#then I made zero progress on my portfolio

[collophora]

Hi there !!! I wanted to let you know your bad batch art is BEAUTIFUL I'm always happy to see it cross my dash!! Your art style is so pretty and I love the way you draw Tech!!

Do you have anymore sketches of Tech we haven't seen yet? No pressure <3!!! Have a lovely day :DD

Oh my that's so sweet thank you! éAè <3 <3 <3 Hughhhhh well since you ask nicely I dug into my wip folder and found a sketch ^^

[fujupro]

How I Went from Broke to Making $10,000/Month Writing Online — My Blueprint for Success

From Zero to $10,000: The Step-by-Step Process to Starting Your Writing Journey Without the Overwhelm

Introduction

If you had told me three years ago that I'd be making $10,000 a month from writing online, I would have laughed. It seemed impossible. Back then, writing was just a hobby, something I did in my free time. Fast forward to today, and that same hobby is now my primary income stream. Sounds surreal, right? But here's the kicker — it didn’t happen overnight. It took time, persistence, and, most importantly, a shift in my mindset. In this article, I’m going to lay it all out for you: the exact steps I followed, the platforms that propelled my growth, and the mental shifts that turned writing into a full-blown business for me.

Chapter 1: Why Writing Online is the Best Skill to Build Wealth Today

Writing isn’t just putting words on paper — it’s a gateway to unlimited opportunities. In today's digital landscape, writing is one of the most flexible, scalable, and profitable skills. You don’t need a fancy degree, an office, or even an extensive portfolio to begin making money. 

Platforms like Medium, Quora, and LinkedIn have democratized writing, giving everyone access to audiences that used to be unreachable.

What makes writing even more powerful is its versatility. You can write blog posts, create eBooks, develop online courses, or freelance. The opportunities are endless, and the startup costs are practically zero. Writing, at its core, is the foundation of most online businesses. And this is why it stands out as one of the best ways to build wealth today.

Chapter 2: Finding Your Niche — The Key to Standing Out

Let’s face it: writing about everything won’t get you anywhere. To succeed as an online writer, you must niche down — and niche down hard. It’s the secret sauce to gaining traction in a crowded market.

When I first started, I dabbled in various topics — health, productivity, personal finance. My growth was sluggish, to say the least. The turning point? I doubled down on a specific niche: personal finance and entrepreneurship. These were topics I was passionate about, but more importantly, they were areas where people were willing to pay for knowledge.

The trick to finding a profitable niche is simple: combine what you love with what the market demands. Find that sweet spot, and you’ve hit gold.

How to Get Started Without Feeling Overwhelmed

Starting is always the hardest part, right? It feels like climbing a mountain, and the peak seems so far away. But here’s the good news — it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. The secret is breaking it down into bite-sized steps.

Choose your platform: Start on free platforms like Medium or Quora. These come with built-in audiences, so you don’t need to worry about SEO or traffic at the beginning.

Create your first piece of content: Don’t overthink it. It doesn’t need to be perfect. Write something valuable, even if it's rough around the edges.

Consistency is key: Set a simple goal of writing twice a week. Consistency beats perfection every time.

I began by answering questions on Quora, and that small step helped me build confidence while gaining visibility. Remember, it’s about starting — not overthinking.

Chapter 4: Building Consistency — The Habit That Transformed My Writing Career

Consistency was the fuel that powered my growth. I made writing non-negotiable. Whether I felt inspired or not, I wrote. Some days, it was just a few hundred words. Other days, I churned out thousands. But I wrote every single day.

The habit of writing is like a muscle — the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets. Here’s how you can build this life-changing habit:

Start small: Write for 15 minutes a day.

Track your progress: Keep a simple log or journal. Seeing your progress will motivate you to keep going.

Reward yourself: Celebrate your wins, no matter how small. It’s the small victories that lead to big results.

Chapter 5: Monetizing Your Writing — From Pennies to Thousands

I won’t sugarcoat it — my first earnings from writing were laughable. I made just a few cents here and there. But that’s how it starts. Over time, I scaled my earnings, and soon enough, I was making thousands.

Here’s how I diversified my income:

Freelancing: I offered my writing services on platformslike Upwork and Fiverr. Small gigs eventually turned into a solid portfolio.

Affiliate Marketing: As my blog grew, I began promoting products that aligned with my niche and earned commissions on every sale.

Self-Publishing: I wrote eBooks and courses, which became additional income streams.

The key? Diversification. I didn’t rely on one income source. Instead, I created multiple streams that added up over time.

Chapter 6: Leveraging Platforms for Maximum Exposure

Writing alone isn’t enough. You need to put your content in front of the right people. The secret to making real money from writing is exposure. Here’s how I did it:

Quora: Answering questions related to my niche helped me build authority and attract a loyal audience.

Medium: I used Medium’s Partner Program to monetize my articles and reach a broader audience.

LinkedIn: Posting articles and engaging with professionals in my niche opened doors for freelancing gigs and collaborations.

Each platform has its strengths, but the key is learning to use them strategically to grow your audience and boost your credibility.

Chapter 7: Scaling to $10,000/Month — What Really Made the Difference

Hitting my first $1,000 was tough. But getting to $10,000? That took strategy. Here’s what made the difference for me:

Repurposing content: I reused my content across multiple platforms, reaching different audiences without extra effort.

Networking: I built relationships with other writers and influencers in my niche. These connections opened doors to collaborations, guest posts, and speaking opportunities.

Outsourcing: As I grew, I outsourced administrative tasks, giving me more time to focus on writing high-quality content.

Scaling takes time, but every step compounds. It’s about working smarter, not harder.

Chapter 8: Mindset Shifts for Long-Term Writing Success

The hardest part of this journey wasn’t learning to write. It was shifting my mindset from “this is just a hobby” to “this is my business.” Writing for fun and writing for income are two very different things. Here are the mindset shifts that helped me the most:

Think long-term: Writing isn’t a quick fix for wealth. It takes time and effort, but the rewards are worth it.

Embrace failure: Early on, I faced a lot of rejection. But each failure was a steppingstone to success.

Treat it like a business: Time management, consistency, and discipline were crucial in turning my passion into profit.

Conclusion: Your Path to $10,000 a Month Starts Today

My journey from broke to making $10,000 a month wasn’t fast or easy. But it was worth every moment. With the right strategy, mindset, and platforms, anyone can replicate this process. Remember, consistency and persistence are your biggest assets. Start today, and your $10,000/month writing journey is closer than you think.

[jcmarchi]

Toward socially and environmentally responsible real estate

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/toward-socially-and-environmentally-responsible-real-estate/

Toward socially and environmentally responsible real estate

The MIT student of popular imagination is a Tony Stark or a Riri Williams working in a lab and building the technology of the future. Not necessarily someone studying real estate.

Peggy Ghasemlou is doing just that, however, and she’s traveled over thousands of miles and jumped through about as many hoops to do it.

A licensed architect in her hometown of Tehran, Iran’s capital, Ghasemlou enrolled at MIT to pursue her interests in sustainability and inclusion in the fields of architecture and real estate development. Now, after managing visa and travel issues that required her own superhero-like determination, she’s halfway through earning a master of science in real estate development (MSRED) from the School of Architecture and Planning’s Center for Real Estate (CRE). This fall, she will be working with lecturer Jacques Gordon, CRE’s former “executive-in-practice,” on a thesis involving portfolio management.

Throughout her time at MIT, Ghasemlou has enjoyed her program’s balance of economics, technology, sustainability, and design. She says the curriculum has supported and challenged her in equal measure, but above all, she appreciates the program’s emphasis on financial, social, and environmental responsibility.

“I’m so grateful that I chose MSRED, because they are not just thinking about how to make more money,” she says. “They are teaching us about how to make a lasting positive impact.”

It hasn’t been an easy journey. Visa issues, scholarship rejections, and thousands of miles stood between her and MIT, and the challenges didn’t end when she did get to campus, halfway around the world from her home and family. She beat all those odds, however, and is ready for whatever the future brings.

“When I first arrived here, I had three main feelings: relief, hope, and doubt,” she said. “Now, I am just feeling grateful for my time here and the friendships I have made.”

From design to ownership

While growing up, Ghasemlou loved design “from the start.” That affinity led her to pursue a bachelor’s in architectural engineering, followed by a master’s in digital engineering with a focus on sustainability.

She first made serious contact with MIT while pursuing her master’s, taking the Institute’s online courses to help her with her thesis on zero-energy buildings. She chose both the thesis and the classes out of a desire to “do something positive and impactful” and learned how to use tools to optimize a building’s energy efficiency, among other important measures.

After she earned her master’s, she spent the next five years designing and developing residential buildings for a studio in Tehran. The experience sparked her interest in the financial side of architecture and real estate, and along with it, the intersection of sustainability, economics, and design — areas encompassed by MSRED’s curriculum.

She decided to apply, and was also awarded the Goldie B. Wolfe Miller Women Leaders in Real Estate scholarship.

“The Goldie Initiative is the most supportive community,” she says. “They’re the best thing that’s happen[ed] to me in the U.S. They really care about you, and they really want, in their heart, to help you.”

With women underrepresented in the real estate fields, particularly at leadership levels, awards like this emphasize both the progress that has been made as well as the work that is yet to be done. In Tehran, Ghasemlou founded Girls in Real Estate Development (GIRD), to introduce the fields of architecture and real estate to young women and help create career pathways for these traditionally male-dominated professions.

“I really love to see women being in decision-making positions and to be able to influence different industries in meaningful ways,” she said. “Whatever I learn, I try to [pass along to the next generation]. It might have a small impact on them, but I tell them, ‘If I can do it, you can do it.’”

Once she made it to MIT for her first semester, she took finance and economics courses, which were new subjects for her. Adjusting to a new environment was also jarring, but she credited her classmates and professors for being “incredibly supportive” and helping her “not feel so isolated.”

Her second semester featured sustainability courses — a friendlier prospect, given her background in design — and helped point her in the direction of sustainable portfolio management for her thesis topic.

However, enrolling at MIT was one thing. Actually getting to campus was another.

The long and winding road

Rewind back to last summer. Once the excitement of being accepted to the MSRED program wore off, reality set in. Like other international students, Ghasemlou had to apply for a visa. She did so through the U.S. embassy in Turkey’s capital, Ankara, and began the waiting game. Days turned into weeks, however, so she decided to try her luck with a different embassy and packed her bags for Toronto.

With the start of classes only weeks away, she made the decision to wait it out in the Canadian metropolis. She ended up having to take online classes during the beginning of the semester, but right on the day she “lost all hope,” her visa was finally issued.

In Ankara, that is.

She had already flown over 6,000 miles just to get from Tehran to Toronto, and she was now staring down the barrel of a 10,000-mile-plus trip to go back to Turkey for her visa and then get to MIT’s campus, all while the semester was kicking into gear. That may have been too daunting a prospect for some, but not for her.

“I calculated the hours I was in the airport and airplane: over 30 hours,” she said. “I arrived in Boston, I remember, at 11:30 p.m., then I just thought, ‘Tomorrow, I should go to my classes.’”

Luckily, her family supported her throughout the process.

“I’m so thankful for my parents and my brother — especially my brother — because he believes in me all the time,” she said. “That really helped me go through all the hard times I had to go through to be here.”

Now that she is here, she’s got a lot of big ideas for the future of housing, sustainability, and real estate. She’ll be spending the summer with a Boston-based nonprofit called Preservation of Affordable Housing, assessing units for sustainability goals and updating sustainability criteria.

Going forward, she expressed an interest in staying in Boston long-term, noting its potential to join other cities in becoming ��one of the leaders in sustainability.” She’s a believer in policy for effective change-making, and cites New York City’s Local Law 97 (LL97), which requires that large buildings meet certain limits regarding energy efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions, as an example of a law that is “not just a policy” but also makes people think about the city around them.

Ghasemlou also aims to continue to support other women in the real estate fields, and expresses admiration for female industry leaders such as Fidelity’s Suzanne Heidelberger.

“When I see successful women in this industry, I feel inspired and proud of them,” she said. “I really want to see more and more female leaders in the industry.”

[the-bjd-community-confess]

There was a confession here about c0spigeon’s commission quality, specifically how bad the Venti one was with the clashing lace and literal enamel pin of an accessory. A commenter said the client would have approved it. I just need to vent about this, but as a previous client of cospigeon I guarantee this isn’t true. There is zero communication when you commission her and I have heard the same from others.

She makes every decision herself, without prior discussion or approval, and frequently they are strange ones. She doesn’t even ask you to approve the progress photos she posts on her Insta, I literally wouldn’t know she had even progressed unless I checked. I personally was not that satisfied with what I got because there were several bizarre changes made to the characters outfit without ever consulting me about it, and the sewing was bizarrely poor in places (but I was lucky, as another friend received something so poorly made that had to send it to another friend to fix the stitching) I am trying to be vague because I don’t want to reveal who I am, but one part of the outfit especially was almost insultingly badly done and I’m still angry about it.

I also do not like many of her fabric choices. While I admit she does have some good things in her portfolio (which makes her instances of poor work more confusing to me) she is very much a ‘never question my vision’ person but I personally find that very unprofessional and would never commission her again. If they were cheaper I would let it slide as an ‘artist choice’ option but if I am paying you that much for a commission I expect to be at least vaguely involved in the process, even if it’s just to run things by me first. Basically, had I known this is how my commission would have turned out in terms of choice of fabric and random design changes, plus overall quality of certain parts I definitely wouldn’t have commissioned her.

And yeah sorry I agree with anon that Venti looks pretty sad, parts are uneven and tacky looking, the lace stands out in a bad way and I simply cannot get over the audacity and cheapness of using a cartoonish enamel charm for an accessory so a whole section of the outfit is completely 2D. As soon as I saw that I just KNEW that was her decision that she didn’t consult them on. If the commissioner did like it then whatever but it’s very amateurish work overall and certainly not worth whatever insane price it undoubtedly was.

~Anonymous

[a-woman-apart]

Separating the Boys from the Men

Yes, that title is click bait, and if you keep reading, you’ve been warned. I’ve got a lot to get off my chest, and it’s going to involve defending masculinity, femininity, and our right to BEHAVE LIKE CHILDREN FOR THE REST OF OUR LIVES because in many ways, we already do. 

Let’s get straight to the point. As Millennials, regardless of our age, financial status, or level of “success” (air quotes 100% intentional) we have been accused of being lazy, entitled, and way too enthusiastic about avocado toast. At the same time, we have been described as having enough power to decimate the napkin industry, the diamond industry, and the concept of traditional marriage. We have been accused of a collective “Peter Pan” syndrome, because we “refuse” to cut off papa’s apron strings and get off the proverbial mama’s teats. 

Wonderful to know. 

Let’s unpack the “lazy” bit. Supposedly, this is tied to the fact that we have access to higher education, we [often, not always] have parents who financially support or house us well into adulthood. 

So now, my question is, Gen X (the entitled ones, ironically) and Salty Boomers, YOU DIDN’T? 

What do you call that “inheritance” you received? What do you call that education your parents paid for that was less than 1/3 what we have to pay? For Boomers, how do you explain the lavish weddings, cheap [and apparently nuke proof] home appliances, and “nights out on the town” that you were able to afford by working at whatever passed for a McDonald’s back in the day? Working on a farm, at a grocery store, or in retail used to ACTUALLY provide a livable wage; for us, those are a “side hustle” and we still have to get a “big boy job” that usually requires an education that can put us over $100,000 in debt by age 30. 

Hate to say it, but if you hadn’t made most of your income “during the War” or in  the absolute economic boom that followed it, you wouldn’t survive 24 hours in our shoes before having an emotional collapse.  

Despite the disastrous living conditions of the U.S. in the 21st Century, not much has changed in how men define their level of “manliness.” 

Financial gains (stocks, bonds, portfolio, bank account) 

Bro “gains” (a.k.a. “gym gains”, how “Gaston” they are, including whether they want to go for the Adonis, Apollo, or Brawny boi look, or just how far they can throw something or how “boyish” they look if strength isn’t an option and they suffer from femme-levels of body dysmorphia) 

Body count (since we’re in a time of peace and not literally war, this is LITERALLY a modern term describing how many people you’ve slept with, and I have never heard an adult man, regardless of sexual orientation, who isn’t a little concerned about putting those notches in the bed post, and if not that, VERY concerned about his bedroom performance: it’s quality vs. quantity) 

Kill death Ratio (I know this is a video game term now, but did you know that before video games, men in England used to regularly get on horseback, get a bunch of hounds together, and chase down tiny foxes and rabbits? FOR FUN?!?!? Did you know, that before modern sports ((including Esports)), men used to just fight to the death, regularly, even if an official war wasn’t going on? It was known as “dueling”, and in less socially developed societies, men still behave like this. So the next time you complain about “male rage” and how heartless it is to make live chickens fight, note that even though we’ve quelled male anger and hostility on some level, you will NEVER be able to take away man’s urge to destroy. Boys and men will always like knocking things over, building things from the rubble, and ruling shit. It’s what they do-- and we women can and do, too, but we have a LOT more risk-aversion and self-preservation, which is a blessing and a curse for our species-- but we just need to make sure humanity as a whole stays...chill)

So what, say ye, has changed about how WOMEN define themselves now vs. in the past. I would say that very little has changed, but the level of internalized misogyny, insecurity, and good-old fashioned denial has SKYROCKETED. 

Let’s look at some terms of how the majority of women value themselves. 

Financial Security (few women will admit to “wanting to be rich”, because that sounds kind of “Trump”, but plenty will talk about having minimum income requirements for their partner(s), wanting to retire at a young age so they can “travel the world”, wanting to eliminate their debts, etc. It’s different language but essentially it translates to: I want to work so hard or marry into so much wealth that I never want to worry about money after age 35. #Hustle) 

Looks (it doesn’t matter if you want a Kardashian butt, you’re in the body positivity movement, or you just want to “dress like a bawse” women are just as obsessed with clothes, image, and body weight/shape/size as they ever were, it is just that now that we’ve “slain the patriarchy” we have more fashion options than ever before, because “boy clothes” are just as “in” as femme ones)

Ability to attract a partner (some women, like me, “chase”, but thanks to biology, most women, regardless of sexual orientation, seem to enjoy being pursued more than being Artemis-style hunters. This is evidenced by the fact that when the feminist owner of Bumble changed the rules of the dating website to where women had to start conversations with men rather than vice versa ((a move that had ostensibly zero effect on lesbian matching)) 72% of women that she later surveyed stated that they liked it better when men were approaching them rather than the other way around. I am sure Bumble’s female CEO was shook ((as was I)), especially because she made the change to empower women, and apparently 72% of women didn’t want the power because it meant they now had the power to face rejection, and it made them uncomfortable. Big yikes. So much for #EndPatriarchy and #ChivalryisDead ?)

Playing house (this is probably going to get me some unfollows, but I’ll take my chances. Women, regardless of sexual orientation, often seem to be REALLY into having babies or just “playing house.” There’s also men like this, too, “Family men” as they’re aptly called, men in love with fatherhood ((or just being called “daddy”, and that will never not be weird)). So many women who never want to pop out a baby describe being taken by an OVERWHELMING urge to fuck during their “fertile window” ((or is that just me?)) and seeing every baby alive as the cutest human being ever once we pass the tender age of 25. The biological clock is REAL, and I learned the hard way that being bisexual and having immense fear of pregnancy and childbirth didn’t spare me from the awful truth of my biology. 

I really don’t want to keep making references to modern video games, but they seem to serve the dual purpose of being deeply satisfying and helping us to quell “problematic” urges, including that one to dominate and destroy the world. For a lot of women gamers, though, our choices ((on a broad scale, every #girlgamer is different)) deviate from men’s in some interesting ways. 

#1: We still love The Sims Franchise way more than guys do 

Not only do we love it, but while a lot of men (again, #notallmen) tend to build elaborate neighborhoods to extensively mod and destroy them in terrifying ways, I still see women gamers taking obscene amounts of time to design homes, raise happy little families, and cause TERRIFYING blood feuds by having Sims marry Sims from rival families ((I guess we’re more Shakespeare than we thought, eh ladies?))

#2: We make up most of mobile gaming

Most male gamers think mobile games “aren’t real” and I tend to agree, but a mobile game is invaluable for when I, a woman, have time to kill between the 3 jobs I hypothetically have and I and don’t want to whip out something like a Nintendo 2DS that is both unwieldly and attracts the eyes of every impoverished, thieving human being in a .5 mile radius. #RiskAversion. These games are often low-quality, mindless, and insanely easy, but that is WHY WE LIKE THEM. Our entire life is a job. #Hustle

#3 We also love farming sims and RPGs

While we-- and most male Millennials-- beg god to not have to birth calves, milk cows, or labor in the tomato fields under the hot sun, most of us have no objection to having our virtual avatars perform the same back-breaking tasks to the tune of cheerful chiptune music. Also, even though men definitely enjoy them, too, I have never met a woman gamer who didn’t enjoy a nice RPG; why do you think we’re such avid readers of fantasy/romance YA? 

We want to be transported to a different world, and if you won’t take us there, we’re happy to go there virtually ((because we probably can’t afford travel; we’re still millennials)). 

Ability to murder people who threaten our young or our partner(s) (Okay this one is a bit more complicated, but I’m just going to tell you a bit about female animals. DON’T MESS WITH THEIR BABIES IF YOU WANT TO LIVE. Human females, are, in that regard, just as savage, if not more so, than our male counterparts. 

I’ve never heard of any woman ((outside of prison, maybe)) who killed another woman for “looking at her weird” or saying “your mama” too many times. I’ve heard plenty of women threaten literal murder because another woman ((or man, we’re #progressive)) came too close to her romantic/sexual partner, or another human being threatened harm on our kids or our “squad.” 

I don’t know where the meme truly originated from, but “Don’t talk to me or my son ever again” is SUCH a Mom thing to say. So much misandry is wrapped up in the idea that men are predators, and that is true, but not in the excessively sexually deviant ways you think ((that’s only sometimes true)). They just like hunting things, including people, but if you give them a toy to play with ((I MEAN ACTUAL TOY OMG)) they seem alright. Let them go play with their cars, Xbox, [insert whatever] or something. They’re men, okay, they’re easily distracted/impressed/occupied. 

Women, on the other hand, have seemed to be having an EXTREME amount of trouble curbing that baby-making urge, or the Excessive Nurturing Urge, that one that makes you ask your grown husband if he’s remembered to pack lunch for work or if he remembered to pack money for his playdate with his bros, because he’s gonna need money at Six Flags and you aren’t going to bring it to him because he should’ve remembered, you reminded him 30093390 times. 

THAT’S NOT HIS FAULT. HE HAS MANAGED BY SOME MIRACLE TO STAY ALIVE FOR 33 YEARS. THAT’S YOU, SWEETIE. STOP BEING SUCH A MOM. GO BE A NURSE, DOCTOR, OR SOCIAL WORKER OR SOMETHING OMG. 

In summary...

What separates the “men from the boys” or the “women from the girls” isn’t the era that we were born in to, our economic status, or whether we’ve been able to “conquer” our biology. That’s definitely not possible yet, chiefly because transhumanism involves a lengthy, ethics-guided process, and even if we all turn into cyborgs, the goal is to become BETTER humans, not LESS humane. Societal advancements have done more in terms of making us healthier, less destructive citizens of planet earth than raw technology ever can and ever will. Rapid technological advancement, when not combined with respect for morality, ethical standards of living for humans and all other life forms, almost always leads to human slavery, widespread abuse of animals, sex trafficking, and environmental destruction, because the “rules of supply and demand”, when not governed by strong international trade laws, dictate that consumers should be supplied with whatever they demand, because the suppliers can profit, and their right to profit should be defended at any cost. 

So, in summary, I believe that “adulting” involves giving up on entitlement. What separates a truly childish human being-- regardless of their actual age-- from someone who is, in essence, “adulting” is experience, and how much those experiences serve to broaden that person’s perspective. It is an extremely childish, self-centered view, to think that you “deserve” anything for being “a good person” or, in the case of many a “woman child” or “man child” in media and in real life, just being “not so bad.” 

Grown-ups are able and willing to do something that is known as “delaying gratification” which is the simple ability to delay a temporary pleasure for a long-term gain. Grown-ups are also able to perform true “cost-benefit analyses” to determine if a course of action, business deal, or even relationship is worth their time and effort. Finally, grown-ups are able and willing and able to make an informed choice and stick to it; in essence, we don’t try to “have our cake and eat it too” we understand that once we’ve eaten that cake, the cake is gone, but we also realize that if we are willing to work hard and make sacrifices, we can earn the ingredients to make ourselves another cake to eat, even if we might need a lot of help from other adults in getting those ingredients (we call this teamwork and cooperation). 

Children, on the other hand (in literal and metaphorical terms), are very impatient. They get angry when things don’t go their way, and instead of taking the steps needed to improve their situation, they storm off and return home. It doesn’t matter if their home is with their parents, with their 3 roommates, or with their husband or wife, these people throw tantrums, refuse to communicate/cooperate, and stew in their displeasure until someone feels sorry for them and fixes their problem for them. They lack the ability to work through daily life problems and refuse to take any responsibility for how their actions or inaction contributed to their dilemma. 

There is one difference with an actual human child or teen, though, is that they have an excuse. Their brains are still developing, and they haven’t had the chance to live through these situations yet; these are new challenges to them. Even if they do have a “bad attitude”, with help from peers and patients, principled adult mentors and teachers, these cantankerous kids can grow into well-adjusted, able adults. The high levels of neuroplasticity in their brains actually make it so that it is easier for them to accept large amounts of sensory data and to learn from processing and practicing using it.

An “adult child” is someone who, more often than not, has been coddled instead of challenged. These people have often faced no significant hardships in life. There is a reason why, even after we have recognized the immense downsides of authoritarian parenting and have demonstrated psychological harms of corporal punishment for kids, we still call “bad kids” and “irresponsible adults” spoiled. 

Authoritarianism produces rigid, scared people who often struggle with critical thinking and self-esteem or end up being authoritarian parents themselves, but that last one is actually one of the less likely options. Children of authoritarian parents often develop Borderline Personality Disorder or become defiant against authority (shocker). Overly permissive or overly neglectful parenting, though, are parental styles most associated with producing narcissists, who often become authoritarian parents, because when their kids challenge them, they completely lack the patience or emotional capacity to deal with it and resort to “because I said so”, stonewalling and/or physical abuse as forms of “character-building.” 

The reason why overly permissive parents spoil their kids is because kids actually do need discipline and guidance, and so these kinds of parents produce kids who are outwardly capable and confident but completely lack any of the life skills to justify it, and when they ask their parents for advice they are just met with a bunch of hippie mumbo jumbo or told to just avoid the conflict rather than resolve it. These kids grow into adults who are still sad little kids inside, because they never grew up, but now they’re sad little kids who are articulate and well-spoken and now can-- and often have no choice-- but to con their way through adult life because they’ve maxed out Charisma and they have almost no points in Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, or Dexterity.

The only parenting style worse than Authoritarian and Neglectful/Permissive is Mixed, in which a child grows up in a COMPLETELY unpredictable environment where the rules of the game change from day to day, and parents either give their children no attention at all, or they practically lock them up and throw away the key. Being raised like this is associated with the worse outcomes for the child throughout life. 

So, why am I now talking about parenting styles? Because, for all that we love to trash Boomers and large swaths of Gen X on this page, we can’t forget where they came from, so we cannot allow them to forget WHO THEY MADE. It isn’t an accident that even though we live in the times of incredible economic hardship, WE are the generation (and Gen Z, to some extent) that got hooked on reality TV, video games, and social media in incredibly unhealthy ways. A lot of us 30+ millennials are growing out of it, and a lot of us have realized that it is an invaluable (and damn near unavoidable) way of marketing our products and talents. We’re often self-employed because that’s our only option in most cases. 

The issue with Gen Z (who, while we called “Zoomers” now just all themselves “Doomers” and I think we should be a bit concerned about that) is that unlike us, they have no memory of “Before the Internet.” We remember dial up, we remember before that when you played outside untl the sun went down. They don’t have the privilege of being linked to that history. 

Now, we have to be the Bigger Person. It’s our time to be Grown-Ups. Gen Z feels really fucking lost right now, and hearing us whine about our parents probably makes them pretty pissed off, when some of us older millennials are the parents, aunts/uncles, and older siblings to Gen Z kids. Even if we can’t be mentors, we have to lead by example, because we have a responsibility to these kids. A lot of them aren’t stupid, they see exactly what’s happening and they feel incredibly hopeless about it. Greta Thunberg is still 16 years old. She shouldn’t be out there doing that; I mean seriously, climate change is accelerating, but it isn’t even as bad as Al Gore said, it’s still reversible, but the fact that SHE FELT SHE HAD TO makes us shitty people. ALL OF US. 

So you know, we all need to stop being hypocrites. We need to stop being entitled. We need to stop thinking this is about us. It isn’t. Not even close. We’re not important, even if our videos go viral or if we’re swimming in cash next to hot models by a huge swimming pool. America’s fucked up. I hate to sound Republican, but it’s because of our values. We suck at valuing what’s important, and if we don’t change that soon, it’s really going to suck to live in America. 

It already does.  

[atlanticcanada]

Veteran member of N.S. Liberal government resigns, ending party's majority rule

A veteran member and former cabinet minister in Nova Scotia's Liberal government announced Friday that she has submitted her resignation, sending the party to minority status in the legislature.

In a post to Facebook, Margaret Miller said her resignation from the legislature will take effect June 1.

Miller did not give a specific reason for leaving but said her move "does not reflect on my feelings for the party or my hardworking colleagues."

She said the message was a hard one for her to deliver. "It's not something I thought I'd ever do, but you all know I'm true to my beliefs and my word, and I believe that's why many of you voted for me," she wrote. An assistant in her East Hants constituency office reached by phone Friday said Miller was declining further comment.

Miller's pending departure follows the May 3 retirement of former premier Stephen McNeil and means the Liberals will no longer have a majority in the legislature. Once Miller leaves, two Liberal seats will be vacant, reducing the party to 24 seats in the 51-seat legislature. The Progressive Conservatives have 18, the NDP 5 and there are two Independents.

There is no set election date, although Premier Iain Rankin will have to call one by May 30, 2022, when his government's current mandate runs out. A raging COVID-19 outbreak has dampened election speculation, but there is the looming prospect of a fall legislature sitting with the Liberals in a minority position.

Lori Turnbull, a political scientist at Dalhousie University, believes the new alignment won't make much of a difference at this point.

"I don't think going from a caucus of 25 to 24 in the current circumstances really changes anything about the confidence in the government or the survival of the government," she said in an interview. Turnbull said the fact a government member is leaving for the reasons she stated could prove more challenging for Rankin at a time when he's also trying to deal with a public health crisis.

On Thursday, CBC reported that Miller sent an email this week to Rankin's chief of staff, saying she planned to resign from caucus following the hiring of a new director of strategic initiatives in Rankin's office. The report said Miller told Joanne Macrae she was "beyond disappointed" by the hire and saw no other way to express her feelings.

Rankin told reporters on Friday that he has seen the email and has asked his chief of staff and the executive director of the Liberal caucus office to look into the matter to ensure "that any allegation at all be dealt with."

"Due process needs to be followed to see if there are any formal complaints made previous to that email," he said. "I have been assured that there were no complaints raised before that email was sent into the office."

Rankin has said that he has "zero tolerance" for people who don't respect one another.

Miller announced in November 2018 that she would not run in the next provincial election and she has been focusing more recently on her husband's poor health.

"My family situation is well known and certainly needs my attention and further to that, recent events have dictated that this is the best course of action at this time," she wrote in a resignation letter to legislature Speaker Kevin Murphy.

A former president of MADD Canada, Miller was first elected in 2013 and had served in cabinet under McNeil, holding the environment and natural resources portfolios.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 7, 2021.

from CTV News - Atlantic https://ift.tt/33spxJg

[norbert-weber]

https://www.aier.org/article/an-education-in-viruses-and-public-health-from-michael-yeadon-former-vp-of-pfizer/

➖➖➖Dr. Michael Yeadon is an Allergy & Respiratory Therapeutic Area expert with 23 years in the pharmaceutical industry. He trained as a biochemist and pharmacologist, obtaining his PhD from the University of Surrey (UK) in 1988.

Dr. Yeadon then worked at the Wellcome Research Labs with Salvador Moncada with a research focus on airway hyper-responsiveness and effects of pollutants including ozone and working in drug discovery of 5-LO, COX, PAF, NO and lung inflammation. With colleagues, he was the first to detect exhaled NO in animals and later to induce NOS in lung via allergic triggers.

Joining Pfizer in 1995, he was responsible for the growth and portfolio delivery of the Allergy & Respiratory pipeline within the company. He was responsible for target selection and the progress into humans of new molecules, leading teams of up to 200 staff across all disciplines and won an Achievement Award for productivity in 2008.

Under his leadership the research unit invented oral and inhaled NCEs which delivered multiple positive clinical proofs of concept in asthma, allergic rhinitis and COPD. He led productive collaborations such as with Rigel Pharmaceuticals (SYK inhibitors) and was involved in the licensing of Spiriva and acquisition of the Meridica (inhaler device) company.

Dr. Yeadon has published over 40 original research articles and now consults and partners with a number of biotechnology companies. Before working with Apellis, Dr. Yeadon was VP and Chief Scientific Officer (Allergy & Respiratory Research) with Pfizer.

Below is a transcript of the video above:

My name is Dr Michael Yeadon. 

My original training was a first-class honours degree in biochemistry and toxicology. Followed by a research-based PhD into respiratory pharmacology; and after that I’ve worked my entire life, uh, on the research side of the pharmaceutical industry – both big pharma and also biotech. My specific focus has been inflammation, immunology, allergy in the context of respiratory diseases (so the lung, but also the skin). So I would say I’m a kind of a deeply experienced inflammation, immunology, pulmonology kind of research person. 

I initially became concerned about, the, our response to the coronavirus pandemic towards the middle or back end of April as early as that. It had become clear that if you look at the number of daily deaths versus the date the pandemic had turned. Really, pleasingly, already the wave was fundamentally over, and we would just watch it fall for a number of months – which is what it did. And so I became very perturbed about increasing restrictions on the behavior and movement of people in my country and I could see no reason for it then and I still don’t. 

Government’s response to emergencies is guided by the scientific group who sit together under the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies or SAGE. So they should provide scientific advice to the government about what’s appropriate to do. SAGE has got several things wrong, and that has led to advice that’s inappropriate and – uh, not only has had horrible economic effects, but has had continuing medical effects in that people are no longer being treated properly. 

SAGE took the view that since SARS-CoV-2 was a new virus that they believed there wouldn’t be any immunity at all in the population. So, I think that’s the first thing. I remember hearing that and I puzzled, because I already knew – because I read the scientific literature that SARS-CoV-2 was 80% similar to another virus you may have heard of called SARS that moved around the world a bit in 2003, and more than that: it’s quite similar, in pieces of it, to common cold-causing coronaviruses. 

So, when I heard that there was this coronavirus moving across the world I wasn’t as worried as perhaps other people were, because I figured that since there are four common cold-causing coronaviruses, I figured that quite a lot of the population we’ve been exposed to one of those viruses, and would probably have a perhaps substantial protective immunity. And just to explain why I was so confident everybody knows the story of Edward Jenner and vaccination, and the story of cowpox and smallpox. And that the old story was that milkmaids had very, uh, clear complexions: they never suffered from things like smallpox, that if it didn’t kill you would leave your skin permanently scarred. And the reason that they had the protection was that they were exposed to a more benign, related virus called cowpox. 

Edward Jenner came up with the idea that if it’s cowpox that saves the fair maid – he reasoned that if he could give another person an exposure to the cowpox, he would be able to protect them from smallpox. Now, he did an experiment that you can’t do now – and he never should have done it – but apocryphally, or really, or maybe you’re ill, we’re not sure. Edward Jenner acquired some of the liquid from a person infected with cowpox. Relatively mild pustules that then go away. And he got some of this and he – he scraped it into the skin of a small boy and a few weeks later, he obtained some liquid from some poor person that was dying of smallpox and infected the boy. And, lo and behold, the boy did not get ill and that gave birth to the whole field of what’s called vaccination. And vax, the vaccine’s “vac.” It comes from “vaccus,” the Latin name for cow. So, we are really familiar with the principle of cross immunization.

I’ve thought quite a lot about, you know, the vulnerable people in in care homes and there’s an awareness that, even though people really careful using PPE and so on, but that’s only going to go so far in a kind of, hot house environment where people are pretty close together in a care home. So the question I’ve had all year is: once one or two people, you know, got the virus in a care home, why wouldn’t almost everyone get infected? And of course the truth is, they didn’t. And one interpretation of that distinction is that a large proportion of people in the care homes had prior immunity. 

At this time of year, about 1 in 30 people have a cold, caused by one of these coronaviruses. And just like the protection against smallpox provided by previous exposure to cowpox, so people exposed to having had a cold caused by one of these coronaviruses they’re now immune to SARS-CoV-2. So, 30% of the population was protected before the start. SAGE said it was zero – and I don’t understand how they could possibly have justified that. There’s a second, and equally fatal, unaccountable error that they have made in their model. The percentage of the population that SAGE asserts have been infected to date by the virus is about seven percent. I know that that’s what they believe and you can see it in a document they published in September called “Non-pharmaceutical interventions” and it says sadly more than 90% of the population is still vulnerable. 

It’s unbelievably wrong. And I’m just going to explain why: they’ve based their number on the percentage of people in the country who have antibodies in their blood. And only the people who became most ill needed to actually develop and release antibodies around their body. So, it is certainly true that the people who have lots of antibodies were infected. But a very large number of people had milder symptoms, and even more people had none at all. And the best estimates that we can arrive at is that those people either made no antibodies, or so low amounts that they will have faded from now. 

A recent publication on the percentage of care home residents who have antibodies to the virus very, very interesting. This time they were using high sensitivity tests for antibodies and they carefully picked out residents that never were PCR-positive: these are people who never got infected. And they found that 65% of them had antibodies to the virus; they never got infected. So I believe there was high prevalence of immunity in that population prior to the virus arriving. Big story in the media, recently, was that the percentage of people with antibodies against the virus in their blood was falling. Now, this was cast as a concern that immunity to SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t last very long. Well, you know, anyone with knowledge of immunity would – would just simply reject that. It’s not the way immunity to virus works – that would be T-cells. So, if the antibodies are falling gradually over time – which they have – from spring to present, the only plausible explanation is that the prevalence of the virus in the population is falling, and that’s why the antibody production gradually subsides.

Less than 40% of the population are susceptible. Even theoretical epidemiologists would tell you that that’s too small a number to support a consolidated and growing outbreak, community immunity, herd immunity. So, SAGE says that we’re not even close, and I’m telling you that the best science, by the best scientists in the world, published in the top peer-reviewed journals, says they’re wrong: that more than 60 of the population are now immune, and it’s simply not possible to have a large and growing pandemic. 

Really good news, genuine good news, to hear that there’s data emerging from the vaccine clinical trials, and we are seeing vaccines that raise not just antibodies – but they’re also producing T-cell responses. This is great; back to proper science, proper immunology. That’s how immunity to viruses works. So, my surprise though, and it’s just annoying that when we’re talking about, uh, the percentage of the population that’s still susceptible we only talk about antibodies, like seven percent from SAGE. Why are we not talking about the 50% that have got T-cell immunity? 

And so you might be thinking if Mike – and Dr Mike Yeadon is telling you these things… – or how come the pandemic isn’t over? Well, this may come as a surprise to you, but I believe fundamentally it is over. The country has experienced almost a complete cycle now of the virus sweeping through the land, and we are at the end of it. London was –was horribly affected in the spring, and somewhere in early April they were experiencing several hundred deaths per day from people dying with similar symptoms in respiratory failure and, uh, inflammation. And at the moment the number of people dying of SARS-CoV-2 in the capital is less than 10. So it’s down by 98, or something like that. And, the reason it’s down, is because there are now too few people in London susceptible to allow the virus to magnify, to amplify, to get an epidemic. And, and they would have been hit by now, because they were the first place hit in the spring. And I think what we’re seeing now in the Northeast and the Northwest would be the dying embers of the spreading out of this virus. And I’m very sorry that it is still true, that a small number of people are catching it, getting ill, and dying. 

So why aren’t the media telling us that the pandemic is over? It’s not over because SAGE says it’s not. So SAGE consists of very many scientists, from a range of disciplines – mathematicians and clinicians – and there are multiple committees. But I found to my surprise – and I’m actually going to use the word – horror, that in the spring, all the way through the spring and summer, SAGE did not have on their committee someone who I would call a card-carrying immunologist; a clinical immunologist. I have to say I think that in the spring and summer SAGE was deficient in the expertise it had. They should have armed themselves, you know, with – around the table all the people required to to understand what was happening, and they didn’t do that. People asked me then, “Well Mike, if it’s, you know, if it’s fundamentally over, why are we still getting hundreds of deaths a day from SARS-CoV-2?” And I’ve thought a lot about this. There is a test that’s performed where people have their noses and tonsils swabbed, and then a test (called a PCR test) is performed on that. And what they’re looking for isn’t the virus – you might think it’s looking for the virus, but it’s not. What they’re looking for is a small piece of genetic sequence; it’s called RNA. Unfortunately, that bit of RNA will be found in people’s tonsils and nose not if they’ve just caught the virus, and they’re about to get ill, or they’re already ill. It’s also going to be found if they were infected previously weeks – or even, sometimes, a small number of months ago. Let me just explain why that is. 

If you’ve been infected, and you’ve fought off the virus (which most people do), you’ll have broken, dead bits of virus. These are tiny things smaller than your cells, perhaps spread all the way through your airway, embedded in bits of mucus, maybe inside an airway lining cell. And so over a period of weeks or months you bring up cells that contain broken, dead pieces of the virus that you have conquered and killed. However, the PCR test is not able to detect whether the viral RNA has come from a living virus or a dead one (as I’ve just described). So I think a large proportion of the so-called positives are, in fact, what I call “cold” positives: they’re correctly identifying that there is some viral RNA in the sample – but it’s from a dead virus. It can’t hurt them, they’re not going to get ill, they can’t transmit it to anybody else. So they’re not infectious. So that accounts for a large number of the so-called positive cases. These are people who’ve beaten the virus. Why are we using this test that cannot distinguish between active infection and people who’ve conquered the virus? 

This test has never been used in this way – and I’ve worked in this field. It’s not a suitable technique it’s a – it’s the kind of technique you would use for forensic purposes, if you were trying to do a DNA test to establish whether or not a person was at the scene of a crime. You would not be doing these tests by a windy, supermarket car parking; what looks like plastic marquee tents; on picnic tables. It’s not suitable at all – and it definitely shouldn’t be done in the way it’s been done. It’s subject to many mechanical errors, should we say, handling errors. If this was a test being used for legal purposes, for forensic purposes like a DNA identity test, the judge would throw out this evidence; would say it’s not admissible. It produces positives even when there’s no virus there at all. We call that a false positive. 

As we’ve increased the number of tests done per day, so we’ve had to recruit less and less experienced laboratory staff – and now we’re using people who’ve never worked professionally in this area. What that does is it increases the frequency of mistakes, and the effect of this is that the false positive rate rises and rises. So, if you had a false positive rate of one percent – which Mr. Matt Hancock [British Secretary of State for Health and Social Care] told us was roughly the number they had in the summer – then if you tested a thousand people that had no virus ten of them would be positive, astonishingly. If the prevalence of the virus was only one in a thousand, that’s 0.1% – as the Office for National Statistics told us it was through the summer – then if you use the PCR test only one of them will be positive and genuinely so. But if the false positive rate is as low as one percent, you’ll also get 10 positives that are false. 

Some people did say to me, “Well, there’ll be a higher percentage of people coming forward for testing in the community,” so-called “Pillar 2” testing, because they’ve been instructed only to come if they’ve got symptoms. But I call B.S. on that one. I don’t think that’s true. I know lots of friends and relatives who’ve been told by an employer, “Well, you’ve sat near someone who’s tested positive, and I don’t want you to come back to work until you’ve got a negative test.” I’ve seen information from many towns in the North – certainly Birmingham was one; Manchester was another; Bolton – where councils (and I really think they were trying to be helpful) were out leafleting the people of their cities saying, “We’re going to come round and swab you all because we want to track down this virus.” Now once you start testing people, more or less randomly, instead of [those] having symptoms you get the same amount of virus in the population as the Office of National Statistics found which is, at the time was, one in a thousand. And I’ve just told you Matt Hancock confirmed during the summer they had a false positive rate of about one percent. So that means out of a thousand people 10 would test positive, and it would be a false result, and only one would test positive and it was correct. 

This test is monstrously unsuitable for detecting who has live virus in their airway. It’s subject to multiple distortions that are worsening as we get into the winter. As the number of tests done per day increase[s], the number of errors made by these overworked, not very experienced lab staff increase[s]. I think it’s not unreasonable to say a best guess of the false positive rate at the moment – what’s called the operational false positive rate is about five percent. Five percent of 300,000 is 15,000 positives. I think some of those positives are real; I don’t think it’s very many. Now, the problem with this false positive issue [is] it doesn’t just stop it at “cases”: it extends to people who are unwell and go to hospital. So people who go to hospital having tested positive – and it could be a false positive, and I think most of them are at the moment – if you go to hospital and you’ve tested positive previously, or you test positive in hospital, you’ll be counted now as a Covid admission. 

Although there are more people in hospital now than a month ago, this is normal for autumn. Regrettably, people catch respiratory viruses and become ill, and some will die. I just don’t believe it’s got anything to do with Covid-19 anymore. There are more people in intensive care beds now than there were a month or so ago. That’s entirely normal as we move through late autumn into the early winter: those beds become used. But there aren’t more people than is normal for the time of year, and we’re not about to run out of capacity, certainly at a national level. But I think you know it is going now: if you should now die, you’ll be counted as a Covid death. But that’s not correct; these are people who might have – have gone to hospital having had a broken leg, for example, but they’ll – three percent of them will still test positive, and they’re not, they haven’t got the virus. It’s a – it’s a false positive, and if they die they’ll be called a Covid death – and they are not. They’ve died of something else. 

One of the most troubling things I’ve heard this year was Mr. Johnson telling us about the “Moonshot” testing everybody often, maybe every day, is the way out of this problem. I’m telling you it’s the way to keep us in this problem: that number of tests is orders of magnitude higher than we’re already testing now, and the false positive rate (however low it is) will be far too large to accept. It will produce an enormous number of false positives. 

What we should do is stop mass testing. Not only is it an affront to your liberty, it will not help at all: it will be immensely expensive and it will be a pathology all of its own. We’ll be fighting off stupid people – mostly government ministers – I’m sorry to say, who are not numerate, and do not understand statistics. If you test a million people a day with a test that produces one percent false positives, 10 000 people a day will wrongly be told they’ve got the virus. If the prevalence of the virus was say 0.1%, like the Office of National Statistics said it was in summer, then only a tenth of that number, uh, 1,000 would correctly be identified. But you can’t distinguish amongst the 11,000 who have genuinely got the virus and who are false positives. Moonshot, I think, will have a worse false positive rate. It’s not fixable, and it’s not necessary either. The pandemic – having passed through the population not only of, of the UK, but of all of Europe – and probably all of the world quite soon – it won’t return. Why won’t it return? Well, they’ve got T-cell immunity. We know this. It’s been studied by the best cellular immunologists in the world. 

Sometimes people will say, “Well, it looks like the immunity is starting to fade.” You’ll sometimes see [statements] like that, and when I saw the first headline like this I remember being really quite confused, because that’s not the way immunology works. Just think about it for a moment. If that was how it worked it could kill you. When you had to fight it off, and if you had successfully done that, it somehow didn’t leave a mark in your body. Well, it does leave a mark on your body. The way you fought it off involved certain pattern recognition receptors, and has left you with – as it were – memory cells that remember what it was they fought off. And if they see that thing again it’s very easy for them to get those cells to work again in minutes or hours, and they will protect you. So the most likely explanation is it’ll last a long time. 

So I read a bit more about this so-called tailing off of immunity – and I realized they were talking about antibodies. Just incorrect to – to think that antibodies, and how long they stay up, is a measure of immune protection against viruses. I mean you can tell I’m – I don’t agree with this. It says there have been some classic experiments done on people who have inborn errors in parts of their immune system, and some of them have inborn arrows that means they can’t make antibodies, and guess what: they – they are able to handle respiratory viruses the same as you and me. So, I don’t think it’s harmful to have antibodies, although some people are worried about the potential for amplifying inflammation from antibodies, but – but my view is that they’re – they’re probably neutral, and you definitely should not believe the story that because the antibody falls away you’ve lost immunity. Again, that’s just not the way the human immune system works. 

The most likely duration of immunity to a respiratory virus like SARS-CoV-2 is multiple years. Why do I say that? We actually have the data for a virus that swept through parts of the world 17 years ago called SARS, and remember SARS-CoV-2 is 80% similar to SARS, so I think that’s the best comparison that anyone can provide. The evidence is clear. These very clever cellular immunologists studied all the people they could get hold of who had survived SARS 17 years ago. They took a blood sample, and they tested whether they responded or not to the original SARS, and they all did. They all have perfectly normal, robust T-cell memory. They are actually also protected against SARS-CoV-2 because it’s so similar, it’s cross-immunity. So, I would say the best data that exists is that immunity should be robust for at least 17 years. I think it’s entirely possible that it is lifelong. The style of the responses of these people’s T-cells were the same as if you’ve been vaccinated and then you come back years later to see, has that immunity been retained? And so I think the evidence is really strong that the duration of immunity will be multiple years, and possibly lifelong. 

There have been but a tiny handful of people who appear to have been infected twice – now they’re very interesting, we need to know who they are and understand them very well, they’ve probably got certain rare immune deficiency syndromes. So I’m not pretending no one ever gets reinfected, but I am pointing out that it’s literally five people (or maybe 50 people), but the World Health Organization estimated some weeks ago that 750 million people have been infected so far by SARS-CoV-2. That means most people are not being reinfected, and I can tell you why that is: it’s normal. It’s what happens with viruses, respiratory viruses. Some people have – have called for “zero Covid” as if it’s some political slogan. And there are some people I’ve heard calling for it almost every day; they’re completely unqualified to tell you anything. 

Something that’s really important to know is that SARS-CoV-2 – it’s an unpleasant virus. There’s no question about it, but it’s not what you were told in spring. We were originally told that it would kill perhaps three percent of people it infected – which is horrifying. That’s 30 times worse than flu. We always overestimate the lethality of new infectious diseases when we’re in the eye of the storm. I believe the true infection fatality ratio of Covid-19, the true threat to life is, the same as seasonal flu. 

So there’s no reason why you would want to try and drive Covid to zero. It’s a nonsense – that’s just not how biology is. And all the means I have heard, uh, proposed, as ways to get us there are much more damaging and pathological, I would say, than than the virus itself. It’s simply not possible to get rid of every single copy of the Covid-19 virus, and the means to get you there would destroy society. Forget the cost – although it would be huge – it would destroy your liberty, you would need to not go out until you’ve been tested and have your result back. And I have described how the false positive rate would just destroy it from a statistical perspective. I don’t believe it can be done: it’s not scientifically realistic, it’s not medically realistic, and it’s not what we have ever done. 

As the virus swept towards the UK in the – in the late winter and early spring I too was concerned, because at the time we were told perhaps three percent might die. So when the Prime Minister called for a lockdown I wasn’t pleased about it, but I understood that we should try this. But it’s important that you understand, that when we look at the profile of the pandemic as it passed through the population, that it was clear that the number of infections every day was falling. We’d passed the peak quite a long time before lockdown started. So we took all that pain, that locked down pain which was multiple weeks – I don’t remember exactly how many multiple weeks – we took it for nothing. If there was a really important effect of lockdown on the number of people who died, or the rate of it, you should at least be able to order them. Like, these people had locked down, and these didn’t – and you cannot. All heavily infected countries’ shapes are the same, whether they had locked down or not. They don’t work. I don’t know why anyone is allowing you, know you, to be pushed into this corner. 

I don’t think we entirely know why it is that some countries were hit harder than others, but I have to say I think scientifically the smart money is on a mixture of forces. One would be this cross immunity. Although China had an awful time in Wuhan, in Hubei province, it didn’t spread elsewhere in the country, and I suspect that meant because a lot of them had this cross immunity. And I think nearby countries, in the main, had lots of cross immunity. So that’s one possibility. The other one, though, is in terms of the severity of what did the virus do to a particular population. We’ve seen devastating effects in countries like UK and in Belgium, uh, France, and maybe even in Sweden, and much smaller numbers of deaths in other countries like – like Greece and in Germany. And you might think, “Well, was that was it something that they did?” And I wish it was true, because if it was something we did we could learn from it and do it and it would work in the future. But there’s no evidence whatsoever that it was anything humans did. The passage of this virus through the human population is an entirely natural process that completely ignored our puny efforts to control it. 

So there is this theory – I don’t like the name very much – but it’s called “dry tinder.” If people in a country who are vulnerable for to dying in the winter (usually of respiratory viruses), if you have a very mild winter season, like UK did – we had a very mild seasonal flu last year and the year before and so did Sweden – then what happens is there are larger number of very vulnerable people who are even older than usual, and – and I think that’s why we suffered a rather large number of deaths. It was still only 0.06% of the population, equivalent to about four weeks of normal mortality. But countries that had very severe winters recently, and Greece and Germany certainly had very lethal winter flus in the last two years. I think then, they had a smaller population of very vulnerable people, and that is the main reason why they lost fewer people. It’s not to do with locking down, it’s not to do with testing, or tracking, or tracing. I personally don’t think any of those measures have made any difference at all. So Belgium and UK and Sweden were particularly vulnerable, whereas adjacent Nordic countries – I – I get fed up with hearing about this, uh, idea that they locked down and that’s why it saved them and afraid the other Nordic countries had normal flu epidemics the last two or three years. Sweden, like UK, had very mild epidemics: you can just go and look at the number of deaths, it’s sub-normal for UK and Sweden. And now we’ve got a supra-normal, a larger-than-normal, number of deaths from Covid. 

Now there may be other reasons, I’m not saying there are not but I think those two main forces – the amount of prior immunity and the so-called “dry tinder,” what vulnerable fraction of the population did you have as a result of seasonal flu being intense or not – I think that accounts for most of it. And it’s – it’s just puberistic and, uh, and – and kind of silly that our government and advisors tell you that doing things that have never worked in the past, like lockdown are going to make any difference to the transfer of respiratory viruses. I don’t believe it for a moment. There’s no scientific evidence behind it and there are much stronger scientific hypotheses that do explain it. You might think that in terms of numbers of deaths – excess deaths – that Covid has produced such a large number that this will be an awful year for excess deaths, but surprisingly not. 2020 is lining up to be about eighth in a list since 1993. 

Roughly 620,000 people die every year in this country. They say in life we are also in death – and it’s true, it’s been awful for those who have been personally affected by illness and death, but it’s not particularly unusual in terms of the number of people who’ve died. So one of the things I’ve noticed has happened in – in recent years is that we almost seem to be moving, uh, you know post-science, post-fact as if – as if facts don’t matter. For someone who’s qualified and practiced as a professional scientist for 35 years I think it’s deeply distressing that, I don’t think you should listen to me if I talked about – I don’t know, the design of motorways or something – like, I don’t know anything about motorways or – or how to grow trees better, I don’t know anything about that. But I do know quite a lot about immunology, infection, inflammation, and the way infectious organisms move through a population. 

I’ve no other reason for giving this interview other than I really care what happens to my country – and we have to pull ourselves out of this. And I personally believe the way forward is twofold, it’s not difficult. One, we should cease mass testing of the mostly-well in the community immediately – it only provides misleading and grey information, and yet we’re driving policy almost completely based on it. It’s definitely wrong, we should not do it. Use the tests in hospital – I’m not saying don’t test – don’t continue mass testing, and for God’s sake, don’t increase the number of tests. It is a pathology all of its own which must be stamped out by right thinking people. And I’m afraid the people on SAGE, who have provided the modeling, the predictions, the – the measures that should be taken, that their work is so badly, and obviously flawed – lethally incompetent, that you should have no more to do with these people. They should be fired immediately. And the effect of that advice has been to – have cost lots of innocent people their lives from non-Covid causes, they should be dismissed and reconstituted using an appropriate group of skilled individuals – especially avoiding any who might even have the suggestion of a conflict of interest. I think we’re right at the edge of the precipice. I really hope that we can pull back.

[anastasiaskarsgard]

Hydrangea - Chapter 1

The home was large and imposing. Located on the second largest island, in the Stockholm archipelago, it was connected to Stockholm by a bridge, which meant it was in the perfect location to quickly reach the rest of civilization whenever the moment was required -- but was enough out of the way that I didn't have to be bothered by anyone. The quiet location of the home allowed me the peace and privacy recent events, had made so valuable.

Upon stepping inside, I noted the dust that covered every single surface within the home; and on the kitchen table -- sat a magazine from six years ago. It had been a while since anyone used this place. It had been in our family for several generations, and although it was grand and beautiful in the summer, it was a hard place to live in the winter. Just heating it, was a small fortune, especially considering it had no protection or barriers to help shield it from the ferocious frozen winds, that relentlessly lasted the coldest months of an already savage cold.

 My tiny Pomeranian, Max, took a moment to sniff around. He was as fearless as he was adorable, and I could only pray that he managed to stay out of trouble. Max was my loyal little man, and when i was at my lowest, he really helped me keep going. I had given up on myself, but I couldnt let my little Max down. I leaned down and gave him a quick back rub, before he trotted off to sniff around some more. I could only imagine the sensory overload all this was to a little city dog, that now had an entire new world to investigate.

I walked around the house, going from room to room, opening up windows to let in the fresh air. I peeked over at my neighbors house, and was pleased to see people were there.

Back when I was growing up, I would come here every summer, without fail. During that time, I had managed to develop amazing friendships with the children who had lived next door -- Bill and Eija Skarsgard. Bill was the tall and lanky boy who would always have scrapes and bruises, and absolutely zero fear whatsoever. Eija, was just as bold as her older brother. She never failed to be confident in any situation -- even when I was hesitant about something. In fact, if I tried to chicken out, or god forbid, not even try, she always found a way to change my mind. I was a naturally timid child, but they would have none of it. There were 3 older brothers, and although theyd often humor us, they were too old to play our silly games of pretend.  But looking back on the events that led me here, I couldn't help but wish I’d stayed that sweet timid girl, that cried when i caught a fish, because id made its mouth bleed. Being fearless and passionate hadnt gone well for me.

These days, from what I'd seen online and read about in articles, it seemed that almost all of the Skarsgard brothers were actors. I remembered the father was some sort of artistic type, and was shocked his sons had followed suit, all but one of them, got so embarrassed by his unapologetic nudity. The boys I grew up playing "make believe" with as children, were now critically acclaimed actors. Not only that but beautiful ones at that! Bill had grown into quite the looker. He was handsome by anyone's standards,  with his rich and dark brown hair, sinful full lips, chiseled facial features and penetrating green eyes. Looking at him in magazines, it was mind-blowing that this was the same boy that helped me build dams out of stones, or dig in the dirt for hours. I was sorry I'd lost touch with them but was too shy to reach out to them now that they were famous. That wasn't why I missed them, although I'm sure that's what they'd think. I hoped that the fame hadn't gone to their heads and that they were still the friendly, free-spirited family that I had always remembered them to be before I couldn't find the time to come back to this place.

When you're a teenager, you don't want to escape the rat race; you want to be in the thick of it. I was by no means a party girl, but I did enjoy an active social life in my teens, and all through college. I was obsessed with getting good grades and was a bit of an overachiever, so I kept myself busy. I was always aloof with boys because frankly, they all seemed more trouble than they were worth. I had high standards and was of the mindset that I would rather be alone than settle for someone perfect for me. Then I met Adam.

Adam appeared perfect, at least at the surface. He was naturally athletic and tall, attractive by conventional standards; and very funny -- as well as charismatic and successful. He honestly had it all, or so I thought. People, myself included, were instinctively drawn in by him. Adam could always be counted upon for a good time with a great story. He was your typical all-american boy next door that you wanted to do bad things with. It’d actually flattered me, when he took an interest in me, and tirelessly pursued me.

If I had to describe myself, physically, I was fortunate enough to be naturally conventionally attractive as well. However, I had a standoffish vibe. In my defense, resting bitch face is a thing that can’t be fixed for some people, but with every cloud, there's a silver lining. Especially since it's saved me from numerous creeps approaching me, and at least gave me the illusion that I blended in, and didn't draw much notice.  I HATED being the center of attention. On a Friday night, you're more likely to find me at home curled up on my couch engrossed in a good novel -- rather than dealing with strangers and drunk people.

I had a very secure career as a  business analyst, for a big utility company; so I was not the person you ever wanted to see. I analyzed our various departments and employees, to always be sure, we work at our most financial efficiency, and if I did come to see you, it wasn’t because to give you a high five. As long as I kept us out of the red, and looked professional and clean, they really couldn't have cared less about aging or being fashionable.

As time progressed within our relationship, I thought nothing of it when Adam got a new assistant at work named Alexis. Alexis had a lovely face and Victoria's Secret body. She was slender, and never appeared to have a single strand of hair out of place. A few friends made comments, but I defended her, annoyed people only looked at her superficially, and didn't take her seriously. I had suffered this same plight, my entire life, so I refused to acknowledge her beauty as anything suspicious. She was brilliant and tenacious, and her organizational skills were spectacular, and coming from me, that's quite a compliment.  She also knew a lot about healthy eating habits and managed to share diet and exercise tips with Adam when he started to find it difficult to fit in some of his suits. I thought it was sweet of him to make a new friend, and treat her like a peer and looking back, I want to choke myself.  I was, quite frankly, the most naive, trusting idiot on the planet.

It started simply; she would occasionally "forget" to give him some messages from me and once in a while laughing a little too much at one of his jokes that just wasn't as funny, or always would touch his arm or back or shoulder. Honestly, it was a tint bit annoying, but he had always been a handsome, charming guy, that made people feel comfortable. She wasn't the first one to be a bit too familiar, but at the end of the day, he loved me and wanted to marry me. I had no reason to not trust him because of her actions. If I'm honest, I probably should confess I am a bit of a reclusive type and am not very attentive or needy. Alone time is right up there with oxygen, for me, so I have to trust completely, or I’ll drive myself nuts.

If I’d paid closer attention, id have questioned why he started staying later and later at the office. I just assumed he was taking on more cases, that he had gained from all the free publicity when he had represented a notorious South American cartel crime lords son, and saved him from what was thought to be a certain a guaranteed death sentence. He’d still received a life sentence, but considering the 74 crimes had been guilty of, that was damn near a miracle! So, I didn’t mind when he had to cancel several dates with me. In fact, I was proud of him for getting more work, rising in the ranks of the legal hierarchy as well. Then there was his sudden disinterest in looking at houses with me. One of the most significant conflicts in our relationship had always been that I refused to move in together until we were married. Since we were going to be getting married at the end of summer, he had been foaming at the mouth to pick out our future home, but now it was like he planned on buying a house after we were married. I didn't let it bother me though, I figured that because of his busy work schedule, it would just be easier for me to take photos of the houses for him, and put them all in an online portfolio for him to review at his convenience. I even went as far as completely buying his bullshit excuse of "needing something to hold back his hair out of his eyes, while he was at the gym" when I found a woman's hair tye in his fucking bathroom. (Believe me, if I could go back and slap the shit out of myself --) :

It wasn’t until I received a call from my gynecologist with the results from my yearly pap smear -- that I was doused in the cold hard reality of what was going on. I had chlamydia, and quite frankly -- I wanted to cut his manhood off and make him eat it, I was so mad. I stormed into his office and burst through the doors dramatically slamming the test results on his desk in front of him. And you want to know the embarrassing part? I still didn't think it was Alexis.

“What dirty ass whore, have you been sticking your dick in? Who was worth throwing us away, because its fucking over.” I said menacingly enough, he scooted back a bit.

“I dont think you should talk about her like she cant hear you, for fucks sake,” he said looking over at Alexis who continued to work quietly and avoid eye contact with me; almost pretending as if nothing were wrong and she could not in fact hear me.

I was at a complete loss. I stood there with my mouth agape, trying to process this information, and when I could feel the lump in my throat rise, and the tears threatened to fall, I turned on my heel and left, without saying another word.

Looking back, I should have noticed several signs that something was amiss.

About six months ago, he became very concerned with his appearance; hitting the gym, eating healthy, buying anti-aging products, investing in several expensive wardrobe pieces, getting a new hairstyle. I had found it funny that at 30 years old, he was having a mid-life crisis. I’d tease him about it a little bit, and he’d just roll his eyes and say he wasn’t a natural stunner like me.

I’ve always been very low maintenance, but that’s because my body knows it has to keep it together because I’m not doing a bunch of crazy stuff to stay young. I’m totally fine with gray hairs, wrinkles and wearing my Juicy tracksuits that haven’t been in style, for a decade. There were better odds that I’d get superpowers than I’d get Botox.

I had been so blind. Such a fool.

When Adam came by my home to pick up his possessions he’d left there over the years, she came along and even had the audacity to come inside with him. She had this smug look on her face, and kept whispering to Adam and giggling. I knew she was trying to get a rise out of me but was a lady dammit... I held it together until they finally left, and as I closed the door and locked it behind them, I pressed my forehead to the door, willing myself to stay strong, but my legs got so weak, and the air felt like it’d been knocked out of me. And I suddenly felt far too heavy to stand. I crumpled to the floor, and curled myself into the fetal position, and cried like I, ve never cried in my entire life. Hysterical, slobberyface, sobbing with boogers, till my throat and diaphragm hurt, and then I cried some more.

My heart was broken. I felt like my life was over, and my chance at happiness had left with him. I sunk into a pretty deep depression and stopped cleaning the house and speaking to anyone outside of work. If it hadn't been for my loyalty to Max, I don't know if I would of left my house. I had to take care of Max tho, so I pressed on although I was a shell of my old self.

I’d torture myself looking at their social media accounts, with all their cute little pictures and sappy comments. I’d never been one to post 1000 pictures of my life or write to my boyfriend. I saw every day, professions of my love for all the world to see. I updated my Instagram maybe once a month, unlike Alexis, who seemed to update hers about once an hour. It was disgusting.

That’s how I saw the hydrangea bushes.

I always loved hydrangeas and had asked Adam if I could plant some at his office, and he’d always said they were too problematic. I’m an analyst, so rather than argue, I gathered various varieties and strains, what their strengths and weaknesses were, what colors were offered, how often they bloomed and what was required to keep them alive. I had presented Adam with the top 3 hydrangea candidates in folders that were the color they’d bloom to be, and was rather pleased with myself. He’d been busy at the time and handed the folders off to Alexis, promising to look them over later. I asked him a few times if he’d gotten a chance to look them over and he’d get annoyed, so I just let it go.

Now I was sitting here, seething with rage, looking at Alexis, posing next to a sizeable Bloomstruck hydrangea bush holding my motherfucking folder.

I don’t know what came over me, but I had to destroy that bush.: I stayed up all night, figuring out the best strategy. Finally, I decided to go by his office before sunrise, since no one would be around, for me to douse said bush in lighter fluid and walk away to let it soak in. Eventually, once they had arrived at the office a little bit later, I would wait for them to all be inside and then casually stroll on by and toss a lit match in the bush.

 Burn baby, burn! 

His office building was made out of bricks and the flowering bed was also encased in bricks; there was no risk of it getting out of control.

I jogged by, splashing the contents all over the bush, and then crossed the street to the parking garage, where I took the stairs up to the sixth floor, where I could see them arrive without being seen. People never look up.

It didn't take long before I saw Adam’s shiny black Mercedes pull into his reserved parking space, and imagine my surprise when Alexis got out the passenger side. I guess he was giving her rides to work now too, or maybe they even lived together. Frankly, I didn't care, but they were not getting happily ever after, with my favorite fucking flowers!

They kissed and held hands, in front of God and everybody. It was repulsive and so unprofessional. He pulled her into a deep kiss and then went inside, leaving her outside. What was she doing? I bet she was going to take some fucking selfies. She walked over to MY bush, digging in her purse. More pictures with the bush, but when she pulled something out of her purse, my stomach dropped. In her hand, she had a cigarette and a lighter. She tried to light her cigarette, but it was a windy day. Thank God, I breathed a sigh of relief until she huddled down into the bush, using it to block the wind and lit her cigarette. I'm not exaggerating when I say; she quite literally burst into flames.

 I watched in horror, as she ran around flailing her arms and screaming completely engulfed in flames. Then I turned around, and I ran as fast and as far as my legs would take me in the opposite direction.

I want to give a huge thank you for helping me with editing @imaginationlane. She is such a good writer, and she took the time to help point me in the right direction and I'm very thankful. I actually edited something!!!! Yeah!!!

If I should keep going, like or comment or reblog. I welcome any comments, good or bad.

[10000badframes]

Why I Left Music

To understand why I left music, you've got to start with why and how I got into music.

When I was little, I was deaf, and when my hearing was restored, it came back in stages. I would listen, rapt, to a My First Symphony tape as the sections of the orchestra were introduced one by one, and as time went on, each became more intelligible. High pitches were easier to discern, so the flute stood out like a beam of light in the darkness. What's more, I was surrounded by music on a daily basis. My dad is a wildly creative and intuitive musician, proficient on a number of instruments, my mother and brother sang beautifully, and my sister had been singing and playing violin from an early age. We sang as a family at home and at church, and I was in choir and handbell choir from my earliest memories on. I don't remember not being able to read music.   I started with piano, and moved to flute once my arms were long enough for the starter headjoint, in about fourth grade. My first teacher was the principle flute player with the Rochester Philharmonic, and when I moved to Iowa, I learned from the principal of the Des Moines Symphony. Both teachers made the smart move of throwing repertoire at me which was much more advanced than the usual stuff at my level, and because I didn't know it was supposed to be hard, I rocketed forward at a feverish pace. I continued with choir and handbell choir, and as my skill became more evident, I added youth orchestra, honor band, and pit orchestras, and that was just after school. During school I was in marching band, concert band, jazz band, and orchestra. I attended elite months-long summer camps for the nation's best young musicians. I competed regularly, and at one point was considered to be one of the top three musicians in my age bracket in the country. My first tattoo was of a treble clef. As a shy child in a talented family, I was pleased to have found my talent, the thing I didn't have to work very hard at in order to achieve great things. I rested my self-confidence on that talent, and when opportunities came up to show it off, I didn't turn them down. Nobody forced me to do any of the activities above; it came with a built-in social life and plentiful affirmation, so I almost never paused to think about whether or not this was something I actually wanted to do forever. It was simply assumed, as inherent a fact of life as the sunrise.   I probably should have known it wasn't for me when practicing was boring; almost unbearable. I heard about people enjoying practicing, and assumed that they were lying in order to look good. I would avoid it however I could, and did pretty well regardless. I loved ensemble work because I loved music, but listening to myself for hours on end, however good the result was, was miserable. At the worst of times, I assumed that my hatred of practicing meant that I was lazy and undisciplined, inherently a bad artist, and probably a bad person. I heard talk about 'flow state,' and how it made the time fly. Having never achieved it, I assumed that it was a lie. Since I'd specialized to such a high degree, music was the only course to follow in college. The culture surrounding classical music then became much more evident, divorced as it was from my little Midwestern fishbowl. I learned about the way I was expected to present my gender, and was pressured by my teacher to grow out my pixie cut out of concern that I wasn't feminine enough to be a flute player. I learned about the ingrained gender divide, and how child-bearing was considered the knell of doom for female musicians. I learned that I was one of thousands of young musicians all competing for the same handful of jobs, which could wait for perfection to walk through the door as the market was so flooded. I learned that blind auditions don't mask your gender if the judges can hear you inhale. Most depressing of all, I learned that my chances of getting an orchestral job - the only thing which I enjoyed about being a musician - were so small as to be statistically impossible. I would have to join the military, become a teacher, or quit. At first, I quit. Two years into my bachelor's degree at a prestigious school, I quit, leaving my family and community reeling in shock. They had all invested faith, time, and money in my dream of being a musician, and I had thrown it away. To them, it appeared to be an impulsive, flaky, and selfish decision to make, flying in the face of every opportunity I'd been given. To me, I was trying to stand up for myself. I was lost, depressed, occasionally suicidal, and suffering from ulcers. I was still battling the notion that I was lazy and undisciplined, and now everyone I knew saw me in the worst possible light. I leaned into my new failure status, and piled bad choices on top of bad choices, embarrassing myself and my family. Years later, when I had leveled out somewhat and come to terms with the fact that I needed a bachelor's degree in order to be taken seriously on the job market, I wanted to do anything except for music. I enrolled in a community college and took math, science, and art courses, the latter having been a hobby of mine since I was young. I'd been drawing cartoons to put in my boyfriend's lunch for years, and in my drawing and painting classes, I honed the skill. When the time came to transfer my credits to the state college, the majority of my post-high school credits were in art and music. I applied at the state's art school, and was turned down. My financial reality became clear; in order to get a bachelor's degree in under three years, the majority of my transferrable credits were in music, so to music I had to return. I was accepted at the music school, and went back to rehearsals, practicing, and competing. It was much the same as the last time, in ways both good and bad, with the notable difference that this time I was resigned to the impossibility of it all. Whenever people said they'd had a satisfying practice session, I lied through my teeth and said I had, too. I incurred my debt, got my degree, and left with zero intention of pursuing a master's, surfing a new wave of disappointment from teachers and my community alike. The shambling zombie of my career ambitions followed me when I moved to New York City due to my husband's job, and I paid hundreds of dollars for lessons from eminent professionals at Juilliard and the New York Philharmonic. I took masterclasses, invested in new equipment, and auditioned. Nothing substantial ever came from it, as the statistics had foretold. I watched my classmates move into the military and teaching, with a lucky few going on to teach at the collegiate level, and even fewer achieving a performance career. I practiced, and hated every minute. Then, at my breaking point, I watched Monsters University. It's such a weird way to switch gears. People took a number of things away from their experience of MU; mine was the message that you can be amazing at something and still never hope to make a career of it. What you have to do when you've faced up to that truth is to find what you loved about the career you thought you were going to have and apply it somewhere else. Adapt. Something better might be waiting. I thought about how live music is being replaced with synthesized music and orchestras are dying across the nation. I looked at my dusty art portfolio. There were dozens of animators in that credits sequence after MU, I thought. There are two flutes in every orchestra. The next day, I sat down with my husband at lunch, and said, "let's move to California. I want to be a 3D animator." This was surprising coming from me; I'd only ever reluctantly taken to digital media, and barely knew how to use Photoshop. My reasoning was that if I wanted to be at the forefront of a growing industry, and if I re-trained in animation, I would have a better chance of getting work than I had now (there was nowhere to go but up in that respect.) There would be more opportunities for both of us out in California, where his company had a major office, and where several prominent studios were housed. He agreed immediately, and got me The Illusion of Life for my 29th birthday. Maya is a hell of a tough program at the best of times. It has a mind of its own, and even when everything is running smoothly, you have to contend with such gauntlets as the graph editor (a mathematical representation of motion over time.) You know what you want the characters to do, but you have to use this thorny, labyrinthine program to do it, and I've cried many tears of frustration over it. You are responsible for every single movement, every blink, every shrug, every breath. It is dizzyingly easy to mess up, and impossibly, sixteen-dimensionally complicated. And yet. Flow state, that thing I thought was a lie? I found it. It was about six months in, while I was still wrestling with the program. I was grappling with the reality that I'm not naturally good at this, that my talent lies elsewhere, and any progress I make in this quarter will come from elbow grease alone. I was making adjustments to a scene, and realized that four hours had passed unnoticed. I felt energized and satisfied. I craved more. At thirty, I found out that I wasn't lazy and undisciplined, that I didn't hate hard work, that I wasn't a terrible person - I was just very, very good at something I didn't truly want to do. Now, I struggle and weep and sink weeks and months into seconds worth of footage, and I love it. Wild horses couldn't keep me away.

[continuations]

World After Capital: Getting over Privacy (Intro)

NOTE: This is part of a series of excerpts from my book World After Capital. Today’s section introduces the idea that privacy is a strategy for freedom that has real downsides if we want to enter the Knowledge Age. In case you missed it, I posted a talk last week that summarizes my case for getting over privacy.

Getting Over Privacy

Copyrights and patents aren't the only legal limitations slowing down the Digital Knowledge Loop. We are actively creating new restrictions in the form of well-intentioned privacy regulations. Not only do these measures wind up restricting Informational Freedom but more fundamentally privacy is incompatible with technological progress. Instead of clinging to our current conception of privacy we therefore need to understand how to be free in a world of widespread information sharing. Put differently: privacy is not a value in and of itself, rather it has been a strategy for achieving and protecting freedom. To get over privacy and stay free we need to expand Economic Freedom, Informational Freedom and Psychological Freedom.

Before getting into the arguments to support this position, let me first note that countries and individuals already today are taking dramatically different approaches to the privacy of certain types of information. For example, Sweden and Finland have for many years been publishing everyone's tax return [113]. And some individuals, including the CIO and Dean for Technology at Harvard Medical School [114], have published their entire medical history on the Internet. This shows that a world which embraces strategies other than privacy to safeguard individual freedom is eminently possible and exists in parts already today.

To better understand this perspective, consider the costs and benefits to individuals and to society from keeping information private with the costs and benefits of sharing it widely (potentially publicly). Digital technology is dramatically shifting this cost/benefit trade-off in favor of sharing. Take a radiology image as an example. Analog x-ray technology produced images on a physical film that had to be developed could then be examined by someone holding it up against a backlight. If you wanted to protect the information on it, you would put it in a file and lock up that file in a drawer. If you wanted a second opinion, you would have to get that file out of the drawer and have it sent it to you or the other doctor by mail. That process was costly, time consuming and error prone (the film could be lost in the mail, or the wrong film could be sent, etc.). The upside of analog x-rays was the ease of keeping the information secret; the downside was the difficulty of putting the information to use for your benefit.

Now compare analog x-rays to digital x-ray images. You can instantly walk out of your doctor's office with a copy of the digital image on a thumb drive or have it emailed to you or put in a Dropbox or shared via some other way made possible by the Internet. Thanks to this technology, you can now get a second opinion nearly instantly. Not only one, you could get two or three. And if everyone you contacted directly is stumped, you could post the image on the Internet for everyone to see. Some doctor somewhere in the world may go, “ah, I have seen that before” even if “that” is incredibly rare. This in fact has happened repeatedly on Figure 1, a USV portfolio company, which provides an image sharing network for medical professionals.

This power comes at a price: Protecting your digital x-ray image from others who might wish to see it is virtually impossible. Every doctor who looks at your image could make a copy (for free, instantly and with perfect fidelity) and then send that to someone else. The same goes for others who might have access to the image, such as your insurance company.

Now, critics will make all sorts of claims about how we can prevent unauthorized use of your image using encryption. But as we will see, those claims come with important caveats and are dangerous if pursued to their ultimate conclusion (preview: you cannot have general purpose computing). So in summary: The upside of a digital x-ray image is how easy it makes it to get help; the downside is how hard it is to protect digital information.

But the analysis hardly ends there. The benefits that accrue to your digital x-ray image go well beyond just you. Imagine a huge collection of digital x-ray images all labeled with diagnoses. We can use computers to search through those images and get machines to “learn” what to look for. We know that such systems can be built given the recent progress with deep learning. And these systems, because of the magic of zero marginal cost, can assist with and eventually provide future diagnoses for free. This, you may recall from the section on technological deflation in healthcare, is exactly what we want. How rapidly we make progress with that and who controls the results will depend heavily on who has access to digital x-ray images.

If we went to the extreme and made all healthcare information public, we would dramatically accelerate innovation in diagnosing and treating diseases. At present, only large pharma companies and a few university research projects can develop new medical insights and drugs, since only they have the money required to get many patients to participate in research. Many scientists are forced to join a big pharma company, leaving the results of their work protected by patents (pharma companies have repeatedly lobbied for the ability to keep such information strictly for themselves). Even at universities, the research agenda tends to be tightly controlled by department heads and access to information is seen as a competitive advantage. While I understand that we have a lot of work to do to create a world in which broad public sharing of health information is compatible with freedom, this is the direction we should be embarking on.

[globalindian]

Here is how CEO Jayasree Ullal became a self-made billionaire

Jayshree Ullal has a slew of monikers to her name, including "Queen of the Wired World." She isn't simply another Indian businesswoman who has built a reputation for herself around the world. Ullal is one of the top five prominent persons in the world of networking, according to Forbes, and has been giving IT behemoths a run for their money. With a net worth of $1.7 billion, Ullal, 60, was one of five Indian Americans and Indian entrepreneurs listed on Forbes' list of America's Richest Self-Made Women this year. 

Arista Networks' president and CEO, who is well-known for her financial acumen, was instrumental in transforming the cloud computing company into a global leader in networking technology. Her knowledge and abilities have earned her a number of prizes and accolades. She was named one of VM World's Top Ten Executives, A Woman of Influence for Security CSOs, Information Week's Innovator and Influencer Award, CRN's Top 25 Disruptors of 2014, World's Best CEOs: Growth Leaders in 2018, and Fortune's Businessperson of the Year for 2019. She was also ranked 118 on Fortune's Businessperson of the Year for 2019.

Ullal was born in London and raised in Delhi, where she attended the Convent of Jesus and Mary before moving to the United States with her family when her physicist father got a new job. She finally earned her bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from San Francisco State University and her master's degree in engineering management from Santa Clara University. She was one of only two female students in a class of 70 at college. She interprets this as a message that more women should be encouraged to pursue technical education.

She started her career at Fairchild, then moved to AMD before joining Crescendo, a communications firm that was ultimately acquired by Cisco. Cisco also hired Ullal on a two-year contract, which she was able to extend for another 15 years because of her abilities. According to a Business Line interview with Ullal, she was able to expand the switching business from zero to more than $10 billion in a decade with the help of her CEO and employer. The startup ethos within such a massive corporation piqued Ullal's interest, and she was soon promoted to a senior executive position at Cisco. By letting businesses connect their devices to the same network, the switching business turned out to be a cash cow, bringing in a third of Cisco's income. 

Ullal had her moments of self-doubt as she progressed from strength to strength. Was she doing a good job as a mother or a father? Was she able to strike a balance and do credit to all of her responsibilities? “ In the year 2000, I began to wonder if I was too focused on my career. As a result, I took a leave of absence from Cisco for several months in order to be a full-time mother to my two girls. 'Amma, when are you going back to work?' they asked me soon after. This is a pivotal moment. In an interview, she remarked, "I did return to Cisco, this time with a heightened sense that I was destined to manage my job and family." It also helped that she had very supportive parents and hubby. 

She left Cisco in 2008 to become the Indian billionaire, president, and CEO of Arista Networks. She'd always wanted to run her own business, and Arista provided the perfect opportunity. She quickly gained business from her former employer and added some large companies to her portfolio, including Microsoft and Facebook. Arista has become one of the fastest-growing cloud networking firms, with a valuation of upwards of $25 billion, as she has chipped away at Cisco's market share. In truth, Ullal was a key figure in transforming a once-obscure company into a big player in the world of computer networking. 

[theliterateape]

American Shithole #23 — Burn in Hell, Motherfucker (Adios, John McCain)

By Eric Wilson

“You’ve been off the grid for two months after collapsing from stress; are you really going to come back now and revisit a languishing column, just to trash a dead war hero?”

It seems so, yes.

"OK, seems like suicide though."

I also thought I would alleviate any concerns regarding my mental health by talking to myself throughout this piece.

Anyway, it's not as if we have a long-standing tradition as a species regarding the expression of ill-will toward the deceased...

De mortuis nihil nisi bonum

… er, right; so I suppose with all the adoration and reverence for this war-decorated turd in the air, I am fairly certain my harshness regarding his fucking abysmal voting record (which is the bulk of what should matter when considering his service to this country) will be met with contempt?

Perhaps, but the truth remains — he was a shit-biscuit, like all fucking conservatives. The only question is: How much shit was in his biscuit?

Well, let’s take a look at his voting record, shall we? The folks at PoliticsThatWork have been kind enough to compile all manner of data on our government officials and representatives, including the voting history of our senators, including Sen. John McCain.

I’ve chosen three related areas to focus on, although I believe a completely random selection from this list would net the same conclusion. For a more in-depth look at their data collection and weighting, check out their methodology page.

1.      Poverty Amelioration: 0% Support.

What to focus on when his focus on keeping rich people rich is so clearly defined?

McCain’s Nay on the amendment to establish pre-kindergarten programs for low-income families (2015 roll call s247) seems particularly cruel amidst a sea of cruelty.

2.      A Robust Safety Net: 5.3% Support.

The thing to take away here seems to be that if the legislation had anything to do with social security benefits, Medicare or Medicaid, the McCain position was consistent.

“If you are sick or disabled in America and you are poor, fuck you.”

3.      Public Health: 16.3% Support.

With a fair amount of crossover from the previous category, McCain has remained a hard-line conservative with zero empathy for sick Americans that struggle with access to affordable healthcare.

He has been particularly harsh to efforts offering protections for vulnerable minority groups.

For further evidence I encourage you to check out the rest of his legislative stances. Go ahead; open up McCain’s voting record on environmental protection. I dare, ya. I double-dog dare ya. Look at that epic-level corporate-whoring!

Overall — as his voting clearly demonstrates — McCain was an overstuffed shit-biscuit for pretty much every American that wasn’t rich and white.

Paints quite a different picture, just looking at the recorded facts.

“But, but, but…”

No buts — he was an enemy of the motherfucking people.

“But, he saved healthcare!”

Yeah, he saved healthcare — only after trying to kill it for years, and only after considering how much of a blow it would be to his arch-nemesis Trump if he were able to torpedo the vote to repeal Obamacare at the very last second. I imagine it was also a last-ditch effort to cement his Maverick legacy.

So, yeah, thanks, John. Thanks for staving off the inevitable — maybe now some of us will die in four years, instead of two.

Eternal damnation seems a light sentence for the rest of your dinosaur beliefs put to action; all your fucking saber-rattling, your warmongering — and all of your billionaire-servicing corporate-whoring, your incessant toeing of nearly every motherfucking republican party-line. Your repeatedly misogynistic, anti-LGBTQ, anti-social progress stances, and support for almost every fucking conservative front-line agenda.

Until Trump mocked you into one vote of ancillary decency.

Now everyone wants to paint you up a spirited folk hero. “Son, have I ever told you the story of the wandering Maverick Fuckface of Washington D.C.?”

Maverick, my ass. You were a fucking Neanderthal; a flag-waving imbecile with Corporate America’s dick so far down your throat, I’m surprised you never shit stock portfolios.  

Your decades-long inane conservative rhetoric and dog-whistling across the aisles didn’t make you out to be a renegade; it made you out to be a dick. Blowing up a nation of terrified brown people, and then repeatedly shitting all over the poor and disenfranchised of your own country — that is your legacy.

You were another cog in the late-stage-capitalist slave-machine. You were a voice of the few.

Good fucking riddance.

At least I don’t feel so alone any longer in my disapproval; the fine folks at DemocracyNow! recently weighed in on McCain, albeit with a gentler touch.

What pisses me off most about McCain’s death is how many fucking liberals couldn’t fall over themselves fast enough to lionize this absolute shit of a public servant.

The same fucking liberals calling out for “restraint” from progressives.

The same elites that can’t fucking wait to forgive Trump supporters — not Trump voters mind you, anyone can make a mistake — but his insane base that would just as soon burn the world to the motherfucking ground before entertaining even a moment of self-realization.

“Don’t disparage noble McCain,” the rich, white, liberals who have suffered fuck-all from the evils of the republican party insist (while the rest of us have been through various degrees of actual hell). They just want everyone to get back to getting along, so they can get back to their fucking privilege. I may be a poor, white, disabled, male, Scandinavian-grade uber-progressive — and I am very aware of the privilege I have experienced in America — but I am not sucking one single republican dick (alive or dead) to get one lick of status-quo back; or to lay any groundwork for welcoming stray Trump supporters back into the fold. Fuck privilege, fuck inequality, fuck the Trump base, fuck all greed-related ideology, and fuck dead John McCain. I may angrily wish there were a hell for him to burn in, but fortunately for him I’m an atheist, so the nothingness of the beyond will have to suffice.

“Don’t you have anything nice to say about him at all?”

Absolutely. He was one of the very best republicans we had.

[personalcoachingcenter]

Power Coaching Tool: Safety versus Risk

New Post has been published on https://personalcoachingcenter.com/power-coaching-tool-safety-versus-risk/

Power Coaching Tool: Safety versus Risk

A Coaching Power Tool Created by Maimon Md. Arif (Transformational Coach, MALAYSIA)

Life is an ongoing process of choosing between safety (out of fear and need for defense) and risk (for the sake of progress and growth). – Abraham Maslow

Safety vs. Risk

Cambridge Dictionary Definition for:

Safety: (a noun) a state in which or a place where you are safe and not in danger or at risk: the condition of not being in danger or of not being dangerous: the condition of not being likely to cause damage or harm: the fact of keeping people safe in a particular place:

Risk:(a noun) the possibility of something bad happening: to take a risk – to do something that might be dangerous:

Human Motivation and Needs

Maslow, in his “Hierarchy of Needs”, stipulates that people are motivated to fulfill their basic needs before moving on to their needs for growth. The need for safety is acknowledged as a basic human need. Safety needs include the security of body, of employment, of resources, of the morality of family, and health.

Safety is an evolutionary need, which is often manifested in what we refer to as the “fight or flight” response. From the minute we wake up, we have to make decisions – do I want to stay in bed or do I want to wake up? On any day of our lives, we make many decisions: decisions to maintain or improve our well-being, physically, spiritually, or mentally. In deciding for self or others and in doing, whether it is for exchange of services or goods, there is still a personal need we are fulfilling. It could be to ensure the safety of others close to us or to make us feel safe in our environment. Most of our decisions and actions are based on needs or desires to sustain or improve our circumstances. Sometimes we make a decision we don’t necessarily agree to, just to avoid a confrontation because we don’t want the risk of jeopardizing our relationship, trust, and/or safety.

Human motivation as explained by Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” reveals why individuals think first about threats and why they see opportunities as optional extras to be addressed later, if at all. Safety is always connoted in a positive space and the opposite of safety is a risk, a space where something bad/negative will happen.

Staying safe can make you feel stuck.

Risk exposes the potential for failure, and failure is painful. It is a human reaction to want to stay safe. Risk-averse people may stay stuck as they are afraid of being hurt, afraid of being vulnerable, and afraid of failing. It is very convenient to not try, as the potential of failure is zero. The thinking goes, ‘not failing,  I won’t get hurt.’ They are stuck in this limiting belief that they have imprisoned themselves in their own safe cocoon. They think they never get hurt, but they will never grow or progress, and in that, it is self-inflicted hurt.

Coaching Application

My niche is to coach social leaders to grow and elevate their impact to achieve their dream of building a better world.

Anna (not her real name) is a graduate from a top-ranking university, an idealistic and intelligent young adult in her early 30s. Hers is a young family with a very understanding and supportive husband. She quit a well-paying, secure corporate job for a social enterprise for the cause for which she is very passionate. Although Anna was brought up in a low-income household, her parents were committed to ensuring that she had all the opportunities for a good education.

Being very conscious of their circumstances and her family’s sacrifices for her education drove Anna to be focused on her studies. She set high expectations for herself -success was about performing well in school. She was always a top student and participated actively in many school activities. The same drive followed her through university, and she never had any major setbacks in her education. She described herself as a very competitive and hard-working person.

The social enterprise’s works is a very lean outfit where decisions are made on the fly and everything is needed yesterday. Anna couldn’t bring herself to speak out her opinion in the many meetings and discussions, even when she felt strongly about the issues. Her non participation in the discussion is bothering her, and she finds herself mulling over the missed chance for days. Her lack of confidence to participate in the discussion is eating her. She wants to be able to actively contribute and have a say in the direction and design of the programs and the company’s direction, but what if her opinion is not good enough? Would her colleagues think less of her for coming up with such opinions? What if she embarrasses herself?

Anna’s story is not unique among young social leaders. Their high expectation of self and their competitiveness ‘paralyzes’ them in their perceived safety zone – a zone where they feel they have control.

Getting them to trust the coaching process and to let go of control is the first step to awaken their awareness. There are layers to this ‘lack of confidence’ statement, partnering them to get them to peel the layers to get to the real cause and understanding of underlying beliefs:

What does lack of confidence feel like?

You mentioned that you have a lack of confidence. Is it true?

What are you really afraid of?

What are the real issues here?

What makes this significant to you?

What values do you hold that makes you feel like this?

Partnering with them to change their perspectives:

What is stopping you from having your say?

What does ‘being silent’ serve for you?

What would happen if you hold on to your values?

What would happen if your opinion is rejected?

What would happen if you continue doing what you are doing now?

What would happen if your opinion is well received?

Helping them to build a structure on their new perspective:

What would happen if you are next triggered to go back to your safe zone?

What support do you need to be able to take risks in the future?

How might you use the awareness about yourself to develop an action plan?

What resource do you not have to enable you to develop your action plan?

What can get in your way?

Man is hardwired to find safety. The motivation for safety is fear and defense. Man is also willing to take risks, growing and progress.

References:

Hillson, D. (2008). Risk management, Maslow, and memetics. Paper presented at PMI® Global Congress 2008—EMEA, St. Julian’s, Malta. Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute.

https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html

“Social Leaders are Leaders who devote one’s life and talents to improving society regardless of social standing, wealth, or privilege. A leader is someone who empowers other leaders.” – The Center for Social Leadership.

Original source: https://coachcampus.com/coach-portfolios/power-tools/maimon-md-arif-safety-vs-risk/

[rankertopgoogle]

Promotional signs

Maximall.ie

 Discovering Real Deal Graphic Design Services

These days there are a ton of Graphic Designers offering administrations on the web. Maybe too much. This article covers some valuable need-to-thinks about Graphic Designers and what to search for when requesting a logo plan, leaflet plan or any of the innumerable motivations to arrange a visual computerization administration for your organization or association's imaging needs.

Visual depiction benefits nowadays (like any administrations nowadays) have been on a descending slide for quite a while (in this current Designer's perspective). Take logos for instance. I can't reveal to you the number of logos I see out there highlighting a swoosh or swipe glancing realistic that shoots out like circling the text that makes up the logo. I might want to reveal to you that the Designers who made the a large number of swoosh logos out there, used this staple of plan since it was the best answer for their customer. I can simply hear them expressing how this basic component is actually a mind boggling and grown "toning it down would be ideal" way to deal with their customer's plan and worth each drop of the many dollars they are charging for it. I might want to disclose to you that however lamentably that is simply not the situation.

I'm not saying that assuming you have a swoosh in your logo, you got misled by a bogus Graphic Designer hoping to make a speedy buck on a basic plan that grabs your attention. Indeed I have even utilized a swoosh or two in my plans (however as a rule at my customer's solicitation and surely not as the main component in the plan). I'm saying that when you check out the number of logos out there highlight this realistic swoosh component it ends up being unmistakable that a lot of visual communication sources these days are simply attempting to get their orders filled as fast as conceivable without really placing thought into the motivation behind the plan and the requirements of the customer. It is miserable yet a fact that most organizations of any sort these days are zeroing in more on resembling an organization instead of really being an organization. How often have you requested something just to discover later it was only a trick intended to get the deal.

So how can you say whether you are employing a genuine Graphic Designer zeroed in on doing genuine plan work and not only one of the numerous shams out there attempting to appear as though they are placing the time and thought into your plan that you are paying them acceptable cash for? A decent spot to begin is current realities.

 Visual depiction Services - A Hiring Guide

You undoubtedly can't manage not to recruit a visual depiction administration. You might have an incredible item or administration however in the event that your marking and showcasing material is glaring "custom made", getting a deal will be more earnestly. Initial feeling of your organization is passed on by the visual effect of the promoting guarantee, including print notice, leaflets, indexes, bundling and web architecture. Refreshing or making new showcasing guarantee can be a successful method to make new energy around your organization and its items. On the off chance that you as of now have an illustrations fashioner, it is normal to return to the person in question for new plans. Yet, assuming you need to mix new reasoning and a new look, it is prudent to think about new originators.

 How would I choose a visual fashioner?

Quest for visual fashioners on the web at places like Google, B2B commercial centers or the business directory. Likewise ask your business partners and companions for proposals. Waitlist around four architects for additional assessment. There are various things to remember prior to employing a visual computerization administration.

Really take a look at the portfolio: First step in assessing an illustrations configuration administration is to request their portfolio and audit explicit tasks that are of a similar class as your plan project. A visual creator's style is clear from the portfolio. The material she makes for you is probably going to be in a similar style, so feel alright with it. In case you will enlist a plan firm, demand inspecting arrangement of explicit creators who might deal with the venture.

Check for mastery in website composition: If your undertaking incorporates website architecture, ensure the visual depiction administrations organization has programming engineers acquainted with great website composition standards. Try not to be dazzled with great website architectures that utilization a ton of media, weighty illustrations and progressed highlights. Such plans typically raise a ton of difficulties, crash frequently and are frustratingly sluggish.

Concede to the quantity of idea plans: A decent visual fashioner will make a few ideas for you to survey prior to concluding the plan and making the end result. What might occur on the off chance that you don't care for any of the ideas?

Visual Designer ought to be a decent audience: If you need to give input before the plan interaction, ensure the visual creator will invest the energy to tune in and think about your thoughts. She needs to find some kind of harmony between requesting input from you and utilizing her innovativeness and creative mind to foster the ideas.

Actually look at references: It is essential to really look at references prior to recruiting somebody for the venture. Explicitly inquire as to whether the visual architect is acceptable at understanding the prerequisites, fusing your input and giving amendments.

 And All Other Service:-

1.       Flags customization and branding

2.      Graphic design services

3.      Promotional signs

4.      LED signs light box

5.      Flyers and leaflets

6.      Garments clothes costuming and branding

7.      Stickers and labels services

8.     Vehicles cars branding wrapping

9.      Business cards

10.  Digital printing

11.   Large format printing

 More Information: - https://www.maximall.ie/

[bfreelancing]

Something new, something borrowed, something...failed?

Hello World,

I can't take it anymore.

I just can't.

I have to tell someone all these stories, or I'm positively going to BURST.

So, this is me, starting a blog that no one will read. A blog basically for myself to chronicle my adventures as a freelance marketer; a blog that I can pretend people are reading so they can share in the hilarity of my adventures.

And I'm doing this anonymously - or as anonymously as one can be on the internet. I'm not going to share client names or locations or anything like that. If I use people's names, they will be changed. BUT, these stories can be crazy and specific so if it sounds like you, then it most likely is. Sorry. (Not really).

My life got a little off track at the beginning of 2021. No, not because of COVID (though that did add to the whole ordeal). I had a personal matter take over my life. I couldn't search for new clients. In fact, I barely managed to hang on to my old clients.

But that ordeal is now over. And I find myself with more time on my hands. And not nearly enough money to pay off all my debt (we're talking student loans AND credit card debt incurred during COVID trying to keep my family afloat - oh, and not to mention the taxes I owe the government for 2020).

I have once again started the *interesting* journey of reaching out to companies in the hopes of gaining new freelance clients.

What do I do, exactly? Marketing. But really anything a company needs. I once helped a company get a new phone system. I work completely remotely (I've done so for several years before COVID made it the cool thing to do) and never visited their building which was several states away. Did I know anything about phone systems before that? Nope. But I do now.

I try to stick to marketing, though: website design and development, social media management, graphic design, photography, videography, blogging, etc...if companies give me a chance, that is.

I've done this for seven years now. SEVEN. I can't believe it's been that long. Where does the time go? Have y'all seen the movie The Last Holiday with Queen Latifah? There's a line in that which has stuck with me over the years. I can't find the exact quote online (come on, Google, you're letting me down), but it's something like this: You put your head down, and you work, and you work, and you work, until one day you look up and think, how did I get here?

God, if that's not the truth. They told me growing up in school that I could be anything I wanted to be - that I would have the world at my feet, so long as I worked hard.

That was a lie.

I've worked hard. Harder than I ever thought I would have to. And I only have experience to show for it. Experience that still isn't enough. I'll never understand that.

How did I get where I am? In college, I had a family emergency. After I graduated, I moved back home to help my family. I was stunned to discover that my Bachelor of Science in ecological sciences provided me ZERO job opportunities at home. And I mean ZERO. I live in the country, but the city is only an hour away.

I'm in the Midwest. So, it's not like the city is HUGE like New York, but if I told you the city, you would 100% know it. Still, there were no opportunities.

I decided to go a different direction. Yep, you guessed it, MARKETING. Why? Because life threw me two more curve balls when I was in college, and instead of having multiple ecological internships, I had a few of those, but also a few marketing internships. Maybe one day I'll tell you about those.

But for now, you get the gist: I had two years of actual, real world marketing experience. I started applying to local marketing jobs. No one would hire me. When I was able to get feedback - which was few and far between - I was told that while my portfolio from my internships was impressive, the companies didn't like me because I didn't have a degree in marketing. Sure, I had a 4.0 GPA in all my science classes, and I graduated an entire year early. I was an officer in five clubs, a regular member in two others, worked five jobs, and took 21 hours of classes each semester. That wasn't enough. College told me I was well-rounded, but the real world could have cared less.

Thankfully, that didn't matter to the people from my internships. Several businesses I met from there begged me to help with their marketing. I started freelancing while searching for a full time gig elsewhere. Freelancing provided me a little money, but not enough.

I listened to all those people that told me they weren't happy with my degree, and I returned to college to get a master's degree in marketing. I completed it in a year.

With that under my belt, I started applying to places for a full time job - still freelancing on the side. I was barely making any money. But I was getting lots of experience. I can never thank my first clients enough. They would come to me and say things like, "Do you know how to use WordPress?" I would truthfully tell them no, but for a discounted rate I would figure it out for them. They took me up on the offer, and I learned invaluable lessons that way.

But it still wasn't enough. No one would hire me. Why? No idea. No one likes to give feedback these days. I guess too many applicants and not enough real people to respond to them.

So, I turned back to my freelancing and focused heavily on it. But then someone close to me suggested we start a business together. I thought maybe that was my chance, and jumped at it. I did that for three years before throwing in the towel. It took up too much time and the return just wasn't enough. But that same person offered me a job with their other company, and I took it.

Here's the deal about that, though: I went into the office every day. But I didn't work all day. I worked when projects came in and kept track of my time. When there weren't projects, I was allowed to freelance from my desk.

Those projects weren't enough to get me where I wanted to go. This was pre-COVID. This was a world where people didn't want to work remotely with other people. I received a few clients from referrals (thank you, sweet people!), but again, not enough.

When I say enough, I mean enough to pay off all my debt and get a house. That's all I've ever wanted in life: my very own house. That's my goal.

I'm not even close to attaining it at this point.

So, I start reaching out for full time jobs again. This time, I try to see if there are remote jobs available. I find one on the west coast. It seems like a dream, and the salary is great.

It was a complete nightmare. I'll tell you about that sometime too, but not today.

COVID hits, and they tell me my job is secure. They tell me they are going to give me a raise, after a job review. I go in for my job review and come out WITHOUT a job. Don't worry, I promise I'll tell you about that in another post.

What do I do? Go back to my tried and true freelancing. In a post-COVID world, EVERYONE wants to work with you remotely. It's amazing. I get new clients. I think I'm making progress.

Then my life is shattered due to a personal matter. Then tax season hits, and I realize that while I thought I was suffering during COVID with my freelancing, I actually made more money than ever. But didn't make my quarterly tax payments. The government wants an arm and a leg in exchange - literally.

I work out a payment plan with them, and I find that I'm completely broke. Barely able to make those payments, barely able to keep my credit cards UNDER the limit.

My personal matter slowly calms down. And I have a horrible realization: I've been doing this for SEVEN years, and I've gone absolutely nowhere. NOWHERE.

I don't judge my progress based on others. But, I thought by now I would have a house. I don't. I haven't paid off any student debt. My credit cards are now all pretty much maxed out thanks to COVID.

It's time to get my butt in gear, put my nose to the grindstone, and start reaching out to companies again to see if they need a freelancer's help.

Which brings me to my first official freelancer story, which I am sure you all will get a kick out of, if you read this far. Which I doubt you have. If you have, I'll love you forever. Feel free to message me, and I will legitimately tell you I love you. No joke.

So, to set the scene, it's a hot, humid Sunday. I'm inside. My air conditioner is broken, so I'm huddled next to a portable unit I purchased because I'm told that it will be a MONTH before my central air is fixed. I'm not moving a lot, trying to keep cool. The TV is on with old movies I've seen a thousand times playing in the background: old, familiar friends that make me happy, cheering me on while I search job boards for freelancing positions.

I find one for a web designer. It sounds dreamy. A company is looking for someone with a little bit of HTML experience, that they can train to use their brand new web design platform. I would be making templates for them, and their price per hour is exactly what I charge. I'm excited at the thought of learning something new, and I'm excited to find a company that's willing to teach me!

I immediately apply. I receive an automated response back that they want me to take a personality test, which I promptly do.

The questions are simple ones, that I know will reflect my hard-working nature. One question asks: You've had an event planned in your personal life for several weeks. When it comes time to leave work early for the event, your boss says that there's an emergency project they need your help on. What do you do? Do you...A) Stay on after you expected to leave then go to the event later....B) Go to the event....C) Ask a team member to do the project for you...and some other option I can't remember.

I choose A. That's the person I am (except for that nightmare job I mentioned awhile back, but that's REALLY for another post, so I need to stop mentioning it).

Another question asks: Your plate is full, and your time is completely booked, but a team member comes up to you, asking for help on their project. Do you...A) Put aside your work to help your team member...B) Tell your team member you're busy and to go ask someone else...and two other options I don't remember that are basically B, just repeated in different wording.

I choose A. Again, that's who I am. If I'm crazy busy and you come to me for help, I might be a bit cranky and stressed, but I'm going to set aside what I'm doing to help you. I'm not going to kick you to the curb.

But that's not what this company wants, apparently.

Why?

I submit the personality test, and it says that I FAILED it. Yes, it tells me that I FAILED the personality test. I'm still laughing about it. I guess companies want people that don't care about their coworkers and don't want to work? If so, that's definitely not me.

But how do you even fail a personality test? Who even knew that you COULD fail a personality test? Not me. Though I do know now.

What made it funnier? About an hour after being told I failed the test (which, by the way, was the WORST I have ever done on a test, so there ya go), I received a notification that said I was moving onto the next step in the application process. I just had to answer *one* more question: why am I a good fit for this job?

The answer I wanted to give? Because I want it. The answer I actually gave? A real one, full of bull to make everyone feel better about themselves.

Will I get this position? Probably not once a human gets involved and sees I failed. I think right now I'm just in their automated process.

Still funny though. I'm the girl that failed the personality test. I feel like I need to go make a t-shirt about that now.

That's all for now folks, thanks for sticking with me through this long read. Can't wait to see you back for more!

-B

[zeecourse]

Pi Network | What is a Pi network?

What is a pi network: Pi Network is a another digital currency for and by regular individuals that you can “mine” (or procure) from your telephone. Digital currencies are another type of advanced cash that is kept up and gotten by a local area, rather than by governments or banks.

What is a Pi Network?

The Pi Network is a digital currency project that aims to keep crypto mining accessible as the first generation centralization of currencies such as bitcoin has made them out of the reach of everyday users. The pi network, developed by a team of Stanford graduates, enables users to mine coins using their mobile phone app, validating transactions on a distributed record.

Pi Network With branding by number, Phase 1 of the project was launched on Pi Day, March 14, 2019, with its free Pi Mining app. As of June 2019, the network had over 100,000 active users, and a year later when Phase 2 launched, there were over 3.5 million. The app began running ads in May 2020 to provide a source of financing for the project. The user base reached 14 million in March 2021 after crossing the 1.2 million mark in February. Pi Coin is a cryptocurrency that operates on the Pi network, and along with other cryptos such as Bitcoin, PI was designed to go through a regular "half" to protect it from shortages. A halt occurs when the number of coins a miner receives to process a new transaction is halved upon reaching a certain milestone. Pi mining rate has halved from 1.6 per hour when it reached 100,000 users, again to 0.4 million per hour when it reached 1 million, and again to 0.2 π when it reached 10 million. It will continue to be halved, reaching zero on 1 billion users. During the current second phase of the project, users can voluntarily test Pi Node desktop software on their computers. But when will Phase 3 launch - will it be in 2021? According to the developers, the start of the third phase is not predetermined but depends on the progress made in the second phase. Unlike nodes in networks such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, which use a proof-of-work protocol, pi nodes use an algorithm based on the Stellar consensus protocol (SCP). Pi nodes validate transactions on a distributed ledger and reach a consensus on the order of the new transaction that the ledger records. Under SCP, PI nodes form security circles or groups of three to five trusted people, known to users of each network. Security boards build a global trust network that prevents fraudulent transactions, as transactions can only be validated on a shared ledger if trusted nodes approve them.

Pi Coin remains in pre-release mode

If you are wondering how to buy pie coins for your portfolio, then this is not possible right now. Users who have mined the pie cryptocurrency will only be able to withdraw or exchange their coins during the third phase of the project, when the PI moves to a fully decentralized blockchain. According to the project's website, the pie cannot be moved during the testing phase, to prevent fake accounts from depositing coins. When the blockchain protocol goes out of development and is fully deployed, the pie wallet balance is expected to be honored when the pie shifts from testnet to mainnet. As a result, PieCoin is not yet available to trade on any cryptocurrency exchange or trading platform. Once Phase 3 launches, holders will be able to take full control of their private and public wallet keys and use the coin to buy products and services at PI's peer-to-peer marketplace, or use it as fiat currency Can exchange for. Without keys, users cannot move or spend the currency they hold. The Pi mobile app acts as a cryptocurrency wallet, which is linked to the user's phone number or Facebook account. Like other public blockchains, the PI blockchain will allow external wallets to hold PI coins and directly transact with them by depositing transactions to the blockchain. However, unlike other blockchains, its developers have not yet released its source code. In December 2020, Pie developers introduced a new Pie ​​Brainstorming app, so that users could propose app ideas, join projects, and engage other users. Early adopters have been accumulating PI crypto in the hope that the price will rise sharply after Phase 3 goes live. Although the token mining rate has been reduced by half, users can increase their mining rate by connecting with other active miners. New users can join the pie network only if they have another user's referral code. The developers of the project claim that the security of the PI network is enhanced by personal networks, encouraging users to bring in friends and family - which is prompting suspicion that this is a multi-tiered marketing or pyramid scheme is. However, it is worth noting that users can only earn coins from their own direct network - and not from their network of connections with the MLM scheme. Some cryptocurrency observers have already started predicting their pie network value. Let's take a look at what the price of the pie is likely to be when it starts trading.

Q&A

Is Pi worth the money? Digital currencies that you simply install and just invest some time as in 10 to 15 min a day you will get $100 – $500 daily. How To Earn 1000 Per Day? Now you got the app and installed the app, Now you get 1 Pi Coin Free for using my promo code and it’s started mining. Is Pi Cryptocurrency safe? Pi Network is a another digital currency for and by regular individuals that you can “mine” (or procure) from your telephone. Digital currencies are another type of advanced cash that is kept up and gotten by a local area, rather than by governments or banks. Today, you can mine (or acquire) Pi by assisting with getting the money and by developing Pi’s confided in organization. While most digital forms of money (like Bitcoin) have been difficult for ordinary individuals to utilize and get to, Pi places the influence of cryptographic money into the palm of your hand. Can you make money from Pi network? You will get 3.6 PI Coin Daily free by just one click a day . Every 24 hr it needs to be refreshed again and it is for verification that you are not an Auto-computer mining . In Future One Pi = $10 Daily you are getting minimum 4 PI Coin = $40 (2925 INR)  It is not a fake content do follow my steps and you will be a millionaire when PI Launch. How much is a PI worth? You will get 3.6 PI Coin Daily free by just one click a day . Every 24 hr it needs to be refreshed again and it is for verification that you are not an Auto-computer mining . In Future One Pi = $10 Daily you are getting minimum 4 PI Coin = $40 (2925 INR)  It is not a fake content do follow my steps and you will be a millionaire when PI Launch. Can I sell PI Cryptocurrency? You will get 3.6 PI Coin Daily free by just one click a day . Every 24 hr it needs to be refreshed again and it is for verification that you are not an Auto-computer mining . In Future One Pi = $10 Daily you are getting minimum 4 PI Coin = $40 (2925 INR)  It is not a fake content do follow my steps and you will be a millionaire when PI Launch. Read the full article