“
Be very careful of what you allow to infiltrate your consciousness and subconsciousness. When you watch too much television, you'll start to feel inferior from all the commercials hard selling the idea that you're not complete unless you buy their product [...] The ad agencies appeal to your fear of not being wanted or loved. It's the same with the local news. They get you to stay tuned with a constant stream of fear tactics [...] It's as if our culture is addicted to fear and the flat screen is our drug dealer. Don't allow that crap into your head!
”
”
RuPaul (Workin' It! Rupaul's Guide to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Style)
“
People walk the paths of the gardens below, and the wind sings anthems in the hedges, and the big old cedars at the entrance to the maze creak. Marie-Laure imagines the electromagnetic waves traveling into and out of Michel’s machine, bending around them, just as Etienne used to describe, except now a thousand times more crisscross the air than when he lived - maybe a million times more. Torrents of text conversations, tides of cell conversations, of televisions programs, of e-mails, vast networks of fiber and wire interlaced above and beneath the city, passing through buildings, arcing between transmitters in Metro tunnels, between antennas atop buildings, from lampposts with cellular transmitters in them, commercials for Carrefour and Evian and prebaked toaster pastries flashing into space and back to earth again, I am going to be late and Maybe we should get reservations? and Pick up avocados and What did he say? and ten thousand I miss yous, fifty thousand I love yous, hate mail and appointment reminders and market updates, jewelry ads, coffee ads, furniture ads flying invisibly over the warrens of Paris, over the battlefields and tombs, over the Ardennes, over the Rhine, over Belgium and Denmark, over the scarred and ever-shifting landscape we call nations. And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets, like terns, like starlings? That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough? They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs, and pass out through the other side, the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it.
Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world.
We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.
”
”
Anthony Doerr (All the Light We Cannot See)
“
You can all supply your own favorite, most nauseating examples of the commodification of love. Mine include the wedding industry, TV ads that feature cute young children or the giving of automobiles as Christmas presents, and the particularly grotesque equation of diamond jewelry with everlasting devotion. The message, in each case, is that if you love somebody you should buy stuff. A related phenomenon is the ongoing transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb 'to like' from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse: from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice. And liking, in general, is commercial culture's substitution for loving.
”
”
Jonathan Franzen (Farther Away)
“
I have this highly developed fraud-alert for social influencers. From a mile away I can spot an ad designed to undermine the contentedness of vulnerable female teens.
”
”
Michael Benzehabe (Zonked Out: The Teen Psychologist of San Marcos Who Killed Her Santa Claus and Found the Blue-Black Edge of the Love Universe)
“
In fact quite generally, commercial advertising is fundamentally an effort to undermine markets. We should recognize that. If you’ve taken an economics course, you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. You take a look at the first ad you see on television and ask yourself … is that it’s purpose? No it’s not. It’s to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices. And these same institutions run political campaigns. It’s pretty much the same: you have to undermine democracy by trying to get uninformed people to make irrational choices.
”
”
Noam Chomsky (The Kind of Anarchism I Believe in, and What's Wrong with Libertarians)
“
[M]y mother read a horror novel every night. She had read every one in the library. When birthdays and Christmas would come, I would consider buying her a new one, the latest Dean R. Koontz or Stephen King or whatever, but I couldn't. I didn't want to encourage her. I couldn't touch my father's cigarettes, couldn't look at the Pall Mall cartons in the pantry. I was the sort of child who couldn't even watch commercials for horror movies - the ad for Magic, the movie where marionette kills people. sent me into a six-month nightmare frenzy. So I couldn't look at her books, would turn them over so their covers wouldn't show, the raised lettering and splotches of blood - especially the V.C. Andrews oeuvre, those turgid pictures of those terrible kids, standing so still, all lit in blue.
”
”
Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius)
“
The very idea of massified advertising meant that large cirulation newpapers were not in the business of selling information to people but rather of selling the attention of their readers to commercial concerns... to tap into the resorvoir of resources constitutred by the growing urban populations
”
”
Manuel DeLanda (A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History)
“
Are we more likely to suffer from arthritis, stiff joints, poor memory, flagging energy, and decreased sex drive as we age, simply because that’s the version of the truth that ads, commercials, television shows, and media reports bombard us with? What other self-fulfilling prophecies are we creating in our minds without being aware of what we’re doing? And what “inevitable truths” can we successfully reverse simply through thinking new thoughts and choosing new beliefs? The
”
”
Joe Dispenza (You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter)
“
Advertisements on YouTube are the new infomercials.
”
”
J.R. Rim
“
Advertisement shouldn’t look like information, it should look like a promise.
”
”
Amit Kalantri
“
This is the lesson of all great television commercials: They provide a slogan, a symbol or a focus that creates for viewers a comprehensive and compelling image of themselves. In the shift from party politics to television politics, the same goal is sought. We are not permitted to know who is best at being President or Governor or Senator, but whose image is best in touching and soothing the deep reaches of our discontent. We look at the television screen and ask, in the same voracious way as the Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?" We are inclined to vote for those whose personality, family life, and style, as imaged on the screen, give back a better answer than the Queen received. As Xenophanes remarked twenty-five centuries ago, men always make their gods in their own image. But to this, television politics has added a new wrinkle: Those who would be gods refashion themselves into images the viewers would have them be.
”
”
Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business)
“
Sometimes when I’m watching TV and I see a horrible commercial I think, “Only an asshole would buy that.” Then I think, Wait a minute! The advertising agency did research on their client’s target market and which channel and TV shows the ideal demographic watches, right? This would mean a carefully chosen ad campaign to get the product in front of the likely buyers, who in this case, are assholes. And I’m on the chosen channel, which means that I am one of the assholes of interest. Then I get spooked, because how’d they figure out that am asshole? Scary how well they know me.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (At even one penny, this book would be overpriced. In fact, free is too expensive, because you'd still waste time by reading it.)
“
So what's your doll's name?" Boo asked me.
"Barbie," I said. "All their names are Barbie."
"I see," she said. "Well, I'd think that would get boring, everyone having the same
name."
I thought about this, then said, "Okay, then her name is Sabrina."
"Well, that's a very nice name," Boo said. I remember she was baking bread,
kneading the dough
between her thick fingers. "What does she do?"
"Do?" I said.
"Yes." She flipped the dough over and started in on it from the other side. "What
does she do?"
"She goes out with Ken," I said.
"And what else?"
"She goes to parties," I said slowly. "And shopping."
"Oh," Boo said, nodding.
"She can't work?"
"She doesn't have to work," I said.
"Why not?"
"Because she's Barbie."
"I hate to tell you, Caitlin, but somebody has to make payments on that town house
and the Corvette,"
Boo said cheerfully. "Unless Barbie has a lot of family money."
I considered this while I put on Ken's pants.
Boo started pushing the dough into a pan, smoothing it with her hand over the top.
"You know what I
think, Caitlin?" Her voice was soft and nice, the way she always spoke to me.
"What?"
"I think your Barbie can go shopping, and go out with Ken, and also have a
productive and satisfying
career of her own." She opened the oven and slid in the bread pan, adjusting its
position on the rack.
"But what can she do?" My mother didn't work and spent her time cleaning the
house and going to PTA.
I couldn't imagine Barbie, whose most casual outfit had sequins and go-go boots,
doing s.uch things.
Boo came over and plopped right down beside me. I always remember
her being on my level; she'd sit
on the edge of the sandbox, or lie across her bed with me and Cass as we listened to
the radio.
"Well," she said thoughtfully, picking up Ken and examining his perfect physique.
"What do you want to
do when you grow up?"
I remember this moment so well; I can still see Boo sitting there on the floor, cross-
legged, holding my
Ken and watching my face as she tried to make me see that between my mother's
PTA and Boo's
strange ways there was a middle ground that began here with my Barbie, Sab-rina,
and led right to me.
"Well," I said abruptly, "I want to be in advertising." I have no idea where this came
from.
"Advertising," Boo repeated, nodding. "Okay. Advertising it is. So Sabrina has to go
to work every day,
coming up with ideas for commercials
and things like that."
"She works in an office," I went on. "Sometimes she has to work late."
"Sure she does," Boo said. "It's hard to get ahead. Even if you're Barbie."
"Because she wants to get promoted," I added. "So she can pay off the town house.
And the Corvette."
"Very responsible of her," Boo said.
"Can she be divorced?" I asked. "And famous for her commercials
and ideas?"
"She can be anything," Boo told me, and this is what I remember most, her freckled
face so solemn, as if
she knew she was the first to tell me. "And so can you.
”
”
Sarah Dessen (Dreamland)
“
What I'm saying is, where have all the real people gone? Where are the recognizably-human beings? Of course, it's silly of me to look them on TV commercials, no one watches ads for their true-to-life portrayals. If the ads were full of real people, they wouldn't be able to sell anything. Which is the point of this rambling column.
Real people just don't sell.
”
”
Jessica Zafra (Womenagerie and Other Tales from the Front)
“
A growth hacker is someone who has thrown out the playbook of traditional marketing and replaced it with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable. Their tools are e-mails, pay-per-click ads, blogs, and platform APIs instead of commercials, publicity, and money.
”
”
Ryan Holiday (Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising)
“
Every Unwind believes in their heart of hearts that it won’t happen to them—that their parents, no matter how strained things get, will be smart enough not to fall for the net ads, TV commercials, and billboards that say things like “Unwinding: the sensible solution.
”
”
Neal Shusterman (UnWholly (Unwind, #2))
“
Nowadays, people no longer know Beethoven's Ninth from concerts, but form the for lines of the 'Ode to Joy' that they hear every day in the ad for Bella Perfume.
”
”
Milan Kundera
“
Should we trust the scientists and the so called experts that created the endless parade of pharmaceutical concoctions that we see advertised on TV? ads that are soon discontinued as they're followed up by an avalanche of commercials from legal firms inviting people who are permanently damaged or worse from last week's big pharma witch's Brew to sue for damages...
”
”
Dane Wigington
“
Moreover, some of the images covered by the definition go far beyond what can reasonably be considered pornographic. For example, "women's body parts . . . are exhibited such that women are reduced to those parts." This description would include everything from blue jean commercials which zoom in on women's asses to cream ads which show perfectly manicured hands applying the lotion-the sort of advertisements that have appeared in Ms. magazine. Although it is commonplace to criticize such ads for using sex to sell products, it is a real stretch to call them pornographic.
”
”
Wendy McElroy (XXX: A Woman's Right to Pornography)
“
Any time you see a film or TV show or a commercial that features someone dressed up as an animal, it’s probably Todd inside. “I was in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” he told me. “Guess,” he added, “which one I was.
”
”
Douglas Adams (The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time)
“
Michael Jordan, the basketball great, is a case in point. In a famous Nike commercial, he said: ‘I’ve missed more than nine thousand shots. I’ve lost almost three hundred games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed.’ For many the ad was perplexing. Why boast about your mistakes? But to Jordan it made perfect sense. ‘Mental toughness and heart are a lot stronger than some of the physical advantages you might have,’ he said. ‘I’ve always said that and I’ve always believed that.’ James
”
”
Matthew Syed (Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success)
“
I have a great idea, Gregori," she told him wickedly. "Let's take a commercial flight."
"What?" He was staring at her mouth. She had a great mouth.A perfect mouth. A sexy mouth. Mon Dieu, he wanted her mouth.
"Doesn't a commercial flight sound fun? We could take a night flight, mingle with people.It might even throw off the reporter."
"Nothing is going to throw off the reporter.He is tenacious.And there will be no commercial flight.There will be no discussion on this,either. None. If we go to New Orleans,and I am not saying we will, commercial flights are out."
"Oh,Gregori,I was only kidding. Naturally we'll do things your way," she added demurely.
He shook his head,exasperated at himself. Of course she had been teasing. He wasn't used to anyone treating him as Savannah did. Outrageous woman. "I need to go out and talk with Wade Carter."
She stood up instantly, expectantly, her blue eyes wide in anticipation. "Tell me what you want me to do. I can probably manage mist.I'm stronger now,using your blood.I can back you up."
Amusement warmed the cool silver of his eyes. "Mon Dieu, Savannah, you sound like a cop movie.
”
”
Christine Feehan (Dark Magic (Dark, #4))
“
Bear with me a moment, now. Chicken-sexing. Since hens have a far greater commercial value than males, cocks, roosters, it is apparently vital to determine the sex of a newly hatched chick. In order to know whether to expend capital on raising it or not, you see. A cock is nearly worthless, apparently, on the open market. The sex characteristics of newly hatched chicks, however, are entirely internal, and it is impossible with the naked eye to tell whether a given chick is a hen or a cock. This is what I have been told, at any rate. A professional chicken-sexer, however, can nevertheless tell. The sex. He can go through a brood of freshly hatched chicks, examining each one entirely by eye, and tell the poultry farmer which chicks to keep and which are cocks. The cocks are to be allowed to perish. “Hen, hen, cock, cock, hen,” and so on and so forth. This is apparently in Australia. The profession. And they are nearly always right. Correct. The fowl determined to be hens do in fact grow up to be hens and return the poultry farmer’s investment. What the chicken-sexer cannot do, however, is explain how he knows. The sex. It’s apparently often a patrilineal profession, handed down from father to son. Australia, New Zealand. Have him hold up a new-hatched chick, a young cock shall we say, and ask him how he can tell that it is a cock, and the professional chicken-sexer will apparently shrug his shoulders and say “Looks like a cock to me.” Doubtless adding “mate,” much the way you or I would add “my friend” or “sir.
”
”
David Foster Wallace (Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: Stories)
“
Contrary to what the ads and commercials tell you, romance does not need to cost a thing. There’s not a single thing about being romantic that should require the folks at MasterCard to increase your credit limit. You are deluding yourself if you think that the only way you can be wildly romantic is by single-handedly jumpstarting the economy.
”
”
Paul Joannides (Guide To Getting It On--8th edition (2015): A book about the wonders of sex)
“
[N]ow that growing your own (food, dope, hair, younameit) is hip," wrote the author of an essay widely reprinted in alternative newspapers, "it's time to resurrect the Dope of the Depression - Homebrew." Homemade beer inspired "good vibrations" and a "pleasant high." Unlike the rest of "plastic, mass-produced shit" of modern America, homebrew represented "an exercise of craft" and empowered the "politically oriented" to retaliate against "Augustus [sic] Busch and the other fascists pigs who [were] ripping off the Common Man." "If you're looking for a cheap drunk," added the beer adviser, "go back to Gussie Busch. But if you dig the good vibes from using something you make yourself, plus an improvement in quality over the commercial shit," brew on, brothers and sisters, brew on.
”
”
Maureen Ogle (Ambitious Brew : The Story of American Beer)
“
usual, he threw himself into the marketing, working with James Vincent and Duncan Milner at the ad agency (now called TBWA/ Media Arts Lab), with Lee Clow advising from a semiretired perch. The commercial they first produced was a gentle scene of a guy in faded jeans and sweatshirt reclining in a chair, looking at email, a photo album, the New York Times, books, and video on an iPad propped on his lap. There were no words, just
”
”
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
“
Pathways toward a New Shabbat Do 1. Stay at home. Spend quality time with family and real friends. 2. Celebrate with others: at the table, in the synagogue, with friends or community. 3. Study or read something that will edify, challenge, or make you grow. 4. Be alone. Take some time for yourself. Check in with yourself. Review your week. Ask yourself where you are in your life. 5. Mark the beginning and end of this sacred time by lighting candles and making kiddush on Friday night and saying havdalah on Saturday night. Don’t 6. Don’t do anything you have to do for your work life. This includes obligatory reading, homework for kids (even without writing!), unwanted social obligations, and preparing for work as well as doing your job itself. 7. Don’t spend money. Separate completely from the commercial culture that surrounds us so much. This includes doing business of all sorts. No calls to the broker, no following up on ads, no paying of bills. It can all wait. 8. Don’t use the computer. Turn off the iPhone or smartphone or whatever device has replaced it by the time you read this. Live and breathe for a day without checking messages. Declare your freedom from this new master of our minds and our time. Find the time for face-to-face conversations with people around you, without Facebook. 9. Don’t travel. Avoid especially commercial travel and places like airports, hotel check-ins, and similar depersonalizing encounters. Stay free of situations in which people are likely to tell you to “have a nice day” (Shabbat already is a nice day, thank you). 10. Don’t rely on commercial or canned video entertainment, including the TV as well as the computer screen. Discover what there is to do in life when you are not being entertained.
”
”
Arthur Green (Judaism’s Ten Best Ideas: A Brief Guide for Seekers)
“
All these commercials about health and diet and fitness. All of these ads for waistlines and libidos and teeth whiteners. If you're not taking care of yourself or eating right or exercising, if you're overweight or you have a small penis or you don't have bright enough teeth, then there's something wrong with you. Spiritually. Physically. Morally. Instead of being defined by your actions, you're defined instead by your smile. Your sexual performance. Your percentage of body fat.
”
”
S.G. Browne (Big Egos)
“
The circle of salt’s potential victims grew at an alarming rate. Part of Dahl’s research into the evils of salt involved breeding a strain of salt-sensitive rats, in which he induced hypertension by feeding them commercially prepared baby food that contained added sodium. In April 1970, newspapers ran an Associated Press report about Dahl’s findings under scary headlines like “Baby Food Salt May Be Harmful, Researcher Says.” The report quoted Dahl calling salted baby food “a needless kind of risk.
”
”
Alan Levinovitz (The Gluten Lie: And Other Myths About What You Eat)
“
All the while, the market and commercial interests are enjoying free rein. The food industry supplies us with cheap garbage loaded with salt, sugar, and fat, putting us on the fast track to the doctor and dietitian. Advancing technologies are laying waste to ever more jobs, sending us back again to the job coach. And the ad industry encourages us to spend money we don’t have on junk we don’t need in order to impress people we can’t stand.28 Then we can go cry on our therapist’s shoulder. That’s the dystopia we are living in today.
”
”
Rutger Bregman (Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World)
“
Nuts and seeds contain 150 to 200 calories per ounce. Eating a small amount—one ounce or less—each day, however, adds valuable nutrients and healthy unprocessed fats. Nuts and seeds are ideal in salad dressings, particularly when blended with fruits and spices or vegetable juice (tomato, celery, carrot). Always eat nuts and seeds raw because the roasting process alters their beneficial fats. Commercially packaged nuts and seeds are often cooked in hydrogenated oils, adding trans fats and sodium to your diet, so these are absolutely off the list. If
”
”
Joel Fuhrman (Eat to Live: The Amazing Nutrient-Rich Program for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss)
“
Power itself is founded largely on disgust. The whole of advertising, the whole of political discourse, is a public insult to the intelligence, to reason - but an insult in which we collaborate, abjectly subscribing to a silent interaction. The day of hidden persuasion is over: those who govern us now resort unapologetically to arm-twisting pure and simple. The prototype here was a banker got up like a vampire, saying, 'I am after you for your money' . A decade has already gone by since this kind of obscenity was introduced, with the government's blessing, into our social mores. At the time we thought the ad feeble because of its aggressive vulgarity. In point of fact it was a prophetic commercial, full of intimations of the future shape of social relationships, because it operated, precisely, in terms of disgust, avidity and rape. The same goes for pornographic and food advertising, which are also powered by shamelessness and lust, by a strategic logic of violation and anxiety. Nowadays you can seduce a woman with the words, 'I am interested in your cunt' . The same kind of crassness has triumphed in the realm of art, whose mounds of trivia may be reduced to a single pronouncement of the type, 'What we want from you is stupidity and bad taste' . And the fact is that we do succumb to this mass extortion, with its subtle infusion of guilt.
It is true in a sense that nothing really disgusts us any more. In our eclectic culture, which embraces the debris of all others in a promiscuous confusion, nothing is unacceptable. But for this very reason disgust is nevertheless on the increase - the desire to spew out this promiscuity, this indifference to everything no matter how bad, this viscous adherence of opposites. To the extent that this happens, what is on the increase is disgust over the lack of disgust. An allergic temptation to reject everything en bloc: to refuse all the gentle brainwashing, the soft-sold overfeeding, the tolerance, the pressure to embrace synergy and consensus.
”
”
Jean Baudrillard (The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena)
“
However hyped the risk of germs may be, it is at least real. Some corporations go so far as to conjure threats where there are none. A television ad for Brita, the German manufacturer of water-filtration systems, starts with a close-up of a glass of water on a kitchen table. The sound of a flushing toilet is heard. A woman opens a door, enters the kitchen, sits at the table and drinks the water. The water in your toilet and the water in your faucet "come from the same source," the commercial concludes. Sharp-eyed viewers will also see a disclaimer a the start of the ad printed in tiny white letters: MUNICIPAL WATER IS TREATED FOR CONSUMPTION. This is effectively an admission that the shared origin of the water in the glass and the toilet is irrelevant and so the commercial makes no sense--at least not on a rational level. As a pitch aimed at Gut, however, it makes perfect sense. The danger of contaminated drinking water is as old as humanity, and the worst contaminant has always been feces. Our hardwired defense against contamination is disgust, an emotion that drives us to keep our distance from the contaminant. By linking the toilet and the drinking glass, the commercial connects feces to our home's drinking water and raises an ancient fear--a fear that can be eased with the purchase of one of the company's many fine products.
”
”
Daniel Gardner (The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn't--and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger)
“
Sitting at the edge of his bed those days, weaving and watching television movies – movies themselves, mostly made from the seasickness of misguided creative endeavor.
Normalization of commercial compromise had left his medium as one of dominantly irrelevant fantasies adding nothing to the world, and instead providing a perfect storm of merchanteering thespians and image builders now less identifiable as creators of valued products than of products built for significant sales. Their masses of fans as happy as hustled, bustled, and rustled sheep. A country without culture? Nothing more than a shopping mall with a flag? Still, business is branding buoyantly, leaving Bob to yet another bout of that old society-is-sinking sensation.
”
”
Sean Penn (Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff)
“
I once worked as a writer for a big New York ad agency. Our boss used to tell us: Invent a disease. Come up with the disease, he said, and we can sell the cure. Attention Deficit Disorder, Seasonal Affect Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder. These aren't diseases, they're marketing ploys. Doctors didn't discover them, copywriters did. Marketing departments did. Drug companies did. Depression and anxiety may be real. But they can also be Resistance. When we drug ourselves to blot out our soul's call, we are being good Americans and exemplary consumers. We're doing exactly what TV commercials and pop materialist culture have been brainwashing us to do from birth. Instead of applying self-knowledge, self-discipline, delayed gratification and hard work, we simply consume a product.
”
”
Steven Pressfield (The War of Art)
“
It is sometimes assumed that Americans care only for material things, that they are bent only on that kind of success which can be cashed into dollars and cents. That is a very narrow and unintelligent opinion. We have been successful beyond others in great commercial and industrial enterprises because we have been a people of vision. Our prosperity has resulted not only by disregarding but by maintaining high ideals. Material resources do not, and cannot, stand alone; they are the product of spiritual resources. It is because America, as a nation, has held fast to the higher things of life, because it has had a faith in mankind which it has dared to put to the test of self-government, because it has believed greatly in honor and righteousness, that a great material prosperity has been added unto it.
”
”
Charles C. Johnson (Why Coolidge Matters: Leadership Lessons from America’s Most Underrated President)
“
Torrents of text conversations, tides of cell conversations, of television programs, of e-mail, vast networks of fiber and wire interlaced above and beneath the city, passing through buildings, arcing between transmitters in Metro tunnels, between antennas atop buildings, from lampposts with cellular transmitters in them, commercials for Carrefour and Evian and prebaked toaster pastries flashing into space and back to earth again, I’m going to be late and Maybe we should get reservations? and Pick up avocados and What did he say? and ten thousand I miss yous, fifty thousand I love yous, hate mail and appointment reminders and market updates, jewelry ads, coffee ads, furniture ads flying invisibly over the warrens of Paris, over the battlefields and tombs, over the Ardennes, over the Rhine, over Belgium and Denmark, over the scarred and ever-shifting landscapes we call nations. And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets, like terns, like starlings? That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough? They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs, and pass out through the other side, the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it. Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world. We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.
”
”
Anthony Doerr (All the Light We Cannot See)
“
Family Theater was created by Father Patrick Peyton of the Holy Cross Fathers in an effort to promote family unity and prayer. Initially it was seen as a forum to broadcast the Rosary: when the networks refused to allow such a narrow one-denominational appeal, Peyton broadened the scope, made it a weekly drama, added the glamor of Hollywood, and saved the “message” for the slots normally reserved for commercials. Throughout the ten-year run, only one commercial was heard: the continuous appeal for family prayer in America. Al Scalpone created the slogans that were used on each broadcast: A world at prayer is a world at peace and, most memorably, The family that prays together stays together. A line from Tennyson was used to open each broadcast: More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.
”
”
John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
“
Researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, Saga University in Japan, and the University of California, Davis, proposed creating an artificial inorganic leaf modeled on the real thing. They took a leaf of Anemone vitifolia, a plant native to China, and injected its veins with titanium dioxide-a well-known industrial photocatalyst. By taking on the precise branching shape and structure of the leaf's veins, the titanium dioxide produced much higher light-harvesting ability than if ti was used in a traditional configuration. The researchers found an astounding 800 percent increase in hydrogen production as well. The total performance was 300 percent more active than the world's best commercial photocatalysts. When they added platinum nanoparticles to the mix, it increased activity by a further 1,000 percent.
”
”
Jay Harman (The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation)
“
The History of Social Anxiety
The fact that some people are shyer than others has been observed since ancient times. However, the medical community didn’t become interested in this condition until the 1970s, when Philip Zimbardo founded the Stanford Shyness Clinic.
At the time, many professionals believed that shyness was a natural state that children eventually outgrew. Zimbardo showed that shyness actually is a widespread psychological problem that has deep and lasting effects on those who suffer from it.
This new awareness led to a great deal of research into the causes and treatment of social anxiety. Today, the condition is in the spotlight. Ads in magazines and commercials on television tell about social anxiety and advertise medications to treat it. People are becoming more open about discussing when they feel anxious and feel less ashamed about asking for help. The time has never been better for you to try to overcome your social anxiety.
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Heather Moehn (Social Anxiety (Coping With Series))
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When ad legend Lee Clow took the imagery from George Orwell’s 1984 to create the most iconic TV commercial of all time, almost no one watching Apple’s Super Bowl ad understood all of the references. (They’d read the book in high school, but if you want to impact a hundred million beer-drinking sports fans, an assigned high school book is not a good place to start.) But the media-savvy talking heads instantly understood, and they took the bait and talked about it. And the nerds did, and they eagerly lined up to go first. The lesson: Apple’s ad team only needed a million people to care. And so they sent a signal to them, and ignored everyone else. It took thirty years for the idea to spread from the million to everyone, thirty years to build hundreds of billions of dollars of market cap. But it happened because of the brilliant use of semiotics, not technology. At every turn, Apple sent signals, and they sent them in just edgy enough words, fonts, and design that the right people heard the message.
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Seth Godin (This Is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn to See)
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Back in Russia, where they’re still getting acclimated to the whole capitalism thing, most TV advertising took a straightforward approach to persuasion. Thus, even though I don’t speak Russian, I had no trouble understanding Russian ads. They were all along the lines o: “Oh, no, there’s a stain on the tablecloth! What will Mom do? Thank goodness for this effective detergent!” Not so in Japan, where sophisticated consumers have grown bored with simple persuasion, forcing advertisers to get wildly inventive. Japanese TV ads have at this point evolved into an abstract mishmash of symbols and sounds. Your average thirty-second Japanese commercial is something like: Here’s a man holding a giraffe. Now the giraffe morphs into a rainbow. The rainbow is friends with a talking pencil, and they live together on a spaceship. A few seconds of laughter! A snippet of loud reggae music! Fad out. At least half the time, I have no idea what the product being advertised is or what it does. And yet I very much enjoy the ads. They’re like short-acting hallucinogens.
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Seth Stevenson (Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World)
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The only path McAuliffe saw to hard-money parity ran through cycles of prospecting new donors, in the mail and online. To accomplish that on the scale he believed crucial, Democrats needed the list of 100 million new names, sortable by party registration or voting behavior, that would fill a national voter file. McAuliffe proposed a deal to the state chairs, that the DNC would effectively borrow their files, help clean them up, add new data like donor information and commercially available phone numbers, and then return them for the state party’s use. At the same time, McAuliffe went to Vinod Gupta, a major Democratic fund-raiser and Clinton friend who was the founder and CEO of InfoUSA, one of the country’s large commercial data vendors. Like many of his rivals, Gupta had been trying for years to find customers in the political world, and offered McAuliffe a good deal for his product. McAuliffe agreed, and as the state files came in, the DNC would send them out to InfoUSA’s Omaha servers, where hundreds of pieces of new information were added to each voter’s profile. A new interface was built to navigate it all. It was called Demzilla.
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Sasha Issenberg (The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns)
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The real rivalry between Britain and France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was about commercial and political power. They sought to achieve their aims, however, in very different ways. The British were mostly interested in money and therefore mainly indifferent to the cultures of the ‘natives’ they colonized, subjugating them by force of arms when and if necessary. The French, in contrast, controlled their colonies by pursuing the ‘civilizing mission’, effectively seeking to make their subjects culturally French. Of course the French plundered where they could, but there was an added strategic urge to extend the concept of ‘Frenchness’ across the world.
Furthermore, under the rigidities of the French educational system, there could be no argument about what this identity meant. The absurd end-point of this policy was Berber Muslim students in the hills of Algeria, who had never been to France, reading about their ‘Gaulish ancestors’. The comedy soon turns tragic when this cultural cosh splinters individual identity; as we shall see, such psychic trauma is the key to understanding not just the killing-jar of Algeria but the entire French sphere of influence in the Arab world.
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Andrew Hussey (The French Intifada: The Long War Between France and Its Arabs)
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TechCrunch, Fast Company, Mashable, Inc., Entrepreneur, and countless other publications. LinkedIn and Hacker News abound with job postings: Growth Hacker Needed. Their job isn’t to “do” marketing as I had always known it; it’s to grow companies really fast—to take something from nothing and make it something enormous within an incredibly tight window. And it says something about what marketing has become that these are no longer considered synonymous tasks. The term “growth hacker” has many different meanings for different people, but I’ll define it as I have come to understand it: A growth hacker is someone who has thrown out the playbook of traditional marketing and replaced it with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable. Their tools are e-mails, pay-per-click ads, blogs, and platform APIs instead of commercials, publicity, and money. While their marketing brethren chase vague notions like “branding” and “mind share,” growth hackers relentlessly pursue users and growth—and when they do it right, those users beget more users, who beget more users. They are the inventors, operators, and mechanics of their own self-sustaining and self-propagating growth machine that can take a start-up from nothing to something.
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Ryan Holiday (Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising)
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Honestly, I'm relieved. Finally someone's calling Athena out on her bullshit, on her deliberately confusing sentence structures and cultural allusions. Athena likes to make her audience "work for it." On the topic of cultural exposition, she's written that she doesn't "see the need to move the text closer to the reader, when the reader has Google, and is perfectly capable of moving closer to the text." She drops in entire phrases in Chinese without adding any translations—her typewriter doesn't have Chinese characters, so she left spaces and wrote them out by hand. It took me hours of fiddling with an OCR to search them online, and even then I had to strike out about half of them. She refers to family members in Chinese terms instead of English, so you're left wondering if a given character is an uncle or a second cousin. (I've read dozens of guides to the Chinese kinship nomenclature system by now. It makes no goddamn sense.)
She's done this in all her other novels. Her fans praise such tactics as brilliant and authentic—a diaspora writer's necessary intervention against the whiteness of English. But it's not good craft. It makes the prose frustrating and inaccessible. I am convinced it is all in service of making Athena, and her readers, feel smarter than they are.
"Quirky, aloof, and erudite" is Athena's brand. "Commercial and compulsively readable yet still exquisitely literary," I've decided, will be mine.
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R.F. Kuang (Yellowface)
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Making the most of an experience: Living fully is extolled everywhere in popular culture. I have only to turn on the television at random to be assailed with the following messages: “It’s the best a man can get.” “It’s like having an angel by your side.” “Every move is smooth, every word is cool. I never want to lose that feeling.” “You look, they smile. You win, they go home.” What is being sold here? A fantasy of total sensory pleasure, social status, sexual attraction, and the self-image of a winner. As it happens, all these phrases come from the same commercial for razor blades, but living life fully is part of almost any ad campaign. What is left out, however, is the reality of what it actually means to fully experience something. Instead of looking for sensory overload that lasts forever, you’ll find that the experiences need to be engaged at the level of meaning and emotion. Meaning is essential. If this moment truly matters to you, you will experience it fully. Emotion brings in the dimension of bonding or tuning in: An experience that touches your heart makes the meaning that much more personal. Pure physical sensation, social status, sexual attraction, and feeling like a winner are generally superficial, which is why people hunger for them repeatedly. If you spend time with athletes who have won hundreds of games or with sexually active singles who have slept with hundreds of partners, you’ll find out two things very quickly: (1) Numbers don’t count very much. The athlete usually doesn’t feel like a winner deep down; the sexual conqueror doesn’t usually feel deeply attractive or worthy. (2) Each experience brings diminishing returns; the thrill of winning or going to bed becomes less and less exciting and lasts a shorter time. To experience this moment, or any moment, fully means to engage fully. Meeting a stranger can be totally fleeting and meaningless, for example, unless you enter the individual’s world by finding out at least one thing that is meaningful to his or her life and exchange at least one genuine feeling. Tuning in to others is a circular flow: You send yourself out toward people; you receive them as they respond to you. Notice how often you don’t do that. You stand back and insulate yourself, sending out only the most superficial signals and receive little or nothing back. The same circle must be present even when someone else isn’t involved. Consider the way three people might observe the same sunset. The first person is obsessing over a business deal and doesn’t even see the sunset, even though his eyes are registering the photons that fall on their retinas. The second person thinks, “Nice sunset. We haven’t had one in a while.” The third person is an artist who immediately begins a sketch of the scene. The differences among the three are that the first person sent nothing out and received nothing back; the second allowed his awareness to receive the sunset but had no awareness to give back to it—his response was rote; the third person was the only one to complete the circle: He took in the sunset and turned it into a creative response that sent his awareness back out into the world with something to give. If you want to fully experience life, you must close the circle.
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Deepak Chopra (The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life)
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Whether it honors them well or not, an essay’s fundamental obligations are supposed to be to the reader. The reader, on however unconscious a level, understands this, and thus tends to approach an essay with a relatively high level of openness and credulity. But a commercial is a very different animal. Advertisements have certain formal, legal obligations to truthfulness, but these are broad enough to allow for a great deal of rhetorical maneuvering in the fulfillment of an advertisement’s primary obligation, which is to serve the financial interests of its sponsor. Whatever attempts an advertisement makes to interest and appeal to its readers are not, finally, for the reader’s benefit. And the reader of an ad knows all this, too—that an ad’s appeal is by its very nature calculated—and this is part of why our state of receptivity is different, more guarded, when we get ready to read an ad. 38 In the case of Frank Conroy’s “essay,” Celebrity Cruises 39 is trying to position an ad in such a way that we come to it with the lowered guard and leading chin we properly reserve for coming to an essay, for something that is art (or that is at least trying to be art). An ad that pretends to be art is—at absolute best—like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what’s sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill’s real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.
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David Foster Wallace (A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments)
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Jobs later explained, “We discussed whether it was correct before we ran it. It’s grammatical, if you think about what we’re trying to say. It’s not think the same, it’s think different. Think a little different, think a lot different, think different. ‘Think differently’ wouldn’t hit the meaning for me.” In order to evoke the spirit of Dead Poets Society, Clow and Jobs wanted to get Robin Williams to read the narration. His agent said that Williams didn’t do ads, so Jobs tried to call him directly. He got through to Williams’s wife, who would not let him talk to the actor because she knew how persuasive he could be. They also considered Maya Angelou and Tom Hanks. At a fund-raising dinner featuring Bill Clinton that fall, Jobs pulled the president aside and asked him to telephone Hanks to talk him into it, but the president pocket-vetoed the request. They ended up with Richard Dreyfuss, who was a dedicated Apple fan. In addition to the television commercials, they created one of the most memorable print campaigns in history. Each ad featured a black-and-white portrait of an iconic historical figure with just the Apple logo and the words “Think Different” in the corner. Making it particularly engaging was that the faces were not captioned. Some of them—Einstein, Gandhi, Lennon, Dylan, Picasso, Edison, Chaplin, King—were easy to identify. But others caused people to pause, puzzle, and maybe ask a friend to put a name to the face: Martha Graham, Ansel Adams, Richard Feynman, Maria Callas, Frank Lloyd Wright, James Watson, Amelia Earhart. Most were Jobs’s personal heroes. They tended to be creative people who had taken risks, defied failure, and bet their career on doing things in a different way.
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Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
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NATO paper: Modification of Tropospheric Propagation Conditions, detailed how the atmosphere could be modified to absorb electromagnetic radiation by spraying polymers behind high flying aircraft. Absorbing microwaves transmitted by HAARP and other atmospheric heaters linked from Puerto Rico, Germany and Russia, these artificial mirrors could heat the air, inducing changes in the weather. U.S. Patent # 4253190 describes how a mirror made of “polyester resin” could be held aloft by the pressure exerted by electromagnetic radiation from a transmitter like HAARP. A PhD polymer researcher who wishes to remain anonymous told researcher William Thomas that if HAARP’s frequency output is matched to Earth’s magnetic field, its tightly beamed energy could be imparted to molecules “artificially introduced into this region.” This highly reactive state could then “promote polymerization and the formation of new compounds,” he explained. Adding magnetic iron oxide powder to polymers exuded by many high flying aircraft can foster the heat generation needed to modify the weather. Radio frequency absorbing polymers such as Phillips Ryton F 5 PPS are sensitive in the 1 50 MHz regime, HAARP transmits between two and 10 MHz. HAARP's U.S. Air Force and Navy sponsors claim that their transmitter will eventually be able to produce 3.6 million watts of radio frequency power. But on page 185 of an October 1991 “Technical Memorandum 195” outlining projected HAARP tests, there is a call by the ionospheric effects division of the U.S. Air Force Phillips Laboratory for HAARP to reach a peak power output of 100 billion watts. Commercial radio stations commonly broadcast at 50,000 watts. Some hysterical reports state that HAARP type technologies will be used to initiate
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Tim R. Swartz (The Lost Journals of Nikola Tesla: Time Travel - Alternative Energy and the Secret of Nazi Flying Saucers)
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Cultivating loyalty is a tricky business. It requires maintaining a rigorous level of consistency while constantly adding newness and a little surprise—freshening the guest experience without changing its core identity.” Lifetime Network Value Concerns about brand fickleness in the new generation of customers can be troubling partly because the idea of lifetime customer value has been such a cornerstone of business for so long. But while you’re fretting over the occasional straying of a customer due to how easy it is to switch brands today, don’t overlook a more important positive change in today’s landscape: the extent to which social media and Internet reviews have amplified the reach of customers’ word-of-mouth. Never before have customers enjoyed such powerful platforms to share and broadcast their opinions of products and services. This is true today of every generation—even some Silent Generation customers share on Facebook and post reviews on TripAdvisor and Amazon. But millennials, thanks to their lifetime of technology use and their growing buying power, perhaps make the best, most active spokespeople a company can have. Boston Consulting Group, with grand understatement, says that “the vast majority” of millennials report socially sharing and promoting their brand preferences. Millennials are talking about your business when they’re considering making a purchase, awaiting assistance, trying something on, paying for it and when they get home. If, for example, you own a restaurant, the value of a single guest today goes further than the amount of the check. The added value comes from a process that Chef O’Connell calls competitive dining, the phenomenon of guests “comparing and rating dishes, photographing everything they eat, and tweeting and emailing the details of all their dining adventures.” It’s easy to underestimate the commercial power that today’s younger customers have, particularly when the network value of these buyers doesn’t immediately translate into sales. Be careful not to sell their potential short and let that assumption drive you headlong into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Remember that younger customers are experimenting right now as they begin to form preferences they may keep for a lifetime. And whether their proverbial Winstons will taste good to them in the future depends on what they taste like presently.
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Micah Solomon (Your Customer Is The Star: How To Make Millennials, Boomers And Everyone Else Love Your Business)
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And the unconscious never listens to this stuff, you cannot teach it this way, it will not listen. If it senses a deeper, broader - It’s a tremendous spectrum of things, and then there’s narrow consciousness, you see, built up by authority figures. The unconscious relates to the entire world, the whole panoply of the universe. It learns from birds, it learns from ads it sees, it learns from television commercials, it learns from everything at once, not just from a few narrow authority figures, parental figures. You see what I mean? Like, my mother built up my consciousness. Now which would you rather go on, your mother or the entire rest of the world? Not just people but everything you see.
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Philip K. Dick
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Back when people listened to the radio, you kept a tape handy in your boombox at all times so you could capture the hot new hits of the week. The intro would always get cut off, and the DJ would chatter over the end. You also ended up with static, commercials, and jingles, but all that noise just added to the field-recording verisimilitude.
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Rob Sheffield (Love is a Mix Tape)
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They’re not TV shows. They’re experiments in how to create attention deficit disorders in the entire population with endless commercials and ads that pop up right in the middle of programs.
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Diana Palmer (Texas Born (Long, Tall Texans Book 46))
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At their invitation we crowded into the spacious control cabin of the great airship, where scientific gear occupied every available cubic—perhaps hypercubic—inch. Among the fantastical glass envelopes and knottings of gold wire as unreadable to us as the ebonite control panels scrupulously polished and reflecting the Arctic sky, we were able here and there to recognize more mundane items—here Manganin resistance-boxes and Tesla coils, there Leclanché cells and solenoidal magnets, with electrical cables sheathed in commercial-grade Gutta Percha running everywhere. Inside, the overhead was much higher than expected, and the bulkheads could scarcely be made out in the muted light through three hanging Fresnel lenses, the mantle behind each glowing a different primary color, from sensitive-flames which hissed at different frequencies. Strange sounds, complex harmonies and dissonances, resonant, sibilant, and percussive at once, being monitored from someplace far Exterior to this, issued from a large brass speaking-trumpet, with brass tubing and valvework elaborate as any to be found in an American marching band running back from it and into an extensive control panel on which various metering gauges were ranked, their pointers, with exquisite Breguet-style arrowheads, trembling in their rise and fall along the arcs of italic numerals. The glow of electrical coils seeped beyond the glass cylinders which enclosed them, and anyone’s hands that came near seemed dipped in blue chalk-dust. A Poulsen’s Telegraphone, recording the data being received, moved constantly to and fro along a length of shining steel wire which periodically was removed and replaced. “Ætheric impulses,” Dr. Counterfly was explaining. “For vortex stabilization we need a membrane sensitive enough to respond to the slightest eddies. We use a human caul—a ‘veil,’ as some say.” “Isn’t a child born with a veil believed to have powers of second sight?” Dr. Vormance inquired. “Correct. And a ship with a veil aboard it will never sink—or, in our case, crash.” “Things have been done to obtain a veil,” darkly added a junior officer, Mr. Suckling, “that may not even be talked about.
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Thomas Pynchon (Against the Day)
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The same people who tell you they hate negative political TV commercials will also be able to tell you exactly what was in them. A political strategist's job is to exploit negative but memorable ads for the purpose of winning votes. The trick is being able to engage in negative campaigning without being successfully cast, or widely perceived, as running a "negative campaign.
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Roger Stone (Stone's Rules: How to Win at Politics, Business, and Style)
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Open core/hybrid source Probably the most common model today, open core describes an open source project that is partially, even mostly, open source, but with some portion of the project or some features remaining proprietary. Typically there is a basic level of functionality — referred to as the core — which remains open, and proprietary features or capabilities are added upon and around this. The highest profile example of this model today is Hadoop. Cloudera, the first organization to commercialize the data processing platform, contributes along with other organizations, commercial and otherwise, to the base Hadoop project, which is open source. A proprietary product that includes management functionality is then sold to customers on top of the base open project. This model is viable, but can be difficult to sustain. One of the challenges for those adhering to the open core model is that the functionality of the underlying open source project is evolving at all times, which means that the proprietary extensions or features must outpace the development of the open source project to remain attractive to customers.
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Stephen O’Grady (The Software Paradox: The Rise and Fall of the Commercial Software Market)
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Ancient Rome
According to legend, the ancient city of Rome was built by Romulus and Remus. They were twin sons of Mars, the god of war. An evil uncle tried to drown the boys in the Tiber River, which runs through present-day Rome. They were rescued by a wolf who raised them as her own. Many years later, Romulus built a city on Palantine, one of the Seven Hills of Rome. The city was named after him.
The manager of our hotel suggested we see ancient Rome first. So we hopped on the metro and headed to the Roman Forum. According to my guidebook, this was once the commercial, political, and religious center of ancient Rome.
Today, ruins of buildings, arches, and temples are all that are left of ancient Rome. I closed my eyes for a moment, and I could almost hear the shouts of a long-ago political rally. I especially liked the house of the Vestal Virgins. It once had 50 rooms and was attached to the Temple of Vesta. She was the goddess of fire.
The nearby Colosseum was originally called the Flavian Amphitheater. It reminded me of a huge sports stadium. Emperor Vespasian began building it in A.D. 72. It had 80 entrances, including 4 just for the emperor and his guests. It had 3 levels of seats with an awning along the top to protect spectators from the sun and rain. It could hold up to 50,000 people!
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Lisa Halvorsen (Letters Home From - Italy)
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Direct calls to action can be included at the end of every e-mail blast, on signage, in our radio ads, and even in our television commercials. Consider including direct calls to action in every team member’s e-mail signature, and if you really want to get the point across, on all your business cards. The idea is to make it very clear what we’d like customers to do: to make a purchase so we can help them solve their problem.
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Donald Miller (Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen)
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Environmentalists probably know already about “the Great Pacific garbage patch”—that mass of plastic, twice the size of Texas, floating freely in the Pacific Ocean. It is not actually an island—in fact, it is not actually a stable mass, only rhetorically convenient for us to think of it that way. And it is mostly composed of larger-scale plastics, of the kind visible to the human eye. The microscopic bits—700,000 of them can be released into the surrounding environment by a single washing-machine cycle—are more insidious. And, believe it or not, more pervasive: a quarter of fish sold in Indonesia and California contain plastics, according to one recent study. European eaters of shellfish, one estimate has suggested, consume at least 11,000 bits each year. The direct effect on ocean life is even more striking. The total number of marine species said to be adversely affected by plastic pollution has risen from 260 in 1995, when the first assessment was carried out, to 690 in 2015 and 1,450 in 2018. A majority of fish tested in the Great Lakes contained microplastics, as did the guts of 73 percent of fish surveyed in the northwest Atlantic. One U.K. supermarket study found that every 100 grams of mussels were infested with 70 particles of plastic. Some fish have learned to eat plastic, and certain species of krill are now functioning as plastic processing plants, churning microplastics into smaller bits that scientists are now calling “nanoplastics.” But krill can’t grind it all down; in one square mile of water near Toronto, 3.4 million microplastic particles were recently trawled. Of course, seabirds are not immune: one researcher found 225 pieces of plastic in the stomach of a single three-month-old chick, weighing 10 percent of its body mass—the equivalent of an average human carrying about ten to twenty pounds of plastic in a distended belly. (“Imagine having to take your first flight out to sea with all that in your stomach,” the researcher told the Financial Times, adding: “Around the world, seabirds are declining faster than any other bird group.”) Microplastics have been found in beer, honey, and sixteen of seventeen tested brands of commercial sea salt, across eight different countries. The more we test, the more we find; and while nobody yet knows the health impact on humans, in the oceans a plastic microbead is said to be one million times more toxic than the water around it. Chances are, if we started slicing open human cadavers to look for microplastics—as we are beginning to do with tau proteins, the supposed markers of CTE and Alzheimer’s—we’d be finding plastic in our own flesh, too. We can breathe in microplastics, even when indoors, where they’ve been detected suspended in the air, and do already drink them: they are found in the tap water of 94 percent of all tested American cities. And global plastic production is expected to triple by 2050, when there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish.
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David Wallace-Wells (The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming)
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AI-powered technology enables advertisers to reach more of the right people in the right moments for much less than it would have cost decades ago to buy a billboard or create a television commercial. But in practice, while the tools to target and distribute ads are decidedly futuristic, advertisers have been unable to keep up. Creating, targeting, and optimizing modern ads effectively is simply too complex a task for human advertisers to do well.
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Paul Roetzer (Marketing Artificial Intelligence: Ai, Marketing, and the Future of Business)
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I see you on television. You’ll jump through hoops to provide fast relief from painful athlete’s foot fungus.”
“That’s not me,” I tell her. “I get you a great deal on a new or used vehicle.
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Gordon Korman (The Unteachables)
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As Justice Kennedy—the presumed swing vote among the justices—noted, If we concede … that a short, 30-second, 1-minute campaign ad can be regulated, you want me to write an opinion and say, “well, if it’s 90 minutes, then that’s different.” It seems to me that you can make the argument that … 90 minutes is much more powerful in support or in opposition to a candidate. Olson disagreed, however, stating that the Court had previously found that broadcast materials whose purpose was to “inform and educate,” in addition to mere persuasion, were “on the line of being permissible.” As a documentary film, Olson argued that Hillary: The Movie held greater potential than the typical 30-second campaign commercial to educate viewers. Justice Souter did not appear to be persuaded, saying, [The film is] not a musical comedy. I think we have no choice, really, but to say this is not issue advocacy; this is express advocacy saying “don’t vote for this person.” And if that is a fair characterization, the difference between 90 minutes and 1 minute, either for statutory purposes or constitutional purposes, is a distinction that I just cannot follow. Souter’s question suggested that his position was that neither the length of the film nor its general level of information was relevant to whether Citizens United could legally broadcast it. Because it was (to Souter, presumably) a totally one-sided description of why Hillary Clinton was unfit for the White House, the movie amounted to electioneering of the sort proscribed by the BCRA.
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Conor M. Dowling (Super PAC!: Money, Elections, and Voters after Citizens United (Routledge Research in American Politics and Governance))
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avoid refined carbohydrates: white sugar, honey, high-fructose corn syrup, cookies, cakes, pastries, white bread, crackers, potato chips, french fries, commercial waffles, candy, donuts, and many dry breakfast cereals (juice-sweetened cereals listing whole grains as a primary ingredient are okay, but those with added sugar, evaporated cane juice, or honey are likely to raise your levels of tumor-fueling blood sugar and insulin). Instead, emphasize whole grains such as those above, as well as complex carbs such as vegetables, legumes, beans, and fresh fruit. If you crave something sweet, try dried fruit, rice syrup, barley malt, agave, kiwi sweetener, stevia, FruitSource, or maple syrup.
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Keith Block (Life Over Cancer: The Block Center Program for Integrative Cancer Treatment)
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Carlton Church Warning - Nuclear Fraud Scheme
North Korea has been producing different nuclear weapons since last year. They have sent warning on the neighboring countries about their plan for a nuclear test. Not just South Korea, but other countries like China, U.S., and Japan have stated their complaints. Even the United Nations has been alarmed by North Korea’s move.
During the last period of World War, a bomb has been used to attack Japan. Happened on 6th of August 1945, Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb just 10 kilometers away from Tokyo. This is why people and organizations like Carlton Church who’s against the use of nuclear power for production of armory in war. Many protested that it is a threat to mankind and environment.
Groups who are in favor of the nuclear use explained its advantage. They say it can be helpful in generating electricity that can be used for residential and commercial purposes. They also expound how it is better to use than coal mining as it is “less harmful to the environment.”
Nuclear Use: Good or Bad?
Groups who are against the use of nuclear reactor and weapons try to persuade people about its catastrophic result to the environment and humankind. If such facility will be used to create weapons, there is a possibility for another world war.
But the pro-nuclear groups discuss the good effects that can be gained from it. They give details on how greenhouse gas effect of coal-burning can emit huge amounts of greenhouse gases and other pollutants such as sulfur dioxide nitrogen oxide, and toxic compounds of mercury to the atmosphere every year. Burning coal can produce a kilowatt-hour of electricity but it also amounts to over two pounds of carbon dioxide emissions. They also added that the amount of carbon dioxide it produces contributes to climate change. Sulfur dioxide may cause the formation of acid rain and nitrogen oxide, if combined with VOCs, will form smog.
Nuclear power plants do not emit harmful pollutants or other toxic gases. Generating energy from nuclear involves intricate process, but as a result, it produces heat. These plants have cooling towers that release water vapor. If the facility has been properly managed it may not contribute disturbance in the atmosphere.
It may sound better to use compared to coal. But studies have shown that the vapor that came from nuclear plants have an effect to some coastal plants. The heated water that was released goes back to lakes and seas, and then the heat will eventually diffuse into surface warming. As a result of the increased water temperature on the ocean bodies, it changes the way carbon dioxide is transferred within the air. In effect, major shifts in weather patterns such as hurricanes may occur.
It does not stop there. The nuclear power plant produces radioactive waste, which amounts to 20 metric tons yearly. Exposure to high-level radiation is extremely harmful and fatal to human and animals. The waste material must be stored carefully in remote locations for many years. Carlton Church and other anti-nuclear groups persuade the public to initiate banning of the manufacturing of nuclear products and give warnings about its health hazards and environmental effects.
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Glory
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For Elon Musk, this spectacle has turned into a familiar experience. SpaceX has metamorphosed from the joke of the aeronautics industry into one of its most consistent operators. SpaceX sends a rocket up about once a month, carrying satellites for companies and nations and supplies to the International Space Station. Where the Falcon 1 blasting off from Kwajalein was the work of a start-up, the Falcon 9 taking off from Vandenberg is the work of an aerospace superpower. SpaceX can undercut its U.S. competitors—Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Orbital Sciences—on price by a ridiculous margin. It also offers U.S. customers a peace of mind that its rivals can’t. Where these competitors rely on Russian and other foreign suppliers, SpaceX makes all of its machines from scratch in the United States. Because of its low costs, SpaceX has once again made the United States a player in the worldwide commercial launch market. Its $60 million per launch cost is much less than what Europe and Japan charge and trumps even the relative bargains offered by the Russians and Chinese, who have the added benefit of decades of sunk government investment into their space programs as well as cheap labor. The
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Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future)
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These Big Brewers scorned honest beer in favor of watery swill brewed from cheap corn and rice. The Big Brewers added insult to injury by using crass commercials, linked mostly to professional sporting events, to sell their foul brew to working-class people. By the 1970s, only a handful of brewers remained and American beer was a thin, yellow concoction with no flavor and even less body.
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Maureen Ogle (Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer)
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Politics as the art of managing vice is a dangerous game to play, and many have ruined their societies in trying to play it. In Augustine’s biblical view, only God can manage the subtleties of the process, and the theological term for God’s management of the world is providence. By contrast, all would-be human providences will fail in the end, whether Hobbes’s false providence of the “Leviathan” of the political state or Adam Smith’s false providence of “the invisible hand” of the commercial market. Today’s liberal democracy, with its culture of transgression, its drive to liberate anything and everything done by and between consenting adults, and its mania for management by metrics, appears bent on adding to history’s examples of societies that failed to manage vice and the crooked timber of our humanity.
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Os Guinness (Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion)
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Over the next couple of years, we built and tested a series of prototypes, started dialogues with leading manufacturers, and added business development and technical staff to our team, including mechanical and aerospace engineers. Our plan was that PAX scientific would be an intellectual-property-creating R & D company. When we identified appropriate market sectors, we would license our patents to outside entrepreneurs or to our own, purpose-built, subsidiaries. Given my previous experience on the receiving end of hostile takeovers, we were determined to maintain control of PAX Scientific and its subsidiaries in their development stages. Creating subsidiaries that were market specific would help, since new investors could buy stock in a more narrowly focused business, without direct dilution of the parent company.
We were introduced to fellow Bay Area resident Paul Hawken. A successful entrepreneur, author, and articulate advocate for sustainability and natural capitalism, Paul understood our vision of a parent company that concentrated on research and intellectual property, while separate teams focused on product commercialization. With his own angel investment backing, Paul established a series of companies to market computer, industrial, and automotive fans. PAX assigned worldwide licenses to these companies in exchange for up-front fees and a share of revenue; Paul hired managers and set off to sell fan designs to manufacturers.
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Jay Harman (The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation)
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An old TV commercial for Berlitz showed the training of a German coast guard watchman. The supervisor shows the new man all of the monitoring equipment and then leaves him alone to man the controls. Later, a distress signal comes in: “SOS, we’re sinking! We are sinking.” The new watchman is confused. “What are you sinking about?” he asks. Success and failure in communications often depend on a single word—even a letter or two. The way most people write today—in business, education, government, even journalism and publishing—is the result of an accidental, ad-hoc process of learning and mislearning.
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Charles Euchner (The Elements of Writing: The Complete How-To Guide to Writing, With Case Studies from the Masters in All Genres)
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AS IF THE abstracting qualities of numbers and scale aren’t enough to deal with when trying to run an organization, these days we have the added complication of the virtual world. The Internet is nothing short of awe inspiring. It gives the power to operate at scale or spread ideas to anyone, be it a small business or a social movement. It gives us the ability to find and connect with people more easily. And it is incredible at speeding the pace of commercial transactions. All of these things are good. But, just as money was developed to help expedite and simplify transactions by allowing payment to be rendered without barter, we often use the Internet as a means to expedite and simplify communication and the relationships we build. And just as money can’t buy love, the Internet can’t buy deep, trusting relationships. What makes a statement like that somewhat tricky or controversial is that the relationships we form online feel real. We can, indeed, get bursts of serotonin when people “like” our pictures, pages or posts or when we watch ourselves go up in a ranking (you know how much serotonin loves a ranking). The feelings of admiration we get from virtual “likes” or the number of followers we have is not like the feelings of admiration we get from our children, or that a coach gets from their players. It is simply a public display of “like” with no sacrifice required—a new kind of status symbol, if you will. Put simply, though the love may feel real, the relationship is still virtual. Relationships can certainly start online, but they only become real when we meet face-to-face.
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Simon Sinek (Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't)
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Are we more likely to suffer from arthritis, stiff joints, poor memory, flagging energy, and decreased sex drive as we age, simply because that’s the version of the truth that ads, commercials, television shows, and media reports bombard us with? What other self-fulfilling prophecies are we creating in our minds without being aware of what we’re doing? And what “inevitable truths” can we successfully reverse simply through thinking new thoughts and choosing new beliefs?
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Joe Dispenza (You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter)
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A growth hacker is someone who has thrown out the playbook of traditional marketing and replaced it with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable. Their tools are e-mails, pay-per-click ads, blogs, and platform APIs instead of commercials, publicity, and money. While their marketing brethren chase vague notions like “branding” and “mind share,” growth hackers relentlessly pursue users and growth—and when they do it right, those users beget more users, who beget more users. They are the inventors, operators, and mechanics of their own self-sustaining and self-propagating growth machine that can take a start-up from nothing to something.
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Ryan Holiday (Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing and Advertising)
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began. A chief element in positioning the new Barbie was her promotion. In 1984, after a campaign that featured "Hey There, Barbie Girl" sung to the tune of "Georgy Girl," Mattel launched a startling series of ads that toyed with female empowerment. Its slogan was "We Girls Can Do Anything," and its launch commercial, driven by an irresistibly upbeat soundtrack, was a sort of feminist Chariots of Fire. Responding to the increased number of women with jobs, the ad opens at the end of a workday with a little girl rushing to meet her business-suited mother and carrying her mother's briefcase into the house. A female voice says, "You know it, and so does your little girl." Then a chorus sings, "We girls can do anything." The ad plays with the possibility of unconventional gender roles. A rough-looking Little Leaguer of uncertain gender swaggers onscreen. She yanks off her baseball cap, her long hair tumbles down, and—sigh of relief—she grabs a particularly frilly Barbie doll. (The message: Barbie is an amulet to prevent athletic girls from growing up into hulking, masculine women.) There are images of gymnasts executing complicated stunts and a toddler learning to tie her shoelaces. (The message: Even seemingly minor achievements are still achievements.) But the shot with the most radical message takes place in a laboratory where a frizzy-haired, myopic brunette peers into a microscope. Since the seventies, Barbie commercials had featured little girls of different races and hair colors, but they were always pretty. Of her days in acting school, Tracy Ullman remarked in TV Guide that she was the "ugly kid with the brown hair and the big nose who didn't get [cast in] the Barbie commercials." With "We Girls," however, Barbie extends her tiny hand to bookish ugly ducklings; no longer a snooty sorority rush chairman, she is "big-tent" Barbie.
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M.G. Lord (Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll)
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By noon, we had run almost every test we could do in our own small lab, and found one or two useless things. First, the basic broth was made from one of the commercially popular high-octane energy drinks. Human blood had been added in and, although it was difficult to be absolutely certain using the small and badly degraded sample, I was reasonably sure it had come from several sources. But the last ingredient, the organic something, remained elusive. “Okay,” I said at last. “Let’s go at this a different way.” “What,” Vince said, “with a Ouija board?” “Almost,” I said. “How about we try inductive logic?” “Okay, Sherlock,” he said. “More fun than gas chromatography any day.” “Eating your fellow humans is not natural,” I said, trying to put myself into the mind of someone at the party, but Vince interrupted my slow-forming trance. “What,” he said, “are you kidding? Didn’t you read any history at all? Cannibalism is the most natural thing in the world.” “Not in twenty-first-century Miami,” I said. “No matter what they say in the Enquirer.” “Still,” he said, “it’s just a cultural thing.” “Exactly,” I said. “We have a huge cultural taboo against it that you would have to overcome somehow.” “Well, you got ’em drinking blood, so the next step isn’t that big.
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Jeff Lindsay (Dexter is Delicious (Dexter, #5))
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Most recently, I worked for this advertising agency that specializes in perceptual marketing. They ensure that whatever ads you see in your everyday life are geared to your specific taste, style, demographic, purchasing history, and countless other interwoven criteria. If you walk by a billboard, it shows you something you actually want or an upgrade to something you already have. They use real-time rolling data feeds, so you might see a different ad depending on your mood before versus after lunch, if you were running late or had time to linger, whether you had sex that night or argued with your spouse that morning. Following a negative experience with some company’s wares, they’d give a competitor a shot at shifting your brand loyalty. My big idea was that clients could pay a monthly fee to see no ads at all. Instead of individualized niche marketing, you could experience a world blissfully emptied of promotional clutter. It was a total failure. Because it turns out people like ads. Especially when they’re targeted to warp the visual environment around you to emphasize your needs above all others, as if you’re the indispensable center of the global economy. Nobody wanted to pay for the privilege of being irrelevant to commercial interests. Except me. I essentially got my employer to launch an expensive new product solely for my use. An industry of one.
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Elan Mastai (All Our Wrong Todays)
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Experimentation also proved serendipitous for Greg Koch and Steve Wagner, when they were putting together the Stone Brewing Co. in Escondido, California, north of San Diego. It was destined to become one of the most successful brewing startups of the 1990s. In The Craft of Stone Brewing Co. Koch and Wagner confess that the home-brewed ale that became Arrogant Bastard Ale and propelled Stone to fame in the craft brewing world, started with a mistake. Greg Koch recalls that Wagner exclaimed “Aw, hell!” as he brewed an ale on his brand spanking new home-brewing system. “I miscalculated and added the ingredients in the wrong percentages,” he told Koch. “And not just a little. There’s a lot of extra malt and hops in there.” Koch recalls suggesting they dump it, but Wagner decided to let it ferment and see what it tasted like. Greg Koch and Steve Wagner, founders of Stone Brewery. Photograph © Stone Brewing Co. They both loved the resulting hops bomb, but they didn’t know what to do with it. Koch was sure that nobody was “going to be able to handle it. I mean, we both loved it, but it was unlike anything else that was out there. We weren’t sure what we were going to do with it, but we knew we had to do something with it somewhere down the road.”20 Koch said the beer literally introduced itself as Arrogant Bastard Ale. It seemed ironic to me that a beer from southern California, the world of laid back surfers, should produce an ale with a name that many would identify with New York City. But such are the ironies of the craft brewing revolution. Arrogant Bastard was relegated to the closet for the first year of Stone Brewing Co.’s existence. The founders figured their more commercial brew would be Stone Pale Ale, but its first-year sales figures were not strong, and the company’s board of directors decided to release Arrogant Bastard. “They thought it would help us have more of a billboard effect; with more Stone bottles next to each other on a retail shelf, they become that much more visible, and it sends a message that we’re a respected, established brewery with a diverse range of beers,” Wagner writes. Once they decided to release the Arrogant Bastard, they decided to go all out. The copy on the back label of Arrogant Bastard has become famous in the beer world: Arrogant Bastard Ale Ar-ro-gance (ar’ogans) n. The act or quality of being arrogant; haughty; Undue assumption; overbearing conceit. This is an aggressive ale. You probably won’t like it. It is quite doubtful that you have the taste or sophistication to be able to appreciate an ale of this quality and depth. We would suggest that you stick to safer and more familiar territory—maybe something with a multi-million dollar ad campaign aimed at convincing you it’s made in a little brewery, or one that implies that their tasteless fizzy yellow beverage will give you more sex appeal. The label continues along these lines for a couple of hundred words. Some call it a brilliant piece of reverse psychology. But Koch insists he was just listening to the beer that had emerged from a mistake in Wagner’s kitchen. In addition to innovative beers and marketing, Koch and Wagner have also made their San Diego brewery a tourist destination, with the Stone Brewing Bistro & Gardens, with plans to add a hotel to the Stone empire.
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Steve Hindy (The Craft Beer Revolution: How a Band of Microbrewers Is Transforming the World's Favorite Drink)
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An example is the campaign that Goodby, Berlin & Sil- verstein produced for the Northern California Honda Deal- ers Advertising Association (NCHDAA) in 1989. Rather than conform to the stereotypical dealer group advertising ("one of a kind, never to be repeated deals, this weekend 114 Figure 4.1 UNUM: "Bear and Salmon. Figure 4.2 UNUM: "Father and Child." 115 PEELING THE ONION only, the Honda-thon, fifteen hundred dollars cash back . . ." shouted over cheesy running footage), it was decided that the campaign should reflect the tone of the national cam- paign that it ran alongside. After all, we reasoned, the only people who know that one spot is from the national cam- paign and another from a regional dealer group are industry insiders. In the real world, all people see is the name "Honda" at the end. It's dumb having one of (Los Angeles agency) Rubin Postaer's intelligent, stylish commercials for Honda in one break, and then in the next, 30 seconds of car salesman hell, also apparently from Honda. All the good work done by the first ad would be undone by the second. What if, we asked ourselves, we could in some way regionalize the national message? In other words, take the tone and quality of Rubin Postaer's campaign and make it unique to Northern California? All of the regional dealer groups signed off as the Northern California Chevy/Ford/ Toyota Dealers, yet none of the ads would have seemed out of place in Florida or Wisconsin. In fact, that's probably where they got them from. In our research, we began not by asking people about cars, or car dealers, but about living in Northern California. What's it like? What does it mean? How would you describe it to an alien? (There are times when my British accent comes in very useful.) How does it compare to Southern California? "Oh, North and South are very different," a man in a focus group told me. "How so?" "Well, let me put it this way. There's a great rivalry between the (San Francisco) Giants and the (L.A.) Dodgers," he said. "But the Dodgers' fans don't know about it." Everyone laughed. People in the "Southland" were on a different planet. All they cared about was their suntans and flashy cars. Northern Californians, by comparison, were more modest, discerning, less likely to buy things to "make state- ments," interested in how products performed as opposed to 116 Take the Wider View what they looked like, more environmentally conscious, and concerned with the quality of life. We already knew from American Honda—supplied re- search what Northern Californians thought of Honda's cars. They were perceived as stylish without being ostentatious, reliable, understated, good value for the money . . . the paral- lels were remarkable. The creative brief asked the team to consider placing Honda in the unique context of Northern California, and to imagine that "Hondas are designed with Northern Californi- ans in mind." Dave O'Hare, who always swore that he hated advertising taglines and had no talent for writing them, came back immediately with a line to which he wanted to write a campaign: "Is Honda the Perfect Car for Northern Califor- nia, or What?" The launch commercial took advantage of the rivalry between Northern and Southern California. Set in the state senate chamber in Sacramento, it opens on the Speaker try- ing to hush the house. "Please, please," he admonishes, "the gentleman from Northern California has the floor." "What my Southern Californian colleague proposes is a moral outrage," the senator splutters, waving a sheaf of papers at the other side of the floor. "Widening the Pacific Coast Highway . . . to ten lanes!" A Southern Californian senator with bouffant hair and a pink tie shrugs his shoulders. "It's too windy," he whines (note: windy as in curves, not weather), and his fellow Southern Californians high-five and murmur their assent. The Northern Californians go nuts, and the Speaker strug- gles in vain to call everyone to order. The camera goes out- side as th
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Anonymous
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The camera goes out- side as the noise reaches a crescendo, and we see the parking lot. In the Southern Californian section, all the cars are huge, gas-guzzling land yachts. In the Northern Californian lot, everyone has a Honda. The commercial finishes with the line, "Is Honda the Perfect Car for Northern California, or What?" ========== Truth, lies & advertising (Jon Steel) - Your Highlight on Location 2671-2674 | Added on Wednesday, November 12, 2014 1:53:39 PM defining the product outside traditional category boundaries changed the rules of engagement and allowed the companies to compete on what they did best, avoiding areas of potential weakness or competitive activity. This doesn't work for everyone, but when it does, it can be very potent. ==========
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Anonymous
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Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations (Carol J. Adams;Josephine Donovan) - Your Highlight on page 9 | location 125-127 | Added on Friday, 23 January 2015 20:44:47 We believe that all oppressions are interconnected: no one creature will be free until all are free—from abuse, degradation, exploitation, pollution, and commercialization.
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Anonymous
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Increased congestion was highlighted by the 2009 collision between a Russian government Cosmos satellite and a U.S. commercial Iridium satellite. The collision created approximately 1,500 new pieces of trackable space debris, adding to the more than 3,000 pieces of debris created by the 2007 Chinese ASAT test.
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Anonymous
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E fra i Tennò, quanto colore di vicende si intravede sotto la rigida lacca dell'agiografia tradizionale! Da quelli mitici come Jimmu, che parlano con gli alberi, con le rupi, con gli uccelli lucenti discesi dalle nubi, a quelli in carne e ossa come Hiro Hito, il timido biologo che preferisce il microscopio, i vetrini e il camice bianco da scienziato alle cerimonie, alle alte uniformi, e che pure una volta, lasciando gli amati studi, intervenne con mano fermissima sfidando i militaristi impazziti, nell'agosto 1945, ed impose si accettassero le proposte di pace, senza rischiare più oltre il sangue dei suoi sudditi. Ci sono stati Tennò sepolti da congiure di palazzo in squisiti giardini, condannati ad eccellere nelle finezzze della calligradia o nei malinconici giochi di corte, ci sono stati Tennò esiliati ai rigori e alle solitudini dell'isola di Oki; ci sono stati Tennò che invano hanno cercato di ribellarsi all'assedio dei reggenti, dei marescialli di palazzo, dei ministri, e Tennò infine che hanno legato il proprio nome alle massime glorie del popolo, come Meji (1852 – 1912) sotto la cui guida il Giappone è passato da un periferico potere asiatico, agricolo e feudale, ad una potenza oceanica, forse non meno feudale, ma retta da un'economia di grandi industrie e d'intensi commerci.
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Fosco Maraini (Ore giapponesi)
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Tesla applied for a patent on an electrical coil that is the most likely candidate for a non mechanical successor of his energy extractor. This is his “Coil for Electro magnets,” patent #512,340. It is a curious design, unlike an ordinary coil made by turning wire on a tube form, this one uses two wires laid next to each other on a form but with the end of the first one connected to the beginning of the second one. In the patent Tesla explains that this double coil will store many times the energy of a conventional coil. The patent, however, gives no hint of what might have been its more unusual capability. In an article for Century Magazine, Tesla compares extracting energy from the environment to the work of other scientists who were, at that time, learning to condense atmospheric gases into liquids. In particular, he cited the work of a Dr. Karl Linde who had discovered what Tesla described as a self-cooling method for liquefying air. As Tesla said, “This was the only experimental proof which I was still wanting that energy was obtainable from the medium in the manner contemplated by me.” What ties the Linde work with Tesla's electromagnet coil is that both of them used a double path for the material they were working with. Linde had a compressor to pump the air to a high pressure, let the pressure fall as it traveled through a tube, and then used that cooled air to reduce the temperature of the incoming air by having it travel back up the first tube through a second tube enclosing the first. The already cooled air added to the cooling process of the machine and quickly condensed the gases to a liquid. Tesla's intent was to condense the energy trapped between the earth and its upper atmosphere and to turn it into an electric current. He pictured the sun as an immense ball of electricity, positively charged with a potential of some 200 billion volts. The Earth, on the other hand, is charged with negative electricity. The tremendous electrical force between these two bodies constituted, at least in part, what he called cosmic-energy. It varied from night to day and from season to season but it is always present. Tesla's patents for electrical generators and motors were granted in the late 1880's. During the 1890's the large electric power industry, in the form of Westinghouse and General Electric, came into being. With tens of millions of dollars invested in plants and equipment, the industry was not about to abandon a very profitable ten-year-old technology for yet another new one. Tesla saw that profits could be made from the self-acting generator, but somewhere along the line, it was pointed out to him, the negative impact the device would have on the newly emerging technological revolution of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At the end of his article in Century he wrote: “I worked for a long time fully convinced that the practical realization of the method of obtaining energy from the sun would be of incalculable industrial value, but the continued study of the subject revealed the fact that while it will be commercially profitable if my expectations are well founded, it will not be so to an extraordinary degree.
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Tim R. Swartz (The Lost Journals of Nikola Tesla: Time Travel - Alternative Energy and the Secret of Nazi Flying Saucers)
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his novel is set in the period of Roman history called the Decadence, which began about 160 AD, a distinction it richly deserved: social distinctions had become lax; the bureaucracy was increasingly corrupt, due in large part to the privatizing of most of the civil service; the nobility were competing in luxury and excess, and were rarely held accountable for their overindulgence, either legally or politically; the Emperors were more often than not puppets for powerful families and influential plutocrats; maintenance of Roman roads, the most successful communication routes in the ancient world, was reduced or abandoned even as the Romans strength, now filled their ranks with client-nation soldiers and gave high rank positions to mercenaries; the standards of education and language-use had declined and the quality of linguistic communication and literary expression were eroding; public entertainments, from the arena to the stage, were violent, sensationalistic, and debauched. The attempt to maintain a society of laws was giving way to one of political and commercial influence, and all the while the gulf between rich and poor was widening, and the legal rights of women and slaves were diminishing steadily.
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Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
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You can’t just repurpose old material created for one platform, throw it up on another one, and then be surprised when everyone yawns in your face. No one would ever think it was a good idea to use a print ad for a television commercial, or confuse a banner ad for a radio spot. Like their traditional media platform cousins, every social media platform has its own language.
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Gary Vaynerchuk (Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy World)
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key, and please be sure to avoid commercial orange juice products with added calcium. The vitamin C-complex in orange juice helps to ensure that the minerals noted below get to the liver to then nourish the adrenals. 1/4 tsp of Cream of Tartar (potassium bitartrate). This is an excellent source of potassium. As an alternative, you can use potassium bicarbonate or potassium chloride. 1/4 tsp of fresh ground Redmond’s Real Salt or sea salt. This is an excellent source of sodium, plus 90+ other trace minerals. (Please know that the original source of this recipe was Susan Blackard, NP, ND, PhD, at the Rejuvenation Health Center in Springfield, MO. The following alternatives have been compiled by UBER MAG-pie and RCP enthusiast, Valerie Engh.) Alternative #1: Replace Cream of Tartar and orange juice with organic coconut water and whole food vitamin C-complex. 8 oz. / 1 cup / 250 mL of coconut water. Be sure to use enough coconut water to ensure you receive 375 mg of potassium. 1/4 tsp of fresh ground Redmond’s Real Salt or sea salt. 60 mg of whole food vitamin C-complex.
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Morley M. Robbins (Cu-RE Your Fatigue: The Root Cause and How To Fix It On Your Own)
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Finally, Christians can use more-advanced strategies like geofencing. Geofencing is a powerful marketing strategy my marketing company uses for commercial clients. It targets prospects and gathers their mobile IDs based on their physical location. You can target your prospect by time and/or location — for example, anyone who went to a selected church in the last week, in the last month, or in the last six months. You can also select anyone who went just one time, two times in one month, four times in two months, and so on. It’s a great way to get very specific contact lists that meet pretty much any criteria you can think of.
If a pastor simply won’t talk about the election, geofencing their church is a good way to get directly to the church attendees.
For one campaign, my company “fenced” 74 different evangelical churches in a candidate's district and gathered 94,000 mobile IDs, thereby building a large database in a short amount of time. In the end, we collected the contact information of 10,000 highly motivated voters who were also considered “low propensity” voters for the clients’ database.
We also generated potential voters by getting:
• 100,000+ landing page visitors. • 942,000 ad impressions. • 288,000 video views. All these views and ad impressions led to increased voter awareness and turnout for our client.
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Craig Huey (The Great Deception: 10 Shocking Dangers and the Blueprint for Rescuing The American Dream)
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The ad as the New Utopia is currently a cult phenomenon. We watch the dreadful or boring things on television, because (as public-opinion research has shown) after the sight of prattling politicians, bloody corpses strewn about various parts of the globe for various reasons, and dramatizations in which one can- not tell what is going on because they are never-ending serials (not only do we forget what we read, we also forget what we see), the commercials are a blessed relief. Only in them does paradise still exist. There are beautiful women, handsome men-all ma- ture-and happy children, and the elderly have intelligence in their eyes and generally wear glasses. To be kept in constant delight they need only pudding in a new container, lemonade made from real water, a foot antiperspirant, violet-scented toilet paper, or a kitchen cabinet about which nothing is extraordinary but the price. The joy in the eyes of the stylish beauty as she beholds a roll of toilet paper or opens a cupboard like a treasure chest is transmitted instantly to everyone.
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Stanisław Lem (One Human Minute)
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survey companies in Myanmar, with various respectable organizations arising as central members on the lookout. Among these organizations, Myanmar Study Exploration (MSR), Kantar TNS Myanmar, and Knowledge Myanmar Exploration stand apart as driving suppliers of statistical surveying and review administrations in the country.
Myanmar Overview Exploration (MSR) has set up a good foundation for itself as an unmistakable review organization, offering a large number of examination and counseling administrations to homegrown and worldwide clients. With a solid spotlight on information exactness and unwavering quality, MSR has gained notoriety for conveying smart market knowledge and significant proposals to its clients.
Kantar TNS Myanmar, one more key part in the overview business, brings an abundance of involvement and skill to the Myanmar market. As a component of the worldwide Kantar organization, the organization offers state of the art research strategies and a profound comprehension of buyer conduct, empowering clients to pursue informed choices and gain an upper hand in the commercial center.
Knowledge Myanmar Exploration is likewise transforming the review business, giving top notch research arrangements custom fitted to the particular necessities of organizations working in Myanmar. The organization's obligation to conveying significant experiences and vital direction has added to its progress in serving a different cluster of clients across different areas.
These study organizations assume a vital part in assisting organizations and associations with exploring Myanmar's dynamic market scene. By utilizing their skill in information assortment, examination, and translation, these organizations enable clients to acquire a more profound comprehension of customer inclinations, market patterns, and industry elements.
Also, the presence of legitimate study organizations like MSR, Kantar TNS Myanmar, and Knowledge Myanmar Exploration mirrors the developing interest for solid and far reaching statistical surveying administrations in Myanmar. As the nation keeps on starting up to worldwide business open doors, the requirement for exact and noteworthy bits of knowledge has never been more prominent.
As well as serving the necessities of organizations, these overview organizations likewise add to the improvement of survey companies in Myanmar overall. Through their obligation to maintaining elevated requirements of impressive skill and moral lead, they set a positive model for different players in the business and assist with raising the general nature of examination and counseling administrations accessible in the country.
Besides, these organizations effectively draw in with neighborhood networks, giving work open doors and cultivating the improvement of nearby ability in the field of statistical surveying and information examination. By supporting a talented labor force and advancing information trade, they add to the structure of a vigorous and maintainable exploration biological system in Myanmar.
All in all, the development of review organizations, for example, Myanmar Overview Exploration (MSR), Kantar TNS Myanmar, and Understanding Myanmar Exploration mirrors the rising significance of dependable statistical surveying and study administrations in Myanmar. With their obligation to greatness and their commitments to industry improvement, these organizations are ready to assume a critical part in forming the fate of survey companies in Myanmar.
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survey companies in Myanmar,
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Even more objectionable to them: Bhaktisiddhanta initiated non-brahmins as his disciples. Only men born in Brahmin families, conservatives argued, qualified for initiation. Lower castes had never been allowed to take part in the diksha ceremony. The prohibition was purely political, since nothing in India's scriptures supported such discrimination, but it had kept caste Brahmins in power for generations.
Bhaktisiddhanta threatened their commercial livelihood. Hostility against Bhaktisiddhanta increased when he added empowerment of women to his list of outrages. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu taught that all souls were prakriti, or female in relation to God. For Bhaktisiddhanta, this meant gender was not a consideration on the path of devotion.
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Joshua M. Greene (Swami in a Strange Land: How Krishna Came to the West)
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The public image, in the magazines and television commercials, is designed to sell washing machines, cake mixes, deodorants, detergents, rejuvenating face creams, hair tints. But the power of that image, on which companies spend millions of dollars for television time and ad space, comes from this: American women no longer know who they are. They are sorely in need of a new image to help them find their identity. As the motivational researchers keep telling the advertisers, American women are so unsure of who they should be that they look to this glossy public image to decide every detail of their lives.
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Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique)
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Missing information flows is one of the most common causes of system malfunction. Adding or restoring information can be a powerful intervention, usually much easier and cheaper than rebuilding physical infrastructure. The tragedy of the commons that is crashing the world’s commercial fisheries occurs because there is little feedback from the state of the fish population to the decision to invest in fishing vessels. Contrary to economic opinion, the price of fish doesn’t provide that feedback. As the fish get more scarce they become more expensive, and it becomes all the more profitable to go out and catch the last few. That’s a perverse feedback, a reinforcing loop that leads to collapse. It is not price information but population information that is needed.
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Donella H. Meadows (Thinking in Systems: A Primer)
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The movies were just kind of figuring out how to use computers in 2003, and nobody was just kind of figuring out how to use computers harder than Michael Bay. It’s tempting to say that every frame of Bad Boys II looks like a TV commercial, but truly every frame looks like a print advertisement, like those Candies ads where Jenny McCarthy’s taking a shit, shallow and glossy and tinged acid green. There are four car chases, one of which is at least fifteen minutes long. Even the most passing transitions are giddily tasteless: the camera EXPLODES out of the speedboat’s tailpipe and ZOOMS across Biscayne Bay and WHAMS down the ventilation shaft in the backward sunglasses factory and SHOOMPS into the buttcrack of a raver’s low-rise jeans and SPROINGS across her transverse colon and SQUEAKS through her appendix and AIRHORNS out her belly button and PLOPS into the Cuban drug lord’s mojito as he shoots his favorite nephew in the head while saying, “Adios, kemosabe,” or something fucking cool like that.
When faced with a choice, Bay picks “all of the above” every time. He’s like a dog in one of those obedience trials who’s like, “Obedience? I don’t know her,” and just goes buck wild on the sausages. Except instead of “obedience” it’s “having a coherent plot that holds the audience’s attention” and instead of “sausages” it’s “explosions, Ferrari chases, and how many different cool kinds of box could a gun come in.
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Lindy West (Shit, Actually: The Definitive, 100% Objective Guide to Modern Cinema)
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Matt Edwards
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TASSC also ran ads in commercial and campus newspapers across the country, and developed potential congressional testimony on “public health priorities.”70 They also created a “Sound Science in Journalism Award,” first granted to New York Times reporter Gina Kolata, “who responsibly detailed … how science has been distorted and manipulated to fuel litigation” on silicone breast implants.71 (Kolata has subsequently been heavily criticized by scientists, environmentalists, and her journalism colleagues for a persistent proindustry, protechnology bias, and an overt skepticism about environmental causes of cancer.)
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Naomi Oreskes (Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming)
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Just like there are television commercials and magazine ads that try to tell girls that fat is bad, there are also messages that tell girls that they must have big breasts and curves to be real girls. Of course, you know that is ridiculous because there is no such thing as a "real" girl. If you feel like a girl, you are a girl! Your genes, which are specifically made only for you, may mean you are going to be tall and thin or short and thin. Being a girl with a thin body is just as good as being a girl with a curvy or round body. There is no such thing as a better body than any other. No matter what, your body is growing into the body it was meant to be-perfect for you!
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Sonya Renee Taylor (Celebrate Your Body (and Its Changes, Too!): The Ultimate Puberty Book for Girls)
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The fate of the books and all their vast numbers, is epitomized in the greatest library in the ancient world, a library located not in Italy but in Alexandria, the capital of Egypt and the commercial hub of the Eastern Mediterranean. The city had many tourist attractions, including an impressive theater and red light district. But visitors always took note of something quite exceptional, in the center of the city, at the lavish site known as "the museum" most of the intellectual inherits of Greek, Latin, Babylonian, Egyptian and Jewish cultures ad been assembled at enormous costs and carefully archived for researched. Starting as early as 300BCE, the Ptolemaic Kings who ruled Alexandria had the inspired idea of luring leading scholars, scientists and poets to their city by offering them life appointments at their museum...The recipients of this largess established remarkably high intellectual standards. Euclid developed his geometry in Alexandria, Archimedes discovered Pi and laid the foundation of calculus.
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Stephen Greenblatt (The Swerve: How the World Became Modern)
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A good ad agency should know to never, ever mess with puppies. Yet somehow, Godaddy.com made the unspeakable blunder of creating a commercial where the puppy is not just unloved but also somewhat mistreated. The ad starts by pulling at the heartstrings, showing the puppy getting thrown from the back of a pick-up truck. The puppy then braves distance, weather, and terrain to get back to his owner, who is excited to see “Buddy” - but only because she had already sold him online with the help of a Godaddy website. The ad closes with this hag of a woman sending Buddy away and shouting, “Ship him out!” While our feelings for our fellow human beings can sometimes be mixed, our adoration for puppies is universal. If there’s one rule in marketing, it is this - thou shalt not mess with the puppies! Godaddy.com received a gargantuan amount of backlash and millions of inquiries regarding the well-being of Buddy the puppy. Can you believe this ad was supposed to run in the Superbowl?
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Adam Douglas (Mega Fails: The Hilariously Funny Book of Humorous Blunders and Misadventures (Crazy True Stories and Anecdotes))
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Direct Calls to Action It bears repeating: there should be one obvious button to press on your website, and it should be the direct call to action. When I say, “one obvious button,” I don’t mean “only one button,” but rather one that stands out. Make the button a different color, larger, a bolder text, whatever you need to do. Then repeat that same button over and over so people see it as they scroll down the page. Our customers should always know we want to marry them. Even if they’re not ready, we should keep saying it. You just never know when they’re going to want to make a commitment, and when they do, you want to be on one knee, holding flowers, smiling for the picture. Examples of direct calls to action are •Order now •Call today •Schedule an appointment •Register today •Buy now Direct calls to action can be included at the end of every e-mail blast, on signage, in our radio ads, and even in our television commercials. Consider including direct calls to action in every team member’s e-mail signature, and if you really want to get the point across, on all your business cards. The idea is to make it very clear what we’d like customers to do: to make a purchase so we can help them solve their problem.
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Donald Miller (Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen)
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Where Are the Ads of Old? The granddaddy of them all was the Yuban coffee commercial, parodied so well in Airplane!, in which a couple is leaving a dinner party when the host appears and offers them a second cup of coffee. The husband, Jim, takes it. The wife, dejected and shamed, hangs her head like a dog that just got caught shitting on the carpet as we hear her internal monologue: “Jim never has a second cup of my coffee.” Her credentials as an adequate wife were just torched. This is the female equivalent of being cuckolded. She was cuckolded by coffee.
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Adam Carolla (I'm Your Emotional Support Animal: Navigating Our All Woke, No Joke Culture)