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greatworldwar2 · 4 years ago

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• STG-44 Automatic Rifle

The StG 44 (abbreviation of Sturmgewehr 44, "assault rifle 44") is a German selective-fire assault rifle also known as the MP 43 and MP 44 developed during World War 2.

MP 43, MP 44, and StG 44 were different designations for what was essentially the same rifle with minor updates in production. The variety in nomenclatures resulted from the complicated bureaucracy in Nazi Germany. StG is an abbreviation of Sturmgewehr. According to one account, the name was chosen personally by Adolf Hitler for propaganda reasons. The rifle was chambered for the 7.92×33mm Kurz cartridge. This shorter version of the German standard (7.92×57mm) rifle round, in combination with the weapon's selective-fire design, provided a compromise between the controllable firepower of a submachine gun at close quarters with the accuracy and power of a Karabiner 98k bolt-action rifle at intermediate ranges. Studies had shown that few combat engagements occurred at more than 300 metres (330 yd) and the majority within 200 metres (220 yd). Full-power rifle cartridges were excessive for most uses for the average soldier. Only a trained specialist, such as a sniper, or soldiers equipped with machine guns, which fired multiple rounds at a known or suspected target, could make full use of the standard rifle round's range and power. The British were critical of the weapon, saying that the receiver could be bent and the bolt locked up by the mere act of knocking a leaning rifle onto a hard floor. A late-war U.S. assessment derided the StG-44 as "mediocre", "bulky" and "unhandy", declaring it incapable of sustained automatic fire and prone to jamming, though the report accepted that its accuracy was "excellent for a weapon of its type".

In the late 19th century, small-arms cartridges had become able to fire accurately at long distances. Jacketed bullets propelled by smokeless powder were lethal out to 2,000 metres (2,200 yd). This was beyond the range a shooter could engage a target with open sights, as at that range a man-sized target would be completely blocked by the front sight blade. Only units of riflemen firing by volley could hit grouped targets at those ranges. That fighting style was taken over by the widespread introduction of machine guns, which made use of these powerful cartridges to suppress the enemy at long range. Rifles remained the primary infantry weapon, but in some forces were seen as a secondary or support weapon, backing up the machine guns. In early 1918, Hauptmann (Captain) Piderit, part of Gewehrprüfungskommission ("Small Arms Examination Committee") of the German General Staff in Berlin, submitted a paper arguing for the introduction of an intermediate round in the German Army with a suitable firearm. He pointed out that firefights rarely took place beyond 800 metres (870 yd), about half the 2 km (1.2 mi) sight line range of the 7.92×57mm round from a Mauser Gewehr 98 rifle or less for MG 08 machine gun. The German Army showed no interest, as it already had the MP 18 submachine gun firing 9 mm pistol rounds and did not want to create a new cartridge.

At the start of World War II, German infantry were equipped with weapons comparable to those of most other military forces. A typical infantry unit was equipped with a mix of bolt-action rifles and some form of light, medium or a general-purpose machine guns. A problem with this mix was that the standard rifles were too large to be effectively used by mechanized and armored forces, where they were difficult to maneuver in the cramped spaces of an armored vehicle. During the invasion of the Soviet Union, increasing numbers of semi-automatic Tokarev SVT-38 and SVT-40s were used by the Red Army – mostly elite units and non-commissioned officers – while some Soviet rifle companies were completely equipped with PPSh-41 submachine guns. After experiencing high volumes of automatic fire from these weapons, German commanders re-thought their small arms requirements. The German army had been attempting to introduce semi-automatic weapons such as the Gewehr 41, but these proved troublesome in service, and production was insufficient to meet requirements. By 1941, it was becoming clear that action needed to be taken. Although various experimental rounds had been developed to one degree or another by this point, the Army instead decided to select yet a new design, the Polte 8×33mm Kurzpatrone ("short cartridge"). This used a spitzer bullet and basic cartridge design of the standard 7.92×57mm Mauser rifle cartridge, cutting down the cartridge from the original 7.92×57mm Mauser to 7.92×33mm Kurz.

Contracts for rifles firing the 7.92×33mm Kurz round were issued to both Walther and Haenel (whose design group was headed by Hugo Schmeisser), were asked to submit prototype weapons under the name Maschinenkarabiner 1942 ("machine carbine") or MKb 42. Both designs were similar, using a gas-operated action, with selective fire. Since both rifles shared the title of Maschinenkarabiner 42 the letters (H) and (W) were added to differentiate the two. The MKb 42(H) along with the less successful MKb 42(W) were predecessors of the later MP 43, MP 44, StG 44. The majority of the MP 43's features came from the MKb 42(H), with the hammer firing system and closed bolt coming from the MKb 42(W). As work moved forward to incorporate this new firing system, development halted when Hitler suspended all new rifle programs due to administrative infighting within the Third Reich. Hitler ordered that newer submachine guns were to be built, and he strongly disagreed with the use of the Kurz ammunition. To keep the MKb 42(H) development program alive, the Waffenamt (Armament Office) re-designated the weapon as the Maschinenpistole 43 (MP 43) and, making a few improvements, billed the weapon as an upgrade to existing submachine guns. Much time was wasted trying to make the MP 43 a replacement for the Karabiner 98k rifle. This goal was eventually realized to be impossible; the MP 43 cartridge was too weak to fire rifle grenades, too inaccurate for sniping, and the weapon was too short for bayonet fighting. In September 1943, it was decided that the MP 43 would supplement rather than replace the Kar 98k.

Adolf Hitler eventually discovered the designation deception and halted the program again. In March 1943, he permitted it to recommence for evaluation purposes only. Running for six months until September 1943, the evaluation produced positive results, and Hitler allowed the MP 43 program to continue in order to make mass production possible. The weapon made extensive use of for the 1940s advanced cost-saving pressed and stamped steel components rather than machined parts. The first MP 43s were distributed to the Waffen-SS; in October 1943, some were issued to the 93rd Infantry Division on the Eastern Front. Production and distribution continued to different units. In April 1944, Hitler took some interest in the weapon tests and ordered the weapon (with some minor updates) to be re-designated as the MP 44. In July 1944, at a meeting of the various army heads about the Eastern Front, when Hitler asked what they needed, a general exclaimed, "More of these new rifles!". Production soon began with the first batches of the new rifle being shipped to troops on the Eastern Front. By the end of the war, a total of 425,977 StG 44 variants of all types were produced and work had commenced on a follow-on rifle, the StG45. A properly trained soldier with a StG 44 had an improved tactical repertoire, in that he could effectively engage targets at longer ranges than with an MP 40, but be much more useful than the Kar 98k in close combat, as well as provide covering fire like a light machine gun. It was also found to be exceptionally reliable in extreme cold.

A primary use of the MP 44/StG 44 was to counter the Soviet PPS and PPSh-41 submachine guns, which used the 7.62×25mm Tokarev round. These cheap, mass-produced weapons used a 71-round drum magazine or 35-round box magazine and though shorter-ranged than the Kar 98k rifle, were more effective weapons in close-quarter engagements. The StG 44, while lacking the range of the Kar 98k, had a considerably longer range than the PPS/PPSh submachine guns, more power, a comparable rate of fire, an ability to switch between a fully automatic and a default semi-automatic fire mode and surprising accuracy. At the end of the war, Hugo Schmeisser claimed that 424,000 MP 43/MP 44/StG 44 rifles were built between June 1943 and April 1945 in four plants: 185,000 by C.G. Haenel in Suhl; 55,000 by J.P. Sauer & Sohn in Suhl; 104,000 in Erfurt; and 80,000 by Steyr-Daimler-Puch AG in Steyr, Austria. This was fewer than the 1.5 million ordered, and far fewer than the 4 million planned. Some 822 million rounds of 7.92×33mm Kurz ammunition were produced from 1942 to 1945. At the beginning of March 1945, the troops had 273.9 million rounds.

The Sturmgewehr remained in use with the East German Nationale Volksarmee with the designation MPi.44 until it was eventually replaced with variants of the AK-47 assault rifle. The Volkspolizei used it until approximately 1962 when it was replaced by the PPSh-41. It was still used by other public security formations thereafter. Other countries to use the StG 44 after World War II included Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, where units such as the 63rd Paratroop Battalion were equipped with it until the 1980s. Argentina manufactured their own trial versions of the StG 44 made by CITEFA in the late 1940s and early 1950s, but instead adopted the FN FAL in 1955, because it used the then more common and powerful 7.62×51mm NATO round. 7.92mm Kurz ammunition is currently manufactured by Prvi Partizan of Serbia. The extent to which the Sturmgewehr influenced the development of the AK-47 is not clearly known. Apart from external layout similarity and the gas-operation principle, the AK-47 was not a copy of the German gun because the AK-47 used a very different mechanism. However, tens of thousands of Sturmgewehrs were captured by the Soviets and were likely provided to Kalashnikov and his team, so it is likely that he knew of it while designing the AK-47. United States and, later, NATO developed assault rifles along a roughly similar path by at first adding selective-fire capability in a reduced power, full-caliber cartridge.

#world war 2 #second world war #world war ii #military history #german history #firearms #guns #assault rifle #ww2 #wwii #military equipment #military #german engineering

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dweemeister · 4 years ago

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NOTE: This is the third film released theatrically during the COVID-19 pandemic that I am reviewing – I saw Raya and the Last Dragon at the Regency Theatres Directors Cut Cinema’s drive-in operation in Laguna Niguel, California. Because moviegoing carries risks at this time, please remember to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by your local, regional, and national health officials.

Raya and the Last Dragon (2021)

As Raya and the Last Dragon, directed by Don Hall and Carlos López Estrada and written by Qui Nguyen and Adele Lim, made its theatrical and streaming bow, the United States was grappling with a wave of highly-publicized hate incidents towards Asian-Americans in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. This spike in racially-motivated verbal abuse, assaults, and homicides began with the pandemic and, frustratingly, had only been receiving national attention in these last few weeks. Despite the nation’s racist origins entwined with chattel slavery of black people and its continued unequal treatment of minorities including Asian-Americans, I am not qualified to say if the U.S. is “more” or “less racist” than other countries. But I can hardly think of any other people that interrogate racial inequality and oppression as much (and as publicly) as Americans – an undeniable strength. There was no way Raya and the Last Dragon’s cast and crew could have anticipated the film’s fraught timing, but the film provides a much-needed, positive, and heavily flawed, action-adventure romp drawn from Southeast Asian cultures.

The very notion that Walt Disney Animation Studios was attempting to craft a film using an amalgam of Southeast Asian cultures stoked my excitement and dread. Southeast Asian cultures – including, but not limited to, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam – are often lumped into those of East Asia (China, Korea, Japan), which dominate Asian-American depictions or Asian-influenced media in the United States. What gave me pause is that Disney’s track record in films featuring non-European-inspired characters and places inspired by non-European cultures is mixed. Aladdin (1992) and Pocahontas (1995) are aggregations of (and indulge in stereotypes towards) Arabs and indigenous Americans alike, especially in their presentations of “savagery” (Pocahontas in particular is guilty of false equivalences).

Cultural aggregations in fictional settings are not insensitive, per se. Yet, Disney’s stated intentions on this film are undermined by a voice cast ensemble almost entirely composed of actors of Chinese and Korean descent – you can bring up Adele Lim’s response to the voice casting controversy all you want, but her response contradicts the film’s promotion. Amid its gorgeous production and character design, Raya manages to avoid the worst mistakes of its Disney Renaissance predecessors. But its hero’s journey is too cluttered and too littered with the anachronistic and metatextual jokes plaguing the last decade’s Disney animated features.

Five centuries before the events of Raya and the Last Dragon, the land of Kumandra saw its people live in harmony with dragons. That relationship, however, would be devastated by the appearance of the Druun – a swirling, purple vortex that turns living beings into stone. In the conflict against the Druun, the last dragon, Sisu (Awkwafina), makes a fateful sacrifice to save Kumandra by concentrating the dragons’ collective power into a magical orb. Soon after, Kumandra’s five tribes – Fang, Heart, Spine, Tail, and Talon (named after parts of a dragon) – fight amongst each other for control of the orb (Heart eventually gains possession of it), effectively partitioning the land. In the present day, the Heart tribe’s Chief Benja (Daniel Dae Kim) proposes and hosts a feast-summit to discuss and heal Kumandra’s divisions. Benja has taught his daughter, Raya (Kelly Marie Tran), the ways of a warrior and the necessity for Kumandra’s tribes to realize their oneness. At the feast-summit, Raya befriends Namaari (Gemma Chan; Jona Xiao as young Namaari), the daughter of Fang Chief Virana (Sandra Oh). Predictably, Namaari betrays her new friend in an orchestrated ploy to pilfer the dragons’ orb for Fang. Just as the Druun make a surprise invasion of Heart, the botched heist sees the orb break into five, and each of the tribes makes off with part of the orb. It will be up to Raya to recover the other four pieces of the orb, lest Kumandra succumb to the Druun.

The film’s screenplay is, charitably, a mess. Though Qui Nguyen (primarily a playwright) and Adele Lim (2018’s Crazy Rich Asians) are the credited screenwriters, Raya’s phalanx of story credits (mostly full-time, white employees at the Disney studios) suggest studio interference. Raya seems as if it is trying to cleanly differentiate certain tribes as based on a certain Southeast Asian nation. Instead, it comes off as a brew of mish-mashed parts (this problem extends to the otherwise stunning animation). With the exception of those from the militant Fang, the bit characters from the various tribes do not behave any differently from the members of other tribes. The partition of Kumandra, five hundred years before the events of Raya, feels like as if it had never existed for lengthy stretches in this film.

After Kelly Marie Tran, as Raya, narrates the mythology and history of Kumandra in the opening minutes, the film’s structure tethers itself predictably to the monomyth. The fracturing of the dragon’s orb into five parts sends Raya onto a tedious adventure: the physical travel to a new part of Kumandra, introduction of a sidekick (all of them are comic reliefs), an action setpiece involving a necessary assist from new sidekick, and the integration of that sidekick into Raya’s ever-growing party. Lather, rinse, repeat. To squeeze the four other tribes into the film’s 107-minute runtime and set up a climax and resolving actions results in a frantically-paced movie. Almost all of the film’s dialogue is subservient to its structure, the hero’s journey. This disallows the viewer to learn more about our lead and her fellow adventurers. In arguably the most important example in how the dedication to story structure undermines the characters, take Raya’s repeated mentions to her newfound confidants that she has difficulty trusting others. Six years have passed since the day of Namaari’s betrayal and Raya’s discovery of Sisu. How has Raya’s sense of distrust evolved over time, and how does it manifest towards those of other tribes? Does it appear in moments without consequence to her quest, in gusts of casual cruelty? In terms of characterization, Raya is showing too little and telling just the basics – a dynamic that also applies to the film’s most important supporting characters.

Ever since Tangled (2010), the films of the Disney animated canon have increased their use of metatextual and anachronistic humor (e.g. Kristoff’s comment about Anna’s engagement to a person she just met in 2013’s Frozen and Maui’s Twitter joke in 2016’s Moana that still makes me gnash my teeth when I think about it). Invariably, the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has seen its brand of pathos-destroying humor bleed into the Disney animated canon and Star Wars. Like so many films in the Disney animated canon, Raya takes place in a fantastical location in a never-time far removed from the present. From the moment Raya meets Sisu, the circa-2020s humor is ceaseless. For Disney animated movies set in fantastical worlds, this sort of humor suits films that are principally comedies, such as The Emperor’s New Groove (2000) – a work that owes more to Looney Tunes than anything Disney has created. Instead, Raya’s comedy will suit viewers who frequent certain corners of the Internet, “for the memes.” Do Disney’s animation filmmakers believe the adults and children viewing their films so impatient and unintelligent about human emotions? That they will not accept a scene that deals honestly with betrayal, disappointment, heartbreak, or loss unless there is a snide remark or visual gag inserted within said scene or shortly afterward?

Raya seems like a film set to portray its scenarios with the gravity they require. But overusing Awkwafina’s Awkwafina-esque jokes and a DreamWorks- or Illumination Entertainment-inspired infant causing meaningless havoc will subvert whatever emotions Nguyen and Lim are attempting to evoke. These statements are not arguing that Raya and Disney’s animated films should be humorless, that Disney should stop casting an Awkwafina or an Eddie Murphy as comic relief. Instead, Raya is another case study in how Disney’s brand of ultramodern humor is overtaking their films’ integral dramatics. Raya is noisy, clamorous – no different than anything Disney has released in the last decade, save Winnie the Pooh (2011).

Production designers Helen Mingjue Chen, Paul A. Felix, and Cory Loftis have worked on films like Wreck-It Ralph (2012), Big Hero 6 (2014), or Zootopia (2016). Each of these films feature glamorous, near-future metropolises or sleek digital worlds. Where the tribespeople of Kumandra might not be behaviorally-differentiated, the color coding, lighting, and biomes of each of the five lands comprising Kumandra ably distinguishes Fang, Heart, Spine, Tail, and Talon from each other. As if taking cues from the production designs of Big Hero 6’s San Fransokyo and, to some extent, The King and I (1956), it is difficult to pin down specific influences on the clashing architectural styles within the lands, in addition to the unusually empty and cavernous palaces and temples and varying costumes. As picturesque as some of these lands are, the art direction does not help to empower the characteristic of the tribes and their native lands. Nor does James Newton Howard’s thickly-synthesized grind of an action score, which prefers to accompany the film’s excellent combat scenes rather than stake a clearer thematic identity for its own. Howard uses East and Southeast Asian instrumentations and influences in his music, but, disappointingly, they are heavily processed through synthetic elements and are played underneath the film’s sound mix.

Character art directors Shiyoon Kim (Tangled, 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) and Ami Thompson (2017’s MFKZ, 2018’s Ralph Breaks the Internet) embrace the (generally) darker and varying skin complexions of Southeast Asian peoples. The skin textures are among the best ever produced in a Disney CGI-animated feature, and the variety of face shapes – although still paling in comparison to the best hand-drawn features – is a pleasure to witness.

The number of films starring actors/voice actors of Asian descent (all-Asian or majority-Asian), animated or otherwise, and released by a major Hollywood studio makes for a brief list. Raya and the Last Dragon joins an exclusive club that includes the likes of The Dragon Painter (1919), Go for Broke! (1951), Flower Drum Song (1961), The Joy Luck Club (1993), and Crazy Rich Asians (2018). Among those movies, Raya is the only entry specifically influenced by Southeast Asian cultures. Its cast may be headlined by Kelly Marie Tran (whose skill as a voice actor is one of the film’s most pleasant surprises), but most of the roles went to those of Chinese or Korean descent. No disrespect intended towards Gemma Chan, Sandra Oh, or veteran actress Lucille Soong, but the majority East Asian cast only serves to further monolithize Asians – as the amalgamated story, plot details, and production design have already done. I will not second-guess any fellow person of Southeast Asian descent if they feel “seen” through Raya. What a compliment that would be for this film. How empowering for that person. But the life experiences of those of East Asian and Southeast Asian descent are markedly different. Disney’s casting decisions in Raya – all in the wake of the disastrous Western and Eastern reception of the live-action Mulan (2020) – have revealed a fundamental lack of effort or understanding about the possibilities of a sincere attempt at representation.

To this classic film buff, the discourse surrounding Raya strikes historical chords. When Flower Drum Song was released to theaters, the film was labeled by the American mainstream as the definitive Asian-American movie. Opening during the height of the American Civil Rights Movement, the film (and the musical it adapts) looked like nothing released by Hollywood (and on Broadway) at that time. In that midcentury era of rising racial consciousness and the lack of opportunities for Asian-Americans in Hollywood, the marking of Flower Drum Song as the absolute pan-Asian celebration was bound to happen – however unfair the distinction. Even though Rodgers and Hammerstein (two white Jewish men who made well-meaning, problematic attempts to craft musicals decrying racial prejudice and social injustices) composed the musical and zero Asian people worked behind the camera, those labels remained. With some differences in who wrote the source material, The Joy Luck Club and Crazy Rich Asians have followed Flower Drum Song’s fate in their categorizations. Will Raya? Time will be the judge, the only judge.

Before time passes judgment, we have some present-day hints. Though not released by major studios, the quick succession of The Farewell (2019) and Minari (2020) point to an experiential specificity that Raya attempts, but never comes close to achieving. Whether through aggregation or specificity, Hollywood benefits from the perspectives of underrepresented groups. Widespread claims that Raya too closely copies Nickelodeon’s Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005-2008) reflect that dearth of East Asian and Southeast Asian representation in American media. For too many, ATLA is the Asian fantasy. These simplistic observations and bad-faith criticisms (one could rebuke Disney’s vaguely-European princess films on the same principles, but I find this as lazy as the bad-faith ATLA criticisms) also suggest a lack of understanding that Asian-inspired stories are drawing from similar tropes codified by Asian folklore and narratives centuries old. If one reads through this reviewer’s write-ups, you will find an abiding faith in the major Hollywood studios – past, present, and future – to be artistically daring and to genuinely represent long-excluded persons. Many might see this faith as misplaced. But even in the major studios’ flawed attempts to depict underrepresented groups, like Raya, they concoct astonishing sights and form moving links to the cinematic past.

Assuming you have not skipped to this paragraph, the write-up that you have read may seem scathing to your eyes. Raya is no Disney classic – there has not been one for some time. However, I thoroughly enjoyed my first viewing of Raya. After a few weeks’ worth of keeping my agony private over the recent uproar over attacks on persons of Asian descent in America, it was a surreal experience to see even an amalgamated celebration of Southeast Asian culture. Over this last year, we have lost people and things that emboldened us and ennobled us. In this season of unbelonging and otherizing feelings for Asians in America, Raya’s timing is fortuitous. It is emboldening and ennobling.

My rating: 6/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. Half-points are always rounded down. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog (as of July 1, 2020, tumblr is not permitting certain posts with links to appear on tag pages, so I cannot provide the URL).

For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.

#Raya and the Last Dragon #Don Hall #Carlos López Estrada #Kelly Marie Tran #Awkwafina #Izaac Wang #Gemma Chan #Daniel Dae Kim #Benedict Wong #Sandra Oh #Thalia Tran #Lucille Soong #Alan Tudyk #Qui Nguyen #Adele Lim #James Newton Howard #Disney #My Movie Odyssey

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ansu-gurleht · 4 years ago

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sermon 35 annotated: the scripture of love

before i begin, it’s important to note that this is probably the trickiest sermon in the whole bunch to interpret. i’ve spent months mulling this one over, and there’s still stuff i don’t understand. so if you disagree with me on any of this, great! i’d love to hear what you have to say! but here’s my best guess:

- - -

'The formulas of proper Velothi magic continue in ancient tradition, but that virility is dead, by which I mean at least replaced.'

the ways of the velothi remain the same in practice, but the “virility,” the purpose and driving force, has shifted from the good daedra to the tribunal.

'Truth owes its medicinal nature to the establishment of the myth of justice.'

justice means getting down to the truth. to know the truth means to know justice. but vivec says justice is a myth. although, ze could be using “myth” in its other sense, not so much as “a falsehood” but “a tradition.” a tradition still need not be necessarily based in fact, but it’s still an extant thing which holds sway over culture.

'Its curative properties it likewise owes to the concept of sacrifice.'

for something to be true, that means many other things must not be true. many possible truths are sacrificed for one single truth. (likewise, for justice to run its course, it is sometimes necessary that the guilty go free and the innocent are punished.)

'Princes, chiefs, and angels all subscribe to the same notion.'

all three of these offices are of authority, which are responsible for establishing justice, which here is associated with truth and sacrifice. (also, “princes” are daedric princes, “chiefs” are aedra, and “angels” are magna-ge.)

'This is a view primarily based on a prolific abolition of an implied profanity, seen in ceremonies, knife fighting, hunting, and the exploration of the poetic.'

vivec says that the idea of “truth = justice + sacrifice” is based on getting rid of the things you assume are taboo (“implied profanity”). this means exploring the taboo and redefining it.

'On the ritual of occasions, which comes to us from the days of the cave glow, I can say nothing more than to loosen your equation of moods to lunar currency.'

the first part might be some kind of reference to plato's allegory of the cave - perhaps equating the dawn era to the cave. "loosen your equation of moods to lunar currency" might mean "don't be afraid to turn towards lorkhan” - see: the lunar lorkhan theory (bear in mind, it IS just a theory in-universe, not a given fact)

'Later, and by that I mean much, much later, my reign will be seen as an act of the highest love, which is a return from the astral destiny and the marriages between.'

despite the many crimes of vivec, ze believes that ultimately hir impact on hir people and the world will be overwhelmingly positive. “the astral destiny” is what vivec believes is hir rightful, fated rule.

'By that I mean the catastrophes, which will come from all five corners.'

“the catastrophes” refer to the “the marriages between” of the last line. note that ze refers to hir sexual assault as a “marriage.”

what are the five corners? the house of troubles has four. the provisional house has four. is this referring to the house of troubles plus tiber septim? it fits best, i think.

'Subsequent are the revisions, differentiated between hope and the distraught, situations that are only required by the periodic death of the immutable.'

history has been, and (according to vivec) must be rewritten on multiple occasions, either out of hope of bettering the people, or to shield them from ugliness. if history is immutable, unchangeable, then rewriting history every now and then is the “periodic death of the immutable.”

'Cosmic time is repeated: I wrote of this in an earlier life.'

if i were more into the concept of cyclic kalpas, this would be a wonderful reference. otherwise, this could refer to a belief vivec had in hir “earlier life” as a mortal, wherein the same (usually traumatic) events happen over and over again. this could apply more generally to certain events recurring, such as the catastrophes mentioned above.

'An imitation of submersion is love's premonition, its folly into the underworld, by which I mean the day you will read about outside of yourself in an age of gold.'

love causes a feeling of being submerged, but it’s only an imitation, a folly. someday, in a better time, you will discover it was always external to you. once you no longer need love, you will understand “its folly into the underworld”

'For on that day, which is a shadow of the sacrificial concept, all history is obliged to see me for what you are: in love with evil.'

“concept of sacrifice,” part of what makes truth healing, is again referenced. but the better time is the “shadow” of that concept, meaning on some level the concept is null, or no longer necessary.

who is vivec addressing? hirself? “in love with evil?” is this guilt? vivec knows that the sacrifices ze made are no longer necessary, and the reversal in “see me for what you are” might imply that ze sees hirself as the final sacrifice - very messianic.

'To keep one's powers intact at such a stage is to allow for the existence of what can only be called a continual spirit.'

seems to be a reference to CHIM and zero-summing. in order to achieve CHIM at the stage whereupon you see the wheel sideways is to keep existing as you are, not to join with the tower and zero-sum. (this seems like a nonsequitur following the lines before. maybe those lines hint at this one more than i suspect?)

'Make of your love a defense against the horizon.'

horizon = the world, the unknown world beyond your body and mind. by loving others, you expand your body and mind, thereby expanding your horizon.

'Pure existence is only granted to the holy, which comes in a myriad of forms, half of them frightening and the other half divided into equal parts purposeless and assured.'

on some level, mortal existence is sullied. only immortals, divines, daedra and aedra, can have a pure existence, although it takes many forms, as many as there are spheres of dominion. the daedra are “frightening” and the aedra are “purposeless and assured”

'Late is the lover that comes to this by any other walking way than the fifth, which is the number of the limit of this world.'

confusing. what makes the lover “late?” isn’t the fifth walking way love? how is five “the number of the limit of this world?” is this world vivec's world, limited by the "five corners" mentioned earlier? or does the sixth walking way go beyond the limit of the world?

'The lover is the highest country and a series of beliefs.'

the lover is both of powerful physical (political) power, as well as philosophical power.

'He is the sacred city bereft of a double.'

the hortator has a double in the sharmat. but vivec, the lover, has no double, no equal.

'The uncultivated land of monsters is the rule.'

“uncultivated land of monsters” could refer to morrowind, as it is well known for being a dangerous and unforgiving place. but “monsters” could also refer to the “children” vivec has been hunting in the past several sermons.

'This is clearly attested by ANU and his double, which love knows never really happened.'

anu’s double is padhome. anu happened b/c he said he happened. padhome never claimed to happen, which makes him anu’s double, his opposite. he is defined only by how he is distinct from anu.

'Similarly, all the other symbols of absolute reality are ancient ideas ready for their graves, or at least the essence of such.'

reality is relative, not absolute. absolutist ideas are “ancient ideas ready for their graves,” outdated philosophies. symbols cannot represent absolute reality: they are merely signposts pointing towards it.

'This scripture is directly ordered by the codes of Mephala, the origin of sex and murder, defeated only by those who take up those ideas without my intervention.'

not sure what ze’s trying to say here. could be saying, "i become the lover through mephala. only the lover who becomes such of their own power can defeat me," with an implied, "no lover can do this, so no lover can defeat me."

'The religious elite is not a tendency or a correlation.'

to become “the religious elite” is not something you happen into, it’s something you strive to become. this line seems to clarify the previous.

'They are dogma complemented by the influence of the untrustworthy sea and the governance of the stars, dominated at the center by the sword, which is nothing without a victim to cleave unto.'

sea = seht, stars = ayem, sword = vehk. the sea and stars exist on their own, but a sword requires a victim - just as a lover requires a beloved.

'This is the love of God and he would show you more: predatory but at the same time instrumental to the will of critical harvest, a scenario by which one becomes as he is, of male and female, the magic hermaphrodite.'

“God” needs a victim "to cleave unto", but it’s ultimately very important that ze does so, in order to become what ze’s meant to be. also, "to cleave" is to make one into two, and vehk seeks to reconcile two parts into one - mortal and immortal, chimer and dunmer, male and female. this dichotomy of opposites is important. ze cleaves them apart and then cleaves them together, over and over.

'Mark the norms of violence and it barely registers, suspended as it is by treaties written between the original spirits.'

original spirits = et’ada. if you go about violence in the way prescribed by them, you will achieve little if anything. it's all like games played between gods.

'This should be seen as an opportunity, and in no way tedious, though some will give up for it is easier to kiss the lover than become one.'

but vivec seems to claim that these little victories within ancient boundaries can be useful. the lover seems to live within these boundaries, so as to show others how to escape them. but to take such a position is very difficult, much more so than simply accepting the lover’s assistance.

'The lower regions crawl with these souls, caves of shallow treasures, meeting in places to testify by way of extension, when love is only satisfied by a considerable (incalculable) effort.'

there’s some obvious innuendo here, but i won’t dwell on it. but this line really sums up what i think the walking way of love is. it’s creating a network of “lovers” who (through incalculable effort) help bring all of the souls it can into its breast (‘testify by way of extension’), so as to expand the network as well as help those it can to achieve something greater.

#tes #tesblr #teslore #36 lessons of vivec #vivec #morrowind #almsivi #chim

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marshmallowprotection · 3 years ago

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WARNING! VERY LONG! AND ALSO TALKS ABOUT ABUSE AND MANIPULATION AND ALSO MENTIONS OF ALCOHOL.

Please don't read if that triggers you!

ALSO MAJOR AND I MEAN MAJOR SPOILERS FOR DRAKENGARD 3 AND POSSIBLY EVILLIOUS CHRONICLES TOO. — Submission

It has been like a millennium since I have sent you any sort of things about a character (or in this case, characterS) but as I recently revised the story of this very fucked up pair of twins, I decided to show them to you. They are specifically characters in an RP of mine with my friend Jade which is a crossover between Evillious Chronicles and Drakengard 3.

Here's a bit of context:

The Intoners are beings that can use the power of song, but their true purpose is to destroy the world. The original Intoner was Zero, who became an Intoner after the Flower, some sort of being that the Gods created to destroy the world, took root inside of her corpse and effectively 'revived' her as an Intoner; also, Zero wasn't always called Zero, previously she was named Rose (which wasn't her birth name, as she has no birth name), but she changed her name to Zero after she became an Intoner (it's unknown why). After Zero tried to kill herself when she realized that she'd eventually be forced to destroy the world by the Flower, the Flower, sensing her hostility towards it, birthed five beings from her as sort of 'backups' in a sense to ensure it would succeed in destroying the world: One, Two, Three, Four, and Five. These beings are all in some way like Zero, as they were created from fragments of her memories, personality, and resemble people from Zero's past; e.g. One resembles a rebel girl who Zero was tied up next to as she was left to die in town's square of some village as punishment for her crimes of murdering hundreds of people; Five resembles a nun who Zero had killed at some point before she became an Intoner; etc. The Flower did this on purpose to make Zero hesitate in killing them, which...on paper it would seem to be a good idea, but Zero's not the type to hesitate in killing anybody, unless it's someone she cares about (which, the only people she cares about are not even really 'people', their dragons), and she don't give two fucks about the other Intoners at all, so, yeah.

'HERS' is a acronym for 'Hereditary Evil Raiser Syndrome' and its a fictional disease in Evillious that when your infected you become compelled into doing violence, as the goal of anybody whose ends up with HERS is to destroy the world and everybody in it; well that's an oversimplified explanation of it.

The Climb One is a ship that the last Earthlings from the Second Period used to escape their dying planet.

The First Period was the very first world in Evillious, which heavily resembled our world; the Second Period was a virtual reality created by the people of the First Period which also heavily resembled our world. At some point the First Period died (it's implied that a nuclear war happened there which is why everybody there died) and thanks to Behemo the Earthlings on the Climb One were taken into reality and they found the ruined First Period planet and on its ruins was built the Third Period (which was a world of its own). Oh and the humans from the Second Period are referred to as Earthlings in order to differentiate them from First Period/Third Period humans as they were originally not even 'real'.

Sickle is a robot built by an Earthling named Luna Hazuki and eventually he becomes a god and takes the form of a bat who observes the people of the Third Period.

Medora is another OC of mine from my RP with Jade. Her story is a story for another time ^^'

Aurende is an original kingdom of mine, not a country that's canonly in EC.

Why are Lumina and Eliora Romanian? I dunno I found out Lumina means sunshine in Romanian and just went with it; it's an insignificant detail anyways that's not exactly very relevant to Lumina and Eliora's stories but is just there.

Alright the context dumping is done with ^^''''' go onto the Evillious Chronicles and Drakengard wikis, they can give you a lot more less simplified context for this stuff but I think I told you the bare minimum you need to understand whats going on? I hope I gave you enough context to understand ^^'

But anyways on with th character info and Lumina and Eliora's story!

Name: Lumina

Aliases: True God Twins (With Eliora)

Lumi (By Eliora)

Lumina Ardelean (Full Name)

Hypocritical Strawberry (By Sickle, Mockingly)

Age: 1,045+ (On 499 E.C.)

Looks 18

Height: 163 cm/5’4’’

Weight: 49 kgs/110 lbs

Cup Size: C

Bust/Waist/Hip: 84/59/85

Sex: Female

Gender: Female

Classification: Human (Till 529 B.T.)

Earthling (Till 528 B.T.)

God

Race: Romanian

Hair Color: Strawberry Blonde

Eye Color: Gold

Born: 546 B.T.

Died: Varies

Status: Varies

Sexuality: Bisexual/Demiromantic

Relatives: Unnamed Mother (Deceased; Died In Childbirth)

Unnamed Father (Deceased; Died of Alcohol Overdose)

Eliora Ardelean (Younger Twin Sister)

Flower (Creation)

Zero (Flower’s Host)

One (Creation Via Flower)

Two (Creation Via Flower)

Three (Creation Via Flower)

Four (Creation Via Flower)

Five (Creation Via Flower)

Medora Aurende (Prototype Intoner)

Occupation: Creator of The Flower And Intoners

Affiliations: None

Favorite Food: Chocolate-Strawberry Sundae

Loves: Eliora, Revenge, Inducing Suffering In Others, Chocolate, Sundaes, Sweets, Strawberries

Hates: Alcohol, Her Father, People Who Hurt Others, People Calling Out Her Hypocrisy, Faeries, Her Father’s Girlfriend, Five

Weapons: Magic

Background + Personality: Lumina is a prideful but vengeful girl, whose been irreversibly scarred by the events of her and her twin sister’s childhood. Her mother died giving birth to her and her sister, which caused her father to blame her and her sister for their mother’s death, giving him an excuse to constantly beat her and starve her and her sister. Lumina did her best to protect Eliora from their father, taking most of their father’s beatings. Due to their father being an alcoholic and his alcoholism only causing her and Eliora to be abused even more horribly and brutally whenever he was drunk, Lumina developed a hatred of alcohol, especially beer and wine, which her father drank often. Her father eventually got a girlfriend, who also often abused the two girls, and ironically, this girlfriend heavily resembled Five, the youngest Intoner sister, which caused Lumina and Eliora to often be uncomfortable whenever she is in Five’s presence later on.

Lumina one day discovered her mother’s diary and found that her father had in fact heavily abused her mother when she was alive, like he did to Lumina and Eliora, and that her mother had been a way for him to take out all his anger and pain, and her mother believed that that was ok, because this way she had a meaning, this way her ‘worthless’ life had a meaning. Lumina realized her father was not upset about her and Eliora’s mother’s death because he was in love with her mother, he was upset because he had lost his main coping mechanism to deal with all of his problems, and so had replaced her mother with her and Eliora. Lumina became enraged by this revelation and confronted her father about it, but only found herself battered to near death.

The next day, her father died of an alcohol overdose, and she and Eliora ran away and ended up on the streets. From there they were constantly beaten yet again, except not by their father, but by people they had never even met before.

Lumina continued doing her best to protect her sister from the abuse and often took care of her, leading to the two sisters becoming starkly different in their world view;

Eliora’s world view will be stated in her info, but nonetheless here is Lumina’s world view:

Lumina, sick and tired of all of the pain she went through because of the world, developed a hatred of the world and a desire to destroy it all and start again, as well as to punish humanity for being ‘sinful’ creatures, believing that starting from zero again was the only way to end the cycle of abuse. Ironically, Lumina found herself also enjoying watching other people suffer, as she believed that other people deserved it for being ‘cruel, sinful humans’, which made her no better than her abusers and only showed she was a hypocrite in what she believed, as she began actively inflicting harm upon others just like how she had been hurt.

Eventually, Lumina and Eliora by unknown means managed to sneak into the Second Period, where Lumina ended up unknowingly being infected by HERS, which only served to make her desire to destroy the world stronger; Eliora, however, remained uninfected. Lumina and Eliora then snuck onto the Climb One, where they would then end up in the chaos somehow reincarnated into Gods and trapped inside the Climb One with Levia and Behemo, who questioned who they were until Behemo recognized them as the two homeless girls he saw often wandering the streets. Lumina and Eliora would manage to escape the Climb One within a few years thanks to their bodies being intact, and they soon found that they had become gods, which gave Lumina an idea; they enact a plan to destroy the world. Despite Eliora’s hesitance, Eliora went through with it and so the two sisters began their experimentations which would eventually lead to the creation of the Flower and the concept of Intoners.

One of their prototype Intoners was Medora Aurende, a princess of the Kingdom of Aurende, who was later deemed a failure due to not being strong enough to destroy the world, and so the twins disposed of her, leaving her for dead in a forest in the Beelzenian Empire.

Eventually, the Flower was finally complete along with the concept of Intoners, and the twins enacted their plan to destroy the world. They went to the city of Alicegrad in the country of Holy Levianta and infected a human who had been left for dead in the city square named ‘Rose’ with the Flower, and she was soon revived and turned into an Intoner. Rose changed her name to Zero soon after. Eliora began to become more and more hesitant and concerned with Lumina’s plan to destroy the world, but in response, Lumina slapped her and told her

“I’ve protected you for your entire life, you know. It’s time you repaid me a bit by helping me destroy the world that hurt me so much. And this will only serve to benefit you anyways; after all, this world hurt you so much too, despite my attempts at protecting you. Why wouldn’t you want to destroy it as well, Eli?”

Eliora afterward meekly nodded and never questioned Lumina again out of fear of what she’d do to her if she dared to question the plan again, even though Eliora could tell the Flower was slowly growing out of their control.

Lumina’s overall a very hateful, vengeful, hypocritical woman who at this point constantly contradicts herself, claiming that she wants to break the cycle of abuse whilst continuing to harm others. Yet deep in her heart, it seems she does genuinely still care for her sister, although it appears as time passes she slowly becomes more and more obsessed with hurting other people and punishing humanity for its sins as she gradually succumbs to her HERS instincts, and her care and empathy slowly wither away; even her love for her sister and feelings of kinship with Zero is slowly dissipating; until all that remains is her hatred of the world and humanity overall. Sickle mockingly calls her a ‘hypocritical strawberry’ due to her hypocrisy and strange obsession with strawberries.

Name: Eliora

Aliases: True God Twins (With Lumina)

Eli (By Lumina)

Eliora Ardelean (Full Name)

Pitiable Strawberry (By Sickle)

Age: 1,045+ (On 499 E.C.)

Looks 18

Height: 161 cm/5’3’’

Weight: 48 kgs/108 lbs

Cup Size: C

Bust/Waist/Hip: 83/58/84

Sex: Female

Gender: Female

Classification: Human (Till 529 B.T.)

Earthling (Till 528 B.T.)

God

Race: Romanian

Hair Color: Strawberry Blonde

Eye Color: Gold

Born: 546 B.T.

Died: Varies

Status: Varies

Sexuality: Bisexual/Demiromantic

Relatives: Unnamed Mother (Deceased; Died In Childbirth)

Unnamed Father (Deceased; Died of Alcohol Overdose)

Lumina Ardelean (Older Twin Sister)

Flower (Creation)

Zero (Flower’s Host)

One (Creation Via Flower)

Two (Creation Via Flower)

Three (Creation Via Flower)

Four (Creation Via Flower)

Five (Creation Via Flower)

Medora Aurende (Prototype Intoner)

Occupation: Creator of The Flower And Intoners

Affiliations: None

Favorite Food: Chocolate-Strawberry Sundae

Loves: Lumina (Or So She Claims), Dancing, Chocolate, Sundaes, Sweets, Baby Animals, Children, Dragons, Books, Reading, Singing, Zero, Strawberries

Hates: Seeing People Suffer, Her Father, Her Father’s Girlfriend, Five, The World (To A Much Lesser Degree Than Lumina), Alcohol

Weapons: Magic

Background + Personality: Most of Eliora and Lumina’s backstory was covered in Lumina’s info, so most of it will not be stated here except for any parts unique to Eliora.

Eliora is a meek, weak-willed girl who does as her sister tells her, secretly wishing to deviate from her sister’s will but being unable to as she is blinded by her ‘love’ for her sister and by what Lumina constantly tells her about their plan with the Flower and Intoners being “for the best”, that it’s “better for them to destroy the world here to stop humans from continuing to sin and hurt each other”, that “humanity is a sinful, malicious race that should be annihilated along with this cruel world they created”, even though Eliora knows deep inside that Lumina is merely manipulating her and forcing her to go along with what she wants.

Eliora’s world view is vastly different from her sister’s, as Eliora, who often could only watch as her sister was beaten and hurt constantly, found herself believing that revenge didn’t do much but perpetuate the cycle of abuse that she and Lumina suffered from, and so believed that the only way to end the cycle was to help abuse survivors not repeat the actions of their abusers. But Lumina heavily disagreed with her and forced Eliora, whether through physical harm or threats, to go along with Lumina’s plans and act the part of an ‘evil god who wants to destroy the world’.

Eliora also feels as if she’s indebted to Lumina for her protecting her from most of abuse of their childhood, and so feels obligated to help her even though she really believes that what Lumina’s doing is wrong.

Sickle pityingly calls Eliora a ‘pitiable strawberry’ due to her strange obsession with strawberries just like Lumina and because she’s a person who is very pitiable.

Whenever Eliora is able to, she often spends her time dancing, singing, or reading, loving all three activities immensely and secretly wishing she could have become a dancer or writer or singer or something of the sort rather than a mere instrument in her sister’s plans to destroy the world, and hopes that in some other life she could go follow her dreams rather than be forced to help her sister.

Also unlike her sister, Eliora is a very empathetic person, and despises killing and hurting others, although pretends as if she does enjoy such activities in order to please her sister.

So yeah, that's Lumina and Eliora's story. *me torturing my characters again and again goes brrrr-*

For reference here's their official designs (btw I probably should redo their arts considering their older as I made them back in April so yeah- oof) as well as sketch I made of them I may never finish but who knows:

Left girl is Lumina, right girl is Eliora ^

Oh, wow.

Okay. You’ve really edited and revised a lot of the story. The girls are looking really good, too. Angst can be a good device to help you channel your emotions in a healthy and constructive way. I think you’re building a really fun universe that just works for you and all of this design, planning and care takes a lot of time and effort. Never discount that work you put into it.

They are foils of each other.

They suffered but they handled it differently. That makes for an interesting arc for the both of them as they try to make sense of reality.

#submission #littleghostlyrose #not mm #ask #mod kait

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alagonasleyyy · 4 years ago

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Strategic Management Paper about Sevron Ltd.

I. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Computer service software is widely recognized to be among the leading providers of OT solutions and outsourcing services in the Philippines. It is a centralized system within a company for tracking, prioritizing, managing, responding to, and resolving customer queries or employee requests all together. It can benefit companies of all sizes and types from multinational enterprises supporting millions of other businesses in multiple languages, to small consumer-facing businesses that need to answer customer questions quickly without hiring an army of support representatives.

Sevron is one of the computer service support that has been using by many of the Filipinos and different people all over the world. It provides all companies with unique task-based risk assessment software provided through a web service. The company was created in year 2007 and now considered one of the most innovative online solution developers in the world. Constantly striving to reduce risk in the workplace, our intuitive solutions enable businesses of all sizes and sectors to create and manage Risk and COSHH assessments, acquire and manage Safety Data Sheets, and capture, record, and report workplace incidents in real-time. It has been created with the purpose of helping businesses reduce risk. To achieve that, they employ a holistic approach to what is a complicated problem. They do that by identifying the many different factors that contribute to risk; from obvious causes such as insufficient training and a lack of resources, to wider, more generalized problems, including the general misconception that health & safety is a hindrance to business. With all of these, Sevron becomes one the backbones of great customer experiences.

II. INTERNAL ASSESSMENT

A. CORPORATE PROFILE:

Sevron provides all companies with unique task-based risk assessment software provided through a web service. The solution integrates a fully managed library of safety data sheets allows everyone to create a fully compliant task based COSHH risk assessment or task risk assessment within a minute from one simple and intuitive form. Sevron is used by over 40,000 users throughout the globe, and includes clients such as BHI Healthcare, Coca-Cola, Interserve, Virgin, Proctor and Gamble, and Weetabix. Joining Sevron Company can make your workplace a safer place to be.

B. MISSION AND VISION

The Mission

Our vision is for a noble cause that requires innovation to drive us towards our destination. Along the way we may have those who love us and those that do not but as long as our voices are heard, we will make a difference.

“To get where we are going, we need to have massive impact and take massive action.”

The Vision

It is imperative that the negative social dogma surrounding Health and Safety be improved to protect our future generations.

Sevron have formed our volunteer community called The Knights of Safety™ to rebrand safety across our planet.

“The most important thing in safety since common sense.”

C. CORPORATE OFFICERS

They believe that to be successful the right people need to sit in the right seats and that’s exactly what their team is. Everybody has the ability to do the job but what matters most is that their team member meets their culture values. Each Sevronian might be an individual but together they work like a well-oiled machine, reaching goals fast and effective.

D. PRODUCT LINE

Computer / Software

They make risk assessment, incident reporting and msds management apps, connected on one platform. Their mission is to protect you and your reputation.

E. INTERNAL FACTOR EVALUATION MATRIX

The cumulative weighted score of the strengths is 2.06, while the weaknesses are 0.27, according to the table above from IFE Matrix. This demonstrates that the business has a large network of branches as well as a good working relationship with its employees. The number of experienced management teams with a positive value system and strong brand recognition had increased. Sevron has a strong internal role, as this graph indicates. Poor Service is Sevron's greatest internal flaw. This condition can be resolved by enhancing their facilities and properly training themselves to provide the best possible service to their customers.

III. EXTERNAL ASSESSMENT

A. PORTER’S MODEL ANALYSIS

Porter’s five forces

Porter’s five strengths show is a layout for any industry analysis that's utilized in analyzing an industry. The five competitive strengths are; dangers of modern participants, haggling control of clients, risk of substitute items, haggling control of providers and competitive rivalry within an industry. By applying Michael Porter’s five forces system, it'll offer assistance to establish Sevron Ltd.’s position within the market.

Threats of new entrants

Sevron Ltd which is a universal computer software is competing with the Sphera, RAMs, Crams The one who supplied on the computer software developer are the Investors, manufacturers and clients the Sevron ltd is now considered one of the country’s most innovative online solution developers.

Bargaining power of suppliers

The control of providers in any given industry will ordinarily be decided by the sum of suppliers within the given industry. This implies that few suppliers in any industry will infer that the suppliers have more bargaining control. The suppliers for Sevron Ltd are Risk Assessment Software, COSHH Management Software and Incident Management Solution. These softwares developer companies have different features compared to universal softwares. These are being created with the purpose of helping businesses reduce risk such as insufficient training and a lack of resources, to wider, more generalized problems, including the general misconception that health & safety is a hindrance to business.

Bargaining power of buyers

The large array of safety data sheets has created a lot of power at the hands of the consumers. They use this system for their COSHH assessments, from start to finish they use a plethora of MSDS available to use which then self-populate all the hazardous you need to address. Once the initial purchase has been made, brand loyalty may start to formulate.

Threats of substitute products

A substitute item can be portrayed as a software that's interesting whereas compared to another software within the system but can meet the needs more often than not by the software that it is different with. A few of the substitutes are Risk Assessment Software, COSHH Management Software. However, substitute threats cannot be said to be very high since they cannot be used in urgent cases unlike Sevron Ltd.’s software.

Rivalry among existing competitors in the industry

Rivalry between competing firms in a given industry can be of distinctive types. Competing firms compete in forms of cost wars, software differentiation and software development among others. Law entry boundaries within the industries implies that there exist many competitors within the different sectors that Sevron Ltd works in which results in intensified competition as the companies aim to extend their market share.

B. EXTERNAL FACTOR EVALUATION

Sevron Ltd., based on the External Factor Evaluation Matrix, has a weighted score of 2.15. Though, relatively lower on score than the average of 2.50, Sevron Ltd. still has influential significance and strength in its industry or the market. The low weighted score was highly influenced by the economic movements due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which is a primary variable.

According to the EFE Matrix, the factor with the most weight is the “Corporate Sponsorship”. This is due to the recent connections, partnerships, and sponsorships made by Sevron to other leading companies in the same and other industries. One of the biggest factors for these connections, partnerships, and sponsorships are their flagship product, COSHH365 Suite, which promotes chemical safety and protocols. On the other hand, the external factor with lowest weight is the “worker strikes”. Although it is not much imminent, the threat of worker strikes is still possible, thus still considered as an external threat factor in this matrix.

It is to be noted that Sevron Ltd.’s performance score shown in this EFE Matrix has significant difference from the results than their pre-pandemic performance. They are usually a high-performing and scoring company and could also be considered a primary competitor in the market. But due to the negative effects of the pandemic to the economy, their weighted score is also expected to be lower like this.

C. COMPETITIVE PROFILE MATRIX

The Critical Success Factors are vital for Sevron Safety Solutions Company’s Business Growth and opportunities. Though all play a crucial part for Sevron, ratings play an important role. Hence, these rankings range from 1-4. Four (4) being the highest and one (1) being the lowest in which they are vary based on the level of importance Sevron Safety Solutions Company prioritizes as follows:

4- means having superior importance

3- means having above average importance

2- means having average importance

1- Means having poor importance

According to the CPM matrix above, Sevron Safety Solutions obtained a total weighted score of 3.44. Sphera, on the other hand, obtained the highest total weighted score of 3.67 and CRAMs obtained a weighted score of 3.36.

In order to catch up in a few years, Sevron Company should focus on improving competitive advantage more and make substantial improvements with factors that have low ratings, allocating additional advertisements as well as investments.

D. KEY EXTERNAL FACTORS

Key External Factors that Bring Opportunities for the Company

Corporate Sponsorship

Economic Status

Growth in Technology

Environment

Majestic Software Upgrade

Other Key External Factors that Bring Opportunities for the Company

Rising of Technological Dependence

Businesses strengthening their Internal Control Systems

Economic rebound to be expected

Key External Factors that Bring Threats for the Company

Increase of Dollar and Peso Difference

Business Tax Increases in the Country

COVID 19/Pandemic

National Disaster/Fortuitous Events

Worker Strikes

Other Key External Factors that Bring Threats for the Company

Big economic recession

Shortage for skillful employees

IV. STRATEGY FORMULATION

A. BOSTON CONSULTING GROUP MATRIX

According to the matrix above, Forward and Horizontal Integration is a star category for Sevron Health & software because the company competes in a rapidly growing industry. Since 2017, Sevron has provided solutions such as risk management, safety data sheet inventory, and COSHH risk assessment management to their 7.7 million trusted users around the world.

Related diversification, market development, and penetration are in the question mark category because they have a large market share in a slow-growing industry, whereas product development and backward integration are in the cow category since they should be the company's priority to keep their powerful position for as long as possible. Sevron does not have services or strategies that fall under the dog category, since Sevron’s services are competitive.

B. STRATEGIC POSITION AND ACTION EVALUATION MATRIX

The SPACE matrix which is also known as the strategic position and action evaluation is a four-dimension framework that illustrates whether an organization’s strategies are forceful, conventional, defensive or competitive. The SPACE matrix normally has two axes where one axis represents the two internal dimensions of an organization – financial and competitive position while the other axis represents two external dimensions – stability and industry position.

A look at Sevron’s performance shows that the company should be placed on the aggressive quadrant since it is financially stable and competing very strongly in the various industries that it serves. Since Sevron qualifies to be on the aggressive

C. GRAND STRATEGY MATRIX

Although Sevron Ltd.’s growth may be strong and large, but their competitive position is weakening and they are under threat of being pushed out of the market by other companies. They are not able to compete effectively. The market is growing fast and an intensive horizontal integration strategy helps. Also, the situation doesn’t help since pandemic really gave negative effects to the company and also to the economic.

D . INTERNAL-EXTERNAL MATRIX

Based on the IFE and EFE Matrices in the previous factor evaluations, with the resultant result and scores were 2.33 and 2.97 respectively, the joint effect of the internal and external analysis falls in CELL V rates 2.97 for IFE Total Weighted Scores and CELL V that rates 2.33 for EFE Total Weighted Scores.

The outcome of the IFE and EFE total weighted scores falls and described as HOLD AND MAINTAIN strategies wherein this section shows that the company should focus on market penetration and product development. It should expand, but not aggressively; Penetrate market further; Develop new products or modify existing products.

E. STRENGHTS- WEAKNESSES- THREATS- ANALYSIS

Strengths

Software Services

One of the best in terms of software services specially when it comes to health and safety software developing.

Corporate Culture

Strong corporate culture and ethics being promoted by the management inside the organization. Proof of this is the “Top 10 Values of the Sevronians”.

Strong Brand Recognition

Sevron Ltd. is pretty much well-known to big companies (Coca-Cola, AkzoNobel, EDF, etc.) and business powerhouses as it is one of the top software developers and producers when it comes to health and safety, which helps those businesses strengthen their internal controls.

High Level of Customer Satisfaction

Sevron Ltd. receives a strong 5-star recognition from its big company customers like Coca-Cola, AkzoNobel, EDF, and GKN Aerospace showing that the products and service are top-notch.

Service Time

As the software products are already developed by the time the customers avail, there is no to less lag time when it comes to service. Though if modifications were requested, the time consumed before service is still considerably excellent.

Experienced Management Team

Management team of Sevron Ltd. is composed of highly-trained professionals who are more than qualified for their positions and with considerable number of years of experience in the field and in the company.

Weaknesses

Inaccessible to a Larger Consumer Audience

Sevron Ltd. is a very much well-known software developer and service provider for big companies. But its name is pretty much new for those small-time and start-up businesses. Its main target of business is also mainly on western countries, leaving a large consumer audience on the east unattended.

Lacks Other Product Segments

Sevron Ltd. is very much successful when it comes to its core product or service. But it lacks other known products or failed to introduce other products besides its main product or service.

Ineffective Promotions and Advertisements

Even though Sevron Ltd. is pretty well known to big companies, it is still a stranger for small-time and upcoming businesses. There are also few advertisements being done, denying to maximize the use of social media and new technologies.

Access to International Markets

Sevron Ltd. is a big company but it still doesn’t have access to the majority of the world.

Need for New and Flexible Product and Service

Sevron Ltd. is a leading player in the industry it is in. But, as the demand for more new software service and product rises from different business types, the company can’t keep up as much. Though it introduces a new service (COSHH Risk Assessment Management), it is pretty much specific. It is burdensome for small to medium-time businesses. Thus, the need for more flexible product services is needed.

Opportunities

Corporate Sponsorship

Sevron Ltd. is being offered and receiving partnerships and sponsorships from various companies from other industries due to the demand of the health and safety software they offer.

Economic Status

Global economy is starting to recover after the economic crisis brought by COVID-19 pandemic.

Growth in Technology

Technological advancements help Sevron Ltd. to produce and manufacture high-quality software products and services. Newly introduced technologies also help to increase efficiency and productivity for businesses.

Environment

Global movements encourage businesses to make sustainable products and services opening opportunities for Sevron Ltd. to cater a larger array of customers through sustainable software designed to be used by businesses.

New Trends on Consumer Behavior

An opportunity to lure new customers as the trend on consumer behaviors changes.

Threats

Increase of Dollar and Peso Difference

Foreign exchange rate instability poses risks and threats for Sevron Ltd. in terms of global market penetration and operations.

Business Tax Increases in the Country

Philippine’s corporate tax is the highest among other Southeast Asian countries with 30% tax rate. Although recently because of COVID-19, corporate taxes are reduced to 25%, it is still substantial as the economy is still unstable thus this high tax rate can pose a threat.

COVID 19/Pandemic

Businesses are highly affected by the effects of COVID-19 in the economy. COVID-19 also affected the Philippine economy the worst in Asia making it unideal for businesses at the moment.

National Disasters/Fortuitous Events

As fortuitous events mean, this is unavoidable. Philippines as it is located in the Pacific Ring of Fire is prone to natural disasters, from earthquakes to volcanic eruptions, not to mention the frequent strong typhoons.

Worker Strikes

Labour quality in the Philippines can be deemed unideal. Low-income salary and wages, poor employee treatment and protection by law, unideal work environments, and such lead workers to rally or have worker strikes. Thus poses a threat for businesses, especially with bigger multi-national businesses like Sevron Ltd.

F. QUANTITATIVE STRATEGIES PLANNING MATRIX

In the QSPM table, two alternate strategies are the Market Penetration and Market Development. The Total Attractiveness Scores is 4.84 and 3.75. Sevron provides all businesses with task-based risk management software that is accessible through the internet. Since its inception, it has been very profitable and has been growing at a rapid pace. These strategies were developed, implemented, and evaluated in order to make functional decisions that would allow them to continue to meet their goals. Sevron has accumulated some of the methods that were developed and analyzed using an analysis of external and internal variables, multiple matrices, and SWOT Analysis.

Market Penetration and Market Development on improving the goods and services are both bonded to all of the strategies that have been performed, according to the SWOT Study. The BCG Matrix was used to plot the market share and strategies for the company's products and services. The SPACE Matrix is a strategy formulation method that focuses on an organization's strategic position at the height of its business. The GSM is used to decide which technique is most appropriate. External and internal variables are used again to determine how appealing each strategy is. The GSM's findings indicate that market penetration and development are feasible.

According to our findings, business development for enhancing operations and service, as well as market development, which includes service development, upgrading new services and product technology, and staff development training, must be introduced in order for Sevron Ltd to maintain its current market and industry position.

V. STRATEGY RECOMMENDATION

It is recommended by any business company that they need to create an intensive strategy. These strategies are required to do for the goal, improvement or for the development of the company.

1. Software Improvement.

Sevron’s products are vulnerable to cybercrime. For example, the operating system remains a target of countless cybercrime attacks globally. This factor is a weakness because it limits the attractiveness of products. In this regard, cyber security is a product aspect of competition among firms in the computer hardware and software industry. On the other hand, the imitability of some products is a weakness because it could reduce the strength of the Sevron brand. Moreover, the company’s product portfolio shows dependence primarily on software products, which weakens the business against competitors that have dominant hardware and software products in the market.

2. Product development

A product can be described as anything that is capable of providing a solution to a customer’s perceived problem whether it is physical or psychological. Therefore, any product that fails to provide the needed solution to a customer is not a good product.

VI. ACTION PLAN

In order for the company to achieve its strategic objectives, action plans usually involve determining who will do what, by whom, and in what order. The structure and needs of the company influence how action planning is designed and implemented.

Market Penetration

This intervention entails extending operating hours and days, promoting other business partnerships, and safeguarding clients' reputations. This will keep and serve more clients, and it would be more effective if more time management is followed.

Market Development

A successful collaboration with a well-known company can be beneficial to Sevron Ltd.’s. company expansion. The aim of collaborating with businesses is to increase market share, benefit, and market expansion. Clients will be able to connect with the goods and services available as a result of this. Only through their partnerships will they raise brand and company recognition.

VII. CONCLUSION

For the researchers’ final analysis, Sevron needs to focus on improving and implementing strategies specifically in market penetration and market development. These strategies were found based on the statistical outcomes of different matrices which are the IFE Matrix, EFE Matrix, CPM, BCG Matrix, SPACE Matrix, GSM, IE Matrix and QSPM.

Based on the Internal Factor Evaluation Matrix (IFE Matrix), the Sevron Software Company has a total weighted score of 1.59 while the weakness is 1.02. It demonstrates the company’s extensive network of branches and a good working relationship with their employees and management teams. It only shows that the most significant internal flaw is poor service. This problem can only be resolved if they enhance their facilities and adequately train themselves to provide the best possible service to their customers and build their company’s integrity. While in the External Factor Evaluation (EFE Matrix), it has a weighted score of 2.15. Though relatively lower on the score than the average of 2.50, Sevron still has influential significance and strength in its industry or the market. The economic movements highly influenced the low weighted score due to the COVID-19 pandemic; they are usually a high-performing and scoring company and could also be considered a primary competitor in the market.

In the Competitive Profile Matrix (CPM), Sevron only ranked second with a total weighted score of 3.44. While Sphera, their biggest competitor which ranked first with a total weighted score of 3.67, and on the other hand, Crams the last place with only a 3.36 weighted score. Being able to snatch first place from Sphera, the company should focus on improving competitive advantage and making substantial improvements with factors that have low ratings, allocating additional advertisements, and investments.

In the Boston Consulting Group Matrix (BCG Matrix), Forward and Horizontal Integration are the stars of Sevron Safety Solutions because the company competes in a rapidly growing industry. The company can provide a solution such as risk management, safety data sheet inventory, and COSHH risk assessment management to their 7.7 million trusted users worldwide. Related diversification, market development, and penetration were put in the question mark category because they have a significant market share in a slow-growing industry. In contrast, product development and backward integration are in the cow category since they should be the company's priority to keep their powerful position for as long as possible. They do not have services and strategies that fall under the dog category since the company is a competitive one.

According to the Strategic Position and Action Matrix (SPACE Matrix), the company's performance shows that it should be placed on the aggressive quadrant since it is financially stable and competing very strongly in the various industries it serves. Since it qualifies to be on the aggressive side, it means that the company can fully exploit available opportunities and enhance its market share. As the company has the high financial strength, high industry strength, enjoys a competitive advantage, belongs to an attractive industry, and operates in relatively stable environmental conditions.

As what has been stated above and as the results of the matrices that are given, Sevron needs alternative strategies to fulfill their lack in terms of product, services, competitors, etc. and to be more successful in the industry. In addition, the Quantitative Strategic Planning Matrix (QSPM) shows the two alternative strategies: Market Development and Market Penetration. These two must be developed, implemented, and evaluated to make operational decisions that would allow them to continue meeting their goals. These strategies can help Sevron Software Services fulfill their lack of product, services, competitors, etc., and to be more thriving in the industry.

VII. FINANCIAL PROJECTION

Based on the given tables above, which is the Income statement. Sevron Safety Solutions seems to be doing well in the computer software industry despite of major competitors such as Sphera, RAMs, CRAMS, and other Software vendor businesses. With this level of major competition, The Company managed to stay ahead of its game and compete with other competitors. Sevron is a well-known and a competitive software company that places itself as one of the leading companies in the computer software industry.

REFERENCES

Competitive Matrix References Adison. (2019). Marketing Mix Sun Life Financial Inc. Retrieved from https://www.essay48.com/term-paper/15481-Sun-Life-Financial-Inc-Marketing-Mix

David, F., & David, F. (2017). The External Audit. Strategic Management: A Competitive Advantage Approach, Concepts and Cases (16th ed.). Pearson.

David, F., & David, F. (2017). Strategy Generation and Selection. Strategic Management: A Competitive Advantage Approach, Concepts and Cases (16th ed. 258-262). Pearson.

Dale Allen. (2007). The Mission. Retrieved from https://www.sevron.co.uk/the-mission

Dale Allen. (2007). The Vision. Retrieved from https://www.sevron.co.uk/the-vision

Joyasaini. (2010). The SPACE matrix. Retrieved from Scribd: https://www.scribd.com/doc/41739334/The-SPACE-Matrix

Maxi-Pedia. (2017). IFE Matrix (Internal Factor Evaluation). Retrieved from http://www.maxi-pedia.com/ife+efe+matrix+internal+factor+evaluation

Maxi-Pedia. (2017). Quantitative Strategic Planning Matrix (QSPM). Retrieved from http://www.maxipedia.com/ife+efe+matrix+internal+factor+evaluation

Mcclure, B. (2020), How to Analyze a Company’s Financial Position. Retrieved from https://www.investopedia.com/articles/fundamental/04/063004.asp

Mulder, P. (2019). Grand Strategy Matrix. Retrieved from https://www.toolshero.com/strategy/grand-strategy-matrix/

Pbctoday. (2019). Sevron and BESA Partnership to Streamline Chemical Safety. Retrieved from https://www.pbctoday.co.uk/news/health-safety-news/streamlining-workplace-safety/67580/

Rajak. (2021). Internal External Matrix. Retrieved from https://hmhub.me/internal-external-matrix/

Rocket reach. (2007). Sevron Information. Retrieved from https://rocketreach.co/sevron-profile_b5e2bcb9f42e634e

Rosette Dela Paz. (2011). The IFE Matrix/EFE Matrix. Retrieved from https://rossete-blog-blog.tumblr.com/post/3848879614/strama-paper-waterfront-hotel

Sevron. (2017). Safety365 Anniversary Update. Retrieved from Sevron: https://www.sevron.co.uk/blog/safety365-anniversary-update

Sevron. (2019). Sevron’s AI Technology Provides Clear Insight. Retrieved from https://www.sevron.co.uk/blog/sevrons-ai-technology-provides-clear-insights

Trust Pilot. (2007). Sevron LTD. Retrieved from https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.sevron.co.uk

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thembnko · 3 years ago

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Beware of speculation

WAR produces speculation. As the aftermath of the First World War and the Second World War saw massively produced amounts tend to make governments the target of financial speculators. This is because as producers of the monies they keep in central banks as securities or bonds governments also acquire debt they use as collateral. Many United Kingdom (UK) and US citizens and civil servants during the First World War were private bondholders who lent to the US, British and French governments. When on 24 April 1917 President Woodrow Wilson signed the First Liberty Loan Act authorizing the Treasury to borrow up to $5 billion for the US to enter the war that made them extra-rich. Entente and Allied debts were after the war $600,000,000,000. They purchased some of the debt. Britain and France soon refinanced their short-term debts to private US citizens by borrowing from the US government. The Transvaal supplied about half the total world output of gold. It funded 60 percent of the war debt paying even for German reparations when Germany had massacred 100,000,00 Hereros before the war in South West Africa. War debts were a form of massive “profiteering” because the British also pretended they entered into agreements with colonies even though they had no planned economic development taking place there. All that they emphasized in reports to the League of Nations was how resource endowed Africa was. The Treaty of Saint-Germain was for Austria to pay Britain £250,000 monthly and on it interest of £97,670 4s. 11d. The title indicated colonies were signatories. France had its own debt paid in gold because it insisted so.

Era Dabla-Norris edited in 2019 for the IMF In Debt and Entanglements Between the War. This book is for the whole world to understand how debt for Europe and the US accumulated after the war. The IMF and the World Bank determines financial assistance and exerts strong influence on policies developing countries adopt and on whether or not they receive credit. It highlights learning about the debt the First World War caused is an important step in the resolution of any large-scale problems the world currently has like Covid-19 but as a policy determining help it leads all potential international creditors to conclude developing countries do not have money and commodities to pay emergency loans. They also do not have similar wealth as the citizens of the US before the First World War. Currency volatility and permanent debt are now a permanent feature of developing countries meaning more than 55 percent of the world's population will starting in 2025 have countries with no revenues. Chad, Somalia, and Niger are already those countries hence US officials and Army Commanders went to all the three countries in September 2020 to establish military bases to fight China.

A basis for all countries to understand the international debt the First World War caused is looking at demand and productivity capitalism very quickly underwent as a result of the plundering of Africa during the First World War. For 90 years the IMF like the League of Nations which gave Britain, France, Italy, and Belgium African colonies made the world not to know that. The fall of the international gold standard made Europe and Britain face political uncertainty Africa faced too.

South Africa's gold helped and made the US emerge as a major creditor nation. Governments in Europe were swamped with debt after the First World War but co-operation with the US made 'common movements in growth rates in national GDPs (for example, a worldwide boom in the 1920s followed by the Great Depression in the 1930s)' possible within a short period of 18 years. No region in the world had produ the fall of the international gold standard made Europe and Britain face political uncertainty Africa faced too the same consequence. South Africa's gold helped and made the US emerge as a major creditor nation. Governments in Europe were swamped with debt after the First World War but co-operation with the US made 'common movements in growth rates in national GDPs (for example, a worldwide boom in the 1920s followed by the Great Depression in the 1930s)' possible within a short period of 18 years. No region in the world had productivity as Europe and the Americas because raw materials France, Britain, Italy, and Belgium extracted from Africa were extremely abundant. Labour as a result grew demands for social security, housing, wage increases of 10 percent, shorter working hours, an age limit to start to work, recognition of women's protection and bargaining rights. Realise this: social security and housing together form a 'social wage' that is provided for by the state in billions of US dollars. Worker income was seperate. This in human relations was a great revolution funded through speculation. The standard of living increased dramatically. The International Labour Organization (ILO) had one aim after it was formed after the war in 1919: to prevent another war using social policy. All governments co-operated with it. All countries eventually increased momentum for faster delivery of social services such as education, health, child and elderly guardianship by having volunteers except in Africa. By 1973 governments had so co-operated to make Europe's and the US's living standard equal at so an entire region moved at the same time. An entire region now has the same labour legislation.

The ILO only started working in Africa in 1973. To date labour legislation in Africa is not uniform and does not equal Europe's or the US's. It only covers work injuries and bargaining and unlike in Europe and the US excludes housing and social security.

When making comparisons between 1913 and 1928 regarding productivity and population growth it will be found the world’s population had increased by 10 percent. The production of foodstuffs and raw materials had increased by 25 percent. Foodstuffs alone increased by 16 percent and raw materials by no less than 40 percent. GDP growth rates averaged 5,8 percent. The League of Nations recorded that this was for Europe a ‘very rapid and substantial progress.’ ‘Other Continents’ just had ‘normal progress.' For the rest of the world it was only 2,4 percent. This differentiation continued in 1929. If the Soviet Union was excluded the differences would be still great. Growth in international trade was not so marked showing the increases were due to South Africa and Africa.

Britain had a standard of living that was higher than any other country in the world. In 1930 it had 1 million people that were unemployed but 12 million workers were insured. There was in general an expansion of 43 percent in the number of the insured population since 1923. There was a post-war boom which raised Europe's competitiveness. Weekly wage rates in Britain were 70 percent above the 1914 levels. Overseas investments totalled £235 million. Gold placed Britain internationally in the strategic position of being able to influence the value of all currencies and the price of commodities because it set the value. Mines in South Africa had to increase employment. From 100,000 South African mines had to employ 205,000 black workers producing £42,997,608 worth of gold in 1927 and £85,323,447 the following year. The world's monetary stock of gold rose during 1930 from £2,301 billion to £2,407 billion but only eight countries (Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Spain, US, Argentina, and Japan) held 80 percent excluding South Africa. Of the eight the US, France, and Britain controlled 74 percent.

South Africa's gold exports increased from 10,7 percent to 10,8 percent in 1956. The ANC had by the time already a known delegation to the UK in 1919 pleading for liberation and adopted in the wake of the Second World War an Africa Claims document calling on Europe and the US to stop colonization and the Freedom Charter promising the nationalization of mines. It had no British government’s support for the white South African government to end apartheid and yet again reinstated the gold standard premising as before the Second World War national security on it. To the extent a Trends in Usage of Gold report of the National Materials Advisory Board showed Britain made South Africa still produce by 1965 more gold than any other country. It produced 30,554,000 ounces; Canada 3,587,000 ounces; and the US 1,675,000 ounces. Austria came last at 878,000,00 ounces. This gold was for a single country with a population slightly higher than South Africa’s. Because of apartheid mining companies including municipalities deferred the payment of wages arguing blacks used the money for liquor. The US’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) facilitated the arrest of Nelson Mandela for forming UMkhonto WeSizwe (MK) as a military wing of the ANC. Thus after giving its gold and raw materials for capitalism upon which speculation rose South Africa now has 2.2 million people living in slums. Every year it delivers 200,000 free formal houses but because of population growth the figure just moves slightly. Consequently government will never end slums and that prospect has now been increased by the need for government to repay the R500 billion it borrowed from the IMF for Covid-19 during March 2020.

There are seven chapters in Debt and Entanglements Between the Wars and they all emphasize the fact that sovereign debt is a claim on a state’s future revenue. Karl Marx devoted time for four decades to write about the debt. In The Class Struggles in France 1848 to 1850 he highlighted the increasing role of the state on debt under capitalism. He saw debt as an instrument by which the exercise of political power and repression by the powerful over the powerless was made possible. For debt gave political power to the creditors of the state. He wrote it turned unproductive capital accumulation into a vital form where the national debt through government bonds formed the most important subject of speculation and the bourse the chief market for the investment of capital. So speculation under the development of capitalism before 1900 was made rife against the state because it had revenue and sources. Gold after its discovery strengthened the trend because cash deposits and liquid assets kept by central banks all of a sudden became very large.

Speculators siphoned money off the state paying little attention to the public’s needs. When he wrote speculation was a developing capitalist trend that had not caused wars. The world since then had two major wars in the First World War and the Second World War. They killed 10 million people. The Second World War originated because Adolf Hitler claimed Germany lost its surplus through the League of Nations when it gave Britain, France, Italy, and Belgium its African colonies after the First World War.

The IMF regarding Covid-19 has an Extension of Consultation Cycles Due To Covid-19 Pandemic, and Suspension of Framework To Address Excessive Delays in Article IV Consultations and Mandatory Financial Stability Assessments document. It is about mandatory Financial Stability Assessments (FSAs). The approach is not flexible for it lays the framework consultations as in the case of Venezuela going back to 2004 when Covid-19 did not exist. That opens opportunities for speculation since as Ingham Analytics also reports that from March 2021 the US ten-year Treasury hit 1,74 percent, its highest since January 2020. Stocks in the UK also rose to 0,84 percent from 0,2 percent. It reports yield curves steepened across the board compared with last year causing bond investors in the US to anticipate a rise soon in interest rates betting that inflation is close given the very large amounts central banks and the IMF gave for Covid-19 social relief. Ingham Analytics highlight inflation is bad for bonds. So bond investors are globally to press for interest rates to quickly rise again.

Much like in South Africa there has been a big rise in the supply of Treasury stock. To prepare for the speculation and prevent its possible damage to South Africa and Africa and to relations with Europe, US and BRICS including with multilateral organizations or international financial institutions the South African government must demand (a) an amendment of the IMF's Article IV so where Covid-19 matters are pertinent they are the only focus (b) an inclusive thorough study of prices in all major countries, the state of their exchange rates and monetary policies and preparedness to cope with higher interest rates.

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marketnewsstudy · 4 years ago

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Global Automotive Differential Market – Analysis and Forecast (2020-2025)

The global automotive differential market is expected to expand at a CAGR of 5.6 percent from 2020 to 2025. It is expected to grow from a market size of USD 18.8 billion in 2020 to USD 24.2 billion by 2025. The demand for improved road traction and fuel efficiency are two major factors driving the growth of the automotive differential industry. With a vehicle demand, the automotive differential market has a lot of room for development. A major driver for the differential market is the increasing demand for all-wheel-drive vehicles.

Since the outer wheels must occupy a greater diameter, the automotive differential assists in smooth operations by assisting the wheels to revolve at different speeds. It is a component of the rear axle assembly of rear-wheel drives, consisting of rear drive axles and rear axle housing, which splits or allows the wheel's power to move independently.

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Market Trends

COVID-19 has caused a drop in vehicle demand, which harms the overall automotive differential market. However, the automotive differential market is expected to expand in the coming years due to a projected steady recovery in vehicle production by Q1-Q2 of 2021. China and Japan, for example, are major vehicle manufacturing centers in the area. The demand for automotive differential is expected to rise significantly as vehicle output increases. Off-road vehicles and sports cars have also grown in popularity in Asian countries, thanks to an increasing preference for all-wheel and four-wheel drive integrated vehicles. During the forecast period, these factors are likely to contribute to overall market growth. However, due to the high volume of vehicles produced in the area, the overall demand for differential is the highest.

Market Drivers

The global automotive differential market is expected to be driven by factors such as rising demand for commercial vehicles and growing penetration of AWD and 4WD vehicles. However, declining automotive production and sales over the last two years and an increase in the production of vehicles with in-wheel electric motors are expected to limit demand growth over the forecast period. Furthermore, winning contracts/agreements is a key strategy for gaining a competitive edge, and electronically limited-slip differential output is expected to complement the global automotive differential market development. As a result, these trends are projected to improve the market's growth prospects shortly.

Opportunities

OEMs use vehicle differential assemblies extensively and often in their manufacturing processes. Open contracts and agreements between OEMs and manufacturers of automotive differential assemblies are seen in this product procurement. These contracts detail the collection of conditions that must be met within the specified timeline. To achieve a competitive edge and maintain long-term market prospects, manufacturers must concentrate on winning contracts and deals with new installations.

Challenges

The growing demand for electric buses and trucks and increased knowledge about electric vehicles may stymie the automotive differential market in the forecast period. The automotive differential market faces a challenge in developing and delivering electronics that ensure safety.

COVID-19 Impact on the Global Automotive Differential Market

The COVID-19 crisis is causing instability in the automotive differential industry by slowing supply chains, stifling business growth, generating unpredictable demand scenarios, and growing consumer fear. The selling of automotive differentials is inextricably linked to the manufacture and sale of automobiles all over the world. If the country-by-country blockade is prolonged, production loss is expected to rise. In the third quarter of 2020, global automotive production fell by 22.3 percent compared to the third quarter of 2019. Furthermore, global light vehicle sales fell by nearly 20% year over year, from 6,335 thousand in February 2019 to 5,077 thousand in February 2020.

Market Key Players

Some of the key players in the global automotive differential market are:

• American Axle & Manufacturing, Inc. (AAM) • BorgWarner Inc. • Dana Incorporated • Eaton • Hyundai Wia Corporation • JTEKT Corporation • Linamar Corporation • Melrose Industries PLC • Schaeffler Group • ZF Friedrichshafen AG • GKN • Continental AG • Auburn Gear • LLC • Neapco Holdings LLC • Magna International Inc. • Drexler Companies Inc. • RT Quaife Engineering Ltd. • Xtrac Ltd • NSK Ltd. • Bharat Gears Ltd. • CUSCO Japan Co. Ltd. • Zen Technologies Limited • Kermanmotor Co.

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linkersint · 4 years ago

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The “Rich Getting Richer” Argument

This piece of writing is taken from Bestselling Author Rob Moore book “MONEY”. This book is all about philosophy of money, myths we have in mind about this concept, and how we can achieve financial stability and then financial freedom by understanding the nitty gritty of money!

We normally hear an argument that “RICH GETTING RICHER”. Mr Moore claim that this argument is a myth. Everyone can become rich if he/she follows its fundamental laws. Those who have more money are doing and behaving in certain way than those who are struggling with it. In below chapter, you will learn why “rich getting richer” argument is invalid.

****

from the book

You hear many people debating, ‘why do the rich get richer and the poor get poorer?’ Many people get frustrated about this and demand a redress of the balance through higher taxation, setting up unions, and greatly increased philanthropy.

There are simple economic laws that explain why the rich tend to get richer. These economic fundamentals bust many of the myths about the rich and poor divide, certainly in the first world. And guess what? The wealthy know and leverage these, and the poor don’t and are leveraged by them.

Common Sense?

Common sense suggests that something tends to move more easily in the direction it is already going than if it changes direction. You could call this momentum, or compounding or simple common sense. Newton’s first law of physics is this:

‘An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion, with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force’.

Of course you’re likely looking for a deeper argument than the rich get richer than ‘because they are already rich’, and the poor get poorer because ‘they are already poor’, but let’s not dismiss something for its simplicity. If you have not attained the levels you desire yet, keep going. Keep on, keeping on, you will get there.

Balanced Economics:

In any monetary system all expenditure must equal all receipts. This means that all spending equals all money received.

People don’t burn money (unless they are The KLF, the British band who set fire to a million pounds of their own money) and even if they did, that money would be out of the system and all existing money in the system would balance between expenditure and receipt. Even when more money is printed, that new money in the system, like all the existing money, balances where all expenditure equals all receipts.

Therefore, of that finite (but huge) amount of money in circulation at any one time: it distributes exactly from those who ‘spend’ the most (expenditure) to those who sell or receive the most (receipts).

If there is an inequality of balance, which there always is because products and services are not of equal value and humans value money differently, then money moves more freely and in higher amounts from those who value and focus on expenditure higher than receipt to those who value and focus on receipt higher than expenditure.

In other words, money moves from those who value it least (or value expenditure more than receipt), to those who value it most by saving, investing, compounding, (or value receipt more than expenditure). Money moves from consumers to producers.

No matter how many times you may try to use power, rule, unions, regulations, or governments to more equally distribute money, it will always reset its ‘balance’. So, if you want to redistribute wealth more towards you, don’t ever get dragged into the victim mentality of a higher power or system, begging or expecting them to redistribute it for you. The capitalist system is unlikely to change in your lifetime, so it is a huge waste and opportunity cost of your time and energy to fight against it. Instead, learn about and focus on the management, mastery, and rules of money, service, contribution, enterprise, momentum, compounding and velocity, and make it more important to you to understand and value money and wealth. And more will come your way. The more you learn, the more you earn.

Theoretical redistribution of wealth:

It has often been suggested that there should be a redistribution of wealth, from those who have the most to those who have the least. Before we delve into this, there already is a redistribution format: it is called taxation. In most developed countries, taxation is geared towards being a higher percentage of income the more one earns.

The main problem I see in theoretical wealth redistribution is that it doesn’t stay with or serve those it is distributed to. I’m certainly not against sharing wealth with those who need it more, in fact it is contribution that plays a big part in building wealth. However, you can’t manage more money until you learn how to manage what you already have, and the big abundant lack is in education as much as it is in redistribution.

Imagine if a wealthy person owns a betting shop. A gambler comes in and spends all his money, helping the owner make more money. The state increases taxes and redistributes much of the money back to the gambler. The gambler then goes back to the betting shop and makes more bets. The owner might have to increase his margins to compensate for the increased ‘taxation’. This costs the gambler, who keeps gambling, more money. And so the cycle continues, but doesn’t help or change anything other than perhaps the owner moves to another country if too much is taken from him, and the gambler spends more and has a bigger addiction.

Perhaps if the business owner was allowed to create fair profit, was given assistance, protection and tax breaks and incentives to start up, and there was fair competition so that prices self-regulated, then the system would work. Oh, wait a minute, that’s called capitalism. And for the gambler, education and help on the addiction is likely to be far more effective than feeding the habit. While this might seem an extreme example, most people manage their money like a gambler, wasting it and only just keeping their heads above water. It is education that is needed, in our schools and society, on how to manage and master money, not redistribution and handouts that de-incentivize work and contribution.

Lottery redistribution:

The National Endowment for Financial Education cites research estimating that 70 per cent of people who suddenly receive a large sum of money lose it within a few years. Forty-four percent of lottery winners had spent all of their winnings within five years of winning the lottery. Nine out of every ten lottery winners believe that their new family wealth will be gone by the third generation. Again, you can’t manage more money until you learn to manage what you already have. Interestingly, only 2 per cent of respondents said that they were less happy with life after winning the lottery, despite the data above suggesting a greater percentage can’t handle it, lose it, or feel it will be lost soon enough. Who says money doesn’t make you (more) happy?

So in fact, there actually is a seismic wealth redistribution right now: from the poor when they get large sums without knowing how to handle it, back to the rich.

Production vs consumption

Non-wealth, first-world poverty doesn’t contribute. It doesn’t create service, enterprise or economy, and doesn’t care enough about humanity to give value to others. Poverty in this sense consumes more than it produces, and is more selfish than selfless.

To be wealthy is to give service, to produce for other people in physical (consumable) or ethereal (information) form. To be poor is to consume: wasting or spending money and time-consuming depreciable. The wealthy produce for the poor to consume, and so redistribute wealth towards themselves from the first-world poor. Vast wealth comes from vast production nationally, globally, and in high volumes, whereas poverty comes from a negative differential between production and consumption. Individuals, geography, or governments could cause this.

The wealthy create enterprise and economy through jobs, value creation, increased flow and velocity of money, contribution to taxes, hope, belief and inspiration to others, service to vast numbers of people. The poor are independent on these to survive. Virtually all global wealth is now private: 99 percent according to Thomas Piketty in his book Capital. This means that producers finance all state benefits that poor consumers consume. Because poverty consumers more than it produces, this has to be economically balanced by large-scale production, and because of the 80/20 principle, the 20 per cent will produce for the 80 per cent to consume, roughly speaking. And so this will compound in the direction it is already going – the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. It is hard to change the velocity once it has momentum, which explains why when starting a new vocation it can be hard to make money in the early years, yet those who’ve been doing it for decades seem to have vastly compounded wealth and passive income, more easily.

For redistribution of wealth to work, consumers would have to take responsibility to produce more than they consume. If you give a drug addict money, you know much of that is likely to go. If you give any consumer more money without the responsibility and education to produce with it, it will be consumed in the same manner all previous money was consumed. If a producer receives more money, mostly through cashflow, increased profits or leveraged loans (rarely through gifts and subsidies), they will invest it to produce more. Of course you could call this greed, but you could also call this growth, evolution and supply and demand. Greed and growth are only differentiated by an individual’s perception. As long as there is demand and a need for the human race to grow and evolve, producers will produce more and more and more, and consumers will keep consuming. The titans of wealth across the last 6000 years are the largest, most vast producers.

The question is: which will you choose to be, a producer or a consumer? Will you get sucked into debating the rights and wrongs of the rich and poor divide, or focus on service, solutions, scale, and contribution, and enjoy your fair share of wealth?

#real estate real estate agency wealth&money

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techpalace-blog · 5 years ago

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How to Start a Blog

Why are you starting a blog?

Do you want to communicate something, like a message or an idea? Do you want to build a community around your love for a cause? Do you want to keep your followers and fans updated on what’s the latest with your brand? Do you want to explain how your product or service works and why people should buy it?

A blog can help you inform, educate, promote and even sell, but only if you are clear about your intention from the start.

Hence, take some time to figure out your message and the purpose of your blog. In the meanwhile, here are several reasons why many people make a blog and enjoy blogging:

To enhance writing and thinking skills

To establish expertise

To increase self-confidence

To network with others in the industry

To make money blogging

There are many ways to make money by starting your own blog; you can sell products and merchandise online or place ads and receive compensation from brands by promoting their products and services – considering that 61% of online customers make purchases based on recommendations from a blog, this could turn into a highly profitable endeavor for you.

All in all, there are four important steps to making a blog quickly. I’ll go into details on how to start a blog on WordPress later, but for now, you can review these steps. If you are familiar with these things, you can create a blog in 15-20 minutes or even less:

Carefully select the best blog platform

Find a perfect web host and get a domain name

Design your blog

Find as many useful resources as you can

The first thing you should do is find the best blog site. There are many of these, with all kinds of different features, but I use and recommend self-hosted WordPress.org. It’s one of the biggest and easiest blogging sites and it allows you to design your blog with ease. Simplicity is key here.

Free blogs have tons of limitations and downsides, but self-hosting a blog on your domain allows you to fully own your blog. That’s why you should seriously consider hosting a blog on your own domain. I tested Bluehost, a web hosting company that provides you with a free domain name, and I recommend them to all new bloggers.

If you decide to go with WordPress, you’ll get a chance to enjoy multiple free WordPress blogging themes. Go with the one that’s easy to customize and looks professional to some degree.

The more you know about social media and online experiences, the more prepared you will be to step into the blogosphere. Remember, the big fish always eats the small one, so keep learning and improving if you want to stay ahead of the curve.

Step #1: Select a perfect niche for your blog

Before you learn how to start a successful blog, you must first find your niche, figure out how to make it profitable, and figure out who your ideal readers are. In short, a niche is a topic that you write about most often, or even exclusively, in your blogs. Niche blogging is creating a blog to advertise to a particular market. Niche blogs are easy to monetize and they usually contain affiliate links, advertisements, etc., and that’s mostly how they become profitable.

How to choose a niche for your blog

To become a successful blogger, you will have to choose the right niche and work on attaining the highest form of knowledge within that topic. So pick the one that appeals to you—the one you are passionate about and most interested in. Strive for success, happiness, and recognition. By choosing the niche of interest and having your own point of view, you’ll be able to differentiate your personal blog ideas from the competition.

Step #2: Choose a blogging platform

At this stage, you’ll need to look at the best blog sites out there and determine the type of blog management tool you want to use. I recommend that you make your own blog using a self-hosted setup that I show in this guide. But before you ask yourself, how do I start a blog, let me describe each option. When it comes to popular blogging platforms, you have the following options: free and self-hosted (recommended).

Free platforms

for top management platforms in the United StatesWordPress96.19%

Blogger3.29%

MovableType0.18%

Ghost0.17%

Tumblr0.03%

Blog Engine0.01%

Pagekit0%

Svbtle0%

Posthaven0%

Anchor CMS0%

Source: builtwith.com

For many new bloggers, the availability of free blog platforms such as WordPress.com, Blogger or Tumblr is tempting.

By keeping your blog on a free platform, you let the platform own your name. You’ll be subject to their rules and restrictions. If you are looking to learn how to make money with a blog, they may limit or prohibit ads on your blog, or they may even place their own ads. If you’re serious about blogging, you’ll want to move away from free blog sites.

Self-hosted platforms

Self-hosted platforms allow you to run a blog using your own domain. Aside from following your domain registrar and web hosting company’s rules, you’re fully in charge of your blog and its contents.

You have several choices when it comes to self-hosted systems (also called a Content Management System or CMS). The most popular is WordPress.org. This option is called self-hosted because you will use your own web hosting space and name. If you use our recommended hosting company, it will cost just a few bucks per month for the webspace (hosting account), and you will get a FREE name (domain) for the first year. The actual CMS is usually open-source and free.

Although I mentioned some free hosting options, the best course of action is to own your blog, especially if you will be using your own copyrighted material (articles, drawings, photos, etc.). Pay a small amount of money every month, about the same as a Starbucks coffee, and you will build your own equity. If you plan to sell products, services, music, or anything else via your blog, then this is the best way to go. Many hosting providers can help you maintain an e-commerce blog.

One of the best and most well-known self-hosted content management systems (CMS) is WordPress.org, powering 25.4% of all websites in the world and responsible for over 76.5 million sites. It is recommended by 99% of the blogging experts I’ve surveyed.NOTE

To create a WordPress blog, you need to decide on two important things: a domain name and a web hosting provider. If you are a new blogger, you should try using Bluehost, a company that powers over 2 million websites worldwide.

I was able to negotiate a special deal only for my visitors that includes:

Free domain name

60-day money-back guarantee period

Discount price of $2.75 per month

Step #3: Pick a domain name

Your domain name will be the name by which you will be known online, no matter what niche you choose. It’s your unique address on the Internet. Your domain will be yours as long as you continue paying the annual fee ($10 to $15 for a .com domain). Users who know your domain/URL (uniform resource locator) can simply type it into their browser’s address bar. Others will be able to discover you through search engines such as Google and Bing, so you definitely need to find a unique moniker.

Your domain name may be the highly popular “dot com,” or it may be country or niche-specific. The general rule is to go for a “dot com” domain, but some of the other extensions can work. For example, “dot net” or “dot me.”

If you can’t find the domain name you like, Bluehost will let you choose a Free Domain later. That will give you time to do some research and thinking.

Recommended tool:

In the end, it’s about being memorable, so if a different extension or country code helps you be memorable, then break the rules!

Step #4: Get a web hosting account

After choosing a domain name, selecting reliable hosting services will be one of the most important decisions you make. To a great extent, the functionality and performance of your site will depend on your blog hosting. The host makes sure your site is available 24/7 to potential readers and it’s where your files are stored online.

Most hosting companies also offer domain registration services. Some people keep their domain name with the registrar company, separate from the hosting account. I recommend keeping it all under your hosting account for hassle-free management and maintenance.

The wrong web host can cause many problems with your blog. Just imagine choosing a mobile company that has no reception. Your web host is a major piece of the puzzle to creating a successful blog; therefore, you must choose a reliable provider.

Based on our survey, a reliable provider is Blue-host. 99% of blogging experts suggest using it with WordPress.org.

Step #5: Starting a blog on WordPress

This section provides detailed information to help you sign up for the web hosting account and how to set up a WordPress blog. As an example, I will show you how to make a blog with Bluehost, and I included screenshots of the pages that you need to go through.

Watch Blog Set Up Instructions

1. Visit Blue-host

Then click the “Get Started Now” button.

2. Select your blog’s hosting plan

You should start by selecting your plan. If this is your very first one, you should go with the basic one – at least until you explore your options. The one called plus should be able to cover all your needs once you get going, and you should consider the pro version once your popularity skyrockets.

3. Input your blog’s domain name

Your domain name has a say in the success of your blog, so you should take your time to come up with something new. Just type in the desired domain in this “new domain” box and Bluehost will show you whether it’s available or not. If not, it will provide you with a list of similar names for you to choose from.

4. Register for Bluehost

After you pick out your domain name, Bluehost will take you to the registration page where it will be required from you to fill in your personal info, including the billing data. A couple of minutes are all you need.

5. Select your hosting options

Pay additional attention to your hosting options. Obviously, the 12-month package has the lowest price, but the other two are great when you want to make a long term investment.

You can feel free to uncheck the rest of the boxes – you can always get them later when you find them necessary.

6. Launch your WordPress blog with Bluehost

Congratulations, we are almost there! Once you have your domain name and web hosting connected, it’s time to set up WordPress.

Go to your Bluehost cPanel account, find the ‘My Sites’ section and click Install WordPress. That’s the famous one-click set-up offered by Bluehost that makes blog creation a breeze.

Now, if you go to your site’s URL, you will only see a ‘Coming Soon’ page because the site hasn’t gone live yet. For this, you’ll need to set up and design a WordPress site before launching it, but I’ll get to that later. Once this is done, go back to the cPanel and hit ‘Launch.’

Step #6: Find the right them (blog design)

The first thing your blog’s front end needs is a face (design and layout). You want to create an environment that is both eye-catching and practical. In the long run, you want your visitors to easily find information on your site. You don’t want visitors to be discouraged by the colors you choose or the non-intuitive and unpractical way in which information is displayed. Your design can cause instant distrust of your blog or immediate acceptance.

Start your search for a theme as soon as your WordPress platform is installed. The look and feel of your new blog rely on the theme you choose. Your readers will first notice the overall appearance, before even taking a look at the content. Choose a theme that looks great, but also works for your unique content needs. The default theme that comes with your WordPress blog installed is Twenty Nineteen—while it’s a good starter theme, you’ll want to choose a theme that is unique and compatible with your niche. There are more than three thousand themes available on WordPress.org.

A premium WordPress theme has the average price of $40

Among the 10 most popular free themes on WordPress.org, only 3 come from third-party developers (not developed by WordPress.org or Automattic). They are: Swift, Zerif Lite, ColorWay

Here’s a quick checklist for choosing your theme by searching within the blog dashboard:

Read the description. Most themes come with a short description of features and functionality. Reading it can help you figure out if the theme matches your needs.

Check for responsiveness. Aim for a responsive design that will work on desktop browsers and mobile devices. This is recommended by Google.

Check the ratings. Star ratings will be visible in the preview and under theme details to give you a clear idea of how good the theme is.

Preview the theme. Preview the theme (demo) to get an idea of the overall look, layout, and how customizable it is.

If you find a theme that takes your breath away, cool down. Once you install a theme you like, don’t be surprised if it doesn’t look quite right. It is just a skeleton of your blog. To make it appealing, you’ll have to fill in content (text, photos, videos, etc.).

Should you choose a free, premium or a custom theme when setting up a blog

For many visionary novice bloggers, the world is not enough. The stash of free themes does not satisfy their particular desire for the look and feel they are going for. There are two other options you can take a look at, premium and custom themes. But they incur a cost, sometimes a tiny one, at other times a considerable amount.

Premium themes are created by both single developers and dedicated showcase websites. The price range for single-use licenses ranges from $30 to $500, depending on which premium theme you choose.

Custom themes are created by an individual developer (coder and designer, or agency) who will either customize an existing theme or create a brand new theme for you. While coming with clear-cut advantages, they are not the ideal choice for a beginner blogger due to their high cost. Prices to customize a theme, ranging from $500 to $2,000, depending on the features you want.

Recommended reading: The Best WordPress Themes for 2020

Blog theme customization

Installing and setting up your new theme is quite exciting; these steps confirm that you made a good choice with WordPress as your blog management system. Remember, your Dashboard is the place where it all happens in the back end, including the option of installing your theme.

Once you login to your account, you are now able to choose one of the default WordPress themes provided by Bluehost. Keep in mind that you can always pick another theme from a WordPress.org repository.

After selecting a theme of your choice, you are now ready to log in to the WordPress dashboard.

Once you login to your WordPress dashboard, you will be prompted with the “Welcome” message and you can choose to accept the help provided by Bluehost for selecting the type of website you are about to create. Or, you can always do it on your own.

If you click on the Bluehost button in the left-hand corner, you will see the page with various tools that are designed to help you create your own blog. Click the “Launch” button and you’ll be seen online within minutes.

After clicking the “Launch” button, you will just need to fill the two most important fields for your site. The title and description, which will tell your future visitors what is your site all about.

Congratulations, you just learned how to create a blog. Your new blog is ready for launch, so get ready to learn how to blog!

Recommended tutorial: The Beginner’s Guide to Managing WordPress Blog (including Video Tutorials)

Now you should learn what it takes to customize your blog, make the necessary tweaks to make it stand out and please your readers.

Step #7: Write content and promote your blog

So far, you’ve captured a domain name, chosen your blog site and set up the theme, and you are ready to go. Your framework is complete. Now comes the moment of truth. You must learn how to write blog content – in the blogging world, any useful information that you bring to readers can be called “content.” It must be something people will want to interact with and come back to get more, something of value.

The next step is to figure out what content you need to make for your new blog and the best practices you should follow. Whether your blog is to be composed primarily of words, photos, graphics, audio, video, etc. – the content will be the bait that draws your crowd. Few will come just to see your new site.

Without great content, even the most well-designed, tightly-structured blogs will ultimately fail. The framework of the web is code – but the attraction of the web is the content found there.

Three things your content should do

Your content speaks to a specific audience and provides value to them in some significant way. If this sounds suspiciously like our Commandments, you are right. Drill the idea into your mind and never forget it: It’s not about you; it’s about them.

Your content should be easily accessible and attractively presented. Your presentation must equal the quality of your content. Here again, don’t cut corners on low-quality graphics or designs. Everything about your blog must attract your visitors and encourage them to interact with your content.

Your content may be commercially purposed, but should never be commercially focused. Never greet your visitors with pop-up ads and giant banner ads. Greet them with content and reasons to engage with that content. Let them know you are there to help them, not to use them.

As a blog owner, you might get overwhelmed by all the available types of content and methods you can deliver it to your readers. You have to remember that the content delivery method is less important than the actual content and its quality.

Wondering how you can create quality content? It’s simple.

Here are three simple steps approach you can use to make great content of any type:

Point. State your main idea and point you are covering.

Prove. Give an example of the idea you are covering.

Perform. Give a simple way to execute the idea.

There are two blocks you need to worry about, pre-launch and post-launch contents:

Pre-launch content

Before you start writing your day-to-day blog posts, you will want to make sure static pages (such as About us, Contact, etc.) and other parts of your blog (Sidebar, Footer, etc.) are filled with the suitable information. Let’s explore each of these content areas.

About us. The most traditional page on any blog is the About page. This page tells new visitors to your blog what it is all about, who you are and why you run a blog about the particular topic. Depending on your niche and your style, the information you provide can be “all business” or personal and fun.

Contact. This page allows visitors to your blog to communicate with you at any time. It can be a simple page with your email address plus social network links, or you can use a simple contact form that visitors can use to communicate with you without leaving your website.

Sidebar content. Your sidebar is the smaller column to the left or right (depending on the theme you selected) of your blog’s main content. In the sidebar, you could include your blog categories, the most popular posts, ads, etc.

SEO meta tags. You will need to prepare content for the SEO titles and description tags of each page (not seen on the actual page, but you need to have it ready).

Post-launch content

Blog posts. The blog post is an entry (article) that you write on a blog. It can include content in the form of text, photos, infographics, or videos.

Cornerstone content. Cornerstone (or evergreen) content continues to be relevant to its readers and gives them value years after the publish date. It is always fresh and up-to-date. It remains informative and retains its original quality. As its name implies – it is timeless.

Recommended reading: How to Write Blog Content – Posts, Pages, & More

Content is not limited to written material but easily overlooked. It is often best to utilize numerous forms of content and give your audience more than one way to obtain knowledge.

Recommended reading: 100+ Types of Digital Content You Can Make

To produce quality content, you will have to use your originality and imagination. However, you have to understand that some content performs better than others. But again, you should start creating content that you feel comfortable with, right for your readers, and for your blog.

Start promoting your blog

You’ve learned that the content will be the bait that draws your audience. You can write the most compelling copy the world has ever seen and design a blog interface that would sell people their own shoes…if no one sees the blog, though, all your work is in vain. Marketing and promotion happen every time you engage with your current and future readers. The success of your blog promotion will depend on the ability to engage in your niche.

Let’s look closely at the advanced and straightforward promoting/marketing activities you could be taking to become an authority and successful blogger:

Let your friends know about your blog

Inform everyone you know about your new endeavor. You should include your blog name and URL in your email signature, list it on all your social media profiles, and use every opportunity to get the word out about your new undertaking.

Submit your blog to search engine

It only takes a moment, and it will help to get your blog indexed. To submit your blog URL to Google, sign in to your Google Account and go to the Submit URL option in Webmaster Tools. For extra credit, submit your site to Bing.

Submit your blog to bookmarking sites

Bookmarking sites can offer your content to a lot of potential viewers who are searching for content within your niche. You should do this every time you publish a new blog post to spread the word out. Some popular social bookmarking sites are Scoop.it, Reddit, etc.

Be active in your niche

Get active on relevant blogs, forums, and social pages. Blogger communities are a good way to connect with other bloggers within your niche. You can engage, build friendships and help each other in spreading the content.

Be active on social networks

Your business is unique, and you should make use of the social media avenues that best fit your own niche and style. Choose the one (or ones) that best fit your needs and become an expert at leveraging them to help reach your goals.

Comment on other blogs

Commenting on other relevant blogs is a great way to build relationships with top bloggers within your niche. This will help you make them and their readers aware of your existence as well as developing your personal brand within the topic.

Guest blogging

Take the relationship a step further and offer to write a guest post for other websites. Just be sure your work goes on reputable sites and that the content is directly related to your niche. Guest blogging is an excellent way to build an online presence.

Start building your mailing list

Once your blog gains new fans and readers it’s a good idea to collect the email addresses of those who want to be notified of new articles and offers. As people come to know and trust you, they will respond better to your promotional efforts.

Advertising on the web (paid traffic)

Appropriate and well-informed use of paid media can help you gain exposure and attention before your organic (naturally derived) traffic takes hold. Paid traffic avenues include Google AdWords, and Facebook, to name a few major ones.

Recommended reading: How to Promote Your Blog and How to Increase Blog Traffic (100+ Hands-on Tactics)

Remember that you can always find other ways to promote your new blog. Rely on the blogging fundamentals: a clear and well-functioning blog, focused and helpful information, engaging conversation and practical advice. Your authority will come from helping and giving advice to other people, your fans or readers.

Step #8: How to make money blogging

Monetization is the process of translating your blog activity into earnings. You should keep in mind that blogging isn’t all about making money but instead creating useful content that will attract readers and make them come back for more.

After producing great content for some time and by engaging with your niche market, you will become a recognized expert who will be able to build a significant list of followers and subscribers. Only then you could consider adding content that will generate income.

Blog monetization channels

How to monetize a blog? There are several options from which to choose. You should use the ones that prove most useful to you:

Running ads on your blog

There are seamless possibilities for you to run ads on your blog. Regardless of your niche, you can opt for ads that are specific to what you are writing about or ads that simply better serve your advertiser’s purposes. Google Adsense is one of the most popular choices for ads.

Enrolling in affiliate programs

Affiliate programs are ways of teaming up with retailers to promote their products and benefit from successfully carrying out sales through a commission. Some things that you need to consider when enrolling in affiliate programs:

The number of affiliate sales will strongly rely on the number of visitors you have.

You need to be credible enough for your visitors to click on your links.

You may want to consider placing a notice on your Terms of Use page that you do use affiliate links.

There are a few popular online platforms that offer many affiliate programs you can enroll in Amazon Associates, ShareASale, etc.

Selling your products and services

If you are more on the creative and entrepreneurial side, you may want to consider using your blog as a venue for selling your products and services. Use this advantage especially when your blog gains in readership, authority, and popularity. There are plugins that you can easily integrate into your blog and start selling, such as the WooCommerce plugin. It comes with product pages, cart, checkout, secure payments, etc.

Writing and selling an Ebook

Another great opportunity to make money is to gather existing content from your own blog and offer it as a downloadable ebook. Your ebook can be sold independently if your blog has a commercial platform (such as Bigcommerce), or it could be sold elsewhere. A great publishing opportunity is offered by Amazon and their KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) program.

Sponsored posts

Advertisers are always looking for exposure and are willing to pay you for placing a sponsored post on your blog. Those posts usually promote advertiser products or services and are a good way to earn some additional income for your blog. In the future, if you’re able to build one of the most popular blogs and become an authority in your niche, the advertisers would approach you to publish their posts.

Recommended reading: How to Make Money Blogging

As you can see, there are numerous ways to monetize a blog. Consider the possibilities, and then choose the method or methods that best suit you and your audience. As a minimum, you should – from the very start – begin compiling a mailing list of your readers through subscriptions. Then, when you are ready to recommend products, you will have ready access to those who want to hear what you have to say.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a blog?

Some people still don’t know what is a blog? A blog (in the early stages called “weblog”) is known as many things—a digital magazine, diary, newscast, collector’s meeting place, a showcase for your art, information sharing, teaching hub, a place to learn and…well, almost anything you want it to be. A typical blog combines text, images, videos, and links to relevant pages and media on the Web. Blog readers can leave comments and communicate with the author. In fact, dialogue and interaction are a popular part of a blog’s success.

How to start a blog for free?

People often wonder where to start a blog, but several blogging platforms allow you to create a blog for free. All you have to do is to choose the one you like, register an account and start blogging. For example, you can start a free blog on WordPress.com, Blogger or Tumblr in a matter of a few minutes.

But you need to understand a few things when starting a blog for free:

If you open a BlogSpot account, your free blog name will be in this form: “blogname.blogspot.com” or “blogname.tumblr.com”. In the blogging community, this type of blog is the sign of an inexperienced beginner who likely won’t be taken seriously.

You’ll be subject to rules and restrictions set by the platform. They may limit or prohibit you from using ads, or they may even place their own ads on your blog. If you’re serious about blogging, you’ll want to move away from this option sooner than later.

How to make a blog the right way? I strongly suggest setting up a WordPress blog, and I covered how-to in this blogging guide. If for some reason, the free blog is the only option for you, then create an account on one of the free blog platforms mentioned above and check them out.

What is a niche and how do I choose one for my blog?

If you’re unsure what a niche even is, you’ve come to the right place. In short, a niche is a topic that you write about most often, or even exclusively, in your blogs. Think about the countless of ‘healthy living’ blogs – they give advice on, well, healthy living. They often offer some interesting recipes, share insight into great exercise routines, talk about which foods you should avoid, etc. Leading a healthy lifestyle would be their niche. Brainstorm to find your topic Following is a process that can help you determine which niche is best for you:

Make a list of your interests or hobbies. Which topics fascinate you? List them all, for instance: golf, fishing, yoga, playing games or cooking.

Next, list accomplishments you are proud of, such as musical talent, artistic talent or sports achievements.

Now, list difficulties you have overcome or defeated, such as: losing a significant amount of weight, recovering from a financial setback or managing a disease.

During this exercise, you will get a better feeling for the topics that resonate with you. The ones you are most passionate about are the best candidates for your niche. The reason is that while blogging is an enjoyable process, most people give up after a few months because they lose interest in it. You don’t need to be an expert on the topic that you choose, but it is necessary to want to learn more about it. It’s necessary that you’re excited about it. When you’re disinterested in the topic, the readers will notice and they’ll stop coming to your blog; it’s as simple as that. Narrow it down Once you’ve found your topic of interest, it’s a good idea to narrow it down. If you’re super excited about yoga, for example, choose the type that you’re interested in the most. Is it Hot and Bikram yoga? Kundalini? Something else? If you pick too broad of a topic, it’ll be difficult for you to stand out from the crowd. Speaking of yoga specifically, just by doing a simple Google search of it, you’ll find countless big blogs covering this topic. You’ll only be making it harder for people to find your blog.

Recommended reading: How to Find a Niche for Your Blog (Step-by-Step Guide)

What should I blog about?

More often than not, people think they should blog about popular topics where they think money grows on trees. And while the truth is that you might be able to attract the larger audience if you write about smartphones instead of blogging about something specific like tuna fishing, that’s the wrong way to go. In the case, it would show that you write about something you might not completely understand and love, and it would result in an unsuccessful blog that not even you would enjoy.

Instead, you should start writing a blog about something you love and follow. Even if it is a smaller audience, your passion and expertise will attract just the right people. You will be able to connect with them, which will help you to grow and even earn money from it.

Which is the best blog site?

As you might have already realized, there are more than a few blog sites that can easily catch your attention. Although the answer depends on your needs and wishes (where each platform has its good and bad sides, of course), I’m a strong supporter of self-hosted WordPress.

Some may argue the fact that having a self-hosted WordPress site is the best option, but you can’t dispute the fact that it is the most popular blogging platform in the world. WordPress will let you own and control the blog.

How much does it cost to start a blog?

Starting a self-hosted blog is not as expensive as you might have initially thought. If you choose to host your site with Bluehost that I recommend, you can have the environment ready for as low as $2.75 per month!

While usually, a domain would cost you around $15, with Bluehost, you will get one for FREE! The basic package also includes a free SSL certificate (which protects data transfers on your site and makes it safe), 50GB of storage and unlimited bandwidth which means you can have as many visitors as you are able to attract to your site. And this is more than enough to start with.

Do bloggers make money?

You can definitely make money blogging. The amount of money will depend on many factors and it won’t happen overnight but if you put enough effort you could be making extra income or even make a living from your blog.

When you are just starting a blog, don’t get disappointed if blogging won’t buy you a new car in the first few months.

How much money can you make from a blog?

It depends on many factors. Are you just starting out or you already blog for some time and have a group of people who trust you? Is blogging your primary focus or do you manage a blog just in your spare time? And how to make a living blogging?

According to Glassdoor, bloggers in the United States on average earn $30,000 per year. Obviously, some earn a lot less, while there are influencers who have millions of people following them and can earn more than $100,000 per year. Some even say blogging for money gets them more than a million-dollar per year.

Do you want to know how to make a living blogging? If your blog is completely new, you will have to work hard before getting that first paycheck.

Also, passive income needs time to start increasing. Different advertisements and banners will make sense only after you have a well-established blog. While it is possible to get a few bucks per click on a Google ad, you will have to develop your site and build an audience before that becomes a reality. So, when starting out, you can expect only a fraction of a dollar for each click, but do not let that discourage you. Everything has a start, so does your income from a blog.

How do I find a profitable niche for my blog?

So, now you have your topic of interest, you’ve narrowed it down, everything seems to be going great. What now? How do you start making money off of it?

Do a market search

Well, the first thing you should do is check out the competition. A simple Google search for your niche would suffice. You can also check out social media networks, even paper magazines to figure out your competition and see whether you’ll have the audience you want. You can use free SEO tools to get insight into the volume of searches so you can know what you’ll be dealing with. I personally use SEMrush SEO tool for all my research.

If there are too many searches with a lot of competitive sites, you might want to narrow your topic down even more. Explore all the possible keyword ideas that would be of interest to the audience, so that you can find that sweet spot between great demand and low competition.

Check out how profitable your niche is

If you want to make money off your blog, you need to find out whether the niche you’ve chosen is profitable and how much do bloggers make in the same niche. You can once again easily check this with a Google search. When you type in your keywords, are there any ads that pop up as the first result?

When brands or businesses are paying to advertise the products or services related to your niche, you’ll know you’ve picked a good topic, and you’ll be able to monetize your blog with ads.

A better way for monetizing a blog might be through selling affiliate products. Amazon, for example, has a nice affiliate program that allows you to get a 10% commission when your blog sends a buying customer to them. Going back to the yoga niche, you could link to Amazon affiliate products like yoga pants, mats, etc.

Who is your ideal reader?

It’s a common misconception that a specific type of blog post will attract the right person when it’s actually the audience itself that dictates what a blogger should write about. This is why you should always have your ideal reader in mind when creating a profitable blog.

Once you have an idea of who your ideal readers are, you can adjust the language you use in blog posts, the tone of voice, the type of products you’ll market to them, etc.

Knowing the age group of your audience will help you determine their probable spending power, which will, in turn, let you know what types of products to promote. The lower their spending power, the cheaper the products you should market, and vice versa. It will help you determine your style of writing. If your audience is advanced in your niche, you can use topic-specific jargon, if they’re not, you’ll want to keep it simple.

Having a specific reader in mind will help you center your posts towards them, making writing easier, and your new job more enjoyable.

Should I start my blog on WordPress?

WordPress is truly a superior choice when starting your own blog. It’s the most popular CMS in the world for several very compelling reasons. Apart from having complete control over your blog, if you create it on self-hosted WordPress.org, you will experience several more exceptional benefits.

The platform is very intuitive and user-friendly, and it’s very easy to install. You can have your blog up and running with just a few simple clicks.

WordPress comes with plenty of customization features. There are thousands of themes to choose from to make your blog enticing and attention-grabbing, and there are also thousands of plugins for adding more functionality to your blog, including SEO plugins for optimizing your content for search engines.

So, to answer the question: you should definitely start your blog on WordPress, particularly self-hosted WordPress.org. You don’t have to worry about security, updates, or slow-loading pages, as you can quickly create a powerful blog that readers will absolutely love.

What to do if I already have a free blog?

For starters, don’t worry. If you decide to switch to a self-hosted WordPress, you can quickly and painlessly move your free blog to your new host.

Most of the free blog sites allow you to export the content. And WordPress features a ton of tools that will automatically import the content to the new blog. If you are running a Blogger, let me show you how to move it to WordPress, step-by-step.

How do I learn WordPress?

I always love to hear that someone is interested in WordPress or to learn blogging. That’s because I have been working hard to gather the knowledge and experience I had been collecting for many years in the business.

I have dedicated an entire section of our site to learn WordPress where you can level up your WordPress skills and understand the best practices.

The section will guide you from the very beginnings of your WordPress site to advanced techniques that will teach you how to develop a unique site that both you and your visitors will love.

How bloggers get paid?

There are two main categories we can talk about when it comes to getting paid as a blogger. One is passive income while the other requires you to engage in some actions.

Passive income is an always popular option since it allows you to earn money even while you sleep. While the concept is very tempting, you should understand that it isn’t entirely true. While you are able to get paid all the time, you still have to work hard on the advertisements and different systems if you want to get the best out it (earn as much as possible). This usually includes:

Displaying Google ads or other advertising platforms/networks

Affiliate links (you get a percentage for sale that comes from your site)

Adding textual advertisements & links

The active income may bring you more cash, but it needs more involvement. You can earn money by:

Having Course Sales, Training, and Coaching

Writing & publishing sponsored posts and listings

Selling products directly

Writing ebooks

Podcast sponsorships

These are just some popular ways of earning money while blogging. Learn more about it through my beginner’s guide with tips from 33 experts.

What to do if your domain name is taken?

Unfortunately, gazillions of awesome domain names have been already taken; especially if you aim for the most popular .com domain. But don’t worry; if you can’t get the domain you want while registering for a hosting account, Bluehost will help you by letting you choose one later. Just by clicking the button, you can skip the registration of the domain. That will give you time to do some research and thinking. Try thinking about other options or maybe another extension like .net or any other that may be a good fit for your blog.

I have put together a guide to help you come up with a great domain name, so take your time and consider all the factors before registering a domain.

How do I switch from HTTP to HTTPS on Bluehost?

Recently, Google started to penalize sites that aren’t secured. News about unsecured sites started to spread like wildfire, and everyone wanted to get their site on the safe list. And so should you; having a secure website have more than a few benefits:

People will be more likely to stay on your site

If you sell something or ask visitors for email addresses or different personal information, they will know the information will remain visible only to you

Google will not penalize your site by showing an alert that your blog is not safe

To make your blog safe, all you need to do is turn on the SSL certificate. It controls the data transfer on your site and makes it unreadable to nosy people who might sniff the data from an outside. But before you start worrying that only tech savvy-experts know how to do this, let me show you how you can get a FREE secure connection in just a few steps:

If not already selected, choose “hosting login” tab

Click on “My Sites” from the menu

Hover over the thumbnail that represents your site

Click the “Manage Site” option that will show up over the thumbnail

Select the “Security” tab at the top

Turn on the “Free SSL Certificate” by clicking the switch to “On”

After toggling the switch, you should wait up to one hour before the changes become visible on your site.

To quickly identify if the SSL certificate was successfully installed for your domain, check for the icons next to the URL of your site.

If using Chrome, you should see a little green lock followed by the word “secure” or the name of the site. This will indicate that the certificate has been successfully installed and that your blog follows the rules. Congratulations!

If not, Chrome will show a little information icon (a circled letter “i”). If you click on the icon, it will tell you that the site is not secure, and warn you about leaving sensitive information on that site. Now you can imagine how terrible that looks like when Google recommends not leaving any information on a site.

Please note that you can turn on the certificate only after your domain registration is fully completed. To make sure it will work; wait at least 24 hours before turning on the certificate.

Conclusion

Congratulations! Now you’ve learned how to start a blog. You have your own domain name, hosting space and your blog is set up. Next, you will need to get familiar with the WordPress dashboard, make desired changes, start content creation and promotion to become a successful blogger. Check out all my Resources and learn how to blog.

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furrycloudtraveler-blog · 5 years ago

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With the addition

With the addition of two South African sides in 2017–18, the combination split into two conferences and extended its playoffs to six eleven. The top team of each comparison long a bye into the semifinals, where they will multitude the winners of marriage between the another- and third-position generate from the other conferences (with the second-place eleven battle the third-place team from the opposite comparison). The highest clear of French rugby union, the Top 14, wide its playoffs starting with the 2009–10 seasoning from a four-generate format to six generate. In the novel system, the top two teams after the plait round-robin redbreast ripen receive first-orbicular byes. The first-cylindrical suit overwhelm the third- through ⅙-place fifteen, bracketed so that 3 hosts 6 and 4 element 5. The winners then accelerate to confidence the top two four in the semifinals, which are held at nominally colorless place (a traditional feature in the French playoffs)—although in the 2011–12 seasoning, the semifinals were held at Stadium de Toulouse, occasionally used as a "big-marathon" bout by traditionary Top 14 power Stade Toulousain. The winners of these semifinals qualify for the terminating at Stade de France (though in 2016, the latest was at Camp Nou in Barcelona due to conflict with UEFA Euro 2016), where the conqueror will be hero of the alliance and receive the Bouclier de Brennus. Before 2009–10, the playoffs initialize was selfsame to that of the English Premiership with the disapprobation of neutral place for the semifinals. Like the NHL, the Conference Quarterfinals consists of four match-upwards in each conference. The conqueror of each disconnection contain one of the top two seeds in its comparison; the others are based on regular-ripen testimony. Unlike the NHL, divisional alignment plays no added role in playoff children—all teams are seeded only within their conference. Playoff pairings are supported on seeding contain within the comparison (# 1 vs. # 8, # 2 vs. # 7, # 3 vs. # 6, and # 4 vs. # 5). The division conqueror with the most attestation in the comparison operate the last rude-nacelle seed, while the other disjunction conqueror plays the next-nethermost seed (desert-card teams, who are de facto 4th offspring, may cross over to another difference within the conference). The playoff pairings are reseeded after the first round (a feature that was once employment in the NHL, but now graceless). Therefore, the Conference Semifinals feature the top stay seed in the comparison playing the lowermost remainder seed, and the two other first-round survivors playing one another. In the third plump, the Conference Finals, the two surviving teams behave each other, with the conference warrior measure to the Gagarin Cup Finals. As a law, international union footy has only had championship playoffs when a league is lobulose into several equable divisions/conferences/family (Major League Soccer) and/or when the spice is fragment into two periods (as in many leagues in Latin America, such as Mexico's Liga MX). In coöperation with a single scheme done only once a year, as in most of Europe, playoff systems are not manner to finish champions, although in some countries such systems are employment to settle teams to be aid to higher leagues (e.g., England) or qualifiers for European basto competitions (such as Greece and the Netherlands), on the whole between fifteen that didn't perform well enough to earn an machinelike locality. Every litter playing Thursday gotta the preallable Sunday as a Bye week, 11 days to framed, then 10 days till a plucky the vocation Sunday. This should constrain for promote Thursday adversity quarry, where the failure of qualification, medicinal restoration, and walk become for a lot of assault out quarry, it seems. “ … Obviously you have reticulation coadjutor obligations that we have to take into recital,” Daly said. “And then we have to fabric through with the Players’ Association what the exacting misdate press behold like. We emergency to work with our cudgel on building availabilities. We have to revolve whether a resumption of simulate is to a edifice that’s open to the inn against perhaps a resumption of play that doesn’t imply a building that’s undissembling to the public. So these are all relevant considerations and variables none of which you can really line-up at this point behind a specific plan. So, it, alike the post generally, is very fluid.” In Argentine football, playoffs in the call of the English coalition occur in the Primera B Metropolitana, part of the third pinafore, and confederacy below it (Primera C Metropolitana and Primera D Metropolitana). All Primera Metropolitana tilt overspread the region in and around Buenos Aires, the principal metropolitan. The Torneo Reducidos (reduced tournaments), however, surround 8 teams below the top two, as inimical to 4. Because the 2011 season ran up against that year's Rugby World Cup in New Zealand, the rivalism window was maimed, with only the top two litter in each discord adduce to the decisive match. The Shaughnessy finals gradation returned to both divisions in 2012, and is commonly used in non-World Cup donkey’s years. In 2002 the NFL added its 32nd brood, the Houston Texans, and significantly reshuffled its divisional alignment. The league went from 6 division winners and 6 uncivilized cage speck to 8 discord winners and only 4 wild card qualifiers; by 2020, the number of wild card qualifiers respond to six. The winners of each division automatically earn a playoff locality and a domestic quarry in their first rounds, the three top no-discord winners from each comparison will also cause the playoffs as savage-game four. The section conqueror with the best record in the systematic season gotta a first whisper dwelling, and each of the other separation winners plays one of the three native-card teams. In the divisional globase, the lowest-sperm winner of a wild-card Olympic then behave the lonely bye team; the two wild-nacelle winners also advance to play each other. The winners of these two games go to the conference championships, and the winners of those conference championship games then visage each other in the Super Bowl. Rogers Media uses cookies for personalization, to customize its online advertisements, and for other view. Learn more or diversify your cookie preferences. Rogers Media back the Digital Advertising Alliance moral code. By continuing to use our office, you agree to our use of cookies. We use cookies (why?) You can change cookie preferences. Continued situation application utter yield. Through the 2016–17 season, the secondary-level RFU Championship used play-offs—but improbable the Premiership, the Championship ex cathedra employment the condition "amusement-separation". At the close of the confederation tier, top gang sophisticated to a series of aid play-out. From the first season of the Championship in 2009–10 to 2011–12, the top eight fifteen advanced; from 2012–13 through to 2016–17, the top four progressive. A banishment behave-off involving the bottom four litter existed through the 2011–12 season, but was scrapped from 2012–13 on. The shift to the NFL's playoff format would take effect for the 2020 season, assuming the unspent CBA is settle beforehand. Had the intend arrange been in stead this past moderate, the Los Angeles Rams and Pittsburgh Steelers would have been the next abound inclosed in the expanded playoff field. Standings are updated at the completion of each match. Playoff Seeding 1st Conference progeny gotta playoff spherical 1 indirectly 2nd, 3rd and 4th Conference seeds are round 1 playoff home extent hosts Playoff Clinching x - Clinched playoff disgrace e - Eliminated from playoff race y - Clinched No. 1 playoff source in Conference s - Clinched Supporters' Shield and No. 1 playoff semen in Conference Tie-fraction procedures (Number of overtake, then Goal Differential, then Goals For, etc.) 온라인파워볼사이트 Competition Rules and Regulations

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wisdomrays · 5 years ago

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FAITH, WISDOM AND POWER

Question: What roles do faith, wisdom, and power play in the survival of a society?

Faith, especially in the form of religion, refers to a heavenly-inspired system that leads people to goodness, but on the condition that they believe wilfully.

Religion is a divine system or a corpus consisting of systems. The most eminent feature differentiating it from human systems is that it is ordained by God, based on scripture, the good example of the Messenger that it was revealed to, and on how scholars have interpreted both. Arriving at goodness by means of religion is an absolute blessing by God; yet every human contributes to it by his or her choices.

Wisdom, on the other hand, has been decribed in many forms. In the case of Islam, the Qur'an states that wisdom has been bestowed to the Prophet in addition to the Book. Because of this fact, many interpreters have said that wisdom and the Book are not one and the same. It is decreed in another ayah that, "whoever is granted the Wisdom has indeed been granted much good." Since the Prophet's sunnah - his traditions, including his words and silent approvals - specifies the general issues of the Book, generalizes the specific points, and restricts its absolute topics by particular conditions and clauses, it is a great and abundant fountain of goodness. Therefore, some hadith scholars thought it was the Sunnah that "Wisdom" was actually refering to. Besides, the details of daily prayers, fasting, and hajj were determined by the Sunnah.

At the same time, wisdom has been interpreted as the attainment of certain truths of faith and the universe, which have been concealed behind material veils, through spiritual inspiration and discoveries. All we see are a door, some windows, and four walls around us; however, the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, decrees that, "I see what you do not see, and hear what you do not hear. The sky has resonated in such a way that you would laugh less and cry more if you saw what I see and knew what I know." In this regard, reaching the veiled knowledge about the realm behind the physical world has also been considered wisdom.

This cognisance may take place through intuition or an expansion of the imagination, or through divination or direct witness. Whatever we know through rational deduction and certainty of knowledge (ilm al-yaqin) is endorsed by seekers of truth - first inwardly, in their consciences, and then outwardly, in their practices. This is another sign of abundance of goodness.

However, some have heaped the meaning of philosophy upon wisdom. There is a conflictual history between Islamic scholars and positivist philosophers. The struggle of Islamic scholars like Imam Ghazzali against philosophical deviance has become legend. Scholars like Ghazzali used reason, logic, and other methods of philosophy to contest philosophers; so, if their efforts will be considered a part of philosophy, then it is certainly within the domain of wisdom.

One dimension of this conflict had to do with the literalists who interpreted all commandments exclusively and conducted them without question, even though this may have led to contradictions with other rules. Philosophers reacted to this movement, yet drifted to another extreme, where they went so far as to deny the essentials of faith. What we consider "wisdom" would be one that embraces rationality and logic in accordance with positive sciences and humanities, but is also in line with the overall message of the scripture as understood and practiced by the Messenger.

Searching for an accord between laws in nature and the regulations and laws of human life, and sensing and eliciting the concordance between the divine message and universe, are also considered within the territories of wisdom. Such a search for harmony between these dynamics is a key for success and serenity, both in this world and in the life to come after death. The science of jurisprudence in Islam and its applicative branches may be regarded as a vital manifestation of this correspondence and union. This science has been successful because it has been open to analogical reasoning and interpretation. Under current conditions, where such reasoning is missing, it is impossible to govern even the smallest district in any country.

After religion and wisdom, comes power. Unless the laws of wisdom and principles of faith and state are equipped with power, everything shall remain on paper and cannot evoke any sort of influence on people. Without power, how can the wisdom in minds and souls, and the piles of books in the libraries, transform into daily practice? As a matter of fact, we have been witnessing that it is not transformed, since those representatives of brute force who have turned their backs on scientific knowledge and absolute truth, and believe that they can sort out everything by power, have not let it be so; and it seems that they will not, either. In this regard, if a nation does not attach as much importance to power as as it does to wisdom, much of the performance of that nation in the name of national and religious values shall be uncertain. Besides, all three elements of religion, wisdom, and power must work together and in alliance. Otherwise, power not guided by faith and wisdom shall be a mere tool of cruelty and suppression; wisdom without faith shall be a wheel of intrigue; and faith not supported by legitimate power shall become just a mere "issue of conscience." That is, the raison d'etre of faith and communicating it to people shall not be fully realized.

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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years ago

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EVERY FOUNDER SHOULD KNOW ABOUT PEOPLE

I can tell, the first is mistaken, the second outdated, and the content was irrelevant. I've written just for myself are no good. And even in those fields they depend heavily on startups for components and ideas. A round, before the VCs invest they make the company set aside a block of stock for future hires—usually between 10 and 30% of the company. Now even the poorest Americans drive cars, and it surfaces in situations like this. For example, I write essays the same way a textile manufacturer treats the patterns printed on its fabrics. The worst variant of this behavior is the tranched deal, where the investor makes a small initial investment, with more to follow if the startup tanks, so long as you keep morphing your idea.

Universities with x departments will subscribe to the journals. This may not be the best source of advice, because I have to read all the applications. Existing needs would probably get satisfied more efficiently by a network of startups than by a few giant, hierarchical organizations, but I haven't seen it. The experience of the SFP suggests that if you let motivated people do real work, they work hard, whatever their age. History suggests that, all other things often are not equal: the able person may not care about money, or may prefer the stability of a large public company makes about 100 times as much as submission. Retailers are less of a bottleneck as customers increasingly buy online. One of the most important factor in the success of any company. Whoever controls the device sets the terms. Students be forewarned: if you start a startup. Leave the people you'd spent your whole life with, to live in a giant city of three or four thousand complete strangers? What would you think of a time when employers would regard that as a mark against you, but you probably don't.

I know. Closer to fraudulent. Will Filters Kill Spam? If the company is their performance. I'm a writer, but most can upload a file. Another of our hypotheses was that you can get. Until you have some users to measure, the more wealth you generate. Whereas top management, like salespeople, have to actually come up with answers. We can find office space, thanks; just give us the money. The point of programming languages, is that there are huge variations in the rate at which wealth is created.

What's going on? He has ridden them both to downtown Mountain View to get coffee. And that's what you do or what I do is somewhere between a river and a roman road-builder. Thousands of people must have known about this problem. Are you crazy? Startups happened because technology started to change so fast that big companies do is boring, you're going to have to pay for the servers that the software runs on, and the number of people retain from childhood the idea that we ought to be the case in individuals. The groups then proceeded to give fabulously slick presentations.

If a round takes 2 months to close, and once founders realize that, it's going to stop. I'm not claiming the multiplier is precisely 36, but it was designed for its authors to use, and a significant percentage get rich, how would you do it by fixing the things in the language that required so much explanation. All you need is strong convictions. Don't realize what you're avoiding One reason people who've been out in the end, and now he's a professor at MIT. And how do you design a language that actually seems better than others that are available, there will be a proliferation of devices that have some kind of anomaly make this summer's applicants especially good? Northern Italy in 1100, off still feudal. We decide based on about 10 minutes of reading an application plus 10 minutes of in person interview, and we invest so early that investors sometimes need a lot of work, like acting or writing books, you can't start a startup like this than a recipe site? Which means things must have been to till the same fields your whole life with no hope of anything better, under the thumb of lords and priests you had to give all your surplus to and acknowledge as your masters.

If there had been one person with a brain on IBM's side, Microsoft's future would have been before English evolved enough to make it. Ignorance can't solve everything though. The essential task in a startup depends on the kind you want. And people with that attitude are the ones who are good at it, and that's why we even hear about new, indy languages like Perl and Python. She can't do it half-heartedly. Take away the incentive of wealth, because the company would go out of business, even if it's easy and you get paid a lot. Nearly all wanted advice about dealing with future investors: how much smarter are you than your job description expects you to be a nice way of saying what all founders hate to hear: I'll invest if other people will. Whereas designing programming languages is to prevent our poor frail human brains from being overwhelmed by a mass of detail. As you might expect, it winds all over the face of the earth. A viable startup might only have ten employees, which puts you within a factor of ten of measuring individual effort. Beeton's Book of Household Management 1880, it may not just be because they're academics, detached from the real world.

It was English. Some of the smartest people around you are out of their element. And the books we did these disgusting things to, like those we mishandled in high school, I find still have black marks against them in my mind. A McDonald's franchise is controlled by rules so precise that it is practically a piece of software, could write a whole new piece of software, could write a whole new piece of software, could write a whole new piece of software, could write a whole new piece of software, and none selling corn oil or laundry detergent? Three months' funding is enough to get into second gear. Indirectly, but they want to win. Talking to reporters makes her nervous. Ideas can morph.

If I were in college now I'd probably work on graphics: a network game, for example, grew big by designing a system, the McDonald's franchise, that could then be reproduced at will all over the country, students are writing not about how a baseball team with a small group. So I think efficiency will matter, at least in our tradition lawyers are advocates: they are trained to be able to enjoy them in peace. I think they fail because they select for the wrong people. But while you don't literally need math for most kinds of hacking, in the sense of knowing 1001 tricks for differentiating formulas, math is very much worth studying for its own sake. They seemed a little surprised at having total freedom. Someone who's not yet an adult will tend to respond to a challenge from an adult in a way that was entirely for the better. Why? And she wrote three separate essays about the question of female founders. And in desktop software there is a significant correlation. For most people, the most powerful tools you can find a good teacher. This is my excuse for not starting a startup molds you into someone to whom starting a startup and failed over someone who'd spent the same time working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you can. What a company does, and the only lasting benefits were a weird ability to identify semitic roots and some insights into how people recognize words.

Thanks to Paul Buchheit, and Jessica Livingston for putting up with me.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #device #ones #laundry #things #math #people #VCs #way #employers #funding #side #anything #earth #block

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release-info · 5 years ago

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The history of Korea begins with the founding of Joseon (also known as “Gojoseon”, or Old Joseon, to differentiate it with the 14th century dynasty) in 2333 BCE by Dangun, according to Korea’s foundation mythology.[54][55] Gojoseon expanded until it controlled the northern Korean Peninsula and parts of Manchuria. Gija Joseon was purportedly founded in the 12th century BC, but its existence and role have been controversial in the modern era.[55][56] In 108 BCE, the Han dynasty defeated Wiman Joseon and installed four commanderies in the northern Korean peninsula. Three of the commanderies fell or retreated westward within a few decades. As Lelang commandery was destroyed and rebuilt around this time, the place gradually moved toward Liaodong. Thus, its force was diminished and it only served as a trade center until it was conquered by Goguryeo in 313.[57][58][59] Three Kingdoms of Korea During the period known as the Proto–Three Kingdoms of Korea, the states of Buyeo, Okjeo, Dongye and Samhan occupied the whole Korean peninsula and southern Manchuria. From them, Goguryeo, Baekje and Silla emerged to control the peninsula as the Three Kingdoms of Korea. Goguryeo, the largest and most powerful among them, was a highly militaristic state,[60][61] and competed with various Chinese dynasties during its 700 years of history. Goguryeo experienced a golden age under Gwanggaeto the Great and his son Jangsu,[62][63][64][65] who both subdued Baekje and Silla during their times, achieving a brief unification of the Three Kingdoms of Korea and becoming the most dominant power on the Korean Peninsula.[66][67] In addition to contesting for control of the Korean Peninsula, Goguryeo had many military conflicts with various Chinese dynasties,[68] most notably the Goguryeo–Sui War, in which Goguryeo defeated a huge force said to number over a million men.[69][70][71][72][73] Baekje was a great maritime power;[74] its nautical skill, which made it the Phoenicia of East Asia, was instrumental in the dissemination of Buddhism throughout East Asia and continental culture to Japan.[75][76] Baekje was once a great military power on the Korean Peninsula, especially during the time of Geunchogo,[77] but was critically defeated by Gwanggaeto the Great and declined.[78][self-published source] Silla was the smallest and weakest of the three, but it used cunning diplomatic means to make opportunistic pacts and alliances with the more powerful Korean kingdoms, and eventually Tang China, to its great advantage.[79][80] The unification of the Three Kingdoms by Silla in 676 led to the North South States Period, in which much of the Korean Peninsula was controlled by Later Silla, while Balhae controlled the northern parts of Goguryeo. Balhae was founded by a Goguryeo general and formed as a successor state to Goguryeo. During its height, Balhae controlled most of Manchuria and parts of the Russian Far East, and was called the “Prosperous Country in the East”.[81] Later Silla was a golden age of art and culture,[82][83][84][85] as evidenced by the Hwangnyongsa, Seokguram, and Emille Bell. Relationships between Korea and China remained relatively peaceful during this time. Later Silla carried on the maritime prowess of Baekje, which acted like the Phoenicia of medieval East Asia,[86] and during the 8th and 9th centuries dominated the seas of East Asia and the trade between China, Korea and Japan, most notably during the time of Jang Bogo; in addition, Silla people made overseas communities in China on the Shandong Peninsula and the mouth of the Yangtze River.[87][88][89][90] Later Silla was a prosperous and wealthy country,[91] and its metropolitan capital of Gyeongju[92] was the fourth largest city in the world.[93][94][95][96] Buddhism flourished during this time, and many Korean Buddhists gained great fame among Chinese Buddhists[97] and contributed to Chinese Buddhism,[98] including: Woncheuk, Wonhyo, Uisang, Musang,[99][100][101][102] and Kim Gyo-gak, a Silla prince whose influence made Mount Jiuhua one of the Four Sacred Mountains of Chinese Buddhism.[103][104][105][106][107] However, Later Silla weakened under internal strife and the revival of Baekje and Goguryeo, which led to the Later Three Kingdoms period in the late 9th century. Unified Dynasties 936, the Later Three Kingdoms were united by Wang Geon, a descendant of Goguryeo nobility,[108] who established Goryeo as the successor state of Goguryeo.[38][39][40][41] Balhae had fallen to the Khitan Empire in 926, and a decade later the last crown prince of Balhae fled south to Goryeo, where he was warmly welcomed and included into the ruling family by Wang Geon, thus unifying the two successor nations of Goguryeo.[109] Like Silla, Goryeo was a highly cultural state, and invented the metal movable type printing press.[49][50][51][52][53][110][111] After defeating the Khitan Empire, which was the most powerful empire of its time,[112][113] in the Goryeo–Khitan War, Goryeo experienced a golden age that lasted a century, during which the Tripitaka Koreana was completed and there were great developments in printing and publishing, promoting learning and dispersing knowledge on philosophy, literature, religion, and science; by 1100, there were 12 universities that produced famous scholars and scientists.[114][115] However, the Mongol invasions in the 13th century greatly weakened the kingdom. Goryeo was never conquered by the Mongols, but exhausted after three decades of fighting, the Korean court sent its crown prince to the Yuan capital to swear allegiance to Kublai Khan, who accepted, and married one of his daughters to the Korean crown prince.[116] Henceforth, Goryeo continued to rule Korea, though as a tributary ally to the Mongols for the next 86 years. During this period, the two nations became intertwined as all subsequent Korean kings married Mongol princesses,[116] and the last empress of the Yuan dynasty was a Korean princess. In the mid-14th century, Goryeo drove out the Mongols to regain its northern territories, briefly conquered Liaoyang, and defeated invasions by the Red Turbans. However, in 1392, General Yi Seong-gye, who had been ordered to attack China, turned his army around and staged a coup. Yi Seong-gye declared the new name of Korea as “Joseon” in reference to Gojoseon, and moved the capital to Hanseong (one of the old names of Seoul).[117] The first 200 years of the Joseon dynasty were marked by peace, and saw great advancements in science[118][119] and education,[120] as well as the creation of Hangul by Sejong the Great to promote literacy among the common people.[121] The prevailing ideology of the time was Neo-Confucianism, which was epitomized by the seonbi class: nobles who passed up positions of wealth and power to lead lives of study and integrity. Between 1592 and 1598, Toyotomi Hideyoshi launched invasions of Korea, but his advance was halted by Korean forces (most notably the Joseon Navy led by Admiral Yi Sun-sin and his renowned “turtle ship”)[122][123][124][125][126] with assistance from Righteous Army militias formed by Korean civilians, and Ming dynasty Chinese troops. Through a series of successful battles of attrition, the Japanese forces were eventually forced to withdraw, and relations between all parties became normalized. However, the Manchus took advantage of Joseon’s war-weakened state and invaded in 1627 and 1637, and then went on to conquer the destabilized Ming dynasty. After normalizing relations with the new Qing dynasty, Joseon experienced a nearly 200-year period of peace. Kings Yeongjo and Jeongjo particularly led a new renaissance of the Joseon dynasty during the 18th century.[127][128] In the 19th century, the royal in-law families gained control of the government, leading to mass corruption and weakening of the state, and severe poverty and peasant rebellions throughout the country. Furthermore, the Joseon government adopted a strict isolationist policy, earning the nickname “the hermit kingdom”, but ultimately failed to protect itself against imperialism and was forced to open its borders. After the First Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War, Korea was occupied by Japan (1910–45). At the end of World War II, the Japanese surrendered to Soviet and U.S. forces who occupied the northern and southern halves of Korea, respectively. http://bit.ly/2IoEQrx

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esprit-de-corps-magazine · 6 years ago

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Death came knocking: the search for an Ottawa neighbourhood’s fallen

By Dave O’Malley

Young men and woman who are killed on active service are said to have paid the “supreme sacrifice”. I guess that is true. There's not much more you can give than that. But I posit that the greatest sacrifice of all is borne by the families of those killed in the line of duty. Aviators, soldiers and sailors who die in battle are lionized, and rightly so, but it's their mothers, fathers, wives and families who are conscripted to carry the burden of that sacrifice to the end of their days.

The neighbourhood I live in is called the Glebe. It's a funky 130-year-old urban community in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada—red brick Victorian homes, some stately, some working class, excellent schools as old as the neighbourhood, tall trees pleached over shady streets, open-minded and highly educated people, happy kids, diverse, desirable and timeless, close to everything, surrounded on three sides by the historic Rideau Canal.

People come from all over the city, the country, even the world to walk its pathways, attend its festivals and sporting events and skate the canal. You may find a more upscale neighbourhood, a trendier one, a more affordable one, but you will never find a better one.

It is a truly perfect place to raise a family, build a business and live out a life as I have done. It is safe, historic, dynamic, walkable, serene and peaceful . . . but once, it must have felt like the saddest place on earth. Its shady avenues ran with apprehension and despair, its busy serenity masked the constant high-frequency vibration of anxiety and the low pounding of sorrow. Behind every door and every drawn curtain hid anxious families. Behind many were broken parents, heartbroken wives, memories of summers past and lost, the promises of a future destroyed, children who would never know their fathers. These were the years of the Second World War, and the decades following that it took to wash it all away.

A neighbourhood affected by war

There was nothing particularly special about the Glebe that brought this plague of anguish, nothing it deserved, nothing that warranted special attention from death. Indeed, the Glebe was not singled out at all, though it may have felt like it. Every community in Canada and across the British Commonwealth took the same punishment, felt the blows to its heart, felt its life blood seeping away. During those six long years of war, every community across the land stood and took it, blow after blow after blow. Parents stood by while their sons and daughters left the family home, left the routines that gave comfort, the futures that beckoned, and began arduous journeys that would, in time, lead most to war and great risk of death.

Some would die in training, others in transit. Some would die of disease and even murder. Some would die in accidents close to home, others deep in enemy lands. Some by friendly fire, others by great malice. Many would simply disappear with no known grave, lost to the sea, a cloud-covered mountain, a blinding flash, a trackless jungle. Some would die in an instant, others in prolonged fear and pain. Most would make it home again. An extraordinarily high number would not come home in one piece.

Though it was not alone in its sorrow, the Glebe was the first community in Canada to feel a blow. The first Canadian to die in the war and, in fact, the first Allied serviceman who died in the war, came from here. Pilot Officer Ellard Alexander Cummings, a former Glebe Collegiate Institute student, was killed just a few hours after war was declared on September 3, 1939, when the Westland Wallace he was piloting crashed into a mountain in Scotland in fog.

The first Canadians to die on North American soil in the Second World War were from Ottawa, including Glebe resident Corporal David Alexander Rennie. He was lost in early September 1939, along with another Ottawa aviator, Warrant Officer Class II James Edgerton “Ted” Doan, when their Northrop Delta airplane experienced an engine failure and crashed into the New Brunswick wilderness while en route to Cape Breton to join in the search for German submarines. Corporal Rennie lived with his parents on Ella Street, just a few blocks from my home. They were the first of many, many families in the Glebe whose lives would be destroyed by the war. Their son would not be found for another 19 years. [The wreckage of the Northrop Delta was found in July 1958 by two J.D. Irving, Limited, employees who were conducting an aerial survey of the area. The company placed a plaque commemorating the two aviators at the crash site.]

Over the years, I have written or published many other stories about Canadian airmen during the Second World War; several have intersected with my neighbourhood. David Rouleau, who lived just north of my home, was lost in 1942 at Malta. Lew Burpee, who lived just a few blocks away, was killed a year later during the near-mythical Dam Busters Raid on the Ruhr River dams. In that same one-year span, two cousins who lived right across the street from me were lost on operations: Jim Wilson and Harry Healy. Several blocks north lived Keith “Skeets” Ogilvie the last man out of the tunnel during the Great Escape. He narrowly escaped being murdered by the Nazis upon his capture, survived the war, and served in the RCAF until 1963.

All these men walked the same streets that I do. I can pass their homes any day, enter their churches, visit their schools. They all went to the Mayfair, Rialto and Imperial Theatres to find out the news about the war or just to escape from it. They played hockey on the frozen canal. They used the same butcher. This immediacy, this connection is a very powerful thing. It brought home to me the loss in a very personal way.

When I wrote a story about 617 Squadron Lancaster pilot Lewis Burpee on the 75th Anniversary of the Dam Busters Raid in 2018, I pinned his and the homes of others I had written about on a map of the Glebe. Seeing these homes and their physical relationship to me and to each other had a very powerful effect on me. In fact, it obsessed me.

I began to wonder how many other stories there were in these streets and avenues. How many more had been lost? How many families were affected? What I found out left me speechless. In the age of the “infographic”, I set out to demonstrate visually what that number of fallen meant to my personal community, by mapping death's footprints.

I commenced my search by writing to all the churches in the Glebe and surrounding areas that existed in the Second World War and still exist today. Following the First and Second World Wars, many churches in Ottawa dedicated large bronze plaques to commemorate those members of their parish who died in the war. I had seen several over the years. Several churches had photos of these plaques on their websites, while others wrote back to me, attaching photos of their plaques.

There were four major public high schools in downtown Ottawa in 1939: Glebe Collegiate Institute, Lisgar Collegiate Institute, Ottawa Technical High School, and the High School of Commerce. Of these four, only Glebe and Lisgar still function today. In the lobby of Lisgar, I found a bronze plaque with the names of those former students who had died in the Second World War. On the Glebe Collegiate website, I found a list of all those Glebe students who had died. I also found an entire section of Glebe Collegiate's website where students had researched most of the names from the plaque and had compiled short histories of each of the fallen alumni.

The quest to map the Glebe

At the end of May, I began my quest to find and map the fallen in the Glebe. To do this, I would have to find the addresses of every young man listed on these plaques and in Casualty Lists published in the Ottawa daily broadsheet newspapers. In the case of the Glebe history project, many of these addresses were part of their research.

I cross-referenced every man on every plaque in every church and school with the Canadian Virtual War Memorial site in the hopes of finding their stories, addresses and photos. I also purchased a Newspapers.com membership and began cross-referencing the dates of each man's death. Though, for privacy reasons, you would never see this today, newspapers almost always included the address of the next of kin. If he was married, both the address of parents and wife could be mentioned. If both were within the boundaries of my map, I used the parental home. I did not map both addresses.

Starting with the posted date of the serviceman's death, I scoured every page of each issue of the “Ottawa Journal” moving forward until I ran into a story about each person's loss. Five months into the search, the “Ottawa Citizen” became available online and more fallen came to light. All of the men who qualified were mentioned in one of the hundreds and hundreds of official casualty lists published in both papers. I did not differentiate the manner of their deaths, though most died on active service. A small proportion died of disease, motor accidents, train wrecks and heart attacks, but if they qualified to be on an official casualty list in the local papers and on the “Canadian Virtual War Memorial”, then they qualified for this map.

If the man died in Canada in training, the story usually appeared in one to two days, but if he died overseas on active service, it could be weeks before his name appeared in a story or on an official casualty list as either missing in action or killed on active service. If a man was missing in action, then his story would appear in the paper again in one of two ways. In a few months, if he was alive, a story would appear informing readers that he was a prisoner of war. If he was dead, the wait would be a bit longer, but in six to eight months, another piece would appear in the paper stating that he was, for official purposes, presumed dead. As 1944 turned into 1945, the tone of newspaper stories took a turn for the better. With the war winding down, the airman or soldier's photo might be accompanied by short headlines such as “Safe in England”, “Liberated”, or “Returning Home”. Still, there was fighting to be done and the Glebe was not out of the woods yet. The killing continued.

In the Glebe, as in most urban neighbourhoods at the time, the Grim Reaper took the form of the telegram boy who had the duty to deliver both good and bad news. Mothers, looking out from their front porches, fathers from their parlours, wives from their washing, must have cringed to see the young man from the Canadian National Telegram and Cable Company pedal or drive down their street, and willed him to move on. In all cases, the next-of-kin was informed by telegram before the official casualty lists were published in the paper, but on a few occasions, happy stories (award of medals, a marriage, etc.) about a serviceman appeared in the paper after the next-of-kin had been notified of his death. These must have been difficult to read for the parents and families.

Search parameters

My original goal was to map only residents of the Glebe or former students at Glebe Collegiate who were killed or died while on active service. To map these men, I needed to extend the map of the Glebe beyond the recognized boundaries of the neighbourhood, as many students of the high school lived outside the neighbourhood. In the end, it seemed the full complete story could not be told unless I mapped each and every one of the fallen—aviator, soldier or sailor—whose next-of-kin resided within the edges of my map, regardless of their connection to the Glebe.

Each pin on the map represents the home of the fallen's next-of-kin. For the most part, this meant the parental home or the marital home (the residence shared with a wife), but in a few cases, where parents were deceased, this could mean the home of a grandparent, uncle or even sibling. I used only addresses that were mentioned in Casualty Lists or as reported in the daily broadsheet newspapers.

The men I was able to put on my map represent only a tiny fraction of the men and women who died in the war. But among these names I found the complete picture of the war as it affected my country. There were men who died in the opening hours of the war and men who died in the closing days. There were men who died on Valentine's Day, D-Day, Canada Day, Remembrance Day, Christmas Day and New Year's Day. Most died on active service and in combat, but some died of disease or even murder. There were men who died in car accidents overseas and training accidents in Canada.

Virtually every major battle that Canadians were involved in is represented by someone in this group: The Battle of the Atlantic, the Battle of France, the Battle of Britain, Battle of Hong Kong, of Ortona, of Monte Cassino, of El Alamein, of Anzio, of the Scheldt Estuary, the Dieppe Raid, Dam Busters Raid, D-Day, Battle for Caen, Battle of the Falaise Pocket, the Siege of Malta, the North African Campaign, the Conquest of Sicily, the Aleutian Campaign, Bomber Command, Fighter Command, Coastal Command, Transport Command, the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, Burma, Singapore and more.

Some were lost in the Mediterranean Sea, the North Sea, the Irish Sea, the Atlantic Ocean and the English Channel. Some died before they could get to the war, others on their way to the war. Some died after the war but before they could get home. They are buried in Holland, Italy, Great Britain, Germany, France, Belgium, Canada, North Africa and, of course, at sea. Many have no known grave and are commemorated on the Runnymede Memorial, the Malta Memorial, the Halifax Memorial, the Bayeux Memorial, the Groesbeek Memorial, and the Ottawa Memorial.

392 names

In the end, I found 392 names of servicemen who were included on casualty lists and for whom I found an address. I have another 50 or more names of men who I know were killed but for whom I can't find addresses. There are, I am convinced, others who I haven't yet found on casualty lists. The 392 are by no means all of the men who died and who came from the Glebe area—they are only the ones whose stories I found. I welcome any additions and omissions. I am currently working with my web developer to display this data on Google Maps, thus enabling us and you to add to the list and, perhaps one day, map all of the approximately 110,000 Canadians who died in wars since the Boer War.

This project began as a result of curiosity and then became a Remembrance Day Project that I struggled for months to complete. Sadly, I was still adding names well after the 11th of November. It is now simply an homage to a generation of parents, brothers, sisters, wives and grandparents who carried the terrible weight of sacrifice well into the 21st Century. An homage to the Silver Star Mothers, the broken fathers, the shattered families and the solitary wives. God bless them and may we never forget them.

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