When we talk about living a conscious life, we're often focused on ourselves or our purchases day to day. But in this column I want to discuss family life — more specifically, eating together and food education for the next generation.
It's amazing just how weird family meals can be: children having meltdowns about dinner, refusing to eat a certain colour, parents making four different meals, white food addicts who won't eat anything else … Then we've got the health challenges of today. If only I had a dollar for every time a grandparent said, "We just didn't have any of these issues in my day", meaning eczema, dermatitis, asthma, allergies, intolerances and autism spectrum disorder. It seems these days every family has a child with some sort of health challenge and I refuse to accept this as the new normal when we can all empower ourselves to do so much to shape a different future.
It's hard to believe in the need to eat your vegies when you never see your parents do it.
There's a lot of stress these days as parents feel less and less able to provide their children with food education and are confused about how to help them broaden their food tastes. We don't just have to teach manners these days; we have to teach detective skills, additive meanings, food marketing tactics, distinguishing real from fake, all while the food industry continues to turn the volume up on convenience, with food in squeeze pouches and bars so our children "don't have to think about it" and parents "don't have to worry".
Thing is, though, there is nothing to worry about but, in our minds, we've become muddled. Nowhere have we been equipped with the skills to navigate today's children's food education landscape.
That's why this month I want to share with parents and teachers my SCVEE method (pronounced "skivvy") to get kids excited about and interested in real food. The more we can teach them about the magic of the incredible produce nature provides us, the stranger the fake stuff becomes. It's easier to illustrate why something wouldn't be a good option if they're in the know about what actually is.
And I don't mean at the supermarket. Keep supermarket shopping as a solo trip if you shop there (take a podcast and a tea and make it an enjoyable after-dinner solo activity!) or order those items online so your kids aren't exposed to junk at the cash registers, not to mention the endless shelves of cereals and processed foods in the middle and those end-of-aisle promotions. Just getting them out of that environment will be a big win in reducing their exposure to processed weirdness.
Chat to farmers, sample everything possible and comment not on whether something is "healthy" or "good for you" but more on the pretty colour, yummy crunchy texture or about the season and how it grows best then. Don't set kids up for "evil" and "good" food and a lifetime of shame and guilt that comes with that! What we're doing here is making our children conscious of the origins of the food on their plates and getting to know the people who work so hard to produce it for us.
We seem to let our kids in the kitchen cook with us mainly when it's cake-making time. If they're part of everyday cooking and conscious of everything that goes into it, feeling clever about helping Mum or Dad, they'll be much more inclined to have a go at eating stuff they've made the effort to cook. No age is too young. At four months, my son used to stir his purées — assisted by me; he's no boy genius!
I remember there was pretty much only one way we ate green vegetables growing up: steamed. Plus, of course, with the low-fat era in full swing, butter was out of the question. So I was just not excited about vegies — surprise! Variety is the spice of life and some kids will fall in love with vegies they thought they hated when they're presented differently. Oven-roasted broccoli with olive oil and salt is a great example. Puréed, buttery honey carrots is another one.
Invest in a good stick blender or Vitamix-type appliance that you'll have for years and years and make ultra-delicious, super-smooth mashes and purées packed with vegies. Then roast things, mash things, serve as raw sticks or drowned in roast chicken juices, cooked in the same pan as the roast. Varied approaches can often be the kicker for broadening the variety on the love list as kids become conscious of different textures and ways of presenting the same food.
Yes, we're all busy, but dinner isn't a restaurant with unlimited options. Whenever you can, try to eat together as a family. For some, breakfast ends up being that meal — or weekend meals because it's easier for everyone to be together. Why? It's hard to believe in the need to eat your vegies when you never see your parents do it. Don't talk about whether or not they're being "good" by eating or eating it all or being "naughty" by not. Whether they're eating or not shouldn't be the focus for congratulations or getting in trouble because that can quickly become about control.
Meanwhile, you can affirm their choices when they helped you fill the shopping basket: "Thanks so much for choosing the broccoli; this is the best one I've ever tasted." It might sound like overkill but our kids love validation, and making them feel clever for choosing something for you is a brilliantly simple way to give them some positivity without any expectation that they eat it.
Food was never meant to be stressful; nor is every human meant to love everything (hello, green capsicum, my arch nemesis!). Meals are meant to be simple and delicious occasions when we connect with our favourite humans and exchange ideas, stories and love. So if food is a cause of stress at your house and you feel you can work on your kids' consciousness, give my little SCVEE method a good, consistent go — and may you raise gorgeous, real-food-loving humans for a thriving future.


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Studies Quotes
Studies have found that preparing your own food is usually healthier and less expensive than buying fast food. But most people just don't have the time.
Eric Schlosser
Author Profession: Journalist
Find on Amazon: Eric Schlosser
Hunter S. Thompson, Erma Bombeck, Ambrose Bierce, Ann Landers, Dave Barry, Heywood Broun, Dan Rather, Finley Peter Dunne
Buying, Expensive, Fast, Fast Food, Food, Found, Healthier, Just, Less, Most, Own, People, Preparing, Studies, Than, Time, Your
One might expect that the families of murder victims would be showered with sympathy and support, embraced by their communities. But in reality they are far more likely to feel isolated, fearful, and ashamed, overwhelmed by grief and guilt, angry at the criminal-justice system, and shunned by their old friends.
Old Friends Angry Grief Friends
Fast food is popular because it's convenient, it's cheap, and it tastes good. But the real cost of eating fast food never appears on the menu.
Good Food Eating Never
Yes, a cheeseburger and fries is probably my favourite meal. But I don't eat ground beef anymore.
Ground Eat Meal Cheeseburger
Different people, in good faith, can look at the same fact and interpret it differently. But that's where an interesting conversation begins.
Good Faith People Look
McDonald's revolutionized fast food. They introduced a way to eat food without knives, forks or plates. Most fast foods can be eaten while steering the wheel of a car and the restaurants are usually drive through.
Car Food Drive Way
The fast-food industry is in very good company with the lead industry and the tobacco industry in how it tries to mislead the public, and how aggressively it goes after anybody who criticizes its business practices.
Good Business Good Company Company
Fast food chains spend a large amount of marketing to get the attention of children. People form their eating habits as children so they try to nurture clients as youngsters.
Food Children People Eating
Hey, I used to eat at McDonald's: I liked the taste of the food, especially the French fries.
Food French Fries McDonald Eat
McDonald's has been extraordinary at site selection; it was a pioneer in studying the best places for retail locations. One of the things it did is study very carefully where sprawl was headed.
Best Things Studying Study
Most fast food is fried. Fried food tastes great, and people don't seem to care about the fat aspect.
Food People Great Fat
I'm all in favor of animal rights, but I'd like to see the food movement take a much stronger stand in defense of basic human rights. If you're a vegan or a vegetarian, you should care about the people who are picking your fruits and vegetables by hand.
You Food People Animal
Very few people realize that the U.S. government does not have the power to order the recall of contaminated meat.
People Power Government Realize
It's not a question of McDonald's vanishing from the face of the earth. It's a question of these companies assuming some more responsibility for what they're selling.
Face Responsibility Earth More
I'm just angry at the sort of things that are winding up in ground beef. I'm angry that other people - mainly children - are going to be sickened by eating a hamburger.
Angry Children People Eating

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Home General Government
Sandes Is India's Answer To WhatsApp, Here's What To Know
An upgrade to India's Government Instant Messaging System (GIMS) has been launched. Sandes is the name of the new app and it is set to replace WhatsApp and other messaging apps in the country. Sandes was recently launched by the National Information Centre (NIC).
Unlike the existing Government Instant Messaging System (GIMS) which was created for government officials only, Sandes can be used by all and sundry. The GIMS was strictly designed for government officials to give them a communication platform similar to WhatsApp's. Sandes is Hindu for 'message' and can be used by anyone who wishes to.
The Indian answer to WhatsApp is available for download on Google play store for Android devices and from Apple store for Apple's IOS devices. Sandes works on iPhones, iPad and even the iPod Touch that's on iOS 12.0 and above.
Signing up on the application requires a valid phone number or a valid email. Interestingly, the app's features are similar to WhatsApp's. A user can star messages or mark them as favourites and can send message broadcast. Users can also create groups and send multimedia messages like photos and videos to other users on Sandes. Like WhatsApp, as well as other instant messaging apps, they claim to support end-to-end encryption.
The first step to signing up is getting the app installed on your phone. After installing the pp on your phone you'll need to register using your phone number or your email address. After providing your phone number or your email address, you will receive a six-digit one-time password for verification. Once verified, your account will be instantly created. You can afterwards set your profile and probably write a short description of yourself, just like it is on WhatsApp.
The Sandes messaging app may be similar to WhatsApp, it differs from WhatsApp in certain ways. For instance, WhatsApp requires a phone number to sign up, but this is a lax rule with Sandes, you can either use a phone number or an email ID, whichever you please. Government officials who use it get verified accounts, whereas WhatsApp has no verified accounts for anyone. WhatsApp allows a user to change number, but this is different with Sandes, a user's phone number or email ID cannot be changed once signed up.
While the government has already sent out a circular asking its employees to use the app for communication, Sandes is yet to go viral.
Ethiopia Plans Its Own Social Media To Eliminate Facebook…
WhatsApp Is Testing A Feature That Lets Users Hide Their…
Uber Users In India Can Now Book A Ride Via WhatsApp
WhatsApp To Introduce Two-Step Verification For Desktop…
Google To Start Offering Loans To SMEs In India, Updates…
Tags: indiamessagingsandeswhatsapp


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KEVIN MORGAN
About KEVIN MORGAN
About Kevin Morgan (www.myspace.com/kevinmorgancountry)
Kevin Morgan is a Pennsylvania native and singer/songwriter and country music performer. He has performed throughout the United States, landing radio airplay and numerous TV spots. He has also been the opening act for such names as Lonestar, Merle Haggard, Travis Tritt, Montgomery Gentry, Tracy Byrd, Tracy Lawrence, Joe Diffe, David Allen Coe, Clay Walker, Lila McCann, Lorretta Lynn, and many more.
After opening for Lonestar, Kevin was invited backstage by lead singer, Richie Mcdonald, who invited him to come to Nashville where Richie was intrumental in getting Kevin a Sony songwriting deal, and record deal. As it often goes, unfortunately, one small man with power took Kevin's record deal away from him and to everyone's disappointment Kevin had to return to his home in Pennsylvania. Before Kevin left he had the pleasure of meeting Gretchen Wilson who ended up singing three demos written by Morgan. Kevin is recording his newest CD project entitled " The Undiscovered Country," and with your help perhaps he can get some recognition from "MySpace" which will help him regain lost ground. Kevin is still in contact with Richie McDonald and the two are still writing songs together.
Perhaps one of Morgan's greatest writing efforts, is a song called "Fallen Heroes" which is a tribute to the 911 tragedy and our troops in Iraq and Afganistan. The song was ranked number one for two straight months in the Northeast and was performed for the Vice President, as well as for two anniversary/dedication ceremonies at the crash site of Flight 93 in Somerset, PA
After years of charity work for such organizations as Cystic Fibrosis, American Cancer Society, Presents for Patients, Verland Foundation, Pittsburgh School for the Blind, various blood drives, and others, Kevin is turning his attention to the Wounded Warrior Project. By raising awareness with his tribute song "FALLEN HEROES" Kevin hopes to raise badly needed funds for our returning injured veterans from Iraq and Afganistan. With the sales of this song and your help Kevin hopes to contribute to making a difference in the quality of care for our returning veterans. Fallen Heroes is available for purchase above. Your support will be greatly appreciated. Dont forget to tell all your freinds about our efforts. Thanks for stoppin' by
Follow KEVIN MORGAN on
www.myspace.com/...


Enrique Iglesias announced on Social Media today that he will be performing in Slovenia!
The concert will take place on May 12th at the Stožice Arena in Slovenia!
Tickets go onsale tomorrow at Eventim.si!


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GLG LIFE TECH CORPORATION ANNOUNCES MAJOR MILESTONE IN DEBT RESTRUCTURING PLAN - GLGLifeTec
By GLG Life Tech Corp.
GLG LIFE TECH CORPORATION ANNOUNCES MAJOR MILESTONE IN DEBT RESTRUCTURING PLAN
Vancouver, B.C. July 26, 2016 – GLG Life Tech Corporation (TSX: GLG) ("GLG" or the "Company"), a global and agricultural leader in the natural zero-calorie sweetener industry, committed to the sustainable development of high-quality zero-calorie natural sweeteners, is pleased to announce an important milestone in the Company's plan to restructure its China-based bank loans. Additionally, the Company successfully renewed a RMB 7 million bank loan with the Huishang Bank on July 1, 2016.
As of July 20th, 2016, four of five of the Company's 100% owned Chinese Wholly-Owned Foreign Enterprises ("WOFEs") were consolidated into a single entity (Chuzhou Runhai Stevia High Tech Company Limited or "Runhai") under Chinese law – and, significantly, Runhai is approved to become a Joint Stock Company ("JSC"). This form of corporation, under Chinese law, enables it considerable opportunities to raise capital. For example, Runhai will now be able to add Chinese investors, raise equity capital in China, and convert China-based debt into equity in the JSC. Post consolidation of the four China subsidiaries, the Company retains its 100% ownership of Runhai and all of the consolidated assets of the previous four China subsidiaries.
The three subsidiaries consolidated into Runhai are:
Anhui Bengbu HN Stevia High Tech Development Company Limited ("Bengbu")
Qingdao Runhao Stevia High Tech Company Limited ("Runhao")
Dongtai Runyang Stevia High Tech Company Limited ("Runyang")
One of the key outcomes of the conversion of Runhai into a JSC was the underlying agreed valuation of the consolidated Runhai entity. Runhai's total investment approval by the China Government is USD 120 million and its net assets are valued at USD 42 million. The difference between the asset valuation and net assets value provides Runhai USD 78 million available for debt conversion, additional working capital or equity raises.
GLG's subsidiary Qingdao Runde Biotechnology Co., Ltd. remains a 100% owned WOFE of GLG.
One particular benefit of reforming the Company's Chinese holdings into a JSC is that the limitations previously foreclosing the Company from access to Chinese debt and capital markets are gone. As a JSC, Runhai will be eligible to have its Chinese-held debt converted into equity shares at the subsidiary level, such that a major portion of that debt could be removed from the Company's balance sheet. GLG, with the PRC government's support, is in active discussions with Runhai's Chinese debt-holders to negotiate terms for a debt-equity swap, and is exploring multiple options for access to valuable working capital. The Company expects to retain a majority controlling interest in Runhai after any expected debt conversion into equity in Runhai. Further, Runhai will have the ability to solicit Chinese capital markets and investors for working and other capital, bolstered by a more attractive balance sheet and a strong appetite in China for growth opportunities.
The process to convert the four WOFEs into a single consolidated Joint Stock Company was unusually complex. To give perspective on this major accomplishment, GLG management had to work through ten different government agencies across three provinces and four cities in order to obtain the relevant approvals necessary to accomplish this important milestone.
With this foundational milestone completed, GLG's plan is to restructure its China debt by availing itself of one or more options now open to the Company. The Company also expects to gain access to new sources of working capital to facilitate its plans for substantial growth in its stevia, monk fruit, and GLG Naturals+ businesses.
Simon Springett, Investor Relations
Phone: +1 (604) 285-2602 ext. 101
Forward-looking statements: This press release may contain certain information that may constitute "forward-looking statements" and "forward looking information" (collectively, "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Often, but not always, forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of words such as "plans", "expects" or "does not expect", "is expected", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate", or "believes" or variations of such words and phrases or words and phrases that state or indicate that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved.
While the Company has based these forward-looking statements on its current expectations about future events, the statements are not guarantees of the Company's future performance and are subject to risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from future results expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors include amongst others the effects of general economic conditions, consumer demand for our products and new orders from our customers and distributors, changing foreign exchange rates and actions by government authorities, uncertainties associated with legal proceedings and negotiations, industry supply levels, competitive pricing pressures and misjudgments in the course of preparing forward-looking statements. Specific reference is made to the risks set forth under the heading "Risk Factors" in the Company's Annual Information Form for the financial year ended December 31, 2015. In light of these factors, the forwardlooking events discussed in this press release might not occur.
Further, although the Company has attempted to identify factors that could cause actual actions, events or results to differ materially from those described in forward-looking statements, there may be other factors that cause actions, events or results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
GLG LIFE TECH CORPORATION ANNOUNCES AGM VOTING RESULTS
GLG LIFE TECH CORPORATION REPORTS 2016 SECOND QUARTER FINANCIAL RESULTS
GLG Life Tech Corp.
All stories by:GLG Life Tech Corp.
GLG Life Tech Corporation Announces Distributorship Agreement For Sale Of Cannabidiol (CBD)
GLG Life Tech Corporation Announces Finalization Of Plan To Improve The Company's Capital Structure
Indeed, bloggers do not only produce content to post on their blogs, but also build social relations with their readers and other bloggers.


The deal late yesterday to keep Rouge Park and 76 other parks in Detroit has prompted a decent amount of discussion on Facebook and elsewhere about how to best maintain financially. I posted the comment below, which received positive reactions. I am, therefore, repeating it here.
This is counterintuitive, but the road to fiscal stability for Detroit leads straight to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court. Almost 70% of our tax dollars go straight to debt service, in one form or another. This includes Detroit Public School debt, City of Detroit general debt, the revenue anticipation bonds, and Wayne County debt.
We need a massive reorganization of those debts, on a scale that can only be done under the supervision of bankruptcy judge.
We love all your coverage of neighborhoods and local businesses in Detroit. Keep the posts coming cause we have you bookmarked and we'd love to see more!
If your non-exempt assets are not enough to cover your debts, bankruptcy allows you to discharge some of your debts, which means they do not have to be repaid. Under Chapter 13 bankruptcy filing, you will be given a new repayment plan that significantly lowers the amount you have to pay, and you will be given a set number of years in which you have to repay your debts.


A task manager that cheers you.
Is there a better alternative to Swipes?
Is Swipes really the best app in Personal Info Managers category?
Will Swipes work good on macOS 10.13.4?
Swipes needs a review. Be the first to review this app and get the discussion started!
Swipes needs a rating. Be the first to rate this app and get the discussion started!
Swipes takes away the stress of looking into long lists of to-dos and helps you focus on one priority at a time. It stands on the shoulders of a powerful productivity concept called the Swipes Way - Collect, Organize, Take Action. Based on smart integrations (with Gmail and Evernote, triggered via Swipes on mobile), the app helps you automatically collect all your tasks into one place. You can then quickly organize them according to your priorities and re-schedule everything else for later. As a final step of the success loop, Swipes lets you set your mind on this one priority and work on it with full focus. Once you're done, the app will cheer you and send you the next action from the list.


Hi-rise removals present their own unique challenges. At Quality Moves, we've been moving folks in and out of hi-rise apartments in the Tweed Heads and Gold Coast region for the last decade. As a result, we're experienced with the best ways to maximise efficiency and minimise your costs.
One of the obvious challenges with hi-rise removals is managing the lift and stair access. We liaise with the building management to ensure we have full, clear access at the most convenient time. Consequently, this saves time and therefore cost for you.
Our removalists are all eager and polite and have been trained to operate efficiently and with workplace safety in mind. You can trust them to treat your possessions as if they were their own. In addition, we work hard to meet all our proposed deadlines and will keep you fully informed if there have to be any changes.
As for scheduling, at Quality Moves For You, we know that sometimes dates have to be changed or moving dates can be short notice through no fault of your own. For this reason, we remain as flexible as possible to accommodate your needs and will always strive to make any new dates work.
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With nearly a decade's experience as a trusted hi-rise removals firm in the Tweed Heads area, you can be sure we know the challenges before they've even happened. Consequently, our costs are comparatively low without any loss of quality. Whether you've opted for a full apartment packing-up service or you're doing it yourself, you'll find our hi-rise removals service great value. In short, we bring a combination of care, professionalism and experience to every job.
Fill in the form below and we will get back to you with a quote.
We have movers all over Australia, theres a mover near you!
To talk with one of our friendly staff, please use the number below.


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Edward Snowden and the Rise of Whistle-Blower Culture
In his memoir, he chronicles his life game by game, from Nintendo to the N.S.A.
By Jill Lepore
Snowden has been called a patriot and a traitor. In his memoir, he's a gamer.Illustration by Matt Chase
One of Edward J. Snowden's earliest memories is of sneaking around the house and turning back the time on all the clocks in the hope of tricking his parents into letting him stay up late to watch more TV. Another is of the day his father brought home a Commodore 64 and how exciting it was, that very first time, to hold a joystick. Snowden's new autobiography, "Permanent Record" (Metropolitan), is the autobiography of a gamer, pale and bleary-eyed and glued to his screen, longing for invincibility. Some people write memoirs; other people craft legends. Snowden, who once aspired to be a model and is in some quarters regarded as a modern messiah, is the second kind. As a kid, he read about King Arthur, and his family name comes from Snaw Dun, a mountain in Wales on top of which the legendary ruler is said to have slain a terrible giant by sticking a sword in his eye. Snowden makes a lot of this Tolkien-y sort of thing—avatars, portents of destiny, signs of greatness.
"Permanent Record" offers less than what most readers will want of the John le Carré-meets-Jason Bourne stuff: why, at the age of twenty-eight, while working for a defense contractor, Snowden decided to smuggle top-secret computer files from the U.S. government and give them to reporters at the Guardian and the Washington Post; how he did it; and what his life has been like since then. In dozens of interviews, Snowden, who lives in exile in Russia, has fielded and dodged a lot of questions about those parts of his life. Critics charge him with evasion and distortion; supporters see a becoming honesty and the nobility of an unimpeachable integrity. Readers will split over his book, too, without actually learning much, except about the mind of a gamer. Most of the book chronicles not Snowden's disclosures and their consequences but his childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, game by game, from the Nintendo Entertainment System to the National Security Agency.
"I used to work for the government," Snowden begins, "but now I work for the public." In 2013, Snowden's disclosures proved that the N.S.A. had been conducting surveillance on the entire U.S. population, by way of a series of top-secret programs staggering in their scale and intrusiveness, including the bulk collection of telephone records in the form of metadata that was acquired from telecommunications companies. The scale of Snowden's heist was also staggering. The N.S.A. claims that he stole 1.7 million classified documents. Snowden disputes this number, but, even if the actual number is quite a lot smaller, it's likely that he stole more documents than he was able to read.
Snowden is a controversial figure, and whistle-blowing, which is how Snowden describes what he did, is a contentious subject, especially when it concerns intelligence operations. Much of the controversy, in Snowden's case, divides along what can appear to be merely a matter of opinion: Is he a patriot or a traitor? Obama's Justice Department charged him with treasonous federal crimes under the 1917 Espionage Act. Snowden's defenders view these charges as wrongheaded; his critics suggest that he ought to face trial, even though, since the material he stole was classified, any proceeding would be partly closed to the public, a condition that, as a rule, makes a fair trial awfully unlikely. People who consider Snowden a patriot argue that exposing the N.S.A.'s mass-surveillance program was both a public service and an act of heroism. People who consider Snowden a traitor argue that his disclosures set U.S. counterterrorism efforts back by years, and endangered American intelligence agents and their sources all over the world. Some also point to the circumstances of his flight and exile: because Snowden first sought refuge in Hong Kong and has been granted temporary asylum in Russia (due to expire in 2020), it has been variously alleged, without proof, that he did not act alone, that he shared American military secrets with China, and that he's a dupe of Putin. Snowden denies these accusations.
The patriot-traitor divide should be less a matter of opinion than a matter of law, but the law here is murky. On the one hand, you might think, if Snowden is a patriot who did what he did for the good of the country, then he deserves not only the protection of First Amendment freedom of speech but also the legal shelter afforded whistle-blowers, under legislation that includes the 1989 Whistleblower Protection Act—except that Snowden signed an oath not to disclose government secrets, and neither the Whistleblower Protection Act nor its many revisions and amendments extend its protections to people who disclose classified intelligence. On the other hand, you might think, if Snowden is a traitor whose actions put his country at risk, the Justice Department was right to charge him under the Espionage Act—except that it doesn't sound as though he were a spy. (Unlike Julian Assange, Snowden has criticized Putin, and the F.B.I. believes that Snowden acted alone.) "Permanent Record" doesn't settle any of these questions, or even evince much concern about them. Instead, Snowden appears to have other worries. "Forgive me if I come off like a dick," he writes, knowingly.
"Snowden could one day be seen as America's first traitor-patriot," the political scientist Allison Stanger writes, less King Arthur than King Solomon, in "Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump" (Yale). Stanger interviewed Snowden for her book, a brisk and interesting history of people who, while working for the government, find out about terrible things the government is doing, including waste, fraud, mismanagement, and abuse of authority, and expose that misconduct to the public. She argues that Americans support whistle-blowing in theory, but, in practice, they treat whistle-blowers badly. They also tend not to like them. "Whistleblowers are by definition troublemakers," Stanger writes. "For that reason, they can be difficult people."
Laws protecting government whistle-blowers from retaliation have been on the books in the United States since 1778, when, in the wake of a scandal in the Navy, Congress resolved that "it is the duty of all persons in the service of the United States, as well as all other inhabitants thereof, to give the earliest information to Congress or any other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds or misdemeanors committed by any officers or persons in the service of these states, which may come to their knowledge." In "Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud" (Riverhead), Tom Mueller dates legislation having to do with corporate whistle-blowers to the Civil War, when Congress passed the False Claims Act of 1863, to encourage private citizens, referred to as "relators," to help counter corruption among military contractors by initiating suits for fraud on behalf of the government. (The Department of Justice did not then exist.) Relators who could prove fraud were to be rewarded with a portion of any recovered money. They still are.
Whistle-blowing, at least by that breezy name, is on the rise. In the years since Congress passed a sweeping revision of the False Claims Act, in 1986, relators have recovered sixty billion dollars in misspent taxpayer money. "This is the age of the whistleblower," Mueller observes. Mueller, who interviewed more than two hundred whistle-blowers and profiles half a dozen, focusses on the corporate kind, especially in the health-care and finance industries. Stanger sets corporate whistle-blowing aside, declaring it a separate case. But the age of the whistle-blower is also an age of corruption, deregulation, and privatization in which the border between the public and the private sectors is as thin as a dollar bill. Snowden, notwithstanding his "I used to work for the government" line, worked mostly for a series of private companies, because the kinds of services he provided, mainly security and systems administration, had been privatized.
"Don't sit there—it's wet."
Cartoon by Robert Leighton
Snowden currently heads the board of the nonprofit Freedom of the Press Foundation, which was established in 2012 by, among others, Daniel Ellsberg. In 1971, Ellsberg leaked to the New York Times and the Washington Post forty-seven volumes of classified documents about the Vietnam War which came to be called the Pentagon Papers. (Unlike Snowden, Ellsberg, a former marine with a Ph.D. in economics, had held positions of considerable influence: he'd served as an adviser in Vietnam and helped draft some of the reports that made up the Pentagon Papers, and he'd read all of them.) In New York Times Co. v. United States (1971), the Supreme Court ruled the publication of the papers to be constitutional, but the Nixon Justice Department pursued charges against Ellsberg under the 1917 Espionage Act all the same. So desperate was Nixon for a conviction that his "plumbers" broke into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist in the hope of finding evidence to discredit him. The arrest of the plumbers led both to the dropping of the charges against Ellsberg and to the great unravelling known as Watergate. But the exposure of classified intelligence still falls into a different bin from all other kinds of whistle-blowing. Since 1978, whistle-blowing that risks national security has been a contradiction in terms. If you steal classified documents, you can't be a whistle-blower.
Then, there's the question of legality. In the summer of 2013, when Snowden gave an apparently countless number of stolen files to the press, the question of whether the N.S.A.'s mass-surveillance program was unconstitutional was, at least in a narrowly legal sense, unresolved. Behind closed doors, both Congress and the White House had approved the program under the authority of the 2001 Patriot Act. In public, the N.S.A. denied that the program even existed. "Does the N.S.A. collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" a Senate committee had asked the director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, early in 2013. "No, sir," he answered. "Not wittingly." Lying to Congress is against the law. After Snowden's revelations, Presidential advisers recommended that the Obama Administration make changes to the program, which, as they also pointed out, had been almost entirely ineffective, but they did not find it to be unconstitutional. In 2014, after the Times described Snowden as a whistle-blower, some government officials insisted that he wasn't: because what he exposed wasn't illegal, he was merely a leaker. This nicety is hard to take. Glenn Greenwald, the reporter who broke the Snowden story, asked, "If disclosing proof that top-level national security officials lied outright to Congress about domestic spying programs doesn't make one indisputably a whistle-blower, then what does?"
In May, 2015, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, reversing the earlier opinion of a lower court, ruled that the N.S.A.'s bulk collection of Americans' telephone metadata violated the terms of the Patriot Act. The next month, Congress passed the USA Freedom Act, which prohibited the N.S.A. from collecting that metadata. Stanger argues that before 2015 Snowden was a leaker, but that after 2015 he was a whistle-blower. It's a Catch-22: if Snowden hadn't broken the law to point out that the government had broken the law, what the government had done wouldn't have broken the law.
Edward Joseph Snowden was born in North Carolina in 1983. When he was six, he got a Nintendo for Christmas and fell in love with the Legend of Zelda, which, let me be clear, remains the greatest of all Nintendo games. But for Snowden, a lonely and seemingly miserable kid, the Legend of Zelda was much more than a game. Super Mario Bros., he says, taught him about mortality. Mario runs into bad guys; he falls into pits; he gets crushed by spikes. There are so many ways to die. Nintendo "was my real education," Snowden writes. "I am being perfectly sincere," he insists, in a book loaded with I'm-not-a-dick asides in which the author begs the reader to believe him, and to like him.
Snowden came from a military family—one of his grandfathers was a rear admiral in the Coast Guard with an office at the Pentagon—and his father and mother worked for the government. "Both my parents had top secret clearances," he writes, which is about the most loving thing he says about either of them. Soon he could beat his father at Mario Kart, Double Dragon, and Street Fighter. "I was significantly better than him at all those games," Snowden writes. "Almost immediately, I grasped the limitations of gaming systems," he says of himself, at age seven, jumping up a level, leaving mere game consoles behind.
When Snowden was eight, his family moved to Maryland, near Fort Meade, where the N.S.A. is headquartered, and his father brought home a Compaq Presario 425. "From the moment it appeared, the computer and I were inseparable," Snowden writes. A disconsolate little boy began to shut out the real world. Hitting Enter on his first computer is the only encounter he describes as having been worth his time. "No teacher had ever been so patient, yet so responsive," he writes. "Nowhere else—certainly not at school, and not even at home—had I ever felt so in control."
With the Compaq, he started going online. "Internet access, and the emergence of the Web, was my generation's big bang," he writes. "From the age of twelve or so, I tried to spend my every waking moment online." The offline world was horrible. His parents' marriage was falling apart. He stopped going to school. He stopped sleeping. Nintendo had been his education; the Internet became his everything. "The Internet was my sanctuary; the Web became my jungle gym, my treehouse, my fortress, my classroom without walls." This sounds less like a childhood than like an experiment in human deprivation.
He spent endless hours on gaming sites looking for cheat codes for his favorite games, Doom and Quake. There's a thing in gaming known as "god-mode," where, temporarily, you can play invisibly and even invincibly. But god-mode conjures something more, a way of being outside the game, above the game. Around puberty, Snowden appears to have gone into god-mode and got stuck. At least, the way he tells it, he has believed his whole life that he knows more than everyone around him. His teachers were idiots. His co-workers were idiots. His bosses were idiots. Idiots, idiots, idiots. Delete, delete, delete. Game over. Reset. New game.
The great passion of Snowden's autobiography is his anguished love for the very early Internet. Online in the nineteen-nineties, he could be anonymous, on bulletin boards, and on massively multiplayer online role-playing games like Ultima Online, which he played so constantly that his parents installed a second phone line so that he could have unlimited access. On Ultima Online, players choose an alternate identity, an "alt"; you can be a wizard or a warrior or a tinkerer or a thief. "I could toggle between these alts with a freedom that was unavailable to me in off-line life, whose institutions tend to regard all mutability as suspicious," Snowden writes. Online, he could be whoever he wanted to be. And he could make the world be the way he wanted it to be.
Disillusionment, in this life story, is watching the wrecking of the Internet. "To grow up is to realize the extent to which your existence has been governed by a system of rules, vague guidelines, and increasingly unsupportable norms that have been imposed on you without your consent," Snowden writes, offering a definition of adulthood that better describes arrested development. He left high school after a year. He went to community college for a while. He posted a lot of stuff on bulletin boards, including a Japanese anime site where, in April, 2002, when he was eighteen, he uploaded a short autobiography called "The Book of Ed," illustrated with a cartoon of himself, a bitmoji before they were called bitmojis, wearing a T-shirt that reads "I ♥ Me":
I like Japanese, I like food, I like martial arts, I like ponies, I like guns, I like food, I like girls, I like my girlish figure that attracts girls, and I like my lamer friends.
That's the best biography you'll get out of me, coppers! . . . I really am a nice guy, though.
In the spring of 2004, Snowden joined the Army reserves but, five months later, washed out of basic training. Not long afterward, on an early dating site called HotOrNot, he met a twenty-year-old photographer and pole dancer named Lindsay Mills. (They married in 2017.) In 2005, he became a contractor for American intelligence services, working as a security guard.
Whistle-blowing is very often an upstanding act of courage, undertaken at great personal cost, and resulting in great public good. But the presence of a lot of whistle-blowing—an age of whistle-blowing—isn't a sign of a thriving democracy or a healthy business world; it's a sign of a weak democracy and a sick business world. When institutions are working well, either they don't engage in misconduct or their internal mechanisms discover, thwart, and punish it. Democracies have checks and balances, including investigations, ethics committees, and elections. Businesses have regulations, compliance departments, and inspections. Whistle-blowing is necessary when these safeguards fail. But to celebrate whistle-blowing as anything other than a last resort is to give up on institutions.
An act of whistle-blowing is more than an accusation of specific misconduct; it's an indictment of an entire system of accountability. Whistle-blowers don't say, "My company sells drugs that make you sicker." They say, "My company sells drugs that make you sicker and my company knows it's doing this and I alerted my bosses and asked them to stop it and they won't, because they are making piles of money off this scam." Whistle-blowers have a lot in common with one another. Most discover abuses while holding positions of power within their organizations, often in oversight roles. They typically report those abuses to their superiors, repeatedly, for months and even years, before seeking help outside their organizations, usually from lawyers or other advocates. Less frequently, they go straight to the press.
Snowden doesn't fit any part of this pattern. Early in his training, he was upbraided for failing to follow the chain of command. He never held a position of influence or oversight within the intelligence community. He didn't come across evidence of wrongdoing. He went looking for it. Stanger says that Snowden began "siphoning off classified information" from the servers on which he worked beginning in 2009, when he was sent to Geneva for the C.I.A. Snowden says he began searching for evidence of a mass-surveillance program before being posted to Japan, later that year, where he worked for Perot Systems (which was acquired by Dell soon afterward), at the N.S.A.'s Pacific Technical Center, at Yokota Air Base. His job there, he says, was "helping to connect the NSA's systems architecture with the CIA's." To do this work, he had extraordinary access to classified documents, far above his standing in the intelligence community.
"She's a little sensitive to gluten."
Cartoon by Brooke Bourgeois
He began prowling around. "To find out about even a fraction of the malfeasance, you had to go searching," Snowden explains. "And to go searching, you had to know that it existed." N.S.A. mass-surveillance programs had been the subject of the 1998 film "Enemy of the State," starring Will Smith; of the 2000 Nintendo 64 video game Perfect Dark; and of Patrick Radden Keefe's 2005 book, "Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping." But Snowden says he began to suspect that the United States was engaged in mass surveillance only after being assigned to assess China's surveillance capabilities. "I had the sneaking sense while I was looking through all this China material that I was looking at a mirror and seeing a reflection of America," he writes. "And although you should hate me for it, I have to say that at the time I tamped down my unease." Still, he was upset. So he kept digging. Eventually, he came across a classified report that provided the evidence he'd been looking for.
Snowden has claimed that he alerted more than ten officials at the N.S.A. about his discovery and expressed his alarm. He has provided no support for this claim. The N.S.A. says he reported his concerns to no one. "There were other avenues available for somebody whose conscience was stirred and thought that they needed to question government actions," Obama said at a press conference in 2013. The classified documents Snowden released to the press contained a good deal more than evidence of the surveillance of American citizens; they included, for instance, a 2006 memo detailing the N.S.A.'s monitoring of the telephone conversations of thirty-five unnamed world leaders, which led the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, to charge the Obama Administration with tapping her phone, causing a diplomatic uproar. "I think it is fair to say that the senior leadership of the NSA probably hate me a little bit," Snowden told Stanger, as if this were personal.
Snowden writes that, when he reached the end of his quest, he "felt more adult than ever, but also cursed with the knowledge that all of us had been reduced to something like children, who'd be forced to live the rest of our lives under omniscient parental supervision." He'd been finding the offline world annoying for a long time, and now the N.S.A. had wrecked the online world, too. He unsheathed Excalibur.
The U.S. government has collected information about Americans since the first federal census, in 1790. At every point in American history when the government has stepped up those efforts, clandestine or not, citizens have protested and resisted, some number of Americans greeting each new regime as marking the end of American freedom. As the gifted historian Sarah Igo argues in "The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America" (Harvard), within this long fight lie the origins of most modern ideas about both privacy and citizenship, including the idea of the "private citizen." Americans complained in the eighteen-seventies, when the federal government was found to be opening people's mail. They complained in the nineteen-teens, after the founding of the F.B.I., which spied on socialists and African-American "subversives." They complained about draft-registration cards, drivers' licenses, and every other government-issued identification, as forms of tracking and surveillance, including, after 1935, Social Security cards, a punch card for every American. By 1966, as the Senate Judiciary Committee reported, the federal government held, in separate agencies, computer files containing "more than 3 billion records on individuals, including 27.2 billion names, 2.3 billion addresses, 264 million criminal histories, 280 million mental health records, 916 million profiles on alcoholism and drug addiction, and 1.2 billion financial records." That year, Americans debated a proposal for establishing a National Data Center, a peer to the Library of Congress (which holds books) and the National Archives (which holds manuscripts), to store all the data on a central computer. Congress convened hearings on "computers and the invasion of privacy." Critics warned of "data surveillance." "The citizen concerned about the erosion of his privacy has until now had some consolation in knowing that all these records about his life have been widely dispersed and often difficult to get at," Vance Packard wrote in the Times. "But today, with the advent of giant sophisticated computers capable of storing and recalling vast amounts of information, this consolation is vanishing." The proposed National Data Center died. But data surveillance endured.
In 1971, Senate hearings on federal data banks revealed the existence of a vast program of domestic surveillance conducted by the U.S. military. By 1974, there had been so much documentation of government-run and computer-stored and processed surveillance of civilians that Congress passed the Privacy Act, which opened with this indictment: "Increasing use of computers and sophisticated information technology, while essential to the efficient operations of the Government, has greatly magnified the harm to individual privacy that can occur." Passed when Americans' distrust of government was at a high point, given the betrayals of Vietnam and Watergate, the Privacy Act failed to protect individuals' private data from corporations. Concern about the capture of personal data seemed to be directed only at the government. (Bell Telephone Company, for instance, had been collecting bulk data about its customers to the best of its ability since its founding, in 1877.) At Senate committee hearings in 1975, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense was asked whether ARPANET, the Pentagon-run precursor to the Internet, was secretly collecting information about American citizens. "It is a marvel in many ways," he answered, but it "simply does not fit the Orwellian mold attributed to it."
But Snowden's interest in the N.S.A.'s surveillance program appears to have had as much to do with the vanishing Internet of his childhood as with the overreach of the national-security state. In 2011, after four years of living abroad, Snowden returned to the United States. "Contradictory thoughts rained down like Tetris blocks, and I struggled to sort them out—to make them disappear," he writes. Working at Dell, under a contract for the C.I.A., he felt that Americans had become pitiful victims of their own government. "The Internet I'd grown up with, the Internet that had raised me, was disappearing," he writes. "And with it, so was my youth." He was twenty-seven.
Snowden subscribes to the theory of a Once Great Internet, a techno-utopia in which boys and men could be free and anonymous and undiscoverable and ungovernable. "Back then, being online was another life, considered by most to be separate and distinct from Real Life," he writes. "The virtual and the actual had not yet merged. And it was up to each individual user to determine for themselves where one ended and the other began. It was precisely this that was so inspiring: the freedom to imagine something entirely new, the freedom to start over." This is the anarchists' Internet, promoted by countercultural figures, including Stewart Brand, of the Whole Earth Catalog, and John Perry Barlow, the former Grateful Dead lyricist, and advanced by libertarians and anti-antitrust conservatives led by Newt Gingrich and George Gilder. Their Internet isn't the Internet we lost; it's the Internet we got, under the terms of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, a Gingrich-and-Gilder travesty, signed by Bill Clinton, that shielded the Internet from government regulation and made it a commercial free-for-all. Google, Facebook, and Amazon know far, far more about most Americans than the N.S.A. does. But Snowden came to believe that the forces that ruined the Internet of his boyhood were less the forces of libertarianism that left corporations unchecked, giving rise to endless forms of capture, tracking, mining, and manipulation, than the forces of government that, under the expansive authority of the 2001 Patriot Act, made the Internet a place where it was impossible to be unknown and ungoverned. He wanted to end that game. Reset. New game.
In 2012, after taking a disability leave, Snowden moved to Hawaii to work as a contractor at an N.S.A. facility in Oahu. He was determined to know everything about how the agency was trying to know everything. He wrote a program to flag any unusual documents that were moving through the traffic of the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communication System. In 2013, he took a lower-paying job working for Booz Allen Hamilton, in order to gain access to more classified information. He writes, "I was resolved to bring to light a single, all-encompassing fact: that my government had developed and deployed a global system of mass surveillance without the knowledge or consent of its citizenry." He neared the eye of the giant.
On his desk, Snowden kept a pocket U.S. Constitution, propped up against a Rubik's Cube. He stored the files he stole on micro SD cards, smaller than postage stamps. He'd pry off a square of his Rubik's Cube, tuck an SD card inside, jam the square back on, and walk out the door. This move did not end the game. ♦
An earlier version of this article overstated the extent to which a potential trial for Edward Snowden would be closed to the public, inaccurately described the character of Snowden's work for the C.I.A. in Geneva, and misstated the opinion of a lower court concerning the N.S.A.'s bulk collection of Americans' telephone metadata.
Published in the print edition of the September 23, 2019, issue, with the headline "Know It All."
Jill Lepore, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is a professor of history at Harvard and the author of fourteen books, including "If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future."
More:Edward SnowdenWhistleblowersDaniel EllsbergBooksMemoirsNational Security Agency (N.S.A.)Surveillance
A Critic at Large
Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, and the Modern Whistle-Blower
From their backgrounds to their motivations, the two men have some striking differences.
The Holder of Secrets
Laura Poitras's closeup view of Edward Snowden.
From "Star Trek" to "Game of Thrones": The Rise of the Superfan
Michael Schulman reports on how the Internet has brought fan communities together.


Martin Cockburn's home "Springfield" was still standing when Kate Mason Rowland wrote about it in 1892 in her account of The Life of George Mason. According to notes by historian Edith M. Sprouse on file in the Virginia Room of the Fairfax City Regional Library, Martin Cockburn married Anne Bronaugh in about 1763, and built Springfield soon after.
Mrs. Sprouse says that the Cockburns "were buried, as was the custom, in their garden. Until 1851, when the house was sold out of the family, the bodies undoubtedly remained there." Edith Sprouse reports that the owner of Springfield in 1964 said that the Cockburn graves had been removed to Pohick Church (q.v.).
Although the exact location of Springfield is not known, it is very likely near Springfield Drive on Mason Neck which intersects Gunston Road (Route 242) just west of Gunston Hall (q.v.).


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Home / Sappi launches new Ultracast Viva range of textured release paper line for solvent-free systems
Sappi launches new Ultracast Viva range of textured release paper line for solvent-free systems
April 28, 2020 - 11:26
BOSTON, April 28, 2020 (PRNewswire) -Sappi, a leading producer and supplier of diversified paper, packaging products and dissolving pulp, today launched Ultracast Viva, a textured release paper line made specifically for high-fidelity PVC, PU, semi-PU and solvent-free casting systems. This product embodies Sappi's forward-looking sustainability practices to align with global goals for environmentally-friendly manufacturing.
Regulations are going into effect that limit or eliminate solvent-based casting systems in China and the European Union to reduce chemical waste and pollution. As a result, many of the world's leading textile and fashion brands have formed the Zero Discharge of Hazardous Chemicals (ZDHC) Program to implement changes to their value chains that align with the ZDHC's Manufacturing Restricted Substance List (MRSL). As these changes continue to be adopted, Sappi has proactively created the industry's first premium high-fidelity casting paper compatible with solvent-free systems. Ultracast Viva also offers performance improvements, particularly with regards to reduced curl, increased reusability and easier handling with expanded temperature limits for PVC, semi-PU and 100% PU including aqueous PU chemistry. One early adopter indicated, "[Ultracast Viva provides] easy release, consistent quality and high efficiency for our PU production," said by production director of Anli Co.,Ltd.
"Sappi is wholeheartedly committed to sustainability, so the launch of Ultracast Viva is a natural next step as we pursue ways to improve environmentally sustainable manufacturing through innovation," said Mark Hittie, Director of Release Strategy, Sappi Casting and Release. "We continue to evolve our business to meet global demands and this product line is the perfect example. We're proud that Sappi sets the standard for high-fidelity textures with a reduced environmental impact."
Sappi's forward-looking products and textures continue to leverage state-of-the-art technology from its Westbrook Mill in Maine. Sappi has been at the forefront of technological innovation and evolution for the release paper industry with nearly 80 years of experience creating textures. Most recently, the company brought to market the first microtextures in 2016 and now introduces Ultracast Viva to its permanent line of products. Customers can choose from over 150 textures, which are available for all coated fabric manufacturers and brand owners to browse on the Sappi Release Textures App. To request a launch kit and sample of Ultracast Viva paper, please contact your Sappi sales representative. Launch kits will be available within the next few weeks.
About Sappi North America, Inc.
Sappi North America, Inc., headquartered in Boston, is a market leader in converting wood fiber into superior products that customers demand worldwide. The success of our four diversified businesses high-quality Coated Printing Papers, Dissolving Pulp, Packaging and Specialty Papers and Casting and Release Papers – is driven by strong customer relationships, best-in-class people and advantaged assets, products and services. Our high-quality Graphic Papers, including McCoy, Opus, Somerset, and Flo, are the key platform for premium magazines, catalogs, books, direct mail and high-end print advertising. We are a leading manufacturer of Dissolving Pulp with our Verve brand, a sustainable fiber, which is used in a wide range of products, including textile fibers and household goods. We deliver sustainable Packaging and Specialty Papers for luxury packaging and folding carton applications with our single-ply packaging brands, Spectro and Proto, and for the food and label industries with our specialty papers, LusterPrint and LusterCote. We are also one of the world's leading suppliers of Casting and Release Papers with our Ultracast, PolyEx and Classics lines for the automotive, fashion and engineered films industries. Customers rely on Sappi for high technical, operational and market expertise; products and services delivered with consistently high quality and reliability; and, state-of-the-art and cost-competitive assets and innovative spirit.
Sappi North America is a subsidiary of Sappi Limited (JSE), a global company headquartered in Johannesburg, South Africa, with more than 12,000 employees and manufacturing operations on three continents in seven countries and customers in over 150 countries.
Conmark Systems and Radix announce strategic partnership to deliver fully integrated ESG solution to pulp and paper industry


The following MBW blog comes from Andy Edwards (pictured inset) – a music business and technology consultant whose career covers record label, artist management and various technology companies. You can follow him on Twitter @andyedwardsbiz.
It feels like the back-and-forth between the music industry, Google and various legislative bodies on 'safe harbor' has rumbled on for an eternity.
Legal arguments, policy positions and research papers that support this process are traded continually.
Google recently published a series of papers to support its position on YouTube. The music industry, not surprisingly, wasted little time in rubbishing them.
Supposing that legislators rule in the music industry's favor, the question remains: then what?
How, in practical terms, is the value gap closed?
It is worth reminding ourselves of some basic business fundamentals.
Let us be candid: the bottom line is YouTube does not generate enough cash for the music industry – certainly not relative to its usage and user base. That much is obvious.
Apple and Spotify have both attracted plenty of vitriol – sometimes justified, sometimes not.
In the case of Apple's iTunes the principle gripe was unbundling album tracks, in the case of Spotify it was the free tier.
Whatever the misgivings, large amounts of cash (i.e. real cash flow, not just advances) helped put the music industry's concerns to one side. This is business and money talks.
In fairness to Google, many people on the music industry side have failed to understand the basis on which YouTube monetizes content.
It is about Watch Time, not per-stream rates.
Watch Time is not just about building an audience and channel subscribers, but encouraging that audience to stick around on your channel.
One point worth reiterating is this: YouTube tries to apply a one-size-fits-all business model for a vast array of content creators, regardless of appropriate fit.
In some cases YouTube recognizes an ad-funded Watch Time model is not enough and enables creators to up-sell users to higher value content.
Search for Star Wars and you will find plenty of clips, parodies and memes that excite and engage global audiences. You can also watch the original movie in full. All you have to do is click on the buy button, from £7.99.
Watch Time does not work for recorded music content. There need to be more options to monetize.
YouTube Red has been held up as potential higher value tier. After almost two years of talk, however, the service has only launched in North America and a handful of other markets – and doubts remain.
In contrast, Google Play Music is available in 64 countries around the world and offers a full subscription offering comparable to Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer and Tidal.
The trouble is, no one talks about it that much.
Google Play Music is not Spotify. It does not have the same attention to detail to attract an obsessive music fan.
What it does have is a simple user interface with the potential to make streaming more accessible to the casual music fan. It is a great service and a huge opportunity.
If YouTube's massive funnel of users is properly connected to Google Play, then paid-for streaming becomes truly mass market. This would be a big win for both Google and the music industry.
YouTube currently has 1.5 billion signed-in monthly users. That is one hell of a funnel.
Even if a tiny percentage of this number is up-sold, that is a huge difference to everyone's bottom line – be that on the Google or the music industry.
The difficulty is, while Google is an innovative company in some respects with some incredibly smart people on its payroll, achieving any kind of change in such a huge company is an overwhelming task. There are so many silos.
In that context, the hiring of Lyor Cohen is very significant. This is someone with the track record to cut through the silos and shift the trajectory.
As a promoter, manager and label executive Lyor Cohen is a proven winner. He knows how to generate cash (real cash). Google needs that attitude in building its music service.
Earlier this year, The Verge reported that the music teams for YouTube and Google Play were combining. Not only does this include the content teams but also, more significantly in this context, the product development teams.
The product teams hold the key to seamlessly integrating Google Play Music and YouTube. This creates the pathway to higher-level monetization including tiered subscription packages.
If YouTube can also reassess the level of functionality for listening to music on the ad-funded platform with built in trigger points and up-sells to Google Play, the business case is even more compelling. The cash will flow.
Supposing all of this comes to pass, a potentially far greater issue than 'safe harbor' will be that old chestnut, competition law.
There is a balance to be had between growing Google Play Music to its full potential as a premium streaming service, while also not creating unfair barriers for competitors in accessing YouTube's user base.
Google needs no reminder about the perils of competition law, as the recent comparison shopping ruling illustrates.
Perhaps the more simplified lean back nature of Google Play Music is better placed to convert those older and relatively less engaged users that have not yet converted to streaming?
Amazon Prime may prove to be a closer competitor to Google Play Music in chasing the more casual consumer.
That match feels like a natural equilibrium: two tech giants slogging it out for a piece of that market.
Provided the music industry has learned the lessons of the supermarket era (where giant corporations obliterated everyone else), streaming could evolve into a well-rounded free market offering – delivering full value through the value chain to creators.
Safe harbor has been a huge battle for all involved. It has sucked up a lot of oxygen.


Carefully think about what you specifically need, and then make your plan based around those items. Think about where you might be able to find these items. As much as possible, you should never scavenge alone. Not only will it be easier for you to work as a team, but you will be able to get help in case anything happens to you or anyone else in your group. To scavenge more efficiently, you should start looking in areas that are the furthest away, and then work your way back toward your camp. If you have a map, you should mark the areas that you have already checked, so that you can avoid scavenging in the same area twice.
You don't want to be caught red-handed in case the owner of the items you are rummaging through is actually still there. Before doing anything else, you should first send a scout to make sure no one else is in the vicinity or has any rightful claim to the items. If possible, your scout should be equipped with binoculars, a radio, and a gun for self-defense. The scout should use the binoculars to survey the area for several hours to ensure that it is safe to scavenge there and that there are no bandits lying around. They can then communicate with the rest of your group using the radio and inform them if the area is worth the trouble or not.
On the off chance that you do get caught red-handed while scavenging, you should know the proper protocol to avoid escalating the conflict to a potentially deadly situation. It is important to make no sudden moves, as the person who caught you might be armed with a gun. Try to give off a non-threatening vibe by remaining cool, calm, collected, and friendly. Apologize profusely and clearly explain to the other person what you are doing and why. They might be reasonable and let you have the items. If they aren't, then don't push your luck. Leave and don't come back.
Learn more tips on survival scavenging by going to Survival.news.
You're prepped to survive SHTF and bug out – but what if you're captured?


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Q: How to find the maximum resolution link of new Instagram posts? I've discovered with instaloader (a tool downloadable from github) that Instagram now saves posts with a size larger than 1080 pixels height or width, I think 1440 maximum. But adding "/media/?size=l" to a link post I'm only able to get the image with 1080 pixels (height or width) maximum.
I certainly know there is a greater quality version of a post that the one "/media/?size=l" gives me because when I compare this version with the one downloaded with instaloader the difference is notable, but I have not been able to find the link of it.
Does anyone know how to find it?
Thanks.

A: From https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-api/reference/ig-user/media

Photo Requirements

*

*Maximum file size: 8MiB

*Aspect ratio: Must be within a 4:5 to 1.91:1 range

*Minimum width: 320 (will be scaled up to the minimum if necessary)

*Maximum width: 1440 (will be scaled down to the maximum if necessary)

*Height: Varies, depending on width and aspect ratio

*Formats: JPEG

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Well, I hope everyone had a fun and Happy Easter! He is risen! The girls had a morning Easter egg hunt in the backyard (the ants really enjoyed the Starburst jellybeans), and we went to a late 1pm service at our church, followed of course by a trip to the lot (more on that below) and an easy lunch at Arby's. Later we dyed eggs. I am ashamed to say this, but this was the first time my girls had ever done that (they are 10 and 13). #momfail. I thought they'd be bored with it after a couple of eggs, but they did all 26 I had! Looks like I've found a new Easter tradition, as this will probably be the last year for egg hunts. I'm glad they had fun!
This card was made using April's Week 1 Viva La Verve Sketch+Color and some fun stamps and dies from VERVE. This tall and skinny sentiment is from the LET IT BE stamp set. I stamped it in black and then clear embossed it with my heat tool to make the words shine. Then I added the two birds from the CHICKS RULE set (because I love birds) that I colored with Prismacolor Pencils and covered with a layer of Glossy Accents to make them shiny as well. The trim across the bottom was made with the AWARDS BANNER die in white with a few other pieces trimmed off and added from gray and pink cardstock. I have to say, every time I use my stamps and dies from Verve, I fall in love with them all over again!
It took ALL of these trucks plus 3 more I couldn't get in the picture for our house!
A couple of days later, the lumber started to arrive. I LOVE this picture with the beams on the little lift truck with our new address on them (8744 Maple Ridge Trail).
Pre-fab framing laid out like a puzzle!
We are a little farther along than these show, but I want to get y'all up to speed and then I'll post some a little more current in the next couple of days (hopefully!--I have jury duty tomorrow, so we'll see when I get home). We are almost to the point of bricking the outside and starting the drywall on the inside. We have 2 inspections to pass this week before that starts, though--structural/plumbing/electrical and then the very welcome Energy Star inspection. This is the one that makes sure our electric bill will stay low!
Stay tuned for more in the next few days! It's super exciting and it's going so fast!
SUSIE Q-TIP: When using Glossy Accents, make sure you stamp your image using a pigment ink and not a dye ink. As y'all can see, mine bled a little bit because I didn't do this. It's one of those "don't ask me how I know this, I don't want to talk about it" moments.


No waiting rooms or shelters provided at the station.
Impaired Mobility Set Down Note: step free access from road to station entrance. However a gently slop access via a underpass from the road level to the station.