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Image of the DayThese 4-D ultrasound scans of fetuses of smoking (top) and non-smoking (bottom) mothers point to developmental delays in the former group. |
1. CHECK YOUR GRAMMAR
No one's going to take you seriously if you use "there" instead of "their" or "your" instead of "you're." Maybe you should write your missives in Word first, where there's a grammar checker. Or maybe run your prospective words by your mother, since you want her to be proud of you. I'd say to get a review by your significant other, but I've yet to find a hater with a spouse.
2. SPELLCHECK
This is built into so many of today's programs, especially e-mail. How much effort does it take to scroll up to the menu and give it a go?
Then again, you're probably hating from your smartphone, and you don't want to risk waiting and having your anger subside. Otherwise you won't have the desired effect of pissing off your target. Hating must be done right away, when you're irate, when it's still the most important thing in the world. However, those worth hating judge you by your spelling mistakes. They're evidence of education. And if you haven't got any, the target will not take you seriously.
3. SCRUB SEARCH ENGINES
The problem with today's world is everybody is identifiable, researchable. Especially in this challenged economy where everybody is looking for a job and posts his curriculum vitae on LinkedIn. You don't want the recipient of your hatred to know you don't have a job, or a bad one. You're embarrassed about your situation enough! So hire a reputation company to get rid of stuff you don't want people to see. As for victims checking out your resume... You might think you've won, but the truth is victims like to laugh too!
4. DON'T HATE IN YOUR FIELD/BACKYARD
Otherwise it just evidences jealousy.
If you're in music, hate in sports or TV. Because if you hate in your preferred area it just shows that you're frustrated, you believe that the recipient has your job. Then again, haters hate because they don't know how to climb the business ladder, wherein social skills are key to advancement. However, this is not just a hater problem. With so few good jobs available, the populace is defeated. So, for this we must have sympathy for the hater.
5. CONTENT PEOPLE!
A reasoned argument has impact. Assuming the hate reaches the target, and you must assume this, being the head of a military operation with many strikes, you never know when you'll succeed, don't just say STOP, or YOU'RE A JERK! That stuff works on the schoolyard, when it's accompanied by physical intimidation and social status. But not online. Then again, you're lucky you have online as your sandbox, because haters tend to be wimpy loners who've found this one way to vent their anger that their lives are not working out. So, if you're hating on someone, delineate your complaint thoroughly. Point out not only the mistake, but the path of correction. This is your true mission, helping others. Why else would someone reach down in the pit and rescue you from your misery, acknowledge you and give you a job, if you're not helpful?
6. PUNCH UP, NOT DOWN
Only hate on those higher up the food chain than yourself. Nothing undercuts your status more than posing as popular and successful and then hating someone you keep saying is beneath you. It makes you look small and petty. Which is why when someone receives hate e-mail from an attorney or public figure, that contains no analysis (see #5 above), it changes the recipient's viewpoint of the hater. I'll give you the opposite example. Obama is President, that's why he does not hate, there's no one above him. He just experiences the vitriol and smiles. Whereas Republican Congresspeople and Fox News excoriate him, because they want his job.
7. ANONYMITY
Shows cowardice. It radiates fear. If you're not willing to put your name to your hate your hate will not be taken seriously.
8. CABAL
Some haters have friends, who they rally to pile on. Is the lone gunman more powerful than the army? It's debatable. But if you enlist your minions have a goal. And make sure you can win. Because if you rally everybody and don't get the desired response, which is usually a response at all, then you'll have a hard time getting everybody to hate together in the future.
9. SOCIAL NETWORKS
Twitter is on to your game. It's banning hate accounts based on phone number. How many phone numbers do you have? Not many, therefore you won't be able to keep creating new accounts for strategic attacks. Which is why you're best off hating in your own name.
10. TAKE HATING SERIOUSLY
One hate mail is dismissible. Could have been a missend, meant for someone else, and will be ignored. Then again, so much hate is ignored. Which is why you must send hundreds of e-mails even if you get no response. Because hating is the most important thing to you. If you stop hating, the terrorists win.
I love great art, no matter the medium.
AUSTIN, Texas–Should music ever be free? That was the inescapable topic of discussion among the hordes of recording-industry middlemen and hangers-on gathered for the music section of the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference last week.
It’s a schism that has emerged just when it looked like subscription streaming services, such as Spotify, were bringing an end to the music industry’s years of economic pain. The dispute concerns the “freemium” model, which allows consumers to listen to music for free in exchange for listening to ads, or pay to listen without ads.
The backlash against free began last year, when arguably the biggest recording artist on the planet, Taylor Swift, pulled all of her music from Spotify. In the past couple of weeks, Swift’s stance has gained backingfrom the world’s two biggest record companies, Universal and Sony, who together account for more than half of the recorded music market, and seem determined to clamp down on free listening. Universal is using licensing negotiations (paywall) with Spotify to “push for changes to the company’s free service,” the Financial Times reported last week.
In general, music ownership, in both physical and digital download forms, is in a death spiral. Although vinyl is making a surprise comeback, it’s a niche market.
That makes subscription-based streaming the closest thing the music industry has to a savior. Figures released by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) this week showed that revenue from streaming services in the US surpassed that from CDs in 2014, and grew 29% on the previous year. Credit Suisse has forecast that the global recorded music industry could return to growth again as soon as next year, thanks to the spread of streaming.
The reason is simple math. Streaming subscriptions cost roughly $120 a year—about double what the average consumer has been prepared to spend on music since the industry’s peak back at the turn of the millennium. So if enough people sign up, the world could spend more on music than ever before.
Yet even though that money buys you access to the vast majority of recorded music, a thing unthinkable just a few years ago, convincing people to subscribe is proving hard. And not everyone agrees why.
The major labels think that free, ad-supported streaming is dissuading consumers from paying, and that if it’s taken away, they will cough up the money. “Look at Netflix,” one mid-ranking major label executive told me at SXSW. “If they can charge $7.99 a month, with no free advertising-based service, and have millions and millions of subscribers around the world, why can’t we do that in music?”
At the end of last year, Netflix alone had 37.7 million US subscribers. All the streaming music services combined had only 7.7 million, the RIAA’s figures show. Subscriptions generated $799 million in revenue last year; ad-supported streaming brought in only $294 million.
“I equate ‘free’ with the decline of the music business,” Sony Music CEO Doug Morris recently told music industry outlet Hits Daily Double. “In general, free is death.” Universal Music CEO Lucian Grainge has been equally clear, telling Re/Code that “Ad-funded on-demand is not going to sustain the entire ecosystem of the creators as well as the investors.”
A generation of consumers who grew up with illicit file-sharing services like Napster have been conditioned to expect access to music for nothing. Spotify thinks that turning them back into paying customers is a delicate process. Erecting pay barriers too soon could turn them back to piracy. As CEO Daniel Ek explained in a blog post earlier this year, “If we want to drive people to pay for music, we have to compete with free to get their attention in the first place.” So the growth of Spotify’s paid service depends heavily on its free option.
The model seems to be working. Spotify says 80% of its 15 million paying subscribers started out as free users. “The idea [that] you would talk about cutting off a free service that has a clear proven path to subscriptions, when you have all these other free services out there, it just doesn’t make any sense to us,” Jonathan Prince, Spotify’s head of communications, told Quartz.
Blissfully unaware music fans, roaming the streets at SXSW(John McDuling/Quartz)Kill the free service, therefore, and you kill Spotify’s growth. The uncertainty over its future has rattled the company. Last year it looked like it was headed for an IPO; now it is trying to raise funds from private investors (paywall) instead.
Yet Spotify’s failure could hurt the record labels, who not only would benefit from a successful exit (they hold equity in Spotify), but also, increasingly, from the royalties it generates.
Spotify has made it clear that it will not give up its free service without a fight. Earlier this month, internal emails leaked to the New York Postshowed that the company expects to pay Universal $1 billion in royalties over the next two years. By 2017, it claims that it will account for 39% of the label’s pre-tax earnings, up from about 28% currently. The message: Why mess with what is quickly becoming your most important revenue stream?
But Spotify isn’t the only one feeling the heat. The industry has been trying to crush Pandora, the free online radio service that music labels think pays them too little in royalties. And there are even hints that they are beginning to turn against YouTube. Up until now, no-one has really been brave enough to take on the Google-owned video upload site, which attracts more than 1 billion sets of eyeballs each month and is very popular for music videos. “YouTube gets a free ride,” bemoans Merlin’s Caldas.
But that’s changing. “Free [music] has been way overdone, and the biggest culprit is YouTube,” Sony’s Morris said this month. “This has to be curbed if we’re going to have a successful business.” Another music industry source told Quartz: “There is a lot of label pressure on YouTube free on demand as well… Stay tuned.”
Music videos have been estimated to account for nearly 40% of the content viewed on YouTube, but the relationship has been symbiotic: Hits like Psy’s “Gangnam Style” probably wouldn’t have emerged without it. YouTube has also generated $1 billion in royalties in recent years for labels and performers. That elements of the recording industry are preparing to turn against it shows their determination to re-price music.
In a coup for the major labels, Apple, the world’s biggest company, is widely expected to eschew a free, ad-supported option when it launches its own eagerly anticipated streaming music service later this year. Apple can afford to do this. It has nearly $180 billion in cash sitting on its books and doesn’t need to make any money from music. But the decision also makes strategic sense, because it means the labels will ramp up pressure on companies that do offer a free service—namely, Apple’s competitors.
If the major record labels get their way and shut down free music, it seems unlikely that CDs or even digital downloads will experience a surprise resurgence. It is possible, as the music industry hopes, that consumers, starved of music, will flock to paid streaming.
By now it’s a Republican Party tradition: Every year the party produces a budget that allegedly slashes deficits, but which turns out to contain a trillion-dollar “magic asterisk” — a line that promises huge spending cuts and/or revenue increases, but without explaining where the money is supposed to come from.
But the just-released budgets from the House and Senate majorities break new ground. Each contains not one but two trillion-dollar magic asterisks: one on spending, one on revenue. And that’s actually an understatement. If either budget were to become law, it would leave the federal government several trillion dollars deeper in debt than claimed, and that’s just in the first decade.
You might be tempted to shrug this off, since these budgets will not, in fact, become law. Or you might say that this is what all politicians do. But it isn’t. The modern G.O.P.’s raw fiscal dishonesty is something new in American politics. And that’s telling us something important about what has happened to half of our political spectrum.
So, about those budgets: both claim drastic reductions in federal spending. Some of those spending reductions are specified: There would be savage cuts in food stamps, similarly savage cuts in Medicaid over and above reversing the recent expansion, and an end to Obamacare’s health insurance subsidies. Rough estimates suggest that either plan would roughly double the number of Americans without health insurance. But both also claim more than a trillion dollars in further cuts to mandatory spending, which would almost surely have to come out of Medicare or Social Security. What form would these further cuts take? We get no hint.
Meanwhile, both budgets call for repeal of the Affordable Care Act, including the taxes that pay for the insurance subsidies. That’s $1 trillion of revenue. Yet both claim to have no effect on tax receipts; somehow, the federal government is supposed to make up for the lost Obamacare revenue. How, exactly? We are, again, given no hint.
And there’s more: The budgets also claim large reductions in spending on other programs. How would these be achieved? You know the answer.
It’s very important to realize that this isn’t normal political behavior. The George W. Bush administration was no slouch when it came to deceptive presentation of tax plans, but it was never this blatant. And the Obama administration has been remarkably scrupulous in its fiscal pronouncements.
O.K., I can already hear the snickering, but it’s the simple truth. Remember all the ridicule heaped on the spending projections in the Affordable Care Act? Actual spending is coming in well below expectations, and the Congressional Budget Office has marked its forecast for the next decade down by 20 percent. Remember the jeering when President Obama declared that he would cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term? Well, a sluggish economy delayed things, but only by a year. The deficit in calendar 2013 was less than half its 2009 level, and it has continued to fall.
So, no, outrageous fiscal mendacity is neither historically normal nor bipartisan. It’s a modern Republican thing. And the question we should ask is why.
One answer you sometimes hear is that what Republicans really believe is that tax cuts for the rich would generate a huge boom and a surge in revenue, but they’re afraid that the public won’t find such claims credible. So magic asterisks are really stand-ins for their belief in the magic of supply-side economics, a belief that remains intact even though proponents in that doctrine have been wrong about everything for decades.
But I’m partial to a more cynical explanation. Think about what these budgets would do if you ignore the mysterious trillions in unspecified spending cuts and revenue enhancements. What you’re left with is huge transfers of income from the poor and the working class, who would see severe benefit cuts, to the rich, who would see big tax cuts. And the simplest way to understand these budgets is surely to suppose that they are intended to do what they would, in fact, actually do: make the rich richer and ordinary families poorer.
But this is, of course, not a policy direction the public would support if it were clearly explained. So the budgets must be sold as courageous efforts to eliminate deficits and pay down debt — which means that they must include trillions in imaginary, unexplained savings.
Does this mean that all those politicians declaiming about the evils of budget deficits and their determination to end the scourge of debt were never sincere? Yes, it does.
Look, I know that it’s hard to keep up the outrage after so many years of fiscal fraudulence. But please try. We’re looking at an enormous, destructive con job, and you should be very, very angry.
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Date: March 22, 2015 at 6:32:28 AM EDT
To: maybe@therainbow.com
Subject: 1 New Articles on MakeUseOf
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1 New Articles on MakeUseOf
Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About The Batmobile
Posted: 21 Mar 2015 07:30 PM PDT
There are a few cars in movies that are truly iconic, but few have reached the same level of renown as the Batmobile. Batman‘s vehicle has seen its share of changes over the years, with different generations of the superhero making some huge shifts to the look of the car, but one thing has remained constant: its level of coolness. Of course, more has changed than just the look of the car. The cost, design, and features of each one has also changed tremendously. How can you keep track of all these changes? Just check out the images below, and...
Read the full article: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About The Batmobile
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Spring gets 30 seconds shorter every year. The Earth’s wobbly axis is to blame.
Breastfed children earn more as adults. A three-decade study involving almost 6,000 babies found that the longer a child is breastfed, the more he or she will achieve in life.
