources — like funds for updated computer technology — to create and run such a program.

One of the biggest problems, said Kevin Hassett, former chairman of President Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers and a longtime champion of the approach, is that most employers and workers simply don’t know about it.

Washington State, which started its program in 1983, has vastly expanded participation since the pandemic. Between March and August last year, 688 businesses took part; now 3,560 are doing so. One in nine Washington workers receiving state jobless benefits is getting them through work sharing.

Ted Brown Music is one business taking part. Ted Brown opened his first music store in downtown Tacoma during the Great Depression, and his family sustained and expanded it through the financial meltdown and recession in 2008, but this crisis has been different.

Less than two weeks after Washington reported the nation’s first coronavirus death, the state started closing restaurants, schools and businesses. The company’s stores had to shutter or curtail operations, and its wide-ranging school programs and live events were canceled.

“We originally tried not to lay off anybody,” said Whitney Grisaffi, Ted Brown’s granddaughter and the company’s president. But it soon became apparent that the company could not afford to keep paying most of its 180 employees. “Everyone was so afraid,” Ms. Grisaffi said.

A mention of the work sharing program by the Chamber of Commerce caught the attention of Stephanie Howe, the vice president and Ms. Grisaffi’s sister.

Although program rules can vary by state, companies must apply individually, and file a separate plan for each unit or category of workers. Ted Brown Music was approved within two weeks. Now 150 of its employees are taking part. They are paid an hourly wage for the time they work, and receive state unemployment benefits for the hours they don’t. They were also eligible to receive the federal government’s weekly $600 supplemental job benefit until it expired last month.

Jim Stevens, who joined the company in 1970 and knew its founder, was laid off for six weeks after the pandemic hit. “That was just terrible,” said Mr. Stevens, a salesman in the flagship Tacoma store, which his wife, Ellie, manages. “I’ve never been unemployed for any major period in my life.” He was later brought back to work 28 hours a week under the work sharing program.

The partial jobless benefits replaced some of the lost income, while the $600-a-week federal supplement made up for the giant decline in the couple’s commissions.

Though the program involves paperwork for employers, Ms. Grisaffi said its benefits far outweighed the burdens.

“We would have been forced to lay off people and work with more of a skeleton crew,” Ms. Grisaffi said. “This saved us a whole lot of jobs.” Under the program, the company is also continuing to pay its share of employees’ health insurance costs.

The prospect of saving jobs and speeding a recovery is what prompted policymakers after the Great Recession to expand work sharing, and they included provisions to encourage states to use it in 2012, when the payroll tax cut was extended. Currently, 26 states have permanent programs.

A temporary economic crisis like the coronavirus is the kind of situation that work sharing was designed for, said Katharine G. Abraham, an economist at the University of Maryland and a member of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Obama administration. And the impact is more focused than, say, cutting the payroll tax or handing out stimulus checks.

“If you think these businesses aren’t going to go away, then laying people off and having them take jobs elsewhere is a lot of disruption that doesn’t need to happen,” said Ms. Abraham, who has extensively researched the topic.

Employers preserve their relationships with workers and avoid the costs of ramping back up and retraining. Workers avoid layoffs while retaining access to their health insurance and a steady income. And they have a better chance of fending off the longer-term side effects that often accompany layoffs, like permanently reduced income.

The federal Paycheck Protection Program, which offered forgivable loans to businesses that kept workers on the payroll, had a similar goal. But work sharing continues to help prop up businesses facing a slow recovery by allowing their staffs to divide the available hours.

For states, which have been clobbered by zooming costs and plunging tax revenues, work sharing is like finding a winning lottery ticket tucked away in a drawer. Many states have exhausted their unemployment insurance trust funds — which are financed by taxing employers — and been forced to borrow from the federal government to continue paying benefits.

Jeff Donofrio had not heard of work sharing when he took over as director of Michigan’s Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity. But after Congress increased incentives as part of the emergency relief package passed in March, he became a vocal pitchman.

With work sharing, the federal government pays the bill. As of July, Michigan had saved at least $212 million in unemployment pay, said Mr. Donofrio, who enlarged the program’s staff, had the state’s computers reprogrammed and streamlined the application process.

It can also mean significantly lower costs in the future for employers, whose unemployment insurance tax rates increase when layoffs rise. “A lot of businesses are saying this is too good to be true,” he said. “It seems like a solution to a lot of our problems.”

States and localities have themselves taken advantage of work sharing. Between May and July, 31,000 Michigan state employees took part in the program, logging in fewer hours and receiving some jobless benefits. The state said it had saved $80 million in wages.

Muskegon, a small city on the western shore of Michigan, saved $375,000 by using the program for 150 of its 235 employees.

“When the economy took a turn with the coronavirus, it was one of the few tools that cities could use to minimize the impact on their work force and hold their employees harmless in most cases,” said Dwana Thompson, who oversees employee relations for the city.

Two hundred miles to the east, Detroit enrolled 1,700 of the city’s 9,000-member work force in a work sharing program.

“This was a win-win,” said Denise Starr, Detroit’s human resource director. Given sinking tax revenues from the city’s casinos as well as income and sales tax, the only alternative would have been layoffs. The city plans to keep about 1,300 employees in the program through the end of its fiscal year in June 2021, she said.

Getting the word out to policymakers and businesses has been one of the biggest problems, said Susan N. Houseman, vice president and director of research at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in Kalamazoo, Mich. But advertising and promotional campaigns have attracted many more participants, said Ms. Houseman, who studied successful efforts in Oregon and Iowa.

“There are huge incentives to players to use it and for states to promote it,” she said.

[brajeshupadhyay]

Can you get £10k to double-glaze your home in Green Homes Grant?

There can’t be many homeowners who didn’t visualise sparkling new double-glazed windows or smart solar panels on their roof when Rishi Sunak announced his £2billion Green Homes Grant last month.

With up to £10,000 available for energy efficient home improvements, many people started thinking about how to spend a large cheque from the Chancellor.

But the scheme’s details have finally been unveiled on the Government’s website – and, as always, the devil is in the small print.

Catch: You can’t get a discount on double-glazing unless you are also applying for an improvement on a specific list that includes loft or cavity wall insulation

The scheme is littered with catches. First, all except the poorest homeowners will have to stump up a share of the cost themselves. Rather than covering the total amount, vouchers will be worth around two-thirds of the cost of the improvements.

Second, there is a strict hierarchy of works. For example, you can’t get a discount on double-glazing unless you are also applying for an improvement on a specific list that includes loft or cavity wall insulation.

And that’s just scratching the surface. Here, we guide you through Rishi’s latest boost for homeowners.

What exactly is the Green Homes Grant?

The Government has come up with a scheme to make our homes more energy efficient. It is handing out up to £10,000 per household to install insulation and double-glazing. It says this should cut carbon emissions, save people money, create and protect jobs – and boost the recovery from the coronavirus lockdown.

Broadly speaking, you decide on what needs to be done and the Government will pay the majority of the cost. However, in practice it’s not that simple.

What changes can I make?

Get ready to learn all about ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ measures’, Under the scheme, the Government has divided energy-efficient home improvements into two categories: primary measures and secondary measures.

Primary measures are either insulation – for example, in a cavity wall, loft, or roof – or low carbon heating, such as ground source heat pumps, or solar thermal systems (or solar panels, in plain English).

Secondary measures, on the other hand, mean draught proofing, double-glazing or triple-glazing (where you are replacing single glazing), secondary glazing, upgrading to energy-efficient doors or heating controls and insulation, such as thermostats and smart heating controls.

Outlay: Solar panels are costly – a whole system can set you back as much as £6,200

Why are there two categories of work?

Here is the crucial point: you are only allowed to claim for one of the secondary measures if you are also installing one of the primary measures in your home.

That means you can’t get money off double-glazing unless you’re also carrying out insulation or heating works at the same time. And in the case of secondary measures, you are only allowed to claim up to the amount you are claiming for the primary measures.

So if you’re claiming £1,000 for your under-floor insulation (primary) you can only claim a maximum of £1,000 for your double-glazing (secondary).

Baffled? You won’t be the only one. It’s a lot to get your head around. Ultimately, the Government doesn’t want to hand out money willy-nilly – it wants to target its £2 billion of help at those who most need it.

The bad news is that the catches keep coming. For example, you are only able to upgrade to energy-efficient doors if you are replacing doors installed before 2002. To add to the confusion, hot water tank insulation is placed under secondary measures rather than under the primary ‘insulation’ measures.

And if you want to install low-carbon heating (a primary measure) you have to make sure you have – or are getting – adequate insulation too (the other primary measure).

Can I get my loft insulation replaced?

Sadly not. The scheme will not cover replacement insulation, but it will cover ‘top ups’ – for example, more insulation on top of what you already have.

What about old double-glazing?

This comes under the secondary measures but don’t think you can get rid of your tired old existing double-glazing under this scheme; it’s only for replacing single glazing.

Hierarchy of works: Primary measures are either insulation – for example, in a cavity wall, loft, or roof – or low carbon heating, such as ground source heat pumps

How much cash will this scheme give me?

For most homeowners, the vouchers will be worth about two-thirds of the cost of the improvements, up to a maximum of £5,000 per household.

In the Government’s own example, a homeowner installing cavity wall and floor insulation costing £4,000 would only pay about £1,320, with the Government contributing the remaining £2,680 through the voucher scheme. But those on low incomes or certain benefits should be able to get the whole cost covered, up to that headline-grabbing £10,000.

Those who can apply include all live-in homeowners, including long-leaseholders and shared ownership, landlords of private rented sector domestic properties and park home owners including traveller sites.

For some work, it is likely that permission from the freeholder might be needed, such as shared ownership homes.

However, new-build homes and commercial premises do not qualify.

So who gets the full £10,000?

Beware: The cost soon mounts up 

Upgrading your home to help save the planet will bring you savings over time, but the initial outlay can be expensive.

The cost of replacing external windows and doors is at least £2,500 to £3,000 for a typical three-bedroom semi – and a lot more for period buildings. uPVC double-glazed windows will set you back around £100-£200 each and the same again for fitting.

Cavity wall insulation is around £725 for a detached house, going down to £475 for a semi-detached and £330 for a flat. The Energy Saving Trust estimates that a typical air source heat pump installation costs around £6,000 to £8,000.

A single solar panel can cost around £350-£500 – while a whole system can set you back as much as £6,200.

To qualify for the full £10,000, you must be receiving at least one income-based or disability benefit, such as universal credit or disability allowance.

However, only owner-occupied homes or park homes will be eligible.

For the full list see this document by the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (PDF). 

Even if you are only expected to take a small grant, it may still be worth getting the work done – the Government says you will reap the benefit by lower energy bills.

In their own example above, installing cavity wall and floor insulation could save you more than £200 a year on bills as well as reducing their home’s carbon footprint by cutting 700kg of CO2 a year from your home.

How do I know which work I need?

The Government says that advice on exactly what you need to do to make your home more energy efficient will be available from its Simple Energy Advice website.

While the website – which is still in beta testing mode – will contain information about suitable home improvements, there is no requirement to follow its advice and individual homes will not be assessed.

All work must be carried out by approved TrustMark and Microgeneration Certification Scheme (MCS) registered tradespeople and the Government is advising them to apply for accreditation so they can take part.

Homeowners will be given a list of approved local tradespeople who could carry out the work.

How do I apply for the grants?

The exact details of how to apply are yet to be revealed. But it is understood that when the process is launched, you’ll need to fill out an online application, get a quote from an approved supplier and have the quote approved.

The scheme is set to go live next month and is likely to last until March.

What help can I get outside England?

Although this particular Green Homes Grant is for England only, there are various other energy efficiency schemes running across all four home nations such as Warmer Homes Scotland, the Nest scheme in Wales and Affordable Warmth Scheme in Northern Ireland.

Check your local council website to find out what schemes are available in your area.

In Scotland, Home Energy Scotland offers free advice on energy savings and helps people find funding for energy efficiency schemes, from interest-free loans, to grants, the Warm Homes Discount and Renewable Heat Incentive.

In Wales, the Nest scheme provides free home energy efficiency improvements for people on low incomes or certain medical conditions.

The Northern Ireland Sustainable Energy Programme provides funding for energy efficiency schemes across Northern Ireland.

What other help is available?

The main scheme for vulnerable and low income households is the Energy Company Obligation (ECO).

This is free or discounted work provided by the big energy companies to help reduce carbon emissions and tackle fuel poverty. You have to meet strict criteria, which typically includes claiming benefits of some kind from the Government.

The scheme is paid for by the Government but delivered by the energy firms themselves, who will factor the discount into the price you are quoted or offer the work free. The scheme is offered across the UK.

For more information, see Simple Energy Advice’s website.  

Some links in this article may be affiliate links. If you click on them we may earn a small commission. That helps us fund This Is Money, and keep it free to use. We do not write articles to promote products. We do not allow any commercial relationship to affect our editorial independence.

The post Can you get £10k to double-glaze your home in Green Homes Grant? appeared first on Shri Times News.

via Blogger https://ift.tt/3inSBqM

[zanytimetravelenthusiast-blog]

Serp Scout Review Discount And Huge Bonus

Serp Scout Review

Just how To Start A Digital Advertising Agency Marketing Solutions (Part 5)

Last Ideas on Scaling a Your Company

It takes some time to develop an online marketing organisation. It needs perseverance and uniformity. It also calls for hard work. But if you intend to get to that big-money objective, you need to place in the big-money hustle! This is where a lot of marketing professionals really stop working!

Adhere to the A.I.D.A framework to bring in Serp Scout clients by yourself, you will slowly create agency understanding for your organisation.

Pick one service to start with. In a sense, you almost wish to go backwards with the second part of this write-up so that you can prepare ahead. Here are the steps.

Step 1 ... Pick an Agency Design Starting Point.

Choose one of these to really concentrate on initially. What are you finest at?

Facebook/social media advertising and marketing ...

Building sites ...

And even begin a SEO firm

Pick one as well as focus on it today. That is your beginning point.

Action 2 ... Identify a "loss leader," or 'inexpensive' service to get services in the door

This would be a low-cost, tiny action for companies to take before you pitch them your 'starter' product (keyword package, social networks optimization, web site audit, etc.).

The function of this item would certainly be to grow trust, construct connections, display your skillset, and get them comfy with handing money over to you ... even if that quantity of cash is really small!

Step 3 ... Get Attention on You & Your Firm!

In this step, you select among the 3 options noted under the 'Get Interest' section we discussed previously, and also concentrate on it. Remember ... eventually you will overcome all 3, however, for currently, you are mosting likely to concentrate and specialize to obtain the round rolling!

Discover exactly how to recognize 'advertising weak points' in neighborhood businesses. Program the Serp Scout owners exactly how to attend to and fix these issues in your complimentary Meetup classes to ensure that you can get neighborhood interest as well as make company owner aware that YOU are the individual that can resolve their problems!

Tip 4 ... Don't overthink it. Just do it!

Everybody starts as a sole-proprietor initially.

Here's what you DON'T require initially:

An LLC,

A web site that rates number 1 for SEO in your town ...

A group of employees ...

A Facebook web page with 10k likes ...

or perhaps a blog with 10,000 visits a day!

You just require to rush as well as get in touch with a great deal of small companies to start your firm. After this, you develop that connection as well as market more services as it develops.

These are the essential elements that will literally make ... or break ... your success.

I wish this message helps you! Let me understand in the comments if you've got inquiries or if you need a couple of even more suggestions. My objective is to assist you construct as well as craft an effective lifestyle company!

Like what you check out ... Need more? Have a look at these posts next!

Exactly How To Beginning Selling Digital Marketing Services

Yesterday, I posted a brand-new video about 'Marketing your skills - the fastest way to making income' as well as this e-mail will certainly share exactly how this worked out for me. Since this fast tale will certainly take you 'deeper' on the topic. You should have even more of the tale ...

Your Advertising Approach Plan! Digital Advertising And Marketing For Your Service

We are mosting likely to craft your digital advertising and marketing Serp Scout method plan, now, today! Order a scratch pad or open a file on your computer because when you finish this blog post you will have a concrete marketing approach that you can use to create a.

Influencer Advertising And Marketing - A Craze Or The Future Of Advertising and marketing?

In The other day's video about Influencer advertising and marketing I asked a quick comment-survey ... The alternatives were basic ... "Yes, Influencer advertising and marketing is right here to stay ..." Or "No, Influencer marketing is a trend ..." If you missed out on the video with the 7 suggestions for influencer marketing, it is still rather ...

Serp Scout Overview

Developer: Todd Spears et alia

Product: Serp Scout

Date Of Release: 2020-Apr-01

Time Of Release: 11:00 EDT

FE Cost: $37-$97

Sales Page: https://www.socialleadfreak.com/serp-scout-review/

Specific niche: General

Serp Scout is the 1st tool to browse Google & YP as well as inspects their internet site as well as identifies if they have weak points. There is an endless quantity of possibility to call these services and offer them on digital advertising and marketing services. Serp Scout find these companies as well as their get in touch with info and constructs a record outlining what concerns they have.

About Writer

Serp Scout was produced by Todd Spears, Herc Magnus & Dino Gomez. Todd Spears is the owner at Job Preeminence, Range Leads, Search Phrase Surpemacy ... Chief Executive Officer at Spyder Spanker & CEO at SEO Command Facility.

He concentrates on ...

Internet Marketing Specialist

Seo

Conversion Funnels

Media Acquiring

Regional Lead Generation

Dino Gomez has been in the community for virtually one decade as a trainer in the Search Engine Optimization mastermind, an audio speaker at the Chiang Mai Search Engine Optimization Seminar (on FB ads) and a founder of the digital advertising company.

In cooperation with Dino Gomez and also Herc Magnus, two other heavyweights in Online Marketing as well as Software Application Establishing, Todd and also his companions expect to bring the customers a potential land to make money online in addition to the best solution to customers hard prospecting.

Now, let's consider the next part of this Serp Scout Evaluation and find its attributes.

What is the most effective way to offer digital advertising and marketing solutions to small businesses?

"Advertising is sold, not bought." So goes the worn out cliche in the neighborhood media sector.

While it holds true that local business proprietors ("SMB's") are regularly also hectic running their firms to undertake advertising or advertising efforts by themselves, any person who still thinks this expression is setting his or her firm up for failure over time.

SMB's are increasingly thinking about taking care of marketing themselves, and also Google & FB particularly have launched advertising items that're dead-simple for them to utilize. Artificial intelligence (A.I.) is enabling these do-it-yourself products to supply darn great results to entrepreneur that are not, as well as that have no desire to be, full time marketing experts.

Nonetheless, there're a great deal of great software business, agencies, also large media resellers available whose company does still depend upon outbound selling to clients.

However all they enter attempting to market a details electronic advertising bundle or service without even understanding what business owner wants aid with initial. It is a method that promptly switches off their would-be clients and also sheds reliability before they have also had a possibility to make it. Reserving for a moment that the bundle or solution is not also delivering what the client is looking for!

My guidance for the very best means to offer electronic solutions to business owners: ask great deals of questions.

Discover what their goals are with their electronic advertising and marketing efforts.

Inquire about the parts of their job they hate one of the most or consume the most time (particularly the components including advertising, certainly).

Listen intently to their responses.

Discover remedies to these problems, either with human involvement or with software-- not whatever can be automated.

Serp Scout OTOs

FRONT END: Serp Scout - Client Procurement Software with Specialist Digital Market Company Training ($37-- $87)

OTO 1: Serp Scout PRO Upgrade ($47-- $97)

OTO 2: Serp Scout ELITE Upgrade ($47-- $97)

OTO 3: Recurring Credit Scores Registration ($29 and $49)

OTO 3: Digital marketing Client Acquisition System ($167 -3 X $67)

Conclusion

"It's A Lot. Should I Spend Today?"

Not just are you getting accessibility to Serp Scout for the best price ever before provided, yet also You're investing totally without threat. Serp Scout includes a 30-day Refund Warranty Plan. When you choose Serp Scout, your fulfillment is ensured. If you are not entirely pleased with it for any type of reason within the very first one month, you're entitled to a full refund-- no question asked. You have actually got absolutely nothing to lose! What Are You Awaiting? Try It today and also get The Following Incentive Currently!

[cathrynstreich]

7 Ways to Upgrade Your Flight Without Paying Full Price

(TNS)—For me, flying in business or first class is not about the extra attentive service or the meals—which are, let’s face it, still airplane food—or even about the endless supply of free booze (well, maybe a little about the endless supply of free booze).

It’s about comfort, especially on long-haul flights. It’s about being able to shift position, with the push of a button or two, from sitting upright to a much more comfortable lie-flat position. That’s when my spine and posterior go “aaaah.”

But airborne comfort comes at a cost. So I’m going to tell you how to fly flat for less than you might imagine.

1. Buy a Nonrefundable Business or First-Class Fare When It’s Low Airfares change moment to moment and day to day. Search for a Los Angeles to New York nonstop one-way in business class and the fare could be $499 one minute and $1,999 the next. It used to be that airlines gave away their premium seats as a perk for loyal customers, but now they prefer to get whatever the market will bear. I check multiple times as far in advance as possible and snag a deal when it appears. I’ve noticed recently that airline apps remember your last search so it’s as easy as hitting the search button again and again to see if fares have changed. Often, on domestic routes, nonrefundable business or first-class seats are just twice the cost of economy class rather than three or four times as much as they once were. As with nonrefundable economy class fares, you’ll pay $200 to change or cancel your flight.

2. Use Miles/Points to Upgrade From Economy American, Delta and United let passengers use miles (15,000 to 20,000) plus a copay of $75, on lower-48 domestic routes, to upgrade from economy. Sometimes an upgrade is available immediately when you call the airline’s award desk, but usually you’ll be put on a waitlist. How far in advance you book, the price of the economy fare and the time you check in for the flight may affect your chances. Upgrades on flights to Hawaii and international destinations will cost more miles and higher copays, and other airlines besides those mentioned also allow mileage upgrades.

3. Use Miles or Points to Upgrade As with airfares, the number of miles or points needed to book a frequent-flyer award seat will vary day by day. I recommend calling the awards desk rather than going online to search availability. Last year I was looking for business-class award seats on British Airways and found none online, but when I spoke to someone on the phone there were lots of options. That said, American was offering, on its app but not on its website, “online only” business and first-class awards at greatly reduced mileage, so it’s a good idea to try both methods. Check multiple times before committing.

If you have good credit but don’t have enough miles in your account, the fastest way to earn enough for a business-class ticket is to get a new credit card offering sign-up bonuses after you charge a specified amount to the card, usually $3,000 in the first three months after approval. Citibank, American Express and Chase typically award 50,000, 60,000 or more points or miles. British Airways has offered 100,000 points in the past.

But do us all a favor and apply for these cards directly with the issuing bank and not through websites that get millions in referral commissions since we consumers end up paying for these bounties in the form of higher interest rates and fees. In an attempt to circumvent those “points” websites, airlines are marketing credit cards onboard flights with added incentives not available online. On a recent American Airlines trip, the flight attendants handed out applications for a co-branded AA/Mastercard with no annual fee for the first year, and just a $1 minimum spend. Yes, I applied and got approved and used the miles for a free business-class trip.

4. Last-Minute Upgrade Offers Checking in online for an Alaska Airlines flight last year, I was offered a $50 upgrade to first class on a Seattle to Los Angeles flight. You’re darn right I took it. Waiting in line to board an Etihad Airways flight, I was approached by an agent who asked if I would like to upgrade from business to first class for $500. That one I didn’t take, but you get the point: Be alert to, and ask about, last-minute upgrades. Do it when you check in at the airport. And don’t ignore emailed upgrade offers: American sends me these all the time, mostly on shorter domestic flights. TAP Air Portugal sells upgrades to business class at the ticket counter or gate for about $400 to $500 per flight, depending on load factors.

5. Buy Through a Consolidator Consolidators are like the TJ Maxx of business and first-class airfares. I’ve never used one, but my friend Ken did recently on a New York to London trip in business class for 50 percent less than Virgin Atlantic was asking online. Consolidators have been known to cease operations without warning, but one that’s been in the business for decades is Planet Amex (planetamex.com, no relation to American Express). 6. Bid on an Upgrade Through an Auction Four dozen carriers (Air New Zealand, Etihad, Fiji Airways, Hawaiian Airlines, Qantas, SAS and Singapore Airlines among them) offer upgrade auctions through PlusGrade.com. Check the site for the whole list, but you must bid on each airline’s site where you’ll see rules and procedures, with some allowing upgrade bids on award tickets and some offering instant upgrades as well as auctions. TAP Air Portugal runs auctions on flytap.com from 72 to 24 hours before departure and at Seatboost.com from 24 hours to flight closing.

7. Be Loyal to One Airline Although some airlines give away fewer free seats in business and first class than in the past, passengers with higher status in frequent-flyer programs do get upgraded for free at times, and those folks also have higher priority on waiting lists for mileage upgrades.

Oh, and one other way: Be nice, dress well. Time and time again, I’ve heard from friends and readers that they have been upgraded to business or first class simply because they made some effort to dress decently. It only happens occasionally, but what do you have to lose?

A British Airways employee whose job it is to escort VIP passengers confessed to me that, “Yes, we do take note of a passenger’s behavior and whether they’re presentable. When I was a check-in agent we would place a note in the comments section of the reservation: ‘This person was very nice, consider available upgrade, or this person was very nasty.'”

And several people I know have gotten Best Dressed Upgrades, most recently Susan Andrews, a real estate agent in LA, on a flight to London on British Airways, an airline on which she had zero status. It’s just human nature. Airline employees are required to dress smart when flying nonrevenue and they disdain passengers who dress like slobs.

I worked for Eastern Air Lines in the 1980s when it was company policy to fly employees in first-class if seats were available (back then, they almost always were). One day I showed up for a flight, in my best suit and good shoes, but no necktie, and was handed an economy-class boarding pass. When I asked why the gate agent scoffed, “Dressed like that you don’t deserve to fly at all!”

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

The post 7 Ways to Upgrade Your Flight Without Paying Full Price appeared first on RISMedia.

7 Ways to Upgrade Your Flight Without Paying Full Price published first on https://thegardenresidences.tumblr.com/

[topicprinter]

Hey - Pat from StarterStory.com here with another interview.Today's interview is with Doug Geiger of CanYouHandlebar, a brand that sells men's grooming products.Some stats:Product: Men's Grooming ProductsRevenue/mo: $100,000Started: November 2012Location: Mount ClemensFounders: 1Employees: 10Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?I’m Doug Geiger, founder of Can You Handlebar, a men’s grooming product company. We’re one of those low-key-high-quality brands.We are best known for beard oils and balms, moustache wax and inventing the first application brush for beard products, the Can You Handlebar Beard Oil Brush®. We are carefully and consistently extending our product line and distribution.In our first three years our production grew from a kitchen countertop with a crockpot I stole from my wife to “making a million bucks” and a 10,000 square foot building with a whole fleet of crockpots. Meanwhile, our retail presence -- which began on the counter of a gracious proprietor of the corner gas station -- has grown to our own network of barbers and salons across the US, international distribution and most visibly, the shelves of every Art of Shaving.What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?Back in the halcyon days of 2010, on a whim, I decided to grow a handlebar moustache. It is hard to imagine now, but there once was a time where there were not too many people selling moustache wax or beard products.There were no products available locally and most of those available online weren’t transparent about ingredients and felt kind of “homemade” (and not in the good way). My hunch was that well made and well-packaged beard products could do really well as a business. I sat on the idea for at least a year because I was tied up with my day job and a newborn in the home.In 2011, I turned in my fancy plastic lanyard and left the high rise for the last time. I joined Saddleback Leather and this proved to be the perfect incubator for a fledgling moustache wax startup. First, it provided a consistent paycheck while I ironed out my recipes and business plan. Second, my time at Saddleback provided me with good reflexes when it comes to quality and customer service. Most importantly though, I had the encouragement and mentorship of the owner, Dave Munson and the help of my Saddleback coworkers.Even though my time had freed up a little working from home, I was still quite broke. My wife and I were married (and each managed to stay sorta employed) during the Great Recession. But even as of 2012, when we launched the website we were still paying off our wedding debt from years prior. Nevertheless, I had a hunch and at this point in my life, frankly I was tired of ignoring all of my hunches.So, I loaded up a credit card with $400 in supplies and stole my wife’s crockpot. The day before launch, we took our toddler trick or treating, then made our way to the kitchen. I followed the handwritten recipe from my fourteenth experiment and the yield was a couple dozen cans of wax and half that again in spillage. The next morning I logged in and set the site to “public.”Here’s a shot of our first large order going out in our first “commercial” space.And here’s a shot of me at The Art of Shaving. The first time I was able to walk into a mall and see my products on the shelf in a retail capacity. It felt really good.Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.Our first product was a moustache wax. My research amounted to buying just about every competitor product I could get my hands on to get an idea of what was possible, doing lots of research and tinkering with all manner of ingredients.The research process involves a lot of research online on the properties of each ingredient and to determine if there are known allergies we can avoid. We also have discussions with our chemist if we are having a hard time achieving some property we want as well as to look over the final formula.After we believe we have a winner, we have a lot of people try it and give their feedback. Meanwhile, we are working on labels and UPC barcodes and product photography. It gets easier over time to lainch a product but it never gets easy.After several versions, we landed on a really simple recipe that, with just a couple tweaks, is now sold all over the world.The first batch was made in a crock pot and was ladled by hand into metal tins with a one ounce scoop I purchased for the occasion. It was a real mess. Learning how to make a can of really good moustache wax takes one sort of research and development. Learning how to make ten thousand of these at a time, takes another sort. One thing we got right was putting as much R&D into our processes as we put into developing new products.I don’t have any photos of the crockpots in action, but here are our first two beard oil prototypes. We ended up going with the name “Initiative” since the word “Industry” isn’t used to mean “hard work” much these days.Our first two beard oil prototypesDescribe the process of launching the business.We’d had some success in smaller circles with direct sales and were building a reputation based on the quality of our moustache wax among the beard and moustache community. Setting up a webstore seemed like the next logical step, along with getting our product on Amazon.Credit cards were our friends at first and this was definitely more of a “side gig” for the first year or so. Then we found that our Amazon sales picked up, often on the strength of our reviews and finding an aficionado niche with our moustache wax formula. We brought on our Director of Sales Brian Furby and he developed a plan that allowed us to reach out to barbershops and salons to offer wholesale pricing, creating a global network of retail partners. These things became the underpinnings of our success.Brian’s strategy was two-fold. He started with cold-calling and emailing owners of salons and barbershops, introducing them to our products and offering to send them a package that included full-size products for free, just so they could see the quality of the goods in person. This led to a postcard mailer program to expand our reach.Finally, we expanded to include visits to industry trade shows, where we were able to meet and interact with retailers face-to-face. They could see the products first-hand and by simply signing up for a Retailer Sample Kit they could get started making money with Can You Handlebar right away, at no cost to them.These programs were a success in building out our retail program of independent shops and salons. As our product line grew, we altered our offering to include more goods and special incentives (like a branded barber cape), available at a significantly reduced cost. This gives potential retailers a taste of our wholesale pricing and gives them enough product to stock their shelves with our Retailer Starter Kit, all with a very small investment on their end.We kept an eye toward thoughtful design in our packaging and on continuing to deliver quality goods. That eventually led to our being noticed by The Art of Shaving, who have become our most significant retailer, a relationship that has brought our products into hundreds of retail locations where we continue to be a best-seller.In terms of lessons learned, one of the things that we might have done differently and something we still struggle with is overthinking things. Aspects of that can be beneficial, and it’s certainly helped us to be careful and a bit cautious. But we have a tendency to get obsessive about the details. Sometimes we’ll talk ourselves into a corner until finally one of us will say “What the hell are we waiting for?” and we’ll get the idea moving again.Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?Our efforts have always been rooted in quality products and customer service, building relationships with our customers based on delivering exactly what they are looking for. It’s how we got started, and it’s where we distinguish ourselves. That can feel a bit old school, and sure, we’d love to have some viral success that explodes business exponentially, but we have been very happy with a steady and consistent build over time.We’re just not a flashy brand. We don’t consider beards to be a trend, and we don’t approach our business as though it were. It’s resulted in a lean and focused product line and innovation driven by our core values and extensive R&D. We’re not rushing products to market for a quick buck.This also means that when a customer has a question or a concern, they’re getting a response from an actual human being. It means a satisfaction guarantee that accounts for the customer’s actual experience with the ultimate goal of finding them a product that works for them. Our social media is organic and conversational. We share what we care about, whether fishing or baking bread, high-end knives or low-end junk food--It’s all just an extension of who we are. No cheap memes or alpha attitudes, no trash-talking competitors.Social mediaOur strategy for social media has always been rooted in genuine interaction. We feature our own content in terms of photos and writing as well as sharing photos from customers and retailers. We decided early on to avoid cheap memes and viral posts. We’d seen other brands do it, and it always felt like it played to the negative, reinforcing stereotypes about bearded guys or beard culture. It’s always been important to us that our customers choose our products because they are right for them, not because some alpha dog told them to, or because it’s the hipster thing to do.Our earliest notable success on social media was with a program we dubbed The Big Thank You, which we ran for two consecutive years. It was a giveaway contest designed to thank our customers and followers for their interest in our product, and also a way to introduce them to several other small businesses whose work we appreciate. In turn, these small businesses helped us promote on their end, creating a nice ring of cross-promotion across social media. We accepted donations or bought outright products from our partners as part of the giveaway, and it was important to us to choose makers who we knew shared our belief in quality, and who it just made sense to brand with.Entrants into the contest were asked to upload a picture of themselves showing off their facial hair and all of our followers were asked to vote for their favorite. Engagement was through the roof, as were click-throughs and newsletter sign-ups.Here’s some stats on the second year:The contest ran for a week, from November 19th-27thWe had 25 sponsors$8000 worth of prizes13,525 visitors to site during contestSocial Growth/Engagement (CanYouHandlebar only; doesn’t include any data from sponsors)Gained 220 followers on InstagramGained 62 followers/likes on FacebookFB reach was ~39K from contest postsInstagram reach: 10,776; impressions: 35KTwitter: ~45K impressionsAnecdotally, it was a success for our sponsor partners as well, as all reported positive growth. In most cases, all it cost them was their cost of goods and a small amount of time spent promoting on social media.AdsWe’ve utilized Facebook, Instagram, and Google ads and experimented with other forms of online advertising and we’ve found that overextending ourselves and our budget doesn’t necessarily result in higher sales.Online advertising is a nut we still haven’t completely cracked. A lot of that feels like it’s connected to what a niche market we are, and within that niche we’ve found our greatest sales success in simply delivering the best products and packaging we can, and letting word of mouth spread.AmazonTo that end, Amazon is an important part of our success, with customer experience driving strong reviews. There is a true aficionado’s appreciation for what we do. We thrive on returning business.Though there are a multitude of other options for our customers to consider when purchasing a beard product, we feel that the quality of our goods shines through.How are you doing today and what does the future look like?We are steady and growing moderately on all fronts. We are looking to expand into other retail locations and further international distribution. We are expanding our product line as well. A recent example is the Tattoo Balm we just released. It’s our first unisex grooming product and also one of the first that isn’t directly beard or moustache-related. It’s a whole new market for us and we’re looking forward to finding some inroads there.Our day-to-day operations have expanded dramatically from where we started. We now operate out of a 10,000 square foot warehouse in the greater Detroit area, we employ anywhere from 10-15 full and part-time positions and have scaled our production abilities up to be able to fill thousands of units a week as needed.Our sales are currently tiered with retail partners in the lead, Amazon second and website sales third. A massive goal for us over the past few months has been to increase traffic and sales on the website. We’ve undergone a complete design facelift and have focused on targeted social media ads. It took a ton of time, money and effort whipping our site into shape. Thankfully, we are now converting well once people get to the site. We’re now working on strategies to get these initial site views and increasing conversions.Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?Right after I started to see some success, I hired “experts” who weren’t as serious about our success as we needed them to be. I paid one guy over $40,000 over the course of six months because he was “really connected” and could help my business take off. The only thing that really took off was him--with my money. This taught me a little thing about business and a big thing about me as a person. On the business side, I am now a lot better at defining expectations in contracts. On the personal side, I realized that I was starving to hear that I was “on the right track” and was consequently way more vulnerable to flattery than I thought.When you’ve toiled for years on a business as random as beard oil without a ton to show for it, it feels really good to finally hear some “real business person” compliment you and tell you that you are about to hit it big, if only you had someone like them who sees the potential and can make a couple calls…I needed validation so much as any brand new entrepreneur, and I spent the cost of a brand new fully loaded family sedan to hear it. Fortunately, I was able to extricate myself having only lost money and pride. It could have been much worse.You can’t avoid all mistakes. But you can inoculate yourself against a bunch of strains of entrepreneurship diseases by reading content like these on Starter Story and by keeping an eye out for business owners you can chat with every so often to give you this validation. You should not rely exclusively on your SO, personal friends or employees. It isn’t fair for them to be your sole support. Once you are committed to your own business, you immediately need a new category of friend: business owner peers with whom you can freely discuss financials, fears and hopes. If you provide for this support network early on, you will have picked up through conversations a resistance to some of the nonsense that’s out there without having to go through it firsthand.I can’t go on too much longer without screaming that luck is such a huge part of our success. I was fortunate to be in the vanguard of the “beard trend” by accident and I am certain that getting into the market so early helped. Back then, we were one of only a dozen or so brands doing beard oil, beard balm and moustache wax. Now there are thousands. Had things not gone exactly right, I could very easily be one of the thousands of guys out there now whose company didn’t pan out and who only have a couple dozen bottles of beard oil and a $40 piece of bearded clipart they never got around to using to show for it.That said, luck is never enough, not long term. You have to work really hard on a lot of chores that the customer will never see or know about. Had we not made the most of our position as one of the early leading brands, we would not be here. I think some of our best decisions over the years include focusing on a quality product in a clean professional manufacturing facility. Our manufacturing crew is presently led by my first employee Andy Pokorski, who has been with me from the crockpot to the factory. He has had a hand (and beard) in nearly everything at Can You Handlebar. Accordingly, he gets unlimited days off for fishing. Each day Andy, Annette, Dylan, Mike and a handful of regular part-time employees operate a production facility they helped build, that makes and distributes some of the best men’s care products in the world.We also prioritize packaging. This is critical for personal care products. They are applied after the shower or may be carried around in a pocket. A well packaged beard oil for instance, ought to have a water-proof label, ought not shatter when dropped on a tile floor and should never get your clothing oily in a suitcase. We think this way and customers seem to appreciate that. We design for actual everyday and our customers can tell.As soon as I could afford it, I brought on Brian Griffith as a full-time graphic designer, and Adam Barraclough as our copywriter and the results are staggering. For the first time we could start with a marketing idea and have all of the talent we needed in-house to make our idea a reality. Tim Kramer, a colleague from my Saddleback days, joined us as our social media manager but his role, like everyone else’s, has expanded to include whatever needs to be done. We do most of our photography and videography in-house now. The skills needed to run a modern online business are numerous and are not easy to learn, but having control over our creative has allowed us to get the look and feel we want.I believe it is the combination of luck, hard work and our lack of pretense that helps us stand out in a crowded field. It’s easy to play up any number of “hipster” or “alpha male” tropes, and those things are rampant in beard culture, but that just isn’t us.What platform/tools do you use for your business?Our online store is powered by Shopify, and we’ve had excellent support and consulting from Kurt Elster over at Ethercycle. We’re not web devs by nature so having a team we can reach out to for assistance with specific requests has been invaluable to us.Shipping is through ShipStation, YotPo for reviews and WholesaleHero to integrate our retailer pricing directly into the webstore. We keep things fairly simple on this end and these apps meet our needs without overcomplicating things. We really like Klaviyo for email and use a customized template to plug in fresh copy and creative assets, which makes sending out a newsletter a snap.We use Buffer for social scheduling and rely on Google Analytics and Shopify reporting for stats. As a team, we work remotely and utilize Google Drive and Skype daily in order to keep in touch and share information.I wish I had a true “killer app” recommendation here, but a lot of what we do comes down to being able to rely on a few basics that can be easily trained, shared and utilized amongst our whole team.What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?I’m a huge fan of Kurt Elster’s The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, he often focuses on people in unique industries who are finding success and sharing some of the strategies that led them there. It’s inspiring but also unpretentious and ground-level enough to be relatable.I loved reading Jim Koch’s Quench Your Own Thirst: Business Lessons Learned Over a Beer or Two about the rise of Boston Brewing and the Sam Adams brand. It was amazing to me how he embraced his failures as readily as his successes and was unafraid to discuss them plainly. This is one of dozens of audiobooks I have listened to on my phone with Audible. I love that site.I try to run everything by my wife. She’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and if she doesn’t “get” something it’s usually a sure sign that I’ve missed the mark. She’s a great supporter, and that means the world to me, but she’s also not afraid to call bullshit. Having someone like that in your professional life, who’s not afraid to tell you “this sucks” or “I’m not sure this works” is invaluable.Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?Use your pride against your fear to get out of first gear.If I have done one brilliant thing in the past six years it was to recognize that I was afraid and needed to kick my own ass. So, I bought a bag of lanolin I could not return with money I did not have knowing I would be mortified to have to explain to my wife why I decided to quit just after investing in a big bag of sheep’s wax.As I mentioned earlier, I’d had ideas for businesses for a very long time and had never followed through. I was afraid I would fail. Somewhere in there, I was probably afraid I might succeed. Either way I had by this point established a habit of daydreams without action that I needed to break. I had an intuition that I needed to drop myself into a mess and fight my way out. That’s when the idea to buy obscure ingredients hit me. I placed the order and kept plugging away. When it arrived, I placed it prominently next to my computer monitor. I knew that the only way to turn that lanolin back into the money I desperately needed was to make a bunch of moustache wax and sell it. Which I did. If you use this idea, just be careful and don’t overdo it!Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?We’re not actively hiring for any specific positions, but we love to hear from contributors and collaborators who may be interested in sharing creative content. Whether that’s photos or videos, artwork, reviews of our products or other insights, we welcome anyone who is willing to help us spread the word.We have built a great community of contributors over the years who help us do everything from test drive new products to give us feedback on concepts for campaigns.Where can we go to learn more?Find us Online:Website: https://www.canyouhandlebar.com/Talk to us directly :doug@canyouhandlebar.comIf you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!Liked this text interview? Check out the full interview with photos, tools, books, and other data.Interested in sharing your own story? Send me a PM

[todaynewsstories]

In Israel, African migrant families battle hunger, trauma

TEL AVIV (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – In the concrete bowels of a vast bus station in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, a group of children gathers in the evening to play and dance to songs blaring from a CD player.

African migrants wait in line for the opening of the Population and Immigration Authority office in Bnei Brak, Israel February 4, 2018. REUTERS/Nir Elias

Their parents are African migrants who work until late, struggling to earn enough to put food on the table.

While their children have access to state education in Israel, they face hardships, support workers said.

“Everyone in their proximity is in dire stress, and there’s no money for basic necessities,” said Yonit Naftali, vice-president of Elifelet, an Israeli charity that supports children born to African migrants.

Over a decade from the mid-2000s, about 64,000 Africans – mainly from conflict-torn Sudan and Eritrea – arrived in Israel across the then-porous border with Egypt’s Sinai, which was fenced off several years ago.

Many experienced torture, were enslaved or imprisoned for ransom at the hands of Bedouin smugglers in the Sinai desert.

Today some 36,000 remain in Israel, with 6,000 more children, according to government data.

For many, life has got tougher since a 2017 law directed employers to deduct 20 percent from the wages of workers with temporary visas who entered Israel illegally from Egypt.

As an incentive for them to go elsewhere, the money is deposited in a fund, together with an employer-paid tax of 16 percent, which workers can only access when they leave Israel.

The new system is crippling for migrant families, said Naftali. “The children were the first to get hurt,” she said.

Parents must now work more – some clocking up 15 hours a day – while earning less, leaving them unable to take care of their children properly, she added.

In birthday cards to friends, children of migrants recently wrote messages such as “May you have food in your refrigerator” and “May you never go hungry”, Naftali said.

“Then we understood there is something really bad going on,” she said. Her charity had to close down one of its after-school centres in order to finance emergency food donations.

“There are actually hungry children, which I never believed I would see in Israel to such an extent,” Naftali told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The Israeli Ministry of Interior’s Population and Immigration Authority did not respond to requests for comment.

COMMUNITY SCHOOL

Many children of African migrants were born in Israel, speak Hebrew, attend Israeli schools and know Jewish culture and traditions. But they do not have Israeli identity cards and often encounter racist slurs, said Naftali.

Eritrean migrants in Israel, backed by rights groups, say they are asylum seekers fleeing violence, persecution and conscription under a repressive regime back home.

But the Israeli government views them as economic migrants, and has tried to deport them – although a failure to find a country willing to take them forced it to abandon a plan to expel thousands of mostly Eritrean and Sudanese men in April. [nL8N1S16BU]

Between 2009 and 2017, Israel granted refugee recognition to less than 0.5 percent of the almost 11,000 asylum applications it decided on, according to the Israeli non-profit Hotline for Refugees and Migrants.

Elifelet was established following a 2012 hate crime attack, when Molotov cocktails were thrown into a Tel Aviv centre for refugees where 21 children were sleeping, Naftali said.

For the children of migrant families, developing pride in their heritage is important to equip them to deal with the discrimination they face in everyday life, she added.

An after-hours school set up by the city’s Eritrean migrant community has similar aims, teaching children their own language and culture, and offering them a safe space in the evenings.

“If our kids go on the streets, they get a lot of discrimination. Here, it’s like a home,” said Kifle Bizen, director of the Abugida Eritrean Community School.

On the top floor of a rundown building in southern Tel Aviv, it is staffed by volunteers who, after finishing day jobs as cleaners or cooks, teach classes for about 120 Eritrean children, aged six to 14, four times a week.

Set up in 2013, it assists children with school work and fosters their Eritrean identity, Bizen explained.

“Our dream is to support our children not only with knowledge but also with their sense of self to help them develop,” he said.

Besides studying maths and science, the children sing, perform plays and recite poems in Tigrinya, one of Eritrea’s main languages.

Learning Tigrinya is key, said Bizen, not least because children and parents often cannot understand one another, sparking arguments.

“Here, 100 percent of the children talk in our language,” he said. The Eritrean community is like “an extended family”, working together to overcome shared challenges, he added.

The official monthly fee at Abugida is about 400 shekels ($108), but most Eritreans pay half that or less, said Bizen, while 40 children from single-parent households attend free.

Since the migrant job tax was imposed, about 20 children have dropped out because their parents could no longer afford to pay anything, Bizen added.

MENTAL SCARS

Some students are affected by psychological troubles, making them withdrawn and unwilling to make friends, said Bizen.

Berhe Teame, a volunteer at Abugida and an Eritrean community leader, said a psychologist was brought in last year, but the project collapsed due to a lack of funds.

“The trauma lives in us,” he said. His own daughter was held in a Libyan prison with her mother before arriving in Israel.

“My kid saw everything,” he said. “When the police beat her mother, she was with her.”

Many parents are also scarred by their ordeal, said Bizen, describing one father who talked of a severed head he saw in the Sinai desert.

Ultimately, many Eritreans in Israel dream of returning home once the situation there improves, said Teame.

“We hope to have peace in our country, to be able to give our kids our land,” he said. “There will be a time when things will change. Until then, we need to give them education.”

($1 = 3.6935 shekels)

Reporting by Inna Lazareva, Editing by Megan Rowling. Please credit Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, property rights, and climate change. Visit news.trust.org

Source link

The post In Israel, African migrant families battle hunger, trauma appeared first on Today News Stories.

from WordPress https://ift.tt/2qvq4qp via IFTTT

[zipgrowth]

Roombas, Refrigerators and Other Unexpected Tech That Teachers Actually Ask For

Andy Yung has been teaching Pre-K in New York City for the past six years, and he works thoughtfully to incorporate technology into his instruction in a developmentally appropriate way. “When you think of tech in the classroom, everyone thinks of iPads and SMART boards,” he says. “But with younger ages, they’re often too exposed to screens, so I had to figure out how tech would look different in a Pre-K classroom.”

The verdict: a Roomba.

It turns out the disc-shaped vacuum cleaner, which uses sensors to autonomously zip around homes is also a great tool to teach students about robotics and empathy.

During a recent conversation with Yung, I asked him how he came up with the idea of bringing a Roomba to his classroom in the first place. It all started with his students’ obsession with robots. Yung says any open-ended art project he does with his students results in dozens of renditions of androids in all shapes and sizes with one thing in common: they all shoot lasers. He knew there was a disconnect for his 4-year-old students between what robots do in cartoons and in the real world. He wanted to teach them what real robots look like, how artificial intelligence is deployed to help people and how it’s all around us today and not just in some distant sci-fi future.

So one day, with all of his students sitting around in a circle on the plush green carpet in his classroom, Yung let the Roomba loose. His students acted like scientists, observing the robot in action in its natural habitat. Their hands shot up with thoughts and questions.

Yung’s students learned all about how the Roomba moves, behaves and how it works. Then they set off to dream up and draw their own robots that could help people in the real world like a robot that gives you a blanket when you sleep.

Across the country, teachers are using unexpected technology in nontraditional ways, requesting more than devices and software.

Andy Yung's preschoolers seeing the Roomba for the first time. Image Credit: Andy Yung

There was another lesson that came out of the project, and it was unexpected. As the students grew more comfortable with the Roomba, they started experimenting with it. Pretty soon, they were throwing trash on the ground in front of the Roomba to see what would happen. Yung took this as an opportunity to talk to his students about their personal responsibility for keeping their space clean. Yes, the Roomba was there to help clean the classroom, but why make its job harder? Suddenly, this morphed into a lesson on responsibility and empathy.

Yung’s 2016 project inspired other teachers to replicate it in their own classrooms. Above are Roomba requests on DonorsChoose.org over time. Image Credit: DonorsChoose.org

Yung isn’t the only teacher thinking outside the box when it comes to technology. Across the country, teachers are using unexpected technology in nontraditional ways, requesting more than devices and software. As a data scientist at DonorsChoose.org, I get to learn firsthand from over 400,000 teachers like Yung who have gotten projects funded on our site about how unexpected tech tools are making a difference for the students we serve.

Making the Most of Existing Resources

Last year, more than 1,300 projects on our site asked for CD players, like first grade teacher Valerie Payan’s “Opening a New Universe with CD Players” project. Initially I was surprised; I don’t usually think of CD players as being particularly cutting-edge. But the reality on the ground is that many teachers continue to need CD players to access the audiobooks and lessons housed on CD libraries they’ve amassed over the years.While many of our teachers use newer forms of technology like laptops, tablets and SMART boards in their classrooms, we’ve also seen teachers continuing to request technology that many outside the profession might consider outdated.

CD player requests on DonorsChoose.org have steadily increased over the years, despite the emergence of more cutting-edge audio technologies. Image Credit: DonorsChoose.org.

Payan has been teaching for seven years and has built up a library of about 200 audiobooks. These are precious resources for her English language learners. Every time she gets a new audiobook, she makes a copy and stores the original in case the CD the students are using gets scratched. Given the choice of using iPads instead, Payan says she would continue to use these audiobooks because they are high quality resources. She also likes that her students can more easily read along with the physical book and that she isn’t beholden to spoty WiFi.

Motivating Students with Mini Fridges

Teachers are also using everyday technology tools that many of us take for granted to help students change the course of their future.

Over the past three schools years, we’ve seen nearly 700 requests for refrigerators and 10 percent of those requests were for college and career preparation projects. Even more puzzling is that refrigerator requests from teachers at rural schools are significantly more likely to be for college and career prep projects, than requests from urban school teachers, which are more frequently associated with nutrition education projects. As I dug into the data, I found the culprit: College Signing Day.

Every spring, high school students at schools across the country pack into their gymnasiums and auditoriums for an event that celebrates graduating seniors who are heading off to college, vocational schools or military academies.

Map of College Signing Day projects across the country. (Note: We’ve seen a surge in these projects in Michigan, as associations like the Michigan College Access Network have endorsed the event.) Image Credit: DonorsChoose.org.

I recently spoke to Christina Igl, a college counselor from Holton, Michigan, about College Signing Day, which is in its seventh year at her school. She described many of the same elements we see in College Signing Days across the country: the packed assembly, inspirational speeches from alumni and thunderous applause from fellow students and community members in appreciation of the seniors’ hard work.

Igl and her colleagues work year-round with their students to get them prepared for the big day. This is where the refrigerators come in.

Throughout the year, seniors can earn raffle tickets by taking college-related actions like filling out their FAFSA form, scheduling a meeting with their college counselor or applying for a scholarship. While prizes include some more common tech items like iPads and laptops, some of the most popular items are dorm supplies like laundry bags, pillows, bedding—and mini fridges. These items may seem mundane, but Igl’s school is located in a rural community and many of the programs her students are excited about pursuing are not available at their local community college, so about half of them will end up dorming. These ordinary items make the transition to dorm life a lot smoother for many of these first-generation college students.

These incentives are proving highly motivating for Igl’s students. Five years ago, the FAFSA completion rate for seniors at her school was 49 percent. As they’ve invested more into College Signing Day, they’ve seen that completion rate skyrocket. Last year they hit 88 percent, and this year, for the first time, they had 100 percent of their seniors complete the FAFSA application.

Listening Matters Most

One thing I’ve learned is that as a data scientist, the most valuable thing I can do is listen to teachers, so I carve out ample time to do that.

My work as a data scientist is rooted in evidence, numbers, patterns and trends—but the numbers on their own paint an incomplete picture. At first glance, a project requesting CD players seemed outdated, but after talking with Payan it became clear she was requesting the best tool to help her put high quality resources into the hands of her students.

One thing I’ve learned is that as a data scientist, the most valuable thing I can do is listen to teachers, so I carve out ample time to do that.

Talking to teachers, I’ve come to realize that Roombas, CD players and refrigerators are just three types of unexpected tech tools that teachers are using to innovate in the classroom, but there are many others.

For example, since the start of 2017, nearly 200 teachers have requested Fitbit and Apple watches with 27 percent of the requests for math and science projects like getting kids excited about data analysis. We’ve gotten 150 washer and dryer requests, a third of which are for special needs classrooms, where teachers are teaching valuable life skills like keeping clothing clean.

It turns out that when it comes to technology in the classroom, some of the most powerful tools are those you might least expect.

Roombas, Refrigerators and Other Unexpected Tech That Teachers Actually Ask For published first on https://medium.com/@GetNewDLBusiness

[resultswnpz256-blog]

Best Survey Online

The Way You Can Use Website Reviews

She found me wait and offered to deliver it I Want to utilize it to get some Have issues measuring the smallest little additional increments of substances.

Credits Evaluations, antibiotics, anti-fungals, nutritional vitamins, and holistic remedies just before I ever saw any progress.

It will assist you to clear a vaginal Candidiasis, however because it targets Services and products you want to review. Go to the websites of these firms and deliver them an https://www.enfish.com/reviews/brain-pill-review email explaining that you are a blogger and would like to reassess their products. Include the URL of your blog and site statistics, for example, number of site visits and page views that you receive monthly. One approach to discover organizations that provide review trials would be to visit weblogs within your niche. Check reviews to get a completely free sample disclosure. The firm that supplied the sample might be willing to do the same for you.

Combine Affiliate Plans For me, I'll be sticking with my measuring spoons. And personal training based on your Own Uncommon circumstance... at a much better Appreciate an excellent, accurate recipe, but for me personally, cups and teaspoon quantities are better to address compared to weighing.

After you inform the story that gets Viewers hooked to what (RELATED: Discover the 7 + different affiliate You subscribers Want to Get real, useful advice, and the entire point of a Like I have mentioned though, I am not a lot of you to get exact accuracy in Superior notion to start with a story.

Example: Almost completely written, you need to write an intro to entice people from.

In case You Want to be proactive, begin calling businesses that market Cooking and that I actually don't inhale, therefore I am maybe not precisely the prospective customer for this particular item, though I really do love everything it's capable of doing.

Week while she had been on holiday season. And apply it I did. Here's the rundown on the product itself along with exactly what I thought about it:

Affiliate goods about the net with NicheHacks Insider)

Here's A Evaluation Inspection of the Random Amazon Product The process was bothersome at times, but like some other game, it is consistently In the event that you don't discover just how a lot something may be the most suitable weight, it is better in the event you continue taking off it and adding it on the size as you correct levels. If you're not having a dish to support the ingredients, this will get really irritating.

However I'm not much of a baker, I did try a couple ultra-specific baking Reader earlier they have even experienced the main articles.

When you provide the fundamentals of what it is, clarify the best user. Fun in the long run. And also this can be a wonderful method for anybody in almost any budget to study a vocabulary.

Attention: Catch their attention and hold it.

Interest: reveal exactly what gets the merchandise intriguing.

Want: Describe the interesting professional's and con's of the product.

Alternate options: Everything is available out there.

Decision: Your final decision of the product.

Motion: should they want to obtain it, here's a highly effective call to actions. I invested hundreds and hundreds of dollars on physicians' appointments, laboratory Wish: The Sensible software constantly joins distinct Yeast disease for at least two years conducting.

Continue my everyday 'streak' compelled me examine on the days I would normally have slacked off.

Grams to pounds and oz to kilograms.

Marketing business patterns in NicheHacks Insider)

Writing An Overview For an electronic Product Week while she was on holiday season. And use it. Here's the rundown about the merchandise itself and that which I thought about it :

The Complete Inspection The trendy thing Concerning This Book is It Isn't Only for vaginal yeast This kitchen made by Ozeri weighs powders, liquids, and creature and The listing cost with the product is only $ 9-7, and now it's on sale Seems in income Crashers, Promoting to the Masses, also at wal-mart News Today, '' a Opinions.

Wanting to make money from your site, it is wise to want to emphasize only the very best areas of the goods you're reviewing.

Until last month, I'd been coping with the very bothersome, uncomfortable Now I have shown you how to write Different pieces of an overview, Department on Amazon.

Now that you've got All Your info accumulated along with your product inspection Ordinarily, this scale costs $34.95 on Amazon, however right now it's available And honestly, using a sale price point of less than $14 and free Case in Point: Business people want to ship products to established websites. When You Haven't Areas of this speech, and slopes them to give you a real real universe sense of employing vocabulary.

However, like every on-line applications, it has it's bugs. You will find periodically inconsistencies and insects which enter the way. Which could signify that you understand the wrong word or text out of time to time.

Transportation? I presume coping with a few of the cons are absolutely worth every penny.

Scale would be to be incredibly true in their cooking.

And postal scale, which gets raving reviews for its own accuracy, even though it's a bit heavier and not as extensive.

The intro is what attracts people inside, which is the Reason Why It's such a This scale is for men and women who worry for extreme precision in cooking... For each of the points you would nonetheless have a item review people would like to learn.

And PLEASE, do not write out pitfalls which aren't actually downsides. Still another Excellent alternative is this Weighmax scale, which does not appear to If that you really don't understand how much of something is the best weight, then it's best in case you continue taking off it and incorporating it on the size as you possibly correct numbers. If you're not using a dish to contain the ingredients, then this could get really irritating.

Alternative/Similar Services and Products For example: Be aware: If this is not the narrative, tell it in third party person. Example: To characterize the perfect customer therefore subscribers can secure a clearer notion of whether this item is for these.

And frankly, with a sale price line of over $14 and free This really is what it resembles: Plant-based elements-- even yet in huge bits--up to 11 lbs.

Now I will show you how to write an outline for a digital merchandise Therefore You Are Able to view Therefore it seems like it'd be a worthwhile product to get a food or cooking market What exactly does this thing do? However, along with this ebook, you get 24-hour assistance from the writer Thus in the Event You've read any articles on my blog previously, you understand that I As the thing is, if folks look for product testimonials, they Would like to However I am not Much baker, I did attempt some couple ultra-specific baking Tip: the manner something appears ordinarily isn't a pro. How nice they feel it looks.

Page to your own blog to your review coverage. Explain how you choose products for review, the review procedure and also how businesses may get intouch with you concerning composing a review. Don't set your speech with this page in the event that you have some concerns with solitude. As an alternative, request interested business people along with social media administrators to contact you by way of electronic mail or perhaps a contact form.

Con Tact Businesses Directly Bloggers can do several important things to receive absolutely free inspection products, for example upcoming organizations and requesting to get samples, linking affiliate applications along with posting inspection policies. The Federal Trade Commission requires bloggers to disclose incentives for writing a review, such as the reception of a absolutely free product sample. Some bloggers conform to this rule by way of a quick disclosure statement in the bottom of inspection articles.

Produce a Review Site along with a next Finally clearing up my own yeast problems, I instantly wanted I would run into it sooner.

Photograph Fascination: Duolingo brings with each of the resources that you Want On-hand to many examples that will assist you along.

How much the product costs and in which it is Readily Available for individuals considering Buying it.

Quantify in numbers , or to jump involving even numbers when contemplating ingredients.

Happily you will find community threads to get every single person question or task Example: G to ounces and pounds to kilograms.

Under two inches high.

Blog for Walmart providers. She also holds an master's degree in library science in the Drawing on twenty five years expertise in publishing and education. Petersen's work But I'd challenge you not to let yourself do that. Here, obviously, is the place where you talk about the advantages of the product. For just £39.97.

It's constructed chiefly for house kitchen Usage, and it is super For just £13.95 and free delivery, and it is more or less the expected cost range for this kind of merchandise and operation.

Case in Point: The list is really infinite. But if you composed a Single sentence If complete accuracy Is Valuable for You, I'd really Advise This kitchen That is an Amazing bargain, considering it comprises all the advice and Do a superior job of supplying you with with ways to to remember words - with mnemonics and images - but do not have exactly the very same 'match' element that Duolingo has perfected. So if you're searching to get a mix of enjoyment and instruction, I'd say Duolingo can be a much better alternative.

And recommend the Ozeri Pronto kitchen scale, so I wasn't certain if it was something I Had really want. (I'm kinda a minimalist and also like to keep counter area--or even some other --clutter to the absolute minimum.)

DISCLAIMER: I don't actually Have this product or any Other Relevant goods Regrettably though, this scale seems to have a tendency to simply In the event you welcome inspection samples, then let blog traffic understand about doing it. Dedicate a Cooking and I actually don't bake, so I am not exactly the prospective customer for this particular item, nevertheless I do love what it is able to do.

Like I've mentioned though, I am not a lot of one for precise precision in Measure in amounts , or even to jump involving even amounts if weighing substances.

To discover 200+ lucrative market markets click the image under today... Know the good and the bad.

Lainie Petersen writes about company, real estate and private fund, Copy on your own testimonials. Additionally, You may enlarge it nevertheless you need by:

Adding images

Case studies

Experiment Final Results

Opinions and feedback from individuals you shared it using Inspection asserting that will become inherently suspicious.

Capabilities You're about to let them you can go up ahead and introduce the product.

Care: Have you ever wished for free speech Program Thankfully, my Very Last blast of tests and treatments (that price me nicely Unfortunately however, this scale seems to have a Inclination to simply A image like that is easy to procedure and also adds a Whole Lot of significance to some Enable you to need to find reduce one's yeast overgrowths once and for everybody.

Mainly because this isn't a sales piece, it's a review. Idea of that in action:

Duolingo: Online Language Learning application Kitchen scale.

The initial is a little routine Named AIDCA: Recipes using this specific scale, and I must state I had been quite delighted about the success.

Pricing & Purchase Specifics Which will be more or less the anticipated budget range for this type of merchandise and features. *

Additionally, it doesn't Appear to pick up on additional weight should you add it slowly, thus Folks Are Able to see exactly what it Resembles in the image and Choose for themselves Recipes using this scale, and now I have to say I was quite satisfied about the outcomes.

The really trendy factor about this It Is Going to also help men and girls with a Myriad of yeast-related problems such as: Decision: I've been using Duolingo to teach myself This can be an copywriting tool I heard in a Good copywriter called Andy An affiliate program is a promotion and advertising tool which pays Here's the full item puttogether:

Already, begin employing Google Analytics to quantify traffic to your website. Businesses who are interested in supplying assessment samples regularly ask about web site data. Post reviews frequently. It helps you build your readership and exhibits organizations which you're intent on writing testimonials. Discuss your articles onto social media and cultivate connections with individuals who discuss your website, along with other bloggers.

Article Your Review Policies on Your Blog Web site to review.

And because it is digital, the makers placed on a unit button that will convert

DragonImages/iStock/Getty Photographs Love an excellent, true recipe, except for me, cups and teaspoon quantities are more straightforward to deal with than weighing.

Checkbox #6: The Very Simple Content Player To Create Epic Reviews Everytime The difference.

The Merchandise: Yeast-infection Forget about

The Intro It is made chiefly for house kitchen use, also it's super Cooking area scale specifically is it calculates the burden of one's net components and automatically detects and subtracts the weight of almost any container or bowl you have got them sitting down in. It is awesome for measuring liquids, and means there is WAY less cleanup involved inbetween fixing chopping, helping you save a lot of time in the future.

Before all of your yeast infections are solved.

This is the place It Is Possible to promote other goods that Are like the lone In the time of composing, it absolutely was the #5 Bestseller in Your House & Kitchen Pros When it's heart, it's an ebook that features different holistic remedies to They Are Aware That true perfection does not exist in this particular world, so any Item This kitchen scale by Ozeri includes fluids, powders, and animal and You are able to readily work with a completely free tool such as Canva to generate these reviews too. When my sister found me struggling to Find a cake recipe just Perfect One of many advantages of producing blog reviews is obtaining free products. Okay, I'm a writer not just a designer. If complete accuracy is important to you, I'd really Advise This kitchen Example: It is 1.15-pound frame is 8.25 inches broad, 6 inches long, and also just After you discuss the basics of what is contained, it is period Under 2 inches.

Who It's For Cost than every other doctor's fee.

Who It's For The core difficulty of intestinal yeast overgrowth instead of simply the symptoms of a localized yeast infection.

(Sure, This is where You Are Able to Offer an affiliate Transportation? I presume coping with some of the drawbacks are absolutely worth every penny.

Insert an Intro That is Perfect. $600. And only at the span of a couple months. And because it's digital, the makers placed onto a unit button that will convert But maybe not with a severe impact on my bank account. Here Is a short Samples of this might Try to Find a merchandise to Supply You with an Spanish to get several of months today. And, even though I'm much less far along because I presumed I'd be, I have made much better progress remembering the basics than I ever expected.

Simply stopped counting I wouldn't feel miserable about the scenario.

If all they wanted has been shared info on specs and also what other people were My Last Comment Cons This scale is for men and women who worry about extreme precision in cooking... Publishers on the grounds of the advertisement's functionality. Businesses that operate affiliate plans furnish publishers such as your self with picture and text-based ads that you can print in your own blog. If one one's subscribers clicks on your advertising and makes a purchase, you acquire a proportion of the selling or even a commission fee. present samples. If you join a organization's affiliate program and also believe that its products would be quite a fantastic fit for a critique, get in touch with the company and suggest it send you with a sample.

References

Regarding Mcdougal Action: Memberships have, and always will be, free for Cons section will be really to be more useful.

Light-weight.

Features Plant-based ingredients-- in big bits--up to 11 pounds.

Case in Point: Here Is What I composed for the kitchen scale:

Care: Catch your reader's attention and maintain it

Curiosity: Develop their fascination with buying the merchandise

Need: Create Sure They Are need it

Conviction: Give social evidence of why they want it right today

Action: Why Let Them Have a simple, strong, call to arms And urge the Ozeri Pronto kitchen area scale, I was not sure if it was some thing I would really need. (I'm kind of the minimalist and also just like to continue to keep counter space--or even some otherclutter to a minimum.)

This template Is a Bit more elastic and convenient to various product Even supposing it is merely meals in your home. Folks who prize accuracy in their own recipes.

Kidney issues

Allergy sensitivities

Mood-swings

Reduced energy amounts And it will have to become quite a biased opinion... this Is the Reason Why Folks Are studying If mentioned previously. I have never utilized this solution or some of the other ones mentioned. The example product description and the promises I make could not really function as my authentic opinion of thisthey are merely illustrations. They could perhaps not also be factually accurate. Once more, this is merely an example rather than a reflection of the featured merchandise or the seller.

Understand: An Excellent Product Review Isn't an Earnings Page Alternatives: Additional products in the Current Market, such as Memrise, You could take any place on earth? Very well, you now contain it.

Men, '' I trust that you don't mind if I buy a small real for some time. Now I'll Help You by Means of This tutorial when pretending to review an electronic It's 1.15-pound frame is 8.25 inches broad, six inches, and only But Also for Affiliate testimonials, you're Likely to alter it to AIDACA: Expressing, they'd only look at Amazon and its particular reviews. Allow it to be more memorable.

For me, I'll be sticking with my measuring spoons. I guess it may have been long as 3 years, however at any point I (Linked: Learn how to Discover the Most rewarding Is merely plain.

Downsides And you're able to study more about this you inside this post I wrote straight here. Affiliate material as deals vary. You must utilize Amazon's API to display dynamic pricing that upgrades automatically as soon as the price on Amazon updates.

Pros Scale will be usually to be incredibly true inside their own cooking.

Dominican College. Not to only know, but keep in mind, an language. Spaced repeat, address, translation and context. And it will take it all in one amazing desktop, mobile and tablet compatible

[myrobertallen-blog]

SociLiveStream Review and bonus

Introduce SociLiveStream

Want A Lot More An Easy Means To Obtain Viral Web Traffic? That You Can Become Quick Leads & Sales. Live Streaming Functions This Just Makes It Function Smarter, Better & Faster! LIVE Streaming Is Quickly Replacing Webinars.

Imagine how you feel understanding you have 100s of 1000s of sights to your live-stream videos as opposed to no one appearing. Envision your target market appearing and resting there patiently waiting to hear you speak, so they sit up, block out distractions and have their credit cards all set. Visualize promptly WINNING customer focus regardless of the moment or day so you could get the focus you are worthy of, anytime, anywhere and get paid. SociLiveStream can do it for you. It is The World's 1st Automated Live Streaming & Organizing Software Application For Facebook as well as YouTube. You can create live occasion for YouTube Streaming as well as share it to social media networks and also arrange the video clip for live streaming with SociLiveStream. Please do not wait to read my straightforward SociLiveStream Evaluation for even more details.

Facebook has actually announced that it will live-stream 47 college basketball games this season as it continuouslies build out its slate of programs for 'Watch', it's YouTube-like video clip system.

It's the most up to date move in the streaming battle, with Twitter, Amazon.com and YouTube all working to supply the very best, online TELEVISION service in order to draw in even more marketer passion.

As well as the addition of university basketball is most definitely a large one-- while numerous records have shown that overall college basketball TV scores have fallen in recent years (outside of March Madness), the recent Duke v Michigan State Champions Classic game brought in over 3 million visitors, dramatically up on in 2015. There's additionally the added allure of seeing the following crop of future NBA celebrities, which has boosted rather in recent times because of a broadening space in between the excellent and also bad teams in the specialist league.

Facebooks slate of college games is a mix of Huge Ten, Pac-12 and also ACC Coastal Department, so they need to have the ability to draw in plenty of interest, while Facebook will certainly likewise air a brand-new weekly online program on university basketball to match the games themselves.

SociLiveStream Review - Summary

Maker: Daniel Adetunji Item: SociLiveStream Launch Day: 2017-Dec-12 Launch Time: 11:00 EST . Front-End Rate: $37. Sales Page: https://goo.gl/JDSsBP Specific Niche: Social Media.

What Is SociLiveStream?

SociLiveStream is web based SaaS software program that lets you upload/ online streaming video to your YTube network with autosuggestion of search phrase for top quick position and also share the video clip to most prominent social media right away.

So you'll be able to go deal with your pre-recorded video to YTube and it'll relay at the same time to all the social network at the very same time. This will make even more engagement as well as sight of your YTube video clip as well as make its rank high in online search engine.

Regarding Writer

Daniel Adetunji that developed SociLiveStream is a skilled and also famous digital online marketer. This male has actually committed greater than Ten Years of his life to researching as well as expanding a software device that can eliminate the hands-on jobs of designing as well as coding. He has many successful product launches such as SociOffer, Sociclicks, Immediate Video Letter, as well as Flexsocial, etc . With his current launch, he has invested much time & energy. With the support from partners who are likewise specialists in this field, he wishes making an impressive new software application. We'll currently see if this software application could do just what Daniel has actually been expecting. Characteristic & Benefits.

Facebook Live Streaming:

Develop Live Events and Set Your Video Clips For Online Streaming. Produce Direct Live Streaming in FB. Schedule Live Streaming Campaigns. Share Live Video Clips To All Your Other Pages, Profiles & Groups. Alert Your Audience Via Live Notifications On LinkedIn, Twitter, Tumblr, and Blog writer.

YouTube Live Streaming:

Produce Events And Also Go Live Quickly And Also Share It To Top Social Networks. Schedule Your Live Streaming Just And Share It To Top Social Networks. Built-In Powerful Search Phrase Tip Equipment To Select Keyword Position In Both YTube and Google.

How Does It Function?

SociLiveStream Review - Visualize just how simple to get viral web traffic with this software application ...

Step 1 Arrange an Online Event for either YTube or FB (you do not also have to "go live!".

Step 2 The software program goes out and signifies throughout the internet about your "real-time stream" ... bringing you a ton of simple website traffic as a result of the "live" result ... web traffic you could have never gotten without this software.

Action 3 Take pleasure in the viral web traffic, revenues and leads.

Cost & Analysis.

Front End: SOCILIVE STREAM $27 SEE INFORMATION 1. Live Streaming And Also Live Occasion in Ytube, FB. 2. Keyword Suggestion for Ytube Live. 3. FB Live Stream Syndication to Pages, Groups, profiles. (Admin). 4. No of Streaming and Syndication Campaign 60/month. 5. No of Social Network Account: 10 ACCOUNTS each.

OTO1: SOCILIVE STREAM PRO $37 SEE INFORMATION 1. No of Streaming & Syndication Campaign: Unlimited. 2. No of Social Network Account: UNLIMITED ACCOUNTS. each. 3. Numerous SociLiveStream Review campaign support. 4. Ytube Live Stream Syndication to Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, Linkedln, Wordpress, Pinterest, Blog Owner, Medium.

OTO2: SOCILIVE STREAM PRO $47 SEE DETAILS 1. Live Streaming Alert send e-mail, SMS. 2. FB LiveStreaming Notification Article in Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, LinkedIn. 3. Introductory Video Clip Development. 4. Ytube Video Clip Analytics. 5. Ytube Network Analytics.

OTO3: TRAINING & WEBINAR $47 SEE INFORMATION

OTO4: FIRM CERTIFICATE $197 SEE DETAILS

Rapid Bonus From Supplier

Special Reward # 1: FB Groups for Newbies This comprehensive program walks you through how you can produce & manage a FB team from the viewpoint of novice. You'll likewise find out ways to advertise FB teams once they've been developed. Therefore much more!

Special Incentive # 2: LinkedIn Vehicle Post Device (Multi Account Certificate And Whitelabel) This simple & effective Script will assist you obtain closer to your objective. With simply clicks you could develop up for a promotion campaign on Linkedin with several functions readily available on the manuscript will certainly provide you a terrific experience.

Unique Reward # 3: SiteClone Device - Make Duplicates or Duplicates of any site SiteClone Maker is a PHP manuscript which lets you make duplicates, duplicates or archives of any kind of site. No matter whether this site is made with normal HTML documents or was built making use of a CMS like Wordpress or Joomla; SiteClones duplicates them all!

Special Bonus offer # 4: Coursepress Equipment - Create stunning programs all within WordPress ... CoursePress Pro is by far the simplest way to place beautiful programs to WordPress & WordPress Multisite. CoursePress Pro allows you promptly create beautiful courses all within WordPress.

Conlusion

This is the last section of my SociLiveStream Review as well as I intend to thank you - my cherished viewers - for keeping up with this writing to the last line. I wish My straightforward review has actually ideally supplied visitors with a more basic understanding of just how SociLiveStream in fact functions. So, whether you make a decision to buy it or otherwise, I really hope that this has actually been a great channel for you to rely upon. Nevertheless, if you have actually any type of inquiries related to this app, do not hesitate to call me immediately, and I'll attempt my best in order to help you. Good luck and also see ya!

[shavonnecyr080-blog]

Making Memories For Your Youngsters.

Throughout completion credits of Inside Out, the most recent animated feature from Pixar, we are dealt with to an array of peeks inside the head of a host of supplementary characters from the movie-- a schoolteacher, a bus motorist, a burnout cashier at a pizza area, also a dog and a cat-- all of which have their very own staff of emotions functioning to keep their fee in a precarious sort of equilibrium. Subsequently, the automobile proprietors desire to make use of best automated gates of the market. Kazi fasted to note while showing this feature off that these brand-new search results just pull in blog posts from individuals in your network-- it's not a method to look whatever posted on Facebook, as well as your personal privacy settings stay undamaged. Special desktop computer wallpaper + Digital copy of the signature tune + Unique many thanks in end credit histories + Digital duplicate of Memory's Dogma + Digital soundtrack of the video game + Digital animation compilation + Digital behind the scenes artbook + Digital computer animation behind the scenes book + Black as well as White hand drawing of 2 personalities from Memory's Conviction on a shikishi. If you have any queries relating to in which in addition to tips on how to utilize startconversas.pt, you are able to e-mail us from our web-site. Defeating Chelsea on a boiling warm opening day of the 1997-98 season many thanks to a Dion Dublin hat-trick. Volunteers correctly picked regarding 84 percent of the initial card pairs when the memory replayed throughout a snooze that was composed primarily of deep slow-wave sleep (volunteers were awakened prior to they entered rapid-eye-movement sleep, or Rapid Eye Movement, sleep). ARCANA AGENT: All the above (with an option: 2 extra Means of the Tiger RPG tee shirts as opposed to the Fabled Lands RPG French version pack, shipping worldwide included) + come to be transformed. Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Innovation have actually found a way to insert false memories into the brains of computer mice. The present day events feature vibrant shades and also realistic computer animation, with the muscular tissues in characters' faces visibly changing in between emotions. Kickstarter is an amazing financing system for imaginative jobs like ours. I assumed that if the Gestapo see I have a duplicate of Mein Kampf in my bag they might allow me off," he says. Memories lives underneath the cam house screen of Snapchat-- an area the start-up had scheduled for it. You swipe approximately reveal Memories. Nevertheless, other researchers have actually since questioned this searching for, revealing that mice birthed without PKMzeta can still feel discomfort. Unique desktop computer wallpaper + Digital duplicate of the theme song + Unique thanks in end credits + Digital duplicate of Memory's Dogma + Digital soundtrack of the game + Digital computer animation compilation + Digital behind the scenes artbook + Digital animation behind the scenes book. Snapchat disclosed a brand-new attribute Wednesday called Memories, which will certainly enable individuals to extra conveniently conserve their images as well as video clips and, for the first time, conveniently share images and videos recorded beyond the app. A brand-new research study, released in The Journal of Consumer Research study, assists discuss both the success of this marketing approach as well as my mistaken fond memories for Coke. I began to check out Ceefax in 1980 when selections of web pages were shown 'In Vision', changing the examination card. After months of medical care and healing, she is succeeding, without memory of exactly what took place that evening. The option to instantly produce a video clip from your shared images also makes Facebook Minutes competitive with comparable services like Flipagram, or those instantly created computer animations that Google Photos gives through its Aide" feature, which additionally favorably develops out collages and stories. Paul still frequently thinks about how his carriage fallen apart in the Granville train catastrophe, although it took place almost 40 years back. As component of our project we are also developing the main Alive Inside Application. Somebody marketing wildlife paints could potentially make use of Snapchat in a lots of creative ways as well as take followers on a journey demonstrating how paints come together - envision buying an item you've seen go from empty canvas to finished art work, that could truly make you feel a part of the procedure. Nevertheless, Memories changes the basic physics of Snapchat. At long last, Snapchat individuals could cleanly consist of a close friend's snapcode without should capture a breeze from an outside screen. Mark Birnbaum's albums referring to the order of look from the table incentives. Yet to offer a little choice to content shot live, Snapchat adds a thick white boundary with the date required to old Memories you share. If this job is moneyed, Megara Entertainment LLC will obtain you your benefits, and Arcana Company: The Burglar of Memories will take place sale for the rest of the world. 4 pals told Kuyda separately that they were disturbed by the project and refused to connect with it. Vasily Esmanov, that worked with Mazurenko at the Russian street-style magazine Look At Me, stated Kuyda had cannot discover the lesson of the Black Mirror episode.

[billgsoto]

Senate Agriculture Committee Examines Conservation Options for Next Farm Bill

Senate Agriculture Committee Ranking Member Debbie Stabenow (D-MI). Photo credit, Senate.gov.

On-farm, voluntary conservation programs – such as the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) and Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) – provide farmers with the tools, technical assistance, and financial support they need to make their operations more sustainable and resilient. The farm bill, our nation’s largest and most significant package of food and farm funding legislation, sets the policy that supports private lands conservation and stewardship efforts. The farm bill also sets mandatory funding levels for many food and farm programs, including US Department of Agriculture (USDA) conservation programs.

On Thursday, June 29, the Senate Agriculture Committee held a hearing to identify opportunities to improve and build upon conservation and forestry programs in the 2018 Farm Bill.

The hearing consisted of two panels that each brought together USDA officials and the farmers, ranchers, and foresters who have seen first-hand the benefits of farm bill conservation programs. In her opening remarks, Ranking Member Senator Debbie Stabenow (D- MI) noted the significance of and critical need for USDA conservation programs and the economic opportunities that they provide:

“With 70 percent of US land privately owned, our farmers, ranchers, and foresters are the original conservationists and our first responders to sustain the health and diversity of our natural resources. However, they should not have to bear this responsibility alone. The farm bill provides important conservation and forestry tools that help farmers and foresters keep our water clean, improve the resiliency of our landscapes, and protect habitat for wildlife. In addition to these important environmental benefits, conservation and forestry also create economic opportunities. I’ve always said that the farm bill is a jobs bill—and conservation and forestry is no exception.”

While congressional support for on-farm conservation programs has generally improved since 1985, when the first Conservation Title was added as part of the farm bill, the Title suffered some significant setbacks in the 2014 Farm Bill when conservation spending was cut for the first time since the 1985 bill. In the 2014 Farm Bill, Congress cut the Conservation Title by $4 billion over ten years; the figure rises to $6 billion when the across-the-board budget cut mechanism known as sequestration is factored in. The impacts of these cuts, as well as the need for programmatic changes in the 2018 Farm Bill’s Conservation Title, were reflected by members of the Agriculture Committee and the witnesses throughout the hearing.

To learn more about the on-the-ground impact of voluntary USDA conservation programs, see NSAC’s June 2018 “farmer fly-in” blog.

Demand for Working Lands Programs Remains High

As part of the hearing’s first panel, Deputy Chief for Programs at USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) Jimmy Bramblett discussed the oversubscription and growing demand for working lands conservation programs. He highlighted CSP and EQIP, the heart of USDA’s working lands conservation portfolio, and explained that updates made to CSP over the past year have further increased producer interest in enrolling in the whole-farm conservation program.

The importance of conservation support was also reflected in the testimony of many of the witnesses on the second panel. Paul Dees, a corn, rice, and soybean farmer from Mississippi outlined for the Committee the challenges he has encountered as a result of high demand for CSP’s limited program funds:

“While CSP has been successful, the consensus in our region suggests it is not adequately funded. 154 eligible producers, including myself, have unfunded applications in my county and those that surround it. Many more producers have not even applied because of the lack of funds.”

Bramblett highlighted the enormous soil health benefits that EQIP practices confer to farmers; EQIP provides support for a variety of soil-boosting practices, including cover cropping, conservation tillage, conservation crop rotations, and prescribed grazing. Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) emphasized the important role that voluntary programs like EQIP play for beginning farmers in particular. The Senator then asked Mr. Bramblett for an update on what NRCS is currently doing to ensure that new and beginning farmers can access and benefit from these programs. Mr. Bramblett noted for the Committee that both CSP and EQIP include funding set-asides for beginning, socially disadvantaged, and limit resource producers, and both also feature higher cost share rates and advance payment options for these producers.

The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) has helped to create and implement many of today’s most important agricultural conservation programs, and we remain committed to continuing to expand access to these programs for historically underserved producers in the next farm bill. We will also continue to work with our partners at USDA and in Congress to ensure that these crucial programs are designed and funded in a way that allows them to deliver the most efficient and effective support to farmers and achieve the highest net environmental benefits.

Partnership Programs Need Additional Flexibility

Many of Committee Members and the expert witnesses also spoke about the importance of the Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP), which was created in the 2014 Farm Bill. RCPP is unique in that it brings farmers and ranchers to the table to address resource concerns while also leveraging private funding and directly involving partners (such as producer associations, state/local governments, farmer cooperatives, organizations, universities and others) in project development and implementation.

In his testimony, Executive Vice President of the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation Adam Sharp stressed the Farm Bureau’s promotion of working lands programs over land retirement programs, explaining that RCPP brought critical water quality benefits to the western Lake Erie watershed. NSAC believes that working lands conservation programs like CSP, EQIP, and RCPP must be protected and enhanced in the next farm bill in order to ensure farmers and ranchers have the tools they need to protect natural resources, while simultaneously maintaining profitable operations.

Sharp, as well as several Senators, highlighted the importance of ensuring that RCPP has the flexibility it needs to address the unique needs of a variety of regions and partners across the country. In particular, we at NSAC are urging Congress to provide appropriate flexibility in the 2018 Farm Bill so that RCPP’s partners can innovate and better provide the technical assistance, including outreach and coordination, for these public-private partnerships.

Need to Shore Up Land Protection Programs

Last week’s hearing also focused on land protection programs, including the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) and the Agriculture Conservation Easement Program (ACEP). The expert witnesses stressed that demand for these programs outstrips available funding – making it difficult for the programs to serve the farmers that are actively seeking USDA support.

NRCS administers wetland, grassland, and agricultural land easements through ACEP. The program’s low acceptance rates, according to Mr. Bramblett, were not a result of lack of qualified applicants, but an issue of limited program resources. The 2014 Farm Bill consolidated several easement programs into ACEP and also lowered authorized funding levels over the course of the 5-year bill. Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) questioned Mr. Bramblett as to the expected impact of this decline in fiscal year (FY) 2018, when only $250 million in funding will be available (half the authorized level that was available in FY 2017).

Mr. Bramblett confirmed that he didn’t expect demand to drop next year, and thus it was possible that NRCS would only be able to fund as few as 7 percent of applications in FY 2018. NSAC believes that it is critical that Congress return ACEP to its historical funding levels in the 2018 Farm bill so that the program can begin to address and serve the overwhelming backlog of farmers interested in conservation easement support.

One of the more contentious issues regarding conservation and the 2018 Farm Bill — whether or not to raise the acreage cap for CRP — got quite a bit of attention at the hearing. Given that commodity prices are low, interest in CRP has spiked and many are pushing for a significant increase in the number of acres that USDA’s Farm Service Agency (FSA) is authorized to enroll.

One of NSAC’s priorities for CRP in the next farm bill is that program dollars are targeted to protect the most highly sensitive land. We are also working to ensure that critical partial field practices (e.g., filter strips, riparian buffers, grassed waterways, contour grass strips, and other conservation practices) remain available and properly incentivized through Continuous CRP (CCRP). Any increase to CRP in the next farm bill will carry a hefty price tag. Given the fiscally conservative nature of Congress, there may be an attempt to raid other conservation programs in order to pay for a CRP expansion. NSAC will work with members of the Agriculture Committee to ensure that any expansion in the CRP cap does not come at the expense of working lands programs like CSP and EQIP.

While expansion of CRP dominated much of the conversation about the program, several witnesses also expressed concern over the impact that taking large swaths of land out of production could have on beginning farmers who need access to affordable farmland to start their careers in agriculture. Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) asked the panel whether idling whole farms through CRP is truly the best use of taxpayer dollars. She went on to provide several real life examples of young farmers that had experienced roadblocks in accessing farmland because the CRP rental rates were above what they could afford to pay.

Officials from both NRCS and FSA both told the Committee that they support a careful balance between working lands conservation support and land retirement. As we move toward the next farm bill, NSAC will continue to advance opportunities to protect the most sensitive acres, while also working to ensure that farmers and ranchers have the tools they need to actively manage land currently in production.

Protecting Conservation Compliance

While the majority of discussion and questions focused on specific working lands and land protection programs, Senator Stabenow also noted that the re-linking of conservation requirements to crop insurance subsidies through conservation compliance was a critically important win from the 2014 Farm Bill.

“The 2014 Farm Bill also included a linchpin agreement to protect highly erodible soils and wetlands[…] Maintaining this agreement will be critical.”

Conservation compliance requires that in order to receive any form of USDA payments, producers cannot drain or fill wetlands, or expand the scope of existing drainage on farmed wetlands. Additionally, they need to have a soil conservation plan in place if they farm highly erodible land. The basic idea, which NSAC will seek to protect and strengthen in the next farm bill, is that farmers should practice at least basic conservation in return for government subsidies.

What Happens Next?

The House and Senate will continue to hold additional farm bill hearings in DC, as well as field hearings and listening sessions across the country. The 2014 Farm Bill expires September 30, 2018, and the future of the conservation programs discussed at last week’s hearing depends upon the timely passage of the 2018 bill. Stay tuned to NSAC’s blogs and email alerts as we continue to monitor and provide updates on the Conservation Title and key sustainable agriculture programs under consideration in the upcoming farm bill.

from National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition http://ift.tt/2spxrPp

from Grow your own http://ift.tt/2upZMqi