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#mergers and acquisitions explained
kjhysgy · 2 years
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Mergers Acquisition, Distribution, Franchise Business is growing on a high-scale in India and people looking for great Business Opportunities are actually Investing their time and money in it.
Investors who are running a successful Franchise Business have experienced an upwards growth in their Business and in their overall capital.
We at Sell Mergers, are on a mission to find Great Business Buying and Selling Deals for the people who are looking for some Business Opportunities in India.
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fans4wga · 9 months
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Writers Guild West Official: Era of Hollywood Mergers Hastened the Strike
August 10, 2023
Laura Blum-Smith, the Writers Guild of America West’s director of research and public policy, considers the strike a result of a tsunami of Hollywood mergers that has handed studios and streamers the power to its exploit workers.
“Harmful mergers and attempts to monopolize markets are a recurring theme in the history of media and entertainment, and they are a key part of what led 11,500 writers to go on strike more than 100 days ago against their employers,” Blum-Smith said on Thursday at an event with the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice over new merger guidelines unveiled in July.
She pointed to Disney, Amazon and Netflix as companies that “gained power through anticompetitive consolidation and vertical integration,” allowing them to impose “more and more precarious working conditions, increasingly short term employment and lower pay for writers and other workers across the industry.” But she sees revisions to the merger guidelines that address labor concerns a key part of the solution to prevent further mergers in the entertainment industry moving forward.
“The FTC and DOJ’s new draft merger guidelines are part of a deeply necessary effort to revive antitrust enforcement,” she added. “Compared with earlier guidelines, the new ones are much more skeptical of the idea that mergers are the natural way for companies to grow. And they focus more on the various ways mergers hurt competition, including how mergers impact workers.”
In July, the FTC and DOJ jointly released a new road map for regulatory review of mergers. They require companies to consider the impact of proposed transactions on labor, signaling that the agencies intend to review whether mergers could negatively impact wages and working conditions. FTC commissioner Alvaro Bedoya, who was joined by agency chair Lina Khan, said in a statement about the guidelines that “a merger that may substantially lessen competition for workers will not be immunized by a prediction that predicted savings from a merger will be passed on to consumers.” Historically, transactions have been considered mostly through the lens of benefits to consumers.
The guidelines lack the force of law but influence the way in which judges consider lawsuits to block proposed transactions. They also tell the public how competition enforcers will assess the potential for a merger’s harm to competition.
Antitrust enforcers have steadily been taking notice of negative impacts to labor as a result of industry consolidation. “We’ve heard concerns that a handful of companies may now again be controlling the bulk of the entertainment supply chain from content creation to distribution,” Khan said last year during a listening forum over revisions to the guidelines, in a nod to anticompetitive conduct by studios that led to the Paramount Decrees. “We’ve heard concerns that this type of consolidation and integration can enable firms to exert market power over creators and workers alike.”
Adam Conover, writer and WGA board member, said in that April 2022 forum that his show Adam Ruins Everything was killed by AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner in 2018 when TruTV’s parent company forced the network to cut costs. He stressed that a handful of companies “now control the production and distribution of almost all entertainment content available to the American public,” allowing them to “more easily hold down our wages and set onerous terms for our employment.” It’s not just writers that are impacted by an overly consolidated Hollywood either, he explained. After Disney acquired 21st Century Fox in 2019, he said that the studios pushed the industry into ending backend participation and trapping actors in exclusive contracts preventing them from pursuing other work.
Blum-Smith said that aggressive competition enforcement is necessary as “Wall Street continues to push for more consolidation among our employers despite the industry’s history of mergers that failed to deliver any of the consumer benefits they’ve claimed that left writers and audiences worse off with less diversity of content and fewer choices.”
“More mergers will leave writers with even fewer places to sell their work and tell their stories and the remaining companies will have even more power to lower pay and worsen working conditions,” she warned. “Strong enforcement against mergers is essential to protect workers in media and workers across the country and these guidelines are an important step in the right direction.”
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Apologies for the off topic but would you have any tips on writing lawyers who arent just smarmy?
I DO INDEED.
Some negative traits for a lawyer character that aren't "smarmy asshole:"
Being gossipy. I have never, in my entire fucking life, met a lawyer who didn't like drama, and I am including myself in that. I know the exact details of at least three different affairs involving other attorneys in my area, all of which happened years before I started work. In law school I knew which professors had married students (and, in one case, divorced his wife who was also a professor at the same law school to marry a student), who was sleeping with whom, and who'd been kicked out for various infractions. This does extend to our clients, and we definitely will complain about them to other attorneys (within the bounds of not sharing confidential information).
On a similar note, being critical of other attorneys. So-and-so never files motions on time, or doesn't know the rules of evidence well enough to make objections, or can't write their way out of a paper bag.
Being competitive. This is more a thing with litigators, I think, but god does it feel good when you crush your opponent into the dirt. Law is an adversarial system with winners and losers, and it is so fun to be the winner. Even when you like the opponent, there's something innately satisfying when you destroy them with your superior skills.
Not knowing how other people operate. This can take a variety of forms. For some people, it's that "I have no idea if what I'm talking about is common knowledge or something only I know, so I need to explain it in detail" thing. For others, it can be "oh, not everyone thinks attempted murder is funny. Whoopsie." I had a conversation with a fellow attorney where I nodded along politely while he complained to me that representing landlords was no longer profitable for him, all the while thinking, "Does he....... does he not know that I do eviction defense?"
Being know-it-alls. I feel like this goes without saying, but quite a lot of lawyers are very confident in their knowledge and will be assholes about it. However, this doesn't stop them from...
Being perfectly average. The common idea about lawyers is that they're all Harvard-educated geniuses who know everything there is to know about everything. And I am here to tell you that lawyers are just as capable of being dumbasses as anyone else. I am incapable of doing math, and so are a lot of lawyers (the judge in the Alex Jones case kept joking about her inability to do math). When I was in law school editing the students' journal articles, I needed to give a remedial training on how to write essays because some people genuinely didn't fucking know how. And I'm not even getting into the guys who didn't know what sundown towns were.
On the flip side, some positive traits for a lawyer character:
Caring a lot. It is really, really common to burn out on law, either because your subject matter is depressing or your schedule is fucked or your clients just keep being in horrible situations that you can't help them in.
Being fucking nerds. About the law, about other interests like history or science, about fandom shit. I just found out that one of the public defenders here is taking his girlfriend (also a lawyer) to a con this week; he's easily 10+ years older than me and really good at oral arguments. I am mutuals on Tumblr with so many fucking lawyers. And that can include getting excited about weird shit, like me watching the Alex Jones trial the way other people watch sports events.
Having good social skills. Law is a service profession. Even in cases where your client isn't a human person (in-house counsel for a corporation, mergers & acquisitions, criminal prosecution where your client is The State), you are still providing a service and you are going to need to interact with the humans that benefit from that service, even if it's the complaining witness in a criminal case or the CEO of a company you work for. Attorneys with bad social skills – who are obstructionist to their opponents, or abuse their staff, or are bad with clients, or are smarmy assholes – are not liked in the profession, and being liked goes a long way with other attorneys. The number of times I've done things like call another attorney and said something like, "Hey, your client is violating the custody order, can you tell him to knock it off so I don't need to file something about it?" or "Why don't we both knock CPS out of this case and then do the adversarial thing when they're gone?" is... a lot.
In general:
Most lawyers are not making shitloads of money unless they are at very specific firms or doing extremely specific kinds of work. The majority of lawyers are basically middle class. So while the "rich asshole lawyer" stereotype exists for a reason, most lawyers aren't.
We have very strict ethical rules that we need to follow. Now, the ethical rules were implemented because people weren't being ethical on their own, but we do have them. If you want to be a nerd, go look up your local bar's sanctions page.
We specialize in different areas of law. Just like how an eye doctor might vaguely remember stuff about the endocrine system from medical school but probably doesn't know more than that, a criminal lawyer is probably not going to go into, say, wills & trusts. They can, but most people find their niche in an area they like.
There are other kinds of law than just corporate and criminal. Where is my seasons-long TV series about legal aid? Environmental prosecution? TAXES?
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willkatfanfromasia · 10 months
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Hey guys! This is my collab with the awesome @nspwriteups - modern, corporate AU! KunxVT
Sudden Sparks✨✨
It was just another day at the Chola corp. household.
They were a successful family run MNC with interests in a wide range of sectors like agriculture, industries, hospitality etc
Kriti's dad Sundar, the CEO, was feeling his age of late and really looked forward to that retirement mansion in the Seychelles-and she agrees. Her mom Vani was the perfect chaebol wife, keeping up social connections and coordinating the multiple companies.
Kriti and her dad’s best friend Anirudh – the chief legal advisor- have been running the show for the last few years.
She was truly appa’s pride, surpassing him in all aspects. It grieved him greatly that his great-grandfather, the founder, had willed the ownership only to sons in order of age.
Her hothead big bro Aditya made their dad age rapidly, as he was a mess through his teens and 20s- oscillating between therapy and overdrinking. His stubbornly insisted on marrying a regular girl Nandini- who oddly resembled his own ex. Huh! Like father like son
Girls like that just won’t fit in our circle, they all thought. Kriti and her great aunt Seema all disapproved and tried to bribe her away. But the young couple stood firm even through separation. Sundar gently explained his doubts to his son, who cockily returned with a DNA test proving his concern false.
Aditya became the chief of mergers and acquisitions, knowing a good takeover when he sees one. Nandini proved to be just as capable as herself (although she’d never say it aloud), smartly planning the legal aspects of her husband’s activities. Nothing gave the couple more joy than sleuthing and negotiating hard bargains, even with the most hostile businesspeople.
However, it is her darling boy Arun who is the all time favourite. Everyone from the janitor to the executive board loves him.
He started off as a cute intern, now he’s their PR face. Journalists flock to just see him smile. He’s been seeing Vinita, the junior at R&D in an office romance that’s the company’s worst kept secret. She rolled her eyes at her fastidious little brother. He was first very stiff with Vinita, the niece of their South zone president, because everyone wanted to get the two heirs together. He slowly fell for her, but tried very hard to hide it – much to kriti’s amusement. The longer than necessary waiting by the coffee machine, the abnormally frequent dropping of papers ( only for the other to come running for ‘help’) fooled no one, she chucked.
She laid back in the plush orange recliner in her living room. Her apartment was well decorated although she lived alone. Her brother and Anni lived in the floor above with their daughter, Kriti jr. Yes Kriti’s ego was greatly flattered by her namesake niece and she became nicer to her sister in law due to it.
Her brother lived in a cottage next door, with a large courtyard and her parents lived in a mansion next door to their company HQ
They had their usual Friday night entertainments. All except Kriti. She’d have occasional movie nights with Vinita and her other mates, poojas with seema paati and family birthday dinners.
She was happy to be the hustler for her family. She loved being swept by complex problems and solving them. She took pride in being their ‘brains’, not once regretting her cold demeanor or workaholic attitude.
Lately though, seeing her brothers' relationships left a pang in her stomach. Cousin Sandeep too was seeing Pooja, their coordinator for offshore branches.
Kriti blankly stared at the ceiling she’d seen a million times before. Smooth peach walls, a bronze ceiling fan and wall moulding on all sides. Her laptop glared, asking her to get back to work before the Monday noon deadline. Uncle Anirudh won’t like me slacking, she sighed and sat up. The IT girl of Chola corp can’t disappoint!
She began reading through the document sent by the budget team, noting where to edit or add comments. It was pretty linear, except this time some reps of their rival was out scouting start ups and releasing bad predictions for Chola’s next quarterly.
Enthusiastic footsteps and tinkling of metal made kriti exhale and go “gosh! Again?’.
Friday nights usually meant the same for her, her older brother and nandini would usual drop off her niece as they went off on their mandatory dates. There’s no way those 2 randy creatures have been together for 2 decades now, she groaned.
Kriti was soft, everyone knew most of her
evenings were spent working and she had a huge weakness for her niece.
She would often play sitter for Kriti jr. and Timmy (Arun and vinita's dog). She was just grateful Arun didn't make her babysit Airavat, the rescue elephant he adopted!
This time though, work was getting tight. She had to sort out Chola corp 's finances while also figuring who was spreading bad predictions for their stock.
Her train of thoughts was disrupted by the doorbell ringing. She knew who the visitors were and put on the best fake smile she could when she opened the door to see her brother and sister in law with a five year old girl in Nandini's arms. "I was hoping you forgot about your Friday routine" She said in mock annoyance. "Well actually I did ask my best friend to babysit Kriti jr here since I know how much of a busybody you are" Adithya told her, pinching his daughter's cheek as he spoke while Kriti frowned. A best friend of Adithya's that she hasn't met yet? Now that's odd. "We asked him to come here so you can have an extra hand to take care of her" Nandini joined in, kissing her daughter's forehead and handing her over to Kriti who was still wondering about this mysterious "friend" who is apparently a familiar face to everyone but one she hasn't heard about at all.
"He can be trusted Kriti. Why else would I entrust the safety of my beloved sister and daughter to him?" Adithya said after seeing a look of uncertainty on Kriti's face.
After Adithya and Nandini left them, Kriti turned to her niece sitting on the couch, "So my dear sugarplum, what will we do now?" Kriti jr ran to the showcase and took out board game from the drawer. They played the game for a while, watched Tom and Jerry on the tv. Kriti looked over at the clock. It's been half an hour since she started babysitting. Where was this so called trusted friend who was supposed to give them company? She contemplated on calling up Adithya and give him a piece of her mind but then she didn't wanted to interrupt theie date night. "Best friend…Trusted indeed" She muttered "He's going to ghost me for sure"
"Ugh! Why can't I stick to one decision? Now I'll have to host a stranger" she inwardly groaned
Kriti jr looked up at her aunt "Why are you angry Aunty?" She squeaked
"How do you know I am angry?" Kriti enquired
"Because Amma says you murmur when you are upset. So I know you are angry" the little girl said as a matter of fact. Kriti laughed, how well Nandini knows her.
"I am not angry Kanne, I'm just irritated" Kriti sighed, glancing at the clock again. He looked at her niece again when she felt a tug on her kurti. "I am hungry" Kriti jr said with puppy eyes.
"Okay, let's go have dinner" Both girls made their way to the kitchen and was deciding whether to make dinner or order out when the doorbell rang again. "Yay, Kamsa Mama is here!" Saying this Kriti jr sped out of the kitchen, leaving behind a perplexed Kriti behind.
Kamsa who?
The glee in the child's eyes made her irrationally jealous
She heard her niece calling out "It's open, Mama. Come, come" and went to investigate, stopping midway to see a young man twirling her niece, laughing with her. The guy was tall, looked the same age as her and was casually dressed in denim jeans and sweatshirt. She only had a few seconds to admire his curly hair and sparkling eyes before those same eyes met with hers. He set down Kriti jr, looking at her with curiosity and suddenly Kriti felt consious of how she was looking - Not expecting him to show up, she was dressed in an old kurti with three-fourth leggings and her hair in a bun, with a few strands already escaping here and there. My God! What a first impression I am giving this guy. She thought. But then again, why am I stressing on how I look? Not like he's here to flirt with me.
The newly arrived person, walked over to her and extended his hand, still smiling wholeheartedly "So you must be this little mischief queen's godmother. Adi and Nandu can't stop talking about you" He said "Hi, I'm Vaishakh "
"Hi, I'm Kriti"
"Do you know the word Kriti means creation, a work of art?" He asked suddenly
"Yes" Kriti replied, wondering where this was going
"Art is beauty. So I don't think I have to tell you how beautiful you are, Miss Kriti" He said with a grin .
Kriti is no stranger to compliments but she would be lying if she said that pickup line wasn't good. Either he was buttering her up for coming in late or he was a natural flirt.
"Thank you" She said, not letting him give the impression that he had won her over "And if I'm not wrong, people with the name Vaishakh has a good and nice disposition"
He grinned wider "So you like giving out compliments as well. Good for you. We are going to get along just fine" He winked at her and walked towards the kitchen, with a gleeful Kriti jr following him.
Kriti let out a breath she didn't know she was holding in "This is going to be a long night" She wondered as she shut the door.
Anni- sister in law
@nashibirne @nspwriteups @vibishalakshman @thelekhikawrites @dr-scribbler @kovaipaavai @budugu @dosai-maavu @matka-kulfi @curiousgalacticsoul @harinishivaa @chiyaanvikram @celestesinsight @inveter @deepti1011 @itszhunotz @babayagahunt @thegleamingmoon @maisadalawa @ragkee @inlovewithfictionalbeings @happysharkdragon @gowrimenonop-1 @ramcharanobsessed @nature-writes29 @voidsteffy @whippersnappersbookworm @hollogramhallucination @thereader-radhika @sowlspace @rang-lo @nirmohi-premika @love-ps1ff @canonless5
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dbs-superleggera · 1 year
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Croupier Comptable: Game Theory for The Venetian Macao, China (Trapping Aesthetic for Volleyball) 14K
BIO
My Name is Adrian Blake-Trotman. I am Indo-Mediterranean Caribbean Born in Toronto but From Barbados and Haiti. I am a Beta-arbitrage Mergers & Acquisitions Banker that Specializes in Commodities. I have Understanding Financial Markets by Université de Genève and Monetary Policy in the Asian-Pacific by Hong Kong University of Science and Technology with No Gr. 12 Math or Intro to Linear Algebra; I built a mathematical learning style by using Japanese Candlesticks Bullish Engulfing Discounted Cash Flow Charts for Poker. I Operate TAX AVOIDANCE through Freelance Mergers & Acquisitions through an Enterprise Foundation and Investment Trust. My background is Agriculture Working Class, I've worked in Kitchens and Grocery Stores. My goal is to connect the Democratic Republic of the Congo to two tax havens; Haiti & Seychelles to stabilize the Diamond Trade and more Important the Commodities Market. Through Mercantilism Agriculture Hedge Fund as a Central Bank, Options Volatility Exchange, Lab Grown Re-sale Market, Decentralized Currency and Fiat Money, Hospitality & Gaming. Also To form a Socioeconomic Status Agriculture Working Class; Blue, Pink, and White Collar Jobs. I am Modelling my Cartel off of Wall Street for De Beers but is owned and operated by the Société des Bains de Mer (SBM); The Casino de Monte-Carlo is owned and operated by the Société des Bains de Mer (SBM), a public company in which the government of Monaco and the ruling princely family have a majority interest. The company also owns the principal hotels, sports clubs, food service establishments, and nightclubs throughout the Principality. The Société des Bains de Mer operates in the accommodation, dining, entertainment, and gambling services. SBM manages and owns casinos, hotels, restaurants, bars, nightclubs, spas, beach clubs, and golf clubs. Fifty-two of their fifty-eight properties are located in Monaco. The concept of state-corporate crime refers to crimes that result from the relationship between the policies of the state and the policies and practices of commercially motivated corporations. The term was coined by Kramer and Michalowski in 1990.
THE ARNAULT MODEL: BALANCING FINANCIAL DISCIPLINE AND CREATIVITY
Over the next three decades, as he brought the best luxury brands in fashion, cosmetics, and beverages under the LVMH umbrella, Arnault proceeded to make “a series of brilliant business decisions” that “can only be called masterful.” Even his critics were impressed by “his ability to manage creativity for the sake of profit and growth.” Industry observers frequently credit his outstanding success in a highly competitive industry to the fact that—unlike other global CEOs—Arnault understands both the creative and the financial aspects of running a luxury business
Financed through Real Estate and Convertible Bonds
The Creation of Star Brands
In a 2001 Harvard Business Review interview, Arnault explained his famous business process, which—unlike the traditional fashion industry—requires financial discipline as well as creativity. The entire focus of Arnault's teams is the creation of “star brands” that must meet a high bar for four artistic and financial criteria: LVMH brands must be “timeless, modern, fast-growing, and highly profitable.” In practice, “profitable creativity” means that “star brands are born only when a company manages to make products that ‘speak to the ages’ but feel ‘intensely modern’ and ‘sell fast and furiously, all while raking in profits
Although the LVMH process begins with "radical innovation—an unpredictable, messy, highly emotional activity” on the creative end, as soon as “it comes to getting creativity onto shelves—chaos is banished,” and the company imposes "strict discipline on manufacturing processes, meticulously planning all 1,000 tasks in the construction of one purse.”
The genius of Arnault’s process is that, although the "front end of a star brand—the innovation…the creative process, the advertising—is very, very expensive,” the “back end of the process in the atelier (the factory)” is a place of "amazing discipline and rigor” that drives “high profitability behind the scenes.” Brands with “unbelievably high quality” require “unbelievably high productivity,” so “every single motion, every step of every process is carefully planned with the most modern and complete engineering technology.”
For example, when Arnault automated production at Vuitton, he drove that venerable old brand to the top spot on Fashionista’s list of the world's best-selling luxury brands in 2011, with a value of $24.3 billion—more than twice the amount of its nearest competitor.
As he spent “lavishly” on advertising, Arnault "rigorously" controlled costs by leveraging every possible synergy across the group: Kenzo manufactured a Christian Lacroix line; Givenchy manufactured a Kenzo perfume, and Guerlain created the first Vuitton perfume.
Creative Talent Management
As Arnault built LVMH into the world's largest luxury conglomerate, he hired new design talent for star brands that “speak to the ages” but “feel intensely modern”: from Céline, Kenzo, Guerlain, and Givenchy to Loewe, Thomas Pink, Fendi, and DKNY.
Because his model requires that “the counterbalance to creativity must be commerce,” Arnault “never hesitated to reign in, or outright terminate, creative executives who did not produce.” Since the early days at Dior, he has often replaced creative executives with non-traditional talent and then shuffled them across his brands to help him identify opportunities to drive profit—no matter how unpopular.
For example, at Givenchy in 1995, Arnault brought in a “fashion industry darling” and “notorious wild child,” British designer John Galliano, to replace Hubert de Givenchy, the industry icon “credited with defining simple elegance for an entire generation of women, (including) Audrey Hepburn, Jacqueline Kennedy, and the Duchess of Windsor.”
Within a year, Arnault moved Galliano, the first British designer in French haute couture, from Givenchy to Christian Dior to replace Gianfranco Ferré, the Italian couturier who had led Dior design since the late 1980s. Other non-traditional Arnault hires included installing 27-year-old Alexander McQueen (another British designer) at Givenchy and Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton, where he gave the American designer a mandate to challenge LVMH’s competitors, Prada and Gucci.
Although those iconoclastic designers later left LVMH, they had served Arnault’s purpose: interest in his traditional fashion houses had been jumpstarted by the early 21st century.
HOW TO STABILIZE THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO, SEYCHELLOIS, AND HAITIAN CURRENCY (INDIAN PREMIER LEAGUE BUT FOR MMA & COMMODITIES NOT CRICKET & TECHNOLOGY MODEL)
Bioeconomy Agriculture Central Hedge Fund with Agriculture Bulge Brackets Oligopolistic System Hyper Inflation Vehicle Fiat Currency: Strict Negative Interest Rates for Investments; Debt/Equity Business Loan Period and Construction Loan/Tax Benefits Programs, Investment Trusts & Enterprise Foundations are Common Corporate Tax Avoidance Practices, and Raise Denominator of Currency & Print Currency for Insurance Companies for Building Process
Combat Sport as National Sport: Free Internet with Corporate Sponsor Purse Bid System Mixed Martial Arts Camps, Orphanages, Polytheist Churches, Gaming-Hospitality; and +EV Gambling
Mercantilism Fiat Currency Pegging: Foreign Exchange Rate to Diamond Peg Currency
Market Extension Vertical Integration Mergers Lottery
Industries: Mergers & Acquisitions Agriculture Industry, Decentralized Finance, Real Estate Finance and Economics, Capital Gains Tax Haven, Corporate Tax Haven, Inheritance Tax Haven, Art Ports, and Gaming-Hospitality
Blockchain Diamond-Metal Exchange Modelled Off of CBOE Volatility Index (VIX). Founded in 1973, the CBOE Options Exchange is the world's largest options exchange with contracts focusing on individual equities, indexes, and interest rates. Credit Spread Options and Blockchain the Commodities Market.
Business Capital is a Collaborative Environment through Generalized Education (STEM AND M & A)
Socioeconomic Status Agriculture Working Class Immigrants
XYY or Triple X Syndrome, ACTN3 Gene, MSTN Gene, and Mercury-Venus Births
A ROUND OF PAR GAME THEORY NETWORK
Beta Arbitrage with Convertible Bonds Compounding
Key Ingredients 
Player's: Futures Exchange and Investor
Actions: Issue payments under any circumstances 
Payoffs: Exchange - Larger Market Volume, Investor - Larger Assets Under Management  or Profits
Representation
Extensive Form includes timing of moves. Player's move sequentially, represented as a tree (timing). Chess: the white player moves, then the black player can see White's move and react
Theory
There's a common expression of higher the risk, higher the reward; but in finance it should be higher reward, higher risk because people's savings are involved. This is why I created The Round of Par Games Theory Network where the intended score should always be 0. Nobody wins and nobody loses between investor and stock exchange, just a nice friendly draw. The Investors assets under management grows and the Exchange's Market Volume Grows.
Let's break down the Components:
Beta Arbitrage
Investor: Beta Arbitrage involves longing in one market and shorting in a DIFFERENT market. The example is longing Company A in the stock market but then going to Company A in the options market and placing a put/short option. Either way the Investor earns a profit.
Exchange: The Futures Exchange benefits because now not only is equity on the stock market is being bought but the options market has a larger volume.
Convertible Bond Compounding
Investor: By compounding through Convertible Bonds not only are you going to be paid back your money because creditors are first on the company's bankruptcy list unlike investors, but it's an easier way to buy more shares for growth investing while not diving head first.
Exchange: The Futures Exchange benefits because now not only is equity on the stock market is being bought, but the bond market has a larger volume.
LANGUAGES
Mandarin
Latin
INDUSTRY WORTH FOR COMMODITIES (AGRICULTURE WORKING CLASS)
In 2012, Forbes reported that $21 trillion was Off-Shored
In 2017 the equivalent of at least 10% of the world’s GDP is in offshore banks, and that number is probably higher due to the opaqueness of the world’s global tax havens, according to a research report release this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The estimated amount of money laundered globally in one year is 2 - 5% of global GDP, or $800 billion - $2 trillion in current US dollars.
Taxes in the US – The federal government collected revenues of $3.5 trillion in 2019—equal to about 16.3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) (figure 2). Over the past 50 years, federal revenue has averaged 17.4 percent of GDP, ranging from 20.0 percent (in 2000) to 14.6 percent (most recently in 2009 and 2010).
The foreign exchange or forex market is the largest financial market in the world – larger even than the stock market, with a daily volume of $6.6 trillion, according to the 2019 Triennial Central Bank Survey of FX and OTC derivatives markets.
In 2019, for example, the sales value of rough diamonds amounted to some 13.9 billion U.S. dollars worldwide. After polishing, the value increased by nearly double to 26.7 billion U.S. dollars. In 2019, the global diamond jewelry market value was approximately 79 billion U.S. dollars.
Global Cut Flowers Market to Reach $41. 1 Billion by 2027.
The global coffee market was valued at USD 102.02 billion in 2020,
Global Vanilla Market Is Expected to be worth Around USD 735 Million By 2026 
According to the report published by Allied Market Research, the global cocoa market generated $12.8 billion in 2019, and is projected to reach $15.5 billion by 2027, witnessing a CAGR of 4.3% from 2021 to 2027
The global water and wastewater market was valued at 263.07 billion U.S. dollars in 2020. The market is projected to reach a value almost 500 billion U.S. dollars by 2028 at a CAGR of 7.3 percent in the 2021 to 2028 period.
The global tobacco market size was estimated at USD 932.11 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach USD 949.82 billion in 2021.
For the year 2020, Worldwide Cotton Market was US$ 38.54 Billion. Global Cotton Market is expected to reach US$ 46.56 Billion by 2027, with a CAGR of 2.74% from 2020 to 2027.
The global waste management market size was valued at $1,612.0 billion in 2020, and is expected to reach $2,483.0 billion by 2030, registering a CAGR of 3.4% from 2021 to 2030
According to Brandessence Market Research, the Energy Drink market size reached USD 61.23 billion in 2020 and expected to reach USD 99.62 Billion by 2027.
LEGAL DEFENSE
Smurfing: Reverse Onus, Challenge Mens Rea and Actus Rea, Press Malicious Prosecution Charges, Financial Settlement
RICO Legal Disputes Trademark (30 for 30 Court): Undisclosed Settlement; 1 large sum ($30 million) broken into a 3-part settlement, Not going to trial settlement (guaranteed payment for being brought into court), Case being unsealed settlement (if the case gets reopened), and Testimony settlement (in court testimony in reopened case). The non-disclosure agreement (NDA); Agreement to 10 years jail time for every broken NDA, NDA on Case, NDA on Testifying, and NDA on Settlement. Sealed Federal Cases: Have legal matters sealed by the court to prevent leaked information to media and Precedence for RICO
CRIME COLLAR
White-Blue collar crime is a subgroup of white-collar crime White Collar Crime, a term reportedly first coined in 1939, is synonymous with the full range of frauds committed by business and government professionals. Blue-collar crime is a term used to describe crimes that are committed primarily by people who are from a lower social class. This is in contrast to white-collar crime, which refers to crime that is usually committed by people from a higher social class.
SOCIOCULTURAL THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT
Agriculture Working Class Immigrants Socioeconomic Status Focused Key Players in Commodities Market*
Polytheism (Zeus, Poseidon, and Ogou-Athena)*
Births: Mercury-Venus, MSTN Gene, ACTN3 Gene, XYY Syndrome, or Triple X Syndrome
Māori All Blacks Sports Culture and Volleyball is National Sport*
Jumping for Cardio*
Poker Brain*
REITs/Real Estate ETF Investors with Index Credit or Debit Spreads Options Trading*
Mergers and Acquisitions Exploratory School System*
Sand-Based Calisthenics  kallos sthenos (beautiful strength) Interval Training: Isometric-Plyometric, Circuit Training: Isometric-Isotonic, and Isometric-Mobility
Tofu is Protein of Choice
Fish/Seafood is Meat of Choice
Blueberry is consumed at every breakfast
Mineral Water instead of Spring Water
Coconut Syrup as Sugar Replacement
Business News is a part of The Cigar Culture
Sports Gambling for Extra Revenue Stream instead of Lottery Tickets when in Working Class
Hydrolyzed Collagen-Leucine is the Main Sports Medicine
Brokerage Accounts with First 10 Investments as Bond Funds and REITs
VAMMMBRGC LIFESTYLE BRAND RACKET
Volleyball (Trampoline)
Acting (Short Film Series: Aesthetic Taxi Game, Character: Expansive Mood Villain)
Modeling (Brand Activation Models)
Music (Psychedelic Festival Trap)
Martial Arts
Ballet (Females Only)
Rings Gymnastics (Males Only)
Graffiti (Art)
Cooking (Endorsements)
LVMH-Lacoste Collaboration Company For Tax Mergers Law; Market-extension merger: Two companies that sell the same products in different markets. 4.2.2 Corporate Taxation At the corporate level, the tax treatment of a merger or acquisition depends on whether the acquiring firm elects to treat the acquired firm as being absorbed into the parent with its tax attributes intact, or first being liquidated and then received in the form of its component assets.
What Is Vertical Integration? Vertical integration is a strategy that allows a company to streamline its operations by taking direct ownership of various stages of its production process rather than relying on external contractors or suppliers. A company may achieve vertical integration by acquiring or establishing its own suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, or retail locations rather than outsourcing them. However, vertical integration may be considered risky potential disadvantages due to the significant initial capital investment required.
Analysis Discounted Cash Flow (DCF): A key valuation tool in M&A, a discounted cash flow (DFC) analysis determines a company's current value, according to its estimated future cash flows. Forecasted free cash flows (net income + depreciation/amortization (capital expenditures) change in working capital) are discounted to a present value using the company's weighted average cost of capital (WACC). Admittedly, DCF is tricky to get right, but few tools can rival this valuation method.
VŒUX DE CHAMPAGNE SOGNI CAVIALI
Description: Beta-arbitrage Mergers & Acquisitions Cartel that commits Mediterranean-Caribbean and Afro-Mediterranean Socioeconomic Status Development Conflict Prevention and Reconstruction (CPR) Unit Charities, Protection Racket, Paramilitary Financing, Lobbyist-Investment Trust, Commodities Management, Gambling & Diamond Trafficking, Rolex Re-sale Market, Real Estate Brokerage, Graffiti Art Port, Smurfing, Nike Sports & Fashion Corporate Espionage and Larceny Business Model Reengineering, and VAMMMBRGC Contract Racketeering Through Enterprise Foundations
Activities: Executive Council for Mayor, Culinary Arts, Grey Market Fashion, Trap Shooting Gambling Tournaments, Volleyball Tournaments, Corporate Sponsor EdTech, Grocery Insurance & Electronic Financial Data Interchange, Diamond Encrusted Accessories Collaboration with LVMH, OTC Beta-arbitrage Branch Bracket, OTC Exchange (Commodities, Sports Betting Investment Trust, Real Estate Investment Trust, Cuisine Real Estate Investment Trust, Forex Pairs Contract for Difference, Retail/Hospitality Real Estate Investment Trust, Credit Swap Options Endorsement Index), VAMMMBRGC Youtube Distribution Channel (Gambling News Network, Noir Short Film Series [Shakespearean Crime], Cooking Channel, Sports Resort Real Estate, Sports/Modelling/Acting Business Case Study Video Essay, Brand Activation Modelling, Combat Sports, Calisthenics Workout Class, Sports Science Lessons, Graffiti Tourism, Music Videos, Natural Resources Documentaries, Hype Beast Re-Sale Market, Rolex Business Case Study Video Essays, Business Conferences).
DIAMOND TRAFFICKING
The WFDB Trade And Business Committee
The Trade and Business Committee makes recommendations to the Executive Committee concerning industry relations with financial institutions worldwide, lab-grown diamonds, Know Your Customer and the System of Warranties.
Idea 1: Luxury Goods Encrusted Items Investment Service and Auction. Example: Hermès Bag, Investment System: Masterworks, Auction System: Information Catwalks with models then bidding in a separate room with Video Replay for YouTube.
Idea 2: A sightholder is a company on the De Beers Global Sightholder Sales's (DBGSS) list of authorized bulk purchasers of rough diamonds. De Beers Group made this list, the second largest miner of diamonds. DBGSS was previously known as DTC (Diamond Trading Company). In May 2006, DTC released a list of the 93 sightholders on its website. High Fashion Accessories Aggregator Business Model with Auction and Re-sale.
Business Model 
The London Metal Exchange (LME) which is based in Hong Kong is a commodities exchange that deals in metals futures and options. It is the largest exchange for options and futures contracts for base metals, which include aluminum, zinc, lead, copper, and nickel. The exchange also facilitates trading of precious metals like gold and silver.
Originally known as the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), the exchange changed its name in 2017 as part of a rebranding effort by its holding company, CBOE Global Markets. Traders refer to the exchange as the CBOE ("see-bo"). CBOE is also the originator of the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX), the most widely used and recognized proxy for market volatility.
ABC Exchange (Alumina, Beryllium, Carbon): There are four types of precious stones: diamonds, rubies, sapphires and emeralds. Each type has its own specific chemical and physical properties. Diamonds are made from carbon, rubies and sapphires from alumina and emeralds from beryllium.
Diamond Monopoly 
What Is Vertical Integration? Vertical integration is a strategy that allows a company to streamline its operations by taking direct ownership of various stages of its production process rather than relying on external contractors or suppliers. A company may achieve vertical integration by acquiring or establishing its own suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, or retail locations rather than outsourcing them. However, vertical integration may be considered risky potential disadvantages due to the significant initial capital investment required.
My Vertical Integration Mergers: Company’s Diamond Mines, Merger Manufacturers, Company’s Distribution, and Merger Hospitality and Gaming Diamond Exchange
The Diamond Standard 
Influence: Agricultural Bank of China is active in commercial banking, investment banking, and insurance services.
Mercantilism was a form of economic nationalism that sought to increase the prosperity and power of a nation through restrictive trade practices. Its goal was to increase the supply of a state's gold and silver with exports rather than to deplete it through imports. It also sought to support domestic employment.
The bio-economy is defined as the economic activity associated with the invention, development, production; and use of primarily bio-based products, bio-based production processes, and/or biotechnology-based intellectual property.
Industries Association; Hospitality and Gaming: Daily and Monthly Revenue Streams, Capital Gains Taxing: Create Offshore revenue through trading and Blockchain is a volatile market for good liquidity. FOREX Vehicle Currency: Low Interest Rates means currency will be traded against other currencies, Shorting own currency to get foreign currency and exchanging returns to domestic currency stabilize exchange rate and Currency Basket 
Interest Rate Pegging: Environmental alternative to gold, Surplus item during Quantitative Easing, and Low Interest Rates lead to spending and loans for investment which means buying and trading diamonds will balloon 
Mine Options: Credit spreads and debit spreads are different spread strategies that can be used when investing in options. Both are vertical spreads or positions that are made up entirely of calls or entirely of puts with long and short options at different strikes. They both require buying and selling options (with the same security) with the same expiration date but different strike prices.
Diamond Mine Investment Group: Mines can create private Investment Groups. Items within Group: diamond retail, diamond trading, industrial diamond manufacturing sectors
Lab-created diamonds are grown in controlled laboratory environments using advanced technology that replicates the conditions under which diamonds naturally develop beneath the Earth's crust. These lab-grown diamonds consist almost entirely of carbon atoms and are arranged in a diamond crystal structure.
DIAMOND ROLEX INVESTMENT TRUST (EXAMPLE)
Description
Watch Listing Through Discounted Cash Flow for Rolex Drop Culture or Re-Sale Market
Underwriting Products
$50,000 in value
Collector's Edition
Less than 20 models made
Masterwork Investing Platform (reference)
Masterworks is making the world of art a little less exclusive by offering everyday investors the chance to own a fraction of these high-priced investments with a much smaller amount of money.
Through the fine art investing platform, users can purchase (and trade) shares in what the company has defined as "blue-chip" art: masterpieces from artists like Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Andy Warhol, Banksy, Kaws, Jean-Michel Basquiat and more.
How Masterworks functions (reference)
Masterworks provides an affordable way to invest in art. What was once an option reserved exclusively for wealthy investors is now accessible to investors of all types. Here's how the platform works:
Masterworks will purchase a painting and file it with the SEC as a public offering, or IPO, similar to how a company goes public. Shares of the painting are then made available for purchase on the Masterworks website for as little as $20 per share. The company says it launches about one new painting every four to five days.
The platform stands out, especially for using propriety data to determine which artist markets have the most momentum, focusing on the very high-end segment of the art market that has predictable returns, the company says. Meanwhile, its research team works in the background to calculate appreciation rates, correlation, and loss rates.
Masterworks even recently added a secondary market, too, where investors can trade shares in paintings. Plus, Masterworks lets you invest your IRA earnings into their fine art through its partnership with Alto IRA, an alternative asset investing platform.
Industrial Embassy 
Business Model: Insurance companies base their business models around assuming and diversifying risk. The essential insurance model involves pooling risk from individual payers and redistributing it across a larger portfolio. Most insurance companies generate revenue in two ways: Charging premiums in exchange for insurance coverage, then reinvesting those premiums into other interest-generating assets. Like all private businesses, insurance companies try to market effectively and minimize administrative costs. Types of Insurance: Mining, Manufacturing, Retail, Logistics 
Financing is the process of providing funds for business activities, making purchases, or investing. Financial institutions, such as banks, are in the business of providing capital to businesses, consumers, and investors to help them achieve their goals. The use of financing is vital in any economic system, as it allows companies to purchase products out of their immediate reach. Equity financing is the process of raising capital through the sale of shares. Companies raise money because they might have a short-term need to pay bills or have a long-term goal and require funds to invest in their growth. By selling shares, a company is effectively selling ownership in their company in return for cash. Advantages of Equity Financing; Funding your business through investors has several advantages, including the following: The biggest advantage is that you do not have to pay back the money. If your business enters bankruptcy, your investor or investors are not creditors. They are part-owners in your company, and because of that, their money is lost along with your company. You do not have to make monthly payments, so there is often more cash on hand for operating expenses. Investors understand that it takes time to build a business. You will get the money you need without the pressure of having to see your product or business thriving within a short amount of time. 
Planning Permission and Building Regulations Courses: Planning permission assesses whether the development fits in with local and national policies and whether it would cause unacceptable harm, for example, to neighbours' quality of life. Whereas building control covers the structural aspects of development and progress throughout the construction
AFRO-MEDITERRANEAN PARAMILITARY FINANCING
Military Payments
Sercurity Operations (SercOps) Payment: $150,000 yearly salary: Receives $100,000 salary; other $50,000 is used for branch-managed investment portfolio and investment trust
Discharge Payment: $75,000 yearly salary for Armoured Car Guard and Driver, Receives $50,000 salary; other $25,000 is used for branch-managed investment portfolio and investment trust
Military Funding: Central Hedge Fund Equity Given
Payment is in Fixed Currency
AFRO-MEDITERRANEAN SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS DEVELOPMENT CONFLICT PREVENTION AND RECONSTRUCTION (CPR) UNIT CENTERS
Corporate Sponsor: M & A Schools (Mergers and Acquisitions) & Retirement-preparatory School
Cross-Curriculum
STEM education is the cross-curricular study of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and the application of those subjects in real-world contexts.
Studying Style
I use Interleaving Studying for Generalist Kinaesthetic Learners.
Transition to Interleaving Studying: Online PowerPoint Presentation, Video Essays, Case Studies & Meta-analyses over Books to present Information as a country, Less Paper Use, Courses on Different PowerPoint Studying Styles, Make country a Business & Finance Culture and Technological Advanced, Overview at Beginning; Program Learning Concept Check During Quizzes at the End for Courses, Spaced Learning on concept checks before exiting the course.
A great example of when to use interleaving is sports, for instance, tennis. Instead of just practicing backhands in one session, you can interleave backhands, forehands, and volleys to get increased results. Another great example can be found in science classes, where interleaving math, physics, and chemistry, for example, can provide you with an advanced understanding of all 3 fields. 
Spaced learning is a learning method in which highly condensed learning content is repeated three times, with two 10-minute breaks during which distractor activities such as physical activities are performed by the students. It is based on the temporal pattern of stimuli for creating long-term memories reported by R. Douglas Fields in Scientific American in 2005.
Spacing boosts learning by spreading lessons and retrieval opportunities out over time so learning is not crammed all at once. By returning to content every so often, students' knowledge has had time to rest and be refreshed.
The two concepts are similar but essentially spacing is revision throughout the course, whereas interleaving is switching between ideas while you study. Although interleaving and spacing are different interventions, the two are linked because interleaving inherently introduces spacing. These two concepts will create student-athletes
The best part about interleaving is that it is almost a universal aid in learning
Evidence suggests that spaced practice is more effective for long-term retrieval.
Interleaving Studying forces the brain to continually retrieve because each practice attempt is different from the last, so rote responses pulled from short-term memory won’t work. 
Multiple choice test is an example of measuring retrieval by A. reconstruction. B. recognition.
Chess
Increasing Intelligence: Fluid and crystallized intelligence are constructs originally conceptualized by Raymond Cattell. The concepts of fluid and crystallized intelligence were further developed by Cattell and his former student John L. Horn. Crystallized intelligence. This refers to your vocabulary, knowledge, and skills. Crystallized intelligence typically increases as you get older. Fluid intelligence, also known as fluid reasoning, fluid intelligence is your ability to reason and think abstractly. Fluid intelligence refers to basic processes of reasoning and other mental activities that depend only minimally on prior learning (such as formal and informal education) and acculturation. Horn notes that it is formless, and can "flow into" a wide variety of cognitive activities Tasks measuring fluid reasoning require the ability to solve abstract reasoning problems. Examples of tasks that measure fluid intelligence include figure classifications, figural analyses, number and letter series, matrices, and paired associates. Crystallized intelligence refers to learned procedures and knowledge. It reflects the effects of experience and acculturation. Horn notes that crystallized ability is a "precipitate out of experience," resulting from the prior application of fluid ability that has been combined with the intelligence of culture. Examples of tasks that measure crystallized intelligence are vocabulary, general information, abstract word analogies, and the mechanics of language.
Bullet Chess: The rules for bullet chess aren't different from those of a regular chess game. Bullet chess refers to games played with time controls that are faster than 3 minutes per player. The most popular forms of bullet chess are 1|0 (one minute with no increment per player) or 2|1 (two minutes with a one-second increment per player). Increment (also known as bonus and Fischer since former World Chess Champion Bobby Fischer patented this timing method)—a specified amount of time is added to the players main time each move, unless the player's main time ran out before they completed their move.
Chess Benefits: It has been suggested by different scientists that chess involves, and possibly boosts, cognitive abilities such as working memory, fluid intelligence, and concentration capacity. Besides, chess may be beneficial for mathematical ability and, more widely, academic achievement by enhancing concentration and problem-solving skills.
Life-History Strategy
Life history theory posits that behavioral adaptation to various environmental (ecological and/or social) conditions encountered during childhood is regulated by a wide variety of different traits resulting in various behavioral strategies. Unpredictable and harsh conditions tend to produce fast life history strategies, characterized by early maturation, a higher number of sexual partners to whom one is less attached, and less parenting of offspring. Unpredictability and harshness not only affects dispositional social and emotional functioning, but may also promote the development of personality traits linked to higher rates of instability in social relationships or more self-interested behavior. Similarly, detrimental childhood experiences, such as poor parental care or high parent-child conflict, affect personality development and may create a more distrustful, malicious interpersonal style. The aim of this brief review is to survey and summarize findings on the impact of negative early-life experiences on the development of personality and fast life history strategies. By demonstrating that there are parallels in adaptations to adversity in these two domains, we hope to lend weight to current and future attempts to provide a comprehensive insight of personality traits and functions at the ultimate and proximate levels.
The Savant Skills Curriculum
Savant gifts, or splinter skills, may be exhibited in the following skill areas or domains: memory, hyperlexia (ie, the exceptional ability to read, spell and write), art, music, mechanical or spatial skill, calendar calculation, mathematical calculation, sensory sensitivity, athletic performance, and computer ability. These skills may be remarkable in contrast to the disability of autism, or may be in fact prodigious when viewed in relation to the non-disabled person.
Learning Centers
Enrichment centers require you to be aware of your students' learning styles (Kinesthetic) as well as their knowledge about a topic. The enrichment center can provide individual students with varied activities or combination of activities that differ from those pursued by other students. As such, the center becomes an individualized approach to the promotion of the topic.
Skill Centers Skill centers are typically used at the elementary level, more so than at the secondary level. Students may work on math facts, phonics elements, or other tasks requiring memorization and/or repetition.
Interest and Exploratory Centers: Interest and exploratory centers differ from enrichment and skill development centers in that they are designed to capitalize on the interests of students. They may not necessarily match the content of the textbook or the curriculum; instead they provide students with hands-on experiences they can pursue at their own pace and level of curiosity. These types of centers can be set up throughout the classroom, with students engaging in their own selection of activities during free time, upon arrival in the morning, as a “free-choice” activity during the day, or just prior to dismissal. These centers allow students to engage in meaningful discoveries that match their individual interests.
Programmed Learning
The way a teaching machine works is: It asks you a question. If you give the right answer, it goes on to the next question. If you give the wrong answer, it tells you why the answer is wrong and tells you to go back and try again. This is called "programmed learning". 
Programmed learning, educational technique characterized by self-paced, self-administered instruction presented in logical sequence and with much repetition of concepts. Programmed learning received its major impetus from the work done in the mid-1950s by the American behavioral psychologist B.F.
Exploratory Learning (Singapore Field Trips)
The Choice Theory Culture:
Is an expected way of being or living
Encourages positive choices which lead to healthy relationships
Is relationship based and collaborative
Is not about controlling behavior, rather promoting personal responsibility
Carol Dweck's Growth Mindset Theory
Growth Mindset: “In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment. With a growth mindset, students continually work to improve their skills, leading to greater growth and ultimately, success. The key is to get students to tune into that growth mindset.
Dweck writes, “In the fixed mindset, everything is about the outcome. If you fail—or if you’re not the best—it’s all been wasted. The growth mindset allows people to value what they’re doing regardless of the outcome. They’re tackling problems, charting new courses, working on important issues. Maybe they haven’t found the cure for cancer, but the search was deeply meaningful,” (Dweck, 2015).
Poker as Intro to Portfolio Building
Famous Fund Managers who played Poker 
Steven A. Cohen (born June 11, 1956) is an American hedge fund manager and owner of the New York Mets of Major League Baseball since September 14, 2020, owning roughly 97.2% of the team. He is the founder of hedge fund Point72 Asset Management and now-closed S.A.C. Capital Advisors, both based in Stamford, Connecticut. Cohen grew up in Great Neck, New York, where his father was a dress manufacturer in Manhattan's garment district, and his mother was a piano teacher. He is the third of seven brothers and sisters. He took a liking to poker as a high school student, often betting his own money in tournaments, and credits the game with teaching him "how to take risks." Cohen graduated from John L. Miller Great Neck North High School in 1974, where he played on the school's soccer team. Cohen received an economics degree from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1978. While in school, Cohen was initiated as a brother of Zeta Beta Tau fraternity's Theta chapter where he served as treasurer. While in school, a friend helped him open a brokerage account with $1,000 of his tuition money.
Carl Icahn is one of the most recognisable and successful investors in the world, having far outperformed the market on an annualised basis since 1968; at a rate which, by some measures, has him ahead of Warren Buffett. Carl Icahn was born on the 16th February 1936 in Queens, New York. It was a beach neighbourhood and a poor area. His mother was a pianist, but dropped her dreams of pursuing it as a career and instead chose a more stable job as a school teacher. His father also became a substitute teacher. As you may expect with both parents involved in education, Carl was extremely studious. At high school, he didn’t involve himself in many activities such as sports and clubs, instead he had set himself the big goal of making it to an Ivy League university; something most people in his area had no chance of doing. His teacher didn’t even think it was worth him applying, but this made him even more determined to be different. He had a mind-set that he wanted to be the best at everything. Icahn’s parents said they would only pay for university if he got into one of the top Ivy League universities. Although no one thought he stood a chance, he managed to enrol at Princeton University and studied philosophy as his major. His parents fulfilled their promise and paid for his Princeton fees but couldn’t stretch to anything else such as his accommodation or food. Instead, Carl got himself a summer job at a Cabana club in his neighbourhood to fund his living costs. It was at the Cabana club that he learnt how to play poker and joined in the games regularly. He says at the start he didn’t know how to play, but then he read 3 poker books in 2 weeks and became the best player there, taking home huge winning each summer. He says: “To me, it was a big game, big stakes. Every summer I won about $2,000, which was like $50,000 back in the ‘50s”
Brain Training: How Regular Poker Play Could Help Soccer Stars Succeed: An athlete’s brain is their most vital organ. It controls how the body functions, and it needs to be cultivated and disciplined just like the muscles do. Those in the industry are constantly searching for new ways to help soccer players get their heads in the game, and it turns out that poker can help immensely. By sharpening cognitive function, increasing social awareness, and improving mental endurance, poker enables athletes to rise to the occasion for peak performance on the field.
Conflict Prevention & Reconstruction Unit Psychology
Reintegration of child soldiers should emphasize three components: family reunification, psychosocial support and education, and economic opportunity. Family reunification—or, where that is not possible, foster placement or support for independent living—is crucial to successful reintegration.
Children are reintegrated into community life through the provision of psychosocial support, life skills classes and basic vocational training. At the end of the program, participants are provided with small grants to start businesses.
Post-traumatic growth (PTG) is a theory that explains this kind of transformation following trauma. It was developed by psychologists Richard Tedeschi, PhD, and Lawrence Calhoun, PhD, in the mid-1990s, and holds that people who endure psychological struggle following adversity can often see positive growth afterward. Post-traumatic growth often happens naturally, Tedeschi says, but it can be facilitated in five ways: through education (rethinking ourselves, our world, and our future), emotional regulation (managing our negative emotions and reflecting on successes and possibilities), disclosure (articulating what is happening and its effects), narrative development (shaping the story of a trauma and deriving hope from famous stories of crucible leadership), and service (finding work that benefits others).
People who have experienced posttraumatic growth report changes in the following 5 factors: Appreciation of life; Relating to others; Personal strength; New possibilities; and Spiritual, existential or philosophical changes
Although posttraumatic growth often happens naturally, without psychotherapy or other formal intervention, it can be facilitated in five ways: through education, emotional regulation, disclosure, narrative development, and service.
Forgeard found that the form of cognitive processing was critical in explaining growth after trauma. Intrusive forms of rumination caused a decline in multiple areas of growth, whereas deliberate rumination led to an increase in five domains of posttraumatic growth. Deliberate rumination involves perceiving multilateral sides of the stressful experience including value, meaning, and significance (Calhoun et al., 2000; Cann et al., 2011), and may also decrease the discrepancy between global and situational meanings, as it promote finding meaning. Trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy (TF-CBT) & Compassion-focused therapy (CFT) is a recommended psychotherapy
The two psychological traits which indicate a higher likelihood of experiencing post-traumatic growth are openness to experience and extraversion. Novelty seeking is positively associated with the Big Five personality trait of "extraversion," and to a lesser extent “openness to experience,” but is inversely associated with "conscientiousness." Online poker players are high sensation seekers who gamble to experience strong feelings and arousal, whereas impulsivity plays an important role in developing and maintaining pathological gambling.
CORPORATE SPONSOR: BETA-ARBITRAGE M & A EXAM
Poker Contest: Bankroll Budget*
Math Contest: Linear Algebra Contest, Probability and Ratios
Investment Management Contest: Decentralized Portfolio Building Simulation
Latin and Mandarin Technical Analysis Settings Fair: Year-Long Competition 
Blues Ocean Strategy Game Theory Network Mergers & Acquisitions Contest: Macau Game Theory - The course includes modules in areas such as: Essentials of M&A, Due diligence training, Business valuation training, post-merger integration planning
Machine Learning Contest: Quantitative Aptitude 
Winners Get a Full Ride to Internships (Licenes Courses I'm Gonna Make with Established Schools and Banks) Freshman Class is made of the contest winners: Mergers & Acquisitions Generalization with Corporate Sponsor; Understanding Capital Markets, Game Theory, Investment Model & Analysis, Quantitative Aptitude, Hedging Techniques, Foreign Language, Business Engineering, Business Models & Reengineering, Offshore Law, Blue Ocean Strategy, Investment Management with Python (Machine Learning)
Ages: 10, 12, 14, 17, 18, 20
SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS DEVELOPMENT CENTRES
Socioeconomic status is the social standing or class of an individual or group. It is often measured as a combination of education, income, and occupation.
EdTech
 Business Model: Grants, corporate sponsorships, and recruiting business FutureLearn is another MOOC heavyweight with 210+ partners that include universities, humanitarian foundations, and large businesses. Some startups even rely on corporate sponsorship as their main business model
Generalist Education
VAMMMBRGC: Volleyball, Acting, Modelling, Music, Martial Arts, Ballet (Female), Rings Gymnastics (Male), Graffiti (Art), Cooking (Gastronomy)
STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics
M&A: Merger, Acquasitions
Welfare Investment Program 
Fund through Rental Properties: Bond Funds, REITs
Credit Building Program: Line of Credit Deposit Program
Job Placement for Agriculture Working Class
Agricultural Industry means an industrial activity involving the processing, cleaning, packing or storage of the results from agricultural production. The working class (or labouring class) comprises those engaged in manual-labour occupations or industrial work, who are remunerated via waged or salaried contracts. Working-class occupations (see also "Designation of workers by collar colour") include blue-collar jobs, and most pink-collar jobs. Members of the working class rely exclusively upon earnings from wage labour; thus, according to more inclusive definitions, the category can include almost all of the working population of industrialized economies, as well as those employed in the urban areas (cities, towns, villages) of non-industrialized economies or in the rural workforce.
As with many terms describing social class, working class is defined and used in many different ways. The most general definition, used by many socialists, is that the working class includes all those who have nothing to sell but their labour. These people used to be referred to as the proletariat. In that sense, the working class today includes both white and blue-collar workers, manual and menial workers of all types, excluding only individuals who derive their livelihood from business ownership and the labour of others. The term, which is primarily used to evoke images of laborers suffering "class disadvantage in spite of their individual effort," can also have racial connotations. These racial connotations imply diverse themes of poverty that imply whether one is deserving of aid.
COMMODITIES REAL ESTATE
Insurance Premium, Financial Electronic Data Interchange, Royalties, Lease, & Gross Sale Payments for Restaurant Clientele Grocery Stores and Delivery Food Courts:
A lease payment is the equivalent of the monthly rent, which is formally dictated under a contract between two parties, granting one participant the legal right to use the other individual's real estate holdings, manufacturing equipment, computers, software, or other fixed assets, for a specified amount of time.
Gross sales refer to the grand total of all sales transactions over a given time period. This doesn't include the cost-of-sales or deductions (like returns or allowance). To calculate a company's gross sales, add up the total sales revenue for a specified period of time—monthly, quarterly, or annually. 
A franchise (or franchising) is a method of distributing products or services involving a franchisor, who establishes the brand's trademark or trade name and a business system, and a franchisee, who pays a royalty and often an initial fee for the right to do business under the franchisor's name and system. Royalties is the amount someone pays you to use your property, after you subtract the expenses you have for the property.
CONFLUENCE FOREX & COMMODITIES BETA-ARBITRAGE FORMULA
Trading Psychology: Play Defense, Focus on preserving capital instead of gaining capital
Position Trading: Currency being used, Shorting Low-Interest Currency against High-Value Currency Or Currency Being used, Shorting Low Interest/High-Value Currency against High-Interest Currency. Examples: Carry-Roll Down Bonds, CFD Forex Gold
Swing Trading: Use mt4/mt5 With Heiken Ashi Charts, Setting at 14 or 21 Momentum Indicator above 0 as Divergence Oscillator and VSA as Reversal Oscillator and Trade when bullish candlesticks above 200 exponential moving average and/or 20 exponential moving average (EMA) on H1 (Hourly) Time Frame; use H4 (4 Hours) and D1 (1 Day) as reference. Works for Oil & Gold Commodities
Master Supply and Demand (S&D) Zones (banks use this)
Candlestick Patterns for Momentum: Bearish Engulfing, Hanging Man, Shooting Star Three Crows, Evening Star, (Short). Bullish Engulfing, The Bearish Inverted Hammer or Regular Hammer (Regardless of Colour), Morning Star, and Piercing Line (Long) are extremely Important
Candlestick Patterns for VSA When Volume Spikes Down and Price is Up Bearish: Shooting Star, Doji, Hanging Man, Doji-Star
Candlestick Patterns for VSA When Volume Spikes Up and Price is Down Bullish: Hammer, Inverted Hammer, Doji, Doji-Star
S&D Reversal Patterns: The Drop-Base-Rally is a bullish reversal pattern, The Rally-Base-Drop is a bearish reversal pattern
S&D Continuation patterns: The Rally-Base-Rally is a bullish continuation pattern, The Drop-Base-Rally is a bearish continuation pattern
Swing Trading Time Frame H1 (Hourly) Reference D1 and H4 to locate supply and demand zones Pivot Points and VSA
Heiken Ashi Candlesticks Much easier to read candlestick charts and analyze market trends
Using Pivot Points for Prediction A pivot point is a technical analysis indicator, or calculations, used to determine the overall trend of the market over different time frames Works for commodities
Exponential Moving Average (EMA) 200 Day 20 Day
Momentum Indicator Settings 14 or 21
Volume Spread Analysis (VSA Trading) Entry 4 Steps: Identify the trend, Identify the sign of weakness in an existing uptrend, Wait to test the weakness for confirmation for the continuation of the uptrend, Look for any bullish reversal candlestick pattern for entry.
Relative Strength Index (RSI) Relative Strength Index (RSI) is a momentum indicator. It is a single line ranging from 0 to 100 which indicates when the stock is overbought or oversold in the market. If the reading is above 70, it indicates an overbought market and if the reading is below 30, it is an oversold market. RSI is also used to estimate the trend of the market, if RSI is above 50, the market is an uptrend and if the RSI is below 50, the market is a downtrend.
Commodity Channel Index Commodity Channel Index identifies new trends in the market. It has values of 0, +100, and -100. If the value is positive, it indicates uptrend, if the CCI is negative, it indicates that the market is in the downtrend. CCI is coupled with RSI to obtain information about overbought and oversold stocks.
What is Cash-and-Carry-Arbitrage? Cash-and-carry-arbitrage is a market-neutral strategy combining the purchase of a long position in an asset such as a stock or commodity, and the sale (short) of a position in a futures contract on that same underlying asset. A cash-secured put is an income options strategy that involves writing a put option on a stock or ETF and simultaneously putting aside the capital to buy the stock if you are assigned.
What are Gold CFD? A contract for difference (CFD) is a popular type of derivative that allows you to trade on margin, providing you with greater exposure to the gold market. Instead of purchasing gold itself, you buy or sell units for a given financial instrument depending on whether you think the underlying price will rise or fall.
What is Quanto Option? The Quanto option is a cash-settled, cross-currency derivative in which the underlying asset has a payoff in one country, but the payoff is converted to another currency in which the option is settled.
Hedging Strategies: Forex and Commodities CFD, Crude Oil Cash-secured Put Options (Binary Options)
TURF ACCOUNTANT
Beta-Arbitrage (PROFITS FOR BOOKMAKER)
+EV (Investment)
Live Betting (Balance Sheets)
BRANCH BRACKET DISCOUNTED CASH FLOW PORTFOLIO BET SLIP
+EV Round Robin instead of WACC Portfolio
$5 Units
GAME THEORY OPTIMAL POKER WITH LOOSE AGGRESSIVE & GROWTH INVESTING
Growth Investing Strategy & Game Theory
Japanese Candlestick Charts: Bullish Engulfing
Discounted Cash Flow Model: EV (Expected Value replaces WACC)
Mixed Strategy 
Fold Equity 
Community Cards
Companies Charts and Historical Financials
Royal Flush
Straight Flush
4 of a Kind
Full House
Flush
Hands
FCF of Companies
Strategy
Every chart starts with a green candlestick
Depending on your hand the second candlestick is either green or red
Green for the top 5 hands: Listed above
Red for the bottom 5 hands
If it's green invest by betting
If it's red fold
The third candlestick depends on the Flop
The fourth candlestick depends on The Turn 
As more money gets betted the Green candlestick gets larger
After The Flop risk-assessment and probability needs to be accounted for
After The Flop, The Turn, and The River it is possible for a red candlestick to appear because of a fold or a better hand because you lost money. Judge how much money you lost by the size of the candlesticks growth
Tony Dunst Tips
Learn to think in Big Blinds, Opponents are Effective Big Blinds 
Identify Player Types then Adjust
Study Big Blind Defense Frequency (Hand Ranges)
Work on Bubble and Final Table Play (Independent Chip Model)
Build 3 Betting Ranges
AFRO-MEDITERRANEAN SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS VOLLEYBALL SPORTS PERFORMANCE FOR KINAESTHETIC LEARNERS
Volleyball Physiological Age System for Both Genders: Plyometric High-Intensity Interval Training Through Cross Training, Wingspan Through Cross Training, Unstable Surface Muscle Recruitment Contrast Training, Isometric-Plyometric-Sprint-or-Vertical Jump Contrast Conditioning, Intermittent Hypoxic Training (IHT) Weighted Jump Rope Respiratory Conditioning, Functional Threshold Power (FTP) Cycling, Fascia and Central Pattern Generator Skill Development, Stretch-Reflex Elastic Strength Training, Running-Based Anaerobic Sprint Test (RAST), Stimulus-Fatigue-Recovery-Adaptation for Supercompensation, Autophagy Recovery, High Fat and High Carb with Lipolysis Supplement Nutrition: 3 Fuels of Energy in Oxygen, Fat, and Glucose, Convert Hybrid Muscle Fibers
Stretch Goal of Having a Physiological Age of 25
Volleyball is an aerobic sport with additional anaerobic demands. This will require volleyball players to work both energy systems, making cardiorespiratory conditioning very important. The aerobic, or lower intensity training, will help build a strong cardio base that is needed for a long match. A study done on college athletes showed that gymnasts and volleyball players had significantly higher bone mineral density than swimmers, which is considered a low-impact sport.
Collagen Athletes: Researchers found that a year of daily collagen peptides supplementation measurably increased bone mineral density in the lumbar spine and in the upper femur. The women also had higher levels of a blood biomarker that indicates bone formation. Collagen provides resistance to tension and stretch, which commonly occur in fascial tissues, such as ligaments, tendons, sheaths, muscular fascia and deeper fascial sub-layers. Julio Jones and Cam Newton do Fascia Beach Workouts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unm5dvlcqL4
Offensive Systems 5-1 System Rotation 1: Setter Starts in Right Back, Rotation Offense to Middle Front, Run One Man or Two Man Routes, Call out Formations
Defensive Systems Middle Back Systems: The Set is important to determine if there’s enough time for one man, two man, or three man block. Shots to Plan for: Dink, Off-speed, and Angle. Setting Blocks: Mix Sequencing of Jump Two Man and Three Man Back
Anta Sports Fashion Collab Circuits (Graffiti Beachwear Fashion Week and Trade Show): Key City Tournaments
Planned Pregnancy: Mercury-Venus Cusp, MSTN Gene, ACTN3 Gene, and XYY Syndrome or Triple X Syndrome
CARTEL THEORY
HSBC Bank Holding Company Equity Financing
What Is a Bank Holding Company? A bank holding company is a corporation that owns a controlling interest in one or more banks but does not itself offer banking services. Holding companies do not run the day-to-day operations of the banks they own. However, they exercise control over management and company policies. They can hire and fire managers, set and evaluate strategies, and monitor the performance of subsidiaries’ businesses.
What Is Equity Financing? Equity financing is the process of raising capital through the sale of shares. Companies raise money because they might have a short-term need to pay bills or have a long-term goal and require funds to invest in their growth. By selling shares, a company is effectively selling ownership in their company in return for cash. Equity financing comes from many sources: for example, an entrepreneur's friends and family, investors, or an initial public offering (IPO). An IPO is a process that private companies undergo to offer shares of their business to the public in a new stock issuance. Public share issuance allows a company to raise capital from public investors. 
Palmiers Noirs Rivals
United Kingdom
Jews
Luxembourg (EU Blacklist Creator)
Latin Kings
Sinaloa Cartel
Sonora Cartel
Colombian Cartels
Neymar
Banker Title
Croupier Comptable: An investment banker who has experienced decadence through Casino Capitalism 
Palmiers Noirs Structure
Clandestine Cell System
A clandestine cell system is a method for organizing a group of people (such as resistance fighters, sleeper agents, mobsters, or terrorists) such that such people can more effectively resist penetration by an opposing organization (such as law enforcement or military units).
In a cell structure, each of the small group of people in the cell know the identities of the people only in their own cell. Thus any cell member who is apprehended and interrogated (or who is a mole) will not likely know the identities of the higher-ranking individuals in the organization.
The structure of a clandestine cell system can range from a strict hierarchy to an extremely distributed organization, depending on the group's ideology, its operational area, the communications technologies available, and the nature of the mission.
Criminal organizations, undercover operations, and unconventional warfare units led by special forces may also use this sort of organizational structure.
Infrastructure cells
Any clandestine or covert service, especially a non-national one, needs a variety of technical and administrative functions, such as: Recruitment/training, Forged documents/counterfeit currency, Finance/Fundraising, Communications, Transportation/Logistics, Safehouses, Reconnaissance/Counter-surveillance, Operational planning, Arms and ammunition, and Psychological operations
A national intelligence service has a support organization to deal with services like finance, logistics, facilities (e.g., safehouses), information technology, communications, training, weapons and explosives, medical services, etc. Transportation alone is a huge function, including the need to buy tickets without drawing suspicion, and, where appropriate, using private vehicles. Finance includes the need to transfer money without coming to the attention of financial security organizations.
Cartel Definition
Cartel is an ambiguous concept, which usually refers to a combination or agreement between rivals, but – derived from this – also designates organized crime. The main use of ‘cartel’ is that of an anticompetitive association in the economy. 
Price cartels engage in price fixing, normally to raise prices for a commodity above the competitive price level.
Cartel Theory
Cartel theory is usually understood as the doctrine of economic cartels. However, since the concept of 'cartel' does not have to be limited to the field of the economy, doctrines on non-economic cartels are conceivable in principle. Such exist already in the form of the state cartel theory and the cartel party theory. For the pre-modern cartels, which existed as rules for tournaments, duels and court games or in the form of inter-state fairness agreements, there was no scientific theory. Such has developed since the 1880s for the scope of the economy, driven by the need to understand and classify the mass emergence of entrepreneurial cartels. Within the economic cartel theory, one can distinguish a classical and a modern phase. The break between the two was set through the enforcement of a general cartel ban after the Second World War by the US government.
Constituent characteristics and exclusion criteria for cartels
Constituent criteria for cartels would be the following: The members are, at the same time, partners as well as competitors (so do e.g. enterprises, states, parties, duelists, tournament knights).  These members can be individual persons or organizations. The members of a cartel are independent of each other, negotiating their interests with each other and against each other. So there have to be at least two participants and they determine their interests autonomously. The members of a cartel know each other; they have a direct relationship, in particular they communicate with each other.
Exclusion criteria for cartels would be the following: There is a "hierarchical" or other strong "dependency relationship among the participants": a drug mafia that is organized hierarchically and managed by a single boss can't be a drug cartel in the sense of a real "cartel". KLikewise, a business corporation can't be a "cartel" due to its central management, which controls its subsidiaries. Furthermore, an OPEC, in which all adherents would be dependent on the largest member (since long: Saudi Arabia) would no longer be a "cartel". Similarly, colonial empires from a motherland and colonies do not constitute a "state cartel". The union of competitors, in their entirety or via important members of its association, is dependent on an outside power. A strict, state-mandated compulsory cartel without freedom of choice between the partners would not be a (real) cartel. A suitable example is the "Deutsche Wagenbau-Vereinigung" (German Railway Cars Association), which was organized in the 1920s by the "Deutsche Reichsbahn" (German Imperial Railways) – its "market opponent". The combination takes place between actors of different levels. Thus, the concerted actions of employers’ associations and trade unions in some industrialized countries was not a cartel, because the allies there were no homogenous competitors. The alleged members of a suspected cartel do not know each other, but only randomly show a parallel behavior: “Cartels of the godless”, “cartels of maintenance deniers” or “silent cartels” are therefore usually no real cartels, but pure verbal abuse formulas.
MACAU ECONOMICS
Science
Science of Aesthetics
Nutritional Biochemistry
Vertical-Rotational Force Kinetic Chain
Biomechanics
Sports Medicine
Technology
Biotechnology
FinTeach
RealTeach
Merger & Acquisition EdTech
Engineering
Business Engineering (Tribes Organism and Keynesian Macroeconomics)
Construction Management
Business Model Reengineering
Mathematics (Decentralized Central Banking)
Investment Management
Monetary Policy & Central Banking
Wolf Packs are Generalist
David Epstein examined the world’s most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, forecasters and scientists. He discovered that in most fields—especially those that are complex and unpredictable—generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel. Generalists often find their path late, and they juggle many interests rather than focusing on one. They’re also more creative, more agile, and able to make connections their more specialized peers can’t see.
Wolves are habitat “generalists,” meaning they can adapt to living in many kinds of habitat. They basically need two things to thrive: abundant prey and human tolerance.
Trophic Cascade, an ecological phenomenon triggered by the addition or removal of top predators and involving reciprocal changes in the relative populations of predator and prey through a food chain, which often results in dramatic changes in ecosystem structure and nutrient cycling. (Trillwave in Macau)
A keystone species is an organism that helps define an entire ecosystem. Without its keystone species, the ecosystem would be dramatically different or cease to exist altogether. Keystone species have low functional redundancy. (Trillwave in Macau)
Unpredictable and harsh conditions tend to produce fast life history strategies, characterized by early maturation, a higher number of sexual partners to whom one is less attached, and less parenting of offspring.
BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY BY RENÉE MAUBORGNE AND W. CHAN KIM (COURTESY OF BLINKIST)
What’s in it for me? Conquer uncontested market space.
Every business asks themselves the same question: how can we beat out the competition? And almost every business comes up with the same answer: we need to become bigger, better, and faster to outperform our rivals.
But what if your business didn’t have to beat the competition because there wasn’t any? What if you could enjoy unlimited growth without worrying about limited demand? This isn’t some idle fantasy but a strategic approach that a handful of successful businesses have already made reality. How did they do it? And how can your business do the same? This short Blink will give you a taste.
Escape your competition by setting sail to a blue ocean.
When you establish a new business, competition can be brutal. Whether you’re selling wine, audio books, or life insurance, the market for a product can only get so big. So you’re left to fight with hundreds of other companies for your share of a limited demand. No surprise that America’s most popular business TV show is called Shark Tank! Markets today are like oceans, swarming with hungry companies ready to kill each other. There’s so much blood in the water, we can call these markets red oceans. 
But every once in a while, a company emerges that seems to sail past all the competition. These are businesses that rise fast, grow uncontested, and seem to play by their own rules. What are they doing differently?
Well, instead of fighting over scraps in red oceans, these businesses navigate uncharted territory: blue oceans. You can think of blue oceans as all the markets we haven’t yet discovered, for products and services that don’t yet exist. Demand isn’t limited because demand isn’t there – it has to be created. But this isn’t a handicap, it’s an opportunity. Because if the size of your market isn’t limited, neither are your growth and profits.
In blue oceans, the water isn’t bloodied by cut-throat competition. It’s deep, clear, and full of undiscovered potential. The blue ocean strategy gives you the methodology and tools to conquer such uncontested markets. The basic tenet is this: It’s true that the space in a certain industry might be limited. But who’s to say that a business can’t create an entirely new industry?
Let’s look at an example of this in action: famous Canadian circus company Cirque du Soleil. With its extraordinary variety shows, Cirque du Soleil has entertained millions of people worldwide. On top of that, it’s made record profits. Not something you would expect from a circus company! How did the company do it?
Well, Cirque du Soleil did two interesting things. First, it got rid of the old circus staple of animal acts. Then, it supplemented its human acts with live music and compelling storylines. The first move reduced costs while the second introduced exciting new elements into the world of circus. In effect, Cirque du Soleil created a blue ocean: it carved out an entirely new market for artistic theater experiences. And people love it.
Lower your costs and differentiate yourself.
Perhaps you find the example of a circus company a bit too eclectic? No problem. There are thousands of other businesses that have successfully implemented a blue ocean strategy. Companies like Ford, Nintendo, Netflix, Nespresso, Yellow Tail, Southwest Airlines, and even The Body Shop. In this section, we’ll take a closer look at how they succeeded.
But first, a few more words about red oceans. In red oceans – industries that are already established – everyone plays by agreed rules. Not so long ago, these rules might have looked something like this: “Movies can be bought or rented.” “Wine needs to have an air of sophistication.” “Air travel is expensive.” But in blue oceans, none of these rules apply. Blue oceans are actively shaped by the actions of the industry players who create them.
Let’s be clear – you don’t need to reinvent the wheel to establish a blue ocean. Often, a few little tweaks are enough to set a product apart from its competitors and create a new market. It’s really quite simple: Take a close look at your industry as it is right now. Then think about which factors you can Raise, Eliminate, Reduce, and Create. Let’s go through these points step-by-step with examples.
Raise. Think about how you can elevate the product quality, price point, or service standards of your industry. Southwest Airlines did this when it became the first US airline to make domestic flights quick, easy, and affordable for everyone.
Eliminate. Consider which aspects of your product or service can be cut completely. Remember how Cirque du Soleil got rid of costly and unethical animal acts? Every industry has some outdated practice they’d be better off abandoning.
Reduce. Look at which production processes, product features or service offers you can reduce. Australian wine brand Yellow Tail, for instance, decided to reduce its focus on prestigious vineyards and the aging process in favor of affordable wines with broad appeal.
Create. Brainstorm what new features you can offer your customers. Netflix is a premium example of this that barely needs an explanation: it was the first company to offer on-demand streaming for movies and TV shows.
Ideally, considering these questions will help you do two things: lower your costs and differentiate your business from the competition. And that’s really all you need to create a blue ocean. Even more so, if your company keeps addressing these four factors – that’s raise, eliminate, reduce, and create –, it will stay one step ahead of the competition at all times.
Final summary
In this short Blink, you’ve learned about the difference between red and blue oceans. Rather than competing for limited market space, successful businesses often capture new markets with unlimited potential. They’re discovered by raising, eliminating, reducing, and creating industry factors in a way that lowers costs and sets your business apart from the competition.
RANGE BY DAVID EPSTEIN (COURTESY OF BLINKIST)
What’s in it for me? Learn why taking a wide-ranging approach to life will pay off.
In our complex and cutthroat world, there’s a lot of pressure to get a head start and specialize early. Many successful people, such as Tiger Woods, start to focus on one path early in life. But delve a little deeper, and it becomes clear that it’s generalists, not specialists, who are primed to excel.
Generalists may take a little longer to find their path in life, but they are more creative, can make connections between diverse fields that specialists cannot. This makes them more innovative and, ultimately, more impactful.
Drawing on examples from medicine to academia to sport, these blinks explore how breadth and range are far more powerful than specialized expertise. They also show that experts often judge their own fields more narrowly than open-minded, intellectually curious amateurs do.
In these blinks, you’ll learn; what comic books have to tell us about the ingredients of success, how the complexity of modern life has changed the way we think, and why you should be a Roger; not a Tiger.
Starting early and specializing is fashionable, but has dubious merit.
At the age of ten months old, Tiger Woods picked up his first miniature golf club. At two, he showed off his golf drive on national television. Later that same year, he entered and won his first tournament in the under ten category. Tiger Woods embodies a now popular idea that the key to success in life is to specialize, get a head start and practice intensively.
This trend toward specialization doesn’t only show up in the sports world. In fact, it’s also true of academia, our complex financial system and medicine. Oncologists, for example, now rarely focus on cancer alone. Rather, they specialize in cancer of a particular organ. The writer and surgeon Atul Gawande notes that when doctors joke about right-ear surgeons, we shouldn’t be so quick to assume they don’t actually exist.
But is specializing really the way to go? Simply put, no. In many walks of life, building up experience in just one field doesn’t help performance. In a 2009 paper, psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein explored the connection between experience and performance.
Klein shows that experience counts in certain fields. For firefighters, for example, years of focused experience trains them to recognize patterns in the behavior of flames, which enables them to make 80 percent of their on-the-job decisions instinctively in seconds.
But Kahneman found that in other areas, experience counted for nothing. Studying the assessment of officer candidates in the Israeli Defence Forces, he found that recruiters’ predictions of a recruit’s future performance, based on physical and mental abilities, were no more reliable than guesswork. Crucially, as the recruiters received more and more feedback after multiple recruitment rounds, they didn’t get any better at making predictions. Kahneman concluded that there was a complete disconnect between experience and performance.
Some fields of life resemble golf or firefighting. While not necessarily easy, they offer recurring patterns or simple rules that govern decision-making. But there are many more fields of life, like army recruitment, that are much more nebulous and require the creativity and flexibility that generalization offers.
Experimentation is as reliable a route to expertise as early specialization.
In 2006, a now 31-year-old Tiger Woods watched Roger Federer win the US Open final for the third year in a row. Both were at the peak of their powers. As they sipped champagne together in the locker room afterward, Federer felt he had never connected with someone who understood his feeling of invincibility so well. They became firm friends. But, as Roger later told a biographer, his story was very different from Tiger’s.
Roger’s mom was a tennis coach, but if she ever felt tempted to coach him, she resisted it. As a young boy, he dabbled in squash, skiing, wrestling, skateboarding, basketball, tennis and badminton. Later, he gave credit to this range of sports experience for helping his hand-eye coordination and athleticism.
Over time, he found that he liked sports with balls. He moved toward tennis as a teenager, but not intensively. In fact, when his instructors recognized his talent and tried to move him to a group of older players, he asked to stay in the group with his friends. Roger Federer’s winding path to tennis success points to the fact that sampling, rather than specialization, can often be the best route to eventual success.  
And plenty of evidence across multiple disciplines supports this. This is true even in an area like music, where plenty of outstanding musicians do specialize young. World-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma, for instance, started playing music at a very young age. But what many people don’t know is that Ma first tried violin and piano, and only moved to the cello because he didn’t like the first two.
Yo-Yo Ma isn’t alone in this. In a study of students at a British boarding school, music psychologist John Sloboda found that every one of the students who attended structured music lessons early in their development was categorized by the school as “average,” while not one was “exceptional.” In contrast, those children identified as exceptional were those who had tried out three instruments.
So, if you haven’t yet found your calling, experiment. You could take Vincent van Gogh as inspiration. He tried everything from working in bookstores to teaching and art dealing to preaching before finding his calling as an artist who changed painting forever.
Let’s find out how this works.
Living in a complex world has increased the average person’s IQ and ability to think abstractly.
In 1981, James Flynn, a professor of political studies from the beautiful hilly town of Dunedin in New Zealand, changed the way we think about thinking.
Flynn stumbled upon reports of IQ test scores of American troops that showed dramatic improvement between the two World Wars. The same score that placed a World War I soldier in the 50th percentile would only land him in the 22nd percentile of World War II troops. Intrigued, Flynn asked researchers in other countries for data. He received IQ test results from the Netherlands that showed similarly huge leaps from generation to generation. He then compiled data from 14 other nations.
In what’s now known as the Flynn effect, this research reveals an average three-point increase in IQ every decade in over 30 countries. But what causes this rapid rise? The work of a Russian psychologist, Alexander Luria, gives us an idea.
In 1931, the Soviet Union was changing rapidly. Remote, essentially premodern villages operating in ways unchanged for centuries were converted to collective farms with industrialized development, planned production and division of labor.
Luria capitalized on this rate of change to conduct unique studies. In one experiment, he asked villagers to sort wools into groups. In more modern villages, people would happily group similar pieces of wool, like those in different shades of blue. But in the remote, still premodern villages, participants simply refused to do so. According to them, each piece of wool was different – it was an impossible task!
Other questions involving conceptual thinking got a similar response. One villager, named Rakmat, was shown a picture of three adults and one child and asked which person did not belong. But Rakmat didn’t think about the question abstractly, as we would, and identify the child as different. Instead, he insisted that the boy must stay with the adults and help them with their work.
Luria’s findings were clear. The more exposure to modernization, the greater the ability to make conceptual connections between objects or abstract notions. Today, our minds are constantly dealing with abstract concepts. We glance at a download progress bar on our computer, for example, and instantly understand its meaning. Our minds are better at understanding a breadth of topics and making connections between ideas than ever before.
And yet, we continue to narrow our conceptual focus.
If you want it to stick, learning should be slow and hard, not quick and easy.
The teachers you liked the most in your educational career might be the ones who taught you the least. A study of teaching at the US Air Force Academy tracked the progress of thousands of students working with hundreds of different professors, starting with Calculus I classes. It found that the professors whose students’ got better grades on the exam were also highly rated in student evaluations. The professors whose students did not receive good grades received harsher student feedback.
But when the economists conducting the study looked at long-term results, there was a twist. The professors who received positive feedback had a net negative effect on their students in the long run. In contrast, those professors who received worse feedback actually inspired better student performance later on.
Rather than teaching to the test, these professors appeared to be facilitating a deeper understanding of underlying math concepts. It made their classes frustrating and difficult, hence the poor grades and student evaluations. But it paid off in the long run. Those professors were using desirable difficulties – harder, but ultimately more rewarding, ways to learn.
There are certain techniques we can all use that embrace desirable difficulties. One such technique is spacing, which means leaving time between learning something and practicing it. Consider a 1987 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. This study separated Spanish students into two groups, testing one group on vocabulary that they had learned the same day, and the other group weeks later. Eight years later, and with no further study in the interim, the two groups were tested again. The results showed that the latter group could remember over 200 percent more words.
Even short-term spacing is effective. In a 1972 study, researchers at Iowa State University read people a series of words. The first group of participants was asked to recite the words straight away. Another group was asked to recite them after being distracted for fifteen seconds by some simple math problems.
The first group did considerably better than the group that was distracted. But later the same day, the participants were asked to write down each word they could recall. This time, the group that previously performed worse did the best. The process of working hard to recall the information in the first instance had helped them move it from short-term to long-term memory.
So, don’t get too excited by quick progress when you learn. Embrace hard, slow learning. It will pay off in the long run.
A narrow focus is unhelpful, and a remedy for this is to think outside the box.
In some environments, dealing with specialists is desirable. If you need an operation, you probably want a doctor who specializes in the procedure and has done it many times before. However, as we benefit from more reflection and thinking, this narrow focus can be unhelpful.
For example, cardiologists use stents – metal tubes that hold blood vessels open – to treat chest pain so often that they often do so reflexively, even in situations that may be dangerous or inappropriate. This explains a 2015 study by Dr. Anupam Jena of Harvard Medical School. The study found that patients with cardiac arrest or heart failure were actually less likely to die if they were admitted to hospital while top cardiologists were away.
Other fields also point to the benefits of looking at problems with an outside view, rather than the inside view dictated by your own particular specialty.
In a study by University of Sydney professor Dan Lovallo, private equity investors were asked to provide a detailed assessment of businesses they were considering investing in, including their estimated return on investment. The investors were then asked to write notes about some other projects with broad similarities, like another tech start-up or an infrastructure project.
It turned out that the investors’ estimates of returns for the businesses they were actually planning to invest in were around 50 percent higher than for those alternative projects they had identified but not looked at in detail. The investors were shocked to discover the differences, and quickly slashed their estimated profit for their original potential investments.
As further psychological research has repeatedly shown, the more details we consider about something, the more extreme our judgments become. In one example, students rated a university higher when told that only certain science departments, rather than all science departments, were ranked in the national top ten.
Clearly, failing to see things from a broad perspective can lead to some bad calls.
A breadth of experience and interest drives innovation.
Comic books can tell us a surprising amount about range and success. When Dartmouth business professor Alva Taylor and Henrik Greve from the Norwegian School of Management decided to examine the impact of individual breadth on creative impact, they chose to study comics.
Tracking the careers of comic creators and the commercial success of thousands of comic books from 1971 onward, they made some predictions about what would boost the average value of a comic. They predicted that the more comics a creator made, the better the comics would be. Further, they thought that the more resources a publisher had, the higher quality and more successful its product would be.
All these assumptions were wrong. Neither experience nor financial resources bred success. What did drive success was the breadth of a comic creator’s experience across comic genres. Of 22 genres, the more a creator had worked in, from comedy to crime, fantasy to non-fiction, the more successful they were. But this link between breadth and success isn’t just the case in creative or artistic worlds.
Andy Ouderkirk, an inventor at the multinational company 3M, was named Innovator of the Year in 2013 and has been named on 170 patents, a proxy for creative success. He became fascinated with what generates successful and inventive teams, so he started to do some research. He found that the inventors who were most likely to succeed within 3M and win the company’s Carlton Award, which recognized innovation, were not specialists. They were polymaths, people with one area of depth, but a great deal of expertise in other areas as well.
These polymaths tended to have many patents in their area of focus, but also repeatedly took expertise gathered in one area and applied it to another. A study of prestigious scientists led by Robert Root Bernstein, a Professor of Psychology at Michigan State University, confirm Ouderkirk’s findings. Comparing Nobel prize-winning scientists to other scientists, the figures show that Nobel laureates are a full 22 times more likely to be an amateur actor, magician, dancer or performer.
So, for any hiring managers out there looking for fresh talent, here’s a plea. Don’t just look for people who fit into your clearly-defined slots. Make some space for those who don’t fit so clearly into any one category. Their breadth of experience might be invaluable.
The experts and pundits that our society listens to are usually hopeless at making predictions.
During 20 years of the Cold War, world-renowned forecasting expert Philip Tetlock collected and assessed the predictions of 284 experts. He concluded that experts are absolutely terrible at making predictions about anything.
Tetlock found that an expert’s years of experience, academic degree and even ability to access classified information made no difference. When experts said that some potential event was impossible, it happened in 15 percent of cases. Events declared to be an absolute sure thing failed to occur 25 percent of the time.
And worryingly for anyone who listens to cable news, Tetlock found that there was a perverse and inverse relationship between fame and accuracy. The more an expert appeared in the news, the more likely they were to be wrong, or as Tetlock famously put it, “roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee.”
One of the problems was that many of the experts’ focus was too narrow. Having spent entire careers studying a single issue – say, US-Soviet relations – they tended to have explicit theories about how it worked. So, what makes a better forecaster of future events? Well, researchers like psychologist Jonathan Baron point to active open-mindedness – a willingness to question your own beliefs. Most of us fail at this, and can’t override our strong instinct to cherry-pick evidence that confirms our existing beliefs.
Consider a study run by Yale professor Dan Kahan. Pro and anti-Brexit voters were first tasked with interpreting a set of statistics about the effectiveness of a skin cream. Most participants completed the task successfully. But when presented with the same numbers framed as the link between crime and immigration, many of the participants misinterpreted the statistics according to their political beliefs. The same study has yielded similar results in the US on the topic of gun control.
So, how exactly can we combat our tendency to stick to our existing beliefs, despite the evidence? Kahan argues that one personality feature is important if we want to stay open-minded and think clearly about the world around us. Instead of scientific knowledge – how much you know – emphasize scientific curiosity – a desire to learn more, willingness to look at new evidence and ability to think with a genuinely open mind.
Now, let’s consider how we can embrace this kind of curiosity.
To be more of a generalist, you need to change your attitude toward learning and success.
See if you can answer this question correctly. Disease X has a prevalence of one in 1,000 people. The test for the disease has a false positive rate of five percent. What is the chance that someone receiving a positive test result has the disease?
If your answer was two percent, or 1.96 to be precise, you got it right. And in doing so, you did better than the 75 percent of physicians and students at Harvard and Boston University who got it wrong. Their most frequent answer was 95 percent.
The problem is straightforward if you know how to think about it. In a sample of 10,000 people, ten will have the disease and get a true positive. Five percent, or 500 people, will get a false positive. So out of the 510 people with a positive result, only 10, or 1.96% are ill. Sadly, many students aren’t taught to think openly about such problems. And this, according to Arturo Casadevall –  a star in the world of microbiology and immunology – has to change.
In a new role at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Casadevall is developing programs focused on an interdisciplinary understanding of topics such as philosophy, ethics, statistics and logic. One course, called “How do we Know What is True,” examines different types of evidence in various academic disciplines. “Anatomy of Scientific Error” encourages students to hunt for signs of misconduct or poor methodology in scientific research.
Casadevall hopes that, with a more rigorous grounding in reasoning and multidisciplinary thinking, students will be better prepared to make a real impact on our economy and society.
Of course, not all of us hold senior academic positions like Casadevall. What can we do to expand our range? Well, one thing is to embrace failure. Dean Keith Simonton, a creativity researcher, has shown that the more work creators produce, the more failures they produce, but they are also more likely to produce a superstar success. Thomas Edison, for instance, held over 1,000 patents, many of which were ultimately failures. But his successes, like the light bulb, were revolutionary.
Treading a wide-roaming, disorderly path of experimentation may not always bring instant results. But it may just be the best route to greatness in the end.
Final summary
The key message in these blinks: Embracing range, experimentation and breadth of experience is often a better road to success than specialization. Range demands patience, open-mindedness and scientific curiosity. If we can foster and exemplify these, the chances that we will generate major innovations and contribute significantly to our economy and society increase.
THINKING IN BETS BY ANNIE DUKES (COURTESY OF BLINKIST) CROUPIER COMPTABLE PSYCHOLOGY
Human minds tend to confuse decisions with their outcomes, which makes it hard to see mistakes clearly.
Super Bowl XLIX ended in controversy. With 26 seconds left in the game, everyone expected Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll to tell his quarterback, Russell Wilson, to hand the ball off. Instead, he told Wilson to pass. The ball was intercepted, the Seahawks lost the Super Bowl, and, by the next day, public opinion about Carroll had turned nasty. The headline in the Seattle Times read: “Seahawks Lost Because of the Worst Call in Super Bowl History”!
But it wasn’t really Carroll’s decision that was being judged. Given the circumstances, it was actually a fairly reasonable call. It was the fact that it didn’t work.
Poker players call this tendency to confuse the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome resulting, and it’s a dangerous tendency.
A bad decision can lead to a good outcome, after all, and good decisions can lead to bad outcomes
In fact, decisions are rarely 100 percent right or wrong. Our decision-making is like poker players’ bets. We bet on future outcomes based on what we believe is most likely to occur.
So why not look at it this way? If our decisions are bets, we can start to let go of the idea that we’re 100 percent “right” or “wrong," and start to say, “I’m not sure.” This opens us up to thinking in terms of probability, which is far more useful.Volunteering at a charity poker tournament, the author once explained to the crowd that player A’s cards would win 76 percent of the time, giving the other player a 24 percent chance to win. When player B won, a spectator yelled out that she’d been wrong. But, she explained, she’d said that player B’s hand would win 24 percent of the time. She wasn’t wrong. It was just that the actual outcome fell within that 24 percent margin.
If we want to seek out truth, we have to work around our hardwired tendency to believe what we hear.
We all want to make good decisions. But saying, “I believe X to be the best option” first requires good-quality beliefs. Good-quality beliefs are ideas about X that are informed and well thought-out. But we can’t expect to form good-quality beliefs with lazy thinking. Instead, we have to be willing to do some work in the form of truth-seeking. That means we have to strive for truth and objectivity, even when something doesn’t align with the beliefs we hold.
Focusing on accuracy and acknowledging uncertainty is a lot more like truth-seeking, which gets us beyond our resistance to new information and gives us something better on which to bet.
We can learn a lot from outcomes, but it’s difficult to know which have something to teach us.
The best way to learn is often by reviewing our mistakes. Likewise, if we want to improve our future outcomes, we’ll have to do some outcome fielding. Outcome fielding is looking at outcomes to see what we can learn from them.
To become more objective about outcomes, we need to change our habits.
Habits work in neurological loops that have three parts: cue, routine and reward. As Pulitzer-prize-winning reporter Charles Duhigg points out in his book The Power of Habit, the key to changing a habit is to work with this structure, leaving the cue and reward alone but changing the routine.
We can improve our decision-making by being part of a group, but it needs to be the right kind of group.
We’ve all got blind spots, which makes truth-seeking hard. But it’s a little easier when we enlist the help of a group. After all, others can often pick out our errors more easily than we can.
But to be effective, a group dedicated to examining decisions isn’t like any other. It has to have a clear focus, a commitment to objectivity and open-mindedness, and a clear charter that all members understand.
In a decision-examining group committed to objective accuracy, this kind of change is self-reinforcing. Increasing objectivity leads to approval within the group, which then motivates us to strive for ever-greater accuracy by harnessing the deep-seated need for group approval that we all share.
To work together productively, a group needs CUDOS.
Shared commitment and clear guidelines help define a good-quality decision-examining group. But once you’ve got that group, how do you work within it?
You can start by giving each other CUDOS.
CUDOS are the brainchild of influential sociologist Merton R. Schkolnick, guidelines that he thought should shape the scientific community. And they happen also to be an ideal template for groups dedicated to truth-seeking. The C in CUDOS stands for communism. If a group is going to examine decisions together, then it’s important that each member shares all relevant information and strives to be as transparent as possible to get the best analysis. It’s only natural that we are tempted to leave out details that make us look bad, but incomplete information is a tool of our bias. U stands for universalism – using the same standards for evaluating all information, no matter where it came from. When she was starting out in poker, the author tended to discount unfamiliar strategies used by players that she’d labeled as “bad.” But she soon suspected that she was missing something and started forcing herself to identify something that every “bad” player did well. This helped her learn valuable new strategies that she might have missed and understand her opponents much more deeply. D is for disinterestedness and it’s about avoiding bias. As American physicist Richard Feynman noted, we view a situation differently if we already know the outcome. Even a hint of what happens in the end tends to bias our analysis. The author’s poker group taught her to be vigilant about this. But, teaching poker seminars for beginners, she would ask students to examine decision-making by describing specific hands that she’d played, omitting the outcome as a matter of habit. It left students on the edge of their seats, reminding them that outcomes were beside the point! “OS” is for organized skepticism, a trait that exemplifies thinking in bets. In a good group, this means collegial, non-confrontational examination of what we really do and don’t know, which keeps everyone focused on improving their reasoning. Centuries ago, the Catholic church put this into practice by hiring individuals to argue against sainthood during the canonization process – that’s where we get the phrase “devil’s advocate.”
If you know that your group is committed to CUDOS, you’ll be more accountable to these standards in the future. And the future, as we’ll see, can make us a lot smarter about our decisions.
To make better decisions, we need to spend some time in the future.
Temporal Discounting – making decisions that favor our immediate desires at the expense of our future self – is something we all do.
We can also recruit our future feelings using journalist Suzy Welch’s “10-10-10.” A 10-10-10 brings the future into the present by making us ask ourselves, at a moment of decision, how we’ll feel about it in ten minutes, ten months and ten years. We imagine being accountable for our decision in the future and motivate ourselves to avoid any potential regret we might feel.
Backcasting, imagining a future in which everything has worked out, and our goals have been achieved, and then asking, “How did we get there?" This leads to imagining the decisions that have led us to success and also recognizing when our desired outcome requires some unlikely things to happen. If that’s the case, we can either adjust our goals or figure out how to make those things more likely.
Premortems are when we imagine that we’ve failed and ask, “What went wrong?" This helps us identify the possibilities that backcasting might have missed. Over more than 20 years of research, NYU psychology professor Gabrielle Oettingen has consistently found that people who imagine the obstacles to their goals, rather than achieving those goals, are more likely to succeed.
Final summary
The key message in these blinks: You might not be a gambler, but that’s no reason not to think in bets. Whether or not there’s money involved, bets make us take a harder look at how much certainty there is in the things we believe, consider alternatives and stay open to changing our minds for the sake of accuracy. So let go of “right” and “wrong” when it’s decision time, accept that things are always somewhat uncertain and make the best bet you can.
Side Note: I think there is a link between Poker and Financial Psychopathy & Cerebral Narcissism because of the Rewiring of the Brian Benefits of Poker through Dopamine Release.
PITCH ANYTHING BY OREN KLASS (COURTESY OF BLINKIST)
PITCH ANYTHING is a fast-paced narrative packed with crystal clear examples illustrating the unique S.T.R.O.N.G. Method, which takes advantage of how the brain really works by Setting the Frame; Telling the Story; Revealing the Intrigue; Offering the Prize; Nailing the Hookpoint; and Getting a Decision.
You must tailor your pitch to the audience’s croc brains.
Everyone should learn to pitch ideas well. In every profession, from dentistry to investment banking, there comes a time when you must convince someone of something. Unfortunately, there is a gap between what we are trying to tell our audience and how they perceive it. To understand this gap and overcome it, we must look at the evolution of the human brain.
Basically, the human brain has evolved in three separate stages, resulting in three distinct parts: the primitive reptilian part, the croc brain, developed first. It’s a simple device primarily focused on survival and it can generate strong emotions, like the desire to flee a predator. Next, the midbrain developed. It allows us to understand more complex situations, such as social interactions. Finally, the sophisticated neocortex evolved, facilitating reasoning and analysis to understand complex things.
When you pitch, you use your neocortex to put into words the ideas you are trying to convey. Unfortunately, your audience doesn’t at first process these ideas with their neocortices. Instead, it is the audience’s primitive croc brains that receive the ideas and they ignore everything that is not new and exciting. Worse still, if your message seems abstract and unfathomable to the croc brain, it might perceive the message as a threat. This will make your audience want to flee to escape the situation.
This is why you must tailor your pitch to the croc brain. Since croc brains are simple, your message should be clear, concrete and focused on the big picture. You also need to ensure the croc brain sees your message as something positive and novel, which deserves to be passed on to the higher brain structures.
To secure your target’s attention, you must create desire and tension.
The one critical thing you need throughout your pitch is the attention of your target. To successfully attain this, research has shown that you must evoke two sensations in your pitch: desire and tension. Desire arises when you offer your target a reward, and tension arises when you show them they might lose something, like an opportunity, as a result of this social encounter. On a neurological level, this effectively floods your target’s brain with two neurotransmitters: dopamine and norepinephrine.
Dopamine is a chemical associated with anticipating rewards — desire. One such reward would be the pleasure of understanding something new, such as solving a puzzle. Thus, to increase the level of dopamine in your target’s brain, you must introduce novelty through a pleasant surprise, like an unexpected yet entertaining product demo.
Norepinephrine, on the other hand, is the chemical responsible for alertness and it creates tension in the target. If your pitch convinces them that there is a lot at stake here, their brains will be flooded with norepinephrine.
To create tension, you must create a bit of low level conflict with a push-pull strategy. This means first saying something to push the target away, like, “Maybe we aren’t a good match for each other.” You then counter this by pulling the target back toward you with something like, “But if we are, that would be terrific.”
This push-pull dynamic creates alertness in the target, as they sense that they might lose this opportunity. Depending on the situation, you may use very powerful push-pull statements, especially if you sense your target’s attention beginning to wane.
To control a meeting, you must first establish frame control.
Different people will see any given situation from a different perspective or point of view based on their intelligence, ethics and values. These perspectives are called frames, and they dictate how we perceive social situations such as meetings and sales pitches. Frames also determine who controls those situations.
When two people meet, their individual frames crash into each other. Only one frame can survive such an encounter — the stronger one. For example, let’s assume a cop pulls you over for speeding. He has a strong moral-authority frame and you only have a weak “I’m so sorry officer”-frame. It is clear that when your frames clash, his frame will prevail. This means he will control every aspect of the encounter: from its duration to its content and tone.
You will often face a similar clash of frames in a business environment; for example, a customer may be focused on the price of your product while you are focused on its quality. You will both try to get the other to focus on what you think is important.
If it is your frame that survives this clash, you will have frame control in the situation meaning your ideas and statements will be accepted as facts by the customer. This is a crucial advantage in any pitch. Without frame control, you are unlikely to convince anyone of anything.
You will often encounter the power frame, time frame and analyst frame, hence you must know how to counter them.
In a pitch or sales meeting you will often encounter certain archetypes of frames, and it is important you choose strong with which to counter them.
Typically, your target will use the power frame which exudes arrogance. You must not do anything that validates the other person’s power. Instead, use small acts of defiance and denial to bust the frame; for example, by yanking your presentation material away from the target if they do not seem to be taking it seriously.
Another oft-used frame is the time frame, where your customer asserts control over time: “I only have ten more minutes.” This is meant to push you off balance, but you can always counter with: “That’s fine, I only have five.”
A particularly lethal frame is the analyst frame, denoted by a fixation on details and numbers. If your opponent is in this frame, they will likely insist on drilling down into minor technical and financial details, effectively bogging down your pitch.
In such situations, give a direct but high-level answer to the question asked and get right back to your pitch. Analysis comes later. Before more questions come up, counter the analyst frame with your own intrigue frame. This basically means you tell a compelling personal story and leave it unfinished as a cliffhanger: “… so there we were, in a pitch black, falling airplane with no idea what was going to happen. Anyway, back to the pitch …" This redirects the focus of the room onto you and makes the discussion personal once again.
Use prizing to make the target seek your acceptance.
The most important frame you should be able to use is the prize frame, as it works in a variety of situations against many opposing frames.
Typically when you’re selling something or pitching an idea, your target will tend to see their money as the “prize” of the meeting, something you have to fight for. You must reframe the situation so that you are the prize and they would be lucky to do business with you.
Because people tend to want things they can’t have, prizing yourself will make your target work for your acceptance instead of the other way around. BMW does this with a special-edition M3. The company demands prospective buyers sign a contract assuring they will take proper care of the car, otherwise they cannot buy one.
In a pitching situation, never engage in behavior that makes it seem as if you are chasing the target, for example by agreeing to last minute schedule changes or trying to prematurely close the deal by saying things like, “So, what do you think so far?” Such behavior only reinforces the impression that the target is the prize. Instead, get your target to explicitly qualify themselves to you; for example, you could say, “I am very particular about with whom I work. Why should I do business with you?” This usually catches them off guard and they start trying to impress you.
Stack frames to trigger hot cognitions.
Contrary to popular belief, we are more prone to making choices instinctively than through rational analysis. In fact, we often make a decision about something before we even fully understand it and only later come up with reasons for that decision. These gut calls are called hot cognitions, whereas the decisions arrived at through rational reasoning are known as cold cognitions.
After you’ve introduced your big pitch idea, you want to trigger hot cognitions within your target. These will make him or her want what you have to offer in mere seconds, instead of analyzing your pitch for days to reach a rational, cold decision. You trigger the hot cognitions by stacking frames, meaning you introduce multiple frames in quick succession.
The first frame is the intrigue frame: you tell your target a compelling story, a personal narrative where a dilemma is solved. At the crucial juncture, you stop telling the story, leaving your target on the edge of their seat, ensuring their full attention.
Next, you pile on the prize frame, where you flip the tables on the target: instead of trying to impress them, make them qualify themselves to you. You could say something like, “This deal has so many investors after it, I have to choose who to take on board.”
After this, you stack on the time frame by adding time pressure to the pitch: “Unfortunately, this is a limited-time offer, and the train, so to speak, is leaving the station on Monday.” This will make the target feel like they are losing an opportunity, at which point they will want it even more.
By triggering all these hot cognitions in the target, you will leave them drooling for what you have to offer.
Don’t be needy – make the target chase you.
Neediness, otherwise known as validation-seeking behavior, is a sign of weakness and it can be absolutely fatal to your pitch. If you act needy, the audience will sense you are weak and their primitive croc brains will classify your proposal as a threat – to their money. This can easily push you into a vicious cycle where the audience becomes more and more distant due to your neediness, which in turn makes you anxious and even needier!
To negate neediness, you can use a simple three-step formula based on the movie The Tao of Steve, where the protagonist, Dex, follows a pseudo-Taoist philosophy to pick up women.
First, try to eliminate your desires, at least in the eyes of the target. If they have something you desperately want, this will translate as neediness in you. To negate this, make it clear to the target that you do not need them.
Second, focus on the things you do well, your strengths. Demonstrate something that showcases your excellence. Dex, for instance, was great with children and made sure the target of his affections saw this. Similarly, you must demonstrate excellence in front of your target.
Third, withdraw. At the crucial moment when your target expects you to chase them for their money, withdraw instead by saying something like, “I’m not totally convinced we’re a good match for each other.” This will make them chase you, much like the women in the Tao of Steve chased Dex.
To pitch effectively, you must attain situational alpha status.
Status plays a vital part in any social encounter. In any meeting, a dominant member known as an alpha emerges, while others take subordinate beta-positions. It is very difficult to be persuasive from a beta-position; hence, you must grab alpha status.
Though some elements of status, like your reputation or wealth, are quite stable, situational status can vary immensely; for example, while a successful surgeon has considerably higher social status than a golf teacher, the teacher is still the alpha during a golf lesson.
Often your pitch targets will lay so-called beta traps to force you into the situational beta position; for example, being made to wait in the lobby is a classic beta trap.
You must try to ignore these traps and avoid doing anything that enforces your opponent’s alpha status. Instead, use small acts of defiance and denial to grab the situational alpha status for yourself as soon as you can.
Say a customer has made you wait in the lobby. Once in the meeting room, you could begin examining some papers on the table in front of you. When the customer peeks at them, you could yank them away and say something like, “Nope, not until I’m ready.” If done in a good-natured, half-joking manner, this enforces your alpha position.
Once you have alpha status, you must then steer the discussion into a direction where you are the expert, much like the golf professional talks about golf, not heart surgery, when teaching the surgeon. To solidify your status, force your opponent to say something that reinforces your alpha position with a good-natured jest, like, “Remind me, why on earth should I work with you guys on this?”
Keep your pitch short and simple.
Before you begin any pitch, let your target know you will keep the presentation short. This will put them at ease. When Watson and Crick presented their Nobel Prize-winning idea of the DNA helix, they only needed five minutes. If you know what you are doing, you can pitch anything in twenty.
Start your pitch by introducing yourself. This does not mean rattling off your entire résumé but just outlining your greatest successes, like projects where you really did something impressive.
Most people will be tempted to jump right to the “big idea” for which they’re trying to get financing. But before you get to it, you should address one crucial concern in your target’s mind. Namely, you must explain why now is the right time to invest.
Rather than a long and complex analysis, simply outline the economic, social and technological forces which make your deal unmissable right now. Economic forces that benefit your pitch, for example, could be your target customers becoming wealthier and interest rates going down, the social forces could be the rising consumer concern for the environment, and the technological force could be the development of the electric car. You must present these forces in a way that shows a window of opportunity has recently opened but will not remain open forever.
The three forces set the stage and paint a backstory for your big idea, which should also be kept brief and simple. Use an established “recipe” for this: “For [target customers] who are dissatisfied with [current offerings on the market]. My product is a [new idea] that provides [solution to key problem] unlike [competing product]. My product has [key product features].”
That’s it. The time for details comes later.
Final summary
The key message in this book is: In any social encounter where you aim to be persuasive, it is vital that you seize control of the situation and ensure the target sees your pitch through the frame of mind you have chosen. At the same time, you must cater your pitch so that on a neurological level, the target’s brain works for you, not against you.
TRIBES BY SETH GODIN (COURTESY OF BLINKIST)
All Tribes Share 3 Components
A Group of People
A Common Cause
At least one Leader who Represents and Organizes the Tribe
The most important feature for a tribe is the shared cause.
A tribe’s shared cause leads its members to internalize the tribe’s values and ideas as their own. These internalized incentives make tribe members into driven believers instead of mere followers
Don’t engineer your ideas for the masses: make it exclusive and meaningful for a distinct group of people.
Apple set out to produce a new kind of phone that almost no one would initially like, but that a few people would really love.
With today’s technology, everyone can form and lead a tribe.
The first thing to know is that people need to be able to communicate intensely about their shared cause. This means that communication can’t just be vertical – between you (the leader) and the individual tribe members – more importantly, it must be horizontal, between tribe members.
With today’s technology, you have everything you need to facilitate both vertical and horizontal communication. Websites, blogs and social networks allow you not only to spread your cause, but also provide the room and the tools for your tribe to communicate, share ideas and organize. For example, you can use Basecamp to organize projects, and Twitter to share brief updates about developments. At the same time, these websites allow you to set ground rules for participation, and align everyone with your common vision by setting specific goals.
If you have a meaningful cause and the will to lead, people will follow.
Have you ever wondered how many people make up a movement? The answer is around 1,000: that’s the amount of true believers you need for a group to keep moving.
Creating a movement is about organizing an existing yearning into a way that tribe members can connect with each other, and form a movement under your leadership.
As former U.S. Senator Bill Bradley defines it, a movement contains three elements: A narrative that tells the story of the future you’re trying to build; a connection between the leader and the tribe and among the tribe members; and something to do – the fewer limits, the better.
When forming a tribe, don’t worry about making it grow – concentrate on tightening connections.
At least in the beginning, a tribe’s biggest advantage is not its size, but the multiple connections between the members, the leader and the outside world.
In fact, a tribe has four different directions of communication: Leader to tribe, tribe to leader, tribe members to one another and tribe member to outsider. Normal marketing pales in comparison, with communication generally only in one direction: company to market.
The most important of these directions is the communication between members. And this is where tightening a tribe comes in.
Tightening a tribe means bringing members closer together by facilitating communication and tightening their common bonds. You can do this by transforming a shared interest into one passionate goal, and by providing a platform for members to easily connect with each other.
Or you can harness the power of insiders and outsiders. To create a feeling of cohesion, you have to develop a culture of insiders – which inevitably excludes others. This allows the tribe to differentiate itself from other tribes, and create a stronger sense of internal identification.
Leadership is about stepping into a vacuum and creating motion.
For a tribe to form there has to be a particular change that people want to see made. This need for change has to come from a certain discomfort with the status quo, from a sense that there is something missing in the world. A leader steps right into this discomfort zone – the vacuum – and starts to organize so people will follow him.
Leaders do this despite the risks because of two things: they have faith in the cause and they know that innovation is always more effective the earlier it happens – so the sooner the better.
To make the world a better place, we need more heretics and less sheepwalkers.
What we need in the world are more heretics: people who question the status quo and the existing dogmas, and take action without asking for permission. Organizations need more heretics to advocate change from the inside: because if you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they will do amazing things. And tribes need heretics as leaders to break into new territory and help change the world.
ARMED ROBBERY INFLUENCE PASSING ATHLETE
Generalist Kinaesthetic Learners VAMMMBRGC
Volleyball
Acting
Modeling
Music
Martial Arts
Ballet (Female Only)
Rings Gymnastics (Male Only)
Graffiti (Art)
Cooking (Endorsements)
Characteristics
Suddenness
Speed
Intense
Aggressive Intervention for the Victim
Maximum Masking his own Contribution
Choosing the  appropriate  moment to attack and target the more vulnerable and defenseless victims.
Roles: The Bosses
**The Mastermind: The leader, who found the target, calls the shots, and thought up the plan. Usually the most experienced in the business as well, and very respected by their crew otherwise they wouldn't be able to keep all these amoral people in line. Compare The Chessmaster (Bullet Chess), The Captain, the Big Bad. May or may not have been the one to put the team together
**The Partner In Crime: The leader's second-in-command, who assists The Mastermind in plan-making and usually almost equally as experienced. Depending on the nature of the crew, he might be the only one besides The Mastermind who actually knows what's going on. May overlap with other roles. Compare The Lancer, The Dragon, the Number Two.
**The Backer: The Client who is paying for everything. Sometimes he has a deadline or is fussy in some other way that influences the crew's actions. Usually only The Mastermind and his Partner interact much with him. There isn't always a backer though, sometimes the crew front the money themselves and fence it hoping to make back enough for a profit.
Business Equity Heist
Scatter Site Shares Appreciation Rights Social Club
Bullet Chess Influenced Robbery
Preparation: The first step in creating such a good repertoire is to understand that memorization comes in a distant second to an appreciation of the ideas behind your opening moves
Prophylaxis*: In the game of chess, prophylaxis or a prophylactic move is a move that stops the opponent from taking action in a certain area for fear of some type of reprisal. Prophylactic moves are aimed at not just improving one's position, but preventing the opponent from improving their own. 
Pre-Move: This is when you make your move *before* the opponent has taken their turn. Helps with Time and Creates psychological pressure.
Tactical Vision: Tactics are maneuvers that take advantage of short-term opportunities. They can support your strategy and/or destroy your opponent's plan and ideas. Tactical and combinational themes must be mastered.
Opening Game: A chess opening is the group of initial moves of a chess game. In addition to referring to specific move sequences, the opening is the first phase of a chess game, 
Middle Game: The middlegame in chess is the portion of the game in between the opening and the endgame, though there is no clear line between the opening and middlegame or between the middlegame and endgame. Theory on the middlegame is less developed than the opening or endgames.
Development: It is important to develop your whole Army. Note the word whole. Some players get a few pieces out and launch an attack. The necessity for quick development depends on the type of Center that exists. For example, if the center is closed, development is not necessarily a priority because the enemy pieces won't be able to break into your position. However, if the center is open, development takes on a great significance
Initiative**: The side that forces it's ideas on a reacting opponent and Are making believable threats or responding to threats.
Dynamic Advantage: A dynamic Advantage centers around temporary items like development, the initiative, and more active pieces. Make sure you make use of this Dynamic plus before the opponent catches up in development, initiative runs dry, or you're active pieces are exchanged
Compensation: If you give up something (space, structural weakness, squares, material) and get nothing in return you are in trouble. However if you give up the same imbalances (space, structural weakness, squares, material) in exchange for different types of imbalance you are said to have compensation for whatever it is you gave up
Material Advantage: A material advantage goes to the player who has more and/or stronger pieces.
End Game: In chess and chess-like games, the endgame is the stage of the game when few pieces are left on the board. The line between middlegame and endgame is often not clear, and may occur gradually or with the quick exchange of a few pairs of pieces.
KEY MOTIFS
Mr. & Mrs Smith, Physical Fitness, Force-Velocity Curve Stimulus-Fatigue-Recovery-Adaptation Performance Training, Circuits, Networking, Chaárms or Athena Venus-Mercury Cusp Births, Triple Decker Projects with Sand Volleyball Courts, Brand Activation Modelling, Sports Larceny & Contract Racketeering, Sports for Orphans Charities, Short Film Series Acting, Polyglot, Industrial-Organizational Psychologist and Mergers & Acquisitions Bankers Advisory Team
KEY VALUES
Brass Knuckles as Weapons, Decadence, Socratic Methods Game Theory, Poker Country Clubs with Sports Betting Investment Trust, Red Bull Music Festivals, Athletic excellence, Sports Performance Centers, Med Spas, Patchwork Tattoos, Pastel Goth, Pastel Wavy Hair, Video Games, Real Estate Investment Groups, Scatter-site Share Appreciation Rights Social Club, Art House and Management Companies, Business Incubators and Startups Accelerators Collaboration Holding Company, Syncretism of Athena through Occult Magic to Warrior Spirits, Law Education EdTech Sponsor and Provider, Armed Robbery Sports Playbooks, Force-Velocity Curve Physique, Smurfing, Sports Betting, Poker Tournaments, Enterprise Foundations, Rental Properties, and Overview of the Nevada Economy: The top three sectors by total employment are Real Estate and Rental and Leasing, Accommodation and Food Services, Retail Trade, while the unemployment rate across the state in 2022 was 4.8%.
AESTHETIC THEORIES
Subjective
Based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions
Precarious Balance
Precariously: If something is happening or positioned precariously, it's in danger. A glass could be precariously balanced on the edge of a table. If something is on the verge of danger, then the word precariously fits.
Semblance
Semblance is generally used to suggest a contrast between outward appearance and inner reality.
Phantasmagorical
Having a fantastic or deceptive appearance
adjective. having a fantastic or deceptive appearance, as something in a dream or created by the imagination. having the appearance of an optical illusion, especially one produced by a magic lantern.
Law of Polarity in Relationships
In any successful relationship that has an intimate connection and sexual attraction, there is polarity. What does this mean exactly? Polarity in relationships is the spark that occurs between two opposing energies: masculine and feminine. Gender does not affect whether you have masculine or feminine energy.
Second Reflection
Burden Aesthetics with Intentions
The Second Reflection lays hold of the Technical Procedures
CRIMINOLOGY THEORIES
Choice Theory: The belief that individuals choose to commit a crime, looking at the opportunities before them, weighing the benefit versus the punishment, and deciding whether to proceed or not.
Classical Theory: Similar to the choice theory, this theory ascertains that people think before they proceed with criminal actions; that when one commits a crime, it is because the individual decided that it was advantageous to commit the crime.
Critical Theory: Critical theory upholds the belief that a small few, the elite of the society, decide laws and the definition of crime; those who commit crimes disagree with the laws that were created to keep control of them.
Labeling Theory: Those who follow the labeling theory of criminology ascribe to the fact that an individual will become what he is labeled or what others expect him to become; the danger comes from calling a crime a crime and a criminal a criminal.
Life Course Theory: The theory that a person’s “course” in life is determined by short (transitory) and long (trajectory) events in his life, and crime can result when a transitory event causes stress in a person’s life causing him to commit a crime against society.
Positivist Theory: The positivist rejects the idea that each individual makes a conscious, rational choice to commit a crime; rather, some individuals are abnormal in intelligence, social acceptance, or some other way, and that causes them to commit crime.
Rational Choice Theory: Reasons that an individual thinks through each action, deciding on whether it would be worth the risk of committing a crime to reap the benefits of that crime, whether the goal be financial, pleasure, or some other beneficial result.
Routine Activity Theory: Followers of the routine activity theory believe that crime is inevitable, and that if the target is attractive enough, crime will happen; effective measures must be in place to deter crime from happening.
Social Learning Theory: Social learning indicates that individuals learn from those around them; they base their morals and activities on what they see others in their social environment doing.
Strain Theory: The theory holds that individuals will turn to a life of crime when they are strained, or when they are unable to achieve the goals of the society, whether power, finance, or some other desirable goal.
Trait Theory: Those who follow the trait theory believe that individuals have certain traits that will contribute to whether or not they are capable of committing a crime when pushed in a certain direction, or when they are in duress.
Consensual or Victimless Crime: Consensual crime refers to crimes that do not directly harm other individuals or property. Rather, individuals choose to participate in risky behaviors that may be considered against the law. This includes indulging in drug use, prostitution, or obscenity.
CROUPIER ACCOUNTING
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c0ry-c0nvoluted · 11 months
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Gorrlax: The Merger 
"...and here, on the 1-year anniversary of the mass acquisition of the final thirty-two banks country wide, JPMorgan Chase has put the finishing touch on their newest building on Wall Street by resurrecting what appears to be a demon monument that they boast is purely artistic sensationalism, while others warn that it is much, much more. Is it a glimpse into the dark truth of this organization, or simply creatively aggressive marketing and gaudy tastelessness? In a recent interview, Jamie Dimon, the company's top shareholder, spoke fondly of this ostentatious eye-sore, promising it to be a symbol of modern 'badassery,' as he put it, explaining it was simply meant to be 'bold and edgy'. 'It scored great with the under-forty crowd and, I have to say, we've already sold-out of the miniatures in the first presale. Gorrlax is the new 'golden bull!!, he responded with practiced zest that I, for one, wasn't entirely convinced by. The interview has, of course, gone viral, and whether the perceived terror in his voice and eyes is in fact real, or a figment of all our imaginations, remains to be decided. Some say that 'he's just old' and the shakiness of his voice and demeanor reflect his struggle with those long years he's lived on Earth. While others point to several different recent interviews to clearly point out the falsehoods to those claims. Nevertheless, it seems 'Gorrlax' is here to stay, as is this new superpower in financial infrastructure that has many die-hard American patriots finally tucking tale and fleeing the country. But is there anywhere on this planet outside of the influence of an institution this powerful? After all, the company has already positioned themselves to have their logo adorning the first civilian structures set to be colonized on Mars. With a reach spanning the cosmos, I'm afraid these expats are simply only delaying the inevitable. I'm Olivia Gutiérrez..." moving her hand from her long coat pocket, the past-her-prime star reporter revealed the small .22 caliber revolver she'd been keeping warm in her palm, "...and I don't want to be here anymore. God speed."
No one on the street even bothered to flinch at the shot. Olivia's blood and skull-matter hardly made it past Gorrlax's ankles and was removed in minutes with a single wipe from a cloth. Although the camera angle wasn't able to confirm it, several unrelated onlookers claimed to have seen the golden demon smile in that instant at its first taste of blood. And in the months since, hardly a day goes by without another lost soul quieting their existential torment at the feet of the fifty-foot monument.   -cm
by AnomalousDesigns
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bionibots · 1 year
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Kiss Me in Komorebi+ | Meet Rune Tégner
Here comes Rune, a very special charming dude for Daniel @rainymoodlet
Name: Rune Tégner | He/Him | Pansexual Age: 36 , 6′3 or 1.93 meters Zodiac: Virgin Traits: Creative, Adventurous, Loves Outdoor Aspiration: (custom) Voice Virtuoso 😏 Career: Lyric Sing-Songwriter (official title at Ministry of Labor) 🤭
Who is Rune Tégner?  This handsome Italian/Swedish multitalented soul is a Simtuber, Songwriter and Daddy. He graduated at Britechester in Fine Arts with a distinguished degree and travelled the world. Has a bunch of hobbies like cooking, doing yoga and fitness, loves to travel, enjoys the nature, knows how to catch fishes. Yeah sit down by the campfire and once he start to play his guitar? Dude, you will be mesmerized by his voice along with his poetic love songs. Rune does believe in love. He is sort of romantic but not in a extreme way. Nothing kitschy nice stuff, you know! 
Backstory, Lifestages Quirks, Fav’ Playlist, and an Interview are below the cut. Maybe I went up and over the horizon.🤪 
PS: If you found some errors - please keep them 😝 getting a bit tired over here. But I’m super thrilled to see who will win Daniels’ heart! Please enjoy him!  🥰 😌
BACKSTORY 
Rune was born in Gothenburg, Sweden. His mother left Italy (Florence) for Gothenburg when she was 19 to work as a principal dancer at the Gothenburg Opera.
Eventually, they moved to Stockholm as his father, Ruben, established a company for mergers and acquisitions, also known as M&A. Tégner M&A Investments is widely known and successful in various sectors globally.
Success has always driven Rune's father. Whenever Rune failed to follow orders, Ruben punished him. He plotted his whole future for him:  Rune was supposed to study economics and be his successor. Once there was a quarrel where Rune rebelled against his father. Ruben hurt him by becoming violent. Hence the nose scar.
He said that creative careers would not bring much bread, that he was nothing special, and would never succeed as an artist. Rune should pursue a more grounded career.
However, their father/son relationship broke at 16 when Rune tried to explain he had a boyfriend. He also explained that he does not mind which gender his partner has. Runes' pansexuality is something his father refused to accept until today. Ruben told him he was not his son. A son of his would never act against nature's laws. In the aftermath, bitterness and deep disappointment arose on both sides. Not a word has Rune exchanged with his father since he moved out. Unlike his mother, she unconditionally loves and accepts her son. Rune has a younger brother. Alarik - he is 16 years younger than him. You guessed it, Ruben wanted another child - a replacement! The young man admires Rune and might be motivated to venture out and pursue his dreams as well.
After coming out at 16, Rune stayed with his first boyfriend.
At Britechester he studied Fine Arts and graduated with a distinguished A+ degree.
After graduation Rune broke up his relationship with is first boyfriend. They drifted apart.
Being single again, he needed some time to explore himself. For the first time in his life, he experienced the freedom to enjoy life. Yes, it was an eye-opener for him. He traveled to Selvadorada, where he learned how to meditate, and Yoga became a new thing. As a result, he developed a love for nature.
Being out in the nature and traveling gave him space to think about his future and what he wanted to achieve in his life.
Rune traveled the world until he met Anais in Tartosa. Not long after, they were both blessed with an adorable son named Elias. Elias is ten now. After almost eight years of dating, he proposed to her and planned on getting married.
One day Rune had a rather crucial meeting with the famous record label Brindle Melodies. Sometimes, though, you find yourself in weird situations when you're stressed. He forgot to take his songs with him. By the time - Rune got home to get the papers, he had to face reality. His fiancée romanced another guy in their bedroom. Surely, you can imagine that Rune called off the engagement, and yes, they broke up. The deal with the record label didn't work out that day, either, due to extreme delays. He canceled the deal.
His relationship collapsed, leaving him angry and disappointed, but instead of arguing, he left her without saying anything to her. He only talked to her about Elias. Elias stayed with his dad because Anais is very success-driven and said she wanted to pursue her career now. 
Rune finally realized that the two didn't have much in common. Both had different perceptions of their lives. They should have never dated each other in the first place. Yet, in conclusion? Rune does not regret it because Elias is the best thing that could have happened to him. Of course, he has obtained custody of his son.
For two years now, he has devoted himself exclusively to his son and his career. As a Simstuber he produces his music videos and writes song lyrics. His loyal followers adore his talent, and his channel is growing - rapidly. Last year he established his first music label 'Tunely Records' with plans to release his first music album soon.
He wrote some special lyrics like: Shades of You, Destiny Smoke, Wild Minds, and a new song is in the pipe: Love or leave.
Rune and Elias have a deep bond together. They are best buddies. So, whoever wants to love Rune? No doubt, they must also make room for Elias in their hearts. Rune is a relationship person. It took him a while to recover, and now after almost three years, Rune is ready to give love another shot.
LIFESTAGES
16yrs: Broken relationship with his father Ruben, came out of the closet as pansexual, moved out
18yrs: Applied to Britechester, received a scholarship due to his musical talent
22yrs: Broke up with his first boyfriend after graduation, He traveled the world.
26yrs: Met Anais, got his son Elias
34yrs: Relationship broke, due to her cheating
36yrs: Single Father, Founder of ‘Tunely Records’, Successful Simtuber and Musician
___________
CHARACTER
Rune is a very private person, who does not like to be the center of attention but he loves music. 
He is logical, practical and systematic
Hyper-aware of every detail, be it food or whatever he does
Perfectionist, sometimes he needs someone to stop him because beauty exists within our imperfection, too.
He hates whoever raises voices when having an argument. If someone does that? Be in the know he will leave the room! He will come back and talk to you when you are calm, again. Now you can talk it out. He has a zero-tolerance regarding any shape of violence be it mentally or physical.
Above all else Rune wants to help.
He is kind, gentle, and supportive towards friends and lovers who use his incredible intellect and resourcefulness to problem-solve. 
He is always striving to provide workable solutions and improve what’s broken. But sometimes you cannot fix what is broken - if it makes no sense he won’t continue trying to fix what’s broken.
A committed and hardworking soul with a passion for guitars and pianos.
He loves all sort of Asian Food - Salmon and Butterflied shrimp Sushi (Sake and Ebi Nigiri) with Wasabi, Ginger and Soy sauce the most. 
QUIRKS
loves cozy bedcovers
skinny dipping is a thing
manicured nails are important
loves rainy days
dislikes smoking
___________
RUNEs Lil’ PLAYLIST
Sam Smith: To Die For
Alec Benjamin: Let me down slowly
Lenny Kravitz: I belong to you
Rag’n’Bone: Human
Jacob Lee: Cursed
Jonathan Roy: Keeping me alive
Garden Gloves: Somewhere Forever
___________
INTERVIEW
Interviewer: Rune - quite an unusual name isn’t it? Rune: [chuckles] In my language? It means “secret or mystery” Would you believe me that I’m from Sweden?  Interviewer:  Well, I would have said rather somewhere from the south. Rune: [smiles] My mum is from Italy, and my father is from Gothenburg.  Interviewer:  Rune, why did you want to join Kiss Me in Komorebi+?  Rune:  I’m here for love. Aren’t we all looking for the one? I mean, look at Daniel! Do I need to say anything else? Who would not want to fall in love with him? Interviewer: I heard you are not much of a TV watcher, so how did you learn about him? Rune: [chuckles] Yeah, not much my cup of tea. I spend the day outside with my son on the basketball court in San My.  Saw a billboard advert with handsome Daniel. Did some research, checked some clips, and here I am.   Interviewer:  Research, good point. We did our homework, too. We have some juicy stuff about you on our plate.  Rune:  Of course you do. What do you want to know? Interviewer: Tégner Investments, are you related to Ruben Tégner? Rune: [tense] Yes. We are related, but we are not close, though!  Interviewer:  [notices the change in his body language] All right. Well, you have a music channel on Simtube, too. Your fans adore you. How come we haven't heard about you yet? Rune: I will get there, eventually. I established my record label. At some point, I will publish my first music album.  Interviewer: Sounds intriguing. You're a musician, songwriter, traveler, and single father aka. DILF.  Do you live alone with him in San My? Rune:  [ignores the Word Dilf] You mean my ten-year-old son? Interviewer:  Well, yeah. Elias, right? You used to be engaged to your fiancé. Is that true? Rune:  Yes, my son is Elias. And yes, I called it off. With the emphasis, I used to be engaged. That’s correct. Interviewer: Can we know why? Rune: I think - that’s a private topic! And for Daniel to find out. Wouldn’t you agree? Interviewer: You are not much of a talker, huh? Rune: [smiles] Depends on who asks. Interviewer:  [smiles back] Rune Tégner, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining us today. Rune: Pleasure is all mine. Thanks for having me.
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Twitch does a chokepoint capitalism
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When Amazon bought Twitch, the story was that the new conglomerate would be more efficient and that would benefit everyone — streamers and audiences. That’s the story we hear about every anticompetitive merger, and it’s always a lie.
One major efficiency that the Amazon-Twitch merger was supposed to produce? Lower bandwidth costs. That’s one of the largest expenses associated with running a streaming service, after all, and Amazon Web Services is the 800lb gorilla of cloud computing. They’ve bought or built tons of infrastructure, and even for parts of the stack they don’t own, they are so big they can demand preferential treatment.
Hypothetically, cheaper bandwidth leaves more money on the table for the creative workers whose labor generates Twitch’s revenue, but that’s not how it’s played out. In incredible blog post explaining why Twitch is unilaterally canceling its highest-tier royalties, company president Dan Clancy blames the change on the cost of bandwidth:
https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2022/09/21/a-letter-from-twitch-president-dan-clancy-on-subscription-revenue-shares/
With most streamers, Twitch takes half the money they earn. That’s a big chunk, which Clancy justifies by citing “continuous investments in the products and people that make your growth possible.” He describes some new features that have increased the revenue per audience member since Amazon’s 2014 acquisition of Twitch.
But for Twitch’s most valuable streamers — the ones it courted most aggressively — there’s a better revenue split: 70/30 (the worker gets 70%, while Amazon takes 30%). These are the deals that Clancy is unilaterally cancelling.
Clancy says it’s not fair that the company’s favored streamers should be earning more than the majority of streamers, which is a pretty good point. What he doesn’t explain is why the solution to that unfairness isn’t to just give all the streamers a 70/30 split — especially in light of all the new revenue he boasts about.
After all, nearly all of Twitch’s costs are fixed — adding a new monetization feature costs the same whether there are a million Twitch streamers or just two of them. That means that every streamer boosts the dividends from new monetization features.
The major variable cost for Twitch — the cost that changes based on the number of streamers on the service — is bandwidth, which may be why Clancy blames the clawback on it. But this is weird. As Sam Biddle wrote, “Amazon is charging Amazon so much money to run the business via Amazon that it has no choice but to take more money from streamers.”
https://twitter.com/samfbiddle/status/1572667269284777984
It’s not a very plausible explanation, especially when there’s a far simpler one sitting right there: Amazon is cutting the wages of its workers because it can. The streaming industry is highly concentrated, and Amazon is the largest player. It’s where audiences go to get their streams, so streamers who want to address that audience need to submit to whatever terms Amazon imposes. Whatever negotiating leverage creators were able to exert at the start of their tenure on Twitch has been incinerated by the growth of Amazon’s market-share, and so Amazon has torn up its contracts and handed those creators new ones.
There’s a name for an economic arrangement where there are just a few buyers, and they put the squeeze on sellers: a monopsony. In the economic literature, monopsonies are considered especially dangerous because they are able to extract concessions from their suppliers far more easily than monopolies (concentrated sellers) can from their customers. Monoposonists who represent just 10 percent of their sellers’ business can start turning the screw.
Amazon’s pretty frank about this. In its own investor presentations, it describes its “flywheel”: bring in customers by subsidizing below-cost prices, lock those customers in with Prime, then extract price concessions from businesses that have to use its platform to reach those locked-in customers:
https://twitter.com/rgibli/status/1561761732108107777
This flywheel is at the center of California’s antitrust case against Amazon, where Attorney General Rob Bonta argues that the company claims so much of its sellers’ revenues that they have no choice but to raise prices, and that those higher prices spill over to all retailers, thanks to Amazon’s “most favored nation” contracts:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/15/prime-suspect/#consumer-welfare
For 40 years, the entertainment industry has grown ever larger and more profitable, even as the share of those profits going to artists has fallen and fallen. To solve this, legislatures have granted creators more copyrights — longer terms, lower barriers to enforcement, higher penalties for violations — and yet, the problem has only worsened.
There’s a reason for that: the major factor in suppressing creative workers’ wages isn’t copyright infringement, it’s monopsony With four major publishers, three studios, three labels, one trade book distributor, one cinema chain, etc, there are innumerable chokepoints between creators and artists where giant companies can simply demand that creators hand over whatever copyrights they’ve been given, along with the lion’s share of the revenue those copyrights generate.
That’s the thesis of “Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back,” a new book that Rebecca Giblin and I have coming out on Sept 27 from Beacon Press:
http://www.beacon.org/Chokepoint-Capitalism-P1856.aspx
Our book is split into two parts. In the first half, we unpick a representative sample of the scammy accounting practices and shade contracting terms that different tech and entertainment giants use to screw creative workers, from ad-tech to Spotify to DRM-based lock-in to the unbelievably crooked “packaging fees” that prompted every Hollywood screenwriter to fire their agents on the same day and embark on a grueling two-year strike:
https://www.wga.org/the-guild/about-us/history/wga-agency-campaign-timeline
In the second half, we address ourselves to detailed, shovel-ready, technical proposals to put the brakes on those anticompetitive flywheels and put groceries in creative workers’ fridges; proposals like declaring NDAs over accounting fraud unenforceable in California, Washington and NY, the three states where most creative contracts are signed:
https://doctorow.medium.com/structural-adjustment-fded18104bbe
This half of the book is devoted to structural changes, because market concentration is a structural problem. As we see with Twitch, even if you’re the kind of streaming superstar who can demand a 70/30 split at the outset, the instant a company’s market share lets it demand a worse deal for you, you will lose your premium.
One of the best moments in the development of this book was when an editor rejected it, saying he liked it a lot but was disappointed that all our remedies were about structural change, not actions individual fans and creators could take on their own. We were like, “He’s so close to getting it!”
Just like you can’t recycle your way out of the climate emergency or shop your way out of a monopoly, you can’t individually bargain your way out of a buyer’s market for your labor. This is a lesson that the labor movement learned a long-ass time ago, but 40 years of neoliberal brainwashing has left many of us unable to imagine that we’d act as a movement, rather than as a bunch of individuals.
But you know who hasn’t forgotten that lesson? The buyers for our labor — and for all labor. Everywhere we see private equity financiers buying up companies, loading them with debt, and paying themselves stiff “management fees”, the first casualties are the workers in those companies.
But after the workers are screwed over by monopsony, the new owners start to use their monopoly power against their customers — think of how Amazon used its investors’ cash to subsidize the price of goods, locking in customers, then charging its suppliers such high fees that they had to raise prices.
The last chapter of Chokepoint Capitalism describes how the plight of creative workers is part of a cross-industry sickness, where concentrated buyer power for labor hurts all kinds of workers. Creative workers are very vulnerable to this because people make art because they can’t help themselves, which means that companies can offer the most abusive contracts and still get takers (“What, and quit show-business?”).
But there are many such professions. Workers in the “caring industries,” such as healthcare, show up for their patients, even when their bosses are driving them into the poorhouse. That’s partly why private equity is so obsessed with buying up and merging hospitals — they know they can cut pay for healthcare workers and many of them will still report for work:
https://khn.org/news/article/noble-health-private-equity-rural-hospitals-missouri-employees-medical-bills/
Rebecca and I are on the road with the book right now. We’re presenting it in New York City this Friday at 7PM, hosted by the NYU Engelberg Center and Nilay Patel:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/chokepoint-capitalism-funtime-book-party-tickets-411552222777
And on Sunday afternoon, Joseph Menn and the San Francisco Public Library will host us in the Koret Auditorium:
https://sfpl.org/events/2022/09/25/author-rebecca-giblin-and-cory-doctorow
On Sept 27, we’ll be at Beverly Hills Public Library, where David A Goodman — who led the Hollywood writers’ strike — will host us at an event jointly presented with Book Soup:
https://www.booksoup.com/event/cory-doctorow-rebecca-giblin
I’ll also be in Miami on Oct 12 at the great Books and Books in Coral Gables:
https://www.booksandbooks.com/event/in-person-chokepoint-capitalism-an-evening-with-rebecca-giblin-and-cory-doctorow/
If you can’t make any of those events and you’d like to pre-order a personalized, signed copy, the good folks at Folio Books have you covered:
https://www.foliosf.com/chokepointcapitalism
[Image ID: A modified version of the Beacon Press cover for 'Chokepoint Capitalism' featuring the title and a stylized horizontal hourglass graphic; the logo for Twitch is superimposed over the pinch-point and the wordmark for Twitch is beneath it.]
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ereardon · 1 year
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Upcoming Rhett Abbott fic sneak peak
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Rhett shook his head. “Where are you from, darlin’?”
“Chicago.”
You watched the confusion run across his face. “If you don’t mind me asking, what are you doing here, of all places?” 
Leaning forward you took the last few sips of your drink and motioned for a second with the bartender, who nodded. “Business.” 
“What kind of business?” Perhaps he didn’t notice that he had shifted until his denim-clad thigh was pressed against your bare calf. But it was all you could focus on. 
“M&A.” 
He squinted. 
“Mergers and acquisitions,” you explained and he nodded, but you could see he was still trying to connect the dots. “I’m part of a restructuring team. Our clients come in, ask us to evaluate whether or not it’s financially worth buying a business. It’s my job to make a recommendation.” 
Rhett’s eyes widened. “Well shit,” he murmured after a few seconds. The bartender dropped off your second drink and you smiled up at him. 
“It’s just a different kind of bull,” you said softly and Rhett laughed, a low chuckle that you felt reverberating in your own chest. His hands were tanned and slightly dirty as he gripped his beer glass, taking a long sip. 
“How long are you in town?” he asked. 
You shrugged. “Not sure. Depends on how long this takes.” 
Rhett wanted to reach out and run his coarse hands across your smooth taupe skin. If he was being honest, he wanted to know what you felt like pressed against his chest, your lips tattooed on his. “So I might see you again?” he asked quietly. 
You opened your purse, pulling out two twenties and laying them down on the bar next to your drink before standing and smoothing your dress. Rhett’s eyes followed you as you inched closer and flashed him a smile. “I hope so.” 
As you stepped toward the door, fingertips on the handle, Rhett called out to you. “What business did you say you were evaluating?”
“I didn’t.” 
He rubbed one open palm against the leg of his jeans. “OK then, guess I'll ask. What business are you here to potentially buy?” 
You tugged open the door, the cool Wyoming air filling your lungs. “The town. The whole damn thing.” 
A/N: Full first part now posted here!
Tag list: @writercole 
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subdee · 1 year
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And the other way to look at this, really, is not about AI at all, but seeing this as the continuation of a gradual corporate incursion into the early spirit of sharing that characterised the internet. I say incursion but maybe the better word is enclosure, as in enclosure of the commons. And this positions AI as just a new method by which companies try to extract value from the things people share freely, and capture that value for themselves. And maybe the way back from this is being more intentional about building our communities in ways where the communities own them. GameFAQs was created to collate some useful stuff together for a community, and it ended up as part of a complicated chain of corporate mergers and acquisitions. But other communities experienced the kinds of upheaval that came with that, and then decided to create their own sites which can endure outside of that - I’m thinking here especially of Archive of Our Own, the biggest repository for fan-writing online. And incidentally, the source of 8.2 million words in that AI training set, larger even than Reddit.
The Washington Post published an article - GATED, which is exactly what "How to Find Things Online" talks about - that allows you to search Google's C4 training dataset, and this is what turns up for Ao3. 8.2 million words!!!!! No wonder the African content moderators are striking for better pay to remove all the porn from the chatGPT results!!!!!
Anyway. This is a very good accessible article about our upcoming... what? Retreat to unsearchable private communities that lock newcomers out so that people can talk to other people, not robots? Increasingly paywalled and corporatized commons? Future that looks like The Matrix, culture permanently frozen at "the peak of your civilization" as all the future training sets keep regurgitating the same info that millions of people put online, for free, from 1990 - 2020?
Here's AO3's recent post on their AI policies BTW, where they explain that they already removed the website from the Common Crawl in 2020 and recommend, for now, setting your new works to archive-only if you don't want them used to train commercial AI without your consent.:
https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/25888?fbclid=IwAR0GgjG4nOWZh7WuwNT4bPCEnLd-sX1j9PxYNx7fQoC5OGQST24SOr5b1lw
Archive-locking as the only real solution makes sense, but also, is again exactly what this article talks about in terms of the incentives moving from putting things online for free where anyone can access them, to putting them behind a gate of some kind to keep the community a nice place **for** the community that built it.
Anyway. May AO3 live a long, long time. Not just because it's the most popular website in the WORLD in category: "books and publishing" but because it's being increasingly recognized as a gold-star example of a community seeing where the corporatization trend is going, and getting out ahead of it to make a community space for humans to share their work with other humans, for free.
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akajustmerry · 1 year
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Can you talk a little about Roman and Matsson scene in 3.08?
Matsson says a lot of weird things there and I'm not sure what his goal was.
He is playing Roman for sure but how? he talks about failure, about getting way too into people, being dissapointed. and then he seems sort of emberrased that he shared all that?
so, first roman is there to find out why matsson seems to have doubts about the gojo acquisition and over the course of the scene matsson basically tells roman he wants a merger of equals.
the whole weakness/failure thing is a test. he wants to test that roman/logan are all in as equals with him, not as people who will pander to him. if roman had tried to comfort him when matsson said he was feeling weird, or roman admitted any failures to matsson, it probably would have signalled desperation/weakness. who wants to make a deal with a weak partner?
"i get way too into people and they disappoint me" <- that's a warning not to disappoint him but it's also a compliment that roman hasn't so far. matsson is not embarrassed. at most, he's feigning bashfulness to cover how smug he feels that roman passed the little test.
that then gives roman the leeway to interrogate him directly about the tweet and call matsson's bluff on these supposed doubts. then, like the majority of business deals in succession, matsson explains what he wants using innuendo "i like getting into bed with people, but sharing it equally" by way of explaining he wants a merger of equals.
so, yes, he is playing roman here, but roman to his credit meets every play with his own and i don't think matsson was expecting him to (hence the tests). but roman passes matsson's tests and matsson passes the vibe check for roman too i.e he wasn't really having doubts.
and all of this has a huge homoerotic subtext because of the location, the innuendo and coded language. this is all also happening on the eve of a wedding. there's that ICONIC shot where they linger on roman watching matsson pump his fists. ........
but of course, those are really just 2 dudes chatting by a pool in a romantic location about, you know, business!! they're definitely *not* in every way but physically measuring each other up to see how into each other- i mean, into the deal, they are. naur. they're just discussing FINANCE! that's why the conversation ends with matsson looking suggestively into roman's eyes saying. "i want the best of everything" because that's just how dudes talk about stonks.
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Galaxy mergers shed light on galactic evolution model
An Australian astronomer has solved a century-old mystery regarding how galaxies evolve from one type to another. The same study shows that the Milky Way, the galaxy we live in, was not always a spiral.
The work by Professor Alister Graham from Swinburne Astronomy Online uses new and old insights and observations to reveal how galaxy speciation occurs. The research appears in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
In the 1920s and 1930s, astronomer Edwin Hubble and others established a sequence of varying galaxy anatomy, now known as the Hubble sequence or the Hubble tuning fork diagram. It lacks evolutionary pathways but is still widely used to classify galaxies based on their visual appearance.
Galaxies can contain billions of stars orderly following circular orbits in a crowded disk or chaotically buzzing about in a spherical or ellipse-shaped swarm. These disks can host spiral patterns, with such spiral galaxies defining one end of the long-standing Hubble sequence.
In this sequence, lentil-shaped galaxies, known as lenticular galaxies with a central spherical structure in a spiral-less disk, were considered the bridging population between disk-dominated spiral galaxies like our Milky Way and elliptical-shaped galaxies like M87.
In the new study, Professor Graham analyzed optical images from the Hubble Space Telescope and infrared images from the Spitzer Space Telescope of 100 nearby galaxies. By comparing their stellar and central black hole mass, he discovered two types of lenticular galaxies: old and dust-poor, and dust-rich.
The dust-rich lenticular galaxies are built from mergers of spiral galaxies. Spiral galaxies can have a small central spheroid plus a disk containing spiral arms of stars, gas and dust winding out from the center. The dusty lenticular galaxies have notably more prominent spheroids and black holes than the spiral galaxies and the dust-poor lenticular galaxies.
In a turn of events, Professor Graham's research has shown that spiral galaxies reside midway between the two types of lentil-shaped galaxies.
"This re-draws our much-loved galaxy sequence," says Professor Graham, "and, importantly, we now see the evolutionary pathways through a galaxy wedding sequence, or what business might refer to as acquisitions and mergers."
If the dust-poor lenticular galaxies accrete gas and material, this can gravitationally disturb their disk, inducing a spiral pattern and fueling star formation, changing their structure and shape.
The Milky Way has several smaller satellite galaxies, such as Sagittarius and Canis Major, and its structure reveals a rich history of acquisitions. The Milky Way was likely once a dust-poor lenticular galaxy that accreted material, including the Gaia Sausage–Enceladus satellite, and over time it evolved into the spiral galaxy we live in today. Deep imaging by countless ground-based telescopes over recent years has shown this is a feature common to spiral galaxies.
Some acquisitions will be more dramatic. Such a marriage is on the cards in 4 to 6 billion years when the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy collide.
Their collision will destroy the current spiral patterns in both galaxies, yielding a merged galaxy with a more-dominant spheroid, throw up a lot of dust clouds, and be accompanied by an increase in the central black hole mass. It will lead to the birth of a dust-rich lenticular galaxy.
The subsequent merger of two dusty lenticular galaxies appears sufficient to fully erase their disks and create an elliptical-shaped galaxy, unable to retain cold gas clouds harboring dust.
In some ways, the dust-poor lenticular galaxies appear as a fossil record of the universe's primordial galaxies. These disk-dominated galaxies are very old and common. The merging of two of these in the young universe may explain the recent observation by the James Webb Space Telescope of a massive spheroid-dominated galaxy when the universe was 700 million years old.
Furthermore, the new research has also revealed that merging two elliptical galaxies is sufficient to explain the universe's most massive galaxies today, observed at the centers of 1,000-member galaxy clusters.
Professor Graham notes that many clues were known but had yet to be combined into a cohesive picture. He says, "Things fell into place once it was recognized that the lenticular galaxies are not the single bridging population they were long portrayed as."
The new work means galaxies now have their family tree. "It's survival of the fittest out there," says Professor Graham, "which ultimately means the reign of spheroids over disks." He adds, "Astronomy now has a new anatomy sequence and finally an evolutionary sequence in which galaxy speciation is seen to occur through the inevitable marriage of galaxies ordained by gravity."
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leveragehunters · 10 months
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Holy shit haha.
[Picture is of two tweets. The first is from T(w)itter Daily News, which reads:
News: Twitter has sued Watchell, the law firm that represented the company in the Delaware case that sought to force Elon to his complete his purchase. "Watchell exploited a corporate client left unprotected by lame duck fiduciaries," Twitter said in a statement.
The second tweet is a reply from Elon Musk, which reads:
Watchell brags about how many former Delaware judges work at their firm. They specialize in institutionalized corruption.]
Text of a paywalled Wall Street Journal article with the details under the cut.
Twitter Sues Wachtell Over $90 Million Payout for Musk’s Buyout Deal
Company alleges it was left unprotected by ‘lame duck’ fiduciaries pending sale to Musk
By Alexa Corse
Updated July 7, 2023 7:28 pm ET
Twitter sued Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, the law firm it hired under previous management to enforce Elon Musk’s agreement to acquire the company, accusing it of improperly obtaining a $90 million payout as the deal-closing loomed.
Twitter alleged in a complaint filed Wednesday in California Superior Court in San Francisco that Wachtell and its litigation department, led by William Savitt, were at the center of a spending spree by Twitter’s departing executives. Twitter is asking for full restitution of the $90 million paid to Wachtell. Twitter says in the complaint that the amount includes an unspecified “success fee” that it describes as extraordinary and unconscionable.
Savitt, an attorney for Wachtell in the Twitter case, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Musk completed his takeover in October in a deal valued at $44 billion. Twitter is accusing Wachtell of an 11th-hour adjustment to its fee structure the day of the closing, despite directions from the new ownership to suspend payment to third parties ahead of the imminent merger.
“Fully aware that nobody with an economic interest in Twitter’s financial well-being was minding the store, Wachtell arranged to effectively line its pockets with funds from the company cash register while the keys were being handed over to the Musk parties,” Twitter says in the complaint.
Twitter’s board signed off on the payment with Wachtell the day the deal closed, according to the complaint. Bret Taylor, chairman of Twitter’s board of directors at the time, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Wachtell spent months defending Twitter’s interests after Musk said he was walking away from the deal. Ultimately, Musk decided to complete his takeover, shortly before a trial scheduled in Delaware, in which a judge would have determined whether he could abandon the acquisition.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads launched to compete with Elon Musk’s Twitter. And as WSJ’s Dan Gallagher explains how successful Threads is may come down to timing and scale. Photo: Stefani Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
Bruce MacEwen, a legal consultant, said a $90 million payment didn’t seem like a lot given that the acquisition deal was valued at $44 billion. “This does not strike me as out of line,” said MacEwen, president of consulting firm Adam Smith, Esq.
If Wachtell was instrumental in getting Twitter the $44 billion price after Musk tried to get out of the deal, he said, that provided value. “Did old Twitter get its money’s worth or what?” he said.
A $90 million payment isn’t unusual for such a consequential case, said law-firm consultant Kent Zimmermann from Zeughauser Group. “I’d be surprised if Wachtell was faulted for the amount they charged, considering the stakes and the outcome,” he said.
Wachtell is known to be a leading law firm for cases like the Twitter one, he added. “There’s a limited supply of firms like Wachtell and a lot of demand for them, which drives the price up,” he said.
The suit also names Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s chief legal officer at the time. “Immediately following the Twitter board’s rubber-stamp approval, Gadde signed Wachtell’s letter agreement,” the complaint says. Gadde didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Twitter headquarters in downtown San Francisco. Elon Musk completed his takeover of Twitter last October in a deal valued at $44 billion.
Twitter filed the complaint under the corporate name X Corp., which the company adopted after Musk took over. Twitter is being represented by Reid Collins & Tsai in the suit filed this week, the complaint shows.
The complaint includes attachments of emails and memos regarding Wachtell’s representation of Twitter. In one memo by Wachtell that Twitter included as part of the filing, the firm said its fees in other comparable litigation had ranged from approximately $33 million to $134 million.
Musk first agreed to buy Twitter in April 2022 for $44 billion, then threatened to walk away from the deal, before reversing course several months later and committing to see through the acquisition.
Musk’s decision to go through with the deal averted a high-stakes trial in Delaware Chancery Court. Twitter initially sued Musk in Delaware, seeking to enforce the terms of the merger agreement, and Musk later countersued, accusing Twitter of misrepresenting its business.
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wumblr · 2 years
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i'm seeing a few pontificating posts and i'm not sure how to really explain the situation we are in. so i guess i'd like to coin a term like "fictitious capital" or something to describe the way that, specifically, exclusively, by and large, whatever -- intentionally and by design under capitalism -- products and services are bad. it's not an accident that peloton or juicero or tesla or uber or doordash or mcdonalds or walmart or amazon or facebook are not selling well made products. it's not a coincidence google search results got worse, they were redesigned to become better at something else
at best, disruptive economies of scale can only ever pitch a fever dream of a product, beg for venture capital, go public to distort their corporate valuation and print money to scale with, while outsourcing production, cutting labor costs to absorb bad quarterly numbers, hemorrhaging money to bleed out the competition and then absorbing the debt in either a merger/acquisition or spinoff corporation after they're the only player left in the market, at which point they can cut costs and jack up the prices to hell. this is a game to the rich. the richer you are, the more dice rolls you get to try for a unicorn
that's literally it, that's all there is to it, and there is no limit to the number of people they will kill to keep it that way. it's not a coincidence everything's wrapped in plastic, plastic is a petrochemical derivative. these capital schemes are so alienated from the production itself that it, frankly, does not make any sense to criticize the quality of products. what else would they be? you bought into a cheap scam, it's all capitalism has to offer. of course a vast portion of it could be better designed, or production ceased altogether, but how are you going to get people to stop buying into the fiction?
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gacmediadaily · 8 months
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In a strategic move that aims to boost the offerings of faith and family content, Great American Family and Pure Flix Entertainment have now completed a merger that will combine two popular media companies. Bill Abbott, CEO of Great American Family, discussed the significance of the new focus, highlighting the shared values and the bright future the collaboration holds.
Abbott emphasized the alignment of values and missions between Great American Family and Pure Flix as a pivotal factor in the merger’s success. “This is really a match made in heaven. The values and missions of both Great American Media and Pure Flix are completely aligned,” Abbott stated.
With the growing trend of shifting viewership from traditional linear TV to streaming platforms, Abbott sees the merger as a strategic step toward reaching a broader audience while staying true to their shared mission. “Viewers are shifting from linear TV more and more to streaming. While linear TV still has a longer runway to go, we now have a streaming outlet that gives us the chance to reach 80 million potential subscribers that don’t get Great American Family,” he explained.
The collaboration also involves a reciprocal approach. Abbott revealed that Great American Family would feature content from Pure Flix’s library on its linear TV channels. “We tapped into the Pure Flix library and saw some content that was available for linear as well. We’ll be proud to have content like ‘Strong Fathers Strong Daughters’ on our channel,” Abbott noted, emphasizing their commitment to inspiring and uplifting programming.
When asked about the growth of Great American Family, Abbott pointed to their flagship channel’s impressive trajectory. “We’ve had triple digit growth since November of this past year, finishing our eighth consecutive month as the leader in growth in the entire cable landscape,” he shared. This sustained growth demonstrates the strong appetite for faith and family content in a media landscape that often lacks such offerings.
Exploring the reasons behind the surge in popularity of faith-based programming, Abbott stated, “There are less and less outlets out there that are 24/7, 365 days a year, just so focused on never surprising the viewer in a negative way…but also compelling, inspiring, uplifting, and celebratory of many of the institutions and philosophies of the majority of the country.”
Abbott acknowledged the significance of key acquisitions, including talents like Candace Cameron Buré and Danica McKellar, who have elevated the mission of Great American Family. He described Buré’s role as Chief Content Officer, highlighting her exceptional creativity, understanding of branding, and commitment to the company’s mission.
“She is bringing us a number of different projects that really will resonate across both the faith and family audience in a different way,” he said. “And she is mission driven, as are many of our talent, from Danica and on and on.”
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nameless-brand · 11 months
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Aren't hostile takeovers illegal?
A hostile takeover in of itself is perfectly legal. The tactics employed to make it succeed on the other hand...
The basic definition of a hostile takeover is that an outside party has taken over a target company without the consent or approval of the target company's board of directors. The natural opposite of a hostile takeover is a friendly takeover where the board of directors approves the acquisition.
There's three main ways to perform a hostile takeover - with some variances depending on a company's by-laws and provisions.
The first is a tender offer where you offer to buy shareholder stock at a premium (more than it's worth) until you become the majority shareholder (>51% of the shares) and can approve of the takeover directly or just oust the board of directors yourself and install your own ( the second option, while cleaner, is more difficult than you'd think for reasons I'll explain later).
The second is a proxy vote where you collude with other shareholders that have voting rights to gain a sorta pseudo-majority stakeholder status to directly approve of a merger or vote to oust members of the board of directors that oppose a merger and install members that will approve it.
The third is to just buy shares of the publicly-traded company in the open market. This is often cheaper than a tender offer since you won't be buying at premium. But at the same time, the SEC requires an acquiring company to report if they own 10% of a target company's shares, so you usually lose the element of surprise if you did things normally.
I more or less made my move during a time where the Jerome Management Company was in that awkward period between becoming a small-scale company and a large-scale company. Essentially, the board of directors opened up their company to public trade which diluted out their personal voting power (as a significant number of shares are added to the share pool) at the benefit of getting an enormous amount of public investment from the public buying those shares.
I employed the third option for hostile takeover through the usage of companies not quite affiliated with the Nameless company. Frank's Sec-Corp which provides security to my places is one example. I also indirectly invested in a hotel chain through preferential transport and supplying of goods in another. These companies were willing to help me so long as I repaid them back naturally. Others were just shell companies, which I ended up not really needing in the first place. Always kept to buying shares within the 9% with all these shell companies. I had around 42% when I made my tender offer, the first option - and offered to buy shares at 25% more.
Naturally, the shell company and allied companies' shares were "bought" by me. And many other shareholders took my offer, mostly because they didn't trust the board of directors and management overall. I mean, who demolishes an orphanage and tries to build in a mall in the proverbial Crime Alley out of all places? My charge could probably tell that would fail badly.
And there were other questionable management decisions including raising rents so high in the apartments they did own that no one wants to stay in them - Jerome Apartments have an exceptionally poor retention rate for poor management, over pricing, and a whole slew of maintenance issues.
Anyway when I struck with the tender offer, I managed to get over 65% of the shares, which is good. And with help from my legal and accounting teams, we started making sure the company by-laws couldn't be modified during my takeover.
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There are certain ways to make a hostile takeover much harder to do. They either involve decreasing the value of the company itself or increasing the cost to acquire the company.
Crown jewel defense, where a company sells its most prized asset to a friendly company only to rebuy it when the threat of a hostile takeover ends, is one way to dissuade a hostile takeover. According to my research, during the hostile takeover of the back-then Wayne Industries over a decade ago, the company threatened to sell WayneTech to stall out a hostile takeover.
Poison-pill strategy is a defense where through a provision if a shareholder gains a certain percentage of stock, the company will issue shares at a discounted price or even for free to any shareholder except the one who triggered the provision. This was actually the threat Twitter made when Elon Musk announced he had 9% of Twitter's stock.
The advantage of a poison-pill strategy is as follows: if I own 51 shares and the total shares in the company are 100, I am majority shareholder. However, if you poison-pilled out 100 more shares to other shareholders, I no longer have majority shareholder status because it's now 51/200. But the poison part comes in because by increasing the number of shares, you've effectively reduced your stock's worth - and in my example, that would be by half - which also counts as decreasing the company's market value in the short term. That would've been Twitter's strategy had Musk hit 15% of shares owned, had they not agreed in the end to a buyout. In this case, the Jerome Management Company did not have such a provision in place though, probably because they didn't expect to be targeted like this - but no mistake, had I given them time to realize what I'm doing, this definitely would've been employed.
Currently, I'm dealing with their golden parachute defense, where if key management is dismissed after a merger, they are entitled to a very large benefits package into order of tens of millions dollars (increasing the cost of the unwanted merger). I'm dealing with this by borrowing the heavy stick of the law; none of these people are clean as you'd expect from people willing to overprice rent or demolish orphanages for the sake of profits. Many of these people are utilizing the property management company as a means to write off personal/home expenses as business tax deductions - ones that aren't legal to do such as a personal chef, flights to their vacation home, etc. So I intend to get them to resign on their own, because the alternative is that I get the IRS after them with hard evidence in my possession - since no one in their thick as thieves group expected my hostile takeover. Ha.
I probably should watch my back for the next couple of weeks - like I said, they aren't clean. Luckily for me, everyone still thinks I'm somewhere in NJ at the Retirement Mansion instead of the Inn.
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