DSA: Direct Selling and the Virtual Push because of COVID

“ Like most people, direct selling executives are crossing out travel and large in-person gatherings from their calendars. For an industry known for its relational appeal, eliminating the face-to-face factor should be crushing. But instead, many executives are reporting that they feel more connected to their teams than ever before and are experiencing record engagement.”

“I’ve been involved in more field events in the last two months than I have been since I started the company in 2014,” says MONAT President Stuart MacMillan. Connecting virtually has become part of the daily workflow for MacMillan and many direct selling executives like him, as their teams and distributors take part in trainings while experiencing the benefits of connecting from home for both small- and large-scale events. “I still don’t believe there’s any replacement for face-to-face, and our people are itching to get back together—both employees and the field,” MacMillan says. “But I think what we’ve learned is that between those opportunities to get together, there are better ways to do this.”

Increasing Engagement with Function and Fun

This shift to virtual has opened the event doors wider, allowing people who would normally be limited by family obligations or financial flexibility to participate. For SeneGence Founder and CEO Joni Rogers-Kante, virtual events have drastically impacted the company’s attendance numbers. “Only a percentage of distributors go to our events, and ours was never a huge percentage,” Rogers-Kante says. “But we have five times more distributors than we have ever had at a single seminar because it was online, and they just got to sit down and login.”

The SeneGence virtual event sought to emulate a lot of the function—as well as fun—of a live event by passing out virtual awards that instantly appeared across social media channels as names were announced, conducting drawings and shipping prizes to distributors’ houses. While their next company-wide in-person event has been postponed, the SeneGence team is already implementing plans for a conference that will take place in Tulsa. “We think it will be the largest event we’ve ever had because people are so excited to get back together, and we have so many new distributors who can’t wait to actually physically show up at a SeneGence event. We just know it’s going to blow everything we’ve done out of the water.”

“We have five times more distributors than we have ever had at a single seminar because it was online, and they just got to sit down and login.”—Joni Rogers-Kante, SeneGence Founder & CEO

10 Cents on the Dollar, 10 Times the Reach

Twenty-four hours after a recent Mannatech virtual live event, the entire 12-hour event was available for replay. The 6,500 unique visitors, representing a ballpark of 8,000 to 12,000 viewers who watched the virtual event live, quickly multiplied as people shared the content and participated after the event had ended. A traditional Mannatech event hosts 1,200 to 1,500 people.

“For one-tenth of the expense, we were able to connect with six to ten times the number of people we would have connected with,” says Mannatech CEO and President Al Bala. And although event product sales were one-third of the normal amount, Bala says it was offset by the savings in product transport to the event and the convenience of shipping it directly to consumers’ homes. “It was more efficient and definitely more profitable sales than we would have had normally.”

“Even though we aren’t all together, we see you!”

“Going virtual” has a simple ring to it, but executives in the driver’s seat know the challenging behind-the-scenes experience of sifting through broadcasting options and platforms. Arbonne, who planned to launch 13 new products at their live convention this year, suddenly had only a fraction of their usual preparation time to devise communication strategies that would build excitement while playing well through the screen. Social media, which has always assumed a role at Arbonne events, was now critical, and the company leaned hard into these social integrations. To allow the executive team space to focus on engaging with attendees through the chat function, much of the content was prerecorded.

“Virtual GTC 2020 was created in about four weeks, and because of the incredibly pressing deadline, we absolutely learned as we went,” says Arbonne Senior Director of Communications Kristen Gruber. Gruber’s social media team developed teasers, quizzes and other interactive content that posted throughout the event. “This provided a level of engagement to our audience to really say, ‘Even though we aren’t all together, we see you!’”

Despite the fog of uncertainty during the first few weeks of the stay at home orders, LegalShield dove headfirst into creating virtual experiences and may have been the first direct sales company in North America to pivot to an entirely live-streamed international convention on April 4. When it became clear that their planned live event would not take place, the company transformed the auditorium in their Oklahoma headquarters into a full studio with only three weeks’ lead time. From there, they offered 16 hours of training content and recognition from over 40 field leaders and live hosts to more than 10,000 viewers. In addition, more than 5,000 associates joined their two-day Zoom Breakout Trainings before the larger event.

“For one-tenth of the expense, we were able to connect with six to ten times the number of people we would have connected with.”— Mannatech CEO & President Al Bala.

“Our field leaders are extremely creative in using Zoom as a recruiting and training platform,” says LegalShield Network Division President Don Thompson. “They use breakout rooms to host associates and their guests after a presentation for a Q&A session and for associate interaction.”

To not only survive, but thrive in this unprecedented environment, LegalShield’s CEO Jeff Bell has cast a vision for the company as a “digital disruptor” who uses technology to fulfill their company’s mission. The focus for the company is not on their limitations, but rather on how they can innovate and improve and use the tools available to spread their message and keep the field engaged and excited. “We are not at the level of Netflix or CBS,” Bell says, “but we are getting smarter and more successful in producing engaging content.”

As companies expand their live-streams to their international markets, the existing cultural and language barriers will have to be considered. Elepreneurs Chief Impact Officer Garrett McGrath, who also serves as President of the Association of Network Marketing Professionals, is watching as these virtual events begin to take shape on a global, multi-lingual scale. Although these broader events are more complex, McGrath is encouraged by the existing platforms that can do the heavy lifting for the direct sales industry.

Vimeo, a tool the ANMP relies on for its broadcasts, is paired with remote translators who use the Interactio app—which McGrath describes as a flawless application—to tap into the livestream and recreate the content in their listeners’ language.

“All you have to have is a good originating broadcast quality, and that becomes the place from where everybody views the actual convention, even though we’re bringing people in from all over the world,” McGrath says.

Caution: Challenges Ahead

Everyone is more than eager to get back to normal and industry leaders are at the front of the line, hurriedly trying to recreate their office environment from thousands of satellite home offices scattered across the globe where their leaders live and now work. But as the world has quickly discovered, working separately but together has come with its own set of unique challenges, and large virtual events are not immune to these foibles.

Security has been a hot topic for Zoom users (LegalShield reported instances of “Zoom Bombers” during their first few training sessions before password protections halted any further disruptions), but for other, more complex broadcasting platforms, hacking isn’t as much of a concern. The security concern, according to Katapult Events President Erik Johnson, should be privacy. “I wouldn’t put anything out on a stream that you wouldn’t want the world to see,” Johnson says. “Someone at home is likely recording it whether you want them to or not, and it’ll be on YouTube by the end of the day.” For companies who live and die by FTC compliance, it’s a stern warning for leaders. Even if a distributor thinks they’re in a private virtual room with only top-tier leaders, there is great potential that their words will become public.

“Our field leaders are extremely creative in using Zoom as a recruiting and training platform. They use breakout rooms to host associates and their guests after a presentation for a Q&A session and for associate interaction.”— LegalShield Network Division President Don Thompson.

There will also be a fluency issue for older distributors who aren’t used to virtual interactions and for whom these new changes will require a steep learning curve. “I feel sorry for companies that are older and already have their culture set in stone because they’re going to have to switch at some point to this,” RevitalU CEO Andrew McWilliams says.

Even though virtual events are notoriously less expensive than their in-person counterparts, going too cheap can be very obvious. “A lot of people think they can just hop on Zoom and be fine,” says Johnson, who now produces SeneGence’s virtual events. The result of a frugal presentation, however, is fuzzy resolution, glitchy streaming and a visible mouse pointer on shared screens—not the high-quality presentation multimillion- and multibillion-dollar brands should attach their names to.

For the April SeneGence virtual event, Johnson utilized Vimeo for live streaming at the Enterprise level and set up studios at the Oklahoma and California SeneGence offices. With his crew and all of their gear at both locations, they connected the two offices live on camera for a high def broadcast that looked like prime time tv.

As physical events reemerge in the months to come, Johnson warns that virtual events should never be just a recorded version of the live event. Instead, he encourages leaders to plan for physical and virtual hybrids. For example, his crew is building a side stage that is reminiscent of the ESPN Sports Desk for the host of the virtual watch party at one of his client’s upcoming in-person events. Even though one large event will be happening, two different audiences with different attention spans will be watching. By having a dedicated host, he’ll be able to accommodate both.

Facebook Live Fright

As leaders who are used to delivering speeches from stages in loud rooms begin broadcasting from their kitchen table or home office to an audience they can’t see, they’re discovering that stage fright and Facebook Live fright are two different fears and require two different skill sets.

McGrath described his feelings about hosting an eight-hour live event as somewhere between nerve-wracking and exciting. He and wife Sylvia, Elepreneurs Chief Experience Officer, introduced live speakers and announced prerecorded segments and then watched comments and emojis unfold in real-time over an eight-hour stretch.

The stamina required to create these engaging content segments back-to-back for that length of time is similar to expecting sprints in the middle of a marathon. “The biggest concern you always have is: can you keep people’s attention for 12 and a half hours?” Bala says.

But it’s not just the audience’s attention that leaders are concerned about. “I don’t think you can underestimate what it does to the speaker’s energy to talk to a crowd,” Bala says. “When you’re a speaker, it engages you at a different level. You can’t replicate that virtually.”

An Attention Shift

Change can be a dirty word in an industry rooted in tradition, and that’s why McWilliams is choosing to embrace this time of disruption. As people readily accept digital platforms out of necessity, McWilliams says this temporary shift to virtual will now be permanent for his young organization. “I’m never going back,” he says. “It has been the most cost-effective thing we’ve ever done.” In April, RevitalU experienced double-digit percentage growth over March. After their first major virtual event on May 2, the company was up almost 55 percent over April by May 7. “It does not feel like a blip on a radar screen,” he says. “What it feels like is a shift of attention.”

These live virtual events with openly visible comment boxes bring with them a lack of control, but the effect, McGrath says, is unparalleled. “We were very aware that people don’t want a presentation; they want a conversation,” he says. “There’s a risk with a conversation because you don’t know what the other person is going to say, but that’s why people show up: because it hasn’t gone through the corporate whitewash and hasn’t been overly sanitized. It’s spontaneous and real.”

“We were very aware that people don’t want a presentation; they want a conversation.”– Garrett McGrath, Elepreneurs Chief Experience Officer

In the short term, physical events aren’t possible, but even when the restrictions from the global pandemic are lifted, some executives are expecting a slow return as people remain gun-shy about close social interaction and even handshakes. McGrath says the question of when things will go back to normal is the wrong question. “The real question is, between now and then, can we document a plan that people can rely on as proven to work today?”

Is Virtual Really a Success?

There is no industry-wide metric for success when it comes to this new switch to virtual. Still, as many leaders face pent up demand and anxiety swirling around the new normal that has been thrust upon them, the measurement for success will depend upon each company’s specific goals and missions.

For affiliate-focused companies, comment engagement on a Facebook Live event could provide a gauge for distributor reach. Many executives are now reporting a sharp increase in sales during and after virtual events—when distributors would usually be socializing or traveling home—and are using that as their new benchmark for success.

Virtual can’t mimic the adrenaline rush of a packed arena, but industry leaders are approaching this new playing field with cautious optimism. For now, there is convincing emerging data that pivoting to virtual is doing little to harm the health of direct selling companies, and might actually be making a once-in-a-lifetime paradigm shift that offers a glimpse into where the future of the industry might be headed.

“This is here to stay,” Bala says. “It’s just going to become another tool in our toolbox to create that engagement with our associates and for associates to create engagement among themselves.” DSN

VirBELA: The New Virtual Headquarters

Virtual events may be booming, but it will be finding ways to digitally recreate the ordinary daily interactions that will be key for direct selling to weather this storm of isolation and uncertainty. RevitalU has found its solution through VirBELA, a technology platform that allows companies to create a virtual headquarters. With VirBELA, people can come together formally for events, like a conference room where they’ll hear keynote speakers, as well as informally, like in virtual hallways between sessions where they can start up casual conversations.

Through avatars and multi-dimensional rooms, users can interact digitally in a personal way that doesn’t create the Zoom fatigue that comes with endless video chats. “It gives you autonomy to interact with whom you want to interact with and go where you want to go,” says VirBELA Founder and President Alex Howland, Ph.D. “When you read a book, you’re not paying attention to the black and white words or pages; you’re getting immersed into the book. The same thing happens with VirBELA. Your brain starts to feel like you’re physically in the room with colleagues.

Glenn Sanford, eXp Realty Founder and CEO, has been using VirBELA as his company’s virtual campus since 2016. During that time, he grew his number of agents from 900 to 29,000 from the virtual headquarters that he mans from the casita over his garage. In April of this year, his success with the virtual platform led him to join the VirBELA team as the company’s Chief Strategy Officer so that he could extend his knowledge and experience with simulated campuses to other business leaders navigating these unprecedented waters.

Sanford offered advice to McWilliams, one of the newest CEOs to become an adopter of the VirBELA technology, by explaining that the simulated campus will only work if McWilliams insists that people meet him in his virtual Planet RevitalU office, rather than picking up the phone. “We have an office, and I don’t care if it opens back up,” McWilliams says. “We’re going to make the physical office voluntary. For our business practices and working together, it’s going to be done online.”

Virtual Event Tips

Take your virtual event to the next level with these tips from production expert and consultant to the direct selling industry, Erik Johnson of Katapult Events.

“How good your first event is will determine if they buy your next.” — Erik Johnson, Katapult Events President

Forget Zoom. Use Vimeo to live stream.

Prerecording some content eliminates the potential for user error, streamlines transitions and trims the boring out of stories.

Use permissions to put events and event extras behind paywalls or passwords. Erik uses Phinkific.com to preserve special VIP treatments, like a Q&A with the keynote speaker, for specific distributor ranks and above.

Hire a professional. Picture-in-picture, title animation and HD screen shares matter.

Show others what they’re missing. Even if you’re charging for a virtual event, share a short segment onto Facebook Live for things like new product announcements. At the end of the segment, offer viewers the opportunity to buy access to the rest of the event. It’s a double bang for your production buck and a quick upsell.

Everything has to be faster. What might have taken you four minutes to say on a live stage, should take you 90 seconds when speaking to a virtual audience.

Shoot with two cameras. A simple wide shot and a close up will give your broadcast movement and will be more likely to hold attention.

A high-quality mic is just as important as good video. If they can’t hear you well, they will leave.

Don’t be afraid to hire an outside emcee. Professional talent can take your event from stagnant to funny, drive the energy of the show, and be in charge of throwing it to different hosts—chief executives, distributors—to keep the show moving.

Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. Get rid of the extra stuttering and “um” sounds and give your team the chance to feel the flow of the event.

Double-dip your filming days. When broadcasting virtual events, you’ll likely have the members of your executive teams and an elaborate, staffed studio all in one place. Use this opportunity to film upcoming product launches, expand your expert interviews and update your opportunity presentation.

Five Ways to Simplify Your Pivot to Virtual

Don’t confuse virtual with automated. Even though there are no smoke machines and spotlights, this is not a set-it-and-forget-it type of environment. Building an interactive experience is key to getting virtual events right.

Prepare your team. Expect worst-case scenarios and plan how they’ll be addressed on the spot to protect your brand.

Choose your comment comfort level. Instantly visible, unfiltered feedback may complement the tone of a keynote address, or it might exacerbate the awkwardness of lackluster attendance. Pick an audience participation level that matches the event vibe.

Tap into existing partner platforms. Seamlessly charge registration for large events and automatically capture potential customer contact information. (Eventbrite, PayPal, Pardot and HubSpot are good leads for these functions)

Deliver an in-person experience. Pick two or three elements of your usual in-person events that can be creatively replicated while apart. If distributors have come to expect a lavish lunch break at events, send restaurant or food delivery gift cards to registrants ahead of time. These small gestures will build community while making a memorable impact.

Ready Player Two — Opening Cutscene & Chapter 0

Hello again.

It’s been a while. I haven’t been active on this blog since, fittingly enough, Ready Player One. I was going to do this sooner—even had an alarm set up and everything—but then, it turns out, I’m feeling so much negativity about the world in general that a book just pales in comparison.

Seriously, I had to scrap this post’s entire intro because it’s not even 2020 anymore as I write this. And you know, maybe that’s for the best. I’m not really in the mood for doom and gloom and bitching anymore. I uninstalled Twitter from my phone a while back, I’ve been doing good at my daily writing sprints, my biggest fanfic project concluded on a positive note from people I didn’t even realize had been following it for years.

So I don’t know what this is going to be like. My commentary, I mean; I’ve heard echoes of what the book is like, so I’m not expecting a surprise there.

The book opens right after the end of Ready Player One, in a “Cutscene” where Wade recounts to us what happened after he won Halliday’s contest. It also assumes you remember exactly who the main characters of the book are, which is a bold move for a sequel that came out almost a decade after the original.

Technically, I could just look up the details I’m fuzzy about. But also, I think it’s more authentic if I don’t. I trust my memory enough that if I’m wrong, it’ll be in subtle enough ways that it’ll almost be a private jokes between all of us. An “if you know, you know” sort of error system. And I don’t think there’s anything more true to the spirit of this book than that.

Shoto had flown back home to Japan to take over operations at GSS’s Hokkaido division.

So Wade starts his tenure with nepotism. Wasn’t Shoto really young? Why is he qualified to run anything?

Aech was enjoying an extended vacation in Senegal, a country she’d dreamed of visiting her whole life, because her ancestors had come from there.

You know what, I’m not touching “send the token black character back to Africa.” This isn’t my lane.

And Samantha had flown back to Vancouver to pack up her belongings and say goodbye to her grandmother, Evelyn.

Why is she saying goodbye? Why, she’s moving to Columbus to be with Wade, of course! It’s not like there was anything else in her life. Was there? And why isn’t she referred to as Art3mis? I’m pretty sure Wade found out all of their offline names in the last book, and the inconsistency mildly bothers me.

These three sentences are back to back, by the way. Someone—I forget who—once described Ready Player One as a book that’s fun to write a wiki about, because it’s got fun concepts to summarize about until you realize that all the emotional connective tissue you need to turn a list of things into a story is missing, and that’s roughly how this first page feels.

Hell, the first line of the book is Wade telling us he remained offline for nine whole days after winning the contest, but by the end of the second paragraph we’re already to him logging back into the OASIS to "distract himself from [his and Samantha’s] reunion.

I’ll give Ernest Cline one thing: it feels like he wrote this opening nine days after the first book and did about as much maturing as a teenage boy would do between the two books.

Way more time is spent describing Wade’s OASIS rig, or the in-game planet where the climax of the last book happened, than anything else in this introduction. He is immediately greeted by a crowd of adoring fans who have been waiting over a week for him to come back in the game, because they’re all grateful that our protagonist and his friends restored their avatars after they were annihilated by the Sixers.

You’d think the adoring fans would serve some kind of purpose, or that something would happen, but no. Wade immediately goes “ew, people” and teleports away, since he essentially has ultimate powers within the game. With a caveat: the powers are actually coming from the Robes of Anorak he’s wearing, and I’m mentioning that in the hopes that it will pay off sometime in the book’s future, assuming Cline at least learned to do that. But still, let’s not skip too fast the fact that we introduced that crowd of adoring fans for no other purpose than to tell us they’re out there, because it fits right in with the last book’s attempts at saying as little as humanly possible in as many words as possible.

Anyway, Wade went back into Anorak’s study, where he arbitrarily checks out the Easter Egg he got at the end of the last book, and finds an inscription on it. I was dreading another riddle, but no, it’s just straight-up instructions to a vault in the GSS archives, so Wade logs off and goes to check it out.

Of course Halliday had put [the archives] [on the 13th floor]. In one of his favorite TV shows, Max Headroom, Network 23’s hidden research-and-development lab was located on the thirteenth floor. And The Thirteenth Floor was also the title of an old sci-fi film about virtual reality, released in 1999, right on the heels of both The Matrix and eXistenZ.

I’m equally shocked that it took two whole pages (on my ereader) to get to the first slew of references, and that one of these references is from 1999. I didn’t know we were allowed to think of anything that isn’t the 80s. Speaking of which, I’ll spare you the whole paragraph, but the book does feel the need to explain why it’s vault 42.

Inside the vault, there’s another egg containing a super-fancy and advanced OASIS headset. The egg also has a video monitor that plays a video message from James Halliday shortly before his death.

But despite his condition, he hadn’t used his OASIS avatar to record this message like he had with Anorak’s Invitation. For some reason, he’d chosen to appear in the flesh this time, under the brutal, unforgiving light of reality.

That oh-so-important message? An infodump about the headset’s working. He called it an OASIS Neural Interface, ONI for short. It basically lets you experience the OASIS through all your senses with sensory input just like the real thing, you know, that thing Wade had to get a fancy suit and massive rig to do in the first book. And yes, Wade does spend a paragraph or two comparing it to other works of science fiction. Of course he does.

More importantly, it also records all the sensory input into a separate file, which can then be replayed over to re-experience said sensations, or live someone else’s experiences. Halliday tries to frame it as a tool to generate communication and empathy, seemingly all without acknowledging the potential creepiness of that. But hey. Who knows. Maybe that’s because this is the setup stage, and it’ll pay off eventually.

I also wondered about the name Halliday had chosen for his invention. I’d seen enough anime to know that oni was also a Japanese word for a giant horned demon from the pits of hell.

Add “reducing Japan to anime” to the list of things the book has failed to improve upon. By the way, the narration insisted on spelling out ONI letter by letter earlier, so it’s weird to make that link now. It’s also just kind of inelegant to just tell us “this is the symbolism behind the name”, but that’s just the sort of thing I’ve come to expect from this book.

Anyway, the reason Halliday kept this for his successor to find is he wants Wade to test out the technology and decide if humanity is ready for it. Why Halliday thinks the most glorified pop culture trivia / video game competition qualifies you for such a decision should be a problem, but sadly, a lot of billionaires have said and done a lot of dumb and eerily similar things in the past few years since I read Ready Player One, so actually, I can’t fault the book for that one. Tragically, our fates really are in the hands of people who should rightfully be cartoon villains.

To his credit, Wade does question Halliday’s motives in keeping this under wraps at all rather than releasing it himself. So hey, maybe it really is setting something up.

Wade goes back to his office with the ONI, and we’re treated with this lovely piece of narration:

I was grateful that Samantha wasn’t there. I didn’t want to give her the opportunity to talk me out of testing the ONI. Because I was worried she might try to, and if she did, she would’ve succeeded. (I’d recently discovered that when you’re madly in love with someone they can persuade you to do pretty much anything.)

There’s a lot to unpack about the implications this has for their relationship, but it’s way too early in the book for me to editorialize when one character hasn’t even been on the page yet. So I’ll just leave it here for the record. Hopefully you see the problem without me needing to point it out anyway. If not, feel free to hit my inbox.

So Wade, confident in the fact that Halliday would have warned him if there were any risks to using the ONI, decides to try it out. Even though he immediately follows up that statement with this:

According to the ONI documentation, forcibly removing the headset while it was in operation could severely damage the wearer’s brain and/or leave them in a permanent coma. So the titanium-reinforced safety bands made certain this couldn’t happen. I found this little detail comforting instead of unsettling. Riding in an automobile was risky, too, if you didn’t wear your seatbelt…

Wade. My dude. What the fuck is this simile. And why don’t you see that maybe a machine where you’re forcibly trapping yourself inside a virtual reality might be dangerous? Hell, when I said this was setting something up, I was expecting something vaguely interesting about the potential breach of privacy, or how you don’t need to literally walk in someone’s shoes to feel empathy for them, or anything substantial, but now I’m worried it’ll just end up as “man, sometimes science fiction machines will scramble your brain, isn’t that weird”?

Like, I don’t know, to me “it will put you in a coma” sounds like a good reason for Halliday not to release the ONI. Maybe we can still make it into a commentary on how corporations will sell stuff they know is directly harmful if it can make them a profit. Who knows.

The book waffles on about more risks, and the mechanics of how the ONI activates, and the warning disclaimer when it does turn on. Specifically, there’s a time limit of twelve consecutive hours, after which you’ll be automatically logged out, because yes, using the thing for too long can also cause brain damage.

Gregarious Simulation Systems will not be held responsible for any injuries caused by improper use of the OASIS Neural Interface.

See, now there’s the sort of thing that could be a source for commentary, but no, instead it’s thrown in there like it’s nothing and Wade glosses over the entire warning, and instead keep wondering why Halliday didn’t just release the ONI if even the safety disclaimers were in place.

By the way: this whole system has apparently gone through several independent human trials already, so I’m finding it hard to imagine that it’s actually a secret Halliday took to the grave as Wade says. Unless he also had everyone involved in those trials killed afterwards. Or maybe they all ended up with brain damage which rendered them incapable of talking about it.

And before you think I’m being unfair and maybe we’re supposed to understand that ourselves even if the protagonist doesn’t, I’ll remind you that the book didn’t trust its reader to know what the number 42 is a reference to, or what an oni is, even though I don’t think anyone in the target audience wouldn’t know about these two things.

There’s also the fact that, since this book came out, a video game did release with a scene intentionally designed to cause seizures, and it had countless fans flocking to defend it over that fact. So you’ll have to excuse me if I’m not assuming this book’s stance on whether your video game console causes brain damage and possibly coma is actually a bad thing, or just an acceptable risk.

Wade certainly seems to think so, since he agrees to the terms of service.

As the timestamp faded away, it was replaced by a short message, just three words long—the last thing I would see before I left the real world and entered the virtual one. But they weren’t the three words I was used to seeing. I—like every other ONI user to come—was greeted by a new message Halliday had created, to welcome those visitors who had adopted his new technology: READY PLAYER TWO

Well now that’s just silly.

And that’s our opening cutscene. And while this post is already long enough, I feel like I have to go on to chapter 0, because it feels like barely anything has happened so far. We didn’t even introduce any new character motivation or conflict, or a mystery to set the plot into motion, unless I’m supposed to think “why didn’t Halliday release this?” counts.

So Wade is back into the OASIS, and tells us about how much more real it all feels thanks to the ONI. I especially have to question how he can smell or taste anything—both of which he tells us he can. Like, who coded that? Did Halliday implement every single smell and taste himself, without anyone noticing? I hope you don’t need me to tell you that’s not typically how features are added to a large-scale video game.

If it feels like I’m nitpicking at the logic of the book, even though I always say I’m not very interested in that and would rather talk themes, it’s because I am, because there isn’t much else to discuss so far. Wade is happy about tasting virtual fruit. That’s the scene.

He tests out if he can feel pain, but no, the ONI reduces pain (a gunshot is translated as “a hard pinch”). On one hand, good, it would be a nightmare otherwise. On the other hand, I sort of hope there’s a setting for that in there, because otherwise, you just lost an entire clientele of kinksters.

This was it—the final, inevitable step in the evolution of videogames and virtual reality. The simulation had now become indistinguishable from real life.

Ah, now we have some juicy themes. Because if you think this is the inevitable final step in the evolution of video games, I invite you to look at literally any other art form, and what happened to them once hyperrealism became easy. Hint: they didn’t stop evolving, because it turns out realism isn’t the only goal one can achieve with art.

The realism discussion is not a new one in video games, mind you. In case you’re out of the loop: most of the big-budget blockbuster games (“AAA” as they’re known) are aiming for hyperrealism nowadays, and it results in development teams being forced to work in horrible conditions (known with the equally horrible euphemism of “crunch”). And, because it turns out that 1) humans working themselves to the bones isn’t healthy and 2) racing for realism with little to no vision besides it makes for poor creativity, a lot of these games come out as disappointments. Oh, there are hordes of Gamers™ who will defend them to the bitter end, but inevitably, in the months following release, the defense cools off while the criticism keeps on going, because the defense was a knee-jerk reaction born of a mix of people hyping themselves up for a game they hadn’t seen that much of yet, then attaching a part of their identity to liking that thing.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that this throwaway line feels like it comes from someone who is so out of touch as to accidentally support a world view that has in fact resulted in the biggest part of the industry stagnating artistically while growing more toxic for the people working in it. All the while, more and more independent games come out every year, proving that that realism is nowhere near the most important thing to making a game good, and that you can achieve much better results with a small team.

What I’m trying to say is: watch Jim Sterling’s channel, they’ve been bleeding out subscribers since they came out as nonbinary and make much better commentary on this topic than I could, and play Hades.

Back to the book, which sadly hasn’t become any more interesting since I decided to go on a tangent. Wade tests the ONI functions some more, all the while musing on how he knows Samantha would disapprove but that he doesn’t care, because what loving relationship doesn’t consist of that?

Among the functions, he tries the ONI files, the aforementioned recordings of someone else’s experiences. Specifically, a woman, which Wade tells us by telling us he suddenly has breasts, I suppose because Ernest Cline saw that subreddit about men writing women and went “I want a piece of that”. Oh, and also, those sample files were recorded from real people, in the real world. And yes, this goes exactly where you think it does.

SEX-M-F.oni, SEX-F-F.oni, and SEX-Nonbinary.oni

Look, I actually started writing a complaint about the boobs thing, and I deleted it, but now Cline is doing it on purpose. So, here goes: I saw a quote from this book on Twitter that looked like Cline attempting to make up for Wade’s casual transphobia in the first book. It wasn’t good, but it at least sounded like he was trying. So to immediately get this is…a lot? Let’s go for a lot.

I can almost excuse the use of “M” and “F”. You gotta name your files and you could excuse a non-exhaustive list. But…nonbinary? On one hand, I want to know what Cline means. On the other hand, I don’t think he can come up with an answer I’ll find satisfactory.

We are thankfully spared from finding out because Wade has just lost his virginity to Samantha a few days ago and he’s 1) not ready for this and 2) pretty sure this counts as cheating. You could make a case that this is more like porn, but I can see that this is more of a personal distinction anyway, and I can respect that one. Plus, you know. I don’t want to find out.

Wade logs off, and he can’t tell the difference between the OASIS with the ONI, and decides this will change the world. And then it’s back to the “how did he do it and keep it a secret”, even though Wade now finds out in the documentation that this had been in development for twenty-five years, basically since the OASIS launched. So it’s not really that it’s a secret, so much as there are a lot of people under very strict NDAs out there. Or, again, they’re all dead and/or otherwise incapacitated.

The ONI is the product of the Accessibility Research Lab, and Wade tells us about other stuff that the lab has produced using similar technology, mostly for medical purposes.

GSS patented each of the Accessibility Research Lab’s inventions, but Halliday never made any effort to profit from them. Instead, he set up a program to give these neuroprosthetic implants away, to any OASIS users who could benefit from them. GSS even subsidized the cost of their implant surgery.

Look, it’s nice that you want Halliday to be the good guy through and through, but it’s kind of hard to take any social commentary seriously when you think this is how a billionaire is made. Hell, even when he shut down the lab and fired its entire staff, he gave them a big enough severance package to set them for life. You know. Capitalism!

Hey, remember when Samantha said she was going to end world hunger if she won the contest, a thing billionaires right now could be doing, but aren’t, and she is now the co-owner of GSS? Yeah, I kind of hope the book remembers that too.

Speaking of the co-owners, the book just completely skips over the debate that our four main characters have over whether or not to release the ONI to the world. All we know is that they voted, and the vote goes in favor of releasing it. I mean, why have characters who could have opinions and feelings that could create a discussion? That might make us care about them! And who wants to care about characters in a story?

We put them on sale at the lowest possible price, to make sure as many people as possible could experience the OASIS Neural Interface for themselves.

What exactly is “the lowest possible price” here? Your company literally owns money. Like, OASIS money is real money. There is literally nothing stopping you from giving them away, especially because what you’re giving away is access to the platform you’re already running for a profit.

It’s almost like, even trying to make “good billionaires” out of its protagonists, the book can’t stop and actually make them significantly good.

Oh, I should mention. If you thought my Ready Player One review was angry at capitalism, wait until you see what the past couple years have done to me.

Anyway, once they his 7,777,777 simultaneous ONI users, a new riddle shows up on Halliday’s website. Because yep: our plot is apparently not about the implications of releasing the ONI, or any of the potential ideological discussions associated with that, it’s another riddle. Oh boy, do I wish I’d known that.

Seek the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul On the seven worlds where the Siren once played a role For each fragment my heir must pay a toll To once again make the Siren whole

I cannot wait to have the book give me just not enough information to solve the riddle until it’s solved by the book itself. That was so much fun the other…what was it, five times? Six times? Something like that. Wade already tells us the Siren might be Kira Morrow, because her alias was named after one of the sirens of Greek myth, so I can’t wait for that plot point to stick around. It was so fun to hear all about this man pining for another man’s wife the first time!

So this is the “Shard Riddle”. People are apparently convinced it was made by Wade and his crew as a publicity stunt, but of course, they know that that isn’t the case, and they also don’t know what that riddle is supposed to lead to. So, that’s great. We have a puzzle, and we also don’t know what the stakes are. All we know is that Wade wants to solve the puzzle essentially because it’s a challenge.

We skip over a year, and Wade tells us about how IOI collapses and gets absorbed by GSS because of the ONI’s launch. Remember IOI? They were the bad guys, so I guess we have to cheer?

GSS absorbed IOI and all of its assets, transforming us into an unstoppable megacorporation with a global monopoly on the world’s most popular entertainment, education, and communications platform.To celebrate, we released all of IOI’s indentured servants and forgave their outstanding debts.

On one hand: good for the slave. On the other hand: not gonna cheer for a monopoly, you guys.

Another year’s skip, and now 99% of the OASIS users are using the ONI, and yes, that includes trading their experiences with one another too. And I guess we’re still hand-waving any possible problems associated with that technology, because the technology is made so that all recordings must be shared and played through the OASIS.

This allowed us to weed out unsavory or illegal recordings before they could be shared with other users.

How? Do you know any of the problems associated with content moderations on the current platforms? I don’t know if I want to point to Youtube’s extremely faulty algorithm, Twitter’s complete apathy towards its Nazis, or Facebook doing moderation by making underpaid staff watch all potentially problematic content, which resulted in serious psychological damage to said staff.

You can’t just say that as if it solved everything. The chapter later says this is handled by an AI called “CenSoft”, and as an AI engineer myself, let me tell you: this is not going to work. Again: Youtube is the way it is for a reason.

It also let us maintain our monopoly on what was rapidly becoming the most popular form of entertainment in the history of the world.

And again, monopolies are totally a good thing as long as it’s in the right hands!

When I’m implying that the book does not care for any of these potential problems, I mean it. These enormous ethical issues are sidestepped in cold narratin, and we just keep going on introducing new slang that I hate, but have to quote so help you keep up.

“Sims” were recordings made inside the OASIS, and “Recs” were ONI recordings made in reality. Except that most kids no longer referred to it as “reality.” They called it “the Earl.” (A term derived from the initialism IRL.) And “Ito” was slang for “in the OASIS.” So Recs were recorded in the Earl, and Sims were created Ito.

There. You have been infodumped.

In the midst of all this (still extremely dry) exposition about how this changed media, we also get this tidbit:

You could take any drug, eat any kind of food, and have any kind of sex, without worrying about addiction, calories, or consequences.

Now, I was going to rant about this, but then, a page later, this happens and spares me the trouble:

I’d struggled with OASIS addiction before the ONI was released. Now logging on to the simulation was like mainlining some sort of chemically engineered superheroin.

So, you are aware that addiction isn’t just possible, but extremely facilitated by this. But sure, no worries! It’s perfectly safe! Because our protagonists are good.

Also, remember how the last book ended on a weak attempt at having a moral that maybe the real world is good, actually? Yeah, Wade tells us the ONI helps poor people live enjoyable lives in the OASIS. So. Fuck that message, I guess. It only applies if you’re the literal wealthiest man on Earth.

And me? All my dreams had come true. I’d gotten stupidly rich and absurdly famous. I’d fallen in love with my dream girl and she had fallen in love with me. Surely I was happy, right? Not so much, as this account will show.

Aside from the aforementioned returning OASIS affiction, there’s the Shard riddle that Wade is now obsessed with, to the point of offering a billion-dollar reward to anyone with information about the riddle’s answer.

I announced this reward with a stylized short film that I modeled after Anorak’s Invitation. I hoped it would seem like a lighthearted play on Halliday’s contest instead of a desperate cry for help. It seemed to work.

On one hand: good, Wade finally has a character flaw that the book actually acknowledges as a character flaw. I can work with that. On the other hand: this is all told to me in such a dispassionate that I am dreading how the book will handle this character flaw. Which is to say, I’m not expecting it to be very good.

(For a brief time, some of the younger, more idealistic shard hunters referred to themselves as “shunters” to differentiate themselves from their elder counterparts. But when everyone began to call them “sharters” instead, they changed their minds and started to call themselves gunters too. The moniker still fit. The Seven Shards were Easter eggs hidden by Halliday, and we were all hunting for them.)

Especially when this is something the narration feels is more important to tell me about.

Anyway, skip another year, and a gunter finally leads Wade to the First Shard. Solved that riddle, I guess. And wait, wasn’t part of why IOI was ~evil~ in the first book that they were paying people to find the Easter Egg for them? How is this any different, Wade?

And when I picked it up, I set in motion a series of events that would drastically alter the fate of the human race. As one of the only eyewitnesses to these historic events, I feel obligated to give my own written account of what occurred. So that future generations—if there are any—will have all the facts at their disposal when they decide how to judge my actions.

And that is the end of our chapter 0. And can I just say: what a mess already. I don’t think my snark can properly convey how utterly devoid of emotion this book’s writing is, and that alone is honestly more of a turn-off than anything else in the book so far. Even, knowing that I railed about it in the first book, I still feel newly unprepared for it. And it’s not like this double-prologue is making me hopeful that the book will show an ounce more critical thinking—or decent fucking humanity towards marginalized groups—as its predecessor.

So, that’s a lot to look forward to! For the sake of my sanity and schedule, don’t expect me to do such big posts every time. I’ll probably do one chapter a week from now on, if that. We’re in for a long ride, but I hope it’s worth it, at least.

The extreme efforts of broadcasting in Extreme E

(Motorsport news): Jenny has worked at AMW for almost three years now, and the company, along with North One, has created XE Studios, which is notable for delivering the championship’s broadcast product. She is part of the on-site production team of just 15 and works with producers and production staff, Extreme E teams and sponsors, technical partners alongside managing production schedules and budgets, permits and much, much more. 

We asked Jenny how a broadcast product like Extreme E is created from the most remote corners of the planet. She says, “the action is captured on-site using a mixture of operated cameras, fixed minicameras, point-of-view and several ENG cameras, which equates to 30 cameras, plus four onboards per car. More than 60 cameras are used in total. We capture a live race cut and non-live content around the races to send back to London via satellite. There are about 30 satellite feeds in total.”

 The London studio is an important structure of the broadcast and the hub of pulling the production together. Jenny explains, “the London studio takes the 30 or so feeds from the site and masters the programme. The team layers the camera angles, Command Centre point of views, replays, sporting graphics, augmented and virtual graphics, the presenter, commentators and so on to create a finished, formatted programme complete with pre-produced content ready for transmission to the world.”

 The plan of a remote broadcast wasn’t by accident, though. This is all part of Extreme E’s strategy to be as sustainable as possible. By creating the broadcast in this way, it reduces the number of people needed on site and, therefore, travel and carbon emissions. Currently there is a core technical team of around 25 required to set up and operate equipment on site, and a small production team of 15 including presenter Layla Anne Lee. The equipment itself fits into two sea containers which goes to each location via Extreme E’s ship the St. Helena. This also reduces the championship’s carbon footprint as sea freight is less carbon intensive than air freight.

 There are also remote teams in Amsterdam who manage the augmented reality graphics plus Al Kamel’s team in Barcelona who are involved in making the sporting graphics. All of this is then fed back to the team in London, which consists of around 15 people including the championship’s main commentators Jennie Gow and Andrew Coley.

But why are the commentators not on site with all the action? Jenny explains, “the programme is being made in London, so it makes sense to have the commentators close to the production team. Jennie and Andrew can throw to our reporter Layla and the guests on-site and dial in contributors from anywhere in the world, which included X44 Founder Lewis Hamilton in Senegal. One of the big advantages of the London hub is its connectivity and the delays involved are small, despite all the signals going backwards and forwards to location by satellite.”

 Also read: Mahindra Racing record fifth victory in Formula E

 Putting on a production like this from some of the remotest locations in the world is complicated and Jenny says, “from an operational point of view the harsh environments test the equipment and the team to the limit. However, the payoff is that the hard work puts the production in a great position to capture stunning locations anywhere in the world. Every setting comes with its own obstacles, from the canyons and sand of AlUla to the humidity and saltiness of the Senegalese coast  so the kit must be super resilient. The locations are so remote there is no option of sending footage back over fibre, so satellite connectivity is the only option.”

In Motorsports news the next challenge is Greenland at the end of August. Jenny says, “we are most looking forward to the expansiveness of the race location and the backdrop of the Russell Glacier. We are racing in an environment that is changing before our eyes, and a location that really hammers home the climate crisis to our viewers. This is by far the most remote location we will race in. It’s going to push the satellite equipment to the limit because the location is so far north, but it will look spectacular, and we couldn’t do it without the hugely talented team of producers, engineers, camera operators and drone operators.”

When asked what it is like to work on Extreme E, Jenny says, “it is truly incredible. I love to travel and to be able to see these places and call it work is amazing. I supported the Extreme E launch back in 2019 so it’s been a great experience watching it grow and go from strength-to-strength.”

Provide ao dai dance group COMPANY BLUE GLOBAL

Spanish, the stating goes, would be the loving tongue, but French, significantly, would be the language the whole world dances to. Its not the French of Maurice Chevalier or Edith Piaf; its Creole-ized French from places in which colonizers and emigrants ran into the African diaspora - from the Caribbean, in Africa and around the Louisiana bayou. It is the language for the dance tunes popping out of Paris studios along with for that homegrown, accordion-driven get together audio of Gulf Coastline dancehalls, and though the dialects alter from nation to region, the exhortation Allons dansez! is usually a common imperative.

This weekend, New Yorkers can dance to three from the worlds finest Afro-French bands. Les Quatre Etoiles, an alliance of four top rated Zairian musicians now based in Paris, are going to be at Kilimanjaro tonight; Tabou Combo, the major Haitian band (although its now based in Brooklyn), will return to S.O.B.s tomorrow, and Nathan plus the Zydeco Cha-Chas, from Lafayette, La., is going to be at Tramps tonight and tomorrow. Quatre Etoiles Les Quatre Etoiles Participate in soukous -rumba rhythms carried back to Africa, lightened up, and topped with cascading, intertwining, dizzyingly infectious guitar lines and sweetly harmonized vocals, usually in Lingala (a pan-tribal Zairian language) or French. Its 4 co-leaders experienced good individual reputations each time a document producer persuaded them to band together in Paris in 1983. Nyboma, a singer, were primary his very own band due to the fact 1973, and had collaborated with Yet another primary Zairian band leader, Sam Mangwana; Syran Mbenza played guide guitar on Mr. Mangwanas Maria Tebbo, a pan-African hit, and worked consistently for a studio musician. Wuta May perhaps experienced sung and composed tracks for eight years with Franco and O.K. Jazz, one of Zaires most critical and very long-working bands. And Bopol, who plays bass with Les Quatre Etoiles onstage, worked with Francos major rival, Tabu Ley and Orchestre Afrisa, then proven himself like a guitarist and bassist from the Paris studios. The band also provides a drummer from Guyana, Ti Paul, and two Zairian singers, Passy Jo and Jean Papi. Nyboma, the bands principal songwriter, said he knew he wished to sing from his early childhood. When Franco or Tabu Ley was actively playing, I'd do something just to hear them, he reported in French as a result of an interpreter. I'd personally stand outdoors the celebration, or climb trees, in an effort to see them. When he was 11 a long time previous, he commenced singing in the Roman Catholic Church mainly because I knew it was a fantastic destination to establish my voice. And by the point he was sixteen, twenty years in the past, he was discovered by Verckys, a major Zairian history producer, who manufactured hit just after hit soon after hit right up until nowadays, he claimed. Whilst soukous utilizes electrical guitars and lure drums, it has robust regular undercurrents. The fundamental rhythm, Nyboma stated, is named zebola, and it is actually employed by regular spiritualists in therapeutic ceremonies. If they have to Forged out evil spirits, he mentioned, the spiritualist or the head of the city wears a red outfit masking his whole body and performs particular dances, Which rhythm is in tune with zebola. The Zairian guitar style, whose rounded arpeggios at the moment are well known across West Africa and while in the Caribbean, also has regular roots. For most elements of Africa, Mr. Mbenza claimed, the motivating power in the communitys track and dance is definitely the drums. But in Zaire, it's got Traditionally been one sort or A further with the kalimba, a thumb piano that plinks out melodic designs that could be transferred to electric guitar. In Senegal, he continued, you can have an orchestra of drums of various dimensions. As well as in Zaire, you've got guide, rhythm and bass guitar. Whilst Les Quatre Etoiles will take precedence, its members explained, their personal careers proceed. Mr. Mbenza has been Energetic in Paris studios, lately dealing with Kassav, whose associates are from Guadeloupe and Martinique, and whose zouk, One more dance audio with Creole lyrics, has affinities with soukous. Once i do the job with Kassav, he mentioned, the inspiration might be zouk. But Each time the guitar comes in, it will be soukous. In Paris, everybody is seeking that soukous guitar line. The band will be to Engage in tonight at eleven:30 at Kilimanjaro, 531 West 19th Road (627-2333); admission is $15. Tabou Combo Tabou Combos new music, the compas direct, is a New Globe analogue of soukous - an insinuating midtempo lilt, with its own circular guitar traces. And due to the fact 1968, when Tabou Combo took its title, the team has long been carrying compas to the earth, maintaining the bounce of compas whilst borrowing Suggestions from around. In 1969, when Tabou Combo designed its standing by winning a national band contest, its edge arrived from The point that it drew on bossa novas and Wes Mongomerys jazz; these days, as Caribbean songs cross-pollinates, Tabou Combo dips into funk, merengue, even rap. The band doesnt Perform for Haitian people only, said Roger M. Eugene, a singer. We will play for virtually any nation. Now, we have tracks in French, English, Spanish, Creole and Lingala. Whenever you listen to the music for the first time, it's like youve never ever tasted sugar - and when you do, you cant Reside with out it. Tabou Combo began out being an eight-piece mini-jazz band; mini-jazz distinguished lesser teams, which used guitars, from older Haitian massive bands with horns. During the mid-seventies, if the band was listening to Earth, Wind and Fire, it decided to insert a four-piece horn area. We needed the American flavor, Mr. Eugene stated. Lately, a synthesizer has taken above some guitar lines. But even now, the music revolves throughout the compas defeat. Tabou Combo has just summed up its job having a Are living album, Reside au Zenith, on the band taking part in its hits for nine,000 individuals in Paris, lots of them stretching to dance-floor duration. (Its available by Mini Documents, Box 432, Baldwin, N.Y., 11510.) The band writes its new music as a cooperative. No one inside the band can say, Im the a person who built that tune, Mr. Eugene mentioned. We often give the credit history into the one particular who delivers the melody of the main a few traces, but then All people needs to carry anything to it, and in Haitian new music what can make the track is the middle - thats the place everybody memorizes the song. It is vital to us to work togther. Tabou Combo is to accomplish tomorrow at 10:thirty P.M. and 1 A.M. at S.O.B.s, 204 Varick Avenue (243-4940); admission is $17. Zydeco Cha-Chas Zydeco is really an all-American hybrid - waltzes and two-ways introduced to Louisiana by Celtic Acadians (who became Cajuns), additionally blues, rhythm-and-blues and whatsoever else Appears excellent to the dance ground. The new music rides around the wheeze of an accordion, the clatter of the frottoir or rubboard (a corrugated metallic vest, played which has a pair of spoons), and bluesy, resilient singing. Nathan Williams, who leads the Zydeco Cha-Chas, signifies zydecos younger technology - hes 26 a long time outdated, from the bayou city of St. Martinville, La. When I very first started out participating in, my wife didnt like it, he explained. She explained I had been far too youthful for zydeco. Now, she likes it. As a toddler, Mr. Williams accustomed to loaf around outdoors dances the place Clifton Chenier, the late king of zydeco, was undertaking; ultimately, Mr. Williamss older brother Sidney acquired him an accordion of his possess from An additional zydeco stalwart, Buckwheat, who also gave him classes. Whilst Doing work at his brothers advantage store, Sids A single-Quit in Lafayette, La., Nathan would vanish into your again room with his accordion, all day long lengthy, until eventually my brother said, Youre gonna make me split that accordion. But it had been an idle menace. Finally, Sidney Williams begun a club, El-Sid-Os, and installed his brothers band there on Friday evenings. We played for nothing every Friday evening right until the gang crafted up, Nathan Williams stated. Cung cấp nhóm múa Flamenco -Chas Engage in a crisp, modernized zydeco, with hints of rock and Jamaican ska rhythms, but Mr. Williams can be more likely to pump out aged-fashioned zydeco-and-rubboard duets. And he keeps an eye within the dance floor. You dont have as much Vitality if individuals arent dancing, he explained. When theyre dancing, they give you far more rhythm, and they cause you to funk it up. Nathan and also the Zydeco Cha-Chas are accomplishing tonight and tomorrow at eight:thirty and 11 P.M. and twelve:30 A.M. at Tramps, 45 West twenty first Avenue (727-7788). Admission is $twelve.

Hoops is an incredibly pop lark. Millions of spectators ticker backup games on TV and merely as many tooth root for their possess littler in high spirits educate teams and leagues. Everyone wants to be persona of a fetching team so if you are a player, you need to turn over your fans something to in truth hearten nigh. So Hera are more or less tips to service you ameliorate your biz and to nock approximately points for your squad and for those who are in that location to cheerfulness you on.

For whitening debauched dribbling, simply similar the pros, sole consumption your finger tips on the ballock. When you habituate wholly of your fingers, your dribbling testament be much slower. Shit this a separate of your day-after-day practice session Roger Sessions until it becomes endorsement nature to drool with solely the tips of your fingers. When you drip a basketball, you are alleged to usage your fingertips. Many multitude imagine you are purported to habit your palm, only this is wrong. Victimisation the tips of your fingers when you are dribble the nut wish solution in you existence able to carry more in a shorter sum of clip. Observe your take shape patch you dribbling the musket ball. Right dribbling proficiency involves enjoyment of the fingertips, non the medal of the script. This provides you with very much More nut assure. Jounce the Lucille Ball no higher than your shank and maintain the glob at your English quite than in face. Forever expect upwards, never at the primer. maillot senegal pas cher is non e'er requirement to drop the glob. In fact, you should alone drivel it when it is disunite of your bring. For instance, you bequeath privation to dribble the formal when you are stressful to bewilder the musket ball up the court, to mother in a post for passing, or to convey the Defense slay you. Forever think of that to be a avid basketball game player, you've got to be a cracking athlete number one. Lay as a lot sentence into conditioning your physical structure and increasing your survival as you do shooting and going. This volition meliorate your meet nether regular the virtually agonising circumstances, devising you an invaluable team up appendage. Do sprints in your practice drills. Basketball is a identical alive mutation for the stallion gage. And thither are multiplication in it when you ask to draw up your utmost bite of push for an highly debauched dash to the opposite go with of the woo. Your physical structure necessarily to be put-upon to sprinting, regular when worn come out. You only when achieve this done drill. Before, during and later on the season, manoeuvre come out games by yourself. Regular though you bring on a team, practicing only toilet be helpful. There's cypher improper with that. Playacting on your ain tin can grant you the take chances to lick on stranded areas of your gritty. Mold on your release throws or your pin moves. On that point is no famine of things you sack do. If posting up is what you're doing, you receive to birth expert footwork to sire open up for a jibe. You do, of course, require to be nigh the basket, just finding the properly blemish without acquiring plugged is all-important. In one case you're in position, you likewise demand to procure your blot. Proficient footwork is headstone to a adept basketball game halt. As the sure-enough expression goes, there is no "I" in team up. So don't direction only on nerve-racking to be the unmatchable to take a shit entirely the victorious points. Reach certain you are simply as set to help oneself your squad members mark their winning points as wellspring. Beingness a team up participant agency the all squad running together, from each one playing their have piece to win the back. Ascertain how to do a crossover voter if you project to be in monomania of the glob a muckle. Crossovers are when you motility the testicle from unmatchable script to the other spell dribbling. If done quickly, the Opposition won't be able to gravel the formal gone from you as you potty overhaul it to the face they are not on. As you comfortably know, basketball non simply involves the histrion only includes the fans and spectators as good. They are in that respect to jolly up you on and to suffer you. So totally players lack to be able to yield their fans something to brook up and embolden virtually. Everyone loves to keep a fetching squad. So retain the to a higher place tips in judgment when you are on the tribunal and you toilet service yield those fans a season they wish commemorate forever.

SAOTA Shortlisted for WAF 2021

SAOTA Shortlisted for WAF 2021, World Architecture Festival Awards News, Architects, Buildings

SAOTA Projects Shortlisted for WAF 2021

12 July 2021

SAOTA Projects Shortlisted for WAF 2021

La Reserve in Dakar, Senegal Two SAOTA designed projects – DDS in São Paulo, Brazil and La Reserve in Dakar, Senegal – have been shortlisted as finalists for the World Architecture Festival (WAF) Awards 2021.

DDS is SAOTA’s first project in Brazil and is shortlisted in the House – Future Project category. The design of the house is based on the idea that culture, landscape, architecture, interior design, furniture and art form a whole. The architectural precedents of Brazilian Modernism and particularly Paulista Brutalism are apparent in the design of the house.

DDS in São Paulo, Brazil

“Fundamental to the whole design is the notion of the experience of architecture. The building is not an object but rather a series of experiences. From the dramatic arrival sequence, the house sets up a playful engagement with the experience of space and landscape,” say SAOTA Director Greg Truen.

Shortlisted in the Leisure Led Development – Future Project category, La Reserve is a hotel resort situated on the outskirts of Dakar in a semi-arid landscape interspersed with Baobabs. The precise location of the Baobabs played an integral role in the masterplan design, along with the positioning of key buildings on-site to create a dynamic and poetic relationship between these colossal trees and the resultant architecture.

“All the buildings share a common thread in that the same themes underpin them, that being an architecture that is very closely associated with the site via the use of natural material,” explains Phillippe Fouché, Director at SAOTA. “This creates an architecture that is rooted in place, that not only respects its surroundings but elevates it and promotes a closer connection to the landscape.”

WAF is the world’s largest, live, inclusive, and interactive global architectural awards programme and festival held in Lisbon, Portugal, from 1-3 December this year.

SAOTA Projects Shortlisted for WAF 2021 image / information received 120721

Previously on e-architect:

World Architecture Festival Goes Virtual

image : Ben van Berkel of UNStudio and Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang World Architecture Festival Virtual

WAF 2020 Architecture Drawing Prize

World Architecture Festival Anton Markus Pasing, City in a box: paradox memories, overall winner of the 2019 Architecture Drawing Prize WAF 2020 Architecture Drawing Prize

WAF Awards Archive

World Architecture Festival 2019 Shortlist News World Architecture Festival 2019 Shortlist

2019 Architecture Drawing Prize Li Han, ‘The Samsara of Building No. 42 on Dirty Street’, overall winner of the 2018 Architecture Drawing Prize World Architecture Festival 2019 Drawing Prize

World Architecture Festival Awards 2018 Day One Winners

WAF Awards 2018

Stirling Prize

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REVEALED:Fulani People Brainwashed To Think All Of Nigeria Belongs To Them—Prof Akintoye

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REVEALED:Fulani People Brainwashed To Think All Of Nigeria Belongs To Them—Prof Akintoye

Well known Yoruba history specialist, Professor Banji Akintoye has clarified why he is in the battle for the actualisation of the autonomy of the Yoruba Nation.

Akintoye, who is the head of Ilana Omo Oodua, the umbrella body for Yoruba self-assurance gatherings, said his battles for the actualisation of the Oduduwa country was required by the need to save his kin from their misery.

Akintoye, who was a congressperson in the Second Republic expressed this in a virtual gathering with Dele Momodu’s Ovation Media on Wednesday night.

He talked about how herders were not rough in years past.

He said, “The herders were not brutal nor were they dangerous however the ones that have been sent since 2014 have been purposely inculcated and engaged to proceed to hurt individuals, as workers of a way of thinking that says ‘That we, Fulani, Allah has given us Nigeria and the entirety of Nigeria and it is our obligation to drive individuals off their territory and take the land’.

“That is the thing that we have been having, individuals call them herders however when I came and discovered individuals in Afenifere gatherings speaking interminably about the threat, I closed we need to discover what’s going on. We explored the emergency, I composed a paper, I think a day and a half, I went all over Nigeria attempting to comprehend and afterward I went to nations in West Africa, inside and outside Nigeria.

“I addressed Fulani people in places like Yewa, I addressed Fulani people in Upper Senegal and the Gambia in West Africa. Some famous people among the Fulani political elites concluded that the awful circumstance among the Fulani was a chance to release them as heroes against the remainder of Nigeria thus they were inculcated, intensely influenced to accept that God (Allah) has offered Nigeria to the Fulani and that that the Fulani should have simply held onto the land forcibly and that is the thing that we are encountering.

“One Aliu Gwazo wrote in January 2014, ‘In 1960, Allah through the British, gave us Nigeria to run and to do with however we see fit. We have been doing that since 1960 and we wish to proceed and in the event that anyone attempts to stop us, we will murder, mangle and obliterate and go Nigeria to the bloodiest disaster area in Africa’. That is the thing that they are doing, guaranteeing and attempting to accomplish.

“I was on the assignment of the individuals who visited Benue State Governor when the Fulani public came in huge number on January 1, 2018, they composed a letter to him, ‘Mr Governor, I see that you and your kin are grieving and they do mass entombments however what’s going on is a tad bit of what is coming to you and your offense before us is that your ethnic gatherings in your state accept that the land they are living on is theirs in light of the fact that they have been on it for millennia yet the land isn’t theirs, it has a place with us Fulanis and Allah has offered it to us and we will take it forcibly we have collected the cash and weapon for the fight. Also, we will keep battling for many years if that is the thing that it will take and we are not discussing the ethnic gatherings in your state alone however all over Nigeria, the Yoruba, Igbo, Kanuri and nothing can stop us and in the event that you figure the FG can secure you, you are misleading yourselves’.

“That is what’s going on; saying it is a conflict among ranchers and herders, is clearly false, it isn’t truth. At the point when I returned to Nigeria, I was away for a very long time, I never figured I would return to Nigeria. At the point when I returned 2015, I discovered our kin amidst all these. I approached addressing individuals that Yoruba is an extraordinary country.”

The educator likewise talked on why races ought not hold in the southwest district, he said, “The more we hold races under the 1999 constitution, the more we drag out our misery. The Fulani raiders are disclosing to us that they are in Southern Nigeria, Yoruba land, Igbo land, wherever on the grounds that the constitution permits that, so the more we hold races under 1999 constitution, the more we drag out our torment.

“I’m sure that on the off chance that it goes to a choice or some kind of casting a ballot, the Yoruba public will say in an extremely vast lion’s share that they don’t need political decision in their piece of Nigeria and those in the East and Middle Belt are saying something similar and take a gander at it, South and the Middle Belt represent 3/4 of the number of inhabitants in Nigeria so this isn’t the subject of the minority.

“In our sort of circumstance, it is reasonable to fall back on what different identities have turned to. Numerous identities that have attempted to lead their political race like the Catalonians in Spain, similar to the Scots in Britain. We figure it is smarter to convince the United Nations to come and run our choice, a similar way they did it in Sudan, I accept we can complete that.

“It is the pressing factor from 3/4 of the country that will squeeze the United Nations to run it, individuals running the nation may not need it yet the 66% will place such measure of pressing factor on the planet that a many individuals will concur with them and that will add up to a decision on the United Nations that will approve the UN to intervene. Process and method to expect as far as self-assurance

“We are setting up in an extremely solid manner, the hands of some significant individuals from this administration, basically significant individuals from the security chamber in this matter, we may likewise be going to court over certain pieces of the battle all set up to cause a circumstance where there will be no uncertainty that the United Nations needs to mediate.

“Joined Nations doesn’t decide to mediate in any circumstance all alone, the circumstance compresses the UN to intercede in any case thus we will be utilizing that information definitely.”

Talking on how some Yoruba lawmakers are purportedly getting ready for the 2023 decisions, Akintoye said, “They are heating up and there is nothing amiss with that except for they will before long find they will hit a stone very soon.”

The antiquarian added that the Yoruba country should be accomplished as there could be no other option in contrast to that.

“Yoruba should have their own country in light of a legitimate concern for mankind so they can bring improvement, flourishing and advancement to their kin once more, and I accept that it is a similar kind of deduction among the Igbo, Middle Belt and individuals of the South-South. There is no extensive alternative that will fulfill the mankind that we are trying to fulfill.”

𝘿𝙖𝙮 1: 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙎𝙩𝙖𝙩𝙚 𝙎𝙚𝙘𝙧𝙚𝙩𝙨:

𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟑 𝙀𝙡𝙚𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣: 𝙏𝙞𝙣𝙪𝙗𝙪 𝙤𝙧 𝙔𝙤𝙧𝙪𝙗𝙖 𝙉𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣.

Although we are far from Yorubaland, we remain Yoruba citizens and cannot, under the current circumstances, remain indifferent to the fate of our beautiful homeland.

In this regards, we would like to remind the Yoruba nation that in 1954 and as a result of the new constitution of Nigeria enacted into law, Victoria Island was excised from the Western Region of Nigeria to make it the Federal Capital of Nigeria. The Island, ceased to be the Federal Capital of Nigeria in 1976 as a result of the ingenuity of the Yoruba leaders of thought led by Awolowo who asked the Federal Government of Nigeria to move the capital to Abuja in order to stop the Ißo claim that they mass migrated to Lagos because it is the Federal Capital of Nigeria. Lagos Island was therefore the Federal Capital of Nigeria for only 22 years.

Since 1976, Abuja, the land of the Gwari people, has been made the federal capital of Nigeria. It remained the Federal Capital of Nigeria for 45 years and counting. The Yoruba nation has never lay any claim on Abuja. The Ißo nation therefore has no legal or moral right to migrate en masse to any area of Yorubaland because Abuja has since been the FCT.

However, we have on good authority that the SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service in England, also known as MI6, is using the IPOB members to stage a coordinated attack on Lagos. The #EndSARS demonstration in Lagos was coordinated by British MI6 to try to assassinate Bola Ahmed Tinubu, using IPOB members led by Nnamdi Kanu.

The ongoing actions of the IPOB’s Eastern Security Network in Iboland is a prelude to an attack in Lagos by IPOB members used by British MI6. The scheme is so obvious and one of the reasons why the government in England made a provision for asylum for members of the IPOB.

In 1994, the young Yoruba of this period seized control of the Yoruba ports in Lagos from the Fulani minority. But the English Royal Navy attacked our people, killed several of them, seized our ports from us and handed it back to the Fulani who are foreigners in Nigeria and working for the English Establishment in what is known as neocolonialism. The procedure is different this time under the guise of #EndSARS, but the result is the same -the continuous subjugation of the Yoruba nation.

The ongoing bombing of the police station and government establishments in Iboland is intended to keep the Yoruba people distracted from our clear will - the Oduduwa Republic.

The Yoruba Conservatives, led by the Yoruba-APC, believe that we can get the Oduduwa Republic by electing a full blooded Yoruba citizen in the person of Tinubu as the President of Nigeria through which we are going to get the Oduduwa Republic. However, the Yoruba liberals, led by the Yoruba-PDP, who are mainly half Yoruba, believe that the only way to get the Oduduwa Republic is to go through the United Nations. But rather than for the Yoruba liberals to continue to work with the UN to get us the Oduduwa Republic, they are more focus on attacking the Yoruba Conservatives’ approach of the using the presidency of Nigeria to bring home the bacon.

It is, therefore, very clear that the Yoruba liberals of the Yoruba-PDP are not really interested in the actualisation of the Oduduwa Republic, but working with the Yoruba’s enemies to stop Tinubu from getting the presidency of Nigeria for the good of our people. This approach of the Yoruba liberals in conjunction with the Ibo and Fulani is not a new approach to destroy the Yoruba leadership. The approach was used against Chief MKO Abiola which led to the annulment of his victory and assassination by the Ißo and the Fulani.

YYF is conscious of the fact that 63% of the current population in Yorubaland was born after 1999. They were born into degradation; never experienced a welfare system; have no sense of history; being raised in a dysfunctional society where ethnically motivated killings are prevalent; and above all, never being raised to think Yoruba first, but to see themselves first as Nigerians, which is a clog in the wheel of our progress as a people.

Even in our movement, not a single member of the Young Yoruba for Freedom’s executive, a movement of young Yoruba conservatives that is changing the course of history in Yorubaland, voted in the June 12 election of 1993 because we were all under the age of 18 and many of us have never been born. But, today, due to our lack of sense of history, we see the restlessness of Prof. Banji Akintoye and Sunday Igboho, as a new approach for realising the greatness of the Yoruba nation. This is not really the case. Prof. Banji Akintoye, Sunday Igboho and the Yoruba-PDP agitators for the Republic of Oduduwa, are working on the model of the ABN that led to the assassination of Abiola.

In a research authored by the Research Directorate of Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, on information about the Association for a Better Nigeria (ABN), published on May 1, 1994, clearly shows that the no election campaign of Prof. Banji Akintoye was from the play book of the ABN.

In 1991, the Ibrahim Babangida regime abolished all political parties and created the two national parties, the National Republican Convention (NRC) and the Social Democratic Party (SDP). Soon thereafter, the Association for Better Nigeria (ABN) was established in June 1993 with 25 million members.

In a report released on 19 April 1993, the International Press Services (IPS) noted that the ABN had held its first formal meeting in Lagos on 15 April 1993. The same source also reported that Jerry Okoro, an Ißo, was the national coordinator for ABN. The ABN's primary goal was to keep Ibrahim Babangida in power and to maintain the military administration that ruled Nigeria for so long.

The ABN demonstrated its determination to achieve its objective by putting up billboards in the Nigerian capital Abuja that carried the message "Four More Years," which means the military government should stay in power for another four years. The intensity of the ABN's pro-government campaigns led many observers to conclude that the federal military government was behind its activities.

The Research from Canada stated that the leadership of the ABN was basically a "one-man show" headed by Chief Arthur Nzeribe, an Ibo and Abimola Davies, a half-Yoruba and director of the association. The study noted that the ABN was not a popular group and was treated with disdain particularly by pro-democracy groups and most of the Nigerian press. Consequently, many of those who were associated with ABN kept it virtually secret. Research suggests that it is difficult to determine the full leadership or composition of the ABN.

In its tenacity to support the ongoing military regime, the ABN went to court to stop the June 1993 presidential election. The ABN's reason for demanding the injunction was that the leaders of the NRC and SDP were corrupt politicians.

Why did the ABN go to court to attempt to put an end to the June 1993 presidential election? It is because the opinion polls then showed that Abiola was going to win and they didn’t want him to win because he was a full blooded Yoruba man.

Prof. Banji Akintoye and Sunday Igboho are campaigning for a no election in the 2023 presidential election because they know that if Tinubu contests, he is likely to win and they do not want a full blooded Yoruba citizen as the president of Nigeria.

In the case of the ABN, it lost the case in court. There was a presidential election in June 1993. But after the elections, the ABN again went to court to stop the release of the election results. The Research from Canada stated that the current political impasse in Nigeria began at this point, when the government cancelled the results. According to the study, the ABN has always shown contempt for the return to civil government and campaigned for the maintenance of the military regime. Therefore, it goes without saying that the ABN was happy that its immediate goal was achieved when the results were cancelled.

The clear intention of the Yoruba liberals led by Prof. Banji Akintoye in a working relationship with the Ibo and Fulani is to prevent Tinubu from being elected President of Nigeria. They will stop at nothing until they are able to stop Tinubu from becoming the next President of Nigeria. The Yoruba Conservatives must now take the war to the door steps of the Yoruba Liberals.

I would like to begin with the first day of our campaign on the State Secrets as disclosed to the public by Ms. Modupe Onitiri-Abiola, the wife of late Chief MKO Abiola.

On 21 April 2021, Ms Modupe Onitiri-Abiola, the wife of the deceased MKO Abiola's, in an exclusive interview, provided state secrets about Nigeria and the Yoruba Nation. I will underscore this and share with you our conclusions on what she said.

But first, I want to thank her for her action to enlighten the Yoruba Nation, particularly its youth. She drew our attention to the most important enemy of the Yoruba nation, the British government, and blamed it for the murder of her husband, MKO Abiola, the first Yoruba elected President of Nigeria.

She also blamed the half-Yoruba and non-Yoruba masquerading as Yoruba who worked with the Fulani and Ibo and betrayed MKO Abiola. She increased the pace of our resolution to end the minority rule of the Fulani in Nigeria by clearly stating the obvious fact that the minority Fulani in Nigeria are foreigners from Senegal and the Gambia and should have no moral right or legal right to rule over the Yoruba people in Nigeria.

Importantly, she condemned the Ißo and openly rejected their assertion that Nigeria is One. One Nigeria, she says, is a fake and that Nigeria is not one, but a country of many nations. In addition, she condemned the Nigerian census as a fraud. She says that Kano, a state that was less than Lagos in 1967, and has since been divided into Kano and Jigawa, remains the state with the highest number of people because the census in Nigeria was a fraud. Obasanjo carried out the latest fraudulent census which gave Kano, the false number of people.

For a first of its kind, she condemned Babangida, a Muslim who vowed with the Quran that he would not betray MKO Abiola, but betrayed him. She reminded the Yoruba nation, particularly its Muslims population not to ever trust the Fulani because of the religion of Islam and that the Fulani are very deceitful people and not good Muslims.

And most importantly, she rejected the 1999 Constitution as any reasonable Yoruba citizen would have done and called it the foundation of our problem in Nigeria. Going forward, she stated that it is the tradition of the English to always used the military to take other peoples' wealth and that the Government in England had always used the Fulani to disrupt peace, unity and progress in Nigeria targeted at make Yorubaland poor and underdeveloped.

To be clear, not everything she said was correct. She was wrong to assert that only the Fulani people were responsible for the annulment of MKO Abiola’s election victory. Indeed, the Ißo obtained a black market judgment in court to have the election annulled. This was the basis upon which the Fulani annulled the elections.

And while she was correct that Nigeria is not one country, her statement about southern Nigeria as a unit was misleading. The reality is that we are not people of the north or the south; we are people of the North, the Centre, the West, the East and the South. The Hausa and Kanuri occupy the North; The Nupe, Tiv, Jukun and others occupy the Central; the Yoruba occupies the West; the Ißo occupies the East; the Edo, Ijaw, Uhrobo, Efik, Ibibio and others occupy the South.

She tended to support the audio Oduduwa Republic being championed by the Yoruba liberals and members of the Yoruba-PDP when she asserted erroneously that if we go back to the regional system of government, the Ißo and Fulani who used the military to destroyed the parliamentary system could mess up everything again.

Her fear is genuine. But what she doesn’t know is that under the restructuring arrangement we desire, the police, the military as well as immigration, customs, prison, judiciary, seaports, land borders, civil service and everything else will be devolved along the ethnic/linguistic lines and answerable to the government in each region. For instance, the Yoruba police and military will be under the command and control of the government in Yorubaland and personnel will be 100% Yoruba and government in Yorubaland could sign a military pact with the United States to provide an army in case the Fulani or the Ibo military attempt to take over the Federal Government of Nigeria as they did in 1966.

She championed a government of Yoruba unity. She wanted Yoruba-APC and Yoruba-PDP to form a Yoruba Government of National Unity. This goes against the provision of the Constitution of Western Nigeria proclaimed in 1951, but suspended by Ibo in 1966. The Constitution of Western Nigeria says that in the case of an emergency like war or the dissolution of Nigeria, the subsisting government takes over the governance of Yorubaland for five years. After five years, there will be an election or reappointment of the subsisting government for another five years if the emergency situation persists. So, there is no justification for a government of Yoruba unity. If Nigeria breaks up today, the Yoruba-APC will form the government in Yorubaland for the first five years because it has the majority of the elective posts across the Yoruba states as of today.

Ms Abiola was correct with her assertion that since the 1999 election conducted by Abdulsalam Abubakar, there has never been a free and fair election in Nigeria.

The 1999 elections were rigged by the Fulani in favour of Obasanjo, an Ißo. The 2003 elections were rigged by Obasanjo of the PDP. The 2007 elections were rigged by Obasanjo in favour of Yar'Adua and the PDP. The 2011 elections were free and fair and Jonathan won it. The 2015 elections were rigged by both the PDP as well as the APC. The 2019 elections were free and fair and Buhari won it.

In closing, we are excited about Ms. Abiola's remarks that it is the tradition of the English to always use the military to take the wealth of other peoples. This is what the Government in England has been doing to the Yoruba nation since the 60s using the minority Fulani to steal the wealth and resources of the Yoruba nation to build England while the Yoruba people remain poor and miserable.

Uncovering the atrocious plot to tarnish Adesina’s legacy at AfDB

Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, President, African Improvement Financial institution (AfDB)

By Pleasure Umoru

The African Improvement Financial institution (AfDB) is at present gearing up for one more management election. The present President, Mr. Akinwumi Adesina, is already coping with setbacks and a coup hell bent on eradicating him from workplace. This isn’t sudden, contemplating the truth that Adesina is operating for a second time period in workplace as an unopposed candidate at an annual common assembly scheduled to carry later in August. Just a few months in the past, an undercover ‘Group of Involved Workers Members,’ mentioned to have been hurriedly coupled collectively by some non-African shareholders filed a report towards the financial institution’s president, demanding an investigation into his governance, human sources, offers and administration.

The purported ‘sins’ of Adesina, Nigeria’s former agriculture minister, are uncommon. He’s being accused of ’Nigerianisation’ of the financial institution, particularly handing contracts to acquaintance and appointing family to strategic positions on the Abidjan-based lender; additionally, by simply granting strains of credit score to Nigerian firms; an allegation that was debunked by information on the financial institution’s web site, which confirmed that Senegal, Cameroon, Tanzania, Rwanda, Namibia and others are key beneficiaries of about 75 tasks price $64.5billion.

However a latest letter dated Could 22 and addressed to Niale Kaba, chairwoman of the financial institution’s board of governors from the US Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, rejected plans by the African Improvement Financial institution’s board to finish Adesina’s investigation and known as for an unbiased probe into allegations towards him.

Additionally, the ethics committee had discovered no proof to assist allegations of favouritism by Adesina. He was duly exonerated fully and the case was dismissed as a result of not one of the costs was substantiated by the “whistle-blowers”, of which some had been patently ridiculous. However Mnuchin mentioned the US Treasury, which occurs to be AfDB’s largest non-African shareholder, disagrees with the ethics committee findings that “completely exonerated” the president.

Recall that on March 13, a break-away group from the rank of petitioners registered a criticism towards a key non-African government director for allegedly deceptive and manipulating the members of the group towards Adesina. The group additional alleged that there have been extra severe and repeated violations of the code of conduct by this mentioned government director, which incorporates breaching the confidentiality necessities of the foundations and laws of the ethics committee. This he did, by sharing exhaustive studies of all discussions to 3rd events and likewise aligning with different whistle-blowers plotting towards Mr. Adesina.

Who precisely is that this nameless non-African government is, although? He goes by the identify, J. Steven Dowd, an American businessman who at present serves because the US Director within the financial institution. Confirmed sources revealed that he was appointed by David Malpass, the present World Financial institution president. Curiously, they each occur to be bosom childhood associates and had been finest males at one another’s weddings. Since his arrival on the financial institution in September 2017, he has finished the whole lot doable to tear down the repute and integrity of not simply Mr Adesina, however the entire establishment, for causes unbeknownst to many.

Whereas sure retailers have been fast to hyperlink Adesina’s travails to President Trump’s reported dislike of the continent, and his latest criticism of Tedros Adhanom, the African Director-Basic of the World Well being Organisation, dependable sources within the Oval Workplace have, nonetheless, affirmed that Mr. Adesina is within the President’s good books and is unaware of any plans to cease his re-election bid. It’s extra of an orchestrated marketing campaign geared toward tainting his legacy and commendable work to this point.

You will need to state that in 4 and a half years as AfDB President, Adesina’s achievements are legion and his daring reforms have helped repositioned the financial institution’s international affect and different excessive impression mission, thus accelerating improvement throughout the continent. It’s, nonetheless, stunning that any particular person or group would oppose his quest for continued management, as much as the purpose of unexpectedly cooking up allegations that query his integrity. Much more suspicious is the timing of those frivolous tussle, when it’s virtually inevitable that the financial institution’s president will reassume workplace for one more tenure.

The unproven allegations nonetheless, main figures reminiscent of Arunma Oteh, who as soon as served as Vice President answerable for the treasury on the World Financial institution and has years of labor expertise on the African Improvement Financial institution, have voiced assist for Adesina’s candidacy. Writing on her Twitter deal with on Monday, she described Adesina as ‘a person of integrity and an incredible chief.’ “He stays the very best man to guide Africa’s nice establishment for the subsequent 5 years,” she tweeted.

Sadly, the present scenario is an try by some key gamers in the usAdministration exterior of the White Home, to bully different nation states into accepting its place on this difficulty. Any right-thinking believer within the rule of regulation would take exception to the U.S. Treasury Secretary’s place. It’s hoped that the establishment will resist the bully tactic and shield the establishment from pointless and doubtlessly harmful company governance disaster. Africa wants AfDB. The AfDB wants Adesina too.

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Quelle année 2020 plein de rebondissements dites-moi, voici que le monde est confronté à une crise sanitaire sans précèdent, qui touche tous les pays et nous ramène à notre nature éphémère d’humain tous de passage. ‘Imagine the Conf’ 1′ car il y aura une série de trois (3) articles sur le sujet 😊.

Quand on sait que c’est via l’alimentation qu’a commencé à se propager ce virus, ça fait réfléchir sur nos modes de vie en général. Et ici je veux parler de tout ce qu’on observe actuellement le prix du baril qui chute, les voitures à l’arrêt, le vélo qui reprend sa place de leader, les métiers de l’ombre redorés. C’est une vraie remise en question mondiale qui s’opère actuellement, ce qui est dommage c’est qu’il faille attendre un virus pour que l’Homme redescende de son piédestal et se remette en question. M’enfin, ça c’est mon côté philosophe sur la vie.

Toutes nos habitudes d’humain libre et autonome sont bouleversées par l’établissement d’un confinement en France par exemple. Au début, j’étais anxieuse comme la plupart sur les réseaux, anxiété alimentée par les titres à sensation des chaines d’infos. Car je me laissais porter dans la spirale de masse des réseaux qui influent sans qu’on s’en rende compte sur notre humeur. Et au fur et a mesure j’ai pris du recul, je me suis recentrée pour me faire ma propre idée de ce confinement.

C’est en ce sens que j’ai nommé cet article ‘Imagine the Conf’ car tout est question d’imagination et de point de vue. Certes on doit rester chez nous pour la Santé de Tous mais si l’on y réfléchit bien c’est juste qu’on a la chance de pouvoir travailler de chez nous pour la plupart en Télétravail, on peut s’adonner a des passions qu’on n’avait jamais le temps de commencer. Et pour peu que vous ayez un balcon, jardin ou autre qui vous connecte à l’extérieur, installez-vous au soleil et imaginez vous a Bora Bora par exemple. Je voulais bannir le vélo aux prémices du conf’ mais je n’ai pas pu tenir ; surtout avec mes courses que je fais en début de mois et qui pèsent lourd. Le vélo est super pratique quand on a 2 paniers pour transporter ses courses. J’en profite pour redécouvrir Paris vide, avec moins de circulation et agréable, un vrai plaisir.

Il est vrai que c’est facile à dire mais on vit une période pas évidente psychologiquement, mais il faut tenir et pour ça heureusement qu’il y a les nouvelles technologies et les réseaux sociaux qui maintiennent un semblant de relationnel et d’échanges. Je suis une âme assez solitaire de manière générale, j’ai un concon restreint d’amis mais cette période m’a permis de renouer avec des amis perdus de vue ou qui vivent au Sénégal et ça fait du bien.  Imaginons, recréons du lien virtuel, épistolaire mais ne lâchons rien car dans la vie tout passe.

Je me fais déjà la liste des choses que je ferai au moment du déconfinement : entre autres Voyager ce qui m’a mené en France actuellement. J’ai ce besoin vital de voyager, de découvrir d’apprendre et cela fait un bout de temps que mes valises prennent la poussière a Paris. J’ai d’ailleurs créé une Chaine Youtube de Vlog Vélo Créasandart pour allier ma passion des Voyages au Sport et vous le partager.

J’avais promis de vous expliquer ce qu’est le Concept Créasandart que j’ai créé en 2010 lorsque j’ai choisi de partager mes passions. C’est simplement une contraction de Créa = Création Créer + Sand = Sandrine et Art = Ma vie.

© 

Je vous invite à me rejoindre sur ma chaine Youtube  Vlog Vélo Créasandart a vous abonner et surtout a laisser vos avis sous mes 2 vidéos déjà en ligne, je vous parlerai plus en détails du process créatif des vidéos dans un prochain article, d’ici la prenez soin de vous et fabriquez vos masques.

Je vous réserve 2 autres articles ‘Imagine the Conf’ très prochainement, laissez-moi votre avis sur la crise actuelle en commentaire, est ce que vous sortez a vélo, a pieds, quelle passion développez-vous, dites moi 😊

Sentiments –Bayi Pics – Copyright © SB

What a year 2020 full of twists tell me, here the world is facing an unprecedented health crisis that affects all countries and brings us back to our fleeting nature of human all passing.

When we know that it is through food that this virus began to spread, it makes us think about our lifestyles in general. And here I want to talk about all that we are currently observing the price of a falling barrel, the cars stopped, the bike returning to its leading position. It is a real global questioning that is taking place at the moment, what is unfortunate is that it is necessary to wait for a virus so that Man comes down from pedestal and questions himself. Finally, this is my philosopher side on life.

All our habits of free and autonomous humans are upset by the establishment of confinement in France for example. At first, I was anxious like most on the networks, anxiety fueled by the sensational headlines of the news channels. Because I let myself be carried in the mass spiral of the networks which influence without being aware of it on our mood. And as I took a step back, I refocused to get my own idea of ​​this confinement.

It is in this sense that I named this article ‘Imagine the Conf’ because it is all a question of imagination and point of view. Of course we have to stay at home for the Health of All but if we think about it it’s just that we are lucky to be able to work from home for the most part in Telework, we can indulge in passions that ‘we never had time to start. And as long as you have a balcony, garden or other that connects you to the outdoors, sit in the sun and imagine yourself in Bora Bora for example. I wanted to ban the bike at the beginnings of the conf ’but I could not hold out; especially with my shopping which I do at the beginning of the month and which weighs heavily. The bike is super practical when you have 2 baskets to carry your shopping. I take this opportunity to rediscover empty and pleasant Paris, a real pleasure.

It is true that it is easy to say but we are living in a period which is not obvious psychologically, but we have to hold on and for that fortunately there are new technologies and social networks which maintain a semblance of relationships and exchanges. I am a fairly lonely soul in general, I have a restricted number of friends but this period allowed me to reconnect with friends who are lost to follow up or who live in Senegal and it feels good. Let’s imagine, recreate the virtual, epistolary link but let go of nothing because in life everything goes.

I am already making a list of the things that I will do at the time of the deconfinement: among others Travellling what has led me to France now. I have this vital need to travel, to discover to learn and it has been a while since my suitcases take dust in Paris. I also created a YouTube channel of Vlog Vélo Créasandart to combine my passion for Travel with Sport and share it with you.

I promised to explain to you what the Créasandart Concept that I created in 2010 when I chose to share my passions. It is simply a contraction of Créa = Creation Create + Sand = Sandrine and Art = My life.

©

I invite you to join me on my Vlog Youtube channel Vlog Vélo Créasandart  to subscribe and especially to leave your opinions under my 2 videos already online, I will talk to you in more detail about the creative process of videos in a next article, from here take it take care of yourself and make your masks.

I reserve you 2 other articles ‘Imagine the Conf’ very soon, leave me your opinion on the current crisis in comment, I take pleasure in reading you.

Feelings – Bayi Pics – Copyright © SB

Imagine the Conf’ 1 Quelle année 2020 plein de rebondissements dites-moi, voici que le monde est confronté à une crise sanitaire…

"Spyglass" Reveals Fisheries Crime

[By Dyhia Belhabib]

Wild fish feed 3 billion people. Fishing provides an income and livelihood for nearly 60 million people, mostly within waters close to their homes, from small boats.

Since the 1970s, these artisanal fishers have increasingly been forced to compete with huge industrialised fleets from abroad. This has pushed many fish populations past the point of sustainability. Illegal fishing is adding further pressure, and bringing a heavy human cost.

Legitimate fishing is already a dangerous job. Illegal fishing has increased the risks and death toll. In highly vulnerable places such as Somalia, industrial vessels spend up to 93 percent of their time in prohibited areas. It’s estimated that more than 250 people die every year, mainly from collisions, when boats intrude on West African waters reserved for coastal communities.

The fishing sector also plays a part in transnational slave labour. An estimated 21 million people are trapped in this unregulated sector. Some spend years at sea. Others never make it back. Exact numbers are unknown but in countries such as Thailand, trafficked labour accounts for about 40% of the fishing workforce.

The sector has also become a haven for drug traffickers who use boats as mules, further weakening coastal communities. Beyond these tangible impacts, illegal fishing destroys the traditional fabric of fishing within once thriving coastal communities. This issue is global, plagued with opacity and needs to be urgently addressed.

A new tool to widen the net on crimes at sea

At the end of 2019, Ecotrust Canada launched a platform called Spyglass which publishes the criminal records of fishing vessels and seafood companies. Its aim is to help surveillance departments, NGOs and governments focus their efforts on high-risk vessels, sanction them more effectively and improve monitoring efforts. It brings to light information otherwise hidden by layers of bureaucracy, language barriers and confidentiality constraints.

Spyglass lets some of the most vulnerable countries access information on the risk of illegal fishing by a vessel or a company and the presence of a repeat offender. It will systematically reduce illegal fishing and criminal activity of large-scale vessels, and help understand the drivers behind small-scale illegal fishing.

Spyglass shows how cooperation and information-sharing can dramatically improve a country’s ability to protect its waters. For example, when Senegal’s Department of Surveillance got information on a fleet seeking access to its fishing grounds, it sanctioned every vessel for under-reporting their capacity, and refused fishing licences to high-risk vessels. Under-reporting of vessel capacity often goes unpunished, especially when the resources to verify such information is virtually non-existent.

Spyglass has now reached 7,400 entries, making it the largest repository of information around criminality in the fishing sector.

Sharing information is key

The platform has shown that illegal fishing and associated crimes, such as those linked to labour rights abuses and the drug trade, are widespread in developed countries as well as the global south. Combatting illegal fishing therefore requires international collaboration and transparency, along with solid regulations targeting high-risk offenders.

However, information is often hard to acquire, particularly on illegal actions by fishing vessels and their companies, and the sanctions that have been placed on them. During 10 years of researching west African fisheries, I learnt about the difficulties of data sharing. Lack of information has meant licences being granted to offenders well known in other countries. Despite due diligence, coastal states often fail to identify past crimes when records are not readily available.

A platform that shares such information was clearly needed. One challenge was that beneficial owners of offending vessels often hide behind several layers of subsidiaries and shell companies spread all over the world, including in flag of convenience countries and tax havens.

Spyglass meets such challenges by researching information about crimes at sea in seven languages and publishing in five. It seeks to establish connections between offending vessels and their beneficial owners, and then shares this information promptly, publicly and freely.

Dyhia Belhabib is the principal investigator of community fisheries at Ecotrust Canada. This article appears courtesy of China Dialogue Ocean and may be found in its original form here. 

from Storage Containers https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/spyglass-reveals-fisheries-crime via http://www.rssmix.com/

Africa Roundup: Jumia files for IPO, OneFi acquires Amplify, FlexClub expands in Mexico

Less than a decade ago IPOs, acquisitions, and global expansion by African startups were more possibility than reality. March saw all three from the continent’s tech scene.

Pan-African e-commerce company Jumia filed for an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange, per SEC documents and confirmation from chief executive Sacha Poignonnec.

In an updated filing, (since the March 12 original) Jumia indicated it will offer 13,500,000 ADR shares, for an offering price of $13 to $16 per share to trade under the ticker symbol “JMIA”. The IPO could raise up to $216 million for Jumia.

Since our first story (and reflected in the latest SEC docs) Mastercard Europe agreed up front to buy $50 million in Jumia ordinary shares.

With a smooth filing process, Jumia will become the first African startup to list on a major global exchange. The company is incorporated in Germany, but maintains its headquarters in Nigeria, and operates exclusively in Africa with 4000 employees on the continent.

The pending IPO creates another milestone for Jumia. The venture became the first African startup unicorn in 2016, achieving a $1 billion valuation after a funding round that included Goldman Sachs, AXA and MTN.

Founded in Lagos in 2012 with Rocket Internet backing, Jumia now operates multiple online verticals in 14 African countries. Goods and services lines include Jumia Food (an online takeout service), Jumia Flights (for travel bookings) and Jumia Deals (for classifieds). Jumia processed more than 13 million packages in 2018, according to company data. The company has started to generate annual revenues over $100 million, but like many burn-rate startups, has done so while racking up big losses.

There’ll be a lot more to cover, analyze, and debate pre and post Jumia’s NYSE bell toll—which could happen in coming weeks or months. For example, can Jumia generate a profit, is it really an African startup, will Jumia become an acquisition target for a big outside name or an acquirer of smaller startups in African e-commerce? Stay tuned for continuing TechCrunch coverage.

On the acquisition front,  Lagos based online lending startup OneFi bought Nigerian payment solutions company Amplify for an undisclosed amount.

OneFi is taking over Amplify’s IP, team, and client network of over 1000 merchants to which Amplify provides payment processing services, OneFi CEO Chijioke Dozie told TechCrunch.

The purchase of Amplify caps off a busy period for OneFi. Over the last seven months the Nigerian venture secured a $5 million lending facility from Lendable, announced a payment partnership with Visa, and became one of first (known) African startups to receive a global credit rating. OneFi is also dropping the name of its signature product, Paylater, and will simply go by OneFi (for now).

Collectively, these moves represent a pivot for OneFi away from operating primarily as a digital lender, toward becoming an online consumer finance platform.

“We’re not a bank but we’re offering more banking services…Customers are now coming to us not just for loans but for cheaper funds transfer, more convenient bill payment, and to know their credit scores,” said Dozie.

OneFi will add payment options for clients on social media apps including WhatsApp this quarter—something in which Amplify already holds a specialization and client base. Through its Visa partnership, OneFi will also offer clients virtual Visa wallets on mobile phones and start providing QR code payment options at supermarkets, on public transit, and across other POS points in Nigeria.

On the back of the acquisiton, OneFi is in the process of raising a round and will look to expand internationally, considering Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, DRC, Ghana and Egypt and Europe for Diaspora markets.

On African startups expanding globally, FlexClub—a South African venture that matches investors and drivers to cars for ride-hailing services—announced it will expand in Mexico in a partnership with Uber after closing a $1.2 million seed round led by CRE Venture Capital.

The move comes as Africa’s tech-transit space continues to produce unique mobility solutions shaped around local needs.

FlexClub touts itself as a “gig economy investment platform” that is creating new asset classes in emerging markets, according to chief executive and co-founder Tinashe Ruzane.

That asset class, for now, is ride-hail vehicles. FlexClub allows investors to go on the site and purchase a car (ultimately managed and serviced by FlexClub). The startup then connects that car to an Uber driver who uses earnings to pay a weekly rental charge.

Those fees generate monthly, fixed-rate interest income for the investor. The driver has the option of buying the car after the 12 months, with a descending purchase price over time.

FlexClub’s platform manages the investment, rental income, and disbursement of funds across all parties. The startup also handles insurance, maintenance, and upkeep of the cars.

Ruzane envisions this as a model to finance multiple asset classes in emerging markets—where lending options are fewer for individuals who may not have credit histories.

“Our goal is to make this completely passive… where investors can invest in different kinds of assets on our platform, login to a dash, and see this is how my five cars in South Africa are doing, my vans in Mexico, my motorbikes in Indonesia — with a diversified portfolio around the world,” he explained.

FlexClub will begin work matching investors to cars and Uber drivers in Mexico in April. The startup sees opportunities to move into other mobility classes, such as Africa’s ride-hail motorcycle taxi and three-wheel tuk-tuk market, CEO Tinashe Ruzane told TechCrunch in this feature.

And finally, francophone Africa will see a boost in funds and support for startups. The Dakar Network Angels group launched last month, making its first investment to cleantech venture Coliba—an Ivorian startup that uses a mobile app to coordinate waste recycling

The deal is part of Dakar Network Angels’ mission of convening experts and capital to bridge the resource gap for startups in French-speaking Africa — or 24 of the continent’s 54 countries.

The organization — which goes by DNA for short — will offer seed fund investments of between $25,000 to $100,000 to early-stage ventures with high growth potential. These rounds will come with the entrepreneurial guidance of DNA’s angel network.

Launched in Senegal, the organization’s founder is Marieme Diop — a VC investor at Orange Digital Ventures — named the goal of bridging VC disparities between francophone and non-francophone Africa as the primary driver for DNA. She pointed to funding data by Partech indicating that 76 percent of investment to African startups goes to three English-speaking countries — Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa.

To gain consideration for DNA investment, startups must gain referral by a member. DNA will take a minority stake (less than 10 percent) in ventures that receive seed funds and provide program mentorship until exits, Diop told TechCrunch.

To become an angel, members must commit to investing a minimum of $10,000 a year (for those coming on as individuals), $20,000 (for corporates) and be on hand to support the portfolio startups, according to DNA’s Corporate Membership Charter.

More Africa Related Stories @TechCrunch

Seven Africa-focused startups present at Y Combinator’s Demo Day

Nigeria’s Gloo.ng drops consumer e-commerce, pivots to e-procurement

Why Warriors’ Andre Iguodala joined African unicorn Jumia’s board

Nala has built a hassle-free, offline mobile money payment platform for Africa

African Tech Around The Net

African tech startups raised over $1.2bn in funding in 2018 – Partech report

Microsoft’s Azure cloud data centers expand to South Africa

Applications open for Jack Ma’s Africa Netpreneur Prize

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/04/africa-roundup-jumia-files-for-ipo-onefi-acquires-amplify-flexclub-expands-in-mexico/

Africa Roundup: Jumia files for IPO, OneFi acquires Amplify, FlexClub expands in Mexico

Less than a decade ago IPOs, acquisitions, and global expansion by African startups were more possibility than reality. March saw all three from the continent’s tech scene.

Pan-African e-commerce company Jumia filed for an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange, per SEC documents and confirmation from chief executive Sacha Poignonnec.

In an updated filing, (since the March 12 original) Jumia indicated it will offer 13,500,000 ADR shares, for an offering price of $13 to $16 per share to trade under the ticker symbol “JMIA”. The IPO could raise up to $216 million for Jumia.

Since our first story (and reflected in the latest SEC docs) Mastercard Europe agreed up front to buy $50 million in Jumia ordinary shares.

With a smooth filing process, Jumia will become the first African startup to list on a major global exchange. The company is incorporated in Germany, but maintains its headquarters in Nigeria, and operates exclusively in Africa with 4000 employees on the continent.

The pending IPO creates another milestone for Jumia. The venture became the first African startup unicorn in 2016, achieving a $1 billion valuation after a funding round that included Goldman Sachs, AXA and MTN.

Founded in Lagos in 2012 with Rocket Internet backing, Jumia now operates multiple online verticals in 14 African countries. Goods and services lines include Jumia Food (an online takeout service), Jumia Flights (for travel bookings) and Jumia Deals (for classifieds). Jumia processed more than 13 million packages in 2018, according to company data. The company has started to generate annual revenues over $100 million, but like many burn-rate startups, has done so while racking up big losses.

There’ll be a lot more to cover, analyze, and debate pre and post Jumia’s NYSE bell toll—which could happen in coming weeks or months. For example, can Jumia generate a profit, is it really an African startup, will Jumia become an acquisition target for a big outside name or an acquirer of smaller startups in African e-commerce? Stay tuned for continuing TechCrunch coverage.

On the acquisition front,  Lagos based online lending startup OneFi bought Nigerian payment solutions company Amplify for an undisclosed amount.

OneFi is taking over Amplify’s IP, team, and client network of over 1000 merchants to which Amplify provides payment processing services, OneFi CEO Chijioke Dozie told TechCrunch.

The purchase of Amplify caps off a busy period for OneFi. Over the last seven months the Nigerian venture secured a $5 million lending facility from Lendable, announced a payment partnership with Visa, and became one of first (known) African startups to receive a global credit rating. OneFi is also dropping the name of its signature product, Paylater, and will simply go by OneFi (for now).

Collectively, these moves represent a pivot for OneFi away from operating primarily as a digital lender, toward becoming an online consumer finance platform.

“We’re not a bank but we’re offering more banking services…Customers are now coming to us not just for loans but for cheaper funds transfer, more convenient bill payment, and to know their credit scores,” said Dozie.

OneFi will add payment options for clients on social media apps including WhatsApp this quarter—something in which Amplify already holds a specialization and client base. Through its Visa partnership, OneFi will also offer clients virtual Visa wallets on mobile phones and start providing QR code payment options at supermarkets, on public transit, and across other POS points in Nigeria.

On the back of the acquisiton, OneFi is in the process of raising a round and will look to expand internationally, considering Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, DRC, Ghana and Egypt and Europe for Diaspora markets.

On African startups expanding globally, FlexClub—a South African venture that matches investors and drivers to cars for ride-hailing services—announced it will expand in Mexico in a partnership with Uber after closing a $1.2 million seed round led by CRE Venture Capital.

The move comes as Africa’s tech-transit space continues to produce unique mobility solutions shaped around local needs.

FlexClub touts itself as a “gig economy investment platform” that is creating new asset classes in emerging markets, according to chief executive and co-founder Tinashe Ruzane.

That asset class, for now, is ride-hail vehicles. FlexClub allows investors to go on the site and purchase a car (ultimately managed and serviced by FlexClub). The startup then connects that car to an Uber driver who uses earnings to pay a weekly rental charge.

Those fees generate monthly, fixed-rate interest income for the investor. The driver has the option of buying the car after the 12 months, with a descending purchase price over time.

FlexClub’s platform manages the investment, rental income, and disbursement of funds across all parties. The startup also handles insurance, maintenance, and upkeep of the cars.

Ruzane envisions this as a model to finance multiple asset classes in emerging markets—where lending options are fewer for individuals who may not have credit histories.

“Our goal is to make this completely passive… where investors can invest in different kinds of assets on our platform, login to a dash, and see this is how my five cars in South Africa are doing, my vans in Mexico, my motorbikes in Indonesia — with a diversified portfolio around the world,” he explained.

FlexClub will begin work matching investors to cars and Uber drivers in Mexico in April. The startup sees opportunities to move into other mobility classes, such as Africa’s ride-hail motorcycle taxi and three-wheel tuk-tuk market, CEO Tinashe Ruzane told TechCrunch in this feature.

And finally, francophone Africa will see a boost in funds and support for startups. The Dakar Network Angels group launched last month, making its first investment to cleantech venture Coliba—an Ivorian startup that uses a mobile app to coordinate waste recycling

The deal is part of Dakar Network Angels’ mission of convening experts and capital to bridge the resource gap for startups in French-speaking Africa — or 24 of the continent’s 54 countries.

The organization — which goes by DNA for short — will offer seed fund investments of between $25,000 to $100,000 to early-stage ventures with high growth potential. These rounds will come with the entrepreneurial guidance of DNA’s angel network.

Launched in Senegal, the organization’s founder is Marieme Diop — a VC investor at Orange Digital Ventures — named the goal of bridging VC disparities between francophone and non-francophone Africa as the primary driver for DNA. She pointed to funding data by Partech indicating that 76 percent of investment to African startups goes to three English-speaking countries — Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa.

To gain consideration for DNA investment, startups must gain referral by a member. DNA will take a minority stake (less than 10 percent) in ventures that receive seed funds and provide program mentorship until exits, Diop told TechCrunch.

To become an angel, members must commit to investing a minimum of $10,000 a year (for those coming on as individuals), $20,000 (for corporates) and be on hand to support the portfolio startups, according to DNA’s Corporate Membership Charter.

More Africa Related Stories @TechCrunch

Seven Africa-focused startups present at Y Combinator’s Demo Day

Nigeria’s Gloo.ng drops consumer e-commerce, pivots to e-procurement

Why Warriors’ Andre Iguodala joined African unicorn Jumia’s board

Nala has built a hassle-free, offline mobile money payment platform for Africa

African Tech Around The Net

African tech startups raised over $1.2bn in funding in 2018 – Partech report

Microsoft’s Azure cloud data centers expand to South Africa

Applications open for Jack Ma’s Africa Netpreneur Prize

Via Jake Bright https://techcrunch.com

Singapore, Indonesia offer monetary adventures

(Image courtesy www.directferries.com)

I spent much of the previous two weeks in Singapore, with a day trip to Batam Centre, Indonesia. In contrast to the United States, just about anywhere in Singapore is less than 20 miles from Indonesia and Malaysia, nations whose populations (32+ million and 266+ million, respectively) are much more populous than the 5.8 million in Singapore.

Because of the close proximity and the significant financial interconnectedness, monetary arrangements in Singapore and Indonesia are different than they are in the United States.

In both countries, one of the most common businesses you encounter are currency exchanges. Some are stand-alone operations, but many stores also have a currency exchange counter. In one Singapore mall, of four side-by-side stores, three had currency exchange counters. I think about 1/3 of the exchange places had long boards posting their buy/sell prices – none of them charged any service charges beyond those prices.

With so many options available, I found the buy/sell spreads to be far more competitive than are available in America, a land where most currency exchange activities would tend to be near to national borders or major ports of entry.

For instance, the Singapore dollar is worth about 72-73 cents to the U.S. dollar. The inverse is that the U.S. dollar is worth about $1.37-1.39 Singapore dollars. The buyers were offering at least $1.30 to as much as $1.35 Singapore dollars per U.S .dollar. The U.S. dollar sell rates ranged from $1.375 to $1.40 Singapore dollars. One vendor was buying U.S. dollars at $1.35 and selling at $1.375 Singapore dollars, a spread of barely 1.8 percent. Even for exchanges between Singapore dollars and the Indonesia rupiah, the buy/sell spreads tended to be 3 percent or tighter for small quantities. One operation would pay $1.34 Singapore dollars for U.S. currency up to $20 denomination and $1.35 for U.S. $50s and $100s. There was virtually no paperwork other than a receipt for the transaction, no names or ID required.

Singapore gained independence in late 1965 and issued its first coins in 1967. All are still legal tender, although the diameters were reduced during 1985 and some metal compositions have changed. I brought with me all the spendable Singapore coins that my company had accumulated and only had one store where they would not accept the large older coins. One taxi driver even got excited to receive an old dollar coin as part of his tip.

One-cent coins were last issued for circulation in 2001. It is of such small value that merchants always rounded cash transactions to the nearest five cents. Circulating coins include the 5¢, 10¢, 20¢, 50¢, and $1 denominations. Currency denominations, which are all plastic now, start at $2, $5, $10, $50, and go up to $1,000. Because the notes are plastic, the condition of all that I saw was high.

Most goods and services were priced inclusive of the Goods and Services Tax. Exceptions included sit-down, non-fast food restaurants, where such establishments normally added a 10 percent service charge plus the GST. Most merchants that accepted credit cards did not add an extra fee. However, taxis and service businesses often did charge a fee to accept cards.

In walking around, I passed a few coin and stamp shops that seemed more to serve tourists than serious numismatists. One had some junk boxes on a table outside on the sidewalk, so I took a closer look. In the dollar bucket were about one-third arm’s length poor quality counterfeits of coins that otherwise might be $10-50 pieces. Every single piece in those buckets had been harshly cleaned. That discouraged me from wanting to investigate further. It there are coin shops for serious collectors, they are likely not to be found in tourist shopping areas.

If you wanted to purchase gold, your best bet would to be to go to a jeweler. One jeweler had a sign indicating that the .999 fine gold ingots and jewelry in a section were selling for $59 per gram (approximately $1,330 U.S. per troy ounce) or the .916 fine gold items at $54 per gram (again, about $1,330 U.S. per troy ounce of gold content). The displays had almost no coins. I believe that Singapore recently exempted gold coins from a 3 percent import tax. There were no signs indicating that the Goods and Services Tax would be added to the sales price. If not, then the jewelry could be purchased for less than 7 percent above the intrinsic gold value.

I did see some instances of banks operating a single-desk kiosk in malls. I would be fearful of security to the bank and its customers if this were done in many other countries, including America.

Taking the ferry over to Indonesia for a day trip turned out to be less than wonderful. First, the ferry was held for a half hour while an incoming cruise ship docked. Then, it took 90 minutes to go through Indonesian Immigration once arriving in Batam Centre. The planned trip was to put us on Indonesian soil for four hours. Half of that was gone before we even exited the arrival building.

Then we learned we had to go through immigration again an hour before departure, which barely left us time to go to the mall across the street to eat lunch. It might sound like paying 118,000 rupiah for lunch for two is a lot, but that was barely $8 U.S. Besides restaurants with multiple Asian cuisines, the mall also had an A&W, Burger King, KFC, and a Wendy’s.

My sister and I grabbed a few quick souvenirs on the way back to the ferry dock, but I spent less than one-third of the Indonesia currency that I had brought with me to leave in that country (meaning more business for the currency exchange in Singapore, where one of the 20,000-rupiah notes was too worn to be acceptable – all Indonesia currency is still printed on paper). The slow operation of Indonesia’s immigration resulted in less business for the country’s merchants.

While I did see multiple currency exchanges in Indonesia, I didn’t have time to investigate buy/sell rates. The circulating coins go up to 1,000 rupiah, while the currency goes from 5,000 through 100,000 rupiah.

Upon return to Singapore that day, in comparison, it only took about 10 minutes to pass through immigration.

Neither nation had money changers operating in the streets as I have utilized in a handful of other nations I’ve visited over the years.

Next year, I plan more international travel, including a trip to two new African countries for me. In my childhood, I lived in Sudan and then Liberia for several years while my father was in the foreign aid program. I also visited Egypt and Senegal. I can speak a little bit in about ten African languages and dialects, plus Arabic and French, and am starting to learn the dialect spoken in southwest Uganda. Look for another report after that trip.

Remember – correlation does not prove causality! However, it did happen that the gold and silver prices jumped at least 1 percent when I left the country and did not return to the lower levels until I got back. While I take no credit for that occurrence, if some dealers and collectors would like to raise funds to send me on an additional foreign vacation, I would be willing to sacrifice myself for the cause.

Patrick A. Heller was the American Numismatic Association 2018 Glenn Smedley Memorial Service Award, 2017 Exemplary Service Award, 2012 Harry Forman Dealer of the Year Award, and 2008 Presidential Award winner. He was also honored by the Numismatic Literary Guild in 2017 and 2016 for the Best Dealer-Published Magazine/Newspaper and for Best Radio Report. He is the communications officer of Liberty Coin Service in Lansing, Mich., and writes Liberty’s Outlook, a monthly newsletter on rare coins and precious metals subjects. Past newsletter issues can be viewed at http://www.libertycoinservice.com. Some of his radio commentaries titled “Things You ‘Know’ That Just Aren’t So, And Important News You Need To Know” can be heard at 8:45 a.m. Wednesday and Friday mornings on 1320-AM WILS in Lansing (which streams live and becomes part of the audio and text archives posted at http://www.1320wils.com).

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Legacies of Colonialism: Cry, the Beloved Country

Not only does a politics of invidiousness not work, by allowing hatred to dictate policy, a nation will dash itself to pieces in the belief it is somehow correcting historical injustices, real, perceived, or selectively remembered. What purports to be liberalism in the modern era is nothing more than a preoccupation with the past that must by necessity hold the present hostage to the past and mortgage the future for the redress of the sins of another age. In this zeitgeist, there can be no reconciliation. White Namibians, like white South Africans, like white Rhodesians, like white Americans, have been targeted for oblivion as “cosmic retribution” for daring to exist in the historical shadow of since-passed colonialism and Apartheid.

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It is one of the gravest mistakes one can make to foist the dominant values of the present on to the past, and it results in often profoundly lethal distortions. The purpose of Year One under Pol Pot was not simply to mark the new age of his communist regime, but to erase history prior to the ascendancy of the Khmer Rouge; on April 17th, 1975, the “Because Current Year” trope was given legs in Cambodia with the declaration of Year Zero and the onset of the “classless society.” For not only Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, but virtually every other totalitarian regime, the erasure of history from monuments to books boils down to absolute control and the re-making of man in its image. As Dominique Venner wrote, “Like plants, men cannot exist without roots.” Divorced from identity, from history, they become tumbleweeds, subject to the whims of forces beyond their control, easily moved and even easier to corral and shepherd. Lightweight and without resistance, with nothing to tie them to the land, the deracinated and identity-less man is useless to everyone but his master. As the Czech writer Milan Kundera, no stranger to communist totalitarianism wrote:

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was.

The transition to Year Zero is well underway across the Occident, from the United Kingdom’s making Tommy Robinson an Unperson to the United States doing the same to the accused men of the #MeToo hysteria; in Africa, Brave Africa, the same fate is being visited upon the entirety of the white population. Ethnic cleansing is the latest trend below the Sahara, the process—barring two Spanish cities in Morocco—complete in the Maghreb. As the legacy of colonialism looms large in the rhetoric justifying the spectacular failures of post-colonial independence, the need for a scapegoat becomes all the more pressing to justify the egalitarian mythos. You don’t see anti-Turkish pogroms in Bulgaria or Macedonia or Greece, for example, despite the atrocities visited upon their native populations by the Turks for centuries. You do, however, see anti-“Settler” pogroms in Africa, and often in countries where colonial rule was far more benign than was the Ottomans’.

I will use just one more example to illustrate this rank hypocrisy. Whites are portrayed as uniquely evil colonialists responsible for slavery, ethnic cleansing, and all sorts of other horrors, and yet China, in all of its flagrant disregard for human rights and its aggressive expansionism, somehow escapes scrutiny. That the Chinese engaged in the African slave trade for a millennium and that the first nations to actually abolish it were European and European-founded never registers. Similarly, it is apparently unremarkable that the communist regime is sitting on a mound of tens of millions of corpses; according to historian Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Leap Forward was responsible for forty-five million deaths in a four year span (1958-1962) alone. The country continues to censor, censure, repress, and imprison, all the while continuing its ethnic cleansing of regions like Tibet, which represents an extension of what they’ve done historically in regions like Manchuria. China is also continuing to expand its imperial influence in the South China Sea, they provide material aid and support to the North Korean regime, and they persist in the refusal to acknowledge Taiwan as a sovereign nation. They’re also, shrewdly, practicing a more discreet form of economic imperialism, with the effect that China effectively owns countries such as Jamaica, Uganda, Kenya, Senegal, and Venezuela. Their rapid industrialization follows no restrictions on pollution, and the environmental degradation as a consequence has been profound. Finally, while liberals go ballistic about American Vice President Mike Pence’s supposed views on homosexual “conversion therapy,” it remains standard practice throughout China.

There is clearly a double-standard at work here. Far from the charade of expanding “tolerance” and “inclusion,” the anti-white fervor sweeping the globe is becoming increasingly blatant. The rhetoric is one of Original Sin (example: “Namibia’s Whites May Atone for Apartheid Sins”), but there is no means of redemption. Not even extinction will do—the “legacy” of colonialism, exploitation, “white supremacy,” et cetera will still persist. This, too, must be “dismantled.” As the anti-white virulence continues to spread, there are few countries left on earth that do not work toward the active dispossession and ultimate extermination of their white populations, regardless of whether or not they ever even practiced colonialism. What “legacy of colonialism” do Norway or Sweden or Ireland or Switzerland have to atone for? “Colonialism” is clearly just a thin justification for global white genocide. If it’s not colonialism, it’s something else. Sam Francis explains:

The attack upon us defines itself in racial terms and seeks through the delegitimization of race for whites and the legitimization of race for non-whites the dispersion and destruction of the foundations of our solidarity while at the same time consolidating non-white cohesiveness against whites…If and when that challenge should triumph and those enemies come to kill us as the Tutsi people have been slaughtered in Rwanda, they will do so not because we are “Westerners” or “Americans” or “Christians” or “conservatives” or “liberals” but because we are white.

From Australia to Canada, the United States to Namibia, we are uniformly being told No Whites Allowed. It is, simply, apartheid with the roles reversed. So much for reconciliation. Namibian Democratic Movement treasurer general Nico Smit explains that the reason most white Namibians do not participate in Independence Day celebrations is quite simple—they are tired of being scapegoated for everything that’s gone wrong in the country by the ruling party, Swapo, and the majority of the black population. Smit stated:

This is the thing that is haunting us now maybe for 28 years, which is actually sad. Unfortunately, it’s true. Nobody can deny that it is especially the ruling party. Their weakness is that when anything goes wrong in this country then they accuse the White people for being the cause of that…They are being labelled…as people who are not in favour of progress, not in favour of this and that. If you are always accused, always being…told that you’re responsible for things that are not good, then you will also feel not being part of the house… To be involved in the economy of the country to open a business, to do business, there (are) no White people that forbid Black persons to do this. It’s open. We welcome. We even help them. We give people who are starting young businesses, you know, Black and Brown people, many of the White people are even helping those people to get on their feet. But we still are being labelled and accused of being sort of responsible for these type of things. Even last year when the celebrations were in Rundu, the president again chose to pick on White people to accuse them of this. Now the more you accuse people, the more you push them away. Why would I go there knowing that I will be insulted and be called names? Why? Why should I do it to myself?

Despite using their economic clout to help blacks, the Namibian whites are routinely vilified and, even worse, often barred from participating in many aspects of public life, as well as actively disadvantaged in economic terms by the ruling party. Namibia, despite the overt acrimony from the black majority and much of the governmental structure, had heretofore avoided some of the more egregious expropriations, policies, and attacks that have been wrought on whites in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, South Africa, and other former European colonies, but unfortunately that is starting to change in Namibia, too. Borrowing a page from the Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) programs instituted in South Africa, all white-owned businesses will now be required to sell a controlling interest of a minimum of 25% of their companies to blacks as a form of apartheid “redress” under the Namibian equivalent of BEE, the Namibian Economic Empowerment Framework (NEEF), and this new bill. In addressing the “necessity” of passing such a bill, President Hage Geingob stated:

The majority of Namibians remain structurally excluded from meaningful participation in the economy and as we established earlier, inclusivity ensures harmony and exclusivity brings discord. We require the support of all Namibians to fix the obvious and dangerous flaws in our social structure.

Spoken like a true college professor! It is not a slippery slope fallacy to note the parallels here with Zimbabwe and South Africa. In countries with no tradition of or care for democratic principles, one man, one vote, one time became the norm. Post-independence, Zimbabwe’s new leadership, just like South Africa’s, and Mozambique’s, and just about every other African country’s rushed to embrace some version of communism or socialism, and the strong-men often brutally consolidated power, nationalized and strip-mined existing industries, and, as so many former colonies deteriorated into chaos and civil war, or watched the bottom drop out of their infrastructure and economy, or both, their former colonial overlords and the small populations they left behind became convenient targets.

This is how the ethnic cleansing and the attendant deterioration of Zimbabwe began. From 296,000 whites in 1975 to less than 30,000 in 2018, the white population declined precipitously against a backdrop of “indigenization” laws that barred whites from certain professions, legalized confiscatory policies and the stripping of social benefits, and, ultimately enshrined land expropriations from the bread-basket of the nation—the white farming community. At the time of the expropriations, 4,000 white Zimbabwean farmers employed roughly 40% of the nation’s people; the expropriations put forth by Mugabe, which re-distributed productive white farmland to poor blacks, was nothing short of a disaster and hastened the country’s death spiral. Still more whites fled the country, and the mismanagement of the land led to Zimbabwe going from a food exporter to a food importer.

Due to the decline in supply, prices shot up, which caused Mugabe to impose price controls. As economist Bradley R. Schiller explains, the price controls further discouraged production, and coupled with a new black market, the inflation rate continued. The passage in 2008 of the “black empowerment” Indigenization and Economic Empowerment Bill into law called for the transfer of majority shares from foreign-owned firms to black Zimbabweans, discouraging investment and leading to a number of companies leaving the country. That same year, 2008, inflation in Zimbabwe hit an astounding 165,000%! The use of foreign currency had to be legalized the following year as the nation abandoned its own currency. The Economist ran a piece in 2007 entitled “Blackening the Economy” about the situation, apparently unaware of the deep ironies:

Doing any business at all in Zimbabwe is no mean feat these days. Sky-rocketing inflation— officially estimated at 7,600% in July but probably over 10,000%—unemployment at 80% and crippling power and fuel shortages are daunting enough. On top of that, price controls slapped on in June have emptied shelves and depleted stocks, bringing many shops and factories to a standstill. The official exchange rate was devalued last week from 250 to 30,000 Zimbabwean dollars to the American one. But this new rate is still at least eight times less than what you can get on the black market. Now, following the land redistribution that has devastated agriculture, President Robert Mugabe’s government seems to have declared open season on other parts of the economy as well. In the next few weeks, Parliament looks set to pass the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Bill that might ultimately transfer at least 51% of all businesses into local black hands. This is in addition to a law which already reserves 60% of most listed companies to local blacks. Zimbabwe’s government is not the only one in the region trying to involve more blacks in the economy, none more so than South Africa with its “black economic empowerment” programme.

Foreign and white-owned companies with assets of more than $500,000 either needed to cede or to sell a 51-percent stake to black Zimbabweans or to the country’s National Economic Empowerment Board. Let us also not forget the “darkest” aspect in all of this, the state-sanctioned murders of whites. The new government is pleading for white farmers in particular to return in order to ramp up food production once again, but to quote the band Gallows, “The bed they made is a grave in hell.” For forty years they’ve maligned, murdered, and chased away the whites, scapegoating them for everything that has gone wrong in the country, when all along it was the whites who were holding it together. The appeals to white Rhodesians now, after everything has fallen apart, are too little too late, and I find poetic justice in Zimbabwe’s fate.

In South Africa, the situation is not quite that far gone (yet), but it is rapidly disintegrating to Zimbabwean levels. Forcible white land expropriations are now constitutionally enshrined by the black majority. The Black Economic Empowerment laws also impose racial company ownership quotas, and call for the kind of blatant affirmative action policies Americans will no doubt be familiar with. Further, the whites of South Africa are tortured and victimized while the state turns a blind eye, and the murder rate in the country is approaching epidemic levels.

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Under the auspices of “reparations,” the black majorities in Zimbabwe and South Africa have stripped the white populations of their voices, their assets, their legal protections, and increasingly, their lives. Namibia now appears to be ready to follow suit. Instead of living standards rising in Africa following independence and the end of colonialism, they have plummeted; in fact, global poverty is not only increasingly clustered in Africa, but its standard of living is lower now than it was in 1960. This is largely the product of biological regression to the mean, but even if you are not convinced by the biology-drives-culture argument, surely what are at best deeply misguided policies instituted by Africa’s rulers would then be at issue, and in lieu of understanding that the politics of invidiousness I discussed at the top of the article does not work—and that any attempted implementation of Marxist doctrines is doomed to failure—only intensifying the scapegoating of African failures vis-à-vis whites is proving to be nothing short of catastrophic. Either way, in the brave multicultural future of tomorrow, what makes you think the “colonizers” of America, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand will be safe? The justifications will be the same; their civilizations reduced to squalor and abject poverty in the hands of the people who resent them, and will do everything they can to extinguish not just the people themselves, but the memory that they ever even existed.

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Actual Madrid v Liverpool: May James Milner be key to Champions League closing?

Actual Madrid v Liverpool: May James Milner be key to Champions League closing?

Actual Madrid v Liverpool: May James Milner be key to Champions League closing?

One in every of these gamers is unlikely to be in Ballon d’Or competition – however might be pivotal within the closing

The Champions League closing shall be contested by the highest-scoring groups on this season’s competitors, with two of the world’s most potent forwards on show.

Actual Madrid are chasing a report 13th title – and their third in a row – whereas Liverpool can transfer above Bayern Munich and Barcelona into third (behind AC Milan) within the listing of most European Cup/Champions League wins if they’re victorious in Kiev.

The fixture has all of the makings of a traditional, however what can we study from the stats heading into the match?

Is Milner the unlikely key man in Kiev?

Why James Milner is Liverpool’s Champions League unsung hero

With greater than 90 objectives between them in all competitions this season, it’s hardly stunning the Champions League closing has been billed as a battle between Actual Madrid’s Cristiano Ronaldo and Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah.

Each are positive to be within the working for the Ballon d’Or on the finish of 2018, however it’s a man who’s unlikely to obtain any particular person accolades who might maintain the important thing to success in Kiev.

James Milner made headlines within the semi-final towards Roma when he took his tally of assists on this season’s competitors to eight, equalling the match report set by Neymar in 2016-17.

Most assists in a Champions League season Participant Assists Season

For seasons since 2003-04, when Opta began gathering assists information

James Milner 8 2017-18 Neymar 8 2016-17 Ryan Giggs 7 2006-07 Xavi 7 2008-09 Mesut Ozil 7 2010-11 Zlatan Ibrahimovic 7 2012-13 Roberto Firmino 7 2017-18

That whole is three greater than Actual Madrid’s complete midfield of Luka Modric, Toni Kroos, Isco, Marco Asensio and Casemiro have managed between them.

Milner’s elevated productiveness within the closing third has been essentially the most notable facet of his Champions League shows – he has gone from an help each 588 minutes within the Premier League to 1 each 99 minutes in Europe.

However there was extra to his excellent European kind than simply creating objectives. The previous England midfielder, already a robust performer domestically, has raised his sport within the Champions League in virtually each statistical class.

The place Milner ranks amongst Liverpool gamers in PL The place Milner ranks amongst Liverpool gamers in CL Assists eighth 1st Tackles third 1st Tackles received third 2nd Touches sixth 2nd Passes fifth third Duels received seventh 4th Interceptions ninth fifth

And, regardless of Actual Madrid’s proud European report, Milner could by no means have a greater likelihood to create objectives for his team-mates in a closing, for the reason that reigning champions are something however safe defensively…

Who’s extra weak on the again – Actual or Reds?

The opening months of the season had been dominated by speak of Liverpool’s defensive vulnerabilities, however the arrival of Virgil van Dijk in January and the advance from goalkeeper Loris Karius have meant it’s now not thought-about such a evident weak spot.

For Actual, nevertheless, it’s a totally different story. They sorely missed the presence of captain Sergio Ramos within the second leg of their dramatic quarter-final tie against Juventus, when an injury-time Ronaldo strike meant a 3-1 defeat on the night time however a 4-Three combination victory.

That porous show was removed from a one-off. Actual have saved solely three clear sheets in 12 Champions League matches and have conceded 15 objectives, following on from a complete of 17 in 2016-17. No other team since 2004-05 has let in more than 13 in getting to the final, with the common being 8.3.

Liverpool have their very own flaws, in fact. They’ve conceded 13 occasions themselves within the Champions League correct, together with six occasions towards Roma of their semi-final tie. However Jurgen Klopp’s facet have saved six clear sheets within the competitors this season, a tally matched solely by Barcelona. They usually did solely concede 38 occasions within the Premier League, six fewer than Actual’s tally in La Liga.

One concern for the Reds might be if the match stays within the stability within the closing levels. Within the first 75 minutes of their previous six matches Liverpool have been 12-Three up general. However within the closing 15 minutes it has been a very totally different story, conceding a collection of late objectives that imply they’re 6-1 down within the latter levels.

In fact, there may be each likelihood one among these sides may need run away with it by then…

Essentially the most attack-minded Champions League closing but?

Has a significant closing ever promised a lot in an attacking sense?

For years followers have marvelled on the BBC – Gareth Bale, Karim Benzema and Cristiano Ronaldo – all of whom might play on Saturday.

However, regardless of being one of many nice ahead strains of the Champions League period, they won’t even be essentially the most prolific entrance three on show in Kiev.

Sadio Mane’s strike within the semi-final second leg in Rome made the Senegal ahead, Salah and Roberto Firmino the trio to attain essentially the most objectives in a single Champions League season, surpassing a report set by their Actual counterparts 4 years in the past.

Workforce Objectives Trio Liverpool 2017-18 29 Salah (10), Firmino (10), Mane (9) Actual Madrid 2013-14 28 Ronaldo (17), Bale (6), Benzema (5) Barcelona 2014-15 27 Messi (10), Neymar (10), Suarez (7) Barcelona 1999-2000 23 Rivaldo (10), Kluivert (7), Enrique (6) Man Utd 2001-02 23 Van Nistelrooy (10), Solskjaer (8), Beckham (5)

Certainly, Liverpool are the highest scorers on this season’s competitors and their tally of 40 objectives is the third highest in Champions League historical past (behind Barcelona’s 45 in 1999-00 and Actual’s 41 in 2013-14).

Whereas Actual have scored 10 fewer occasions, all of them however assure objectives. The truth is, they’ve scored of their previous 27 Champions League matches and their previous 29 Uefa fixtures, final failing to search out the web in a European match towards Manchester Metropolis in 2015-16.

Thoughts you, it helps when you may have one of many sport’s greats in your beginning XI…

Ronaldo’s data

A 3rd consecutive Champions League victory would assist Cristiano Ronaldo in his quest to win the Ballon d’Or for a 3rd straight 12 months

Barely a sport goes by with out Ronaldo setting a brand new landmark. His feats this season have included scoring in 13 consecutive matches (24 objectives in whole throughout that run) and turning into the primary participant to search out the web in each group match in a Champions League season.

His tally of 15 within the competitors in 2017-18 is five more than closest rivals Firmino and Salah, and he wants two extra within the closing to match his personal report of 17 in a single marketing campaign, set in 2013-14.

However there may be one other report that’s positive to drive on the competitors’s report scorer, with this closing towards Liverpool providing him the chance to change into the primary participant to win the trophy 5 occasions within the Champions League period. He would be part of an elite four-man listing that includes Actual Madrid trio Paco Gento, Alfredo di Stefano and Jose María Zarraga plus AC Milan’s Paolo Maldini as five-time winners of the European Cup.

There are different data, too, that Ronaldo can set in Kiev. He has already scored extra Champions League closing objectives than anybody else (4) and might change into the primary participant to attain in consecutive finals.

You wouldn’t wager towards him, seeing as he’s already the one man to attain in three totally different finals (2008, 2014 and 2017).

If he does encourage Actual to victory, he may even assist his supervisor create his personal piece of historical past…

From the brink of the sack to 90 minutes from historical past

Regardless of his success within the Champions League, Actual completed third in La Liga, 17 factors behind champions Barcelona

In January Zinedine Zidane’s future was the topic of a lot dialogue, with the Frenchman himself describing the state of affairs on the Bernabeu as a “fiasco” following a shock residence Copa del Rey defeat by Leganes.

That, coupled with the very fact Actual had been 19 factors adrift of leaders and eventual champions Barcelona, led Zidane to say it was “clear” his future on the membership trusted their progress within the Champions League.

And, as has change into the norm for Zidane’s Actual, it’s that competitors during which they’ve dominated, in outcomes if not at all times in performances.

The 1998 World Cup winner has led Actual to the Champions League closing in all of his three seasons in cost and is one sport away from turning into the primary supervisor in historical past to win Europe’s premier membership competitors in three consecutive campaigns.

Had been he to elevate the trophy in Kiev, he would change into solely the third coach – after Bob Paisley (Liverpool) and Carlo Ancelotti (Actual and twice with AC Milan) – to be a three-time European champion.

Actual Madrid expertise vital, however it’s not all the pieces – Klopp

That knack for profitable main finals is one thing his counterpart Jurgen Klopp has but to grasp. The Liverpool boss has misplaced 5 of the six main finals he has been concerned in, together with his two earlier European finals.

The primary got here with Borussia Dortmund, once they misplaced the 2013 Champions League closing to Bayern Munich at Wembley, whereas the second got here when Liverpool had been crushed by Sevilla within the 2016 Europa League closing.

Had been Liverpool to lose, Klopp would change into the fourth supervisor – after Max Allegri (2015 and 2017), Diego Simeone (2014 and 2016) and Hector Cuper (2000 and 2001) – to expertise defeat in two Champions League finals.

His crew, although, don’t have any such unfavourable experiences. Not one participant to have performed for Liverpool this season has appeared in a Champions League closing, a stark distinction to Actual’s squad, eight of whom are in line to win the trophy for a fourth time.

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