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ratingtheframe · 4 years ago

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I Care A Lot, Malcolm & Marie, Capone, The Life Ahead and the News of the World: Everything I watched in February.

Newsflash ! The cinemas still aren’t open and I’m starting to lose hope in them ever opening. Despite the UK government drawing a step by step guide into lifting the UK out of lockdown (like its flat pack furniture and not a critical pandemic) with cinemas due to open in April, I wouldn’t hold my breath seeing as our own human biology and its resistance is the actual measure of when it is safe to go out and about, not what our government says. So until everyone is vaccinated and has sustained the first few months of vaccination symptom free, I’m having to sift through Netflix and Amazon for something to watch, like I’m looking through a charity shop sale; without much luck. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for these streaming services, I (my dad) pay for them for Christ’s sakes and I know that one day I’ll be eating my words when I’m offered a Netflix deal that I (in a Vito Corleone voice) “cannot refuse”. However, unlike some of the creators on Netflix, I’ll make the most of this opportunity and be incredibly anal about what I want to make, even if it kills me.

I feel like so many people are given the license to make whatever they want for Netflix and then I look at the trophy wall of Emmys that HBO has garnered over the years and consider their quality writers and casts. I would say most recently, shows like The Crown, Sex Education, Top Boy and Bridgerton are Netflix’s exceptions currently, being both of quality and giving us something we actually want to watch. And guess what all these shows have in common?! Not only are all the casts largely British but all productions of these shows are British too. The British quality of TV programmes for streaming services in the US is a win win for all; Americans get to watch our good quality TV and we get Golden Globes. Most notably, The Crown did exceptionally (as it always does) at this year’s Golden Globes, further proving the show's excellence despite controversy. I thoroughly praise Netflix's resistance to label the show “fiction” and the lengths it took in making the show as authentically as possible, despite the criticism. The awards speak for themselves and the Crown has scooped up several this year so far.

To conclude, I want the cinemas to open just as much as anyone, but I’m happy to comply with the stay-at-home-and-watch-Netflix-rule for now. For now...Here’s everything I watched this February.

Annihilation (2018) as seen on Netflix

Netflix’s Annihilation starring Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Lee, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson and Oscar Issac was a multitude of things that were difficult to comprehend. This is not me saying this is a bad film, in fact its me saying the complete opposite as the complexity drew a tangible beauty to the film from beginning to end. I reeeaaalllyyy liked the beginning and how the first scene sucked you into the crazy and fanatical story that later unfolded. Natalie Portman as always was wonderful in this role, playing a biologist who enters another world in search of her husband, who’s gone missing on a similar expedition to hers. Like with most sci fi films, it was difficult to gather the meaning of such a film, however this lack of meaning didn’t draw away from the story or how it was portrayed, in slow and enigmatic shots that told the story with a natural pace. If you’ve seen / liked Ex Machina (2014), Annihilation has the same director and I would thoroughly recommend you watch this too as the way Alex Garland merges sci fi with horror is incredibly seamless.

Score: 10/10

Eastern Promises (2007) as seen on Amazon Prime

This film starring Naomi Watts, Viggo Mortensen and Vincent Cassel was incredibly dark and gritty. Even though I’m not Russian, I found Mortensen and Cassel’s Russian personas to be rather good for a Dane and a Frenchman. Their on screen chemistry was also really good and its make me wonder why I haven’t seen a film with these two in it before. The story follows Anna (Naomi Watts) a nurse and her hunt for the true identity and life of a baby that was born to a 14 year old girl. Nikolai and Kirill (Mortensen and Cassel) are Russian gangsters living in London and set about covering up this obscene scandal and getting rid of the product of it, a baby girl belonging to the condemned and now deceased child. It's a difficult plot to wrap your head around and like I said, it's incredibly dark. Actor and director David Cronenberg (A History of Violence 2005) directed this film and helped Viggo Mortensen with a nomination for Best Actor at the 2008 Academy Awards.

Score: 8/10

Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) as seen on Netflix

So remember how I said I was DESPERATE for films this month...I watched Fifty Shades of Grey with zero expectations and I can say definitively that it was worse than I thought. It's a true miracle that both Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan still have careers 6 years after such a film was released and I personally wouldn’t rush to cast either acting in my film after seeing this. Harsh, I know but reputation is everything and when you sign onto something that instead of highlighting your acting abilities, highlights your body parts, what am I supposed to think... I’m all for body confidence and what not, but I feel like most of this film sort of abuses sexuality and sexual expressions. The fact is, the BDSM part of this film wasn’t even that bad, it was the characters that pissed me off the most and their LACK of character in fact. They were orchestrated in such a flat way and the only time where either one of them found any character was through the sex itself and the discussion of it, especially Anastasia’s character. The most profound and irritating thing about this film is that Anastasia’s life seemed to only have meaning when she met the so called handsome, charming, wonderful, drop dead gorgeous Christian Grey. What does that teach us about women people? I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again, sexualising women in film and media shouldn’t be the only reason for them to be there. And the entirety of Fifty Shades of Grey is built upon that fact. Even though the novel was written by a woman, it definitely missed the point in giving us a strong female character who could both be into sex and taken seriously at the same time. Seems like a really hard thing to do in cinema as filmmakers either go for the over-hyped sexualised prostitute, the caring mother or the nun. Like female professionals have never had sex in their lives… think again. I like to wonder what it would’ve been like had it been Ms Grey and Christian as her submissive. Not only would that mix up the character dynamic and go against gender confirmation, it’d actually be interesting. But maybe I should just write that story altogether...To conclude, the characters in this film were flat and the entirety of the film hyped up sex and the act of it way too much. It's like making a film about walking or breathing.

Score: 1/10

Malcolm & Marie (2021) as seen on Netflix

Malcolm & Marie received a lot of attention in the media and sadly not for the right reasons. In fact, what’s so childish about the backlash is that hardly any of it had to do with the filmmaking techniques Sam Levinson (Euphoria’s creator) used or the story he wrote. More of it had to do with Levinson’s controversial ideas about how the media likes to view and prod film like a goldfish in a bowl, acting ostentatiously towards the art and appearing woke as opposed to just seeing film for how it is. I gather many film critic’s egos were bruised when Levinson used the lead character, Malcolm (John David Washington) as a butcher to film critics. He says things like “I’m choosing to make a film that’s fundamentally political, but not everything I do is political because I’m Black” in reference to the ignorance of some film critics who stamp politics onto any black directed film, attempting to brand the films with their own understanding of the film as opposed to its real message and story. Malcolm spends the majority of the night loathing a fictional “white LA reporter” and betting on her exact words for his own film, about an African American woman trying to get off drugs. What he says is funny, so funny it's true. White reporters DO do this and instead of embracing Levinson’s satricalism, the real LA white reporters of our media got overly offended and used the “lack of story” card as a backdrop to fuel their distaste at being called out. Had they known Levinson’s intentions with this film, they wouldn’t have reviewed it all together as I’m sure Levinson knew what he was getting himself into when mentioning the annoying “white LA reporter” and making the stereotype central to the lead's frustrations towards the industry. Levinson also graciously mentions that even though Malcolm has such hatred towards the critics, he is their fuel and by making his so-called “art” he only joins them in the argument . Levinson made his bed when he made the film and I think he’s sleeping rather comfortably. No one even bothered to praise both Zendaya’s and Washington’s performances, which were phenomenal considering the circumstances and the added pressure of having to carry a whole story in one room using only each other to fulfil that story. The cinematography was ambitious and overall, it was a simple yet well executed story. What are y’all complaining about?

Let's put egos aside and focus on the actual film for once, rather than how its perceived the articulation of your opinions towards it.

Score: 10/10

Coming to America (1988) as seen on Amazon Prime

At this moment I truly was becoming a slave to streaming services. I wasn’t particularly leaping at the opportunity to watch this film, however I chose to watch it as I heard that Eddie Murphy was releasing a sequel this year. As someone who doesn’t like comedy, I found this rather funny in places but it's hard to laugh at the black stereotypes portrayed in such a film even when those stereotypes were perpetuated by a black person. There was also a lot of misogyny, something else that I don’t call comedy but just misogyny. I found it hard overlook these moments and kinda saw this element as the downfall to the film which detracted from any of the other comedic moments.

Score: 5/10

Do the Right Thing (1989) as seen on Amazon Prime

One of Spike Lee’s earlier films, Do The Right Thing is a film I’ve been dying to watch for quite some time. The film is like a fascinating book, with chapters on each of the plights of living in Brooklyn in the 1980s. Though it takes one character’s perspective, there are a multitude of other stories that can be found in this film, with them interlinking seamlessly and coming together at the end. This isn’t a film about race but rather one about anger and its potential to divide people, especially when things become heated and fingers are pointed. It covered a variety of perspectives which I like, almost like an episodic series where each episode is different and takes on a different character. This structure added variety to the film and allowed it to cover a multitude of topics in a small space of time. The structure of this film was only successful because its characters, who were funny, three dimensional and above all, had something to say. Director and writer Spike Lee played Mookie, the lead, a pizza delivery man and quite the f**k up on the streets of Brooklyn, using his mouth more than his actions to get by in life. I really liked the balance of moments of comedy and severity which had me laughing in places and immediately stopping afterwards. Well written and I commend Spike Lee for having written, directed and starred in the same film.

Score: 10/10

The Life Ahead (2020) as seen on Netflix

As an actress, Sophia Loren is one of my all time favourites. On seeing films such as A Special Day (1977) Two Women (1960) Marriage, Italian Style (1964), I began to appreciate the work of Sophia Loren and notice how much of an icon she still is today. Having picked up several awards over an expansive 71 YEAR career, she has been honoured many a time by the Golden Globes and Oscars as one of the finest actresses of all time. Her presence on screen is inspiring and she’s been often referred to as the Italian Marilyn Monroe for her beauty inside and out. Here at the age of 86, she plays a Holocaust survivor and foster mother who cares for a troubled boy in The Life Ahead. Loren’s character, Madame Rosa, eventually saving him from a miserable life thieving and selling drugs on the streets of Italian. Loren’s son, Edoardo Ponti directed this film for Netflix and was generous enough to give us Sophia Loren’s presence on screen once more by casting her in the film as the lead.

Score: 9/10

Gold (2016) as seen on Amazon Prime

I found Gold to be one of those talky, talky films that starts at the end and ends at the end (if that makes sense) which in my opinion isn’t the most courageous structure one could use, but is common in biopics. It either starts on the protagonist’s death bed or at the point where the police have just caught them and for Gold it was the latter. The appearance of women in this film was second to none and that’s not me saying the director should’ve added female characters for good measure or token but why make a film that only appeals to one demographic, despite the intensity of the story...film is universal after all and if a film appeals to one certain group then what’s the point of releasing it? This doesn’t detract from Matthew McConaughey’s performance though as a “prospector” looking for gold in Indonesia. Even saying this, the character was very typical of him and it didn’t truly stretch his ability as an actor, not like Dallas Buyer’s Club (2013), Killer Joe (2011) or Interstellar (2014) did. To sum up Gold into one word it’d be “meh”.

Score: 7/10

Creed (2015) as seen on Amazon Prime

This was one of the most surprising films of the month. I’m not crazy about the Rocky films nor see myself watching all of them anytime soon, but Creed appealed as a more modern take on the hit franchise. Michael B Jordan plays Adonis Creed, son of Apollo Creed, a champion boxer who died during a fight before Adonis was born. After being adopted by Apollo’s wife, Adonis Creed sets out to follow his father’s footsteps by becoming a champion heavyweight boxer himself, much to his maternal mother’s displeasure and his coach’s the one and only Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone). The story is similar to that of Rocky and if anything, is a complete revival, using the son of one of Rocky’s former fighter as a backdrop to tell the story. Director Ryan Coogler (Black Panther 2018, Fruitvale Station 2013 ) brought this story to life and a courageous performance out of Michael B. Jordan. Not only was I fascinated by boxing by the end of the film, but just the whole idea of Adonis Creed, a fighter and not a quitter who thoroughly believes in pursuing your goals until they are obtained. Not only is this film for boxing fans but for those who share that same universal message and refuse to give into their own inhibitions to achieve great things. We should look to athletes more often in this respect and consider the pursuit of our own desires as boxing matches and marathon races more often as it helps put our fight into perspective and teaches us never to give in.

Score: 11/10

Arrival (2016) as seen on DVD

Before anyone comes for me for not having seen Arrival, before I was a movie buff I had briefly come across the film several times but had never taken the time to sit it out and watch it from beginning to end. I’m glad I did as Denis Villeneuve is one of my favourite directors evah and along with Christopher Nolan, I consider him as the King of Sci Fi. Every single one of his films is incroyable (as the french say) and it's a mystery why he hasn’t been handed an Oscar yet. Arrival is this slow and beautiful story of a linguistics teacher (Amy Adams) who agrees to help on a mission to communicate with extraterrestrial life forms that have landed on planet earth in the form of twelve huge spaceships. Structure isn’t something we typically consider when watching a film, but it plays such an important part in Arrival for time and the manipulation of it is the main theme of this film. Essentially, the language in which Dr. Banks translates from the intelligent life form gives its readers the ability to see into the future, which is when we come to realize that she’ll have a child, who will die of an unnamed disease. Despite this fact, she decides to live the life fate intended for her. The reason why Arrival is a highly credible film is because of the coverage it has as a film in terms of what it's trying to say as a film. From someone who finds it hard to bring out the emotion of a screenplay, Arrival is a great example to me as a film that combines both a cinematic feeling and a strong emotional presence throughout the film. It doesn’t abandon emotions or relationships just because the film is about aliens, but instead embraces them into the story and intertwines them with the aliens who’ve come to planet earth. At the end of the day, we can have explosions, spaceships and aliens galore, but if we’re unable to connect with characters on an emotional level then the film becomes boring. Arrival is far from boring and may bring a tear or two to your eye by the end.

Score: 11/10

The News of the World (2020) as seen on Netflix

I feel like it's impossible to hate a film with Tom Hanks in it and The News of the World definitely fits into that. Five years after the US Civil War, Cpt. Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Tom Hanks) spends his days travelling around the US ‘reading the news’ to anyone who’s willing to listen. The majority of the US was illiterate in the 19th Century, meaning it was up to people like Jefferson to inform others of the ongoings in the world by reading them the paper. It’s a wondrous thing to think about, how information was once spread throughout the world in such an archaic format. Jefferson did this off his own back, not asking for much and finding fulfilment in the reactions to the news that he “broadcasted” to them. Whilst on his travels, Jefferson comes across a young girl (Golden Globe nominee Helena Zengal) who’s negro family had been killed by lynchers. The girl was originally from a Native American tribe but had been separated by them, leaving her to fend for herself. When Jefferson comes across her, he’s reluctant to take her in at first but decides to take her to some relatives across the country. It’s definitely the role you expect of Tom Hanks and his heart warming nature is captured for us in this film for Netflix.

Score: 9/10

The Mask (1994) as seen on Netflix

It's hard for me to label The Mask as a good film as that would mean shaking off the horrendous amount of misogyny it has and the lack of diversity within its characters. Films mean different things for people, but ultimately most of them reflect an element of humanity and explore it on screen with originality and authenticity. Cameron Diaz’s character was only there to fulfil the sexual appetites of the men around her, which is something I loathe in female characters. Originality The Mask has, authenticity, not so much. That's probably the reason why I hate comedies so much, most of them are written by men and are about men so it can get quite boring to watch at times. I liked the idea of The Mask but it definitely could’ve been executed in a less misogynistic way.

Score: 5/10

Jackie (2016) as seen on Amazon Prime

One word; perfection. This film was hands down one of the most beautiful, genuine and honest films I’ve seen in my entire life. It had me reminiscing Todd Haynes’ Carol (2015) in a number of ways, from the similar filmmaking techniques to the slow and melancholy atmosphere that was being created on screen. The AMAZING Natalie Portman plays Jackie Kennedy, wife of John F. Kennedy who was brutally assassinated on a visit to Dallas, Texas in 1963. The fact that I didn’t even KNOW that his poor wife was in the car with him at the point of the assassination is shocking. On watching the film, I learnt Jackie was a remarkable, brave and intelligent woman who after her husband's death put so much into preserving her husband’s legacy despite his lack of popularity. The way the film is shot and the music by the brilliant Mica Levi (Under the Skin 2013 , Monos 2019) just ties everything together into a enigmatic and wonderful film. Natalie Portman was nominated for Best Actress at the 2017 Academy Awards and rightly so. This film has further proven my thoughts on her as one of the greatest actresses of our time. I seriously cannot EXPRESS how much I love this film, directed by Chilean director Pablo Larraín, who’s also made another film that I can’t get enough of Ema, which was released 2 years ago.

Score: 12/10

Foxcatcher (2014) as seen on BBC iPlayer

When we first think of Steve Carell, our minds probably drift to his most notable performance as Michael Scott from The Office or even Gru in Despicable Me. It's rare for a so called “comedy” actor to find his way into films with a more dramatic substance and over the last few years, this is what Carell has been showing us on screen, with this role in Foxcatcher and more recently, in Felix van Groeningen’s Beautiful Boy (2018). Foxcatcher is the true story of a wrestler offered the opportunity to train with a private wrestling team owned by a huge chemical corporation. Channing Tatum plays Mark Schultz, a quiet and reserved wrestler who trains alongside his brother David (Mark Ruffalo), also a champion wrestler. What's sad to see in this twisted story is how validated Mark feels once the powerful and wealthy John Du Pont (Steve Carrell) begins to take an interest in him and takes him under his wing. This relationship drives a wedge between Mark and his brother David, but much to John’s displeasure, it doesn’t last long. This is definitely a story of power and how people can react in bad ways when they are owed too much of it. Every performance in this was astounding and the slow and subtle telling of the story was truly beautiful to watch. Foxcatcher is a film I’ve been dying to watch for some time and it DID NOT disappoint. Period. The film was also nominated for five Oscars back in 2015, including Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor.

Score: 11/10

In Fabric (2018) as seen on BBC iPlayer

Based on the current reviews of In Fabric, I deem the film a poncy experimental spectacle. Not only did it not say much, but what it was trying to say was rather disturbing and quite frankly bizarre. However, it's not a film I can necessarily hate on as it is experimental, meaning from the get go, I shouldn’t be expecting any sort of clear cut narrative, with relationships, protagonists, conflict or hierarchies. Experimental films are more about exploring a central idea and having all its “characters'' not essentially prove the idea, but just talk about it, like a debate but everyone agrees in the end. A debate where everyone agrees would be boring, which is why I find experimental films to be boring as most of the time they don’t have a meaning and sadly as humans, we’re obsessed with finding the meaning of things or else we’ll go crazy. And I would say this film definitely left me crazy at the end, proving the idea of man’s constant need to find meanings in things. In Fabric wasn’t really relatable, funny, clever or bold. It kinda just...was.

Score: 5/10

Delicatessen (1991) as seen on DVD

I love how the world likes to think that the American film market is the only film market when in actuality the French created the actual concept of cinema and the idea to project “movies” onto a large screen. With this has come a plethora of incredible movies from France that have gone onto to change the film industry forever. There’s a reason why the most prestigious and exclusive film festival in the entire world is held in the South of France and not LA. Jean-Pierre Jeunet is the auteur behind Amélie (2001) one of the most well known independent films ever to be made and before Amélie came Delicatessen. This film is Tim Burton meets Wes Anderson but in French and tells the story of a man working for a butcher and the crazy characters he meets in the same apartment as him. By the end it's clear that The Butcher is selling more than pork and beef down in his store and that the new tenant is due to be the next item on sale. I loved how weird and larger than life the characters were and the otherworldly set design used for this film. There were so many moments that are quite hard to explain the beauty of them and if you’ve seen Wes Anderson or Tim Burton’s work, you’ll notice the similarities between this film and their work, perhaps showing a french influence on the current American market.

Score: 10/10

Amélie (2001) as seen on DVD

Continuing on with the French theme, I was reminded this month of the beauty of Amélie. Every, single, shot in this film is pure perfection and I bet all my money that Wes Anderson was a mega fan of this film when it came out. It's truly a film like none other and it’s only this time around did I realise how much I RELATE to Amélie. The way she sacrifices herself for others and gets nothing in return, the lengths she goes to tell someone something instead of JUST SAYING IT, her lack of friends, I can definitively say that there isn’t a character on screen that I’ve related to more than Amélie (besides Elio from cmbyn). If you haven’t seen Amélie have a word with yourself.

Score: 11/10

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) as seen on Amazon Prime

Pan’s Labyrinth was a surprisingly amazing film and I wonder why I hadn’t seen it sooner. I was astounded to see it was in Spanish which I thought made the story somehow better. It's rare that we see such high budget and well known film that’s in a foreign language but I’m glad this film got the noise it did when it was released. Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water 2017) tells us the story of 10 year old Ofelia and her discovery of magical creatures in the woods that inhabit the outskirts of her new home. Not only that but it’s 1944. The Spanish Civil War has been over for five years but small groups of guerrilla rebels continue to fight against the new fascist dictatorship led by Francisco Franco. This is a well structured film that shows two strong worlds and combines them in a satisfying way, which isn’t an easy thing as sometimes films can get lost in the facts of history instead of the emotions and dynamic relationships. The set design in this was UNREAL as always and I really felt for the characters and their given circumstances. And that’s what we call a film.

Score: 11/10

I Care A Lot (2021) as seen on Amazon Prime

For a full review of I Care A Lot, follow the link: https://ratingtheframe.tumblr.com/post/643763403606867968/a-strong-performance-from-rosamund-pike-that-we

Score: 8/10

Interview with a Vampire (1994) as seen on BBC iPlayer

We were doing SO WELL until I made the costly decision to watch this waffle of a film, directed by Neil Jordan. Not only was the story all over the place, but the dialogue itself was incredibly on the nose and self explanatory throughout. It feels like there was more talking about the film instead of showing the film, which just made me switch off from early on in the film. I hated the casting of Tom Cruise in this and there were moments when I believed his character, but none of them outweighed the overarched and over bearing performance he was attempting to give. Brad Pitt was marginally better but the performance of Kirsten Dunst who was 12 years old at the time this film was released, outdid both actors. She was the only character that I truly felt for / cared about and her on screen presence was both enviable and wise beyond her years. Personally, I can’t explain what this film was even about because I truly didn’t get what was going on, however if you’re a fan of Kirsten Dunst’s work, this would be a suitable film to watch in that respect.

Score: 4/10

Fargo (1996) as seen on Amazon Prime

Fargo is probably most known as a Netflix series, but before that, it was originally a film directed by the Coen Brothers and starred the likes of Frances McDormand, Steve Buscemi, William H Macy and John Carroll Lynch. I’ve been meaning to watch Fargo for quite some time and I was not disappointed with the outcome of it. It's one of those good old fashioned crime films, with lots of twists and blood split throughout the film. The film won two Oscars in 1997; one for Best Actress which was handed to Frances McDormand playing a police officer investigating a string of murders in Minnesota and another for Best Original Screenplay. A really well constructed story with a fantastic cast and great cinematography work from Roger Deakins (1917 (2020), Blade Runner 2049 (2017) The Shawshank Redemption (1994).

Score: 10/10

The Darjeeling Limited (2007) as seen on Amazon Prime

The Darjeeling Limited further proves to us Wes Anderson’s ability to create entire new worlds and show us stories that take place all across the world. Three brothers, Peter (Adrien Brody), Jack (Jason Schwartzman) and Francis (Owen Wilson) have travelled to India in an attempt to bond with one another “spiritually” after the death of their father. Peter and Jack aren’t too keen on this little expedition, irritated at their brothers' intrusiveness over the trip. The majority of the film is set on this fanatical train travelling across India and yet again, we are blessed with some phenomenal production design to tell us a fun and uplifting story. What’s more is that the boys’ mother (Anjelica Huston) lives in India as a nun at the foot of the Himalayas. This becomes the real reason for their venture and such a thing changes the character dynamics between the three men. India is shown in all its beauty in this film using the backdrop of three men’s relationship with one another as a story.

Score: 9/10

The Life Aquatic of Steve Zissou (2004) as seen on DVD

Another one of Wes Anderson’s lesser known films but equally as good as the rest, this film follows a group of marine explorers travelling across the pacific to try and kill a shark that supposedly ate a member of Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) ’s crew. With an all star cast composed of Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Cate Blanchett, Jeff Goldblum and Anjelica Huston this film was entertaining, enlightening and cinematographically ambitious. Steve Zissou is a fictional character who makes a living off of extreme and dangerous marine explorations. He makes films of his travels using his crew and after screening his latest film, he meets a young man (Owen Wilson) claiming to be his son. Evidently, Zissou is reluctant to accept that this man is his son and uses his presence as financial gain to the project. I appreciated all performances in this film and the set design (as always with Anderson’s films) was exceptional.

Score: 9/10

Life of Pi (2012) as seen on Amazon Prime

A highly visual and emotional film that carries beauty throughout in both performance and story, Life of Pi was directed by Brokeback Mountain (2005)’s Ang Lee and tells the story of Pi (Suraj Sharma and Irrfan Khan) a young boy alone in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with a fully grown Bengal Tiger. Winner of 4 Academy Awards including Best Director at the 2013 Academy Awards, this film does a phenomenal job of reminding us why cinema is such a superior and infinite art form. Pi’s family are on their way from India to America, exporting a large number of their zoo animals in hope of selling them once they reach the other side of the world. After a horrendous storm ravages their cargo ship, Pi is left all alone in the ocean with what only appears to be a small dingy, but to his horror, he comes to find that the zoo’s tiger Richard Parker is keeping him company in the middle of the ocean. Now if that ain’t a viable story, then I don’t know what is. To make a film look like it was set in the middle of a Pacific and with a Bengal Tiger is no small feat. Suraj Sharma’s performance was both truthful and powerful, despite the film being mostly shot in a studio with nothing but animation for Richard Parker. This is one of very few films that does the original novel justice.

Score: 11/10

Capone (2021) as seen on Netflix

Yikes. Capone has not been getting a lot of love in the media since its release on Netflix on 24th February. Personally, it's not the most god awful, offensive film I’ve seen and yet I wouldn’t have been the one to have made such a film either. The film is supposed to depict the last year of the infamous and notorious Al Capone, who suffered from numerous illnesses at only the age of 48. Tom Hardy plays the blood thirsty gangster and I have to say, this was a thoughtless casting choice. Hardy doesn’t have an ounce of Italian in his face and he put on this larger than life caricature of an accent that had me feeling rather sorry for him at moments when I shouldn’t have been. The acting was exceptional, but believable and interesting? That’s another argument altogether. Cinematography and sound wise, I thought the film was excellent in those respects but again, those should be additions to the integral story of a film. I get why Hardy signed up though, what actor wouldn’t want to play a mob boss? Maybe the point of Al’s life in which this film was built upon was perhaps wrong for the screen and I’m sure most would have preferred Hardy to play Capone at his peak. This film is a clear example of people getting ahead of themselves when they first explore an idea for a film. This film could have easily been saved in the development stage had someone said let’s not do this.

Score: 5/10

Creed II (2018) as seen on Amazon Prime

Obviously a prequel will always outdo a sequel, however I found Creed II to be just as meaningful as the first film. Maybe even more so as Adonis Creed (Michael B Jordan) is becoming a father his responsibilities have shifted dramatically. He’s also desperate to fight Viktor Drago, a Ukrainian ruthless boxer whose father accidentally killed Creed’s father in a match decades before. Drago is tough, beyond what he and his coach Rocky (Sylvester Stallone) could ever imagine and because of this, it drives a wedge between Adonis’ relationship with his coach. Creed thinks Rocky doesn’t believe he can beat Drago but Rocky insists not fighting the bull of a boxer would benefit him greatly, after all, look what happened to his father. The character dynamics have shifted in this sequel, but the structure has remained largely the same. We kind of knew what we were being served at the end and the change in character was there for everyone.

Score: 10/10

...and that’s it! Everything I watched this February, you do not want to KNOW how long this list took to compile. Thanks for reading and see you next month!

ig: @ratingtheframe

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tobeornottotc · 4 years ago

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Happy Christmas Darling @noona96n, talking to you has been a highlight this month. I was so excited when I got you as secret santa since we already bonded over analysing my gear and your gown. You deserve so much more than this but I hope it makes you smile. Hope you have a great year and you enjoy the new BLS hope we keep squealing about BLs together. Enjoy:

The thing about Inn: Korn’s perspective Until we meet again

It’s the little things. The way he shines each time he appears in front of you. He’s breath taking, his smile makes the tightness in your chest fade away, he’s a soothing balm on your heart, you stare at him. God he’s beautiful. Does he know this, does he know how many peoples eyes linger on him and want to stay by his side forever. Does he understand how dangerous he is for people like you? How dangerous you are for people like him. You’re the darkness, you’re doomed for it, you’re doomed to not escape this path you’re in and yet he shows up with a cruel sign of hope. He’s everything to you but you can’t show him how shattered your walls are because of him. So you go back to pretending that that smile isn’t making you lose every ounce of control you’ve fought so hard to have.

It’s the stupid things. The way he runs up to you and introduces him self. ‘I’m going to love you forever’ he says with a smirk, he doesn’t flinch at all at your glare, he tilts his head to the side and takes in all of you, your turned back which holds the weight of all the pain you hold, all the burdens that load in your mind, all the tiredness you feel, your eyes that aren’t allowed to look back at his with longing and wanting though they would, they automatically should, your frown ;which actually is a mask because from just seeing him appear, from just hearing him, that frown feels false. You want to smile, you want to smirk, you want to laugh at the absurdity of how this beautiful boy thinks he’s yours. Forever. Could that be possible? Could it be possible to have him forever by your side. Stupid, things like that can’t happen and yet, the hope stays like a flame refusing to die, it stays and warms your frozen heart, it burns down your walls and it makes you breath again. It’s incredible how much stupidity can lead to the one thing that matters, the one thing that saves you time and time again. Him.

It’s the crazy things. The feeling of his touch when he leans to take something from your hair, he leans in so close, his breath tickles your cheek, you want to pull him closer, you want to make sure he stays right next to you forever. You want to keep kissing him and letting the sparks fly over and over again. He’s so bright, God he’s so bright, he’s so explosive with joy and happiness, he’s consuming, you feel pulled to him, so addicted, so obsessed. Can this be allowed? Is he allowed to be yours forever? Can you hold him for eternity without ever letting go? You want to stay here, you want to forget everything. He’s everything.

It’s the messy things. Like the way he burns the eggs each time he tries to make them for you, the way he flirts and makes cringy faces which you can’t help but want to laugh at and make fun of him for. You’re finding reasons to laugh and smile, you never thought you could be this person? Did you even know you could smile for silly reasons? Did you know it was possible to actually feel joy? Hope? Happiness? Apparently with Inn it is, apparently with him everything is possible.

It’s the silly things. The conversations that seem to be about nothing, just small talk, just little updates about life. His friends are wary of you, it’s not like he cares, it’s not like he ever cared what people thought of you. Inn sees you as his all, Inn sees you as his rock, Inn sees you as his air to breath. Inn sees you. For so long you’ve never wanted to be seen, you never wanted to be noticed, and yet now you want this beautiful light to keep seeing all of you every time. To read through you and keep seeing through you every way possible. You’ve let him have that right, you’ve let him hold your heart. It’s all his.

It’s the hard things. The way he cries when he trips because of his clumsiness. The way you want to keep protecting him and removing those hurts and scars. The way you want to keep holding him on your back and not let him go, the way you lose your mind at the thought of anyone breaking his spirit and joy. It’s the way you feel thousand cuts at seeing him cry, it’s something that shouldn’t be felt, it makes you feel angry, protective, delirious with determination to remove any obstacle that tries to hurt him. Inn is the one thing in your life that should be protected and safe at all cost. Inn is the one person in your life that should be given everything he wants. Because he saved you. And you will keep on fighting to save him too time and time again

You’re looking at him still worried you could hurt him, you’re upset that you were such a coward for leaving him, for hurting him, for breaking him. You let something come and take away that bright smile, you let something come and ruin that wonderful person’s spirit. It’s not fair, you don’t deserve him and yet you’re together forever now, he’s smiling again, his hands interlinked, both walking into the brightness filled with peace and joy. You’re with his smile, his heart is beating right next to yours where he should always be, his touch is back on yours stamped and never fading, and you guys feel you’ve made it, never to be pulled apart ever again.

It’s the thing about Inn, he’s the light in the dark for you, the air when you’re drowning, the water in the desert, the rain to the fire, he’s everything and more. And you’re just so happy he’s all yours. And will always be forever more.

Korn

@mistletoinks

#secretsanta'20 #mistletoinks #me!!!#fan fiction #until we meet again #uwma #thai bl

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jamesgraybooksellerworld · 4 years ago

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To see the web page which goes with this choose the link [in blue] below.

Seven Emblem books and two others!

Two sort of emblematic books (A&B) and Seven(1-7) emblem books in contemporary or original bindings!

1) Andres Alciati 1492 – 1550

V.C. Emblemata (Viri Clarissimi) Emblemata. Cum Claudij Minois ad eadam Commentariis & Notis Posterioribus. Quibus Emblematum omnium aperta origine, mens auctoris explicatur, & obscura omnia dubiáque illustrantur.

Lugduni (Lyon), Hæred. Gvlielmi Rovilii, 1600. 1600. Bound in coeval vellum with author and title on the spine in an early hand. Octavo ã8, e4, i8 A-Eee8, Eee*2 Fff8 Ggg4.

The ultimate reference for this book is Daly’ Andres Alciatus Index Emblematicsus 1985; ; Landwehr, J. Romanic emblem books; 89 ; Adams, A. French emblem books; F.063; Emblem books at the Univ. of Illinois; A32; Green, H. Andrea Alciati and his books of emblems,; 127; Baudrier, 1895-1921, v. 9, p. 464-65;. Item #738G

The emblem book, which attained enormous popularity in continental Europe and Great Britain, while it is possible to trace it back before was certantly made most popular by Alciati. . Alciato’s emblems were first published in Augsburg in Germany (two editions in 1531 and one in 1534); from 1534 onwards publishing shifted to France and remained there for the next thirty years. Wechel, who printed the Paris editions (from 1534), are like those in Augsburg. He can be said to have set the standard for clear presentation of emblems, with each emblem beginning on a fresh page, featuring the motto or title, the pictura below that, and then the subscription/epigram or verse text the main focus of publication for emblems shifted more firmly to Lyons from the mid 1540s, The 1550 Latin edition by Rouille is the first to have 211 emblems (the whole corpus, apart from the so-called obscene emblem ‘Adversus naturam peccantes’) illustrated. This edition includes biography of Andrea Alciati (leaves i1-i8). These emblems depict Alciati’s concern for the eternal nature of man and its contradictions, the attentive ear to the popular speech, the unfolding of the personality, madness, the reflection on human existence, the relationship between man and the woman, the struggle between reason and passion, and to the satire of society and its rules and rulers.

A) CARTARI 343J Vincenso Cartari. 1531–1569

Seconda novissima editione delle Imagini de gli dei delli antichi di Vicenzo Cartari …Ridotte da capo a piedi alle loro reali, & non più per l’adietro osseruate simiglianze. cauate da’marmi, bronzi, medaglie, gioie, & altre memorie antiche; con esquisito studio, & particolare dligenza da Lorenzo Pignoria … Aggionteui le annotationi del medismo sopra tutta l’opera, & vn discorso intorno le deità dell’Indie orientali, & occidentali, con le loro figure tratte da gl’originali, che si conseruano nelle Galleri de’principi, & ne’musei delle persone priuate. Con le allegorie sopra le imagini di Cesare Malfatti … Et vn catalogo di cento più famosi dei della gentilità. Con l’aggiunta d’vn’altro catalogo de gl’autori antichi, & moderni, che hanno trattato questa materia, ordinato & raccolto dal medesimo Pignoria che ha accresciute le annotationi & aggiunte molte imagini.

In Padova, Nella stamparia di Pietro Paolo Tozzi. 1626. Quarto, 9 1/4 x 6 1/2 in 224×162 mm. Signatures: ‡8 ≠≠1,a6, ‡‡4 [∏2 FOLDOUTS] A-Z8 ,AA-OO8 (38 pages, 589 pages illustrations, two folded plates) [[38] pages, 589 pages illustrations, two folded plates 24 cm]. 2 double-page woodcuts and 227 full-page and in-text woodcuts of the ancient gods by Cesare Malfatti. * *. *

#1 Vincenzo Cartari, Images of the Gods of the Ancients: The First Italian Mythography, translated and annotated by John Mulryan. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies vol. 396. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012.

Praz 36; Cicognara 4686; Graesse II.56; Nagler XXII.15, ; Harvard 156.108; JCB Library catalogue; 2:198; Sabin 11104.; BM. STC.(Ital.) 152.; ‘Choix 4280. See Also: Mortimer, Italian, 108 note. Caillet 2047 (French trans.) Brunet I,1601. Graesse II,56.Univ. Cat of Art, 287. Arntzen & Rainwater H35.Dekesel 16th, C11. And :

1)Sonia Maffei, ‘Le imagini de i Dei degli antichi di Vincenzo Cartari: Dalla poesia all’archeologia’ http://dinamico2.unibg.it/cartari/leimaginideiDei.html

2) Marco Urdapilleta Muñoz, ‘El bestiario medieval en las crónicas de Indias (siglos XV y XVI)’, Latino América, Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos, 58 (2014), 237-70. 5160.235500

3) Miguel A. Rojas Mix, América imaginaria (Barcelona, 1992) LB.31.b.10858

4) Rosa López Torrijos, La mitología en la pintura española del Siglo de Oro (Madrid, 1985). YV.1988.b.1010 María Jesús Lacarra, Juan Manuel Cacho Blecua, Lo imaginario en la conquista de América (Zaragoza, 1990). YA.1997.a.7376

5) Mercedes Aguirre at 11:59:11 in Americas , Collections , Latin America , Medieval history , Mexico , Rare books. BL.

6) Mexican Codex Vaticanus 3738. Item #743

This is the First Edition in which the antiquarian and egyptologist who was also interested in the sciences, and a friend of Galileo. Lorenzo Pignoria added his appendix Seconda Parte delle Imagini de gli Dei Indiani displays detailed illustrations of some archeological remains portraying Mexican, Egyptian, Indian and Japanese gods, seeking ‘a sort of unique visual language in pre-Christian religions. It is bound in.

Price: $4,500.00

B). Cuper, Gisbert Cuper. 1644-1716

Gisb. Cuperi Harpocrates, Sive Explicatio imaguncluæ argenteæ perantiquæ; quæ in figuram Harpocratis formata representat Solem. Ejusdem Monumenta Antiqua Inedita. Multi Auctorum loci, multæ Inscriptiones, Marmora, Nummi, Gemmæ, varii ritus, & Antiquitates in utroque Opusculo emendantur & illustrantur. Accedit Stephani Le Moine Epistola de Melanophoris.

Utrecht: (Trajecti ad Rhenum) Apud Franciscum Halma, Acad. Typogr., 1687, Quarto. This copy is bound in 20th century quarter calf. .

¶Harpocrates was adapted by the Greeks from the Egyptian child God Horus, who represented the newborn sun, rising each day at dawn. Harpocrates’s name was a Hellenization of the Egyptian Har-pa-khered or Heru-pa-khered, meaning “Horus the Child”. In the second century B.C., Egyptians connected Harpocrates with the mystic cult of the Egyptian goddess Isis. Harpocrates holds a finger to its lip for the Egyptians a symbolic gesture representing childhood.

¶Yet the Greeks mistook for a hush for silence., misinterpreting Harpocrates as the personification of silence, and this particular work is a study of statues and other art from classical antiquity that depict these later figures of silence. And again, the Roman interpretation added strength to the Mystery of silence.

The frontispiece signed and dated in the plate: Joh. van der Avele invention and fecit. Title page in red and black. This edition is enhanced with a letter of Etienne Le Moyne; this text has a half-title and the second text: Monumenta Antiqua. Cuper’s research is a precursor to art history and Winckelmann.

Brunet 6, no. 22603; Cicognara 3212; Ebert 5512; Graesse 2,308 , Item #388J

Price: $1,800.00

2). David, Jan David. 1545?-1613

Veridicus christianus: auctore P. Joanne David … Editio altera, auctior.

Antverpiæ ex officina Plantiniana, M. DCVI. Second edition. This copy is bound in full contemporary blind stamped calf over wooden boards with two working clasps. Quarto ‡4, ‡‡4, A-Z4, a-z4, Aa-Ee4.+ 100 Numbered Plates. With a special engraved t.p. with allegorical depiction of Christ carrying the cross, surrounded by ten artists at easels painting scenes from his life (as well as a few questionable profane subjects). The vovelle : The centers of the engraving and the volvelle (through which a string passes) are reinforced with small paper roundels printed with the monograms of Christ. The numbers are keyed to an “Indiculus orbitae” that follows (Bb1r-Bb2r). There a number, having been selected, is provided with a phrase from various Latin authors (listed on Bb2v), and a reference to one of the hundred sections that comprise the main text. It is suggested in Bibliotheca Belgica that this game may have been intended as a pious alternative to such superstitious books as Thuys der fortvnen.

Veridicus Christianus emphasizes the Society of Jesus’ investment in thinking in, though, and about visual images that exemplify the supreme mystery of God. Published as a tool of devotion and meditations, it features one hundred chapters that encompass a wide

range of topics for reflection. Each chapter incorporates an extensive commentary that interprets the emblematic image David too follows the order in which we apprehend things with our senses, beginning with a visual representation at the head of each chapter. Then comes the explication. The symboli explicatio was considered necessary because cultivated readers would be more susceptible to a reasoned argument than a

picture. The text is divided into 100 chapters, each with an allegorical engraving incorporating letters keyed to the explanatory text and with marginal references. Each of the 100 numbered plates has a single line of Latin at the head giving the subject, with two-line explanatory verses below the allegorical engraving in Latin (roman letter), Dutch (civilité) and French (italic) First plate (following [2 daggers]4) is added title leaf for the ill., which were also published separately; see Bibliotheca Belgica. The added title reads: Icones ad Veridicvm Christianvm P. Ioannis David e Societate Iesv At the end is Device with compasses and the motto “constantia et labore” on Ee4r . This book is notoriously found defective in one way or another, this copy is perfect and complete. . Item #382J

De Backer-Sommervogel Vol.II col 1845 N. 5; Funck 302; Praz 313: EBIU D 17; Landwehr EFBLC 138; Landwehr FISP 253. Daly & Dimler CLE Jesuit Series Part one p160 #J.153.

Price: $5,500.00

3) David, Joannes David 1546-1613.

Duodecim specula deum aliquando videre desideranti concinnata.

Antwerp: Antverpiae: Ex officina Plantiniana, apud Ioannem Moretum, 1610, 1610. Theodor. Galle fecit. First Edition? This copy is bound in a contemporary soft vellum, (recovery vellum with writing. Faded and on the the inside. ) Ex libris ms.

First edition of this wonderfully illustrated work about 12 mirrors mankind uses to try and see God. David was born at Courtrai and entered the society of Jesuits in 1581. He was distinguished for his zealous fight against heresy. “Emblem number with caption,pictura with motifs flagged, then subscriptio,prose identification flagged motifs,facing page with number followed by a prose conversation between Anima and Desiderus.

Youth edition with engravings only, without text. Each plate bears, at the top, a serial number and an inscription indicating the subject represented in the bottom part a Latin couplet with a summary explanation. RRef. Landwehr 188, Funck p. 303, BCNI 5556, Bibl. Belg. D 157, Praz p. 313 “scarce”

DeBacker-Sommervogel vol. II col.1851 no.20 ; McGeary & Nash. Emblem books at the Unviersity of Illinois,; G2; Daly & Dimler corpus Librorun eblematun(CLE) J141; Praz, M. Studies in 17th century imagery,; vol. I p.192 vol.. II, p. 46; Landwehr, J. Dutch emblem books,; Funck p. 303, BCNI 5556, Bibl. Belg. D 157; see also The Jesuits and the Emblem Tradition: Selected Papers of the Leuven International Emblem Conference, 18-23 August, 1996.

. Item #409J

Price: $1,900.00

4) Izquierdo, Sebastian Izquierdo, Saint Ignatius of Loyola

Praxis exercitiorum spiritualium P.N.S. Ignatti. Auctore P. Sebastiano Izquierdo Alcarazense Societatis Jesu.

Rome: Romae : Typis Joannis Francisci Buagni, 1695, 1695. Octavo 7 X 4.75 inches A-G8,H4 This copy is very clean and bound in full contemporary vellum. Landwehr, Romanic, 412.Sommervogel, IV, 70 1#4 ; Palau 291230; Landwehr:Romantic 412.; Praz,p.382. Item #716

The Jesuit Sebastián Izquierdo in his Práctica de los ejercicios espirituales, written in (Spanish in )1665 translated in to Italian the same year then in 1678 translated as here into Latin and later published in several translations and versions offers an illustrated guide to the Ignatian spiritual exercises. The illustrations, 12 of them, are the subject of image meditation which was a favorite method of the Jesuits who, beginning with the monumental Evangelicae Historiae Imagines (1593) of Jerónimo Nadal, actively took hold of religious iconography and adjusted and concentrated it for the teaching of the Societies ( and Ignatius’ ) vision. The images are not just simple depiction’s instead they are mnemonic devices. These images are points of departures and give the current 21st century reader a precious examples of images that inspire meditation, direct the reception of the teachings and anchor them in the memory. Particularly memorable is the Image of Hell on page 72, The lay-out shows the pedagogical intentions and possibilities of this little book: there are 12 parts consisting of 12 separate quires, numbered from ‘A’ to ‘M’ and paginated each from 1-12, each with its own full-page illustration , these could have been meant to be distributed separately – according to match the educational needs or level of the students. The Images are in high contrast, with plenty of Bloody and memorable images. The Puteus Abyssi depicts a poor man who is naked and sitting in a chair in some sort of oubliette. He has sevenswords, each with animal head handles, in him and each is strategically stuck in various parts of the body. The swords are labeled for the passions. Most interesting of these might be the sword marked ‘Vengeance’ it is hanging offer the mans head, the Idleness sword is stuck between his legs, Gluttony in his stomach, Lust … Envy in his back, Avarice between his Shoulders and Pride in his heart.Izquierdo was also the author of Pharus scientiarum, a treatise on a methodology to access knowledge,

conceived as a single science. In this work, he assimilated Aristotelian and Baconian logic, and he expressed some original ideas on mathematics and logic that have earned their author a reputation as an outstanding mathematician. Not just like his Spanish contemporaries John Caramuel or Tomás Vicente Tosca , but also significant foreign mathematicians as Athanasius Kircher , Gaspar Knittel or Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz , the latter, in particular, cited with, his Disputatio of Combinatione, in Combinatorial Art (1666).

Price: $1,800.00

5) SCARLATINI, Ottavio Scarlatini

Homo et eius partes figuratus & symbolicus, anatomicus, rationalis, moralis, mysticus, politicus, & legalis, collectus et explicatus cum figuris

Augsburg & Dillingen, Johann Caspar Bencard, 1695. First and only Latin edition. Bound in a beautiful contemporary pig skin over wooden boards. Caillet 9948 (“unique in its genre”); Landwehr, German emblem books 530; Praz 490 note; R. Raybould, Emblemata 29. Item #734

With 42 engraved emblems revolving around the human body and body parts. It describes and depicts the human body in its details and in its entirety in every aspect conceivable. The book also discusses magic, in the strict sense of the word, revealing many marvellous secrets, such as the occult properties of saliva, urine, sperm, etc.”The erudition demonstrated by the author is really quite extraordinary” (Raybould) including metoposcopy (the interpretation of facial wrinkles for divination!). . Book One studies individual organs: heart, etc. And Book Two the overall dignity of the whole and aspects of human life.An appendix adds short accounts of several subjects, including “hieroglyphia” and “androgyni”, along with short works by other authors: Lactantius Firmianus’s “De opificio Dei”, Coelius Rhodiginus on humanity, and a long “Ode” to humanity: “Considerationes patheticae de creatione, & dignitate hominis” based on Trismegistus, Plato, Coelius and other ancient sources.With a faint marginal water stain and a couple small rust spots in the paper, but

otherwise in fine condition. The binding shows a few scratches, cuts and stains, small cracks at the head and foot of the hinges and 1 sewing support broken at the hinge, but is still in good condition. A fascinating emblem book for both text and imagery (some of it now also humorous), and an impressive piece of book production.

Price: $5,500.00

6). Sucquet, Anton Sucquet

Piæ considerationes ad declinandum à malo et faciendum bonum : cum iconibus Viae vitae aeternae R.P. Antonij Sucquet è Societate Iesu.

Viennæ Austriæ : Wien : [s.n.], 1672, 1672. Boetius a Bolswert and title by “I.M. Lerch sc. Viennae. Quarto,4 ¾ X 7 inches . ( no printed signatures) π 4 A-T4 V2. This copy is bound in original vellum. There is a really interesting modern bookplate on the pastedown. ¶ Praz, M. Studies in 17th cent. imagery (2nd ed.),; p. 506; Corpus librorum emblematum. Jesuit series,; J.1414; Landwehr, J. German emblem books,; 564; De Backer-Sommervogel,; VI, column 892, no. 2. Item #715

There is an engraved emblematic title page signed “I.M. Lerch sc. Viennae;” The other 32 illustrations (numbered 1-32) are full-page emblems engraved by Boetius a Bolswert–See Landwehr. ¶The Illustrations are printed on the verso of leaf, recto is blank; accompanied by explanatory text on facing leaf. The text and illustrations are printed within ruled border. This popular emblematical work is arranged as a series of meditations, by the Jesuit Antoine Sucquet. Many religious emblem books were published during the 17th and 18th centuries, and of these, Sucquet’s work was one of the most popular. Because of its engravings by Boëtius a Bolswert , it was especially important for the development of the 17th-century Christian iconography. The counter-reformation produced a great number of emblematic meditation-books where text and illustrations are interwoven. Emblem books were therefore much favoured by the Jesuits for the purposes of teaching, as religious propaganda, and to provide subjects for meditation. The 17th-century Jesuit curriculum prescribed that emblems were composed in the schools. Members of the highest classes in the Flemish Jesuit colleges each composed an emblem, and the production of the entire class was collected in commemorative albums painted by professional artists and calligraphers. The meditation on the soul’s relation to Christ was precisely guided by provision of references in the engravings. The first religious catholic emblem book was published in 1571 and composed by Arias Montanus. In 1601 Jan David composed the first Jesuit emblem book, the “Veridicus Christianus”. Sucquet’s work is composed around the widely spread concept of the “homo viator in bivio”, the creature who during his life again and again arrives at the cross and has to make the good choice for the narrow and difficult path to his eternal destination. Sucquet made clear that vision is the most important sense of a human being. It had foundational importance for the Christian iconography of the seventeenth century. According to Brunet the work was very much searched after by the pious for its texts, by the curious minds for the 32 engravings by Boetius a Bolswert

Price: $1,900.00

7) Venius, Otto van Veen

Theater moral de la vida humana, en cien emblemas; con el Enchiridion de Epicteto, y La tabla de Cebes, philosofo platonico.

Antwerp: Amberes,{Antwerp} Por Enrico y Cornelio Verdussen 1701, 1701. The Rubens master. third Edition.This large folio is bound in full contemporary vellum with gilt tooling. Snags repaired in the blank of the title page and on the folding Engraving , without damaging the text. Scattered freckles. Good copy. Landwehr, Dutch 240; Landwehr, Low Countries 678. (cfr. PRAZ, Studies in seventeenth-century imagery I pp.523-524 & Peeters Fontainas Bibliographie des impr. espagn. des Pays-Bas mérid. 1275;. Folio. 14 x 9 inches * 6, ** 4, *** 2, A-Z4, 2A-2C4 / a4, a-f4, g2. Item #97

This Emblem book is made up of three Stoic works, beginning with Text from Horace in latin with 103 copper plates of engravings, That is a full page engraving of Vaenius by his daughter Gertrude van Veen engraved by Pontius.

These emblems also appeared in “Emblems from Horace, but not directly, these engravings represent both allegoric and general passages from Horace, these are in Spanish. The Horace is followed by

The Table of Cebes which has a large folding plate (16 x 13 inches) Cebes’ Tablet is an Ekphrastic work interpreting a probably mythical Tablet which symbolically represents “the whole Truth of Human life” Cebes is one of the characters in The Phædo of Plato. Xenophon tells us that Cebe was in the inner circle of Socrates’ friends. This is followed by The ENCHRIDION of Epictetus, in spanish. This manual is a ‘hands-on’philosophical collection of epigrams which promises to free the mind from Fear and enslavement to false Ideas.

Price: $3,500.00

Seven Emblem Books and Two others To see the web page which goes with this choose the link below. Seven Emblem books and two others!

#Alcati #Early Anthropology #Emblem Books #Iconology #Illustrated #Jesuits #Mexico #Mythologics

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mobappdevelopmentcompany · 3 years ago

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Blockchain’s Contribution in Implementing Employee Safety Protocol in Workspaces!

Today, a huge chunk of employees across the globe have returned into a physical office environment and several others are scheduled to resume working-from-office after remotely working for a long time. But, the fear of getting infected with the Covid19 virus persists.

So, how could organizations maintain safety protocols at their workspaces? Well, the two most effective mechanisms that are being incorporated by enterprises to ensure employee safety are: contact tracing and maintaining digital health wallets for employees. However, there are security risks involved in both these processes and so employees may be reluctant to adopt these processes.

This post explores how Blockchain application development improves the effectiveness and enhances the safety quotient of the aforementioned processes.

Before we delve deeper, check out the unique attributes and functioning of Blockchain technology!

Blockchain Technology: Key Attributes

Distribution

The participants, who are a part of the blockchain, are connected through a distributed network. “Nodes” (computers) are present for operating this network. The nodes run programs for imposing the rules laid down by the business enterprise that owns the blockchain. The nodes also maintain a copy of the ledger and updates data independently, whenever a new transaction takes place.

Decentralization

Blockchain is a decentralized ledger, based on peer-to-peer technology, in which the information is distributed across the network instead of being stored by one single entity. As such, no entity can control a majority of the nodes or dictate terms. Thus, unlike the traditional approach, this approach eliminates the need for a centralized authority for controlling the network. Instead, multiple participants are authorized for managing the network – a “consensus mechanism” is employed for approving and checking transactions. Decentralization, increases reliability as the users no longer have to trust a third-party authority and also minimizes the risk of systematic failures considerably. Hence, Blockchain solutions are more transparent, secure, performant, and irreversible.

Encryption

This feature uses pseudonyms to record the participants’ details and thus ensures the security of all recorded data. The participants are entitled to control their personal details and share them only with authorized entities whenever needed.

Tokenization

With this functionality, items of value or physical or non-physical elements are converted into “tokens”. Blockchain identifies these “tokens” as “currency” within the system and these can be traded as well. Data and even a participant’s identity can be represented as the value that can be converted to tokens and then traded.

Transparency

This aspect of Blockchain imparts a layer of accountability that is a crucial prerequisite for several enterprises. All transactions can be searched for as well as traced in open Blockchain. And, to protect data privacy, granular access is provided to certain authorized users and at the same time, the data is protected from unauthorized access.

Immutability

This ground-breaking property of Blockchain rules out any third-party interference to the continuously growing chained data. Blocks are used for storing data introduced into Blockchain and these blocks are connected as well as secured by cryptography. Each block is given a unique identification number employing a cryptographic algorithm and is called the cryptographic hash function. During a transaction, blocks are time-stamped, sequentially added to the ledger, and cryptographically signed. Each block contains its own hash, transaction-related data, a timestamp, and the cryptographic hash of the previous data. As such, data once entered into the Blockchain network, cannot be tampered with.

Functioning of the Blockchain Network

When somebody joins the Blockchain network, an entire copy of the Blockchain is received and the nodes verify whether every aspect is in order. This new block is then sent to all participants of the network and the block is verified by each node for ensuring that no tampering has taken place. Once successfully verified, the block is added by each node into their Blockchain and the transaction is completed.

For ensuring the authenticity of this new block, the nodes use a particular consensus mechanism. All the nodes present within the network create a consensus by agreeing on which of the blocks are valid and which of them are invalid. Any block within the network that has been tampered with will be rejected by the other nodes of the network.

So for tampering with a Blockchain system successfully, one must manipulate every block contained within the chain and then gain control over more than half of the P2P network, which is not possible by any means.

Blockchain’s Role in maintaining Safety Protocols at the Workplace

Today, contact tracing and maintaining digital health wallets for employees has become an essential prerequisite to ensure safety protocols at workplaces. And, employing Blockchain app development for architecting such solutions is necessary. Let’s explore!

Contact Tracing

What is Contact Tracing?

Contact tracing is a mechanism that is implemented for limiting the spread of communicable diseases or disease-causing viruses. This process involves the following steps:

Step 1: Identifying the infected and their contacts

Individuals infected with a communicable disease are identified and asked about their routine activities and locations visited in the recent past. This is done to identify other individuals like family members, colleagues, friends, medical practitioners/staff, etc. who were within close vicinity of the patient.

Step 2: Tracking down the contacts

Once identified, a list of all persons who have come in close contact with the patient during the past couple of days is prepared. These contacts are then tracked down and notified about the situation. They are also provided guidance on the timely measures to be adopted and the practices to follow if they develop any symptoms of the communicable disease and are advised to stay in isolation if needed.

Step 3: Follow-ups with contacts

The health symptoms of these contacts are closely monitored by conducting regular/periodic follow-ups and tests to limit the spread of the disease.

The Traditional way of Contact Tracing: Limitations

Contact tracing was implemented in the past to control the spread of various communicable diseases. Also, for tackling Covid19 the traditional approach was implemented in some countries. But, the traditional approach comes with certain limitations. The lists of identified contacts who are likely to contract the infectious disease are maintained in paper files and the contacts are notified as well as advised via phone calls or emails. So, the entire process becomes not only time-consuming but also error-prone. To sum up, the paper-based system is unorganized, incomplete, less effective owing to data redundancy, alterable, insecure, and less accurate.

Digital Contact Tracing and its Challenges

In modern times, digital contact tracing, with the use of contact tracing apps via smartphones is trending. This method guarantees prompt as well as convenient contact tracking and is being implemented for tracing down Covid19 patients and their contacts in several regions. But, this approach too, comes with its share of downsides, the key challenges being issues concerning transparency and risks to the security and privacy of personal/medical data, if the apps are not bound by strict privacy rules like GDPR.

For example, the Covid19 patients need to upload their personal data to the centralized server so that the concerned authorities can download it and use it in contract-tracing maps. But, during this process, the users’ data becomes vulnerable to risks like trajectory attacks and reconstruction of information. For this reason, many users are reluctant to share personal health information and if the participation rates are low, the apps become virtually useless.

So, the employers whose employees need to share personal data using a contact tracing application must comply with the laws mandated by the State, Federation, and Region, depending on the kind of data that is being collected. Some regions in the U.S like California have enforced privacy laws for protecting the geolocation data of individuals by providing the option of opting out or deleting obligations. But such laws do not exist in other areas of the country.

How does Blockchain-enabled contact tracing solutions resolve all challenges?

Despite its challenges, there is no other better option than using digital contact tracing app solutions for contact tracing, and integrating Blockchain technology for building such applications is the one-stop solution. Blockchain-powered contact tracing apps can successfully resolve all challenges and also enhance the efficiency, accuracy, and speed of this system. In such solutions, a symmetric key cryptographic mechanism is employed to avoid misuse of data and guarantee the privacy of users’ data. And, digital contact tracing is decentralized, thereby keeping users’ data private and secured and ruling out any chances of trajectory attacks.

Blockchain-empowered Digital Health Wallets

Why are Digital Health Wallets needed?

While the contact tracing process is needed for isolating the Covid19-affected individuals, there also needs to be an effective means of verifying that all employees entering the workplace have tested negative. For fulfilling this requirement, employees need to share their test results and immunization records digitally with third parties like the employer, TSA agents, transportation personnel, etc.

Here again, data security is essential and hence, a digital health wallet based on Blockchain is needed so that the users’ sensitive/personal data is protected from the risks of getting exposed.

How does a Blockchain-infused digital wallet function?

Persons who wish to get tested for Covi19 need to share their Blockchain-powered digital ID with their healthcare service provider. Once the test is conducted, the medical provider will upload the test results and link them to the patients’ digital credentials with cryptographic evidence, so that its authenticity could be easily verified by any third party. Thereafter, the test result is directly issued into the health wallet of patients.

On reaching the workplace, an employee is required to scan his/her QR code with a smartphone/computer application for verification. This app would then extract the information contained within the credential and check the evidence prior to displaying the test result.

Advantages of Decentralization

Blockchain entirely decouples the users’ Covid19 status from their personal information, ruling out any possibility of data reconstruction. Moreover, the data can be moved off the chain into a private database so that the owner can directly control his/her data and delete obsolete data. Thus, the decentralized platform created by Blockchain ensures the privacy of users’ data. However, for making this model work effectively, the Covid19 test results and immunization records provided by medical bodies need to be wallet-ready.

Concluding Lines:

With Blockchain-empowered systems in place, coupled up with other common safety measures like social distancing amongst colleagues, daily screening of employees, etc. employers would be able to create a safer workplace.

If you are looking for experienced and adept Blockchain app developers / Blockchain app Development Company for crafting impeccable Blockchain-powered solutions, reach out to Biz4Solutions. We are a prominent Offshore app development company in India having a proven track record of delivering outstanding Blockchain solutions.

To know more about our other core technologies, refer to links below:

Swift App development Company

Angular App Development Company

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#Blockchain app development company #Offshore app development company in India

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cutsliceddiced · 5 years ago

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New top story from Time: Low Wages, Sexual Harassment and Unreliable Tips. This Is Life in America’s Booming Service Industry

Published in partnership with The Fuller Project, a non-profit newsroom that reports on issues impacting women.

After an eight-hour shift on her feet, shuffling between a stuffy kitchen and the red vinyl booths of Broad Street Diner, Christina Munce is at a standstill in traffic. Still wearing the red polo shirt and black pants required for work at the diner in South Philadelphia, she’s arguing with her colleague Donna Klum. They carpool most days to spare Klum a two-hour commute on public transportation that involves three transfers.

“It’s not O.K. for people not to tip,” Munce says from the driver’s seat, the Philly skyline passing by. Klum believes that bad karma will catch up with non-tippers, but Munce, a single mother who relies on tips to live, doesn’t care much about their fate. “I have to make sure that my daughter has a roof over her head,” she says. The desire for cash over karma is understandable: Munce’s base pay is $2.83 an hour.

The decade-long economic expansion has been a boon to those at the top of the economic ladder. But it left millions of workers behind, particularly the 4.4 million workers who rely on tips to earn a living, fully two-thirds of them women. Even as wages have crept up–if slowly–in other sectors of the economy, the minimum wage for waitresses and other tipped workers hasn’t budged since 1991. Indeed, there is an entirely separate federal minimum wage for those who live on tips. It varies by state from as low as $2.13 (the federal tipped minimum wage) in 17 states including Texas, Nebraska and Virginia, up to $9.35 in Hawaii. In 36 states, the tipped minimum wage is under $5 an hour. Legally, employers are supposed to make up the difference when tips don’t get servers to the minimum wage, but some restaurants don’t track this closely and the law is rarely enforced.

Waitresses are emblematic of the type of job expected to grow most in the American economy in the next decade--low-wage service work with no guaranteed hours or income. Though high-paying service jobs have been growing quickly in recent months, middle-wage jobs are growing more slowly and could decline sharply in the event of a recession, says Mark Zandi, chief economist with Moody’s Analytics. Those who lose their jobs in a recession usually move down, not up, the pay scale. Jobs like personal-care aide (median annual wage $24,020), food-prep worker ($21,250) and waitstaff ($21,780) are among the fastest-growing occupations in America, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). They have much in common with the burgeoning gig economy, in which people turn to apps in the hope of getting shifts delivering food, driving passengers and cleaning houses.

Sasha Arutyunova for TIMEChristina Munce waits tables at Broad Street Diner in Philadelphia, where she’s worked for more than eight years.

This “sometimes” work has put the stress of earning a weekly wage, paying for health insurance and saving for retirement squarely on the shoulders of workers. Munce is on food stamps and Medicaid, and many days doesn’t make it to the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. One of her recent paychecks read $58.67 for 49 hours worked. Add in the $245 she took home in tips, and she made about $6.20 an hour. She wants to work 40-hour weeks, but some days the diner is slow and she gets sent home early. “I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, all I do is save money,” Munce says.

But these employers are hiring, and these jobs are becoming a fallback for people whose former jobs placed them solidly in the middle class. Food-service jobs have grown nearly 50% over the past two decades, to 12.2 million, according to the BLS. They are on track to surpass America’s manufacturing workforce, which, at 12.8 million, has fallen 25% over the same period.

Sasha Arutyunova for TIMEn the kitchen at the Broad Street Diner in Philadelphia, waitress Christina Munce keeps her daughter’s photo next to her pad for taking orders.

Markets have swung wildly in recent weeks on fears of a possible recession, which could speed up the nation’s continuing shift from one that makes things to one that serves things. The last recession, from 2007 to 2009, took a sharp toll on industries that make things in America, with construction and manufacturing each losing 1.9 million jobs in the five years after the recession began. In contrast, industries like health care and food service added hundreds of thousands of jobs in the same period.

If another recession starts, “the primary hit is going to generally be in sectors that don’t involve providing basic services to other people,” says Jacob Vigdor, an economist at the University of Washington. On Aug. 20, President Trump, while declaring the economy still strong, said the Administration is examining various options to bolster the economy. Still, whenever the next recession comes, more workers will have to turn to the booming service industry, where low wages and unstable hours are the norm.

Christina Munce didn’t plan to be a waitress. She was in school studying massage therapy when, at 21, she got pregnant, and started waiting tables to put away the cash she would need as a young mother. She doesn’t regret a thing–her daughter, now 11, is her whole world, her name tattooed in cursive on Munce’s forearm. Pictures of the two posing together dominate the otherwise blank walls of their government-subsidized two-bedroom apartment. But being a single parent has limited Munce’s job options, since she needs the flexibility to take care of her daughter.

Tipped workers have always been an underclass in America. The concept was popularized in 1865, when some formerly enslaved people found employment as waiters, barbers and porters; still seen as a servant class, they were hired to serve. Many employers refused to pay them, instead suggesting that patrons tip for their service. A 1966 law tried to bring some measure of security to these jobs, requiring employers to pay a small base wage that would bring tipped workers up to the federal minimum wage when combined with their tips. In 1991, the tipped minimum wage was equal to 50% of the value of the overall minimum wage, but it’s stayed at $2.13 since then, as the minimum wage has nearly doubled. In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed legislation that froze the wage for tipped workers at that amount. It hasn’t changed since.

The regular minimum wage has doubled in that time. If the tipped minimum wage had even risen with inflation since 1991, it would be $6 an hour, according to research from Sylvia Allegretto, co-chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the University of California, Berkeley. Only 12 states currently pay waitstaff above that.

The serving workforce remains a microcosm of pay disparities in the broader economy. According to 2011–2013 data from the Economic Policy Institute, people of color make up nearly 40% of the workforce that falls under federal tipped-minimum-wage rules, which includes nail-salon workers and car-wash attendants. The flexibility of restaurant work is in part why more than a million single mothers are on the job. After eight years working at the 24-hour diner, Munce, 32, mostly gets the shifts that she wants–working breakfast and lunch and leaving by 3 p.m. when her daughter gets out of school–so for that, she’s grateful. When her daughter got bullied at school and Munce had to pick her up, Munce was able to get other waitresses to cover for her without getting in trouble for calling off work–though of course this also meant she didn’t get paid. When her daughter was younger and Munce couldn’t find anyone to watch her, she’d bring her daughter to the diner and have her sit quietly in a booth with crayons.

Half a century ago, people like Munce without a college education could expect to make a middle-class wage. But in recent years, as male-dominated manufacturing jobs have been outsourced or automated, women are contributing more to their families’ paychecks, and more of the 40% of Americans with no more than a high school education are being pushed into the service sector–as waitresses, domestic workers, hairdressers and Uber drivers.

Consumer spending on restaurants surpassed spending in grocery stores for the first time in 2015, and to support that, the BLS projects more than 500,000 food-serving job vacancies between 2016 and 2026, a higher number of openings than in all but three occupations it tracks.

“We’re not a sliver of the economy,” says Saru Jayaraman, co-founder of the Restaurant Opportunities Center, an advocacy organization pushing to eliminate the tipped minimum wage. “We’re increasingly the jobs that are available to every new entrant into the economy, including people being laid off from other sectors.”

Karen Baker, 52, one of Munce’s managers at Broad Street Diner, says she once made $90,000 a year as an assistant production manager in a plant that made plastic soda bottles. When the plant moved to Iowa, she didn’t want to uproot her family so she returned to the service industry. “That’s one good thing–if you can’t find a job anywhere else, you can always find a job waitressing,” she says.

This is true of many service jobs, says David Autor, an economist at MIT who studies the future of work. But as job seekers are flooding into those fields, they’re being met with low pay, few benefits and no raises as they age and gain more expertise. In 1980, 43% of workers without a college education were in middle-skill jobs; by 2016, that number had dropped to 29%, Autor says.

Sasha Arutyunova for TIMETwo-thirds of tipped workers in America are women, and female waitstaff make less than men do.

A raise for tipped workers, then, could mean a raise for middle-class families across the country, says Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute who worked in the Department of Labor under President Obama. In the seven states where servers are paid the regular minimum wage for those states before tips, including Minnesota and Oregon, the poverty rate for waitstaff and bartenders is 11.1%, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Where there’s a separate tipped wage, the poverty rate among waitstaff is 18.5%.

Under Pennsylvania’s $2.83-an-hour tipped minimum wage, Baker’s colleague Debbie Aladean, 74, says she can’t retire because she has so little Social Security. Olivia Austin, a 30-year-old waitress in rural Pennsylvania, started driving across the border to a restaurant in New York, where there was a higher minimum wage, because she couldn’t save any money as a waitress in Pennsylvania. “Most of the people I worked with could barely pay their rent,” she says.

Of course, some do quite well in the restaurant industry–especially white men, who are more frequently employed by fine-dining establishments. According to the National Restaurant Association (NRA), a lobbying group that represents more than 500,000 restaurant businesses, the median hourly earnings of servers, including tips, actually ranges from $19 to $25 an hour. Asking owners to do away with tipping and pay workers a $15-an-hour set wage puts too much burden on business owners and could sink one of the economy’s strongest-growing sectors, they say.

“We need a commonsense approach to the minimum wage that reflects the economic realities of each region, because $15 in New York is not $15 in Alabama,” says Sean Kennedy, the executive vice president of public affairs for the NRA.

The owner of Broad Street Diner, Michael Petrogiannis, is supportive of raising wages. “If [the minimum wage] goes to $15 an hour, then we’ll go to $15 an hour, no problem. I support that,” he says. He leaves reporting tips up to the waitstaff, and his employees have not complained about being shorted. “We want them to make whatever they have to make.”

Sasha Arutyunova for TIMEBecause their pay is so unpredictable, the women at Broad Street Diner sometimes have to pull double or triple shifts when they’re short on cash.

The strength of the service sector offers a sort of tenuous job security for waitresses, but it comes with few protections. Sexual harassment is rampant. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission receives more complaints of sexual harassment from the restaurant industry–more than 10,000 from 1995 to 2016–than from any other industry. Many waitresses have come to expect it. On a shift in July, Munce chirped back at offhanded sexual comments as readily as she dished out nicknames to regulars. When a man called her “thick and delicious” on his way out the door, she replied, “I think you mean tiny and tasty,” without skipping a beat.

After 12 years of waitressing, Munce’s somewhat hardened to the disrespect, but for her, the fickleness of the work is a bigger problem when it affects her family’s well-being. Her daily income depends on whether people decide to brave the heat or snow to dine out the day she’s working. It depends on whether customers order the $5.29 breakfast special or the $16.99 New York sirloin strip with two eggs, and whether they leave 20% of their bill. It depends on how many other waitresses are working that day, all hungry for tables.

This lack of certainty is stressful for waitresses, but as more workers face this reality, it has implications for the broader American economy, which relies on consumer spending to drive growth. Munce has saved about $1,000 by putting aside every $5 bill she earns in tips, but she can’t seem to ever get ahead. During a recent shift, she was staring down a weekend where she’d need cash for a cake for her daughter’s 11th-birthday party, $650 for a new evaporator for her car and quarters for the laundry. She feels the weight of taking a day without tips, wondering whether she’ll have enough to pay for back-to-school season, or the money that finally allowed her to get an air conditioner for her apartment. “My mind is always calculating,” she says of each tip, good or bad. Though the women at the diner will chip in and pay for one another’s expenses in case of emergency–a car accident, a babysitter or even funeral costs–slow shifts mean they’ll have to lean more on the one free meal they get at work, or make another trip to the food bank, or dip into whatever cash they have stored away from a better week.

Because their pay is so unpredictable, the women at Broad Street Diner sometimes have to pull double or triple shifts when they’re short on cash. The day before Munce drove Klum home, Klum had worked her regular day shift, taken her 5-year-old daughter to a public splash park, and then gotten a call from her manager at 11 p.m. to come in for a night shift three hours later. Klum paid for a Lyft to the diner, since public transportation doesn’t run to her apartment after midnight, then worked a double shift, from 2 a.m. to 3 p.m. “The diner’s been slow, so I really needed it,” Klum says. But as bad as the money can be, it’s helpful to be able to go home with cash in hand. She still holds out for the chance of one big payday, obsessing over YouTube videos where women are left a $12,000 tip. But when Munce suggests that they would be better off getting a fair hourly wage rather than depending on tips, Klum balks. “I would never do this without tips,” she says.

Sasha Arutyunova for TIMEMunce works eight-hour shifts at Broad Street Diner for $2.83 an hour; her tips are supposed to get her to $7.25 an hour, but they often don’t.

Restaurant owners say that the problem isn’t low wages, or even low tips–it’s that the federal government should enforce its requirement that waitresses make at least the minimum wage after tips. But the sheer number of restaurants in America–an estimated 650,000 and growing–makes that difficult.

“We could have spent all of our time on tipped-minimum-wage enforcement because the violations are so pervasive,” says David Weil, who was the head of the Wage and Hour Division in the Department of Labor under President Obama. Weil’s division did 5,000 investigations into the restaurant sector in his time in the department, but “we were just scratching the surface,” he says.

The Trump Administration last year revoked an Obama-era rule that would have increased enforcement on restaurants that make tipped employees spend more than 20% of their time on non-tipped work.

The federal government does help low-wage workers like waitresses in other ways–with food stamps, subsidized housing and health care. Some cities have raised their own tipped minimum wages; others have opened wage-and-hour enforcement offices, but investigations on behalf of tipped workers often remain a low priority. In Philadelphia, a branch of the Mayor’s Office of Labor looks into complaints of wage theft. But the city’s messaging suggests it devotes more staff and resources to its long-standing offices guaranteeing fair pay for construction and government workers; its department that enforces wage-theft complaints was formed in 2015 and has only four employees. The chief of staff of the Mayor’s Office of Labor, Manny Citron, who is responsible for enforcement, says that although he was “not a pro on what our labor law says,” he believed that people who didn’t earn $7.25 an hour with tips “could just be a bad waiter,” and he falsely asserted that state law guarantees only $2.83 an hour. Without any documentation showing that cash tips didn’t bring waitresses to the minimum wage, he says, it’s hard for his office to take any action.

In July, the House passed the Raise the Wage Act, which would phase out the tipped minimum wage nationwide by 2027, eventually bringing all low-wage workers to $15 an hour. “Every member of this institution should be fighting to put more money in the pockets of workers in their communities,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on the House floor when the bill was passed. In 2019 alone, at least 12 states as politically varied as Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Indiana introduced legislation to end the tipped minimum wage.

But the Raise the Wage Act has little chance of advancing in the GOP-controlled Senate. It has vocal opponents in the NRA and the Restaurant Workers of America (RWA), a group of servers who want to keep tipping. “It’s a system that works,” says Joshua Chaisson, a Maine waiter who is a co-founder of the RWA.

Restaurant owners say they aren’t the ones who should pay the price of America’s shift to a service economy. “Today, the middle class has been gutted, but [lawmakers] are trying to legislate entry-level low-skilled jobs into living-wage jobs where you can raise a family in New York, one of the most expensive places in the world,” says Andrew Riggie, executive director of the New York City Hospitality Alliance, which represents hotels and restaurants. “We can’t address all societal ills on the shoulders of small-business owners.”

Sasha Arutyunova for TIMEMunce cuddles with her daughter in their apartment in southwest Philadelphia.

In the long, final days of summer, business at Broad Street Diner has been slow. Munce tries to stay positive. The customers and staff of Broad Street Diner are her family, more or less, and not just because her sister, Jeanne, is also a waitress there. Munce speaks fondly of one of her regulars, Bill, an elderly man who likes his toast dark as a hockey puck. “They’ve got the best girls in here, and I’ll tell ya, not one grouch,” Bill says to no audience in particular one day this summer.

For Munce, it all adds up: the freebies, the walkouts, the cops receiving a 50% discount, the mess-ups from the kitchen–each one a knock to her take-home pay. “I am a people person. But at the end of the day, your compliments and smiles are not enough,” she says during one of her shifts, a sheen of sweat on her forehead.

She hopes she can give her daughter a better life than she had growing up. Her dad served in Vietnam and her mom always scraped by on odd jobs, she says, but it’s harder to string together a living these days. She lives a couple of miles from where she grew up. Is she really doing better than they did? She tells her daughter that education is the most important thing, that she needs to get good grades, no matter what. “I say, ‘I just want you to be better than me,'” she says. Not that she’d steer her daughter away from waitressing, necessarily. If you’re a people person, Munce says, it can be fun to talk to strangers all day. Depending on them for tips, though, is something else.

This appears in the September 02, 2019 issue of TIME. via https://cutslicedanddiced.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/how-to-prevent-food-from-going-to-waste

#Time #top stories #IFTTT #news

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visa-online-services-blog · 6 years ago

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HOW CAN CANADIAN CITIZENS APPLY FOR INDIA VISA?

How can Canadian citizens apply for India Visa?

Two Ways for Canadian citizens to Get An Indian Visa Here are details the process of obtaining your India eVisa online for Canadians, there are 2 ways - the easy way or the hard way in which you can apply for an eVisa

1. EVisa (Online Visa)

Step 1: Visit https://www.indianvisagov.in/apply-visa and fill the “Information For Visa” form.

- Provide your flight information including the airport of arrival, the date of arrival, and your personal information such as your full name, the passport number, date of birth and nationality. - Your personal information supplied and the information on your passport must match together.

Step 2: Pay the Service fee and Government fee online by your Credit/Debit Card or Paypal mentioned in Payment Guidelines:

- After finishing the payment, an email will be sent to confirm your eVisa order and documents request to complete the Indian eVisa application. When the process is finished, the visa copy will be sent to you by email.

Step 3: Print out Indian eVisa. After that, please present your eVisa for checking at the airports in India. It takes you only 5-10 minutes to get the stamp on your passport by India Immigration Officers at the airports.

The Indian eVisa will make you confident to travel to India, your trip will be more convenient and money-saving because entire application process will be taken care by the specialized group of the consultancy experts who can help international tourists not just in Canada apply for their visas online.

2. Visit consulate general of India in Canada

Step 1: Apply for the Indian Visa through Online application link, in order to make an application for getting the Indian visa.

Step 2: After filling the Visa Form, please take a print out, sign and submit the same, along with required documents, to the nearest center of the outsourcing agent, BLS International.

Notice: Please consult them about the total cost and the exact procedure for remitting the fee. In case the application is sent by mail, the same should be forwarded to the Vancouver Center of BLS International. There is a lot of important information that visa seekers need to take a careful look before applying for an Indian visa.

How long does it take to get an India eVisa for Canadian citizens?

Normally, the government suggests that you should apply for an Indian eVisa at least 8 days prior to travel (Friday and weekends not included). But with the reliable online services for the global customer, 4 days is the maximum for an eVisa to be granted. You can even get an Indian eVisa withing 1 business day if you are in a rush.

Will the fees be refunded if the Canadian citizens cancel their Indian Visa application form?

The visa fee is non-refundable so the Government will NOT refund the fee if you cancel your visa.

However, if you choose indianvisagov.com services, you will have a chance to get back your money by our flexible refund policy for denied case and cancellation.

Read more: INDIA VISA FOR CANADIAN CITIZENS

#india visa #canadian #canadian citizens #indian evisa #requirement #visa #canada

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myallywynn · 4 years ago

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MSC accelerates adoption of electronic Bill of lading (eBL) in India with WAVE

The Electronic version of the most powerful document in shipping – the Bill of Lading has been making news for quite a while..

I wrote earlier that 2020 will be remembered as the year that saw the beginning of the end for the paper “Bill of Lading” and the year in which the switch to “Electronic Bill of Lading” (eBL) began in earnest..

Carriers are pushing more and more for the adoption of the eBL in various regions of the world with the aim to improve documentation flow and avoid costly delays to customers..

MSC has just released a statement confirming that they will be accelerating the adoption of their eBL with the WAVE platform in India..

MSC’s electronic bill of lading (e-BL) solution, offered via the WAVE platform, enables its customers to continue shipping goods despite COVID-19 quarantine and lockdown measures, by providing a reliable, and secure digital platform for the fast transfer of trade-related documents.

MSC Mediterranean Shipping Company and third-party blockchain platform WAVE have been partnering since 2019 to promote and introduce the Electronic Bill of Lading (e-BL) with selected shippers in India.

As part of its response to COVID-19 to ensure business continuity, the company is now accelerating efforts for a wide adoption of the digital solution throughout the country.

Traditionally the shipping industry has heavily relied on physical documentation, stamps and signatures. The bill of lading is one of the most important documents in international trade, present from origin to destination and critical to ownership of cargo, customs clearance and financing.

In the pre-COVID, paper-based process, it would take days for the BL to travel from origin to destination, physically changing hands several times along the way.

However, once lockdown and social distancing measures were put in place, the existing manual processes and physical method were disrupted or even no longer feasible in some countries.

“We have had situations where couriers were unable to deliver documents between ports, trade offices and banks due to quarantine measures,” relates Capt. Deepak Tewari, Managing Director at MSC India.

Digital e-BL helps keep containers moving amidst COVID-19

With the flow of a significant number of shipping containers being impacted by the pandemic, MSC has started to offer the WAVE e-BL solution to streamline affected operations and ensure continuity of service.

“We have been working with WAVE on introducing and piloting an e-BL solution since 2019. We ran successful pilot projects with some of our customers last year, where we saw first-hand the benefits which arise from digitalising this part of the process. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we decided to accelerate our roll-out and offer the e-BL solution to our broader base of customers.” explains Capt. Deepak Tewari

“WAVE mirrors the paper-based process that the shipping and cargo transportation industry is used to, only without physical couriers,” explains Managing Director.

“Thus, it’s an ideal solution to implement at a time when our customers need to rapidly adjust their processes, as the learning curve is quite low.” he adds.

Gadi Ruschin, CEO at WAVE, comments: “Our mission since founding WAVE has been to transform the efficiency and security of international trade documentation through our robust digitisation protocol.

We now see ourselves as ‘mission critical’ to ensuring trade can continue as physical movement of people and the paper they carry has been shuttered across the world. It couldn’t come at a more critical time as countries rely on trade to fight COVID-19 and save their economies.

We launched this unique onboarding effort to help MSC swiftly onboard stakeholders and navigate the challenges while preparing the carrier to flourish once conditions normalise.”

With MSC’s e-BL solution, BL transit time can be reduced from days to minutes, without the need for physical contact.

The eBL is sent using WAVE’s blockchain-based system, which uses distributed ledger technology to ensure that all parties can issue, transfer, endorse and manage trade-related documents through a secure, decentralised network.

The protocol is approved by the International Group of Protection & Indemnity Clubs and meets the highest industry standards for security and privacy.

The application is available free of charge for on-premises installation for shippers, importers and traders. Users only pay for issuing the original documents, and they do not need to invest in any IT infrastructure or make operational changes in order to use the service.

They can simply sign up via the WAVE section on MSC’s website: www.msc.com/wave.

For more information on WAVE, visit: https://wavebl.com/

The post MSC accelerates adoption of electronic Bill of lading (eBL) in India with WAVE appeared first on Shipping and Freight Resource.

from Moving https://www.shippingandfreightresource.com/msc-accelerates-adoption-of-electronic-bill-of-lading-ebl-in-india-with-wave/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

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hudsonespie · 5 years ago

Text

Standardization is Key to Boosting Economies of Scale

The networked economy of container shipping relies on collaboration.

In serving the multitude of clients bringing goods from their point of origin to their point of destination, the supply chain industry may be conceived as a network of actors having different capabilities to fulfill the needs of the customer. In such a business network, business actors would be of different sizes and undertake different roles, where some of them are in direct interaction with the client while others may be serving the needs of the client’s client. In many industries this has brought companies to focus on core capabilities and pursue business in the so-called networked economy. Each participating actor then has a role as part of such a value creating system.

The supply chain ecosystem is quite complex, involving multiple actors that are continuously trying to enhance their processes, optimize their costs, and enter strategic alliances and collaboration with other partners to better serve their customers. In pursuing business in a networked society efficiently, participating actors must have agreed ways of communicating, to share information on both the key physical parameters, such as the identity and location of containers, and on other important organizational information, such as bills of lading, and timing of operations and movements.

As is becoming clear in container shipping, the collaboration between shipping lines is now evolving from operational collaboration focused on rationalizing resources and offering more global coverage, to strategic collaboration focused on IoT (Internet of Things) communications and smart everything data exchange. The container segment of shipping has a profound proven history of collaboration in which they various actors and elements back up each other. Some examples of such collaborative endeavors are:

• Different shipping line alliances, such as 2M and Ocean Alliance signing cooperative agreements including vessel sharing on major global routes. This can be seen as similar to the aviation sector where different airlines form strategic alliances (such as Star Alliance, OneWorld, and SkyTeam).

• Several shipping lines, namely CMA CGM, MSC, and Maersk, have together invested in a French start-up called TRAXENS to deploy smart containers across their fleets.

• The top shipping lines have helped establish a non-profit consortium called Digital Container Shipping Association (DCSA) to develop technology standards to transform inefficient practices and accelerate digitalization through a unified industry effort.

• The TradeLens platform, coming out of the collaboration between Maersk and IBM followed by CMA CGM, MSC, Hapag Lloyd, and ONE becoming engaged as well, is offering opportunities to standardize all the events related to goods movements track-and-trace across different means of transport, stakeholders including cross-border agencies.

Collaboration is a key factor in enhancing the services and increasing the customers’ satisfaction, achieving cost effectiveness and meeting sustainability goals. The purpose of this article is to elaborate on some of the possible collaboration opportunities seen in the light of what comes out of digitalization empowering the network economy of container shipping. What may be seen now is that this collaboration is not just happening between different complementary service providers, downstream to the customer; the collaboration is now expanding horizontally between competitors facing the same technical and regulatory challenges.

Historical trends in capability building among shipping lines

Historically, the shipping lines were more focused on their vessels’ capacity, building bigger ships and trying to optimize their stowage plans and routes. The success of their alliances depends on the degree of compatibility of their service networks. Historically, shipping lines have also secured port capabilities by establishing such things as own terminal operator’s companies and having their own tugboats operating within the port.

However, bigger ships have not generated significant economies of scale and have yielded only marginal cost benefits for the shipping lines while creating significant costs elsewhere such as the need for dredging deeper draft berths, and wider access roads to the dockside to cater for increased cargo volumes per ship. Hence, the race to build bigger ships has slowed or perhaps even stopped, and shipping lines need are now looking elsewhere to optimize costs.

The ongoing efforts in utilizing digitalization for supply chain integration have also put port developments in focus. Trade patterns as well as short first and last mile distribution carried out by not utilizing sea transports points to the need to empower a large network of smaller ports to serve the needs of overall sustainability along the supply chain. At the same time, port’s does though need to become smarter and concerns have been raised over some ports pushing too hard at establishing themselves as the gateway to larger regions.

Digital solutions easing the burden in collaboration

As an example of historical collaboration among shipping lines, when one carrier has had more bookings than it has capacity, competitor carriers that still have capacity have been approached, so as to still satisfy the needs of the original client rather than refusing a booking outright. This buyer-seller collaboration ensures that the customer is served, and the cooperating competitors both receive revenue by maintaining or even increasing respectively their shipment volumes and capacity utilization.

All the document flow associated with such collaboration has been considered as the inevitable consequence of enabling the different collaborative arrangements. The traditional flow of exchanged documents includes specifications, production schedules, and forecasts such as booking requests, booking confirmation, shipping instruction (BL instruction) and shipment status and tracking via various electronic data interchange (EDI) messages.

Nowadays, taking full advantage of digital technologies is clearly a high priority for shipping lines that wish to benefit from smart assets and big data to transform their processes and gain in efficiency and security. Leading shipping companies are investing heavily in smart assets (smart containers, smart vessels, API gateways, being part of smart ports development efforts, and smart everything) to digitalise their fleet, operations and administration. In this effort, the ecosystem actors are collaborating to define enabling technologies, including specifications and requirements for Internet of things (IoT) communication and data exchange interfaces definitions, and competing in value-added services definitions.

Some of these efforts and expected outcomes are elaborated below.

Uses cases coming out of different standardizations

Smart containers

Smart containers are traditional containers – reefers, dry or tank containers – with added electronics. The added electronics enable the tracking and monitoring of a container during its journey and the conditions under which its contents have been transported. The smart container solution can be configured to send real-time data regarding location, door opening and closing events, shocks and vibrations, temperature or other relevant physical parameters.

Smart container data offering door-to-door visibility of the trip execution is conceived as foundational for end-to-end supply chain excellence. Smart container data enable the creation of value adding services such as Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA) calculation, optimizing the container flow as part of fleet management services, container utilization management, monitoring of the condition of the container, CO2 emission calculations for the journey, as well as predictive maintenance.

The UN/CEFACT Smart Container Project has delivered formal global Smart Container Business Requirements Specifications Standards and a standard Smart Container Data Model based on the UN/CEFACT Core Component Library. The next steps in standardization efforts will be focused on completing a standard describing the data governance rules with respect of the competitive advantages of all the actors, as well as defining a catalog of standard Smart Containers APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to communicate all the standard smart container data elements.

In addition to defining standards for data exchange protocols, the collaborative efforts should result in defining the requirements specifications of IoT communication protocols. In fact, one of the biggest cost factors of smart containers is power consumption that is mainly consumed to establish power-hungry cellular communications while roaming. In addition, establishing connections almost everywhere is very challenging due to the highly metallic and harsh environment in which containers are deployed and frequently shielded from mobile communications signals. The leading shipping lines must define the technology to be deployed in smart ports and on smart vessels to ensure extended reach for smart containers with no line-of-sight to enable coherent and sustainable massive deployment of smart containers.

Time stamp data sharing for port call optimization

During the recent years, a lot of focus has been on using digitalization for supporting the coordinating and synchronization of port operations with what happens at sea and in hinterland transport operations. For this purpose, the unbiased, non-proprietary, open, and international concept of Port Collaborative Decision Making (PortCDM) coming out of the European MONALISA project and Sea Traffic Management (STM) efforts, has been brought forward providing both operational and technical guidelines for regional and local implementations.

This effort of international standardization is a way for episodic visiting actors, such as the ships from shipping lines, to be able to share relevant advance information and progress in the same way with all ports to which they make port visits to. By having a standardized way of communicating and with agreed procedures for collaboration, this also enables shipping lines, for example, to e.g. exchange time slots given a delay of one ship with another one that is being closer to arriving.

One of the next steps is defining the use cases and the standards interfaces between the data collected from the seaside and the hinterland side supporting the optimization of the port as a transhipment hub, and by that also taking advantage of the smart container data and services.

DCSA Track and Trace Standards

The focus of the DCSA is to simplify shipment visibility across multiple carriers, enabling them to better plan and optimize their shipment handing activities. DCSA Track and Trace Standards describe the underlying set of processes along with the data and interface standards needed to communicate the fundamental track-and-trace information across multiple carriers. Next steps could be reviewing and redesigning these processes taking advantages of emerging relevant standards and new data availability, namely the smart container services and data on berth arrival, departure planning and port operations. This consistent approach, endorsed and supported by the shipping lines, is already implemented in their ongoing digital projects.

Combinations of the different initiatives

The DCSA shipping industry is currently working on providing requirements specifications for the IoT communication technologies of the smart container to ensure a better coverage for the smart container. While the smart container standard has enriched the UN/CEFACT data model with smart container and geofencing data, the DCSA track and trace standard is also aligned with the former data model thereby taking advantage and preserving existing investments.

DCSA has also started an initiative to achieve significant pollution emission reductions through advanced berth arrival and departure planning, at scale building upon standardized principles of collaboration and standardized data sharing.

Standardization – a key to enable business benefits coming out of collaboration

With the ramp-up of new and emerging technologies, standards and horizontal collaboration between competitors are now more necessary than ever. A standard is an agreement among a business network constituted by actors that share the same common object of interest.

Adoption of global multimodal standards is a win-win situation, since these standards guarantee interoperability. Standards enable stakeholders in the logistics chain to reap the maximum benefits from smart container solutions, while enabling them to share data and associated costs. Standards-based solutions increase the ability to collaborate, which in turn increases efficiency. Additionally, data exchange standards reduce development and deployment costs and cut time to market for IoT solution providers. This is also valid for final customers as they will be able to get the maximum value of their data regardless the shipping lines they booked with.

Examples of contemporary standardization initiatives are the Smart Container standardization efforts, port call messaging for the integration of what happens at sea and in ports, and track-and-trace standardizations supporting global trade. For this purpose, there are several organizations that enable collaboration among different actors, such as the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) using the Smart Container Business Requirements Specification (BRS) to ensure that the various ecosystem actors share a common understanding of smart container benefits, the IMO/FAL (International Maritime Organization Facilitation Committee) developing the IMO Reference Data model to facilitate alignment of definitions that come from different standardization bodies, as well as efforts pursued by e.g. the International PortCDM Council (IPCDMC), the International Task Force Port Call Optimization (ITPCO), and the H2020 funded DataPorts project focused upon event definitions, messaging standards, operational processes, and data sharing environments (including the definition of a service market place).

The latter efforts build upon the facts that shipping lines are collaborating with actors together with operating within the port. The standardized definition of the data elements that different devices and operations can generate accelerates integration and the use of data from many sources on different platforms for the enhancement of operations. In addition, utilizing different types of data, such as data from smart container data, port call operations, timing of ship movements, and track and trace enables open communications channels between supply chain actors.

Shipping lines will be limited in their ability to provide their customers with business intelligence coming out of the solutions above for their customers in the absence of a global standards. Standards data models and standard APIs will help stakeholders to make the necessary transformation to achieve supply chain excellence. Indeed, APIs are key to ensuring simplification and acceleration of the integration of digital services from various sources. Data sharing is particularly important in the logistics supply chain due to the large numbers of diverse players and because container movements are global.

Easy access to information for all the relevant stakeholders enables situational awareness (e.g. in other words; the status, progress, and outcome of a particular process) and empowers data-driven risk analysis and decision-making.

Conclusion

As pointed out by the European Commission, the many zettabytes of data that are channelled from the source to use in diverse business cases is going to expand exponentially towards more increasingly becoming generated by connected IoT devices. This also means that it will be increasingly possible to derive business intelligence from the combination of multiple sources for the better good for the industry. In doing so, it is important to distinguish between the sharing of business critical rather than business sensitive data, so as to promote the actors’ willingness to share data.

Digital data standards are now being introduced to encourage the generation of data streams and to facilitate their combination, especially in the logistics chain, as concrete examples of where collaboration is enabling this development. The use of a standard for sharing data on the timing of port call events allowing for estimations on the cargo flow and a foundation for the exchange of time slot allocations between shipping lines.

It is important to note that the communication technologies are on the agenda as current challenges for the shipping lines. Like telecoms companies, shipping lines must collaborate to define communication technologies - communication is a commonality that transcends beyond competition enabling the necessary adoption of smartness in the networked economy of container shipping.

Other areas to consider, but not discussed in this article are aspects associated with cyber security, a common approach to the identification of consignments, the handling of empty containers positioned in different parts of the world, solutions associated with the digitalisation of bill of lading, aligning common processes used in container shipping, and IoT standards for container shipping.

Collaborating between shipping lines is a win-win strategy for reducing transportation costs, empty miles and environmental impact provided that logistics are willing to take advantages of the emergence of big data and increasingly interconnected communicating objects (IoT). Improving the technological aspects is clearly a high priority to getting ahead at this pivotal time of changing regulations and growing demand for business and at the end of the day provide a better service to the end customer. As in many other industries some areas are fully okay to collaborate while others might be more sensitive. The establishment of the DCSA is the proof that the leading shipping lines have come to an agreement to reinforce the utilization of standards in the container industry.

About the authors

Hanane Becha is actively driving smart assets standardisation for key industries such as maritime and rail freight. She is currently the Innovation and Standards Senior Manager at TRAXENS and she is also the Leader of the UN/CEFACT Smart Container Project as well as the UN/CEFACT Cross Industry Supply Chain Track and Trace Project. Hanane has received a Ph.D. and an M.Sc. in Computer Sciences from the University of Ottawa and a B.Sc. from l’Université du Québec.

Mikael Lind is Associate Professor and Senior strategic research advisor at RISE, has initiated and headed several open innovation initiatives related to ICT for sustainable transport of people and goods. Lind is also the co-founder of Maritime Informatics, has a part-time employment at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, and serves as an expert for World Economic Forum, Europe’s Digital Transport Logistic Forum (DTLF), and UN/CEFACT.

Andre Simha is the Chief Digital & Information Officer at MSC Mediterranean Shipping Company, the second largest container carrier in the world, whose team is responsible for implementing and developing the complex data flow between the company’s headquarters and its agencies around the globe, as well as steering the business towards the digital future of the shipping and logistics sector. Simha is also the chairman of the Digital Container Shipping Association (DCSA).

Francois Bottin is the Head of the Digital Factory, a global organisation having the responsibility of leading the digital transformation of CMA CGM Group and digital projects delivery. CMA CGM is a French container transportation and shipping company headquartered in Marseilles, leading worldwide shipping group, using 200 shipping routes between 420 ports in 160 different countries.

Steen Erik Larsen is the head of Technology M&A in A.P. Moller – Maersk, the global integrator of container logistics, connecting and simplifying the supply chains. Larsen has the responsibility of the enterprise risk management aspects pertaining to information technology in integration and partnering, and is also representing Maersk in the Digital Container Shipping Association (DCSA).

from Storage Containers https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/standardization-is-key-to-boosting-economies-of-scale via http://www.rssmix.com/

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melindarowens · 7 years ago

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U.S Data Continues To Disappoint!

Good day… And a Tom Terrific Tuesday to you! Boy, am I about to throw the towel in on my beloved Cardinals’ season! They can’t hit, can’t catch, can’t throw, can’t run, and when it gets to the 7th inning they can’t pitch! Maybe the GM will stir things up with a major trade, like he did in 2013, that propelled the team to the World Series… And maybe he’ll sit on his hands like he did last year, not wanting to admit that “his team” needed help… Oh well, as my wife tells me all the time, “it’s just a game”… Derek and the Dominoes greet me this morning with their Rock Classic song: Layla… Eric Clapton was the lead force of this band, and this song is his ballad, telling of the unrequited love for Pattie Boyd, the wife of his friend, George Harrison…

OK, not wanting to turn this letter into another Peyton Place, I’ll get on with what you came here for… Well, the currencies didn’t really move much yesterday, and Gold only ended up with an 80-cent gain on the day… And today’s movements aren’t much to talk about, except in Japanese yen… Yes, proving that even a dead body bounces, yen is on the rally tracks VS the dollar this morning, having moved through its 200-day moving avg. I’m sitting here trying to figure out what got yen so lathered up last night, and the only thing I see is that this is simply a risk-aversion trade… And could go further, given the things we have going on this week…

And Thursday is the triple-witching day for the markets, as we will see the results of the U.K. election, the European Central Bank (ECB) meets, and here in the U.S. former FBI chief, Comey, will testify… That’s a lot on the markets’ collective plates for one day, and I think we’ll see a lot of this kind of trading between now and then… The dollar has, for now, stabilized, after getting sold like funnel cakes at a State Fair on Friday and through to yesterday morning…

Last night, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), met, and left their rates and neutral bias unchanged, and then held a very balanced meeting with a statement afterward. The Aussie dollar (A$ ) saw some initial positive reaction to the RBA statement, but then the anti-risk sentiment in the markets wiped those gains out…

Across the Tasman, the New Zealand dollar / kiwi, got a boost last night from a report that showed commodity prices improved in May by 3.2%, and that offset the other piece of N.Z. data that wasn’t so good, and that was a building data report that printed negative… In fact, the bad data was ignored for the most part, and kiwi was allowed to gain, even with the A$ not faring so well. This doesn’t happen very often, so make note of the fact that kiwi gained while the A$ didn’t…

The Indian rupee has been quiet as a church mouse lately, not wanting to ruffle the feathers of the analysts that went all Chicken Little because the rupee was rallying… The move in the rupee this time has been quite stealth-like, and will most likely be supported when the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) meets tomorrow, and leaves rates unchanged. At least that’s what I’m thinking will happen at the RBI meeting tomorrow, I could be wrong about that… The rupee is our current “Currency of the Month” and it would be nice to see the rupee continue this stealth-like move, to put the stamp of approval on its current title of “Currency of the Month”…

In China tonight, the latest report on their reserves will print… Their reserves have really been the focus of a lot of analysts, who predict gloom and doom on China, because their reserves have fallen from $ 4 Trillion to $ 3 Trillion… I look at it differently… You build up reserves to use when things get tight, and things were very tight in China, and the outflow of funds were really beginning to become a real problem because it put a lot of negative pressure on the currency. So, the Chinese used their reserves to defend their currency’s value… And it now appears that the outflows problem has subsided, and the reserves are being added to again… So, look for a gain in the reserves, and that would be good thing for the global growth sentiment…

I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but the Chinese renminbi has really been on a run in recent weeks… What the heck has gotten into the Chinese and the Peoples Bank of China (PBOC)? Last month the renminbi was closing in on 6.90, and now it’s closing in on a sub 6.80 figure… (renminbi is a European priced currency so as the number goes down the greater the value is returned in dollars, as it takes less of the currency to sell to equal a dollar)

I think China saw an opportunity to attract investment into China, as the dollar was weakening, and looking like it could be near the end of the strong dollar trend, and that gave the Chinese the opportunity to allow the renminbi to appreciate… Just my thoughts on that… I know nothing more than the next guy about what’s going on in the PBOC’s head…

And the Singapore dollar (sing) or (S$ ) has really been moving in the right direction for the last couple of months. Their economy has seen waves of good and then waves of bad data, so it’s been quite uneven, but their financial status remains solid, and in today’s investing, that goes a long way toward, currency appreciation. I was reading Ed Steer’s letter this morning (www.edsteergoldandsilver.com ), and he featured a story about how Singapore’s plan to develop itself as a Gold Hub, has proven successful, as its imports and exports almost doubled in the years after the goods and services tax (GST) was removed for investment grade metals in 2012… I love reading stuff like this where success has been generated because someone had the intestinal fortitude to say, “Hey, if we become a Gold Hub, and remove the GST on investment grade metals, we’ll double our imports and exports”…

And we’re one day closer to the U.K. elections, which will take place on our Tub Thumpin’ Thursday… I think in the end PM May’s party will retain their seats, and all the drama that built up around the election will be forgotten… But then the polls have been wrong before, and that’s what I base my thought on, the polls.. But not this time, at least, that’s what I think, and if that’s correct, then the pound should be able to regain some of the lost ground it has seen taken from it, because of the election drama…

So, yesterday, I was going on and on about the jobs data from May, and how the BLS had basically saved the month with their 230,000 jobs added after the surveys… But one thing I forgot to talk about was the downward revisions to the previous two months… This is from the BLS site: The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for March was revised down from +79,000 to +50,000, and the change for April was revised down from +211,000 to +174,000. With these revisions, employment gains in March and April combined were 66,000 less than previously reported. Monthly revisions result from additional reports received from businesses and government agencies since the last published estimates and from the recalculation of seasonal factors. Over the past 3 months, job gains have averaged 121,000 per month.

OK.. so let’s look under the hood so that I can prove something once and for all… In March, the BLS added just 32,000 jobs, but March’s total was just 79,000 (at the time) and the BLS had to go back and revise the number downward by 29,000, Hmmm, isn’t that very close to the jobs they added out of thin air? Why, yes Chuck it is!

And April’s addition was 255,000 jobs out of thin air by the BLS, when the total at that time was 211,000… It was revised downward by 37,000, to 174,000… So, we didn’t quite reverse all the jobs added but those can still be revised downward next month!

But remember in May, when the 211,000 jobs were reported and everyone was doing their happy dance, and the Fed were slapping themselves on the back? This is why I get so upset with these hedonic adjustments! The dollar rallied, on this news, but should it have? NO! And by the time the downward revisions come along, everyone has forgotten that they were doing their happy dance and slapping themselves on the back! The next executive order I would like to see, is that there be no more hedonic adjustments on economic data!

As I said above, Gold only gained 80-cents yesterday, after being up over $ 5 in the early morning trading… Ted Butler, no relation that I know of, the Silver guru, pointed out yesterday that the press release regarding the Deutsche Bank trader that pleaded guilty of spoofing with Gold, Silver, Platinum and Palladium, left out something… And that is that all this illegal trading was going on during the CFTC’s (commodity regulator) 5 year investigation into Silver manipulation… Remember that, I totally recall Bart Chilton, former Commissioner at the CFTC, on TV telling people that the CFTC saw no signs of manipulation… Uh Oh…

The U.S. Data Cupboard yesterday, like I told you yesterday, was full of a bunch of economic data, but the one that I pointed out as the only one I cared about, showed up in the red… Factory Orders for April were negative -0.2%… Since April is the first month of the second quarter, and there were high hopes, yes we’ve got high hopes, we’ve got those high apple pie in the sky hopes, that the 2nd QTR was going to take off to higher ground so that the Fed could point to how proactive they were in hiking rates… And there is still 2 more months of data to round out the 2nd QTR, but quite frankly, I just don’t see the high hopes coming to fruition! And, when it all comes down the pike, the Fed is going to have to reverse their rate hikes because the rate hikes put the economy into a recession! And Factory Orders is a “real economics” piece of data folks… And with it printing negative for April, it sure isn’t getting out of the batter’s box with any speed is it? No, instead, it’s stumbling, fumbling, rumbling its way down the first base line, only to fall flat on its face before it reaches 1st base! (reminds me of my beloved Cardinals base running!)

Today’s Data Cupboard is pretty much empty, and already the markets are writing off tomorrow’s data, as they focus on the triple-witching Thursday.. But I think tomorrow’s data is important, as it will be the April print of Consumer Credit, which should read, Debt… But we all know what it is, and it will be interesting to see if March’s $ 16 Billion number is overcome by April’s or not… Remember, Easter was in April this year… I’m just saying…

To recap… The dollar has stabilized, against the currencies and metals for the most part, except the Japanese yen, which overnight rallied VS the dollar through its 200-day moving avg. Chuck thinks it’s simply an anti-risk trade with the triple-witching day on Thursday, with the U.K. election, an ECB meeting, and the Comey testimony… Gold only gained 80-cents yesterday, and is down a buck or two in the early morning trading today. The Indian rupee and Singapore dollar are both moving stronger in a stealth-like manor, as to not ruffle the feathers of analysts that go all Chicken Little when these two begin to make noise with their rallies. The Chinese renminbi has also been on the move, positively, reversing the trend that was in place for daily weakening fixings last month. Chuck uses the BLS’s own web site to prove how wrong they were to add jobs each month…

For What it’s Worth… I had a choice this morning between an article on why Consumers aren’t spending, or an interview with San Francisco Fed President Williams… And I chose the Consumers article, because I’m just not buying what Williams had to say, and I’m afraid I would get into trouble with that one! So, here’s the link to the article on why Consumers aren’t spending by Gary Shilling ( a well-respected economist/ analyst): http://ow.ly/DDBk30cmate

Or, here’s your snippet: “Consumer confidence and retail sales have not moved in tandem of late. Since the U.S. economic expansion started in mid-2009, a gauge of confidence has risen sharply from a low of 25.3 in December 2008 to 120 in April, and has accelerated recently. After an initial recovery, however, retail sales growth has trended down.

Consumer confidence is ineffective for predicting retail sales. The correlation between the two is weak, and the best fit is between year-over-year retail sales growth in the current month and consumer confidence three months later.”

Chuck again… Gary Shilling makes a list of things he believes are keeping Consumers from Spending, and while I won’t go through all of the reasons I will point out one that I think is a real problem…

“Weak income growth. Inflation-adjusted incomes for most Americans have been declining for more than a decade, with total real wages and incomes holding about flat because of the polarization of incomes that benefits top-end households. Average private-sector weekly earnings, inflation-adjusted, rose just 0.3 percent in April from a year earlier.”

Yeah, that’s one that will continue to bite us.. But there are other reasons, and I think Gary Shilling nails all of them…

Currencies today 6/6/17… American Style: A$ .7486, kiwi .7175, C$ .7434, euro 1.1250, sterling 1.2916, Swiss $ .9641, … European Style: rand 12.7841, krone 8.45, SEK 8.6640, forint 273.31, zloty 3.7278, koruna 23.40, RUB 56.59, yen 109.69, sing 1.3807, HKD 7.7940, INR 64.40, China 6.8068,peso 18.37, BRL 3.2654, Dollar Index 96.74, Oil $ 47.39, 10yr 2.15%, Silver $ 17.60, Platinum $ 959.60, Palladium $ 846.00, Gold $ 1,280.73, and SGE Gold $ 1,285.51

That’s if for today… I’ve taken up working crossword puzzles… As I start out, I need a lot of help from Google, but I’m starting to get the gist of the questions… I figured that I needed to keep my mind sharp, in something other than markets and economies! The moon sure was bright last night… The next full moon will come this Friday, and is called the Strawberry Moon.. I was sitting outside for a bit yesterday, and noticed just how beautiful our roses have come in this spring… They are full of color, and tons of blooms… Some years they disappoint, but not this year! Well, the nearly 3 weeks of Kathy being gone is coming to an end, as she will return home on Thursday, which is an infusion day for me, so I’ll be in a fog.. Welcome home! Note to Jen and Christine… I survived 3 weeks without my wife! (they always razz me that I can’t survive without my wife! ) The Moody Blues takes us to the finish line today with their song: Lost in a Lost World, which is exactly how I feel the day after an infusion! So, it’s time to go… I hope you have a Tom Terrific Tuesday, and Be Good To Yourself!

Chuck Butler Managing Director EverBank Global Markets Creator / Editor of: A Pfennig For Your Thoughts 1-800-926-4922

http://www.everbank.com

The post U.S Data Continues To Disappoint! appeared first on Daily Pfennig.

Daily Pfennig

source http://capitalisthq.com/u-s-data-continues-to-disappoint/ from CapitalistHQ http://capitalisthq.blogspot.com/2017/06/us-data-continues-to-disappoint.html

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everettwilkinson · 7 years ago

Text

U.S Data Continues To Disappoint!

Yeah, that’s one that will continue to bite us.. But there are other reasons, and I think Gary Shilling nails all of them…

Chuck Butler Managing Director EverBank Global Markets Creator / Editor of: A Pfennig For Your Thoughts 1-800-926-4922

http://www.everbank.com

The post U.S Data Continues To Disappoint! appeared first on Daily Pfennig.

Daily Pfennig

from CapitalistHQ.com http://capitalisthq.com/u-s-data-continues-to-disappoint/

#TrumpNews #CapitalistHQ.com

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hudsonespie · 5 years ago

Text

Standardization is Key to Boosting Economies of Scale

The networked economy of container shipping relies on collaboration.

• Several shipping lines, namely CMA CGM, MSC, and Maersk, have together invested in a French start-up called TRAXENS to deploy smart containers across their fleets.

Historical trends in capability building among shipping lines

Digital solutions easing the burden in collaboration

Some of these efforts and expected outcomes are elaborated below.

Uses cases coming out of different standardizations

Smart containers

Time stamp data sharing for port call optimization

DCSA Track and Trace Standards

Combinations of the different initiatives

Standardization – a key to enable business benefits coming out of collaboration

Conclusion

About the authors

from Storage Containers https://maritime-executive.com/article/standardization-is-key-to-boosting-economies-of-scale via http://www.rssmix.com/

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