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Posted inJuly/August 2012
Too Important to Fail
Predatory lending still poses a systemic risk to the economy. Will Obama's new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau succeed in taming it, or will the agency be strangled in its crib?
by John Gravois July 7, 2012 January 25, 2022
The Hole-in-the-Bucket Brigade: Elizabeth Warren, Richard Cordray, and Barack Obama, the key players in the rise of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which aims to protect Americans from asset-draining predatory lenders. (AFP/Getty Images)
If you want a hint as to where the battle of the 2012 general election might go, you could do worse than to look at where it started. On the morning of January 4, 2012, in his first official act of the campaign year, President Barack Obama mounted a podium in a packed high school gym outside Cleveland and rolled out an announcement. Blowing past months of GOP filibustering, he declared his recess appointment of Richard Cordray, a mild-mannered former Ohio attorney general, to serve as the first head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a powerful new regulatory agency created by the Dodd-Frank law. Back in Washington, GOP leaders, who had held Congress open in a pro-forma session during the Christmas break precisely to block such a recess appointment, went into fits of televised dudgeon, calling the move "arrogant," "unconstitutional," and—this from Mitt Romney himself—"Chicago-style politics at its worst."
The consumer bureau has provoked virulent opposition from Republicans ever since it emerged as the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard law professor turned progressive folk hero who is now running for Ted Kennedy's old Senate seat in Massachusetts. Though the GOP couldn't stop the creation of the CFPB, it did manage to put enough pressure on Obama to make him shrink from nominating Warren to serve at its head, a decision for which he was promptly vilified by liberals. Then, when Obama nominated Cordray, Republicans held the appointment hostage, demanding structural changes to the bureau that would have made it more accountable to congressional committees and the industries that comfortably influence them. Most recently, in May, Glenn Hubbard, a top economic adviser to the Romney campaign, suggested to the Wall Street Journal that defanging the bureau would be a central agenda item in Romney's economic strategy.
This GOP fury might seem strange, even self-destructive, from afar. After all, the prime mission of the CFPB, which is still just barely up and running, is to crack down on predatory lending—a range of practices epitomized by the sale of the exploding subprime mortgages that hollowed out much of the wealth of America's middle class and precipitated the Great Recession. Polls show that, though few Americans are yet aware of the CFPB, an overwhelming majority support it once they learn about its mission of protecting consumers from big financial institutions.
Nevertheless, the now-bailed-out financial sector claims that if a strong regulator scrutinizes the safety of its products—as the federal government does with toys, cars, appliances, airlines, food, drugs, and most everything else that's for sale in our capitalist economy—it will tank the industry. And so it has gone to war.
Obama's rather nervy decision to begin 2012 by appointing Cordray suggests that he is prepared to make the CFPB an issue in the campaign—as well he should. We might as well just say it: saving the CFPB is essential to fixing the fundamentals of our economy and even restoring the American Dream. Americans need a strong financial sector, but not, as we now know from painful experience, one that profits by methodically stripping its customers of their assets. Predatory lending has become endemic to the business model of American finance, and until that changes, it's hard to see how the economy can once again provide broad prosperity. Not even the financial services industry itself will prosper in the long run unless it adopts a business model that helps build, rather than erode, the wealth of average Americans. The question is whether the bureau can survive the Republican onslaught, and, if so, whether this "twenty-first-century agency" will be powerful enough to change the way our consumer finance market behaves.
The origins of the CFPB trace back, as many things do, to a conversion experience. In the early 1980s, Elizabeth Warren was a young conservative law professor in Texas who had set out to study why families filed for bankruptcy. The laws governing bankruptcy had recently been liberalized, and Warren had a dim view of the likely consequences. "I was going to expose these people who were taking advantage of the rest of us," she recalled in a 2007 interview. "I set out to prove they were all a bunch of cheaters." But her data came back telling a vastly different story.
American families weren't going broke from shopping sprees at the mall, Warren found. They were going broke because their incomes were stagnating while their fixed costs—health care, housing, car payments—continued to rise. The struggle for these necessities was driving families to rely on a set of financial products that were increasingly mystifying to them and profitable for issuers: credit cards, home equity loans, payday loans, and the like. Once a family's assets were depleted, bankruptcy was often just an illness, a job loss, or an exploding interest rate away.
The way Warren tells the story, she first had the idea for the consumer bureau years later, in 2007, at a time when she was having a lot of meetings with credit card executives. She was trying to sell them on the idea of offering what she called a "clean card"—a credit card that listed all its costs, its fees, and its true, long-run interest rate up front. (That is: instead of selling a card with, say, a 4.9 percent teaser rate and then jacking it up to 18.9 percent after some months, companies would just market a card with a straightforward 7.9 percent rate.) The card would then be granted a kind of Good Housekeeping seal of approval.
But the credit card executives all took a pass. At one meeting, an executive confided in Warren. "If we had to tell people what these things cost while our competitors play the same old games, no one would use our product," he told her, as she recalled in a speech in 2011. There was no advantage for anyone in the business to be the first mover, she realized; the government had to get involved and set rules across the entire market. It was around that time, she says, that she began sketching out the idea for what would become the CFPB.
Warren's wasn't the only conversion experience that ultimately led to the CFPB. In the mid-2000s, Richard Cordray was serving as the treasurer of Franklin County, Ohio. An Oxford and Chicago-educated lawyer with several arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court under his belt, Cordray had made a failed, quixotic bid for the U.S. Senate in 2000 before adjusting his sights on local office. His campaign in Franklin County had rested largely on a promise to aggressively collect delinquent property taxes. Much like Warren, he expected to take on the shirkers who were taking advantage of the rest of us. But what he found was something else.
"There were deadbeats," he grants. But a huge number of delinquent Ohioans were ordinary middle-class folk who had simply hit road bumps—medical problems, divorce, a death in the family, job loss—but had no shock absorbers, no savings, to help them bounce back. And so they had stopped paying their mortgages and, with them, their property tax bills. Cordray's office also began to detect that a larger story was playing out: Ohio, it turned out, had been one of the first hotspots of subprime lending, and, by the mid-2000s, evidence of rampant speculation and mass delinquency was surfacing fast. "We began to see the irregularities that eventually became known as the foreclosure crisis," Cordray recalls.
While essentially serving as a popularly elected collection agent, Cordray increasingly pivoted toward another mission: trying desperately to keep Ohioans in their homes. In 2006, Cordray was elected state treasurer, and continued in much the same vein. The problem was that other entities to whom homeowners owed money—the mortgage servicing companies that were in charge of managing people's loans, for instance—were far less interested in problem solving and working with Ohioans than he was. In fact, they were ruthless. And so, in a 2008 special election, Cordray ran for the office of state attorney general. His platform this time: holding Wall Street accountable.
A lanky former basketball player with sandy blond hair, Cordray exudes a slow-moving midwestern gentleness—he wears Gold Toe socks around the office—combined with a cool cerebral intensity; he comes off like an odd cross between Mr. Rogers and Eliot Ness. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, he aggressively won billions in settlements for Ohio from firms like Merrill Lynch and AIG, epitomizing a class of state attorneys general who fought to bring Wall Street to justice at a time when the federal government was doing little more than trying to stabilize it. "We see what Washington doesn't: the houses lying vacant, the eyesore stripped for copper piping with mattresses out back," he told the New York Times during his tenure as Ohio's top lawman in 2010. "We bailed out irresponsible banks, but we forgot about everyone else."
Still, because of a legal regime called regulatory preemption—a rule that allowed federal regulators to keep state attorneys general from taking action against federally chartered financial institutions—Cordray was constantly frustrated by what he couldn't do. "I could not sue any nationally chartered bank," he recalls. "We were kind of picking around the edges of the problem." In 2010, Cordray lost his seat to the popular ex-senator Mike DeWine. A mere three days later he got a phone call from Elizabeth Warren, who was putting together the founding team of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, wanting to know whether he might be interested in coming to Washington.
When Obama finally appointed Cordray to lead the bureau this past January, it had the effect of legally imbuing the bureau with all of its powers, and all of its responsibilities, under the law. For Cordray, the event entailed sitting quietly on a stool next to the president in a crowded gym for a few minutes and then spending the next several months in a dead sprint. "It was like being shot out on a rocket," recalls Peggy Twohig, the bureau's head of nonbank supervision (a role, by the way, that has never existed in the history of U.S. government or finance).
The many deadlines that the bureau is required to meet under Dodd-Frank have held its staff to a grinding pace. Thus far, the CFPB has issued proposed rules for mortgage servicers, proposed to bring large debt collectors and credit reporting agencies under federal supervision for the first time ever, and launched an inquiry into overdraft fees, among many other things. In terms of sheer man-hours, it has spent the largest share of its time writing extensive new rules for the mortgage sector—the largest consumer finance market in the world.
Along the way, the bureau has done what any go-getter does while new on the job: try to make itself seem indispensable. Whenever possible, the bureau has made its announcements, kickoffs, and speeches in places other than Washington. On the day I met him, Cordray had just returned from Nashville and was on his way to Indianapolis, luggage in hand. In late January, barely two weeks into the job, he had flown to Birmingham, Alabama, to hold a field hearing about payday loans. The event was scheduled to take place in a small room in the city's civil rights museum, but as the RSVPs piled up, it had to be moved—first to a different room, and then a few blocks away to a space in the Birmingham convention center. Even there, fire marshals eventually had to turn people away at the door.
If there is a rule—as it sometimes seems there must be— that the noble purpose of a D.C. institution is proportional to the drabness of its offices, then the early incarnations of the CFPB were awfully noble. For the first stretch of its existence, the bureau was housed in a few floors of rented space in a reddish granite-faced building near Farragut North. The interior was a scene of scuffed carpet, boxes lying about, fluorescent light, and décor the palette of seasickness: greenish pale gray and bruised purple.
Into this vessel, an unusually young, bright-eyed, and idealistic corps of civil servants crammed itself steadily over the course of 2011. The staff grew from a handful to hundreds in a matter of months. Bullpens sprang up in any room much larger than a closet; at one point, there were senior economists working at card tables in the bureau's heavily cannibalized main conference room.
In part because of its wonky but swashbuckling mission, and in part because of its association with Elizabeth Warren, the bureau has attracted an unusual mix of talent for the civil service. "I'm not someone who ever thought I would work for the government," says Audrey Chen, a New York information designer whose previous employers included several tech start-ups and Comedy Central. The bureau's part-time assistant director of research is Sendhil Mullainathan, a MacArthur "genius" grant recipient, Harvard professor, and star of the emerging field of behavioral economics. And numerous other recruits came from high-powered consulting firms or data-intensive advocacy groups like the Sunlight Foundation or Pew, giving the bureau a high-nerdy, service-minded feel: like a McKinsey and Company for the 99 percent.
One of the chief custodians of this heady culture is a man named Rajeev V. Date (pronounced Da-tay), one of the bureau's first hires and now Cordray's deputy. He has played an outsized role in recruiting staff and setting the bureau's high-minded tone—which is interesting, given that Date's background is not primarily in academia or advocacy, but in the financial industry. A boyish-looking lawyer trained in applied mathematics, Date is a former vice president at Capital One Financial, the wildly profitable Virginia credit card company that pioneered the use of "big data"—that is, analyzing mountains of transaction records to predict and then goose profitable consumer behavior—in financial marketing.
Date's route to the CFPB began one day in the summer of 2006, when, in the course of researching some financial institutions that Capital One had recently acquired, he gave himself a crash course on the basics of the mortgage market of the time. And the basics were horrifying. "I flipped out. I completely flipped out," he recalls. "The entire market was making fanciful credit decisions." Date became so convinced that American finance was on the verge of collapse that he quit his job and sold his house. But rather than run for the hills, he went to work for Deutsche Bank on Wall Street—expressly to help banks raise capital as a buffer against the coming calamity. Then, after being paid well to raise those alarms, he left finance and turned full time to advocating for reform.
When I first met Date, he was sitting in his office at the bureau—a bare room little bigger than a supply closet, with a single small window looking out on the brick wall of an adjacent building. With a sheepish grin, he handed me a piece of gum, apologizing that he had nothing else to offer. He had taken a 95 percent pay cut from his last paying job, but he brimmed with the pride of an institution builder. "I've got little toddlers, so I'm very attentive to the fact that toddlers learn bad habits very quickly, and they learn good habits very quickly. The same thing is true with institutions," he said. "We have tried to be intentional about baking in good habits." (One policy Date carried over from Capital One is a rule that all executives must spend some time every month manning the consumer help lines.)
But, of course, the start-up phase of any institution's life cycle—when major decisions are made in hallways, aspirations are grand and abstract, and the boss sits in a glorified closet—is an ephemeral thing. Already, the consumer bureau has had to choose its battles, raising the ire of consumer advocates recently, for example, by allowing credit card companies to exploit a loophole in the CARD Act by charging large signup fees. And it remains to be seen how the bureau will strike what is likely to be a tricky balance between its two most important mandates—to protect consumers and, at the same time, foster access to financial services. If the bureau focuses exclusively on protecting consumers by cracking down on abusive products, it could limit access to credit; if it focuses too much on expanding access, it could just give cover for driving more Americans into debt and the arms of a powerful financial sector. And it will doubtless be lobbied heavily in both directions.
So the question is: Over the long run (assuming the CFPB has a long run), why should we believe that the bureau will succeed in protecting consumers where other regulators have failed? Why, in other words, is it any less likely to become captive to the interests of the complex, powerful, and deep-pocketed industry it regulates?
This spring, the CFPB began moving out of its rented start-up digs and into its permanent headquarters—an address whose pedigree is enough to cause a shudder among those who know the recent history of financial regulation. The bureau's employees now come to work at a high-Brutalist concrete and glass structure just a block from the White House, at the intersection of 17th and G streets, a building that, before the crash, served as the headquarters of the now-defunct Office of Thrift Supervision—former regulator to the subprime giants Washington Mutual and Countrywide.
The OTS, in its day, had jurisdiction over federally chartered savings-and-loan associations, or thrifts, and derived its funding from a system of fees: basically, any institution that was regulated by the agency paid dues to the agency. After a period of aggressive oversight in the early 1990s, bureaucrats at the OTS began to realize that they were eating away at their own revenue by closing runaway thrifts. And so, over time, the agency came to rely on a rather different strategy: hustling for new business. The OTS sent its agents out to the highways, byways, and boardrooms of America, trying to convince banks and other financial entities to change their charters and become thrifts, on the promise that the OTS would regulate them with a lighter hand than other federal agencies. This practice, and the consequent ability of firms to shop for the most congenial overseer, is known as "regulatory arbitrage."
Experts often describe the run-up to the financial crisis as a "race to the bottom." In reality it was a veritable track-and-field meet of such contests: some of them played out in the marketplace, others inside the government. Out in the financial marketplace, in the 2000s, opaquely marketed subprime products pioneered by unregulated, fly-by-night, nonbank mortgage lenders began to take off in the mainstream. Much as in the credit card business—where the boldly marketed 4.9 percent teaser rate masks the 18.9 percent rate that will eventually kick in—these were often mortgages that masked exploding costs down the line. Banks and thrifts, in order to hold their own, had to jump in with similar products, lest their plain-Jane fixed-rate mortgages look expensive by comparison. In market after market, hiding the true costs and risks of a product became a requirement for survival. And as lenders began to compete with each other on lack of transparency, regulators competed on laxity of oversight. The rest, as they say, is history.
Years later, when it was announced that the CFPB would take over the retired OTS building, some bureau staffers joked about holding an exorcism. In a sense, that's just what the architects of the CFPB set out to do in designing the bureau's institutional structure. "The bureau," says the Harvard political scientist Daniel Carpenter, "is probably the first modern agency designed from the ground up with an eye to preventing regulatory capture and preserving autonomy."
For example, the bureau's jurisdiction covers the entire waterfront of consumer financial products and transactions—whether they involve banks, thrifts, payday loan shops, nonbank mortgage lenders, credit unions, debt collectors, student lenders, credit reporting services like Equifax, or something else. By regulating a sweeping array of institutions that have divergent, even fiercely competing interests, the bureau ensures that its interests are less likely to line up with any one segment of the industry. "They'd have to be captured by the entire financial system," says Ed Mierzwinski, the consumer program director at the Public Interest Research Group. "Those guys will play against each other." This commanding view of the market should also allow the bureau to level the playing field, taking away the advantages that once flowed to unregulated institutions—the nonbank players that served as nurseries for the predatory practices that eventually swept the market.
The CFPB is also designed so that, rather than receive its funding through a system of regulatory fees, it survives on a dedicated stream of money from the Federal Reserve. That means it relies on neither industry nor Congress for its supper. This is hugely important. Consider the case of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which was given huge new responsibilities under Dodd-Frank to set up so-called derivatives exchanges, a technically complex feat demanding substantial new manpower, technology, and money. The CFTC receives its funding through congressional appropriations, however. And Congress—perhaps in a spirit of austerity, or perhaps because Republicans have simply been looking for quiet ways to sink a knife into Dodd-Frank's back all along—has more or less flat-lined the agency's budget. As a result, the CFTC has missed scads of deadlines along the way to fulfilling its new obligations.
Unlike other financial regulators, the CFPB's prime mission is to ensure the safety and soundness of financial products for consumers, not to ensure the safety and soundness of financial institutions. Under the old regime, regulating financial markets with an eye to consumer protection ranked low on several agencies' lists of priorities. "Orphan mission" and "bastard stepchild" were terms I heard a few times in my reporting. At times, regulators even justified industry behavior that was widely considered to be predatory by saying such practices were necessary to keep these institutions solvent, which was the main regulatory concern. The bureau has no such built-in conflict of interest. (The CFPB's decisions are subject to something called the Financial Stability Oversight Council, and may be overturned if they are seen to pose a risk to the financial system.)
Finally, the CFPB has a uniquely broad range of tools and powers at its disposal. It has the power to conduct onsite supervision of big banks and nonbanks, write and enforce rules, collect and track consumer complaints, and conduct original research on markets. And under its mandate to "facilitate access and innovation," the CFPB's remit includes running public financial education campaigns and could conceivably stretch, some experts say, to facilitating randomized trials of financial products to help create ones that aren't predatory.
Indeed, the most innovative, interesting, and potentially powerful work of the bureau has to do with fixing the signals that move markets and drive consumer behavior. Until now, consumer financial protection in America has basically involved forcing lenders to disclose their onerous terms in what you and I know as the "fine print." Under this regime, financial institutions were legally in the clear as long as the backdoor fee, the interest rate hike, or the obscure charge was noted somewhere in a product's thirty-page contract. The idea was that somehow, because humans are rationally optimizing creatures, these important but buried signals were clear enough to guide the market to its best outcome for everyone.
Meanwhile, companies actually market their products based on a scientific understanding of how we humans actually behave. They highlight a few carefully chosen facts about a product, and hold them out as the most salient ones, knowing that these will be the signals that truly move the market. And these signals aren't selected using mere guesswork; they are usually based on an empirically robust understanding of the way large populations of people have behaved in the past, and how they are likely to respond to certain stimuli in the future.
Credit cards, in particular, are like the fruit flies of finance: they generate reams of data about consumer behavior week in and week out. "You can run all kinds of tests all the time," says Raj Date, referring back to his time at Capital One. Credit card issuers know, for instance, that lowering a customer's minimum required monthly payment can make him into a more profitable user, because people then tend to carry a larger balance. Issuers also know that, simply by increasing a customer's credit line—from, say, $2,000 to $20,000—there is a decent chance the customer will go from someone who reliably pays off his balance to one who will fall behind, and thus, again, become more profitable. "There are ways to model what are the attributes of somebody for whom that's going to be true, versus not," Date says, "and frankly, that's more science than art. And it's that kind of insight that has been almost exclusively the domain of issuers and not at all that of consumers."
Probably one of the best ways to understand the consumer bureau is to think of its job as rectifying that imbalance. "I almost think about it as democratizing the value of data," Date says. Ever since the bureau opened a year ago, it has been running experiments on new forms of disclosure—one- or two-page documents rather than novellas of fine print—under a program called "Know Before You Owe." By posting model disclosure forms online, tweaking them over time, and eliciting feedback from tens of thousands of consumers, the bureau has begun gathering its own data on how people actually process different contract information. Similarly, it has also begun datamining the customer complaints about financial products that it collects.
But that's just the beginning. The bureau's research department—which will be made up not only of economists, but also psychologists and marketing experts—is only just getting off the ground, but could one day have the capacity to oversee large-scale randomized trials. At the same time, the bureau is also amassing huge amounts of industry data. Soon, it will have access to account-level information from nine of the largest credit card issuers—a far larger database, in other words, than what any individual issuer has on its own.
So what will the bureau do with all this information? In much the same way that companies use all their data to figure out exactly how best to profit from their customers, the bureau will use data to decide exactly how best to hold the market to the standards outlined in Dodd-Frank—how to keep it fair, transparent, and competitive; how to make sure that it is not abusive or deceptive; and how to make sure it supplies consumers with information that is timely and understandable.
It's still too early to say exactly how the bureau will intervene, but much of the early rhetoric surrounding the agency points to the idea of requiring a radically simplified form of disclosure—one that essentially merges a product's marketing pitch with its fine print. Across a given market of products, for example, the bureau could mandate a standard one- or two-page contract written in plain English, with required fields and consistent framing.
In a world where plenty of people still want to see bankers sent to jail, this might not sound like regulation with a full set of teeth. But simple disclosure, if it forces companies to market products on their true costs—including the stuff that has traditionally been buried on page 19 of a contract—could have a hugely powerful effect in reshaping markets and even upending business models. Companies would suddenly have to compete with each other on value to the consumer, rather than on how to most cleverly hide the ball. (For complicated contracts like a mortgage, which may not be reducible to a couple of pages, the behavioral economist Richard Thaler recommends using online "choice engines"—tools not unlike Kayak.com or Expedia, which can rank and compare products even when they involve a complicated set of variables and parameters.)
But undoubtedly, in some cases the bureau's research will lead it to the conclusion that disclosure is not enough. For example: after the crash, mortgage brokers came under fire for taking special kickbacks called "yield-spread premiums" in return for guiding borrowers to loans with a higher interest rate but lower up-front costs—loans, in other words, that were more profitable for lenders. When the Federal Reserve performed some empirical tests to see whether the problem could be tackled with disclosure, the results were unexpectedly fascinating. When brokers were required to disclose how much money they were getting out of a yield-spread premium, the Fed found that consumers simply didn't understand what they were being told. And in a different test, when brokers were required simply to explain in the abstract that they were working in their own interest and not the borrower's, something strange and utterly human happened: borrowers trusted them more for being honest, still without really understanding what was going on. And so the Fed decided that disclosure was not going to work. It banned the yield-spread premium altogether. Down the road, the consumer bureau is bound to make similar calls of its own; as the financial industry surely knows, given their full-court war on the CFPB, some of their practices are not long for this world.
The other day, I was taking an early-morning walk around my neighborhood when I saw a sheaf of papers scattered across the street and a nearby yard. The cover page was lying faceup on the crosswalk. It was a notice of foreclosure. The address listed on the paper referred to a house a little way down the street, one much like mine: toys and plastic sleds in the yard, a slightly overgrown garden.
A person in today's economy doesn't have to look hard to see that, four years after the 2008 crisis, the American household balance sheet has made a modest recovery at best. After reaching the highest average debt-to-income ratio since 1929, families have been slowly "deleveraging" ever since. Between 2007 and 2009, the typical American household lost a fifth of its wealth. Nearly half of Americans say they would have a hard time coming up with $2,000 in thirty days if a financial emergency arose. And in some states, foreclosures are back on the rise.
Another way in which the crisis lingers is in the deep distrust many Americans still feel toward the finance industry. Last year, around the time a Los Angeles artist was making a killing on eBay selling oil paintings that depicted suburban Chase Bank outlets on fire, an online activist in Southern California was organizing a mass protest called Bank Transfer Day—encouraging people across the country to close their bank accounts en masse and switch over to nonprofit credit unions. (On the appointed date, some 40,000 people reportedly joined credit unions.) According to a recent survey by the Corporate Executive Board, only one in five North Americans has confidence that their financial institution will keep its promises and commitments. Globally, the same report finds, this lack of trust in financial institutions results in some sixty-three million unsold products every year.
The banks, for their part, seem stuck in an embattled and defensive crouch. At an annual meeting of the American Bankers Association in Washington this year, the audience gave a cool if not overtly hostile reception to a representative of the CFPB, offering applause on a five-second delay. The small bankers I spoke to there felt that they were being unfairly blamed for problems that started in unregulated pockets of the financial market; but at the same time, they simply didn't believe that the consumer bureau would be capable of leveling the regulatory playing field. The mood was one of closed ranks; the bankers repeatedly referred to themselves as "the indispensable industry" and proffered the slogan "To denigrate one is to denigrate all"—which is, bizarrely, only a slight variation on a saying most closely associated with the Wobblies.
All this comes at a time, ironically, when Americans need financial services—the boring, help-you-plan-for-tomorrow kind—more than ever. "People need a place to safely store their money, they need a way to make payments, they need a way to save, and they need access to credit," said Jennifer Tescher, the president and CEO of the Center for Financial Services Innovation, in a recent speech. "Financial services aren't going to provide more income, or a job, or health care. But they provide structure and stability, and without that all those other things are hard to achieve."
Some bankers, at least, are starting to see the upside of the CFPB. Sallie Krawcheck, the former president of Bank of America Wealth Management and the former chief financial officer at Citigroup, wrote an op-ed for Politico in April arguing that the bureau would ultimately expand and strengthen the market for financial services. Most banks, she wrote, owe far too much of their revenue to plain customer inertia. Financial products, with their umpteen-page contracts, are so opaque that consumers don't really know what they're getting—or what they would gain from switching to someone else's product. And so they stick around, confused, frustrated, and dependent. The supposedly hyper-innovative financial industry is actually, when it comes to customer service, a sucking bog.
If the CFPB instituted a world of simple, one- or two-page contracts for all competitors in a market, Krawcheck writes, the immediate result would be a bunch of customer churn. This would "strip banks of the significant earnings they derive from customer inertia—including earnings from deposits on which they pay below-market interest rates," she writes. But it would also, in the next beat, introduce a jolt of competition and innovation to the market, as providers scrambled to find more clear ways to benefit consumers. And who knows? Perhaps one day banks and thrifts could compete to use the insights of behavioral economics to get people to actually save money.
The only problem is that, in all likelihood, such a world would be one where banks only get more sophisticated, powerful, and centralized. And herein lies the main philosophical shadow lurking over the bureau. By setting out to match the analytical prowess of the financial industry, the CFPB is implicitly giving its assent to a world where finance is governed by complicated models, big data, and the statistical masters of the universe who command them—as opposed to an older world where finance was governed by the personal relationship between a borrower and a lender. It's just that now the public has a few statistical masters of the universe on its side. "The hubris of finance is now being matched by the hubris of the regulator," says Amar Bhidé, an economist at Tufts University. "Wonderful." Throughout the debate over financial reform—and for much longer than that, really—there have been people who believe we should craft sophisticated regulations tailored to the heavily engineered financial system we have; and then there have been those who believe we need to break up that system, shatter the behemoths into smaller pieces, and bring finance back down to human scale. The CFPB does little to satisfy those in the second camp.
That said, for as long as that system exists, the CFPB is our best hope. For the past generation, financial institutions have gotten a few things—burying revenue streams, extracting wealth, and juking consumer behavior—down to a science. Now, assuming the bureau survives and can fulfill its mission, the most important question facing them will be whether they can figure out profitable ways of helping Americans build wealth. This also happens to be one of the most important questions facing the rest of us as well.
[Return to The Future of Success in America]
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Tagged: financial services, GOP, regulation
John Gravois
John Gravois is an editor of the Washington Monthly.
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Q: VHDL - Index out range even If I made concurrent checking using when-else I'm implementing a register file where I wanna read asynchronously and write on the rising edge.
I made concurrent checks on the addresses and the writing occurs inside a process.
However, it always cause me a fatal error and I don't know why!
Here's my code if anyone could help and tell me how can I read asynchronously and write on rising edge
Thank you!
library ieee;
use ieee.std_logic_1164.all;
use ieee.numeric_std.all;

entity RegFile is
  port(
            outData1    : out std_logic_vector(15 downto 0);
            outData2    : out std_logic_vector(15 downto 0);
            inData      : in  std_logic_vector(15 downto 0);
            writeEn     : in  std_logic;
            reg1Sel     : in  std_logic_vector(2 downto 0);
            reg2Sel     : in  std_logic_vector(2 downto 0);
            writeRegSel : in  std_logic_vector(2 downto 0);
            clk         : in  std_logic
    );
  end RegFile;

architecture Register_File of RegFile is

type registerFile is array(0 to 5) of std_logic_vector(15 downto 0);
signal registers : registerFile;
signal reg1Address,reg2Address : integer;
signal reg1FinalAddressing,reg2FinalAddressing : std_logic_vector(2 downto 0);

begin

--Conversion of logic vector to unsigned integer
reg1Address <= to_integer(unsigned(reg1Sel));
reg2Address <= to_integer(unsigned(reg2Sel));

reg1FinalAddressing <= reg1Sel when (reg1Address<6 ) else
                                    (others => '0');

reg2FinalAddressing <= reg2Sel when (reg2Address<6 ) else
                                    (others => '0');

outData1 <= registers(to_integer(unsigned(reg1FinalAddressing)));
outData2 <= registers(to_integer(unsigned(reg2FinalAddressing)));

process (clk) is
begin
    -- Reading from Registers 1 and 2
    if rising_edge(clk) then
                -- Writing to Register file Case Enabled
                if writeEn = '1' then
                    registers(to_integer(unsigned(writeRegSel))) <= inData;
                    -- Case a value being written to register file, it will be out simultaneously if
                    -- the register was already selected. (The updated values are being released instantly).
                    if reg1Sel = writeRegSel then
                        outData1 <= inData;
                    end if;
                    if reg2Sel = writeRegSel then
                        outData2 <= inData;
                    end if;
                end if;

    end if;

end process;
end Register_File;

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Another interesting pacing study, with many similarities to the one I blogged about last week, published once again in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. Cyclists are asked to do a series of 2,000-metre time trials in a pseudo-virtual reality set-up. Most of them they perform solo, but in one of the trials they race against a virtual competitor (who, unbeknownst to them, is actually programmed to exactly mimic their own previous trial). The result is obvious: competition improves performance, so they're able to beat their doppelganger and race significantly faster.
What's interesting is how they manage to beat their previous performance. Throughout the race, the power generated from aerobic sources is exactly identical in all the different trials. But the power from anaerobic sources is significantly higher in the "racing" scenario during the second half of the race (during the last 90 seconds or so, in other words).
Consequently, it has been argued that all exercise performances are sub-maximal, since they are terminated before there is a catastrophic metabolic or cardio-respiratory failure, and that a physiological 'reserve' capacity will always remain. The ergogenic effects of the [head-to-head] competition might therefore result from the central influence of some motivational or dissociative effect enabling the use of a greater degree of the physiologic 'reserve' capacity.
That's actually quite a powerful statement: "all exercise performances are sub-maximal." If the stakes are raised sufficiently, you can always squeeze out a little extra. I think most of us grow up knowing this intuitively, but at some point — after we start learning about VO2max and lactate threshold and so on — it's often forgotten.
Agreed I am sure the same holds true for momentary force contractions during a fight or flight situation. The amazing abilities that the body can produce to save a life.
I think this is still a carryover from evolution. First one to make it to a meal wins!
Fine and true, but do we want all exercise performances to be maximal? Isn't there something to be said about working various areas and then resting, and then over time we improve and then when we need to be maximal we have it, rather than wear ourselves out each day and not being ready to work another aspect tomorrow, or what am I missing?
Sure, nobody's recommending that you try to be "maximal" in every day in workout. What the researchers are suggesting is that ALL sustained physical exertion is submaximal — even when you "need to maximal." So even if you're sprinting down the final straight of the Olympic final a half-stride behind the leader (a situation where you'd expect to maximal), you'd manage to find an extra burst if a tiger jumped out of the crowd and started chasing you. If you were truly maximal with nothing held in reserve (these researchers argue), your oxygen-starved muscles would go into rigor and you'd die.
In practice, this is more of a thought experiment than an argument that we should hire tigers to leap out of the stands at track meets. The point is that in any effort lasting longer than, say, 30 seconds, we're pacing our effort — and that means that the brain is controlling the level of exertion, not some absolute physical limitation somewhere in the body.
Most all of the "thought experiments" here are composed from the perspective of the winner. I've come second in many races where I was doing everything I possibly could to claw back the winner all the way to the line, yet still coming up short, sometimes by inches. Perhaps I could have gone harder if a tiger was chasing me, but it seems much more likely that I would produce a maximal effort under these circumstances than in the cases where I'm going up against another rider and beating him/her.
Some of my personal examples that I can think of where I came up just short (and sometimes when I won) involved massive cramping and collapse in the middle of a sprint, being so blown after the loss that I could not dismount from my bike without assistance, going into gagging fits, etc.
Coming from endurance sports, I've often wondered if some people are genetically predisposed to push themselves closer to maximal effort than others. I had a guy run with me for the final 10km of an Ironman where I was running fairly within myself (not gunning for any great performance) yet that guy killed himself to keep up and promptly collapsed at the finish line and needed medical attention. Same goes for people I've seen at road races and time trials who throw up right after the finish and take hours to recover. Despite (or maybe because of?) some reasonably good results in races I've done, I've never been able to push myself quite so far that I've vomited or collapsed afterwards. There's just something in my brain that won't let that happen — my brain will shut down my body's effort long before reaching my physical limit. Yet some people seem to be missing that auto shut-off switch?


text:
Pentagon Seeks to Knit Foreign Bases Into ISIS-Foiling Network
Mark Mazzetti
(The New York Times) – As American intelligence agencies grapple with the expansion of the Islamic State beyond its headquarters in Syria, the Pentagon has proposed a new plan to the White House to build up a string of military bases in Africa, Southwest Asia and the Middle East.
The bases could be used for collecting intelligence and carrying out strikes against the terrorist group's far-flung affiliates.
The growth of the Islamic State's franchises — at least eight militant groups have pledged loyalty to the network's leaders so far — has forced a debate within the Obama administration about how to distinguish between the affiliates that pose the most immediate threat to the United States and Europe and others that are more regionally focused. The regional groups, some officials say, may have opportunistically adopted the Islamic State's brand to bolster their local clout and global stature.
In the midst of that debate, senior military officials have told the White House that the network of bases would serve as hubs for Special Operations troops and intelligence operatives who would conduct counterterrorism missions for the foreseeable future. The plan would all but ensure what Pentagon officials call an "enduring" American military presence in some of the world's most volatile regions.
Administration officials said that the proposal for the new basing system, presented to the White House this fall by Gen. Martin E. Dempsey during his final days as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was not intended to be a specific Pentagon proposal to combat the affiliates of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. The officials said that it was meant primarily as a re-examination of how the military positions itself for future counterterrorism missions, but that the growing concern about a metastasizing Islamic State threat has lent new urgency to the discussions.
The White House declined to comment about continuing internal deliberations. The plan has met with some resistance from State Department officials concerned about a more permanent military presence across Africa and the Middle East, according to American officials familiar with the discussion. Career diplomats have long warned about the creeping militarization of American foreign policy as the Pentagon has forged new relationships with foreign governments eager for military aid.
Officials said the proposal has been under discussion for some time, including this week during a White House meeting with some members of President Obama's cabinet. Shortly after General Dempsey retired in September, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter referred to the plan in a little-noticed speech in Washington. "Because we cannot predict the future, these regional nodes — from Morón, Spain, to Jalalabad, Afghanistan — will provide forward presence to respond to a range of crises, terrorist and other kinds," Mr. Carter said. "These will enable unilateral crisis response, counterterror operations, or strikes on high-value targets."
Pentagon planners do not see the new approach as particularly costly by military standards. One official estimated it could be in the "low millions of dollars," mainly to pay for military personnel, equipment and some base improvements.
For the approach to have any chance of success, analysts said, regional American commanders, diplomats and spies will have to work closely together and with Washington — something that does not always happen now — to combat threats that honor no borders. "You can't just leave this on cruise control," said Vikram J. Singh, a former official at the Pentagon and State Department who is now vice president for national security and international policy at the Center for American Progress.
Officials said that the Pentagon's proposed new architecture of bases would include four "hubs" — including expanding existing bases in Djibouti and Afghanistan — and smaller "spokes," or more basic installations, in countries that could include Niger and Cameroon, where the United States now carries out unarmed surveillance drone missions, or will soon.
The hubs would range in size from about 500 American troops to 5,000 personnel, and the likely cost would be "several million dollars" a year, mostly in personnel expenses, Pentagon officials said. They would also require the approval of the host nation.
The military already has much of the basing in place to carry out an expansion. Over the past dozen years, the Pentagon has turned what was once a decrepit French Foreign Legion base in Djibouti, in the Horn of Africa, into a sprawling headquarters housing 2,000 American troops for military operations in East Africa and Yemen.
Similarly, the American military has been using a constellation of airstrips in Africa, including Ethiopia and Burkina Faso, for surveillance missions flown by drones or turboprop planes designed to look like civilian aircraft, to collect intelligence about militant groups across the northern part of the continent.
The Pentagon plan also calls for a hub in the Middle East, possibly Erbil, in northern Iraq, where many of the 3,500 American troops in Iraq are based.
The new approach would try to bring an ad hoc series of existing bases into one coherent system that would be able to confront regional threats from the Islamic State, Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups — including possible attacks against American embassies, like the assault on the diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012. It would also ensure that the bases would receive regular financing in the annual Pentagon budget and it could lengthen — and make more predictable — troop deployments, especially among Special Operations forces who often rotate assignments every several months.
A senior Pentagon official said the proposal was still very much in its early stages, with some officials advocating a larger string of new bases in West Africa, and others, mindful of African fears about a large American military footprint on the continent, saying the main hub for West Africa would actually be located in southern Europe. Any American bases in Africa, American officials said, might have approximately 500 soldiers.
The size of the bases will most likely depend on the regional threat. American officials said intelligence was still murky on how the various affiliates are tied to the Islamic State leadership, and there are some disagreements between spy agencies.
For instance, American officials said that the intelligence agencies were generally unanimous in their view that the Islamic State affiliate in Libya and some of the other franchises had strong ties to the group's leaders in the Islamic State's self-declared caliphate in Syria and Iraq, and that they had a desire to carry out its agenda of attacking the West.
But there is greater uncertainty about groups like Boko Haram, a Nigerian-based Islamic militancy responsible for years of destruction in north-central Africa. The group announced its allegiance to the Islamic State this year, but American officials have given conflicting statements about the strength of Boko Haram's bonds to the Islamic State's top leadership.
Gen. Joseph E. Dunford Jr., who took over in October from General Dempsey as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told Congress this month that he saw little to distinguish among the Islamic State affiliates. He said that the Islamic State's inclusion of Boko Haram and other militant groups into its fold was part of a "global dynamic."
"These threats are difficult to confine to one place," he said, adding that was why the United States needed to strike at the Islamic State not only in Iraq and Syria but also in "other places where it is."
But Gen. David M. Rodriguez, commander of the Pentagon's Africa Command, said around the same time that he did not see strong ties between the Islamic State and Boko Haram, which he indicated still saw itself as a regionally focused group.
One American intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was discussing classified assessments about the various groups, said that the Islamic State "does not vet the new affiliates" with the same scrutiny that Al Qaeda does, and generally welcomes any opportunities to build its global brand.
The affiliates, the official said, are a mélange of different identities and agendas — and some might not be "completely subsumed" into the Islamic State.
While he said that some groups were the result of active efforts by the Islamic State to expand its global presence, others like Boko Haram and the Islamic State branch in the Sinai Peninsula were products of local circumstances and were seeking to exploit the group's resources and prominence.
They are flying the Islamic State flag, he said, "in an attempt to elevate their cause."

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Integrated security solutions manufacturer TDSi has appointed its new Strategic Business Development Manager, Gary Aimson and Marketing Assistant, Sophie Wilkins to facilitate the company's ongoing growth, in its latest round of recruitment.
The continued expansion of the TDSi team follows the recent announcement of the company's new Graduate Software Developer; Thomas Bird and Senior Export Technical Support Engineer; Kevan Fry. Other new recruits over the last few months have included Officer Manager; Kathryn Sutcliffe, Exports Customer Care Advisor; Jody Hayter and TDSi France's new Paris-based Assistante Technico-Commerciale; Samia Dali.


text:
Home Drama Through a Cloud
Through a Cloud
Author: By Jack Shepherd
Through a Cloud quantity
SKU: BK2426 Categories: Drama, Full-length, Plays Tag: Nick Hern Books
A battle of wits between Cromwell and John Milton, by the well-known actor Jack Shepherd.
1656. Two revolutionaries meet in the woods at Hampton Court: the blind poet, John Milton, and his long-term comrade, Oliver Cromwell. But after the bitter ravages of revolution, regicide and civil war, freedom is hard to come to terms with.
Jack Shepherd's play Through a Cloud was first staged at the Drum Theatre, Plymouth, in 2004.
'Manages to find not only humanity but also humour in two of the most important yet inscrutable figures in English history… maintains a grip on both the head and the heart'
— Metro
'Orchestrates a fascinating clash between two types of revolutionary'
— Independent
'Intriguing insight into life in England several years after the end of the bloody civil war… outstanding'
— Evening Mail
History and Criticism, Theatre
The Ground On Which I Stand
Adaptations, Drama, Full-length, Plays, Political / social themes, Significant female role/s
We are Three Sisters
Drama, Full-length, Plays
Comedy, Drama, Full-length, Plays, Young adult
The Three Musketeers (stage version)
No Naughty Bits
Drama, Full-length, Multicultural themes, Plays, Political / social themes
The Empty Quarter
Rosmersholm
Drama, Full-length, Plays, Young adult
Drama, Plays, Screenplays
Drama, Full-length, Nick Hern Books, Plays, Political / social themes, Significant female role/s


This TV cable is constructed of coax cable with male to male connectors. It is supplied with a gender changer / Coupler to suit any situation where a male to female cable is required. The coupler could als be used to join the cable to en existing cable to form an extension. All contacts are gold flashed for a higher quality connection.


text:
Redigerare är en redaktionell medarbetare, journalist eller grafiker, på dagstidningar, tidskrifter, etermedier, eller andra arbetsplatser, som sammanställer nyhets- eller featurematerial till färdig form för tryck eller sändning. Det inkluderar texter, bilder (foton och grafik), ljud, eller film. Till sin hjälp har redigeraren särskilda datorprogram.

Tidningsredigerare använder oftast antingen Adobe Indesign eller QuarkXPress, radioredigerare SoundForge och TV- och webb-TV-redigerare FinalCut eller Avid ProTools.

Större tidningar har ofta speciella textredigerare, som enbart ägnar sig åt att korrigera och förbättra texterna.

Historia
Innan desktop publishing-tekniken blev vanlig på 1990-talet, var det, på en dagstidning, redigerarens uppgift att dels göra korrigeringar i skribentens manus (som var skrivet med skrivmaskin på ett manusblad) samt att formulera rubriker, dels att utforma sidans layout på ett layoutblad (eller "laja"), som sedan lämnades över till sätteriet.

I dag har redigeraren ersatt flera gamla yrkesgrupper, både journalistiska och grafiska. En redigerare på en mellanstor dagstidning gör idag, med datorernas hjälp,  samma arbete som förr utfördes av bland annat redigerare, reprofotografer, sättare och korrekturläsare.

Källhänvisningar

Massmedia
Yrken inom media

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
Q: Remove all substrings between angle brackets In the following string
test_string = "This is a te<8239154>st str<ass31>ing."

I would like to replace all occurences of the form <xxx> with an empty string.
I know that I can use gsub("<8239154>", "", "test_string ") but this cannot be applied dynamically to any string which is in between the comparison signs. How can I achieve this?

A: You can use
gsub("<[^>]*>", "", test_string)
gsub("<[^<>]*>", "", test_string)

The <[^>]*> regex matches <, then any zero or more chars other than > and then it matches a > char. The <[^<>]*> pattern is similar except that it does not allow < in between < and > (this can be handy to remove innermost occurrences of < and >).
See this regex demo.
Note that in case you need to remove only word chars enclosed with < and > symbols, you can use a more specific solution, namely
gsub("<\\w+>", "", test_string)

where \w+ matches one or more letter, digits or underscores. See this regex demo.


text:
"""add projects table

Revision ID: 438b950c4c9a
Revises: 0e40ea638be8
Create Date: 2018-01-10 16:21:34.598966

"""
from alembic import op
import sqlalchemy as sa

# revision identifiers, used by Alembic.
revision = '438b950c4c9a'
down_revision = '0e40ea638be8'
branch_labels = None
depends_on = None

def upgrade():
    op.execute("""
        CREATE TABLE projects (
            id UUID PRIMARY KEY DEFAULT uuid_generate_v4(),
            name TEXT NOT NULL,
            keys text[]
        );
    """)

def downgrade():
    op.execute("""
        DROP TABLE projects;
    """)

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
function ddg_spice_translate_detect_phrase (api_result) {

    var params = get_params("detect", api_result);

    // translate multi-word phrase
    if (params.phrase_len > 1 && params.from && params.to) {
        var endpoint = '/js/spice/translate/from_to_phrase/';
        nrj(endpoint + params.short_from + '/' + params.short_to + '/' + params.phrase);
    }
}


Before finding out the tips on how to get rid of leg cramps, you should perceive the definition and reasons leading to this ailment. Cramps are a sudden muscle spasticity, causing severe pain in the muscles.... Sleep more. Usually soreness in the body indicates that muscles in the sore area are undergoing repair. Muscle repair takes place mostly when you sleep.
The How To Get Rid Of Muscle Strain Leg And Hip Muscles with Treatment For Strained Hip Flexor and Hip Bursitis From Running that Hip Pain And Back Pain Hip Bursitis From Running between Pain In Lower Back Hips Hip Pain And Back Pain then Standing Hip Flexor Stretch between Leg And Hip Muscles with There are 3 known golf postures, the N, C, and... Sleep more. Usually soreness in the body indicates that muscles in the sore area are undergoing repair. Muscle repair takes place mostly when you sleep.
These muscles connect onto the inside of the knee so stretching this muscle group reduces compression and the inward pull of the leg. Hold this static stretch a �... Sleep more. Usually soreness in the body indicates that muscles in the sore area are undergoing repair. Muscle repair takes place mostly when you sleep.
Learn Muscle Leg Pain Injured Hip Flexor then Causes Of Pain In Hips and Sore Left Hip Sore Left Hip that Training Hip Flexors then Hip Pain Bursitis Treatment between Sore Left Hip Cures For Bursitis Of The Hip and I Pulled A Muscle In My Thigh with What Could Cause Hip Pain Infomation.


banner (468 x 92 px) and text to go with it. Please report dead links.
We are bringing Swoop Virtual Airlines to the people who love to fly on VATSIM or Offline. If you enjoy flying the 737, apply today. All pilot applicants must have a vaild VATSIM ID.
We simulate the real world Operations of Swoop Airlines.
We have a custom ACARS for all pilot reporting. You will be able to bid on real world routes within the custom Acars.
Swoop Virtual Airlines has over 10 destinations that they operate year round and growing.
- 174 real world airlines from all around the world.
- Charter system where you can fly one of 109 different aircraft wherever you desire.
- Unique and professional Dispatch Centre designed and tested by real pilots.
- A plethora of tours where you can earn more points which allow you to level up.
We welcome pilots from all over the globe that want to fly what they want, where they want, when they want. Although we have ranks and awards, emphasis is placed on the quality of PIREPS. Traditional VAs place heavy emphasis on flight hours and ranks, although we track this as well, it says very little about the quality of the flight. Our automatic PIREP system grades each flight to ensure our virtual passengers experience nothing less than excellent. So, sure you can jump on the flight deck of a 747 or 777, but what is your quality score? Landing FPM? We have a saying here, fly quality over quantity.
Our Values are simple. We are committed to excellence, and most importantly to our pilots.
MetroAir Virtual Airlines has been serving the flight simulator community since early 2006. We bring a different concept to the virtual airline pilot by providing a real world simulated airline experience that enables you to grow with us. MetroAir operates hubs in Boston, Dallas & Los Angeles.
American Airlines Virtual is the most prestigious American Airlines VA, with over 600 active pilots, hand selected and time tested staff members, and innovative web technology. Our executive staff has combined experience of over 20 years of Virtual Airline management. Over the course of that time, we have perfected our services to meet the needs of our crew.
Take a moment to explore our website and see why so many pilots choose to fly AAvirtual!
Founded in September of 1998, Atlantic Sun continues to strive for excellence, and we continue to meet our ultimate goal each and every day – to provide pilots with a realistic flight experience while maintaining an organized and professional environment. Atlantic Sun Airways is definitely a one of-a-kind virtual airline. Offering nearly unlimited numbers of flights per day, using different state-of-the-art aircraft, we provide an enjoyable and fulfilling virtual pilot experience.
Join today - we would love to have you as part of the team. Atlantic Sun Airways… 'Expect more'.
that fly as realistically possible. We offer liveries or merges for FSX payware aircraft where we have a freeware version in our fleet.
We support flights on both the VATSIM & IVAO networks and have automatic flight logging in order to save you the hassle of manually filing your flight reports.
Pilot participation is the key at Canadian Xpress® and we encourage this by hosting several on-line events every month. We also have monthly competitions that will put your flying skills to the test, contests, pilot's forum for Canadian Xpress® members and much more.
We are bringing you the largest regional virtual airline to the people who love to fly on VATSIM or Offline and enjoy the regional aircraft experience.
All pilot applicants must have a valid VATSIM ID.
We simulate the real world Operations of all North America Regional Airlines as closely as we can to include Delta Connection, United Express, American Eagle, US Airways, Alaska and Charter Operations Etc.
We have a custom ACARS for all pilot reporting. You will be able to look up real world route schedules from flightaware.
Regional Airways Alliance has a combined 1,337 destinations across North America, Canada and Mexico as well as some seasonal flights.
Formerly Virtual ExpressJet Airlines & Virtual SkyWest Airlines.
Intercity Airways is a large regional virtual airline with bases in London City, Edinburgh, Birmingham and Düsseldorf, offering over 900 daily flights to 104 destinations across Europe, using PMDG BAe Jetstream 41 and Majestic Dash 8 Q400 in FSX (there will be jets in the future), each with detailed operating procedures (SOP). Flights with Intercity are generally less than two hours, so our pilots spend more time flying in and out of exciting airports, and less time monitoring instruments and watching clouds!
Our exclusive Intercity ACARS provides flight tracking, pilot logbook with maps and graphs, live news and schedule search. Intercity's pilots benefit from partnerships with renowned industry names (FS2Crew, UK2000, VATSIM, vRoute, Sky Blue Radio) and friendly community forums.
Lynx Airways Worldwide is the second oldest virtual airline in the world. We opened our hangar doors on July 1, 1992 and have since been in full operation stretching through six regional Hubs. As we continue today, we at Lynx Airways provide you with a unique experience that challenges your imagination. You can select from our established flight schedules and take scheduled flights around the world. Or, hop into your favorite aircraft, climb to altitude and just take a left. Come visit us and take a tour around our Award winning website and come join Lynx Airways Here.
Noble Air is a virtual airline made up of Aviation Enthusiasts flying all over the virtual world in Flight Simulator. Noble Air caters for all types of flying including set Assigned Airline Flights, Simulated Charter Flights, Challenge Flights and Air Races. Noble Air exists in all 4 corners of the globe in the way of Hubs creating a strong local community along with the backing of the Noble Global community.
Pacific Airways is an international virtual airline, which has been in operation since 1997. Headquartered in Seattle, WA, we offer over 750 flights a day from seven hubs including Seattle, Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, Miami, New York and internationally from London, England. The airline also operates a cargo division from Los Angeles, New York, and London. Pacific Airways facilitates easy connections throughout smaller markets in its route system with Pacific Blue, its connection carrier; operating regionally to smaller airports in the US and Europe. Pacific offers some of the most modern aircraft available and carries one of the largest and most diverse fleets in the virtual aviation community. Experienced staff, excellent pilots, comprehensive training and support, and a strong presence will make you feel apart instantly. Join Pacific Airways Here.
Southwest Virtual Airlines was formed in December 2008 as a collective idea. Their vision was to create a virtual airline that was designed for the pilots, and not to compete with other virtual aviation organizations. This concept allowed for the creating of a superior community in which anyone interested in the aviation and flight simulation hobby was welcome. Come find out why over 600 pilots fly with us. We are a proud partner and training provider with We support FS2002 , FS2004, FSX and X-Plane. We also have our own custom ACARS system. Join by clicking HERE Like us on Facebook.
The VA has been founded in November 2012. Our goal is to provide a platform for our common hobby, flying virtual "as real as possible". We have made it to our task to support the online flying and therefore prefer the online IVAO network. In order to offer our VA for as many pilots, there is the wide range of areas to choose from the interested pilot.
Are you looking for a VA that has a bit of structure but is very laid-back at the same time? Are you searching for a VA whose members are loyal, whose administration is solid (TCA has been in existence since 1995), and whose members willing share ideas and help each other?
Then check out TCA at the link posted. Lots of liveries, lots of different aircraft, lots of different routes from short mail runs to international flights. Join Tradewind Caribbean Airlines by clicking HERE.
Welcome to US Airways Virtual Airlines! Our goal is to simulate US Airways flight operations as realistically as possible and are proud to offer a fun and relaxed environment for our members to enjoy the excitement of flight. If you haven't already joined the USAVA family, we welcome you to apply by clicking here. JOIN US.
Virtual American was founded in December of 2013 by both real world pilots and flight enthusiasts. Each staff member strives daily for realism and fun like no other. Teamwork has always been a part of our philosophy. We strive to create an environment in which any pilot can feel comfortable among people with the same hobby and interest.
At Virtual American, we will continue to improve the experience for all of our pilots. With enhanced ACARS capabilities, flight schedules that reflect the real American Airlines and its OneWorld partners, and staff that are constantly there for you, Virtual American strives to be the number one Virtual Airline in the community. Like us on facebook.
Welcome to Virtual Norwegian, Scandinavia's greatest low cost airline!
We have a fast growing network with 12 bases spread over Europe, with the main focus area in Scandinavia.
Our operations are mixed with everything from shorter domestic flights to longer flights reaching other continents, such as Asia and the US. The seasonal changes to our route portfolio also creates a high diversity.
The fleet consists of Boeing 737 aircraft, both the -300 and the -800 variant, with the -300 variant being replaced as new aircraft enters and the Boeing 787-8. You are also welcome to fly the MD80 in our historic fleet.
If you own a copy of FS2004, FSX or XPlane, you are more than welcome to apply for a career with us HERE. Like us on facebook.
Southwest Virtual offers you the virtual pilot the opportunity to emulate the real world Southwest Airlines routes and schedules through our ACARS system or by flying online with . If you are interested in becoming a member of our team then please click HERE to join.
Virtual United Airlines began Operational planning in October 2010 and opened its doors in May 2011 with more than 8000 United and Star Alliance routes available to our Pilots.
We believe that flight simulation is a hobby therefore, we do not have check rides. The whole purpose is to have fun!
We are accepting Pilot Applications, and enrollment into the VATSIM ATO Pilot Rating Training Program , if you are brand new to flight simulation or experienced, we welcome all. Join us today by clicking HERE. Like us on facebook.


text:
Q: If I release a program under GPL, do I have to continue to do so? Consider this scenario:

*

*I am developing a program FooSuite that uses a GPL-licenced library QuuxTools

*I release the program FooSuite 1.0 under GPL

Later on I discover that, for some reason, I need to licence the program to someone on different terms.
Hence:

*

*I remove the dependency on GPL via QuuxTools, by either...

*

*rewriting the program not to use this library any longer

*obtaining a different licence for QuuxTools (if it's dual-licenced; see PyQt)

*I release FooSuite 1.1 under a non-GPL licence.
However, FooSuite 1.1 is still a derivative work from FooSuite 1.0. I understand that it's not legal for a stranger to do what I did, but am I myself - as the owner of FooSuite - free from this restriction?

A: So long as you retain the copyright to all the code that is part of FooSuite (this gets problematic if you've incorporated code from the community unless you got the contributors to assign their copyright to you), you are free to distribute the code under as many different licenses as you'd like.  So you could release FooSuite 1.1 under a different license.
Of course, someone else could take the code to FooSuite 1.0 that is already released under the GPL and create their own OpenFooSuite 1.1 that would be under the GPL and incorporate whatever functionality you added for the 1.1 release.  If there is a reasonably large community interested in FooSuite, it can be very difficult for your closed source version to compete with the open version.


Gurugram April 17 (IANS) A couple and a woman all in their 30s were found murdered on Tuesday in the Aravali foothills in Gurugram district police said on Tuesday.
Police said Chhidiya the husband of one of the deceased Komal was missing. The other two dead were Lakhan and his wife Sheela.
The two families hailing from Madhya Pradesh s Panna district were living in Ghamroj village near Bhondsi on the Sohna Road here for the last one year. They were labourers employed by a construction contractor.
A senior police officer said the four had gone on Monday to collect fuelwood and were reported missing.
"The throats of the three victims were slit. One of the bodies had an animal bite mark. No sharp object or weapon was seized from the spot " a police officer who did not wish to be named told IANS.
The post-mortem reports of the victims were awaited to find whether the two women were sexually assaulted before they were killed.
Though Chhidiya was the suspect nothing can be said till his arrest police said.


text:
Posted on September 21, 2019 September 21, 2019 by andreemurphy
Ring a Rosie
Dublin has only ever seen one other night like it. The night Ireland beat Romania on penalties in Italy and we were in the quarter finals of a World Cup. But this was different. This was ours. This team, who leave so many in their dust. This squad who dig deep when worthy adversaries figure out yeah they might be beatable, but not this year. No not this year. This year the Dublin football team wrote their name on the history books. Five in a row. The best there has ever been. The Dubs.
The tannoys started to play The Rare Aul Times. "Based on Songs and Stories, Heroes of Renown". Few could sing the words. Singing throats choked after the first few notes. After all those years of singing their hearts out with "Come on you Boys in Blue" and "Molly Malone" grown men and women could do nothing but sway, smile and hug through their tears. So many of those years of singing had been in disappointment, yet constantly encouraging Our Boys, because they believed. They believed in the Dubs. They sang them through the years of seeing the rest of Croke Park change beyond recognition except the Hill. Hill 16 stays the same. "Hill 16 Is Dublin Only". It isn't really but on their days it is. Apart from the rascals in other colours who chance their arms if they fancy a slagging and are prepared to take one. On the third Saturday night of September 2019 those singing throats choked with the memories of family, and friends no longer with us who would have loved this.
The sun was setting and had its own fireworks of reds and oranges across the Grand Canal. "Ah Ciarán Kilkenny was just in a different class tonight, did you see him?" "Did you see that pass Conno(lly) sent into him though", "But Cluxton", "Yeah Cluxton". It was like reverence. Each and every player gave it everything. It was 70 minutes of football for the ages by new heroes of renown. But Stephen Cluxton, the captain, the shy, undemonstrative leader is loved beyond words. There were those walking over Luke Kelly's bridge in Ballybough who think more of that Parnell's man than they do most of their own families. Universally admired, he has changed football and how it is played. It is his vision that consigned the days of defensive football to a chapter in the GAA's past tactics handbook. His placing of the ball into whatever pair of hands he picks. His courage in front of those sticks. He deserves player of the year. Feck it, player of the decade. But he won't get it. That will be reserved for one of those the ego he doesn't have is sacrificed for.
At my father's funeral I was told how he played for the Dublin minors. The man, smelling of porter and whiskey, told me of how my da loved the Dubs, how if life had've been different he could've played for Heffo's army, the glorious team of the '70s. Drink talk. But our house did come down with the paper sky blue and navy peaked caps in the summers of those years. A different era. But connected now to a new team for the ages. The old songs and the new sung together in harmony. Ring a Rosie, the Jacks are back.
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* rather than the PHP code itself.
ini_set('precision', 20); // For readability on 64 bit boxes.
Two functions to convert 16bit or 8bit binary to integer using two's complement. If input exceeds maximum bits, false is returned. Function is easily scalable to x bits by changing the hexadecimals.
Binary to Decimal conversion using the BCMath extension..
This will simply convert from Base-2 to Base-10 using BCMath (arbitrary precision calculation).
See also: my 'BCDec2Bin' function on the 'decbin' document.
A binary to decimal conversion function that takes advantage of the BC library functions to return decimal values of arbitrary length.
Input type must be a string in order to work properly.
The "smartbindec" function I wrote below will convert any binary string (of a reasonable size) to decimal. It will use two's complement if the leftmost bit is 1, regardless of bit length. If you are getting unexpected negative answers, try zero-padding your strings with sprintf("%032s", $yourBitString).


Get in touch with us and plan your trip to the Kölblwirt in Johnsbach right away.
Did you like what you've just read on our website? You are sure that the options you have in Johnsbach are exactly what you have been looking for? You would like to go ski touring in the winter or for a hike in the summer or you plan a family event or even a wedding? We are looking forward to welcoming you soon in the Kölblwirt Inn!


text:
North Muir är en kulle i Storbritannien.   Den ligger i rådsområdet The Scottish Borders och riksdelen Skottland, i den centrala delen av landet,  km norr om huvudstaden London. Toppen på North Muir är  meter över havet.

Terrängen runt North Muir är kuperad åt nordost, men åt sydväst är den platt. Den högsta punkten i närheten är Catstone,  meter över havet,  km norr om North Muir. Runt North Muir är det glesbefolkat, med  invånare per kvadratkilometer. Närmaste större samhälle är Livingston,  km norr om North Muir. Trakten runt North Muir består i huvudsak av gräsmarker.

Kustklimat råder i trakten. Årsmedeltemperaturen i trakten är  °C. Den varmaste månaden är juli, då medeltemperaturen är  °C, och den kallaste är januari, med  °C.

Kommentarer

Källor

Kullar i Skottland
Berg i Storbritannien 200 meter över havet eller högre
Kontrollbehov inkommande wikilänkar


text:
"Clockwork Angels: The Novel" Review at Power Windows
Hitting bookstores everywhere September 4th, Rush fans around the world will finally get their hands on the long awaited and much anticipated novelization of Clockwork Angels by Kevin J. Anderson, from a story and lyrics by Neil Peart.
While many of the early reviews of the Clockwork Angels novelization hold it as a fine work of fiction which just happens to be based on the Rush album of the same name, I, like most other Rush fans out there, view this novelization as a rare, perhaps once in a lifetime opportunity to see the full lyrical vision of a Rush album brought to life.
Clockwork Angels tells the story of a naive young man whose dreams of adventure set him on a path which forever changes how he views the world. Along the way via his travels to various exotic locations we meet The Pedlar, The Anarchist, The Carnies (including "a goddess, with wings on her heels"), The Wreckers, and of course The Watchmaker and the Clockwork Angels, along with a few other characters not mentioned in the album. For a Rush fan who is already very familiar with the album, the novel paints the rest of the story, filling in the gaps between songs if you will, fleshing out the lyrics, and drawing the story from point A to point B.
In addition, besides drawing from and expanding upon the lyrics of the album Clockwork Angels to tell the story, author Kevin J. Anderson also liberally sprinkles the novel with lyrics taken from the vast Rush back-catalog. While at first glance this would seem to be a lovely addition to the novel, the results are mixed. Although the occasional subtle reference would bring a smile to my face, I did find that some of the references to be a tad overdone.
The novel itself is brief, clocking in at only 290 pages which includes all of Hugh Syme's original album artwork and more (one treat is a new illustration of a city wall which reads "The Watchmaker, Est. MMCXII" [I'll give you a moment while you remember your Roman numerals...]). While the novel does a fine job expanding on the album, the fast pacing of the story itself seems to have left little room for the author to build upon the relationships of the characters. This likely may have been intentional on the author's part, but this Rush fan would have liked something even more epic!
Posted Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Jag2112 August 28, 2012 at 7:48 AM
I know exactly what you mean about the 'sprinkling' of Rush references in the novel, Eric. Judging solely from the 3 chapter preview booklet, it was nice to see the addition of some lyrical 'sightings' in the novel, but some of them seemed forced as well...
Still looking forward to reading the novel when it arrives...
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text:
Antonio de Azcona Imberto (Estella, Corona de España, 1618 – Buenos Aires, gobernación del Río de la Plata, 19 de febrero de 1700) era un religioso que fuera elegido como el cuarto obispo de Buenos Aires desde 1676 hasta 1700, el primero que provenía de las filas del clero secular.

Biografía

Antonio de Azcona Imberto nació en 1618 en la localidad de Estella del Reino de Navarra que formaba parte de la Corona española. En 1643 se trasladó al Virreinato de Nueva España acompañando al nuevo obispo de Yucatán, monseñor Juan Alonso de Ocón. Tras licenciarse en teología en 1644 fue ordenado sacerdote.

Acompañó a Ocón a la diócesis de Cuzco, donde se desempeñó como cura beneficiado de Anta, visitador general y juez eclesiástico del obispado del Cuzco. Cuando Ocón se trasladó años más tarde a Charcas como arzobispo lo acompañó nuevamente y fue nombrado párroco, vicario y juez eclesiástico de la ciudad de Potosí.

Se lo consideraba como un hombre virtuoso, caritativo y modesto lo que le valió el ofrecimiento de una canonjía en la catedral de La Paz, que rechazó, y en 1671 su candidatura para obispo auxiliar de Lima.

Habiendo prosperado ese nombramiento, el 19 de octubre de 1676 fue elegido por el nuevo papa Inocencio XI, como obispo de la diócesis de Buenos Aires, vacante desde 1673.

Azcona arribó a su nueva sede el 6 de noviembre de 1676 pero tomó posesión recién el 16 de mayo de 1677 y en septiembre recibió la consagración episcopal en Córdoba del obispo Francisco de Borja.

Una de sus primeras medida fue gestionar ante el rey la apertura efectiva del Hospital de San Martín, que si bien en teoría se hallaba instalado en realidad no operaba por lo que los enfermos de la ciudad estaban abandonados a su suerte.

En 1678 informó al Rey acerca de las costumbres de los indígenas de su región y de la dificultad de contar con misioneros sin contar con recursos adecuados. En 1681 constituyó la Capellanía de Nuestra Señora de Luján. Ese mismo año inició la visita pastoral de su extensa diócesis, finalizándola en 1682.

En el curso de la misma visitó la ciudad de Esteco (Nuestra Señora de Talavera), e informó a la Corona que "es la más opulenta de aquella provincia del Tucumán, porque su distrito es el más fértil de toda ella, y en él tenían sus vecinos gruesas estancias de ganado que conducían a los minerales de Perú".

Durante su obispado intentó evangelizar a los indios pampas proyectando reducciones cercanas a la capital y se efectuaron intentos de los jesuitas para evangelizar la Patagonia. Al igual que su predecesor Cristóbal de la Mancha y Velazco promovió sin éxito la idea de reunir nuevamente las diócesis de Buenos Aires y la de Asunción ante la escasez de sacerdotes y la penuria económica.

Debió encarar la remodelación de la Catedral Metropolitana ya que pese a haberse inaugurado en 1671 los serios problemas de filtraciones y rajaduras que pronto surgieron, sumados a los daños causados por un temporal estival en 1682, hicieron caer la torre y obligaron a rehacer en buena medida la edificación.

En las obras iniciadas en octubre de 1682 y supervisadas diariamente por Azcona trabajaron más de 30 indígenas tupíes y más tarde, otros provenientes de la reducción de Santa Cruz de los Quilmes. En 1693 se concluyeron "las tres naves del cuerpo principal levantada sobre arcos de cal y ladrillo y cubierta de tejas".

El 12 de julio de 1691 se creó en el ámbito de la Catedral la Hermandad de San Pedro con el objeto de brindar asistencia a los sacerdotes ancianos o enfermos.

Azcona murió en Buenos Aires el 19 de febrero de 1700. El Cabildo eclesiástico nombró provisor del obispado al deán Domingo Rodríguez Armas quien permaneció al frente de la sede vacante hasta 1713.

En abril de 1704 el rey Felipe V de España propuso al fraile agustino Juan Bautista Sicardo pero su candidatura no se sostuvo. En junio de 1708 se propuso al fraile trinitario Pedro de Fajardo, quien tras un primer rechazo, accedió en agosto de 1710.

Fajardo tuvo inconvenientes en el inicio de su viaje y renunció en 1711, por lo que al conocer el Consejo de Indias su renuncia propuso al franciscano fray Gabriel de Arregui y Gutiérrez, nativo de Buenos Aires, quien en enero de 1714 desde Córdoba dio instrucciones al deán Domingo Rodríguez de Armas para asumir en su nombre el gobierno de la diócesis.

Al no tenerse noticias en Roma de la renuncia de Fajardo ni del consiguiente pedido de anulación del Rey de su nombramiento, el 22 de mayo de 1713 el papa nombró obispo de Buenos Aires a Fajardo quien esta vez aceptó el ofrecimiento, con lo que la designación de Arregui fue revocada por la corona y finalmente se lo destinó para el obispado del Cuzco.

Notas y referencias

Bibliografía

 , J.; Cabildo y élite local: Buenos Aires en el siglo XVII, Revista Latinoamericana de Historia Económica y Social (Lima).

Enlaces externos

 Arzobispado de Buenos Aires.
 Catedral de Buenos Aires.

Obispos de la ciudad de Buenos Aires
Nacidos en Estella


The IC LM386 is a 8-pin tiny power amplifier chip, specially made for operating under relatively low voltage parameters, yet provide considerable amplification.
IC LM386 amplifier circuit becomes suitable for applying in small low power audio gadgets like in FM radios, door bells, telephones etc.
In order to make the IC better with its response, its pin#1 and 8 have been attributed with a gain control facility which may be set externally.
Gain simply means the capacity or the amplifying level of the device up to which it is able to amplify the applied input low signal audio input.
When the above pin outs are kept unconnected to anything, the internal 1.35K resistor sets the gain of the IC to 20.
If a capacitor is joined across the above pin outs, the gain is suddenly lifted to 200.
The gain may be simply made adjustable by connecting a pot in series with the above explained capacitor across the pin 1 and 8.
The following figure shows a typical IC LM386 amplifier circuit having the bare minimum number of components required to make the IC operate at its internally set level of gain 20.
The speaker used is a 2 watt, 8 Ohms type.
The input at Vin may be fed from any audio source such as a cell phone headphone socket, a CD/DVD player RCA L or R socket or any other similar source.
The pin Vs should be connected to +12V DC supply from an AC DC adapter or a home made transformer/bridge power supply unit.
Pin #4 should be connected to ground or the negative of the power supply.
The earth wire or the negative wire from the input audio source should also be connected to the above negative of the power supply.
The input pin#2 goes to a 10K pot which becomes the volume control, one of its end terminals is picked for receiving the input signal while the other end is connected to ground, the center one goes to the hot end of the IC.
The speaker is connected to in #8 via a high value blocking capacitor, the resistor/capacitor arrangement connected across pin #5 and ground has been included for frequency compensation and to provide greater stability to the circuit.
I like this circuit, thank you. I was wondering what would be required to add headphones?
Thank you, glad you liked it, you can simply replace the shown speaker with a headphone, just make sure to reduce the volume control suitably so that the input power does not exceed the headphone specs.
Thank you for your reply, that is easy enough.
Thank you. Would you know where to find actual schematics for a transformer input?
sorry, I do not have much idea about it.
Good write up on the LM 386. One question. Can I use a transformer with the secondary connected to inputs 2 and 3 as an input device. If so could I use an 8 Ohm primary to 1300 Ohm secondary and get some extra gain?
Thanks Hans, I don't think that would work, because the input of the amp is already is too sensitive and set at high gain, therefore adding more voltage at the input side would result in distortion at the output side.
I do not plan to connect pins 1 and 8 with a cap, I just wish to get rid of common mode noise. As alternative could I use a 600 Ohm:600 Ohm audio transformer connected with say 10 uF caps to 2 and 3?
Hi bro, i want to increase the outpt of LM 386 to around 5W using either Transistors or Mosfets so do have any idea how to configure the driver stage using these ????
Irshad, if you force the IC to work above it's specified rating then the output will distort.
so you will need to keep the input music only upto that level which does not exceed the amps max handling capacity.
Sir, i made the circuit with 5volt power from usb port. i had no 0.1uf capacitor i used 10uf capacitor. sound is very good, when i loud the sound, The speaker's voice was burst۔ what is the solution for this????? Sound should be clear on loudness.
Can multiple num of 386 be conected in series to get greater power?
i have no idea about it so can't suggest….
how much voltage(maximum) include in this ckt..?


text:
At Asylum Digital, we are here for one reason – "WE LOVE THIS!"
As you can see, each individual on our staff is an artist, musician, songwriter or "straight-up audio junkie" by nature. It is our passion for excellence that has attracted all sorts of projects & artists to us since day one. Regardless of budget, each and every project is treated with the same care and priority as if it was our very own.
Scott Slagle - owner/engineer/producer
Scott is a 20+ year veteran of the Carolinas music scene. During those years, Scott worked as a freelance engineer / producer at The Bassment, Chung King, D&D, DARP, Firehouse, The Hit Factory, HUSH Studios, Reflection Sound Studios and The Sonic Cafe'. In large part, Scott cut his teeth on the sound of "East-Coast" Hip-Hop, working alongside industry heavyweights such as Eddie Sancho, Tone & Poke, Kieran Walsh and "Prince" Charles Alexander.
In 1998, Scott opened the doors of Asylum Digital and has worked extensively with indie and major label acts of all genres. With hard work and a genuine respect for the craft, he completed a new studio build in late 2012.
Scott is a founding member of Electric Mountain, a team of producers that consists of Stephen Barrett, Dave Haire, Christopher Holston & Jason Michel. Scott is 1/5 of the band Super Ape (handling keyboards, percussion, production & programming) & is a voting member of the Audio Engineering Society (AES).
Influences: David Axelrod, Roy Ayers, Beastie Boys, The Beatles, The Bomb Squad, Brainfeeder, James Brown, Miles Davis, Devante, Jimmy Douglass, Gang-Starr, Rudy Van Gelder, Grandmaster Flash, Al Green, Herbie Hancock, Rod Hui, Jean Michel Jarre, Glyn Johns, Quincy Jones, Teo Macero, Marley Marl, Native Tongues, Parliament Funkadelic, Paul C, Pete Rock, Bob Powers, Prince, Public Enemy, Rick Rubin, Run DMC, Sly and The Family Stone, Larry Smith, Charles Stepney, Stones Throw, Joe Tarsia & Bob Thiele.
email – sslagle@asylumdigital.com
telephone – 704.492.9289 (main)
Shawn Milligan - assistant engineer/producer
Shawn "S. Millie" Milligan is the newest member to the Asylum Digital team. In 2007, he started recording regional artists in the Charleston, South Carolina area. After deciding (in 2010) that sound would be his career path, he moved to Orlando, Florida to study the recording arts.
While in the Orlando area, Shawn also worked as a freelance engineer at both KDS Studios and Green Room Studios. There, his focus was primarily on the sound of "modern" Hip-Hop and R&B – mixing records for Maybach Music Group, 1017 Brick Squad & Atlantic Records. Shawn soon earned his degree at Full Sail in late 2013, and in the summer of 2014 joined the staff of Asylum Digital as assistant engineer.
Shawn is also 1/2 of the production team Millie & Frazier & an in-house producer for Aces Nation.
Influences: Black Eyed Peas, Cardo Got Wings, DJ Khaled, Dr. Dre, Drumma Boy, Epik the Dawn, Gym Class Heroes, Ryan Leslie, Lex Luger, Lil' Wayne, Mannie Fresh, Maroon 5, Jason Mraz, The Roots, Noah "40" Shebib, Scott Storch, Three 6 Mafia, Kanye West and Young Jeezy.
email – s.milligan@asylumdigital.com
telephone – 843.364.9811 (cell) / 704.492.9289 (main)
Stephen Barrett - graphic artist/web design/producer
Stephen "Steve Thuro" Barrett started out as part of the areas hip-hop/drum & bass DJ scene in the late 90's.
Scott saw Stephen perform at the 2002 DMC Southeast semi-finals. Impressed by his turntabalism and ear for perfection, Scott soon began to share with Stephen the fundamentals of studio recording and production.
Since then Stephen has grown tremendously as an artist and has become very skilled at producing hip-hop and electronic music in general. Stephen is a founding member of Electric Mountain, a team of producers that consists of Scott Slagle, Dave Haire, Christopher Holston & Jason Michel. Stephen also handles drum machine & keyboards in the band Super Ape.
Stephen is also an amazing graphic artist /web desingner and is instrumental to the success of our graphics wing. We feel that Stephen's design work speaks for itself, making a strong statement with a clean aesthetic. His experience includes years of solid work (with a professional design education) & he can help you design your complete album layout and/or all of your promotional materials (handbills, flyers, posters, t-shirts, etc).
Influences: A Tribe Called Quest, Adult Swim, Alchemist, Aphrodite, The Beatles, DJ Krush, DJ Revolution, Gangstarr, Heiroglyphics, Hi Tek, J Dilla, Bob James, Just Blaze, Talib Kweli, MC Escher, Mos Def, Pete Rock, Phantom 45, Quannum Projects, Rawkus Records, Skills, Stretch Armstrong, Tes One, The Cool Kids, The Wu Tang Clan and Kanye West.
email – studioinfo@asylumdigital.com


There is no correct set of tools every developer should be using. The right tool is the one best suited to you.
Mashable has compiled a list of 10 exceptional free or open source apps for developers to help keep costs minimal, improve productivity and simplify workflow. You will find some old favorites listed; however, you might discover some new tools for your arsenal.