#saving this build for hypothetical future campaigns

[mernolan]

dnd one shot sword lady!

[sundayswiththeilluminati]

I LOVE your meta on how essek was the perfect asset and want to ask the follow-up question in your tags: how do you think it went down? The agreement between Essek and the Assembly? And I think the fandom was convinced Essek would be disposed of after the peace talks — how do you see his future if there was no intervention by the Mighty Nein in 97?

ruvi-muffin asked:

What are your specific thoughts abt how ludinus recruited essek??👀👀 oh Person who knows a surprising amount of spy stuff 🙏🙏🙏👀👀👀

Anonymous asked:

PLEASE share your specific thoughts about how Essek was recruited, I'm so intrigued!

Anonymous asked:

Hello yes i am very interested in these very specific thoughts about how Essek got recruited? All these things about how actual intelligence works/uses their assets/how that ties to Essek and the M9 is really interesting :D

Thank you all so much for asking me the specific question I wanted someone to ask. I had to write and rewrite this post a half-dozen times because I kept going off on tangents about other Cold War spy stories so trust me there’s plenty more where this came from.

For reference, my original post on what made Essek an ideal recruitment target and why the M9 were the ideal counter to it.

First off, this is all based on real-world intelligence ops and is only as relevant to the campaign as Matt Mercer cares to make it. Having said that *slams notebook on table* BUCKLE UP, KIDDOS.

There are two ways Essek may have been recruited: he approached the Assembly or the Assembly approached him. I think the Assembly approached him. Not to be too hard on the guy, but Essek said it himself: he’s kind of a coward. I can’t see him mustering up the nerve to take that first step. Plus his espionage seems to have focused specifically on the beacons rather than dunamancy as a whole; that sounds like the Assembly to me. The beacons specifically offer the prospect of immortality and the Cerberus mages are arrogant enough to assume they can figure out dunamancy themselves if they have a beacon in hand. There’s no way the Assembly haven’t been trying to beg, borrow, or steal those beacons for centuries. Essek may not have even been their first try - just the first that worked. 

Chronologically, Essek would have popped up on either the Assembly or the Augen Trust’s radar quite early as I assume they keep tabs on all powerful Dynasty mages. As they followed his career, the Assembly would have ID’d Essek as a perfect target for recruitment as a spy, and then further for ego-based recruitment. Recruitment for espionage is a slow process - even slower in a fantasy world where some races reasonably expect to live 500+ years. Many intelligence agencies will do a sort of light meet-and-greet just to start a file on various people who might years later be of interest. The Assembly would have cultivated Essek as an intelligence asset with the same degree of time and care - and using some of the same methods - that Trent used to turn the Blumenthal trio into assassins. 

If they followed a modern playbook, they would have made contact with Essek anywhere from 2 to 10 years before the theft - nothing underhanded. A Cerberus mage approaches him at a negotiation or conference and strikes up a conversation. Then it’s increasing “chance” encounters to get Essek familiar with the handler, play the “we’re both mages, really we’re on the same side” angle to earn enough sympathy & trust to start talking regularly. Once the channel’s open, the handler and asset meet and/or talk routinely while the handler assesses the target’s motives, weaknesses, and the possibility that they’re a double agent. 

Espionage proper then starts with small favors, acts Essek can rationalize as victimless or even helpful to the Dynasty. In this stage the handler is getting the asset comfortable with engaging in espionage. They reward the asset for what feels like minimal moral trespass. For Essek that would have been praising his research, encouraging avenues of investigation they knew the Dynasty had shut down. Having meetings with Ludinus plays right into the ego trip - the Head of the Assembly himself is taking the time to meet with him! The Assembly gets how important this work is! That keeps Essek isolated from Dynasty members who might convince him to take a step back and builds loyalty to the Assembly over the Dynasty.

Once an asset settles in, espionage becomes easier. Routines get established. Moral hurdles have been overcome. Now the asks get bigger and the rewards get sparser. The handler will suggest larger acts just to get the asset thinking about them, since the more they consider “just hypothetically” how to pull it off, the more likely it is they’ll do it. This is where the idea of stealing the beacons would get introduced (though of course it’s been the goal all along.) I’ll bet the Assembly hinted at all the study that could be done if they could just get to the beacons in person, constantly bemoaning the lack of access. By now Essek sees the Assembly as colleagues in arcane pursuits, kindred minds, unlike the boring, stuffy old mages of the Dynasty. Of course he could outwit the Dynasty’s security and get the beacons to the Assembly - he’s a prodigy, a genius, everyone says so. And it’s not like he was stealing all of them. The consecuted would be fine. Everyone would be fine.

None of this is intended to absolve Essek of personal responsibility. But it provides a context for his actions, and for why he might regret them so much even though he apparently did them willingly. Asset handlers are very, very good at drawing someone willing to commit minor transgressions into far greater crimes. Look at how Trent shaped Caleb, Astrid, and Eadwulf. He didn’t order them to execute their own parents on day one. He spent years coaxing, tempting, and coercing them into darker and darker crimes, letting them rationalize their own actions at each step, preying on the same vulnerabilities as Essek: isolation (separating the three from other students, telling them their work was secret), ambition (the promise of great arcane power, of shaping the Empire’s destiny), and ego (”we were going to keep the empire safe,” telling them they were gifted, they were chosen).

So how do IRL spies rationalize their actions? Those who spy for reasons of conscience or ideology have done the rationalizing ahead of time, but everyone else has to get there somehow. Some who spy for revenge tell themselves it’s what their superiors deserve, while others tell themselves everyone’s doing it. Some just need a lie to get started (most commonly about who they’re spying for), while others have to keep up the charade all along. Let’s look at a few cases similar to Essek’s that demonstrate just how slippery the slope can be.

Aldrich Ames, a long-term CIA officer slash double agent for the KGB, got suckered in by thinking he could control the situation and wasn’t really hurting anyone. Ames had chronic financial trouble related to excessive drinking & his wife’s lavish lifestyle and in 1985 came up with a plan: he would essentially con the KGB by selling them a minor amount of classified info that he deemed “virtually worthless.” In April he set up the exchange and the KGB paid him $50,000, enough to satisfy his immediate debts. But after actually doing it Ames said he felt he’d now crossed a line he couldn’t step back from, and continued to sell information to the Soviets. By the time he was caught he had, by his own admission, compromised “virtually all Soviet agents of the CIA.”

While some assets just need a lie to get started, others require a delicate dance of self-delusion. Col. George Trofimoff was an Army officer who ran the center where would-be Soviet defectors were assessed & questioned. Trofimoff, a Russian émigré at a young age, was chronically in debt. In 1969 he renewed his acquaintance with his stepbrother back in Russia, now a bishop in the Russian Orthodox Church, and began to pass secrets in return for money - but he and his stepbrother never framed the transactions as such. Trofimoff described their meetings as, “very informal. ... First, it was just a conversation between the two of us. He would ask my opinion on this and that--then, he would maybe ask me, 'Well, what does your unit think about it?' Or, 'What does the American government think about it?’” His compensation was similarly informal: “I said I needed money. ... And he says, 'I tell you what, I'll loan it to you.' So he gave me, I think, 5,000 marks and then, it wasn't enough, because I needed more. ... Then he says, 'Well, you know, I'll tell you what. You don't owe me any money. And if you need some more, I can give you some more. Don't worry about it. You're going to have to have a few things, this and that.' And this is how it started.” Trofimoff could pretend to himself that he wasn’t really spying - just having a chat with his stepbrother - and wasn’t really getting paid for it - just borrowing a little money.

This got longer than I intended it to be and there’s still plenty to talk about, so I’ll save the rest for a second post. Next time: what happens long-term to espionage assets? And what happens if an asset regrets their actions and/or attempts to cut off contact with their handlers?

(This accidentally turned into a series on Essek & IRL espionage: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4)

[jostenneil]

It's so funny to me how toji always comes back one way or another, people think they got rid of him just for him to come back again in some form. Also I don't remember him having to sacrifice anything to become as strong but maki has to?? How do you think megumi will process the whole thing about his dad when gojo finally tells him what happened and who he was?

I think the difference lies mostly in the fact that, unlike Maki, for a long time Toji had. . . no one. He pretty much grew up within the clan alone and targeted, and it built up a steady, singularly defined hatred in him for years, until he met Megumi's mom. There's still little we know about her or her relationship with Toji (although I vaguely remember Gege saying in a recent interview that she will show up again in some capacity, correct me if I'm wrong), but I think it's fair to assume she was to Toji what Mai was to Maki. That's the tragedy of Megumi's existence to me, actually. That Toji named him something as significant as "blessings" to me speaks to the idea that before Megumi was born, Toji may very well have been capable of loving him. But Megumi's mom dying may have significantly altered the potential for that future, to the point that Megumi ended up being a blip in Toji's life as compared to the son that he should have tangibly, wholeheartedly cared for. (I also think this could explain why we don't see Toji needing to sacrifice anything; maybe he already did when Megumi's mom died.) And obviously, we know now that Toji's plan to destroy the Zenin clan always featured Megumi at the heart of it, but plotting for your child's successful takeover is something else compared to actually loving them. It's complicated, and it's without a doubt a reflection of how the Zenin clan's treatment of Toji and his subsequent hatred warped him in very tragic ways. After all, what broke then was the heart.

I don't think Megumi is necessarily going to be angry at Gojou when he finds out the whole truth, because Toji was hypothetically already an absent figure from his life considering Megumi didn't even recognize him during the Shibuya arc. But I could see Megumi being weighed down by a weird sort of. . . grief? Especially if the spoilers about the upcoming chapter are true, and there isn't anyone from the clan left to tell him what his father was like. Gojou only has one part of the story, and it's a pretty minimal one in scope. All he knows is that he killed a man with no cursed energy, and that that man was Megumi's dad, a member of the Zenin clan. The deal with Naobito is of course why Megumi's become the head of the clan now, but even the emotional details of that are something Megumi can't be privy to either, because Naobito is dead and the other heirs apparent soon will be if Maki is successful in her campaign. There's so much about Megumi's childhood and his own existence that's obscured, and I think that's why we see that he grew up having an almost detached personality, loath to the world around him, until people like Tsumiki and Gojou and Yuuji pushed him to care and build roots. So yeah, I do think his feelings about Toji will be complicated and leave him wanting of something, as they always have, but the narrative has also done a good job of establishing the fact that mysteries of his life aside, Megumi's been building a community for himself ever since his father died. It's what makes him a good foil to Yuuji, and why his declaration of "First, save me, Itadori," feels so important. Toji left him behind with the weight of the world to carry on his shoulders, but Megumi has people now who will carry it with him.

[threephasebird]

Hello friend, it's Nicole from TAD discord, so sorry for awkwardly & randomly sliding into your dms. I've noticed that you've been reblogging a lot of The Untamed recently and I have just finished The Untamed & literally cannot think about anything else. I'm obsessed. Anyway, I've also noticed from your blog that your favorite seems to be JGY and I find that *fascinating*. He's very much not my fav, but he's such a complex character that I would love to hear your thoughts & feelings & analysis?

And to be completely clear, I will never try to debate with you or say your opinions are wrong or immoral or anything. I'm not an anti, I've stanned plenty of villains in my time. I'm just genuinely curious. I think the fact that you have such different feelings about this character is part of the beauty of stories and a testament to how complex and smart this particular story is.

Hello friend! First of all, thank you for your ask -- I love talking about my fictional faves, so there’s no need to apologize at all! There are definitely people out there who have already posted much more cohesive and succinct character analysis for JGY, but I’ve sat down for a bit to find an answer to the question of why I, personally, like him so much. I ended up finding six possible ways to answer this question, which I’ll list below and then go into (a lot) more detail under the cut. Hope you enjoy!

1) I like him because his motivations as a villain are complex and understandable

2) I like him because there’s no easy solution to his conflicts

3) I like him because he interacts with the story in a unique way

4) I like him because when we see him on top of his game, it’s fun to watch

5) I like him because LXC likes him

6) JGY is very small and has dimples

So, onward! (2.7k)

1) I like him because his motivations as a villain are complex and understandable

One possible way of looking at JGY is that throughout the entire story, his end goal is to eliminate all of the Jin family and come out on top as sect leader, chief cultivator and most powerful person in the cultivation world. However, I personally find it more intriguing to think that his specific plans shifted throughout the story and that he didn’t follow a long con the way NHS did, but that the common ground in everything he does is that he’s motivated by wanting security. Then, everything that he does afterwards is a step-by-step escalation when no matter what he does and how far he comes, his goal is always dangled right in front of him, but ultimately impossible to reach.

When he joins the Nie clan, on a superficial level it seems that this place could offer him the security he wants and needs, especially with NMJ protecting him -- but on the flip side of the coin, no one apart from NMJ and NHS seem to respect him, and his security entirely depends on NMJ’s goodwill. It’s an exteremely fragile position that could probably only ever last for a limited amount of time. Even if JGY never killed the guard captain and wasn’t thrown out of the Unclean Realm, how would the future have looked like for him? NMJ’s life expectancy was low to begin with, and once he had died (of natural causes, in this hypothetical case), NHS wouldn’t have been able to hold the same protective hand over JGY as his brother, and JGY would have become the disrespected advisor to the disrespected clan leader. (On a side note, I personally don’t think JGY released XY to get the yin iron -- I think it makes more sense that he wanted to use XY as bargaining chips against WC, seeing how he goes to free him immediately after WC asks for NMJ to release XY, to save the Unclean Realm and, in extension, his own ass.)

After JGY is thrown out, he’s basically out of options -- it’s go big or go home, because which other clan would take him in now? So he sets his sight on being recognized by JGS once more, and in order to succeed, he derives the plan of becoming a spy under WRH and do something so “heroical” that after the war, JGS has no other choice but to accept him into his clan. And at first, it seems like he succeeds and that he finally gets everything he wished for -- his father recognizes him as a son and gives him a position, he’s part of the Jin clan, he has power, he’s secure! But then it turns out that he was wishing on the monkey’s paw. His father doesn’t truly recognize him, and even in the Jin clan he’s disrespected (by JGS, by Madam Jin, by Jin Zixun), he doesn’t truly hold power (he just has to do whatever JGS tells him to), and he’s not secure (JGS instrumentalizes him because he’s useful to him right now, but does that mean he’ll be useful forever? So there’s a constant threat there).

I think the only reason JGS officially adopts JGY is that it allows him to claim the victory over WRH for the Jin clan and to expand his own power. Instead of JGY being recognized, JGS instrumentalizes him from the very first second and to make it worse, he makes JGY his attack dog the same way WRH did. I think the things JGY does under both WRH and JGS are absolutely horrifying, but I can’t help but also feel horrified for him. Under WRH, I think he tells himself that whatever he does is the lesser evil because it’ll end the war quicker, and that it’ll all be worth it in the end, and as a result, he loses parts of his own humanity there. And then under JGS, it’s the same fucked up shit again, except that this time, he also wants so very badly for JGS to value him, and in addition, he’s also completely out of options now. Without wanting to excuse the things he does under JGS, the only alternative at this point is for him to leave the Jin clan and the cultivation world as a whole, and I do think there’s a definite possibility that JGS would have him killed if he did because he knew too much about JGS’s plans.

Without passing judgment on his involvement in JZX and JZX’s deaths, as well as him killing NMJ and JGS for now (the latter being the one thing that I’m personally most horrified of), I don’t see JGY as a villain who enjoys being the villain the way XY does. I think he’s constantly horrified at himself and compartmentalizes to a degree where he’s actually derailing his own plans. Him throwing out XY immediately after killing JGS reads to me as him wanting to close the chapter of everything they did under JGS -- I think he must have acted out of a visceral emotion there or else he wouldn’t have left XY to die at the side of a road so carelessly (and, in effect, allowed for someone to live on with detailed knowledge of his own deeds). After rising to power (and finally, seemingly, really getting the security he’s always wanted), he doesn’t use that power to become WRH 3.0, but instead to do genuinely good things (such as building the watch towers). That’s not supposed to mean that him not being a cruel despot makes up for everything he’s done, but I find it interesting to think about from the perspective of, what kind of person could he have been if this opportunity had been given to him freely -- if his own class and social standing didn’t prevent him from that? I think he’d have become an incredibly powerful cultivator and clan leader if he’d have the same privilege as JZX.

In a way, I see JZX, WC, and JGY as narrative foils. WC shows us who JZX might have become if JGS treated him the same way as WRH treats WC. But, JGS doesn’t -- he shields his own son from this part of the Jin clan, and basically allows him to live in a completely different reality as JGY! JZX’s whole character arc is one of personality development, and becoming a hero, and falling in love -- he doesn’t have a clue about his father wanting to get his hands on XY and the Stygian tiger amulet and arguably about at least part of the war crimes he commits against the Wen clan. It’s not part of his life. In a way, JGY is the sacrifice being made to allow him to live his life unaware because in him, JGS found someone else to do his dirty work.

2) I like him because there’s no easy solution to his conflicts

Sometimes, when you want to be a villain apologist, all you need to do is point at one or a few bits of the story and say, “well if they hadn’t done that...”. (See, for example, Anakin Skywalker -- you wanna write a RotS canon divergence fixit? Just have Obi-Wan come back approximately one hour earlier and you have it, because before Anakin kills the Jedi even the Younglings he’s basically completely redeemable.) With JGY, you don’t get to have that. There’s no single turning point where you could say, “if he had picked the other option, he could have had a happy ending”. And part of the reason for that, which makes him a tragic character in my eyes, is that he crucially lacks options at many turning points.

In order to write a canon divergence AU for JGY where he comes out unscathed and redeemable, you’d have to go pretty far back in the story, and even then, you’d have to work hard to find a solution to his story that doesn’t a) rely on someone saving him (such as: LXC brings him to Cloud Recesses, or: JGS has a change of heart, frees his mother, and sends them a comfortable monthly pension), b) having him be dependent on someone else’s goodwill (such as: staying in the Unclean Realm in a delicate position).

If we don’t want to go back right to the very beginning or change fundamental parts of the story, well... As I’ve mused about above, if we let him stay in the Unclean Realm, he’d have never reached his goal of security either. If he never became a spy during the Sunshot Campaign, he wouldn’t have been accepted into the Jin clan and would have been out of options. If he never committed the atrocities for JGS, JGS would probably have kicked him out or killed him. (I do think there’s a lot of truth in what JGY tells NMJ in the empathy flashback, on that instance.) If he didn’t kill NMJ, there is a distinct possibility that NMJ would have killed him -- we see him try three times on screen, after all. (I’m leaving out the parts about him being directly responsible for JZX’s and JZX’s death in the show, as well as for controlling the corpses at Nighless City and JYL’s death, because it’s not in the book and I think it takes away from WWX’s character. As for QS’s and their son’s deaths...I personally do not see strong motivation for him to kill them, but in the end, we just don’t know which is, on a side note, a thing I really like about The Untamed/MDZS! Sometimes we just don’t know because the only people who know for sure can’t tell us anymore.) One option could be for him to confide to JZX, bring him over to his own side, and non-violently overthrow JGS, which would be a good and satisfying ending both to his and JZX’s character arcs -- but I also think there’s a high possibility JZX would hold JGY responsible for what he and JGS did, and never trust him with power again.

(Again, one thing I really do not wish to excuse away is how he killed JGS, and I just. Desperately wished he didn’t.)

I’ve been going over and over the possibilites for fix-its and canon divergence AUs, but in the end, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that the only real choice JGY has throughout the story is whether to remove himself from the narrative or stay in it. He could make the choice to give up his mother’s dream, reject his father, and leave cultivation world (and, on a meta level, the story!) to become a “nobody”. (Small side note, though -- living on which skills?) If he doesn’t -- well, as soon as he enters the game, the cards are stacked against him.

To pick up on the meta level comment, I do find it fascinating that in a sense, JGY not only has to struggle for respect and recognition within the story, but that what he does also serves to keep his character part of the story. He could choose to give up and leave (and thus come out of the story redeemable), but then he wouldn’t be part of the story anymore.

3) I like him because he interacts with the story in a unique way

Continuing with the last point, JGY interacts with the story in two unique ways that distinguish him basically from all the other characters. He’s not actually supposed to be part of the story, but that he basically claws his way in. But that also means that his class and social status cannot be removed from any of the conflicts he encounters in universe -- they’re at the heart of all of them. In the empathy flashback, he says to NMJ, “You always scold me for indecent scheming. You always say that you are just and straight [...] A decent man shouldn’t resort to devious stratagems. [...] You’re of noble birth and have profound cultivation. What about me? How can I be the same? First, I don’t have the foundation of cultivation. No one has ever taught me that since I was a child! Second, I don’t have any background. Do you think that my position is very solid in the Jin clan of Lanling?” What I find so intriguing about this scene is that he’s right when he says he’s different from the others both in text and on a meta level because most of the other characters are never faced with the same decisions and have a natural place within the story (apart, to some degree, WWX and XY, where also interesting parallels can be drawn). And the other characters are, in a way, self-righteous to judge him when almost none of them come out of the story without blood on their hands -- WWX’s revenge, JC torturing demonic cultivators after WWX’s death, and so on...The entire cultivation world (even NMJ! even LXC!) were complicit in the war crimes against the Wen. But when the cultivation world turns against JGY, they are the most appalled by the things I as a viewer would be the most lenient towards (murdering JGS), and don’t care at all about the thing that horrifies me the most (murdering the sex workers).

There’s an interesting post by @pumpkinpaix​ analysing how class dynamics work in the story, which I highly recommend! I don’t want to repeat what has been said there already in much better ways than I can, but among other things, it makes some really interesting points about how much JGY’s class is tied with his motivations.

4) I like him because when we see him on top of his game, it’s fun to watch

Aside from any analysis, part of the reason why I like him so much is that when he’s acting as a villain, he’s just so much fun to watch. When WWX breaks into his vault in paperman form and JGY has approximately 5 minutes to get rid of the head, the torture bench (?) and anything suspicious, contact and inform Su She, run to a different building and come back, and nonetheless he manages to convince everyone but WWX and LWJ that he’s the victim in this situation, it’s just. Peak entertainment? For a short time, he’s on top of the game, and then he’s backed into a corner and becomes sloppy, and finally loses it all due to sentimentality (if he didn’t want to take his mother’s body with him and say goodbye to LXC, I’m sure he could have fled the country). I think Zhu Zanjin did an amazing job as an actor to portray how JGY is constantly assessing everything, how 23638 emotions flicker over his face in half a second, how his whole body language shows the constant anxiety and pressure and stress and fear he’s under, and how we actually get to see in his microexpressions when JGY chooses a path and commits to the acting and emotional manipulation to follow it through.

5) I like him because LXC likes him 

Here’s a secret: Actually, LXC is my favourite character. And LXC loves JGY a lot. So I’m kind of contractually obliged to at least love JGY a little bit as well?

On a more serious note, I’m very intrigued in their relationship because I do think what they had was genuine. I view it as two people being very open and honest and true with each other, while placing a lot of things outside the brackets and crossing them out. LXC even says that he was aware of some things JGY did (which ones? how? I need to know) but that he justified them to himself. I think they both realised that they could have had something very special, but under the given circumstances, LXC wouldn’t have been able to help JGY (see: point 2) even if he knew everything. Still, they were obviously very close and trusted each other as much as they could. I think in the end, when LXC seemed to have decided to stay and die with him, JGY pushed him away because he was the only genuinely good part of his life, and he felt like he couldn’t rightfully deprive the world of LXC. It’s all very tragic, and I’m very intrigued to explore what they could have been in a slightly softer world.

6) JGY is very small and has dimples

I can only speak for myself, but when I was watching, I was so prone at any point to believe in him no matter what was revealed. Look at him! Could this man do something wrong?

[c-is-for-circinate]

---okay wait, no, nevermind, this is what I want to say about Vex and Percy, I found it after all.  I love them because they’re a love story about choosing what you want to build after the world falls down around you, and finding somebody else who will look to the future and build next to you, even though you’re both working with shattered landscapes and cracked tools.  I love them because the way both of their worlds broke is so fucking different, but they understand each other enough to recognize it, and neither one of them can keep from moving instinctively, unstoppably forward anyway.

Once upon a time, they both had lives with plans, and then those lives fell apart.  And both of those lives, those sets of plans included love in their own way, but neither of them looked anything like the love Percy and Vex found with each other.  They didn’t expect that at all.

I have a lot of feelings about teenaged Percival de Rolo, who is probably going to be a clockmaker.  He has so many siblings in his vast noble family that he can do that, he can be semi-useless and artful.  He expects to get married someday, a respectable arranged match to someone he’ll presumably like well enough, and live a quiet, clever life.  I picture him as fond enough of his family, assuming that he’ll be fond enough of his hypothetical maybe-someday wife and his hypothetical maybe-someday children, happy enough in that partnership, with the time and space to be passionate about his cleverness and his books and his inventions.  There’s such a specific kind of fulfilment in that life I think Percy once envisioned for himself, with people who are reliably there, loved but taken a little bit for granted, all of the focus and elation and ‘this is the point of me’ devotion towards intellectual pursuits.  I think he would have been happy with that life, and that he would have been kind of a vaguely-inoffensive asshole because he never really paid enough attention to other people to bother really hurting them, or to learn that he could really hurt them and stop.

Of course we know how all of that fell apart.  What I’m fascinated by is Percy himself, though, Percy who survived to join Vox Machina, because the Percy we know from canon never actually stopped falling apart.  We know he hasn’t rebuilt himself a new life, he doesn’t have a future, he’s got a revenge quest and then he has a dragon distraction, sure, yes, we see that, but it’s not just the facts of what Percy does, it’s the feelings and the headspace he’s in the whole time.  Taliesin’s said a few times, and I am so interested in the implications, that Percy spends 95% of the campaign mostly staying coherent through the middle of a constant, years-long nervous breakdown.  He is constantly slipping back and forth along the edges of dissociating, present enough to react to things but not exactly here, not really processing the full weight of everything that happens, not quite.  He can’t tell his Orthax-visions apart from nightmares cooked up by his own brain, and he talks more than once about how much the past few years with VM feel more like a dream than reality.  His judgment is a mess, diving headfirst into deals with anyone who’ll have him, making whatever bad decision seems like a good idea at the time.

So Percy’s life was smashed to smithereens and the Percy we know has absolutely not recovered, has not even really begun to recover--but one of the really epic things about Percy is the way he just keeps moving forward anyway.  Dazed, dissociated, acting on instinct, whatever Percy may be, it is baked into his very nature to keep on going.  When Percy is surprised or threatened, he always seems to be shocked into action, not stillness.  We see it when he goes full Determinator in Whitestone during the Briarwoods arc, and again chasing Ripley to Glintshore.  We see it directly after the Chroma Conclave attack, looking for a plan, for a next step, when he tugs Vex to evacuate the keep; we see it in the ruins of Draconia when he’s the only one to notice Tiberius, and he is so careful about asking questions that won’t derail the thing they have in motion, so careful not to alert any of the others who might grind everything to a halt, because grief or no grief this has to keep going anyway.  Even when he’s awash with useless emotions and there’s nowhere to go to, Percy broods at work, down by a forge or setting pen to paper, making and planning and doing.  It’s so telling that even at his absolute worst, in that pit of nothing when Orthax first whispered in his ear, Percy’s reaction was to make something.

.

Which brings us to Vex, who isn’t quite a maker like Percy, but is still a builder in her own way.  Vex who had her own life that fell apart, and I don’t really mean Byroden, and I certainly don’t mean Syngorn.

Vex’s life, Vex’s plans, weren’t handed to her.  The life Vex expected to live was the one she was still living when we first met her: the traveling adventurer’s life she’d built with Vax.  (And maybe that’s our first demonstration of exactly how much Vex is maker and a builder, that after her life fell to pieces the first time--after Byroden, after Syngorn--she’d already managed to put together a new one once.)  She has her brother and she has her bear, and by the time we meet her she has Vox Machina, and it’s not much for convention but it’s a life.  All of her expectations are locked into that life and that future.  VM at level 9, with a keep under construction and the respect of Tal’dorei, was obviously already pretty different than the twins at level 1 living in the woods, but it’s also so easy to see how it’s just a continuation of the same thing.  Vex and her twin live in each others’ pockets, and she shoots things and makes sure that there is always enough to eat and always money for a rainy day, and there’s stability in unconditional love and self-sufficiency right there.  Laura’s mentioned on Talks that, if the Conclave hadn’t attacked and Vax had left the group, Vex would have tried as hard as possible to convince him to stay, and then would’ve gone with him for sure.  Of course she would have. Vox Machina was the life Vex was trying to build, but Vax and Trinket were the life she already had, cornerstone and truth.

You can see how hard Vex works to create and maintain and secure that life with every coin she squirrels away so zealously against a rainy day.  There is no doubt in my mind that, pre-Vox Machina, Vex and her bow and her hoarded pennies was the one who made sure there was always something to eat over the campfire every night.  There is no doubt in my mind that when they found Byroden in ashes, Vex was the one who got her brother moving, who kept them moving, who kept them pointed forwards no matter what.  And you can see how much Vex put into the bigger, richer, theoretically more-stable life Vox Machina was starting to build together when it all came crashing down.

Percy’s life fell apart pre-stream, and we all know exactly how.  The super fascinating thing about Vex’s arc is that we get to see her life fall apart, right there in the middle of the story, maybe more than anybody else.  The Chroma Conclave was hard on everyone for all sorts of reasons, but in terms of what Vex tried to build for herself and tried to keep, it’s easy to see how fast and how utterly she loses very nearly everything.  Greyskull Keep is first, of course, with the heartbreak of watching Vex hesitating there at the edge of the tree with tears in her eyes, because this was their home.  It’s such a big thing for her, more than for anyone else--and of course it is, because Vex more than anyone in the group saw Greyskull as her future.  Keyleth always had the Ashari to go back to, and Pike had Sarenrae, Grog lives in the motion and Scanlan avoids plans, Percy could barely conceive of a future existing and Vax was lost and floundering for any next step he could find, but Vex had this castle and Vex called this castle home.  

Of course it doesn’t end with the castle, though, because this love story is the story of how everything breaks, and the next thing of Vex’s to break was Vax.  Before the dragons came, Vax was already falling apart and falling away from her in two different directions, half of him tugged away by depression and uncertainty, the other half pulled after Keyleth.  The seeds of distance were sprouting there even before Vex died in the Queen’s champion’s tomb.  And maybe that feels even more symbolic now than I ever realized it did before--Vex died and came back, but the deal her brother made, that vow he swore, wiped away any chance Vex still had for ever getting back that wandering rogue-and-ranger life that once was hers.

The Chroma Conclave arc takes nearly half of Campaign 1, and Vex spends it watching bits of her old life crumble while she’s much, much too busy to process or mourn.  There are dragons in the world, and there’s no time to worry about what the world will look like once they’re dead.  She doesn’t have plans.  Vax has raven wings and a goddess and a girlfriend, and Emon is on fire, is turning to lava beneath Thordak’s feet, and Keyleth is a wreck and Grog dies for five minutes and god only knows what’s going on in Scanlan’s head ever--and Vex, like Percy, just keeps going.  She reads the Raven Queen book cover to cover seventeen times.  She takes things, and she hoards things, and she scrounges for loot, and she gets called greedy for it but the thing is that for Vex, acquiring things is very much a fundamental kind of building for the future, maybe even more than making and tinkering is for Percy.  Stocking up now will save them later, it’s baked into the firmament of Vex’s soul, take whatever you can because you will NEED IT someday.  She steals a broom because she wants it, yes, and then it saves all of their lives.  She sets the group after Fenthras because she wants it.  She bargains and she haggles, even when there’s no reason at all to believe that tomorrow will come, even when Vex has no idea what tomorrow could be, because whatever doubts she may have on the surface, her instincts can’t give up that last breath of faith: I will need this money later, because there will be a later.  Just like Percy, scribbling plans in his journals late in the night for inventions he has no time or supplies to make.  Neither of them have any fucking clue what the future could possibly be, but they can’t stop working towards it anyway.

.

This is the environment where they fall into each other, Vex and Percy, in the middle of the mess of the Chroma Conclave, in this violent limbo world where any day could be the last and next month might as well not exist.  This is where they plant the seeds and start to grow the future they don’t even believe in yet.

The attraction and the flirting start before the dragons even come, of course.  Percy builds things for Vex to have and keep and use or squirrel away, and it’s such a perfect expression of both of their attitudes towards the world.  Vex keeps his coin with hers, and makes sure to shepherd it just as carefully, makes sure that Percy will have enough in whatever future comes.  And there are hints of what they’ll be.  There’s a reason that ‘Darling, take the mask off’ is SO MUCH, and it’s because ever-moving determinator Percy is stuck.  He’s driving himself right into a corner, working himself off a cliff.  He’s just killed someone horribly and he’s on the edge of blue-screening right now, of stopping, or maybe of smashing everything until there’s nowhere left to go.   And Vex, who’s got a good life for herself right now but has already lost one and knows what it’s like, says, come on.  Let’s back you away from this wall you’ve thrown yourself up against.  Take the mask off.  Let’s keep moving forward. 

And they’re something, there, in the way Vex not only keeps going but tries to keep Percy going right through it all.  So much of Vex’s constant planning and motion is wrapped around and embedded with keeping other people going too.  We know she took care of Vax when it was just the two of them, because they took care of each other, and you cannot tell me Vex wasn’t the long-term planner of the pair.  She gathers Trinket up out of horror and sadness and makes sure he has a future.  She collects strays, angel slave-boys, the fruitless quest for the Gray Render baby.  She pulls Percy out of a jail cell and keeps him in the first place.  And there’s a selfless generosity to it, of course, or it’s easy to see one anyway, Vex who mothers, Vex who checks in on everybody else after her own death, but that’s not the whole story.  The other half of it is Vex-who’s-never-been-alone.  Vex who hoards people as tightly and as carefully as she hoards coin.  She can keep going through nearly anything, so long as her people are there with her, so she is going to make sure that everyone she loves stays okay because she needs them to be.

The thing about Percy is that--because he’s a builder, a maker, a fixer, a determinator in his own right--he can return that favor.  He can make sure that Vex keeps going, not by stopping and sitting in her feelings with her until she’s ready to move (which is very much the Vax and Keyleth energy), but by tugging her along in the direction she was already going.  In Syngorn he gives her Whitestone, and oh, it’s a way to shut her father up, but more than anything it’s a someday.  There in the city that helped destroy Vex’s first good life, while the dragon that burned the rest of it to ashes sits over the ruins of her last, Percy makes a promise that someday Vex can have a home and a future again.  It’s far away and shrouded in mist.   Percy can’t even really picture his own someday right now.  They might both die before they get there.  But there’s a someday ahead, and it’s enough to get Vex moving again, proud and hopeful and ready to go and collect that bow that’ll help get her there.

And Vex turns right back around again on Glintshore and in its aftermath, demanding that Percy have that future too, because she doesn’t want this one without him.  If he’s going to promise her a someday to move towards again, then he damn well has to get there too.  It’s because she wants him to be alive and happy, and it’s because Vex just wants him, needs him in her life, this human she collected and is so determined to keep.

So the promise of someday, in Whitestone is glittering on the horizon for them when they kiss in the woods after the Vorugal fight, and it’s just barely around the corner past the next couple of hells when Percy comes to her room before Thordak, but I think it also still feels like a far-away mirage, and I think that matters.  They are both still lost in a world full of carnage and dragons and constant threat.  Percy is stabbing Raishan in a council meeting because why the fuck not, this seems like a good idea at this time.  Vex is still so unsure, trying to teach herself to forgive, trying to see a path forward to that someday-horizon, trying to deal with the fact that even if they kill all the dragons and even if they all survive she’s lost her brother to Keyleth and fate.  The world is a wreck and they are a wreck in it, and the only thing they can do is not stop.  The only thing they can be sure of is right here, right now.

So that’s where they fall into bed.  On the eve of the Thordak fight, knowing they both could die tomorrow, knowing they most likely will.  They’re about to go take on the monster that destroyed the only two homes Vex ever loved, a decade and a half apart, and there is no kind of promise that either of them will see the other side of the war, and that’s where they grab each other and hold on.  They’re here in this impossible place together.  They’ll take it as it comes, they’ll take whatever comes, and for this one night they have each other in it.

.

And then they survive.

So much of the episodes directly after the end of the Conclave--the next week or two in Vox Machina’s life, where they save Scanlan and try to bury some ashes and rip themselves apart, and then fight a kraken and die trying, and then go to Hell, and then come back--is just this string of, okay, nobody here knows how to stop.  The dragons are dead, but the fugue state of violence and getting-the-next-thing-done, nose to the grindstone and figure this next step out and don’t worry about long-term plans because we might not survive to see them anyway, that’s still here.  Percy’s been living there for years (and certainly didn’t have time, post-Briarwoods arc, to start thinking about pulling himself out of it).  Vex’s specific life plans got trashed by the dragons more than anyone else’s.  But really, the whole group is living there in one way or another.  It’s just that Scanlan shattered under it and ran, and Grog’s never really suffered from it or lived differently anyway, and Pike keeps taking breaks to fix temples and tend to refugees and work towards rebuilding right through it all.  Keyleth and Vax both found a sort of peace in fatalism and destiny, in knowing that they have set paths there in front of them and all they have to do is choose to follow them.

Percy and Vex, very fundamentally, don’t have those set paths.  Nothing for them is a given.  There’s Whitestone, yes, but there is a reason Percy isn’t Lord of Whitestone, king in his castle, leading his city through the dragons and beyond.  When Percy’s life broke it shattered, and even when Whitestone was freed, he didn’t claim it as his.  He only came back after the dragon attack because Emon was gone and it was the only safe place they knew.  Whitestone is in Percy’s bones, part of how he defines himself and his life, but living there, running it, tying himself to the city--it isn’t a given.  Percy could die fighting dragons or die to a kraken or spend eternity trapped in the Nine Hells, and Whitestone would be fine.  He could leave and never come back, and Whitestone would be fine.

So coming back to Whitestone--sending Vex on the Gray Hunt--fucking in the castle treasury and setting up plans for whatever’s next--it’s a choice.  Nothing about the people Percy and Vex become during peacetime is about destiny.  They had lives and plans and destinies, the rich asshole clockmaker, the ranger on the road.  Those are gone.  Everything they keep from those old lives is a little broken, a little twisted from what they once expected it to be.  Everything they do now is what they decide to build.

And this is the glory of Percy and Vex, the love that’s so big it makes my heart ache: the thing they decide to keep in this new world is each other.  In the fugue of war with no future, they found each other and built things together, spent an entire evening tinkering on Vex’s stolen broom in Percy’s workshop, flirted and fucked and kept each other going even when nobody knew where.  Neither of them had real, passionate romantic love written into their plans, back when they had plans.  Neither of them needed it, not for the lives they wanted.  But those lives are dead and gone, and they found this thing together in the weird wilderness between there and here, and they’re keeping it.  They get to do that.  They get to build their new lives in whatever shape they want, and that means they get to set each other as cornerstones and build everything else around them.

It’s so fundamental to this relationship and this new future that all the building blocks they’re working with, on both sides, are a little bit broken.  Whitestone itself is still a struggling, recovering city sitting on a decimated continent.  Percy is still so caught up in his own anger, still waiting for another shoe to drop, still not quite ready to believe any of this is real.  Vex is pouring through libraries researching Orcus, researching Vecna, waiting for old debts to be called in.  They are neither of them fixed.  They are neither of them safe.

But we get to see, in one-year timeskip, how tentatively and tenaciously they keep working together towards something anyway.  Vex builds a house and a Gray Hunt corps and a tentative detente with her father, starting to pick up those old pieces, starting to try.  Percy builds civic works projects and an international early warning system, still ready for the next disaster, starting to entertain the idea that it doesn’t have to destroy everything.  They get new glasses and open a bakery and invest in armor and ammo and art.  They host a ball.

They get married, in secret, and tell almost nobody they know.  It’s such an asshole thing to do!  They are both still assholes, both still broken enough to be wary of the consequences of inviting their own loved ones to a simple wedding.  They do it because the point isn’t the moment, it’s the marriage, all the future days to come in this new life they’ve agreed they are going to create together.  They want it to be theirs, just theirs, this relationship they never expected to have and now intend to base the rest of their lives on.  It’s kind of a messy, slightly dickish way to go about things, and that’s perfect, because Vex and Percy are kind of messy, slightly dickish people, and they own that together.  They own a lot of things together now.

.

The epilogue of Campaign 1 walks the line between open-ended and closed story in a way I find so deeply satisfying, and so much of that is because of Percy and Vex.

So many stories end at a point where--the day is saved, or it appears to be, and the horizon is wide open for the heroes and the sunset, and everything is triumphant and victorious and anything could happen next.  It’s perfectly satisfying and ripe for sequels, and nothing is quite guaranteed but everybody is happy for now and that’s a good place to tie things up anyway.  It’s the ending of Return of the Jedi, or the first Pacific Rim--something has to happen next, somebody has to figure out what that is, but that’s not the heroes’ problem and that’s not the worry for today.

Sometimes, stories end with everything so tightly wrapped up that there’s no room to breathe.  It’s the ending that says, what you’ve just read or watched or gone through is the entire story.  It is everything that matters.  It is full, and it is complete, and nothing that ever happens in the rest of these characters’ lives will ever be as important as what they’ve just done.  Lord of the Rings does this a bit, and it actually works; Harry Potter does it badly, and I’d submit that The Adventure Zone: Balance does too.  It’s the implication behind every Disney or fairytale happily ever after, although those at least tend to skip the epilogue describing exactly what that happily-ever-after means.

Vex and Percy do neither of these things at the end of their story, or they do both of them, and that’s so great.  They do get the epilogue, with the closed ending and the happily-ever-after.  The Lord and Lady de Rolo settle down, have at least five children, and live in peace for decades until Percy eventually dies of old age and Vex far-more-eventually follows.  Their friends outlive them by decades or centuries.  It’s tidy and nice and final...except.  Whitestone could outlive even Keyleth, and Percy--and by extension now Vex, too--lives as long as Whitestone lives.

Somehow Percy and Vex manage to have an epilogue with every one of the trappings of a perfect picture-book ending, without feeling static.  They’re going to have the house and the kids and the castle and the tiny little kingdom, and it’s going to be full every single day, because inherent in the very makeup of these two people is the inability to ever stop growing.  With the dragons dead, with Vecna gone, they can keep doing exactly what they’ve been doing this entire time.  They can move forward.  They can build.  And they can build something massive that outlasts both of them, lay foundations and groundwork for centuries and generations to come.

Fighting with Vox Machina will always have been the biggest, hardest, most glorious and dangerous, most epic thing that Vex and Percy have ever done, and it’s absolutely over.  The book is done, tied off with a bow.  But they’re not stuck and they’re not empty without it.  They’re going to make clock towers and festivals and change the whole culture of Whitestone.  They’re going to have half a dozen children and raise them towards their future.  The Whitestone of fifty, sixty, seventy years from the end of the campaign when Percy eventually dies will be fundamentally different from the Whitestone they came home to when their adventures ended, and it will be the pair of them who made it so, together.  Which means that even without him Vex will still have him, in civil infrastructure and all the things that let people keep living their lives, in this thing they created as a team, this thing she’ll continue to shepherd and grow without him for the rest of her own life.

And maybe that’s the key to Vex and Percy, to why their ending feels so satisfying, so inevitable and perfect and good.  So many stories end before their characters can change and split away from each other.  So many epilogues decree that their characters will never change, ever, so they can never grow apart.  But Percy and Vex are built of growth and motion, and when they found a match for themselves in each other they decided to point that forward momentum in the same direction and change together for the rest of their lives.  It’s what a real relationship looks like, a real happily-ever-after.  They will pick each other up and help each other on along the way, because we’ve seen it happen.  They’ll hold on to each other, and they’ll build.

[bitcoinminershasrate]

Chia Network (XCH) Mining: Guide |Profit | Best Coins | Set Up| SSD & HDD disk

Chia Network (XCH) Mining: Guide |Profit | Best Coins | Set Up| SSD & HDD disk - Today we will show you how to start mining Chia. You've probably heard about a new virtual coin that claims to be the "Bitcoin killer". For experienced miners, this phrase will cause a skeptical grin. Yes, for over 10 years of the history of the digital industry, many such desperate "matadors" have tried to take the place of the patriarch of cryptocurrencies. They all failed. Some joined the large army of altcoins, that is, digital coins of the second rank, while others have sunk into oblivion forever. Let's look at what the next rival of the Satoshi Nakamoto coin is. Green money for the digital world is the name of the page dedicated to the new Chinese blockchain startup Chia on reddit.com. Chia disk mining became popular even before the coin appeared on exchanges, and this is not at all surprising. Bitcoin steadfastly holds the $ 50,000 bar and many reproach themselves that they have not once mined a few coins for themselves on a regular PC. And then suddenly a magician arrives in a blue helicopter and loudly declares that all is not lost. A new lucrative coin has appeared and mining Chia on SSDs and hard drives will bring you fabulous profits. Chia cryptocurrency mining Chia cryptocurrency mining Chia is one of the newest cryptocurrencies that debuted this year. The project was founded by Bram Cohen (who also invented BitTorrent ) with the main goal of becoming the most energy efficient digital asset. Chia mining farm uses storage resources to process cryptography, rather than the processing power of graphics adapters or integrated circuit devices like more common blockchain currencies such as BTC and ETH. And, so mining Chia coins is a banal plotting, experienced miners will say, so what is revolutionary here? Well, firstly, the requirements for mining Chia are much higher than those of previously launched cryptocurrencies with a similar method of generating new blocks. And secondly, no such project has caused so much hype. Over the past few weeks, Chia's popularity has grown so rapidly that it has caused a shortage of hard drives and SSDs in China that could soon be repeated in the US and around the world. The reason for this is a very well-run marketing campaign. Key points in favor of a new blockchain project: - If cryptocurrencies with no fundamental value, such as Dogecoin , rise in value fueled by the hype (Dogecoin has no limit on the number of coins and can inflate infinitely), then it seems likely that the price of Chia will rise as its popularity grows. The emission of a new digital asset is strictly limited and amounts to 21 million coins, like Bitcoin. - Chia uses the new Proof of Space and Time, or PoST , consensus algorithm , which essentially proves that you have unallocated space on your hard drive / SSD that can be used to create rafts. This is a big improvement, in terms of efficiency, over proof of work. When writing the source code for this cryptocurrency, the no less unique programming language Chialisp was used. Whether Chia will be able to squeeze Bitcoin , or at least take its rightful place among altcoins, is anyone's guess. But let's go directly to the main topic of our review and look at how to start mining the Chia coin. At the time of the review, he had already entered the auction, so we will be able to calculate a very real, and not a hypothetical profit. Chia mining calculator can be opened by following the link https://chiacalculator.com/ . Mining XCH can be compared to farming. The miner downloads specialized software from the official website of the project https://www.chia.net/ru/ and conducts a "sowing campaign" on his storage devices. Each sown sector is called a plot, which in English means "a piece of land", but its owner is called a "farmer." To generate a new block, the system broadcasts a set of codes to the farmers and each of them checks its plot in search of a suitable hash sum. The more “sown fields” you have, the higher the chances of closing the block. But at the same time, your iron must be sufficiently productive, otherwise the process of seeding the rafts will be greatly delayed and farmers with more efficient "agricultural equipment" will constantly outstrip you. When using proof of time (Proof of Time), the period of broadcasting calls between blocks should be as short as possible. After all, proof of time is implemented in practice using a Verifiable Delay Function (VDF). Cryptographic calculations take a certain period of time, but are verified instantly. The key idea of ​​the Verifiable Delay Function is the need to perform sequential computational operations on many parallel nodes, each of which is equivalent. At the same time, energy costs are minimized. The fastest and most powerful nodes of the network will be called Timelords (Time Lords). The developers assume that there will not be very many such VDF servers, which will exclude the appearance of controversial blocks. The fastest timelord will consistently finish first, That is, unlike Bitcoin, which was initially mined on almost any dual-core CPU, the hardware requirements for Chia mining are initially quite high , and with the growing popularity of green coins, they will be even more serious. So what does it take to build a farm? Chia mining hardware Chia mining hardware According to the developers, any user with a desktop computer, laptop, mobile phone or account in the corporate network can participate in XCH farming. You just need to install the necessary software and have enough free space to create at least one raft, and then you can find the hash sum to close the next block and get a reward. Theoretically, this is quite possible, but it happens very rarely. Ready assembly for mining Chia To receive a guaranteed income from mining Chia, you need: - Quad-core processor with a clock speed of 1.5 GHz; - 2 GB of RAM; - Hard disk with a minimum capacity of 1TB. It would seem that everything is very simple and inexpensive, but you are unlikely to earn anything on such an assembly. Here is one of the budget build options for Chia farming presented on the Miningclubinfo forum: - Motherboard the GIGABYTE B550 AORUS the MASTER ; - Processor AMD Ryzen 9 5900X ; - SEAGATE Ironwolf Pro ST16000NE000 hard drive , 16 TB, HDD, SATA III, 3.5 ; - Hard drive WD Purple WD82PURZ, 8 TB, HDD, SATA III, 3.5 ; - SSD SAMSUNG 980 MZ-V8V1T0BW 1 TB, M.2 2280, PCI-E x4, NVMe ; - Memory module PATRIOT Viper Steel PVS464G300C6K DDR4 - 2x 32GB 3000, DIMM, Ret, 2 strips of 32GB each, frequency 3000MHz. With this set of components you can get to work. Although the total volume of hard drives is, of course, small and with a 1TB SSD, 32GB of memory will be used inefficiently. This miner will soon have an urgent need for additional areas for "seeding". Let's take a closer look at the hardware selection process. Choosing an SSD and HDD disk In the XCH mining farm (this is the trading ticker of the Chia cryptocurrency), the most important element is the disk drive. Winchesters smaller than 1 TB are not worth considering .��It is not recommended to buy devices with a spindle speed lower than 7200 rpm. We need capacious and fast HDDs with SATA3 interface. They are used directly to create rafts, each of which will be the standard 101.4Gib size. Disks will be formatted with NTFS, APFS, exFAT, ext4 file systems. But the FAT system is not suitable for plotting. SSD drives are used to create temporary files, which are then "seeding". They have faster read / write speeds, which greatly improves your chances of being the first to find the next block. You can buy both SSD with SATA3 interface of any standard size (2.5 inches or M.2), and NVMe SSD connected to M.2. But keep in mind that different M.2 connectors on the motherboard support different types of SSD (both SATA and NVMe). Read the motherboard specification carefully so as not to waste your money . There are also more expensive server drives with increased wear resistance on sale, but we will not seriously consider them for now. It is not known how the fate of this crypto project will turn out, therefore, the costs of creating a farm are greatly overestimated. Also, pay attention to the recording method. It is best to take ordinary disks that work according to the CMR scenario. But drives using SMR are slow and less reliable . The best choice is size 3.5. 2.5 laptop disks have worse mechanics, which means they have less resource. You can still buy a 1Tb WD Purple HDD for 4450 rubles. Larger drives are already slowly snapping up. As for the auxiliary SATA SSD, we advise gamers to leave the models with QLC memory . MLC flash drives are ideal, but TLC-based SSDs can be used to save money. An equally important component is the controller. Firstly, it must support a DRAM buffer, and secondly, it must withstand multiple data rewrites without failures. We can recommend SATA controllers Samsung, Silicon Motion (not XT), Marvell 88SS1074 . If you decide to buy NVMe, then keep in mind that in this type of drives the controller gets pretty hot and requires additional cooling. Otherwise, follow the same requirements as for SATA SSD. To maximize the lifespan of SSDs, it is strongly recommended that you do not fill more than 85% of the total volume. Consider this when buying. And don't forget to buy another additional small SSD that will host the operating system. This is a mandatory requirement, otherwise mining will not start.https://www.youtube.com/embed/bh-lOQ7ligs?wmode=transparent&rel=0&feature=oembed CPU Chia Farm doesn't need an expensive gaming CPU. A stone operating at a frequency of 3 GHz and cooled by an ordinary boxed cooler is enough. It should have a minimum of 4 cores, and preferably 6 (or a maximum of 8), and integrated graphics. Of course, you can connect a video card, but then you will occupy a PCI-e slot, which in the future could be useful for connecting another hard drive. For example, Intel Core i5-9400F BOX RAM Put more memory, minimum 2 GB. But 16 GB is better, and serious farmers immediately put 32 GB. Two 16 GB DDR4 strips with a frequency of 3200 MHz will be enough. Motherboard The most important thing when choosing a motherboard is SATA3 and USB 3.0 support. It should have as many ports as possible for connecting the HDD. Old boards from the secondary market will not work, buy modern ones. For example, MSI Z390-A Pro . Installing the official program So, you decided to start mining the Chia token, built the farm and installed the OS. What's next? Now you need to download a complete copy of the blockchain. Go to the official website https://www.chia.net/ and press the green button " Install Chia Blockchain ". Direct download link for Windows client: https://download.chia.net/latest/Setup-Win64.exe Installing the official program You will see the project page on the Github service, where you can download a full node compatible with your operating system. We must pay tribute to Chia's team, they are not busy with efficiency. The coin has appeared quite recently, and software has already been released for almost all popular axes. Full nodes are available for: - Windows (64bit); - macOS; - Ubuntu / Debian; - CentOS / Red Hat / Fedora; - Raspberry Pi 4; - Docker; - FreeBSD Install; - Ubuntu Binary Install; - OpenBSD Install. For advanced users, there is special software to run the Chia node in a virtual environment, for example, on an Amazon cloud server. Since the Chia code signing certificate is new, the software will be classified as "insecure". You will have to forcibly save the download, and when you start the installer, you will need to select "Additional information" and " Run anyway ". Purse Well, where to store coins, someone newcomers will ask. Like any other cryptocurrency, a full Chia node is a copy of the blockchain and a wallet that will receive rewards after you start mining. Setting up plotting Plotting is divided into two stages: creating parcels or, to put it another way, plotting, and processing parcels. The first step creates all of your evidence of free space by building seven cryptographic hash tables and storing them in a temporary directory. Then this data is sorted and packed in a temporary directory and after that the dataset is moved to the final destination on the HDD. Choosing the size of the raft (plot) First you need to choose a size. The best option is k32, it will take up 108.8GB and will require 256.6GB of temporary SSD space to create it. Specify the number of rafts based on the size of one site and the amount of bins.  You can tune the hardware for maximum performance using the "Advanced Settings" section. To reduce the load on the RAM, you can add more "baskets", that is, split the temporary file into a larger number of fragments. But keep in mind that the more baskets, the stronger the load on the SSD. Therefore, if you have 32 GB of RAM, it is better to reduce the number of baskets, on the contrary, by reducing the number of I / O requests for temporary files. The number of processor threads depends on the number of simultaneously created rafts. 1 section needs 1 stream. It is better not to touch the "Disable bitfield" item. Reverse sorting by bit field is faster and saves up to 12% of the total number of writes, although it requires more RAM. "Queue name" can also be omitted. But when errors appear in the plotting log, the queue name will help you figure out exactly when the failure occurred. Chia Network (XCH) Mining Guide After everything is set up, click " Create a parcel " and the process of creating a raft will be launched. It can last from 4 to 12 hours, depending on the parameters of your equipment. Parallel seeding To get the maximum number of TB per day, you can build several graphs in parallel. The key is to correctly calculate the capacity of your farm based on the size of the parcels, the space for temporary files, the number of processor threads, and the amount of RAM.https://www.youtube.com/embed/dG6yWOjSbFk?start=66&wmode=transparent&rel=0&feature=oembed Popular bugs - Let's talk about the pitfalls that inexperienced users most often come across. - Remember to set your power supply to maximum performance. If the computer goes into hibernation, the process will have to start over. The same goes for blackouts. - The path to the storage and the temporary folder cannot be written in Cyrillic, the program understands only the Latin font. - Be sure to create a separate directory on the disk, you can't just write Disk C, the program will not understand you - Always run the Chia node as administrator. If a failure occurs, then first try restarting the plotting, and if it does not help, delete the program folder in Windows / Users and then start the process again. We have listed the simplest mistakes of beginner miners, let's move on to more complex cases. Error RuntimeError: Unknown exception occurs for various reasons. It can be: - Russian letters to indicate the path to the directory. - Placement of the folder for temporary files on the same disk with the operating system. - Incorrect distribution of iron resources. An error often occurs related to insufficient memory on disk for plotting. Carefully calculate the allowed number of rafts, otherwise at the end of the log you may see the message RuntimeError: bad allocation . On a 1TB SSD, you can create a maximum of 3 parcels at a time. If you did not listen to our recommendations and nevertheless checked the "Disable bitfield" checkbox, then it is quite possible that the error Caught plotting error: Bitfield plotting not supported by CPU will appear . Uncheck this box and you should be fine. It is recommended to check the finished sections for integrity using PowerShell. Open the program and point to: C: Users "Username" AppData Local chia-blockchain app-1.1.2 resources app.asar.unpacked daemon And then rewrite the path, indicating the drive and the name of the folder in which the generated rafts are located. If there are no errors, everything is in order, the "broken" area needs to be re-seeded, otherwise it will not yield a crop. If there is no synchronization, try deleting all available connections in the program interface. They will automatically update and areas synced to the network will be highlighted in green. In principle, you can start creating new rafts even before the end of the synchronization of your node. To speed it up, try opening port 8444 on your computer and on your router. Available exchanges for selling coins As of 05/12/2021, Chia cryptocurrency can be exchanged on the following exchanges: - Gate.io; - OKEx; - XT.COM; - MXC.COM; - BKEX; - DigiFinex; - LBank; - AOFEX; - Bibox. The current exchange rate, current exchange pairs and other information are available at https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/chia-network/markets . Profitability and payback But is the game worth the candle? How profitable is the mining of this cryptocurrency? Recently, an article was published on the Overloker.ru portal entitled: "It's too late to get Chia Coin." The author calculated that to build the Chia mining farm, which will bring in 1 coin in 18 hours, the farmer must spend at least 1,200,000 rubles or $ 16,263 at the current exchange rate. However, he assumed that one coin would cost $ 30. However, on May 12, one Chia token was sold on OKEx for $ 1069, and a couple of days before that the rate was even higher. The truth and complexity of mining is constantly growing and at the time of this writing, such a farm will mine one coin in three days. But still, the profitability is beyond praise. Smallholder farmers have already started to pool themselves. Look for available ones at https://miningpoolstats.stream/chia . Calculation calculator Сhia mining calculator will help to calculate the current profit. You can find it here . All you need to do is drag the slider and set the number of rafts you are sowing to see the approximate time in which you can earn one coin. Conclusion Whether the Chia cryptocurrency will be able to replace Bitcoin is hard to say. While this is far from a fact, and most likely unlikely. But for a long time already in the blockchain industry there was no project that caused such a violent reaction from the media. At the time of writing this article, the hashrate of this network was 3.88 EB (4019898.88 TB). Three weeks ago, ten times less. If things go on like this, the price of hard drives will skyrocket, and if the project goes bankrupt, then the losses of miners will be enormous. True, it is worth noting that Chia is far from the only crypto coin available for plotting, there are 8 more similar projects. However, you shouldn't expect instant surplus profit. Chia is more and more difficult to mine, equipment is becoming more expensive and liquidity is not too high. If the green coin is listed on Binance and a couple of other reputable exchanges, then you can safely invest in mining, or simply add it to your investment portfolio. However, the opinion of the author of the article should not be considered the ultimate truth. Whether or not to invest in this project is a private matter for everyone. Good luck to you! Read the full article

[michaelandy101-blog]

19 Impressive Product Demo Videos You'll Want to Copy

New Post has been published on http://tiptopreview.com/19-impressive-product-demo-videos-youll-want-to-copy/

19 Impressive Product Demo Videos You'll Want to Copy

In marketing these days, you can’t swing an enthusiastic micro-influencer without hitting someone who’s talking about video content. And it’s not without merit. A recent HubSpot study revealed 54% of consumers want to see more video content from brands and businesses they support.

With video marketers earning 66% more qualified leads per year and a 54% increase in brand awareness, it’s clear video marketing is the future and product demo videos are a lucrative path forward.

In fact, 72% of people would rather use video to learn about a product or service. There are many different types of product demo videos, so I’m sharing a few of my favorites below, along with tips on how to get started on your own product demo video.

Want to skip straight to the videos? Click here.

How to Create a Product Demo Video

Identify the goal

Determine your audience

Set a budget (and a timeline)

Decide between in-house or agency

Structure your video

Choose between animation and live-action

Write a script

Create a marketing plan

1. Identify the goal

Purchases? Subscriptions? Education? Brand awareness? Decide what your video is trying to achieve and what you want the viewer to walk away with. What action do you hope the viewer takes after watching your video, and what business need does it fulfill? For example, “After watching our product demo video, we hope the viewer submits a demo request form.”

2. Determine your audience

Has the audience for this video purchased with you before? Are you introducing a new product or feature to them? Or is this video reaching people who have never heard of you? What will this audience be concerned with? How long will they want to watch? What buyer persona will you be gearing this video for?

All of these are important questions to answer. For example, let’s say you’re introducing software that regulates the temperature of various areas in your office. The audience for your video might be harried office managers who are constantly fielding requests to turn the temperature up or down. They’re concerned with keeping their colleagues comfortable without breaking the bank on electricity costs.

3. Set a budget (and a timeline)

Do you have $7000 or $80,000 to make this product demo video? Identify your budget so you know how to proceed. This is also the time to set expectations. If you have a $500 budget, you’re not going to come out with a video on par with Apple’s latest release — and that’s alright.

Oh, and don’t forget to outline when you need this video to be completed. Even the biggest budgets can run up against roadblocks, if the timeline is too limited.

4. Decide between in-house or agency

This decision will likely be dependent on your budget. If you have a lot to work with, interview agencies who can give you quotes and creative pitches for your project.

If you have a small budget, don’t let that dissuade you from creating a video using your iPhone. You can also record a video of your computer screen while moving through your platform. Work with what you have and be proud of whatever you create.

5. Structure your video

Will you tell a story? Highlight pain points? Use text or visuals only? Decide how you want to communicate your goal and how you’ll bring it to life.

If you’re working with a creative agency or freelance videographer, they may help you define the structure. If you’re going it alone, use videos like the ones we’ve listed below to inspire you and define which format will work best for your product and goals.

6. Choose between animation and live-action

Animation can sometimes be a little cheaper than live-action video. Work within your budget and skill level, and be honest about which option best highlights what your product can do and the scope your project requires.

7. Write a script

The script is a crucial part of your video. It defines the tone, pace, and message. Start with a project brief, move on to an outline, and navigate your script, section by section, making sure it speaks to the goals you’ve previously outlined.

Call out opportunities for B-roll throughout, and always conduct a verbal run-through before getting behind the camera.

For more tips and a video script template, check out this blog post and accompanying video on how to write a video script.

8. Create a marketing plan

Once you’ve shot, edited, and finalized your video, it’s time to decide how you’ll share it with your audience. YouTube, your website or campaign landing pages, and special email campaigns are all great channels for distribution.

But don’t overlook less obvious opportunities, like including your video in your email signature, sharing it in partner blog posts, and incorporating it into your sales team’s pitches.

Product Demo Video Examples

1. Beauty Bakerie

This pleasant demo from Beauty Bakerie‘s CEO and Co-Founder Cashmere Nicole Carillo highlights the brand’s new concealer, foundation and makeup setting mist. Cashmere begins the demo with no makeup on to show her fans what the makeup will look like realistically as she puts it on her face. 

While the demo allows viewers to see what the products will look like in real life, Cashmere also gives instructions on how to use it so they’ll also know just how easy it is to add to their daily beauty routine.

    2. Airtable

This classic product demo video uses animation and the Airtable product to show users exactly who can use their product and how they can benefit from it. The video demonstrates several different use cases, taking a broad, top-of-the-funnel approach that will attract the masses.

They also do something else incredibly smart. As seconds tick by and viewers hypothetically click out of the video, the information shared gets more into the weeds sharing specific tactics and features. Airtable knows if someone has stuck around over one minute into their demo video, this is likely a qualified lead who wants to learn more.

3. Zendesk Sunshine

Zendesk leads with pain points in their product demo video. “Customer relationships are complicated … made up of fragmented pieces of what you know about your customers … it’s kind of all over the place,” a narrator explains. But Zendesk gets it. “What seems like chaos is actually everything you want.”

The viewer immediately feels like Zendesk understands them. It’s a full 50 seconds into the video before Zendesk even introduces a solution. We never actually see the platform at work, but that’s not really the goal of this video.

4. SurveyMonkey

At nearly two-minutes long, this is a lengthy product demo video. But it packs a powerful punch with text-based benefits and features, and a walk-through of the product interface.

Viewers see just how easy it is to send a survey using SurveyMonkey. They even see how it integrates with other platforms like Slack. This is a workhorse of a demo video, but the viewer witnesses how SurveyMonkey can integrate into their daily workflow — and how easy the product is to use, from sign-in to send.

5. Headspace

Is there anything harder to sell on the internet than meditation? Headspace makes it seem easy with their modern, relatable animated product demo video.

They offer a “healthier, happier life” and show you how the app works for a variety of users with differing goals and time. It’s an inclusive video that communicates a lot without overwhelming the viewer.

6. Esusu Financial

Esusu, an app created by Forbes 30 Under 30 social entrepreneurs Abbey Wemimo and Samir Goel, aims to help people in marginalized locations with financial planning. The demo created by the company gives viewers a look inside Esusu;s platform and the tools it has to offer. 

Specifically, this demo walks through how families can use the platform together to build each member’s credit, save funds together, or send funds to each other.

One great thing about the intro above is that it establishes a pain point by asking the audience if they’ve ever dealt with bad credit or poor savings. Then, it highlights exactly how Esusu can help them.

This demo is also a great example of how a quick and simple tour of an app can show potential users exactly what they need to know about navigating and using this type of financial planning app.

    7. Apple’s iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR

This glossy product video introduces the new iPhone XR by showing what it can do. Simple text alerts the viewer to the features this new phone possesses (e.g., “liquid retina,” “face ID,” and “water resistant”), and the benefits are communicated through the vivid visuals.

The goal of this product demo is to “wow” rather than educate, and that’s exactly what it does.

    8. Slack

Slack uses this brightly hued video to break down a common misconception about their platform: that it’s only for sending private messages. They walk viewers through how teams can communicate using their interface.

“It’s way more than just a place to talk,” explains the actor, “We keep all of our files here too.” The video is feature-heavy, but the actor chimes in with how those features translate into benefits as he walks viewers through a demonstration of Slack. A simple “Get started with Slack, today” closes out this informative video.

9. The Origins of Nike Free

This product demo tells the origin story of the Nike Free running shoes. The shoe creators share a bit about how the shoe was designed and call out benefits like, ��More natural movement” and “Nice, modern evolution.” A simple tagline at the end reads, “Engineered for modern motion.”

    10. Duolingo

Duolingo kicks things off with social proof. “Far and away the best free language-learning app,” says The Wall Street Journal. What follows is a description of how the platform works, backed with more data on how effective it really is.

If you want to prove that your product works, sometimes facts are more alluring than a demo of the product itself.

11. IKEA Place

There’s nothing wrong with stating your purpose up front. “Hey, IKEA would like everyone to know about Place, our new augmented reality app,” explains this demo video. What follows is a demonstration of the app, and a video montage of people struggling to design and furnish new spaces. “We want to make it easier for people everywhere to imagine a better place,” the narrator explains. That’s exactly what this video demo does.

12. NoseFrida

Your baby is cute, until she’s not. The narrator explains what happens to a baby’s nose when they’re sick — and why your baby gets fussy. Immediately, he’s identified the viewer’s pain points and explained the problem with NoseFrida’s competitors.

The narrator begins to explain how to use the NoseFrida — a device that allows parents to physically suck snot out of their baby’s nose and effectively ruins your days of carefree milkshake sipping forever (take it from me).

It’s here that the company does something brilliant. They know their customer’s biggest purchasing block is the gross-out factor this product elicits, so they confront it head on. “Breathe easy, we know what you’re thinking.”

The narrator then explains how NoseFrida is designed to be hygienic and safe. Know your product has a big red flag for customers? Try addressing it bravely, like NoseFrida does, instead of tip-toeing around the elephant in the room.

13. Bluprint

How do you get people to part with their most valuable asset: their free time? Online learning platform Bluprint does just that. They overcome viewer objections early on. Think you don’t have time? “There’s always a way to get your creative fix,” the narrator explains.

The video takes an aspirational lens, showing people cooking, painting, and dancing. It ends with a call to action, “What will you do today?” Bluprint knows what they’re up against, and their demo video is a strong rebuttal against inactivity.

14. Sphero

Are you known for one product but want to introduce another? Sphero knows a little about that. A few years ago, they created a robot called BB-8 for a little-known movie called Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Lucky for them, I hear that panned out.

In a Kickstarter video for their newest robot, they begin by featuring the iconic BB-8 robot that skyrocketed their success. Once the viewer knows who they are, they present their new robot: The Sphero RVR.

The rest of the video features the robot’s engineers speaking about what their new creation does and why it’s special. We believe them, because they’ve tethered this new creation to their past authority.

15. Ring Door View Cam

This is another great example of showing instead of telling viewers what your product can do. The video shows everyday people using Ring’s Door View Cam in a variety of ways. We see them use the mobile interface, benefit from the speaker, and avoid danger using the camera.

16. Lime

Text that reads, “How to Lime” kicks this video off and tells viewers exactly what to expect. We see a step-by-step demonstration of how to use Lime, their safety recommendations, and some basics on their mobile app.

17. Peloton

This product video begins with an origin story of the Peloton bicycle and quickly moves to the benefits (i.e., you can ride it in your bedroom without waking your partner). Before you know it, the video is speaking to viewer pain points, “One of the challenges with boutique fitness is that it can be inconvenient.” They solution? Peloton.

Thousands of classes, experienced instructors, community, and ease of use. Close-ups of the machine in use highlights certain features, but what this video demonstrates most is the experience you’ll have using Peloton. “This is what I’ve been missing,” says one video participant. I can’t help but think that’s the primary goal the makers of this video had for their viewers.

18. Zoom

This is a classic example of a product demo video. A solid, feature-heavy script immediately jumps into how professionals can use and benefit from Zoom. The viewer sees the product being used as they listen to how it works, and they’re left with a clear picture of what Zoom can offer them.

19. Gusto

I’ve saved the most comprehensive product demo video for last. This example, from HR software provider Gusto, clocks in at an impressive five minutes and fifty-six seconds.

What follows is a careful walk-through of the product, it’s benefits, and how to pick the perfect plan.

Viewers who make it to the end likely signal to Gusto that they’re ready to speak with a salesperson. This video probably works best for buyers further along in the buyer’s journey. If your goal is to introduce your product/service to new audiences, stick with a shorter option that’s quick and easy to consume.

Using Product Demo Videos in Your Marketing Strategy

Product demo videos might take a bit of time and planning to create, but once they’re live, they can be an effective piece of your brand’s overall video marketing strategy.

As 2020 continues, and consumer seek out more video content while researching products, marketers are also finding that videos are their most effective asset. Like them, you’ll want to leverage video marketing and product demos to guide your prospect to the customer stage.

Want to create your own video? Check out our ultimate guide to video marketing.

Editor’s Note: This blog post was originally published in June 2019, but was updated for comprehensiveness and freshness in July 2020.

Source link

[climatechangeanddisaster]

Climate Change

Despite overwhelming evidence, there are still leaders in our government that believe climate change is a hoax.  

I am attaching a link from Nasa which verifies what many of us already know, climate change is real and climate change will have devastating effects on ecosystems around the world. Places like Kivalina, Alaska are already feeling the impact of climate change.  With the polar ice caps melting this little village has slowly been overcome by the rising water levels.  In ten years this village will only exist under water.  

It is time for our country to rejoin the global effort for climate change. Yes, it will cost countless U.S. dollars to abide by The Paris Agreement and contribute to the effort to save our planet. If we do nothing it will cost more in the future. When ecosystems are destroyed every creature in an ecosystem is affected and it creates a domino effect.  The organisms that survive must find another ecosystem and this can have catastrophic effects on organisms that already reside in that ecosystem.  This can have a devastating effect on the ecosystem because when an invading species kills all the natural inhabitants, the organisms, animals or plants that rely on that organism can become extinct. 

Hypothetically, Imagine a hundred years from now when the greenhouse effect has made the temperature of the earth rise to a new high and the ice caps of the world all melt.  I don’t have the mathematical ability to calculate how much of the earth would be under water but I know that the outer edge of every country of the world which is adjacent to water will be affected.  

This Paris agreement is not to harm the U.S., it was reached within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to protect the earth’s atmosphere from harmful emissions which are the cause of global warming and climate change. The United Nations Climate Change states the following, “The Paris Agreement builds upon the Convention and for the first time brings all nations into a common cause to undertake ambitious efforts to combat climate change and adapt to its effects (UNCC). The Paris Agreement is a joint effort to save the earth and its atmosphere from a future catastrophic event which is surely headed our way within the next few decades if we do nothing to reduce emissions and harmful chemicals which we release into our atmosphere.   

The Paris Agreement brings nations together for a common cause, for countries to be accountable for the emissions they release into the environment and to keep global warming at preindustrial levels. According to the agreement it states, “This includes requirements that all Parties report regularly on their emissions and on their implementation efforts” (UNCC). The Paris agreement holds every country involved in the agreement to be accountable and submit reports.  The U.S. has withdrawn from the agreement because they don’t want to be accountable. Our current government has tried to pass legislation on fracking which is harmful to the environment. According to Bob Egelko a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, “A federal judge barred the Trump administration Friday from approving oil companies’ requests to use the high-pressure drilling technique known as fracking in offshore wells along the Southern California coast until a review of the possible effects on endangered species... Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, injects a high-pressure mixture of water and chemicals into rocks and mineral deposits to release oil and gas. Environmental advocates contend it causes water and air pollution ” (Bob Egelko).  

Our government should be concerned with how fracking effects endangered species, our air, and water but it appears that oil companies which pollute are more important.  Marianne Lavelle in her article “Fossil Fuel Industries Pumped Millions Into Trump's Inauguration, Filing Shows.”  Ms. Lavelle states that “Among the big donors were Chevron, which gave $525,000; Exxon, BP and Citgo Petroleum, which each donated $500,000; and the Ohio-based coal company Murray Energy, which contributed $300,000. Kelcy Warren, the chief executive of Energy Transfer Partners, developer of the Dakota Access pipeline, gave $250,000. Continental Resources, the Oklahoma-based fracking company whose chief executive Harold Hamm was an early Trump supporter, gave $100,000.Those seven donations alone surpass the $2 million that the Trump campaign raised from the energy and natural resources industry before the election” (Inside Climate News).  I believe that these contributions are the reason that our government has agreed to ignore the detrimental effects of fracking were adamant about passing legislation to allow it.  

What a shame it is that our once great country does not care enough about our own environment to make an effort to save it for future generations.  If we pollute our air, water and destroying the earth with fracking; what a divine legacy to leave for our children.  If we do nothing, we should invest in oxygen and masks because our great-grandchildren will probably need them. 

Work cited.

https://www.businessinsider.com/what-life-is-like-in-kivalina-alaska-2017-9

https://climate.nasa.gov/

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19042017/fossil-fuels-oil-coal-gas-exxon-chevron-bp-donald-trump-inauguration-donations

https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/U-S-judge-bars-Trump-administration-from-OKing-13380068.php

https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement/the-paris-agreement

[nongravity]

DECAF April 2017 Post Mortem

This is going to be a different kind of festival report as I’m not only an exhibitor but I’m also the organizer! So I’ll talk about both sides of the coin here. This was my first time organizing an event like this, I had a lot of help from Sarah and Debbie and the rest of the Stray Lines group.

This is my 8th post mortem convention write up! You can find the rest on the Events page on my website or the post mortem tag here on my tumblr.

First, some event numbers! I’m leaving out the line item costs because it’s not just my money we’re talking about and I don’t want to force transparency anyone.

Budget for the event: €550-ish

Venue

Website

Poster Art

Poster/Postcard Printing

Decorations/Supplies

Sponsor and exhibitor incoming: €392

Damn Fine Print event sponsor

12 exhibitors

For a total budget shortfall of: €158

Our goal was to have 25 exhibitors, which would have safely covered our budget but we were only able to announce DECAF a month before it happened so even though we had interest from about 25 exhibitors, only 12 could pull a table together on such short notice. In retrospect, we didn’t even have room for 25 exhibitors! So from an event flow standpoint, it’s a good thing we only had 12. I’m not sure if there’s a remedy for this one, I feel like we landed on a reasonable price for exhibitors, so I wouldn’t want to double their prices, and 25 exhibitors would have made the event floor way too crowded. 

Space won’t be an issue at our next venue and hopefully having 3 months lead time instead of 1 will give more exhibitors a chance to book a table.

There were also some set-up costs that won’t factor into the next event, like purchasing the website domain and hosting. If you subtract that I maybe only lost €100. 

Now for my exhibitor numbers!

My total outgoing costs for the convention in order of leaving my house to the start of the show: €15

Fuel driving into Dublin - €10

Lunch - €5

What I brought with me:

Loads of We Can’t Afford This

My last 4 copies of Hats that aren’t trapped in storage

Plenty of Odd Reels and Strong

What I sold: 

1 Copy of Hats for €7

2 Copies of Strong €5

2 Copies of Odd Reels €3

11 Copies of We Can’t Afford This €4

For a total incoming of: €67

€52 is a good profit for a group table as opposed to a solo table. Brings down my total loss for the event to only €100. My hopes for the July show is that we’ll have enough space at the Dublin Food Co-op to all have individual tables. 

Obviously even these Dublin shows continue to cost more than they should until we actually move to Dublin. I can’t wait to eliminate the commute from these costs! It was also too much of a mad rush getting to Dublin with everything for the event and two kids so I didn’t pack a lunch of myself. 

We Still Can’t Afford This

It occurred to me while I was getting ready for the show that this was kind of like an Irish debut for We Can’t Afford This. A few copies were at the Temple Bar Gallery Art Book Fair last Christmas but most people never would have seen it! 

Kinda wild that it took me 6 months to show off my book about the Dublin housing crisis to a Dublin audience. But what a difference it made! I sold more than 2x as many as I did at LICAF. 

This kind of reignited my whole desire for organizing DECAF, to have more opportunities throughout the year to reach a local audience. 

Our Table and Us

Due to the Fumbally Stables requirement for a door-person, we had to put the Stray Lines table in the lobby away from the main exhibitor hall. It worked out though, as we became the DECAF greeters and toilet-direction-givers. I imagined it helped with sales a bit as well since it was a prominent placement. It didn’t allow us to hear any of the panels which was a bit of a bummer since it sounded like people were giving great talks from the snippets I heard. I could also barely hear the DECAF playlist I’d spent so long making.

What I brought for the group:

24 books by 6 different artists!

What the group sold:

52 books!

Not as many as LICAF but more than ELCAF and impressive because some of us were worried that the audience for DECAF would be the same Irish comics audience who’ve already read all our books. But instead we saw lots of new faces!

Winner

Is it cheating that I was the winner? It’s absolutely cheating. But I put We Can’t Afford This front and center on my music sheet stand and the music sheet stand is magic, whatever book we put up there (Sarah’s Primark at ELCAF, the Stray Lines Anthology at LICAF) always wins the day.

Dublin Eight Comic Arts Festival

It took about three months for DECAF to morph from hypothetical “a Comic Arts Fest in Dublin would be cool” to “maybe I could organize it” to “DECAF is happening!” I was inspired by Sarah running Pulse: Irish Comics Now last year and Monica Gallagher’s BMore Into Comics in Baltimore, Maryland. I’ve never even been to a BMore event yet since my family visits never sync up but the idea of a smaller, quarterly comic show really appealed to me. Monica hosts her events in bars, but since I’m a teetotaler I chose cafes which I thought would play well with the DECAF name.

Originally, it was supposed to be DCAF, I even okayed the name with The Dartmouth Comics Art Fest in Nova Scotia, but when I went to book the .ie website I found it was already taken by the Dublin Christian Arts Festival! 

Since I was already talking to a few venues in Dublin 8, and I really liked the silly coffee name I narrowed my venue hunt to a place that would keep Eight in the name. What happen if we do a show outside of Dublin 8? I have no idea! Scour the dictionary for E words. It factored into my choosing DublinComicArts for the website instead of DECAF, in case the letter E ever runs dry.

Rookie Mistakes

Besides losing money (definitely didn’t plan on that) some things came up along the way that completely slipped my mind. I didn’t say Free Admission anywhere on the poster or Facebook event. And it didn’t even occur to me until people started asking as they walked in the door! I don’t think it affected turnout but clarity is a good thing!

It wasn’t until a few days before DECAF that I put the first flyer on a college campus. Get with the times old man! If Julie hadn’t asked about dropping some posters and flyers at NCAD it never would have occurred to me! Not a single DECAF flyer made it to Trinity or UCD, DCU, DIT, Griffith, Pulse. Not that I really had posters and flyers to spare, or the budget to print more but really, what a dope to forget college kids, some of which are taking illustration and sequential art classes! 

At most comic events I feel bad for not socializing enough or making the rounds but it feels extra egregious when I’m the organizer! I said hi to people as they were coming in to set up, but once the show started and I got behind the Stray Lines table, that was kind of it for me! Debbie and Sarah made me go up at the end of The Comics Lab talks to say thank you and I’m glad I did. 

Highlights

Over a week later and I’m still pretty shocked by the turn-out we got. Never really a dull moment in the day and it repeatedly got crowded! People who showed up at 11am asked when the talks and panels were and when we told them 2:30pm, they actually came back! That’s wild to me! The Activity table and the Comic Swap table were hopping all day! Adults were drawing up at the table and kids were drawing down on the floor! The Swap table ebbed and flowed with used books and at the end of the day the donation box had €106 to give to the Abortion Rights Campaign! All the exhibitors I’ve talked to say they want to exhibit again at the next DECAF! Really lucky.

The venue was the perfect fit for our first event. The tables and arches were beautiful and it looked nothing like a traditional comic convention. It looked like an art gallery and a friend even asked me if they do gallery events there (they don’t usually but you should contact them anyway and hire their spaces!)

The poster art by Charlot Kristensen blew me away. It was the public face for the event and we needed one since I’m a complete unknown in the Irish comics community, “some dude named Matt is putting on a show” wouldn’t have filled the room. 

Sarah and Debbie agreeing to combine their quarterly Comics Lab with DECAF was a godsend. There’s no way the show would have been as successful as it was without The Comics Lab, DECAF stood on their reputation and the crowds in the afternoon came for The Comics Lab.

Damn Fine Print saved the day by sponsoring us! Our budget shortfall would have been much much worse without them, maybe even jeopardizing the prospect for future DECAFs.

Conclusion

When you consider that I often lose 100+ quid to travel to the UK to table an event, it’s looney tunes that I was able to organize an entire event here in Dublin and only lose 100 quid. Like, why not run an event! This might seriously change my comic show traveling habits. 

My next goals are to make it sustainable, losing only €100 isn’t bad, but I can’t afford to make a habit of it.

Once the show is out of the red, my next goal is to make the show free for individual exhibitors. Just knowing from experience how much table costs eat into the potential profits of a show and what a relief it was last year at Pulse and Small Press Day to have no table costs. The two ways there that I can see are, sponsorships, grants or crowdfunding. Sponsorship saved the first DECAF so I’ll keep pursuing that wherever I can. I haven’t been able to successfully navigate Ireland’s extensive grant system yet but I really need to figure it out. Crowdfunding is a total question mark. Are there 200 people who think having a small press event in Dublin is worth €1 a month? I hope so!

Epilogue

I didn’t officially announce that DECAF would be quarterly until the day of the event because I didn’t want anyone skipping April in favor of July. But I put a deposit down on the July show venue the same week I booked the April venue because why build one when you can build two twice the price?

Tara O Brien did our wonderful July poster. I’ve been so lucky with the people who’ve agreed to work with me on DECAF! There were supposed to be July postcards to give away at the April event but I really didn’t need to spend more money on the April event than I already did so it was fine to release the art digitally and save our printing budget for the final July poster. 

The July event is a bigger venue, with more exhibitors, it’s wheelchair accessible and will have a full spread of cafe tables and chairs. It’s also accidentally booked on my daughter’s birthday (you eeegit!) I can’t wait.

[actuallylorelaigilmore]

Leaving Things Unsaid

My very first AO3 fic seems like it was never crossposted here...until now! Two short chapters, super fluffy, a plot bunny drawn from song lyrics and the idea that a pre-series fling could explain the Josh/Donna dynamic.

Chapter 1: Lean In Close and Don't Let Go

This was so, so stupid.

His hands were everywhere, and she was trying--but failing--to be quiet. It was his hotel room, and they had thin walls between them and the others. She would regret this tomorrow.

Would he regret this tomorrow?

"You work for me," he murmured in a moment of clarity. She was already shirtless, rolling her eyes at him. He was the one who started it, she thought, staring at her from across the office like he couldn't look away. Like he'd been waiting for her.

He was the one who invited her to join them for drinks. She felt awkward. She was new. But they were all so welcoming, and she wasn't the one who got handsy after two beers and needed help getting back upstairs. His friends had made sympathetic faces in her direction, as if they could already tell she would feel responsible for him. Would take him on, because he needed her, even if she couldn't explain why this was so clear on the very first day. She couldn't explain why it was so appealing, either.

"Only technically," she replied, brought back to the moment by his teeth on her neck. Gently, because he was cautious. "I haven't even gotten on payroll yet."

"Good point." He smiled at her as they moved to the bed, suddenly direct as he ran a hand up her calf. "You have the longest legs I think I've ever seen."

"Please don't say I must have been a dancer. That's such a terrible line."

"Well, now I won't."

She tugged him up towards her, tangled her fingers in his hair. How would she be able to work beside him now, after this? It didn't mean anything, really. Nothing more than the fact that they were both a little drunk, and really curious. But it had to change things.

Didn't it?

"So were you athletic then?" he asked suddenly as they were shifting positions. "You really do have a certain kind of...grace."

"No, not really athletic," she replied, arching a little so he could tug down her slacks. They didn't fit quite right, a rushed purchase right after she was hired. "I did twelve years of dance."

He chuckled into her collarbone, sending shivers all the way down to her toes. "So you were a dancer."

"Yeah, but that doesn't make the line any less lame."

"It's not a line if it's true," he argued as she tossed his shirt to the floor. She was already unbuttoning his jeans when it landed.

"It is, actually, because you can't know if it's true until you try it, which is what makes it a line. I--" The rest of her words caught in her throat as he slid his hands up her stomach, toward the front-clasp of her bra.

"You're beautiful," he said quietly, and she rolled her eyes again at the man who had hired her and seduced her on the same day.

"Please, just tell me you're not completely drunk. I can't be the only one who remembers this in the morning. Talk about awkward."

He leaned into her, until they were almost nose to nose, and smiled. It was a slow smile, building until it reached pure wickedness. It surprised her. "I'm not drunk at all," he replied.

His voice was steady, and she met his gaze until she found what she was looking for. There it was, that "where have you been all my life?" look. Like a deer caught in headlights and happy about it.

She realized he was right. He wasn't drunk, just stupid, like her. For the first time, she closed the distance to meet his lips with hers, and decided to worry about it tomorrow.

Chapter 2: The Words, They're Everything and Nothing

When she woke up the next morning, Josh was already awake and dressing cautiously on his side of the bed.

"It's alright," Donna told him blearily. "I'm up."

"Sorry," he replied, turning around. "I tried to be careful."

"It's okay, Josh." She tried to add reassurance to her smile. In the sober morning light he seemed awkward in his own skin again. She might have worried that it had something to do with her, except that he'd been like that with his friends at the bar too. After one day she already knew that it was just his nature; he wore his anxiety like a hand-me-down suit, leaving him permanently tense and rumpled.

It was pretty cute, actually.

He rose from the bed to make coffee. Buttoning her blouse, Donna was barely able to hear him over the burbling of the coffeemaker and the aging radiator's hiss when he spoke.

"It can't happen again," Josh said. Her fingers froze on the second button. All of her froze at that moment, actually. She wasn't sure she could feel her toes anymore.

"I know," she replied. He glanced over his shoulder and frowned at her back. Without being able to see her face, he worried that maybe he'd hurt her feelings. She had to know it would be inappropriate, right? He wasn't being unreasonable.

Finally he left the coffee brewing and crossed the room to face her. She seemed fine, but he didn't know what kind of poker face she possessed.

As Donna tugged her slacks on, she tilted her face up to his curiously. "What?"

"Nothing." Josh looked down at the carpet, then away over her left shoulder. He was practically vibrating with nerves, so she took pity on him.

"Come on, Josh. It's not like I thought this was anything more than what it was."

"Okay," he agreed, his tone wary. "So, when we leave this room..."

"When we leave this room, we go back to work. Y'know, getting a new leader of the free world elected? I'll answer the phones and file papers, and you'll..." She trailed off, staring at him. "I don't actually know what it is you do right now. You'll go back to making jokes and swaggering around the office."

"I don't swagger!"

"One, yes you do. And two, funny how you object to that part and not my assessment of your job performance."

Josh shrugged. "I'm a mystery."

"Maybe to some," Donna said with a smile, "but I figured you out before we even met."

"What, do you have special powers now?"

"Special powers of reading? Sure." She smirked. "I was the one organizing your desk for two hours before you hired me, remember? You have very telling penmanship."

"I barely have penmanship," he argued.

"Exactly." Smoothing a hand down her hair, Donna swallowed a yawn. "Can I borrow your toothbrush?"

"Sure." He sat on the bed in the spot she had vacated and wondered why her casual acceptance bothered him so much.

"You don't think it'll be weird?" He called out to her from where he sat.

"No," came the muffled reply. "I'm already using it."

"Not my toothbrush, the--" He stopped shouting when she reappeared. "The fact that this happened, and now we'll be around each other all the time. You left the water running," he added as she approached him.

"It doesn't have to be weird if we don't let it be," she told him seriously. "It might even help."

"How?"

"I'm your assistant," she reminded him. "And it's a crazy campaign. You might need me to fetch your clothes or order your food or, I don't know, style your hair."

He raised his eyebrows. "I'm never going to need you for that last one."

"Well, I couldn't think of a third thing. My point is, it's close quarters around here and it'll certainly save time and trouble if you're comfortable changing in front of me or letting me into your room."

"You're right," he mused. "You should also probably know how I take my coffee. Since I just brewed a pot, how about you practice now, actually? Cream, no sugar." His best attempt at a winning smile seemed to have no effect on her.

"I'm not going to fetch your coffee, Josh." She swatted him lightly on the ear.

"But that's like job number one of assistanting."

"In the 1950s, maybe," she countered. "But it's 1998 and that particular duty is no longer in the Assistant's handbook. Ask your girlfriends to bring you coffee."

"My future hypothetical girlfriends?"

"Yep." Donna poured her own coffee and sipped it with a smile, watching as he pouted and doctored his own.

"Not even on special occasions?"

"Never."

"What if there's a National Coffee Day? C'mon, you'd have to bring me coffee on National Coffee Day."

She eyed him suspiciously. "There's already a National Coffee Day, isn't there? This is a trick question."

Josh raised his hands in defense. "Not that I'm aware of. There is not. But when Governor Bartlet becomes President Barlet, maybe he'll proclaim one."

He raised his eyebrows at her, looking as hopeful as a little boy on Christmas Eve, and she relented.

"Fine. If someday you proclaim a National Coffee Day, I will bring you coffee in honor of the holiday."

Frowning, he returned to sitting on the bed. "I won't be able to proclaim anything, Donna. Only Presidents can..." He trailed off, narrowing his eyes in acknowledgement. "I see what you did there."

"Mm-hmm." She busied herself with tossing out the used creamer cups while he thought it over.

"So you're saying that the only way you'll ever bring me coffee, even though you're my assistant, is if I become the President of the United States and then create a coffee holiday."

"That's right."

"But if I become President, I'll have a handful of other staff who could bring me coffee whenever I wanted."

"So?" She took the chair across the room from where he sat, watching his face.

"So...never. You're saying you'll never bring me coffee."

"Now you're getting it."

"Well...okay."

Josh's brow furrowed in confusion as she began removing her blouse again. When she shimmied back out of her slacks, he had to close his mouth and swallow before speaking.

"What...what's happening now?"

Her smile was a beguiling cross between bashful and seductive. "What do you want to happen now?"

Shaking his head, he tried to remember the problem with this scenario. "We agreed--"

Donna cut him off, rising from her seat to cross to him. "We agreed that we need to have a strictly professional relationship as soon as we leave this room. Have we left the room yet?"

His grin spread slowly, changing the contours of his face. "A loophole. I like it."

She reached up to smooth her hand across his forehead. "I like the crease you get right here when I confuse you."

"Well, that's good," he replied, rolling his eyes as he led the way back to the rumpled hotel bed. "Because I think you're going to be seeing it a lot."

[jamesgierach]

“LESSONS FOR STATE ON CASH BAIL” AND MUCH MORE

To: Gov. JB Pritzker, Chief Judge Timothy Evans, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, CC State’s Attorney Kim Foxx and CC President Toni Preckwinkle

CC: Frank Main, fmain@sun-times.com Tom McNamee, Chris McQuery

From: JEG, former aide to the late-Chief Judge John Boyle

Date: Monday, January 18, 2021

Summer 1968, as a DePaul law student and aide to then-Chief Judge John Boyle, I helped push an old oak desk into a space at the Cook County Jail under a hand-drawn “ROR” sign, the acronym meaning “Release on Recognizance” bail program, a program that would hopefully release Cook County Jail inmates awaiting trial, who, hopefully, would not commit new crimes while on bail. Chief motivation, likely: reduce jail occupancy and stop the drain on Cook County tax dollars.

The same motivation in 2021, spiked by COVID-19 imperative and a desire for better criminal justice for poor and Black inmates, has again put the bail bond system under the spotlight (“Lessons for State on Cash Bail?” Chicago Sun-Times, 1/18/21, news report by Frank Main) at a time when Cook County has 9,000 people in the sheriff’s custody, 5,400 at the jail and 3,600 more on house arrest with ankle bracelets.

THE PUZZLE

The puzzle — how to balance public safety with criminal justice for the poor who, often, happen to be minorities.

The proposed solution of the Illinois General Assembly is the bill it passed that would do away with the cash bail system. Maybe it will help but as a former Cook County assistant state’s attorney, I think we must recognize other realities pertaining to the criminal justice system.

FREEDOM, INCARCERATION, DELAY

One such reality is: A defendant charged with a crime is less likely to plead guilty if he is free on bond, can delay “judgment day,” and has a chance to “beat the rap” all together, because of future uncertainties. Witnesses die, move, forget, can’t be found, or may no longer be under duress from criminal charge themselves, later.

“Later,” sometimes, just never comes.

REDUCER, JUSTICE, DISCRETION

Another criminal justice reality is: reduced criminal charges can greatly expedite the arrival of Judgment Day.

A “reducer” is shorthand for the amendment of a criminal charge, often from a felony to a misdemeanor, the latter carrying a maximum jail time in Illinois of one year. Why would a defendant plead guilty to a reducer? Because auto theft, say, charged as a felony can put a defendant into a state penitentiary for years (incidentally, the incarceration bill then goes to the state rather than Cook County). Charge reduction is one of the best arrows in a prosecutor’s quiver, one that tends to prevent delay when “Justice delayed is (often) justice denied.”

TIME CONSIDERED SERVED, TIME ACTUALLY SERVED

Time was when an incarcerated defendant would routinely plead guilty after a relatvely brief jail stay for “time considered served, time actually served.”

CAR THEFT, JOYRIDE, CARJACKING

Time was when a car thief caught last night in the stolen car would go from arrest to jail; in the morning he’d go from jail to court, where he pled guilty to a “reducer,” and in handcuffs would leave court to serve a one-year sentence in the Cook County Jail for a misdemeanor. No delay, no continuances, no discovery, no motions, no lost witnesses, no slip between the cup and the lip.

Is one year of incarceration enough for a car theft, you ask? (We’re talking nonviolent, simple car theft here, not kids on a ��joyride,” not carjacking, taking a vehicle from the person by use of force or threat of force).

I remember the assistant state’s attorney training me, who explained to the victim whose car was stolen and asked, why is the defendant only getting a year in prison on a misdemeanor when my car is worth “more than $150” (the misdemeanor-felony threshold in the early 1970s) as originally charged in the felony theft complaint for preliminary hearing, and not valued “at less than $150,” as the reducer complaint as amended charges?

COOK COUNTY CAR THIEVES GET ONE YEAR

“Because in Cook County if you steal a car you get one year in prison,” my teacher explained to the victim.

“But this isn’t the first time he stole a car,” the victim complained.

“Well, of course. He’s a car thief,” the prosecutor explained, “and in Cook County for that you get a year In jail.”

Is the alternative better?

FELONY CHARGING, DISCOVERY, MOTIONS, CONTINUANCES, BOND, PROBATION

Hypothetically, the auto thief steals a car and gets caught. Next morning he goes to court, and no deal is offered by the prosecutor on a reducer. The defendant pleads not guilty and bond is set at $10,000 which defendant cannot pay. Case is continued for two weeks for preliminary hearing on the felony charge.

Two weeks later, defendant’s attorney appears and requests continuance (full retainer probably not paid). First continuance requested by defendant, attorney needs time to prepare, State asked for a continuance last time. Continuance granted, car owner told to come back next court date. Bond reduction motion denied. And with that the felony charge, direct indictment/preliminary hearing, discovery process (discovery rights attach because it’s a felony carrying serious penitentiary prison time), continuance process and delay of justice wheels start to turn and slip.

Eventually, as the case drags on, defendant’s bail is likely reduced, defendant posts bond, and the defendant is no longer anxious for his speedy trial. He’s free. Maybe on a bracelet.

A year later, maybe, it’s judgment day. Is the witness still willing, how crowded is the court docket, how’s COVID-19 relief coming in prisons, has the crime lab witness retired, how much pressure to get cases off the docket to enable prosecution of last summer BLM rioters...maybe probation with time served.

NO INCOME, NO JOB, NO RIGHT TO CARRY A WEAPON

Probationers, like parolees cannot carry a gun. Some probationers and parolees cannot find a job. They get hungry. Their families get hungry. What to do?

Often the drug business is the answer, “the Saving Grace.”

The “War on Drugs” makes drugs a profitable business, and the drug business does not discriminate based on constitutionally-outlawed differences. Everyone is equally invited to deal drugs, because “Just say NO” prohibition doesn’t ask a prospective worker, “Have you every been convicted, or arrested, for a crime?”

Prohibition, again as a century ago, is the universal and fair employer of last resort.

Trouble is: the drug business is highly competitive, very violent, and as a practical matter necessitates that serious players come armed with guns and a willingness to use them. This dilemma presents the probationer or parolee with a monumentally important choice, follow the rules of prohibition or parole and go hungry, or break the rules, eat, and maybe get caught.

And even if apprehension by the authorities presents itself, there is still the last option, “It was either him or me. I wasn’t going back to prison.”

RETALIATION, LIFE STYLE

“I decided to eat, so I ran the risk of working for a gang, selling drugs on a corner and regularly carried a gun. A gun is good protection but you’re more likely to get shot doing things that other people do who sell drugs. Competition becomes your worst enemy, and he looks just like you. The more you succeed in the drug business the more valuable your ‘corner’ or ‘license’ becomes, the more danger you’re in. And soon, the streets become a greater risk to your life than the cops,” a brother explained to me.

“Sure, I broke probation but I ate, and I lived well with a steady income. Then my best buddy got hit, shot like a target on a gun range. I knew who did it, the Upside Down gang. I squared the score. Life was good. I’m off probation. Then Illinois legalized pot.”

“TAKE THE PROFIT OUT OF DRUGS”

As a candidate for Cook County state’s attorney in 1992, I sought to stop much of Cook County crime by “taking the profit out of drugs.” It was a counterintuitive political message, but it made sense to me for a number of reasons, some captured in my campaign slogan.

“Take the Profit out of Drugs;

To take Crime off our Streets; and

Taxes off our Backs.”

Catchy, I thought, but it did not catch on. Instead, leaders like Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) asked, “How much drugs do you want to give addicts?” And I was soon transformed from tough on crime (“If I ever do anything wrong, you’re the last person I want to be prosecuted by,” Bob, a Cook County deputy sheriff with 30 years experience at the Criminal Court Building, 26th and California) to a “soft on crime” liberal.

QUESTION FEARED, NEVER ASKED

During my Don Quijotic quests for state’s attorney in 1992 and Democratic primary race for Illinois governor in 1994 (“Ilinois’ First Drug Policy Reform Governor”), I feared only one question from some smart reporter that never came. The question was:

“Well, Mr. Gierach, suppose Illinois did legalize all drugs. And suppose it did deprive gangbangers of drug revenues. What can we expect from young, armed, Black drug dealers, use to the good life, and now deprived of their customer base. Should we be expecting armed raids on white people in the suburbs?”

The question never came.

RECREATIONAL POT, $1 BILLION

Back to our probationer who couldn’t carry a gun.

In 2020, Illinois changed the law and legalized recreational pot, the most popular recreational drug of them all. This change caused a big, $1 billion revenue shift in its first year when combined with already legal medical marijuana.

According to a front-page, 12/20/1992, Chicago Sun-Times headline (“$7 Billion: Drug Trade In the City and Suburbs”), the drug business is big business here.

Now, $1 Billion on $7 Billion is not nearly all the illicit drug business in Chicago and its suburbs, but it’s noticeably large, large enough for government to notice and gangbangers, too.

And now I wonder. Are armed robberies on the Magnificent Mile, shootings in the suburbs, and on metropolitan Chicago expressways a response to the seismic shift of illicit drug revenues to legal markets? Are Last Resort Employees telling us, telling me, the frightening question my mind contemplated 29 years ago really was a potential threat to fear? Maybe.

COURAGE, INSIGHT

Have we the courage and insight to press on with drug legalization? Cocaine, heroin, meth, hundreds of new synthetics and a long, United Nations “Yellow List” of criminalized drugs. Will we “Just say NO to Prohibition, Again?”

James E. Gierach

Palos Park, Illinois 60464

1.18.21

(708) 951-1601

Risk-Assessment Algorithm: Bail

Delayed-Punishment Algorithm: Crime, Plea of Guilty

Time Considered Served

Time Actually Served

The Reducer

Drug Policy

[newyorktheater]

David Lawson made a personal sacrifice as a public service: He read 10 campaign books, all but one by current candidates for President of the United States. From his reading, he has fashioned an hour-long show that should get wider exposure than the one-shot performance last night as part of the 2019 Gotham Storytelling Festival at the Kraine Theater. He’d be a natural as a correspondent for The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Trevor is Lawson’s middle name, literally. In “The 2020 Book Report,” Lawson presents some funny trivia gleaned from his reading: Mayor Pete had trouble finding a photograph for his OK Cupid profile because all of his were of him in a suit surrounded by people clapping; the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team moving to Los Angeles taught Bernie Sanders “how corporate America works”; Kamala Harris claims she always preferred Tito Jackson over his brother Michael. But there is enough serious analysis to make his show enlightening. On the plus side of Andrew Yang: He is “the only candidate who brings up how the rising costs of college isn’t tied to increased teacher salary or shiny new campus buildings but an administrative shell game that benefits the rich.” On the minus side: “Yang often comes across as the exact type of out of touch tech bro millionaire that he is claiming to try to save us from….For a book called ‘The War on Normal People’ he often talks about normal people as if we are hypothetically real. He describes New York City…as “the bubble,” and talks about New Yorkers as if we are all like the people within five blocks of his Upper East Side property.” In the show, Lawson spends about five minutes on each candidate – and on Stacey Abrams (“Abrams is not running for president. But after reading her book I wish she were”) – dividing each segment into five parts: 1. The good stuff, the things he likes about the candidate judging by their book. 2. The rough stuff, things he doesn’t like based on the book. 3. One funny thing. 4. An anecdote from Lawson’s life that came to mind while reading each book. 5. He then asks each member of the audience to rank each candidate from zero to 10.

Within that framework, Lawson occasionally slips into the role of superficial literary critic – Cory Booker “is a great storyteller.” Pete Buttigieg “tells his story pretty well, in particular a great story about him having to Skype into city meetings as Mayor after driving all day, armed with a gun, in a war zone.” Julian Castro “is a bad storyteller. He dwells on insanely mundane details in his life.”

But Lawson more often functions as a political analyst, though closer to a political columnist than political reporter. He’s not shy about expressing his personal views, albeit vaguely, which sometimes makes his analysis less useful. On Joe Biden: “He’d be better than what we have now at least….While I don’t always agree with him, Biden did talk about foreign policy more than anybody else in any of these books I read.”

  Lawson admires that in her book Warren comes off as a “wonk” who “respects the intelligence of the average American,” and writes “in a way that makes me think she’s not only has a plan for that, but the know-how to execute that plan.” The rough stuff:

“Warren spends a majority of this book talking about the past: FDR’s New Deal, the GI Bill, stuff like the Eisenhower Highway System. Yet in mentioning all these things, putting the past on a pedestal constantly, she starts to sound tone-deaf on how many people were excluded from those things, mainly on racial lines.”

Lawson devotes his last five minutes to a book by Trump that came out in December 2016. The good stuff? “Trump wrote a very small book. A very easy book to read out in public, pressed against my lap, hiding the cover.” If there is nothing really besides rough stuff — “so much of his awful character on display in this book” — Lawson also points out the man’s strategy for winning, and Lawson’s fear that the book “reads like how he wins again.”  Most interestingly, he details how Trump “used pop culture to soften the image of his hateful worldview,” and points out “for this softening of his image that played no small role in him being the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, our president gets a yearly pension from the Screen Actors Guild of $110,000.”

Choosing the president of the United States strikes me as such a crucial test of our democracy this time around that I feel a burden of responsibility just in reporting on David Lawson’s show. I feel like stamping on a warning sign: Do not make your judgment based just on this.  At its best, “The 2020 Book Report” has encouraged me to do something I’ve been meaning to do – read at least one or two of these books.

Also check out: Confessions of a Presidential Candidate. How the political memoir evolved by Jill Lepore in the May 13, 2019 edition of the New Yorker magazine

The list of books discussed, in the order in which they are discussed on The 2020 Book Report, with links to each book’s Amazon page.

Where We Go from Here: Two Years in the Resistance by United States Senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders

An Unlikely Journey: Waking Up from My American Dream by former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro.

The Truths We Hold: An American Journey  by United States Senator from California Kamala Harris.

United: Thoughts on Finding Common Ground and Advancing the Common Good by United States Senator from New Jersey Cory Booker

Lead from the Outside: How to Build Your Future and Make Real Change by former Minority Leader of the Georgia State House of Representatives Stacey Abrams

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future by Venture for America founder Andrew Yang

Shortest Way Home: One Mayor’s Challenge and a Model for America’s Future by South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg

This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America’s Middle Class by United States Senator from Massachusetts Elizabeth Warren

Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose by former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden

Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again Hardcover Donald Trump by the 45th  President of the United States Donald Trump.

  The 2020 Book Report Review: 10 Campaign Memoirs Analyzed On Stage David Lawson made a personal sacrifice as a public service: He read 10 campaign books, all but one by current candidates for President of the United States.

[filipeteimuraz]

The Best Ecommerce Website Builder

Launching an online store and trying to decide among the best ecommerce website builders, but don’t know which one’s right for you? They all seem to promise the same things: gorgeous templates, robust analytics, effortless inventory management, wonderful customer support.

I’ve got you covered. I took a look at all of the options to find the best website builder for creating an online store.

In my research, I paid attention to the following criteria:

Functionality — The major difference between an ecommerce site builder and a “normal” website builder is you’re going to be running your business off this platform. It needs to accept payments instantly and securely. It needs to have a useful dashboard to monitor traffic, sales, and inventory. It needs to keep have a cart the makes buying easy, and a system for calculating shipping.

Ease of use — There should be an easy way to add and remove products, an easy way to see your analytics, and an intuitive sales dashboard that can serve as your home base.

Design — The templates should look good out of the box and be easy to customize without expert (read: $$) help; and the designs should be pretty hard to mess it up or make worse.

Customer support — When things get tricky, you don’t want to feel like you’re going it alone.

Marketing — The pages should be SEO optimized, and the template should work work with your social channels and easily to connect paid ad channels.

Add ons — Since almost no system will have everything for everyone out of the box, I made sure the website builder had a way to accommodate additional needs.

Pricing — Sure, I get that an all-in-one solution like an ecommerce website builder will be more expensive than a DIY option, but we don’t want to pay through the nose, and we want what we get to be worth it. This includes the terms for payment processing. This is the last bullet on the list for a reason though: saving a penny here isn’t worth losing out on a dollar later on.

Which online store builder should I use?

The short answer: You should probably go with Shopify, especially if you plan to do more than $5,000/month in sales. It’s the industry leader for a reason. It has the level of in-depth analytics, inventory management, POS, shipping options, and every other ecommerce feature that you need (and that you really need at the $5,000+ level. If you’re not thinking that big, it’s time to get started.

New digitally-native and niche brands are the future of retail. — “Small Is The New Big,” Forbes

If you’re running more of a professional portfolio with some sales or subscription offerings, then hen you should check out Squarespace. Price wise, they’re basically the same. Squarespace wins for design; Shopify wins for ecommerce features.

The other online store builder worth recommending is Wix, which has a pretty cool AI-builder that’ll turn your social media into a website with a coordinating color palette and pre-populated photos. If you run a bookings-based business, or a music business, then there are features in the Wix stores that are definitely worth checking out. It’s also one of the cheapest options, though if you’re picking your ecommerce platform by price alone, we need to have a side conversation about how you need to get your head in the game. There are some flaws I discuss further down in the in-depth reviews you should take into account — and see if they’re dealbreakers for you during your free-trial period.

Side note: No matter which website builder you pick, you should use the free-trial period as a test run. What features are missing and can you live without them? What’s it like to actually run your business from that platform?

I also reviewed WooCommerce which is an open-source, subscription-free way to sell things through your WordPress store. If you’re running a content site, I wholeheartedly recommend building your site with WordPress; it just wins in the content management space. Simple as that.

Finally, Weebly, which was recently acquired by payments processor Square, is fine, but not impressive. The standards set by Shopify, Squarespace and the other contenders are just too high for Weebly to hit them. I’ll keep an eye out though.

The top 5 ecommerce website builders compared

Shopify

Best ecommerce platform for most businesses

Drag-and-drop store builder

70 themes: 10 free + 60 paid

Competitive pricing

Shopify is my favorite ecommerce software — and the one I recommend to just about everyone. It’s the leader in the industry and rightfully so. The most important ecommerce features are ready to go without any customization, and Shopify makes it easy to customize anything else with its super robust app store. If you run into any issues, there’s 24/7 support.

The worst thing about Shopify is the price point — and it’s generally competitive. The subscription, which starts at $29/month is right in line with what you’d pay with any hosted option, and so are the payment processing fees, which start at 2.9% + 30¢ credit card rates and only get better from there. I just don’t like the 2% additional fee for non-Shopify payment processors. I get that Shopify wants you to stay in the Shopify ecosystem, but offering multiple payment options is better for customers and one of our 8 quick wins for ecommerce sites.

Pros

Robust app store

Clean, modern themes

Intuitive product pages

Easy-to-use drag-and-drop store builder

Competitive payment processing rates

Safety and security

Speed

Can create landing pages

Optimized for SEO

24/7 Support

Cons

Additional fee for payments from non-Shopify payment processors, like PayPal for example

Blog feature is minimal — it’s technically there, but it’s not enough to run a content site on

Majority of the apps in the Shopify app store aren’t free, so you could also increase your monthly spend there

Liquid set up, not PHP

Lock-in feature — it can be challenging to move your store away from Shopify. It’ll export as a CSV file, but it’ll be time-consuming to rebuild where you go next

Shopify pricing

It’s competitive, but like I said charges an kind of annoying fee for external payment processors. All in all, I think the price is worth it.

$29/mo for Basic Shopify — 2.9% + 30¢ credit card rates + 2% for non-Shopify payment processors

$79/mo for Shopify — 2.6% + 30¢ + 1% for non-Shopify payment processors

$299/mo for Advanced Shopify  — 2.4% + 30¢ + 0.5% for non-Shopify payment processors

The difference between these packages:

Increase in number of staff accounts: 2, 5, 15

Unlock gift cards, reporting, and advanced reporting

Unlock third-party shipping calculations

Better rates on shipping and payment processing as you increase in the plans

Shopify themes

When choosing a theme, I suggest skipping filtering by price point. None of the themes on Shopify are going to break the bank — the most expensive themes are $180. If a theme has what you want, that’s the theme for you. Go to the all themes and ask yourself a few questions.

The first question is the most important:

How many products are you selling? Just one? A few? A lot? If you are selling one item your site will be very different than another online store that’s selling hundreds. In fact, set this filter and see if that’s enough to bring the templates down to a reasonable number.

If the number is still large, then you can filter even further:

Do you need a size chart?

What social media do you want integrated? Instagram? Twitter? Pop-up email form?

Would you like a “related products” feature?

Do you need video capabilities?

What layout and menu option will be easiest for your user to navigate?

What’s your store’s style? What’s your business like? Which theme reflects your business and creates the feeling or idea in your customer that you’re looking for? If you don’t have a clue where to start with this question, I recommend filtering by Industry. You’ll get a sense of the types of designs Shopify considers in line with most businesses like yours.

How are you going to tell your brand story? Is it in video? Writing? Photos? Are you running a crowdfunding campaign and the goal tracker is part of that story?

Find one you think you like? Check the theme reviews.

If other people have this theme and are frustrated, that’s a little peek into the future for you too.

Back away from themes with frustrated customers who haven’t had good luck with customer service.

Take a look at the demo sites both mobile and desktop versions. Then take a look at the actual stores using the theme. Are these in line with what you want to make?

If everything checks out, choose your theme. Don’t worry — you don’t have to buy it now. You’ll pay for it later, after you have a chance to test it out. Do check out the different versions of the theme — these will control the overall look and feel of your site, and you’ll want to decide which one you like best at this point. It can be hard to tell which one is best when you have only template content to look at.

I went through this process with a hypothetical business that sells one, and found a theme I like for this business. I chose the Showcase theme because I like the full-page photography. I picked the theme, answered a few questions from Shopify and then got to my dashboard.

From here, I can add merchandise, or I can customize my theme. I’ll do a little bit of both, of course.

Key changes to make:

Change the font — this ensures your store will look different than other stores, even stores with the same theme

Layout, content blocks — you’ll drag and drop these in the menu on the left side and the preview will update to the right

Attach your social media feeds

Customize the cart experience

Shopify app store

If there’s anything your theme doesn’t have, like customer reviews, there’s the Shopify app store. Basically the apps are little snippets of code that will add a feature to your Shopify store. It’s like having a dev build something for you, but because Shopify is a huge ecosystem, you don’t have to pay them the real price of custom building you something. They’re going to sell this same code to thousands of other stores. I love this about Shopify. According to the Shopify app store, more than 80% of stores use apps — and I’ll bet if you filtered that number by the number of live, active stores that are really making sales, then the percentage would be really really close to 100%.

Squarespace

Stunning templates

Professional look

Ideal for portfolio sites

Has a learning curve

Squarespace has a reputation for beautifully designed templates. That reputation applies to its ecommerce store themes as well. They’re handsome, I must admit it. There are a few things you should know going in: I recommend Squarespace more for professional portfolio sites than true ecommerce stores. It’s just set up for those kinds of stores better.

It’s not a bad idea to run your online store with Squarespace; Shopify is just easier when it comes to managing inventory and customizing every little nuance of your store. The Squarespace builder is a module-based builder. It’s not drag-and-drop — but you can get the hang of it pretty easy. Don’t get frustrated by the “demo” content or “sample” pages. You’ll have to copy the page before you can customize it, a silly step but not one to deter you from getting your work done.

Pros

Gorgeous templates

Incredible looking result

24/7 support

15-day free trial

Cons

Tabbed interface that’s not super intuitive

Design requires high-quality photography (which you should get)

Only integrates with Stripe, PayPal, and Apple Pay

No app marketplace

Squarespace pricing

Basic online store: $26/month billed annually

Advanced online store: $40/month billed annually

What’s the difference between these plans?

The Advanced plan includes flexible coupons, subscriptions, abandoned cart auto recovery, gift cards, and advanced shipping. Unless you want one of these features, you’ll be good with the Basic online store. There are also two other plans that aren’t aimed at ecommerce stores — Personal website for $12/month billed annually, and Business website for $18/month billed annually. With the Personal plan you can’t sell anything. With the Business plan you can, but you’ll pay a 3% transaction fee. If you’re doing more than $275 in sales each month, there’s no question between the two plans — you’d be paying in fees the difference in the price without unlocking any of the online store features like inventory, tax, coupons, and shipping labels.

You can also upgrade or downgrade your plan at any time. Unless you know you want one of the Advanced features, I’d start with the Basic online store and go from there.

Squarespace templates

All of them are beautiful. Let’s start there. To find one that fits your store, I’d start by sorting into Online Stores. You’ll see your options are narrowed to 11 templates. Then ask yourself:

How many products do I want featured on the homepage?

What amazing photography do I have?

Do I want to use video backgrounds?

Does the quality of my images stand up to the quality of the Squarespace design?

Do I have much to say in words? Do I want those words over the top of my images or beside them?

What kind of menu do I want?

Do I want anything specific: Grid layout? Scrolling features? On-hover effects?

I suggest you preview the theme and notice what it’s like to use the example layout. To be honest, your site is going to be at best like this one, so if there’s anything you don’t like, take note. It’ll likely annoy you even worse in your own store.

Once you find a layout you like, click Start with “Theme Name.” You’ll create an account at this point. Don’t worry, you don’t have to pay yet — you have a 15-day free trial to customize the store and make sure it’s what you want.

To make changes to the pages, you’ll need to make copies of the sample pages. The interface is minimal and soothing, but not very helpful. Just get in a meditative mindset and keep clicking to figure things out. There are a lot of tabbed sections, which I don’t love. But it’s not challenging.

I wouldn’t call the builder drag-and-drop — it’s more of a module based style to build and go. You’ll get use to it the more time you spend with the system. Though, I’ve gotta say, if you’re using Squarespace, I suggest you take your cues from the design that’s ready-made. It’s one of the things you’re paying for.

Wix

500 templates

Drag-and-drop without limitations

Quick-start with the help of an AI designer

Unique templates for booking, music, events and restaurants

I really like the way Wix has used AI to automate the design decisions. It’s the exact opposite of the Weebly approach of making you pick a theme based on your first glance. If you already have some web presence — maybe in your Instagram or Facebook — Wix will take the work you’ve already done and create a website to match. You can also start from scratch. That’s one of the things I like most about Wix. It’s pretty much down to help you build your online store the way you want to: with help or without, from scratch or from a template, in the drag-and-drop builder or deep in the code.

Pros

Cheapest website builder in this list

Dozens of payment gateways including Square, Stripe, and 2Checkout

VIP Priority Callback support option

Cons

Limited reporting and analytics

No way to automate or integrate tracking numbers

Product pages don’t have a sort filter

The biggest drawbacks for Wix are its store features. Some very basic things you’ll want to do if you’re actually shipping products may become very irritating. I’m talking things like attaching tracking numbers to orders or downloading your reports.

If you’re making the choice on which ecommerce website builder to use simply on price, I implore you to stop using that as your methodology. There is a false logic at play. The $6 you’d save by choosing one website builder over the other will not be worth it when you’re wasting time trying to make the software do something it’s simply not built to do. Give the website builder you do select a thorough test run during your trial. This is the software you are using to run your business — don’t let a few bucks stand in the way of getting software that’ll really support you.

Wix pricing

Business Basic for $20/month

Business Unlimited for $25/month

Business VIP for $30/month

What’s the difference between these plans?

Storage: 20GB, 35GB, 50GB

Video hours: 5 hours, 10 hours, unlimited

VIP plan also gets VIP support with Priority Response

There are also 4 non-ecommerce plans that won’t allow you to accept payments

If you’re interested in learning how to make a Wix website for your online store, I have a whole tutorial on it, so I won’t repeat myself here.

WordPress with WooCommerce

Complete control over your ecommerce site

No subscription fees

1 theme, with variations and customizations

WooCommerce is a little bit different than the other ecommerce options we’ve looked at so far. It’s a self-hosted option, which is the more DIY version. A website builder like Shopify is like living in a hotel where everything is already included: there’s a coffee maker and coffee grinds, clean towels, and shampoo. If anything breaks you know you’ll have help. But it’s also more expensive and you have less control and ownership. You can’t take the towels from the hotel home with you, for example. With WooCommerce, you’ll build your own site on WordPress and use the free WooCommerce Storefront theme. It’s not a drag-and-drop website builder, but you can customize the look and feel.

Pros

Free theme

Works with WordPress blog

Great for content-heavy sites

Easy to customize with add-ons

Cons

Not a drag-and-drop builder

Not an all-in-one solution

WooCommerce pricing

Free

Common add-ons range from $10–$60 a year

With WooCommerce you can get started for free. You’ll need to buy a domain name and set up web hosting. We have a how-to guide on all those steps here in How to Start a Blog. When you get to Step 6, choose a theme, you’ll choose the WooCommerce Storefront theme. There are a few different “child themes” to choose from — these change the look of the theme the way a new coat of paint changes the look of a room. Some child themes are free; others are $39.

I recommend also checking out the WooCommerce extensions. Most sites will benefit from the customizer bundle. You may also need features like the pricing table, a contact section (yes, you definitely want this), and maybe a hamburger menu. Some extensions are free, others are paid. The price points are reasonable.

Weebly

35 ecommerce themes

348 apps

Weebly was bought by Square in 2018, and though Weebly is run as a separate business, it’s clear to me that Square is attempting to bolster it’s full-service suite of offerings for small businesses — with the cornerstone of that suite being in-person POS systems and payment processing. The drag-and-drop builder is intuitive, but the set-up and guidance isn’t all there for me. For the price point — $4/month less than Shopify — I don’t think it’s worth going with Weebly.  

Pros

Intuitive drag-and-drop builder

Includes memberships, forums, support

Cons

Not very useful in helping pick a theme

No way to sort themes by feature

Cluttered page system that’s not good for more than 10 pages

You’ll need to manually copy blog posts if you migrate

If you’re launching an online store, you can skip right over the Starter and Pro plans — you’ll be pay a premium of 3% on every transaction and you’ll be limited in a lot of ways. You won’t be able to modify your cart, for example. For the price, I think you’ll get a better store from Shopify’s $29/month plan.

Starter $8/month annually

Pro $12/month billed annually

Business $25/month billed annually

Performance $38/month billed annually

What’s the difference between these plans?

Weebly transaction fee: 3% on Starter and Pro, 0% on Business and Performance

Number of products: 10, 25, unlimited, unlimited

Features only available on Business and Performance: Shopping cart, digital goods, product reviews, coupons, inventory manager, shipping calculator, among others

Weebly themes

When you create a store, Weebly will ask what you’re selling and if it’s online or offline, or both. After just two questions, it’ll pop you into a store for you. This seems kind of curt, and it is. When you click customize your store, you’ll be able to choose a new theme. How will you decide? Weebly doesn’t make it easy — there’s a page of themes offered, but you can only sort them by the top-of-the-fold look and feel.

Weebly pricing

The first few options are pretty and white.

Take note of a few things:

How large are the photos?

Is there a border?

Is there text on the photos?

Is there a CTA?

Where is the menu?

How many products are featured in that first view?

Since there’s no filtering, your best hope is to choose one you think looks like your store should look.

It’s pretty intuitive to add products and personalize your store. Keep checking back with the preview and you should do fine.

In sum: How to choose the right ecommerce platform for your online store

For an online store, you can’t go wrong with Shopify. It’s the industry leader, easily one of the best ecommerce website builders, and it’s well worth the price point. I like it a lot — particularly how much you can customize it with the app store. It’s got the analytics you need to run a real ecommerce shop. I also like the designs from Squarespace. They really do make it possible for a total beginner to create a professional looking site.

The other contenders for all-in-one builders are Wix and Weebly. I found them to have limitations, so they’re not my top picks. I did like the Wix AI creator and the features it boasts for booking businesses and other speciality stores, like music or video creators. It’s worth checking out (there’s a free trial period) if one of those things intrigues you. I’ll keep tabs on Weebly. However, right now it doesn’t come close to competing with Shopify and Squarespace.

If you want to run a WordPress site, then look into WooCommerce. You’ll find it is very familiar and has all the things that are great about any WordPress site: nearly limitless customization, great content management, excellent SEO, all subscription-free and open source. Granted, you’ll probably end up spending some on customizations and will need to throw down for your domain name and your web host. But if you’re the type that’s curious about building a self-hosted site, you already knew all that.

http://www.quicksprout.com/best-ecommerce-website-builder/ Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-best-ecommerce-website-builder.html

[effectguitar6-blog]

How California’s 11 Ballot Propositions Fared

Yesterday California voters were given a chance to expand rent control, advocate for farm animals, and repeal a gas tax by way of ballot referenda. Here’s how each proposition fared.

This measure would authorize the state to sell $4 billion in bonds so the cash could go into housing programs. Of that, about $2 billion would be dedicated specifically to giving local governments low-interest loans to build or renovating affordable, multi-family apartment buildings, and another $1 billion would go specifically to programs that provide home loan assistance for military veterans. The rest of the money would be put into existing housing programs already in effect across the state.

Passed or rejected? This one hasn’t officially been called, but according to the Sacramento Bee, it’s leaning toward passing, with 54 percent of voters saying yes.

California created the so-called “Millionaire’s Tax”–a one percent income tax that hits residents with annual incomes over a million dollars–in 2004 with that year’s Prop 63. The plan was to allocate that money to create and expand mental healthcare services. In 2016, the legislature moved to use some of the revenue raised from Prop 63 to build housing for homeless individuals with mental illnesses, but a lawsuit hit the pause button on that, saying the money was supposed to go only to treatment, not construction. A “yes” vote on Prop 2 commits $120 million per year to create permanent supportive housing for mentally ill homeless people across the state; a “no” vote throws it back to the courts to sort out what the wording of Prop 63 really intended.

Passed or rejected? Passed, and by a big margin (61 percent to 38.84 percent).

If you cast a ballot back in June, you were asked to weigh in on Prop 68, a $4.1 billion fund for water and environmental projects. November’s Prop 3 sounds similar, but adds an additional $8.9 billion. Except, there’s some key differences between 68 (which passed) and 3. Prop 68 came through the state legislative process; Prop 3 arrived on the ballot by a public campaign, backed in part by large agribusiness interests who will benefit from the projects funded by the measure. The Sierra Club, which backed Prop 68, strongly opposes Prop 3 and suggests a “no” vote. Proponents, however, say that Prop 68 favored urban and coastal concerns over the desires of inland and farm communities, and Prop 3 is their attempt to address that imbalance.

Passed or rejected? This one hasn’t been called yet, but it’s trailing—with 94 percent of precincts reporting, 52 percent of voters voted no.

The majority of the $1.5 billion in funds authorized by the passage of this measure would go to building, updating, and equipping private, nonprofit children’s hospitals that offer healthcare to kids covered by qualifying government programs, like the California Children’s Services program. Money would also go toward general hospitals with dedicated children’s treatment facilities and five University of California centers focusing on pediatric care.

Passed or rejected? Passed. Opponents argued that the proposition would primarily benefit the very hospitals that funded the campaign, but it’s hard to vote against pediatric care.

This is a little complicated, so bear with us. Basically, it gives a break on property taxes to disabled individuals or those over 55 years old when they’re ready to move. Nonpartisan analysis website ballot.fyi offers this hypothetical to explain: “Say your 56-year-old neighbor bought her home in 1980 for $110K, and you just bought the place next door for $1M (aka a steal in SF). Even though you live in very similar homes, she’ll pay $2,200 in taxes this year while you pay $11,000.” That encourages your neighbor to stay in her house rather than move and get hit with a higher tax bill. Prop 5 would ease restrictions on where and how many times that neighbor can move while still getting a discount on property taxes. The theory goes, that lessens the incentive for empty-nesters to hang on to the big houses where they raised families, thus putting more houses on the market, and maybe, possibly, doing something to cool home prices. Critics (like, say, the editorial boards of the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and San Jose Mercury News) say similar tax breaks already exist and any additional reductions in property tax revenue is an unfair burden to local governments that depend on that money to provide services.

Passed or rejected? California voters rejected Prop 5, which was funded largely by the California Association of Realtors. Opponent Rep. David Chiu argued that the proposition wouldn’t have added housing and therefore would not have addressed the housing crisis in any meaningful way.

Remember last year, when state lawmakers approved the “gas tax” to fund repairs to highways and roads and invest in public transportation projects? Republicans in Sacramento were pretty unhappy with that, and now they’re trying to undo that law with a ballot initiative. A “yes” vote on this repeal measure might save individuals 12 cents per gallon on standard gasoline–by cutting around $5 billion a year in funding for transit infrastructure. The referendum writers also aren’t taking chances with the legislature again: Prop 6 includes provisions that any fuel tax or vehicle fee increase in California’s future would have to go to the voters (who have historically been reticent to vote to raise their own taxes, even to fund services they rely upon).

Passed or rejected? 55 percent of voters said no to repealing the gas tax, despite that the vote yes campaign was endorsed by big-name Republicans including Wisconsin’s Paul Ryan.

California has followed the (almost) nationwide Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time shifts since a ballot initiative approving the adoption of the then-new concept was passed in 1949. Passing Prop 7 would not immediately can the idea, but it would open the door to making Daylight Time a year-round thing–if that was to be approved by two-thirds of the California legislature, and then also approved by the United States Congress. Why do it? Proponents think that permanently starting the day an hour earlier could have implications for energy conservation–the earliest the sun would ever set in the winter would be 5:50 rather than 4:50. Opponents worry about an increase in traffic accidents as winter commuters head to work in darkness, and cite the possible cross-country confusion of California being three hours off from Eastern Time part of the year, but only two hours off at others.

Passed or rejected? Passed. As the L.A. Times explained in its endorsement of the measure, “Proposition 7 won’t stop the clock-changing; it would just allow the discussion to continue about the merits of doing so, as well as making the procedural changes needed to allow a future shift to permanent daylight saving time. It’s a debate worth having, and for that reason we urge voters to say ‘yes’ on this measure.”

Passing Prop 8 caps how much certain dialysis clinics can charge patients at 115 percent of a combination of “direct patient care service costs” plus “healthcare quality improvement costs,” prohibits the clinics from discriminating against patients depending on their payment method, and institutes fines and penalties for failing to follow the rules. And while this all might seem pretty niche to voters that don’t interact with the dialysis industry, it actually ended up on the ballot as a result of a bruising and on-going dispute between the state’s two largest dialysis clinic chains and the labor union SEIU-UHM West, which has been blocked from unionizing workers at the clinics since 2016.

Passed or rejected? Voters did not approve Prop 8, which was opposed by dialysis clinics and the California Republican Party.

The Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, passed in 1995, bans cities from establishing certain kinds of rent control–including prohibiting cities from enforcing rent control on apartments and single-family houses built after 1995. Prop 10 seeks to overturn that act. This initiative has seen some of the biggest spending on campaign ads of the season, so you may have heard the basic points for and against. Eric Garcetti has been a vocal proponent of Prop 10, arguing that city governments should be free to make their own rules about local rent control. Opponents worry that landlords and developers will be disinclined to build new rental units and might even go to great lengths to demolish existing ones if they think they’re going to be stuck with tenants paying well below market rates.

Passed or rejected? By a rather wide margin (61 percent to 38 percent), voters rejected Prop 10. A successful opposition campaign argued that the proposition would negatively affect home values.

This one does pretty much what the title implies. If passed, employees of for-profit private ambulance companies would be required to stay on-call via mobile devices during their meal and rest breaks; if the break is interrupted by a call, that one wouldn’t be deducted from the total number of breaks an employee is required to be given per shift. In exchange, the companies have to provide mental health services to workers and provide specialized training for the job.

Passed or rejected? Upward of 60 percent of California voters said yes. EMTs will have to remain on-call during breaks (like police officers do), but will also be paid to do so.

Prop 12 sets minimum standards for the space an egg-laying hen, pig, or veal calf needs to have on a commercial farm. In the case of a hen, for example, there would need to be one to one-and-a-half square feet per animal–enough space to stand up and lay down–and would require every egg sold in California to be “cage free” by 2022. Meat from animals raised below the standards would be ineligible to be sold in California starting in 2020, even if the animal was raised outside the state. Prop 2, in 2008, laid the groundwork for these rules–but Prop 12 adds specific measurements to a law that some have criticized as “too vague,” and officially authorizes the California Department of Food and Agriculture and California Department of Public Health to be in charge of enforcement.

Passed or rejected? Voters passed the measure. Farm animals will get more space to live…while they live.

RELATED: Can the Los Angeles We Know Survive the Death of Its Trees? 

Stay on top of the latest in L.A. food and culture. Sign up for our newsletters today.

Source: https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/ballot-propositions-results-2018/

[rolandfontana]

Parkland Shooting One Year Later: A Lesson for the Media

On Feb. 14, the nation will mark the first anniversary of the high school shooting in Parkland, Fl., that claimed the precious lives of 17 students and teachers. In the year following that massacre, there were at least 53 additional incidents of gunfire on high school and college campuses around the country.

As Americans learned the names and saw the faces of these killers and victims, fear and outrage grew.

The 24-hour news coverage of the Parkland massacre was typical, and seemingly based on the assumptions of reporters and TV news producers that consumers are drawn to stories of mass murder because of morbid curiosity. Thus, much of the Parkland coverage focused on the killer’s background and apparent motivation, as well as the plight of his victims.

The grisly scenes of mass carnage, the videos of students running for their lives from the school building, and the tearful responses of the victims’ families and friends undoubtedly aroused collective empathy among news consumers around the country.

Many audience members surely identified with the innocent victims and their families, and also looked to news reports for “red flags” that might prevent future attacks. The problem, though, is that excessive attention to a mass murderer and his victims also fuels the dreaded copycat phenomenon.

In addition to those who sympathize with the victims, unfortunately there are at least a few in the audience who identify with the killer. In these cases, they sadistically enjoy viewing the grisly consequences of a school shooting while studying the details, perhaps in hopes of replicating (or even outdoing) that violence elsewhere in the future.

In this way, news reports about a mass murder may serve as a training session for potential killers who use the tragic circumstances of a school massacre as inspiration.

For nearly 20 years, school shooters in countries around the world have referred to the April 20, 1999 slaughter at Columbine High School as their model for gaining fame and enacting revenge. Some killers, particularly those who do not expect to survive their planned attack, leave behind letters, manifestos, photographs and videos that explain their rationale, often in hopes of media outlets around the world publishing their material.

*The killers who intend to survive may envision their name in the headlines, their image on TV, or perhaps even a documentary about their life. Some killers just want to be recognized and remembered — to live on in infamy — and often that’s exactly what we give them.

As part of efforts to combat these dangerous messages in U.S. news stories and to lessen the inspiration for would-be murderers seeking fame, several crime scholars have applied increasing pressure on news media outlets to change the ways they cover incidents of mass murder.

Stop Publishing Killer’s Name?

Criminologists Adam Lankford and Eric Madfis proposed that news organizations stop publishing the names and photographs of these killers, and the “No Notoriety” campaign adds to that list killers’ self-created content like videos, artwork, and manifestos. The idea is to eliminate the potential for recognition or fame that motivates many of these killers.

It seems that some journalists are heeding the call, as the killer’s name was sparingly used in reports about the Parkland school massacre.

Moreover, CNN’s Anderson Cooper has indicated he will avoid the names and identifying characteristics in future coverage of high-profile mass shootings.

An alternative avenue for news outlets is to focus more coverage on the heroic responders who are involved in mass murder incidents, such as students, faculty, staff members and security personnel who demonstrate bravery in dire circumstances.

It appears that there were more than a few heroes at the Parkland school when the shooting began, including the janitor who ushered numerous students out of the hallway, the 15-year-old student who died holding the door open so that others could escape, the football coach who lost his life after stepping in front of the killer’s bullets to protect students, and the geography teacher who shielded his students from gunfire.

Crime has long been one of the most widely followed news topics, so news outlets may hesitate to change their coverage because of concerns about declining sales. Yet public interest in crime news does not necessarily mean that consumers are getting what they want from that coverage.

An Experiment

In fact, we recently published an experiment that was designed to examine the source of consumer interest in news about extreme acts of fatal violence, and the findings produced some potentially important, if counterintuitive, results.

Jack Levin

We first developed three versions of a hypothetical news story about a massacre at a high school, including photographs (one of a teenage boy and one of a school building with students filing out), headlines, a pull quote, and a paragraph of the story.  All versions included identical elements and differed only by the story focus: One centered on the life of the killer, one on the killer’s first victim, and one on a courageous student who helped to save lives.

The versions were randomly assigned to more than 200 respondents so that one-third read about the mass killer, one-third read about the victim, and one-third read about the heroic student. All respondents were then asked whether they wanted to read more of the news story.

Respondents were significantly more interested in reading about the heroic efforts of a student who saved lives.

Our findings revealed that respondents were significantly more interested in reading about the heroic efforts of a student who saved lives, compared to stories about the killer or one of his victims.

Our study suggests that sensational reporting that contains grisly details of a heinous crime may actually repel consumers who are more interested in learning about heroic behavior at the crime scene.

Julie Wiest

Moreover, focusing on heroism at the site of a horrific school shooting may offer an additional advantage for society: If the copycat effect works to inspire potential killers, it might also work to motivate rescuers who risk their lives to save others.

 Levin is professor emeritus and co-director of the Brudnick Center on Violence at Northeastern University. Wiest is an associate professor of sociology at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. They are co-authors of The Allure of Premeditated Murder, published in 2018. Readers’ comments are welcome.

Parkland Shooting One Year Later: A Lesson for the Media syndicated from https://immigrationattorneyto.wordpress.com/

[araleenstatham-blog]

Can self-driving cars really make cities safer?

Autonomous vehicles could save thousands of lives per year. Should the U.S. let them be tested on public streets?

From ushering in an era of decreased car ownership, to narrowing streets and eliminating parking lots, autonomous vehicles promise to dramatically reshape our cities.

But after an Uber-operated self-driving vehicle struck and killed 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg, who was crossing the street with her bike in Tempe, Arizona on March 18, 2018, there are more questions than ever about the safety of this technology, especially as these vehicles are being tested more frequently on public streets.

Some argue the safety record for self-driving cars isn't proven, and that it's unclear whether or not enough testing miles have been driven in real-life conditions. Other safety advocates go further, and say that driverless cars are introducing a new problem to cities, when cities should instead be focusing on improving transit and encouraging walking and biking instead.

Contentions aside, the autonomous revolution is already here, although some cities will see its impacts sooner than others. From Las Vegas, where a Navya self-driving minibus scoots slowly along a downtown street, to General Motors' Cruise ride-hailing service in San Francisco with backup humans in the driver's seat, to Waymo's family-focused Chandler, Arizona–based pilot program that uses no human operators in its Chrysler Pacifica minivans at all, the country is accelerating towards a driverless future.

While the U.S. government has historically been confident in autonomous vehicles' ability to end the epidemic of traffic deaths on our streets, there are plenty of concerns from opponents of self-driving cars that are making cities think twice before welcoming them to their streets.

Farrells and WSP | Parsons Brinckerhoff

Self-driving vehicles may be poised to deliver a future of safer, greener streets for all, but testing the vehicles on today's streets is a concern.

Are autonomous vehicles safe?

In 2009, Google launched its self-driving project focusing on saving lives and serving people with disabilities. In a 2014 video, Google showed blind and elderly riders climbing into its custom-designed autonomous vehicles, part of the company's plan to “improve road safety and help lots of people who can't drive.”

Although there were several self-driving projects in the country at the time, many being developed by government agencies or university labs, Google's project differentiated itself by being public-facing. The goal was not to build cars-although Google did build its own testing prototypes-but to create a self-driving service that would help regular people get around.

Google began testing its vehicles on public streets the very same year the project launched. With the reorganization of Google into its new parent company Alphabet, the self-driving program became its own entity, Waymo. Almost a decade later, Waymo remains the clear leader for safe self-driving miles on U.S. streets.

According to Waymo's monthly reports, its vehicles have been in two dozen crashes, only one of which was the fault of the Waymo's vehicle. In that crash, which was in 2016, a Waymo vehicle bumped a bus while going 2 miles per hour. On May 4, 2018, one of Waymo's minivans was involved in a crash with minor injuries in Chandler, Arizona while in autonomous mode, but police said Waymo's van was not the “violator vehicle.”

Now there are dozens of autonomous vehicle companies testing on U.S. streets. As of February 2018, Waymo had logged five million self-driven miles, making it the leader for self-driven miles on U.S. streets. Over the next few months, Waymo's fleet began driving about 25,000 self-driven miles per day, or one million miles per month. In July 2018, Waymo hit another major milestone of eight million self-driven miles as its new electric Jaguar I-Paces vehicle hit the streets.

The next most experienced companies, Uber and GM Cruise, are still several million miles behind Waymo. That doesn't include miles driven in the semi-autonomous modes that many cars now offer, like Tesla's Autopilot, which are more driver-assistance systems than true self-driving vehicles.

In the last few years, the greatest strides taken in the self-driving industry have been by ride-hailing companies, who are devoting an exceptional amount of time and money to develop their own proprietary technologies and, in many cases, giving members of the public rides in their vehicles. In 2017, Lyft's CEO predicted that within five years, all their vehicles will be autonomous. At a press conference in March 2018, where Waymo's CEO John Krafcik announced its ride-hailing program, Krafcik claimed that the company will be making at least one million trips per day by 2020.

Can autonomous cars drive better than humans?

The biggest safety advantage to an autonomous vehicle is that a robot is not a human-it is programmed to obey all the rules of the road, won't speed, and can't be distracted by a text message flickering onto a phone. And, hypothetically at least, AVs can also detect what humans can't-especially at night or in low-light conditions-and react more quickly to avoid a collision.

AVs are laden with sensors and software that work together to build a complete picture of the road. One key technology for AVs is LIDAR, or a “light-detecting and ranging” sensor. Using millions of lasers, LIDAR draws a real-time, 3D image of the environment around the vehicle. In addition to LIDAR, radar sensors can measure the size and speed of moving objects. And high-definition cameras can actually read signs and signals. As the car is traveling, it cross-references all this data with GPS technology that situates the vehicle within a city and helps to plan its route.

In addition to the sensors and maps, AVs run software programs which make real-time decisions about how the car will navigate relative to other vehicles, humans, or objects in the road. Engineers can run the cars through simulations, but the software also needs to learn from actual driving situations. This is why real-world testing on public roads is so important.

But how AV companies gather that information has led to greater concerns about how autonomous vehicles can detect and avoid vulnerable road users, like cyclists and pedestrians, but also people who move slowly and more erratically through streets, like seniors and children. Waymo, for example, claims its software has been explicitly programmed to recognize cyclists. A video that Waymo released in 2016 (back when it was still part of Google) shows how one of its vehicles detected and stopped for a wrong-way cyclist coming around a corner at night.

According to a May 2018 report from The Information, Uber's vehicle did detect Herzberg before its fatal Tempe crash, but the system made a decision not to swerve. “The car's sensors detected the pedestrian, who was crossing the street with a bicycle, but Uber's software decided it didn't need to react right away.” A preliminary report by the National Transportation Safety Board confirmed that Uber's system detected Herzberg six seconds before the crash and did not brake until 1.3 seconds before impact.

The role of human “backup drivers” as part of AV testing has also come into question after Tempe police documents obtained by Gizmodo showed that driver Rafaela Vasquez was streaming a video on her phone at the time of the fatal crash. “The driver in this case could have reacted and brought the vehicle to a stop 42.61 feet prior to the pedestrian,” reads the report, which calls the crash “entirely avoidable.”

Uber's self-driving unit Arizona announced it was closing down on May 23, 2018. In July, Uber eliminated 100 self-driving positions in Pittsburgh and San Francisco.

Self-driving companies also put their vehicles through endless tests using simulated city streets. Many traditional automakers use a facility named M City in Ann Arbor, Michigan, but the larger self-driving companies have built their own fake cities specifically to test interactions with humans who are not in vehicles. Waymo's fake city, named Castle, even has a shed full of props-like tricycles-that might be used by people on streets so that Waymo's engineers can learn how to identify them.

After Uber's fatal crash, Toyota built a new facility to test its vehicles' responses to “edge cases”-extreme situations too dangerous to test on public streets.

M City

USDOT has been testing autonomous technology at the M City facility for many years.

Will eliminating human drivers reduce traffic deaths?

50 years ago, the U.S.'s rate of traffic deaths was higher than they are now-in 1980, generally considered to be the deadliest year on U.S. streets, over 50,000 people were killed. With safety features like airbags added to vehicles, stricter seat belt laws, and campaigns that stigmatized drunk driving, the rate of deaths went down significantly.

But over the last few years, the U.S. has seen a slight increase in traffic deaths again. Additionally, pedestrian fatalities increased by 27 percent over the last decade, while all other traffic fatalities decreased by 14 percent. There isn't agreement for why these deaths are increasing, but some experts believe that this is because Americans are driving more-overall vehicle-miles traveled (VMT) reached an all-time high in 2017.

Using USDOT's claim that 94 percent of crashes are caused by human error, it seems like a fairly obvious way to reduce crashes is to reduce the number of humans behind the wheel. But it's not just the number of human drivers that should be reduced, the U.S. could also reduce the number of cars on roads to prevent fatalities-and autonomous vehicles can help do that, too.

The real safety promise of autonomous vehicles is the fact these vehicles can be be summoned on-demand, routed more efficiently, and easily shared-meaning not just the overall number of single-passenger cars on streets will decline but the number of single-passenger trips will be reduced, meaning a reduction in overall miles traveled.

In addition, cities can use automated vehicles to tackle ambitious on-demand transit projects, like a proposed initiative to integrate shared self-driving vehicles into the public transit fleet. If cities can launch these kind of “microtransit” systems that serve as a first-mile/last-mile solution to help get more people to fixed-route public transportation, that will also mean fewer people in cars and more people on safer modes of transit.

Without having to make room for so many cars, city streets can be narrowed, making even more room for pedestrians and bikes to safely navigate cities. In this way, autonomous vehicles have a great role to play as part of a Vision Zero strategy, which most major U.S. cities have implemented in order to eliminate traffic deaths.

NACTO

A typical U.S. roadway remade as a safe, accessible street filled with autonomous technology, from shared taxibots to self-driving buses, from NACTO's Blueprint for Autonomous Urbanism.

But aren't human-driven cars safer now, too?

While residents of only a few cities can summon an AV on-demand right now, the truth is that much of the safety tech powering self-driving cars is making its way into today's cars. Sophisticated collision-avoidance systems, for example, which can stop a vehicle if an object or person are detected in its path, are already being incorporated into new cars and buses.

This is why the way the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) tests those kinds of safety innovations is also changing. Until recently, all safety standards were based on historical crash data, meaning the government had to track years and years of roadway incidents (and, in many cases, deaths) before making an official recommendation. Now, technology is advancing so quickly that there's not enough time to test every new idea for a decade. The government knows it needs to be more nimble.

In fact, that's what happened for a recent USDOT recommendation that all cars be equipped with vehicle-to-vehicle communication (V2V), a tool which allows cars to “talk” to each other. This recommendation was fast-tracked in 2015 by U.S. transportation secretary Anthony Foxx after detailed simulations and modeling showed that the benefits were obvious-there was no need to spend years collecting historical data.

The same type of recommendation might be made for an aspect of autonomous tech. Once a clear safety benefit has been proven across the self-driving industry, a specific feature might become standard on all vehicles.

Keolis

An 8-person autonomous shuttle by Navya travels a route at a speed of 15 mph in Downtown Las Vegas.

Where are self-driving cars being tested?

About half of U.S. states allow testing of autonomous vehicles on public roads, but regulations for each state vary widely. The majority of testing is focused in a handful of states: Arizona, California, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Washington.

California remains the busiest hub for the AV industry: There are currently 52 companies testing self-driving technology on the state's streets. It's also one of the most heavily regulated markets: California's Department of Motor Vehicles requires companies to file for a permit and submit annual reports that include the number of miles driven and any crashes.

While it's not necessarily used as a safety metric, one performance standard that helps to illustrate how technology is improving is tracking the number of times per self-driving mile that a human driver has to take over, which is called a “disengagement.” California DMV records demonstrate that as self-driving programs log more on-road experience, they see fewer and fewer disengagements. Waymo, for example, now sees one disengagement per every 5,600 miles driven.

Other states don't require as much documentation as California-and they're not necessarily required to make any information public. Arizona, for example, approved AV testing on public roads in 2016 without notifying its residents, and didn't require any reports from companies, although after Uber's fatal crash, that will likely change.

AP Photo/Jared Wickerham

Hills, snow, quirky local driving customs, and loose state regulations are some of the reasons Uber started testing its self-driving program in Pittsburgh.

Does the federal government regulate autonomous vehicles?

In 2016, the U.S. government released its long-awaited rules on self-driving vehicles. The Department of Transportation's 116-page document lists many benefits for bringing technology to market, among them improved sustainability, productivity, and accessibility. But the USDOT report's central promise is that autonomy will pave the way for policies that dramatically improve road safety.

Even President Obama made the case for safety in an op-ed that heralded the dawn of the new driverless age:

Right now, too many people die on our roads-35,200 last year alone-with 94 percent of those the result of human error or choice. Automated vehicles have the potential to save tens of thousands of lives each year. And right now, for too many senior citizens and Americans with disabilities, driving isn't an option. Automated vehicles could change their lives.

In order to get cities across the country to start thinking about using autonomy to solve transportation problems, USDOT hosted the Smart City Challenge in 2016, which awarded $40 million to Columbus, Ohio, to develop a fleet of autonomous transit vehicles. As a result of the challenge, the 70 cities that competed now have blueprints for how to introduce AV tech to their transportation planning.

Under the Trump administration, much of the legislation proposed has been centered around exemptions for automakers and increasing the number of AVs allowed to operate on U.S. streets. In fact, in September 2017, USDOT and NHTSA issued updated AV guidelines, which carried an even lighter regulatory touch, after industry leaders expressed concerns about regulation at the federal level stifling innovation.

In addition to the 2017 policy statement, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao held preliminary hearings about autonomous vehicles where she affirmed the government would not play a heavy-handed role. “The market will decide what is the most effective solution,” she said. However, the aggressive development of V2V-which experts agree can work to make human-driven cars much safer as autonomous technology comes to market-has not been made a priority during her leadership.

The Verge

Tesla's Autopilot feature, one of many driver-assist features which allow control of the vehicle to switch from human to computer, can distract drivers or give them a false sense of security.

What's the difference between semi-autonomous and fully autonomous?

There's one safety debate that continues to divide the self-driving industry: Some automakers are still pushing for versions of vehicles which allow control to pass from human to computer, offering drivers the ability to toggle between semi-autonomous and fully autonomous modes.

Two fatal Tesla crashes-one in 2016 and one in 2018-that occurred while the drivers were using the vehicle's Autopilot feature illustrated the dangers of a semi-autonomous mode. As the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) noted in its report of the 2016 crash, semi-autonomous systems give “far more leeway to the driver to divert his attention to something other than driving.”

Fully autonomous is the official policy recommendation from the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets, a lobbying group that wants cars to eventually phase out steering wheels and let the software take over, 100 percent of the time. This completely eliminates the potential for human error. General Motors is planning to make cars without steering wheels by 2019.

In 2018, Waymo began conducting fully autonomous testing in Arizona without a human safety driver. California now allows fully autonomous testing as well. But especially after the Uber crash, San Francisco bike advocates worry that the tech isn't powerful enough to see cyclists. The California Bicycle Coalition started a petition to stop fully autonomous vehicles from being tested on California streets.

At least for the near future, even fully autonomous vehicles will still have to contend with the mistakes of human drivers. To truly make self-driving technology the safest it can be, all the vehicles on the road should be fully autonomous-not just programmed to obey the rules of the road, but also to communicate with each other.

In 2017, National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) created a Blueprint for Autonomous Urbanism, which encourages cities to deploy fully autonomous vehicles that travel no faster than 25 mph as a tool for making streets safer, “with mandatory yielding to people outside of vehicles.”

From new street designs to accessibility guidelines to a focus on data sharing, NACTO's policy document provides the most detailed AV recommendations for U.S. urban transportation planners. To plot the safest path forward for self-driving vehicles-and for cities to reap the many other environmental and social benefits of the technology-AVs should provide shared rides in regulated fleets, integrate with existing transit, and operate in a way that prioritizes a city's most vulnerable humans above all users of the streets.