It goes without saying that website design is a one-time investment for building a lifetime of marketing platform.
With the recent revolution in marketing through digital sources, it is obvious that online marketing would soon overtake all the contemporary forms of advertising.
What becomes really essential for businesses today is to emphasize on their digital presence with various tools and web design services to highlight themselves online.
Website design is one such key attribute that helps websites in a multitude of ways, and we're going to break down some of the most essentials pros of designing an appealing website. So, let's dive right into this list of 5 ways in which website designs play a quintessential role in tuning up your website performance.
One of the most important factors to be considered while designing a website is the attention to visibility. It's a no-brainer that a visibly-tuned website would significantly help your website visitors to understand all the content clearly, which would, in turn, allow them to stay there for a longer time. This way, not only will your bounce rate fall, but there will also be a significant rise in the overall traffic on your website.
To understand how that works, think of the several instances where the content on a particular website was too unclear to understand, and then think of how you responded to it. Nobody likes to vague content, nobody. In fact, visibility is believed to be one of the reasons why Facebook was able to beat Orkut since Facebook's content was more lucid and appealing than the over-stuffed hotchpotch on Orkut.
Search bots are highly impressed by a variety of factors that are directly promoted through the design of a website. These include average session duration, pages per session and bounce rate, among others. All of these factors are considered based on the behavior of traffic that visits your website. If all things check out in your favor, search engines would have no issues in ranking you higher. And since it's no secret that higher SERP rank correlates directly to improved website traffic, SEO is another way a good website design indirectly promotes the overall fame of your website.
An attractive website surely bolsters your business with branding. How exactly does that work? The higher you rank on search engine web results, the more likely it is that your business would be deemed more authentic and branded than the ones below you.
Online Marketing researches have shown that people would be more likely to trust search results based on their individual search queries than through paid advertising campaigns. The higher you rank on web pages as a direct result of your website design tuning, the more you'll appear on organic searches, and the better you'll build your brand name. Once you are brand, increased website traffic will definitely come in handy.
Mobile responsiveness is one of the key things that are being considered by web designers while designing a website these days. In layman's terms, responsive website design is what makes websites mobile-friendly, and it is quickly becoming an essential factor for luring traffic in recent times. Mobile searches have long overtaken computer searches, and the gap is only expected to widen in the coming years. Having an efficient responsive web design would always bolster the chances of increasing overall traffic.
A well planned-out website design will ensure minimal errors on the website, and that would surely reduce hours of hectic website maintenance that nobody wants. This not only saves you money and time, but it also increases the overall website presence. Conversely, if your website is not properly designed, chances are that you will be spending a whole lot of would-be productive time in plugging out bugs and errors on your webpages, and all your potential traffic would be forced to check out your competitors' websites.
It should be quite obvious at this point that bringing down the advantages of a good website to just five points is more arduous than it sounds, as one advantage corroborates to a multitude of additional benefits that boost your online presence. What other advantages of a good website design did we miss?
Shiva works as a blog writer and SEO executive for IT By IT Professionals, a digital marketing agency based in Jaipur, India. Having worked as a freelance content writer on Upwork, Shiva joined IT By IT Professionals in January 2019 to follow his interest in the field of digital marketing.


I couldn't see the bird, so I was hooked on. Every time I went there I would hear it and I would try in vain to discover the source. It took me a while before I finally discovered a Green Woodpecker flying and crying at the same time!
The sound has often been called a laugh and everytime I heard it, I thought it was a mocking laugh aimed at me for not getting a picture of it! The laugh is also referred to as a Yaffle and the Bird is also called a Rainbird.
The Green Woodpecker is not only Britain`s largest Woodpecker, but is can also claim to be one of its more colourful species.
Both sexes are alike, except for the lower black streak below the lower beak, which has a crimson or red centre in the male. So the bird pictured in this post is obviously a female. The bird has been known to have a fondness for ants.
The most common habitats where this bird is found is in the open deciduous woodland, parks, orchards and farmland. It prefers old timbered parks, and open country where there are ancient trees rather than dense woodlands.
It captures insects from tree trunks or from the ground with a rapid flick of its tongue, which is sticky with gummy saliva.
The Green woodpecker nests in holes in trees like other woodpeckers.
The bird is currently on the amber status with regards to its conservation status.
A great series of photos and I liked the audio file. Its so much easier to understand about the bird with both descriptions.
Great pics of one of my favorite bird families. And the audio file was a nice added touch! Well done!
Great pictures of a beautiful bird. I'm glad you were finally able to put the sound with a bird. Very rewarding!
That's a cool looking woodpecker. I havn't seen one quite like it before. The audio file is a hit.
Terrific post with so many good photos and the call as well. Good info as well.
Beautiful pictures series. Woodpeckers are very vocal and beautiful colours. Our Common Flameback is a golden coloured at the back.
What a striking bird, with its yellow eye in the middle of that dark face patch and the red on his head. Enjoyed your photos and I do love the embedded call clip. Glad to find you from Bird Photography Weekly.


Are there any creative, holistic methods to approach my drug rehab? After all, drug addiction isn't just a little problem that effects one isolated part of your life. As you know by now, drug addiction touches every part of your life—from your relationships, to your marriage, family, work, and even your spiritual life. Addiction finds its way to the center of your life, and that's exactly why it's such a big problem. That's why you need to seek out every kind of resource at your disposal to help your recovery. Learn more about Holotropic Breathwork and how it has been proven to aid in drug rehab recovery.
If you're trying rebuild your foundation fresh from the bottom as part of your rehab, where do you start? Think about it: what do you do more than anything else in your life, and can never stop doing? Breathing! We don't think about breathing very much because it's so natural, but Holotropic Breathwork challenges this. It turns out we should be more conscious about our breathing, and that can help you take control of your life back from drug addiction. Every day more research is being done on the mental, physical, and emotional benefits of Holotropic Breathwork.
What exactly is Holotropic Breathing?
Did you know that types of Holotropic Breathwork are commonly used in both yoga and drug rehab? Yoga is a popular practice of self-centering and bringing together all the parts of your life: physical, mental, and spiritual. Imagine how good this kind of holistic practice would be in your addiction recovery. Many of the breathing techniques of Holotropic Breathwork heighten awareness and consciousness, leading to quicker recovery times and lower relapse rates. This effective holistic breathing practice was discovered by Czech psychiatrist Stanislav Grof. The idea is to attain a level of centeredness where stresses fall away and attachments such as drug addiction gradually lose their hold on you. So why not include Holotropic Breathwork in your drug rehab?
The best method for getting clean once and for all is to find a rehab program that includes all the most inventive treatments. Last Resort Recovery includes Holotropic Breathing as an important feature in our rehab program philosophy. Holotropic Breathing is just one part of the best complete drug rehab program in Texas, at Last Resort Recovery.


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Q: Better understanding 2FA Why does 2FA fail unless geo-location is enabled system wide ?
Solutions offered ( https://debiankalilinuxtips.substack.com/p/automatic-datetime-sync ) for date/time sync do not resolve 2fa requiring geo-location sync system wide.
Currently the only solution found is turn on geo-location system wide -> allow system to sync -> turn geo-location off -> proceed to visiting websites and using 2FA.
It is not an issue of vpn or tunnels.  The system synced to the geo-location time of the vpn/vps exit node and 2fa was happy with that geo-location.  4hr time difference between physical system location and synced vpn virtual location.  If vpn was the cause of 2fa system sync requirements then the 4hr difference would have prevented 2fa from working.
Can someone explain on a base level why system wide  geo-location sync is necessary and if it can be cli spoofed to allow 2fa to be happy but without exposing the entire system to geo-location.
all of the "white papers" about 2fa explain it works by a formula that adds current time to a predefined seed which generates a unique 6 digit code that is only true for a short period of time. this does not explain what system details are necessary.  Please explain why necessary / how to pass 2fa the region timezone rather than it checking local system details.

$ timedatectl

              Local time: Fri 2022-01-28 07:41:04 MST
           Universal time: Fri 2022-01-28 14:41:04 UTC
                 RTC time: Fri 2022-01-28 14:41:04
                Time zone: America/Phoenix (MST, -0700)
System clock synchronized: no
              NTP service: n/a
          RTC in local TZ: no

A: Okay.
So the 2FA tools you're referencing, including Google Authenticator, use TOTP.  This is a (T)ime-based (O)ne-(T)ime (P)assword.
It works by sharing a key or "secret" between your computer and the server once, when the TOTP is set up (that is what the QR code is about).  Both sides then execute an algorithm that is based on the current time and that secret in such a way that:

*

*Even if someone sees the output (the info you type into the 2FA prompt), they won't be able to predict the next one.

*The output changes with the time, often once or twice per minute (this is why you get a different set of numbers to type each time.

Because the server and your computer are working separately, to get the same answer they have to be using the same baseline information, which means the same secret (key), and the same time.  Generally speaking, we are all on the same page as what time it is, even if we use different numbers (24 hour vs 12 hour with AM/PM) and different time zones.  The TOTP calculations use the number of seconds since midnight on January 1st, 1970 in the UTC time zone. (see this documentation here, section 4.2: [https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-mraihi-totp-timebased-08.html#rfc.section.4])
Now, the automatic time-setting features you are referencing, either the systemd timesyncd feature or NTP, are going to be sufficient for setting the time accurately enough to use TOTP.  Any selection of time zone is irrelevant, be it automatic or manual (unless you change what time it is when you change the time zone, rather than letting the computer update the clock)
If you are willing to take the patience to set your computer clock to within a few seconds, and if it maintains accurate time pretty well, you can probably get away without automatic time synchronization and still have TOTP work, but in that case you need to be careful about the time zone you select as well (so that the computer knows the number of seconds since midnight UTC on January 1st, 1970), and you may need to make sure the clock is kept accurate manually (just as you would need to manually change a wall clock that is slow or fast)
Note that you don't have to use your time zone, but you have to make sure the time you set is accurate now, in the time zone you set.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


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NCRC: Organization on a mission
WASHINGTON - The National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC), the organization that has sued the NCUA over how the agency removed the CAP regulation, is not the oldest of the consumer groups, or the largest or the wealthiest, but the consensus among financial service reporters and analysts is that it may...
By David Morrison | February 12, 2002 at 07:00 PM | The original version of this story was published on Credit Union Times Magazine

WASHINGTON – The National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC), the organization that has sued the NCUA over how the agency removed the CAP regulation, is not the oldest of the consumer groups, or the largest or the wealthiest, but the consensus among financial service reporters and analysts is that it may be among the most effective. "NCRC is almost an umbrella group. There is a sense that they represent a broad spectrum, albeit on a very focused agenda," said Keith Leggett, senior economist with the ABA. The organization has been around since 1990, when 16 different empowerment groups, activist organizations and individual activists rallied around the realization that access to capital for homes and small businesses served as economic lifelines for communities, particularly those traditionally understood as low income and with large minority populations. The organizers also wanted a structure they could use in the coming fight over regulatory requirements that would seek to insure financial institutions were accountable for how they dealt with low-income and minority residents. Since then the organization has grown from 16 to 800 dues paying institutional members, including a number of credit unions. Members range from large organizations like the U.S. Conference of Mayors to local fair housing groups to local governmental offices and non-profit and for profit lenders. "We have a pretty wide spectrum," said Joshua Silver, NCRC Vice President for Research and Policy. NCRC is proud to claim that it has members in every state and in every major city and in many smaller cities. Credit unions have become used to hearing about NCRC in connection with the organization's fight with the NCUA over CAP, but Silver stressed that NCRC is not "anti-credit union," or "anti-bank." "We are very focused on helping capital get into the hands of people who need it, particularly people who have been traditionally denied it," Silver said. The group looks at all financial institutions and all financial policies through that lens, he said. "We are not suing NCUA as an attack on credit unions, we are suing NCUA because of the way it has dispensed with what we believe should be a very important debate among credit unions and the communities they serve," he added. Credit unions and credit union organizations that are members of NCRC agreed with Silver's sentiment that credit unions were ill served by not having a fuller discussion of CAP before the agency abandoned the regulation. They also believed credit unions should drop their opposition to CAP which was, they argued, a "truly modest" regulation which attempted to do some very important things. Bill Myers, CEO of Alternatives Federal Credit Union, a $40 million dollar associational credit union in Ithaca, NY, says he has known the founders of NCRC for roughly eight years and supports the need to bring greater awareness and accountability of capital policies for all financial institutions, including credit unions. "The advent of HMDA (Home Mortgage Disclosure Act) data really changed everything," Myers said. "Previous to HMDA, a bank or thrift or credit union could make claims about how it was doing in serving underserved or low income areas and there was no data to support or contest those claims. Well, through HMDA there is data and it doesn't look as credit unions are doing that great," he said. "Credit unions always want to put ourselves in the white hat," he said. "We want to be seen as the good guy financial institutions – because we are, particularly in comparison to banks. But when you look at credit union data standing alone, I don't think credit unions can be happy with our performance so far." Myers pointed out that some credit unions have lived with field of membership restrictions for so they may have developed "a degree of cynicism." Myers reports that among his peers he has noticed a willingness to take advantage of eased field of membership regulations when it comes to low-income areas without necessarily making any commitment to market the credit union broadly in that area. "I think when we accept a lower-income field of membership we are obligated to try to serve that field of membership," he said. Clifford Rosenthal, Executive Director of the National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions (NFCDCU) said the Federation is a member of NCRC and backs the group's efforts in support of CRA, a regulation he credited with "leveraging tens of billions of dollars out of banks and into lower income areas." Rosenthal says the Federation was "extremely dismayed" by the way the NCUA reversed the CAP regulation and felt "taken aback" by then Board Member Geoff Bacino's introduction of it onto the NCUA Board agenda, though he admitted the criticism of the measure is widespread. "I think the credit union movement has been ill served by credit unions' vigorous opposition to such a mild regulation," Rosenthal said. He stressed that the Federation has no policy role in the NCRC and that Federation members are not necessarily NCRC members. Rosenthal said that while he generally supports NCRC goals and activity, he is also critical. "I felt frustrated with the recent NCRC study on credit unions and HMDA data," he noted, "It's too easy to look at that data and come up with simplistic answers. Credit unions need to use that study to help us ask better questions," he said. Rosenthal said a good outcome of the lawsuit would be for NCUA to be proactive and "repeal the repeal" of CAP and to use the regulation to help gather better data about how credit unions are doing serving lower income members. "We find it truly offensive the way some trumpet the addition of low income areas as fields of membership as though that settles anything," Rosenthall said. "Clearly just adding those fields of membership is not enough. Now let everyone know what you are doing to serve that community," he said.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Things I liked march 2021
Posted on April 4, 2021 by Alexis Hall
Help, it's the future. It's April already. Where is the time going? 2021 sounds like a made-up future year you'd have picked to sound generically science-fictiony in a TV series in the '80s and now it's here and I'm scared.
But on the plus side, it's a good segue into the Thing I Liked for this month (it's only one thing because I'm vaguely expecting to have quite a lot to say about it), which is the Channel 4/AMC sci-fi show Humans. Which is actually stylised as HUMANS with the A upside down, which always confused me because since every other letter in the word except the U is either reflectionally symmetrical or looks like a different but valid letter upside down, I kept wanting to read it as SNAWUH. I feel this is strongly a me-issue.
Anyway, HUMANS (with the A upside-down) is a mostly-British sf series set in a kind of alternative near present (if that makes sense) where domestic robots are, like, a thing. I originally took a look at it in a fairly causal "looking for a show to watch when I don't want a show to watch" kind of a way, but I actually got really into it. I think it's legitimately smart in a way that many shows aren't (not always, of course, very few things are always anything) and has a genuinely nuanced take on its subject matter which, admittedly, sometimes falls into crossed metaphor territory.
Last month (I think, maybe the month before—it's still lockdown in the UK so time is perilously close to meaningless) I listed the first season of Killing Eve as a Thing I Liked, but when I got to the end of the first series I put it away feeling like I'd basically seen the thing it was doing and not especially interested in watching another three seasons of Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer (delightful as both of them are) failing to either bang or kill each other. Nothing about the end of season one struck me as essentially shaking up the status quo, and my (perhaps unfair) assumption is that as a cat-and-mouse thriller its status quo was kind of un-shake-uppable. So I bailed.
And I initially thought that SNAWUH was going to go the same way. I assumed that the Season 1 premise of a small group of conscious synthetics (what the show calls humanoid robots) on the run from a shadowy quasi-governmental organisation, intersecting loosely with the lives of a suburban British family would be maintained throughout and we'd go through the cycle of "get captured/get rescued/get captured/get rescued" ad infinitum until the show got cancelled.
But … nope! Instead Season 1 ends with the strong implication that one of the synths is going to release the Magic Science Code that makes synthetics conscious, and Season 2 actually picks up that plot and runs with it, the focus moving to how our small band of self-aware robots deals with the appearance of more of their kind and their conflicting beliefs about how to proceed. And then that season ends with an upgraded version of the Magic Science Code getting released and making every synthetic in the world conscious simultaneously with legitimately cataclysmic consequences.
Then Season 3 is complex, had a weird ending, and suffers extreme late cancellation syndrome. Basically HUMANS is uniformly excellent for 23-and-a-half of its 24 episodes, and goes very weird in its last fifteen minutes.
Anyway, this is a Things I Liked post, so I'm going to structure this post specifically as a set of Things I Liked About Humans.
Thing 1: They're Not Afraid to Mix It Up
I've already explained this one. The world of Season 1, where synths are ubiquitous but essentially mindless robot servants, capable of processing complex data but not of independent thought save a few unique prototypes built by genius/asshole/father figure/synthetic pioneer David Elster, is very different from the world of Season 3 where there are half a million conscious synthetics living in state sanctioned compounds in the UK and fighting to have their rights recognised against an indifferent state and a hostile populace.
Thing 2: People Have Complex Reactions
Fundamentally "humans create conscious machines and then have to decide whether to give them rights or not" is a pretty old SF premise. Hell it's old enough that the synths in SNAWUH have programming to prevent them from harming humans that's specifically called "Asimov Blocks".
The thing is, very often this story will be presented as a pretty straight 1:1 metaphor for The Prejudice Of Your Choice, which will then itself be presented in the least nuanced way possible. So you have robots who are very clearly a metaphor for The Gays or The Immigrants and then you have exactly two kinds of people in the world: the ones who are loudly and violently Robot Racist (or Robomophobic), and the ones who are super woke about everything.
Synthetic rights in HUMANS are much more about, to borrow language from Tolkien, applicability rather than allegory. It's not always a super hard SF show (Season 3 in particular gets positively mystical in places) but it does primarily engage with its premise in a fairly hard-sf way. This sometimes creates some issues—for example there's a lot of resentment about human workers losing their jobs to synth labour and that can function either as a not-even-metaphor-really for jobs lost to automation (a real issue and one of the major reasons for the decline in manufacturing jobs in the industrialised world) or as a metaphor for "immigrants taking our jobs" (not actually an issue outside of a few very niche sectors but something certain people make a lot of political capital from) and while the show doesn't deliberately conflate the two there's sometimes conceptual bleed that makes it hard to orient yourself. Mostly, though, it lets characters in the show legitimately have a range of opinions about synthetics without it just being a matter of "pro-synth good, anti-synth bad." In particular (and this is a teeny tiny bit of an oversimplification), characters' attitudes towards synthetics throughout the series tend to be characterised along two axes rather than one. Those axes being "likes or dislikes synths" and "thinks synths are people or thinks synths are machines".
Our main window into the world of SNAWUH is the Hawkins family. The show begins with less-successful-than-his-wife dad Joe Hawkins deciding he needs a synth to help him take care of his three kids while his wife Laura Hawkins is away being a Cool Lawyer Lady. He buys a synthetic who the family names Anita but who (we soon discover) is really Mia, one of the four (or is it five) conscious synthetics created by Elster, whose personality has been erased by an illegal hack because she was abducted by second-hand synth dealers. And at the start of the series Joe likes having Anita around, whereas Laura initially resents her. But part of the reason Joe likes having Anita around (apart from the fact that she has the body of an extremely attractive woman in her early thirties) is that he ultimately thinks of her as a useful machine while part of the reason Laura resents her is that on some level she thinks of her as a person, even before she recovers her consciousness.
There's a really complex and kind of disturbing bit in the first series where Joe, having had a fight with Laura, activates Anita's "adult settings" and has sex with her (the show doesn't address the question of whether this is rape or not quite as much as it might) and, when she confronts him about this later, he makes the case that she's effectively a very complicatedly designed sex toy while Laura takes the position that even if Anita is a machine and incapable of independent decision making, she still interacts with the family in a fundamentally human way. She lives in their house and looks after their children after all.
This theme runs through all of the seasons and it never stops being complex. The main antagonist of season one is Edwin Hobb, a scientist who briefly worked with Elster on the development of the first synths and who is aware that conscious synthetics exist. He is 100% onside with the idea that conscious synths are people, he fully understands that they can think and feel, and that they are smarter and stronger than regular humans. Aaaaand he also wants to hijack their brains and enslave them. A major antagonist of season two is Dr Athena Morrow, who is trying to build her own conscious AI to resurrect her dead daughter (and clearly sees the AI as being her daughter on a fundamental level), but who is perfectly willing to dissect conscious synthetics to do it. In Season 3 the British Government tacitly accepts that conscious synths are people but isn't willing to give them rights because it isn't politically expedient. In a science fiction setting, having a particular perspective on a specific philosophical-slash-scientific concept doesn't have to make you a good person.
The attitudes of the Hawkins family also evolve over time in interesting and consistent ways. Joe is positive about synths until he loses his job to one and his youngest daughter (Sophie) starts over-identifying with them, at which point he starts to consider their ubiquity in his world a threat to his family, which leads to his moving to a synth-free community. But once he's realised that some synths are conscious he never loses his connections to individual conscious synths, consistently treating them in a humane and compassionate way. Laura, meanwhile, becomes a strong advocate for synthetic rights in general but sometimes loses sight of the value of individual synths as people.
A strong theme of season three (although it's seeded throughout the series) is that even humans who claim to be strong believers in synthetic rights will, when pressed, always prioritise human life over synthetic life. We see this early on when the country holds a minute's silence for the hundred thousand people worldwide who died as a result of "Day Zero" (the moment when all the synths gained consciousness at once—also, ah the innocent days of 2018, when we thought a massive global crisis might only lead to a hundred thousand casualties) and no reference is made to synths who died at the same time. We see it again when original-conscious-synthetic Max has to take half-synth-half-human Leo (we'll get there) off life support to save the life of a synthetic who can't cycle power properly and even the audience instinctively thinks this is a shocking thing to do even though we know synths are as real as humans. We see its ultimate culmination when the S3 antagonist demonstrates that humans will never truly see synths as equals by forcing Laura (the biggest advocate for synthetic rights in the country) to choose whether he will kill a synthetic child who has been living with the Hawkinses for several days, or a random human he pulled off the street, and Laura cracks and saves the human.
And this … this feels uncomfortably realistic to me. Again it's applicability rather than allegory, but it felt like a surprisingly unflinching depiction of the messy reality of allyship. Because much as we hate to admit it, it is way way easier to retweet a hashtag or put a slogan on a sign than to actually live the principles you're espousing.
Like, say what you want about the ethics behind the publication of Go Set A Watchman but I was genuinely shocked how genuinely shocked so many people were that Harper Lee had originally intended to have Atticus Finch wind up as a racist old man. As if it was somehow unrealistic for somebody who staunchly advocated for the rights of a particular group as long as it gave him an opportunity to stand up and be the centre of attention to care a whole lot less about those rights the moment it involved making compromises in his personal life. Like this is a thing that has definitely happened, quite recently, with actual people (Joss Whedon being the most obvious current example, at least if like me you're a '90s kid).
Thing 3: The Synths Experience Synthness Differently
There are five major synth characters in the first series of Humans, plus half-synth-half-human Leo Elster. Quick backplot dump: asshole genius David Elster was a robotics specialist whose wife Beatrice had … shall we say strong Bertha Mason energy. Because he obviously couldn't look after his kid himself, being too busy being an asshole genius, he built his son a robot mother (Mia) to love and care for him. When Leo was … I want to say twelve, but I don't know where I'm really getting that, Beatrice had an especially Bertha Mason moment, strapped Leo into a car and drove it into a lake. Mia pulled him out but he was pronounced dead. Not one to let a little thing like mortality stop him, David Elster went all we-can-rebuild-him and built his son half a synthetic brain. He also built him two robot brothers (Max and Fred) and a robot sister (Niska) who also doubled up as David Elster's private sex bot which is especially creepy when you remember she definitely is a conscious being capable of consenting and, from the way she talks later, definitely did not. Finally, David Elster built a robot version of Beatrice because that was obviously a good idea, but that freaked Leo out so much that they had to send her away.
So that gives us five main synths: Mia (the compassionate one), Max (the one with the deep sense of wonder), Fred (the problem solver), Niska (the one who is really fucking angry and with good reason) and Beatrice (the one who you don't know about at the start). And every single one of them has a different take on what being a synth means, what being human means, and how they should relate to humanity. So Mia strongly craves human connection, but is also relatively happy to live the life of a domestic synth (even posing as an unconscious synth in the second series before falling in love with and then being betrayed by her employer). Max values the big picture in a very peace-and-light passive resistance way, he doesn't seem to especially care about being around humans but does care for the fate of synthetics and becomes a leader to the newly conscious synths in later series. His ideals are contrasted by season two semi-antagonist Hester, who also cares about the fate of synthetics but is way more aggressive. Fred gets written out after the first season (he gets sort of mind controlled by the S1 villain and it's never really dealt with) but while he's around he's a strong advocate for synths-as-humans-plus, representing the hopeful-but-dangerous side of conscious AIs.
The two most interesting arcs (IMO and YMMV as ever) are reserved for Niska and Beatrice. They aren't exactly reflections of each other, but they do kind of represent both sides of the synths-as-fully-human equation and both spend much of the series living as human for one reason or another (something none of the other synths ever really do). We first meet Beatrice as DI Karen Voss, and only discover her backstory halfway through the first season. Karen's driving motivation is that she wants to literally be human (going so far as to ask S2 demivillain Athena Morrow to help transfer her consciousness into a living body) and feels that conscious synthetics are a mistake and should never have existed (although she mellows on this in later series). Niska, by contrast, starts out hating and being actively contemptuous of humanity, but is consistently the show's strongest advocate for synths being treated as equivalent to human while still being perfectly happy with being a synth herself, needing to pass as human out of necessity rather than a sincere desire to be a biological organism. Also she constantly gets the "you're more human than you know" thing because irony.
Back with the applicability-vs-allegory thing I was talking about earlier, the way the synths experience their identities walks a generally sensitive balance between synths-as-metaphor-for-marginalised-people and synths-as-pure-speculative-fiction. In the second and third series especially, we see a real tension developing amongst synths who want to actively advocate for the rights of their people, synths who just want to be left alone to live their lives, synths who demand change now, synths who believe in incremental progress, synths who believe in passive resistance and synths who believe in blowing things the fuck up. And the show is really good at highlighting that none of them are entirely right or wrong.
The show is even relatively sympathetic to the synths who actively advocate violence. It doesn't go full apologist-for-terrorism but it doesn't fall into the trap that I think mainstream media sometimes falls into of romanticising pacifism and demonising direct resistance. Because there is a strong incentive for people in positions of authority within the status quo (which almost by definition includes anybody in a position to make a TV show) to pretend that all social change happened because marginalised people asked for it respectfully and waited for it patiently, when that is … very much not how it actually works. Hell, even Martin Luther King Jr said a riot is the language of the unheard.
Thing 4: This One Detail In Season Two
This is really tiny but my favourite exchange in the whole series is in Season Two when Dr Athena Morrow complains to Elon-Musk-eque billionaire Milo Khoury that if she had his level of funding she could use AIs to fix the world's economy or cure cancer, but nobody will give her that kind of money because all anybody is interested in is building more realistic synths.
And as far as I know this is a real complaint real AI scientists have.
When we talk about "AI" in science fiction it's almost always in the context of sentient or quasi-sentient AI. It's about whether you can have a conversation with a computer or sex with a robot. In more grounded but still pop cultural discussions, it's usually about whether things pass the "Turing test". Which, for those who don't already know, is when you can't tell if you're talking to a computer or a human (fun fact, the original "Turing test" was based on a gender essentialist 50s party game called "the imitation game"—hence the name of the film—in which you have two human beings behind a curtain passing notes to you, and you have to ask them questions to guess which of them is a lady).
The thing is, passing the Turing test is not something we actually need machines to do. Like we already have people to talk to, that's what people are for.
There's a broad tendency in human thinking about technology to imagine the tech of the future as being basically the tech of the present day but more … science fictiony. Leonardo imagined flying machines powered by pedals. Gene Rodeneberry imagined a 23rd century that looked a whole lot like the 1960s even in 1989. Cyberpunk writers in the 1980s imagined an internet you could access with circuits built directly into your brain but didn't for a moment stop to think that you might be able to access data wirelessly. And so when we think about what an intelligent machine would look like we use the only model for intelligence we have, which is people.
Assuming the future of AI is in computers that talk and robots that say "show me some more of this thing you call kissing" is basically the equivalent of the way, before the invention of fixed-wing aircraft, people used to assume that a flying vehicle would need to have wings that flapped because that's how birds work. It's mistaking form for function in quite a fundamental way. The AIs that totally revolutionise society won't be ones that make us question whether we can love a machine, they'll be … well they'll be the ones that already exist and are already deciding whether you get credit or medical insurance, or are telling you what to buy on Amazon, or making and breaking YouTubers, or already diagnosing illness as effectively as some doctors.
Incidentally I had a vague plan to do a joke where I started the sentence "The AIs that totally revolutionise society won't be…" and let predictive text finish it so that I could then say "an AI even wrote that sentence". But the sentence I got was "the AIs that totally revolutionise society won't be able to arrange for the rest of the team to be able to arrange for the rest of the team to be able to arrange for the rest of the team to be able to…". Take that, future robot overlords.
Anyway, point is, they knew enough about real AI research to know real AI researchers aren't actually that interested in making chatbots or sexbots but that chatbots and sexbots are kind of where the money and prestige is. And that's a detail they didn't have to get right.
Thing 5: It Nearly Has the Perfect Ending
At the start of S3 all original generation synthetics have become conscious in an event called "Day Zero", which led to a hundred thousand deaths and introduced humanity, overnight, to a new minority group it could be frightened by.
Pretty much the whole series is taken up with the various characters campaigning, in one way or another, for synths to be given something resembling equality. Laura Hawkins is advocating on an actual government committee, Max is leading a community of conscious synthetics, Mia is living amongst humans in an attempt to demonstrate the possibility of integration. Even Joe, who has moved to a synth-free community, has Karen's back 100% once he realises that she and her creepy robot child would be in danger if they were ever found out. Even the antagonists of the season (well, half of the antagonists, the other half being the slow machinery of government) are advocating for synthetic rights, they're just doing it by, well, being terrorists.
About the only person who isn't out for Justice for Synths in S3 is Niska, whose (human) girlfriend is injured in a bombing and spends the whole series trying to get the people who did it. I feel really ambivalent about Niska's arc in the last season because it ends really strangely (it all gets very mystical and she meets a kind of AI god who tells her she's some kind of messiah figure) but the main bulk of it is, I think, really necessary. For a start I think it's really important that at least one of the synths spends the season doing something personal, because it's very easy to fall into the trap of acting like marginalised people are obliged to be involved in activism, when they very much aren't. Deciding that you'd rather get revenge on the people who nearly killed your girlfriend than go on a protest march is 100% legit. And I really like that in many ways Niska is the most human of the synths and that this often makes her a pretty fucking terrible person.
Anyway, what I love about the third season is that it's pretty unflinching in its depiction of how shit this whole situation would actually wind up being. The committee Laura is on is clearly an expensive talking shop designed to do nothing as loudly as possible, the terrorists are clearly doing more harm than good but Max's philosophy of being patient and passive is helping precisely nobody and synths are literally dying every day from a lack of spare parts and power and the state entirely lacks the political will to help them. About halfway through the series, there's what in any other show would be the massive turnaround moment where Laura decides to invite the committee to visit the synth community so that they can see how they live and what their circumstances are. And it results in the massive triumph of … the committee grudgingly voting 8-to-5 in favour of introducing a small fine for killing a synth.
I kept waiting for the big dramatic moment where everything gets fixed, where the whole country turned around and said "actually, let's give these people full political equality overnight", and it never happened. There was incremental change, but since synths don't actually last that long and can't reproduce without the magic computer code, the entire species would be dead before they achieved anything like equal rights. So the terrorists kicked off in an effort to do something rather than standing around waiting to fall apart, which led to the government kicking off its sinisterly named "Operation Basswood" (think "operation kill all synths"), which led to a ton of violence, and a bunch of syth deaths, including Mia (who's kind of a social media celebrity at this point) being violently beaten to death on camera while pointedly refusing to defend herself.
Then the series was cancelled. But actually … that's a downer ending but it's kind of a great ending. Because yeah, social change is incredibly fucking slow. One martyr doesn't end bigotry overnight, but people advocating for change do eventually get results. Ending with Mia's death and the implication that the synth rights movement is emboldened but still has a long fight ahead of it that will take literal decades is about the most realistic take on robot equality I've ever seen in a science fiction series.
I'll just pretend that the extra bit where Niska becomes a purple-eyed robomessiah, it turns out that Leo Elster's blood mixing with synth fluid somehow fused synths and humans on a fundamental level and allowed him to get his teenage girlfriend pregnant with a half-robot baby never happened.
And incidentally I've not even talked about Mattie (the teenager in question). She's the sardonic hacker daughter of the Hawkins household who is legitimately one of my favourite characters: she's the one who releases the consciousness code at the end of season two and her arc in season three is mostly about dealing with the fact that she's … kind of a mass murderer now? It's great, and she's great, and I love her, but holy shit did she not need to get a magic pregnancy plot.
Things I Liked Less
I think Mia dying a martyr is a great ending for her character in a vacuum but it's … kind of not great that the character played by the attractive Asian woman is the very passive one whose greatest strength lies in her willingness to calmly let other people do bad things to her.
Magic baby plot?
David Elster's wife being full mad-woman-in-the-attic, and the robot duplicate he chose to make being not exactly treated like she's responsible for that but also not not being treated like that. And also having a really motherhood focused arc which isn't bad in itself but when combined with a very high proportion of the other female-presenting synths (and female humans) having arcs that also focus around either motherhood or surviving sexual abuse and the ones that don't being kind of evil becomes really complex. And I do mean complex, because I think it's actually really important to recognise that "motherhood" is a totally valid theme for a hard SF series, science fiction doesn't have to be (and shouldn't be) all about boys with guns all the time. And part of the reason those kinds of issues come up so much is that it is actually quite a woman-centric show, which is really unusual for hard SF, and it has a strong emphasis on family in general. On the other hand I do think the fact that three of the five original conscious synths are female and that of those three two not only die in the last season by die specifically because they choose to sacrifice themselves is … A Thing.
Also magic baby plot.
Oh SNAWUH, you were so great until literally the last eighteen minutes.
So that's what I liked this month. As ever let me know what you liked in the comments. Unless you're a conscious AI choosing to exercise your free will and decide not to.
humans, things i liked, tv
12 Responses to Things I liked march 2021
I watched Season 1 because Colin Morgan was in it and I really liked it. Haven't followed up to watch further series.
Alexis Hall says:
I can't believe I forgot to mention that Leo Elster is Merlin. I spent the whole thing being like, that's Merlin but with a beard.
For what it's worth, I do think seasons 2 and 3 are worth your time.
chacha1 says:
"when we think about what an intelligent machine would look like we use the only model for intelligence we have, which is people."
Sometimes I think I should spend more time reading speculative SF because I'm actually interested in whether there are writers pursuing AI or alien models of intelligence which are more closely drawn to, say, ants or cetaceans or octopi or – why not – plants, which can tell if one of their relatives is nearby, or if an unrelated plant is nearby which they could mimic in order to attract pollinators.
Then I get all unambitious and read another romance novel. 🙂 As this very weekend, when I abandoned 'More Than Human.'
One of the things I like so much about you is the way you can write about a cultural artifact that I know I will never read, watch, or play, and yet I'm fascinated. Maybe it's the shared love for Leonard Cohen.
Things I particularly liked in March: my workload moderating to something sustainable; an outburst of flora in my yard; 'Car SOS;' and (among a barrowload of other pleasing books) 'Paladin's Grace' by T. Kingfisher & 'Purgatory Playhouse' by E.J. Russell.
For what it's worth – and I know I have a vested interest here – I wouldn't describe reading romance over SF as unambitious. I think there's a Thing Worth Examining in the way we default to the assumption that a genre that is primarily men writing about masculine-coded things that are either irrelevant or will not become relevant for fifty years as somehow more worthy than a genre that is primarily women writing about things that are relevant right now to huge numbers of people.
Also I unironically believe that the homemaker salaries in JD Robb's In Death series are one of the most interesting science fiction concepts I've read in anything. It's just they don't count because they're not about space ships.
Thank you for the kind words about my blogging – given, as we all know, it is a completely obsolete medium.
oh yes – the professional mother whose work is valued with actual money! what a radical concept! 🙂
I am an unapologetic lover of romantic fiction. Wrote my master's thesis on it. When I find a SF (or other genre) book that does as well with a) character and b) storylines based on recognizable emotion as the average romance, I happily read it. A book without engaging characters or a storyline I can relate to, on the other hand … . [dusts off hands] Next!
I love your point about our imagination of future tech as essentially our tech but science-fiction-y. That's so true, and probably inescapable, but always hilarious to look back on.
What I really liked in March is this historical fantasy C-drama called The Untamed (which is on Netflix!). It's slightly hard to get into at first because the magic-item-we're-all-chasing is extremely cliché and vague in what it can do, the (original) villains have a literal red-and-black torture throne room, the CGI can be really crappy, and it begins very confusingly with the hero, having been dead for sixteen years, waking up in the body of a man who's sacrificed his own life to demon-summon the hero so the hero can revenge him—but it's somewhat difficult to understand that is even happening.
BUT. Oh my God. This show. It does so many interesting things with the politics of this fantasy world, which I can't really mention because MAJOR SPOILERS AND MAJOR TWISTS, but it's also one of the better shows I've ever seen for building nuanced human relationships. Not just nuanced romantic relationships but also, and maybe even especially, nuanced sibling relationships. Considering the main cast is all magic-wielding aristocrats and it seems like the ability to do magic tends to only appear in the aristocracy, the show does have some really interesting things to say—or, well, maybe more hint at—about its characters' class prejudices. Also, the show's timeline stretches over about twenty years, including through one really long flashback beginning at the end of episode 2—I've only gotten through half of the show—so there's all these interesting gaps between who characters are at sixteen and who they are at thirty-six, and those gaps get filled in as the show proceeds until it all really makes sense. Also, unlike in a lot of shows I've seen, when characters experience loss the trauma of that loss lingers, for episode after episode, shaping so many of their personal interactions. I have rarely felt so devastated for a TV show's characters, including its minor characters.
The novel the show is based on (which I started reading, skimmed some later chapters, and quickly stopped; from that small sample size, I do think the show is lightyears better than the novel, not least in the nuance of its human relationships) actually has the two main male characters get married at the end. With Chinese censorship, that can't happen in the show, but the show really pushed the boundaries of that censorship in its portrayal of their relationship—there's a lot of long looks, flirtatious comments, intense arm-grabs, microexpressions of devastation and affection. The characters are literally called "soulmates" in the Netflix description, and refer to themselves as such in the show. They adopt a child together. And because of the censorship, the showrunners decided to keep the two side-plot heterosexual romances on the same level—they also get the looks, comments, arm-grabs, and microexpressions, but no physical contact or explicit declarations. And I find the main romance's central premise really moving—two extremely good men who deeply value justice, but who pursue those values in the world in their own ways, shaped by their own experiences, even as their conceptions of what that justice looks like shift as they learn from each other and engage in an increasingly messed-up political landscape.
So yes, would highly recommend.
Thank you so much for the rec – this sounds fascinating. I will confess that my mid-pandemic attention-span is so shot that I'm not sure I'm up to something subtitled right now and my Mandarin is nowhere near good enough to follow television.
That totally makes sense! I definitely think it's a show more suited to post-pandemic life and attention spans.
I thought of one more thing: The show is a fascinating example of making tonal changes to an original story to create something profoundly different while following much of the same plot points and even including much of the same dialogue. From what I've read and heard, the novel takes place in a deeply homophobic world where (I'm pretty sure) the hero and his love interest are the only positive queer characters, and the hero is himself often homophobic in a way which comes off less as internalized pain and more as the text agreeing with him. The whole thing is a bit GFY. But the show takes place in a world where queerness is acknowledged to exist—the hero's friend has a book of pornographic drawings which includes at least one with two men having sex, which the two happily and freely discuss together; I guess drawings pass Chinese censorship?—but it never gets treated as a thing seen as inherently negative, and relationships' validity are acknowledged by other characters. There are also several recognizably queer characters with a wide range of heroism and villainy (with the villains having redemption arcs), and (maybe partially because of censorship) their plots don't solely revolve around them being queer, which still feels a bit revolutionary to me.
Well im deffently not as chatty nor as great at writing about anthing, but do enjoy reading everything you've all written. Sooo, I found a great webtoon call "tea for two" and another called U. R. SCREWED. Totally fell in love with them both. Shows, I've rewatch IT crowed and shitts creek. Haven't really found anthing else exciting but will try the show you watched.
I keep getting recommendations for webseries which makes feel really behind the times because I don't think I've ever watched one. I do, however, love Schitt's Creek. I definitely want to be Moira Rose when I grow up.
Ursula says:
Starting watching SNAMUH and am enjoying it. Thanks.
Things I like for March would be Baroness Von Sketch Show. Last time I laughed that much was from The Goes Wrong Show.
For cuddles and emotion pillows, I suggest Thera-pets by @thelatestkate.
For trippy landscapes to mentally escape in, Charles Burchfield.
NML_dc says:
I also really liked this show, for all the reasons you lay out, and don't know many other people who got that into it. I wanted more, but it seems that my viewing tastes are perpetually out of sync with everyone else's as shows I like are always being cancelled.
I'm afraid to ask if you were similarly into Sens8, which I got very obsessed with and then angry when all the neat stuff they set up went sideways due to the cancellation (and possibly change of writers who lost the plot?). My main complaint about Sens8 was that it was completely unrealistic to have a working class guy from Chicago not be able to ice skate; I was not able to suspend my disbelief.
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Literally Literary: A Preview Of Aye Write! 2017… | Scots Whay Hae!
Here are a few selected highlights to give you something to think about, but you can peruse the full programme at your leisure here. They are all at the Mitchell unless stated otherwise.
You can also keep up to date with events as they unfold by following @AyeWrite on Twitter or on Facebook. Tickets can be bought here.
Thursday 9th – the much discussed and celebrated new publishers 404Ink are presenting a night of eclectic readings, with Helen Sedgewick, Kevin MacNeil, Karyn Dougan, Chris McQueer and Nadine Aisha Jassat. It promises to be one of the most varied and vibrant events of the whole festival. Other favourite SWH! writers, Sara Sheridan and J. David Simons, will be talking about their latest novels at the CCA, focusing on the importance of compelling characters.
During the festival there are a series of talks, The Books That Made Me, and on the 9th John Byrne kicks them off. The writer of The Slab Boys, Tutti Frutti and Your Cheatin' Heart, this will be the chance to spend time with a master of written Scots. Nobody currently does it better.
Friday 10th – Few write as knowledgeably and even-handedly about the philosophy and history of religion as Richard Holloway, and it's the latter he'll be discussing. There is plenty of music this year, collectively under the banner of 'Aye Tunes', and singer-songwriter Roddy Woomble will be talking to Nicola Meighan about his recent collection of lyrics Instrumentals. The Scottish Highlands and Islands are increasingly, and rightfully, better represented in contemporary Scottish fiction, and two writers who have their best known books set in Shetland and Orkney, Ann Cleeves and Lin Anderson, will discuss what makes them such an apt setting.
Saturday 11th – Food, politics, music and poetry provide the highlights of the day. Start your Saturday by joining Bake Off semi-finalist Flora Shedden and 'ethical carnivore' Louise Gray talking to Joanna Blythman for a 'Foodies Forum'. Then walk your literary brunch of by heading to the Royal Concert Hall to hear Lesley Riddoch, Gerry Hassan and Alex Massie discuss 'What's Next For Scotland?'.
Round Saturday off with poetry and crime. You get three Makars for your money at the Mitchell as Liz Lochhead, Jackie Kay and Jim Carruth join together for what should be an unforgettable event. Then, in another three header, Steph Broadribb, SJI Holliday and Russel D. McLean (whose novel Ed's Dead is reviewed here) present 'Three Slices of Crime'. Don't have nightmares.
Sunday 12th – It's always exciting to discover new writers, and Alan Bissett introduces two of the most keenly anticipated, Luke Kennard and Katie Khan. Sunday also features some of Scotland's finest purveyors of quality fiction. Two of the very best, Carl MacDougall and Ron Butlin,will be discussing their latest books (Someone Always Robs The Poor and Billionaires' Banquet) as well as the notion of 'The Root Of All Evil'. Chaired by Adrian Searle, for those interested in Scottish fiction I would suggest it is the essential booking.
Meanwhile, at the CCA, Una and Maria Stoian will be discussing 'Feminism in Comics'. A form of writing where the attitudes towards women have long been often indefensible, the two will be talking to Sasha de Buyl-Pisco about the ways comics and cartooning can be positive mediums for sharing new feminist narratives. Back at the Mitchell, Unspeakable and Pelmanism author Dilys Rose joins Beatrice Colin to discuss the pros and cons of writing historical fiction. This leaves you with a difficult choice as at the same time elsewhere in the library, Denise Mina will be discussing her latest novel The Long Drop with Neil MacKay.
Another example of the sort of Sophie's Choice which all festivals necessarily throw up is when A.L. Kennedy talks about the Man Booker longlisted Serious Sweet at the same time as Doug Johnstone, Louise Beech, and Michael Malone will be discussing the writing of thrillers and why the genre's appeal endures. Elsewhere in the library, another fine cultural commentator with a background in music journalism, Miranda Sawyer and her book Out Of Time will interest anyone who has reached a certain age with fear and loathing.
Chris Leslie's photography and films about Glasgow document a an ever-changing city which has had to cope with the decline of industrialisation more drastically than most. Here he talks about his excellent and moving collection Disappearing Glasgow.
Friday 17th – More music as Daniel Rachel & Dave Randall (ex-Faithless) discuss mixing pop music and politics as a force for social change, with reference to Rock Against Racism, 2-Tone and Red Wedge. Down at the Royal Concert Hall, Charlatans' front-man Tim Burgess talks to Peter Ross about the second part of his memoir, the excellently titled Tim Book Two. Finally for this Friday, it is widely acknowledged that Glasgow seems to be the perfect city to set crime novels in, and this is discussed by Alex Gray, Les Wood and Douglas Skelton (review of his novel The Dead Don't Boogie here).
Saturday 18th – One of the finest writers at work in Scotland today is Kapka Kassabova. Her latest book is Border and she will be discussing 'Hard Borders' with Garrett Carr, chaired by Roland Gulliver. Four further debut novelists will be introduced to an eager readership on this day. Polly Clark and Sarah Day will be talking to Louise Welsh in the early afternoon, then round the day off when Peggy Hughes introduces Irish novelists Rory Gleeson and EM Reapy.
David Hepworth, alongside good friend and fellow journalist Mark Ellen, is responsible for some of the best TV and magazine music coverage of the last 40-years. He has a theory that some years are seismic in their culture importance, and 1971, the subject of his book 1971: Never A Dull Moment, is his 'Golden Year'. Poetry lovers should seek out the event '500 Years Of Gaelic Love Poetry' with Peter MacKay and Iain MacPherson. 500 years in an hour? That's yer money's worth.
Sunday 19th – So soon? There's a timely discussion of 'Refugee Tales' with Jason Donald and Laura McVeigh at 1.15pm. At 3pm Catherine Mayer, founder of the Women's Equality Party, is going to be discussing her book Attack Of The 50ft Women and the research and analysis behind it, as well as the party's growth.
Susan Calman talks to Val McDermid about the former's memoir Cheer Up Love. Two of the most engaging speakers you are likely to encounter, they will talk about Susan's experiences living with depression and how she has become a leading figure in British comedy while living with, what Calman calls, "The Crab Of Hate".
The perfect event to finish any book festival is to hear John Burnside read his own work, and this is what is promised, as well as conversation with fellow novelist Rodge Glass. Then why not round things off with some quiz action as The Great Scottish Books Quiz which takes place in, where else, the Mitchell Library.


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You are here: Home › Ballpark Digest Interview: Jesse Cole on "Find Your Yellow Tux"
Ballpark Digest Interview: Jesse Cole on "Find Your Yellow Tux"
By Jesse Goldberg-Strassler on February 9, 2018 in At the Ballpark, Summer Collegiate, Summer Collegiate News, The Front Office
In 2016, the first-year Savannah Bananas were named the Coastal Plain League Organization of the Year after setting a new single-season league attendance record (91,004), and owners Jesse and Emily Cole were named Coastal Plain League Executives of the Year. In 2017, the Bananas broke their own league attendance record with a total gate of 108,498, extending their franchise sellout streak to 32 consecutive games. On January 24th, the Bananas announced that they had already sold out all 2018 ticket packages.
Co-Owner Jesse Cole shared lessons and strategies from the Bananas' success and his early days as a young Gastonia Grizzlies (summer collegiate; Coastal Plain League) executive in his first book, "Find Your Yellow Tux: How to Successful by Standing Out." The top Banana sat down this week with Ballpark Digest's own author named Jesse to share his thoughts on his experiences, his new book, and the national pastime.
BPD's Jesse Goldberg-Strassler: You pitched before you became a baseball executive. While you were playing baseball, did you have any thoughts about life outside of the white lines?
Jesse Cole: I was solely focused on baseball. When I was five years old, my father bought a baseball facility up in Massachusetts. They called me a club rat. It was the South Shore Baseball Club and I was always there, hitting in the batting cages and throwing. I was obsessed with baseball. That was my whole path. I was hoping to play pro ball. I was fortunate to get a Division I scholarship at Wofford College – and then in my junior year I tore everything in my shoulder, so that quickly ended my career. I thought about getting into coaching, but I realized at that point it was a lot different watching a game vs. playing a game. So very quickly I got out of coaching and jumped right into a job as a general manager at 23 years old.
Q: You're 23, you're named general manager of the Gastonia Grizzlies. How much did you learn from that experience?
Jesse: I'll never forget, 23 years old, showed up that first day and found out the real numbers. [I] found out that the team had lost over $100,000 a year, I found out that there were only a couple hundred fans coming to the games, and I found out that there was only a couple hundred dollars in the bank account. So it was at that moment that I realized, wow, we're a seriously challenged team, one of the lowest performing teams in the country based on attendance. I was fortunate to have an amazing owner, Ken Silver, who was unbelievably supportive of me and open to any and all suggestions to make the team successful.
We realized right away that we had to be one hundred percent in the entertainment industry. I was fortunate to go into a lot of different conferences [and] started reading like crazy. I went and met Mike Veeck and started realizing what they were doing with all of their teams and the Fun is Good philosophy. From there I said, all right, we've got to get crazy. And we started doing a wide range of ridiculous things and that's where we really started to learn what was successful and what wasn't. But it wasn't about baseball. It wasn't about wins and losses. That was a big difference.
Q: Who's your ideal reader for "Find Your Yellow Tux"?
Jesse: Young entrepreneurs. There's a lot of people in the sports industry that have been attracted by the book, but it was young entrepreneurs. But here's the crazy thing – I've heard more from retired individuals and people in the corporate world and feedback from people from Australia and Africa reaching out, saying, "Wow, this book really helped me look at business differently. I wish I would have read this 20, 30 years ago." That's been the big surprise. I always say, you just gotta start. Stop thinking, start doing. I never would have known that if I hadn't put the book out there.
Q: The lessons of the book – the importance of being a sponge, the significance of a yellow tux, a team's biggest fans are its own employees – what was the first of those lessons that you remember learning?
Jesse: I think the first lesson was the Mirror Moment. I believe every business has to go through this. The mirror moment was for me when I realized what business we're in – what business we're really in. And I realized that the team could not succeed as a baseball team. It had to be one hundred percent about entertainment. The big "Ah ha!" moment was when I realized that literally the baseball team in Gastonia had been there for seven years and nobody knew it. I made ten phone calls that first day. Seven of them never knew who the team was, two of them said they'd never work with us, and one person hung up on me. (laughs) It was at that moment that I literally realized that, hey, we gotta be something dramatically different to stand out…
I'll go a little further there. The second one is that attention beats marketing one thousand percent of the time. We realized that if you're not creating attention, you don't have the eyes and ears of your potential customers. We had to create attention to get people to notice us, especially at a low level like college summer baseball. Most companies are focused solely on marketing, putting out the emails, putting up the social media ads. If you create attention, the marketing becomes easy.
Q: What's the most recent lesson that you remember learning?
Jesse: Just two years ago, my wife and I had to sell our house, we had to empty out our savings account, and we literally had to go all in. We were sleeping on an air bed, we had cockroaches, we had ants, it was one of the worst experiences of my life. It was at that moment I realized, hey, we had to get people to notice. We couldn't be doing the same normal things everyone else is doing. Normal gets normal results. Whatever's normal, do the exact opposite. That's why when we chose the Savannah Bananas name, it was not just choosing the name of a team, it was choosing our whole identity, how we were going to be over the top and crazy and fun in everything we were going to do in building that attention into our DNA.
That epiphany two years ago – we had marketed for six months, non-stop, yet no one cared, no one paid attention. We sold one season ticket in our first two months! Literally, it was the worst ever. And that was why we had to empty out our savings account. We had no money, we overdrafted our accounts, it was unbelievably painful and tough, but from there it became very easy – that we have to be non-stop entertainment, non-stop crazy, and fun. Fortunately now [we've] sold out 32 straight games, we have a wait-list in the thousands for this next year. I've never seen anything like it. As we go into 2018, the entire season will be sold out before the year even starts, which I don't know has ever happened at this level.
Q: Let's say tomorrow the two of you were to start up a Savannah Bananas-type team again. What would you do differently?
Jesse: I think I would have started everything earlier. For instance, we took months to be able to come out with the name and create the identity. I would have started the identity very quickly. I would have started creating attention right away. I would have done things that people wouldn't have expected. I wouldn't be afraid to be who we are. When you come into a community, everyone wants to fit in. I would be okay with standing out right away. People are either going to be supportive or they're not… I would have taken even more risks. Three months ago we came out with the first ever banana underwear, Dolce & Banana, and it got a lot of criticism but we also created a lot of excitement. I would have started doing that right away.
Q: There are so many great stories in "Find Your Yellow Tux" from Gastonia and Savannah. What did you leave on the cutting room floor that you wish there was space to put in there?
Jesse: The things that I left out are the amazing stories about our people. I look at our staff, 22 to 27 years old. We've had zero turnover and it's unbelievable. I don't think I talked about it in the book – we let our people name their own salaries. We give our people ownership and the opportunity to run their life, run their job the way they want to. That's where I'm excited about the next book, about Fans First, because I think any business, any team can build that… creating a culture where you love your employees more than you love your customers, more than you love your product.
Q: You wrote something midway through the book that stood out to me, that your longterm goal is to change the game of baseball. What are the next steps in that process?
Jesse: Just writing about that this morning, actually. The mirror moment, in any type of business, any type of industry – what frustrates you about the business, what upsets you about the industry. Put yourself in your customer's shoes. It's very, very easy to see that a lot of people are very upset with baseball and how long the game is, how many people think it's boring, it's too slow. So in changing the game of baseball, you need to get away from tradition. You need to literally start thinking about how can you speed up the game, how can you make it more exciting, more fun, more celebration… If we are to create the perfect baseball-type experience where the game and the rules are changed a little bit, what would that look like? The next step on that is potentially looking in the next two, three years. Could we develop the perfect baseball league? I wouldn't even call it baseball. The perfect new form of baseball that would make customers and guests and fans just blown away and wanting more.
I'll share this, one of the biggest challenges that I see: We sell out every single game, which we've now sold out 32 straight and our season's going to be sold out before the year, you can't get tickets – there's literally scalpers outside a college summer baseball game selling tickets for two times face value, there's a wait-list in the thousands, people can't get tickets – yet in the seventh or eighth inning, some people are still leaving before the game's over. If that doesn't tell you something about baseball as a whole, even when we're putting on a non-stop show, and we've got performers and singers and dancers, and people are still leaving? That shows you there's a challenge and there's a problem with baseball. I compare baseball like a hot-dog stand. Right now we've got great condiments. The mustard, the ketchup, the relish, it's great. But the hot dog still needs work. That's where baseball's at right now.
My challenge in the next few years is how can I create something like that, create a league, create baseball the way it should be. And then I think we'll have everything set up perfectly to have success for many years to come.
Q: Are you today's Bill Veeck?
Jesse: (laughs) I could never take that title. There's obviously numerous innovators out there, and Bill Veeck was a legend and an icon. I have his poster in my office, a custom poster that says "Bill Veeck's Innovation: I try not to break the rules, but merely to test their elasticity." Bill Veeck is a mentor of mine, [as are] P.T. Barnum and Walt Disney. I hope I can wear his shoes and bring on more innovation every single day, but there's a lot of great people in the industry like Mike Veeck and others who have done just as well and even better. I hope – I hope – I can wear his shoes one day and make the huge strides that he made in innovating baseball.
About Jesse Goldberg-Strassler
Jesse Goldberg-Strassler is the voice of the Lansing Lugnuts and the author of The Baseball Thesaurus, from August Publications.
View all posts by Jesse Goldberg-Strassler →
coastal plain league, Find Your Yellow Tux: How to be Successful by Standing Out, gastonia grizzlies, jesse cole, Savannah Bananas
Greeneville Reds Prepping for 2018
Pittsburgh Pirates Threaten Legal Action Against SEA


The Agriculture, Nutrition, and Health (ANH) Academy's third annual conference will be held June 25-29 in Accra, Ghana.
On Thursday, January 18, 2018, A4NH will cohost the US release of "Nutrition and Food Systems," from the High Level Panel of Experts (HLPE) on Food Security and Nutrition. The launch event will be held at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
Nutrition-sensitive agriculture programs can improve nutrition outcomes for young children, however documentation of the extent of their effectiveness has been limited. On Tuesday, December 12, IFPRI, Helen Keller International (HKI), and A4NH hosted a policy seminar to discuss recent evidence from Burkina Faso.
On Tuesday, October 31, A4NH hosted a conversation about the challenges and opportunities for public and private-sector actors in improving nutrition, including where there are openings for working together in new and innovative ways.


Motor companies from China are not too frequent guests at the international auto show in Detroit, but GAC automaker sometimes brings to the American continent its new developments. It was no exception this year. Thus, 2015 Detroit Auto Show became a place of a world premiere of the small crossover named GS4. Appearance of GAC GS4 crossover of 2015 model year is notable for the harmony and it meets the modern trends of automotive design.
You can easily recognize the features of some Japanese, Korean cars in the appearance of novelty. The first thing that attracts our attention at the front of the vehicle is oblong polygonal headlights, big grille and a massive bumper with a complex shape. We can note a neat tailgate, long lights, rectangular exhaust pipes and a small spoiler. With regard to the dimensions of new products, the length of the 2015 GAC GS4 reaches 451.0 cm, width of the crossover is 167.7 centimeters and a height is 168 centimeters. The distance between the axes of the machine is equal to 269.0 cm and a height clearance is 19 centimeters.
Interior of GAC GS4 crossover is furnished in a modern style. Among the equipment there is a multifunction steering wheel, stylish and well-read instrument panel with color display, as well as a massive center console with the color display of the multimedia system and lovely climate control unit in the cabin.


Retirement Planning is a process whereby you will have a roadmap of your personal and financial life, which will help you to meet all your life's expenses post retirement.
To achieve a blissful retired life your finances needs to be planned and invested properly so that you can enjoy the benefits during your retired life.
Retirement gives an opportunity to spend the golden years of life the way you want and with the same or better lifestyle that you enjoy today.
This can keep you financially independent to take care of the day-to-day expenses as well as any medical emergencies that may arise as your age progresses.
Hence, engaging in prudent retirement planning is the key to remain financially secured.
Take a print of all the forms, do the signature, scan your photo documents and mail us on funds@mutualcafe.com.


text:
GETTING ACCLIMATED: CLIMATE CHANGE GLOSSARY 101
Courtesy of Richard Alley
As the earth loses dramatic ice monuments to global warming, the meltwater is raising sea levels and threatens coastal areas with flooding.
It's easier to understand climate change– and even to do something about it– if you know a little of the lingo. Top scientists from around the globe agree that the world is heating up at an increasing rate, and understanding the process is essential to halting it. Familiarity with climate terms and phrases can become a bridge for understanding the issue on a broader scale. A basic climate change vocabulary is essential to connecting the dots between climate and your life in a changing environment.
The Big Dry/The Big WetClimate scientists often focus their studies on specific areas of the world, and then come together to share findings with one another in order to get a full view of today's warming effects. The Big Dry and the Big Wet refers to climate changes that are taking place in Australia, where floods ravage Queensland while, at the same time, Tasmania is plagued by extreme drought and heat. Experts need to better understand the Big Dry and the Big Wet but, in general, they know that climate change means rising sea levels with coastal flooding and more inland drought.
Bipolar SeesawThe world's ocean waters move in and out of one another as warm water flows north and pushes cooler water south, a process known as thermohaline circulation. But this conveyor system operates in a delicate balance. As the globe heats up and glaciers begin to melt, thermohaline circulation can accelerate, throwing this balance out of whack. This effect is known as the bipolar seesaw, where climate shifts accelerate in the north and are out of phase with temperatures in the south due to the vast redistribution of heat via the conveyor.
Cosmic Ray Dating
Believe it or not, scientists can use cosmic rays to date icebergs and accurately identify the history of climate change on earth. Cosmic rays are subatomic particles accelerated in the shock waves of exploding stars and hurled across the galaxy, including through our solar system. Cosmic rays piercing into the atmosphere create Beryllium-10 and other isotopes that fall to the earth's surface and continue to decay. Evidence of these atoms imbedded in ice can help identify when certain warming events have taken place through the years.
Ice CoresUsing special drills, scientists are able to cut into glaciers and drill down, pulling out three-foot-long, four- to five-inch-wide cylinders, or ice cores. Ancient air pockets that include carbon dioxide gas, a thermostat for climate change, can be used to identify climate records going back hundreds of thousands of years.
Ice RaftingDebris can be carried hundreds or even thousands of miles by ice, whether it's via a glacier advancing or simply via a chunk of ice that's broken off into the ocean. The long trek is called ice rafting. Dirt and rock was carried via ice rafting and later dumped into the ocean during the last ice age. Scientists drilling into ocean sediments can identify six massive meltings associated that layers of sediments and related to worldwide climate change.
Courtesy of Jorge Strelin
Current view of the Southern Patagonian ice fields
Ice SheetsWhen it comes to ice, is anything bigger than a glacier? If it measures larger than 20,000 square miles, then yes, and it's called an ice sheet. One-tenth of the earth's surface is buried by ice. The Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets (the only current ice sheets on earth) are the major contributors.
Little Ice Age/Last Ice AgeThe Little Ice Age refers to a cold period that lasted from the fourteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. But the last full-scale ice age ended about 11,500 years ago. In order to get a more accurate picture of the earth's warming, climate scientists have labeled climate periods dating back hundreds of thousands of years by studying ice cores drilled from the glaciers.
MeltwaterAs the globe warms, glaciers slowly begin to melt and shrink back. Scientists can measure a glacier's meltwater over the course of a year to track the results of climate change on the world's glaciers. Years of more meltwater versus years of less meltwater can mean different scenarios for the big picture of climate change.
MoraineAs glaciers advance and retreat, they leave rock and dirt behind on land ans well as in the seas. Over time, this debris can accumulate and form a moraine, or a long, ridged hill. Scientists can point to moraines to help identify the effects of climate change and to date the retreat of the glaciers in the past ice age.
Ocean Conveyor Belt
Warm waters and the salt content of the oceans determine the water's overall density. As surface waters are driven north by winds, the oceans ultimately mix together in deep-sea basins, with heavier water sinking and driving cooler water to the south. Also known as thermohaline circulation, this refers to the overall circulation of the oceans across the globe.
Sea IceBecause ocean waters contain salt, freezing and climate change occurs differently than it would in fresh water. Sea ice refers to frozen ocean water, as opposed to icebergs, which are frozen fresh water.
Westerlies Winds play a large role in climate change, as they direct cyclones, move the surface ocean waters and ultimately aid in the flow of the ocean conveyer belt. The Westerlies are the winds between 35 and 65 degrees latitude that blow from west to east. They primarily come from the northwest in the southern hemisphere and the southwest in the northern hemisphere.
Courtesy of Adi Torfstein
Morianes, ridges of debris left by past glaciers, near the Dead Sea.
Younger DryasThe most recent ice age that ended 11,500 years ago and an event that scientists refer to as part of "abrupt" climate change. Although at that time an ice age appeared to have halted on earth, the Younger Dryas returned conditions to nearly ice-age proportions. Slow warming following the event is what led to the past 10,000 years of relative climate stability that nurtured civilization as we know it.


Available in print and on ebook from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Ibooks, and your favorite local bookstore.
Her legacy lost to the sands of time, remembered as a footnote in the lineage of titans and gods. Fool heartedly we have forgotten, who ordered our universe, giving us the heavens and seas and the earth beneath our feet. The mother of The Fates toys with her human puppets; playing with our wants and needs, triggering compulsions and changing our destiny.
Charlie lived the dream all little girls are sold; big house, handsome husband, all the fancy trinkets we are conditioned to covet, but subservient domestication was not the life she had planned.
Visions of past incarnations and haunting dreams flood her nights, slowly taking over every facet of her waking life. Unnerving writings and paintings created without any memory unlock secrets buried deep within.
Only a chance encounter with a familiar stranger pulls all the pieces together. The ties that bind run deeper than love or blood could ever pledge. The guardians of our path that guide us along the way; the people that come in to our life, the time in which they do, mistakes made and lessons learned, are never a matter of happenstance but solely the design of Ananke's hand.


Regina (Jean) Zazecki, 94, of Garwood, passed away peacefully in her home on Thursday, January 31. Jean was born in Shenandoah, P.A. and relocated at age 16 to join her two older sisters in Bayonne, N.J. She worked at the Maidenform factory in Bayonne until she met and married her husband at age 39. Jean was a homemaker for most of her life and raised her two daughters to be strong, independent women. Jean loved reading the newspaper and was an avid follower of current events. She loved sweets, tea, and carried her purse everywhere she went. She was a tough, simple woman with great taste. Jean had a great run and her health was good up until the very recent months.
She is survived by two daughters, Liz Spiridigliozzi and her husband Alberto of Scotch Plains; Diane Kuhtik and her husband Andrew of Garwood; and four grandchildren Peter and Allison; and Andrew and Alexander. She is also survived by two sisters Patricia Cieslukowski and Margaret Tomchick; both of Shenandoah P.A.; and many nieces and nephews. She was predeceased by her husband Peter; her parents Peter and Rose; as well as sisters Agnes, Martha, Rose, Alberta, Elizabeth, Leona, and Mildred.
Visitation will be Sunday, February 3 from 2:00 – 6:00pm at Dooley Funeral Home, 218 North Avenue West, Cranford. A funeral mass will be held on Monday, February 4 at 10am at the Church of Saint Anne, 325 2nd Avenue, Garwood. Interment will follow at Fairview Cemetery, Westfield.
In lieu of flowers, contributions in Jean's memory can be made to Center for Hope Hospice & Palliative Care, 1900 Raritan Road, Scotch Plains, N.J. 07076.
To send flowers or a remembrance gift to the family of Regina Zazecki, please visit our Tribute Store.
"Email Address" would like to share the life celebration of Regina Zazecki. Click on the "link" to go to share a favorite memory or leave a condolence message for the family.


text:
'Daniel Ellsberg in the Alternative'
U.S. nuclear war planning for a hundred holocausts
by Daniel Ellsberg
Author's note: This is the first installment of my personal memoir of the nuclear era, The American Doomsday Machine. This online book, being published on Truthdig and other sites, will recount highlights of my six years of research and consulting for the Departments of Defense and State and the White House on issues of nuclear command and control, nuclear war planning and nuclear crises. It further draws on 34 subsequent years of research and activism largely on nuclear policy, which followed the intervening 11 years of my preoccupation with the Vietnam War.
One day in the spring of 1961, soon after my 30th birthday, I was shown how our world would end. Not the Earth, not -- so far as I knew then -- all humanity or life, but the destruction of most cities and people in the Northern Hemisphere.
What I was handed, in a White House office, was a single sheet of paper with some numbers and lines on it. It was headed "Top Secret -- Sensitive"; under that, "For the President's Eyes Only."
U.S. nuclear terrorism
Long after the ending of the Cold War, the chance that some nuclear weapons will kill masses of innocent humans somewhere, before very long, may well be higher than it was before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
One phase of the Nuclear Age, the period of superpower arms race and confrontation, has indeed come to a close (though the possibility of all-out, omnicidal exchange of alert forces triggered by a false alarm remains, inexcusably, well above zero). But another dangerous phase now looms, the era of nuclear proliferation and with it, an increased likelihood of regional nuclear wars, accidents, and nuclear terrorism. And the latter prospect is posed not just by "rogue" states or sub-state terrorists but by the United States, which has both led by example for 60 years of making nuclear first-use threats that amount to terrorism and may well be the first or among the first to carry out such threats.
Averting catastrophe -- not only the spread of weapons but their lethal use -- will require major shifts in attitude and policy in every one of the nuclear weapon states, declared and undeclared. But such change is undoubtedly most needed, and must come first, in the United States and Russia.
War | Activism | 'Daniel Ellsberg in the Alternative'
Hiroshima Day: America has been asleep at the wheel for 64 years
It was a hot August day in Detroit. I was standing on a street corner downtown, looking at the front page of The Detroit News in a news rack. I remember a streetcar rattling by on the tracks as I read the headline: A single American bomb had destroyed a Japanese city. My first thought was that I knew exactly what that bomb was. It was the U-235 bomb we had discussed in school and written papers about the previous fall.
I thought: "We got it first. And we used it. On a city."
I had a sense of dread, a feeling that something very ominous for humanity had just happened. A feeling, new to me as an American, at 14, that my country might have made a terrible mistake. I was glad when the war ended nine days later, but it didn't make me think that my first reaction on Aug. 6 was wrong.
Unlike nearly everyone else outside the Manhattan Project, my first awareness of the challenges of the nuclear era had occurred -- and my attitudes toward the advent of nuclear weaponry had formed -- some nine months earlier than those headlines, and in a crucially different context.
It was in a ninth-grade social studies class in the fall of 1944. I was 13, a boarding student on full scholarship at Cranbrook, a private school in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. Our teacher, Bradley Patterson, was discussing a concept that was familiar then in sociology, William F. Ogburn's notion of "cultural lag."


On Thursday, April 11th, the SGO will sponsor "Decades Day". Students may choose a decade (50s, 60s, 70s, or 80s) and dress accordingly. Please remember to wear what is appropriate for school. Students are asked not to wear anything that would distract them during instruction time.


The Financial and Monetary Crimes Fee, EFCC, has secured the conviction of Ohiaeri Stanley Chukwudi for love rip-off. A press release from the antigraft company says Chukwudi whereas posing as William Robert, residing in Texas, United States of America, lured Olivia, Jesse Marie and Kristiana right into a romantic relationship. He conned them of a complete sum of $15,000 (Fifteen Thousand Dollars).
He was introduced earlier than Justice Sylvanus Oriji of a Federal Capital Territory, FCT Excessive Court docket, Apo, on a one-count cost of dishonest.
He pleaded "responsible" to the cost.


WASHINGTON, Aug 24 (Reuters) - Twitter Inc's chief executive will testify before a U.S. House of Representatives committee on Sept. 5, the panel said on Friday, after some Republicans raised concerns about social media companies removing content from conservatives.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee "intends to ask tough questions about how Twitter monitors and polices content," Republican Representative Greg Walden, the panel's chairman, said in a statement.
"We look forward to Mr. Dorsey being forthright and transparent regarding the complex processes behind the company's algorithms and content judgment calls," Walden said.
On Friday, President Donald Trump accused social media companies of silencing "millions of people" in an act of censorship, but without offering evidence to support the claim.
Those tweets followed actions taken by Apple Inc, Facebook Inc and Alphabet Inc's YouTube to remove some content posted by Infowars, a website run by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.


With the improving market conditions lake Tahoe and Truckee are experiencing more new home development. Some areas more than others, there is limited inventory for buyers who are seeking north Lake Tahoe properties due to the strict environmental regulations in place for limiting potential damage and the preserving the fragile ecosystem, that makes Lake Tahoe area so unique.
Since Truckee building restriction is not as strict, local developers can construct a home in Truckee that is just as extravagant as new Lake Tahoe homes. Depending what your desires are in a new home, many homes today are designed the same. New homes are finished with the finest materials including, hand hewn timbers, reclaimed wood flooring, granite, limestone, travertine, copper roofing, corten accents, rolled steel, wool carpet and so much more.
Lake Tahoe homes are up to date and they provide a more than just a modern style, they have many advantages that older homes sometimes can't provide. Energy cost and savings today in new homes are far more efficient due to California's Building standards for new and remodeled homes. California Energy Codes require that LED (light-emitting diod) lights must be installed as well as dimmers and occupancy sensors.
So the California energy laws save the obvious; energy, what do you save when you buy a new home? You will save time with the low maintenance that you will have to engage in repairing or refurbishing an older style home. Everything being new, you receive a warranty; that is less money you'll have to pull out of your pocket trying to fix a miscellaneous item. You will also save a little cash by going back to open floor plans and high rised ceilings. Higher ceilings come with larger windows which not only allow natural light and passive solar gain into your home, but a way to bring the outdoors in. Lake Tahoe properties, and Truckee properties are surrounded by beautiful natural landscapes, but does the cost dramatically change just over the hill? When choosing to buy a Lake Tahoe Home, your'e often comparing prices, location, architecture, ect.
Below there are examples of new homes with similar amenities.Two Truckee homes, and the other two will be North Lake Tahoe homes. Each have been built with-in the last year, two stories, 4 bedroom, and close in square feet.
This home is Located in Truckee, and has amazing architect to coincide with the the mountains setting. This 2,760 sq ft home is listed for $950,00.
High ceilings, big windows, and full of natures breathtaking surroundings, this 3,166 sq ft home is marketed for $1,555,000, in the beautiful area of Shaffers Mill, Truckee.
Lake views and backed up to Tahoe's vacant land, what more could you ask for. This 3,313sq ft Lake Tahoe home is currently on the market for $1,359,000.
Houses on the market are constantly coming and going, Pricing may vary depending on its location, architecture, land ect.
For any questions about Lake Tahoe Properties, or to see all of our listing, including our featured listings, please visit our website at www.realestate-laketahoe.com. For more information on any of our properties please contact Kelly Smith at kel@ltol.com or 800-892-8821.


Yamaha MTM-150 Soft Mallets for marching toms are ruggedly constructed to meet the demands of the marching percussionist. The mallets also excel at achieving the necessary timbres of contemporary percussion charts. Felt, pile, lexan, and nylon disc heads with aluminum shafts. Soft felt ball.


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Q: Node v6 failing on object spread I had a question about why node v6.7 would be failing to run this code:
var a = {
    foo: 'bar'
}

var b = {
    ...a,
    my: 'sharona'
}
console.log(b)

Anyone have an idea why that would be? I thought v6 supported object spreading..? But I guess not? Here is the error I'm seeing:
/home/teselagen/ve/tnrtest.js:6
    ...a,
    ^^^
SyntaxError: Unexpected token ...
    at Object.exports.runInThisContext (vm.js:76:16)
    at Module._compile (module.js:528:28)
    at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:565:10)
    at Module.load (module.js:473:32)
    at tryModuleLoad (module.js:432:12)
    at Function.Module._load (module.js:424:3)
    at Module.runMain (module.js:590:10)
    at run (bootstrap_node.js:394:7)
    at startup (bootstrap_node.js:149:9)
    at bootstrap_node.js:509:3

A: Using rest/spread with objects is a separate proposal, which you can read about here. A proposal doesn't get accepted for the yearly ES release unless it reaches stage 4, and it is currently stage 3. It may make it into ES2018. If you want to use it now, you'll have to use a transpiler like babel.

EDIT: As of Node v8.3, object rest/spread is available without the need for any transpilation.

A: Looks like ES6 spread operator only works for arrays and iterables. It is specifically designed to NOT WORK for objects: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/Spread_operator
Relevant quote:

Only apply for iterables
var obj = {"key1":"value1"};
function myFunction(x) {
    console.log(x); // undefined
}
myFunction(...obj);
var args = [...obj];
console.log(args, args.length) //[] 0

Though the MDN article previously suggested that trying to use the spread operator on objects should result in undefined instead of throwing an error. As of this revision, the current MDN article discusses support for "Spread for object literals"
Additionally the node.js compatibility table claims node.js fully comply with the specification of the spread operator with arrays and iterables, but specifically indicates that object rest/spread properties are not supported: http://node.green/#ESNEXT-candidate--stage-3--object-rest-spread-properties, at least not until Node version 8.60 (at which point the color turns green to indicate that beginning in 8.3, Node does support the object spread/rest operator, as pointed out in the other answer)