#sometimes you HAVE to find an intersectional solution that says their safety is as important as mine. and nervous systems can be RETRAINED

[faithfromanewperspective]

you’ve heard ‘respect means treating someone as an authority figure for them to show you the respect of treating you as a human’

now prepare yourself for ‘feeling safe means never encountering anything you’re mildly uncomfortable by as a prerequisite for ensuring other people can go outside without risking being attacked or arrested’

[antoine-roquentin]

First, take a look at the very equivocal position of the Democratic leadership. One little noted detail is important. An amendment inserted in the lame-duck legislation that enshrined the “Swaps Pushout” weakening of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill in January 2015, made it easier for big donors to funnel much larger sums of money to the national party committees. This has, I think, made it even easier for blocs of big donors to control those committees, even as small contributions sometimes surge. Not only in 2018, but in the 2020 primaries, I think this mattered.

As a result, the Democratic National Committee has not been subordinated to the Biden campaign, at least not yet. The surge in the southern Democratic primaries that destroyed the Sanders boom involved many big Democratic donors along with many black congressmen and women, together with the political and financial networks of former president Barack Obama and the Clintons. It was a coming together of the entire Democratic establishment to stop Sanders. Congressional black leaders were thus heavily identified with the “Stop Sanders” movement, too.

But with the combined economic collapse and the pandemic revealing the bankruptcy of the traditional establishment, the whole top of the party has had to scramble. How they have responded is very interesting. Thanks to the dissemination of so many videos, the realization about the racism that black Americans face — and not just by so many police — is very widespread. The revulsion is deep and real.

In response, the Democratic establishment is taking a leaf from the past — not the late ’60s, when groups highly critical of the Democrats became prominent, but the early ’60s. Joel Rogers and I described the process in our book Right Turn. When the civil rights movement emerged, major foundations, prominent business leaders of major multinationals, and foundations allied to them heavily supported that groundswell. John F. Kennedy famously called Martin Luther King in jail, while prominent Wall Street lawyers flew down south or otherwise helped represent civil rights campaigners who were under legal attack. That’s what’s happening right now, with groups closely allied with the Democratic Party helping to raise money. There will be tensions now, as there were then, between the party and the movement, but that’s the basic direction things are taking.                

So how does this play into the election?                                   

I think the basic script each party is following is evident. Democrats are hoping for a repeat of 2008. In that election, policy was hopelessly bungled by the Republican leadership. After Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, nobody in opposition had to say very much. Democrats could just sit and watch John McCain flail helplessly.

Donald Trump, by contrast, is clearly copying the Nixon playbook, though because he’s in power, 1972 is closer to the mark than 1968. His administration’s heavy-handed appeals to “law and order” are obvious, and so are the ways he tries to bait protesters. The “law and order” mantra is looking a bit thin, though, partly because the videos and protests so clearly touch a chord with many members of the public. But it is also apparent that the US military wants no part in quelling domestic protests, so that the best Trump is likely to be able to do is to try to irritate protesters and hope for strong public reactions. Attorney general William Barr is also pitching in, in spectacular fashion.

The other thing the White House is bent on doing is finding a way to levitate the economy. In 1972, Richard Nixon famously relied on Arthur Burns at the Fed to engineer a legendary political business cycle. Today’s Fed certainly reacts to pressures from Trump, but the drastically different world situation severely limits its room for maneuver. It can hardly do more than it has even if it wanted to.

This is why the president and the vice president are trying so desperately to downplay the pandemic. They want to drive people back to work and push up the GDP. Vice president Mike Pence is plainly encouraging state leaders to talk up their successes and downplay bad news, including spiking COVID-19 cases in the South and West. The White House thinks they have to get the economy moving again or Trump will be toast in November.           

How different is this from what the administration was doing earlier?  

It represents a doubling down on policies that Trump and his camp wanted to promote earlier and did for a while. As the pandemic hit, all over the developed world, prominent business figures and conservative economists warned about the dangers of a long lockdown. Some, including an occasional central banker, even talked sotto voce about how such policies would reduce state pension obligations. In the United States, the UK, and other European countries, advocates talked up the idea of “herd immunity.” Trump’s “kitchen cabinet” of business figures, including prominent private equity managers, were repeatedly cited as pushing the president to take a “go slow” attitude on lockdowns.

After the publication of the Imperial College estimates of the death rates such policies would entail, though, enthusiasm waned. The UK changed policy. The switch definitely affected the Trump administration’s attitudes. It helped, along with the ghastly reality of what was happening on the ground, especially on the East and West coasts of the United States, to force the administration to accept lockdowns and sheltering in place. Both in the United States and in the UK, though, pressures from business groups for rapid reopening remained very strong. Conservative groups have even urged reopening without establishing a viable testing regime, which is exactly what the administration has now done.

Clear camps are forming within business, and those look to be seeping into politics. Many small companies whose business models rest on low wages, along with financiers — meaning private equity first and foremost — whose strategies depend on buying and breaking up firms, continue to plump for rapid reopening.

By contrast, many firms in the rest of finance, and especially in high-tech and capital-intensive industries whose strategies do not rest on low wages, are less heedless of the dangers of quick opening. Many tech firms enthusiastically promote their products as solutions to the problems the pandemic creates — as is obvious with many internet and software companies. Robert Rubin called for joint panels of medical professionals and economists to decide when reopening was feasible and for contact tracing; even robotic assistance has been touted.

Where the rubber meets the road, though, is the critical question of worker safety. Trump gutted the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Not only is the number of inspectors way down, but key appointees are plainly uninterested in regulating on the issue at all.

It seems to me that this is a potentially fateful intersection between the movement growing out of Minneapolis and the Democrats. Calls to reopen quickly are basically demands by affluent white-collar managers who can work at home. They want to send blue-collar workers back to work under conditions the senior executives would not accept for themselves. Many of the blue-collar workers are, it is important to add, black or Latino. Though you would never know from reading any major newspaper, wildcat and other strikes have soared since Minneapolis. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of them, as Mike Elk’s Payday Report website is documenting. It seems clear that the protests have inspired many black and Latino workers to demand safe working conditions.

I don’t have much to say for the classic financial bailouts the United States has pursued — they protect the wealth of those that have it, while the government does something, but not much, to protect the livelihood of average citizens. But it would make a great deal of sense to move onto the national balance sheet the costs of redesigning work to make it safe. That would be a really good use of public resources.                              

So how does this play out in the election?                                                   

Right now, COVID-19 cases are soaring in many Southern and Western states, whose Republican governors had followed the White House lead and pretended the pandemic was over or would somehow never reach them. As a result, you can feel a seismic tremor in Trump’s support: the fabled 40 percent or so base level for him that people thought could never be breached is being broken.

But I remember 1988 very well, when Michael Dukakis was almost 20 points ahead of George H. W. Bush in late summer. A lot can happen to change what looks like an all but insurmountable advantage. One needs to remember that Biden looks good mostly next to Trump; the Democratic candidate doesn’t generate much enthusiasm from voters on his own. How the Biden campaign can tap the energy that fueled Sanders, and, to some extent, Warren, is not clear yet. The terms of trade between the camps are still being worked out, and the effort could fail. If Democratic elites are dumb enough to believe the claims so many have made that 2016 had nothing to do with economics, they could repeat that disaster.

I have a hard time believing that people who are out of work and watching how the government is allowing insurers to slip out of covering the costs of COVID tests will be inspired to vote for Biden without something far stronger than a “public option” for health care instead of Medicare for All, for example.

Plenty else can go wrong, too. Let’s just bracket the possibility of some foreign crisis, especially in the South China Sea, since it’s also clear Trump right now is still hoping that a big trade deal with China might come through. Otherwise, there are the old reliables for the GOP: efforts to hold down voter turnout and giant flows of big money.

This year, though, there’s a wrinkle to the first one. Trump’s campaign against the Post Office may have started out as a fight with Amazon, but right now, it’s clearly turned into something else. Empirical evidence from the Wisconsin primary is clear that voting in person led to several waves of new COVID infections.

As a result, interest in mail balloting is way up. Of course, Republicans are mostly opposed to that, though empirical evidence up to now does not suggest that mail ballots have strong partisan advantages one way or the other. But, of course, a broke Post Office won’t be delivering much of anything. My guess is that you’ll see Trump dig in ever more obdurately on this issue as election day approaches.

Which brings us to the money question. Here, I don’t have much to add to what my colleagues Paul Jorgensen, Jie Chen, and I wrote earlier in the year. In 2016, we found that Trump floated to victory on a big wave of late money from large private equity firms, among others. We also conjectured that the perfect correlation for the first time in American history between Republican success in Senate elections and the outcome of the presidential vote in states was not an accident. That turned out to be true. Trump did a bit better in states with Senate races. We’ve now shown how late money turned around those Senate races, when prospects just weeks before the election looked hopeless. That example is instructive. Democratic candidates who lost elections in those final days have told me how they watched the inflow of money turn around what had seemed a favorable situation. Problems with even counting ballots are, I think, likely to make 2020 very tense, no matter what polls say now or even the day before. Whether we live in a pre- or a post-apocalyptic era might be tested.

[ryanssecurityengineering]

Week 8 Notes and Reflection

REFLECTION

This was an interesting week, less focused on any technical things about security Engineering and more concerned with this idea of Errors - especially that you can’t pinpoint an error on one or two people but usually due to a bad system. Systems can be actual “systems” like nuclear power plants, or a system of behaviour in an organisation.

The lecture in the night time was incredibly weird. Richard literally read a book about the Three Mile Island accident. For the exam I will have to research a bit more about the accident - I like watching videos on YouTube, and it helps gain a different perspective. What I learnt was that the accident wasn’t caused by one entity - but by many entities involved - System Failure.

NOTES

Books on Errors

Human Error - James Reason

Normal Accidents - Charles Perror

Just Culture - Sidney Dekker

The Challenger Launch Decision - Diane Vaughan

Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe  - Serhii Plokhy

Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety - Eric Schlosser

When something goes wrong

What is the root cause? Root Cause Analysis. Do this analysis when something goes wrong. The point is that we can improve for the future. Reactive. You can do one more like an engineer.

Humans prefer to have a signal explanation. But in the rare case they say three things:

Human/user/operator error - You sack that person! Blame the person, problem solved. Looking for a hero/villain. 

Every single cyberattack will because of human error. But it won’t be one human.

Story 1 - Aeroplane industry - “the last touch”. Root cause - the engineer who signed off on that last nose cone - the person would be the one at fault and fired. The last person who touched it and is at fault.

Story 2 - The second culprit is culture. We don’t have the right culture we have to change the culture! Culture is nice no need to blame anyone! Pay lots of money for consultants! Doesn’t really tell you how to fix the problem.

The above answers you won’t be able to solve the problem.

Fallback attack - when trying to hack someone, cause them to fall back to a less secure protocol. Only respond with less secure protocols.

Human Weaknesses

Honesty - commander in cheat. Humans not good at telling the truth. Some unis have an honour code - no cheat, no plagiarism. Psychologists what to work out to what extent honour codes alter people’s behaviour. Shredding exam paper - people got higher average score in test when the exam paper was shredded! Dishonest! Before you do it you would have to sign an honour code, saying you won’t cheat on the test. Different result when you sign at beginning vs end. Prinston you are shoved with the honour code. Stanford no honour code. Made no difference! 

Misdirection and limited focus - Our attention is like a torch. Imagine it completely dark - you use the torch and focus on a few things. Some areas you never shine the light on - pay attention to only one or two of those factors. We don’t always pick the best factors to follow. Humans subject to misdirection - focus on something else rather than what you are supposed to focus on. Humans should focus on what’s logically important, but tend to focus on what it is psychologically salient. E.g. magician. Magicians make u make sure you can’t tell whats important to focus on. Sleight of hand and misdirection. Planned and executed in plain sight. If the situation is complex need to turn all the lights on. How do you deal with contradicting data? - Confirmation bias. Ignore stuff we don’t like that - confirm theory we are currently theory. The more often you do something, it will become routine.  His obsession: "those factors which lead to and sustain wishful thinking rather than wise thinking"

satisficing and bounded rationality - Good enough is good enough, let’s move on. 

People prefer positive statements

overriding tendency to verify generalizations rather than falsify them

Group-think syndrome - When you are in a group and the way you act in the group. What is value is group membership. Even if things are going off the rail they don’t want to be the annoying person no one likes.

developmental phases - goed and breaked 2

procedural

meta-procedural

conceptual

The system should be designed so if a human error occurs. it is not catastrophic. 

Heuristics

Similarity matching - Have in your head schemes or situations from the past and try to match it. “Muscle memory”. This is how social engineers exploit you. The Brain is optimised to not think. 

Frequency gambling - When you got a match - I’m going to recall the pattern and pick the pattern. When you pick the pattern how to pick the best matching one? Most likely pick the pattern that worked most often. Frequency gambling - picked the pattern from the past that worked the most. We are just trying to delegate to a pattern very quickly. 

How is an accident different to an attack? - The intent - someone trying to make it go wrong. With an accident our adversary is Murphy. In an attack, you have someone who is adaptive and clever. The bad guy will make the cheese holes line up. Lego trains - interface trains through a serial port. At every Y intersection (switch) you could control it. The real problem was making sure the trains never collide - not the optimal solution. People distracted by the interesting things. Richard attacked them - he made Satin’s simulator. If you engage in an unsafe strategy, you’ve done the bad thing. This is how security is different to accidents. 

SYSTEMS

50 trivial problems - old man driving, bus strike etc, full car park, all sounds lame! Primary cause of failing to get to job interview? Human error, mechanical failure, environment, system design, procedures you used. The best answer is all of them? None of the above - none of them caused the accident. it was a systemic accident. 

Recognise that sometimes when things happen it is not due to the last person. It is about the system.

If you design a well designed system - resilient in accidents and attacks. If highly coupled and incoherent then that is pretty bad. Redundancy - Defence in Depth. However sometimes some failures cause other failures. COMMON MODE failure. 

Cassandra and Apollo and hindsight and Chekhov and simplification - Wooed her about something. Cassandra Syndrome - knowing the truth but no one believes you. Chekhov gun - anything on-screen in a movie is there for a purpose. A gun is on the wall to be used. Hindsight - Looking back everything looks so clear, but at the actual event maybe not.

Belief that event has only one significant cause.

Plan for few contingencies than occur.

-ability to control outcomes - the illusion of control.

- hindsight bias - knowledge of outcome of previous event increases perceived likelihood of that outcome

2911 Things -  complexity coherence coupling visibility  - visibility - direct error (e.g. instant feedback - ship goes wrong way). Easy to detect. The real errors are latent errors and the consequence of the error stays hidden until the future. Latent errors with defence in depth systems. E.g. memory leak. Fail invisibly and think the system is safe. 

operator deskilling due to Automatic safety devices - Ironic! 

latent vs active failures

"Dead Battles like dead generals hold the military mind in their dead grip, and Germans, no less than other peoples prepare for the last war." - Barbara Tuchman - planning for future is planning for what happened before.

Exam question about one of these: 

Chernobyl

Bhopal

Challenger

Three Mile Island - 

Chernobyl will be in the exam. The rods are in same liquid and pumped round and round circulating heat in the red area. Rods drop down to separate things, and absorb neutrons. For safety issues, the red stuff is inside a closed system and there is water cooling. 

Nuclear plants plagued with startup problems. Imagine nuclear react is cloud services! The utility charged the builder, and the builder charged the utility in the accident. The water in the secondary system is pure. Resins might get in the water and must be removed. It leaked out and leaked into the pneumatic air system. The system drives some of the instruments. Interrupted the air pressure which went to two of the values for the water system. Emergency pump used but the pipes were blocked! Valves left in the closed position from a maintenance - invisible failure. Operator couldn’t tell the water is pumping through a closed pipe. Mystery how the valves were closed. Operators testified - not unusual to find some in the wrong position. 

The decay heat builds up enormous temperature and pressure - normally there is lots of water to cool this. However the cooling system didn’t work. If the red part gets too hot, stainless steel around the red part might be brittle. There are ASD’s to handle the problem. The valve at the top of the yellow thing - relive pressure from the core. Reducing pressure becomes a gas, and explodes into steam. 1 in 50 times valve expected to fail. Presidents commission discovered that the valve fails often in other reactors. Unfortunately in this attack, the valve failed to close again after it opened. The radioactive water is gushing out! Absolute disaster. 32 thousand gallons stream out. The thing was simply uncaught. The indicator was recently added to the valve to indicate the valve had failed. However the indicator itself had failed too. Because the light was showing the valve had shut, they didn’t do any other tests. The valve only records whether a signal was sent to the valve to shut, not whether the thing was shut! The second shift determined the error and fixed it? When the mistake is a latent error - operator never notices. Can’t see that mistake again - new eyes come in and might solve the problem! Humans lead to failure and the failure to detect the failure. Operators couldn’t tell - only thing is “why is the core getting so hot?”. The system was tightly coupled - errors in one thing affect another. 

The people were looking for one story to explain the failure - however it was multiple stories. Opaque system. Heat in the bottom tank - its “probably ok” even though it was burning hot. reason to believe the water could have come from anywhere. Went to different wrong tank which overflowed in the wrong building. 

Everything will be weirdly connected - leave the tap on and all the password pour out of the tap. Tightly coupled system. 

Theoretical thing when the core is uncovered and etc. Possible the reaction can lead to hydrogen gas - can lead to explosion. Theoretical reaction that oxygen and hydrogen - thought it was an oxygen explosion. The whole thing filled up with hydrogen gas. China syndrome, steam in air and Fukishima. 

Investigations - Occurred. Reported that operators made terrible mistakes. THere were millions of things that went wrong, causing chain reaction. Can’t pick one person to blame. None of the people are actually the problem - they doing their best in a system designed to fail. 

What we have to do is not focus on finding scapegoats, and pretending we have good systems - Design it so that if things go wrong, the impact is minimised. 

UNSW how to improve cyber security - One real answer - work out the most important assets and JUST DEFEND THEM. Students? Safety? Staff? Money? Step 2- Assume you are going to be breached, and set it up so that is not a disaster. Have the vice chancellor read the press releases. 

HR Department - Can we have a copy of your passport? “I don’t know how long we keep passports, and we built a huge passport database.” Don’t hold the data, and delete the passports. Get rid of the valuable data! Stop building it up. Don’t make a data lake. 

PRIVACY EXTENDED LECTURE

When we use online services we forfeit our privacy for online services and fun. 

Google Timeline - tracks your location when you left your GPS on. 

The problem is when it is compromised - easy target and easy to stalk. 

Signal Blocking - Phone in Aluminium foil. Today there was reports of people accessing metadata without warrants. Aluminium foil breaks bluetooth signal. Faraday bags only $6!!! Foil blocks Find my Android.

Methods of Prevention - Incognito mode, Privacy focused browsers, log out when you can, Don’t make accounts with other accounts (e.g. spotify with Facebook), LIE.

VPNS - Everything you connect through the internet is through the VPN, not your local address. Everytime you make a request the person making the request is the VPN. Trusting whoever makes the VPN. 

Onion Routing - Diverting your request through intermediate nodes. Between each node is a symmetric key. 3 layers of encryption. Each node doesn’t know enough on its own that if it was compromised that it would give something valuable. Don’t know client or server. However attacker can perform timing attacks - see requests in and out. 

A right to privacy - No different to free speech where you have nothing to say. You can get cheaper flight tickets through a VPN from another country. 

Should I be concerned? - I have nothing to hide. I have nothing I can think of that I want to hide. If you are a good law abiding citizen then it is all good? Bruce Schenider = false assumptions of privacy and its value. Premise is that privacy is about hiding a wrong. The problem is the Power of The Government - Imbalance of Power. Left powerless as we don’t have a say on who can view our personal records. E.g. several airlines handed passenger records over to federal agencies after 9/11. Entirely different purpose of what the data was intended for. The policies become meaningless! Left us in a powerless position?

Privacy threatened by many small things, not one big thing. 

DIGITAL FORENSICS EXTENDED LECTURE

Branch of forensics science

Recovery/investigation of material found on digital devices

Two types of personnel

3 Stages of Digital Forensics Investigation

Acquisition/Imaging - Capture an “image”

Analysis - keyword searches, recover deleted files, specialist tools

Reporting - evidence used to construct events/actions, layman report written. 

Type of Forensics

Computer forensics - Memory and data

Mobile device - Phone

Network - Router switches, packet captures

Database Forensics 

Video/Audio forensics - Movie, audio

Stenography - hidden files inside files.

Tooling - EnCase, Autopsy, FTK Imager, File, Strings, XXd, Foremost, Binwalk, mmls. 

Drives and Partitioning (FAT32) - Allocates memory in clusters. FAT records the status of each cluster. Deleted files name is changed to 0xE5[file_name]. The first character of the file name is changed to show it is deleted. Forensics people check this FAT table and check for these deleted files. 

Flag in IMage - https://imgur.com/a/X2mNAIZ 

[queenieofaces]

On being unrequited

This post has been cross-posted to The Asexual Agenda.  On a completely unrelated note, today is my fifth anniversary of writing for TAA!

Content warnings: mention of suicide in a fictional work, discussion of trauma messing with conceptions of the future and relationships, brief mention of abusive relationships (with no specifics),  some crappy statements about the insufficiency of aces in relationships

Let me start by saying that this is a topic that I’m still puzzling out how to talk about, but let me start here: It’s hard to overstate the impact reading Cardcaptor Sakura had on me as a teenager.  It wasn’t the first piece of media I’d consumed that depicted women in love with other women (I’d been in a production of The Children’s Hour, a play in which the lesbian character, predictably, commits suicide), but I think it may have been the first story I’d read that had (non-adult) girls crushing on other girls.  For those not familiar with Cardcaptor Sakura, it’s a manga (later made into an anime, retitled Cardcaptors in the US) about a magical girl named Sakura.  Sakura’s best friend, Tomoyo, is in love with Sakura, but she knows that Sakura doesn’t return her feelings, so she spends much of the series supporting Sakura from the sidelines and cheering her on as she pursues other relationships.

Part of the reason this manga had such a huge impact on me was because I was reading it just as I was realizing that I had a crush on one of my very close friends.  I was absolutely certain that said friend didn’t return my feelings, so I decided to be a Tomoyo and cheer her on from the sidelines.  As long as she was happy, I would be happy.

These types of unrequited crushes are obviously very, very common in wlw media (and in real life).  I have a playlist of wlw music, for example, and while there are a couple of songs about ladies mutually crushing on other ladies, it’s much more common to have songs like “Sleepover” by Hayley Kiyoko or Mary Lambert’s cover of “Jessie’s Girl” or  “Jenny” by Studio Killers (although that one, at least, ends well* in the MV).  Kataomoi (片思い; more or less “unrequited feelings”) is a pretty common trope in Japanese f/f content as well, especially if it’s set during high school or middle school.  (Azumanga Daioh, which was also formative in my teens, has Kaorin crushing on Sakaki for the entire manga.)  I didn’t read a book with a girl who had a girlfriend, let alone one who still had a living girlfriend at the end of the story, until I was in my twenties.  (I started finding books with endgame m/m couples in my early teens, for comparison, although I also read a lot of books with m/m couples who broke up or died before the end.)  While it’s easier to find happy f/f couples in media now, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the idea that if you’re a woman who is attracted to other women, many of your crushes are likely to be unrequited still permeates wlw spaces and media content.

This idea has heavily shaped the way that I approach relationships.  A few months ago I was talking to a friend who said that she found the idea of being friends with someone she had a crush on without ever saying anything really painful.  Never saying anything is my baseline.  I’m pretty much exclusively attracted to people I’m close friends with, so my desire to Not Make It Weird way overweighs my desire to say anything.  I’d much rather have a close friend I have inappropriately big feelings for (and never act on) than make someone else uncomfortable and potentially jeopardize our friendship.  So, unless I’m pretty certain that they feel the same way or the situation is becoming untenable as is, I don’t make it weird.  I’ve had people tell me that’s sad when I’ve mentioned it, but I don’t think it’s sad.  I’m not a martyr or “suffering in the friendzone” (ew)--it just is what it is.

Now here’s where I feel like I don’t quite have the words to talk about this yet: I think there’s a similar phenomenon in ace communities.  I’ve talked before about the puddle problem: “Sure, there may be other fishies in the sea, but, personally, my sea is more like a puddle and most of the fishies would rather hang out in a real body of water.”  Beyond that, I feel that there’s often an assumption of incompatibility or unrequited feelings that aces carry into relationships.  There’s the endless issue of sexual incompatibility, of compromise, and all the different tools we’ve made to get around that.  (This isn’t even touching some of the nastier comments about asexual people “inflicting themselves” on “normally sexual persons.”**)   There’s, as Laura describes it, “a kind of wariness of situations where I might be expected to have sexual feelings or motivations, because then people might want something from me that I can’t give.”  Even in friendships there’s the fear that you’ll never be #1 or that your friends will prioritize their other relationships over you.  There’s often an assumption that you’re going to have to deal with being insufficient (because you don’t experience attraction you should) or with your friends and/or partners prioritizing relationships differently than you (because they’re not getting enough/the right things from your relationship).

Even in ace/ace relationships, I assume that we’ll have incompatible desires--that someone, to some degree, will be unrequited.  There tends to be an assumption that aces are inherently compatible with other aces, but, as someone who has been in relationships with multiple aces, I can say that is not true.***  Here’s a fairly innocuous example: I am not a very cuddly person.  I used to be much cuddlier, but I’ve gotten more touch-averse with age and substantial trauma.  I sometimes have days where I don’t want anyone to touch me, regardless of how casual or glancing it might be.  Needless to say, this can be a major stumbling block if I’m in a relationship with someone who expresses affection physically or who wants consistent physical affection from me.

I tend to assume that any relationship (romantic or not) I have is going to have some level of uneven feelings.  Either I am attracted to them and they are not to me (the Tomoyo problem), or they are to me and I am not to them (the insufficiency problem), or we’re both attracted to each other but in different ways (the physical affection incompatibility problem).  Heck, I designed a model of relationships to help navigate relationships where feelings are imbalanced.  And this is, again, not something I find particularly sad or pity-worthy.  I want different things than other people, not through any fault of mine or theirs, but just because that is how it is.  This is my baseline.

When it becomes a problem is when decide to settle for what I can get--when I look at my tiny puddle and think, “Well, I’m never going to get anything better than this.”  That can be bad when it’s compelled me to stay in abusive relationships, but even in healthy relationships that assumption isn't fair to me, and it’s also not fair to the people who matter to me. I often assume that I care more about other people than they care about me, so I’m sometimes surprised and unsure how to react when people demonstrate that they do actually care for me.  I am much better equipped to deal with having inappropriately big feelings for someone than I am to deal with underestimating someone else’s feelings for me.  I also have the fun PTSD symptom of a sense of foreshortened future.  Specifically, in my case, I rationally know that the future is coming, since that’s generally how time works, and I can plan for it, but I have no gut feeling that the future is real.****  (If this sounds like a really weird experience, I promise you that it 100% is.)  I tend to assume that I have no permanency in other people’s lives.  Other people will move on and find other relationships, and I’ll be there to cheer them on from the sidelines (or just...not be there, I guess; it’s not that I’m expecting something to happen to me so much as that I struggle to imagine my future self).  I’m often caught off guard whenever anyone demonstrates that they’re expecting me to be in their life in a tangible way in the future.

I have no solutions here and no real conclusion, since, as I said, I’m still trying to find the words to talk about this.  I guess the point that I’m trying to get at is the extent to which I carry the assumption of imbalanced feelings (being unrequited? unrequitedness?) into all of my relationships.  I don't know how common this experience is, and I don’t think it’s a uniquely ace experience (as I said at the beginning of this post, it’s a trope in a lot of f/f content).  In my case at least, I think it is shaped by my sitting at the intersection of aceness and queerness and trauma.  I don’t think I can fully say it’s a good thing or a bad thing--on one hand, I’m pretty prepared to do the relationship negotiation dance at any moment (I have CHARTS and KEYWORDS), but on the other hand, I often have to actively counter my own baseline assumptions, which can be skewed in weird and negative ways.

*Well, I mean, if you consider “turning into a tiger and carrying your love to safety” to be “ending well.”

**Dan Savage, who made the comments in the link, has softened signficantly in his stance on asexuality, but I think it’s important to remember that these sorts of comments were coming out right around the time I started coming out to people, and so I had to directly address them when people brought them up (which, to be clear, they did; Dan Savage was weirdly widely read in my college friend group).  While I rationally know I’m not inflicting myself on anyone, when you hear something enough times, it does sort of dig its claws into you.  Or maybe that’s just me.

***Here is where I recommend one of my favorite acefics, “’Til Break of Day.”  I’m not involved in The Hobbit fandom at all, but it’s genuinely one of the best depictions of an incompatible ace/ace relationship that I’ve read.  Check it out if you’re so inclined.

****At some point maybe I’ll bite the bullet and write a proper post on queer futurity instead of just yelling about it incoherently to my friends.  Maybe.

[law10]

Legal Disputes of the Future

Who owns food? Who pays for this accident? Who owns my face? Who owns the Arctic? Who owns the Pacific Ocean? Who owns the sky? These sound like some ridiculous questions at first glance but let's take a second look at the future through the Great Karnak's trusty crystal ball.

Who owns food?

Let's start with this one, since it has, more or less, already taken place. A small landowner in Nebraska named Bill parks his tractor in the shed after a long day of work in the fields. He wipes sixteen hours worth of sweat off his brow while he opens his mail. All bills. Two men in dark suits approach him at the front door and hand him a subpoena. The farmer opens the subpoena, quite surprised to learn he's being sued by a major U.S. corporation for copyright infringement. It's a huge settlement they're after - in the millions. He doesn't have one tenth of what they're asking in damages. Since he sits on a tractor most days, he hasn't got the faintest notion how he could be named in a suit for copyright infringement. He's certain they've got a case of mistaken identity and places the document at the bottom of a pile of correspondence, making a mental note to consult his lawyer about what to do with the nuisance suit.

Rest assured, it's no mistake. The large U.S. corporation spent millions in developing a strand of DNA for corn that is resistant to a pesticide they also own. When you buy their corn seeds and use their pesticide for your crops, you'll get excellent results. They copyright the strand of corn DNA they worked to develop. To protect the investment in DNA research they hire over seventy-five corporate lawyers to aggressively prosecute copyright 'thieves'. They have to establish a legal precedent that attracts a lot of publicity; they intend to branch out into other food stuffs, such as eggs that last longer on the shelf, wheat that produces heavier grain, chickens that add weight quickly, beef that responds to their brand of steroids in cattle foods. The list is endless, and it's all going to be done by protecting copyrighted DNA strands.

Bill consults his country lawyer about the suit, explaining that he has stolen nothing in his life from anyone. The lawyer does a bit of researching and discovers he's opposed on the brief by some of the best legal minds in history, paid for by a Dow Jones multinational. He first explains to the multinational that his client doesn't know how the patented corn seed got into his fields. Possibly the seed cleaning company that strips seeds off Bill's corn for next year's crop has intermingled patented seeds with his. He tries to offer a settlement but this is not what the corporation wants. They want a trial. They wish to establish for the record that they're prepared to sue if anyone grows their corn without paying them for the seeds.

Bill and the country lawyer lose the case which costs him more than he can pay in damages and legal costs. He appeals. The appeal also loses right up to the Supreme Court since copyright law is sacrosanct in the U.S. Intellectual property, in this case a section of DNA, is property protected by the highest court in the land. Bill's house, farm and equipment are sold at auction to the highest bidder, and the proceeds given to a multinational worth more than a quarter trillion in market cap. The proceeds don't cover the cost of one of the lawyers for one year, but they've earned an important victory - they own food.

Who pays for this accident?

Late June, 2016. A new electric car with one occupant is proceeding along a Florida highway within the speed limit. Up ahead, a tractor trailer crossing the pavement at an intersection blocks the way. The driver, who has the vehicle on 'auto-pilot' is reading work-related files and doesn't see the upcoming collision; he trusts his car will react properly and put on the brakes, as advertized. The software or hardware on the car malfunctions, the result is that the car smashes at full speed into the trailer blocking the road, disintegrating the car and killing its occupant.

Within hours of learning of the crash, the vehicle manufacturer issues a statement: 'Neither the auto-pilot nor the driver saw the tractor trailer in the blinding sun', trying to diminish responsibility by including the driver's inattention to the road. A sharp lawyer advises the family of the deceased to sue, since, by definition, he was not the driver; the car company's software was driving. The driver of the tractor trailer is found blameless because it was possible to avoid the accident, just as every other vehicle did in this situation.

The impending lawsuit sends shivers down the corporate world's spine. Will they be forced to halt production of their cars? Offer compensation in the billions as GM or Ford experienced? Will it affect future car sales? Will there be expensive recalls? Their very survival hangs in the balance on the outcome of this legal battle. The car company uses as its indemnity the disclaimer every software user accepts before they can switch on the 'auto-pilot'. Use at your own risk, they say, just like all software. If a calculator gives you the wrong answer, is the calculator manufacturer to blame if you make a wrong bid on a billion dollar tower construction and lose your shirt because of it? No, it's the user's responsibility to check all calculations.

Not so fast, says the family's lawyer. I present to you as evidence sales material from the car company showing people in these cars on 'auto-pilot' busily reading files related to work, texting on their phones, eating sandwiches and coffee, streaming movies. The company has promoted the auto-pilot as reliable, in fact more reliable than humans. The manufacturer, in order to sell the product, has accepted the responsibility for the safety of its passengers, or users, by heavily implying that users can relax while the software guides them safely to their destinations. It's the car company that killed their client, no one else, by encouraging the car buyers to trust the software to the extent that they don't have to pay attention to the road ahead. Why else would you buy it?

Insurance companies are prepared to fund the legal challenge to a successful outcome. They want a clear definition of who's at fault before they begin underwriting any more policies. Driverless car manufacturers are rushing headlong into the intersection of Lawyer and Technology Streets with their eyes closed. Keep watching this space, you'll never see a bigger smash-up.

Who owns my face?

Brad Pratt is a famous movie star. His wife Angie Groaner is too. They're fed up to the teeth with being filmed by paparazzi. Brad is filmed in public toilets. Angie is filmed at the doctor's office. What gets them most upset is they're captured on film with their kids. They don't have a moment to themselves, not even after they move from the U.S. to the outskirts of London, England. Every time they walk past a newsstand they look the other way so they don't have to read headlines about themselves in stories they didn't sanction. Angie especially deplores the stories depicting her children as alien babies. Paparazzi invade their lives every waking, sometimes not waking, moment.

That's the price of fame say the news organizations. Bullpoop, says Brad, and I'm going to come up with a way to stop it. Unbeknownst to the so-called 'news' media, Brad and Angie consult with the best legal minds and come up with a solution: trademark their faces.

A trademark is the copyright of an image related to the conduct of business, and since Brad and Angie's faces are their business (worth millions), they're well within their rights to trademark their mugs. They take a 360° view of their faces and deposit them with all the necessary paperwork at every major trademark registration office throughout the world.

They can't wait for their first lawsuit to prove the concept. Soon, a tabloid prints the story, 'Brad and Angie Have Alien Twins'. The photographer and Celebrity Ogler are served with an invitation to attend court in every country in which they publish.

The photog is a nobody with a camera. He's paid up to a quarter of a million dollars for candid shots depicting Brad on the toilet or Angie in a dress shop changing room. He explains that Celebrity Ogler paid him to take these pictures on a spec basis. The more revealing and damaging the photo, the more they get paid, so anything goes, regardless of the rules of common courtesy or decency.

The publisher, Celebrity Ogler, claims that the two famous people made their millions by being in the public eye, and if it weren't for news and tabloids, the couple would be living in anonymity. They benefited from free publicity for their rise to stardom and now it's simply inconvenient to them. They also argue in most countries, it's their constitutional right to publish news stories related to anyone, regardless of their position in society. What if they were guilty of murder, could we be prevented from displaying their pictures on newspapers?

Pratt and Groaner's legal team argues that their trademark, central to their business of making films, has been used without their permission and that both the photographer and the publisher have profited using someone else's copyrighted image. These magazines are not reporting 'news'; they rely on sales of their tabloids based on the already established popularity of their subjects. Now that they have trademarked their faces, the defendants have profited off someone else's popularity and their image.

The court rules in favor of the plaintiffs. They're awarded damages and any further use of their trademarked images can only be done by permission. It will be a very long time before Pratt and Groaner give permission for strangers to take their picture. A new business for trade-marking faces is spawned.

Who owns the Arctic?

In the 1850's a British expedition to find the Northwest Passage through the Arctic Ocean goes missing for over a hundred years. Fast forward one hundred and fifty years. Due to global warming the ice pack has melted and it is now possible to sail year round through the Arctic Ocean.

Oil is discovered outside the new economic exclusion zone and Canada protests the invasion of oil drilling wells from the U.S., taking the case to the World Trade Organization and the United Nations. Canada claims sovereignty of the Artic to the North Pole. The U.S. says, 'See you in court. No one can own an international waterway.'

Who owns the Pacific Ocean?

In a mirror image incident in the Pacific Ocean in international waters off China, barges filled with earth drop millions of tons of rocks and slurry to create a small land mass. The Chinese fill enough of the ocean to create a tiny island in the Pacific large enough to plant their flag. They then declare an economic exclusion zone of two hundred miles in all directions and begin drilling for oil.

The American navy sails through the disputed waters. Certain of the rightness of their cause, China begins sending belligerent diplomatic notes of protest to the United States and the United Nations. The U.S. does not recognize their sovereignty in an international waterway by the artificial creation of a land mass. The Chinese are ready to start a war and take pot shots at the U.S. navy in what used to be international waters. Tensions come to a boil before the case can be heard in international courts. The Chinese threaten to begin a war with the U.S. over the issue.

The U.S. responds by entering trade agreements with India and setting up manufacturing facilities for a wide range of consumer items, directly competing with cheap Chinese labor. Twenty years after the shift to India, the U.S. and its allies block all further Chinese imports.

Who owns the sky?

Fred and Harriet are having dinner in their isolated country home. They're having Fred's favorite recipe - Mulligatawny soup. An object crashes through the roof and kills the couple outright. Upon investigation, the object belongs to Grooble, a technology firm developing driverless cars. One of their satellites, while repositioning itself to a new orbit, received an incorrect set of coordinates from the controller and crashed back to earth, landing on hapless Fred and Harriet, and the soup tureen. The pieces of wreckage found clearly indicate the ownership of the fallen satellite. Fred and Harriet's heirs file suit.

The ownership of a piece of land includes the space above and below it, with no defined limit. If you wish to build above the land five hundred stories high there can be no legal objection to it. The plaintiffs argue that their property rights are infringed at any altitude and Grooble was encroaching on the couple's right to ownership of their property, even though the satellite might have been hovering six thousand miles above them. Since the satellite owners accept the premise that the hardware might malfunction for any number of reasons and come crashing back to earth, they knowingly encroached on property they do not own.

The Grooble Corporation argues that international agreements have determined space (defined as 62.5 miles altitude) to be outside the purview of local property laws. The heirs of the property owners claim that once the satellite re-entered the atmosphere, it was no longer subject to the laws that govern space and are therefore seeking damages afforded them by local property rights, the same as they would if an airplane dropped on their house.

Looking back we find it hard to believe some of the cases that were heard to defend people's rights and property. The Scopes trial of the Twenties comes to mind, which defended an educator's right to discuss evolution. A divisive question for its time, a mere ninety years later, it's almost irrelevant, replaced by the new issues that arise with the advent of technological discovery. The conflicts these new challenges create will burn brightly in their time, setting one against the other in tumult and violent upheaval until, just like all issues, the unveiling of new eras and new civilizations will make them pass into irrelevance. But is mankind now changing too quickly to adapt to new situations? For instance, will we pollute and kill all marine life in the oceans before we can develop legal frameworks to stop it? Will a country poison the atmosphere for the rest of the world? Will nations figure out a solution to global warming before it's too late? Will DNA continue to be copyrighted preventing food from being grown by private citizens in times of starvation? Will space be cluttered with so much debris as to make it unusable? Legal disputes of the future are extremely difficult to predict but their outcomes greatly impact our societies.

[floridaticketfirm]

Are Police Quotas for Traffic Citations Fact or Fiction?

Drive slow. It’s the end of the month and the police need to meet their quota.

If you’ve been driving long enough, someone has probably said this to you either directly or in passing.

But is it true? Do police quotas exist? More importantly, are police quotas legal?

Keep reading to find out.

Fact: Police Quotas Are Real

Nobody likes receiving a traffic violation, particularly when it’s for something minor like turning right on a red at 4:55 PM when it’s banned at that intersection until 5 o’clock.

All of a sudden, you’re out $129, your dinner plans are ruined, and you didn’t even do anything that wrong.

The easiest solution to your agitation is to blame the police.

Well, depending on where you’re pulled over, you might be right. Police quotas were and are legal across many states. They’re supported by police departments and state governments for several reasons.

We see quotas as a nuisance and as a way for the police to pester us about minor traffic laws and generate some income for law enforcement.

But the police see it as a way of measuring the performance of their officers. They don’t want officers sitting around or avoiding interacting with the public. Traffic police are there to keep our roads safe. Rather than babysitting them, administrations can set a quota and count tickets, which are a tangible representation of how active the police are.

In fact, they’re so important to governments and law enforcement bodies that the lobby thwarts state legislators’ attempts to ban them.

Arizona’s state legislator did just that, but Arizona governor Doug Ducey vetoed the bill. His decision was supported by the Arizona Police Association, Fraternal Order of Police, and the Arizona Association of Police Chiefs.

Are Ticket Quotas Legal in Florida?

Florida Statues 316.640 7(b) says that “no traffic agency may establish a traffic citation quota.”

Seems straightforward, right? The police can’t hunt citations arbitrarily to meet a quota. But the Florida Highway Patrol allegedly still does it.

Back in 2017, Lt. Col. Mike Thomas, the second highest ranking officer at the Florida Highway Patrol lost his job because whistleblowers caught him encouraging officers in the field to write more tickets.

An internal email revealed Thomas wanted troopers to write a minimum of two tickets every hour.

Thomas retired early in response.

The email was interpreted as a quota – and quotas were illegal in 2017. However, Thomas referred to his actions as being more akin to “goal-setting” rather than a hard and fast quota.

A String of Violations

Lt. Col. Thomas wasn’t the first high ranking law enforcement officer to lose his job over the quota issue. Major Mark Welch, who had been on the force for 35-years, lost his job two weeks prior to Thomas.

Officers under his command in eight counties interpreted an email sent on July 28, 2017, as a demand for a quota. Welch also demanded two citations an hour as part of an “important initiative.”

Still, Police Quotas Don’t Benefit Law Enforcement

It might make sense to motorists for law enforcement to get around the ticket quota law. After all, it’s all about the money.

But in reality, Florida Highway Patrol doesn’t see a dime of the citation revenue. The money generated from all tickets paid remains in the county or municipality in which the ticket was issued.

Monetary incentive isn’t the only reason to skirt police quotas: sometimes performance-based measures are enough to encourage both officers and troopers to chase numbers.

Police Quotas or Perks? How Troopers Skirt the Law

Quotas are illegal, but a law doesn’t prevent Florida law enforcement from taking similar measures, not in the form of the quota.

Welch, who was fired for seemingly enforcing police quotas, described his email not as a mandate but as an “initiative.”

The initiative is called Statewide Overtime Action Response, or SOAR.

SOAR is a program funded by Florida taxpayers designed to support and improve highway safety. The program serves as a pathway for state troopers to make extra cash working in high-traffic areas. It’s an incentive: Florida state troopers are some of the lowest paid traffic officers in the country.

Part of encouraging state troopers to those corridors is to deter speeding and to encourage road safety. And they make extra overtime pay for doing it.

In fact, two more emails obtained by the Miami Herald found that officers who met the two tickets per hour quota obtained paid weekends off as a reward for meeting the “goal.”

Indeed, these moves encourage traffic officers to write more tickets, and while they may not violate the official law on police quotas, they potentially violate the spirit of the law.

As Sen. Jeff Brandes, who oversees the budget of the Florida Highway Patrol, says, polices quotas go “against everything the Florida Highway Patrol should be doing. FHP is about safety. It’s not about meeting quotas.”

Challenging Your Ticket

Why is the issue of police quotas such a scandal for the FHP? Beyond potentially disregarding the law, these accusations create problems in enforcing tickets. If a state trooper was violating a law when writing a ticket to meet a quota, it makes it easier to challenge a ticket.

You can challenge a ticket in the state of Florida within 30 days after receiving the citation.

The process of fighting a ticket varies by county, but all the information you need should be provided on your ticket. To get started, read your ticket to find:

Which court you’re assigned to

Contact details for the court

Best way to contact the court

Many speeding tickets are fair. If you were caught blatantly violating the traffic laws, expect to pay the fine. But if you feel the ticket you received was unfair, then don’t be afraid to challenge it.

It’s possible to fight a ticket on your own, but you don’t have to. Florida speeding ticket lawyers are privy to speeding ticket laws and can recognize a flawed citation.

Send Us Your Ticket

Florida Highway Patrol says they’re people friendly – they don’t want to give out tickets. But with two high-level officers fired last year for sending out quotas in the form of “friendly suggestions,” we know it’s not always true.

Have you received a ticket that you don’t feel was fair? Send it to us, and we may be able to help you fight it.

The post Are Police Quotas for Traffic Citations Fact or Fiction? appeared first on Florida Ticket Firm.

from News – Florida Ticket Firm http://bit.ly/2SGtpzj via IFTTT

[mctvcker]

Low Ranking: How to Fix and Avoid (An Expert Guide)

With professional interest and the assistance of qualified SEO specialists, your business may leverage SEO trends to arrive out at the top in 2018 plus beyond. Analyze your website's overall standing, including SEO, usability, performance, plus backlinks. Algorithm adjustments in 2018 seem to center on reducing the effectiveness associated with old-school SEO techniques, with the May 2015 Google ‘Quality' algorithm up-date bruisingly familiar. From an natural search perspective, we feel Youtube . com, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn in most cases remain the particular social media sites that provide the most important SEO worth or in order to drive organic visitors to brand sites in 2018. Since millions of people decide to try their particular digital devices, the opportunities with regard to SEO and content marketing can continue to increase. In other words, focus upon the things you can manage, like on-page SEO, content high quality, website design, social networking footprint, plus overall user experience. Because it takes a great deal of effort and time to look the best techniques, I possess integrated those must use on-page SEO techniques here. Like merely said that will user experience was of comparable importance as on-page SEO with regard to ranking high in search. SEO appears for Search Engine Optimization, which usually is the increasing the high quality and quantity of people in order to your website. It's not enough to just have a good understanding associated with the 2018 SEO trends in the event that you aren't ready to leap along with both feet. Meta description plays the major role in search motor ranking of your post therefore writing an SEO friendly meta description is important for rating factor. Yes, you can now obtain more personalized, precise and well-timed search results; however, this provides made the SEO job even more challenging too. Power Tip: Such as with a post, I've discovered that you get a minor video SEO boost by placing your keyword at the starting of the title. (Screaming Frog SEO Spider is the best helper! ) Neither the user nor the search engine likes malfunctioning links. CoSchedule saw the 594 percent increase in visitors by reshaping their SEO articles strategy to become more in-line with searcher intent.

There are usually various powerful Top SEO methods ” which will help a person to get your site upon first page of Search motor. With the contribution associated with major search engines like Search engines and Bing, website owners are usually seeing technological SEO changes that will reflect in terms of improved user experiences. We are not able to develop a post about the particular top SEO trends in 2018 without writing about how AI and machine learning will effect SEO. Still, the key phrase aspect of SEO is getting increasingly difficult with Google Google adwords hiding volume data. A successful SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION strategy in 2018 will proceed towards relationship building, helping the brand develop powerful contacts plus links that will be helpful in a longer term. As search engines keep on to develop more advanced technology and responsiveness to online lookups, new SEO techniques will arise to keep companies ranking higher on search engines. Within this post, we've broken lower the very best SEO techniques in order to help you skyrocket your ranks and boost your number associated with monthly visitors. In case you want your site in order to rank in today's digital entire world, you need to satisfy Google's SEO criteria. Finally, many SEOs regularly evaluate their competitors' backlinks to determine those they could recreate for sites too. The basic principles behind search engine optimisation (SEO) and high rankings within Google haven't changed much within the last decade. As this is still the start associated with 2018, it will be thrilling to see these and additional SEO trends emerge because the season progresses. As location-awareness and behavior-pattern-awareness become part associated with an SEO toolbox of 'context' of user intent, savvy SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION tool providers, Google included, may find opportunity in 'nano-moments' intersections of location, intent, context plus prior behavior (or predicted behavior). Not only perform you want to use HTTPS because it is a rank signal for your SEO initiatives, but also to enable you to ensure a person are giving your customers the particular safest experience. This is typically the taking treatment of of SEO that individuals spend one of the most time and the particular most optimisation on. This is definitely why it is so astonishing the script is flipping whenever it comes to backlinks, along with more authoritative unlinked words becoming the ones that fight by means of algorithms one of the most effectively. Therefore, having the Google My Business profile is definitely essential for local SEO because it enables you to show up in these results. Hazel, SEO Consultant and founder associated with SEO+, works together with companies throughout the UK. She's fascinated in making websites work successfully and it has a popularity for increasing traffic, leads plus sales. And if they find the particular content useful, they might actually bookmark it. Which is exactly what off-page SEO is all regarding beyond link-building. Moreover, Google may continue to elevate the importance of usability and technical SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION factors, such as site safety, page speed, mobile friendliness, plus navigability. Still, the key phrase element of SEO is becoming progressively difficult with Google Adwords concealing volume data. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION specialists started to abuse Page rank to be able to enhance the rankings. This blog uses the particular tagline Learn SEO Straight through the Search Engines, ” plus it doesn't tackle easy topics. Learn Search Engine Marketing From The Basics Find the very good Keywords On Web page & Off Site SEO! Here's a good example exactly where we try to find plugs of Active Campaign, with simply no link to, utilizing the SERP Tool from the LinkResearchTools SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION toolkit. While this particular holistic approach will eventually remove a lot of the problems created by some SEO professionals through the years, I believe that search engines' engineers can initially overestimate the precision associated with their AI, leading to Penguin-level collateral damage. One important aspect associated with taking care of SEO is definitely identifying issues that are harming search engine rankings and decreasing the traffic you get through SERPs. You are able in order to put up a team yet it would take a great deal of time because you've got to create substantial research and training prior to you can incorporate it. This this case, hiring the solutions of an SEO firm is definitely the best choice for a person. So in particular in the event that someone is pasting links upon a spammy site, or probably a previous SEO went away and ran some script in order to place links and a few of forums, and you still cannot clean that up for whichever reason, and you don't possess a manual action, but a person want to make sure this doesn't even get that significantly, then the disavow file is definitely a great method to simply like preemptively say well I understand about these issues, I no longer wish to lose any rest over them, I'm just heading to disavow them and obtain them taken out of the particular equation. Cell phone optimization for local users, together with the rise of tone of voice search, can provide an superb way to produce a effective SEO strategy in 2018 simply by facilitating the search experience via personalized and relevant answers. Since that action can suggest losing all search engine visitors, Web Strategy Plus always suggests sticking to SEO techniques that will fall within Google's guidelines. As the matter of fact, the strength of any website lies within the DA. Domain Authority is definitely SEOmozs calculated metric for exactly how well a given domain will be likely to rank in research results. You should restrategize your technique to local SEO to create sure you are picking upward on voice searcher intent with regard to keyword groupings around your company or industry. Sometimes the best method to improve local SEO is definitely to correct previous mistakes. In today's rapidly shifting planet, SEO techniques can change upon a dime—and the worst component is that you might not really even know it. Hacks that will could have won you the front-page result as recently since 2016 are not only outdated now, but they may actually hurt your website's rankings. As shown above, in the event that a user will say some thing like Tell me something regarding Semantic SEO? ”, Sir Jerr Link might be invoked. SEO offers you a shot at ranking regarding the terms which your clients use, so you can understand better business. When it arrives to on-page SEO, I'm specific you've heard enough about the particular meta tag and keyword denseness for one lifetime. Awesome article i don't understand about youtube SEO but right after reading this article i completely understand how to rank video clip on youtube and google furthermore. Brand building is the particular new link building and off-page SEO strategy in digital marketing nowadays, given that when brands turn out to be true to their core beliefs, messaging and personalities, it is definitely easy for them to sink into and dominate their target viewers. So what will be something the average joe may do to help boost their particular SEO rankings for a specific keyword? Placing hyperlinks for your other website web pages, is a great way associated with enhancing your site and utilized properly, internal links can end up being a useful weapon inside your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION arsenal.

The third major SEO ranking signal is Google's artificial intelligence search ranking algorithm. In 2018, SEO strategies will be significantly influenced by voice search because the focus will be on long-tail search keywords. Articles is key but content on your own is no longer king; articles, context, and relevance will generate performance of content and electronic marketing, and SEO is component but not full parcel. So, from this blog, you can discover the newest information that Google is usually ready to release, such as Making use of Page Speed in Mobile Lookup SEO 2019 Slide Ranking” Any time you read SEO weblogs on other domains, they will certainly likely be linking to plus quoting from this blog anytime something new is published. For your person who have the website or blog, SEO helps get organic traffic of potential clients, clients and visitors through the free of charge, ” organic, ” editorial” or even natural” search results. This is the next major component of ethical SEO ranking. Keyword research have been listed as Amount 0” because it is a prerequisite to performing best practice on-page SEO.

Smart SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION techniques always come down in order to great content with both customers and search engines in brain. Search motor rankings, above-the-fold calls to activity, prominently placed images, and innovative anchor text do not create the call with regards in order to your marketing success — individuals things of your users perform. All of the other factors of SEO, content creation, plus website design certainly play a function in influencing the visibility associated with your marketing material, but simply no amount of visibility will create someone follow you into your own sales funnel unless you are usually acknowledging, addressing, and meeting the particular needs of your users. With a good increased focus on user knowledge, Google has challenged the SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION community to pay for even more attention to the overall expertise of an internet site and how the particular content interacts with users, instead than just the basic components that many optimize toward. Whether you are usually a marketer or a company owner, or even a business for SEO, it's always advantageous to research and learning brand-new SEO tactics. I'm curious - sometimes along with your chapter-based guides, you possess them all on a one page like this one, yet sometimes they're separate pages along with an overview page as being a kind of intro + table associated with contents, like the Keyword Analysis for SEO Definitive Guide. More significantly for us as SEOs, this means that the power of hyperlinks to rank websites is arranged to decrease, as well because the power of good user-engagement metrics on the website (and anything that improves them) is definitely increasing. Even as we head in order to 2018, SEO is becoming more and more important as more businesses are usually aware they require it in order to get found online. If youโ€d like to know more about doing keyword research that will give a boost to your SEO activities, head over to our completeย long tail keywords research guide and find out some of the FREE tools in action. It does obtain pretty technical, so if a person know nothing about SEO or even digital marketing, you might desire to do some quick analysis on your own to assure you know the terms getting discussed and what they imply to your businesses specific requirements. These types of links don't require any specific action through SEO specialists, they are simply given by websites that want to refer to your internet site or content. This particular really is optional but indexing categories on the internet can also enhance the relevancy of your content to boost page rank plus increase your traffic and enhance your WordPress SEO. SEO helps people to discover businesses or any kind associated with information that they search on-line and list them by recognition. Also, like I stated before, if you've read any kind of other great posts about SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION trends, or how to raise your search ranking, please include them in the comments area, (with a brief description associated with what makes the post special). As Google along with other search motors roll out updates, local SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is becoming even more essential. You wager they are doing. But, the backlinking initiatives on most SEO companies out there there leave an unnatural hyperlink pattern that Google can discover from a mile away. I have been making use of WordPress SEO by Yoast regarding a long period and upon all of my blogs along with no single problem. Due to the fact Backlinko is in the SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION niche, I'll look for movie keywords using searches like key phrase research tips”, building backlinks” plus SEO tutorial”. I've observed success with making videos recently and am looking forward in order to using your SEO tips in order to help my videos rank upon page 1. AI will shape brand-new SEO trends in 2018. Some posts are usually definitely about SEO, such since this one: SEO Marketing Technique: Techniques for Success in 2018 This particular post begins with a declaration that few if any SEOs would dispute: Businesses should make use of 2018 to break the poor habit of viewing facets associated with an SEO marketing strategy because a one-time exercise. Because they look items up on visual search equipment, such as Google Images plus Pinterest, it's important to improve SEO on all image plus video content. We have some great ranks, but we are always searching to improve and see exactly what the future holds for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. Fairly recently, I've noticed a resurgence of on-page SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION factors making a difference within search engine rankings. Don't forget to incorporate the particular basics of SEO, featured thoughts, rich content (like videos), hyperlink earning, and UX in your own strategy. Based on how relevant these keywords are for your business, you can start shortlisting them for your own SEO optimisation process. I actually have a guide for Wp local SEO in my routing menu but most everything is usually the same even for non-WordPress sites. This particular could create friction and the particular impression that many well-designed web sites are very poorly optimized intended for SEO. Unfortunately, 95% of hyperlinks from SEO link building in no way bring a single new customer to your site. A report published by World Journal of Advanced Research Basis states that India is fixed to see the incredible development of digital marketing industry due to the fact of growing acceptance of web commerce and online businesses; and, I actually expect the same for the particular career of content writers or even SEO copy writers. Gaining higher ranks within the search results to gain leads and thus generate on-line revenue from organic marketing strategies is how you rock the particular SEO domain. Despite the ancient usage, Backlinks are nevertheless the most powerful facet associated with the latest SEO trends plus techniques. I discussed this idea within my last post here upon Moz — Get up, SEOs : the NEW New Google is usually Here — so I is not going to repeat myself, but I perform suggest you decide to proceed read it (again). Also, with just how SEO works today, just spamming keywords isn't going to assist you at all. All SEO specialists will give more emphasis in order to content marketing and social press in 2018. The SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION adage length is strength” has been supported by our industry research which found that longer content material has a tendency to position significantly higher on Google's initial page. Google Traffic is near to non and it's getting difficult to keep investing budget in SEO. I was initially concerned regarding ranking my sites and this was too hard to find out about SEO. Talk to your marketing group about how to include Tone of voice into your SEO plans. While SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION assists with driving traffic in order to your site, the designing component helps in grabbing the interest from the users. Right now is the time to pay out more attention to long-tail key phrase phrases and to local SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. Therefore, the SEO's job nowadays much more than keywords plus backlinks. Sign up for our own weekly SEO and daily SearchCap newsletters intended for a recap of all the particular latest SEO related news, suggestions and tactics from Search Motor Land and other sources almost all over the Web.

To get executive buy-in, SEOs need to talk a various language - a CMO will be not thinking about a checklist of rankings, they want in order to know the impact of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION on performance. If a person want to get more SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION traffic in 2018, we suggest you create and optimize content material specifically for YouTube. Search Motor Optimization (SEO) refers to the particular process by which search motors crawl” content to see just how effective it will be in order to attract traffic. On-page SEO optimizes articles for a target keyword inside a single blog post. Link authority is definitely a major component of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, but purchasing links is banned by Google, Bing, and some other search engines. SEO Services - Lookup engines have become rigidly strict as well as the competitors is doing all it may to maneuver up. However, we grab the very best positions with regard to you. SEO is the particular procedure for affecting the presence of a website by lookup engine results.

I know there's the entire idea of search experience optimization” and ensuring you are enhancing for platforms beyond search yet when it comes down in order to it, SEO is about becoming found in search engines. Current addition of Google's new lengthier meta description snippets, featured thoughts, knowledge panels, local packs plus much more, you've got your own SEO hands full! SEO specialists have to look for new tricks and techniques to promote a website since Google algorithms take into accounts not only keywords, but also context, and a lot more. The particular biggest SEO trend in 2018 is voice search queries. There is the blur line between mobile SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and desktop search engine marketing and advertising. One of the particular trends I expect to discover in 2018, which will possess a significant impact on almost all aspects of SEO, could be the improving role of artificial intelligence. SEO is an Online marketing and advertising strategy that improves the visitors on your webpage or web site. Meaning by 2018, SEO based promotion strategy need to concentrate on having long-verse content material for best ranking results.