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EVENT BRANDING: TRANSFORMING EVENTS WITH CREATIVE EXCELLENCE

Event Branding, a leader in event branding solutions, crafts unique experiences that captivate audiences. Through innovative design and digital integration, they transform events into powerful brand showcases. Their commitment to quality and creativity sets them apart in the industry.




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Frontline Source Group, Inc. Wins Inavero's 2017 Best Of Staffing® Client And Talent Awards

Frontline Source Group, Inc., a leading professional staffing firm with nationwide offices announced today that they have won Inavero's 2017 Best of Staffing® Client and Talent Awards for providing superior service to their clients and job seekers.




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Frontline Source Group Wins Inavero's 2018 Best Of Staffing® Client And Talent Awards

Frontline Source Group, a principal employment agency in the staffing industry, announced today that they have received Inavero's Best of Staffing® Client and Talent Awards for providing superior service to their clients and job seekers. Presented in partnership with CareerBuilder, Inavero's Best of Staffing winners have proven to be industry leaders in service quality. This award is based entirely on ratings by their clients and the employees for whom they've coordinated job placements.




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Fast-Growing Online Lender Borro Provides No Credit Loans To Consumers Impacted By Recent Economic Turmoil

Borro's team of accredited luxury asset experts and financing specialists tailor loans to meet individual and business needs, making Borro a trusted lender to over 15,000 clients since 2008.




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STIHL plans additional growth despite challenging fiscal year

• Entry into EC motor manufacturing • Further growth in battery segment • Variety of new battery-operated products for professional and home users




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German-American tech ambassadors: serial entrepreneurs Petra Vorsteher and Ragnar Kruse receive GABA Award of Excellence




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Coeur d'Alene, ID Author Publishes Fantasy Novel

After They Show Her She Deserves A Family Will She Be Able To Save Them In Time




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Selena Gomez 'shines' in new Oscar-tipped musical

The singer and actress stars in Emilia Pérez, a new Netflix musical which has been tipped for awards.




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Small Business Owners Face New Challenges in 2015

The turkey has been carved, the gifts have been purchased and business owners are ready to celebrate the holiday season reflecting on a successful 2014. While small business owners may be thinking about holiday traditions, they are also beginning to focus on priorities and potential challenges ahead. Changes in technology, growing cybersecurity concerns, and shifts in the political landscape are all top of mind as small business owners enter 2015.

As the clock strikes midnight and the champagne bottles pop to ring in the New Year, three topics will be top of mind for entrepreneurs in 2015.

New Year, New Tools

complete article




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Overcoming Small Business Challenges

The future can look bleak when starting a small business. According to the U.K. Office for National Statistics, six out of ten businesses starting in the U.K. today will not make it to 2020. In the United States things are only marginally better with Small Business Administration research showing two-thirds of new businesses close their doors within the first two years and only about half survive the first five years. This may sound like a depressing number for a small business owner, but you can avoid becoming just another statistic by being aware of the most common small business challenges—and how to handle them.

complete article




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Why Is It So Hard To Serve Small Business? Blame The 90% Challenge

There is a convenient narrative about small business that we have all heard a million times.  Small business represents a huge, underserved, and highly lucrative market for finance-oriented entrepreneurs and large organizations alike. The prevailing wisdom is that these businesses run on Intuits QuickBooks, which enables them to have organized, accurate, and timely financial information at their fingertips. By all accounts, the small business market should be an easy one to serve. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Organizations big and small have struggled to serve the small business market in an efficient and effective matter, and it is all due to what we call the 90% challenge.

complete article




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68 Percent of Millennial Small Business Owners Rely on Social Media for Brand Promotion

Millennial business owners depend on social media for brand promotion more than any other medium.

Shocked, right? OK, probably not. But just how much Millennial business owners are using this relatively new media — or how much they don’t use traditional media — may come as a surprise.

New data (PDF) from Magisto shows that 68 percent of Millennial small business owners and entrepreneurs depend on social media channels for developing awareness of their own brands.

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Top Cities for Millennials Looking for Small Business Jobs

It is generally assumed that millennials are seeking jobs in coastal cities — New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles.

But new data from Indeed.com shows that millennials looking to work for small businesses are actually narrowing their searches toward inland cities.

Cities Where Millennials Want to Work for Small Businesses
In fact, when identifying metro areas where millennials are most often looking for work at small businesses. Oklahoma City topped the job board’s list, not L.A. or New York.

This is the latest crop of data looking at generational trends among job seekers.

complete article




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Square Expands Lending To Reach Small Business

Last summer, Square began offering loans to non-Square merchants with the help of a restaurant software partner called Upserve. Now, the payments and financial services company has created a formal partnership program with the long-term goal of reaching millions more.
Square Capital is launching the partnership platform with BigCommerce, an e-commerce software company that is letting Square make loan offers to its tens of thousands of small business clients.

Square is also extending loan offers to restaurants that work with its own delivery service, Caviar, but which do not already process payments through Square.

Taken together, these new partnerships give Jack Dorseys company a way to jumpstart further expansion of its lending program, which has already extended $1.8 billion in funds to more than 140,000 businesses since its launch three-plus years ago.

complete article




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The Seven Factors Lenders Use To Measure Small Business Credit

Why does qualifying for a small business loan have to be such a mystery?

According to a CB Insights study, cash flow issues are the second most common reason startups fail, accounting for 29% of failures. In many cases, access to capital would make a big difference. Yet the loan application process is notoriously opaque for small business owners. Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows the average small business owner spent 26 hours searching and applying for credit, contacted three financial institutions and submitted three credit applications. Despite this time-consuming work, only half of small-business applicants end up being approved for the loan amount they applied for.

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The Surprising Challenge Small Business Owners Are Facing Today

A healthy economy means many small businesses are thriving -- but they're also having a hard time hanging onto employees. A good 24% of small businesses lost at least one employee in 2018, while 11% of small businesses lost 10% of their workforce, according to Bank of America. Not only that, but 58% of businesses had trouble finding qualified candidates for open roles, and 25% said it took more time to fill open positions in 2018 than it did in 2017.

And there lies the problem with a strong job market: When employment is plentiful, workers have more options to choose from, so getting them to join or stay with your team becomes more challenging for companies across the board, but particularly for small businesses with limited resources.

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How to Attract, Hire, and Retain Unicorn-Level Talent

How do you hire, onboard, and retain a great team?

You start by viewing your company through the EQ lens to discover your organizational obstacles―the elephants standing in the way of your company's success.

Attend this webinar, How to Attract, Hire, and Retain Unicorn-Level Talent, as headhunter and executive coach Caroline Stokes delivers a blend of recruiting and emotional intelligence strategies essential to helping you identify and tackle your elephants and acquire and retain key hires―those unicorns―that will help your company stand out, stay resilient, and drive growth.

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FinTechs Must Be Involved In Paycheck Protection Program Lending For Small Business

Small businesses drive the economy and create the lions share of jobs in the private sector economy. However, right now they are struggling mightily. Although it is recommended that companies have at least six months’ worth of revenue in the bank to weather economic disruptions such as the coronavirus, the reality is that most small companies don’t have enough cash to operate more than a couple of weeks.

For the service industry: restaurants, nail salons, haircutters, landscapers, athletic trainers, and others, the loss of weekly revenue is devastating for the owners and staff of small businesses. Most service workers live paycheck to paycheck and cannot go very long without being paid. We have already seen an enormous spike in unemployment claims, ending an era when the economy has basically been at full employment.

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Python Challenge answers 0 thru 4... in clojure

The Python Challenge is a nifty site that presents you with a series of puzzles that it asks you to solve using python; getting each answer allows you to move on to the next puzzle.

Python is a cool language and it's a good tool for this job1 However, I'm learning clojure right now, so I thought it would be fun to try and solve a few of them in clojure. Here's my answers for challenges 0 thru 4 (warning: if you want to do these puzzles yourself, reading further now might ruin the fun)

Challenge #0 (the "Warmup")

Asks you to solve 2 to the 38th power:

(clojure.contrib.math/expt 2 38)

i.e. just use the exponent function in clojure contrib.

Challenge #1

This one throws some scrambled text at you and a clue on what the key is (ROT 2):

(defn translate [text]
  (let [lookup (vec (map char (range 97 123)))]
    (letfn [(letter? [c] (and (>= (int c) 97) (<= (int c) 122)))
            (shift-2 [c] (mod (+ 2 (- (int c) 97)) 26))]
      (apply str (map #(if (letter? %) (get lookup (shift-2 %)) %) text)))))

Create a lookup table of the chars, a predicate to test if a char is a letter. & a function to get the index of 2nd to next letter (the index loops, essentially making lookup as a ring buffer), then map across the given text, shifting by 2 if its a letter or just returning the char if its not.

Challenge #2

This one throws a big hunk of random data at you and suggests you pick out the 'rare' characters:

(defn filter-file [path]
  (let [fs (line-seq (clojure.contrib.io/reader path))
        lookup (set (map char (range 97 123)))]
    (apply str (mapcat #(filter lookup %) fs))))

A quick visual scan of the text led me to a strong hunch the "rare"2 characters were lowercase alpha, so:

Re-use our lookup table from the last challenge; this time make it a set, then use the set to filter each line of the file denoted by 'path' (I first saved the text to a file to make it easier to work with); use mapcat to flatten the lines out (this has the effect of stripping empty lines altogether); apply str to the resulting sequence to get the answer.

Challenge #3

This one's a big hunk of text too, so a quick refactoring of our last solution results in a more abstract (and higher-order) function that takes a filter function as an additional parameter:

(defn filter-file [filter-fn path]
    (apply str (mapcat filter-fn (line-seq (io/reader path)))))

the filter from challenge #2 thus becomes an argument; partial works nicely here:

(filter-file (partial filter (set (map char (range 97 123)))) "path/to/file")

Now we can make a new filter for challenge #3. This one will need to find character patterns that look like this: ABCxDEF. We'll need grab x. This one just screamed regex at me, so here's a filter that gives us the answer:

#(second (re-find #"[^A-Z][A-Z]{3}([a-z])[A-Z]{3}[^A-Z]" %)))

An anonymous function3 that uses re-find to match: "not-cap followed by 3 CAPS followed by not-cap followed by 3 CAPS followed by not-cap"; the second element of the resulting vector (because we use parens to create a group) produces x; mapcat et al do the rest.

Two big assumptions/limitations here: assumes each target is on its own line, and that the target pattern wasn't on the beginning or end of the line (which was good enough to get the answer).

Challenge #4

This challenge requires one to follow a url call chain, passing a different number as the argument to a 'nothing' parameter each time. The resulting page text provides the next number to follow (and/or some noise to keep you on your toes) until eventually we get the answer.

This one gets kinda ugly.

This is the kind of problem scripting languages are made for (e.g. perl, python & ruby coders would all make short work of this problem). Still, it's possible to write procedural code in clojure, and it's still reasonably straightforward.

One decision I had to make is how to GET the url's - my weapon of choice for this sort of thing is clj-http:

(require '[clj-http.client :as client])
(require '[clojure.contrib.string :as string]

(defn follow-chain [base-url number]
  (let [result (:body (client/get (str base-url number)))
        idx (.indexOf result "and the next")]
    (cond
      (re-find #"^Yes" result) (do
                                 (println result)
                                 (follow-chain base-url (/ (Integer/parseInt number) 2)))
      (= -1 idx)               result
      :else                    (let [result-vec (string/split (subs result idx) #" ")
                                     next-number (last result-vec)]
                                 (println result)
                                 (recur base-url next-number)))))

Take the url as a base & the first number to follow; use client-http/get to grab the page; extract the body of the page; get the index of the phrase "and the next" using the java "indexOf" method - we'll use the index later to parse out the end of the text and get the next number...

...unless of course, we get text that tells us something else (like a message saying "Yes" and then instructing us to divide the last number by two and continue on as before) so...

...we set up a switch using the cond macro: If the result starts with "Yes" make a recursive call dividing the last number by two; if indexOf otherwise came up empty, that's our answer, so return it; else pick the next number out of the result by splitting the end of the string into a vector (using clojure.contrib.string/split) and recur (tail recursively call the function again).

The println's could be removed, although they were essential when figuring out what the code needed to do.

Conclusion

This was a fun exercise; clojure's holding up pretty well so far, though clojure would not be my weapon of choice for that last one; if I choose to do the next five, I'll post them in a future article.

Footnotes

[1] It's also the darling of the hipster crowd right now -- in many cases the same people who snubbed python when ruby was the hip language about a decade ago... python abides.

[2] The official challenge answers also tackle ways to deduce "rare"; knock yourself out

[3] #() defines a function where % %2 etc represent positional parameters; the (fn [arg]) syntax would work here too




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Excellent Portents

 I'm still in New Zealand, and life is weird but good. 

Amanda and I are raising our small boy, and I love being swept along in his enthusiasms. Zombies was mostly replaced by Star Wars while I was away. Since I've been back, Star Wars has mostly been replaced by Tintin and Dinosaurs and Sea Monsters, and Tintin and Dinosaurs and Sea Monsters appear to be slowly transmuting into Greek Mythology and Asterix and Obelix. This morning he ate breakfast in character as Obelix, complaining about the lack of Roast Boar, and then lecturing me on all the Greek Heroes who battled monsters (his list consisted of Theseus, Perseus and Herakles. He got very excited when I told him about Odysseus.)


Hair prior to recent haircut. I look like a bush.

Hair after haircut. I look less like a bush. Ash and I are poring over The Seven Crystal Balls. Photo by Amanda


I've done one public event since I've been here -- the Auckland Writers Festival. Here's the video of the first event, in which Lucy Lawless interviewed me and Amanda.


I did another talk -- just me -- and a six hour long signing the following day. It was wonderful to meet the people, but I'm definitely out of practice at doing marathon signings. I kept thinking about the nine months I spent on Skye, during which time I probably interacted with a dozen people who were there, and that includes trips to the little shop in Uig and socially distanced walks with archaeologists on the hills. New Zealand has definitely done right by its people, and that just makes the losses around the world even harder.

Amanda's already vaccinated. I'm due to get vaccinated in a couple of weeks.

The Netflix Sandman is taking up a lot of my time right now.  (Today I received a first cut of episode 9, and a finished-except for music and VFX cut of episode 4 to watch.)

Here's the Sandman First Look Behind the Scenes release from Netflix. 



(I saw an earlier version of this in which I could be seen marvelling at a copy of The Sun newspaper with the headline TUG OF LOVE BABY EATEN BY COWS, because the determination of the team to make it Sandman is astonishing -- to the point where I sent an email to Allan Heinberg, showrunning, last week, while I was watching the Dailies, and I told him of an error I'd spotted. He pointed out right back that the error was in the panel in Sandman 10 they'd used as their reference. I told them not to fix it. That kind of fidelity can only be applauded.)




And in the meantime, all of the writing time, and a lot of the meeting time (because the people I am meeting are in countries on the other side of the world it's either early in my morning or very late at night), has been taken up by two other projects I haven't talked about yet, although they've been 90% of what I've been doing for the last 18 months. But let's leave them for the next blog entry. It'll give me an incentive to write one.






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Really bloody excellent omens...

Many, many years ago (it was Hallowe'en 1989, for the curious, the year before Good Omens was published) Terry Pratchett and I were sharing a room at the World Fantasy Convention in Seattle, to keep the costs down, because we were both young authors, and taking ourselves to America and conventions were expensive. It was a wonderful convention. I remember a huge Seattle second-hand bookstore in which I found a dozen or so green-bound Storisende Edition James Branch Cabell books, each signed so neatly by the author that the bookshop people assured me that the signatures were printed, and really ten dollars a book was the correct price. 

I could afford books. Good Omens had just been sold to UK publishers and then to US publishers for more money than Terry or I had ever received for anything. (Terry had been incredibly worried about this, certain that receiving a healthy advance would mean the end of his career. When his career didn't end, Terry suggested to his agent that perhaps he ought to be getting that kind of advance for every book from now on, and his life changed, and he stopped having to share a hotel room to save money. But I digress.) Advance reading copies of Good Omens had not yet gone out, but a few editors had read it (ones who had bid for it but failed to buy it) and they all seemed very excited about it, and thrilled for us.


On the Saturday evening Terry left the bar quite early and headed off to bed. I stayed up talking to people and having a marvelous time, hung in there until the small hours of the morning when they closed the hotel bar and all the people went away, and then headed up to the hotel room room. 


I opened the door as quietly as I could and tiptoed in the dark across the room to where my bed was located.


I'd just reached the bed when, from the far side of the room, a voice said, “What time of the night do you call this then? Your mother and I have been worried sick about you.”


Terry was wide awake. Jet lag had taken its toll.


And I was wide awake too. So we lay in our respective beds and having nothing else to do, we plotted the sequel to Good Omens. It was a good one, too. We fully intended to write it, whenever we next had three or four months free. Only I went to live in America and Terry stayed in the UK, and after Good Omens was published Sandman became SANDMAN and Discworld became DISCWORLD and there wasn't ever a good time.


But we never forgot it.


It's been thirty-one years since Good Omens was published, which means it's thirty-two years since Terry Pratchett and I lay in our respective beds in a Seattle hotel room at a World Fantasy Convention, and plotted the sequel. (I got to use bits of the sequel in the TV series version of Good Omens -- that's where our angels came from.)


Terry and I, in Cardiff in 2010, on the night we decided that Good Omens should become a television series.


Terry was clear on what he wanted from Good Omens on the telly. He wanted the story told, and if that worked, he wanted the rest of the story told.


So in September 2017 I sat down in St James' Park, beside the director, Douglas Mackinnon, on a chair with my name on it, as Showrunner of Good Omens. The chair slowly and elegantly lowered itself to the ground underneath me and fell apart, and I thought, that's not really a good omen. Fortunately, under Douglas's leadership, that chair was the only thing that collapsed. 




The crumbled chair.



So, once Good Omens the TV series had been released by Amazon and the BBC, to global acclaim, many awards and joy,  Rob Wilkins (Terry's representative on Earth) and I had the conversation with the BBC and Amazon about doing some more. And they got very excited. We talked to Michael Sheen and David Tennant about doing some more. They also got very excited. We told them a little about the plot. They got even more excited.


Rob Wilkins and David Tennant on the second day of shooting.

Me and Michael and Ash aged nearly 2.
What it was mostly like shooting Good Omens: peering into screens while something happened round the corner.



I'd been a fan of John Finnemore's for years, and had had the joy of working with him on a radio show called With Great Pleasure, where I picked passages I loved, had amazing readers read them aloud and talked about them.


(Here's a clip from that show of me talking about working with Terry Pratchett, and reading a poem by Terry: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p06x3syv. Here's the whole show from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7OsS_JWbzQ with John Finnemore's bits too.)




L to R: With Great Pleasure. John Finnemore, me all beardy, Nina Sosanya (Sister Mary in Good Omens) Peter Capaldi (he played Islington in the original BBC series of Neverwhere).

I asked John if he'd be willing to work with me on writing the next round of Good Omens, and was overjoyed when he said yes. We have some surprise guest collaborators too. And Douglas Mackinnon is returning to oversee the whole thing with me.


So that's the plan. We've been keeping it secret for a long time (mostly because otherwise my mail and Twitter feeds would have turned into gushing torrents of What Can You Tell Us About It? long ago) but we are now at the point where sets are being built in Scotland (which is where we're shooting, and more about filming things in Scotland soon), and we can't really keep it secret any longer.


There are so many questions people have asked about what happened next (and also, what happened before) to our favourite Angel and Demon. Here are, perhaps, some of the answers you've been hoping for. 


As Good Omens continues, we will be back in Soho, and all through time and space, solving a mystery which starts with one of the angels wandering through a Soho street market with no memory of who they might be, on their way to Aziraphale's bookshop. 


(Although our story actually begins about five minutes before anyone had got around to saying “Let there be Light”.)








  • Good Omens
  • What time of the night do you call this then?

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Heiner Garg: Grenzkontrollen müssen evaluiert werden und dürfen keine pauschale Verlängerung finden




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Oliver Brandt zur regionalen Steuerschätzung




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Landesbeauftragter für politische Bildung, Aktion Kinder- und Jugendschutz SH und Offene Kirche Sankt Nikolai holen Anne-Frank-Ausstellung 2025 nach Kiel und erinnern mahnend an Novemberpogrome




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Heiner Garg: Schallende Ohrfeige für die Kita-Reformpläne von Schwarz-Grün





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Bentham's mummified corpse, like Lenin's, remains fresh in appearance

It’s almost comforting that such invidious fluffy-minded sludge as this is floating around, as it seems, like religion, to keep the middle-brows hypnotized by “beautiful sentiments” which are so vague as to keep them from actually getting together and doing anything. It’s sort of weird to hear this weakly Marxist social-democratic pap which used to be shouted from the rooftops now being whispered in a low monotonous whine. The author avows his fealty to Jeremy Bentham, not Marx, and calls it utilitarianism not Marxism, but there are many illegitimate fathers along this line of thought.

The root of the idea is that, now that neuroscience has supposedly made it possible to actually identify what makes us happy, the idea of happiness has become quantifiable, and hence a program of providing the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people has become objectively possible. However, the author does not make the slightest effort to apply these wonders of modern science to actually determining what the alleged sources of human happiness are. The neuroscience tack is really just a defensive ploy to ward off the eternal charges that utilitarinism is simply a euphemism for an authoritarian imposition of values. As for espousing his positive program for what constitutes human happiness, it is simply the usual liberal middle-class canards, with not surprisingly a socialist edge: more time to spend with family, a decent wage for everyone, blah blah blah. But he seems to make two pretty criminally unsubstantiated assumptions: one is these sources are essentially the same for everyone, or at least could be under certain conditions, and the other is that they do not inherently conflict with anyone else’s.

I say under certain conditions could be, because in evaluating our current society he seems to privilege envy of other’s material well-being as the principal determinant of happiness. His theory is that above a certain level of material subsistence people are motivated primarily by status-seeking and the desire for a high rank within their social group. Therefore, the increasing wealth of the society will not increase happiness because people measure their well-being relative to the group, not by their absolute prosperity. This is always been a flaw in the concept of the “war against poverty”; I’m not sure it’s much of an argument for socialist economic redistribution. But actually if you read his section on the value of income taxes carefully, he doesn’t even seem to be arguing that they are useful insofar as they can be redirected to the less prosperous, although he does evidently believe that a certain amount of money contributes more to the happiness of a poor person than to a rich one’s. Rather, he seems to think that taking money away from the properous is valuable in and of itself, because it will supposedly make them less focused on the “rat race,” more family-oriented, etc., etc. In short he seems to be advocating a net impoverishment of society.

All of which may be consistent with the program of a good little socialist, but does not necessarily accord marvelously with his own evidence about the supposedly quantified happiness of humanity. The research that he cites non-specifically supposedly indicates that people’s feeling of happiness has not risen in the last half-century, but he does not cite anything which indicates that it has necessarily declined. He cites rising rates of depression and crime as presumably implicit indicators of greater unhappiness, but he does not seem to acknowledge the possibility that in our hyper-medicated and surveillance-based society perhaps people simply report depression and crime more. In any event, if roughly similar numbers of people today as in the ‘50’s report themselves happy (and we believe them), despite the increase in prosperity, that might perhaps indicate that happiness is not fixed to material well-being. Which may be consistent with his general point, but not with his idea of increasing happiness by manipulating income levels.

And even if it did, it seems rather difficult to countenance any social program predicated upon appealing to one of humanity’s most depraved instincts, namely envy. The author acknowledges that his ideal of taxation is mainly motivated by the desire to pander to people’s envy, but he seems to think that their envy will be sated by the loss of prosperity of those around them and that after that point there will be no more. So the envy of the less prosperous will be satisfied by the losses accrued by the more prosperous, which will somehow not be counter-balanced by the chagrin of the more prosperous at the prospect of seeing their status diminished. Very logical.

One of the more egregious presumptions of utilitarians is that non-utilitarian social systems somehow aren’t concerned with seeking the greatest good for the greatest number of people. On the contrary, that’s the defining problem of practically every social and political theory I can think of, and they all either seek or claim to have found the answer—whether such a solution exists, I have my doubts, but that’s why I’m a skeptic about politics. This is a handy trick by utilitarians: they say “I believe in the greatest good for the greatest number of people.” Which is practically begging the question: “As opposed to whom?” It’s useful because it tends to conceal the fact that their real agenda is generally somewhat more specific, and tends to consist in the autocratic notion that one or two measures of social living can be authoritatively determined to be the sources of happiness, and then divided up in a centralized fashion. Those that are the most insistent on the idea of liberty are generally those that are the most skeptical about the possibility of the notion of happiness being either quantitatively defined or generalizable. In other words, only indviduals can determine their own sources of happiness.

For the author, on the other hand, the fact that certain stimuli trigger certain areas of the brain at the times when test subjects profess pleasure has solved the problem of determining happiness. Of course, as mentioned, he never really bothers with the results that those studies have yielded. Somehow the fact that he considers envy to be a principal element of human happiness does not place very severe limits on the harmoniousness of individual happiness. Nor does it constitute a tyranny of the majority, because he claims that in an ideal utilitarian society the happiness of the most unhappy would be considered of pre-eminent importance. Of course, at the beginning of the article he cited the equal importance of each individual’s happiness as the fouding tenet of his theory, but I’m sure it all sorts out in the end.

Among social factors responsible for unhappiness, he cites divorce and unemployment as of pre-eminent importance. Of course, rates of both divorce and unemployment in the crassly materialistic and religious United States are much lower than in the much more overtly utilitarian-embracing Europe, but it would be a bit embarassing for him to admit this after avowing that all traditional value-systems outside of utilitarianism and “individualism” are dead.

Personally the question of the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people doesn’t exactly compel me constantly, although the issue of personal happiness tends to impose itself intransigently. I would have thought that evolutionary biology would have provided an adequate explanation of this, as well as the recurrence of what we call altruism. But such an idea of course suggests that happiness, whatever that is, is not really the point of our little existences, and that the more imperious competitiveness of life will ultimately subvert all of these little trifles of pleasure and pain. But in the meantime, we have these debased statistical notions of happiness to amuse us in an idle hour.

It seems to me that if one’s “objective” measure of happiness is electrical stimulation in the cerebral cortex, the most efficient utilitarian solution to the problem of human happiness would be strap everyone onto hospital gurneys and stimulate the “happiness” part of their brain all day long. If one does not wish to be this deterministic about it, perhaps one should allow more latitute to individuals to discover their own conception of happiness. Personally, I have found happiness generally to be an idea for the unhappy and something rarely spoken of by the happiness; mention of practically guarantees that it is not present in the environment where it is uttered. I don’t deny that what you might call love is the real bridge between personal happiness and moral obligations, and the only true means by which the desires of oneself and of others are united, but such a sentiment can never be mandated; it is entirely resistant to intellectual compulsion. Utilitarianism, which sometimes does a decent job of faking morality, is nevertheless ultimately predicated on the pleasure principle, and hence is wholly inadequate to uniting the moral and the pleasurable except when love truly pertains. In that case, of course, political theory is entirely superfluous, which is why this is all a waste of time.

p.s. I don’t claim that people’s behavior necessarily reflects what really would make them happy, but presumably it does at least reflect what they consciously value. Hence, if I were the author I would have been a bit skeptical of using the results of “surveys” of what people claim to value when the results don’t correlate with their behavior, i.e. they claim that spending time with family is most important, but they spend a disproportiante amount of time working (at least according to him). So either people are not really being forthright (consciously or unconsciously) in responding to surveys, or there is not actually a problem of priorities. In either case, he’s way over-valuing surveys as a guide to what will make people happy.




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The Holy Spirit Pt19: The Fruit Of The Spirit - Gentleness

Have you ever prayed for more gentleness? Have you ever heard teaching on 'how to be gentle'? Do you imagine God as gentle? When you think you are hearing God speak to you, is it with a gentle tone? We trust this next video on 'The Fruit of the Spirit - Gentleness', will answer these and other questions for you. 'Gentleness' or 'meekness' is a much neglected and tragically undervalued attribute that we and others would so benefit from if we experienced it through the Holy Spirit's power. Indeed, this is how we would better influence the people around us to be Christians. As Jesus put it in Matthew 5:5 'Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth'. This message is available at https://www.preachtheword.com now in MP3 audio format and in HD video on our YouTube Channel (https://youtube.com/PreachTheWord)...



  • Religion & Spirituality

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Castilla-La Mancha Cuenta con 50 Días para Inaugurar Centros de Atención a Víctimas de Violencia Sexual

En un acto simbólico y cargado de demandas, Amnistía Internacional ha entregado cerca de 15.000 firmas a la Consejería de Igualdad de Castilla-La Mancha. Con esta acción, la organización busca presionar a las autoridades para que implementen medidas concretas de apoyo a las víctimas de violencia sexual, en un contexto donde el tiempo apremia: apenas […]

Artículo publicado en : Castilla-La Mancha Cuenta con 50 Días para Inaugurar Centros de Atención a Víctimas de Violencia Sexual




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L'affaire de l'UIMM déclenche une crise au sommet du patronat

Le patronat français est entré en crise ce week-end après l'attaque de la présidente du Medef, Laurence Parisot, contre la puissante fédération des industries de la métallurgie (UIMM) touchée par une affaire de mystérieux retraits d'espèces. Après la...





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Forellen Station Deluxe normaal €399,00 nu voor maar €320,00

Forellen Station deluxe Merk: TFT TFT heeft wederom een kwaliteitsproduct voor de forelvisser op de markt gebracht. De TFT forellen Station Deluxe. Een tas met vele mogelijkheden. Het station bestaat uit de volgende onderdelen: - 1 draagtas , hierin passen alle onderdelen - 1x een deegtablet hierin kunt u eenvoudig uw deegpotjes plaatsen, zo heeft ze bij de hand - 1 x een assdoosjes tablet ( op de afbeelding zijn ze verschillende kleuren, maar in het echt hebben ze allemaal een rode deksel) - 1 x een tackle tas :deze kleinere tas kunt u aan de voorzijde van het station plaatsen. - 1 x het staanderwerk, waarom heen ook een tas zit. In deze grote tas zitten een tweedeling. Genoeg ruimte dus om al uw hengelsportartikelen in op te bergen, en handig mee te nemen. Wilt u een filmpje over het forellen station bekijken? ( helaas alleen nog in het duits te vinden) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8JUzhcUtVc




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silstar 3084-950cm lengte 8 delig carbon insteekhengel compe

competition carbon insteekhengel silstar 950 cm lengte 8 delig nieuwstaatin bijbehorende originele hengelhoes 100% geen haarscheurtjes e.dverkeerd werkelijk nog in nieuwstaat helemaal compleet met doppen en ogendit is een zeer dure carbon hengelvissport hengelsport zeevissen karpervissen wit vis vereniging




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Musical Valentine's Day Video Cards, Happy Valentine's Day Ecards

Romantic Valentine's Day cards with music, Valentine's Day love ecards, Happy Valentine's Day Greetings and Video cards for mobile smartphones.




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Liveblog zu Neuwahlen: ++ Kukies erwartet keine Haushaltssperre ++

Der neue Bundesfinanzminister Kukies geht nicht davon aus, dass es eine Haushaltssperre geben wird. BSW-Chefin Wagenknecht sieht für ihre Partei durch den Zeitdruck Herausforderungen. Die Entwicklungen vom Dienstag zum Nachlesen.




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Trumps Wahlsieg: Demokraten im US-Senat wollen Richter im Eiltempo bestätigen

Die Zeit sitzt den US-Demokraten im Nacken. Noch vor Trumps Amtsantritt wollen sie so viele Bundesrichter im US-Senat bestätigen wie möglich. Denn auch in der Parlamentskammer übernehmen bald die Republikaner die Kontrolle.




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Republikaner wollen Führungsposten im US-Kongress besetzen

Die US-Wahl ist gerade eine Woche her, und schon dreht sich das Personalkarussell in hohem Tempo. Heute wollen die Republikaner Führungsposten im Kongress besetzen und zeigen, dass sie die neue Macht im Kapitol sind. Von Katrin Brand.




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Volkswagen startet neue Allianz mit dem Tesla-Rivalen Rivian

Nun ist es offiziell: Volkswagen holt sich für Auto-Software der nächsten Generation Hilfe vom US-Elektroautobauer Rivian. Dafür stockt der Konzern seine Investition in ein Gemeinschaftsunternehmen noch einmal auf.




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Liveblog zu Neuwahlen: ++ Merz fordert grundlegende Politikwende ++

CDU-Chef Merz hat die Regierungserklärung des Bundeskanzlers scharf kritisiert und sich für ein Umsteuern in der deutschen Politik ausgesprochen. Scholz bestätigte den Zeitplan für die Vertrauensfrage. Die Entwicklungen im Liveblog.




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Gary Chew reviews "Blue Valentine"

Two-track love story in which the now of it is shown alternately with its beginning six years before. Chew calls it raw, real, tender, touching, happy, goofy... and sad. A smart date movie for realists. Stars Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams. Now in limited release.




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Lee Woodward on radio pioneer Gordon McLendon

Did Top 40 popularizer McLendon give phony names to his DJs to make them expendable if they asked for more money? More in GroupBlog 323.




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Silent Comedy in B.A. tonight

Jim Reid will be doing a show with the Tulsa Theater Organ Society at 7 pm on Friday, June 17 at the Broken Arrow campus of the Tulsa Technology Center at 129th E. Ave (Olive) and 111th St. He''ll be running his 16mm prints of what he considers the funniest silent shorts, accompanied by organists playing a vintage 1920s theater organ. More in GroupBlog 328.




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Plenty Scary Movie article in The Tulsa World

Jimmie Tramel wrote an article about KTUL's Plenty Scary Movie in Monday's Tulsa World.




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The Plenty Scary Movie page on TTM

One of the attributed sources for Jimmie Tramel's article.




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Weird Al 2018 calendar and Tulsa UHF tour YouTube

Emily Spivy pointed out that TTM is credited along with Dr. Demento on the 2018 Weird Al Yankovic calendar. Watch her movie of our 2013 bus tour of UHF locations in Tulsa.




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British Maltese Biker Cross Calendar Print

British Union Jack Flag Maltese Biker Cross Printed Calendar for those that are into British motorcycles and choppers like Triumph, Norton and BSA - British Union Jack Maltese Biker Maltese Iron Chopper Cross t-shirts, sweatshirts and other cool stuff for British bikers, chopper riders, motorcyclists and fans of British motorcycles and the freedom motorcycling brings. Excellent gift for fans or riders of Triumph, Norton and BSA or custom built choppers and motorcycles.




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Ace Biker Iron Maltese Cross Calendar Print

The Ace Biker Iron Maltese Cross Calendar Print is for bikers, chopper riders, custom bike builders, motorcyclists, motorcycle enthusiasts and anyone who enjoys the freedom that motorcycling brings - The Playing Card Ace Biker Iron Maltese Cross for bikers, chopper riders, custom bike builders, motorcyclists, motorcycle enthusiasts and anyone else who enjoys the freedom that motorcycling brings




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For Amusement Only Calendar Print

With this Calendar Print you can proudly announce that you are to be used for amusement purposes only - Are you not to be taken seriously? Are you only to be used for amusement purposes only? Do you know someone that is to be used only for your or someone else's amusement? Then these are for you!




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Bikers Have More Fun Than People Do Calendar Print

Bikers Have More Fun Than People Do Printed Calendar - Bikers Have More Fun Than People Do Mega Cool Shirts, Sweatshirts, Clocks, Stickers, Mugs And More. Excellent gifts for all bikers, chopper riders, motorcyclists, motorcycle enthusiasts and fans of all motorcycles and the freedom motorcycling brings.




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Bowling Therapy Calendar Print

For Some There's Therapy, For The Rest Of Us There's Bowling Calendar Print - For some there's therapy, for the rest of us there's bowling. Sometimes the best way escape reality a little bit to relax, unwind, think about life is to head to the bowling alley and knockdown some pins. There's just something about rolling a bowling ball down the lane, hearing the crash of the pins as they plow into each other to release tension and stress.