#you just have to trust people as the default. that's the social contract of life

[newstfionline]

Wednesday, May 19, 2021

Changed by pandemic, many workers won’t return to old jobs (AP) There’s a wild card in the push to return to post-pandemic life: Many workers don’t want to go back to the jobs they once had. Layoffs and lockdowns, combined with enhanced unemployment benefits and stimulus checks, gave many Americans the time and the financial cushion to rethink their careers. Their former employers are hiring again — and some, like Uber and McDonald’s, are offering higher pay—but workers remain hesitant. Employers and business groups argue that the $300-per-week federal unemployment supplement gives recipients less incentive to look for work. But Heidi Shierholz, a senior economist who researches low- and middle-income workers with the Economic Policy Institute, said health concerns and child care responsibilities seem to be the main reasons holding workers back. In April, she said, at least 25% of U.S. schools weren’t offering in-person learning, forcing many parents to stay home. And health concerns could gain new urgency for some workers now that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said fully vaccinated people can stop wearing masks in most settings. Some workers say the pandemic helped them prioritize their mental and physical health. And in a tight labor market, some workers are also finding that if they hold out, they might get a better job than the one they left.

Unhealthy Dose of Litigation (CNN) It’s not personal, it’s just business. Tell that to tens of thousands of individuals sued by hospitals for ‘medical debt’ they have no way of ever paying. Community Health Systems, Inc. (CHS) is one of America’s largest hospital chains. A CNN investigation found that since March 2020, company-owned hospitals filed at least 19,000 lawsuits against their patients over allegedly unpaid medical bills, even as other hospitals around the country have curtailed similar lawsuits during the pandemic. CHS’s 84 hospitals are concentrated in the South, but stretch across 16 states from Alaska to Key West, Florida. The hospitals have sued patients for as little as $201 and as much as $162,000. Most defendants didn’t hire a lawyer or fight the lawsuits, and judges often rendered a default judgment in the hospital’s favor. Attorney’s fees and interest are often tacked on. Once a court rules against a defendant, a hospital can proceed to put a lien on the defendant’s house or garnish part of their wages. Many garnishments were against people working for low-wage employers like Walmart. A researcher who has studied hospital lawsuits said that it’s typical for hospitals that sue patients to only make a tiny fraction of their revenue from those lawsuits. “It’s not keeping the lights on for the hospitals—they don’t need to be doing this,” she said. “But for the patients... They’re choosing between medical care and food.”

Argentina Halts Beef Exports for 30 Days to Contain Prices (Bloomberg) Argentina’s government is limiting exports of beef, a staple in the country, in the latest unorthodox move to try to contain runaway inflation that’s approaching 50% annually. President Alberto Fernandez told a key beef export association that they won’t be allowed to sell the product abroad for 30 days, according to a Production Ministry statement released late Monday. “The president expressed his concern over the sustained growth in domestic beef prices over the last few months,” according to the statement. The country’s beef exports in 2020 amounted to roughly $3 billion, but the government may be more focused on the political cost of falling domestic consumption.

Spain Turns to Corruption Rehab for Officials Who Can’t Stop Stealing (NYT) Carlos Alburquerque isn’t your typical rehab candidate. He’s a 75-year-old grandfather living in Córdoba, a city in southern Spain. He was a town notary before he retired in 2015. He hasn’t touched drugs or alcohol in years. But his isn’t your typical rehab program: It’s an 11-month boot camp to reform corrupt Spanish officials and “reinsert” them into mainstream society. “Repairing the damage is what is left for me in this life,” said Mr. Alburquerque, who is serving a four-year prison sentence for stealing around 400,000 euros, nearly a half a million dollars, in his work drawing up contracts and deeds. That such a program exists in Spain may say much about the country’s belief in second chances as it does about how corruption has captured the public imagination here. Flip open a newspaper or turn on the radio: You will hear of schemes, scandals and skulduggery which almost always lead back to the public purse. According to Ángel Luis Ortiz, a former judge who now runs Spain’s prisons, the boom-bust cycles of Spain’s economy had led it to a long history of fraudsters and betrayals of public trust, he said. But at least, corruption rates in Spain were no worse than in other European nations, Mr. Ortiz said, just 5 percent of all crimes.

Russia’s northernmost base projects its power across Arctic (AP) During the Cold War, Russia’s Nagurskoye airbase was little more than a runway, a weather station and a communications outpost in the Franz Josef Land archipelago. It was a remote and desolate home mostly for polar bears, where temperatures plunge in winter to minus-42 Celsius (43 degrees below zero Fahrenheit) and the snow only disappears from August to mid-September. Now, Russia’s northernmost military base is bristling with missiles and radar and its extended runway can handle all types of aircraft, including nuclear-capable strategic bombers, projecting Moscow’s power and influence across the Arctic amid intensifying international competition for the region’s vast resources. Russia has sought to assert its influence over wide areas of the Arctic in competition with the United States, Canada, Denmark and Norway as shrinking polar ice from the warming planet offers new opportunities for resources and shipping routes. China also has shown an increasing interest in the region, believed to hold up to one-fourth of the Earth’s undiscovered oil and gas.

Cyclone kills 19 in India, heavy rains lash parts of Gujarat state (Reuters) A cyclone on India’s west coast has killed at least 19 people and damaged infrastructure and agriculture, while heavy rains continued to lash some regions even as weather officials said on Tuesday that the storm’s intensity had weakened. The cyclone Tauktae, which made landfall in the western state of Gujarat late on Monday, has hit power supply in 2,400 villages in the state as a thousand electricity pylons were damaged, Chief Minister Vijay Rupani said in a media address. Nearly 160 roads have been destroyed, 40,000 trees uprooted and several houses damaged, Rupani added.

India reports record day of virus deaths as cases level off (AP) India’s total virus cases since the pandemic began swept past 25 million on Tuesday as the country registered more than 260,000 new cases and a record 4,329 fatalities in the past 24 hours. The numbers continue a trend of falling cases after infections dipped below 300,000 for the first time in weeks on Monday. Active cases in the country also decreased by more than 165,000 on Tuesday—the biggest dip in weeks. But deaths have continued to rise and hospitals are still swamped by patients. Infections in India have surged since February in a disastrous turn blamed on more contagious variants as well as government decisions to allow massive crowds to gather for religious festivals and political rallies.

In Gaza, grief and destruction (Washington Post) In a conflict already marked by harrowing scenes of tragedy, one image stood out. Rescuers in Gaza City on Sunday pulled out Suzy Eshkuntana, a 6-year-old, from the rubble of a building that had once been her home, but which was flattened by Israeli airstrikes. She was covered in dust but alive. Her mother and all four of her siblings were dead. It’s not clear why the Eshkuntanas’ home was brought crashing down. Israeli authorities told reporters that they had targeted a network of tunnels used by Hamas militants that may have run beneath the area where the family lived. “The collapse of the tunnel system,” Reuters reported, “caused the houses above to collapse and led to unintended civilian casualties, the military said.” In Israel’s telling, there are many more “unintended” casualties in Gaza. According to local Health Ministry officials, the death toll in Gaza climbed to 212 people, including 61 children and 36 women, as fighting entered its second week. Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas in the world, home to some 2.1 million people, the majority of whom are classified as refugees by the United Nations. That’s a legacy of the displacements that followed Israel’s creation in 1948 and the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Children make up about half of Gaza’s population. The territory has been under Israeli blockade since 2007, after Hamas took power following a rift within the Palestinian Authority. “Living conditions in Gaza are bleak: 95 percent of the population does not have access to clean water, according to [the United Nations], and electricity shortages periodically bring life to a halt,” my colleagues reported. “The territory has one of the highest unemployment rates in the world, World Bank statistics show, and the United Nations estimates that roughly 80 percent of the population relies on international aid to survive and access basic services.”

The New Arab Street: Online, Global and Growing (NYT) The video traveled at 4G speed, leapfrogging across international borders, social media platforms and social justice movements: a young Palestinian woman in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, shouting in furious English at a Jewish man, “You are stealing my house!” “If I don’t steal it, someone else will steal it,” he retorts. Within days—as Israel bombed the coastal territory of Gaza, Palestinian militants there launched rockets at Israel, and Arab and Jewish mobs faced off in Israeli cities—the video had rocketed from young Palestinians’ social media feeds into the Arab diaspora, then lit up the internet, kindling outrage around the world. It used to be that when Palestinians were under fire, protests would follow in the streets of Arab cities. That potential for combustion forced Middle Eastern and Western leaders to keep a wary eye on the temperature of what was called the “Arab street.” This time, a week into an Israeli bombing campaign that has killed 212 Palestinians in Gaza, the reaction from Arab capitals has been muted and protests small and scattered. Instead, solidarity with the Palestinians has shifted online and gone global, a virtual Arab street that has the potential to have a wider impact than the ones in Middle Eastern cities. The online protesters have linked arms with popular movements for minority rights such as Black Lives Matter, seeking to reclaim the narrative from the mainstream media and picking up support in Western countries that have reflexively supported Israel.

Ransomware hits AXA units in Asia, Irish healthcare (AP) The Thai affiliate of Paris-based insurance company AXA said Tuesday it is investigating a ransomware attack by Russian-speaking cybercriminals that has affected operations in Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong and the Philippines. Meanwhile, a cyberattack on a public health provider in New Zealand took down information systems across five hospitals, forcing staff to cancel some elective surgeries and creating all sorts of other problems. It was unclear if the event was linked to a cyberattack that has nearly paralyzed Ireland’s national healthcare IT systems. The Irish government’s decision not to pay the criminals means hospitals won’t have access to patient records—and must resort mostly to handwritten notes—until painstaking efforts are complete to restore thousands of computer servers from backups.

The Places Ranked Best for Expats in 2021 (Bloomberg) Taiwan, Mexico and Costa Rica have been ranked as the top spots to live and work abroad in 2021, based on their cost of living, ease of settling in and overall quality of life. The U.S. was ranked only 34th out of 59 places, largely because of how expats viewed quality of life in America, according to a new survey published Tuesday. Taiwan topped the charts for the third year in a row in the survey of 12,420 expats conducted by InterNations, a Munich-based expat network with about 4 million members. The top 10: Taiwan, Mexico, Costa Rica, Malaysia, Portugal, New Zealand, Australia, Ecuador, Canada, Vietnam.

[emberbent]

QUESTIONS FOR YOUR OCs

[Originally posted by @cassandrapentayaaaaas, whose name apparently is also Elle, ayyyy. I’ll be filling this out for my Fire Avatar OC Shinza, and maybe also for some other characters later.]

What’s the maximum amount of time your character can sit still with nothing to do?

Previous to her airbending training, Shinza would have had a hard time being still and doing nothing for longer than a few minutes. Not out of a need to burn off energy, but out of a fear of being alone with her thoughts for too long. Now, she can meditate and be still for over an hour, or much longer if she takes short breaks. She sat for eleven hours for her tattoo, which was the longest she’s gone doing nothing.

How easy is it for your character to laugh?

She doesn’t appear to be easily amused - she’s more of a smirker than a laugher if she finds something funny. Unless she’s among people who are close to her, or she’s drinking pear sake.

How do they put themselves to bed at night (reading, singing, thinking?)

Shinza’s one of the lucky ones who falls asleep as soon as she climbs into bed. She doesn’t have to do anything special to fall asleep.

How easy is it to earn their trust?

Hard to say. Maybe moderate? She doesn’t like to reveal much about herself unless she really trusts someone not to abuse that information, which isn’t all that often. She’s self-reliant enough that she doesn’t need others to help her most of the time, which can be seen as untrusting. But really, all it takes is showing compassion and self-awareness to get her to let her guard down.

How easy is it to earn their mistrust?

Fairly easy, since her default mode is not overly trusting.

Do they consider laws flexible, or immovable?

She's always had trouble determining which rules are or should be flexible vs enforced. Now that she’s in a position where she’s more or less exempt from following rules as necessary to keep balance, she’s realizing it’s even more complex than she ever thought. She contemplates often whether she has a duty not to follow the rules she holds others to, or to lead by example and hold herself to those same standards.

What triggers nostalgia for them, most often? Do they enjoy that feeling?

The smell of petrichor mingling with the oily smog of Republic City brings her back to when she was small, and she would walk with her mother, a doctor, every day to the clinic. Her mother would hold her hand, and they’d traverse in silence, except to point out the stray capuchin cats sheltering under the Satos on the street, or Shinza would ask for a treat from the bakery.

What were they told to stop/start doing most often as a child?

Twirling, dancing, spinning around, singing. It wasn’t that her parents discouraged her from these normal activities, but she often didn’t have the presence of mind to refrain in the wrong situations.

Do they swear? Do they remember their first swear word?

Not often; usually to emphasize her point. She distinctly remembers being nine years old and watching someone walk into traffic. A bystander earthbent them out of the way just before a Sato could run them over. She said her first curse word aloud as she rode in a cab with her father. He wasn’t mad.

What lie do they most frequently remember telling? Does it haunt them?

She never got into habitual lying. Too much to remember, too much guilt.

How do they cope with confusion (seek clarification, pretend they understand, etc)?

Lucky for her, she has thousands of past Avatars to talk to. 

How do they deal with an itch found in a place they can’t quite reach?

She has long arms - this isn’t normally an issue.

What color do they think they look best in? Do they actually look best in that color?

Black and shades of red; absolutely.

What animal do they fear most?

Shinza’s not afraid of any animals in a phobia sense, but she does think canyon crawlers are fairly ugly, and she’d hate to meet one.

How do they speak? Is what they say usually thought of on the spot, or do they rehearse it in their mind first?

She thinks before she speaks, but she doesn’t rehearse what she wants to say before the conversation happens. She speaks deliberately and rarely says something she doesn’t mean. 

What makes their stomach turn?

The normal stuff - gore and viscera, bad smells, being anxious or nervous.

Are they easily embarrassed?

Very much so, although she tries not to let it show.

What embarrasses them?

The biggest thing is having her flaws or screw-ups used as an example to a group. She also suffers pretty bad secondhand embarrassment watching others do embarrassing things.

What is their favorite number?

She doesn’t have one.

If they were asked to explain the difference between romantic and platonic or familial love, how would they do so?

She’d explain familial love as distinctly separate from platonic or romantic love in that for her, it comes from a place of duty as well as physical proximity and similarity. Her personality closely matches both of her parents’, so they naturally got along well most of the time, which made them feel close, which she might define as familial love.

She feels there’s very little difference between platonic and romantic love, and that one can easily morph into the other and back. These are based on things outside of physical proximity or biology, like shared interests, a common goal, and sexual attraction. Sometimes it’s as simple as, “I don’t know. I just love them.”

Why do they get up in the morning?

Duty. Responsibility. The sunlight coming in through her window has woken her and she can’t go back to sleep. 

How does jealousy manifest itself in them (they become possessive, they become aloof, etc)?

It manifests as deep sadness and a feeling that there’s a flaw she should fix in herself that will make the situation better. Then it festers into shame for having those emotions or caring at all, and she becomes aloof.

How does envy manifest itself in them (they take what they want, they become resentful, etc)?

She might pine for whatever this other fortunate person has that she doesn’t for a second, but then she shrugs it off.

Is sex something that they’re comfortable speaking about? To whom?

She’s happy to talk about sex in an academic sense with acquaintances, but she’s only comfortable discussing her own experiences with her best friend Nero. Even then, she squirms a little.

What are their thoughts on marriage?

She likes the idea of loving someone so much that you’d enter a legally binding, life-long contract with them, and she certainly sees the financial and social advantages. As to whether she wants to get married herself, she’d be perfectly fine either way.

What is their preferred mode of transportation?

Xia, her dragon companion. Especially now that she’s not afraid of heights or the open air anymore. Plus, they just get each other - no words needed. They had a strong bond from the beginning, but ever since Xia saved Shinza’s ass in Gaoling, Shinza feels closer to her than ever.

What causes them to feel dread?

Knowing that the world is watching every move she makes, and that everything she does (or doesn’t do) will go down in history. Knowing that if she can’t protect herself, she could be the last Avatar.

Would they prefer a lie over an unpleasant truth?

Definitely not. Being lied to is something she has a hard time forgiving, and she’d much rather deal with the ripples of an unpleasant truth than feeling she can’t trust the person keeping the truth from her, and finding out anyway.

Do they usually live up to their own ideals?

No, but Shinza holds herself to impossibly high standards.

Who do they most regret meeting?

Yanyu, the ex-Dai Li agent who her parents hired to block her bending and repress her memories when she was little. Shinza thought Yanyu wanted to meet with her in Gaoling to apologize for her role in letting the world go for so long without its Avatar, but it turned out to be a trap; Yanyu attempted to subdue her and turn her over to The Organization.

Who are they the most glad to have met?

Amrit. She came to him on the Island of the Sun Warriors thinking she was a nonbender, that she couldn’t possibly be the Avatar, and he helped her through that confusion. He unblocked her chi and helped her flame. Maybe he was a little too hard on her during training, but he taught her the value of working til you puke. He’s always had her back, even from the first day.

Do they have a go-to story in conversation? Or a joke?

No. Shinza rarely leads conversations.

Could they be considered lazy?

Not by any stretch. She’s deliberate, diligent, and hard set on doing things right and thoroughly.

How hard is it for them to shake a sense of guilt?

Very, which is detrimental to her role as the Avatar. She doesn’t know yet that she will live with the burden of guilt for her decisions and actions her whole life, or how to be okay with that.

How do they treat the things their friends come to them excited about? Are they supportive?

She’s a supporter and an attentive listener. She does her best to follow up with questions or mention small details later. Unless it’s something like a friend being excited about getting back together with her toxic ex - then she’d be clear about where she stands on the matter. 

Do they actively seek romance, or do they wait for it to fall into their lap?

She’s never sought out romance, but she has experienced and enjoyed it. Romantic love isn’t something she requires to feel happy or validated.

Do they have a system for remembering names, long lists of numbers, things that need to go in a certain order (like anagrams, putting things to melodies, etc)?

She doesn’t have a system - she just remembers things like patterns, numbers, and names. It’s a gift that, oddly enough, she was bullied for in school. Sometimes she forgets that others don’t have such an incredible memory and gets frustrated with them, but she’s working on it.

What memory do they revisit the most often?

Leaving Nero alone at the bar, mouth agape, as two Fire Nation officials all but dragged her out the door with them. She never got to explain to Nero what happened after she figured it all out, and she hasn’t seen her since that day almost two years ago. The guilt eats at her.

How easy is it for them to ignore flaws in other people?

Fairly difficult. She can’t ignore her own flaws, so she’s unable to extend that to others. She’s working on it though, and she’s got Amrit to practice on. No shade tho.

How sensitive are they to their own flaws?

Extremely. She was an only child, so her parents were hawks circling her, watching her every move. They didn’t pick on her on purpose, but it was pretty clear to Shinza that they were disappointed she didn’t go to medical school or join the military. On top of that, she grew up believing she was a nonbender, which culminated in a general, oppressive feeling that she was deeply flawed.

How do they feel about children?

She was an only child and didn’t grow up around her extended family, so she doesn’t have a lot of experience being around kids. Before, she could think of worse things than raising a child of her own. But now, she can’t fathom trying to balance her duties while raising a child.

How badly do they want to reach their end goal?

The shame of leaving the physical and spirit worlds out of balance and being remembered as an ineffective Avatar is unfathomable to her. She’d say she wants it more than anything.

If someone asked them to explain their sexuality, how would they do so?

She’d say she’s sexual, sometimes, and leave it at that.

QUESTIONS FOR CREATORS

A) Why are you excited about this character? 

In every OC, I think there’s at least a little bit of their creator; I didn’t intend for Shinza to end up so similar to myself, but she is. And as I develop my own sense of self, I see that reflected in Shinza when I write her, and that’s pretty exciting.

B) What inspired you to create them? 

I’d been wanting to write an Avatar OC story for a long time, and nothing felt right or fun or exciting until I considered using Shinza, a character I’d had stewing in my head for a while. Once I pictured her in the Avatar world, things started falling into place pretty quickly.

C) Did you have trouble figuring out where they fit in their own story? 

Absolutely. I planned the story from start to finish so I knew where I was headed, but along the way, Emberbent!Shinza started to take shape in unexpected ways and deviate from the original plan. As her personality in this story evolves, I have to figure out her reactions to things, and the ripples from those reactions, from a new perspective. I don’t have a clear view of her transformation arc, because it’s happening in real time along with mine. The (already flimsy) ending I’d intended has been blown to smithereens, and I have no idea how it’ll go - I’m essentially 50% pantsing at this point - but I feel less frustrated knowing I have more room to see what happens.

D) Have they always had the same physical appearance, or have you had to edit how they look? 

She’s had a number of different physical appearances. At one point, she was a monk child in a DND campaign I played in. In the preliminary planning stages of Emberbent, she looked like Nero, her best friend, and was an Earth Avatar.

E) Are they someone you would get along with? Would they get along with you?

I like to think we’d get along, but we’d both have to be okay with natural silence. Neither of us are inclined to lead conversations.

F) What do you feel when you think of your OC (pride, excitement, frustration, etc)?

All of the above. Pride because of how hard she’s worked to get where she is; excitement because of all the horrific and wonderful things she’ll go through to turn her into who she’ll ultimately become; and frustrated because she feels flat to me, so I’m assuming she feels flat to others too.

G) What trait of theirs bothers you the most? 

She can’t see past her own nose yet in terms of her role. It will take some time for her to realize she has to relinquish all of her own desires and happiness to her duty as the Avatar. For now, she’s stuck in selfish-mode, doing her best to help those close to her while trying to maintain her grip on her old ego.

H) What trait do you admire most? 

While she’s still working on seeing things from a broad perspective, she has an innate ability to deeply understand people, their feelings, and the situations they find themselves in. She’ll drop everything in order to help.

I) Do you prefer to keep them in their canon universe? 

Yeah. I’m not into crossover fics... yet.

J) Did you have to manipulate or exclude canon factors to allow them to create their character?

Mmm, I don’t know about manipulating canon, but I definitely extended it and filled in some parts as needed. Since she’s not the Avatar that came directly after Korra, I had to create the character that came between them. And since Shinza’s timeline is well after Korra’s, I had to envision what Republic City and the world would look like 70 years or so in the future.

Edit: Actually, just kidding. I forgot I totally manipulated canon when I figured out a way for Shinza to reconnect with the Avatars before Aang.

[theregoesmylurkerstatus]

The Mighty Nein keep self describing their group as a bunch of “assholes” but now that I think about it, they’ve kind of... won over the vast majority of people they’ve come across who they weren't trying to kill?

They got a wary mob boss to hire them and give them professional trust and leniency. They got an ENEMY SPY in the middle of a mission to speak with them honestly after about five minutes of talking. They got an anti-social, grumpy old wizard who’s house they almost broke into to give them the time of day and the ability to jump in and out of his house. Two of those they just did on a whim.

They were almost hired on by contract for the Empire, officially. They got a hostile Queen from an enemy nation that was at war with the land she assumed they came from to grant them her favour. They got a fucking Pirate King who KNEW that they’d broken pretty much the only rules he (lethally) enforced to let them go. 

All of these people had legitimate reasons to do so -- given that the Nein had done a them favours or proved their competency -- but the fact remains that the Mighty Nein were able to ingratiate themselves. Have consistently been able to wriggle their way out of bad situations not with their skill in battle, but with forthrightness and communication. They've charmed and deceived and negotiated, yeah. But ultimately what that means is that people were won over by them, by their arguments and gestures of good faith. Because most of these are ongoing connections they’ve made. They didn’t just sweet talk in the moment, they’ve maintained these relationships in some capacity. Very few could have made those relationships in the first place.

How many friends have they made, now? Shakaste, Nila, Twiggy, Keg, Calianna, all out there somewhere. Kiri, Kiri’s adopted family, Bryce, Rissa and her father Cleff, Gustav, Orly. How many allies? Yussah, Essik, potentially Ophelia and the Gentlemen, perhaps Dairon if they don’t step on each other’s toes, Waccoh if they stay on her good side. They’ve gotten guest PCs they’ve met to be willing to die for them (Twiggy and Keg, most notably). Of course, that’s partially just due to the nature of the game, but in-universe the point stands.

Calianna’s letter is what got me thinking about all this. She points out, very correctly, that though they’re suspicious and not terribly polite, they give pretty much everyone the time of day and effort at the slightest incentive. And yet they never think people like them in particular.

They’ve gotten on just about everyone they’ve encountered’s good side, somehow, which is impressive, but they don’t seem to realize anyone is going to continue looking at them with anything other than annoyance or tolerance. There were a lot of great metas floating around over the last week discussing (or just joking) about how they were so close to running last week after a single screw up, and in the end the Bright Queen... thanked them for what they’d already done, instead of punishing them from their failure like they expected.

The Nein think they have to prove, over and over and over again to the same people, that they’re competent and useful and not liabilities. Because otherwise they’ll be tossed aside at the slightest provocation. 

Of course, that’s not news. We’ve known this whole time that they have these issues because it’s pretty obvious in how they interact with one another. It’s taken them this long for them to come to terms, individually, with the fact that people within the Nein actually like them. Hell, that lesson still may have not sunk in all the way! But they clearly still think that no one outside the group will want them around them for any length of time. They think they have to go above and beyond to prove that they’re trustworthy, all the time, and still assume they’re on thin ice. It doesn’t even occur to them that people might find them likeable in any capacity (excluding, of course, Caduceus and Jester. Everyone likes Caduceus and Jester.)

I’m not saying that’s not the case. They’ve had to prove themselves to many, many people, and if they hadn’t then most of these connections probably wouldn’t exist at all. They’re on shaky territory with many of their allegiances. But the fact that they’ve made them at all speaks to them NOT being nearly as bad at gaining trust and good will as they all seem to think. Their general attitude is that these are a series of flukes that will inevitably collapse, and not a pattern that speaks to their general reputation. They think they’re bullshitting their way through everything, and while they may be making it up as they go along, they’ve actually been pretty honest and rather lacking in ill intent, exercising and improving a decent personable front. And the people around them can see that, and have potentially formed favourable opinions from that.

The default, patented Mighty Nein assumption is “we’re skating by.” Yes, Caduceus, you’re right, none of the rest of them HAVE had the experience of being trusted to do the right thing. Not only that, it straight up doesn’t occur to them that they ever could be. It’s a surprise when anyone says anything positive about them aside from “they can do their jobs.” That people might reluctantly find them charming, if they’re not actively trying to seem that way? That people might grow fond of them, value them? There’s a constant clock ticking in most of their heads, counting down until they inevitably burn any and all bridges they’ve made.

I don’t believe any of the Nein realized the impression they’d made on Calianna until that letter. That they might not only have done the bare minimum, but actually raised her bar for how she’d like to be treated. That (shocker) they might actually be... better, and kinder, than the average person.

(And, well. Why would they? Fjord, bullied and outcast his whole life, eyed with suspicion, tolerated at best. Beau, scolded and outcast her whole life, having her own parents fail to give her positive attention, lacking almost entirely for friends and role models. Nott, bullied and outcast her whole life (are we noticing a patten here?), first by her own community and family, then by a community she hated. Caleb, trained up as a ruthless weapon, discarded when no longer useful, locked up alone for a decade, and (you guessed it) outcast once he was free. Jester, alone and sheltered, friendless for all but her most recent months of life, forced out of the only place she’d ever lived under threat of death for a single silly mistake. Yasha! Has never mentioned friends! Lost her only loved one! Kicked out of her only known home. And then Caduceus. Who came from a big family who seems to have loved him, was given legitimate responsibilities, and feels comfortable within them. Is any of this a mystery? Why would most of the Nein EVER expect people to want them around? They never have before.)

I feel like I’m not necessarily saying anything unique here. But I often wonder what people think of the Nein as a whole, and while “crazy” and “competent” are the popular answers (and I’m sure they’re true), “liked” or “thought well of” to ANY degree generally isn’t up there. Certainly not among the Nein themselves. And yet positive inclinations towards them (from Essik, and Calianna, and many others) are perhaps not such uncommon reactions, regardless.

Am I wrong? Are they actually generally disliked or considered annoying? Possibly. It’s hard to know the inner workings of most NPC’s heads. But they certainly have gained better reactions than they give themselves credit for. And the dislike they seem to assume as the default is maybe not as much of a default as they think.

[bulksinfo-blog]

20+ Popular Social media Sites List

Are you looking for some popular social media sites list on the internet? If it is you you have come to the right place.

By default human nature has always been social. He cannot live alone. Inevitably he feels the need and requirement of others to communicate and to survive in life. Here comes the importance of social media. You find some people are more active on the internet while others are less.

This article is going to deal with such 20+ popular social media sites list or free social networking sites.

Let's begin first.

20+ Popular Social media Sites List

1 Facebook

Facebook comes first in the most popular social media sites list on the internet. In these days who doesn't have an account on Facebook? It has become the most popular and most used free social networking sites. That is why I have put it in the very first.

Aside from the capacity to coordinate with companions and relatives, you can likewise get to various Facebook applications to sell on the web and you can even market or advance your business, image, and items by utilizing paid Facebook advertisements.

Apart from that, Facebook is also flooded with a huge base of information and news which are very useful and broadens our knowledge.

Having an account on Facebook slightly feels like celebs. You post your photos on Facebook and your followers and friends start hitting like button and giving reactions and comments.

2. YouTube

YouTube is another popular social media site that aims to help people to share their videos with other users worldwide over the internet.

After Facebook YouTube is the second most searched social media site on the internet.

Millions of people today have turned to YouTube as a mean for earning money online. Thankfully a lot of people has emerged out successfully in the field of YouTube. They not only have become popular but also earns a decent amount of money just from YouTube.

[su_note note_color="#f8f1bc"]Currently, the number of people uses YouTube is 1,300,000,000.[/su_note]

3. WhatsApp

In spite of having been obtained by Facebook in 2014, right now this reliable application exists as an autonomous element in the heart of many users.

Although it arrived quite later than Facebook still it could be able to create a trust and faith in the minds of millions of users worldwide.

WhatsApp claims the messages you send to your contacts are end-to-encrypted. That means between you and receiver no one will be able to notice what you're sending making it thus one of the most reliable social media sites ever.

You can send text messages, share contents like images, videos, audios and more. Plus the video calling feature and the recently added stickers are really cool highlights that I love the most! What do you think?

4. Tumblr

Having been possessed by Yahoo since 2013, Tumblr fills in as a web-based life cum micro-blogging stage that can be utilized to search and follow things that you like.

You can likewise utilize it to post anything, including mixed media, to a short-structure blog. In addition, it gives you the adaptability to tweak nearly everything.

5. Instagram

This is another free social networking site ranks good in the popular social media sites list.

It has been launched completely aiming at sharing phone and videos over the internet.

Instagram enables you to click some best and memorable moments of your life, filters them and share them on the wall. Side by side if you can too post your images on other social sites like Facebook   Twitter, Tumblr, etc. and show off your works of art.

Like Facebook, WhatsApp you can find on Instagram some recent updates and features. I will write on it very soon. Stay with us by subscribing our newsletter.

6. Twitter

Twitter is another aspect of social networking media that enables you to convey your text messages (tweets) to the world in a nutshell. You can connect to the whole work by just twitting some text within limited characters (up to 140) and thus can open your heart as well as share your feelings to people across the globe.

7. Sina Weibo

This is a profoundly mainstream microblogging social stage in China that is known for its crossover blend of Twitter's and Facebook's highlights.

Weibo utilizes referencing and conversing with different registrants utilizing the "@UserName" group, hashtags with #s and reposts of interactive media content.

Posts incorporate photographs, pictures, emojis, music, video clasps and content with a 140-character limit. Weibo additionally has strung remarks and talk work.

Famous individuals and organizations are given a confirmation identification badge on their accounts.

The internet-based life webpage rewards registrants with virtual cash called Weibi, which is earned through posting or by utilizing genuine money. Clients can utilize Weibi for online Sina Weibo amusements.

8. VK

According to Wikipedia, VK.com is the URL for VKontakte, the most popular social network site in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.

On account of its plan and usefulness, VKontakte is frequently professed to be a clone of Facebook, obliging a comparable idea, yet additionally an equivalent plan of action. Notwithstanding, its fuse of different highlights makes it increasingly like YouTube, Pandora, and MySpace folded into one, with an interface profoundly reminiscent of Facebook.

The majority of the site's users are college and university school pupils. Notwithstanding, as the site's prevalence builds, an ever-increasing number of individuals are joining, a considerable lot of whom are young people of different age gatherings.

9. Google Plus

Launched on June 28, 2011 google plus is one of another social media sites that enable you to upload your images, contents, videos and more as well as to share them with others.

Google announced shutting down of google plus due to a major flaw. The choice of closing google plus pursues the disclosure of a formerly undisclosed security blemish that uncovered clients' profile information that was remedied in March 2018.

[su_note note_color="#f8f1bc"]Besides low engagements and low users are two big reasons that led Google Plus close their services.[/su_note]

10. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is effectively a standout amongst the most prominent expert long range informal communication destinations or applications and is accessible in more than 20 languages.

It is utilized over the globe by a wide range of experts and fills in as a perfect stage to associate with various organizations, find and contract perfect applicants, and that's only the tip of the iceberg.

It brags more than 400 million individuals. It is truly a wonderful social site for making good connection related to your niche.

11. LINE

Somewhat like WhatsApp, LINE is an all-inclusive social media site that empowers you to share photographs, recordings, instant text messages and even audio files and other documents. Moreover, it enables you to make voice and video calls whenever of the day just like WhatsApp.

12. Telegram

Similar to WhatsApp, Telegram is another instant messaging app that allows you to share photos, video recordings, audio files and other documents on any time of the day.

One thing to note that in respect to security and privacy Telegram has always been strict.

read more

[primortravel]

New Post has been published on https://primortravel.com/find-work-exchange-opportunities-abroad/

Find Work Exchange Opportunities Abroad

Volunteering has long been a way for thrifty travelers to experience new cultures while helping to make the world a better place.

The challenge has always been how to find organizations you can trust.

Enter Worldpackers, a platform that connects travelers with vetted volunteer opportunities in more than 140 countries.

In this Worldpackers review, we’ll take a closer look at what the service has to offer and how you, too, can find work exchange opportunities abroad.

Discount Offer

But first, if you’re familiar with Worldpackers and ready to find volunteer work, you can save $10 on an annual membership (starting at $49) by clicking the button below.

The membership fee does *not* auto-renew by default. So you can pay now and not worry about getting charged again if you choose not to continue.

Membership fees support the administrative costs of running a platform that makes it easy for travelers to find volunteer jobs.

If you haven’t heard about Worldpackers yet, continue reading to learn more.

About Worldpackers

Worldpackers is a collaborative community that connects travelers with volunteer opportunities around the world.

Trade your skills, time, and energy for a place to stay and possibly more, including meals and local activities.

It’s a chance to give back to local communities, whether it’s a destination you have an affinity for from a previous visit or are there for the first time.

Top destinations include:

United States

Mexico

Costa Rica

Brazil

Thailand

Spain

Italy

These also happen to be some of the most popular backpacking destinations too.

You can make a volunteer experience the primacy focus of a trip or incorporate it into a long journey to one or more of these countries.

Worldpackers was founded by two friends, Riq Lima and Eric Faria. Riq left an investment banking career to travel the world for four years.

Eric, an accountant, moved to the USA to learn English and ended up working at a hostel in San Diego (excellent choice!) before helping to found “International Travellers House, a hostel chain located in California and whose staff was made up entirely of volunteers.”

They both lived a life of travel before they began Worldpackers and saw a need for an online platform to connect travelers with volunteer and work opportunities safely.

How it Works

Sign-Up Process

Signing up on the Worldpackers website is free and easy. It’ll allow you to get familiar with how it works and to begin scoping out potential opportunities.

To register for free, click the “Join Community” button on the home page and choose to sign up with your email address or Facebook account.

When using email, you’ll also be asked for your name, gender (he, she, neutral), and date of birth.

You’ll have the chance to opt-in (or out) of receiving host recommendations, “travel tips, inspiring stories, and upcoming opportunities.”

The next screen asks for your nationality and current location (city, country), information that’s used to help connect you with potential hosts.

Search

Then it’s on to define, in broad terms, what kind of experience you’d prefer.

There are three types of trips:

Work Exchanges, where you trade your skills/expertise for free accommodation.

Social Impact, working with non-governmental organizations (NGOs), schools, and social programs.

Eco Program, where you may live on a farm or participate in agricultural projects.

Then, choose your travel interests, such as professional or personal development, solo or couples travel, English or Spanish practice, backpacking, or digital nomadism.

Now the fun part, which part of the world do you want to explore?

Pick a region that inspires you to want to get up and go! South America has the most experience, followed by Europe and Asia.

And lastly, choose the ways you can help out, which include (but are not limited to):

Welcoming and helping guests (think hostel reception).

Building and hands-on chores.

Communications and marketing.

Eco-activities.

You’ll then be shown opportunities that take your preferences into account.

Search results page

Results

The search results page has two columns. On the left, there are options to refine your search, including preferred timeframe and skills.

On the right, there are snippets of the work exchange and volunteer opportunities.

An effort was made to make the website easy to use and navigate. Information is easy to find and read. It’s well laid out and not too busy.

I saw many opportunities, including a homestay helping with dogs and a family (think au pair), farm stays, working at a children’s refuge in Mexico, and hostel jobs.

The opportunities to volunteer and work abroad in exchange for free accommodation are seemingly endless.

One of the best features of the Worldpackers platform is the ability to read reviews from people who previously volunteered at a place you’re considering.

Not only can you see their star ratings and written reviews about the experience, but you can also reach out and ask them questions directly!

Worldpackers vets their hosts; however, nothing can beat direct and private feedback from those who previously spent time with the hosts.

If you want to make sure your time is well spent, make the most of this option and ask any specific questions.

Just make sure the answers aren’t already available to you on the listing or in the written reviews. Nobody wants to feel like their time is being wasted.

Is WorldPackers Safe?

This is all well and good, but you may be wondering if Worldpackers is safe?

How can you trust that you won’t be taken advantage of, or worse, harmed?

These are important questions, especially for women. And the founders know it.

That’s why they’ve put into place a layered approach to ensuring the safety of volunteers. The Travel Safely page on the Worldpackers website outlines their safeguards.

Hosts are verified by WorldPackers before they can join the platform.

Formal agreements are signed by hosts and volunteers before a trip occurs. This contract spells out expectations and responsibilities to ensure both parties are on the same page before anyone goes anywhere.

Host and volunteers leave community reviews after each experience, as you see on Couchsurfing and Airbnb.

You can reach out to past volunteers for any given host to ask questions not answered in the profiles or public reviews.

If for any reason you need to leave your host unexpectedly, WP Insurance means Worldpackers will help you find a new one, or they’ll pay for three nights at a hostel in the same city.

Lastly, there’s this:

“Reports that compromise the physical, moral, and/or psychological integrity of hosts or travelers may lead to profile deactivation in order to keep our community safe for collaboration.”

— Worldpackers

When it comes to online communities, the potential loss of access to the platform and opportunities it affords is one of the best safeguards to ensuring people behave responsibly.

How much does it cost?

While you can search Worldpackers’ opportunities for free, you’ll need to join as a paying member to contact the hosts about potential stays.

The good news is it’s incredibly affordable. Ridiculously cheap, in my opinion.

Just think about how much you stand to save by getting hooked up with free accommodation in major cities worldwide (or farms, if you prefer nature).

$49 – Solo trips for one year

$59 – Couples / friends for one year

$99 – Pack (includes access to online courses for travel planning and becoming a digital nomad, a $78 value)

If you’re ready to sign up for Worldpackers, you can save $10 by clicking the button below.

The discount will automatically be applied to the membership of your choice.

And remember, you’ll only be charged for one year, so you have the option to decide whether to renew without automatically being billed again.

______

This article was brought to you in partnership with Worldpackers. Go Backpacking is an affiliate, and we’ll receive a small commission at no extra cost if you sign up as a member. This helps to support our site.

Dave is the Founder and Editor in Chief of Go Backpacking and Feastio, a food blog. He’s been to 65 countries and lived in Colombia and Peru. Originally from New York, Dave now calls Austin, TX home. Read the complete story of how he became a pro travel blogger.

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[monsterwayne-blog1]

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer or an accountant. This is not legal advise. Don't act like an idiot and use just anything you come across without studying it first. I am not going to go into crazy amounts of details 'cause this is really informal information. I am willing to put down more if you guys want me to. This is only in reference to American estate planning strategies. There are parallels to the American system and others; if you choose to use this information you do so on your own accord and I am not responsible if you get it wrong.

Lets move on.

We have a system that uses voluntarism by default. Think of it as the hardware. There are tools that if used properly act as legal 'upgrades' to this hardware. They offer asset protection. To date this can be pushed to such extremes as someone earning a taxable income of $1 per year while maintaining a multi-million dollar company. It doesn't sound fair because it is not fair.

These tools are legal relationships and entities that if used properly allow you to keep all assets acquired over your lifetime. What is actually present is not my concern. My concern is that people understand this for what it is. It is republicanism in its purest form. You keep your assets and choose how they are used throughout your life, too your ends. It is a tool for extreme economic individualism. A tool. (Insert hammer: show pictures of murder or construction)

I'de like to take a moment to say: I hate people who gate-keep. Its a shit way to live your life.

You use debt to start companies and provide services, those services provide income, income is used to build wealth, wealth is derived from assets that continually provide income, that wealth is held in a business, this business needs to be a legal entity, this business exists inside of a legal trust, you do not own this wealth, you control this wealth. This structure is what moves debt into wealth in one direction. *In America you must draw a salary from a business you own. You can choose your net worth if in possession of a successful business. *This system has losers. The difference being an amount of general literacy and "proper" rearing.

This is the simplest explanation I can provide without getting into so much detail that I lose your attention.

I don't want to be a self-righteous futurist or armchair scholar. I want you to be free. These tools on the surface are unpleasant and out right destructive to socialized systems of credit. The structure being reared for personalized systems of credit helps this view along. But when you apply these tools to communities? Cities? Entire states? A country? One planet?

I want to make sure your not confused. What I am talking about is creating an estate plan. When using these tools in knowledgeable ways with others in your community, you build the legal contract that builds the foundation for your legal communication with the state. You change your relationship with "authority" and how it is aloud to approach you by it's own admission. You change whether or not your wealth should be used in ways that you may or may not agree with. This is authority. This is republicanism and strategic resource management working hand in hand with a competent, informed, and humane population.

There are families and communities that have already done this. They have been doing it for centuries. If we are to compete with people that are above the need for competition, we have to stop competing with each other.

Thank you for your time. If you liked this and would like to read more of my work give me a like and if you want to add to the conversation add a comment. Don't fucking spam. I would like to do videos on this platform as well but don't have the funds. If you guys could help me, that be cool. I do have an amazon wish-list and if any richfags want to help me that would be welcome. I don't have the luxury of being indirect. I need help

[teshknowledgenotes]

THE GAMBLER – WILLIAM C REMPEL – NOTES

WHY?

Jay Vasantharajah recommended this book, I read his blog post about it and wanted to learn more.

THOUGHTS 

Crazy how far Kirk got in life financially, just by using leverage, loans and moving his money around avoiding bankruptcy and just being fearless taking out loan after loan and buying more profitable businesses.

Chapter 1

Kirk nurses a small charter air service through cycles of hard times after the war, until selling his company for a windfall fortune. But the gambler decided to bet it all on some kind of capitalist trifecta. Suddenly, he was on business news pages across the country risking huge sums in a puzzling range of eclectic markets. He called it “the leisure industry”.

On the West Coast he moved to control America's oldest commercial airline. In New York and Hollywood he waged a takeover battle for the faltering but fabled MGM Studios. In Las Vegas he built the world's biggest hotel – despite a secret campaign to stop him by rival Howard Hughes, the country's richest man. At the same time, Kirk snatched Bugsy Siegel's Flamingo casino out from under decades of mob control. He mad Elvis Presley a Vegas icon.

Overnight he was a major player in the movie, resorts, and gaming industries. Friends would call him a “deal junkie”, addicted to financial thrills, whether at a craps table or at the negotiating table. Two more times he would build the world's biggest hotel. In business as in gambling, Kirk believed there was no point in placing small bets.

In later years he would shake up the automobile industry with separate takeover bids for each of the Big Three carmakers.

There were no tycoons in Kirk's family tree. His immigrant father an illiterate farmer and fruit peddler, was in constant financial trouble. Kirk learned English and how to brawl growing up in Los Angeles. Eviction was a recurring family predicament. He said he studied in the school of hard knocks. It turned out to be an advanced course in survival and the value of trust, loyalty and hard work.

He avoided press interviews most of his life, making him appear reclusive. He hated being compared to the hermit like Howard Hughes, whom he otherwise admired. Kirk had a thriving social life with celebrity friends and business associates among them Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Tony Curtis. He was often noted in news and gossip columns attending charity and other public events. He double-dated with Cary Grant, and their families vacationed together.

Kirk was soft-spoken and understated with a paralyzing fear of public speaking. Kirk wanted his name on nothing – not on buildings, not on street signs, not even on his personal parking spot at MGM Studios. And Kirk never defaulted on a loan and always regarded his handshake as a binding contract.

Kirk travelled without an entourage. He carried his own bags and drove his own car, typically a Ford Taurus or Jeep Cherokee. He jogged the streets of Beverly Hills and walked to lunches without a bodyguard. He refused comps, personally paying for meals and rooms even at his own hotels. Once after a business trip to New York, Kirk was halfway to La Guardia Airport when he ordered his driver back into the city. He had forgotten to tip the maids at The Pierre Hotel.

He gave away millions to charity and to people in need on the strict condition that his gifts were kept secret. When his donations grew into the tens of millions, he formed a charitable foundation. It gave away more than a billion dollars, much of it to his ancestral homeland after a deadly earthquake. In Armenia, Kirk Kerkorian is regarded as one of the saints, but at his insistence there are no monuments to his lavish generosity.

“Never look back” Kirk liked to counsel. But in the end, he reflected on what mattered most in his life. It was neither his successes nor his disappointments. It was the thrill of the risk. “Life is a big craps game,” he told the Los Angeles Times “I've got to tell you, it's all been fun.”

Chapter 2: The Kid From The Weedpatch

The Kerkorian family's financial collapse and forced relocation to Los Angeles would be among the arliest and most unsettling memories of young Kerkor's life. It also ushered in prolonged periods of uncertainty that would extend more than a decade deep into the Great Depression. Missed rent payments and evictions, sometimes as often as every three months, repeatedly uprooted the family and made the boy a new kid in a new neighbourhood over and over again.

There were lessons to be learned from adapting and re-adapting to sudden changes, unfamiliar surroundings, and frequent disappointments. The bond growing from shared struggles and distress “us against the world” fostered fierce family loyalt and underscored the value of friendships over possessions.

But all the moves were also chances for Kerkor to reinvent himself. A first step was to Americanize his name. In the big city, Kerkor became Kirk. And the farm boy who arrived in Southern California speaking only Armenian had to learn English on the streets of Los Angeles.

By age nine Kirk was hawking the Evening Express on street corners, making about fifty cents a day and turning over pocketfuls of pennies to help support his family. His earliest experience with gambling was pitching pennies and bottle caps with fellow newsies.

Ahron tried to stay in the farm business as a produce broker. For a time he had his own fruit stand near what is now Universal Studios at the intersection of Ventura and Lankershim Boulevards. With another Armenian neighbour he started a produce-hauling business, trucking fruit to the city from the San Joaquin Valley over the Tehachapi Mountains. Kirk's older sibling, sometimes including sister Rose, drove the notoriously steep and winding Ridge Route over the mountains. The family enterprise ended after one summer growing season. The trucks were repossessed.

In his teen years Kirk came to regard his father as a heroic figure. Ahron was the man who had sailed to America in steerage, landed in California without a dime, built that million dollar agriculture empire and then lost it all, but who never stopped working hard and dreaming big. And he managed all the ups and downs despite the handicap of illiteracy, with what Kirk always regarded as “two strikes against him”

With perhaps a mix of pride and chagrin, he would later describe his father as “a big, rough man who didn't take anything from anybody” But Kirk and his father shared an important gambler's trait – a degree of comfort with risk.

One of Ahron's biggest scores came when he cornered the watermelon market in the Imperial Valley east of San Diego. Summer in that desert like area had been uncommonly cool and overcast. Watermelon farmers accustomed to sunny days with temperatures well over one hundred degrees feared cucumber sized crops and financial ruin. Many opted to cut their losses by suspending irrigation and saving on water costs.

Ahron saw opportunity. He scraped together every dollar from his fruit stand business and drove more than two hundred miles to El Centro. He had enough cash to get an audience with just about every farmer in the region. Few could resist. Ahron found as many takers as he had cash for buyouts.

As gambles go, it wasn't like Ahron was shooting craps or wagering on pure chance. He was betting on the weather, something familiar to the farmer from Weedpatch. His was a big risk, but a smart bet. When the sun finally came out in the Imperial Valley, Ahron ended up with truckloads of big, ripe melons in the midst of a region-wide watermelon shortage. His watermelon jackpot was an $18,000 profit, a twenty-first century equivalent of about $250,000.

Flush with cash, the family moved into a bigger house in a better neighbourhood just west of the University of Southern California. Ahron bought a new car, invested in new business opportunities, and saw his small fortune once again ebb steadily away. Frequent family moves resumed all too soon.

Kirk discovered early in those vagabond years that every new neighbourhood and every new schoolyard was likely to be his own personal testing ground. His shy nature and slender build made him an easy target for bullies. But he was also scrappy and determined never to back down, even when the odds and the sizes of his tormentors were against him. Kirk became something of a legend among pals after a beating he suffered one afternoon on his way home from school.

A kid had beaten him up four days in a row. What Kirk noticed, even in defeat, was that each time they fought, the bully was a little less aggressive. What the bully noticed, even in triumph, was that Kirk was getting to be a serious nuisance. For Kirk, the contest was a matter of honour. For the bully, it was increasingly a chore. He was losing heart. Finally, Kirk was the last boy standing. The bully gave up. The fights stopped and they wound up being best of buddies.

Public school held little interest for Kirk and in all the family moves he was falling behind other boys his age academically. He was a bright enough student, but he was bored by the repetition of math. One of his worst subject: geography. To Kirk the world was pretty small. He never travelled outside the two hundred mile stretch of California separating his Los Angeles home from his Fresno birthplace.

Chapter 4: Scraps, Craps, And John Wayne

With the war's end in sight by spring of 1945, the aviators of the RAF Ferry Command were increasingly aware that the end was also near for the extraordinary adventure they had ll shared for the most exciting two years that Kirk, for one, could ever have imagined.

Besides providing an enormous boost to the war effort, in particular Britain's domination of the air, another far-reaching contribution by the Ferry Command was the opening of new air routes for commercial aviation. The so-called polar route was tamed, and years ahead of it's time, thanks to the pioneering experiences of intrepid wartime aviators, Kirk Kerkorian among them.

In the end, many of the Ferry Command pilots lookd for ways to stick together after the war. Some shared dreams of starting their own airline. They would need seed money for such a venture.

Kirk, like several of his buddies, reached into his pocket to ante up a starter fund. The price to get into this game, one thousand dollars each.

Kirk returned to Los Angeles knowing only that he wanted to fly and that he had to be his own boss. In a matter of days, he set up a pilot training school at Vail Field in Montebello, a msall oil town just east of the city. He was a teacher again, specializing in helping licensed pilots obtain instrument ratings as required by commercial airlines.

The booming aviation business needed large numbers of instrument-rated commercial pilots, so Kirk's flight school roster was quickly filled. Within weeks the business was turning a reliable profit. But there was no excitement, no adrenaline rush. The teacher was bored with teaching.

Chapter 5: On A Wing And A Spare Tank

Kirk wanted his own airline his own fleet of planes, his own company. He watched pilots from the Pacific war zone combine fores to launch a cargo service named after their volunteer fighter unit, the Flying Tigers. A similar dream shared by his fellow RAF Ferry Command pilots never got off the ground. But Kirk was still dreaming.

One way he could build capital fast was in the surplus military plane market. The versatile twin-engineer C-47 “Gooney Bird” better known to civilians as the DC-3, was in especially big demand among new and expanding freight haulers from Alaska to South America. Fleets of planes coated in olive drab paint were parked all over Hawaii, stranded at war's end by a fuel range limiting them to island hopping or a maximum of five hundred miles.

Kirk had a plan. He bought seven of the planes stranded in Hawaii each worth at least double its purchase price if he could get it to the U.S. Mainland. And doubled again for any plane he ferried all the way down to Rio de Janeiro. He was figuring on profits that in 2018 dollars ranged from about $90,000 to $250,000 per plane. Kirk was back in ferrying business, this time as a broker of scrapped and surplus planes – gambling on the used aircraft market his own ability to fly just about anything with wings.

Now the only he had to do was get those short-range planes from Honolulu to San Francisco across twenty-four hundred miles of ocean.

Fall 1946, Honolulu, Hawaii. Kirk had paid $12000 for the first C-47 he intended to fly to the mainland. He had more than one customer already waiting. In fact, he had likely customers lined up from Hollywood to Rio to buy just about all hi surplus planes, sight unseen. And this on was a sight, with more than its share of dents and scuffs and that tired military drab paint job. But like the teenager who restored used cars, Kirk figured he could always give it a good steam cleaning and a fresh set of “newer” wheels. Far more critical was expanding the Gooney Bird's fuel range.

Kirk went on to deliver most of his surplus acquisitions personally and without drama. His partnership was with a Brazilian flier in Rio added to his international reputation an an aircraft trader. That is, until Kirk flew down to visit his money. Most of it had disappeared without proper accounting.

It was a hard lesson to learn about sloppy accounting and partnerships with strangers, and the drawbacks of conducting business by the seat of his pants. There wasn't enough cash left over in Brazil to fight about. Kirk walked out “Take it and shove it” he said and returned to California where he went into business with his best friend, his sister Rose Pechuls. She had recently divorced, ending a marriage in which her husband chafed at feeling inadequate compared to Rose's high regard for her brother Kirk.

When a small charter airline at Los Angeles Municipal Airport went on the market in 1947, Kirk and Rose bought it a three-plane fleet with a DC-3, a twin-engine Cessna, and a single engine Beechcraft. Kirk put up most of the $60,000 purchase price after borrowing $15000 from the Montebello branch of Bank Of America. Rose invested an additional $5000 and managed the office.

Chapter 7: Art Of The Junk Deal

Life in the nonscheduled airline business remained filled with uncertainties, many from federal regulations intended to protect competing commercial carriers. The Civil Aeronautics Board(CAB), which once encourage expansion of charter services, came under increasing pressure to crack down on their intrusions into profitable commercial routes.

Kirk figured his run of good luck wasn't going to last indefinitely. He started cashing in some of his chips. Over the next year and a half he sold off some of his biggest planes, including the Californian.

His $100,000 cattle scow went to Northeast Airlines for the remarkable price of $340,000 and that was without the used passenger seats. The inveterate scrap dealer sold those separately. That transaction produced a milestone for the thirty five year old entrepreneur. For the first time, Kirk's annual income broke $100,000. He also learned a lesson: pilots don't make big money, business men do.

With proceeds from his downsizing moves, Kirk was able to pay off his bank loans, buy out sister Rose's interest, and reorganize the company. Business operations were split into two ventures, the charter service and his used plane trade. The trimmed down airline could go dormant periodically, subject to the economy's ebb and flow of the shifting burdens of CAB regulation. But his used plane brokering and bartering business never closed, keeping Kirk especially happy and financially sound. We must've traded sixty planes in those days, he once estimated.

Chapter 8: Gambling On Gambling

A decade after the war, hotel and casino development in Las Vegas was still booming. Old Route 91, the Los Angeles-Las Vegas Highway was now called the Strip, where sprawling new resorts replaced barren sandlots. Seven busy casinos lit up black desert nights, and twice as many more were already in development. As University Of Nevada gaming historian David G. Schwartz described those heady days: “It looked like opening a successful Las Vegas casino was as easy as tripping and hitting the ground”

Everyone wanted in on action from Midwest mobsters to investment managers at the Teamsters Union pension fund, from real estate developers to car dealers, from actors like the Marx Brothers and Pat O'Brien to an aviator like Kirk Kerkorian.

As a gambler himself, Kirk knew better than most the fundamentals of a casino business model: customers come in all day and night to throw money at the owners. And they love doing it... win or lose. Kirk consistently lost more than he won yet visits to Vegas “the best times” of his life. “I was just overwhelmed by the excitement of the town”

He accumulate many friends among casino owners and managers. One of them was Marion Hicks, an energetic L.A. Real estate developer who built the El Cortez Hotel in downtown Las Vegas and then the Thunderbird on the Strip. During his many commutes with Kirk, Hicks had opportunities to share some of his hard earned wisdom.

Banks in the 1940's and 1950's did not make loans to casinos for anything least of all to fund shortfalls at the cashier's cage. To cover the huge payout, Hicks and Jones turned to Lansky, “the mob's accountant”. In return for a briefcase full of cash, Lansky extracted a significant share of casino ownership and a job for his brother. Jake Lanksy not only got an executive's title but also the casino's best place to park his black Cadillac, just outside the Thunderbird offices.

Hicks introduced his dancer to Kirk at the casino bar. They were very different. He was a financially comfortable divorce in his mid thirties, she was never married and barely ld enough to rink. He was intense but shy, she was an outgoing, confident performer with a touch of blunt spoken candor like Kirk's sister Rose. He was deeply tanned with black hair, she was pale and fair-haired. So, of course they fell in love. After a two year romance, Kirk took out a marriage license in Los Angeles County and set a wedding date. Kirk was thirty seven and Jean was twenty three.

As Kirk once again was feeling lucky in love, he tried to extend that streak into business, this time the gambling business. A surge in new casino openings promised to make 1955 the biggest year ever for Las Vegas expansion. Some friends were offering to let Kirk buy in to one of thew new ones, he could own a percentage of the Dunes.

Originally envisioned as the Middle Eastern themed Araby, the Dunes opened beneath a roof mounted and lighted thirty five foot fibre glass figure of a sultan. It was on prime property kitty-corner across the Strip from the Flamingo. It boasted the widest stage in town, room for forty chorus girls, and the country's biggest swimming pool. What it didn't have, apparently, was experienced casino management and seasoned resort staff.

The timing was unfortunate, too. Four other hotel casinos opened within a matter of weeks, with two more in advanced stages of development. There was a glut in the making. Life Magazine published a cover story questioning whether Las Vegas was growing too fast.

All the new resort operations struggled that summer. Still, Kirk submitted an application to state gaming regulators seeking approval to buy 3 percent of the Dunes. He was wiling to pay up to $150,000. He listed himself as an airplane dealer and easily passed regulatory review. After an investigation, Kirk was authorized to buy his first casino point (a one percentage share) for $50,000. But the business was too far gone to be salvaged by his late investment.

It's timing is everything this deal had nothing going for it. “They were in such bad shape” Kirk later conceded.

The Dunes managed to stay open (unlike some others), but it went through a rapid series of ownership changes that left Kirk's equity share absolutely worthless. The good news for Kirk was that he lost only $50,000. But it was a bitter lesson. “I learned then not to invest in a business I didn't run”

Chapter 10: A Crapshooter's Dream

Los Angeles Air Service had expanded to operate out of Burbank and Los Angeles and adopted a new name – Trans International Airlines (TIA), reflecting its more ambitious global intentions

Kirk's latest brainchild was a big, bold, and risky plan that could make or break his charter business stakes perversely big enough to excite the small business owner. With commercial airlines all switching their fleets to jetliners, Kirk wanted his to be the first supplemental service to own one. He wanted to buy a state-of-the-art four-engine jet-propelled DC-8. And for that he needed at least $5 million.

It turned out to be an especially difficult challenge to buy a perfectly fine prop plane on the glutted used plane market for a million to a million and a half. That was more easily in Tran International Airline's range. It net annually profits hovered around a quarter of a million dollars. But TIA's corporate value was far from sufficient to secure a loan in the stratospheric neighbourhood of $5 million.

Commercial banks were particularly leery  of edging out on any limb with supplemental air carriers for fear the CAB might abruptly change its rules and shut down a profitable route or service. Regulators had done just that to TIA's California-Hawaii service the year before.

Kirk was getting signals from just about everyone that he might be out of his league, that even if his idea was sound, it was not financially feasible given his limited resources. So, he was out meeting people, testing the market, shopping for cash, riding out to visit Harold Roth at his Long Island residence near Hewlett Bay Park with Charlie The Blade.

Roth owned a tool making firm ran an East Coast vending machine empire that sprawled to St.Louis, and made loans through a corporate entity called Valley Commercial Corporation. Some of those loans were shady, as were some of his friends and clientele. One of those Tourine a.k.a. The Blade, a.k.a. Charles White, Kirk's friendly and well connected Bookie.

In arranging the meeting with Kirk, Tourine made it clear to Roth what mattered most: “He's a very good friend of mine” The emphasis was less on business than on personal favours. “He's a very nice guy. I like him a lot” he told the vending machine executive. So Roth opened his door, shook hands with Kirk, and invited him to make his pitch.

The key to Kirk's grand plan was to go all in with TIA as a defense contractor. Since 1959 when the company landed its first government bid, ferrying U.S. Soldiers and their families to North Africa, military business had become a steady and reliable source of revenue. But that wouldn't last if TIA had to compete with jets moving troops and cargo twice as fast as his prop planes.

Kirk also reasoned that if his company was the first supplemental airline with jets, he could sew up all the government business he could possibly handle and take a giant leap ahead of his competitors.

It wasn't exactly a crap shoot, but it was a crapshooter's dream a big risk for a big payout. But Kirk wasn't taking a wild guess or betting on chance. He knew the business. He saw the expansion of U.S. Military bases in and around the Pacific. And he was confident that future demand for troops and cargo would translate into strong returns on investment.

Roth listened to Kirk's enthusiastic assessment. Tourine was right. Kirk was a very nice guy. But Roth wasn't sure Valley Commercial could handle such a big investment. And across the coffee table, Kirk wasn't sure he wanted anything to with Valley Commercial and whatever came with it.

Kirk headed back to California determined to defy the odds and parlay his numerous advantages with people he knew and trusted in the more traditional banking and aviation worlds.

It was the right move. Back home Kirk's reputation was gold plated. His track record running Trans International, or LAAS for nearly two decades was the envy of the aviation business. His credit was flawless. He had a loyal friend at the Bank Of America. And he had a smart, ambitious idea.

His first stop was Walter Sharp at the Bank of America branch in Montebello a Kerkorian fan since Kirk's Vail Field flight school days. Sharp said he would try to get his main office to go for a loan up to $2 million. It was no sure thing. It was an amount well beyond a branch manager's independent authorization.

With that request pending, Kirk drove out to Long Beach to look at a plane. He had learned that Douglas Aircraft Company was refurbishing a used jetliner, the very first DC-8 fuselage that came off the assembly line back in 1958. It was being upgraded with more powerful engines and reconfigure for passenger and cargo service as a Model 50 Jet Trader. Kirk wanted that plane.

He arranged to pitch his idea to Douglas executive Jackson R. McGowan, a familiar face to Kirk. They knew each other casually, having a negotiated a couple of DC-3 deals in the past when McGowan was a Douglas vice president for sales. He was now vice president and general manager of the entire aircraft division where DC-8's were built.

McGowan was skeptical. A supplemental air service paying five million for a jet? Was he serious? But he knew Kirk's reputation. He knew his credit history. He knew his track record. And Kirk's quiet, controlled excitement describing his plans for the Jet Trader made sense. It got McGowan excited, too. There was even an escape hatch, a Plan B. If government contracts were slow or failed to materialize, Kirk could lease the plane to a commercial carrier. The Douglas exec agreed with Kirk, it was a good bet. And he wanted a piece of it.

McGowan crafted a special deal for Fuselage No. 1, the upgraded Jet Trader. Kirk came up with some cash. Bank Of America came through with the loan of about $2 million. And Douglas Aircraft Company financed the balance, an unprecedented move at the same time of about three million dollars.

On his signature alone, Kirk had assumed a personal debt load of nearly five million dollars. Default would wipe out everything he had built. Failure would give him a taste of his father's desperation back in those final days at Weedpatch. But Kirk the gambling aviation executive was going all in.

The Jet Trader deal closed in June and Kirk moved quickly. He turned to Glenn A. Cramer, a sales executive at Lockheed and leading figure in the postwar charter business, and lured him over to TIA, making him the president of the company. Cramer's mandate was to keep the meter running on their DC-8, keep it making money.

The big jet's first steady work was flying high priority military loads from Travis Air Foce Base in Northern California to Guam. More contracts followed. And just like Kirk envisioned, TIA was scooping up the cream of new defense contracts. In its first partial year of operation, the Jet Trader was single handedly propelled TIA from earnings of a quarter million dollars to $1.1 million. The company's net value surged into the multi-millions of dollars.

Chapter 11: His First Million

Sherwood Harry Egbert, the president of Studebaker Corporation, had flown out from South Bend, Indiana, to make a deal. He was an athletic, six foot four man on a mission, and in a hurry, to save his company through diversification. Studebaker already had a stylish new car called the Avanti and new investments in makers of a commercial ice cream refrigerator and other small appliances. Now Egbert and the board wanted Tran International Airlines.

Egbert came prepared to make concessions. Kirk was a classic self-made entrepreneur who ran his own company. He wasn't going to relish having a boss. Egbert assured him that Studebaker wanted Kirk to continue running the air service. Kirk would be corporate vice president and the president of Trans International, a Studebaker subsidiary. Kirk's poker face disclosed nothing.

Egbert said that Kirk would receive more than 120,000 shares of Studebaker stock, then valued at about $8.25 per share. The deal would make Kirk a millionaire, at least on paper. Egbert agreed to a proviso that if stock prices sagged more shares would be added to guarantee Kirk's sale price at a floor no lower than $950,000. Studebaker also would compensate Kirk with additional annual shares for managing the operations.

Kirk had everything he wanted, plus his first million dollars and a new Avanti. The total deal was worth about $10 million.

After receiving nearly a million dollars in stock from Studebaker at the end of the year in 1962, Kirk turned around and invested most of that fresh income $960,00 on eighty acres of sand and brush. The property was a potentially prime location near the Dunes and across the strip from the Flamingo.

Jay Sarno the maestro behind upscale motel developments from Georgia to California, already had financing lined up through personal friendships with Teamsters Union now needed to win over Kirk Kerkorian, the Strip's newest landowner.

They met over dinner, Jay Sarno wanted to build the greatest hotel-casino in the world. Kirk was intrigued but unconvinced. His ill-fated Dunes investment had coincided with the end of a Las Vegas building boom that had remained stalled for nearly a decade. Not only was Sarno daring to end that development drought, but he also proposed to do so with an ultra luxury project that was unlike anything seen before on the Strip.

Kirk eventually agreed to final conditions. His long term lease would be subordinated to the Teamsters pension fund loan. Sarno and Jacobson would pay a relatively modest monthly lease of $15,000. Kirk would receive 15% of casino profits and have access to his own two bedroom suite in the new hotel.

It would seem that Kirk was violating his first rule of business, to invest only in ventures he controlled, but he was finally gambling again on the business of gambling.

PART II THE MAKING OF A BILLIONAIRE

Trans International Airlines now with a pair of DC-8 Jet Traders, two Constellations and assorted other planes in its relatively small fleet, was barely known outside the aviation industry. Still it was well run. Profits and revenue were steadily growing. And it paid its bills. In April 1965, TIA stock went on the market and investors yawned. It didn't move for weeks.

What fainlly started moving the stock were Kirk's Armenian connections. Kirk had already been getting a lot of press attention in the pages of Mason's California Courier. The airline owning Armenian may as well have owned a fleet of flying carpets. To the Courier's readers Kirk was an Armenian celebrity nearly on a par with J.C. Agajanian, the race car owner and designer whose team had two years earlier won it's third Indianapolis 500. The Armenian community invested in to TIA, in a matter of months, Kirk had paid off the $2 million bank loan iwth which he had bought back TIA from Studebaker. Kirk himself was now sitting on stock worth more than $66 million a vast fortune by any measure. And no on one was more surprised than he was.

Kirk was ready to take full control of his very own Vegas hotel and casino. He hadn't shared the news with anyone but his close friend Shoofey and his most intimate insiders. He asked Las Vegas sun publisher Hank Greenspun to take a ride around town with him. It became a tour of hotel building sites. The tour ended on Paradise Road by the convention center. Kirk was going to change the face of Las Vegas and he wanted his friend the newspaperman to know what was coming. A month laster the news was a headline: "$30 Million Vegas Hotel Near Convention Center"

According to published accounts, Kirk had paid $5 million cash for about sixty-five acres. He planned to break ground on the city's tallest high rise hotel project later in 1967. The casino would feature the largest gaming floor in Nevada. The hotel would have fifteen hundred guest rooms, making it the world's biggest at the time. Hotel guests would have access to an adjacent country club and eighteen-hole golf course then under development. And at $30 millions, Kirk's International Hotel would eclipse Caesars Palace. Kirk launched a tender offer in the morning. His bid: $35 each for a million shares of MGM Studios. His goal: management contro.

  What Kirk saw in a tired old MGM with its run of box office losers was something beyond the view of most investors. He saw hidden value. With a market price wallowing around $25 a share, investors were missing hundreds of millions in existing value, not even considering any turnaround potential. Kirk and Bautzer figured the company's actual value to be closer to $400 million or about $69 a share. What they saw was MGM's vast library of classic films, Gone With The Wind, Singin' In The Rain, The Wizard Of Oz. The company owned music publishers, a record company, overseas studios and tens of millions of dollars in real estate.

And there was the pricess cache of it's legendary name. For many, MGM spelled class, as in old Holywood glamour, gowns and tuxedos, klieg lights and red carpets. What was Leo The Lion worth? No one had ever imagined putting a price on the MGM logo. Not until Kirk Kerkorian.

Kirk would rely on a consortium of European banks to receive loans to make the MGM buy. MGM was Kirk's company to save. He controlled nearly 40% of MGM stock - 40% of Gone With The Wind, 40% of Leo the Lion.

  After getting various loans paid off, paid down or renegotiated, Kirk was once again building up cash reserves in 1971, topped by the summer sale of his last million shares of stock in International Leisure. Even MGM was accumulating cash rather than bleeding it, not so much from making movies as from moving real estate. The company sold off another piece of its back lot earlier in the year for $20 million. Movie production costs had been slashed. And the box office flop rate of recent film releases had been improved from 70 percent duds to 50 percent. Presiden Aubrey was predicting MGM's best revenue numbers in many years.

  Things looked sufficiently promising to Kirk that earlier in October he had convened a private meeting of his closest advisers and MGM executives for a strategic brainstorming session. How could the studio survive and thrive making movies in an entertainment market dominated by free consumer programs on television? How could its hedge its bets? Where could it go for a more reliable, steady, and growing stream of revenue?

Kirk had an idea: modified diversification of sorts. Combine the movie side of the entertainment business with the gaming side. This could be achieved if MGM borrowed about $75 million and built its own grand new Las Vegas hotel and casino. Fill it with movie memorabilia. Name the rooms, restaurants, and menu items after the stars. And call it the MGM Grand Hotel, after the 1933 classic Grand Hotel featuring Greta Garbo telling the world "I want to be alone" MGM, the film studio was going to build the hotel, own it, and operate it as a subsidiary. It would need stockholder approval, but that was never in doubt. Kirk owned 40% and was buying additional shares. MGM would take on debt for construction costs through debentures, interest bearing unsecured bonds. Unlike public offerings of stock, debenture funding would not dilute share values. The hotel would be ubilt on prime Strip-fronting property, sixteen acres already occupied on the then defunct Bonanza Hotel at the same intersection shared by Caesars Palace, the Dunes, and the Flamingo. Kirk owned the Bonanza, so MGM would pay him about $5 million, based on an independent appraisal. MGM would also purchase and adjacent twenty-six acres for $1.75 million making room for another big Kerkorian foorprint in Vegas gaming.

  The MGM Grand would be even bigger than Kirk's International Hotel. For the second time in a couple of years, he was launching construction of the world's biggest resort hotel, twenty six floors with more than two thousand rooms, a casino 140 years long with more than a thousand slot machines, ninety blackjack tables, and ten oversized craps tables, and trimmed with real imported Italian marble and genuine crystal chandeliers.

Kirk failed at gaining a major ownership of Columbia Pictures. The sale of Kirk's Columbia Pictures stock marked a rare caputaliation at that stage in his investing history. But iwas by no financial measure a failure. Kirk had purhcased the stock at an average price per share of $17.50. Columbia Pictures bought it back at a $20 markup for $37.50. Kirk's failure to take over the Columbia studio had resulted in a fifty net profit of $75.6 million. With all that cash in his pocket, he went shopping again for another movie studio.

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New Post has been published on http://cryptonewsuniverse.com/europes-central-bank-is-concerned-about-possible-runs-on-stablecoins/

Europe's central bank is concerned about possible runs on stablecoins

Europe's central bank is concerned about possible runs on stablecoins

Bitcoin: BTC to $40k? Ripple Travels to Brazil & Ubisoft Shows Interest in Crypto

The European central bank has decided to warn everyone about the risk of so-called “stablecoin runs”. In a traditional finance business, banks are responsible to satisfy the customer's service. During the times when people are rapidly withdrawing their money, the probability of default increases.The banks said that there are a number of events that are responsible for stablecoin. Major stablecoin runs could also change the “fixed value” of it. In case of that, they will be responsible to cover all the losses customers will have. This will include the exchange rate fluctuations losses too.If this will happen, the massive negative impact will affect the entire global financial system.Stablecoin market has been growing rapidly in 2020, if stablecoin will lose its power, this will be a shock to the crypto market. Tether (USDT) is the largest stablecoin on the market right now, it contains over $42 billion trading value on a daily basis. This is twice as big as Bitcoin publishing time.

Why is stablecoin so important for the financial market?

It’s a new class of cryptocurrency that offers the price which doesn’t change while the market is changing all the time. Stablecoins have gained the best things from immediate processing and assurance of privacy of payments, and volatility-free solid costs of fiat currencies. Stablecoins are the currencies that are like the US dollar. Stablecoin’s price is connected with backing. It is the most popular cryptocurrency in the market. What makes other cryptocurrencies less attractive? Well, they are unstable. Ideally, a crypto coin should keep its buying value and should own the lowest reasonable inflation rate.

Price stability of the USDT

The price stability is mostly coming from the controlling authorities like central banks. Even when the fiat currencies are moving dramatically, the stablecoin manages to maintain price stability. For example, the person won’t choose Bitcoin in order to make a simple purchase is they know that the price might get twice as big in one month. Stablecoins are used mostly for everyday transactions, and that is why they are so popular. Currently, most cryptocurrencies are pegged to bitcoin. As most Forex and cryptocurrency traders know, bitcoin is prone to major value fluctuations. This affects the prices of other cryptocurrencies too. This is the most popular reason why people criticize bitcoin trading. On the other hand, there are stablecoins which promise us to solve this problem. Tether (USDT) is an example of a stablecoin. Most of the time, one stablecoin is equivalent to the $1. That is why stablecoin is entering the mainstream of the market.

The truth is that price stability is needed in the financial market, that is why any cryptocurrency is having an ambition for a mass utility. For anyone who is fearing to trade with bitcoins, there is another way to try themselves in the currency trading industry. Trading is the most common way to get involved with cryptocurrencies. Stablecoins are the currencies that are as stable as gold and oil. Compared to it, bitcoin and other altcoins are the risks for traders. The good side of trading with stablecoins is that one can save themselves from the large price swings and losses. The reward is also attractive there, that is why this is a great way for the traders to start trading from the beginning. One of the most popular social media websites, Facebook, has also joined stablecoin games with its coin Libra. There are also ways to start trade without money of your own or even making a deposit. In an attempt to prevail over the risk of losing money and to stay safe, it is undoubtedly better to start trading with a free account and then already think about trading with currencies or money.

Blockchain smart contracts

Most of the cryptocurrencies are using blockchain technology. It is a decentralized public ledger managed by a peer-to-peer network. So every transaction is safe and secure. In blockchain technology, there are also “smart contracts”, which means that they use blockchain in order to process the small transactions. They are kind of middlemen before the complex transactions. They also have the ability to support the deals automatically. They are gaining attention from financial institutions since these institutions are embracing certain currencies.

What traders should know

The qualities that stablecoins are having are very appealing for the leading investors. Transparency – the fact that anyone can view the history of the transactions made since the data is stored on public ledgers. Volatility – The fact that the entire foundation of the idea is built on providing the owner with financial stability. Affordability – Lower transaction fees with no need of paying a cut in the bank. Efficiency – No holding periods. There are things that are very important for investors and traders. Digital securities and everything stablecoins can ensure the investor or a trader are making these cryptocurrencies outstanding.

Uses and limitations

If you are still wondering what is the point of having them if you can just own a dollar, well, the fact that financial regulations across the world are putting stablecoins under the microscope is giving some clue about how important they are. It can be a store of value, it can work as a borderless payment system, you are your own boss, it is working outside of the banking system, you can transfer without having to have a third party. In other words, there are main gains one can have if they own stablecoins. People are in need to have some familiar, comfortable, and safe portion of the wealth in their life. It has some potential to displace the retail banking industry and have some impact on the global financial system. The only thing that the regulators are worried about is what if the stablecoin will be adopted by a significant scale. It will cause problems like hacks of private passwords, the collapse of the trust in these currencies, lack of compliance, organized crimes, and money laundering. And surely some of these fears are certainly legit.

Article Produced By Giorgi Mikhelidze

Giorgi is a Georgian-born financial enthusiast that has been following the development of the Blockchain industry for 3 years now. His experience in trading cryptocurrencies on various platforms give him the insight to analyze various news and events happening in Crypto sphere.

https://cryptodaily.co.uk/2020/09/europes-bank-runs-stablecoins

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PAX Australia 2017 Day 3

There are no notes for Day 2 because I spent it socialising a little and sleeping a lot.

Queer Coded: A History of LGBTQIA+ Gaming

David Gaider Q&A

Brian Fairbanks Talks about Addressing Accessibility Through Game Design

Misc: I spent a chunk of the day in the diversity lounge which was fun. I met some great people at the Gender Diverse card game, and got to the semi finals of the Xena Nintendo 64 Fighting Game Tournament (there were only three rounds, but given how much I suck at fighting games this was still a happy surprise, and a sign of what a random button masher the game is)

The gender neutral toilets near the diversity lounge were very well done, unlike GCAP the original signs weren't visible and "with stalls/urinals" was in small letters like an afterthought.

I didn't break anything on Day 3 but did break a mug the next morning. Also the cinema in the Crown Casino is surprisingly inaccessible.

Despite the various mishaps I had a great time and will definitely come again next time we can afford it.

Queer Coded: A History of LGBTQIA+ Gaming

I missed the second half of this to see David Gaider, feeling very annoyed at the programmer.

Anny Sims @ChattyAnny on twitter (I was too slow to get the others!) Keely Thirkell Hayley Williams Soap Pejovic

Most queer characters are just queer coded, with plausible deniability. "It's up to you".Tendency for queer characters to be villains. Indie games tend to be more queer friendly than AAA games.

Lesbians: First known queer character in games: 1986 Moonmist had side-character who was a lesbian murderer.

Other notable lesbian characters:

KOTOR 2003, Juhani, first queer Star Wars character

Gone Home 2013

Dragon Age Inquisition Sera (I thought Sam Traynor from Mass Effect 3 came first?)

Tracer from Overwatch 2016

Trans characters:

1988 Birdo from Super Mario Brothers 2 "A male who believes he is female"

Lots of others but all terrible. Jokes and villains. Trans women seen as threat. Poison from Final Fight 1989, "so you can hit a woman".

Krem DAI 2014 trans man, You can't go "Ok, cool".

Hainly Adams MEA 2017 trans woman. Tells you her deadname, this was patched.

Horizon: Zero Dawn 2017 trans man

Dream Daddy 2017 trans man. One throw away line about wearing a binder, had to be clarified by writers. Non binary people and cosplayers wear binders too!

How do you make it clear they're trans without them implausibly outing themselves or just having it be word of god?

Gay men:

1993 fmv Dracula Unleashed has speaking role

Tended to be background characters, jokes and villains again. No m/m relationships shown onscreen.

Dreamfall: the Longest Journey 2006 (not made super clear until 2015)

Steve Cortez Mass Effect 3 2012

Dorian DAI 2014

Dorian knew exactly what his sexuality was. Coming of age narratives get boring.

Bi Characters (no picture because they're invisible):

1993 Ultima 7 part 2 bi character propositions character regardless of gender.

"Slutty bisexuals". A lot of characters are playersexual and it never comes up outside the relationship.

Zevran DAO 2009

Borderlands 2009

Fable 2004 let player be bi, Fable 2 2008 added bi PCs

Playersexual:

Only queer in the context that they will date players of both genders, but you don't see that unless you play as both.

Dragon Age 2 2011, Anders only mentions his ex-boyfriend if you play as a male PC

Fallout 4 2015. Did have background queer characters.

Stardew Valley 2016

Non Binary:

1995 Chrono Trigger villain

Often robots, aliens or other non human

Frisk Undertale 2015

Life is Strange 2015

Zer0 Borderlands 2 2012

Turing Read Only Memories

Some games let you have gender neutral pronouns.

David Gaider Q&A

1999 Working on Balder's Gate 2, didn't talk about his sexuality at work. Figured he would always be writing stories for straight people.

He was shocked to hear Jade Empire was having same sex romance. Got to be lead writer on DAO after that. "So I can put same sex romances in, right?". More economical to have bi romances, but he would have been happier having some gay characters.

Feeling iffy about playersexuality after DA2, he asked for 2 straight, 2 bi, 2 gay for DAI. "Minority content" is weighed via the percentage of those who play it and those who appreciate it. Eg 5% play dwarves but most see it as a positive thing to be able to do.

Most of his time was spent on the actual plot but Dorian was the most personal writing.

He was targeted by Gamergate but it doesn't compare to, for example, how much Jennifer Helper was targeted.

10 years on Dragon Age was enough, his head would explode if he had to write another story about templars and mages.

How did you get the job: His story is very specific. He was managing a hotel and a comic book artist in his spare time. A friend was a character artist at Bioware but Gaider wasn't really aware of the specifics. Bioware told their employees "If you know anyone who does game related writing let us know", the friend gave them Gaider's LARP rule book without asking. Got a call, gave the stories he wrote in highschool, got offered a job. He said no, it didn't pay enough, but then he got fired from the hotel. It felt like a sign.  

Who do you think will take the romance torch from Bioware: he’s not sure they're giving it up? EA treats romance fans as a reliable audience who don't need to be advertised to, even though it's why a lot of people play in his experience (though obviously those are the kinds of fans he will tend to meet). There is an underserved audience.

Most proud of: Lots of stuff he's not proud of. Wishes he'd been more involved in community discussions early on. Proud that the team tackled issues as they started arising. Proud of the company for standing by them. Most proud of Dragon Age 2 despite the mixed response. They had very little time to create it. It’s like a very big first draft. They had a plan but didn't get to compare notes once things were written, so he had to trust the team would stick to plan as much as they could despite things being cut on the fly. Team said they were happy in a post-game survey, didn't feel he was too dictatorial.

What does your writing look like, a screenplay? A cutscene does. But it’s generally structured like a tree that expands and then contracts back to the core path before expanding again. Flow charts.

Favourite relationship in a game? Morden in Mass Effect. Cried more than in a movie. Tali was his space girlfriend. Of the ones he's worked on, Morrigan will always be closest. She represents Dragon Age to him. Joyous time working with Claudia Black, first celebrity he'd worked with. Flemeth was originally Arabic, but that actress couldn't do it so they got Kate Mulgrew. They stopped looking for an Arabic actress for Morrigan and looked for someone who matched Kate Mulgrew. Claudia Black's audition tape was her reading Smack That like a beat poet. Gaider was very nervous, he'd never spoken to any actor before. First rule he was told was don't compare them to another celebrity, so naturally he said "I had Helena Bonham Carter in mind when I wrote Morrigan". Claudia Black said "So you're saying I'm a cheap Helena Bonham Carter ;D". She would say "Does he want me to do it more like Helena?" during recording.

Has being so closely associated with diversity had downsides? He may be gay but he's still white and a dude. He feels like it's all he talks about conventions sometimes. Teams need to sit down and look at what they've made. Lot of things made individually without concern for the bigger picture eg only 15% speaking roles in DAI were female until they stopped and looked at it and fixed it.  

"We didn't think about it" is no longer a defense. He wants to help with that, but we should be helping other marginalised voices get into the industry and amplifying their voices.

Wishes it could just be expected and we didn't have to discuss it.

He likes dating sim mechanics in the context of a larger story. But he does like the idea of romance not being as tertiary as it's been in Bioware games, romance as part of the adventure eg a romantic adventure. He's not really interested in social sims or day to day relationships. "My idea of a spicy relationship is to have my life threatened."

Why do you think most AAA companies try to avoid discussions of lgbt stuff, why is it taking so long? Because it's Pandora's Box. There is more being added casually. But if they do nothing they get lumped in with the rest of the industry. As soon as they do anything there are 2 sides: 1. why are you doing this, you're politicising your game. 2. Why aren't you doing more, whatever you did is wrong and not good enough.

Not that flawed attempts should be above criticism. But by mostly focusing criticism on the games that did anything rather than nothing, people have increased the feeling that it's Pandoras box. He understands that it feels like those developers might listen to criticism but the dynamic is sending the wrong lesson.

My question: How do you think inclusion of non binary player characters can work with including gay and lesbian love interests instead of just having playsexuality? “We've thought about it”. He defined playersexual for audience, like Shroedinger's sexuality. He doesn't like it when the only way to have something show up is to have the character talk about it. eg asexual: character would have to sit you down and explain what asexuality is. Is unsexy as a feature. Explaining nuances of sexuality is off putting. If there was more nuance across the industry that would mean no one game has to do everything. Any one game can have only so much within it.

(This doesn't actually answer my question. I discussed it with my husband afterwards and even he didn't understand what I was asking, so I may have garbled it in my nervousness)

Are some choices "canon"? One of the features of Mass Effect and Dragon Age was the continuity of choices. No "canon" but there is a default. A lot of people feel like they have to play the whole series to get the full experience, was off putting, and he found the Keep a nightmare as a writer.

They had editors keeping track of which choices were incompatible. And that was just the third game. "Can you imagine for a fourth game? Phew! Not my problem :D"

Have you thought about the morals of gamifying romance, saying what people want to hear to get sex? Dragon Age didn't work that way, sex was not at the end. Some characters in DAI had no sex scenes, sex is optional for Dorian's romance. It's a game, everything is gamified, you can't simulate actual relationships. For proper reactivity you’d have to mark every response and keep track of inconsistency, but that’s too much work. Same with polyamory: too many variables!

Maybe get away from the approval system? Pay more attention to overall choices in major quests etc instead of individual lines.

Bi characters in DAI were bi from the start. Not the first thing that comes up during character creation eg Dorian started out as "the good Tevinter". Helps avoid too many assumptions based on sexuality. But once characters started solidifying they would think about who worked for what sexualities. There's no set way to write someone "as" bi, but the writer can have them talk about relevant things in other scenes. Sera's writer is a straight dude, he didn't want to write About The Lesbian Experience, and got lesbians in the company to check out what he was writing.

Have relationships gotten more or less complicated? In Balder's gate 2 there was a single sequence of romance scenes which you could get kicked off. Dragon Age had approval. If it gets complicated but the player can't see it or understand how reactions relate to their previous actions it just seems random or predetermined. Unless they say "I am angry at you because of X", but noone says that.

Brian Fairbanks Talks about Addressing Accessibility Through Game Design

lostandhound1 on twitter

His notes.

He's not blind himself, and while he obviously cares a lot about accessibility had an unfortunate tendency to treat disabled people as a separate, if respected, "Other" to himself and the audience, even though I was right there in a bright red mobility scooter. He advocated person first language, "a person with blindness" etc, but not all disabled people like it and it shouldn't be presented as unambiguous best practice. I'm building up the energy to talk to him about it.

He's a sound designer.

Audio games: designed for people with a vision disability.

Audio game jam: the games tended to be about blindness as a bad thing. It felt victimising.

How can we make people feel powerful?

He was inspired by his dog's amazing sense of smell. The mechanic is that you follow an invisible trail using sound cues, a humming noise that gets louder and quieter.

Sighted people struggle with extracting information from sound. The game is more difficult for sighted people.

He had to add fruit on the ground as an accessibility measure for sighted people.

All music is diegetic: happening inside the world of the game, eg characters are singing.

There's a lack of much budget for audio games, since they're never going to make much money.

In 30 years current 30-something gamers will need accessible games.

Accessibility tends to be added as an afterthought or accident.

For example Pokemon has unique sounds for materials, collisions, monsters that accidentally make it accessible.

Sony reader: US only

Microsoft narrator: good but hard to use as a developer

EA: Proactively adding blind accessibility

Fighting games are often in stereo, blind players can play and even win tournaments.

Demand more from your games.

Developers: find a consultant. Address accessibility early.

It's about empathy. People with disability deserve the same stories to take part in as everyone else.

gameaccessibilityguidelines.com

daisyalesoundworks

binaural sound is going to make a big difference

audiogames.net: where blind gamers go to play games. They're supportive if you ask for advice and feedback.

People don't mind if you don't do immersive, game specific voices and just rely on the screenreader

Sound designers need more love to make VR accessible.  

Braille games?? He doesn't know much about it.

Curb cut effect examples: curb cuts for wheelchairs but also useful for prams etc. Subtitles. Think about short term problems that benefit from accessibility as well eg the screen is broken, there's sunlight on the screen etc.  

Sounds of a blind person navigating their desktop. To me it sounds like a mangled garble of little bursts of cut off computer speech, here’s a description of what’s going on.

[terselylove]

30 Ways To Stop Feeling Like A Lazy Piece Of Shit

1. What honestly worked for me was following the 5 second rule. Whenever you need to do something but don’t feel like it, immediately start counting down from 5 and once you get to one just start doing it. It sounds dumb but works. Realize that motivation is trash and you’ll never feel motivated, except to do things that feel easy. Look up Mel Robbins on YouTube. She explains it perfectly.

2. Set a schedule for yourself. Not one of those pussy ass pre written schedules, you write this one as you go. Wake up, write down what time. Whatever you do first, write it down: “9am-1pm: Played video games” “1pm-2pm: took shower and brushed teeth.” You get it.

Keep looking at your old “schedule” and improve upon it.

3. First step, don’t hate on yourself so much. You’re never going to realize your potential and worth if you put yourself down. It’s ok to have bad days. It’s ok to feel like shit. We all experience this and for the time and clime we live in, it’s fairly standard. Try and do a little bit better every day. Brush your teeth, floss, make your bed, do the dishes, stand when you eat instead of sitting, don’t take your phone to the toilet, drink water. The little things will snowball. Once you prove to yourself that you can take care of the little shit, the big shit just becomes groups of small shit.

4. Aim low.

Do the tiniest thing possible that will make you feel even the tiniest sense of accomplishment. Clean your room. If that’s too much, maybe just make your bed and that’s it. Get those little “wins”, and use them as momentum to build up to bigger tasks/accomplishments.

Forget getting that new job/getting ripped/asking the gorgeous person out. Start with making your bed.

5. Compartmentalize your tasks.

Do you have cleaning to do?

Make a check list and check off then items as you do them. It’ll feel like you’re getting more done.

6. I had to strop trying to tackle a huge TO DO list. Big lists are overwhelming to some people.

On days that I want/need to accomplish something (Like – at work), I make a list of THREE things I need to get done that day and get straight to those things before anything else. No Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc. Just get to those three tasks. I find I just keep going when those three things are done.

They don’t have to be monster tasks either. Break a monster task into a bunch of smaller tasks and get them done – even if spread over a few days.

7. The first step would be to find a therapist to help deal with the crippling depression that is causing that much self-hatred and low energy.

8. Just look up tons of motivational memes on Instagram. Nothing is more motivational than trust fund babies telling you to get out there and make your dreams come true.

9. Wake up at the same time every single day. Consistency is key.

10. Talk to someone. For real. Talk to a therapist or a doctor or someone. You don’t have to constantly feel like you’re trying to get through life in second gear. You’re not as lazy and useless as you think. Reach out if you need to vent to someone.

11. By getting over the mindset that you have to give everything 100% or not bother. If you can only give 10% today it’s better than nothing. I’d rather go to the gym for 20 minutes than none because I’m not up for an hour. I’d rather get at least the dishes done than nothing.

12. Break things into bite sized pieces. Start a timer for 10 min to start and see if you can get through that, after the alarm goes off it gives you motivation to keep going. Works for me when I feel like I can’t do anything. Start small, everyone can do 10 min! Good luck.

13. I make lists of little things to do in a day, bigger things to do in a week, etc. It helps.

14. Clean your room and maintain it as necessary. (Even little tasks like this make you feel more productive and better about yourself, plus it is nice to live in a clean environment.)

15. Stop calling yourself names and putting yourself down first of all.

The more you call yourself a lazy piece of shit the more likely you will be one.

16. Erase all social media.

17. Get out. I spent most of my summers in bed or on the couch watching TV due to my depression before I turned 18.

Once I turned 18, I got a summer job. I was out of the house for 7 or 8 hours of the day. I had friends or at least coworkers who pretended to like me, and that sometimes led to hangouts.

Even better, I applied to a second job and that has been amazing. I don’t get home until 6 or so, and go to bed by 10 (lots of sleep helps my mental health) and so it’s only 4 hours to pout or nope or anything.

18. Lazy piece of shit in what context? As an educator, I see many different types of students, and they all have so many wonderful things to offer other than just subscribing to a value of “usefulness” based on their ability to generate money/fulfil a societal contract of getting married, having kids, and making money.

I say that the most important thing is to just be you, and take time to reaffirm that it is okay to be you. You are already by default are going to be special and amazing in something, and you should just focus on that, and know that you are still growing.

A lot of my students are bogged down by the need to become a doctor, lawyer, w/e, when they know that it’s not right for them. I think the most important thing to do is to live “authentically” to yourself, and surround yourself with people who share you enthusiasm and viewpoint.

I think the most important thing is to learn that living authentically is good enough, and to tune out people who try to turn you into what they want for you, rather than what you want for yourself.

I had to go to therapy for months to learn this lesson, so know that you are good enough, and that you don’t have to do everything at once. One victory at a time.

Also, one way I now have an easier time making sense of negativity coming my way from other people is to remind yourself that those people probably have layers of trauma and shit they need to deal with as well, and one way for them to sort it (in an unhealthy way) is to project it and fling it on to people.

19. Find a hobby! Anything that you enjoy, just get out into the world.

Also, be kind to yourself, the more happiness you put in the world, the more you get out of it. That mindset has gotten me out of some pretty dark places.

Don’t be afraid to get out and meet people either, whether it’s in line at the grocery store, or a walk in the park. The more you get out, the higher chance of you meeting someone.

If you’re an introvert, pick up hiking! I grew up in a mountain town in Colorado, and when I was in high school, it was super hard for me to get outside. I didn’t like how I looked. I started to gain weight and my self confidence was nowhere to be found. Then one day I decided to get outside because I wanted to see a change in myself, and I found that hiking was really good for me. It cleared my mind and I was able to enjoy life one step at a time. After a couple of months I was seeing changes in me both mental and physical. It was really good for me! (Also when I was hiking I’d always have my dog with me and he’d make sure that we kept going for a long time)

I’m not saying that hiking is going to be what works for you, but I do encourage that you find something that clears your mind and that gets you in the right headspace.

Keep a good attitude as well! You’ll start noticing changes almost immediately! I wish you the best of luck, keep pushing forward! You got this!!

20. First of, cut yourself some slack. Everyone has peaks and valleys, and that is ok.

Second, one thing I learned from reddit was the act of “paying it forward” to yourself.

Say that you spend a lot of time in front of your computer, like me. Every time you get up to refill your water bottle, get a soda, go to the toilet, you do one extra thing. If the dishwasher needs emptying, empty it before going back to your computer. Next time you get up, you throw out the trash. Small victories will add up eventually, and those small victories are very important to me when struggling with depression or anxiety.

Healthy habits aren’t formed overnight. I still have far to go, but paying it forward to myself really helped me keep my life clean, physically and mentally.

21. Figure out what you want in life. Don’t focus on all the ways you can feel bad about yourself. (Negative people around you will, but ignore them.) Instead, focus on something positive you want to see happen, then orient your efforts around that.

Ultimately, if you try to use guilt to motivate yourself, it will work a little, but you just end up being dissatisfied because you resent yourself and see yourself as your own enemy. If instead you have some positive things to work toward, then you can see work as a good thing. Sure, work has unpleasant aspects (that’s why it’s called work), but they’re a lot easier to handle if you can relate it back to something you want.

For example, think about scrubbing the shower. One way of looking at it is to think, hmm, I only scrub the shower once a month at most, but what you’re supposed to do is scrub it every week, so damn it, I suck, why can’t I just get off my ass and do this basic thing that other, more responsible people do? Another way is to think, hey, I remember once how much nicer it was when I had that shower clean, I would walk into the bathroom and see that it was clean, and it was satisfying and maybe I felt in control, and I want that feeling again, and scrubbing the shower is how I’m going to get there.

One way you may be able to relate better to positive feelings about work is to think about a hobby where you put in a ton of effort but it doesn’t feel like work. For example, ever spent 10 hours plugging away getting better at a video game? It probably wasn’t an entirely pleasant process. Maybe you skipped a meal, your body or your eyes got tired, etc. But that didn’t stop you and you did all that because you wanted to beat that level or whatever. Your work lined up with a goal you set for yourself, so you had no problem doing that work.

22. Well, for one, don’t think of yourself as being useless. And start living not for yourself, but to benefit others. You will find that doing for others and the benefit that comes from that will invigorate you to do more. And you will also grow along the way and become a valuable asset to others.

Take pride in learning, growing, and find an outlet to express and utilize what you have learned. Stay around positive people, avoid negativity, and unplug from social media which can be a HUGE source of negativity.

23. Think about why you don’t do stuff.

You can’t fix it if you don’t acknowledge that it’s a problem.

Really try to assess why you don’t do blank.

Problem: I don’t brush my teeth in the morning when I don’t have time. So the fix is to give myself more time.

Solution: Go to bed an hour earlier and wake up an hour earlier.

Problem: I don’t clean house because it feels like it would be an enormous undertaking at this point because I’ve let it go for so long.

Solution: Every time I go to the bathroom, or when I’m in queue, pick up a few pieces of trash and throw them away.

Problem: I sleep the day away.

Solution: Think of any reason to get up early that is rewarding or I enjoy. (There is a place in town that sells these sweet golashes? But they are only open from like 0500 until 0900 so I wake up early just to get one of those and then play games for an hour or two before I do whatever I need/want to.)

Problem: I have a hard time getting up in the morning because sometimes I feel like life sucks.

Solution: Change my alarm to Circle of Life and when it goes off grab my cat and hold it off the edge of the bed, “ONE DAY ALL OF THIS WILL BE YOURS!!!!!”

Problem: I waste my day doing things I don’t enjoy just because the alternative is doing something productive and I just don’t wanna.

Solution: Narrate like I’m in Stanely Parable and just be fucking ridiculous, especially if I don’t feel like it, eventually I’ll really go over the top and laugh at how absolutely ridiculous it all is, I’m always smiling by the end.

Problem: I have a massive library of games and none of them seem like fun.

Solution: Pick a multiplayer game and spend time searching for and helping newbies.

Problem: I’m unhappy.

Solution: Try to make other people happy. If I’m miserable then doing shit for other people won’t make me more miserable and it’ll make them happy which in turn will make me happy.

Problem: I feel like my life sucks because I hate my job and getting out of bed in the morning is just too much. But I don’t want to quit because searching for a new job is scary and I don’t want to risk making my life worse.

Solution: Sorry hoss, just start looking for another job in your off time and when you get an interview and an offer ask if you can give two weeks, if yes then put in two weeks and then start your new job, if no start your new job. If your job makes you miserable and it isn’t wholly on you then fuck ’em.

24. Stand up, right now. Look down at your hands. Listen to your breath. Feel your heart pumping within you.

You’re alive, here on one of the few tiny scraps of rock in this vast universe where you’re possible – where anything like you is possible.

For three billion years, your ancestors have escaped meteorites and ice ages, volcanoes and floods, droughts and predators and viruses and fire and earthquake. They have seen the moon draw away and the Earth’s spinning slow, the continents cool and the atmosphere fill with water and oxygen.

Throughout all those long eons, those tiny mindless cells became fish and reptiles and then mammals. They cooperated, competed, killed, lived. They became humans, and through the long march of history they have survived the wars and pogroms, been heroes and villains. Thieves, saints, cannibals, doctors- every strategy and choice and lucky break is in you summarized and concentrated.

You are the last link in a chain forged across billions of years. You inherit a crown passed through untold generations of winners. You are impossible. You are a miracle.

Look around you. Look at the world we have made, full of knowledge distilled from painstaking examination and wisdom hard-won by a billion survivors and veterans and saints. Look at how far we have all come. Look at the people around you, all asleep to the greatness within them.

Close your hand, open it. You have so many choices. You can do so much. Your time is drawing to an end. Who will tell your story? What will they say?

You can pass the torch. You can stand in glory. I know you can. Because every atom within you has been present for countless victories. You wear a shape sculpted through countless trials. Your thoughts echo down the hallways of a mind designed to master the problems of this world.

You are the end of a billion journeys. You are the summit of a mount older than the stones. You are the victory. You are the reason. You are, and you shall be. Go now. Go forward, to shape the wonders and tales of the world that will follow you. Add a brick to the monument of civilization. Honor the web of life that has made you. Bring life and love into a world that has offered the same to you.

Your time is here. Your victory comes soon. Go.

25. Do things badly!

Anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Let go of that voice in your head that says that if you start something you need to finish it. (I bet it sounds like your mother) Let go of your perfectionism.

Wash one dish! Put your dirty clothes in a hamper! Go to the gym and walk on the treadmill for five minutes! Open a word document and write one run-on sentence of that novel you’ve been meaning to write for years! Inertia effects motivation the same way it does objects — once you are up and moving it will be easier. Tomorrow you might be able to wash two dishes, walk for ten minutes, do a load of laundry, write three sentences of that novel — but if you can’t, don’t beat yourself up about it! Let yourself feel good for accomplishing what you could. Set small, achievable, even ridiculous goals and once you get used to reaching those on the regular, up them. Bit by bit, you will see progress.

26. Depends on what is causing you to be a “lazy useless piece of shit”.

Sometimes that’s caused by an absolute lack of motivation, which can in turn be caused by depression, dysthymia or a restrictive environment that won’t let you even look for your calling. In this case therapy is the best fix, and medication ia useful tool.

Sometimes that happens because your anxiety pushes you towards avoidance through paralyzation and you don’t even realize. In that case, therapy and medication.

Sometimes you’re like that because, frankly, you really enjoy it, and the real problem is the people around you making you believe it is wrong to live your life that way even if it is functional to you.

Maybe you just were never taught how to be proactive and you require to modify your personality.

Or maybe you are self-sabotaging due to a system of dysfunctional beliefs.

Maybe you’re not “lazy”, but actually tired. Maybe you aren’t eating well enough, or not drinking enough water, or you have restless sleep due to stress, anxiety or something else, and you really are tired.

Or maybe you really mentally tired and really do need the rest.

Step one would be fidning out why you are a “lazy, useless piece of shit”.

27. Practice being productive every single day. Recognize that motivation is fleeting, but discipline persists.

28. Things seem overwhelming if you’ve let them build up and avoided them for a while. Responsibilities like chores and a job are bills you eventually have pay to yourself in the form of labor. You can’t fix it all in one day, it takes time. I was where you were for a long, long time. Feeling like I was worthless, lazy, etc. Take it a step at a time.

29. I recently joined a gym, but I needed some kind of motivation to actually go, so I told myself, “there’s a B-Dubs nearby, if you go to the gym you can go get some buffalo wings right afterwards”.

30. Positive reinforcement my dude.

Take pride and feel good about the good choices you make.

Don’t criticize or condemn the bad decisions. Bad decisions help you learn and make better decisions in the future!

[torontopoli]

"The idea first emerged in the legal books of the ancient Roman Empire. When people held a debt in common, they were said to hold it “in solidum.” In other words, the state of being on the hook as a group was the basis of solidarity. If one individual faltered, the group had to step up—meaning that its members would be either bailing one another out or defaulting together. Thus, from its genesis, solidarity had a financial component that raised the stakes. In this original formulation, solidarity is a common identity underpinned by collective indebtedness and obligation, shared responsibility and shared risk, a state of interdependence and mutual aid. Terms like “bonds” and “trust” and “mutual funds” are now used by bankers to describe financial structures and agreements; solidarity turns such notions around to strengthen the ties among a community of debtors instead of affirming a contract with a creditor.

Unlike identity, solidarity is not something you have, it is something you do—a set of actions taken toward a common goal.

After its brief appearance in ancient Roman law, solidarity was mostly forgotten until the modern age. In the 1700s, a reorganization began taking place across Europe. The question emerged: What would hold society together without God or King? As monarchy and religious orthodoxy came into question, how were people to refashion society under new norms?

In France, the concepts of liberty, equality, and fraternity formed a trinity of values that would guide the revolution. But the conception of fraternity itself proved limited. It implied a blood kinship that was inadequate to the modern, pluralistic nation-state. The French politician Léon Bourgeois asked: Is solidarity “just a new word, a change of language? Or does this word express a truly new idea, and indicate an evolution in thought?” It seemed that the idea of solidarity, while it resembled fraternity, was something quite different. Fraternity was believed to be natural, innate. Solidarity, by contrast, had to be cultivated: It was the practice of creating social ties, actively inventing collective identity.

In the early 1800s, the term became central to the fledgling labor movement. Craftsmen from an array of industries, who once saw themselves as separate, as cobblers or bricklayers, began to see themselves as sharing a larger, common character: They were all workers. With industrialization, this shared identity could be fostered on the factory floor. But it was through acts of resistance, especially militant strikes, that this common bond became a source of leverage, a force that could change the conditions under which one toils.

As the labor movement began gaining traction—agitating along to the theme of the movement’s anthem, “Solidarity Forever”—the French sociologist Émile Durkheim also set out to discover what created solidarity and held societies together. Durkheim writes that solidarity is generated through a shared sense of the sacred. Every society, he observes, has a set of rituals around what its members consider sacred or profane. And these rituals—these sets of collective actions—knit us together. (The late–nineteenth-century American socialist Edward Bellamy, author of the classic utopian novel Looking Backward, built on the same set of social assumptions in advancing his idea of a spiritually infused brand of American nationalism—something he dubbed “the religion of solidarity.”)

But these inchoate understandings of social belonging soon began to erode under the corrosive pressures of modern industrial life. Modernity made the individual sacred, producing a paradoxical effect that still hangs over us. We are held together by our recognition of individual rights—yet our individualism is overpowering our sense of community and starting to eat away at the fabric of society.

In the twentieth century, the term “solidarity” became more frequently associated with efforts on behalf of one group to express a commitment to another. We see the term used increasingly in conjunction with international campaigns in support of communities that are resisting either oppressive governments, or the oppressive actions of their own governments upon others. The Central American Solidarity Movement emerged in the 1980s, and recruited citizens of the United States to support the people of Nicaragua and El Salvador, fighting together against U.S. interventions in Latin America. The International Solidarity Movement was created to support Palestinians in their fight for recognition and statehood. In these cases, solidarity was not an expression of empathy or benevolence, but the response required by an understanding of one’s own unacceptable complicity.

In Poland, where the term is often associated with the movement “Solidarnosc,” solidarity was upheld as the thread knitting together workers, community members, and the Church. It denoted a concerted effort to bridge the many segments of society to create a movement against Soviet control of the state and for worker-led socialism. As Józef Tischner, the movement chaplain, wrote, “Solidarity means to carry one another’s burden.” Unfortunately, in Poland’s effort to adopt this social ideal, the “international community” encouraged the movement’s leaders to pursue a neoliberal approach to economic development—and ultimately, that initiative undermined the transformative potential of the movement.

Whether in Poland or here in the United States, the neoliberal model promotes the market as the solution to our political ills, the path to efficiency, prosperity, and individual freedom. Under capitalism more generally, our daily rituals of buying and selling and trying to get ahead become the only practices that unite us. And this has meant that, instead of solidarity connecting us across difference, the language of exchange, of spending and investing, has increasingly become our common tongue. Whereas the revolutionary ideal of democracy sought a way to connect us as citizens, now the market ties us together as consumers—and simultaneously pushes us apart. Profit is sacred. Poverty is profane. Solidarity disappears.

That is, of course, precisely the point. Political and economic elites fear nothing more than the plebs of the world uniting to challenge their rule, which is what sublime solidarity aims to do. Marx and Engels movingly envisioned a form of class solidarity extending across borders and nationalities, yoking together strangers alienated and exploited by the same economic forces. Sadly, this exalted, transformative version of solidarity has only fitfully manifested and proved difficult to maintain, in large part because plutocrats and politicians have mastered a strategy of divide and conquer.

The quote often attributed to robber baron Jay Gould—“I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half”—may never have been uttered by the man, but the basic sentiment holds. Fearing the power of solidarity, employers foment divisions among their workers, typically along racial, ethnic, and gendered lines. (In his excellent 2011 book Carbon Democracy, historian Timothy Mitchell describes how oil companies at the dawn of the twentieth century encouraged ethnic and racial conflict among their labor force in order to weaken it, creating “separate racial groups, with managers, skilled workers and unskilled workers housed and treated separately” in order to keep wages low and revenue high.) As Asad Haider argues in his 2018 study Mistaken Identity, racism’s primary function is to divide the exploited, producing hierarchies of privilege and redirecting anger away from employers, and the capitalist class more broadly, toward other social groups, who are seen as competitors and threats instead of potential comrades.

Solidarity is the antidote to this sort of division; its practice permits otherwise isolated political actors to transcend their own limited personal experiences and build coalitions. But precisely because these coalitions are what the powerful fear most, they have taken extraordinary steps to make solidarity illegal. The limit-case of this strategy was 1947’s Taft-Hartley Act, which rolled back many of the basic collective-bargaining provisions secured during the heyday of the New Deal. Indeed, when the act was signed into law, Businessweek heralded it as nothing less than a “New Deal for America’s Employers.” Among its other provisions, the law prohibited jurisdictional and wildcat strikes as well as secondary boycotts or pickets—in other words, it drastically curtailed the right of workers to engage in solidarity action. “The law’s ban on secondary boycotts and strikes undermined local solidarity, especially in metropolitan settings where smaller, place-based locals had historically engaged in mutual strategic and political support,” historian Colin Gordon explains. Union members found themselves legally bound to fight only for themselves, which defies one of the foundational tenets of union membership: that an injury to one is an injury to all. Today, the Supreme Court is positioned to advance the right’s war on solidarity through further attacks on labor unions, following the recent Janus decision, which took aim at the ability of unions to collect dues. (Meanwhile, in the U.K., the Labour Party is pushing a proposal to allow sympathy strikes, so that domestic workers can agitate on behalf of workers abroad.)

In the absence of any coherent social ethos of solidarity, the rich will always ask why they should have to “give” to undeserving others, and balk at having to pay their fair share.

But it’s not only collective, organized manifestations of solidarity that are imperiled. Even private, spontaneous gestures of kindness must be squelched. Across Europe and in the United States, voluntary action to help migrants, including those on the brink of death, is forbidden. A French farmer was tried in 2017 for housing migrants (though the court later ruled that his action was legitimate on the basis of “fraternity”), while a Swedish journalist was dubbed a “human trafficker” and fined for helping a 15-year-old Syrian get to Sweden in 2014. In the United States, meanwhile, a government lawyer in Marfa, Texas, was arrested in February 2019 for giving a ride to three siblings, including an ill teenager, that she saw on the side of the road, and an Arizona activist faced 20 years in prison for providing clothing and shelter to those in need—“harboring certain aliens” in the dehumanizing language of the law. (His trial resulted in a hung jury.) Many Western societies now treat it as a crime to answer the call of one’s conscience—and have enacted draconian penalties for committing an act of solidarity.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given its original coinage within the ancient Roman credit systems, solidarity reemerged in eighteenth-century political discourse in conjunction with questions of debt. But this time around, the focus broadened beyond specific lending arrangements to ask: Who owes what to whom?

In 1900, a conference in France addressed the political ideal. Stephen Lukes, the British political theorist and biographer of Émile Durkheim, writes, “The Congress concluded with a resolution stating the meaning and implications of the notion of solidarité—the idea of justice as the repayment of a ‘social debt’ by the privileged to the underprivileged, assuming mutual interdependence and quasi-contractual obligations between all citizens and implying a programme of public education, social insurance, and labour and welfare legislation.” In 1895, Léon Bourgeois wrote, “Man is born a debtor to humanity.” From the moment we enter the world, Bourgeois notes, we are bound into webs of relationships—past and future. And solidarity, he argues, is the expression of the intrinsic debts we have to one another.

Solidarity was central to arguments justifying the creation of social safety nets, as well as to the idea that taxes are how we pay the social debts we are all born owing. And at the level of direct organizing, solidarity furnished the framework for the grassroots movements—which preached the need for solidarity and practiced it in deed—that successfully fought for such entitlements from below.

The modern welfare state was a massive breakthrough. Unfortunately, however, today’s social services are run more on the model of charity—invoked via a far less democratic and accountable social ideal of liberal beneficence—than radical solidarity. In the absence of any coherent social ethos of solidarity, the rich will always ask why they should have to “give” to undeserving others, and balk at having to pay their fair share. And then there is the problem of how the state operates once it is fully funded. Currently, the state is set up as a provider of services, a dispenser of welfare to recipients, as opposed to something that grants regular people any direct stake in its operations or ownership. In popular mythology, the government is portrayed as a monster, seizing private property through taxation, or as a smothering mother, the infamous nanny state.

These guiding tropes are all in play in the emerging debate over the Green New Deal. Solidarity, the building of bonds and diverse coalitions, will be essential to the struggle for a more ecologically sustainable and economically just world. At the same time, of course, the powerful forces heavily invested in the status quo will push back with all their might, pitting us against one another and buying off the relatively privileged, who may delusively believe they can weather the gathering storm alone.

But solidarity should infuse not just the fight but our understanding of what we are fighting for. Where the original New Deal brought Americans the welfare state, including services such as Social Security and unemployment insurance, the Green New Deal could usher in the era of what we might call the solidarity state—a state that not only redistributes resources to “beneficiaries” but also democratizes control over how those resources are produced, allocated, and managed. A solidarity state demands both shared sacrifice and shared reward.

And this is the enormous challenge ahead: The Green New Deal we need will not be charity granted from on high by enlightened rulers, but something won through a determined campaign of collective self-liberation. Like the debtors in Rome 2,000 years ago, we must bail one another out, this time as the sea levels continue rising around us.

Either solidarity forever, or our time is up.

[andymatuschak]

Exalting data, missing meaning

Science developed out of philosophy. Before we had Copernicus’s planetary tables or Newton’s equations of motion, we had Aristotle’s rhetoric. That medieval natural philosophy was wrong, but it still made useful predictions.

I’ve spent my career making things in the worlds of consumer products and education, and in both domains, I’ve observed a common failure mode in decision-making: an overriding obsession with data—with appearing scientific—and an associated repudiation of philosophy.

That’s a totally appropriate obsession in some fields, like manufacturing, transportation, and aviation. But in consumer products, education, and so many other domains involving the messiness of humanity, the data obsession falls prey to hidden errors and distorts our true goals. Worse, it deprives us of truly meaningful insights that are available via philosophy, intuition, and stories, but not yet fully explicable through quantitative systems.

This danger lurks in domains that have not yet been systematized. When it comes to people, we lack Newton’s equations of motion. Actually: we don’t even know what the equivalent equation should be measuring. Even if we did, we probably don’t have instruments that can measure those quantities. Can there ever be equations which can usefully describe these phenomena? I think so, but I don’t know we can even be sure of that.

Until we build more powerful explanatory theories of these domains, we must respect the role of philosophy and beware the dangers of playing scientist.

Measuring everything, measuring nothing

Let’s talk about test scores.

Have you ever gotten a fine grade in a class—say, calculus—but later felt like you didn’t really understand what was going on? That you can follow the steps you’d learned to solve problems like ones your class tackled, but you can’t explain why they worked or apply them in new contexts? This experience seems totally ubiquitous!

So: how much do you trust test scores for making decisions about educational systems?

In fields like education and design, we measure only indirect proxies: page clicks, time on site, changes in test scores, survey responses, and so on. Then we try to make decisions with those measurements.

This is like wiggling a rod, attached to a complex set of gears, attached to the thing we want to measure, which in turn is attached (in mysterious ways) to the thing we’re actually measuring.

When we don’t truly understand the mapping between what we really want to know and those proxies, we easily miss important consequences.

Hours of practice worksheets at Kumon might make a child great at arithmetic, but what does it do to their curiosity? To their desire to learn independently as an adult?

When Spotify opts you in by default to noisy push notifications (“the Beatles are now on Spotify!”), they might increase some engagement score, but they also annoy their users. That annoyance may not show up in any dashboard: maybe users keep using the service exactly as much, but when some PR fiasco blows up the following year, they’re less inclined to take Spotify’s side.

Because we don’t understand this mapping, we have to make many more guesses. And with every guess, there’s some chance that we see some result purely by chance. Statistical hypothesis testing only has meaning when you account for all the hypotheses you’ve tried.  

Alternately, sometimes people don’t even make guesses, and they just go hunting in the data. If you go looking for patterns in a sufficiently large data set, you’ll certainly find some!

(”Significant” from XKCD by Randall Munroe)

We know that correlation doesn’t imply causation. Sometimes, you’ll find strong correlations by random chance—just like in the comic above: the data suggest that this shade of blue causes people to engage the most!

But it was just random noise, and if you recolor more elements in that shade of blue, you won’t actually make anyone happier, other than perhaps your own community's navel-gazers.

Another danger is that your correlations may be masking more important underlying phenomena.

Say you want people to share their big news on your social network first. You can’t measure that directly, but you have a proxy metric: photos included with those posts have EXIF data indicating when they were taken. You decide you want to minimize the time between the photo being taken and the photo being shared.

To figure out how to proceed, you hunt for correlations in your logs of users’ behavior. Say you discover a strong correlation between how quickly a photo uploads and how likely it is that users share photos of big news immediately. You tell your engineers to focus on optimizing upload time!

You ship your optimized photo uploader… but you don’t see any benefits in the metric you were measuring. Turns out, you didn’t see this correlation by chance: you saw it because people with faster upload times can afford better cellular connections, which means they’re more likely to upload photos while they’re out and about, as opposed to waiting until they get to unmetered WiFi.

Photo upload time was itself just a proxy measure of the true root cause.

Even if we’re pretty sure we don’t have any hidden causes or consequences lurking, and we carefully account for all our hypotheses, we must remember that these are proxies we’re optimizing. As the situation varies, these proxies’ connection to your true goals may taper—or reverse!

Vitamin C can prevent disease, when taken in small quantities, if your diet already didn’t contain much of it. But that doesn’t mean you should take a hundred times as much seeking a hundred times the benefit (as double-Nobel-laureate Linus Pauling did): you'll see no marginal benefit, and you’ll just excrete it all.

In the worst cases, fixation on these proxies can create perverse incentives. Say that you want to prepare students for a life of solving challenging problems. It’s true that minimizing missed days of school may help make that happen—but past a certain point, other factors will dominate.

If you optimize too aggressively for zero missed days of school, you may easily reverse the correlation, disrupting students’ family lives or creating an atmosphere which makes students resent their autocratic school.

If you make a product, total usage time might seem like a good proxy for customer joy. But if you take that metric too seriously, you’d be punished for making a change which would help a customer accomplish a given task in less time than before.

There’s a subtler issue with exalting data in these domains—one my research partner May-Li Khoe has patiently explained for me over and over again. If you try to design something with human meaning by steering toward maximum impact on business outcomes, you’re very likely to end up with little human meaning… which in turn will likely harm whatever business outcomes you’re measuring in the long term.

Similarly, “teaching to the test” sucks the fascination and participation out of classrooms in exactly the way you would expect.

This talk from Frank Lantz covers the issue wonderfully in game design (this quote at 33:30; my thanks to Bret Victor for the pointer):

The dilemma of quantitative, data-driven game design.... So here's an analogy: Imagine you have a friend who has trouble forming relationships… "I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I go on a date, and I bring a thermometer so I can measure their skin temperature. I bring calipers so I can measure their pupil, to see when it's expanding and contracting..." The point is, it doesn't even matter if these are the correct things to measure to predict someone's sexual arousal. If you bring a thermometer and calipers with you on a date, you're not going to be having sex...

So.

Imagine that two teachers have exactly the same measured impact on their class’s test scores. How likely is it that they have the same impact on creating empowered thinkers?

You decide to adjust some variable because in the past, it correlated highly with increased product usage. How likely is it that this change better solves a meaningful problem for the user?

Meaning without measures

We’ve seen that there are plenty of dangers in making decisions based primarily on indirect measures with hazy connections to our true goals. Yet clearly, great teachers and great designers do operate effectively in these unsystematized fields!

They have insight; they have intuition. These come from an internalized philosophy about the field, drawn from experience, observation, and stories. Yes, their philosophies are imperfect; and no, they can’t necessarily give you a set of calipers you can use to make your own decisions.

But if you ask about one student interaction in particular, or one product detail in particular, they can often explain in hindsight why their philosophy pushed them in one direction or another. Listen enough, and you might build some intuition of your own.

This is not just luck or some kind of confirmation bias—there’s an underlying consistency to these experts’ taste. It’s clearly visible even if neither you nor they can quantitatively describe how they’re doing what they’re doing. Great teachers sure do manage to consistently be great teachers, in a way others consistently recognize, even without a dashboard and A/B tests. Of course, we might have to watch for a while to see that an expert delivers insights consistently, as opposed to by chance—that’s why knowledge worker interviews are so hard!—but it’s clear that some experts’ ideas are more consistently successful than others.

That consistency is what meaning is.

How do you know your house exists? After all, you don’t experience it directly: your contact with it is mediated by all kinds of layers of fuzzy visual processing and your own faulty memory. It exists because it’s reliably where it was last time. It exists because when you’re inside it, you consistently see the same imagery, with shadow angles mediated as you expect by the seasons. It exists because others can talk to you about your house and say things, interpreted through a winding auditory system, that somehow match your own fuzzy perceptions. It exists because your fingers can feel the shape of the house number on your door, which matches the shape on that lease you remember signing long ago.

The same logic tells us that when an expert consistently makes decisions broadly regarded as successful, and can explain their philosophy with rhetoric that makes intuitive sense, there is probably a there there.

Your house is more systematized—we can precisely measure its height, draw blueprints, predict its mass—but society could still effectively talk about houses before we had any of those tools. Until we discover those tools (and the questions we want to ask with them!), all we’ve got is tradition, expertise, rhetoric, philosophy. If we listen with balanced skepticism and curiosity, those can be powerful tools themselves.

Pretending to measure meaning

I don’t need to preach so strongly. In practice, we usually can’t ignore domain philosophy and experts’ intuition anyway.

Meaningful philosophy is meaningful—so even if we say we’re throwing it out, our intuition often remains entangled with our decisions.

I see this all the time in product decisions. For instance, someone might believe that sign-up walls make for a bad product for a variety of philosophical reasons, but they justify this decision outwardly by pointing to some data from one product’s blog about their A/B test on the subject.

That data is not the reason they decided to ditch sign-up walls. It’s just the reason they’re giving to others (and often, themselves) about why they made the decision. This behavior represents a sort of homage to science… while simultaneously violating its core principles.

In the education space, people are very excited about growth mindset interventions. The rough idea: if you can persuade a child that intelligence can grow with practice and hard work (just like their muscles), then they’ll actually perform better in school.

The recent enthusiasm for interventions in this space follows a series of randomized controlled trials documented in studies by Carol Dweck and her team at Stanford. These interventions probably are effective! But: the field’s quantitative results are actually quite modest in effect size.

The studies alone can’t justify the magnitude of the excitement about this topic; that follows the magnitude of people’s pre-existing intuitive beliefs in these interventions. The problem is that when the education community talks about this topic, it primarily justifies growth mindset interventions with these studies.

This type of motivated reasoning corrupts the dialog around decision-making. We should use provisional data like this to support—not supplant—our philosophies.

When two people disagree philosophically about an issue in an unsystematized domain, but allow only quantitative arguments, they end up fighting a proxy war through data weaker than their own beliefs. Worse: if we ever do invent powerful predictive systems for these fields, we’ll need our scientific wits about us, unsullied by post-hoc spin.

I hope it’s clear that I’m not arguing for us to generally abandon data and systematic thought. This scientistic obsession is a reasonable defense mechanism! After all, before precise measurement, physicists used to debate with rhetoric, and we ended up with phlogiston (i.e. things burn because they contain an element called phlogiston; phlogiston is lost to the air when a thing burns; things can’t burn inside a jar because that air can’t absorb any more phlogiston).

It’s in fields without reliable systems that we can’t measure our way to understanding.

Building systems in those fields is a critical project, and progress can be made. Meta-analysis and multitrait-multimethod tests have certainly helped us lay some foundations. Yet while fields’ systems are under construction, we must be careful not to put too much weight on them. They’re not yet structurally sound.

Intuition, philosophy, and expertise deliver all kinds of useful tentative explanations. If we monitor their predictions over time, we’ll discover limitations, and our theories will evolve. All the while, we’ll spot patterns, incorporate provisional systematic concepts, and fluidly evolve our beliefs, taking the best evidence however it comes.

Joy, belonging, and empowerment may live in this figure’s “qualitative black box,” but we can still produce explanations for how they arise. Those explanations may well involve measurable inputs and outputs. But if we insist on explaining joy through, say, engagement time and Net Promoter Scores, we’ll get exactly as much joy as we deserve.

[francescamaxime]

THERE’S NOTHING MICRO ABOUT MICROAGGRESSIONS        

Microaggressions have been described as a thousand paper cuts: its the straw that breaks the camel’s back, the thing that makes us break after withstanding many infractions. Usually I’ve noticed these in my own life as they pertain to the way men fetishize me as what they see as a desirable, Jezebel-esque “spicy Latina” or “exotic other” they feel a “primal urge towards.” Eeewwww. Yea. That’s what I think too. But I’m just being real with you.  For two decades as a TV news anchor I grew accustomed to a few things 1) Having the head of talent development say that I was too big, my hair too frizzy, my gesticulations too grandiose, and my manner too overt to “make it” big 2) men being gross, like asking for my stockings or saying they’d masturbate to watching me on the 11 o’clock news. (I know many women in the “news and entertainment” business get this. Thank goodness I never had a stalker I knew of!) 3) Being policed by the “Karen’s” (or “Becky’s”) of the world, saying things like, when I anchored for an ABC station in Florida, that I was “setting a bad example for young girls b/c I went to tanning beds,” when in fact, as a Haitian-Dominican Italian-American woman living in Florida, was grateful I got to spend time playing tennis every morning before my 2-11p anchoring shift and soaked up the natural sun.

 Those are microaggressions, which Dr. Derald Wing Sue has written extensively about. It’s not that I’ve ever liked them or gotten used to them, but as many folks who’ve been marginalized and bulled can attest, they’re something that often, right or wrong, take a backseat and simmer at a low boil, as we lean into the ongoing work of healing our larger traumas, though various practices.

 Lately, however, as I’ve taken up my meditation mentor Dr. Jack Kornfield’s invitation to lean into better learning about and understanding the legacy and ongoing nature of (internal, to our own minds, as well as in the larger social context) institutionalized, structural racism and systems of oppression, I’ve experienced a kind of “Wizard of Oz” moment around the whole pulling back the curtain/the emperor has no clothes kind of thing. I’ve been deeply seeing many of these institutions as not really practicing what they preach, or, being disassociated, or, perpetuating the kind of harm they say they work to avoid perpetuating.

 In fact, the ways in which the organizations I’ve been a part of - ones I’ve gained great benefit from including somatic therapies, spiritual practices, and philosophical/social justice organizations, as well as things I did just to “get the piece of paper,” like going to therapy school to become licensed - are so steeped in a philosophy of contraction, fear, separation, and dominance (aka “whiteness” or the racialization of operating out of an imperialist/dominant model out of “default” thinking and systems versus intentionally setting up the structure of the organization to be foundationally and structurally both equitable and diverse) and clinging to the veracity of their model as normative, it’s no wonder they perpetuate harm unconsciously. Hence, the Buddha’s teachings on clear seeing, craving/clinging, and the path out are more relevant than ever.

 Specifically, this week alone, in late August amidst the ongoing protests and uprising and the Covid pandemic disproportionately affecting people of color, organizations putting out “statements” about their “commitment to diversity,” etc., two big things stand out. One, I had a nonprofit I work with ask me for a piece of writing at the beginning of the summer. I gave up vacation time to do it, submitted it freely/unpaid, was asked if it could be edited to which I said yes, and then never heard back. They never published it. Then I get a call asking me to edit it and “fix it” again, with no offer of payment. I’m probably the only woman of color I see at that org, so interesting they’re asking me to do these things, and I asked them if they realized asking me for more here wasn’t appropriate unless I was paid, and they got defensive. But then, when I was asked by the newly-hired head of diversity at that org what they could do to make it right and repair, and I offered an invitation to pay me for it, the first response by that person was “well they won’t pay that, I don’t know that they pay that, etc.” without skipping a beat. Defense, explanation, and further micro aggressing over that which had already been damaged in what was ironically supposed to be a reparative conversation in which I was invited to respond to their query for them to fix it!

 Then later this week, in a spiritual retreat setting (online due to Covid) in which I was completing a multi-year certification and would have been awarded my certification today, I was silent during the breakout group talk about the day’s topic of “diversity” after a morning keynote and exercise discussing the org’s diversity policy… I was silent mainly b/c I didn’t see that they really understood what they could not see was wrong about the premise of their approach. I was asked to speak of my experience, (I’m assuming b/c my silence and “staying out of it” made them uncomfortable, again, centering white folx’s comfort over my need for quiet) I did speak, offering my take. Then, a woman who is white (out of the 70 people around the world there, there was not one Black person - that’s saying something!) jumped in to say I was wrong, angry, and that we should “all get along” type of thing. She cried, pulled out of the group, and had quite a display of white fragility. I explained to the group that this was part of the problem: humility and listening and doing educational and embodied antiracism work is key to reparations and healing. They took it in, but I decided to tell the small group leader I would not come back. She then emailed me to ask me to lead a meditation the next day, for collective healing, to which I responded that that was like asking a rape victim to teach a sexual assault awareness and prevention seminar the day after she was victimized. She didn’t respond.

 When I told the Executive Director of that org about those retreat incidents, I also asked to receive my certification without having to pay the fee for it since I had already spent thousands of dollars on the program (no scholarships for me!), and that this was an additional $500- I feel they could absorb b/c of the trauma caused to me because of the org’s ignorance as to how to properly hold safe space, despite their “diversity” mission statement (which is sorely lacking in equity or deep-rooted understanding of the roots of anti-Black violence and oppression in this country). She said she was “deeply saddened,” but that no, I had to pay to play, and that was it. Images of Maine’s Susan Collins came to mind.

 I share all this knowing some of you may respond like, “whoa, this girl is angry!” That’s fine. I’m not really. I’m sad. Because of the gaslighting that many “spiritual,” quasi-philosophical orgs perpetuate when they actually get the benefit of hearing from someone of my caliber trying to educate and share my embodied experience of hurt and trauma with them so they can lean in and learn, but they get so defensive, they can’t hear it, and dismiss and intellectualize their position on proper “policies” that have to be followed, etc.

 These are macro-microaggressions. They’re big. They age me. I can feel my telomeres fraying, my heart and gut sinking, my chest readying for heart attack tightening and my cells prepping for invasive cancers. I won’t let that happen, and thankfully I have amazing somatic practices that help me regulate my nervous system. Writing helps too, regardless if this is published or not or deemed too inflammatory.

 The idea is, we all belong to one another - but we have to realize, if we have white racial advantage, our social location and the way in which our unconscious inheritance of privilege perpetuates harm in an ongoing way, despite what we verbally say. “Watch what people do, not what they say,” comes to mind… a wise adage.

 So to cultivate wise brains, we have to have a courageous heart and do a U-turn and turn the eyes inside. Look. See what’s there. Be scaffolded against your own shame and anger by touching into your essential self, your basic goodness. Invite humility to replace hubris or shame, and really listen and be present. Give things space and time. Use ears and heart not mouth and mind. Be open, not clenched. Trust you’ll survive and perhaps gain a new depth of understanding in relationship.

 I’m far from perfect – I’m on my journey. I also know my limits, and, that I didn’t ask for this fight: people asked me in. So if you’re asking me, then be ready. I’ll share my truth. You may not like it, but, perhaps that’s something to explore: why there’s aversion to someone else’s lived experience, and how we can interrogate our own aversion and perhaps get curious about its roots. And then figure out what’s skillful and unskillful action. What, as the Buddha says, is the real path of non-harming.

 I’m offering an embodied antiracism course this fall for www.therapywisdom.com and offer (online b/c of Covid) embodied antiracism workshops for orgs, companies, nonprofits and groups, as well as have a private clinical practice working with adults and couples. If you’re interested in learning more please reach out www.maximeclarity.com

[magickmiora]

What Coinadrink Limited is doing to help keep your vending machine operational.

We understand that this is a strange and concerning time for everyone. Whatever your plans are as you debate heading back to the workplace, the health, safety and hygiene of your team must come first.

Coinadrink want to help provide the peace of mind you need. We have already emphasised that a vending machine is a safe entity for the provision of food and drink, but we are taking things even further with physical and technological measures we have in place to assist.  

This will ensure you can continue experiencing the benefits of vending and workplace refreshments in the safest way possible.

Social distancing with your vending machine.

There is a good chance that any business heading back to the workplace will be doing so under unusual conditions and requirements. Social distancing will need to be in place where possible.

Coinadrink is helping to encourage 2m distance amongst colleagues with our social distance packs. These consist of floor tape and stickers. Customers are able to receive one pack free per vending machine, whilst any additional packs required can be purchased over on our online store for a small fee.

If you’re a customer and you haven’t yet received your social distancing pack, contact us on 0800 626 191.

Free vending machine relocations.

In order to comply with social distancing guidelines, Coinadrink is happy to move your vending machine or equipment to an alternative location for free as long as it is on the same premises.

If you’re struggling to decide where best to move your machine to, we can help you map out your workspace to determine the ideal location. This will enable staff to continue using the machine as safely as possible.

Move to disposable coffee cups.

We often promote the convenience of being able to use your own mug or cup with modern day hot drinks machines, but are you cleaning it correctly?

For added peace of mind, we recommend using the disposable cup that your hot drink comes in by default. Disposable cups are stored safely in the vending machine and receive very little contact points prior to being stocked.

This guarantees that they are clean and safe to use. They can then be recycled afterwards.

Contactless payment units.

Many of our customers have requested that they now wish to use contactless payments on their vending machine. This removes the risk of coming into contact with germs that can linger on coins and notes.

Coinadrink uses Nayax for all our cashless payment solutions. In addition to the usual contactless payment options including card and mobile, we can now incorporate the Nayax “Monyx” application onto our equipment. This allows the customer to upload funds to a virtual wallet.

The use of styluses with your vending machine.

You face no more risk of contamination using a vending machine than you would using any other workplace facility, but we appreciate customers want as much reassurance as possible.

Customers can now request styluses which can be used to input your selection choice, such as a desired hot drink. If the customer chooses a contactless payment solution, using a stylus means the only time they have to interact with the machine itself is to collect the beverage or item from the dispense area.

As well as introducing new technology and services, we also offer a hygienic range of both existing and new equipment that customers are able to enjoy today.

PPE vending machines.

For those of you who need to take extra precautions when in the workplace, we now supply PPE vending machines. These are initially robust, reliable and spacious snack machines that ca be adapted to stock the products you require. These include goggles, face masks and hand sanitiser.

A vending machine has been proven to be a safe, secure way to offer life-saving PPE. They are sturdy enough to be placed almost anywhere, including public environments, and the innovative stock control system makes it easy to see who is and who isn’t wearing PPE. This also minimises waste.

The Micro Market.

Through Express Refreshments, we were the first company to introduce the Micro Market to UK shores in 2013. The Micro Market is so advanced and carries so many benefits that it is easy to underappreciate the hygienic aspect.

The Micro Market is a self-service convenience store that offers a variety of refreshments in an open-plan design. It is a fantastic and cost-effective alternative to a canteen or contract catering.

The open-plan design makes it easy to social distance with colleagues, whilst the fact that it is open 24 hours a day means you can stagger your break times to reduce the amount of people using the market at the same time. Minimal contact points also include a cashless payment terminal.

Contactless, self-sanitising water coolers.

Our new contactless, self-sanitising water coolers take our hygiene efforts even further. Advanced technology fitted to these coolers is invisible to the user but will sanitise your cooler automatically as part of a custom schedule you can set yourself. These coolers are also contactless, so you never have to interact with the equipment directly. Just place your cup or bottle against the lever.

Distance Select coffee machines.

Specific coffee machines from our Coffetek supplier now offer a contactless dispense thanks to Distance Select technology.

Distance Select builds on the safety the user can expect when using their vending machine or coffee machine. The user simply “hovers” their finger over the desired icon to select their drink, meaning you don’t have to directly interact with the equipment.

This technology is now available on the majority of Vitro coffee machines and the Neo hot drinks machine. It can also be retrofitted to Vitro’s and Neo’s manufactured in the past three years.

Signing off with a reminder about the safety of a vending machine.

Vending machines are a safe entity for the provision of food and drink to your workforce and customers. We really cannot emphasise this enough.

It is a simple and easy to control food delivery system where the items are only handled by the operator who loads them into the machine. Hot drinks ingredients and the cups that go into our machines are in sealed packages. The only time they come into contact with anyone once they leave the manufacturer is when our operators load them into your machine.

As previously mentioned in this article, your staff face no more risk using a vending machine than they would using other common facilities.

Backed up by Coinadrink’s industry-leading hygiene standards.

Coinadrink Limited is a vending supplier you can trust. We go the extra mile for your peace of mind and break the boundaries of what is possible to deliver an enhanced vending experience.

This includes being one of the first UK companies to be ISO 45001 accredited for occupational health and safety, before going on to being the only UK vending company to sanitise all contact parts of your hot drinks machine on our premises without causing any downtime to the user.

You can read more about our hygiene standards here.

Prefer to use a kettle for your hot drinks? Think again…

The kettle is an archaic refreshment solution that is unable to provide the necessary level of reassurance in times like this. Using a kettle for your hot drinks has too many touch points to make it a safe, viable option.

It’s obvious when you think about. Just how many amenities do you come into contact with when making your own hot drink? You touch the kettle, the milk, the sugar, the tea bag, cupboards, the fridge, the tap and that is without the washing up at the end.

Using the kettle is also slow. Very slow. It can take between 2 and 3 minutes to make a drink using the kettle, which will inevitably cause social distancing issues during break times when lots of staff want a hot drink.

A vending machine on the other hand removes all these risks. With a very limited number of touch points, it takes between 15 and 40 seconds to make your hot drink.

Keep this information at hand.

A vending machine is a great way to keep your workforce refreshed. They are clean, safe and simple to use. You can now download this information as a handy PDF to keep with you. If you want to contact us about our services and how they can help your business now and beyond COVID-19, you can contact us and we’d be happy to have a no obligation chat about your requirements.

Vending Machine Safety PDF

CONTACT US



Coinadrink Ltd

10-11, Maple Leaf Industrial Estate, Bloxwich Ln, Walsall WS2 8TF 01922 640777

The post What Coinadrink Limited is doing to help keep your vending machine operational. appeared first on Coinadrink.

source https://coin-a-drink.co.uk/what-coinadrink-limited-is-doing-to-help-keep-your-vending-machine-operational?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=what-coinadrink-limited-is-doing-to-help-keep-your-vending-machine-operational

[yashicat]

What Coinadrink Limited is doing to help keep your vending machine operational.

We understand that this is a strange and concerning time for everyone. Whatever your plans are as you debate heading back to the workplace, the health, safety and hygiene of your team must come first.

Coinadrink want to help provide the peace of mind you need. We have already emphasised that a vending machine is a safe entity for the provision of food and drink, but we are taking things even further with physical and technological measures we have in place to assist.  

This will ensure you can continue experiencing the benefits of vending and workplace refreshments in the safest way possible.

Social distancing with your vending machine.

There is a good chance that any business heading back to the workplace will be doing so under unusual conditions and requirements. Social distancing will need to be in place where possible.

Coinadrink is helping to encourage 2m distance amongst colleagues with our social distance packs. These consist of floor tape and stickers. Customers are able to receive one pack free per vending machine, whilst any additional packs required can be purchased over on our online store for a small fee.

If you’re a customer and you haven’t yet received your social distancing pack, contact us on 0800 626 191.

Free vending machine relocations.

In order to comply with social distancing guidelines, Coinadrink is happy to move your vending machine or equipment to an alternative location for free as long as it is on the same premises.

If you’re struggling to decide where best to move your machine to, we can help you map out your workspace to determine the ideal location. This will enable staff to continue using the machine as safely as possible.

Move to disposable coffee cups.

We often promote the convenience of being able to use your own mug or cup with modern day hot drinks machines, but are you cleaning it correctly?

For added peace of mind, we recommend using the disposable cup that your hot drink comes in by default. Disposable cups are stored safely in the vending machine and receive very little contact points prior to being stocked.

This guarantees that they are clean and safe to use. They can then be recycled afterwards.

Contactless payment units.

Many of our customers have requested that they now wish to use contactless payments on their vending machine. This removes the risk of coming into contact with germs that can linger on coins and notes.

Coinadrink uses Nayax for all our cashless payment solutions. In addition to the usual contactless payment options including card and mobile, we can now incorporate the Nayax “Monyx” application onto our equipment. This allows the customer to upload funds to a virtual wallet.

The use of styluses with your vending machine.

You face no more risk of contamination using a vending machine than you would using any other workplace facility, but we appreciate customers want as much reassurance as possible.

Customers can now request styluses which can be used to input your selection choice, such as a desired hot drink. If the customer chooses a contactless payment solution, using a stylus means the only time they have to interact with the machine itself is to collect the beverage or item from the dispense area.

As well as introducing new technology and services, we also offer a hygienic range of both existing and new equipment that customers are able to enjoy today.

PPE vending machines.

For those of you who need to take extra precautions when in the workplace, we now supply PPE vending machines. These are initially robust, reliable and spacious snack machines that ca be adapted to stock the products you require. These include goggles, face masks and hand sanitiser.

A vending machine has been proven to be a safe, secure way to offer life-saving PPE. They are sturdy enough to be placed almost anywhere, including public environments, and the innovative stock control system makes it easy to see who is and who isn’t wearing PPE. This also minimises waste.

The Micro Market.

Through Express Refreshments, we were the first company to introduce the Micro Market to UK shores in 2013. The Micro Market is so advanced and carries so many benefits that it is easy to underappreciate the hygienic aspect.

The Micro Market is a self-service convenience store that offers a variety of refreshments in an open-plan design. It is a fantastic and cost-effective alternative to a canteen or contract catering.

The open-plan design makes it easy to social distance with colleagues, whilst the fact that it is open 24 hours a day means you can stagger your break times to reduce the amount of people using the market at the same time. Minimal contact points also include a cashless payment terminal.

Contactless, self-sanitising water coolers.

Our new contactless, self-sanitising water coolers take our hygiene efforts even further. Advanced technology fitted to these coolers is invisible to the user but will sanitise your cooler automatically as part of a custom schedule you can set yourself. These coolers are also contactless, so you never have to interact with the equipment directly. Just place your cup or bottle against the lever.

Distance Select coffee machines.

Specific coffee machines from our Coffetek supplier now offer a contactless dispense thanks to Distance Select technology.

Distance Select builds on the safety the user can expect when using their vending machine or coffee machine. The user simply “hovers” their finger over the desired icon to select their drink, meaning you don’t have to directly interact with the equipment.

This technology is now available on the majority of Vitro coffee machines and the Neo hot drinks machine. It can also be retrofitted to Vitro’s and Neo’s manufactured in the past three years.

Signing off with a reminder about the safety of a vending machine.

Vending machines are a safe entity for the provision of food and drink to your workforce and customers. We really cannot emphasise this enough.

It is a simple and easy to control food delivery system where the items are only handled by the operator who loads them into the machine. Hot drinks ingredients and the cups that go into our machines are in sealed packages. The only time they come into contact with anyone once they leave the manufacturer is when our operators load them into your machine.

As previously mentioned in this article, your staff face no more risk using a vending machine than they would using other common facilities.

Backed up by Coinadrink’s industry-leading hygiene standards.

Coinadrink Limited is a vending supplier you can trust. We go the extra mile for your peace of mind and break the boundaries of what is possible to deliver an enhanced vending experience.

This includes being one of the first UK companies to be ISO 45001 accredited for occupational health and safety, before going on to being the only UK vending company to sanitise all contact parts of your hot drinks machine on our premises without causing any downtime to the user.

You can read more about our hygiene standards here.

Prefer to use a kettle for your hot drinks? Think again…

The kettle is an archaic refreshment solution that is unable to provide the necessary level of reassurance in times like this. Using a kettle for your hot drinks has too many touch points to make it a safe, viable option.

It’s obvious when you think about. Just how many amenities do you come into contact with when making your own hot drink? You touch the kettle, the milk, the sugar, the tea bag, cupboards, the fridge, the tap and that is without the washing up at the end.

Using the kettle is also slow. Very slow. It can take between 2 and 3 minutes to make a drink using the kettle, which will inevitably cause social distancing issues during break times when lots of staff want a hot drink.

A vending machine on the other hand removes all these risks. With a very limited number of touch points, it takes between 15 and 40 seconds to make your hot drink.

Keep this information at hand.

A vending machine is a great way to keep your workforce refreshed. They are clean, safe and simple to use. You can now download this information as a handy PDF to keep with you. If you want to contact us about our services and how they can help your business now and beyond COVID-19, you can contact us and we’d be happy to have a no obligation chat about your requirements.

Vending Machine Safety PDF

CONTACT US



Coinadrink Ltd

10-11, Maple Leaf Industrial Estate, Bloxwich Ln, Walsall WS2 8TF 01922 640777

The post What Coinadrink Limited is doing to help keep your vending machine operational. appeared first on Coinadrink.

source https://coin-a-drink.co.uk/what-coinadrink-limited-is-doing-to-help-keep-your-vending-machine-operational?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=what-coinadrink-limited-is-doing-to-help-keep-your-vending-machine-operational

[safeandcute]

What Coinadrink Limited is doing to help keep your vending machine operational.

We understand that this is a strange and concerning time for everyone. Whatever your plans are as you debate heading back to the workplace, the health, safety and hygiene of your team must come first.

Coinadrink want to help provide the peace of mind you need. We have already emphasised that a vending machine is a safe entity for the provision of food and drink, but we are taking things even further with physical and technological measures we have in place to assist.  

This will ensure you can continue experiencing the benefits of vending and workplace refreshments in the safest way possible.

Social distancing with your vending machine.

There is a good chance that any business heading back to the workplace will be doing so under unusual conditions and requirements. Social distancing will need to be in place where possible.

Coinadrink is helping to encourage 2m distance amongst colleagues with our social distance packs. These consist of floor tape and stickers. Customers are able to receive one pack free per vending machine, whilst any additional packs required can be purchased over on our online store for a small fee.

If you’re a customer and you haven’t yet received your social distancing pack, contact us on 0800 626 191.

Free vending machine relocations.

In order to comply with social distancing guidelines, Coinadrink is happy to move your vending machine or equipment to an alternative location for free as long as it is on the same premises.

If you’re struggling to decide where best to move your machine to, we can help you map out your workspace to determine the ideal location. This will enable staff to continue using the machine as safely as possible.

Move to disposable coffee cups.

We often promote the convenience of being able to use your own mug or cup with modern day hot drinks machines, but are you cleaning it correctly?

For added peace of mind, we recommend using the disposable cup that your hot drink comes in by default. Disposable cups are stored safely in the vending machine and receive very little contact points prior to being stocked.

This guarantees that they are clean and safe to use. They can then be recycled afterwards.

Contactless payment units.

Many of our customers have requested that they now wish to use contactless payments on their vending machine. This removes the risk of coming into contact with germs that can linger on coins and notes.

Coinadrink uses Nayax for all our cashless payment solutions. In addition to the usual contactless payment options including card and mobile, we can now incorporate the Nayax “Monyx” application onto our equipment. This allows the customer to upload funds to a virtual wallet.

The use of styluses with your vending machine.

You face no more risk of contamination using a vending machine than you would using any other workplace facility, but we appreciate customers want as much reassurance as possible.

Customers can now request styluses which can be used to input your selection choice, such as a desired hot drink. If the customer chooses a contactless payment solution, using a stylus means the only time they have to interact with the machine itself is to collect the beverage or item from the dispense area.

As well as introducing new technology and services, we also offer a hygienic range of both existing and new equipment that customers are able to enjoy today.

PPE vending machines.

For those of you who need to take extra precautions when in the workplace, we now supply PPE vending machines. These are initially robust, reliable and spacious snack machines that ca be adapted to stock the products you require. These include goggles, face masks and hand sanitiser.

A vending machine has been proven to be a safe, secure way to offer life-saving PPE. They are sturdy enough to be placed almost anywhere, including public environments, and the innovative stock control system makes it easy to see who is and who isn’t wearing PPE. This also minimises waste.

The Micro Market.

Through Express Refreshments, we were the first company to introduce the Micro Market to UK shores in 2013. The Micro Market is so advanced and carries so many benefits that it is easy to underappreciate the hygienic aspect.

The Micro Market is a self-service convenience store that offers a variety of refreshments in an open-plan design. It is a fantastic and cost-effective alternative to a canteen or contract catering.

The open-plan design makes it easy to social distance with colleagues, whilst the fact that it is open 24 hours a day means you can stagger your break times to reduce the amount of people using the market at the same time. Minimal contact points also include a cashless payment terminal.

Contactless, self-sanitising water coolers.

Our new contactless, self-sanitising water coolers take our hygiene efforts even further. Advanced technology fitted to these coolers is invisible to the user but will sanitise your cooler automatically as part of a custom schedule you can set yourself. These coolers are also contactless, so you never have to interact with the equipment directly. Just place your cup or bottle against the lever.

Distance Select coffee machines.

Specific coffee machines from our Coffetek supplier now offer a contactless dispense thanks to Distance Select technology.

Distance Select builds on the safety the user can expect when using their vending machine or coffee machine. The user simply “hovers” their finger over the desired icon to select their drink, meaning you don’t have to directly interact with the equipment.

This technology is now available on the majority of Vitro coffee machines and the Neo hot drinks machine. It can also be retrofitted to Vitro’s and Neo’s manufactured in the past three years.

Signing off with a reminder about the safety of a vending machine.

Vending machines are a safe entity for the provision of food and drink to your workforce and customers. We really cannot emphasise this enough.

It is a simple and easy to control food delivery system where the items are only handled by the operator who loads them into the machine. Hot drinks ingredients and the cups that go into our machines are in sealed packages. The only time they come into contact with anyone once they leave the manufacturer is when our operators load them into your machine.

As previously mentioned in this article, your staff face no more risk using a vending machine than they would using other common facilities.

Backed up by Coinadrink’s industry-leading hygiene standards.

Coinadrink Limited is a vending supplier you can trust. We go the extra mile for your peace of mind and break the boundaries of what is possible to deliver an enhanced vending experience.

This includes being one of the first UK companies to be ISO 45001 accredited for occupational health and safety, before going on to being the only UK vending company to sanitise all contact parts of your hot drinks machine on our premises without causing any downtime to the user.

You can read more about our hygiene standards here.

Prefer to use a kettle for your hot drinks? Think again…

The kettle is an archaic refreshment solution that is unable to provide the necessary level of reassurance in times like this. Using a kettle for your hot drinks has too many touch points to make it a safe, viable option.

It’s obvious when you think about. Just how many amenities do you come into contact with when making your own hot drink? You touch the kettle, the milk, the sugar, the tea bag, cupboards, the fridge, the tap and that is without the washing up at the end.

Using the kettle is also slow. Very slow. It can take between 2 and 3 minutes to make a drink using the kettle, which will inevitably cause social distancing issues during break times when lots of staff want a hot drink.

A vending machine on the other hand removes all these risks. With a very limited number of touch points, it takes between 15 and 40 seconds to make your hot drink.

Keep this information at hand.

A vending machine is a great way to keep your workforce refreshed. They are clean, safe and simple to use. You can now download this information as a handy PDF to keep with you. If you want to contact us about our services and how they can help your business now and beyond COVID-19, you can contact us and we’d be happy to have a no obligation chat about your requirements.

Vending Machine Safety PDF

CONTACT US



Coinadrink Ltd

10-11, Maple Leaf Industrial Estate, Bloxwich Ln, Walsall WS2 8TF 01922 640777

The post What Coinadrink Limited is doing to help keep your vending machine operational. appeared first on Coinadrink.

source https://coin-a-drink.co.uk/what-coinadrink-limited-is-doing-to-help-keep-your-vending-machine-operational?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=what-coinadrink-limited-is-doing-to-help-keep-your-vending-machine-operational