Platform Important Quotes

All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides,' and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot.

Come, dear, [Gwendolen rises] we have already missed five, if not six, trains. To miss any more might expose us to comment on the platform.

How passionately she longed to be important to somebody again - not important on platforms, not important as an asset in an organisation, but privately important, just to one other person, quite privately, nobody else to know or notice. It didn't seem much to ask in a world so crowded with people, just to have one of them, only one out of all the millions to oneself. Somebody who needed one, who thought of one, who was eager to come to one - oh, oh how dreadfully one wanted to be precious.

Right, and you point out something important which is that people who don’t want to pay, people who are pirates, don’t get bothered by the DRM, they go out and buy the cracked books or download the cracked books for free. It’s only people who are foolish enough to pay for them that get locked into these platforms.

Apply the blacksmith's homely principle when you are speaking. If you feel deeply about your subject you will be able to think of little else. Concentration is a process of distraction from less important matters. It is too late to think about the cut of your coat when once you are upon the platform, so centre your interest on what you are about to say—fill your mind with your speech-material and, like the infilling water in the glass, it will drive out your unsubstantial fears.

The internet reminds us on a daily basis that it is not at all rewarding to become aware of problems that you have no reasonable hope of solving. And, more important, the internet already is what it is. It has already become the central organ of contemporary life. It has already rewired the brains of its users, returning us to a state of primitive hyperawareness and distraction while overloading us with much more sensory input than was ever possible in primitive times. It has already built an ecosystem that runs on exploiting attention and monetizing the self. Even if you avoid the internet completely—my partner does: he thought #tbt meant “truth be told” for ages—you still live in the world that this internet has created, a world in which selfhood has become capitalism’s last natural resource, a world whose terms are set by centralized platforms that have deliberately established themselves as near-impossible to regulate or control.

You will never see the full path. The important thing is to do the next right thing.

We were formed and made on purpose, for a purpose. The most important thing we could accomplish here on earth, then, is to give ourselves completely to telling the world with our whole life that God is truer, greater, and more satisfying than our wildest imagination—than the most successful career, the biggest platform, or the happiest marriage.

There are opportunities that come and go, like the trains on this very track. You can climb on any train and it will take you down a new path. But you need to decide which platform to stand on and which train is the one that is the most important for you.

How passionately she longed to be important to somebody again—not important on platforms, not important as an asset in an organization, but privately important, just to one other person, quite privately, nobody else to know or notice. It didn't seem much to ask in a world so crowded with people, just to have one of them, only one out of all the millions, to oneself.

This is almost always the case: A piece of art receives its f(r)ame when found offensive.

It is important to emphasize that the Nazis put their program forward forthrightly and as a noble—even spiritual—ideal to achieve. They promised not merely another political platform, but a whole philosophy of life that, as they and their followers believed, promised renewal.

I would love it if party labels were not allowed on ballots and people were forced to actually know who they were voting for. Blind loyalty to a party platform is tantamount to relinquishing the important duties of intelligent voting.

How passionately she longed to be important to somebody again—not important on platforms, not important as an asset in an organization, but privately important, just to one other person, quite privately, nobody else to know or notice.

Do I really deserve this? Artyom thought. Is my life so much more important than the lives of all these people? No, he was glad to have been rescued. But all these people – randomly scattered, like bags and rags, on the granite of the platform, side by side, on the rails, left forever in the poses that Hunter’s bullets had found them in – they all died so that he could live? Hunter had made this exchange with such ease, just as though he had sacrificed some minor chess figures to safeguard one of the most important pieces . . . He was just a player, and the metro was a chessboard, and all the figures were his, because he was playing the game with himself. But here was the question: Was Artyom such an important piece to the game that all these people had to perish for his preservation?

The political merchandisers appeal only to the weak­nesses of voters, never to their potential strength. They make no attempt to educate the masses into becoming fit for self-government; they are content merely to manipulate and exploit them. For this pur­pose all the resources of psychology and the social sciences are mobilized and set to work. Carefully se­lected samples of the electorate are given "interviews in depth." These interviews in depth reveal the uncon­scious fears and wishes most prevalent in a given so­ciety at the time of an election. Phrases and images aimed at allaying or, if necessary, enhancing these fears, at satisfying these wishes, at least symbolically, are then chosen by the experts, tried out on readers and audiences, changed or improved in the light of the information thus obtained. After which the political campaign is ready for the mass communicators. All that is now needed is money and a candidate who can be coached to look "sincere." Under the new dispen­sation, political principles and plans for specific action have come to lose most of their importance. The person­ality of the candidate and the way he is projected by the advertising experts are the things that really mat­ter. In one way or another, as vigorous he-man or kindly father, the candidate must be glamorous. He must also be an entertainer who never bores his audience. Inured to television and radio, that audience is accustomed to being distracted and does not like to be asked to con­centrate or make a prolonged intellectual effort. All speeches by the entertainer-candidate must therefore be short and snappy. The great issues of the day must be dealt with in five minutes at the most -- and prefera­bly (since the audience will be eager to pass on to something a little livelier than inflation or the H-bomb) in sixty seconds flat. The nature of oratory is such that there has always been a tendency among politicians and clergymen to over-simplify complex is­sues. From a pulpit or a platform even the most con­scientious of speakers finds it very difficult to tell the whole truth. The methods now being used to merchan­dise the political candidate as though he were a deo­dorant positively guarantee the electorate against ever hearing the truth about anything.

I was lucky to meet you, yes.' 'Me too . . .' she said, looking me in the eyes. 'I was lucky too. The men I know are a disaster, not one of them believes in love; so they give you this big spiel about friendship, affection, a whole load of stuff that doesn't commit them to anything. I've got to the point where I can't stand the word 'friendship' any more, it makes me physically sick. Or there's the other lot, the ones who get married, who get hitched as early as possible and think about nothing but their careers afterwards. You obviously weren't one of those; but I also immediately sensed that you would never talk to me about friendship, that you would never be that vulgar. From the very beginning I hoped we would sleep together, that something important would happen; but it was possible that nothing would happen, in fact it was more than likely.' She stopped and sighed in irritation.

How valiant to deny the importance of money when it is had in abundance.

Don’t underestimate the importance of great design. When it comes to selling your product, it can make you or break you.

The most important part of the platform is that it is built for developers.”21

You will never see the full path. The important thing is to do the next right thing. What can you do today to move you toward your dream?

The subways, to my eyes, are a godsend: efficient, they get me where I want to go pretty quickly, they provide entertainment, sometimes via musicians who perform at station platforms, sometimes through the singing panhandlers who traipse through the cars, and most important, they are a stay against solipsism, proof positive that I am not alone in the universe.

The work I do is not exactly respectable. But I want to explain how it works without any of the negatives associated with my infamous clients. I’ll show how I manipulated the media for a good cause. A friend of mine recently used some of my advice on trading up the chain for the benefit of the charity he runs. This friend needed to raise money to cover the costs of a community art project, and chose to do it through Kickstarter, the crowdsourced fund-raising platform. With just a few days’ work, he turned an obscure cause into a popular Internet meme and raised nearly ten thousand dollars to expand the charity internationally. Following my instructions, he made a YouTube video for the Kickstarter page showing off his charity’s work. Not a video of the charity’s best work, or even its most important work, but the work that exaggerated certain elements aimed at helping the video spread. (In this case, two or three examples in exotic locations that actually had the least amount of community benefit.) Next, he wrote a short article for a small local blog in Brooklyn and embedded the video. This site was chosen because its stories were often used or picked up by the New York section of the Huffington Post. As expected, the Huffington Post did bite, and ultimately featured the story as local news in both New York City and Los Angeles. Following my advice, he sent an e-mail from a fake address with these links to a reporter at CBS in Los Angeles, who then did a television piece on it—using mostly clips from my friend’s heavily edited video. In anticipation of all of this he’d been active on a channel of the social news site Reddit (where users vote on stories and topics they like) during the weeks leading up to his campaign launch in order to build up some connections on the site. When the CBS News piece came out and the video was up, he was ready to post it all on Reddit. It made the front page almost immediately. This score on Reddit (now bolstered by other press as well) put the story on the radar of what I call the major “cool stuff” blogs—sites like BoingBoing, Laughing Squid, FFFFOUND!, and others—since they get post ideas from Reddit. From this final burst of coverage, money began pouring in, as did volunteers, recognition, and new ideas. With no advertising budget, no publicist, and no experience, his little video did nearly a half million views, and funded his project for the next two years. It went from nothing to something. This may have all been for charity, but it still raises a critical question: What exactly happened? How was it so easy for him to manipulate the media, even for a good cause? He turned one exaggerated amateur video into a news story that was written about independently by dozens of outlets in dozens of markets and did millions of media impressions. It even registered nationally. He had created and then manipulated this attention entirely by himself.

So she will," said the Dowager. "You'll see that young man in the Cabinet before very long. Such a handsome couple on a public platform, and very sound, I'm told, about pigs, and that's so important, the British breakfast-table being what it is.

She talks about men in the same amiable, unsurprised way that people talk about the weather - men are a kind of constant. a background note. They are useful objects for meaningless chatter when there is nothing else more important to talk about.

How passionately she longed to be important to somebody again—not important on platforms, not important as an asset in an organization, but privately important, just to one other person, quite privately, nobody else to know or notice. It didn't seem much to ask in a world so crowded with people, just to have one of them, only one out of all the millions, to oneself. Somebody who needed one, who thought of one, who was eager to come to one—oh, oh how dreadfully one wanted to be precious!

Invite them to subscribe. In my opinion, this is the most important call to action. You don’t want to depend on your readers remembering to return to your blog. Instead, you want them to subscribe so they receive your content every time you post something new.

People still watch TV?” “Yeah. And they stream. Which extends the time people can get worked up and want to express their very important opinions on a variety of social media platforms, which then catch the attention of media outlets, who report on it, extending the life of the scandal.

However, at the moment, I believe the more important thing that can be done with the platform I have been given is to try to convince the American populace that we are not one another’s enemies even if a (D) is by some of our names and an (R) by the names of others. Knowing that the future of my grandchildren and everyone else’s is put in jeopardy by a continuation of reckless spending, godless government, and mean-spirited attempts to silence critics leaves me with little choice but to continue to expound on the principles outlined in my prayer breakfast speech and to fight for a bright future for America.

All this pitting of sex against sex . . . all this claiming of superiority and imparting of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are ‘sides,’ and it is . . . of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot.

Tomorrow's banks will be decentralized applications of software built on cryptography, blockchain technology and smart contracts. Theyll be platforms for saving, lending, investing, moving and spending that are much more equitable and sensible than they were in the 20th century and ironically it'll be more aligned to what banks were like in much earlier civilizations. So when I talk about banks being to the economy what the heart is to the human body - this is really what I'm talking about. I'm not necessarily talking about the ICBC. The ICBC or Bank of America may play an important role, but so could thousands of small local banks or small apps on a Blockchain.

that this was the first time in the entire history of the Negro that a member of my race had been asked to speak from the same platform with white Southern men and women on any important National occasion. I was asked now to speak to an audience composed of the wealth and culture of the white South, the representatives of my former masters.

An awful lot of hokum is talked about love, you know. An importance is ascribed to it that is entirely at variance with fact. People talk as though it were self-evidently the greatest of human values. Nothing is less self-evident. Until Plato dressed his sentimental sensuality in a captivating literary form the ancient world laid no more stress on it than was sensible; the healthy realism of the Muslims has never looked upon it as anything but a physical need; it was Christianity, buttressing its emotional claims with neo-Platonism, that made it into the end an aim, the reason, the justification of life. But Christianity was the religion of slaves. It offered the weary and the heavy-laden heaven to compensate them in the future for their misery in this world and the opiate of love to enable them to bear it in the present. And like every drug it enervated and destroyed those who became subject to it. For two thousand years it's suffocated us. It's weakened our wills and lessened our courage. In this modern world we live in we know that almost everything is more important to us than love, we know that only the soft and the stupid allow it to affect their actions, and yet we pay it a foolish lip-service. In books, on the stage, in the pulpit, on the platform the same old sentimental rubbish is talked that was used to hoodwink the slaves of Alexandria.

Stop wasting time. Stop making excuses. Who is important to you? Do you tell them you love them every day? The thing is Napkin Notes is simple. I'm not a remarkable guy. I've just somehow been given a platform to remind us of how very straightforward this is. It's about love. It's about communication. It's about small efforts that have great meaning.

My issue isn't with a Christian's involvement in the political arena. We need Christians involved in the political process. But we must not equate a political party's platform as representative of the Kingdom's purpose on earth. Nor should we demonize those who disagree with our political positions. Legislation, though important, cannot create change and transformation in the human heart. Power corrupts!

like the culture developed by Coach Steve Kerr for my beloved Golden State Warriors. Even though he helms a team, Steve believes that having good people is more important that just having good basketball players; he understands that players come and go, but the ethos on the court gets passed down from one game and one season to another. The best teams play together like a family who trust one another to have their back.

Another inventor, J. B. McComber, representing the Chicago-Tower Spiral-Spring Ascension and Toboggan Transportation Company, proposed a tower with a height of 8,947 feet, nearly nine times the height of the Eiffel Tower, with a base one thousand feet in diameter sunk two thousand feet into the earth. Elevated rails would lead from the top of the tower all the way to New York, Boston, Baltimore, and other cities. Visitors ready to conclude their visit to the fair and daring enough to ride elevators to the top would then toboggan all the way back home. “As the cost of the tower and its slides is of secondary importance,” McComber noted, “I do not mention it here, but will furnish figures upon application.” A third proposal demanded even more courage from visitors. This inventor, who gave his initials as R. T. E., envisioned a tower four thousand feet tall from which he proposed to hang a two-thousand-foot cable of “best rubber.” Attached at the bottom end of this cable would be a car seating two hundred people. The car and its passengers would be shoved off a platform and fall without restraint to the end of the cable, where the car would snap back upward and continue bouncing until it came to a stop. The engineer urged that as a precaution the ground “be covered with eight feet of feather bedding.

Any girl faced with daily attention from a gorgeous boy with a cute accent and perfect hair would be hard-pressed not to develop a big,stinking, painful,all-the-time,all consuming crush. Not that that's what's happening to me. Like I said.It's a relief to know it won't happen. It makes things easier. Most girls laugh too hard at his jokes and find excuses to gently press his arm. To touch him.Instead,I argue and roll my eyes and act indifferent. And when I touch his arm,I shove it.Because that's what friends do. Besides,I have more important things on my mind: movies. I've been in France for a month, and though I have ridden the elevators to the top of La Tour Eiffel (Mer took me while St. Clair and Rashmi waited below on the lawn-St. Clair because he's afraid of falling and Rashmi because she refuses to do anything touristy), and though I have walked the viewing platform of L'Arc de Triomphe (Mer took me again,of course, while St. Clair stayed below and threatened to push Josh and Rashmi into the insane traffic circle),I still haven't been to the movies. Actually,I have yet to leave campus alone. Kind of embarrassing. But I have a plan.First,I'll convince someone to go to a theater with me. Shouldn't be too difficult; everyone likes the movies.And then I'll take notes on everything they say and do, and then I'll be comfortable going back to that theater alone.A

The fact that the information platform requires an extension of sensors means that it is countering the tendency towards a lean platform. These are not asset-less companies – far from it; they spend billions of dollars to purchase fixed capital and take other companies over. Importantly, ‘once we understand this [tendency], it becomes clear that demanding privacy from surveillance capitalists or lobbying for an end to commercial surveillance on the Internet is like asking Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand’.15 Calls for privacy miss how the suppression of privacy is at the heart of this business model. This tendency involves constantly pressing against the limits of what is socially and legally acceptable in terms of data collection. For the most part, the strategy has been to collect data, then apologise and roll back programs if there is an uproar, rather than consulting with users beforehand.16 This is why we will continue to see frequent uproars over the collection of data by these companies.

The word zen itself is a Japanese mispronunciation of the Chinese word ch’an, which, in turn, is a Chinese mispronunciation of the Sanskrit dhyana, meaning “contemplation, meditation.” Contemplation, however, of what? Let us imagine ourselves for a moment in the lecture hall where I originally presented the material for this chapter. Above, we see the many lights. Each bulb is separate from the others, and we may think of them, accordingly, as separate from each other. Regarded that way, they are so many empirical facts; and the whole universe seen that way is called in Japanese ji hokkai, “the universe of things.” But now, let us consider further. Each of those separate bulbs is a vehicle of light, and the light is not many but one. The one light, that is to say, is being displayed through all those bulbs; and we may think, therefore, either of the many bulbs or of the one light. Moreover, if this or that bulb went out, it would be replaced by another and we should again have the same light. The light, which is one, appears thus through many bulbs. Analogously, I would be looking out from the lecture platform, seeing before me all the people of my audience, and just as each bulb seen aloft is a vehicle of light, so each of us below is a vehicle of consciousness. But the important thing about a bulb is the quality of its light. Likewise, the important thing about each of us is the quality of his consciousness. And although each may tend to identify himself mainly with his separate body and its frailties, it is possible also to regard one’s body as a mere vehicle of consciousness and to think then of consciousness as the one presence here made manifest through us all. These are but two ways of interpreting and experiencing the same set of present facts. One way is not truer than the other. They are just two ways of interpreting and experiencing: the first, in terms of the manifold of separate things; the second, in terms of the one thing that is made manifest through this manifold. And as, in Japanese, the first is known as ji hokkai, so the second is ri hokkai, the absolute universe.

There was still some time before the train opened its doors for boarding, yet passengers were hurriedly buying boxed dinners, snacks, cans of beer, and magazines at the kiosk. Some had white iPod headphones in their ears, already off in their own little worlds. Others palmed smartphones, thumbing out texts, some talking so loudly into their phones that their voices rose above the blaring PA announcements. Tsukuru spotted a young couple, seated close together on a bench, happily sharing secrets. A pair of sleepy-looking five- or six-year-old twin boys, with their mother and father dragging them along by their hands, were whisked past where Tsukuru sat. The boys clutched small game devices. Two young foreign men hefted heavy-looking backpacks, while a young woman was lugging a cello case. A woman with a stunning profile passed by. Everyone was boarding a night train, heading to a far-off destination. Tsukuru envied them. At least they had a place they needed to go to. Tsukuru Tazaki had no place he needed to go. He realized that he had never actually been to Matsumoto, or Kofu. Or Shiojiri. Not even to the much closer town of Hachioji. He had watched countless express trains for Matsumoto depart from this platform, but it had never occurred to him that there was a possibility he could board one. Until now he had never thought of it. Why is that? he wondered. Tsukuru imagined himself boarding this train and heading for Matsumoto. It wasn’t exactly impossible. And it didn’t seem like such a terrible idea. He’d suddenly gotten it into his head, after all, to take off for Finland, so why not Matsumoto? What sort of town was it? he wondered. What kind of lives did people lead there? But he shook his head and erased these thoughts. Tomorrow morning it would be impossible to get back to Tokyo in time for work. He knew that much without consulting the timetable. And he was meeting Sara tomorrow night. It was a very important day for him. He couldn’t just take off for Matsumoto on a whim. He drank the rest of his now-lukewarm coffee and tossed the paper cup into a nearby garbage bin. Tsukuru Tazaki had nowhere he had to go. This was like a running theme of his life. He had no place he had to go to, no place to come back to. He never did, and he didn’t now.

Enō was not telling Emmyo to do zazen. Even when Bodhidharma was sitting himself, he never told other people to do zazen. Rather, whether sitting or standing or walking, what is important is that state of continuing clear mind moments. If this is something we experience only during zazen, letting go of it when we get off the cushion, it is just empty form. Unless we ripen through the various levels, we will not be able to let go of all concerns, external and internal. Enō had not been on the path for very long, but he was able to help Emmyo in this way to realize that place with no obstructions. Without zazen we can only talk about letting go of all attachments. Our zazen has to be actualized or we are wasting our time.

Given the central place that technology holds in our lives, it is astonishing that technology companies have not put more resources into fixing this global problem. Advanced computer systems and artificial intelligence (AI) could play a much bigger role in shaping diagnosis and prescription. While the up-front costs of using such technology may be sizeable, the long-term benefits to the health-care system need to be factored into value assessments. We believe that AI platforms could improve on the empirical prescription approach. Physicians work long hours under stressful conditions and have to keep up to date on the latest medical research. To make this work more manageable, the health-care system encourages doctors to specialize. However, the vast majority of antibiotics are prescribed either by generalists (e.g., general practitioners or emergency physicians) or by specialists in fields other than infectious disease, largely because of the need to treat infections quickly. An AI system can process far more information than a single human, and, even more important, it can remember everything with perfect accuracy. Such a system could theoretically enable a generalist doctor to be as effective as, or even superior to, a specialist at prescribing. The system would guide doctors and patients to different treatment options, assigning each a probability of success based on real-world data. The physician could then consider which treatment was most appropriate.

The first time that I went to Tuskegee I was asked to make an address to the school on Sunday evening. I sat upon the platform of the large chapel and looked forth on a thousand coloured faces, and the choir of a hundred or more behind me sang a familiar religious melody, and the whole company joined in the chorus with unction. I was the only white man under the roof, and the scene and the songs made an impression on me that I shall never forget. Mr. Washington arose and asked them to sing one after another of the old melodies that I had heard all my life; but I had never before heard them sung by a thousand voices nor by the voices of educated Negroes. I had associated them with the Negro of the past, not with the Negro who was struggling upward. They brought to my mind the plantation, the cabin, the slave, not the freedman in quest of education. But on the plantation and in the cabin they had never been sung as these thousand students sang them. I saw again all the old plantations that I had ever seen; the whole history of the Negro ran through my mind; and the inexpressible pathos of his life found expression in these songs as I had never before felt it. And the future? These were the ambitious youths of the race, at work with an earnestness that put to shame the conventional student life of most educational institutions. Another song rolled up along the rafters. And as soon as silence came, I found myself in front of this extraordinary mass of faces, thinking not of them, but of that long and unhappy chapter in our country's history which followed the one great structural mistake of the Fathers of the Republic; thinking of the one continuous great problem that generations of statesmen had wrangled over, and a million men fought about, and that had so dwarfed the mass of English men in the Southern States as to hold them back a hundred years behind their fellows in every other part of the world—in England, in Australia, and in the Northern and Western States; I was thinking of this dark shadow that had oppressed every large-minded statesman from Jefferson to Lincoln. These thousand young men and women about me were victims of it. I, too, was an innocent victim of it. The whole Republic was a victim of that fundamental error of importing Africa into America.

Hey Pete. So why the leave from social media? You are an activist, right? It seems like this decision is counterproductive to your message and work." A: The short answer is I’m tired of the endless narcissism inherent to the medium. In the commercial society we have, coupled with the consequential sense of insecurity people feel, as they impulsively “package themselves” for public consumption, the expression most dominant in all of this - is vanity. And I find that disheartening, annoying and dangerous. It is a form of cultural violence in many respects. However, please note the difference - that I work to promote just that – a message/idea – not myself… and I honestly loath people who today just promote themselves for the sake of themselves. A sea of humans who have been conditioned into viewing who they are – as how they are seen online. Think about that for a moment. Social identity theory run amok. People have been conditioned to think “they are” how “others see them”. We live in an increasing fictional reality where people are now not only people – they are digital symbols. And those symbols become more important as a matter of “marketing” than people’s true personality. Now, one could argue that social perception has always had a communicative symbolism, even before the computer age. But nooooooothing like today. Social media has become a social prison and a strong means of social control, in fact. Beyond that, as most know, social media is literally designed like a drug. And it acts like it as people get more and more addicted to being seen and addicted to molding the way they want the world to view them – no matter how false the image (If there is any word that defines peoples’ behavior here – it is pretention). Dopamine fires upon recognition and, coupled with cell phone culture, we now have a sea of people in zombie like trances looking at their phones (literally) thousands of times a day, merging their direct, true interpersonal social reality with a virtual “social media” one. No one can read anymore... they just swipe a stream of 200 character headlines/posts/tweets. understanding the world as an aggregate of those fragmented sentences. Massive loss of comprehension happening, replaced by usually agreeable, "in-bubble" views - hence an actual loss of variety. So again, this isn’t to say non-commercial focused social media doesn’t have positive purposes, such as with activism at times. But, on the whole, it merely amplifies a general value system disorder of a “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT HOW GREAT I AM!” – rooted in systemic insecurity. People lying to themselves, drawing meaningless satisfaction from superficial responses from a sea of avatars. And it’s no surprise. Market economics demands people self promote shamelessly, coupled with the arbitrary constructs of beauty and success that have also resulted. People see status in certain things and, directly or pathologically, use those things for their own narcissistic advantage. Think of those endless status pics of people rock climbing, or hanging out on a stunning beach or showing off their new trophy girl-friend, etc. It goes on and on and worse the general public generally likes it, seeking to imitate those images/symbols to amplify their own false status. Hence the endless feedback loop of superficiality. And people wonder why youth suicides have risen… a young woman looking at a model of perfection set by her peers, without proper knowledge of the medium, can be made to feel inferior far more dramatically than the typical body image problems associated to traditional advertising. That is just one example of the cultural violence inherent. The entire industry of social media is BASED on narcissistic status promotion and narrow self-interest. That is the emotion/intent that creates the billions and billions in revenue these platforms experience, as they in turn sell off people’s personal data to advertisers and governments. You are the product, of course.

In life, we are all on the same journey, we are all struggling to get from point A to point B. Different people have different point A originations and B destinations, but the path we travel is the same. If you can take what you have learned; share the experience and shortcuts you've discovered along the way, offer time saving tips and how you finally made it - then you can lighten the load of those who are just beginning on a similar path. Getting paid for it is an added bonus. My hope is that you do not end your journey at “I wrote a book” but rather understand that your book is just the beginning. Imagine the products you can create based on the contents of your book. Imagine the opportunities to share your knowledge with more people by speaking, training, coaching. You have an important message to share and the world is waiting...

Our potent contemporary cultural sanctuaries shape the Dharma to fit our cultural traditions so that the mirroring needed for spiritual paths to work can occur. It is important to the viability of any path that students see themselves reflected in it. This does not have to be only in terms of race, sexuality, or gender, but also in terms of the true nature of students' lives... The Buddha's teachings that are passed on in Dharma centers can certainly benefit everyone. But we will not recognize our true nature until we honestly look at ourselves. To embark on that path of healing or liberation requires exposure--where we can be comfortably seen without encountering another's guilt, explanation, or justification... Cultural sanctuaries provide a space where appearance doesn't act as a platform to launch diversity campaigns, or provide a basis for special attention, which many people of color do not want. They are refuges in which one can participate in the collective, rather than being perceived as a distinct individual in the midst of sameness.

We have generated billions of dollars for social media platforms through our desire—and then through a subsequent, escalating economic and cultural requirement—to replicate for the internet who we know, who we think we are, who we want to be. Selfhood buckles under the weight of this commercial importance. In physical spaces, there’s a limited audience and time span for every performance. Online, your audience can hypothetically keep expanding forever, and the performance never has to end. (You can essentially be on a job interview in perpetuity.) In real life, the success or failure of each individual performance often plays out in the form of concrete, physical action—you get invited over for dinner, or you lose the friendship, or you get the job. Online, performance is mostly arrested in the nebulous realm of sentiment, through an unbroken stream of hearts and likes and eyeballs, aggregated in numbers attached to your name. Worst of all, there’s essentially no backstage on the internet; where the offline audience necessarily empties out and changes over, the online audience never has to leave.

It doesn't take ten years of study, you don't need to go to the University, to find out that this is a damned good world gone wrong. Gone wrong, because it is being monkeyed with by people too greedy and mean and wrong-hearted altogether to do the right thing by our common world. They've grabbed it and they won't let go. They might lose their importance; they might lose their pull. Everywhere it's the same. Beware of the men you make your masters. Beware of the men you trust. We've only got to be clear-headed to sing the same song and play the same game all over the world, we common men. We don't want Power monkeyed with, we don't want Work and Goods monkeyed with, and, above all, we don't want Money monkeyed with. That's the elements of politics everywhere. When these things go wrong, we go wrong. That's how people begin to feel it and see it in America. That's how we feel it here -- when we look into our minds. That's what common people feel everywhere. That's what our brother whites -- "poor whites" they call them -- in those towns in South Carolina are fighting for now. Fighting our battle. Why aren't we with them? We speak the same language; we share the same blood. Who has been keeping us apart from them for a hundred and fifty-odd years? Ruling classes. Politicians. Dear old flag and all that stuff! Our school-books never tell us a word about the American common man; and his school-books never tell him a word about us. They flutter flags between us to keep us apart. Split us up for a century and a half because of some fuss about taxing tea. And what are our wonderful Labour and Socialist and Communist leaders doing to change that? What are they doing to unite us English-speaking common men together and give us our plain desire? Are they doing anything more for us than the land barons and the factory barons and the money barons? Not a bit of it! These labour leaders of to-day mean to be lords to-morrow. They are just a fresh set of dishonest trustees. Look at these twenty-odd platforms here! Mark their needless contradictions! Their marvellous differences on minor issues. 'Manoeuvres!' 'Intrigue.' 'Personalities.' 'Monkeying.' 'Don't trust him, trust me!' All of them at it. Mark how we common men are distracted, how we are set hunting first after one red herring and then after another, for the want of simple, honest interpretation...

HERE IS HOW TO RECOVER STOLEN CRYPTO // MUYERN TRUST HACKER ( Mail them at: muyerntrusted( at ) mail-me( dot )com ) ( Telegram for fast communication ( at )muyerntrusthacker ) ( Website: https:// muyerntrusthack. solutions/ )It's not often you feel the ground disappear beneath your feet, but when my online investment platform froze and my $200,000 savings vanished into thin air, that's exactly what happened. Panic, disbelief, and a crushing sense of helplessness washed over me. My life savings are gone. My dreams shattered. Days blurred into nights as I desperately searched for answers – frantic emails, endless phone calls, and countless online forums fueled by despair. My hope dwindled with each passing hour, leaving only a gnawing fear that the money was truly lost. Then Muyern Trust Hacker appeared, offering a ray of hope. My friend, god bless them, recommended that I check out their website after coming across it. I reached out to them, skeptical but clinging to hope, ready for another letdown. But something felt different. From the first email, Muyern Trust Hacker exuded professionalism and empathy. They listened to my story patiently, outlined their recovery process, and kept me informed every step of the way. They were the lifeline I desperately needed. The days that followed were a rollercoaster of emotions. Hope flickered, then dimmed, then flared again with each update. But slowly, steadily, progress was made. Muyern Trust Hacker unraveled the complexities of my case, navigated legal hurdles, and chipped away at the mountain of despair I had built around myself. Finally, the news arrived. My funds, all $200,000 of them, were recovered. Tears of relief streamed down my face as I read the confirmation email. It felt like a miracle, a second chance at life. My experience with Muyern Trust Hacker wasn't just about getting my money back. It was about regaining my faith in humanity, the possibility of justice, and the existence of good people who fight for what's right. Today, I stand here, no longer a victim, but a survivor. This is a testament to the power of resilience, the importance of hope, and the incredible work of companies like Muyern Trust Hacker. Don't give up if you ever find yourself in a similar situation. Seek help, reach out, and remember – even when the darkness seems absolute, a light is always waiting to be found. Better contact Muyern Trust Hacker ASAP.

Your success with that initial group, the number that clicks on the video, determines how far and wide YouTube will promote it further. If many of your subscribers click on the video, YouTube will send it out to more subscribers and to some non-subscribers that have watched similar content. If that group of non-subscribers also clicks to watch the video, the platform will expand the reach even further. The platform keeps doing this, continuously using data from who is clicking and how much of the video they watch, to determine how much further to expand your video’s reach. So what does this mean to your niche and why is it important? Think about it from the perspective of someone with no definable niche, a person that posts videos with no clear content strategy. People that subscribe to their channel may do so because they like the creator’s personality but they aren’t likely to be interested in a lot of the content. That means there might not be many of your subscribers from that initial test group that will be interested in the new video. They won’t click through and it will be a negative signal to YouTube…even the subscribers aren’t interested so why push it out to more people? That’s going to make it difficult to grow a channel in the first place if your videos aren’t being promoted much by YouTube. Now think of it in terms of someone that posts videos only

There were fireflies riding on the dark air and a dog baying on some low and far-away ledge of the cliff. The table seemed to have risen a little toward the sky like a mechanical dancing platform, giving the people around it a sense of being alone with each other in the dark universe, nourished by its only food, warmed by its only lights. And, as if a curious hushed laugh from Mrs. McKisco were a signal that such a detachment from the world had been attained, the two Divers began suddenly to warm and glow and expand, as if to make up to their guests, already so subtly assured of their importance, so flattered with politeness, for anything they might still miss from that country well left behind. Just for a moment they seemed to speak to every one at the table, singly and together, assuring them of their friendliness, their affection. And for a moment the faces turned up toward them were like the faces of poor children at a Christmas tree. Then abruptly the table broke up - the moment when the guests had been daringly lifted above conviviality into the rarer atmosphere of sentiment, was over before it could be irreverently breathed, before they had half realized it was there. But the diffused magic of the hot sweet South had withdrawn into them - the soft-pawed night and the ghostly wash of the Mediterranean far below - the magic left these things and melted into the two Divers and became part of them. Tender is the Night, Ch VII

Do those things, god damnit, because nothing sucks worse than a girl who reads. Do it, I say, because a life in purgatory is better than a life in hell. Do it, because a girl who reads possesses a vocabulary that can describe that amorphous discontent as a life unfulfilled—a vocabulary that parses the innate beauty of the world and makes it an accessible necessity instead of an alien wonder. A girl who reads lays claim to a vocabulary that distinguishes between the specious and soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her, and the inarticulate desperation of someone who loves her too much. A vocabulary, god damnit, that makes my vacuous sophistry a cheap trick. Do it, because a girl who reads understands syntax. Literature has taught her that moments of tenderness come in sporadic but knowable intervals. A girl who reads knows that life is not planar; she knows, and rightly demands, that the ebb comes along with the flow of disappointment. A girl who has read up on her syntax senses the irregular pauses—the hesitation of breath—endemic to a lie. A girl who reads perceives the difference between a parenthetical moment of anger and the entrenched habits of someone whose bitter cynicism will run on, run on well past any point of reason, or purpose, run on far after she has packed a suitcase and said a reluctant goodbye and she has decided that I am an ellipsis and not a period and run on and run on. Syntax that knows the rhythm and cadence of a life well lived. Date a girl who doesn’t read because the girl who reads knows the importance of plot. She can trace out the demarcations of a prologue and the sharp ridges of a climax. She feels them in her skin. The girl who reads will be patient with an intermission and expedite a denouement. But of all things, the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end. She is comfortable with them. She has bid farewell to a thousand heroes with only a twinge of sadness. Don’t date a girl who reads because girls who read are the storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in the corner of the café, you in the window of your room. You, who make my life so god damned difficult. The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am. You will not accept the life that I told of at the beginning of this piece. You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being storied. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train and take your Hemingway with you. I hate you. I really, really, really hate you.

Strong underneath, though!’ decided Julian. ‘There’s no softness there, if you ask me. I think Emma’s got authority but it’s the best sort. It’s quiet authority . . .’ ‘Rita wasn’t exactly loud, Martin!’ Elizabeth pointed out, rather impatiently. ‘I bet Rita was very like Emma before she was elected head girl. Was she, Belinda? You must have been at Whyteleafe then.’ Belinda had been at Whyteleafe longer than the others. She had joined in the junior class. She frowned now, deep in thought. ‘Why, Elizabeth, I do believe you’re right! I remember overhearing some of the teachers say that Rita was a bit too young and as quiet as a mouse and might not be able to keep order! But they were proved wrong. Rita was nervous at the first Meeting or two. But after that she was such a success she stayed on as head girl for two years running.’ ‘There, Martin!’ said Elizabeth. ‘Lucky the teachers don’t have any say in it then, isn’t it?’ laughed Julian. ‘I think all schools should be run by the pupils, the way ours is.’ ‘What about Nora?’ asked Jenny, suddenly. ‘She wouldn’t be nervous of going on the platform.’ ‘She’d be good in some ways,’ said Belinda, her mind now made up, ‘but I don’t think she’d be as good as Emma . . .’ They discussed it further. By the end, Elizabeth felt well satisfied. Everyone seemed to agree that Thomas was the right choice for head boy. And apart from Martin, who didn’t know who he wanted, and Jenny, who still favoured Nora, everyone seemed to agree with her about Emma. Because of the way that Whyteleafe School was run, in Elizabeth’s opinion it was extremely important to get the right head boy and head girl. And she’d set her heart on Thomas and Emma. She felt that this discussion was a promising start. Then suddenly, near the end of the train journey, Belinda raised something which made Elizabeth’s scalp prickle with excitement. ‘We haven’t even talked about our own election! For a monitor to replace Susan. Now she’s going up into the third form, we’ll need someone new. We’ve got Joan, of course, but the second form always has two.’ She was looking straight at Elizabeth! ‘We all think you should be the other monitor, Elizabeth,’ explained Jenny. ‘We talked amongst ourselves at the end of last term and everyone agreed. Would you be willing to stand?’ ‘I – I—’ Elizabeth was quite lost for words. Speechless with pleasure! She had already been a monitor once and William and Rita had promised that her chance to be a monitor would surely come again. But she’d never expected it to come so soon! ‘You see, Elizabeth,’ Joan said gently, having been in on the secret, ‘everyone thinks it was very fine the way you stood down in favour of Susan last term. And that it’s only fair you should take her place now she’s going up.’ ‘Not to mention all the things you’ve done for the school. Even if we do always think of you as the Naughtiest Girl!’ laughed Kathleen. ‘We were really proud of you last term, Elizabeth. We were proud that you were in our form!’ ‘So would you be willing to stand?’ repeated Jenny. ‘Oh, yes, please!’ exclaimed Elizabeth, glancing across at Joan in delight. Their classmates wanted her to be a monitor again, with her best friend Joan! The two of them would be second form monitors together. ‘There’s nothing I’d like better!’ she added. What a wonderful surprise. What a marvellous term this was going to be! They all piled off at the station and watched their luggage being loaded on to the school coach. Julian gave Elizabeth’s back a pat. There was an amused gleam in his eyes. ‘Well, well. It looks as though the Naughtiest Girl is going to be made a monitor again. At the first Meeting. When will that be? This Saturday? Can she last that long without misbehaving?’ ‘Of course I can, Julian,’ replied Elizabeth, refusing to be amused. ‘I’m going to jolly well make certain of that!’ That, at least, was her intention.

FUNDAMENTAL FIVE  MONDAY - The first exercise you will do is the push-up. Try and perform 3 sets and as many reps as you can in each set. It is fine here if you use a raised platform for the hands as we are just trying to get stronger here. The second exercise you will perform is the dip exercise. Here you can do either a ledge dip if your strength is not strong enough, or some triceps dips if your strength is at a decent level. Keep trying to work towards the goal of doing 10 perfect triceps dips. Thirdly you will perform 3 sets of squats. Concentrate on good form here and try and descend as low as you are able to. Your target is to be able to perform 25 perfect reps before moving on. You can also do conditioning exercises here as well if that is part of your goal. Note that this is not required, as our main focus is to build strength. TUESDAY - On this day you will aim to perform a pulling exercise, ideally the chin-up. If you are not strong enough to perform any chin-ups, work with the row until your strength increases. Again, you should be aiming for 3 sets of as many reps as you can do, until you can do 10 perfect reps. The second exercise should be your core exercise. This can be any of the easier variations, such as the plank, crunch, dish, or hanging leg raise. Remember, that the sole aim here is to work up to performing 10 perfect hanging knee raises. WEDNESDAY - This is a rest day, and you should ensure that you get plenty of good food and sleep on this day. THURSDAY - This should be the same as Mondays workout. FRIDAY - This should be the same as Tuesdays workout. SATURDAY / SUNDAY - These are both rest days, as in the beginning it is important for your body to have enough rest and to be able to recover properly from the workouts. This also leaves you totally fresh for the week ahead. As was said before, only once you can perform the five fundamental movements and their required number of repetitions, you should move on to the next program.

Just as the printing press led to the appearance of a new set of possibilities for democracy, beginning five hundred years ago—and just as the emergence of electronic broadcasting reshaped those possibilities, beginning in the first quarter of the twentieth century—the Internet is presenting us with new possibilities to reestablish a healthy functioning self-government, even before it rivals television for an audience. In fact, the Internet is perhaps the greatest source of hope for reestablishing an open communications environment in which the conversation of democracy can flourish. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. The ideas that individuals contribute are dealt with, in the main, according to the rules of a meritocracy of ideas. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. An important distinction to make is that the Internet is not just another platform for disseminating the truth. It’s a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It’s a platform, in other words, for reason. But just as it is important to avoid romanticizing the printing press and the information ecosystem it created, it is also necessary to keep a clear-eyed view of the Internet’s problems and abuses. It is hard to imagine any human evil that is not somehow abundantly displayed somewhere on the Internet. Parents of young children are often horrified to learn what obscene, grotesque, and savage material is all too easily available to children whose Web-surfing habits are not supervised or electronically limited. Teen suicides, bullying, depravity, and criminal behavior of all descriptions are described and—some would argue—promoted on the Internet. As with any tool put at the disposal of humankind, it can be, and is, used for evil as well as good purposes. And as always, it is up to us—particularly those of us who live in a democracy—to make intelligent choices about how and for what we use this incredibly powerful tool.

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.

HERE IS HOW TO RECOVER STOLEN CRYPTO // MUYERN TRUST HACKER ( Mail them at: muyerntrusted( at ) mail-me( dot )com ) ( Telegram for fast communication ( at )muyerntrusthacker ) ( Website: https:// muyerntrusthack. solutions/ ) It's not often you feel the ground disappear beneath your feet, but when my online investment platform froze and my $200,000 savings vanished into thin air, that's exactly what happened. Panic, disbelief, and a crushing sense of helplessness washed over me. My life savings are gone. My dreams shattered. Days blurred into nights as I desperately searched for answers – frantic emails, endless phone calls, and countless online forums fueled by despair. My hope dwindled with each passing hour, leaving only a gnawing fear that the money was truly lost. Then Muyern Trust Hacker appeared, offering a ray of hope. My friend, god bless them, recommended that I check out their website after coming across it. I reached out to them, skeptical but clinging to hope, ready for another letdown. But something felt different. From the first email, Muyern Trust Hacker exuded professionalism and empathy. They listened to my story patiently, outlined their recovery process, and kept me informed every step of the way. They were the lifeline I desperately needed. The days that followed were a rollercoaster of emotions. Hope flickered, then dimmed, then flared again with each update. But slowly, steadily, progress was made. Muyern Trust Hacker unraveled the complexities of my case, navigated legal hurdles, and chipped away at the mountain of despair I had built around myself. Finally, the news arrived. My funds, all $200,000 of them, were recovered. Tears of relief streamed down my face as I read the confirmation email. It felt like a miracle, a second chance at life. My experience with Muyern Trust Hacker wasn't just about getting my money back. It was about regaining my faith in humanity, the possibility of justice, and the existence of good people who fight for what's right. Today, I stand here, no longer a victim, but a survivor. This is a testament to the power of resilience, the importance of hope, and the incredible work of companies like Muyern Trust Hacker. Don't give up if you ever find yourself in a similar situation. Seek help, reach out, and remember – even when the darkness seems absolute, a light is always waiting to be found. Better contact Muyern Trust Hacker ASAP.

As I write this, I know there are countless mysteries about the future of business that we’ve yet to unravel. That’s a process that will never end. When it comes to customer success, however, I have achieved absolute clarity on four points. First, technology will never stop evolving. In the years to come, machine learning and artificial intelligence will probably make or break your business. Success will involve using these tools to understand your customers like never before so that you can deliver more intelligent, personalized experiences. The second point is this: We’ve never had a better set of tools to help meet every possible standard of success, whether it’s finding a better way to match investment opportunities with interested clients, or making customers feel thrilled about the experience of renovating their home. The third point is that customer success depends on every stakeholder. By that I mean employees who feel engaged and responsible and are growing their careers in an environment that allows them to do their best work—and this applies to all employees, from the interns to the CEO. The same goes for partners working to design and implement customer solutions, as well as our communities, which provide the schools, hospitals, parks, and other facilities to support us all. The fourth and most important point is this: The gap between what customers really want from businesses and what’s actually possible is vanishing rapidly. And that’s going to change everything. The future isn’t about learning to be better at doing what we already do, it’s about how far we can stretch the boundaries of our imagination. The ability to produce success stories that weren’t possible a few years ago, to help customers thrive in dramatic new ways—that is going to become a driver of growth for any successful company. I believe we’re entering a new age in which customers will increasingly expect miracles from you. If you don’t value putting the customer at the center of everything you do, then you are going to fall behind. Whether you make cars, solar panels, television programs, or anything else, untold opportunities exist. Every company should invest in helping its customers find new destinations, and in blazing new trails to reach them. To do so, we have to resist the urge to make quick, marginal improvements and spend more time listening deeply to what customers really want, even if they’re not fully aware of it yet. In the end, it’s a matter of accepting that your success is inextricably linked to theirs.

Since my visit to the Hermitage, I had become more aware of the four figures, two women and two men, who stood around the luminous space where the father welcomed his returning son. Their way of looking leaves you wondering how they think or feel about what they are watching. These bystanders, or observers, allow for all sorts of interpretations. As I reflect on my own journey, I become more and more aware of how long I have played the role of observer. For years I had instructed students on the different aspects of the spiritual life, trying to help them see the importance of living it. But had I, myself, really ever dared to step into the center, kneel down, and let myself be held by a forgiving God? The simple fact of being able to express an opinion, to set up an argument, to defend a position, and to clarify a vision has given me, and gives me still, a sense of control. And, generally, I feel much safer in experiencing a sense of control over an undefinable situation than in taking the risk of letting that situation control me. Certainly there were many hours of prayer, many days and months of retreat, and countless conversations with spiritual directors, but I had never fully given up the role of bystander. Even though there has been in me a lifelong desire to be an insider looking out, I nevertheless kept choosing over and over again the position of the outsider looking in. Sometimes this looking-in was a curious looking-in, sometimes a jealous looking-in, sometimes an anxious looking-in, and, once in a while, even a loving looking-in. But giving up the somewhat safe position of the critical observer seemed like a great leap into totally unknown territory. I so much wanted to keep some control over my spiritual journey, to be able to predict at least a part of the outcome, that relinquishing the security of the observer for the vulnerability of the returning son seemed close to impossible. Teaching students, passing on the many explanations given over the centuries to the words and actions of Jesus, and showing them the many spiritual journeys that people have chosen in the past seemed very much like taking the position of one of the four figures surrounding the divine embrace. The two women standing behind the father at different distances the seated man staring into space and looking at no one in particular, and the tall man standing erect and looking critically at the event on the platform in front of him--they all represent different ways of not getting involved. There is indifference, curiosity, daydreaming, and attentive observation; there is staring, gazing, watching, and looking; there is standing in the background, leaning against an arch, sitting with arms crossed, and standing with hands gripping each other. Every one of these inner and outward postures are all too familiar with me. Some are more comfortable than others, but all of them are ways of not getting directly involved," (pp. 12-13).

How Google Works (Schmidt, Eric) - Your Highlight on Location 3124-3150 | Added on Sunday, April 5, 2015 10:35:40 AM In late 1999, John Doerr gave a presentation at Google that changed the company, because it created a simple tool that let the founders institutionalize their “think big” ethos. John sat on our board, and his firm, Kleiner Perkins, had recently invested in the company. The topic was a form of management by objectives called OKRs (to which we referred in the previous chapter), which John had learned from former Intel CEO Andy Grove.173 There are several characteristics that set OKRs apart from their typical underpromise-and-overdeliver corporate-objective brethren. First, a good OKR marries the big-picture objective with a highly measurable key result. It’s easy to set some amorphous strategic goal (make usability better … improve team morale … get in better shape) as an objective and then, at quarter end, declare victory. But when the strategic goal is measured against a concrete goal (increase usage of features by X percent … raise employee satisfaction scores by Y percent … run a half marathon in under two hours), then things get interesting. For example, one of our platform team’s recent OKRs was to have “new WW systems serving significant traffic for XX large services with latency < YY microseconds @ ZZ% on Jupiter.”174 (Jupiter is a code name, not the location of Google’s newest data center.) There is no ambiguity with this OKR; it is very easy to measure whether or not it is accomplished. Other OKRs will call for rolling out a product across a specific number of countries, or set objectives for usage (e.g., one of the Google+ team’s recent OKRs was about the daily number of messages users would post in hangouts) or performance (e.g., median watch latency on YouTube videos). Second—and here is where thinking big comes in—a good OKR should be a stretch to achieve, and hitting 100 percent on all OKRs should be practically unattainable. If your OKRs are all green, you aren’t setting them high enough. The best OKRs are aggressive, but realistic. Under this strange arithmetic, a score of 70 percent on a well-constructed OKR is often better than 100 percent on a lesser one. Third, most everyone does them. Remember, you need everyone thinking in your venture, regardless of their position. Fourth, they are scored, but this scoring isn’t used for anything and isn’t even tracked. This lets people judge their performance honestly. Fifth, OKRs are not comprehensive; they are reserved for areas that need special focus and objectives that won’t be reached without some extra oomph. Business-as-usual stuff doesn’t need OKRs. As your venture grows, the most important OKRs shift from individuals to teams. In a small company, an individual can achieve incredible things on her own, but as the company grows it becomes harder to accomplish stretch goals without teammates. This doesn’t mean that individuals should stop doing OKRs, but rather that team OKRs become the more important means to maintain focus on the big tasks. And there’s one final benefit of an OKR-driven culture: It helps keep people from chasing competitors. Competitors are everywhere in the Internet Century, and chasing them (as we noted earlier) is the fastest path to mediocrity. If employees are focused on a well-conceived set of OKRs, then this isn’t a problem. They know where they need to go and don’t have time to worry about the competition. ==========

If I as Pekwa Nicholas Mohlala take my family, my brothers and sisters, myself, and our children, combined, we have all the resources, knowledge, skills, and capacity to run a successful, profitable, and sustainable small business. If I take my extended family both maternal and partenal, my aunts and uncles and my cousins, myself, and our children, combined, we have all the resources, knowledge, skills, and capacity to run a successful, profitable, and sustainable medium business. If I take Ba Ga Mohlala family in general, including aunts, uncles, and grandchildren, combined, we have all the resources, knowledge, skills, and capacity to run a successful, profitable, and sustainable Big Business business. If I take Banareng clan including aunts, uncles, and grandchildren, combined, we have all the resources, knowledge, skills, and capacity to run a successful, profitable, and sustainable multinational business. YET, we are not able to do that because of lack of unity, and the lack of unity is caused by selfishness and lack of trust. At the moment what we have is majority of successful independent individuals running their individual successful, profitable and sustainable small businesses and successful individuals pursuing their own fulfilling careers. If ever we want to succeed as families and one united clan, we need to start by addressing the issue of trust, and selfishness. Other than that, anything that we try to do to unite the family will fail. And to succeed in addressing the issue of trust, and selfishness, we must first start by acknowledging that we are related. We must start by living and helping oneanother as relatives, we must first start by creating platforms that will overtime make us to reestablish our genetic bond, and also to build platforms where we can do that. So, let us grab the opportunity to use existing platforms and build new ones, to participate, contribute positively, and add our brothers and sisters, our cousins, and other extended family members to those platforms as a way towards building unity, unity of purpose, purpose of reclaiming our glory and building a legacy. Unity of empowering ourself and our communities. Unity of building a successful and sustainable socioeconomic livelihood for ourselves and our communities. We will keep on preaching this gospel of being self sustainable as Ba Ga Mohlala and Banareng in general, until people start to stop and take notice, until people start listening and acting, we will keep on preaching this gospel of being self sustainable as Ba Ga Mohlala and Banareng in general, until people take it upon themselves and start organizing themselves around the issue of social and economic development as a family and as a clan, until people realize the importance of self sufficiency as a family and as a clan. In times of election, the media always keep on talking about the election machinery of the ruling parties in refence to branches of the ruling parties which are the power base of those ruling parties. Luckily as Ba Gs Mohlala, we also have Ba Ga Mohlala branches across the country as basic units in addition to family, and extended family units. So, let us use those structures as basic units and building blocks to build up Ba Ga Mohlala and Banareng to become successful forces which will play a role in socioeconomic sphere locally, regionally, provinvially, nationally, and internationally. To build Ba Ga Mohlala and Banareng to be a force to reckon with locally, provinvially, nationally, and internationally. The platforms are there, it is all up to us, the ball is in our court as a collective Ba Ga Mohlala and Banareng. It must become a norn and a duty to serve the family and the clan, it must become a honour to selflessly serve the family and the clan without expecting anything in return. ALUTA !!!!!!!! "Struggle of selfsuffiency must continue

Your intention is for readers to benefit from your experiences and avoid the costly and time consuming mistakes you may have made. You want to help your readers know the short cuts and what you would have avoided, and why. As you write, keep a clear sense of why writing this is important to you, but also share your why within the body of the book. Why do your readers need to take the steps you describe? Are you saving them time, money, resources? Why did you start your journey to begin with? Did you want to change the world or get from point ”A” to point “B”? Why did you keep going even when it was difficult? Was there a light at the end of the tunnel, a reward at the end? Why should they hang in there? All of these things will work magically if implemented correctly and consistently.

The easiest way to write a book is to use the Table of Contents as an outline. People get stuck when they think in terms of writing a book. Do not let this delay you. There are a lot of book outline writing software’s available today, but I personally believe they have the potential to cause more distraction then assistance. The best possible outlines have come from pure "flow". I advise my clients to do a simple process of setting the timer for 2 minutes and just writing. I ask that they write everything that pops into their heads without thought or judgment on the subject. The questions I ask are: What is most important to you? What do you know a lot about? Tell me 12 things that fall under that subject that are valuable to know. Under each of the 12 things, give me 3 things that are a "must" in that category. Using index cards to write your answers on is a useful way to arrange chapters and sections of your book. Believe it or not, my students have come up with a Table of Contents/outline in less than 10 minutes using this method. Our greatest block is that we tend to over think things too much. We over analyze and what happens is that we get into analysis paralysis. Our creativity and ‘flow’ freezes up and all spontaneity and creativity just exits out of the thought process. When we stall the creative flow by trying to be correct, proper and appropriate, we end up talking ourselves out of what we intuitively know that we know and into a space of doubt, or what we think we do not know.

The final option to have your book completed is to hire a ghost writer. The challenge with this option is that it is important to note that your voice IS an integral part of your branding. When you hire someone else, what your readers will ultimately get is their voice. When they see you later at your website or on your social media, your voice will not be the same. This will trigger a feeling of inconsistency when relationships need to be built upon trust and authenticity. Your audience will eventually come to think you are not the “real deal” and will find another to replace you. Finally, your book is a springboard and launching pad to greater things such as speaking, interviews, a product line, etc. Will your ghost writer be available for all of that as well? How will you be able to “ghost write” your way through an interview? Hence the reason I stress speaking in your own voice. You may think you are not perfect, but your authenticity will speak in volumes to your followers and they will be customers for life if they see your true being.

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The first report suggests that “social computing could play an increasingly important role in re-engaging citizens in political debate, in securing social cohesion and harmony, and it could provide a platform for dialogue on the grand challenges of the EU [European Union] and the rest of the world.” The second report encourages “policy makers to seize the opportunities of social computing but also to mitigate any undesirable effects” and laments the “limited provision of citizen-centered public services by governments.” The report further warns “that the empowerment and transparency characteristics of social computing initiatives seem to disrupt existing power balances.

Most important jobs of a parent: unconditional love, comfort and protection, and a solid platform and values for future success

There’s another important benefit of platforms: As they grow and get more valuable, they attract more investment, which helps to improve the products and services the platform supports. This is why, in the technology industry, companies always think “platforms, not products.

M113 Family of Vehicles Mission Provide a highly mobile, survivable, and reliable tracked-vehicle platform that is able to keep pace with Abrams- and Bradley-equipped units and that is adaptable to a wide range of current and future battlefield tasks through the integration of specialised mission modules at minimum operational and support cost. Entered Army Service 1960 Description and Specifications After more than four decades, the M113 family of vehicles (FOV) is still in service in the U.S. Army (and in many foreign armies). The original M113 Armoured Personnel Carrier (APC) helped to revolutionise mobile military operations. These vehicles carried 11 soldiers plus a driver and track commander under armour protection across hostile battlefield environments. More importantly, these vehicles were air transportable, air-droppable, and swimmable, allowing planners to incorporate APCs in a much wider range of combat situations, including many "rapid deployment" scenarios. The M113s were so successful that they were quickly identified as the foundation for a family of vehicles. Early derivatives included both command post (M577) and mortar carrier (M106) configurations. Over the years, the M113 FOV has undergone numerous upgrades. In 1964, the M113A1 package replaced the original gasoline engine with a 212 horsepower diesel package, significantly improving survivability by eliminating the possibility of catastrophic loss from fuel tank explosions. Several new derivatives were produced, some based on the armoured M113 chassis (e.g., the M125A1 mortar carrier and M741 "Vulcan" air defence vehicle) and some based on the unarmoured version of the chassis (e.g., the M548 cargo carrier, M667 "Lance" missile carrier, and M730 "Chaparral" missile carrier). In 1979, the A2 package of suspension and cooling enhancements was introduced. Today's M113 fleet includes a mix of these A2 variants, together with other derivatives equipped with the most recent A3 RISE (Reliability Improvements for Selected Equipment) package. The standard RISE package includes an upgraded propulsion system (turbocharged engine and new transmission), greatly improved driver controls (new power brakes and conventional steering controls), external fuel tanks, and 200-amp alternator with four batteries. Additional A3 improvements include incorporation of spall liners and provisions for mounting external armour. The future M113A3 fleet will include a number of vehicles that will have high speed digital networks and data transfer systems. The M113A3 digitisation program includes applying hardware, software, and installation kits and hosting them in the M113 FOV. Current variants: Mechanised Smoke Obscurant System M548A1/A3 Cargo Carrier M577A2/A3 Command Post Carrier M901A1 Improved TOW Vehicle M981 Fire Support Team Vehicle M1059/A3 Smoke Generator Carrier M1064/A3 Mortar Carrier M1068/A3 Standard Integrated Command Post System Carrier OPFOR Surrogate Vehicle (OSV) Manufacturer Anniston Army Depot (Anniston, AL) United Defense, L.P. (Anniston, AL)

The most pivotal product decision we made seemed much less important at the time but was our first big fight. I really wanted “tags” as a way to categorize content, and Steve insisted we let users launch their own reddits within our network (we’d call them subreddits). Just like WordPress was a blogging platform for online publishing, reddit would be a platform for online communities. It didn’t seem important at the time, but Steve was absolutely right and it’s a damn good thing he won because that decision would ultimately drive reddit’s success where all of our then competitors failed. We combined this simple point system with the ability for anyone to create a forum for an online community to share and discuss links—from NFL fans (/r/NFL) to corgi lovers (/r/corgi).

After twelve years as an NFL head coach—six with the Indianapolis Colts—I know that God has provided me with a significant platform that cannot be measured in sheer numbers alone. We are all role models to someone. Speaking to five thousand people is no more important than quietly teaching one. And as long as our hearts are right, God will honor both endeavors, accomplishing what He will in each setting.

1. We believe in the freedom of religious expression. All individuals should be encouraged to develop a personal theology, and to openly present their religious opinions without fear of censure or reprisal. 2. We believe in tolerance of religious ideas. The religions of every age and culture have something to teach those who listen. 3. We believe in the authority of reason and conscience. The ultimate arbiter in religion is not a church, a document, or an official, but the personal choice and decision of the individual. 4. We believe in the search for truth. With an open mind and heart, there is no end to the fruitful and exciting revelations that the human spirit can find. 5. We believe in the unity of experience. There is no fundamental conflict between faith and knowledge; religion and the world; the sacred and the secular. 6. We believe in the worth and dignity of each human being. All people on earth have an equal claim to life, liberty, and justice; no idea, ideal, or philosophy is superior to a single human life. 7. We believe in the ethical application of religion. Inner grace and faith finds completion in social and community involvement. 8. We believe in the force of love, that the governing principle in human relationships is the principle of love, which seeks to help and heal, never to hurt or destroy. 9. We believe in the necessity of the democratic process. Records are open to scrutiny, elections are open to members, and ideas are open to criticism, so that people might govern themselves. 10. We believe in the importance of a religious community. Peers confirm and validate experience, and provide a critical platform, as well as a network of mutual support.

All this pitting of sex against sex... All this claiming of superiority and imparting of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides', and it is... of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamented pot.

new technologies do not emerge in a vacuum free of social, political, and economic influences. Context is all-important. On their own, labor-saving machines, however ingenious, are not enough to bring about a society of abundance and leisure, as the Luddites who destroyed the power looms set to replace them over two centuries ago knew all too well.

Product leaders create product plans, but those product plans often (usually!) lack the most important component: What is the technical insight upon which those new features, products, or platforms will be built? A technical insight is a new way of applying technology or design that either drives down the cost or increases the functions and usability of the product by a significant factor.

A more democratic culture means supporting creative work not because it is viral but because it is important, focusing on serving needs as well as desires, and making sure marginalized people are

Who needs whom, why, and how much? The answer is important for determining the pricing structure and whether to subsidize one group or another. Suppose

It is important to remember that although it is relatively easy to write code, it is very difficult to create a sustainable platform.

Doom, meanwhile, had a long-term impact on the world of gaming far exceeding even that of Myst. The latest of a series of experiments with interactive 3D graphics by id programmer John Carmack, Doom shares with Myst only its immersive first-person point of view; in all other respects, this fast-paced, ultraviolent shooter is the polar opposite of the cerebral Myst. Whereas the world of Myst is presented as a collection of static nodes that the player can move among, each represented by a relatively static picture of its own, the world of Doom is contiguous. As the player roams about, Doom must continually recalculate in real time the view of the world that it presents to her on the screen, in effect drawing for her a completely new picture with every frame using a vastly simplified version of the 3D-rendering techniques that Eric Graham began experimenting with on the Amiga back in 1986. First-person viewpoints had certainly existed in games previously, but mostly in the context of flight simulators, of puzzle-oriented adventures such as Myst, or of space-combat games such as Elite. Doom has a special quality that those earlier efforts lack in that the player embodies her avatar as she moves through 3D space in a way that feels shockingly, almost physically real. She does not view the world through a windscreen, is not separated from it by an adventure game’s point-and-click mechanics and static artificiality. Doom marks a revolutionary change in action gaming, the most significant to come about between the videogame’s inception and the present. If the player directs the action in a game such as Menace, Doom makes her feel as if she is in the action, in the game’s world. Given the Amiga platform’s importance as a tool for noninteractive 3D rendering, it is ironic that the Amiga is uniquely unsuited to Doom and the many iterations and clones of it that would follow. Most of the Amiga attributes that we employed in the Menace reconstruction—its scrolling playfields, its copper, its sprites—are of no use to a 3D-engine programmer. Indeed, the Intel-based machines on which Carmack created Doom possess none of these features. Even the Amiga’s bitplane-based playfields, the source of so many useful graphical tricks and hacks when programming a 2D game such as Menace, are an impediment and annoyance in a game such as Doom. Much preferable are the Intel-based machines’ straightforward chunky playfields because these layouts are much easier to work with when every frame of video must be drawn afresh from scratch. What is required most of all for a game such as Doom is sufficient raw processing power to perform the necessary thousands of calculations needed to render each frame quickly enough to support the frenetic action for which the game is known. By 1993, the plebian Intel-based computer, so long derided by Amiga owners for its inefficiencies and lack of design imagination, at last possessed this raw power. The Amiga simply had no answer to the Intel 80486s and Pentiums that powered this new, revolutionary genre of first-person shooters. Throughout

Keep These Things in Mind While Enrolling For A Professional Online Course While online courses are gaining in popularity due to the conveniences they offer, you must consider a few things before enrolling in one. Not all programs are suitable for everyone. Not everyone is good at learning online. There are a lot of conditions that must be satisfied to make such learning successful. It is better that you consider everything carefully before starting your e-learning course. 1. How Will The Course Help You? There are many online professional programs available from various universities and educational platforms. You must see which one will be most useful for you. If you are working and you need to acquire a skill to get a promotion, then you must choose such a course. It is not just money that you are spending on these courses. You are also investing a lot of your time and effort to successfully complete your learning. 2. Do You Have The Motivation To Learn By Yourself? Getting motivated to study when you are in a classroom full of students is easy. A professor is teaching and also watching you. But in online certification courses, you have the freedom of studying whenever and wherever you want. Many of the e-learning platforms allow you to complete the program at your pace. This can make you lethargic and distracted. You must ask yourself whether you can remain motivated to complete the course. 3. How Familiar Are You With The Technology? You don’t need to be a computer genius to attend online professional programs. But you must be familiar with basic computer operations, playing videos on both desktops and mobile phones, and using a web browser. The other skill you will require in e-learning is the speed of typing on different devices. When there are live exchanges with the professors, you will need to type the queries very fast if you want to get your answers. 4. How Well Will You Participate In Online Classes? It is very easy to remain silent in virtual classes. There is no one staring at you and pushing you to ask questions or give answers. But if you don’t interact, you will not be making full use of online certification courses. Participation is very important in such classrooms. You must also take part in the group discussions that will bring out new ideas and opinions. E-learning is not for those who need physical presence. 5. Who Are The Others On The Programme? Knowing the other participants in online professional programs is very important, especially if you are already working and looking to acquire more skills. There must be people in the virtual classroom whose contributions will be useful for you. If the course has only freshers from college, then it may not give you any value addition. As a working person, you must look at networking opportunities that will help you with career opportunities. To Sum Up….. For working people, virtual classes are the best way to acquire more skills without taking a break from employment. These courses offer you the flexibility that you can never get in campus education. But you must make yourself suitable for e-learning to benefit from it.

I am emphasizing the self-service nature of these platforms because it’s important for a reason I think is somewhat non-obvious: even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation. When a platform is self-service, even the improbable ideas can get tried, because there’s no expert gatekeeper ready to say, “that will never work!” And guess what—many of those improbable ideas do work, and society is the beneficiary of that diversity.2

As the body disappears, so does our ability to empathize. Berardi suggests a link between our senses and our ability to make sense, asking us to “hypothesize the connection between the expansion of the infosphere…and the crumbling of the sensory membrane that allows human beings to understand that which cannot be verbalized, that which cannot be reduced to codified signs.”24 In the environment of our online platforms, “that which cannot be verbalized” is figured as excess or incompatible, although every in-person encounter teaches us the importance of nonverbal expressions of the body, not to mention the very matter-of-fact presence of the body in front of me.

Many entrepreneurial successes are built on platforms. A platform allows the business to grow in multiple markets against multiple competitors. It allows the company to adjust to changing times, technologies, and trends. A platform offers a company a way to change the rules of the game and to develop a competitive edge. Perhaps most important, it allows entrepreneurs to build a stronger competitive position against incumbent companies than just using evolutionary advances.

The seductive inducements to conformity - money, celebrity, prizes, grants, book contracts, hefty lecture fees, important academic and political positions, and a public platform - are scored by those who resist. The rebel does not define success the way the elites define success. Those who resist refuse to kneel down before the idols of mass culture and the power elites. They are not trying to get rich. They do not want to be part of the inner circle of the powerful. They accept that when you stand with the oppressed you are treated like the oppressed.

But however determined this programme of domestic consolidation, following the Reichstag election results of May 1924, not even the votes of the SPD were sufficient to carry the constitutional amendments necessary to ratify the Dawes Plan, which included an international mortgage on the Reichsbahn. Over a quarter of the German electorate had voted for the far right - 19 per cent for the DNVP, almost 7 per cent for Hitler's NSDAP. Almost 13 per cent had opted for the Communists. The two-thirds majority would have to include at least some deputies from the DNVP, intransigent foes of the Versailles Treaty and the progenitors of the 'stab in the back' legend. So concerned were the foreign powers that the American ambassador Alanson Houghton intervened directly in German party politics, summoning leading figures in the DNVP to explain bluntly that if they rejected the Dawes Plan, it would be one hundred years before America ever assisted Germany again. Under huge pressure from their business backers, on 29 August 1924 enough DNVP members defected to the government side to ratify the plan. In exchange, the Reich government offered a sop to the nationalist community by formally renouncing its acceptance of the war-guilt clause of the Versailles Treaty. Nevertheless, on 10 October 1924 Jack Morgan bit his tongue and signed the loan agreement that committed his bank along with major financial interests in London, Paris and even Brussels to the 800-million Goldmarks loan. The loan was to apply the salve of business common sense to the wounds left by the war. And it was certainly an attractive proposition. The issuers of the Dawes Loan paid only 87 cents on the dollar for their bonds. They were to be redeemed with a 5 per cent premium. For the 800 million Reichsmarks it received, Germany would service bonds with a face value of 1.027 billion. But if Morgan's were bewildered by the role they had been forced to play, this speaks to the eerie quality of the reconfiguration of international politics in 1924. The Labour government that hosted the final negotiations in London was the first socialist government elected to preside over the most important capitalist centre of the old world, supposedly committed by its party manifesto of 1919 to a radical platform of nationalization and social transformation. And yet in the name of 'peace' and 'prosperity' it was working hand in glove with an avowedly conservative adminstration in Washington and the Bank of England to satisfy the demands of American investors, in the process imposing a damaging financial settlement on a radical reforming government in France, to the benefit of a German Republic, which was at the time ruled by a coalition dominated by the once notorious annexationist, but now reformed Gustav Stresemann. 'Depoliticization' is a euphemistic way of describing this tableau of mutual evisceration. Certainly, it had been no plan of Wilson's New Freedom to raise Morgan's to such heights. In fact, even Morgan's did not want to own the terms of the Dawes Settlement. Whereas Wilson had invoked public opinion as the final authority, this was now represented by the 'investing' public, for whom the bankers, as financial advisors, were merely the spokesmen. But if a collective humbling of the European political class had been what lay behind Wilson's call for a 'peace without victory' eight years earlier, one can't help thinking that the Dawes Plan and the London Conference of 1924 must have had him chuckling in his freshly dug grave. It was a peace. There were certainly no European victors.

The military implications are obvious, if difficult to act upon in today’s fiscal environment. There’s a clear and continuing need for Marines, for amphibious units and naval supply ships, for platforms that allow operations in littoral and riverine environments, and for capabilities that enable expeditionary logistics in urbanized coastal environments. Rotary-wing or tilt-rotor aircraft, and precise and discriminating weapons systems, will also be needed. There’s also a clear need to structure ground forces so that they can rapidly aggregate or disaggregate forces and fires, enabling them to operate in a distributed, small-unit mode while still being able to concentrate quickly to mass their effect against a major target. Combat engineers, construction engineers, civil affairs units, intelligence systems that can make sense of the clutter of urban areas, pre-conflict sensing systems such as geospatial tools that allow early warning of conflict and instability, and constabulary and coast guard capabilities are also likely to be important. The ability to operate for a long period in a city without drawing heavily on that city’s water, fuel, electricity, or food supply will be important as well, with very significant implications for expeditionary logistics. I go into detail on all these issues, and other military aspects of the problem, in the Appendix.

replace individual trust with trust in the platform is an important part of removing friction from the core transaction

The transaction that is at the heart of the platform is called the core transaction (see Figure 1.5). The core transaction is the platform’s “factory”—the way it manufactures value for its users. It is the process that turns potential connections into transactions. Getting the core transaction right is the most important piece of platform design, as the platform will need its users to repeat this process over and over to generate and exchange value.

quality diminishes as the network grows. Every platform has to face this challenge, and setting the right rules and standards is an important part of overcoming it.

In contrast, services are centralized, and require continued involvement from the platform. Customer support is the most common example, as it’s a service that most platforms have to offer. Services can play an important part in customer satisfaction, as they provide a buffer between your users when something goes wrong.

The importance of user-led innovation for platform businesses means that the traditional software company approach of building a complex, fully featured product before going to market doesn’t make much sense.

I had always believed that the [Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture] should be a safe haven that helps Americans wrestle with and better understand the difficult current issues of race, justice, and equality. In essence, the museum is a bully pulpit that provides NMAAHC with the opportunity and responsibility to clarify and contextualize concerns that often divide or perplex the American public.... I think it is important for NMAAHC, for the Smithsonian, to engage in the public square in a manner that brings reason, knowledge, and contextualization to the contemporary challenges faced by America. Actions like this are not without risk to an institution that operates within a federal umbrella. Yet I believe that museums like NMAAHC have an obligation to use their expertise, their platform, to contribute to the greater good of a nation.

Let us turn now to a study of a small Newfoundland fishing village. Fishing is, in England at any rate – more hazardous even than mining. Cat Harbour, a community in Newfoundland, is very complex. Its social relationships occur in terms of a densely elaborate series of interrelated conceptual universes one important consequence of which is that virtually all permanent members of the community are kin, ‘cunny kin’, or economic associates of all other of the 285 permanent members. The primary activity of the community is cod fishing. Salmon, lobster, and squid provide additional sources of revenue. Woodcutting is necessary in off-seasons. Domestic gardening, and stints in lumber camps when money is needed, are the two other profitable activities. The community's religion is reactionary. Women assume the main roles in the operation though not the government of the churches in the town. A complicated system of ‘jinking’ – curses, magic, and witchcraft – governs and modulates social relationships. Successful cod fishing in the area depends upon highly developed skills of navigation, knowledge of fish movements, and familiarity with local nautical conditions. Lore is passed down by word of mouth, and literacy among older fishermen is not universal by any means. ‘Stranger’ males cannot easily assume dominant positions in the fishing systems and may only hire on for salary or percentage. Because women in the community are not paid for their labour, there has been a pattern of female migration out of the area. Significantly, two thirds of the wives in the community are from outside the area. This has a predictable effect on the community's concept of ‘the feminine’. An elaborate anti-female symbolism is woven into the fabric of male communal life, e.g. strong boats are male and older leaky ones are female. Women ‘are regarded as polluting “on the water” and the more traditional men would not consider going out if a woman had set foot in the boat that day – they are “jinker” (i.e., a jinx), even unwittingly'. (It is not only relatively unsophisticated workers such as those fishermen who insist on sexual purity. The very skilled technicians drilling for natural gas in the North Sea affirm the same taboo: women are not permitted on their drilling platform rigs.) It would be, however, a rare Cat Harbour woman who would consider such an act, for they are aware of their structural position in the outport society and the cognition surrounding their sex….Cat Harbour is a male-dominated society….Only men can normally inherit property, or smoke or drink, and the increasingly frequent breach of this by women is the source of much gossip (and not a negligible amount of conflict and resentment). Men are seated first at meals and eat together – women and children eating afterwards. Men are given the choicest and largest portions, and sit at the same table with a ‘stranger’ or guest. Women work extremely demanding and long hours, ‘especially during the fishing season, for not only do they have to fix up to 5 to 6 meals each day for the fishermen, but do all their household chores, mind the children and help “put away fish”. They seldom have time to visit extensively, usually only a few minutes to and from the shop or Post Office….Men on the other hand, spend each evening arguing, gossiping, and “telling cuffers”, in the shop, and have numerous “blows” (i.e., breaks) during the day.’ Pre-adolescents are separated on sexual lines. Boys play exclusively male games and identify strongly with fathers or older brothers. Girls perform light women's work, though Faris indicates '. . . often openly aspire to be male and do male things. By this time they can clearly see the privileged position of the Cat Harbour male….’. Girls are advised not to marry a fisherman, and are encouraged to leave the community if they wish to avoid a hard life. Boys are told it is better to leave Cat Harbour than become fishermen....

A still more sobering social media example of a different kind, one so important that it could well have influenced the presidential election of 2016, was the cooperation between Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm, was largely the creation of Steve Bannon and his billionaire sponsor, Robert Mercer. One former co-executive referred to Cambridge Analytica as “Bannon’s arsenal of weaponry to wage a culture war on America using military strategies.” Cambridge Analytica combined a particularly vicious version of traditional “dirty tricks” with cutting-edge social media savvy. The dirty tricks, according to its former CEO, Alexander Nix, included bribery, sting operations, the use of prostitutes, and “honey traps” (usually involving sexual behavior, sometimes even initiated for the purposes of obtaining compromising photographs) to discredit politicians on whom it conducted opposition research. The social media savvy included advanced methods developed by the Psychometrics Centre of Cambridge University. Aleksandr Kogan, a young Russian American psychologist working there, created an app that enabled him to gain access to elaborate private information on more than fifty million Facebook users, information specifically identifying personality traits that influenced behavior. Kogan had strong links to Facebook, which failed to block his harvesting of that massive data; he then passed the data along to Cambridge Analytica. Kogan also taught at the Saint Petersburg State University in Russia; and given the links between Cambridge Analytica and Russian groups, the material was undoubtedly made available to Russian intelligence. So extensive was Cambridge Analytica’s collection of data that Nix could boast, “Today in the United States we have somewhere close to 4 or 5 thousand data points on every individual…. So we model the personality of every adult across the United States, some 230 million people.” Whatever his exaggeration, he was describing a new means of milieu control that was invisible and potentially manipulable in the extreme. Beyond Cambridge Analytica or Kogan, Russian penetration of American social media has come to be recognized as a vast enterprise involving extensive falsification and across-the-board anti-Clinton messages, with special attention given to African American men in order to discourage them from voting. The Russians apparently reached millions of people and surely had a considerable influence on the outcome of the election. More generally, one can say that social media platforms can now create a totality of their own, and can make themselves available to would-be owners of reality by means of massive deception, distortion, and promulgation of falsehoods. The technology itself promotes mystification and becomes central to creating and sustaining cultism. Trump is the first president to have available to him these developments in social media. His stance toward the wild conspiracism I have mentioned is to stop short of total allegiance to them, but at the same time to facilitate them and call them forth in his tweets and harbor their followers at his rallies. All of this suggests not only that Trump and the new social media are made for each other, but also that the problem will long outlive Trump’s brief, but all too long, moment on the historical stage.

In a more nuanced analysis of network effects, the importance of first-mover advantage largely disappears. Yes, growth is very important, especially when multiple platforms are battling for control. Because of competitive pressure, most platforms feel a strong pressure to amass users as quickly as possible. This urgency is appropriate. However, growth is not an end in itself. A large, incumbent network has an advantage over new entrants and smaller competitors, but that advantage matters only if it’s sustainable.

Many early-stage platform startups think of themselves as software companies. This is a mistake. Software companies are more likely to focus strictly on the features they’re creating and less on the community that’s using those features. The thinking is often that if you create a bunch of killer features, users will materialize, and growth and success will follow. If you just tweak this feature and move that button, suddenly you’ll get growth. This view isn’t wrong, per se. Optimization is important for any software business. But for a platform, even one built with software, the ultimate killer feature is its network value. In fact, the more successful a platform is, the less its feature set matters. As your platform grows, you give up a lot of control in exchange for better economics and more value.

Piff and others who conduct this work support the argument that, when we consider ourselves to be somehow “better” than those whom we deem “lower than us,” we create the belief that we are actually better, more important, and more deserving, all of which sets up a platform for greater entitlement. The greater the inequality, the lower the generosity—not just of money but of spirit.

People will continue to be critically important in the improved health care delivery systems of the future, but not always in the same roles as today. Emotionally and socially astute care coordinators, rather than brilliant diagnosticians and other HiPPOs, might move to center stage. Earlier, we told the old joke about the two employees—person and dog—in the factory of the future. We suggest a slight tweak for health care: the medical office of the future might employ an artificial intelligence, a person, and a dog. The AI’s job will be to diagnose the patient, the person’s job will be to understand and communicate the diagnosis, and to coach the patient through treatment, and the dog’s job will be to bite the person if the person tries to second-guess the artificial intelligence.

Andrew Murray, a nineteenth-century South African writer, said that “the power of prayer depends almost entirely upon our apprehension of who it is with whom we speak.”1 When we are scared and hurting, when life feels chaotic and out of control, it is more important than ever to anchor ourselves in the absolute and eternal truth that we are dearly loved and deeply held by the most powerful being in the universe. Let this be the great non-negotiable in our lives, the platform for all our other thoughts, and the plumbline for our prayers.