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mortallyclearwonderland · 3 years

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Star Wars Alien Species - Pau'an

Utapau was a remote and rocky planet in the Outer Rim Territories' Utapau system that was covered with enormous sinkholes. Its native inhabitants were the Pau'ans and the Utai, though tribes of Amani also immigrated to the world. It was the location of the Battle of Utapau during the Clone Wars. The majority of Utapau's Amani lived deep underground. Bands of Sugi also lived on the planet.

It was believed that settlers traveled to Utapau hoping to find a hospitable world to colonize after the destruction of their homeworld. Some created homes in the sinkholes, while others lived on the surface. Over time, the species changed genetically, becoming the Pau'ans and the Utai, two species with many differences but some similarities. Researchers from the University of Sanbra discovered evidence supporting the theory that the two species were related, although exact specifications were not certain. Eventually, a climate change, causing severe winds, forced the Pau'ans underground, into the sinkholes. The Utai welcomed the Pau'ans, and over time, the two societies merged together to live in a mutually beneficial civilization. Timon Medon was the Pau'an responsible for this, and he was held in high esteem by Pau'ans for his actions. Following the merging of the two cultures, they split into several different groups, forming sinkhole cities scattered across Utapau. Tion Medon, Port Administrator in 19 BBY, was named for Timon Medon.

Due to trade restrictions placed on them by the Trade Federation, Pau'ans were unable to import many goods such as weapons or starships, and were forced to create their own technology. As Utapau was located in the distant Outer Rim Territories, few independent traders ventured to their planet; although many ventured there around 49 BBY after hearing rumors that the waters on the planet had miraculous healing properties. There were even claims that Utapau was the original home of the Jedi, although these reports were not new; they had originated millennia before. Though the Pau'ans did not want to draw attention to themselves for fear of meeting more powerful cultures who might try to conquer them, they eagerly welcomed visitors who wished to experience the healing for themselves. However, once the water was proven to be nothing more than ordinary water, most people forgot about Utapau, once again leaving it alone.

During the Clone Wars, the Confederacy of Independent Systems sought the planet. Despite this, the planet remained neutral. Late in the war, Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi were sent to investigate the death of Jedi Master Tu-Anh. This led them to locate a massive kyber crystal that the Confederacy was attempting to acquire. They were able to destroy the crystal before it could fall into Separatist hands.

Within months, the Separatists invaded Utapau with thousands of battle droids. Later, a number of key Separatist leaders were stationed on the planet, but were moved to a mining complex on Mustafar prior to the battle on the orders of Darth Sidious. General Grievous remained on Utapau to oversee the battle, but met his end at the hands of Jedi Master Kenobi. Unfortunately for him, Supreme Chancellor Palpatine issued Order 66 shortly thereafter. Because of their behavioral modification biochips,Kenobi's clone troopers turned on their Jedi General and shot him down into a sinkhole. However, Kenobi survived and escaped Utapau. After the end of the Clone Wars, the Galactic Empire occupied the planet.

Following the liberation of their planet by the New Republic, they joined the new galactic government, hoping to avoid further enslavement and poor treatment at the hands of the leaders of the galaxy. Following the Yuuzhan Vong War, the Utapauan Committee elected to join the Galactic Alliance, holding democracy as vital to the preservation of the galaxy. When the Sith Lord Darth Krayt took control of the Galactic Empire, Utapau sheltered Admiral Gar Stazi of the Galactic Alliance Remnant late in the war after having providing the GA fleet shelter throughout the conflict.

Condemning the genocide wrought by the Sith on Dac, Port Administrator Telan Medon of Pau City agreed to harbor Stazi and his wounded men deep in the labyrinthine caves that pocketed the capital. Unbeknownst to the Pau'ans, Sith scientist Vul Isen had established a laboratory on the planet, conducting illegal experiments on the natives. Located within plain sight in one of Pau City's main precincts, the lab's function was to provide Isen a space to concoct a deadly virus that would wipe all life from Utapau indefinitely. Before Isen could unleash the deadly plague, Jedi Knight Cade Skywalker infiltrated the lab and cut Isen down, securing the toxin and saving the Pau'an race from extinction.

Below Utapau's surface was the massive "world-ocean," a huge subterranean body of water. This water contained many powerful currents created by the tidal forces of Utapau's moons. These currents eroded the underside of the planet's crust and caused the formation of Utapau's many sinkholes and chasms, which, when combined with numerous storms, served to make the planet's surface inhospitable. One of Utapau's "continents" was more stable that the rest; for that reason, most Utapauns lived on that stabilized continent.

Because of the lack of timber on the planet, Utapaun architecture was primarily constructed out of the bones of deceased animals. The bones of nearly all of the planet's fauna were used in construction, which later developed into a unique form of architecture known as ossic architecture. The skeletons of the huge animals that roamed the lower sinkholes and ocean had huge enough bones to be used as beams; other fossil bones were mined in caves. The Utapauns' fresh water was extracted from machines that purified the seawater and also separated any valuable minerals from the ocean. Eventually, it was determined that the world-ocean contained a number of valuable substances that the planet began to export.

The Pau'ans fulfilled most of the governmental and administrative duties on Utapau, as the Utai did not desire such work, serving as laborers instead. Most Pau'ans served as leaders early in their lives, often managing teams of Utai laborers. This gave them experience that would be used later in their life. Pau'ans were kind leaders, and sympathetic to their subordinates. Each city on Utapau was controlled by a Master of Port Administration, a hereditary title reserved for Pau'ans. These administrators were assisted by advisory councils for making important decisions about their city, turning to the Utapauan Security Force when necessary. Each Administrator served on the Utapauan Committee and oversaw planetary governance. However, the committee rarely made crucial decisions, as the cities were able to function on their own most of the time.

Despite the many differences between the Pau'ans and the Utai, the two species were able to co-exist peacefully, although inhabitants of the different Utapaun cities often had conflicts due to philosophical differences. Still, these conflicts rarely developed into bloodshed, and it was more common for the cities to ignore each other. Each city had its own culture, and competition was fierce between the groups. However, they were able to cooperate when the situation necessitated it.

Pau'an society was a blend of a variety of styles and cultures, borne from the ancient merger with the Utai. Built into the sinkhole walls, Pau'an settlements such as the Pau City spaceport were divided into different areas, each a mix of architectural styles and other-worldly design. They liked art, and enjoyed studying sculptures and finding ways to incorporate different artistic styles into their architecture. Pau'ans developed an industrial society, despite their seemingly primitive and natural image, though the Utai were the ones who actually did the hard work. The Utai did not mind, however, and collectively much preferred labor to positions of leadership.

They were able to power their city by wind, harnessing it through massive windmills. Over ninety-nine percent of the planet's power came from these windmills.

Most Pau'ans rode living beasts like varactyls and dactillions instead of speeders. Pau'ans, as well as Utai, were known for their love for Podracing.

Pau'ans represented 30% Utapau's total population.

Taller than most Humans, Pau'ans are bald and have gray, wrinkled skin. Their sunken eyes and sharp teeth give them a slightly monstrous appearance. Pau'an, Utapaun or Ancients, as they were sometime called, have sunken black eyes in red eye sockets and jagged, fang-like teeth used for tearing into raw meat, as they were carnivores. Members of the species were able to see well in darkness. Pau'ans had five fingers and toes, but were more mobile than they appeared. They often wore elaborate clothes intended to heighten their impressive stature.

A typical Pau'an stands at 1.9 meters or 6.2 feet tall and weighs 70 kilograms or 154 pounds.

Pau'an age at the following stages:

1 - 16 Child

17 - 30 Young Adult

31 - 400 Adult

401 - 500 Middle Age

501 - 700 Old

Examples of Names: Timon Medon, Tion Medon, Lampay Fay.

Languages: Most Pau'ans spoke both Utapese and Basic. Their native language once had several different dialects.

#Pau'an #star wars aliens #star wars species #Timon Medon #Tion Medon #the grand inquisitor

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dustedmagazine · 3 years

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Punk’d History, Vol. VIII: This Machine [blank] Fascists

Photo by Richard Young

It has the appearance of a worrisome pattern: any number of punk rock’s founding figures embraced the symbolics of Nazi Germany. Ron Asheton, an original and indispensable member of the Stooges, played a number of gigs wearing a red swastika armband, and liked to sport Iron Cross medals and a Luftwaffe-style leather jacket. Sid Vicious loved his bright scarlet, swastika-emblazoned tee shirt, and Siouxsie Sioux, during her tenure as the It-Girl of the Bromley Contingent, mixed her breast-baring, black leather bondage gear with a bunch of “Nazi chic.” And how many early Ramones songs (inevitably penned by Dee Dee) referenced Nazi gear, concepts and geography? “Blitzkrieg Bop,” “Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World,” “Commando,” “It’s a Long Way Back to Germany,” “All’s Quiet on the Eastern Front,” and so on—for sure, more than a few.

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“Appearance” is the key term. Poor Sid lacked the sobriety and smarts to have much of a grasp of fascism as an ideology. Siouxsie was just taking the piss, and gleefully pissing off the mid-1970s British general public, for much of whom World War II was still a living memory. Asheton and Dee Dee? Both were sons of hyper-masculine military men. Asheton’s father was a collector of WWII artefacts, and the guitarist shared his father’s fascination. When the Stooges adopted an ethos and aesthetic hostile to the late-1960s prevailing Flower Power rock’n’roll subculture, the Nazi accoutrement seemed to him fitting signs of the band’s anger and alienation. Dee Dee hated his father, an abusive Army officer who married a German woman. Dee Dee spent some of his youth in post-war West Germany, in which Nazi symbols were highly charged with anxiety and vituperation. Casual veneration of Nazis was a convenient way to reject the triumphal ennobling of the Good War, and of the military men associated with its traditions. And (as Sid, Siouxsie and Asheton also noticed) it really bothered the squares.

None of that makes the superficial use of the swastika or phrases like “Nazi schatzi” any less offensive — it simply underscores that in the cases noted above, the offense was the thing. The politics weren’t even an afterthought, because the political itself had been dismissed as corrupt, boring or simply the native territory of the very people the punks were striking out against. If that’s where the relation between punk and fascism ceased, there wouldn’t be much more to write about.

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The post-punk moment in England provided opportunities to rethink and restrategize the nascent détournement of Siouxsie’s fashionable provocations. Genesis P-Orridge and the rest of Throbbing Gristle were a brainy bunch, and their play with fascist signifiers was a good deal more complex. The band’s logo and their occasional appearance in gun-metal grey uniforms clearly alluded to Nazism, with its attendant, keen interests in occult symbols and High Modernist representational languages. TG’s visual gestures were also of a piece with an early band slogan: “Industrial music for industrial people.” Clearly “industrial people” can be read as a highly ironized coupling: the oppressed workers marching through the bowels of Metropolis were a sort of industrial people, reduced to the functionality of pure human capital. TG seemed to impose the same analysis on the middle-managers of Britain’s post-industrial economy, and their uncritical complicity in capital’s cruelties. But it’s also possible to argue that industrial people are industrious people; like TG, industrial people (middle managers, MPs) can get a lot of stuff done. They can produce things. They can make the trains run on time. And what sorts of cargo might those trains be carrying? What variety of conveyance delivered the naked “little Jewish girl” of “Zyklon B Zombies” to her fate?

To be clear: I don’t mean at all to suggest that TG was a fascist band. Like their punky contemporaries, TG traded in fascist iconography in a spirit of transgressive outrage, expressing their hot indignation with equally heated symbols. And other British post-punk acts flirted with fascist themes and images, ranging from ambiguous dalliance (Joy Division’s overt references to Yehiel De-Nur’s House of Dolls and to Rudolph Hess; and just what was the inspiration for Death in June’s band name?) to more assertive satire (see Current 93’s appealingly bonkers Swastikas for Noddy [LAYLAH Antirecords, 1988]). But a more problematic populist undercurrent in British punk persisted through the late 1970s. The dissolution of Sham 69—due in large part to the National Front’s attempts to appropriate the band’s working-class anger as a form of white pride—opened the way for a clutch of clueless, cynical or outright racist Oi! bands to attempt to impose themselves as the face of blue-collar English punk. And literally so: the Strength through Oi! compilation LP (Decca Records, 1981) featured notorious British Movement activist Nicky Crane on its cover. It didn’t help that the record’s title seemed to allude to the Nazis’ “Strength through Joy [Kraft durch Freude]” propaganda initiative.

Of course, it’s unfair to tar all Oi! bands with an indiscriminate brush. A few bands whose songs were opportunistically stuck onto Strength through Oi! by the dullards at Decca Records — Cock Sparrer and the excellent Infa Riot — tended leftward in their politics, and were anything but racists. But for a lot of the disaffected kids sucking down pints of Bass and singing in the Shed at Stamford Bridge, it wasn’t much of a leap from the punk pathetique of the Toy Dolls to Skrewdriver’s poisonous palaver.

In the States, a similarly complicated story can be recovered:

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In numerous ways, hardcore intensified punk’s confrontational qualities, musically and aesthetically. The New York hardcore scene made a fetish of its inherent violence, which complemented the music’s sharpened impact. So it’s hard to know precisely what to make of the photo on the cover of Victim in Pain (Rat Cage Records, 1984). If inflicting violence was an essential element of belonging in the NYHC scene, with whom to identify: the Nazi with the pistol, or the abject Ukrainian Jewish man, on his knees and about to tumble into the mass grave?

Agnostic Front seemed to provide a measure of clarity on the record, which included the song “Fascist Attitudes.” The lyric uses “fascist” as a condemnatory term. But the behaviors the song engages as evidence of fascism are intra-scene acts of violence: “Why should you go around bashing one another? […] / Learning how to respect each other is a must / So why start a war of anger, danger among us?” That’s a rhetoric familiar to anyone who participated in early-1980s hardcore; calls for scene unity were ubiquitous, and the theme is obsessively addressed on Victim in Pain. But the signs of inclusivity most visibly celebrated on the NYHC records and show flyers of the period were a skinhead’s white, shaven pate; black leather, steel-toe boots; and heavily muscled biceps. Those signifiers clearly link to the awful cover image of Strength through Oi! The forms of identity recognized and concretized in the songs’ first-person inclusive pronouns have a clear referent.

Agnostic Front wasn’t the only NYHC band to refer to and engage World War Two-period fascism. Queens natives Dave Rubenstein and Paul Bakija met at Forest Hills High School—the same school at which John Cummings (Johnny) befriended Thomas Erdelyi (Tommy), laying the groundwork for the formation of the Ramones. Rubenstein and Bakija also took stage names (Dave Insurgent and Paul Cripple) and formed Reagan Youth. But unlike the Ramones, there was nothing tentative or ambivalent about Reagan Youth’s politics. Rubenstein’s parents, after all, were Holocaust survivors. The band’s name riffed on “Hitler Youth,” but specifically did so to draw associations between Reagan and Hitler, between American conservatism’s 1980s resurgence and the Nazi’s hateful, genocidal agenda. Songs like “New Aryans” and “I Hate Hate” accommodated no uncertainties.

Still, it’s interesting that Victim in Pain and Reagan Youth’s Youth Anthems for the New Order (R Radical Records, 1984) were released only months apart, by bands in the same scene, sometimes sharing bills at CBGBs’ famous matinees of the period. And while Reagan Youth toured with Dead Kennedys, it’s Agnostic Front’s “Fascist Attitudes” that’s closer in content to the most famous punk rock putdown of Nazis.

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It’s odd what comes back around: Martin Hannett, whom Biafra playfully chides at the track’s very beginning, produced much of Joy Division’s music, moving the band away from its brittle early sound to the fulsome atmospheres of the Factory records, and to a wider listenership. “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” similarly addresses a formerly obscure, tight scene opening to a greater array of participants, some of whom were attracted solely to hardcore’s reputation for violence. Like “Fascist Attitudes,” the Dead Kennedys’ song itemizes fighting at shows as its chief complaint, and as a principal marker for “Nazi” behavior. Biafra’s lyric eventually gets around to somewhat more focused ideological critique: “You still think swastikas look cool / The real Nazis run your schools / They’re coaches, businessmen, and cops / In a real fourth Reich, you’ll be the first to go.” The kiss-off to punk’s vapid romance of the swastika (it “looks cool”) complements the speculative treatment of a “real fourth Reich.” Both operate at the level of abstraction. The casual, superficial relation to the symbol’s aesthetic assumes a sort of safety from the real, material consequences of its application. And the emergence of a fascist political regime is dangled as a possible future event. That speculative futurity undoes the “real” in “real Nazis.” The threat is ultimately a metaphorical construct. The Nazis are metaphorical “Nazis.”

Still, it’s the song’s chorus that resonates most powerfully. So much so that the song has found its way into other artworks.

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Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room (2015) is frequently identified as a horror film on streaming services. We could split hairs over that genre marker. The film gets quite graphically bloody, but there’s no psychotic slasher killer, no supernatural force at work. And cinematically, the film is a lot more interested in anxiety and dramatic tension than it is in inspiring revulsion or disgust. It terrifies, more than it horrifies. What’s especially compelling about the film (aside from Imogen Poots’ excellent performance, and Patrick Stewart’s menacing turn as charismatic fascist Darcy Banks) is its interest in embedding the viewer in a social context in which the Nazis are a lot less metaphorical, a lot more real. In Green Room, the kids in the punk band the Ain’t Rights are warned about the club they have agreed to play: “It’s mostly boots and braces down there.” And they understand the terms. What they can’t quite imagine is a room — a scene, a political Real — in which fascism is dominant. Their recognition of the stakes of the Real comes too late. The violence is already in motion. In that world, the Dead Kennedys song provides a nice slogan, but symbolic action alone is entirely inadequate.

OK, sure, Green Room is a fiction. Its violence is necessarily aestheticized, distorted and hyperbolized. But perhaps the film’s most urgent source of horror can be located in its plausible connections to the social realities of our material, contemporary conjuncture. You don’t have to dig very deep into the Web to find thousands of records made by white nationalist and neo-fascist-allied bands, many, many of which deploy stylistic chops identified with punk rock and hardcore. You can listen. You can buy. (And yeah, I’m not going to link to any of that miserable shit, because fuck them. If you do your own digging to see what’s what, be careful. It’s scary and upsetting in there.) It feels endless. And the virulent sentiments expressed on those records are echoed in institutional politics in the US and elsewhere: Steve King (and now Marjorie Taylor Greene, effectively angling for her seat in Congress), Nigel Farage, Alternative für Deutschland, elected leadership in Poland and Hungary. Explicit white supremacist music also has somewhat more carefully coded counterparts in much more visible media (the nightly monologuing on Fox News) and in very well-positioned, prominent policy makers (Stephen Miller, who’s on the record touting “great replacement” theory and is a big fan of The Camp of the Saints). It’s a complex, ideologically coherent network, working industriously to impose and install its hateful vision as the dominant political Real.

Sometimes it feels as if no progress at all has been made. Maybe we’re moving toward the reactionaries. Contrast Skokie in the late 1970s with Charlottesville in 2017. And now if the Neo-Nazis have licenses for their long guns, they can strut through American streets wearing them in the name of “law and order.” It’s even more disturbing that a subculture that wants to clothe itself in “revolution” and “radicalism” is so tightly in league with institutional politics. Say what you will about Siouxsie’s Nazi-fashion antics, no one suspected that her prancing echoed political activity, policy-making or messaging in Westminster.

So what’s a punk to do? It’s certain that a vigorously free society needs to preserve spaces in which unpopular speech can be uttered and exchanged. Punk should pride itself on defending those spaces. But speech that operates in conjunction with an ascendant political power and ideological agenda doesn’t need defense or energetic attempts to preserve its right to existence. In October of 2020, that speech (in this case, speeches being written by Miller, texts by folks who have spent time in Tucker Carlson’s writer’s room and songs by white supremacist hardcore bands) has become synonymous with political right itself.

So now more than ever, it’s important to be active in the public square, to stand up to the fascists and to say it, often and out loud:

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Jonathan Shaw

#dusted magazine #punk'd history #jonathan shaw #punk rock #siouxsie and the banshees #throbbing gristle #agnostic front #dead kennedys #green room #mdc

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

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PARTLY BECAUSE YOU DON'T NEED A BRILLIANT IDEA TO START A STARTUP THAN REALIZE IT

Their value is mainly as starting points: as questions for the people who had them to continue thinking about. And for programmers the paradox is even more pronounced: the language to learn, if you want to be running out of money.1 If even someone with the same qualifications who are both equally committed to the business, that's easy. Microsoft. You knew there would be.2 I wonder. You don't need or perhaps even want this quality in big companies, but you need it in a way that doesn't suck. And yet the grad students seem pretty smart. That's ok.3

Milton was going to visit Italy in the 1630s, Sir Henry Wootton, who had been ambassador to Venice, told him his motto should be i pensieri stretti & il viso sciolto.4 I suspect the only taboos that are more than taboos are the ones you never hear about: the company that would be the ideal place—that it would basically be Cambridge with good weather, it turns out you have to have at least one person willing and able to focus on one type of ambition. We felt like our role was to be impudent underdogs instead of corporate stuffed shirts, and that the weight of a few extra checks that might be easy for General Electric to bear are enough to prevent younger companies from being public at all. Like skirmishers in an ancient army, you want to go with Ron Conway and bet on people and those who prefer to bet on people. It would cost something to run, and it might be worth a hundred times as much.5 Some smart, nice guys turn out to be easier than I expected, and also did all the legal work of getting us set up as a company with a valuation any lower.6 We talked to a number of VCs, but eventually we ended up financing our startup entirely with angel money.7 If you believe everything you're supposed to when starting a company. Yes, because they give them more leverage over developers, who can more easily be replaced. There are very, very few who simply decide for themselves.

The English Reformation was at bottom a struggle for wealth and power, but it seems so foreign. When you get a couple million dollars from a VC firm, you tend to, because that's where smart people meet. The church knew this would set people thinking. It would cost something to run, and it came closer to killing us than any competitor ever did.8 That last test filters out surprisingly few people. It used to mean the control of vast human and material resources. Usually the claim is that you should be more careful about drawing conclusions based on what a few people think in our insular little Web 2.9

No one dared put on attitude around Robert, because he was obviously smarter than they were and yet had zero attitude himself. No doubt there are great technical tricks within Google, but the most important may be that once you have users to take care of. Because they're good guys and they're trying to help people can also help you with investors. But that assumption is often false, and this is the right way to search for components. At this stage, all most investors expect is a brief description of what you plan to do.10 It would be too easy for clients to fire them.11 Smile at everyone, and don't tell them what you're thinking. Could you describe the person as an animal? So parents are giving their kids an inaccurate idea of the language by not using them.

Usually there is something deeper wrong. So the acquirer is in fact getting worse performance at greater cost. When you offer x percent of your company for y dollars, you're implicitly claiming a certain value for the whole company. He says the main reason is that people like the idea of being mistaken. One of the founders might decide to split off and start another company, so I figured it had to be carefully planned.12 It's not a charity, but they weren't setting the terms of the debate then. Suppose it's 1998. Of course, if they have time machines in the future they'll probably have a separate note with a different cap for each investor.13 It's worth trying very, very few who simply decide for themselves.14 The trouble with lying is that you get a lot of people need to search for components, and before Octopart there was no good way to do that is to visit them.

In a field like physics, if we disagree with past generations it's because we're right and they're wrong. But can you think of one that had a massively popular product and still failed? It was as if I'd told him how much girls liked Barry Manilow in the mid 80s.15 That depends on how ambitious you feel.16 David Filo's title was Chief Yahoo, but he was proud that his unofficial title was Cheap Yahoo.17 If another map has the same mistake, that's very convincing evidence. Clearly you don't have to find startups. More generally, design your product to please users first, you leave a gap for competitors who do. Online dating is a valuable business now, and they're all trying not to use words like fuck and shit within baby's hearing, lest baby start using these words too. Morale is tremendously important to a startup is that you need someone mature and experienced, with a business background, may be overrated.18 But only about 10% of the total or $10,000 of seed money from our friend Julian. I realized it would probably have to figure out where to live by trial and error.19

Perl may look like a cartoon character swearing, but there are cases where it surpasses Python conceptually.20 Don't do what we did. Of the two versions, the one where you get a lot of data about how they work. What drives people to start startups is or should be looking at existing technology and thinking, don't these guys realize they should be doing x, y, and z?21 And pay especially close attention whenever an idea is being suppressed. How much stock should they get? Programmers like to make a winning product. There could be ten times more startups than there are, and that is exactly the spirit you want. There's a hack for being decisive when you're inexperienced: ratchet down the size of your investment till it's an amount you wouldn't care too much about losing. The reason Cambridge is the intellectual capital is not just that there's a concentration of smart people, but diluted by a much larger number of neanderthals in suits. They'd face some challenges if they wanted to make web apps work like desktop ones.

Notes

I could pick them, but the idea is the only cause of the year, they can grow the acquisition into what it means to be a lost cause to try to be a good plan for life in general we've done ok at fundraising, but that it's boring, we try to become dictator and intimidate the NBA into letting you write has a spam probabilty of.

What if a company tried to raise money? This is an acceptable excuse, but I call it ambient thought. Many more than determination to create a portal for x instead of themselves. So, can I make it easy.

Only in a rice cooker.

We wasted little time on a saturday, he wrote a hilarious but also the perfect life, the top 15 tokens, because there are few who can say they're not ready to invest more, and stonewall about the paperwork there, and b when she's nervous, she doesn't like getting attention in the US treat the poor worse than Japanese car companies have little do with the government, it could change what you're doing. But in most competitive sports, the world in which multiple independent buildings are gutted or demolished to be some number of restaurants that still require jackets for men. Particularly since economic inequality in the Baskin-Robbins.

It's worth taking extreme measures to avoid the topic. They bear no blame for any opinions expressed in it. Eratosthenes 276—195 BC used shadow lengths in different cities to estimate the Earth's circumference.

But it was cooked up, but what they made, but investors can get for free.

They look superficially like the one hand and the valuation of an investor? If the startup isn't getting market price.

William R.

There are successful women who don't aren't. The more people would treat you like a probabilistic spam filter, dick has a similar logic, one variant of compound bug where one bug happens to use some bad word multiple times.

Even though we made a bet: if he hadn't we probably would not change the number of customers you need to be about web-based applications. Everything is a function of two things: what ideas did European culture with Chinese: what ideas did European culture have in 1800 that Chinese culture didn't, they would implement it and creates a rationalization for doing so.

Is what we measure worth measuring? But this takes a startup idea is stone soup: you post a sign saying this is not pagerank commercialized. So if you're a YC startup you have a standard piece of casuistry for this point.

Deane, Phyllis, The First Two Hundred Years.

Anyone can broadcast a high product of some brilliant initial idea.

One new thing the company is like math's ne'er-do-well brother. The original edition contained a few old professors in Palo Alto, but they're not. Travel has the same attachment to their situation.

But although I started using it, whether you realize it till I started using it, and so effective that I'm skeptical whether economic inequality is not a remark about the same advantages from it. Html. But the change is a constant multiple of usage, so you'd find you couldn't do the equivalent thing for startups. 32.

Obviously, if the present, and mostly in less nerdy fields like finance and media. Those groups never have to put it this way that weren't visible in the 1960s, leaving the area around city hall a bleak wasteland, but I'm not talking here about academic talks, which is probably not far from the Dutch not to be in most competitive sports, the fact that the VC.

At YC.

It's unpleasant because the proportion of spam. One source of food. The French Laundry in Napa Valley.

Even as late as Newton's time it takes forever.

That's very cheap, 1/10 success rate is 10%, moving to Monaco would give you fifty times as much the better. In a startup with debt is a negotiation.

There are fairly high spam probability. Once again, I'd open our own startup Viaweb, and that there's more of it in action, there are only pretending to in order to attract workers. Though you should probably be the technology everyone was going to visit 20 different communities regularly. Html.

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trademarkhubris · 6 years

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dark thoughts about how good for the economy floods and other small disasters like the one i endured, or bigger ones i really dont want to think abt rn. my insurance is actually one of the less annoying out there. they'll ask for a quote from a specialist and send the money and then you can do wtf you want. for the most part.

but thats for... the pool, the walls... immovable property... anything thats furniture is reimbursed based on the purchasing price, minus 10% per year since purchase. that means if an object is ten years old, you get zilch.

my big freezer has a good 20 years behind it, it got toasted in the flood. the small summer fridge is from 2005, maybe it survived. the karsher is 15 years old, dead. the compressor is??? maybe it survived, maybe it didnt, but i saw it floating on its belly in mud water so yeah. the small oven and microwave i was keeping from a friend were his grandma's, dead. my washing machine is from at least 2010, only one button works now, it starts on its own & we cant change the programs anymore. my fridge is from the fucking fifties. its not broken *yet* but this year has not been a lucky year so far

plus two of the cars got water in... they're starting but if theres water damage thats not covered... and the vehicle safety inspection just got harder to pass... my mechanic had like 6 or 7 cars behind the garage that were just. going to the junkyard.

so will my insurance refund the time spent washing the house and garden?! or spent looking for my goldfish in the grass. or spent wondering if the cat last seen under a car made it somewhere else bc the water is now halfway to the tyres. or all the food that unfroze. or stressig over how this could probably happen again anytime now bc the environment is so fucked next week is heatwave then rain then heatwave then thunderstorm and the town doesnt care abt how shitty their water evacuation system is and the power outages did i mention the power outages bc these clowns make their live wires with ass hair

& they also dont refund the time spent on the phone with people saying "some people have it worse than you do!" yeah thanks! if you had two cents of empathy you'd realize all the reasons why that doesn't make me feel better! but youre just doing your job so i'll shut the fuck up!

im not... we're not dirt poor... we have a money cushion rn... bc family members died... but its money im so fucking scared to touch... bc i dont have a job... my moms job is not super well paying... we have way too many animals... the *human* health insurance here is pretty fucking great but i dont have a health insurance for every pet i have... and they need to eat... and we need to eat... the house is relatively expensive to maintain and we need to put it back in shape if we want to sell it to find a smaller less costly one... and now floods... that money is something we're all in all really fucking lucky to have, and i say that knowing a beloved grandpa died for us to have it

(and on that note; i can't 100% guarantee that for my entire life bc i dont know what the future is made of, but for as long as i can help it i will not have a ko-fi or a gofundme or even an amazon wishlist. theres so many people deeper in money issues than i have ever been. i cant pretend to understand what theyre going through or that i deserve even one percent of what they need.)

anyway thats not what i was gonna say. do you know how good for economy these disasters are? i gotta buy so much shit rn. even if i get help, that money is moving around and into some rich man's picket. my mechanic is overworked (but he always is lmao its the countryside theres always a car to repair) the car carriers have so much work the one who came for us found a way to make our car work again so he could *not* transport it.

theres so much money going around rn lmao. money to the laundromat bc our washer is kaput and we used a lot of towels and drapes to sponge off the water inside, and also regular clothes. money for the new pressure wash to take care of the mud everywhere in the verandas and garages. my neighbor got like 80 cm of mud in her house and she has to remake everything. she lost everything! shes gotta re-buy all that stuff! she'll get help but it's still money moving around! yaaaay!!!!!

so yeah! the planet's so fucked up it's mud party inside my neighbor's house! but the economy fucking LOVES that shit. gobbles it up like a babybel. doesnt even take the red wax off. om nom nom nom nom

anyway im fine its fine its cool isnt it cool everythings cool and fine and awesome late stage capitalism is a dream

#do you know how out of it i am rn #i swatted a wasp away #wasp got in my face and i slapped it away #a fucking wasp #void #anyway im fine i just feel like crying bc i barely have energy to wash my ass everyday and now i have to do all this shit #its too late to say dont worry abt me huh #but please #please dont #ill make it #ill belly surf if needs be #im not alone #okay enough of that bs lets get to the cws #death cw #money cw #wasp ment #food ment #long post #sam vs the elements

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jamesginortonblog · 6 years

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Spoilers after the break

Any concerns that Alex was planning to double cross Kleiman appear to be scotched as the pair sit in the blandly opulent environs of Geneva airport, Alex telling all as if to a father confessor about his encounter with Mendez. He assures Kleiman the only reason he did not contact him was that, fearing he would be blackmailed, he should abide by Mendez’s conditions. Kleiman conveys to Alex – in terms worthy of Mario Puzo – what he thinks about Mendez and his ilk. According to him, their trick is to make you think you are making all the decisions. Respectfully, Alex points out, isn’t that what you’re doing to me? Ah, replies Kleiman, kindler, gentler as ever: if you let me down, I won’t bury you. He promises to think about Mendez’s proposal.

To the somewhat porous borders of India/Pakistan, where heroin is smuggled through the fence in sausage-like links down a pipe. Easy when there’s absolutely no one around. Chopra receives the message by phone that a consignment of “1000 rupees” (1000 kilos) is on its way. He raises an eyebrow.

Back in London, the atmosphere at chez Dimitri remains brittle and frosty following his infidelity. Oksana refuses to look him in the eye when toasting Alex and Rebecca’s engagement. Katya takes umbrage that Dimitri has served sparking wine rather than champagne and insists on going out to buy the real thing. All this misery feels like a caviar-esque, Russian speciality. “You have spat on my soul,” Oksana later tells Dimitri.

If only Alex had not showered so long, showering perhaps to cleanse his soul as well as his body, he would not have at last aroused Rebecca’s suspicions when she hears a call come through on his secret second phone. Alex blurts something about this being new company policy but Karin, his compliance officer, is also narrowing her eyes at him, wondering why he is being so secretive about his password-protected “global fund”.

Alex lies his way out of that one in a very upper-English way, as if so affronted that it actually rings true to himself that he is anything other than blameless. Rebecca starts to probe, discovering via weather reports on Alex’s computer that he has been spending a lot of time in tax havens unbeknownst to her recently. She and Karin meet to share their concerns. She talks to Dimitri who politely refuses to hear anything ill of his son, a “good Godman”. She discusses his possible Kleiman involvement with her boss, Bloom, who says Alex is best steering well clear of the deeply unsavoury Mr K.

As for Alex, he decides to meet Tobe Miller, a former IT specialist turned hacker with a Klaus Kinski-esque air, sallow from spending 20 hours a day in front of a screen. He wants to re-hire him to cover his IT tracks. Miller agrees and also puts him in contact with a hacker friend in Bangalore.

Kleiman has passed on Alex’s information to Dilly and his posse and they get to work, the antithesis of well-dressed banker/criminals operating discreetly from afar. They are street people, hands dirty and clueless about the computer world. Their surveillance of Chopra, involving a small telescope from a rooftop across the road depends, in time-honoured TV surveillance tradition, of the subject of their attention never looking up. This he doesn’t, despite the sarees flapping on the line behind his observers.

However, on breaking into Chopra’s compound, they muscle and fumble their way towards a devastating breakthrough. First, they persuade at gunpoint a late-working accountant to hack Chopra’s computer for information to stage a heist, then shoot him dead for his troubles (“You’re a good man. I’ll look after your family.”) Next, they hook up forcibly with the Bangalore hacker Miller put Alex’s way. Waving aside his protests, they have him hack further into Chopra’s phone and email accounts, and then into his operation via hacking into, of all things, a chocolate vending machine, to piggyback on the internet to determine precisely which container holds Vadim’s heroin. Once established, they manage to cancel the shipment then seize the container which, according to the computer, never left the country. A text to Alex: It’s done. You feel the kick inside Alex is starting to get from this crime stuff.

Rebecca, however, is not bedazzled. She confronts Alex. Why has he been spending so much time in sordid tax havens? Did he do proper diligence tests on Kleiman? Alex has no choice but to confess, partially. But now he promises he will cut Kleiman loose. “I’ll come clean,” he says, though he’s doing the opposite - he’s going dirty. Rebecca reminds him reproachfully of their conversations about “moral integrity” in capitalism, an illusion that still shines true for her. Alex goes Bryan Adams; “everything I’ve done I’ve done for you.” - and his family.

Meanwhile, with some hack-work of his own, Vadim has tracked down Benes, having arranged for his daughter to be arrested at a nightclub. The ensuing call she makes to her father allows them to access his information, among which is the contact he made with Kleiman in Prague. So now Vadim knows. There is also an awkward conversation with Chopra concerning the heroin heist, the upshot of which is that Chopra’s corpse is found among a pile of garbage bags somewhere in Mumbai. Mate, if you’d just looked up when they were pointing that telescope at you …

Additional notes

No updates on Boris’s killer in the basement of Mendez’s villa. Presumably he’s still dangling there, feeling rather sorry for himself.

You have to pity poor Katya’s boyfriend, Femi. His whole life seems to be spend perched awkwardly on the edge of a tense family situation. Will he get out, while he’s still young?

Shrewd on Kleiman’s part to insist that Alex decide whether the heist should go ahead, implicating him, not allowing him to feel at arm’s length from the criminality.

Another Godfather reminder: Vadim’s justification for killing a cop (“a thief!”) despite Ilya’s qualms reminds of Michael Corleone’s line: “Where does it say that you can’t kill a cop?”

So, is the cat now truly out of the bag for Alex with Rebecca and Karin? Are Vadim and Kleiman heading for a showdown? There’s all to play for in the second half of this series.

#mcmafia #James Norton #recap #mcmafia 1x4

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citrus-feline · 6 years

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going on facebook is always awful cuz ill want to share something with my dad but then see his most recent post is talking about “commie liberal shitheads” like. dad. is that what he thinks about me? he is definitely at least semi-aware of my political views. he’s accused me of being a communist in highschool back when i thought there was a point in talking to him about issues (but hes not going to change his mind). i dont get it either because he will get livid when i say that capitalism in its current state in america is ruining us despite being one of the people affected most by it. i grew up like hating late-capitalist ideals because i saw what my dad went thru and the hardship he endured trying to raise 3 kids all by himself when he was already having money issues. he grew up poor in a house with 5+ kids in it. is it just conditioning where he trusts a system that is so against him? he only just recently finally got a job that pays fairly for the amount of hardwork he does and his reaction to that isn’t being thankful to his hardwork or even his company, but making posts on facebook about how much he loves the president :/. dad... you’re opposed to raising min wage..... like....... he deserves the money for the work he does cuz hes like a genius with the machines he works but dude. go back 50 years and a job in a similar environment would be min wage. im happy he is getting more money but i wish he would like thank himself or his company instead of someone who perpetuates late-stage capitalism despite all of its harm.

generally i actually think my dad is okay but then i look at what he’s saying about people like me and it upsets me. i once made a post about how older people are so unsupportive to newer generations and he got so mad!! but im expected to see his posts that i can easily apply to myself and just be okay with it. im not gonna fight with my dad cuz like even the possibility of being told to move out will be really hard of my mental health and he takes care of me but........ i wish he was more respectful....... say what you will but the meanest i am to conservatives is when im venting about upsetting things i saw in the news on this website. when it comes to actually talking to people with different views i am really kind and understanding, and even on here i’ve experienced that. i’ve made angry posts before with keywords that attracted conservatives and have gotten angry asks about it before and my response is almost always “im sorry i upset you with that post, i was venting. but i am happy to have a conversation with you about this stuff.”..... i have only like once ever had someone take me up on discussing things in a mature way and separate from a personal post but i like to think that the way i handle it is respectful despite my own disbelief in those types of politics.

him going off on facebook is so bizarre to me because i’ve seen him fight with people in comments before. i’ve heard my sister (who is much stronger than me emotionally) address his posts before only to get into arguments where she will avoid visiting us for months aside from popping in after work or something. and she barely does that anymore. i dont get how he is so happy to keep making such rude posts on a platform that everyone he knows will see. i post on here knowing that maybe one or two people i know in real life will see it, if even that. and THAT makes me nervous! i’ve deleted plenty of posts i was typing up mid-rant because i realized i didnt want people who know me personally to see that! like i know looking at my blog it seems like “oh she doesnt have a filter” but i do!! like once a day i will start writing a vent post only to delete it all without ever posting because i realize it could cause some kind of misunderstanding or bitterness between me and the people i care about who check my blog.

all “bleh i hate capitalism” aside, i don’t understand the disrespect at all. i just dont. i can theoretically look at very conservative people as a group and be bitter about that, and i do sometimes, but i usually try to be mindful that people have opinions for their own reasons and i have to remember that everyone’s experience is different. despite people saying things i disagree with, i still respect them as people and i’m willing to talk about things gently. i much prefer a mature conversation about more heavy stuff as opposed to being yelled at. a mature conversation can lead to things being learned, on both sides. being so vocal about your disdain for people who you could potentially have an actual conversation with upsets me. i go off about politicians and stuff on here but for real if one of them talked to me, one-on-one, i would absolutely still be respectful despite everything i dislike about their policies and behavior as someone of power. the only time i wouldn’t treat someone with respect is if they not only treat me disrespectfully but reject my attempt at keeping things civil. and even then i would give multiple opportunities in an attempt to keep things calm and respectful. when i discuss stuff with people who i disagree with, i listen to them. lots of the time i feel the same about the issue at the end, but hearing a point of view is important. brushing all people who disagree with you away is just in bad taste in my opinion. because there are people who will not believe in what you do but also show respect despite that. there are people who will listen, even if they are secretly a little upset about what you’re saying. conversation is important in any kind of society and for one so polarized in political beliefs like ours i think it should be a requirement to show SOME kind of respect.

it just upsets me how i wont even be heard with some people, like my dad. people who are so stuck in their beliefs that they refuse to even consider looking at them critically. i know the stuff i align myself with isn’t perfect. i know some things people who are head-speakers for in the political groups i openly say i agree with aren’t always exactly what i think. and i know that lots of things won’t be treated as serious as i want them to be. focus can easily be put on things that i think should come later compared to what i care about. i know that “liberals” aren’t perfect. a lot of kids i went to school with were heavily and openly liberal and generally i agreed with them but now and then they would go too far with something, or even just be one of those people who are so up in arms about political stuff that they don’t have any real personal experience with (which is fine, i just wish they wouldn’t act like it was them being attacked instead of the actual people suffering from the real-life issues). i know my beliefs, MY personally beliefs, aren’t perfect. i used to have a lot of trouble realizing something i believed in was not what i thought it was, but now its kinda normal for me. my beliefs for lots of stuff is fluid, but of course because its me, i usually end up aligning with most “liberal” ideals (but, again, theres stuff i disagree with in those groups too). i will ride in my dad’s car where the radio is still on a political station he listens to and some of the stuff they say makes me sick because i disagree with it so much. and i like to think that my dad doesn’t believe all of that. but i dont know because whenever i’ve tried to figure out i’ve just been called a communist who hates freedom, lol. he’s not open to conversation which is really weird to me. cuz like. things change?? opinions aren’t static? people are able to look at things from different angles. its not that hard imo? maybe its just cuz im overly-empathetic but like. i dont... get how its so hard for people to put themselves in others shoes... thats what i primarily do when talking to people about stuff where theres any sort of disagreement. lots of the time ill put myself in their shoes and still come out feeling the same about the topic, but its still important to do that kind of thing to at least get SOME kind of grasp to why they believe what they do.

im not sure why im making so many long political posts lately compared to usual but i feel like this is important stuff to talk about... i dont expect anyone to change their views on shit just reading a post where im getting my frustrations out, but if anything is questionable, i want people to know that i AM open to talking about it personally. if you approach me with respect, i’d be happy to talk to you about stuff. it’s something i practice regularly with non-political stuff in my relationship and with close-friends when something touchy comes up. lots of the times core ideas aren’t changed but we all come out of that stuff with a bit more understanding of the other person and why they think what they do. people aren’t perfect and you will disagree about things. that’s why it should be handled respectfully. if i reacted the way my dad does to people trying to make conversation about more serious things, im pretty sure i wouldn’t have nearly as many friends, lol.

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crapfutures · 7 years

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The wolf at the door (domestication of technology, part 1)

One of the enduring objects used to represent the technological future is the robot. This legacy means that its promise has the ability to evolve in accordance with our societal and cultural dreams and aspirations. It can reflect the current state of technological development, our hopes for that technology as well as our fears. Fundamentally though, after almost a century of media depictions and corporate promises, robots are yet to enter our homes and lives in any meaningful way. Or at least not in the way we expected.

If we’re going to talk about robots we should begin with a definition. But this is by no means an easy task. Robot does not refer to one specific object; it is not based on a singular technology, context, or function; and while certain stereotypical (e.g. anthropomorphic) robot forms pervade, other diverse and surprising configurations of technology can also be considered a robot. The robot can exist simultaneously in multiple contexts and planes of reality, and for a multitude of reasons: as a functional engineered machine operating autonomously on a production line (such as an industrial robot); as a corporate vision of the future (humanoid robot); as a complex construct of fiction (android); or as a high-street product (robotic vacuum cleaner). While the promiscuity of the generic concept often leads to a blurring of these worlds and indeed the promise of migration between them, the actual artefact is very poor at making this transition - the spectacular robots of our technological dreams are yet to make it into our everyday lives.

With such a broad range of possibilities the definition must be quite vague. But for the purposes of this discussion it could be as follows:

For a thing to be considered a ‘robot’ it should be able to sense and interpret in some fashion its environment, compute decisions based on that sensory information, and then act on those decisions in some way.

This statement is satisfying from a technical perspective, but its dryness fails to reflect the mythical or emotive factor commonly associated with robots. Therefore to the technical definition we will add:

The complexity or sublimity of either the sensing, computing or mechanics should elevate the status of the robot above that normally ascribed to machines or products.

The dream of robot servants, as with so many technological dreams, is centuries old. In the 1890s Oscar Wilde talked about the need for mechanical slaves in his manifesto for fully automated luxury socialism. At the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the Westinghouse Electric Corporation gave the dream a physical form with Electro, a giant metal walking and talking robotic man. While not the first humanoid robot, Electro was important for pushing forward the idea that robots could enter the home as domestic help.

The promise of this particular type of robot future persists to this day, exemplified by corporate robots such as Honda’s ASIMO and the vast number of similar objects emerging out of academic and corporate research. But while such robots have become commonplace in production lines, tech fairs and research laboratories, their presence is yet to be accommodated in the domestic sphere. Robots continued to hover at the threshold as unwelcome guests, our resistance to strangers seemingly too strong to overcome. Bringing a full-sized humanoid robot into the domestic sphere would be like bringing a wolf through the door. Instead, like the gradual domestication of the wolf, it is happening little by little, in gradual steps, by the process of future nudge. New types of robots are entering millions of homes with the introduction and growing ubiquity of AI-based virtual assistants. Not in our homes, obviously - we’re not called Crap Futures for nothing. But a lot of people actively welcomed these devices into their daily lives.

The key word to describe these new robots is adaptation. Embedding virtual assistants in phones and watches blurred the lines from the start. These familiar everyday objects - rather than creepy humanoid forms - acted as the Trojan horse, and succeeded in bringing robots into the domestic sphere. This had been done to some extent before: the Atari video game console mimicked domestic objects (wood-veneer inlays) and mated with the familiar and thoroughly domestic television set, smoothing its transition from the seedy arcade to the family livingroom. The anonymous black dots and cylinders that house most standalone virtual assistants are a step further along this progression. The domestic robot was decentralised and subtly dispersed around the home, across our numerous devices, as a ubiquitous service. Embodiment is no longer necessary in our post-industrial era: manual tasks are performed either by cheap human labour (a persistent feature of late-capitalist society) or bespoke machine automation, leaving domestic robots free to perform more useful mental labour (choosing dinner music or finding recipes), or to serve as conduits to the supply chain.

There are many reasons why Amazon and the other big tech companies want to have a presence in your home. The work of Paul-Olivier Dehaye and others has demonstrated the value, extent, and secrecy of data collection. Data has become the world’s most valuable resource. The new gold rush is on, and we - it is not too self-aggrandizing to say - are the gold. Advertisements for Amazon’s new Echo and Echo Plus focus specifically on children, seeking - like Facebook’s cradle-to-grave timeline - to gather data on individuals across every stage of life. ‘Kids today’, said David Limp (senior VP in charge of Echo devices), ‘will grow up never knowing a day they couldn’t talk to their houses.’ Except they’re not talking to their houses, they’re talking directly to Amazon.

It is a clever marketing trick referring to Alexa or Siri as a) part of the family or b) synonymous with the home itself. Historically, of course, slaves and live-in domestic servants were often treated this way, being ‘given’ the surnames of their owners. But they obviously fell short of being true family: they were treated not as family but as family possessions, chattels bound together with other property. These moves - naming, possessing, adopting - signal domestication, in the same way that you might consider a dog part of the family, even giving it your family surname to suggest benign ownership, but would not name the deer that wanders through your garden. Alexa and other virtual assistants are different in one important sense, which is that they maintain a primary connection to their true master, the corporation. They are not family, or even family property, but rather family spies. (This is at the heart of their designation not actually as a device but as a service controlled by the provider.)

From the business standpoint the case for wanting robots in every home is clear enough: it is the domestication of capitalism, strengthening our emotional connection to consumption and allowing it to pervade every corner of our lives. But why did we finally invite the wolf inside? The answer must be convenience; and, at last, a degree of comfortable familiarity, an overcoming of the uncanny. The mobile phone now feels to many people like a natural extension of their body and even mind. The fixed or standalone presence of an AI-based helper in the home, the modern domestic robot, is only a short step beyond Siri, if at all.

To return to the fundamental questions:

Is it good? For whom? And in whose interest?

In Part 2 we’ll continue the discussion through the analogy of animal domestication.

Images:

Westinghouse Televox; Electro and ASIMO; Atari 2600; all via Wikimedia Commons

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180abroad · 5 years

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Day 166: Dachau

Having witnessed the horrifying remains of Auschwitz three weeks earlier, Jessica and I were curious to see how Dachau would compare. It proved to be a very different experience, but the two complemented each other very well. Auschwitz focused on the sheer horror of the Holocaust. Dachau does that too, but at the same time it felt more cerebral--taking time to focus on the social, economic, and governmental failures that allowed the Holocaust to happen in the first place.

The two experiences fit together like bookends. When I stood in Auschwitz, it felt like I was standing at the end of the world. Dachau was the beginning of that end.

It was raining on and off throughout the morning. We had gotten up early to meet at the Radius stand in Munich central station. Dachau is a large-ish town just outside of Munich--closer than the airport and just a short train ride away. The concentration camp is on the outskirts of town, opposite from the train station. When prisoners were brought to Dachau, they would be forced to march through the town, and the townspeople would be forced to come out and heckle them.

We took a bus. It was a regular city bus, which is the only way to get to the camp if you don't have private transportation. Dachau doesn't seem interested in going out of its way to accommodate the flow of tourists. According to our guide, a lot of people in Dachau resent the camp and the tourists. Dachau is a proud and ancient town--settled about three thousand years ago by the Celts who gave it its name--and its people don't appreciate having become synonymous with Nazi genocide. And they certainly don't appreciate the floods of tourists clogging up their streets and buses.

It's an unfortunate attitude from our perspective, but it is an understandable one.

As we entered the camp, we learned that it was originally a munitions factory. It was shuttered after WWI as part of the forced demilitarization of Germany demanded by the Treaty of Versailles. After Hitler came to power, the factory was converted into a training academy for SS officers. Even after it became a concentration camp, the prisoners were kept in a fenced prison behind the academy where locals couldn't see them. Any locals caught snooping too closely would be arrested and sentenced to two weeks' hard labor.

We made our way through the gates into the prison compound, then into the museum occupying the camp's former processing and administration building. As I mentioned, it starts with an impressively thorough depiction of the state of German society in the years following WWI, which allowed Hitler's rise to power in the first place.

The 1920s were a time of shocking social change in the West. Short skirts, jazz music, and sexual liberalism all sprouted up seemingly overnight, shamelessly flouting conventional sensibilities. Cars, phones, and radios revolutionized what it meant to be middle class. Even Germany was doing pretty well, all things considered. American loans were helping the country make its reparation payments to the rest of Europe, and the darkest days seemed past.

Then, in 1929, Germany's fragile economy was shattered by the Great Depression. Things were worse than ever before, and many people began to blame it on the decadent liberalism and "Jewish capitalism" of the '20s. The Nazis saw this pendulum swing back to conservatism, and threw their weight behind it. Hitler offered the German people a message of national pride and a return to traditional values.

The other side of this nationalist coin was racism and fear. Like all of Europe, Germany already had a longstanding history of anti-Semitism, especially in times of economic trouble. Add to that the fear of the Soviets to the east and savage black soldiers to the west--a racist caricature inspired by the presence of African soldiers in the French army.

Of course, racism was in no way unique to Germany or even necessarily worse there than anywhere else. But the Nazis realized--just like countless other authoritarians throughout world history--how powerful fear, anger, and racism can be when combined and directed with purpose.

Meanwhile, the German government was perpetually teetering on the edge of total collapse.

I had never realized just how weak and unstable the Weimar Republic--Germany's democratic interwar government--actually was. Even before the Nazis took over, the German national assembly was paralyzed by parties fundamentally opposed to each other's basic ideals of government. There were parties that supported the republic, parties that wanted a communist revolution, parties that wanted a fascist revolution, and parties that wanted a return to monarchy.

By the early 1930s, two-thirds of the seats in the national assembly were held by these revolutionary parties. The only thing keeping the Republic's constitution intact was the fact that all these parties hated each other even more than they hated it. Legislative logjams were so pervasive that the chancellors had begun to rely on emergency declarations as the only way to get anything done--setting the precedent for Hitler to do the same once he came to power.

Keep in mind that Germany didn't have a heritage of democracy. It had always been an empire--and a proud one. Now it had been forcibly striped of its monarch and molded into a republic by its enemies. It's only natural that many people would have resented the Weimar Republic. Given how badly things were going, some may even have seen it as a hobble slapped upon them intentionally by Allies to keep Germany weak and poor. And they probably wouldn't have been far wrong.

It's no wonder that so many people would have seen a single unified government--any government--as an improvement over the mess they had right then.

Another thing I'd always found curious is how the early Nazis were essentially able to run an anti-government militia with impunity even before they started to wield real power. Imagine a private militia in the US staging an armed coup in a state capital, getting into a deadly gun battle with the police while trying to seize the government, and the leaders ending up with a slap on the wrist and a few years in prison even after being literally convicted of treason. It seems absurd.

But the Nazis weren't the only ones that were doing it. The fascist, communist, and monarchist parties all openly maintained their own heavily armed party militias in defiance of the government.

Part of the reason this was able to happen was that the Germans had an enshrined right to form armed militias. Another is that the government didn't really want to. As early as 1920--years before the Nazis had any significant power--more than half the legislature was controlled by the parties running these revolutionary militias. Lastly, the government didn't have the firepower to stop the militias even if it wanted to.

When the Treaty of Versailles forcibly disbanded the German military, a large portion of the soldiers and materiel were simply spun off into "civilian" militias. The thousands of men who fought for these militias were battle-hardened veterans armed with military-grade weapons. The government, on the other hand, had whatever threadbare police force it could convince to work for them instead.

It's pretty much a cliché at this point to say that the Treaty of Versailles ended the First World War at the expense of making the Second World War inevitable, but I had never really appreciated just how true that statement is. The Treaty didn't just create the socio-economic storm that toppled the German Republic, it threw the Republic headfirst into the storm with two broken legs and its arms tied behind its back.

In a way, though, I actually find that reassuring. Despite the unsettling echoes that have arisen in recent years, the nations of the Western world today have far stronger cultural and constitutional regard for democracy than the Germans under the Weimar Republic ever did. While the lessons of the past must not be ignored, neither should they be allowed to inspire irrational fears and thereby become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As the Nazis gained power in the national legislature, German industrialists and aristocrats began to support them. They saw the Nazis as a tool they could use to rally support of a fascist government where they would be in charge. After the election of 1930--when the Nazis won the most seats of any party but failed to achieve a majority--these economic power brokers pressured the government to confirm Hitler as chancellor. It was only after it was far too late that the old elites realized that what they had mistaken for a leashed dog was actually a rabid wolf.

This is where Dachau and the concentration camp system comes into the picture. Two and a half years into Hitler's chancellorship, an arsonist attacked the Reichstag--the German capitol building. The fire was set by a radical Dutch communist, who historians generally believe was acting alone in a genuine attempt to undermine Hitler's regime. But Hitler used the situation to his full advantage.

Declaring an emergency situation, Hitler had the leaders of Germany's communist party--his most powerful political opponents--rounded up and put into "protective custody" at the SS training facility in Dachau. This left Hitler and the Nazis with a de facto majority in the legislature and the freedom to enact his policies without compromise.

Five years after that, Germany invaded Poland and the camp system grew exponentially, from a political prison for Hitler's rivals to an industrial machine of mass enslavement and genocide.

In addition to the Jews, Slavs, and Romani, homosexuals were also incarcerated en masse. And we learned from our guide that it didn't take much to be convicted of homosexuality. Any unmarried adult man was at risk of being accused by a social or political rival, and it's now suspected that the vast majority of the men who were arrested and forced to wear pink triangles on their uniforms weren't actually gay at all.

Our guide made it a point to emphasize that the line between concentration camps and extermination camps is a gray one. Every camp utilized slave labor, and every camp performed extermination--the only difference was the ratio each one employed. Dachau had a relatively low death rate of "just" 20%, but the conditions were still heinous.

Back at the entrance of the camp, we'd learned that the infamous welcome phrase Arbeit Macht Frei ("Work Sets Free") was actually a slogan that had long been used in factories across Germany. It wasn't just a false promise of future freedom in exchange for obedient servitude, it was a clever PR tactic to make the camps look and feel like ordinary factory towns--from the outside, at least.

Similarly, the iconic striped uniforms worn by the Holocaust victims were inspired by contemporary pajama designs. As if someone could look at an emaciated figure breaking rocks at gunpoint and think, "How bad can they really have it if they don't even need to get out of their PJs."

But of course those weren't the types of pictures the people actually saw. Another trick we learned about was how the Nazis would stockpile photos of prisoners when they first arrived at the camp and release them slowly to the public as if they were recently taken, giving the impression that the prisoners were being kept fit and healthy.

When prisoners first arrived at the camp, they would be stripped naked, booked, and given a number and a uniform. The uniforms were assigned randomly without regard for fit, and swapping was strictly prohibited. Those given oversized uniforms were the lucky ones--they had spare material to work with if they lived long enough start wearing holes in it. It was the only one they would ever get.

For those who were given an undersized uniform… Let's just say that failing to appear properly dressed for morning roll call was cause for beating--no excuses.

Prisoners were also expected to keep their hair short and tidy, but they weren't allowed to keep sharpened blades. In desperation, the prisoners resorted to tearing their hair out by hand to avoid beatings or execution.

Occasionally during roll call, it would be announced that several prisoners were being released for good behavior. These events were highly publicized to improve prisoner morale and reassure the public that these weren't really death camps. Of course, the "freed" prisoners were almost invariably arrested on new charges within months and sent to a different camp where no one knew them, this time with the branding of a repeat offender. The friends and family members they'd been observed fraternizing with in the meantime tended not to fair too well, either.

Similarly, prisoners were encouraged to write home to their friends and family--whose addresses could then be recorded by the SS for future arrest.

Even if they weren't killed or "released," prisoners never stayed in any one camp for very long. Unlike Col. Klink in Hogan's Heroes, the real Nazis understood the danger of allowing a group of prisoners to stay together in a single camp for years on end. Over time, they will develop loyalty to each other and familiarity with their environment--dangerous ingredients for sabotage or escape. But if the prisoners are constantly being shuffled, never allowed to become familiar with their prison and fellow prisoners, they can never organize into a threat.

And every time a prisoner was transferred, they would be given a brand new identification number that they had to memorize. It was only in Auschwitz where prisoners were given permanent numbers in the form of tattoos, and that was only because they were processing so many people so quickly that tattoos proved more economical than sewing new number patches every time a uniform was recycled.

Our guide made sure to point out the irony that--despite the fact the prisoners' supposedly inferior blood was used to justify this inhuman treatment in the minds of the Nazis--the prisoners were regularly forced to donate blood for transfusing German soldiers on the front lines.

In one of the few barrack buildings that has been preserved, we saw a reconstruction of the sort of bunks the prisoners were made to sleep in. The bunks were divided by wooden panels on each side, forming a series of buckets into each of which ten prisoners were expected to pile themselves every night. Almost invariably, someone stuck at the bottom of one of the beds would be found dead from asphyxiation in the morning.

As we'd learned before in Auschwitz--and before that at the Deportation Memorial in Paris--even under the weight of all this horror, the prisoners found ways to make life bearable. On display in the main building was an impressively elaborate chess set carved from scraps of wood secreted by a prisoner from the workshop to which they'd been assigned.

Finally, we walked across the camp, out through the barbed wire, and into a small, tree-veiled clearing where the camp's gas chambers and crematoria still stand. Dachau wasn't a dedicated extermination camp like Auschwitz, but it still did its share of exterminations.

Inside, we saw the long row of ovens where people were burned--many still alive. As we'd learned in Auschwitz, the poison gas Zyklon B was chosen because it was cheap, not because it was effective. It was even less effective in the cold, and during winter it was all-too-common for people to be carted out of the gas chambers still sputtering with ragged gasps of life. Some were given the dignity of being hanged from the rafters of the crematoria before being put into the ovens. But not all.

Jessica--along with many of the people in our group--could hardly stand to be in that place, and they understandably left after a just a few minutes. I felt compelled to stay a little longer and witness the rest. To one side of the ovens was the gas chamber. To the other side was a room where bodies were stacked floor to ceiling like cordwood when they began accumulating faster than they could be disposed of. There were pictures.

Set even deeper into the forest is the old crematorium--a half-timbered stable filled by a pair of ovens. A faint but revolting smell of char still seems to permeate the wooden beams and paneled walls. No one in our group could stand by the roped-off doorway for more than a minute or two, and not just because we were eager to get out of the rain.

There had been a point before we visited Dachau when, despite our curiosity at how it would compare to Auschwitz, Jessica and I wondered whether we really needed to subject ourselves to another concentration camp visit. Visiting Auschwitz kills something inside of you; it's not an experience you relish repeating. I'm so glad we decided to visit Dachau after all, and I'm glad that we visited the camps in the order that we did. The emotional horror of Auschwitz gave an existential weight to the lessons of Dachau that no amount of signage could convey.

Having seen all we could stand, we made our muddy, slippery way back to the bus stop for a very quiet ride home.

#180abroad #dachau #munich #germany #history #ww2 #holocaust #concentration camp #hitler #nazis

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jghouse-asia-pacific · 5 years

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New Post has been published on https://www.jg-house.com/2019/05/19/death-davao/

A Death in Davao

The house in Royal Valley was the same. With a doorway missing its door and a window frame without any glass panes, the tiny house offered little separation between an inside and an outside world. Moist sea air settled in the living room, bedroom, and kitchen. Noises were as loud in the bedroom as they were in the street. Animals from the neighborhood wandered in and then walked out. But the atmosphere on this late evening in October, I realized, despite the familiar sounds, was very different.

It was a Sunday, a few hours after sunset. A couple of hours before, I had exited a Cebu Pacific airplane and entered the terminal of the small airport 10 kilometers northeast of downtown Davao. I was back in the capital of Mindanao, the most impoverished and southernmost of the Philippines’ three principal islands.

Inside the living room, my eyes could detect only vague shapes in an almost complete darkness. After a few seconds, they were able to distinguish an object on the floor next to the wall. It was Jogie, lying on a mattress with her face turned toward the dark wall.

“I have a fever,” she said, turning back toward me and adjusting a square bandage on her forehead. She switched on a small, shadeless lamp next to the mattress. A single bulb cast an orange light in the moist air. Above her, attached to the wall, the new air-conditioning unit emitted cool air and a low humming sound. The machine was small, but effective. The air in the room was much cooler than it ever had been before. Usually the heat and humidity inside were extreme.

I sat in the same plastic chair I had occupied on prior visits. On this night in late October, though, I wondered if this visit would be my last. Jogie was fighting, but the problems arising from the cancer in her cervix were increasing. The pain was more severe; her voice, once so strong, now was much weaker.

Royal Valley, Davao, Philippines

Alarming Data

Jogie’s decline coincided with sobering news from recent reports on cancer. For example, the American Cancer Society and the pharmaceutical company, Merck, had released a study, “Global Burden of Cancer in Women.” The number of women who will die from cancer each year, according to the report, will rise from 3.5 million in 2012 to 5.5 million in 2030, an increase of 60 percent in two decades. Where many people had assumed the death rate would drop, with advances in medicine, it rose.

Cancer kills one in seven women worldwide, making it the second most lethal cause of death after cardiovascular disease. The report compared data for women with cancer in a developed country, such as the United States, to data for women with cancer in a developing country, such as the Philippines. In developed countries, breast, lung, and colorectal cancers were the most prevalent; in developing nations, breast, cervix, and lung malignancies were the most common. But in 39 of the poorest nations cervical cancer was at the top of the list.

Man, Cemetery, Davao

Grim Outlook

At 33, Jogie formerly had operated a modest business selling health and beauty products over the Internet.

The oldest of five children, Jogie had lost her father when she was nine. His death from a gunshot wound to the head was sudden. While her mother, a woman with little education, took whatever jobs she could to support the family, Jogie took care of her three sisters and one brother. When Jogie was 19, she decided to move to Japan to start a career in Tokyo’s karaoke bars. Then she learned the Japanese had cancelled the visa program for workers from the Philippines.

Jogie moved to Manila, the Philippine capital, on the island of Luzon, where she lived for the next 12 years, working in various call centers providing customer service. Now Jogie lay on a mattress under her mother’s roof, too sick to take care of herself.

Home, Royal Valley, Davao

Poverty

Globally, cervical cancer is the fourth most common cancer and the fourth leading cause of death among women. However, in poorer nations, it’s the second most common cancer and the third leading cause of death. In fact, almost 90 percent of all deaths due to cervical cancer occur in developing countries, such as the Philippines and Malawi, a country in southeastern Africa.

Medical researchers now consider the human papillomavirus, or HPV, transmitted through sexual intercourse, the cause of cervical cancer. More than a hundred types of HPV exist, but only a few of them cause cervical cancer. The International Agency for Research on Cancer has classified 12 types of HPV as carcinogenic for humans. Of these 12 types, HPV 16 and 18 are the most common, causing 70 percent of all cervical cancers.

Cookie, Royal Valley, Davao

Diagnosis

“Yesterday I went to the hospital,” said Jogie, “to get the results of my latest urinalysis. I have an infection.”

A small child burst into the room, almost falling with every step she took. It was Cookie, the daughter of Jogie’s youngest sister, Mabel. Suddenly the little girl stopped, three feet in front of me. She stared at me, uncertain what to do next. The last time I had seen Cookie she was not yet walking. Now her jet black hair reached almost to her shoulders, and her big brown eyes focused on me.

The catheter attached to Jogie deposited urine into the bag at her side. I watched the flow of yellow liquid. “But the urologist told me there was nothing he could do,” she said. “The only one who could help me now, he said, was the oncologist. I have cervical cancer, stage III b.”

Jogie, Suburbs, Davao

Life-Saving Test

Cervical cancer, like other forms of cancer afflicting women, is, however, preventable. A vaccine exists to protect women against HPV. Also, screening tests, such as the Papanicolaou or Pap test, enable doctors to detect and remove pre-cancerous lesions.

The two to three generations of women around the world who have not received the HPV vaccine or who already have been infected with HPV must rely on screening tests. For such women, the objective is to check for a lesion that can progress to cervical cancer if left untreated.

The Pap test is the conventional screening method, but access to it, as to the HPV vaccine, is not easy.

Two Girls, Supermarket, Davao

Treatment

For Jogie, no vaccine or screening test would help her now. She needed treatment for the cancer in stage three of its four-stage progression. With radiation therapy, the oncologist could shrink the tumor blocking the flow of urine. Until then, Jogie would not be able to urinate on her own.

Jogie finally had started radiation treatment. Three months had passed since doctors at Southern Philippines Medical Center, the government hospital in Davao, confirmed their diagnosis. But for weeks Jogie had languished on a bed in the cancer ward of the hospital, receiving only pain medication. The tumor had doubled in size.

Jogie, with no money, was not a priority.

Now, with funds from two aunts, one in the Philippines and one in Germany, Jogie was able to start radiation therapy. She had a radiation session once a day, five times per week at Davao Doctors Hospital, the most modern health care facility on the island of Mindanao. She was scheduled to have a total of 33 sessions of radiation therapy. Also, she was advised to have six sessions of chemotherapy and three sessions of brachytherapy.

But Jogie didn’t have enough money.

Two Women, Downtown, Davao

Rising Toll

The economic burden of cancer, according to the report from the American Cancer Society and Merck, is growing every year. Expenditures for the early detection of cancer and for treatment continue to climb.

Around the world, larger cities are more likely to have the infrastructure for cancer care, as well as a higher proportion of people who could afford the care. In rural areas and smaller towns, lower-income individuals are less likely to have access to cancer care.

Due to high costs, many chemotherapeutic agents are not part of essential medicine lists in poor countries. The median number of oncology-essential medicines in a recent study ranged from 11 in low-income countries to 18 in lower middle-income and 26 in upper-income nations.

Turkeys, Cemetery, Davao

Lost Hope

“The Baptist church next to SaveMore donated the air conditioner,” said Jogie. “Mama went to them and asked for help.” Jogie laughed. “I don’t think I could survive without the air conditioner. My stomach feels like it’s on fire after a radiation session. Once I have chemotherapy, the burning sensation will be even worse.”

“Arequa,” Jogie said, uttering a word in Bisaya. She was in pain. “I don’t know what I will do when the money for my treatment runs out.” She started to turn over on the mattress, then stopped, reaching down toward the catheter between her legs.

“My only hope is to make it through this month,” said Jogie. It was a Friday at the beginning of December. I was back in the primitive living room of the small structure on the outskirts of Davao City, in the southern Philippines. “In January, my health insurance benefits will renew with the new year,” she said.

For 2016, Jogie had exhausted her benefits from the Philippines’ national insurance program, called PhilHealth. Now she was able to pay for treatment only through charitable contributions. “I’ve completed 23 radiation sessions,” she said. “My oncologist says I need five more in December. The goal is to shrink my tumor to three centimeters by the end of the month and, then, in January to target it with high doses of chemotherapy.”

Jogie’s tumor had grown from four-and-a-half centimeters at the end of August, when Jogie received her diagnosis, to seven centimeters at the beginning of October, when she started receiving treatment.

“But I need $500,” she said.

Gravestone, Cemetery, Davao

Death

On March 13, 2019, Jogie died. She left behind a son, Kobe, 19, and a daughter, Kryztle, 17.

I never saw any of them again.

#LifeCulture, #Philippines #Culture, #Davao, #PublicHealth

#culture #Davao #public health

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nikolinaboldero · 5 years

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Impact of modernity on fashion textile industries.

9/11/18- theory lecture notes.

In today’s lecture, we thought about modernity’s impact on the textile and fashion industries, the shift towards mass production, and the human cost of consumer capitalism. First of all, we spoke about fashion in the pre-industrial society. Characteristics of the pre-industrial society include: feudalism, hierarchical society, status determined by rank (rank determined by lineage), fixed position in society. Pre- industrial was a time before there were machines and tools to help perform tasks on masse. In this time women’s dress followed classical ideas, tightly laced corsets. The natural figure was emphasized by being able to see the body beneath the clothing. In the 14th century we saw a massive growth in the fashion industry, it was the stage of early capitalism. There was the expansion of trade, involving cloth and wool. The expansion of trade meant there was more importation and exportation of goods, therefore greater access to clothing. Fashion was spread globally. Individuals for the first time began to discard their clothes before they were worn out due to them no longer being ‘fashionable’. It was seen as shameful to wear outdated clothing. In the 14th century, up until the 18th century, cloth signified status. The poorest people in society wore cheapest clothing, they would wear the ‘blanket cloth’. Craftsmen wore clothes that reflected their vocation. Aristocracy wore silk, they were the only ones permitted to wear silk and these luxury garments. Sumptuary laws existed in this time, the laws determined who could wear what. The lower classes were not able to wear particular furs, fabrics, trims and accessories. Dressing above your rank was a crime. This was a form of social control, attempt to fix and preserve the distinctions in rank/status.

Modernity and the Industrial revolution (late 18th century, picking up speed in the 19th century.

During the industrial revolution, the nature of capitalism changed dramatically. The industrial revolution allowed for mass production, the ability to produce clothing more quickly and more cheaply. During this time, we also saw the emergence of the middle class, there was less of a visual distinction between rich and poor. Social mobility increased, there was a rapid expansion of cities.

In 1790, the English inventor Thomas Saint invented the first sewing machine design, but he did not successfully advertise or marker his invention. His machine was meant to be used on leather and canvas material. Since its invention the sewing machine has greatly improve in efficiency. His sewing machine used the chain stitch method.

In the 19th century there was a significant growth in the number of department stores, this encouraged the ‘window shopping’ experience, whereby shopping became a leisure activity. They were very unique places, women could go to these department stores without their men, they experienced a little freedom from shopping. Liberties was defined as the ‘chosen resort of the artistic shopper’ Art Noveau. William Morris was very critical of mass production, he saw it as the loss of craftsmanship. ‘Modernity is the experience of constant transformation, of things not staying the same’. The feelings involved in modernity include; uncertainty, anxiety and unrest, loss of stability, speed and acceleration, excitement and optimism, loss of sense of static identity.

Late modernity and late capitalism (1950s and 1960s). During this period of time we saw the introduction of new forms of business: multinational and transnational. Also, a key component which enabled the expansion of fashion globally was the New International Division of Labour. This term refers to the spatial shift of manufacturing industries from advanced capitalist countries to developing countries. On April 24, 2013, five garment factories which manufactured products for approximately 28 brands, collapsed in near Dhaka, Bangladesh, claiming the lives of 1,138 workers and injuring more than 2,000 individuals. One of these garment factories was Primark. Clothing is often made in developing countries were people will work for less, therefore allowing the company to earn more money. In many cases the people who are making these types of clothing are working in very poor conditions (dangerous).

‘Globalisation involves the increasing multi-directional, economic, social, cultural and political connections across the world and our awareness of them’. Globalisation has positives and negatives, positives involve; increased connection between people, more freedom to move between countries. Negatives include; a more homogenous world; less diverse, inequality between rich and poor, not everyone accesses benefits of globalisation. Questions of which we need to ask ourselves are ‘is the production of garments improving, involving better working conditions for the employees? Or is the production of garments hidden, so we don’t see the poor working conditions?

I was fully engaged with this lecture, it was interesting to see how textile design has developed over time (hand based- mechanisation). The facts and figures about the number of people working in sweatshops, under poor and dangerous conditions was shocking. With my textiles, I want to continue making environmentally friendly clothing, it is essential for sustainable development.

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entergamingxp · 4 years

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Let your mind wander with 40 of our best reads • Eurogamer.net

We’ve been lucky enough to publish some wonderful work on Eurogamer over the years, written by some wonderful writers, and we thought pulling some of it together at a time like this would be a nice thing to do.

If you see something you like, scroll down to the bottom of the piece and click on the author’s name to see what else they’ve written. There are some real treats I haven’t been able to include here – it’s a long enough list as it is!

Thank you everyone who contributes to Eurogamer and helps make it what it is, and thank you for reading it. Have a nice Easter weekend.

How Age of Empires 2 got some Scottish kids into RTS – Here’s a question: How do you get a bunch of disillusioned kids in the arse end of Scotland into real-time strategy games? Sam Greer remembers the 90s in Scotland and an unlikely gaming champion.

Petscop, the internet’s favourite haunted video game – Last March, a YouTube channel titled Petscop began releasing Let’s Play-style videos of what appeared to be a bargain-bin Playstation One game designed to entice undiscerning children. But things quickly took a darker turn, as Sara Elsam finds out.

An ode to video game doors – It’s easy to underestimate doors, Andreas Inderwildi writes, and yet they are also imbued with a kind of magic. If you’ve ever wanted to see a lot of lovely video game doors, now’s your chance.

After half my life, Ace Attorney’s re-release brought me full circle – Some games can have profound influences on our lives. Jay Castello grew up with the Ace Attorney series and wanted to be a lawyer – but life doesn’t always go the way it was planned.

I went Christmas carolling in Rust with a real piano, and got shot a hell of a lot – When Emma Kent heard that craftable pianos were coming to Rust (with MIDI support) and she could plug a microphone in too, there was only one thing she wanted to do. But would her fellow Rust players share in her festive spirit?

The story behind the Oblivion mod Terry Pratchett worked on – Imagine one day getting an email thanking you for the companion you made for Oblivion, signed by someone claiming to be author Terry Pratchett. Then imagine discovering, many letters later, it really was him. Cian Maher tells an unlikely story of friendship and collaboration.

The Lords of Midnight: on the legacy of a truly epic wargame – Even now, there’s little else remotely like it. Jennifer Allen remembers a cruel but magical adventure for Commodore 64. And thanks to devoted fans, there is now a way to play it.

Red Dead Redemption 2 and XCOM 2 have one crucial thing in common – companionship – From perishable squad mates to tales around a camp fire, Vivek Gohil digs into what makes companions in Red Dead Redemption 2 and XCOM 2 so special.

I was in Football Manager and I don’t know how to feel about it – Imagine our surprise when writer Chris Tapsell turns around and announces he was once in a Football Manager game, a series he loves – but as a football player. If it weren’t for a shoulder injury he may well have been a professional footballer today. But something always bothered him about his FM representation: his stats weren’t right. His height, his birthday, his eccentricity. This is the story of him getting to the bottom of it.

Roleplaying across the internet – It doesn’t have to be people sitting around a table. In its purest form, roleplaying is when a person says, “Let me tell you a story,” and the other person says, “Me too.” Giada Zavarise takes into the world of forum roleplaying.

If Ubisoft wants to cling on to Clancy, it’s time to talk politics – Tom Clancy relished a political drama so why does Ubisoft try to avoid it in his name? Is such a thing even possible? Edwin Evans-Thirlwell takes a closer look at Clancy and the legacy he left behind.

I owe everything I am to Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday – You’re in a game shop in the mid-1990s and you have £15 to spend, and that’s a lot – you’re a kid and you’re poor. Jennifer Allen had a choice on her hands. What to choose? Pele? Streets of Rage? Or how about this box with the hero and the aliens on…?

Kazunori’s War: the world of Gran Turismo’s creator – He keeps a selection of pre-packed bags by his desk so he can leave at a moment’s notice. He’s an occasional racing driver. And he spun out a car at 200km/h as a very naughty youth. He is Kazunori Yamauchi, creator of Gran Turismo, and Martin Robinson travels to Japan to meet him.

It’s not easy being green: a brief history of orcs in video games – Who invented orcs, how did they get their green colour, and when did they start being more than dumb enemies? Nic Reuben seeks answers.

Why did ancient Egypt spend 3000 years playing a game nobody else liked? – Here’s a game responsible for one of the first ever instances of trash talk, a game played by pharaohs, but even after 3000 years of play, Senet went the way of the disonaur. Christian Donlan tries to find out what happened.

The boy who stole Half-Life 2 – In May 2004, a German boy wakes to find his bed surrounded by armed police officers. Seven months earlier, the source code to the in-development-and-late Half-Life 2 leaks onto the internet. Simon Parkin tells the story of a global hacker hunt, from both sides.

The six-year story of GTA Online’s long-vacant casino – When GTA Online launched, the Vinewood Casino was there. It wasn’t open but it was “opening soon”, according to a sign on the door. One year later, still closed; two years later, still closed. Nearly six years later, still closed. Why did it take so long? Jordan Oloman digs into a troubled development.

The cult of Hideo Kojima – What is it about Hideo Kojima that has crowds turn out in their hundreds to meet him? Khee Hoon Chan waits among one such crowd in Singapore, and then all of a sudden, spotlight on, Kojima is there.

Hearts and minds – Tom Bramwell puts on his best suit for the WWE Hall of Fame ceremony, and it leaves him wondering why there aren’t more heroes in games.

The US town ruled by an AI storyteller – Great storytellers talk about creative partnerships with all kinds of things, from drugs to religion to half-awake states of mind. Can artificial intelligence now be added to the list? Emily Gera shines a light on a fascinating storytelling experiment.

The God who Peter Molyneux forgot – Do you remember Curiosity and the promise of a life-changing prize for whoever tapped the last block? Brayn Henderson does – he tapped it. But did it change his life? Wesley Yin-Poole travels to Scotland to find out.

The Wind Waker inspired me to build a boat – Ever decided to build a boat because you really liked a game about sailing around? No of course not. Nor, I bet, have you ever bought an ocarina instrument because of a game, or fashioned your hair to look like Nathan Drake. Or have you? Omar Hafeez-Bore ponders the influence of games.

Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp and the feud that keeps on running – This time he’s demanding a single coconut. Philippa Warr tells the a hilarious story of two lifelong friends falling out over a valentine.

Brando and Bowie: The amazing stories of a man you’ve never heard about – He alone witnessed Marlon Brando’s last ever performance, and David Bowie kissed him on the lips. He held high positions in the video game world and directed big games for big companies. And yet, he never quite found success as we know it. Or did he? Bertie tells a long story.

Why can’t video games get shoulders right? What an inspired question! And it turns out it’s all in the shoulder blades. Alan Wen investigates.

Viva Piñata places a brutal lens on late-stage capitalism – Don’t be fooled by its cutesy looks. Viva Piñata is, as Hazel Southwell tells us, maybe the only game where the kind of business psychopathy preached on Huel-based wellness retreats outside San Francisco will actually work.

The promise of a game world you can touch – James Holland puts his hands in front of him and as the on-screen bubbles start to pop, he feels them popping on his skin, on his bare skin – he’s not wearing gloves or equipment of any kind. Is this the tech of the future?

Inside Tomb of Horrors, the hardest D&D module ever made – Just getting inside can be an ordeal, as two of the entrances lead to certain death, and losing a character level 10 or higher – all that time invested – really hurts. Why would someone make something like that? Malindy Hetfield takes a closer look.

PS2: The Insiders’ Story – The PlayStation 2 is still the best-selling console in the world. It was a landmark machine and its success made Sony feel invincible. Ellie Gibson takes us back to a time of David Lynch adverts and wild parties.

VR has already taken people with dementia to the seaside, and now video games are exploring neurological disease itself – Watching a participant literally cry with happiness as they remove the headset is not a sight writer Luke Kemp will soon forget.

Decoding Shenzhen: The Chinese city that makes the world’s tech – Known as the mecca of manufacturing, Shenzhen is a fishing city turned megatropolis, where an idea can be made a reality and sold in a market stall in two weeks. Arshiya Khullar investigates.

The human cost of Red Dead Redemption 2 – In October 2018, Red Dead Redemption set a new benchmark for the kind of production values a video game could reach. Technically, it was a marvel. But at what cost?

The folklore roots of Sekiro’s anus-ball snatching enemies – Why does an enemy in Sekiro grab a pale fleshy thing from your behind, hold it up like a trophy, then devour it in its own behind? It’s all to do with some disturbing monsters in Japanese folklore, as Ewan Wilson finds out.

Why I play video games – Dr Omar Hafeez-Bore believes a good part of why he chose to pursue medicine was because of video games, and not for the reasons you may think.

Stories with dice: the thrill of old-school D&D – Even 40 years on, video games have a lot to learn from Dungeons & Dragons. Oli Welsh discovers the joy of pen-and-paper role-playing games.

A horse named Gizmondo: The inside story of the world’s greatest failed console – It’s like it never existed now, but for a while Gizmondo – a handheld gaming machine – was going to conquer the world. The 2005 launch party even featured Pharrell Williams and Sting. But less than a year later, the company behind Gizmondo collapsed into bankruptcy. Ellie Gibson hears the whole shady story from the people who were there.

Passing on the gift of games – Have you ever passed the gift of gaming on and watched someone come to terms with it like you once did? Oh the tantrums I used to throw playing Street Fighter! Emad Ahmed has a niece and nephew to pass the gift onto, with surprising effects.

After I stepped into Yakuza’s world, Yakuza’s world seeped into mine – Wish you were there, in Japan? Well, there are few games better than the Yakuza series for taking you there. They helped Malindy remember happy years studying there, and overcome a painful memory.

The quest for Shadow of the Colossus’ last big secret – What if everything in Fumito Ueda’s renowned game had not been found? Could there be a 17th colossi hidden somewhere, waiting to be discovered? Craig Owens takes us into a world of unsolved mysteries and secret hunters.

The secrets of Dark Souls lore explained and explored – It’s not easy to get at the story in Dark Souls because unlike in other games, it’s scattered and hidden away. Richard Stanton connects the dots for us.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/04/let-your-mind-wander-with-40-of-our-best-reads-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=let-your-mind-wander-with-40-of-our-best-reads-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net

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angrycollectordaze-me-blog · 4 years

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Essay代写：The business ethics

下面为大家整理一篇优秀的essay代写范文- The business ethics，供大家参考学习，这篇论文讨论了商业伦理观。企业遵循良好的商业伦理，履行必要的社会责任，不仅是企业自身发展的需要，也是整个社会的需要。以盈利为唯一目的的商业伦理观的理论基础是，企业是股东的，企业存在的目的是为股东赚钱。该商业伦理观的代表是西方早期绝大部分企业和当今社会大部分企业。考虑社会责任的商业伦理观的理论基础是企业是利益相关者之间达成的一种契约关系。

The trend of economic globalization is increasingly strengthened, and capital is in an increasingly strong position in the economic society. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has drawn more attention, requiring enterprises to assume social responsibility and better serve the society. It is not only necessary for enterprises to follow good business ethics and fulfill necessary social responsibilities, but also for the harmonious and sustainable development of the whole society.

The theoretical basis of the business ethics with profit as the sole purpose is that the enterprise is a shareholder and the purpose of the enterprise is to make money for shareholders. Friedman believed that a corporation's only social responsibility was to make money for its shareholders.

The basis of this business ethics is: only think about making money, not social responsibility. Under this business ethics, the relationship between enterprises and stakeholders is as follows: customers are the victims; Suppliers are squeezed; Competitors are enemies; Circumstances have nothing to do with me; The government is the umbrella; Employees are machine parts and money-making tools; "Cheat you out of a deal" with shareholders and creditors; "Don't look to me" for charity. The representative of this business ethics is the majority of early western enterprises and the majority of today's society.

The theoretical basis of the business ethics of considering social responsibility is that enterprises are a contractual relationship among stakeholders.

The basis of business ethics to consider social responsibility is to consider the interests of stakeholders, that is, corporate social responsibility.

Key to how social enterprises work: not as charities, with the goal of improving social welfare, to recoup costs: overcoming financial dependency. The typical representative of the business ethics of serving the society is the gray group.

After more than 20 years of experimentation, the grid group now operates 25 organizations in areas such as wine and education, communications, funds, telecommunications, products, Internet, telephone, energy, and medical trusts that promote microfinance, improve rural life, create opportunities for young people, and connect every village to the world. For example, graig bank, grida. Graida company profile: the first multinational social company, established by graida and danone group in 2006, with 50% investment from each side.

There are many factors that affect business ethics, including the failure to crack down on unethical behavior, the failure to reward ethical companies, lack of awareness of what is ethical behavior, short-term behavior, local protectionism, poor social climate, national or local economic backwardness, and the pressure to improve corporate interests. They are the correlation between managers' behavior and moral development stage, personal characteristics, self-strength, control points, structural variables, organizational culture, problem strength and stakeholder response.

Set up ethics committee, improve the moral level of management, improve the ethical quality of employees, and improve the ethical behavior of enterprises.

In the late 1980s, a series of financial scandals damaged the credibility of accounting. The anti-fraud finance committee recognizes the importance of establishing an effective set of business ethics.

On November 1, 1991, the judicial commission of the United States issued the landmark guidelines for American trials in the United States. The guidelines impose fines of up to $2m a day for unethical or environmental behavior. But the fine could be reduced to $50,000 a day if the company's directors showed they had been diligent. Business ethics are considered an essential component of effective diligence and responsibility.

Business ethics is the embodiment of an organization's values, to a certain extent, shows the main structural framework of an organization, and the structural framework in addition to provide organizations with strategic and legal aspects of orientation, also for the organization to carry out moral policy have provided the certain basis, and this kind of organization structure show and convey behavior expectations and culture of the organization.

Business ethics contain formal and informal elements that guide employees' thinking and behavior.

To narrow the differences of individual moral behaviors in the company; Produce an ethical corporate culture.

Improve employees' understanding and recognition of ethical issues; To inform employees of relevant procedures and rules; Get to know the relevant members of the ethics committee and ask them to help resolve ethical issues; Understanding the value and culture of the organization; Assess the impact of ethical decisions on the company based on values.

The recognition and support of senior managers should empower employees to make ethical decisions; Employees shall be empowered to make ethical decisions; Ethics should be communicated to all employees.

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coolmohnishahluwalia · 5 years

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The internet of indulgence

India's luxury consumers are getting bored of monotonous, age-old user experiences. Brands are conjuring up exclusivity through AI/AR-VR to hyper-personalized and add that bit of 'magic'

A smattering of pastel houses rises above an inky ocean, peeking from beyond the French windows. I take a seat into the car’s expansive backseat, as instructed, and with the flick of a finger, the seat in front of me has zoomed forward and bent over, adding extra legroom—and a surprise. A plate from the seatback folds out, much like an airplane table, revealing a cushioned footrest. Here, at the rear of the Audi A8L, I have a plush, on-demand foot massager, complete with heating controls.

As I sink into the seat, though, I remember a slight technicality—I can’t actually get that message. The truth is that beyond those French windows aren’t the oasis of blue, but rain pelting down a raucous Mumbai road. For a few minutes, though, I was ‘in’ the car somewhere in France, not on a regular leather chair at a store, and could physically walk around the car to get a sense of its size, or of how it looks in the metallic Navarra Blue versus the muted Impala Beige.

The A8L has been late in coming to India, so the Audi team has devised a high-tech sales experience to keep up the buzz and speed up the pre-order process. It’s snazzy and elaborate, and locally built. Rather effective too.

I’ve played with virtual reality (VR) headsets before and was a bit skeptical putting these on; yet, I had to stop myself from reaching out to pat the seat leather, the color of which I had just changed to an elegant burgundy. I could see each stitch detailing and feel the manufactured luxury of the car, without it being even on the same continent as me. It felt like I could do pretty much everything but drive it.

“Digital customer-centric initiatives are a key focus area for Audi in India,” says Balbir Singh Dhillon, head of Audi India. “In today’s connected world, we want our customers to experience every detail of the car in miniature or actual size from the comfort of their home or office environment; this is possible through virtual and augmented reality (AR). Through these new-age solutions, a customer can experience what the brand truly stands for: Vorsprung Durch Technik, or ‘progress through technology’.”

Audi’s VR experience—which is supplemented with an augmented reality set up on an iPad as well—as part of a new era of luxury business driven by high-end technology. For the discerning set of high net-worth individuals in India, brands are working to engage touchpoints that offer next-level convenience and tell unique stories. The eventual goal is to tailor every touchpoint for each customer. A lot of this process is driven by technology and artificial intelligence (AI), and then built upon to lend that clutter-breaking wow, factor.

“Over the past few years, the quality of data available has significantly improved,” says Manishi Sanwal, managing partner of data analytics firm Voiceback Technologies, who has previously worked in leadership roles at LVMH in India and China. “While social media lets you analyze behavioral trends, a massive increase in computing power has made it possible to correlate sales with customer behavior. Technology can accurately forecast buying decisions today, resulting in less inventory, quick and early monitoring of trends and more customer focus. This leads to higher customer satisfaction and stronger brand loyalty.”

It’s not all smoke and mirrors though. While there is the added incentive to gain eyeballs, the visual tech also plays a utilitarian role.

For instance, StyleDotMe, a Delhi-based fashion-tech the startup introduced an augmented reality setup for the jewelry industry a year-and-a-half ago. Called MirrAR, the patented platform lets customers virtually ‘try on’ different pieces of jewelry at a store or kiosk, much like a Snapchat filter, eliminating the need for inventory at all chain stores and speeding up the customer trial process. the mirror now works with 77 jewelers in 23 Indian cities, including Tanishq, Amrapali, PC Jewellers, and Kalyan Jewelers. They recently did ‘zero-inventory’ kiosks for Tanishq at Delhi and Bengaluru airports, where flyers could browse through the brand’s collection, see how it looked on them, and generate leads.

“Jewellery is a particularly conservative industry, where most jewelers are the third or fourth generation in the family,” says Meghna Saraogi, founder and CEO, StyleDotMe. “It’s tough to change their mindsets. The deal-breaker for us was an association we did with the Jaipur Jewellery Show early on, where we set up an experience zone through different domes. Customers move across the domes and, at eye level, see themselves in different jewelers’ inventories, without physically having to put anything on. After the show, about 30 jewelers paid us upfront.”

Saraogi recalls how one lady asked around to know who had built the zone, and finally found and hugged her. “She was so emotional, saying she never thought she would get a chance to see herself in such jewelry, but with this product, she finally had,” she says.

the mirror uses various data points to make the jewelry life-like, including the height of the pieces and the quality of the diamonds used. The idea is to depict a piece exactly as it is, including its level of shine. Jewelers can add an unlimited number of images to their virtual inventory, and customers simply swipe and click to try them on. If they’re interested in a certain piece, it can be arranged to view physically.

“Jewellers typically show catalogs or pictures on their phones or iPads, and we realized that even a brand like Tanishq can’t have the same inventory at all its stores,” says Saraogi. “It’s so capital intensive; for jewelry retailers, the biggest cost isn’t real estate, but the cost of transporting and securely storing inventory. We wanted to build something that would work seamlessly and solve a real pain point. Many other existing AR products worked on static images, or instruction-based technology, where a voice asks you to look at a certain angle, turn right or left, which a lot of customers don’t like.”

the mirror also allows jewelers to create computer-aided design (CAD) versions of jewelry sets for customers to try on, which can then be built-in the real world based on feedback. “This closes the gap between real and virtual, as jewelers only have to manufacture the sets they know will sell, preventing wastage of both time and resources,” she adds.

According to Saraogi, an average customer tries on 20 to 25 pieces when using MirrAR, versus three to five with physical trials. “So our product is helping jewelers show 5x more SKUs (stock keeping unit) than they would have,” she says. “About 50 percent of people we surveyed say they feel awkward or tired after trying on five physical pieces at a store.”

StyleDotMe is working on launching similar AR solutions for beauty and sunglasses market by the end of the year and say the products are also helping jewelers penetrate newer markets.

“Initially, we targeted the big-brand jewelers who had multiple stores in Tier-1 and Tier-2 cities,” says Saraogi. “We were zapped to see the sort of demand we’re getting from Tier-3 and Tier-4 towns, where smaller jewelry stores take pride in being the first ones to launch such technology in their towns. They want to be projected as tech-savvy, progressive. We’re in places like Kota, Rajkot, Akola, and it’s amazing to see how people are responding there.”

StyleDotMe recently raised ₹2 crore in funding from Indian Angel Network and angel investors, in a bridge round led by Ambarish Raghuvanshi, former CFO, Info Edge, which runs various consumer internet portals. These funds will be used to bolster operations and set up a B2C web and mobile app, where customers can try on jewelry from various brands from their homes, and place orders on the StyleDotMe platform too. The company claims that its number of clients has grown by 40 percent quarter-on-quarter over the past year.

Jewelry isn’t the only traditional industry that technology is disrupting; it is also spawning a new buzzy vertical in real an estate called PropTech, still at a nascent stage in India.

In the luxury property domain, the challenges for the money-rich, time-poor clients are obvious—HNIs are by and large busy people, who may invest in multiple properties and may not have the time to visit each site they might consider. Brochures and websites can give a limited view. But using AR or VR, buyers can be ‘immersed’ in their projects in the next dimension, and take a walk around not just the property, but also its street, surroundings and so on. Interior projects can be monitored without site visits, and updates visualized in real-time.

“Real estate, especially in India, has been slow to adopt technology, but this is rapidly changing,” says Abhay Kumar, head–marketing, JLL India, a real estate consultancy. “Now, technology is the top investment area for many real-estate players—developers know that they can’t keep doing business as they used to. It’s no surprise that a lot of startups who were earlier working on algorithms for IT players are now building solutions for real estate.”

JLL has partnered with the government’s Invest India mission to launch a PropTech accelerator, and claims to have received 1,500-plus registrations for the first round. Kumar says AR and VR sales experiences are far more effective than brochures and miniature 3D models, helping cut down the transaction process—but even more in demand will be the use of AI, machine learning and the Internet of Things (IoT) in this sector.

“From an occupier perspective, this segment has a far more direct use case, something you will interact with every day,” he says. “We’re seeing Alexa and Siri at all kinds of homes today, but in the luxury segment, things are taken a step further with automation.”

Using IoT-enabled devices, residents can not only map water wastage and energy efficiency in real-time, but also control their home temperature, book parking slots, make sure the lift has arrived even before they reach the lobby, and so on. Luxury developers are investing in cloud-based visitor management solutions at projects too. “This is not something we are seeing in the middle segment, but the luxury segment has definitely started implementing it,” Kumar adds. “Think of the convenience and experience, and also the data insights you can draw using these, from both a buyer and seller perspective. These are no longer technologies of the future.”

Elementary, dear Watson

Tech giant IBM has been working extensively in building what it calls ‘cognitive fashion’. In 2017, it partnered with two major Indian fashion houses to stretch the limits of fashion tech, with the use of IBM Watson, its AI-enabled tool.

With fashion designers Falguni and Shane Peacock, IBM Watson worked to project the future of fashion. Using the Watson visual recognition API, the team scanned 600,000 publicly available

fashion images from 2006 to 2017, from the world’s four biggest fashion weeks—London, Paris, Milan and New York. Similarly, they processed more than 5,000 major Bollywood outfits and studied data from 3,000 Bollywood movie posters across the decades from the 70s to the noughties. IBM provided them with tools to identify color, pattern and silhouette trends, and Watson could use AI to analyze thousands of patterns and create entirely unique ones for the future-collection, showcased at a fashion show to a standing ovation.

“We were lucky to have been the first few to work with AI, and it has opened up a lot of ideas on what we can do with technology,” says Falguni. “For example, if I was working on a purple dress, I could scan through the archives to see all the purple dresses showcased earlier so that I know mine is entirely new. This is one way in which designers and AI can work together… I wouldn’t say AI will take over the designer’s job, but it can make their lives dramatically easier.”

“Watson let us travel back and forth in time and space at an unbelievable speed, letting us study vast amounts of data for both broad trends, as well as an understanding of the more obscure data, too,” adds Shane. “We’re looking forward to extending Watson to other parts of the creative process because the future of cognitive couture is looking fabulous.”

IBM also partnered with couturier Gaurav Gupta for a high-tech art-meets-fashion project: The world’s first AI sari. Powered by IoT, the white sculpted sari-gown had an LED light panel running across it, and the lights would change colors based on different personalities. The sari-gown featured as a live exhibit at the Vogue Women of the Year awards, worn by actor and the event’s emcee, Archie Panjabi.

Using Watson’s personality insights API, the sari’s LED lights would change color for each of the night’s awardees—a color assigned after Watson conducted a detailed study of the person’s social media handles. Watson analyzed social media activity using seven parameters, including effectiveness in organizing thoughts, open-mindedness and originality, confidence and problem solving, action orientation, conscientiousness, openness to possibilities and alternatives and social energy. Each of these traits was mapped to a color most associated with them. So, if Aishwarya Rai Bachchan was red, Shah Rukh Khan was gold. The gown was also used as an interactive art installation, where visitors could plug in their own Twitter handles and have the garment analyze their profiles and change to a color assigned to them.

“What the experience taught me is that the future of design development is definitely technology,” says Gupta. “If I have a mood for love—say neon blue—it could come up with a million print ideas that can be customized in milliseconds. Any human developing that would take days, months. I’m toying with the idea of adding Watson to my design team; it will add a different dimension to my design.”

Brainpower

Imagine knowing what every customer is going to buy before they walk into a store.

A powerful line from a Deloitte report titled ‘Digital transformation–the ultimate challenge for the fashion industry’ pretty much sums it up. The report advocates digital transformation across fashion business functions and stresses the urgency and momentum to ‘re-imagine, reshape and retool for an era in which traditional boundaries are broken’.

Data is the new oil, but few companies know just how to use it. The report says ‘digital clienteling’, or leveraging user information at the convergence of big data analytics, IoT and data science, will help brands better tailor their sales information and products to customers, improving conversion rates and revenues. “A misaligned or generic digital offering may actually widen the digital divide and even pose a threat to brand and reputation,” it says.

A few startups are seeing great interest in solving this problem for luxury brands. Vue.ai, for instance, formed in 2016, works on personalization, product digitization and increases the speed at which you can take a product online, for the fashion industry. It also helps analyze data to increase personalizations, which should eventually lead to conversions. The startup is based between Chennai and San Francisco, and services markets including the US, Europe, Latin America, Japan and the Middle East. Its clients include luxury fashion e-store Pernia’s Pop Up Shop, and it claims to have grown its revenue 3x over the last year. Vue.ai and its parent company, Mad Street Den, raised a Series B round of $17 million in April.

“This year, we’ve broken into India, and it’s become a pull market for us,” says Ashwini Ashokan, founder, and CEO, Vue.ai. “It’s interesting to see how the Indian customer is changing and driving this demand. You’re beginning to see the pull towards aggregation and storytelling. I can safely say that the era of the Flipkart-Myntra discounting driving the market is over.”

Ashokan says about 10 to 15 percent of their total business now comes from India. “This is the year of luxury,” she adds. “Indians are now associating heavily with the value of a brand, between both beauty and fashion. Technology cannot create that demand, but it can create an order of magnitude growth. That’s where we’re focussed—how to send a customer the right thing at the right time.”

To explain, if you go on an eCommerce webpage, it is working quietly to understand you in real-time. Are you looking at pink lehengas? Are you looking at pink lehengas with full sleeves? Or are you not looking at pink lehengas at all, but a particular type of embroidery, which led you to your first two clicks that happened to be on pink. “Every single click is specific to you,” says Ashokan. “If a brand knows who they are producing for, it can influence production based on that, and stop wasteful creation. A lot of products get dumped because there’s no demand. When you’re spending that kind of money, you want each detail to be perfect, and brands must understand that.”

Similarly, London-based BeautyMatchingEngine (BME), run by its Indian-origin founder Nidhima Kohli, says India accounts for its third-largest volume of users. BME, an offshoot of its predecessor MyBeautyMatches, is a new AI-powered product for the beauty industry, which can help companies make hyper-personalized product recommendations to users.

“The beauty industry is behind many others on innovation, but it’s good with PR. It’s tough to make beauty recommendations, because each person might react to it differently,” says Kohli. “For example, we are both Indian, but we live in different climate conditions, we are of different ages and may have different concerns. What works for me will not work for you. Our product takes into account all these factors before filtering down them to recommendations.”

BME also analyses patterns—it noticed, for instance, that a a lot of people buying shampoo for hair fall and dandruff also had acne concerns. “This is data the company can use, and we also help them explain to customers why a particular product is being recommended to them,” she adds.

“Consumers are well-educated now in the beauty market, and companies are beginning to see that gimmicky experiences don’t generate revenue. Every touchpoint needs to count.”

“Ninety percent of people still think that personalization is segmentation,” says Ashokan of Vue.ai. “It’s 2019, that doesn’t work anymore. You can’t tell me that I am just like all these other people.” #MohnishRANotes

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endenogatai · 6 years

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Mosaic Ventures, the London-based Series A investor, has closed a second fund at $150M

Well, that was quick: A little over two months since we reported that Mosaic Ventures was in the middle of raising a second fund, TechCrunch can reveal that fund two has in fact now closed, as the London-based venture capital firm looks to double down on backing “Europe’s most ambitious entrepreneurs”.

We began hearing from sources late last week that news was imminent, and in a call on Saturday morning Mosaic founding partners Simon Levene and Toby Coppel confirmed the details. Fund two totals $150 million, as per an earlier SEC filing, and will be used to continue the firm’s Series A remit, which will see it back 5-10 new companies each year, as lead or co-lead, typically with a $3-7 million first check.

Four years since launching, Mosaic has invested in over 20 startups, and in a range of sectors. These include blockchain/crypto startups Blockstream and Blockchain (the firm remains bullish with regards to the space), fintech startup Habito, open source drone company Auterion, period tracking app Clue, and data startup Infosum. The firm has also invested directly in deep tech company builder Entrepreneur First, alongside Reid Hofflan with Greylock, a deal Mosaic helped instigate.

“I think what we do is very unique,” says Coppel, when I ask how the VC differentiates itself from competing early-stage firms in London and Europe, especially since — only just on fund two — it is somewhat unproven. “What we do is focus very much at the early-stage, Series A, where founders have built an early product, they’re a long way ahead of themselves in terms of building out their team and their got-to-market. We roll up our sleeves and get stuck in with them in many of the foundational pieces of building a company. That’s our entire focus”.

He also argues that when Mosaic write a cheque, the firm’s interests are more aligned with the founders it backs than larger venture capital firms.

“Given our fund size and the cheques we write at Series A, we think working with us is a very strong choice because of our experience and because we are willing to take risk and because of our network and so forth. And we’ll give everything — we’re entrepreneurs ourselves. As you say, it is early for Mosaic and therefore whatever we do at this point we are going to give 150 percent.

“There are firms that are much bigger in terms of fund size and for them, often writing a $3 million cheque is not the same, it’s a very small part of their fund, you don’t necessarily get the same focus and effort and alignment. And I think that is what sets us apart”.

To that end, Levene and Coppel, who both built much of their career in Silicon Valley, most notably in senior positions at Yahoo, tell me that Mosaic will continue to invest thematically, specifically outlining five areas. They are: “blockchain, crypto and the decentralized web” (it’s the decentralised aspect of blockchain where no one vendor needs to own or have control over the platform, that the pair say is attractive), “computational health”, “machine intelligence”, “mobility and location services”, and “finance 2.0”.

Elaborating on how Mosaic views health tech, Coppel says that over the next five to ten years the cost of sensors that enable “continuous bio tracking” will continue to drop and therefore we’ll all be collecting huge amounts of data from our bodies, such as our metabolism or cardiovascular systems, so that we can monitor our own health. Combined with various “-omics data” and that the fact that sequencing the genome can be done for less than $100, we’ll be able to generate new drugs or help adapt personalised treatments based on that data. “When you’re collecting all that data it creates significant new things and opportunities in new areas. That’s the transformation that healthcare is going to go through,” he says.

Regards “finance 2.0,” Levene and Coppel don’t entirely disagree with my assertion that much of the low and mid-hanging fruit in fintech has already been picked (Coppel himself was an early investor in Transferwise), as the banks and financial services continue to be unbundled. However, they say there are still opportunities to build “best-of-breed services” both for consumers and businesses.

“Insurance is one of those,” says Coppel. “Today the experience is pretty poor because most insurance companies have gone through channels and therefore they’re not consumer-centric. But also the underlying insurance product itself hasn’t really been geared for trust where they’ve created these products that have suited their own internal risk models not necessarily what the customers need. So there is a whole series of opportunities to reinvent the core underlying… risk and protection product to tailor it to the customer’s needs”.

Pressed to be more specific, he says that today many people are overinsured in the wrong products, such as phone insurance, and underinsured in what really matters, such as life insurance or critical illness insurance.

Another area Mosaic is eyeing up is SME financing, where the “attack vector” could be building a great accounting or invoicing product, and then by using the data passed through those services, offering more flexible business financing.

A common thread throughout a number of Mosaic’s existing portfolio — and just about any VC firm these days — is machine learning, and the Mosaic founders says they remain firm in their belief that the impact of machine learning will be pervasive across all industries and businesses. “We’ve gone deep into machine learning and machine intelligence-based businesses,” adds Levene. “Obviously there’s the investment in EF… that, if you like, is an index of that whole sector. At least half a dozen of the portfolio have a strong machine learning vector as to how they are attacking a particular vertical”.

On that note — and given that AI is an area where Europe and the U.K. in particular excels — I turn the topic to Brexit and ask the pair what they make of the current Brexit mess (actually, I used a far less polite word).

“Entrepreneurs at this point still don’t understand what Brexit means,” says Coppel. “It hasn’t come to fruition and most entrepreneurs are focused on the next week, the next month, the next quarter, rather than what’s going to happen in a year and a half to the U.K. economy. That’s certainly true of the early-stage companies. [For] the later stage companies, there are some more significant decisions. It’s not easy to move hundreds of people around.

“We don’t really know what Brexit means yet and it obviously creates havoc for people who are trying to plan. But at this point we haven’t seen any evidence from entrepreneurs saying ‘I’m not going to start my company in London, I’m going to start my company in Barcelona or Berlin’ and we haven’t seen companies move from London to the continent because of Brexit. Could we see that in six months from now? Possibly”.

Adds Levene, less optimistically: “The biggest single risk that we foresee is… if it changes the hiring market. If you don’t have access to 300 million people you can bring on your books tomorrow. If you have to go through a visa process that is cumbersome, that would stymie startups being able to hire talent quickly and scale up. So the capital follows talent and if we put up the walls around immigration then that’s going to be a problem”.

I suggest that, given the current trajectory and the music coming from the U.K. government, whatever the immigration mechanism put in place post-Brexit, it won’t be as optimal for U.K. startups as the status quo. Levene doesn’t refute my logic. “It’s shooting ourselves in the foot,” he says, “and it’s not just in tech but I think it’s also going to be in other verticals… So I think the government is gonna have a reckoning if they create friction for hiring, not just in tech but in many other industries”.

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