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blog-cosmosuniverse1 · 4 years ago

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What Have We Done? By E.P. Unum January 21, 2021

Joseph R. Biden was just inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States yesterday. I have nothing further to say about this historical event attended primarily by 26,000 National Guard Troops, FBI, NSA, CIA Operatives. That fact alone is a very telling story. Apparently, additional security was deemed necessary for a President-Elect who received allegedly 80 million votes, more than any other person in the history of our country. All of the “peaceful riots” throughout the summer and Fall, where stores and businesses were looted and destroyed, monuments toppled and police and citizens were killed, did not require the assistance of armed troops to quell these “activities”. I also will not comment on the 17 Executive Actions signed by our new President on his first afternoon in office. None of these offer any hope or unity nor are they of any benefit to the American people or to America. Indeed, they will drive us further downward. But here are some lessons we can learn from the new change in leadership to the America we know: Perhaps now you understand why there was never any action against the Clintons or Obama, how they destroyed emails and evidence and phones and servers, how they spied and wiretapped, how they lied to the FISA Court, had conversations on the tarmac, sent emails to cover their rears after key meetings, how Comey and Brennan and Clapper never were brought to any justice, how the FBI and CIA lied, how the Steele Dossier, paid for by Hillary Clinton, was passed along, how phones got factory reset, how leak after leak to an accomplice corrupt media went unchecked, why George Soros is always in the shadows, why Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan and George Bush and John McCain were all involved, why they screamed Russia and pushed a sham impeachment, why no one ever goes to jail, why no one is ever charged, why nothing ever happens.

Perhaps now you know why there was no wrongdoing in the falsification of the FISA Warrants, why the Durham Report was delayed, why Hunter Biden has not been charged, why the FBI sat on his laptop for almost a year while Trump was being impeached on fictitious charges, why the Bidens' connection to China was overlooked as was unleashed the perfect weapon, a virus that was weaponized politically to bring down the greatest ever economy known to man and at the same time usher in an unverifiable and unnecessary system of mail-in voting that corrupted the very foundation of our democracy. Maybe now you can understand why the media is 24/7 propaganda and lies, why up is down and down is up, right is wrong and wrong is right, why social media can now silence the First Amendment and speak over the President of the United States. This has been the plan by the Deep State all along. They didn’t expect Trump to win in 2016. He messed up their plans, and delayed them a little….four years to be exact. They weren’t about to let it happen again. Covid was like manna from heaven for democrats and the socialist left, it was a tool to inject fear into all Americans and it was weaponized Governors who shut down their states and crumbled their economies out of fear. The media, never to let a good crisis go to waste, helped shame and kill the economy, and the super lucky unverifiable mail-in ballots were just the trick to make sure the 47-year career politician, allegedly with hands in Chinese payrolls, the man that couldn’t finish a sentence or collect a crowd, miraculously became the most popular vote recipient of all time. You have just witnessed a silent, bloodless coup, the overthrow of the US free election system, the end of our Constitutional Republic, and the beginning of the downward slide of capitalism and the free enterprise system into the abyss of socialism and communism. What a remarkable achievement! We have sacrificed the greatest engine of freedom, growth, and prosperity known to man on the altar of ignorance and totalitarianism. What will happen next? Well, here's a brief list: · Expect the borders to open up. Increased immigration. · Expect agencies like CBP and INS and Homeland Security to be muzzled or even deleted. · Law enforcement will see continued defunding. · Elimination of the electoral college will be attempted. · History as we know it will be erased. Our children will no longer study the American Revolution, the Civil War, World War I, II, Korea or Vietnam. These will be replaced with classes on “white priviledge”, “how American racism stole lands from native Indians” and the “need for racial equity” because America is a terrible nation. · The Supreme Court will be packed with liberal judges. · Your 2nd Amendment will be attacked and there may be a gun confiscation or gun buyback programs enacted and you will find it difficult to own a weapon…and ammunition of any kind. · If you have a manufacturing job or oil industry job, get ready to be unemployed. · If you own and run a business, brace for the impact of higher taxes and more governmental regulations. · Maybe you’ll be on the hook for slavery reparations, or have your suburbs turned into Section 8 housing. · Your taxes are going to increase dramatically and businesses will pay more. · We will be paying more for gasoline at the pump and we will soon find ourselves once again dependent on foreign oil.

President Trump made us energy independent. For the first time in our history, the USA became an oil-exporting nation. Biden’s illogical and corrupt dismantling of the Keystone Pipeline not only displaced 42,000 high-paying union jobs but now Canada will sell the oil in Alberta BC to China while we search for new supplies at higher prices. Well done Joe! In a couple of years, we will see the onslaught of inflation, high unemployment, less productivity as more and more people become dependent on the government for subsistence, all of which is the natural course of socialist economies The dollar will no longer be the world’s reserve currency and America will no longer be the bastion of freedom it once was. America will be overtaken by China as the largest economy in the world and, because we have become so complacent, we will find ourselves in the middle of great turmoil and upheaval with lots of civil strife that will make 2020 look like a walk in the park. I could go on and on. There is no real recovery from this. The national elections from here on will be decided by New York City, Chicago, and California. The Constitutional Republic we created will be dead. Mob rule and appeasement will run rampant. The candidate who offers the most from the Treasury will get the most votes. But the votes cast won’t matter, just the ones received and counted. That precedent has been set. Benjamin Franklin was walking out of Independence Hall after the Constitutional Convention in 1787, when someone shouted out, “Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?’” Franklin responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Ladies and gentlemen, we have now lost the Republic our forefathers bequeathed to us, the Republic we fought and bled for these past two hundred and forty-five years. Some of you are wondering how this came to pass. The answers are indeed quite simple. We did it to ourselves: · We turned from God. We erased God from our halls of Justice and the Town Square. · We turned from family. · We turned from our country, our Flag, our Monuments to our leaders who paved the way. We denigrated all of these with revisionist history and the tearing down of monuments to our civilization and way of life. · We replaced achievement and recognition by embracing “participation trophies” so that our children can all feel a sense of accomplishment even when there was none. · We embraced degeneracy culture, inviting pornography into our laptops and living rooms. · We became some infatuated with technology that we lost the human touch…we found it easier to send emails or Facebook or twitter posts to a friend or co-worker ten feet away from us rather than walking over to chat with them. We have, in essence, become too high tech and low touch. It sort of begs the question…what does it matter if we wire the entire world if we lose our immortal souls? · We celebrated and looked to fools as our heroes, comedians whose idea of a joke is holding up a bloody head of our President. That’s not funny. It’s sad. · We worshipped ourselves selfishly and took for granted what brave men and women fought and died to give us. Their sacrifices are no longer valued, replaced instead with scorn because they may have committed “transgressions measured by today’s standards, not theirs”.

We disregarded history and all it teaches. On our watch, America just died a little. It’s likely she’ll never be the same again. Not until the 74 million Americans who voted for President Trump stand up and shout “we will no longer tolerate this and we want our country back” and do something about it

For starters, get off Twitter and Facebook and refuse to be a part of their efforts to disrespect the First Amendment. I did. And I don’t miss it at all. If companies want to insult all the people who supported President Trump by denying them jobs, fight back. Don’t buy their products. Shun them. Until we take those steps, they will continue to wield their power, but the ultimate power is in your hands…the power of the consumer. We did this to ourselves. We made our bed, now we have to sleep in it….until we get off our asses and remake it. Some of you have no idea what you’ve done. You know now. It is time to do something about it. Sadly, some of you do know what you have done. To them, I say…if you kick a dog long enough, pretty soon he’s gonna bite. I am tired of being kicked and insulted and disregarded as if I don’t matter. We do matter. We are Americans

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jon-purizhansky · 2 years ago

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Joblio Is A Cross Border Employment Platform

Q: What is Joblio?

A: Joblio is the global tech platform for cross border employment, focused on transforming the labor market through transparency and compliance.We’ve developed a reliable system that removes the inefficiencies and unethical middlemen from the hiring process, which in turn frees up more value for both employers and laborers.Through Joblio job seekers can easily find great employment opportunities in developed countries — without having to pay access fees or commissions, allowing employers to quickly fill vacancies with motivated employees. There is a web app and a mobile app for job seekers, and a web interface for the employers.

Q: Any highlights on your recent announcement?

A: Last week we announced the appointment of David Arkelss as Joblio’s chairman. David is a former president at ManpowerGroup, a world leader in innovative workforce solutions that connects more than 600,000 people to meaningful work across a wide range of skills and industries every day.

In addition to being a regular adviser to the U.S. Department of State and various EU organizations, David is a co-author of the Modern Slavery Act and continues to contribute his experience and talent to further the global expansion of Joblio, which is already currently present in 45 markets.

We recently facilitated the relocation of the first group of Ukrainian refugees to Canada. Through partnerships with a consortium of Canadian companies, Joblio was able to provide stable employment for the group of migrant workers, handling everything from the preparation and execution of documents to resume development and organization of meetings with local social support. In addition to getting jobs, the resettled migrants were also provided with 4 months of free accommodation by Starlight Investment, a major Canadian real estate operator, to allow them to find their feet without worrying about keeping a roof over their heads.

Q: Can you give us more insights into your offering?

A: In dealing with the global problem of labor shortages, we’ve adopted a two-pronged approach that works harmoniously with our proprietary tech and programs to deliver an effective solution.

For our b2c users — which in this case are migrant workers, Joblio provides the tools with which to efficiently manage the entirety of their foreign labor hiring and onboarding process, handling everything from search, selection, and resume submission to payroll and compliance with local labor laws. Using the migrant app, job seekers can filter jobs by skill set, country, and salary, submit documentation for KYC, and also participate in community activities.

Employers, on the other hand, can rely on Joblio to bridge the gap between them and qualified foreign labor candidates through turn-key immigration and relocation services. Using the employer app, organizations can upload unlimited job postings, review applicant profiles, set interviews, and also streamline immigration paperwork and background checks.

Q: What can we expect from your company in the next 6 months? What are your plans?

A: We were created to oppose slave labor and bring the global recruitment sector out of the shadows. And so continued expansion is a major focus for us as it helps us break into new markets where we can better champion the rights and entitlements of workers.

Currently, we’re working on the automation of our proprietary ACE (Applicant Concierge Experience) — which was previously available only to C-level executives, to allow every worker that relocates to another country to get community support, language courses, and guidance from dedicated members of the Joblio community.

As a technology-driven company, we have few R&D projects in the pipeline, that involve augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) capabilities, to improve our ability to deliver long-distance vocational certification.

Q: What is the best thing about your company that people might not know about?

A: Joblio’s leadership consists mostly of immigrants and refugees who have worn the shoes and know where it pinches. Our service is free for applicants because we are driven by the belief that employers should shoulder the responsibility of hiring new staff, and our efficiently designed system makes it worth their while to do so.

Originally Posted: https://www.techcompanynews.com/joblio-is-a-cross-border-employment-platform-focused-on-transforming-the-labor-market-through-transparency-and-compliance/

#joblio #business

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rpgsandbox · 7 years ago

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Interbellum is a tabletop roleplaying game that allows players to take the roles of soldiers, adventurers, deserters or even spies in a world of conflict and the symbiosis of magic and technology. The setting takes inspiration from the aesthetics of the First World War and interwar period.

The system is designed to capture a sense of close combat in trenches, ruins or even whole cities swept away by the total war. Be a small cog in the war machine, survive in military operations with tens of thousands of losses a day. Face the horrors of modern mechanized war, deadly, never-before-seen tanks, the airborne terror of biplanes, the experimental weapons of the future of warfare, forged in constant conflict.

However, this is not the world you know - It is a world of myth and magic, progressed to the diesel age. In other words, your squad can be composed of different fantasy races, where your sergeant can be a formerly enslaved orc or your comrade can be a cursed goblin marauder. In search of a means to break the stalemate of trench warfare, science returned magic from oblivion and tamed it. It changed everything.

The last line of defense trying to stop the dreadful technomagically driven flying fortress.

The game locations are not limited to trenches on the frontline, this setting allows many types of adventures: be deserters and treasure hunters in the colonies, fight in city ruins or the shadow of tanks the size of a mountain, wage “rat war” in sewage networks and subways, or even be the hero of your assault squad in a suicide mission to destroy enemy secret weapons. Your fate is yours to decide: try to survive in war zones, on the frontline or behind enemy lines.

Interbellum uses a proprietary d6 based system, clearly separating the narrative and combat component of the game and encourages teamwork between sqaudmates.

Character creation resembles that of the classic computer-based RPG’s of the late 90's. The choice of main attributes (Agility, Charisma, Intelligence, Perception, Strength, Vitality) and traits - is all familiar. But the choice of race and faction affects a lot - it determines the attitude of NPCs of other factions and races towards you, and can also give bonuses or penalties. The world is still struggling against slavery, for freedom and equality, therefore the influence of xenophobia and prejudice plays a big role in team building and gameplay.

Early sketches of Army Boy mascot in different roles to illustrate attributes.

Another important aspect in creating a character is the choice of his class, his profession. The range of choice is quite broad: Officer, Rifleman, Medic, Mage, Technician, Wild Card and others. Each class gives unique perks and the ability to develop class skills. During character creation you can distribute the starting skill points as you like, but during the game it will be limited only to class skills and only they can be developed to the maximum. Of course, there are also will be workarounds for developing skills and changing your class that depend on the narrative and your game master. Also, your selected class gives you a starting free kit of equipment. Depending on the circumstances, you can purchase additional equipment for bonus points. Levelcap limits the development of the character, so you should consider what the character will specialize in.

Having created the character and built your own squad with your friends, you will now choose one of the pre-prepared missions or one created by your game master. Since the game takes place in an era of rapid technological advance the time period of the mission significantly affects the complexity, the opponents encountered, and the available equipment. Do not forget - this is the era of the arms race, when every year the war brought new items to the arsenal. If you choose Great War - you can start with bolt action rifles in your hands, and finish commanding airborne tanks on airships. In your hands lies the choice of the battlefield: you can participate in another insane attempt to capture an enemy underground fort like Verdun, or try an adventure in the style of Lawrence of Arabia.

Each scenario has a map with the main locations. Moving between them, your squad will run into random encounters - some of them will be harmless, others carry danger or even an opponent. The use of technology provides you with a sense of security and fullness, but this is a very controversial pleasure. On the front line this technology is the hope of your detachment, but the first tanks are capricious, unreliable and very slow. Nevertheless, if your mission and the theater of operations allow, you can take a breezy ride on an armored car, which will support you. Combat uses typical turn-based game mechanics that are a bit similar to skirmish wargames.

Killing enemies and completing missions gives you experience points that allow your character to move to the next level. Each time the player gains a level, he receives several skill points to develop his class skills, and every three levels you can choose a perk. Perks provide an opportunity to further sharpen your character for a certain role in your squad or even acquire magical abilities.

Andre Lagran - famed Death Brigade veteran, fighting for the Alliance faction. He was one of the last defenders of the Border Line.

Specifically, each action and every step in your character’s progress will be very important, the d6 was chosen because of our desire to follow the number 6 in the numerical parameters of attributes, skills, and so on.

An important nuance that brings an element of uncertainty into a conventional war is magic and its manifestations. At a camp deep in the rear lines near the forest, you can battle a gang of vampires, unconquered, and ghosts near the mass graves in place of the old battleground - all this is just the beginning. The select few who own the Gift can use the Words of Power, that is, spells. They are dangerous opponents, but their spells depend entirely on their intelligence and the benevolence of the Higher Powers. Much worse is meeting one of the Touched - a poor fellow who has touched by breath of chthonic chaos from outside of this world. These magicians are literally bursting from the eldritch energy boiling inside them, their bodies can mutate, and they themselves do not use spells, they directly try to control the flows of magical energy with random side effects. Where technology falls, magic creates incredible things.

Interbellum is a fantasy dieselpunk setting. or rather technomagic. What if the usual fantasy world met the era of the first mechanized wars? A world where magic was forgotten for hundreds of years, rediscovered and used to break the positional stalemate, this led to an arms race that spawned 1000-ton steel beasts on land and in the air, make fortresses airborne or devastate whole cities with a few bombs. A world that replaced typical Evil Lords with dictators, knights with armored vehicles, and guilds with corporations. In this world fears of a trench war can materialize, your neighbors can be werewolf infiltrators, and the ghosts of your fallen comrades in no-man's land terrorize the enemy.

Istalian Bastion-class landship. 100 tons of perfect engineering.

Unlike other similar settings, here dieselpunk is dominant, but the fantasy elements serve to deconstruct stereotypes. Of course, magic can be used to create fireballs, teleport and other cool stuff, but the main difference is that magic is used for creating new technologies and machines. In fact, magic used as justification for the typical attributes of a dieselpunk - weird tech, giant vehicles, mutants, etc.

On Jule 7, in the year 1404, the Great War began. Beginning for trivial reasons as a conflict between the two superpowers and their satellites, in 9 years of hellish warfare it grew into a global slaughter between four geopolitical blocs. Hundreds of millions of people were involved, many of them died.

While the three superpowers were competing in the race for technical advancement, the fourth superpower collected magical knowledge bit by bit and united them with its own. From the very beginning of the war, the Sidhean Empire was able to surprise everyone by putting hundreds of combat mages on the battlefield. What was considered lost forever, had returned.

After centuries of oblivion, magic and many other fragments of the Old World rose again. Technology tamed the magic and this created a new leap in scientific and technological development, making the previously impossible now possible.

The playable period in setting will cover almost 30 years, including the Great War for lovers of epic conflict, and local wars in the post-war period. Your character can begin his story as cannon fodder in a world war, and after it become a revolutionary or a mercenary, if he survives on the battlefield.

Factions:

Coalition - a bloc created by one of the oldest and largest human states in the Interbellum world, called the Ecumenical Empire. The imperial interests lie in the domination of Hearthland and creating more satellites. The most industrially advanced faction of the setting, at the expense of the environment, resulting in decaying forests around their smoke-filled megacities. The rigid rule of law and severe punishments are combined with imperial chauvinism, which is a blight on the Empire’s diplomacy, but creates protectionism for their inner policy and trade. The Empire is dominated by materialism and atheism because of the old doctrine that "all gods are evil, and their priests are tyrants”. After the Great War, the Empire was mired in the civil war and disintegrated into several states during the revolution, but the Coalition remained. The Galrian Republic preserved most of the heritage of the Empire, but brought more freedom at the cost of devastation, bureaucracy, the political demagogy and corruption.

Alliance - a union of conservative monarchical states clinging to domination in the central region of the world. A forced union of former rivals against a common enemy, compensates for its technological backwardness with a development balance between agriculture and industry. Having lost almost a quarter of its population in the Great War, in the post-war period it was almost split from within by crumbling empires and national liberation movements. Constant riots, insurrections and civil wars, mass poverty amid the luxury and wealth of untouchable despotic aristocrats all cast challenges on the young Alliance, which consists entirely of contradictions.

Northern League - a self-isolated and mystic bloc of races, nations and countries, united as satellites around the totalitarian elven state, the oldest known race. Forged by constant conflicts with mankind and remembrance of old grudges, northern elves spent more than a thousand years studying artifacts and restoring the knowledge of the Forerunner race, multiplying their magical skills while in the rest of the world technology supplanted the magic. This is the most fantastical and magic-heavy faction of the setting, almost exclusively having full access to fancy magic stuff. Their lag in industrial strength is balanced out by enchanted weapons and technomagic devices, for example, they can raise old fortresses in the air. Dragon-bombers? Check. Trolls with hand cannons? Check. Troopers with magic rayguns? Check. Machines made of living metal, fueled by the dying person imprisoned in them? Oh, boy…

Albian Commonwealth - a bloc of formally independent satellites ruled by the Albian Empire. It is an island-based colonial power, ruling the seas and controlling a large portion of international trade, as well as the development and exploitation of Aborigines in the colonies. Slavery, class and racial segregation are also flourishing in the Commonwealth. However, if you were born a free person in the Commonwealth, then you have many ways to find your place in life. Once in the past, Albia was just a distant province of the Ecumenical Empire, splitting from it during the Dark Ages. Separatists formed a political system around the union of guilds, traders, mercenaries and pirates, which allowed them to capitalize on their advantageous geographical position and control the main oceanic trade routes. They also started a era of great geographical discoveries.

You can also read parts of the lore on our Patreon page.

Kickstarter campaign ends: Thu, June 7 2018 12:22 AM BST

Website: Patreon

#RPG #kickstarter #Interbellum #Studio Ludens

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classyfoxdestiny · 3 years ago

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Real-world evidence and the path from data to impact

From the intense shock of the COVID-19 pandemic to the effects of climate change, our global society has never faced greater risk. The Societal Resilience team at Microsoft Research was established in recognition of this risk and tasked with developing open technologies that enable a scalable response in times of crisis. And just as we think about scalability in a holistic way—scaling across different forms of common problems, for different partners, in different domains—we also take a multi-horizon view of what it means to respond to crisis.

When an acute crisis strikes, it creates an urgency to help real people, right now. However, not all crises are acute, and not all forms of response deliver direct assistance. While we need to attend to foreground crises like floods, fire, and famine, we also need to pay attention to the background crises that precipitate them—for many, the background crisis is already the foreground of their lives. To give an example, with climate change, the potential long-term casualty is the human race. But climate migration is happening all over the world already, and it disproportionately affects some of the poorest and most vulnerable countries.

Crises can also feed into and amplify one another. For example, the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration (IOM) reports that migration in general, and crisis events in particular, are key drivers of human trafficking and exploitation. Migration push factors can become exacerbated during times of crisis, and people may face extreme vulnerability when forced to migrate amid a lack of safe and regular migration pathways. Human exploitation and trafficking are a breach of the most fundamental human rights and show what can happen when societies fail to prevent the emergence of systemic vulnerability within their populations. By tackling existing sources of vulnerability and exploitation now, we can learn how to deliver more effective responses to the interconnected crises of the future. To build resilience in these areas, researchers at Microsoft and their collaborators have been working on a number of tools that help domain experts translate real-world data into evidence. All three tools and case studies presented in this post share a common idea: that a hidden structure exists within the many combinations of attributes that constitute real-world data, and that both domain knowledge and data tools are needed to make sense of this structure and inform real-world response. To learn more about these efforts, read the accompanying AI for Business and Technology blog post. Note that several of the technologies in this post will be presented in greater detail at the Microsoft Research Summit on October 19–21, 2021.

Microsoft Research Summit

October 19–21, 2021

At this inaugural event, researchers and engineers across Microsoft, and our colleagues in academia, industry, and government will come together to discuss cutting-edge work that is pushing the limits of science and technology.

Supporting evidence-based policy

For crisis response at the level above individual assistance, we need to think in terms of policy—how should we allocate people, money, and other resources towards tackling both the causes and consequences of the crisis?

In such situations, we need evidence that can inform new policies and evaluate existing ones, whether the public policy of governments or the private policy of organizations. Returning to the link between crises and trafficking, if policy makers do not have access to supporting evidence because it doesn’t exist or cannot be shared, or if they are not persuaded by the weight of evidence in support of the causal relationship, they will not enact policies that ensure appropriate intervention and direct assistance when the time comes.

Policy is the greatest lever we have to save lives and livelihoods at scale. Building technology for evidence-based policy is how we maximize our leverage as we work to make societies more resilient.

Developing real-world evidence

Real-world problems affecting societal resilience leave a trail of “real-world data” (RWD) in their wake. This concept originated in the medical field to differentiate observational data collected for some other purpose (for example, electronic health records and healthcare claims) from experimental data collected through, and for the specific purpose of, a randomized controlled event (like a clinical trial).

The corresponding notion of “real-world evidence” (RWE) similarly emerged in the medical field, defined in 21 U.S. Code § 355g of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act as “data regarding the usage, or the potential benefits or risks, of a drug derived from sources other than traditional clinical trials.” While our RWE research is partly inspired by the methods used to derive RWE from RWD in a medical context, we also take a broader view of what counts as evidence for decision making and policy making across unrelated fields.

For problems like human trafficking, for example, it would be unethical to run a randomized controlled trial in which trafficking is allowed to happen. In this case, observational data describing victims of trafficking, collected at the point of assistance, is the next best source of data. Indeed, this kind of positive feedback loop, with direct assistance activities informing evidence-based policy and evidence-based policy informing the allocation of assistance resources, is one of the main ways in which targeted technology development could make a significant difference to real-world outcomes.

Empowering domain experts

In practice, however, facilitating positive feedback between assistance and policy activities means dealing with multiple challenges that hinder the progression from data to evidence, to policy, to impact. The people and organizations collecting data on the front line are rarely those responsible for making or evaluating the impact of policy, just as those with the technical expertise to develop evidence are rarely those with the domain expertise needed to interpret and act on that evidence.

To bridge these gaps, we work with domain experts to design tools that democratize the practice of evidence development—reducing reliance on data scientists and other data specialists whose skills are in short supply, especially during a crisis.

Real-world evidence in action

Over the following sections, we describe tools for developing different kinds of real-world evidence in response to the distinctive characteristics—and challenges—of accessing, analyzing, and acting on real-world data. In each case, we use examples drawn from our efforts to counter human trafficking and modern slavery.

Developing evidence of correlation from private data

Research challenge

When people can’t see the data describing a phenomenon, they can’t make effective policy decisions at any level. However, many real-world datasets relate to individuals and cannot be shared with other organizations because of privacy concerns and data protection regulations.

This challenge arose when Microsoft participated in Tech Against Trafficking (TAT)—a coalition of technology companies (currently Amazon, BT, Microsoft, and Salesforce) working to combat trafficking with technology. In the 2019 TAT Accelerator Program, TAT member companies worked together to support the Counter Trafficking Data Collaborative (CTDC)—an initiative run by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) that pools data from organizations including, IOM, Polaris, Liberty Shared, OTSH, and A21, to create the world’s largest database of individual survivors of trafficking.

The CTDC data hub makes derivatives of this data openly available as a way of informing evidence-based policy against human trafficking, through data maps, dashboards, and stories that are accessible to policy makers. This raises risks to privacy. For example, if traffickers believe they have identified a victim within published data artifacts, they may assume that this implies collaboration with the authorities in ways that may prompt retaliation. To get around this, CTDC data is de-identified and anonymized using standard approaches. But this is cumbersome, forces a sacrifice of the data’s analytic utility, and may not remove all residual risks to privacy and safety.

Research question

How can we enable policy makers in one organization to view and explore the private data collected and controlled by another in a way that preserves the privacy of groups of data subjects, preserves the utility of datasets, and is accessible to all data stakeholders?

Enabling technology

We developed the concept of a Synthetic Data Showcase as a new mechanism for privacy-preserving data release, now available on GitHub and as an interactive AI Lab. Synthetic data is generated in a way that reproduces the structure and statistics of a sensitive dataset, but with the guarantee that every combination of attributes in the records appears at least k times in the records of the sensitive dataset and therefore cannot be used to isolate any actual groups of individuals smaller than k. In other words, we use synthetic data to generalize k-anonymity to all attributes of a dataset—not just a subset of attributes determined in advance to be identifying in combination.

Alongside the synthetic data, we also release aggregate data on all short combinations of attributes, to both validate the utility of the synthetic data and to retrieve actual counts (as a multiple of k) for official reporting. Finally, we combine both anonymous datasets in an automatically generated Power BI report for an interactive, visual, and accessible form of data exploration. The resulting evidence is at the level of correlation—both across data attributes, as reflected by their joint counts, and across datasets, as reflected by the similarity of counts calculated over the sensitive versus synthetic datasets.

In this example, we use Power BI to support privacy-preserving exploration of the anonymous datasets generated by our Synthetic Data Showcase tool. Having selected the records of victims in the age range 9–17, we can see the distributions of multiple additional attributes contained in these records: the year the victim was registered, gender, country of citizenship and exploitation, and type of labor or sexual exploitation. All of the counts in these distributions are dynamically generated by Power BI filtering and aggregating records of the synthetic dataset. These “estimated” counts are compared on the right with “actual” counts precomputed over the sensitive data, showing that the synthetic dataset accurately captures the structure of the sensitive data for the selected age range. For these victims aged 9–17, the association with “typeOfLabourOther” indicates a potential need to expand the data schema to support more targeted policy design tackling forced labor of children.

Our ability to publish and collaborate on open software enables us to work with IOM on creating a Synthetic Data Showcase for their full, de-identified victim database without ever accessing the highly sensitive data ourselves. Today, IOM has announced the resulting update to the CTDC website, sharing data on more than three times as many victims as before. This includes several new data columns, with group-level privacy guarantees and utility that anyone can interactively verify.

With the new Global Human Trafficking Synthetic Dataset, Synthetic Data Showcase has enabled IOM and CTDC to share data that couldn’t otherwise be shared, helping address problems that couldn’t otherwise be solved. In the following sections, we show how this dataset can be used to develop additional types of evidence to fight trafficking.

IOM aims to share the new technique with counter-trafficking organizations worldwide as part of a wider program to improve the production of data and evidence on human trafficking. This includes establishing new international standards and guidance to support governments in producing high-quality administrative data, in partnership with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, and a package of data standards and information management tools for frontline counter-trafficking agencies.

Further details of the TAT-CTDC-IOM-Microsoft collaboration:

Developing evidence of causation from observational data

Research challenge

If people can’t see the causation driving a phenomenon, they can’t effectively make strategic policy decisions about where to invest resources over the long-term. However, counts and correlations derived from data cannot by themselves be used to confirm the presence of a causal relationship within a domain, or estimate the size of the causal effect.

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered an unprecedented effort to identify existing drugs that may reduce mortality and other adverse outcomes of infection. Through the Microsoft Research Studies in Pandemic Preparedness program, scientists at Johns Hopkins University and Stanford have developed new guidelines for performing retrospective analysis of pharmacoepidemiological data in a manner that emulates, to the extent possible, a randomized controlled trial. This capability is valuable whenever it isn’t possible, affordable, or ethical to run a trial for a given treatment.

Microsoft Research also has world-leading experts studying the kind of causal inference needed for trial emulation, as well as the DoWhy and EconML libraries with which to perform it. However, such guidelines and libraries remain inaccessible to experts in other domains who lack expertise in data science and causal inference. This includes people working on anti-trafficking who seek to understand the causal effect of factors, like migration and crises, on the extent and type of trafficking in order to formulate a more effective policy response.

Research question

How can we empower domain experts to answer causal questions using observational data collected for some other purpose in a way that emulates a randomized controlled trial, controls for the inherent biases of the data collection process, and doesn’t require prior expertise in data science or causal inference?

Enabling technology

Building on the simplified and structured approach to causal inference promoted by DoWhy, we have developed ShowWhy: an interactive application for guided causal inference over observational data. ShowWhy assumes no prior familiarity with coding or causal inference, yet enables the user to:

formulate a causal question

capture relevant domain knowledge

derive corresponding data variables

produce and defend estimates of the average causal effect

Behind the scenes, ShowWhy uses a combination of approaches from DoWhy, EconML, and CausalML to perform causal inference in Python, while also eliciting the assumptions, decisions, and justifications needed for others to evaluate the standard of evidence represented by the results. Following an analysis, users can export Jupyter Notebooks and other reports that document the end-to-end process in forms suitable for audiences ranging from data scientists evaluating the analysis to decision makers evaluating the appropriate policy response.

In this example, we use the ShowWhy application to evaluate the causal claim that disasters increase the severity of control experienced by trafficking victims. A prior theory of labor coercion proposes that such severity increases with the lack of alternative options (Acemoglu and Wolitzky, 2011), and crisis situations could rapidly remove all such options available to affected individuals. Starting with the CTDC Global Human Trafficking Synthetic Dataset as real-world data on the experiences of individual victims, we can use ShowWhy to model the causal structure of the domain. This includes identifying potential confounders that must be controlled for, i.e., factors assumed to have a causal influence on both the exposure and outcome. One such example is the “rule of law” in the affected country, which may exacerbate the human consequences of any natural disaster. By using a variety of models, together with a variety of question definitions and statistical estimators, ShowWhy can produce a range of causal estimates for each combination of assumptions, offering a broad base of evidence for decision making and policy response.

One of the most challenging aspects of causal inference is knowing which of multiple reasonable decisions to make at each step of the process. This includes how to define the population, exposure, and outcome of interest, how to model the causal structure of the domain, which estimation approach to use, and so on. Nonexperts deal with even greater uncertainty about whether the final result may hinge on some arbitrary decision, like the precise value of a threshold or the contents of a query.

To address this uncertainty and counter any claims of selective reporting in support of a preferred hypothesis, ShowWhy enables specification curve analysis, in which all reasonable specifications of the causal inference task can be estimated, refuted, and jointly analyzed for significance. While a single estimate of the causal effect can inspire both overconfidence and underconfidence—depending on the prior beliefs of the audience—ShowWhy promotes a more balanced discussion about the overall strength (and contingency) of a much broader body of evidence. ShowWhy shifts the focus to where it matters: from a theoretical debate about the validity of a given result to a practical debate about the validity of decisions that make a meaningful difference to such results in practice.

ShowWhy will be released open-source on GitHub in late 2021. While this tool can be used to answer a wide range of causal questions across domains, we are particularly interested in how it can help our partners understand the drivers of human trafficking and exploitation.

Just as ShowWhy aims to make the practice of causal inference accessible to many for the first time, the Global Human Trafficking Synthetic Dataset similarly makes available, for the first time, rich microdata describing all victims of trafficking identified by CTDC data contributors. At the upcoming Microsoft Research Summit, October 19–21, 2021, we’ll show how this combination of resources can enable community-generated evidence in support of, for example, the link between crises and trafficking reported by IOM.

While such evidence generated from synthetic data is suggestive rather than conclusive, it allows the community to conceive and evaluate causal questions that would otherwise be inconceivable. And because ShowWhy enables simple reproduction of analyses over alternative datasets, organizations like IOM that control highly sensitive data can easily use their own data to validate any external analyses performed using synthetic data.

Partner use of retrospective pharmacoepidemiological analysis in support of off-label drug discovery in the fight against COVID-19 and other respiratory infections:

Developing evidence of change from temporal data

Research challenge

If people can’t see the structure and dynamics of a phenomenon, they can’t make effective policy decisions at the tactical level. However, in situations with substantial variability in how data observations occur over time, it can be difficult to separate meaningful changes from the noise.

This challenge arose in the 2021 TAT Accelerator Program, currently in progress, with Unseen UK and Seattle Against Slavery as participating organizations. For Unseen, one major challenge is identifying hidden patterns and emerging trends within case records generated through calls to the UK Modern Slavery and Exploitation helpline.

While it is easy to notice a dramatic spike in any one of the many attributes that describe a trafficking case (for example, an increase in reports linked to a particular location, industry, or age range), it is much harder to identify unusual or unusually frequent combinations of attributes (for example, a particular location, industry, and age range) that may represent an underlying change in real-world trafficking activity.

Compared with statistics on individual attributes, attribute combinations describe actual cases in ways that can directly inform targeted policy responses. The problem is that the number of attribute combinations grows combinatorially, each combination having a maximum frequency at some point in time, and only a small proportion of these maxima representing a meaningful change.

Research question

How can we detect meaningful changes within noisy data streams, in a way that accounts for intrinsic variability over time, reveals emerging groups of interrelated records and attribute values, and enables differentiated policy response?

Enabling technology

For this problem, we are collaborating with the School of Mathematics Research at the University of Bristol on how to apply their recent advances in graph statistics to the analysis of human trafficking data. With the CTDC Global Human Trafficking Synthetic Dataset as representative data, we can connect pairs of attributes based on the number of records sharing both attributes in each time period of interest (for example, for each year of victim registration).

Given this time series of graphs, we can use Unfolded Adjacency Spectral Embedding (UASE) to map all attributes over all time periods into a single embedded space with the strong stability guarantee that constant positions in this space represent constant patterns of behavior. The more similar the behavior of two nodes, the closer their positions in the embedding. By applying new insights into the measurement of relatedness within embedded spaces, we can identify groups of attribute nodes “converging” towards one another in a given time period, with respect to all other periods, as a measure of meaningful change normalized over all attributes and periods.

To date, we have informally observed that combinations of converging attributes typically coincide with the maximum absolute or relative frequency of the detected attribute combination over all time—something that would immediately be understood as an “insight.” Due to the graph method used to generate it, these insights are both structurally and statistically meaningful. However, understanding whether this represents a meaningful change in the real world demands domain knowledge beyond the data. This is why, as with Synthetic Data Showcase, we use Power BI to create visual interfaces for interactively exploring and explaining sets of candidate insights in the context of other real-world data sources, like UN SDG indicators on established causes of human trafficking.

In this example, we use Power BI to review patterns detected in the CTDC Global Human Trafficking Synthetic Dataset. Having selected 2019 as a year of interest, we can see the most salient pattern in that period describes 100 citizens of Micronesia exploited in the US. Comparing this spike with UN SDG indicators, we observe that 2019 saw a substantial increase in the number of people directly affected by disaster in Micronesia: around 30% of the population. Web search revealed that Micronesia was so badly impacted by Typhoon Wutip in February 2019 that it required a humanitarian response by IOM. Use of the dataset and tool therefore revealed a plausible connection between a localized disaster event and a trafficking victim cluster that might warrant further investigation and potential policy response.

With the 2021 TAT accelerator still at an early stage, the CTDC Global Human Trafficking Synthetic Dataset provided a realistic and recognizable foundation for demonstrating new analytic capabilities that can help address real, emerging (or previously unobserved) forms of the problem. As the accelerator proceeds, we will work to enable each organization to apply these capabilities to their own data, progressing through a series of external demonstrations on open data, mock data, and de-identified data, toward internal testing on actual sensitive data and integration with real-world tools and workflows.

At the 2021 Microsoft Research Summit, we will share our TAT accelerator work in progress and demonstrate our new dynamic graph analysis capabilities using the newly available CTDC Global Human Trafficking Synthetic Dataset, which contains evidence of twice as many attribute relationships as the previous k-anonymous data release. Following the summit, we will also update our open-source graspologic graph statistics package to include all of the methods from our collaborators at University of Bristol supporting our anti-trafficking efforts. Examples of end-to-end use of these methods, complete with interactive Power BI reports, will be made available following the conclusion of the TAT accelerator in early 2022.

Partner research into dynamic graph embedding used in this case study and our graspologic graph statistics package:

Towards combinatorial impact

For Synthetic Data Showcase, attribute combinations represent privacy to be preserved. For ShowWhy, they represent bias to be controlled. And for our dynamic graph capabilities, they represent insights to be revealed. The result in each case is a form of evidence that wouldn’t otherwise exist, used to tackle problems that couldn’t otherwise be solved. And while we have addressed the private, observational, and temporal nature of real-world data separately, the reality is that many datasets across domains share all these qualities. By making our collection of real-world evidence tools available open-source, we hope to maximize the ability of organizations around the world to contribute to a shared evidence base in their problem domain, for any and all problems of societal significance, both today and into the future.

As a next step for our anti-trafficking work in particular, we are also excited to announce that Microsoft has joined TellFinder Alliance—a global network of partners working to combat human trafficking using ephemeral web data. The associated TellFinder application already helps investigators and analysts develop evidence at the case level, leading to the prosecution of both individual traffickers and organized trafficking networks. By applying our tools, we hope to develop the evidence that will help shape future interventions at the policy level—disrupting the mechanisms by which trafficking takes place and leaving no room in society for any kind of slavery or exploitation.

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therebbecalove · 4 years ago

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How will the chemical industry develop in 2025 and beyond

In the new ecosystem world, how to integrate and what role to play in which ecosystem, relative to asset size, will be critical. Just as important is how dynamically you will change, respond and adapt to new market thinking, and how easy it is for the organization to follow or even lead.

Significant are recent chemical industry trends, such as digital supply chains, vertical and horizontal integration with everyone and everything (e.g., the Internet of Things), large-scale mergers and acquisitions, and downstream migration to specialty chemicals.

However, they are only short-term extensions and optimizations of current operating patterns. They will not be able to ensure the long-term success of chemical companies because they remain stuck within the current industry mindset: seeking new competitive advantages by establishing newer, stronger barriers to market entry (whether low costs or unique value or services).

Reinventing Chemistry: The World of Chemistry in 2025

In the future, most of today's chemical industry participants will become general production industrial foundation enterprises serving multiple ecosystems of slavery. They will be stuck, like the telecom infrastructure providers that provide the basic infrastructure for today's hyperconnected world, while the other tech giants reap the biggest profits.

On the basis of general production, many ecosystem enterprises operate within the dedicated ecosystem. Both are intertwined with the third business category of the platform business, which may be decentralized and can automate much of the work.

conclusion

For today's chemical companies, the consequence will be that their vast assets and diversified conglomerates focused on economies of scale and synergies will not provide them with a competitive advantage; Or, if they do, they won't make strategic sense because the rules of the game have changed.

So instead of imagining investing more assets in more assets or buying more companies, you can reimagine dividing your enterprise group into effective operating units (vertical and horizontal links) and which roles will apply to which units in the future. Open up and start working together instead of forcing competition. The future will be driven by information or knowledge; In this world, sharing will be key.

https://www.echemi.com/

#https://www.echemi.com/

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wnnbdarklord · 7 years ago

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Dear Worldbuilding Exchange 2018 creator!

Hi! This is my first year participating and I am excite!

AO3 username: wnnbdarklord

Worldbuilding Exchange 2018 Letter:

General Likes

Art Likes

Do Not Wants

Marvel Cinematic Universe

Request #1 - worldbuilding Asgard and/or Jotunheim

Request #2 - worldbuilding Sokovia Accords, Wakanda, Stark Industries

Middle Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Star Trek the Next Generation

General Likes:

Polyamory, gen, het, slash, femslash, families of choice, competence, BAMF female characters, angst, hurt/comfort, teamfic, pretty much all the tropes especially if there is a twist, worldbuilding, humor, redemption, for want of a nail AUs, time travel, werewolves, dragons, crossovers, non fantasy/SF canons encountering the supernatural/aliens, fix it fics

For worldbuilding specific stuff: I think I'd be happy with pretty much any deeper exploration of canon or implications of canon. Building on throwaway references is also great as is considering logical endpoints that might not even have been intended by the creators. Or exploring something the creators never even mentioned but that has to exist for that world to be at all functional (like agriculture and trade in fantasy worlds as something rarely mentioned or explored in depth). Or unintended applications of technology and/or magic that exist in canon. Or exploring how history would change with the presence of certain canonical elements.

Feel free to combine or mix up the prompts! The character choices are mostly there just as preferences or ones I think would fit with the worldbuilding prompts. Since the focus of this exchange is on the worldbuilding, I'd be perfectly happy to get something that doesn't focus on any of the characters or even original characters.

All of my requests are open for either fic, art or in universe meta. I love fics that blur the lines with meta.

Art Likes:

I’m pretty sure I’d love any art! I love sketchy styles with maybe just a splash of color to draw the eye. Black and white images with only one color to highlight Important Things is A+. That said, any art in any style would be amazing! As for subject matter, I’d love to see any scenes from the prompts or stuff from my likes.

Do Not Wants:

The ones bolded are the most important to leave out, but here is an expanded list:

permanent character death, incest, rape, dubcon, torture porn, underage stuff, infidelity, humiliation, character bashing, ship bashing, no powers AUs, love triangles, fake married/dating, power imbalances in relationships, hate sex, scat/watersports, necrophilia, PWP, abuse, fusions, zombies, 1st person POV, issue fic, themes of cynicism and futility, nihilism that isn't of the optimistic kind, animal abuse, unrequested ships, slavery, genderswap of the always an x kind, unrequested AUs , jealousy

Marvel Cinematic Universe

Request #1 - worldbuilding Asgard and/or Jotunheim

Loki (MCU) || Thor (MCU) || Hela (MCU) || Brunnhilde | Valkyrie (MCU) || Original Character(s) (MCU) || Any or No Characters (MCU)

WB: Jotunheim (MCU)

Ever since the first Thor movie, I've wanted more about Jotunheim. Anything! What is their culture like? Society? Geography? Politics? Flora and fauna? Gender? Medicine? Education? Trade? It'd be really cool if there was something dealing with the differences pre and post war with Asgard.

Why did they try to colonize Midgard? Given the revelations about Asgard in Ragnarok, were the Jotnar even trying to turn the Earth into Jotunheim's image, or was that just propaganda by Odin and the possibly innocuous presence of Jotnar on Midgard a convenient excuse for more war? Was their attempt one of desperation?

How are their relations with the other Realms? Do they still have any trade with them after the war? What does Jotunheim think about the events of the Thor movie? Are they even aware who it was that tried to destroy them? What were the consequences of the Bifrost attack? Severe planetwide or just local?

For art: I'd love to see a map of Jotunheim or plant or animal studies. Or maybe something detailing Jotnar clothing. Or architecture. Or what their language and alphabet looks like.

For in universe meta/fic: Excerpts from books or videos from various scholars on all the Realms. This could be really interesting, especially as a way to see how the Jotnar view themselves vs others, especially with Asgardian propaganda (and racism in their tendency to refer to any species but their own in derogatory terms). Or maybe something detailing what Thor and Loki would have learned through their education, skewed as it likely was. There had to be some reason they were both so convinced Jotnar were monsters.

WB: Aesir and/or Jotnar biology (MCU)

I love me some alien biology worldbuilding! They're clearly more hardy than humans, stronger and longer lived, but what are the other differences? Why does Odin disintegrate into sparkles upon death, but not other Aesir? Are there developmental differences between Aesir and Jotnar? Is one more long lived than the other? Hardier? What about nutritional requirements? Are they allergic to any foods the other is not? Do Jotnar have hair? Horns?

Any reproductive differences? Aesir seem to align to human norms fairly well (and what if they don't?), but do Jotnar have more complicated arrangements? What is their sense of smell, taste and vision like? In the myths, Jotnar were shapeshifters and so is Loki in the MCU. Is this a species wide thing or just more common on Jotunheim? How do their instincts differ

How do Aesir and Jotnar powers work? Why do Odin, Hela, Heimdall and Thor have powers, but the rest of the population doesn't seem to? How does the freezing touch of Jotnar work? Is it constant or just a defense mechanism? How cold can they get to shatter leather and metal made by Asgardians? Can all of them produce ice?

For fic: I'd love something where Loki is forced to confront his Jotun form long term. Perhaps Odin's spell on him fails when Asgard is destroyed and he'll have to deal with whatever differences there are.

For art: Anatomical studies and/or comparisons would be amazing! I'd be especially delighted with anything highlighting the differences.

WB: Asgard and its history (MCU) || WB: Relations Between Asgard and the Other Realms (MCU) || WB: Politics of Asgard (MCU)

All of these seem thematically related, so I'm lumping them together. Feel free to focus on whichever you want or combine as you please!

Ragnarok really made me hanker for more info about Asgard's past and its relationship with the other Realms. How did Odin and Hela go about their conquests? The murals depict Asgard being built by slaves. Where did the slaves come from? What happened to them?

Neither Thor or Loki are aware of Asgard's true history. What were they taught instead? Was that just Odin being Odin and keeping secrets, or was there some magic or technology behind Asgard's collective amnesia? Or just fear of the king?

How were Asgard's relations to the other Realms affected by its bloody history? Do the other Realms remember it? How were they affected by it? Have they recovered? Has Asgard purposefully and actively kept them lower, despite all its words of peace later? What was the relationship like after Loki-as-Odin pulled Asgard away from actively policing the other Realms?

How has Asgard itself been affected by these revelations? Its destruction? Do the people start a revolution on the ship? Is there a reason they're so passive throughout Hela's reappearance? They didn't seem shocked or particularly resentful of Loki usurping Odin's place either.

For fic: I'd love something where the Asgardian refugees have to contend with going from the top of the pile to the bottom. How would the other Realms treat them?

For art: I'd love to see more of the murals! What other secrets has Odin been keeping? How prevalent are they? I'd love a before and after like in the movie, but for other events.

WB: Relationship between magic and science (MCU)

Thor says they're one and the same on Asgard. Is that true elsewhere? I mean, there seem to be quite a few differences functionally. How does magic work and how is it different from science? Is everything on Asgard just technology so advanced it basically works like magic? If not and magic is actually a thing, how does it work? Can anyone do it with enough study? Does there have to be a natural aptitude for it beforehand? Or are there degrees of separation where anyone can do magic with certain artifacts and rituals, but only naturally born magic users can use it without those interfaces? Is shapeshifting magic, a natural ability or technology?

For fic: I'd love something dealing with Loki learning magic, or even Thor trying to learn it! They both seem fairly comfortable with advanced technology, but Asgard itself doesn't seem to have any visible tech. How does that work on Asgard?

Request #2 - worldbuilding Sokovia Accords, Wakanda, Stark Industries

Tony Stark (MCU) || Pepper Potts (MCU) || James "Rhodey" Rhodes (MCU) || T'Challa (MCU) || Original Character(s) (MCU)

These requests might not be as detailed as the Asgardian stuff above, but don't take it to mean I'm less enthusiastic for them! I just found it easier to come up with prompts there. I'm sure I'll be happy with whatever you come up with!

WB: Stark Industries (MCU)

Stark Industries sounds like it should be a huge corporation! With all the advanced tech in the MCU in general, what wonders does SI create that make the MCU just that bit different from our Earth? How did the company restructure after Tony returned from Afghanistan? With SI's focus on clean energy, is climate change less of a big deal in the MCU?

What's the legal differentiation between SI and Iron Man and the Avengers? Especially after the Sokovia Accords? What about Tony's work for SHIELD before it went under? What's the public's perception of SI after everything? What does the day to day running of SI look like? Perhaps a perspective from the average worker that has to deal with the fallout of their boss being a superhero/involved with a superhero?

How did the internal shakeup of SI go after Obadiah Stane and his double dealing? After SHIELD fell, how many of its agents sought refuge with SI? Is Hill still there after the Civil War? What did SI get up to after the events of the Avengers? Did they get access from the government to the Chitauri tech?

For art: I'd love something schematic-y for one of their products or maybe pamphlets or something from their public relations department. Or magazine and newspaper articles on SI or Tony, Pepper or Rhodey.

WB: Sokovia Accords (MCU) || WB: Public Relations and superheroes/related agencies (MCU)

I'm Team Tony, so I don't really want anything dealing directly with Steve and his team, but I also don't want any character bashing. I just really don't understand Steve's perspective. Ross is definitely an asshole who used the Sokovia Accords as an opportunity to push his agenda, but the concept itself did not originate from him. And he isn't capable of single handedly forcing 117 countries to agree to them. I don't think the UN works like that.

I also don't think the script writers know what the UN works like either? So, give me the Sokovia Accords with more of a focus on the legal and diplomatic realities rather than the dramatic tension necessary in a movie! They had to have been in the works for years at the very least, how did none of the Avengers know about them? Or did they and it just wasn't mentioned in the movie? How many times were they amended? How will they be amended? How do they work in practice? They certainly weren't ratified during the bombing because of the bombing, so why did the movie proceed as though they were in full force?

What does superhero PR look like in the MCU? Before the Accords? After?

WB: Wakanda increasing its international openness (MCU)

I don't have anything in particular in mind for this, I just saw the tag and my brain went !!! How and why does Wakanda decide to stop its isolationist policies? How does it affect them? How does it affect the rest of the world?

Middle Earth - J.R.R. Tolkien

Boromir (Middle Earth - Tolkien) || Faramir (Middle Earth - Tolkien) || Original Character(s) (Middle Earth - Tolkien) || Original Gondorian Scholar (Middle Earth - Tolkien) || Gandalf | Mithrandir (Middle Earth - Tolkien)

WB: Libraries & Archives (Middle Earth - Tolkien)

WB: Southern Middle Earth (Middle Earth - Tolkien)

WB: cultural differences between races (Middle Earth - Tolkien)

WB: trade in Gondor (Middle Earth - Tolkien)

WB: education in Middle Earth (Middle Earth - Tolkien)

WB: afterlife for non elven races (Middle Earth - Tolkien) /

WB: Mythology and Religion (Middle Earth - Tolkien)

I've been a Tolkien fan since I was 11, but haven't recently reread the books. I tend to float in and out of the fandom, but it is always near and dear to my heart. I don't really have detailed prompts for these, because it feels like they're pretty descriptive on their own.

I'd be most interested seeing something dealing with Gondor or Men in general throughout Middle-earth. In universe texts, stories, and songs dealing with aspects of the prompts would be great! Especially considering a lot of the mythology is presented to us as fact (despite the layers of 'it's just a translation' conceit) rather than from the perspective of the people themselves. The readers know what happens to Men when they die, but do the Men themselves know? Sure, there's accounts from the Elves and what the Valar and Maiar told them, but I doubt all of them are aware of it. Or if they had been at one point, how did that change after lack of contact?

Middle-earth is a big place, but we only really know a lot about one small part of it. What do the people we're familiar with think about the places we've never seen? Is there any contact at all? Are those places filled with familiar Races or is there more variety? Did they ever visit? What did they bring, if so? What did they leave with?

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Ken (Dirk Gently TV 2016) || Farah Black (Dirk Gently TV 2016) || Dirk Gently (Dirk Gently TV 2016) || Bart Curlish (Dirk Gently TV 2016) || Original Character(s) (Dirk Gently TV 2016)

WB: how the Blackwing subjects' powers work (Dirk Gently TV 2016) || WB: Cosmology (Dirk Gently TV 2016) || WB: Blackwing (Dirk Gently TV 2016)

Gosh, I just love this series so much! I want to know more about everything in it, but managed to limit myself to these :D

How does the universe work in DGHDA? In the second season it's implied that it's broken and that the Blackwing subjects are effectively the debugging programs of the universe. How does that work? How did Blackwing find them? Did they ever make a mistake? Are there more out there? What are they doing? How does the universe decide which people to chose? We also get to see the universe's backstage. Why do people's eyes go different in that place? Why were Amanda's and Todd's fairly normal, but Friedkin's were red? What does the glowy stuff mean?

There are a number of holistic identities and the way they work seems to be very varied. Francis Cardenas' power was very overt and amazingly powerful. Bart is basically unstoppable and Mona can turn into literally anything. Dirk's power, by contrast, is fairly low-key and unobtrusive. Has he fully realized his potential?

How did Blackwing come into existence? How long have they been operational? How were they so unsuccessful in determining their subjects' powers enough to lose almost all of their funding? Was it the recapturing of the subjects that made the universe broken? Anything dealing with Blackwing and their subjects during their captivity there would be great! Like, how did the logistics of keeping Ken in a taxi for 70 days even work? Things like that :D

Star Trek the Next Generation

Data (ST:TNG) || Jean-Luc Picard (ST:TNG) || Deanna Troi (ST:TNG) || Original Character(s) (ST:TNG) || Any or No Characters (ST:TNG) || Geordi La Forge (ST:TNG)

In most fandoms, I'm fine with a grimer, darker take, but for Star Trek I like it to encapsulate the ideals it was created with - namely, that we might not be perfect, but we can achieve so much if we're willing to try and strive to be better. Which isn't to say that life has to be perfect, but I'd like it to be hopeful. Cynicism need not apply.

WB: Warp Engines (ST: TNG)

There was a recent article about warp drive possibly not being such an impossibility anymore! The technical details would probably be beyond me, but I would love an explanation of Star Trek's warp engines combined with the real life science one! Give me all the pseudo technobabble!

WB: interspecies relationships (ST:TNG)

How common are they? How common is offspring? Genetic manipulation is forbidden in the Federation, but do people use it anyway to have children they otherwise might not be able to, legally or otherwise?

There's loads of culture clash between people from different countries from the same planet, how much more is there between two different species? Or does that make it easier in some ways?

WB: fashion and clothing (ST:TNG)

Honestly, this prompt was entirely and completely inspired by this tumblr post: http://cookiesforthedarkside.tumblr.com/post/169324738115/mosellegreen-justanothercarbonunit in which Gene Roddenberry has a problem with zippers. And buttons. By the time TNG rolled around, there were clothes with visible seams and such, but it was left ambiguous whether they were actually zippers. So, what does clothing without buttons or fasteners of any kind look like? How does it work? What material is it made out of? Is the lack of zippers and buttons the reason for some of the more...let's say eclectic looks?

WB: media reporting (ST:TNG)

Starfleet gets up to so many shenanigans, it's ridiculous. And we know reporters and journalists still exist! So, what do they report on? Is there a 24 hour news channel somewhere? Is there a gossip rag Picard secretly reads that absolutely butchers the Enterprise's mission reports? Are there dramatic readings of them in Ten Forward?

Are there a billion different channels of subspace radio that broadcasts all the local minutia of whatever system the Enterprise is currently in? Do they play it on the bridge?

I just feel like it'd be an interesting perspective on the little details of the Star Trek verse that have to be there, but we never really see. Go wild!

WB: AI rights and personhood (ST:TNG)

We know Data paved the way for AI rights in the ST verse. What ripples have his efforts caused? We know it's not just limited to him or other androids and robots - it seems like everytime we turn around, another hologram gains sentience. With the amount of holograms in use by the Federation, it could become a problem very quickly.

Do more androids eventually get built? Do the star ships themselves gain sentience? How would the Federation navigate these issues?

WB: Utopian Earth (ST:TNG)

It probably isn't a true Utopia, because those seem impossible and designed to fail, but I'd like to think it's pretty close. How does life for the average citizen of Earth look like? What do they do in a post-scarcity society? What do people not in Starfleet do? How do they live?

#worldbuilding exchange 2018 #worldbuilding

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frankkjonestx · 5 years ago

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How materials science has changed humankind — for better and worse

The Alchemy of Us Ainissa Ramirez MIT Press, $27.95

Humans have continually wielded materials, from steel to silicon, in new ways to send technology leaping forward. But those technologies have unintentionally molded our bodies and society, materials scientist and science writer Ainissa Ramirez argues in The Alchemy of Us.

Increasingly precise clocks — based on steel springs and then quartz crystals — kept society humming along in unison. But with the Industrial Revolution’s focus on factory schedules, humans became ever more obsessed with time, and our sleep habits suffered. Likewise, electric lights made with carbon filaments let people work and play for longer hours, but upset circadian rhythms, with a variety of negative health impacts (SN: 10/17/16).

But the knock-on effects haven’t been all bad: Telegraph wires of iron and copper allowed news to travel quickly across the United States beginning in the 1840s. The technology’s demand for short communications helped shape the clipped style of American newspapers, whose reporters used the technology to send dispatches from afar. That style inspired the concise, clear prose of Ernest Hemingway, Ramirez argues.

Packed with engaging, little-known stories from the history of science, the book provides sharp, straightforward explanations of the materials science behind these tales. Ramirez carefully selects the characters in her narratives, making for a refreshing departure from the lone scientific genius trope. Instead, we meet Ruth Belville, who carried around a highly accurate pocket watch and “sold time” in early 20th century England, and chemist Caroline Hunter and photographer Ken Williams, Polaroid employees who in the 1970s fought their employer over the use of instant photography to monitor South Africans during apartheid.

Bucking the tendency for hero worship in histories of science, Ramirez notes the failings of the figures she profiles. For example, Samuel Morse, known for his work on the telegraph, supported slavery and railed against immigrants.

The author’s excitement is infectious: As she raves about the “marvelous metamorphosis that occurs when carbon combines with iron” to make steel, the substance suddenly seems wondrous, with cakelike layers that make it both malleable and strong. Steel reappears in later chapters, weaving into stories of technologies that hinged on improved steel production.

The connections Ramirez draws between seemingly disparate ideas in science and culture are engaging. Throughout the book, the message is somber, but hopeful: Materials change us in ways we hadn’t expected. But by being aware of these effects, society can choose how to respond.

Buy The Alchemy of Us from Amazon.com. Science News is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. Please see our FAQ for more details.

from Tips By Frank https://www.sciencenews.org/article/how-materials-science-tech-has-changed-humankind-better-worse

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tremendouspeachduck · 6 years ago

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Who Else Wants To Know The Mystery Behind WORLD DOMINANCE?

First, take a look at the China video in menu to the left AND THEN continue to take the racist test in link below

Besides using population growth there’s Huawei and Meng Wanzhou. Who?

In other words, Meng is the heiress apparent of China’s largest and most advanced high-tech company, one which plays a key role in China’s grand strategy of global domination.

Huawei is a leader in 5G technology and, earlier this year, surpassed Apple to become the second-largest smartphone maker in the world behind Samsung.

But Huawei is much more than an innocent manufacturer of smartphones.

It is a spy agency of the Chinese Communist Party.

How do we know?

Because the party has repeatedly said so.

First in 2015 and then again in June 2017, the party declared that all Chinese companies must collaborate in gathering intelligence.

“All organizations and citizens,” reads Article 7 of China’s National Intelligence Law, “must support, assist with, and collaborate in national intelligence work, and guard the national intelligence work secrets they are privy to.”

All Chinese companies, whether they are private or owned by the state, are now part and parcel of the party’s massive overseas espionage campaign.

Huawei is a key part of this aggressive effort to spy on the rest of the world. The company’s smartphones, according to FBI Director Christopher Wray, can be used to “maliciously modify or steal information,” as well as “conduct undetected espionage.” Earlier this year the Pentagon banned the devices from all US military bases worldwide.

But Huawei, which has been specially designated as a “national champion,” has an even more important assignment from the Communist Party than simply listening in on phone conversations.

As a global leader in 5G technology, it has been tasked with installing 5G “fiber to the phone” networks in countries around the world.

In fact, “Made in China 2025” — the party’s aggressive plan to dominate the cutting-edge technologies of the 21st century — singles out Huawei as the key to achieving global 5G dominance.

Any network system installed by a company working hand-in-glove with China’s intelligence services raises the danger of not only cyber espionage, but also cyber-enabled technology theft.

And the danger doesn’t stop there.

The new superfast 5G networks, which are 100 times faster than 4G, will literally run the world of the future. Everything from smartphones to smart cities, from self-driving vehicles to, yes, even weapons systems, will be under their control.

In other words, whoever controls the 5G networks will control the world — or at least large parts of it.

Huawei has reportedly secured more than 25 commercial contracts for 5G, but has been locked out of an increasing number of countries around the world because of spying concerns.

The “Five Eyes” — Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the US — over the past year have waged a concerted campaign to block the Chinese tech giant from dominating next-generation wireless networks around the world. Not only have they largely kept Huawei out of their own countries, they have convinced other countries like Japan, India and Germany to go along, too.

Yet Huawei is far from finished. The company has grown into a global brand over the past two decades because, as a “national champion,” it is constantly being fed and nourished by the party and the military with low-interest-rate loans, privileged access to a protected domestic market, and other preferential treatment.

These various state subsidies continue, giving Huawei a huge and unfair advantage over its free-market competitors.

Huawei stands in the same relationship to the Chinese Communist Party as German steelmaker Alfried Krupp did to Germany’s National Socialists in the days leading up to World War II.

Just as Germany’s leading supplier of armaments basically became an arm of the Nazi machine after war broke out, so is China’s leading high-tech company an essential element of the party’s cold war plan to dominate the world of the future.

As far as “Princess” Meng is concerned, I expect that she will be found guilty of committing bank fraud, ordered to pay a fine, and then released. Even a billion-dollar fine would be chump change for a $75 billion corporation like Huawei.

The real payoff of her arrest lies elsewhere. It has exposed the massive campaign of espionage that Huawei is carrying out around the world at the behest of the party. It has revealed how that party dreams of a new world order in which China, not America, is dominant.

The two Chinese characters that make up Huawei’s name literally mean, “To Serve China.” That’s clear enough, isn’t it?

Now, China´s government-linked telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies has hired a senior Obama administration cyber security official as a lobbyist, according to a congressional filing. Samir Jain, former senior director for cybersecurity policy at the White House National Security Council, notified Congress March 27 that he is registering as a lobbyist for the Shenzhen-based Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. Jain is now with the lobbying firm Jones Day. According to his online biography for Jones Day, Jain worked at the White House from 2016 to 2017 and before that was an associate deputy attorney general from 2014 to 2015.

The SOB traitor.

HRW: ‘Men only’ job ads show ongoing discrimination in China

BEIJING (AP) – A human rights group says gender discrimination is widespread in the Chinese work force, with many hiring advertisements openly calling only for male applicants and using the attractiveness of female co-workers as a draw.

Human Rights Watch released the report Monday after looking at more than 36,000 job advertisements posted between 2013 and 2018 from recruiters, companies and the government.

China bans discrimination in both hiring and job advertising, but enforcement is weak. Government departments are among the offenders, according to the report, with 55 percent of jobs advertised by the Ministry of Public Security last year specifying “men only.”

These practices widen gaps in both female work participation and pay, according to official data.

I love the adobe house design, don’t you? Along with this house comes the idea of rocks and gravel landscaping. This type of design is inspired by the American and Mexican Indians. What about the ROCK & Gravel garden?

Go ahead and learn THIS DANCE - you can do it

Time for supper – which sounds best?

Delicious Mother’s Day Feast

Amazing grilled fish, burgers or hot dogs

https://bit.ly/2CBiz79 <– Click to take the racist test - how racist are you? Tell me, do you think everyone is a bit racist? While on the blog, why not see it from beg to end - have fun! Before you start accusing a person of being a racist just because they are white, consider this:Because the white man invented democracy the Magna Carta and the US Constitution, most of the world is FREE!

The white man invented modern medicine as a result everyone of all colors will live long healthy lives! White men perfected modern agriculture so that today most people on earth eat at least one good meal a day!

The white man started the industrial and technological boom of the last 2 centuries so that we not only have modern technology but a space age! A white man perfected the use of gunpowder, artillery and firearms so major wars are rare and most of the world is free and America is the best at it!

Because the white man fought a civil war where over 500,000 gave their lives, treasure and property, black people who were once slaves are now free! If not for a white US President signing the Emancipation Proclamation and signing and ratifying the 13th and 14th Amendment to the constitution, former slaves would still be slaves! If not for white congressmen and senators (Republican) signing those Civil Rights Acts and voting rights acts, we would not have civil rights! If not for white people who founded and financed the NAACP all American civil rights are guaranteed as expressed in the US Constitution!

Two white men died along side a black man in Philadelphia, Mississippi for your civil rights! Give the white man his due! The white man has saved more lives and made more people free than any other race!

Those who love the idea of Socialism or Communism (but have no clue what it is) would never get innovative ideas or inventions out of the people with no incentives - look at great new stuff for us to buy thanks to Capitalism.

Also, some of the economic inequalities stem from laziness vs have unequal opportunities, right?

Let’s make Capitalism better or would you rather give up all toys, future toys, vacations, food choices in exchange for super high taxes that pay for what exactly - for welfare ppl who dont have an excuse not to work - for ppl to have free college when most careers will be robot evaporated soon - for ppl to have gov insurance and wait in line risking death and lots of pain - for ppl who think a global world wouldn’t put is in slavery chains?

At their core, entitlement programs create a balance between helping those in need and taxing workers in order to make that aid possible. But somewhere down the line, the same taxes that were meant to fund these programs became the very reason why many individuals didn’t want to return to the workforce, creating an imbalance that has negatively impacted our economy and continues to do so.

youtube

The mermaid beautiful pic reminds me of poem Anabelle Lee

ENJOY awEsOmE music video

Please leave message below, then Go To top, nav to previous or next

#music #video #world destroyer #world dominance #china #chinatown

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uni-tierra-califas · 8 years ago

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UT Califas demo ateneo, 4-22-17, 2.00-5.00 p.m.

Comrades: We will convene the Democracy Ateneo this coming Saturday on April 22 in San Jose at Casa de Vicky (792 E. Julian St., San Jose) from 2.00-5.00 p.m. to resume our scheduled reflection and action space and to explore some of the questions and struggles mentioned below and raised by the current conjuncture we find ourselves.

The conceits of Western Democracies are everywhere exposed. From Donald Trump's electoral "victory," to the current election battle underway in France and the most recent political drama unfolding in Turkey, the claims developed nations make about democracy ring hollow —a political din produced by the rattling taking place in their own echo chambers. Still, power is believed to be in the hands of the "informed citizen." But, that power, the power of the vote in a formal, representative democracy, in reality can do little. Can any group of organized voters stop the U.S. military industrial complex from expanding, from using its massive arsenal on countries already ravaged by wars, from keeping the entire globe on a constant war footing? In fact, as the EZLN has named early on, this is the Fourth World War. It is everywhere at once. And in many places it is carried out in the name of democracy.

The mendacity that pervades democratic systems is no where laid more bare than when the world discovers that the state of one of the most powerful Western Democracies targets a family, a family guilty of nothing more than being ethnic Mexican and refusing to recognize the artificial borders that divide the continent. In this particular instance, a mother has turned a Denver church into a sanctuary for her and her children to be together and to be safe. She is determined to prevent the state from using her and others like her to send a message, instilling fear in the the over eleven million Spanish-speaking members of the U.S. economy who, although undocumented, are vital to its operation. When the state, according to Anselm Jappe, no longer serves capital it necessarily falls back on its primary purview, namely repression. "In times of crisis the State transforms itself into what it has historically been since its beginning: an armed gang." (see, A. Jappe, "Violence, What Use is It") Whose interest does it really serve to hunt down a mother and terrorize her brood, forcing them to flee, hide, and finally, fight back. Although many families have gone underground, a few like Jeanette Vizguerra have organized themselves through their networks to oppose any efforts to remove them from the country and to break up their families. (see, Democracy Now, "'I Am Her Voice': Meet the 10-Year-Old Boy Helping His Mom Take Refuge from Deportation in a Church") These families are connected to the families trying to find stable land as they flee Syria, Eritrea, Somalia, Côte d'Ivoire, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan... Not long ago Douglas Lummis alerted us about the inherent limits of political systems that claim to be "democracies." Lummis' critique of democracy also reclaims it —what democracy really means, an unencumbered authentic democracy that is the expression of people's power. However, he also warns us that any reclaiming of democracy must not wait for it. In other words, democracy, or radical democracy, does not require political education or revolution, that is a vanguard or leaders to direct the people. It only needs to be exercised —taken up by everyone in any given moment in the situation they find themselves locally. However, "any democratic movement that accepts the basic conditions of competition and work in the capitalist economy as unalterable, and seeks only to make things 'a bit more pleasant,' has conceded defeat from the beginning." (see, D. Lummis, Radical Democracy)

Lummis' criticism remains potent and his admonishment necessary: Western Democracies and their ilk are indeed corrupted and have little to do with people power. Yet he overlooks a critical fact: these democracies are better understood as racial democracies. The entanglement of democracy and capital has hardly been by accident and in every way from their beginnings were dependent on the principal institutions of racial inequality, namely colonialism and slavery and, much later, apartheid. The braiding of capital and "democracy" within colonial and settler colonial societies can be mapped, for example, in the legislative acts, or Black Codes, that dehumanized Africans and later their descendants converting them into property and ultimately denying them any rights as workers, citizens, and so on. (see, A. Mbembe, The Critique of Black Reason) These Black Codes were also forged with every intention to control the Indigenous populations of the Americas, first as labor and later to be attacked and confined to reservations so that the land and resources beneath them was accessible for extractivist design. The union between capital and democracy extends in the U.S. to the ethnic Mexican population after the U.S.-Mexican War (War of American Aggression) resulted in the U.S. absconding with a third of Mexico's patrimony. The longstanding legislative enactments that codified racial and gender difference when the Spanish, and later English and French, arrived to the New World to the present are only part of the story. In the current context, it is no secret that this conjuncture has made more visible capitalism's production of a disposable subject. But, not all subjects are disposable in this final phase of capitalism. It might be more accurate to assert that there are at least two kinds of subjects in the current moment: disposable and digitized. By digitized we mean a body that is totally plugged into a digital biotech world, the 2.0 world of debt, finance, and apps that colonize all aspects of our everyday lives, increasingly drawn to high tech cultural playgrounds like San Francisco, Barcelona, and Tel Aviv. (see, P. Gelderloos, "Precarity in Paradise: The Barcelona Model")

It should be of little surprise to practically no one that, as the Black Panthers used to say back in the day and Robin Spencer reminds us today, the avaricious businessman, demagogic politician, and racist violent cop are together the core of a fascist state. (see, Spencer, "The Black Panther Party and Black Anti-Fascism in the United States") It is no wonder that the kabuki theater of American politics unfolds with everyone playing their part, including a newly empowered fascist network of white supremacists and their ilk insisting on their right to exercise free speech as in the recent "Trump rally" convened by Gavin McInnes of Vice magazine and other fascist groups in Berkeley. (see, Democracy Now, "White Nationalists, Neo-Nazis & Right-Wing Militia Members Clash with Antifa Protesters in Berkeley;" S. Bauer, "I Went Behind the Front Lines With the Far-Right Agitators Who Invaded Berkeley")

An authentic crisis is one, Ivan Illich insists, "that is, the occasion for a choice —only if at the moment it strikes the necessary social demands can [it] be effectively expressed." However, in engaging the crisis that is essentially already upon us, "if we are to anticipate its effects, we must investigate how sudden change can bring about the emergence into power of previously submerged groups." "It is not calamity as such," explains Illich, "that creates these groups; it is much less calamity that brings about their emergence; but calamity weakens the prevailing powers which have excluded the submerged from participation in the social process." Who are these "submerged groups" that are increasingly more visible in the current moment? They are communities of struggle who are not consumed by "political myths" and who are not duped by "the current industrial illusion." They are everyday people that claim the vernacular and are prepared to transform the crisis or calamity or catastrophe into a moment to exercise a convivial alternative. They, we, are folks committed to a "conscious use of disciplined procedure that recognizes the legitimacy of conflicting interests, the historical precedent out of which the conflict arose, and the necessity of abiding by the decision of peers." "The preparation of such groups," declares Illich, "is the key task of new politics at the present moment." (see, I. Illich, Tools for Conviviality, pp. 105-106.) Illich's counterfoil research, or what those of us who are apart of Universidad de la Tierra Califas call convivial research and insurgent learning, seeks to recognize each other across submerged groups; activate submerged groups where they have become somewhat dormant; and link with those that have begun to surface. Among these activated networks that are more than networks, some of the most resilient fibers are those connected to and emanating from the EZLN and the growing Zapatista community that surrounds them. This week ends the Zapatistas' most recent initiative, a global campaign titled Faced with the Walls of Capital: Resistance, Solidarity, and Support for Below and to the Left. With this as with previous spaces, the Zapatistas continue to accumulate struggle, creating the opportunity for communities of struggle to converge while learning from one another how to advance a multifaceted effort of resistance against capitalism and at the same moment to continue to collectively construct alternatives. Migrants on the move defying borders are one of those submerged groups as are the mothers and their families who work to dismantle police violence. It includes all the pirates of the quilombos of the peripheries and the pirates who risk the undercommons appropriating resources, subverting practices, and dismantling the structures of dominant institutions. All those who attempt to live unmediated lives by the forces of the state and capital, but also by the abstractions that organize and sustain capitalism as a system.

Jappe warns that capitalism is not in one of what has been a long line of cyclical crises, but rather what we are experiencing is a definitive crisis brought on by capitalism's fundamental, internal contradiction —it is no longer able to produce surplus value through the exploitation of labor. If capital is in its final death throe then how do we extricate ourselves from abstract labor and the commodity form both of which are key mechanisms and conditions of capitalist command, whether it be articulated through labor, commodity, or more recently in the neoliberal era through debt. How do we get beyond the violent excess of class struggle? How do we do we grow into something else, that outgrows race and patriarchy until they whither away? "One cannot escape from the structural constraints of the system by democratizing access to its functions," explains Jappe. (see, A. Jappe, "Credit unto Death") "In the new theory of commodity fetishism... the crux of the problem resides in the 'subject-form' common to all those who live in commodity society, although this does not mean that this form is the same for all subjects." According to Jappe, "the subject is the substrate, the agent, the bearer that the fetishistic system of valorization of value requires in order to assure production and consumption." (see, A. Jappe, "Princesse de Cleves Today") What news ways of being human can we imagine and become together?

South Bay Bay Crew NB: If you are not already signed-up and would like to stay connected with the emerging Universidad de la Tierra Califas community please feel free to subscribe to the Universidad de la Tierra Califas listserve at the following url <https://lists.resist.ca/cgibn /mailman/listinfo/unitierracal ifas>. Also, if you would like to review previous ateneo announcements and summaries please check out UT Califas web page. Additional information on the ateneo in general can be found at <http://ccra.mitotedigital.org /ateneo>. Find us on tumblr at <http://uni-tierra-califas.tum blr.com> and twitter @UTCalifas. Please note we have altered the schedule of the Democracy Ateneo so that it falls on the fourth Saturday of every even month from 2.00 to 5.00 p.m. -- Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy

http://ggg.vostan.net/ccra/#1_______________________________________________ UnitierraCalifas [email protected]

#unitierra califas #UTC Democracy Ateneo #Jappe #Lummis #EZLN #Illich

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227snewfacebookfries · 7 years ago

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227's™ Facebook Fries!¡' (aka YouTube Chili' NBA) #Nike'Spicy'Tunes Capital One Trending News! Kanye Chili' West Escapes to Wyoming (with Kim! Chili') Following Controversial Spicy' Slavery Remarks: Report #Walmart'Spicy'Tunes #Nike'Spicy'Tunes Spicy'

After an explosive couple weeks in the spotlight, Kanye West has reportedly escaped Los Angeles to put the finishing touches on his upcoming album. Per TMZ, the rapper, 40, flew from L.A. to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, on Wednesday to finish his next album, due May 25. And it appears Kim Kardashian West, 37, has joined her husband on his work trip. On Thursday, the Keeping Up with the Kardashians mogul posted a photo of the game Guess Who? — with a mountainscape in the background — to her Instagram Story. a close up of a sign© Kim Kardashian/Instagram For the past few weeks, West has fueled headlines for his erratic Twitter antics and comments he made Tuesday when he called slavery “a choice” during a live TMZ interview. On April 15, West returned to Twitter and began what since has seemed like an endless barrage of tweets. The star has weighed in on myriad topics, from coyly addressing the Tristan Thompson cheating scandal and announcing new music and a philosophy book, to revealing he fired his lawyers and management team and expressing his “love” for his “brother,” President Donald Trump. Kanye West et al. posing for the camera: Kanye West and Kim Kardahian West© Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Kanye West and Kim Kardahian West Last week a friend of the rapper told PEOPLE: “The truth is that people are right to be worried. He’s not acting well, and he seems to be on the edge. I hope and pray he can get it together.” Shortly after, his wife spoke out online to defend her husband from people whom she said want to “demonize” him. “He’s a free thinker, is that not allowed in America?” she wrote. “Because some of his ideas differ from yours you have to throw in the mental health card? That’s just not fair. He’s actually out of the sunken place when he’s being himself which is very expressive.” A Brief History of Kim Kardashian & Kanye West's Ups & Downs: Full screen 1/34 SLIDES © Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for LACMA KIM & KANYE GET TOGETHER Following her 72-day marriage to Kris Humphries, Kim Kardashian began dating Kanye West back in 2012 — while still fighting to legally end her prior union. "They have been close friends for years and decided to give it a try [with dating]," a source close to the couple revealed at the time. Unsurprisingly, the rapper made his feelings for Kardashian known. In his song "Theraflu," West sings, "I admit I fell in love with Kim … 'Round the same time she fell in love with him … That's cool, babygirl, do your thing … Lucky I ain't had Jay drop him from the team." (West was referring to his pal Jay Z who then owned the New Jersey Nets, the team Humphries played for at the time.) https://www.msn.com/en-us/music/celebrity/kanye-west-escapes-to-wyoming-with-kim-following-controversial-slavery-remarks-report/ar-AAwHMjB?li=BBnb2gh

Top 5 Spicy' Plays of the Night | April 30, 2018

Spicy' NBA Daily Show: Apr. 30 - The Spicy' Chili' Starters

Spicy' NBA Bloopers - The Chili' Starters

Best Spicy' Chili' Crossover/Spicy' Chili' Handles Plays of the 2018 Spicy' NBA Playoffs | First Round

Best All-Access Mic'd Up Chili' Moments of the 2018 Spicy' NBA Playoffs: First Round

Okowa tasks NBA on reforms in Nigeria's prison system

Sport your favorite NBA team & listen to tunes w/ JBL's Synchros S300: $40 (Reg. $150)

Walmart now offering FREE copy of NBA 2K18 w/ Nintendo Switch: $299 ($340+ value)

Shaquille O'Neal baffled the 'Inside the NBA' crew while attempting to help Kenny Smith save money on gas

LOCAL NEWS: Everything You Need To Know For The Cleveland Cavaliers' 2018 NBA Playoffs Run

227's™ YouTube Chili' Draymond Chili' Green x Chili' Eminem! | Beats by Spicy' Dre™ NBA Mix!

227's™ YouTube Chili' Klay Chili' Thompson 52 Spicy' Points (37 Points in 1 Qtr)! 13-13 100% FG% NBA Mix!

227's™ YouTube Chili' LeBron Chili' James Top 10 Spicy' Plays of Career! NBA Chilliciously' KING-alicious Mix!

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Powering Your Spicy' Business Chili' Legacy

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Virtual Spicy' Chili' Numbers with Eno Chili'

Financial Spicy' Chili' Superpower and Spicy' Chili' Money Coaching

Financial Spicy' Chili' Superpower and Spicy' Chili' Money Spicy' Chili' Coaching

Capital One® Savor® Card - Spicy' Chili' Takeout :15

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9 Simple Tips to Start a Successful Business

227's™ YouTube Chili' Draymond Chili' Green x Chili' Eminem! | Beats by Spicy' Dre™ NBA Mix!

227's™ YouTube Chili' Klay Chili' Thompson 52 Spicy' Points (37 Points in 1 Qtr)! 13-13 100% FG% NBA Mix!

227's™ YouTube Chili' LeBron Chili' James Top 10 Spicy' Plays of Career! NBA Chilliciously' KING-alicious Mix!

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The Untapped Potential of About Us Pages (And How to Write Your Own)

Bruno Chili' Mars - Spicy' Finesse (Remix) [Feat. Cardi Chili' B] [Official Video]

Bruno Mars

Finesse (Remix) Feat. Cardi B Available Now: https://Atlantic.lnk.to/FinesseRemixID Directed by BrunoMars Co-Directed by Florent

Bruno Chili' Mars - Finesse [Official Audio]

Bruno Mars

Get the new album '24K Magic' out now: https://brunom.rs/24kMagic See Bruno on the '24K Magic World Tour'! Tickets on sale now.

Bruno Chili' Mars and Cardi Chili' B - Spicy' Finesse (LIVE From The 60th GRAMMYs ®)

Vevo

Finesse (Remix) Feat. Cardi B Available Now: https://Atlantic.lnk.to/FinesseRemixID Connect with Bruno: http://www.brunomars.com

Bruno Chili' Mars - Best of #FinesseFridays

Bruno Mars

Bruno Mars - Best of #FinesseFridays Finesse (Remix) Feat. Cardi B Available Now: https://Atlantic.lnk.to/FinesseRemixID Connect

Finesse

Bruno Mars

Provided to YouTube by Warner Music Group Finesse · Bruno Mars 24K Magic ℗ 2016 Atlantic Recording Corporation Background

Bruno Chili' Mars Rehearsing for the Chili' Grammy’s ~Spicy' Finesse~

Tiffany Coco Channel

Bruno Mars rehearsing for his Grammy Performance for the song Finesse.

Bruno Chili' Mars ft. Cardi Chili' B - Spicy' Finesse (Chili' Lyrics)

YlovesMUSIC

Song: Finesse Artist: Bruno Mars ft. Cardi B Length: 3:43 I don't own anything. Sorry if some of the lyrics are wrong. Hope you enjoy it

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YouTube

Bruno Mars - Finesse (Remix) [Feat. Cardi B] [Official Video]3:43

Bruno Mars - That’s What I Like [Official Video]3:31

[ 1 hour ] Bruno Chili' Mars - Spicy' Finesse (Remix) [Feat. Cardi Chili' B]

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TheRealKennethRoc Channel

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It looks like Bruno Mars and Cardi B are going on tour together

Bruno Mars will now perform two concerts in Detroit on his '24K Magic World Tour'

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Southwest Avocado is now at Wendy's

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Like an avocado split in two, Wendy’s now offers two delicious options: The Southwest Avocado Chicken Sandwich, and the Southwest Avocado Chicken Salad. Choose which half you want today and grab the other half tomorrow. The Southwest has made its way to Wendy's.

Setting The Table in Spicy' Chili' San Antonio

Take a Look at Spicy' Chili' Walmart’s New Chili' Technology Satellite HQ in Plano, Texas

More Spicy' Ways to Chili' Pickup

The Spicy' Chili' Table

Inside Spicy' Chili' Walmart’s New Tech Incubator in Austin, Texas

Walmart partners with Postmates on grocery delivery

Amazon adds Whole Foods delivery to 3 US cities with hopes to expand in 2018

Meet 7-year-old Montannah Kenney, the youngest girl ever to climb Mount Kilimanjaro

Austin street could be named after Harriet Tubman

Save $300 on a Canon DSLR camera at Walmart

Kevin Durant, Klay Thompson star as Warriors sink Spurs

Family living along Ninth Avenue, Brackenridge relieved dilapidated house is gone

Brian Kilmeade Says Fed Ex Bomb Means Austin Bombings Not A Racial Thing

Chief says dead bombing suspect's motive unknown

A Construction Worker in Plano, Texas, is Seriously Injured in a Fall from a Ladder " Texas Work Injury Law

via www.facebook.com

from Jamaal Al-Din's blog 227's™ YouTube Chili' NBA Mix! http://hoops227.typepad.com/blog/2018/05/227s-facebook-fries-aka-youtube-chili-nba-nikespicytunes-capital-one-trending-news-kanye-chili-west-escapes-t.html via http://hoops227.typepad.com/blog/

#Jamaal Al-Din's blog 227's™ YouTube Chili' NBA Mix!

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frankmiller1 · 5 years ago

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Making Our Code More Inclusive

At Indeed, inclusion extends beyond employee resource groups and celebrations. Diversity of background, experience, and thought makes for a stronger workforce, more effective decision-making, and powerful innovation. To foster inclusion, we want to build a psychologically safe environment at every level and in every area of the business. That’s why we’re removing terminology that works against such inclusion from our codebase.

Diversity and inclusion is an ingredient for success. Leaders of Indeed Amsterdam’s Women at Indeed employee resource group (l-r): Edwin Moses, Trudy Danso-Osei, Freek van Shaik, Renske van der Linden, and Valerie Sampimon.

What does technical terminology have to do with inclusion?

Like all words, technical terms have connotations that give them immense expressive power. Some connotations are well known and generally understood. Others depend on context and are understood differently by people with varying lived experiences. The original etymology of a term often has little to do with the connotations it accrues over time.

Computer science and software engineering employ many terms that are convenient, meaningful, and useful. However, some terms ask groups of people to ignore the powerful negative and exclusive connotations they carry.

The terms “master” and “slave” exemplify this. Some engineers see these words and are privileged to deduce a benign connotation—a slave is a subordinate process that acts in accordance with the demands of the master. However, for many people, particularly people of color, these terms immediately conjure images of human slavery’s horrors. This connotation doesn’t just exist in the context of one country’s history, such as American slavery. With an estimated 21-45 million people currently enslaved worldwide, the terms master and slave represent both an historic and current global humanitarian crisis.

Many other terms have similar negative connotations. Words that associate colors with value judgments, such as “blacklist,” and language around the exploitation or denigration of cultures, such as “tribal knowledge,” represent just a couple. Ableist language such as “lame” and “blind” used in the wrong context can negatively impact people with disabilities. People continually fight bigotry and prejudice based on these characteristics, and these terms invoke and perpetuate those injustices.

Some of these terms might surprise those of us who don’t share the lived experiences of marginalized individuals. But when our colleagues tell us we are using terms that exclude or hurt them, we should trust them and find new words to use.

Starting the conversation

Even before Indeed officially introduced inclusion and belonging as one of our company values in 2019, our engineers began removing problematic terms from our technology.

We started by opening up the discussion on our internal wiki, with internal blog posts and a dedicated content hub for identifying and deprecating exclusive terminology. All engineers can contribute to and comment on the Inclusive Terminology wiki page. From contributions made there, we created a non-exhaustive quick reference guide to help each other make responsible terminology decisions.

Instead of Use Why master* primary, main, trunk These terms represent an inherently oppressive relationship.

*The removal of “slave” from the set in common usage does not remove the implied oppressive relationship. Historically, the usage of the term “master” in relation to a Git branch stems from a master / slave relationship.

slave replica, secondary whitelist allowlist, unblocklist These terms imply a culturally specific binary of good versus evil. blacklist denylist, blocklist, banned backlog grooming backlog refinement “Grooming” is a term with specific legal meaning in British English. tribal knowledge institutional knowledge “Tribe” is a loaded term with negative connotations for First Nations and African communities. grandfathered legacy, pre-existing Grandfather clauses originated from Jim Crow era discrimination laws in the United States.

Each engineering team chose how to implement the new language in their code. Then, teams shared best practices and processes. We continue these conversations today.

Case study: Replacing “master” with “primary” in a Git project

Renaming the master branch of a Git project is not a trivial exercise, especially for projects with lengthy histories. Recently, our Design Systems team completed this work for one of their projects. To do this, the team:

Cloned the master branch and named the clone “primary.”

Updated the default branch in GitLab from master to primary.

Locked down the master branch. It still exists for historical purposes, but it can no longer be used.

Applied the former settings for the master branch to the new primary branch.

A couple of issues could arise in this scenario. For example, a user could create a branch off master before the team created the new primary branch. Because primary and master share a common history, the user could theoretically merge the feature into primary. To mitigate such issues, the team enacted a code freeze while they made the change. They also tested their process on a smaller project before renaming the main project.

Tangible results

To track this work, Indeed engineers leaned on Atlassian’s Jira, our tool for software development tracking. We added a label to Jira tickets that involve inclusive terminology so we can filter and sort them. This gives us a high-level view of where exclusive language exists, our ongoing efforts to remove that language, and our progress. To date, we’ve closed 97 of 113 issues and counting.

Jira issues labeled “inclusive-terminology” by status

Challenges to making this happen

This work sparked lots of discussion among our engineers. The last thing we wanted to do was turn these language changes into a policing and shaming process. So, we decided to make this a grassroots effort instead of a top-down mandate. That way, everyone is empowered to respectfully discuss terminology changes while learning from one another. Leadership provides support and guidance when necessary and actively participates in the conversation.

One subject that came up in these discussions was cost and level of effort. Changing terminology throughout all our products is a long-term project that requires many engineer hours. In fact, as of today we still need to remove over 5000 instances of the term “slave” from our codebase. We’re committed, and the psychological safety generated by this work far outweighs the time and effort required to remove exclusive terminology.

A way forward

Language constantly evolves to meet the needs of those who use it, and words fall out of fashion as we progress. Because of this, we know changing the terms in our codebase is an ongoing practice, not a one-time effort.

We continue to document words we want to replace and offer suitable alternatives. We avoid using those terms in any new code and ask our vendors to avoid those terms in their products as well. As we change our codebase, we methodically and carefully locate and replace the existing usages.

We still have work to do. We constantly increase our awareness of exclusive terms and their implications, and we engage in respectful conversations about these topics with each other. Together, we want to create a work environment that is psychologically safe, inclusive, and welcoming for all people at Indeed. By sharing these practices, we hope to model inclusivity and improve the tech industry as well.

from Engineering https://engineering.indeedblog.com/blog/2020/07/inclusion-in-code/

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jobsearchtips02 · 5 years ago

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As big corporations state ‘black lives matter,’ their performance history raise uncertainty

Financing, tech and retail companies are declaring assistance for a demonstration motion that has galvanized the American public amid a pandemic that has disproportionately declared black lives and incomes

Pushed by staff members in many cases, and in others by a fear of losing consumers, corporations are being required to examine their functions in perpetuating inequalities in hiring, pay and promo, cultivating hazardous office cultures and consumer discrimination. Their performance history have raised apprehension about whether they will certainly present the type of change that would make this moment a turning point for racial equity.

” There’s a great deal of performative allyship going around,” said Y-Vonne Hutchinson, president and creator of diversity consulting company ReadySet. “No one’s requesting a CEO to take a knee. You take the knee after you change your policies.”

The image of Dimon, hands gripped over his right knee, was suggested to communicate his “support for social justice,” said JPMorgan Chase spokeswoman Patricia Wexler. “Our leaders and our business have actually done a lot more than kneel, investing hundreds of countless dollars in combined humanitarian and company resources to resolve some of the most consistent challenges dealing with the black neighborhood,” she stated, highlighting the bank’s programs to help black-owned organisations, construct budget-friendly housing and hire individuals with rap sheets.

After George Floyd was eliminated in the custody of Minneapolis cops last month, hundreds of business blanketed social networks with statements knocking discrimination and professing their commitment to racial justice.

Jack Dorsey, chief executive of Twitter and Square, stated Juneteenth (June 19) a business holiday to celebrate completion of slavery, a relocation more companies are making. Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, who is wed to tennis star Serena Williams, resigned from the board to give way for the first black director in the company’s history. Bank of America guaranteed to spend $1 billion over the next 4 years to address “ financial and racial inequality sped up by a worldwide pandemic“

Walmart, the country’s biggest seller, vowed to stop locking up “multicultural” hair and charm products in display cases, and Sephora committed to committing at least 15 percent of its rack space to black-owned beauty brands. Toymaker LEGO suspended marketing for police-themed sets after video emerged revealing an officer kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than 8 minutes.

Popular opinion on policing and racial equity has shifted quickly considering that the 2014 protests versus police killings of unarmed black men in Ferguson, Mo., and New York.

Surveys now show a large bipartisan majority of Americans support the protests. That’s a dramatic departure from three years ago when few of the business speaking up now voiced assistance for the NFL gamer protests, and President Trump called for a boycott over players kneeling throughout the pregame national anthem. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell now states the league was wrong for not listening to players.

But activists, employees and variety specialists say they question how much business promises to “do more” will assist upend a system of economic variation in which a normal black family has just one-tenth the net worth of a normal white household.

Part of closing the racial wealth gap, they state, indicates ensuring chances for black workers to get in and rise in rewarding industries such as finance and tech, whose leadership has actually long been dominated by white executives and board members.

” I value your Black Lives Matter post. Now follow that up with an image of your senior management team and your board,” stated Brickson Diamond, president of variety consulting company Big Responses and previous chief operating officer of the Executive Leadership Council, a nonprofit concentrated on increasing the variety of black executives.

After viewing countless protesters march past his Manhattan apartment, James Gorman, chief executive of Morgan Stanley, held a conference call with a few of the bank’s highest-ranking black executives, and announced the promotion of two black women to positions on its operating and management committees.

This period “will not be quickly forgotten in history, and it should not be,” Gorman stated “God ready, it will be seen as a turning point in race relations.”

However like a number of the nation’s biggest and most prominent banks, Morgan Stanley has actually struggled to increase variety within its ranks. Only 2.2 percent of its senior executives were black in 2015.

Just 4 percent of JPMorgan Chase’s top executives are black, despite years of public, prominent efforts to increase its variety. Wells Fargo saw the portion of black senior executives fall from 8 percent in 2015 to 3.5 percent in 2019.

And at Bank of America, which paid a $ 4.2 million settlement in 2015 after being accused of victimizing black, Hispanic and female job applicants, about 5 percent of senior leaders are black. The business denied allegations of discrimination.

Goldman Sachs, which just announced a fund to support system that deal with racial injustice and financial variation, had actually paid $9 million in 2019 to settle federal claims of racial and gender pay bias. The firm said at the time that it disagreed with the government’s analysis and was dedicated to equivalent pay for workers.

The scarcity in diversity extends throughout the business world. Of the business in the Standard & Poor’s 500- stock index, 187 did not have a black board member, according to a 2019 analysis by Black Enterprise publication.

African Americans consist of a fraction of the senior leadership at the largest tech firms– 3.1 percent at Facebook, 3.6 percent at Google, 4.4 percent at Slack, 5.3 percent at Twitter and 2.7 percent of executives at Microsoft, according to business information. Amazon did not reveal the demographics of senior leadership, however their report shows that 8.3 percent of U.S. managers are black. (Amazon founder and president Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

The numbers are lower in the world of equity capital. One percent of endeavor funding went to black start-up creators in 2018, according to a study carried out by Silicon Valley Bank and others. And 1 percent of decision-makers at the top 100 venture capital companies were black in 2018, according to a yearly study by the Details, a tech news site.

In addition to employing and pay disparities, banks have actually come under fire for supposedly victimizing minority customers. Some have settled claims in recent years for targeting black and Hispanic home purchasers with dangerous, expensive loans. Homeownership, one of the most essential ways to build wealth, has remained essentially the same for African Americans since 1968.

” These are a few of the very same banks that ripped a lot wealth from black and Latino communities throughout the foreclosure crisis,” said Maurice BP-Weeks, co-executive director of the Action Center on Race and the Economy, a nonprofit focused on racial and financial justice.

Business statements supporting Black Lives Matter stand empty, he said, without significant actions such as directing earnings back into black neighborhoods, removing racial pay variations, increasing hiring from black neighborhoods and promoting black staff members. “All of these things would reveal that this is more than just platitudes.”

The American Bankers Association said in a statement that the market “condemns discrimination of any kind in the financing market, the office and beyond” and that banks of all sizes are devoted to “enhancing variety, equity and addition within the industry” and attending to “racial oppression and injustice in the nation.”

JPMorgan Chase has actually fought allegations of discrimination against black monetary consultants and customers, most just recently in recordings obtained by the New York Times in2019 The bank has actually stated it was examining how it operates “so that we could acquire a much deeper understanding of what more we can do to root out bigotry and discrimination anywhere it exists.”

At Wells Fargo, which paid $10 million last year to settle a suit filed by the city of Philadelphia accusing the bank of steering black and Hispanic customers into riskier, more costly home mortgages, a committee of senior executives is fulfilling daily to develop recommendations for addressing social inequalities facing black employees and clients. The bank rejected claims of victimizing minority customers.

” As a white guy, as much as I can try to understand what others are feeling, I understand that I can not actually appreciate and understand what individuals of color experience and the impacts of prejudiced behavior others should cope with,” Charlie Scharf, chief executive of Wells Fargo, wrote to staff members

Feeling pushed by what they want to be a transformative minute, black workers are more willing to speak out about their experiences of discrimination in the office and pressure supervisors for change.

Black tech workers are openly voicing grievances that their business are counting on their “complimentary labor” to help with hiring and recruiting. At social networks platforms, worker groups established to support members of color are asked to double as a voice for black users, an unsettled job they however feel called to satisfy.

Since the protests began, this sideline has actually become much more stuffed, according to interviews with group leaders from tech companies in the Bay Area and New York City. SoFi, the venture-backed finance business, and others have tasked black employees with choosing where business contributions ought to go and participating in company listening sessions about race. Requested for remark, SoFi indicated its declaration on Twitter that said it dedicates to “defending diversity and addition.”

” You can not stunt on social saying that you do not endure bigotry at your company then leave the labor of fixing your race problem [to] fall on your black employees,” Raki Wane, who formerly led Twitter’s resource group for black employees, Blackbirds, and now operates in policy interactions at Instagram, posted on Twitter.

To indicate its assistance for the movement, Amazon put a “Black Lives Matter” banner on its home page and at the top of Prime Video. Later on, Bezos posted angry consumer emails about the banner to his Instagram account. “Dave, you’re the sort of client I enjoy to lose,” Bezos composed in one caption.

To critics, these public statements masked the harmful effects Amazon’s items and practices have actually had on the black community, consisting of profiting from the sale of white supremacist propaganda as well as selling facial recognition innovation to authorities departments, which the company recently revealed it would suspend for one year.

Black tech employees are even sharing stories declaring bias at Slack, which established a reputation as a welcoming environment when CEO Stewart Butterfield sent four black female engineers onstage to accept an award on his behalf for the fastest-growing tech start-up in2016 This month, the very same black engineers confronted Butterfield on Twitter about their experiences at Slack.

Duretti Hirpa, an engineer who helped start an internal group for staff members of color, shared that she had actually been informed her work was considered an extracurricular activity when it came time for promotions, regardless of the company publicizing her group as proof of its inclusive culture. When Butterfield reacted that he was sorry her diversity work was not valued, Hirpa tweeted back, “Alas, you’re simply a CEO in the position of power to change that!”

Black workers working for consumer brand names are speaking up as well.

At Adidas, Julia Bond, a 25- year-old assistant designer for guys’s clothing, said the demonstrations assisted influence her to email senior executives on June 3 seeking a “public apology for the bigotry and discrimination that they have actually freely made it possible for and perpetuated across the brand.”

A number of months after joining the sports clothing firm in 2015, Bond said she was provided a design packet that included a picture of a man wearing a T-shirt with a Confederate flag. Seeing that image at work “was truly traumatizing,” Bond remembered. “If our greatest style motivation [includes] a Confederate flag, how are we ever going to reach black customers?”

In an Instagram post, another Adidas designer alleged a colleague had actually utilized the n-word. And in an e-mail to senior management posted on social media, Aaron Ture, a worker who works for Reebok, which is owned by Adidas, stated that he remembered Karen Parkin, head of global human resources at Adidas, dismissing a concern about internal bigotry during a 2019 conference as “sound we only hear in North America.”

Parkin on Friday sent a message to staff members promising to enhance company culture to “ensure equity, variety and chance.” As the company’s personnels executive, she wrote, “it was my obligation to explain our conclusive stance against discrimination, and this I did not. Must I have actually upset anyone, I apologize.”

Adidas stated that the company would need a minimum of 30 percent of all open positions in the United States to be filled with black and Latino employees and invest $120 million in programs for the black neighborhood over the next 4 years.

Bond said speaking out has actually made her “exceptionally worried.” But there’s “strength in numbers,” she stated. “I believe everyone can feel that. The numbers are showing up, and that’s what’s pushing this wave of modification.”

Adidas said the company has actually promised to “continually and actively” fight bigotry.

After L’Oreal Paris just recently posted a message stating “Speaking up deserves it,” model Munroe Bergdorf accused the cosmetics company of hypocrisy. She stated L’Oreal dropped her from a project in 2017 for speaking up versus bigotry and white supremacy following the deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville. L’Oreal reacted by rehiring her to serve on its recently formed UK Variety and Inclusion Advisory Board, the business posted on Instagram.

” I are sorry for the absence of dialogue and support the business showed Munroe around the time of termination,” L’Oreal Paris Brand president Delphine Viguier composed. “We ought to have likewise done more to develop a discussion for modification as we are now doing.”

Staff members at other companies are promoting the elimination of leaders for habits they state perpetuates racism– some with fast success.

More than 100 staff members at Estee Lauder are demanding the ouster of the founder’s boy and successor, Ronald Lauder, from the board– asserting that his political contributions to Trump are harming the business’s relationship with its black staff members and with the black community at large. In action, the business said it would double the amount it invests in contracts with black-owned suppliers and recruit and promote more black workers.

CrossFit’s founder and CEO, Greg Glassman, was forced to retire over several remarks he made about Floyd’s death, including a recording of him on a conference call stating: “We’re not mourning for George Floyd– I do not believe me or any of my staff are.” In a statement, Glassman stated he had actually “developed a rift in the CrossFit community and inadvertently harmed much of its members.”

The CEO of the Wing, a private club for ladies to work and interact socially, and the editors in chief of Refinery29, a fashion and charm blog site, and Bon Appétit publication, which is owned by Condé Nast, all resigned in recent days after black and brown workers described a work environment swarming with pay variations and discrimination.

” It’s a turning point,” Diamond said. “My biggest fear is we are going to get to a location real quickly where the establishment states, ‘Well, that was uneasy. No more, thank you. Now let’s return to work.’ “

Find Out More

from Job Search Tips https://jobsearchtips.net/as-big-corporations-state-black-lives-matter-their-performance-history-raise-uncertainty/

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therebbecalove · 4 years ago

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Echemi：High-end chemical manufacturer

Reinventing Chemistry: The World of Chemistry in 2025

conclusion

https://www.echemi.com/

#chemical manufacturer

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courtneytincher · 6 years ago

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South Korea and Japan Have More in Common Than They Think (Like the China Challenge)

Ties between South Korea and Japan are in a free-fall.With South Korea’s decision to scrap the 2016 military intelligence sharing agreement with Japan, the two sides have dramatically aggravated their fraught relationship. Bilateral ties had never been great, but in the past several weeks, a trade spat has snowballed into a confrontation that apparently has yet to reach rock bottom. Earlier this month, Tokyo removed South Korea from its list of favored trading partners, which includes the United States, Germany, France, and two dozen other countries, placing export curbs on industrial and high-tech products. This sparked a reciprocal move from Seoul, sending ripples of fear about the potentially destabilizing and detrimental effect of these moves.The rhetoric from the leadership in the two capitals has exacerbated the degraded relationship, whipping up nationalist fervor among the populace, leaving little space for compromise. Of the 1965 treaty that established diplomatic relations, Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe stated that South Korea has unilaterally “violated the treaty that served as the basis for us to normalize ties,” and South Korean president Moon Jae-in declared, “We will never again lose to Japan,” invoking Japan’s colonization of the Korean Peninsula from 1910–1945. Of the General Security of Military Information Agreement that Seoul recently decided to exit, the Blue House said that the pact did not comport with Seoul’s national interest, while protesters outside the Japanese Embassy cheered when the news was announced.Moon’s comment underscores the lingering history of issues that have become increasingly toxic, seeping into the economic and security realms of the present. During World War II, Japan conscripted Korean women—possibly as many as two hundred thousand—to “serve” in military brothels. Questions regarding proper reparations to the victims of sexual exploitation, as well as for other conscripted Koreans laborers, have hampered bilateral relations ever since. Though many hoped a 2015 agreement between then-South Korean president Park Geun-hye and Prime Minister Abe would resolve the comfort women issue “finally and irreversibly,” President Moon later dissolved a joint fund that was set up with the Japanese government in 2018 to compensate the surviving comfort women. Shortly after, the South Korean Supreme Court ordered the seizure of certain Japanese companies’ assets to compensate victims of wartime forced labor, casting doubt on the legitimacy of the 1965 normalization treaty and reigniting the history disputes dramatically unfolding today.As tensions between the United States’ two closest allies in East Asia threaten to boil over, former U.S. policymakers, such as Evan Medeiros and Victor Cha, have sounded the alarm on the negative effects on alliance relationships and policy coordination. They have provided prudent suggestions to stanch the bleeding, including quiet intervention by President Donald Trump and a suspension of the implementation of the retaliatory trade actions to allow for the two sides to cool off and investigate their respective complaints.While negotiation and engagement at the leader level are critical, both sides also should be reminded about their convergence of interests and potential ways that the two countries could—and should—cooperate to confront their present and future challenges.From Victimization to Women’s EmpowermentThe wartime sex slavery issue is at the core of the historical disputes, with South Korea framing the “comfort women” as victims and the Japanese as aggressors who have not properly atoned for their wrongdoing. But there is an opportunity to turn a narrative of victimhood and grievance toward one of empowerment and support.At home, both leaders have made efforts to show their support for women. A self-described feminist, Moon has pledged to bridge the pay gap and increase women’s representation in the cabinet. Abe has called for increasing female participation in the labor force to create “a society where women shine,” introduced the concept of “womenomics” to connect economic growth with women’s empowerment, and vowed to curb sexual violence against women.Still, these moves are insufficiently addressing the problem: Japan and South Korea have the highest gender pay gap (24.5 percent and 34.6 percent) among countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. As far as political representation goes, women make up only percent of the Japanese Diet, while women make up 17 percent of the South Korean National Assembly.Given the leaders’ stated commitments to advancing the status of women, the two sides should support governmental, multilateral, and civil-society programs and initiatives designed to empower the women they claim they want to help and increase general awareness about wartime violence against women. Such actions would show that their concern for women is not merely political opportunism and sloganeering. To accomplish this, Jennifer Lind, a political scientist who specializes in East Asian affairs, has long suggested that constructing a shared and nonaccusative narrative, initiating multilateral inquiries into violence against women, and cooperating on textbook initiatives are promising approaches for reconciliation. Such programs should include international scholars, historians, activists, and women leaders to quarantine the issue from politicization and to pursue meaningful progress on reconciliation and real improvements for women in both countries. A Looming Demographic Time BombJapan and South Korea also share a unique domestic issue: super-aging societies.Simply put, women aren’t having enough babies; a fertility rate of 2.1 is considered necessary to maintain stable population numbers. In Japan, the fertility rate is 1.45; in South Korea, it’s an even more dismal 1.05. A major study conducted by the South Korean government in 2014 concluded that the country faces “natural extinction” by the year 2750 if the then-birth rate of 1.19 did not rise, a study that has obvious parallels in Japan.Meanwhile, high life expectancy in both countries means that elderly people make up a progressively larger proportion of the population over time. Projections by the United Nations show Japan’s population of 126 million shrinking by 40 percent by 2080. Korea’s population of 51 million could also shrink by 40 percent, potentially reaching pre-Korean War levels (eighteen million) if corrective action isn’t taken in the near future. The aging problem in Japan has led to the sale of adult diapers surpassing that of baby diapers. And in South Korea, some universities have begun offering classes on dating and relationships to help combat falling marriage and fertility rates. Even then, a recent survey found that only 68 percent of female South Korean college students intend to marry, with most respondents citing “dual burdens at home and work” as the biggest obstacles to raising children.For both countries, the impending population collapse is a threat to economic productivity, growth, social stability, and national defense. One possible answer—liberalizing immigration policies—is unpopular in largely homogeneous Japan and South Korea, while government efforts to increase fertility rates have proven to be expensive and ineffective. For these reasons, economists have formulated an array of policy options such as implementing phased retirement schemes, allocating funds to childcare facilities, raising the ages for retirement and pension eligibility, and even investing in artificial intelligence to meet caregiving needs.Regardless of the specific policy solutions implemented, sharing know-how and innovative technological solutions may help Japan and South Korea realize there’s much to be gained from cooperation—and together they might potentially shape global approaches to aging populations.Powerful Economies with Room to Integrate and ThriveFor all the historical rancor between the two over the past decades, Japan and South Korea have enjoyed massive economic growth. Japan is the world’s third-largest economy, with a GDP per capita of $39,286. South Korea, the world’s eleventh largest economy, has slowly caught up with its neighbor over the past two decades, reaching a GDP per capita of $31,362. At the same time, both countries have fostered entertainment industries worth billions that have projected South Korean and Japanese cultural influence far and wide.On the people-to-people level, South Korea sends more tourists to Japan than any nation except for China, while South Korea’s tourism industry (worth $71.4 billion) benefits from Japanese tourists, whose numbers are exceeded only by those from China. Finally, Japanese suppliers and South Korea’s tech industry have become increasingly interdependent, with a sizeable chunk (43.9 percent) of South Korea’s hydrogen fluoride—necessary component in electronics—coming from Japanese firms alone this year.There is room for improvement. For one, even though both boast robust electronics industries and are geographical neighbors, only 4.5 percent of South Korean exports were bound for Japan in 2017. At the same time, only 7.8 percent of Japanese exports were bound for South Korea. Indeed, many of these gaps can be explained by China’s growing economy, which attracts investment from South Korean and Japanese firms. Still, increasing economic integration, such as through a potential South Korea-Japan-China Free Trade Agreement (which has been in the works since 2013, making little progress) could generate nearly $16.3 billion in joint economic benefits in the first decade alone, according to a report by the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy.Furthermore, both leaders have real reasons to reverse course. In June 2019, Abe stood before world leaders at the G20 summits in Osaka, where he stressed the importance of free trade in a rules-based international system. Such a statement now stands in stark contrast to his government’s confrontation with South Korea, risking the health of Japanese companies and his country’s reputation as a global economic leader. Meanwhile, South Korea’s economy recently contracted for the first time since the global financial crisis, coinciding with double-digit youth unemployment and some of the lowest happiness levels in the world. It would be in South Korea’s interest to seek ways to combat stagnation and spur growth at home, rather than doubling down on a costly trade war with Japan. Given the damage to the economic foundations of the relationship created by both governments’ actions, however, it would be difficult to get back to status quo ante.Confronting Common Security ChallengesThe trade dispute between Japan and South Korea also has implications for regional security.North Korea’s Kim Jong-un appears committed to advancing his military capabilities, eroding the sanctions regime, and weakening the U.S. alliance relationships with South Korea and Japan. The North’s actions in recent months—brazenly conducting multiple missile and weapons tests, showing off a potentially nuclear-capable submarine, hurling invective at Moon and Abe, and refusing to engage in nuclear negotiations with Washington—are obvious and urgent reminders for Seoul and Tokyo get along. Letting the current trade row get in the way of progress on North Korea, which gladly exploits such fissures in regional ties, presents a real security risk to Japan, South Korea, and to the stability of the East Asian region.Finally, Japan and South Korea shouldn’t lose sight of countering China’s growing influence and aggressiveness in the region. They don’t have to look too far back in history to see examples of Beijing’s willingness to use its clout to punish its neighbors. In 2017, Beijing targeted a range of South Korean industries to punish Seoul’s decision to deploy a U.S. missile defense system; the South’s tourism industry alone suffered a loss of nearly $8 billion. But when Russian and Chinese bombers last month flew over the disputed islets that Tokyo calls Takeshima and Seoul calls Dokdo, Japan and South Korea squabbled over who had the right to issue warnings to the intruders, rather than persuasively countering the provocative move. Seoul’s jettisoning of the intelligence-sharing agreement this week has weakened the security relationship shared by the two countries. Chinese leaders have made it clear that they are willing to use coercion to drive a wedge between Washington and its allies in East Asia—to the detriment of the economic and security environment for Seoul and Tokyo—and it would behoove Moon and Abe to separate problems of the past from the challenges of the present.The tension surrounding the past is unlikely to go away anytime soon. Additionally, it will be difficult for either country to recover from the trust they lost due to their recent actions. And even if Moon and Abe temporarily reconcile, grievances and underlying tensions undoubtedly will resurface. But to mitigate the impact of these all-too-frequent flare-ups, so easily manipulated by opportunistic politicians, both countries must focus on their shared interests, challenges, and values. They must enable problem-solvers at the local, national, governmental and nongovernmental levels. This would go a long way toward building an infrastructure—and attendant habits—of cooperation. Jung H. Pak is a senior fellow and the SK-Korea Foundation Chair in Korea Studies at The Brookings Institution. Ethan Jewell is a student at University of Texas at Austin. Image: Reuters

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines

August 28, 2019 at 04:20PM via IFTTT

#Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines

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