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Home / Specimen Designer Interview
What Makes the SPECIMEN Tick: A Design Interview with Steve Baldwin
We asked designer Steve Baldwin a series of questions about the design of his new board game 'Specimen.' To give you guys more of a feel for what this game is about, here are Steve's own words. Enjoy! – Toxic Bag
Toxic Bag: Tell us about the new look for Specimen.
Steve: I have always conceived of the game as a film. I was actually imagining scenes from an imaginary sci-fi film as I was coming up with the game events. So I decided early on that instead of having artwork done for the events and characters, I wanted live actors posed with costumes and props. Once playtesting had progressed to a point that I was happy with the game design, Joe and I hired a costume director, a photographer, and six actors, and started building props. The end result was a nine-hour photo shoot that produced some amazing pictures. Joe and I are now in the process of manipulating the photos and we hope to start releasing them in the next few weeks. I'm very excited about how they're coming out! Now if I can only find a place to store that flamethrower prop…
The Crew of the TCS Brown searches for the Specimen
Toxic Bag: How long does it generally take to play Specimen?
Steve: It was really important to me to make a game that can be played in one sitting. So far in play testing we've found that the game can be played as quickly as two hours, but three and a half hours seems to be the norm.
Toxic Bag: Is this a two-player game only? Can more than two people play?
Steve: I've been asked that question a lot during our open play tests. The current version of the game is for two players. I've explored optional rules that would make the game for 8 players (one person would control each crew member and the monster.) The biggest obstacles are distributing the cards and the fragile nature of the crew. I haven't worked out a system that would give every crewmember a card or two to play each turn that I like. Also, crewmembers die very easily, and I'm not sure how excited I would be if my character died 15 minutes into a 3 and half hour game…
Toxic Bag: Could you compare this game to some of the other Card-driven games on the market?
Steve: I would say that Specimen uses a hybrid version of the CDG game systems that are out there. The biggest difference is game scale. Most of the other CDG games that I have seen are historical/strategic games that cover an entire campaign or war involving millions of men and equipment. Specimen focuses on the events taking place on one spaceship. There are seven astronauts and one monster. That's it.
Since there are no reinforcements, each side has to be very careful not to waste the crew's lives or Specimen's wounds. I think that this limitation makes the game more intense in the mid to late stages. The players have to decide whether to play OPS and move or have an event happen. And that decision gets tougher when either the Crew is split up and alone or the Specimen only has one or two wounds left.
Toxic Bag: Please explain the Specimen attributes for us as well as how a player 'builds' their monster.
Steve: The current version of the game has 24 attributes to choose from. The Attributes can be broken down into three categories: offensive, defensive and special. Offensive attributes can be anything from a spikey tail (which gives a bonus die in combat) to razor-sharp talons (a +1drm for combat rolls). Defensive attributes help the monster negate the Crew attacks. Things like an armored exoskeleton (a -1drm for Crew combat rolls) to toxic blood (if wounded, there is a chance that the creature's blood will get on the Crew and potentially kill them! The Special attributes are just that; special. Faster evolution (the monster gets bigger, quicker) and embryo implanter (the monster can reproduce!) are just a couple of examples.
Each attribute also has a point cost associated to it of zero to three points. The Specimen player has three points to spend on attributes and must take three attributes. So, whichever trio of cards they take, the total point cost can't be more than three.
The rule of thumb is the higher the cost, the better the attribute. However, you can build a very nasty creature with three 0 or 1 point attributes.
Toxic Bag: I see that some of the crewmembers are officers. How does rank affect the game?
Steve: I wanted to make the crew makeup realistic. So it was obvious that there'd be a Captain of the ship. After that, I decided to have a first and second officer. One of my goals was to make this game have a horror flavor to it, and so rank only really enters play later in the game when the monster attacks. As the crew dwindles, the chances increase that the survivors will panic when the monster attacks. Having an officer present helps the rest of the Crew with their panic checks. 'Course, that means you have to keep the officers alive too. (Laughs)
Toxic Bag: This is a CDG, so how important is hand management?
Steve: Like any CDG, there are certain cards that really should be played as the event. Specimen is no different. Crew events like the flamethrowers and the trackers are really important events and skipping them can be adverse to the Crew's health. As for the monster, not playing the Air vent movement event really puts the monster in a bad spot. But for the most part, I tried to design the card events as things that you want to have happen, but you could probably win without. That's where hand management comes in. Holding a card or two, waiting hand after hand to draw that one specific card to work out a sequence is not a winning strategy. You have to play the hand you're dealt, not the hand you wanted.
Toxic Bag: How do you see the strategy challenge for a player in Specimen?
Steve: Both sides face big challenges in the game. The Crew holds the advantage in the early turns, but they have several choices facing them. Do they hunt down the monster while it's tiny and weak or do they fix the ship so they don't explode? Maybe they split up (always a great idea in horror!) and try to do both? The monster has to be careful in the beginning, this is when it is at its weakest. During the middle turns, things even out as the Monster evolves and gets stronger, and the Crew fatalities start to increase. The situation flips during the later turns when the monster has the advantage. But the Crew isn't totally helpless, as they will be better armed (guns and flamethrowers) and can always abandon the ship.


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William J. Studer
School of Library and Information Science Distinguished Alumni Award (1978)
About William J. Studer
William J. "Bill" Studer is the retired director of the Ohio State University library system. He began his career with positions at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and was later hired as the OSU Libraries director in 1977. Studer remained in that role until his retirement in 1999. He is also the second person to earn a Ph.D. from Indiana University School of Library and Information Science, which he graduated from in 1968.

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It allows selection of data from very large files, without exceeding the row limit in Excel.
The process is quicker to set up.
The use of VBA allows the possibility of more flexible import criteria.
This feature has now been added to the spreadsheet, which can be downloaded from the link above. The routine as written checks that the values in the specified columns are within a specified numerical range, but it could easily be amended to work on text.
CriteriaRng (A19:C24): Column number, minimum and maximum values to be imported.
This entry was posted in Excel, VBA and tagged Excel, selected rows, UDF. Import text. Bookmark the permalink.
This is nice. Now when you write this, is this just for this site, for this demo, or was there another use for it? Do you put these out there for Do you put these out there for use elsewhere? This took several hours, right?
Most of what I post is things I have done for my own work, education or entertainment. This has the dual benefit of forcing me to complete things to a stage where they are reasonably presentable, and to document and store them in a place where they will get indexed, so I can find them in the future. In this case it was in response to an e-mailed request for help. It was something that I could see being useful to me in the future, so I'm happy to spend a few hours on that sort of thing (if I have a few hours to spare).
The easiest way to use the code in Text-in2.xls is to modify the original workbook, but if you want to start from scratch with a new file you will need to create the range names used in the code. In the case of "destrange" you will need a single cell with the name destrange, and another range (where you want the ouput to go) with the name entered in destrange (TextFileOut was used in my example, but it could be any valid name).
Thanks for the prompt reply….I'll see what happens after work, did not realize you were using names.
The criteria have to be numerical at the moment, but it would be possible to amend it to search for text, either in specified columns, or any column. I'll try and find some time to do that (or if anyone else can recommend a free download that does it already, please let us know).


The sun is out and we currently have piles of programmes on our desks, which can only mean one thing, festival season is upon us! Here at Stellar Quines HQ we're busily preparing for our part in this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe – the presentation of Jennifer Tremblay's Trilogy of plays The List, The Carousel and The Deliverance.
Amidst the flurry of launches in the last couple of weeks we've been delighted to see the trilogy feature in The Skinny's top festival picks, Lyn Gardner's recommendations "if you didn't catch Maureen Beattie in The List in 2013 make sure you do it this year as part of the Jennifer Tremblay Trilogy" and Time Out Edinburgh's Top 5.
Rehearsals also began last week in Edinburgh, and the team will come together in full for rehearsals at Dundee Rep from next week until we preview at the Rep on the 24th, 25th and 26th July; and before heading to the Borders to preview The Deliverance at Eastgate Theatre and Arts Centre and Heart of Hawick prior to our festival run.
Posted in News and tagged Edinburgh Fringe Festival, The Carousel, The Deliverance, The Jennifer Tremblay Trilogy, The List by Stellar Quines.


Description : "The great Victorian detective returns in this action thriller directed by Guy Ritchie and starring Robert Downey Jr (in a Golden Globe-winning performance) Jude Law Rachel McAdams and Mark Strong. Ba..."The great Victorian detective returns in this action thriller directed by Guy Ritchie and starring Robert Downey Jr (in a Golden Globe-winning performance) Jude Law Rachel McAdams and Mark Strong. Based on a new story by..."


For all you non-believers out there, I increased the resolution to 95dpi using Photoshop. Then cut it out using the polygonal lasso.
Next time, instead of using the lasso, try using the eraser tool, decrease the opacity and flow for the eraser at the top menu.
What this does is it blends. You can keep the object's background transparent in its own layer. It leaves a nice edge. This makes it look nice no matter what background you want to place it on. Also looks nice when/if you add layer styles.
It is a little tedious, but worth the effort.
Was the background just that gray color?
If so, use the "Magic Wand" in Photoshop. Make sure its "anti-aliased" and "contiguous" features are turned on. You might have to mess around with the tolerance setting if you're not getting all of the gray.
Then all you have to do is click once on the gray color and you've selected all of the gray. You can either delete the gray or do a "Select Inverse" and you have Lara.


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Beyond YouTube: Playing it Safe with the Future of Video and Toys
Posted by James Zahn | Feb 17, 2019 | Articles, Features | 0
As YouTube officially takes its crown as the new king of toy advertising, it's time to start looking beyond the video platform to see how the industry will connect to kids and parents.
If you ask just about any parent or grandparent what their little ones are into these days, odds are they will fire off the names of a few new toys and games. More often than not, they usually wrap those names in a statement about how the kids found them when watching a YouTube video.
Of course, we all saw the headlines and heard the hype about how the YouTube channel Ryan ToysReview racked up nearly 30 billion plays, and turned the youngster—who will turn 9 years old this year—and his family into millionaires many times over. Out of the top 10 YouTube creators, Ryan is the only one who focuses on toys, but now he's leading the pack and eclipsing more polarizing figures, such as Jake Paul.
What many of the top creators now have in common isn't just the ability to place products in front of a massive audience. Some newly minted licensing deals are shifting some of the focus from helping to market existing brands into marketing brands of their own. pocket.watch partnered with Bonkers Toys to bring Ryan into the toy aisles himself with the launch of the Ryan's World toy line last fall, and Brand Central repped Paul for deals with the likes of Bioworld and Trends International. These deals and ever-blurring lines between entertainment and marketing, and are expected to come under more scrutiny in the months and years ahead, particularly as YouTube and other platforms continue to replace traditional TV and start being held to similar advertising standards. This is important to keep in mind not only for partnered content, but also for video that's developed in-house or through agencies.
Last fall, the Children's Television Act (CTA) of 1990 started popping up on the radar again for two reasons. First, Variety reported that the Federal Communications Commission was looking at the regulations that dealt with balancing advertising and educational programming—which had seen no substantial updates since 1996—in order to ease those regulations on traditional broadcasters. Second, those who watched the digital space grow and replace more traditional TV, a drastic shift since the CTA was first passed 30 years ago, cited it as a growing concern on how toys were being marketed to kids. The FCC originally passed the CTA to prevent companies, such as Hasbro and Mattel, from marketing companion toys during animated shows such as G.I. Joe and Masters of the Universe. Now that YouTube creators, such as Ryan and Paul, are promoting their own merchandise—sometimes in a way that plays loose with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) guidelines on disclosures—shouldn't the same rules apply in the digital space?
The FTC made it very clear that it is the sponsor's responsibility to make sure that their partners play by the rules. There's also the matter of "kids selling to kids," which sponsored content should always avoid. When calling out specific retailers where product is sold, creators should use language such as "available at" or "found at" instead of hard-sell phrases such as "buy this" or "kids, tell your parents!" that could encourage kids to want these products.
When companies partner with influencers of any kind, they need to consider many factors aside from sheer numbers, such as views and follower count. As YouTube culture continues to evolve, there's also a fracturing of sub-genres that's opened some moral, ethical, and—in some cases—legal questions beyond the FTC and FCC as to how the creators present content, and not just from a sales standpoint.
When YouTube creators move beyond traditional toy reviews, features, and commentary and begin making short films using major companies' intellectual properties, when does it cross the line from parody a la Robot Chicken and go beyond fair use and into infringement? Some took notice, and now we're seeing professionally produced, authorized content from major brands presented in a hand-crafted style with unboxings, stop-motion animation, and toy hacks. These are the very formats that captivate young audiences, but in a streamlined form that controls the messaging and maintains the brand's integrity.
And now we're moving beyond YouTube.
OTT: The Next Frontier for Toys
As YouTube becomes more crowded, creators and advertisers alike are starting to look beyond that ecosystem for future opportunities. The over-the-top (OTT) market is heavily developing this year, in which many familiar creators are starting to syndicate their content beyond YouTube, or create original content for specific outlets, such as Roku, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, and Apple TV. Companies even clean up and repackage content, which the aforementioned pocket.watch was quick to do. The company markets half-hour "Ultimate Mishmash" compilation episodes of its YouTube series to other platforms to generate more views.
OTT is giving everyone a new place to play, but these new platforms should be approached cautiously to look out for the greater good of all parties—something that YouTube perhaps evolved past too quickly.
"Regardless of which platform creators choose, they always need to remember that their primary audience is children," says Melissa Hunter, CEO of Family Video Network, an outfit that helps pair creators and brands across an array of digital platforms. "Those in the family space have a much higher level of responsibility than other creators, but many of them still do not understand what that means. Toy brands and influencer agencies need to be certain that the creators with whom they partner are acting responsibly, not just because of the threat of fines or FTC censure, but because it is the right thing to do for children and families."
Avoiding the Temptation of Clicks AND Views Over Quality
Companies should avoid proliferating sensationalized content, particularly content that may appear to place kids in danger or encourage what could be perceived as irresponsible actions or habits (including overeating, overspending, and even gambling). If you uploaded a video to YouTube recently, you may have even noticed a call-to-action on the side that asks straight out, "Do children appear in this video?" As part of YouTube's commitment to improving its kids and family content, the company is actively attempting to steer creators away from "dangerous stunts and pranks" and "emotional distress." The old "don't try this at home" days might be behind us.
Neonate Babies, from Distroller
Right for the Brand, Right for Kids and Families
The best content provides real value to the viewer. Be entertaining. Be educational. Be storytellers. Use the product as the catalyst—or even as a MacGuffin—to do something more or a bit different than everyone else. One of the best examples in the past few years is one that my own daughters discovered on their own on YouTube, the mysterious "Nurse Tania." In a series of short but well-produced clips, kids were getting care tips on taking care of and raising tiny alien babies. Aside from the occasional mention of a Distroller clinic, there was never any mention of where to buy these Neonate Babies, nor were they ever distinctly referred to as being toys. For Distroller and its dolls (mostly known in Mexico), the buzz began growing organically, creating demand for a product sold largely at a few experiential retail locations on the West Coast.
"We love YouTube as the outlet of choice for children to find us, giving them the tools to learn about our brand, our values, and characters through fun and entertaining content," says Daryn Fillis, CEO of Distroller USA. "We don't believe in shoving advertising down kids' throats, just snippets of our world to help tell our story."
Then there's MGA Entertainment, which leveraged partnerships with individual third-party creators and launched its own channels to back young brands, such as L.O.L. Surprise! and Kingdom Builders. The company pulled back on traditional TV ad spend in favor of quality content for new platforms. According to CEO Isaac Larian, the shift was necessary to evolve.
"The best thing that happened to MGA was for Nickelodeon (we used to do more than $30 million of TV advertising a year with them) to cancel our booked TV for the Hard Eight," Larian says. "It forced us to think and find a new way to market. It was risky, but we succeeded and led and never looked back."
And while emerging products often are the biggest focus, legacy brands can also benefit from a video content recharge. One brand doing well in the space is Mattel's Hot Wheels, which the company positions as a lifestyle brand. It brings kids and adults together with a mix of content from STEM-based educational fare to action sports, stop-motion video, and real-life automotive events produced in collaboration with Race Service and Donut Media.
As we move through Toy Fair season and start looking toward summer and the holidays on the horizon, now is the perfect time to pull back and do a little digital housekeeping. Companies should make sure that the content put out there into the world is presented with purpose and integrity when it comes to toys and games. If it's good for consumers, it will also be good for the greater toy industry as a whole.
Photo: YouTube Kids app
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James Zahn
James Zahn is senior editor of The Toy Book and editor of The Toy Report. Best-known as THE ROCK FATHER™, Zahn is an Illinois-based writer, media personality, commentator, director, actor, adventurer, raconteur and overall pop culture and toy enthusiast. James and/or his work have been featured in/on CNN, Fox Business, NBC, ABC, G4, The Chicago Tribune, PopSugar, Fangoria, Starlog & more. He is also senior editor of The Pop Insider and The Toy Insider. Follow James on Twitter @TheRockFather. Email him: james@toybook.com


Somethings in life just go together; spaghetti and meatballs, peanut butter and jelly, and Les Pauls and Marshalls. You just can't beat it. In 2012 to celebrate the quintessential Rock amplifier, Gibson and Marshall collaborated on this limited edition Goldtop Les Paul, aged by master of his craft - Tom Murphy. This Goldtop was limited to a run of only fifty guitars, and this one is the last one out at number 50! The guitar has a truss rod cover with Jim Marshalls signature engraved onto it, a commemortative pickguard, and the Marshall logo inlaid on the 12th fret. This guitar is in excellent collectors grade condition, and all wear is original to how it looked when it left the Custom Shop.


Apple founder Steve Jobs, one of the technology industry's most influential figures, has died after a battle with cancer, at 56.
Jobs underwent a liver transplant in 2009 and had battled cancer since 2004.
He officially resigned as Apple's CEO in August.
The Conversation has collected some reflections on Jobs's legacy.
Steve Jobs's brilliance was in his understanding of the paramount importance of the interface between the human and the machine.
Apple's success has always been linked to the fact its computers and devices are a delight to use, and somehow always seem to know what you want.
I live in a world of economics where we tend to doubt the power of the individual. To be sure, there are individuals who are in positions of power and who can inflict damage on the world.
But in the world of business, these tend to wash out. Leaders may come and go but very little of substantive economic value changes.
Steve Jobs was and had become, in so many ways, the exception that proves the rule. Take him out of the world and one can imagine what we might be without. From the personal computer to the iPhone to a revolution in animated movies, one gets a sense that these parts of our lives – both technologically and culturally – would not be with us.
But if I'm being honest rather than emotional (which is terribly hard as I write this), we would have had most of these innovations (eventually). However, alongside it we would have had considerably more frustration. Steve Jobs made our lives easier by sheer willpower.
This is as true for myself as a loyal Apple customer as it is for everyone else. PCs were made better as were Android phones all because Jobs insisted that the consumer came first.
I recall this passion from a video of Jobs talking to a MacWorld audience just before he returned as Apple CEO. Right then he told his audience of developers that they shouldn't have to struggle to write programs for the Mac.
It should be easier. And that if he had his way, his phone would be able to do email properly. You can see Jobs as the very frustrated consumer that he set his life's work to save both himself and the rest of us from.
He was our representative agent in the technological world. And what a fine example he turned out to be. There is no one there to fill that void. The rest of us are mere atoms.
It's a very sad announcement. The significance is not just for Apple. Steve Jobs was one of the central people in terms of the whole technology revolution from PCs through to mobile phones.
In terms of the most influential people in the past 30 or 40 years, I would say he was in that list.
You can't underestimate his legacy.
Steve Jobs is singularly responsible for taking computing to the masses. First with the introduction of the MacIntosh in 1984, he completely revolutionised how people viewed the computer – from a cold number crunching machine to something "personal".
Then, in 2007, with the introduction of the iPhone, computing became even more personal. The underlying message that came through Steve Jobs' innovations was that computing is as much about art, culture and aesthetics as science and engineering.
At the end of a tutorial this morning, two students of mine opened a MacBook Pro and brought up the homepage of Apple. Steve Jobs had died.
Somewhat more shocked than I thought I might be, I walked back to my office, following the news on my iPhone. I wasn't aware until I sat down to write this that every device that has told me about Job's death was also a product of his vision.
Many will remember Jobs solely as the auteur of Apple, but it was his brief time at videogame company Atari in the 1970s that also lingers in my mind.
Jobs was then a shaggy-haired hippie saving money for a trip to India, and was assigned the task of creating a prototype of the game that was to become Breakout. Along with his friend and Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak, Jobs created a lean and memorable game that foregrounded his skills as a designer.
Breakout's strength was not originality, but a brilliant leanness of form and style. Surrounded, as he was then, by talented people, Jobs clearly had a talent for direction, quality, and business.
Given a $5,000 bonus, Jobs reportedly only passed on $350 to Wozniak, the co-creator of the game. He was ruthless and brilliant to the last.
Disclosure: Remy Davison owns one share in Apple.
Jobs's death has left a tremendous void, not only at Apple, but also in the entire technology industry.
When Jobs resigned as Apple's CEO in August this year, few believed he would relinquish control of the company he founded in 1976 with Steve Wozniak. After all, Jobs would remain as chairman of the board, and within the industry it was largely believed that Jobs would continue to be the power behind the throne now occupied by former Chief Operating Officer, Timothy Cook.
For the past 14 years, Jobs's star had been in the ascendant, following his return to Apple in 1997. Ejected from Apple in a boardroom coup in 1985, Jobs founded NeXT, a company that produced elegant computers that nobody bought. But he also proved a shrewd investor, buying animation studio Pixar, which went on to produce Disney's biggest movies of the last decade.
Jobs ultimately went on to sell Pixar to Disney in 2006, in exchange for the largest individual shareholding in Disney. In doing so, Jobs forced out his erstwhile rival, Michael Eisner, and wound up controlling the company.
From this point, Jobs began to split his duties between Apple and Disney, a move complicated by his contraction of a rare form of pancreatic cancer. Both Jobs and Apple maintained publicly that the disease was not life-threatening. Even when Jobs underwent a liver transplant in 2009 and began to take medical leave from the company, Wall Street did not punish the Cupertino, California company, as Apple continued to release hit after hit: the iPod; the iPhone and the iPad.
Jobs and Wozniak started in the 1970s by screwing together circuit boards in a garage. Jobs ended his tenure leading the world's most valuable company, with a current market cap of more than $US350 billion.
Yesterday, CEO Tim Cook released the iPhone 4S, a product greeted with tepid enthusiasm by the market. Apple's market dominance in several sectors, its $76 billion in cash and short-term investments and zero debt mean it is cushioned from a prospective double-dip world recession, even if the company does have to burn cash for a while.
The bottom line is that Apple cannot replace Jobs's vision, his ability to predict the future of the information age, nor his showmanship, long on display at Apple's product launches. If Apple does not demonstrate – and soon – that there is life after Steve Jobs, Wall Street will be merciless in meting out punishment.
Jobs made a huge contribution to the state of computer science and to the world in general. You only have to observe the influence of Apple on daily life to realise just how significant it has been. Professionals use Apple. Grandparents use Apple. Kids use Apple. It is totally pervasive.
From a professional point of view, I began using some of the earliest Apple computers in the 1980s, but then shifted to Microsoft-based systems for about 10 years – before returning to almost exclusively Apple-based personal platforms (some of the larger computational resources I use are not based on Apple equipment, and adoption in this area has been limited).
The return to using Apple equipment was no accident and was largely a result of Jobs's influence. I now have reliable personal computing that affects almost every aspect of my work and private life.
I simply couldn't imagine my life without this level of technological support.
Many will say Steve Jobs was a visionary – he did give us what we wanted before we knew what it was, after all. And he was a visionary, but he was so much more – organ donor activist, CEO of the Decade (Fortune Magazine, 2007), user-based design guru, philanthropist, tech oracle, and today has achieved a Twitter Fail Whale message as the Twitterati made for the digital airwaves to mourn his passing.
I believe the world is a more interesting and user friendly place for having had it's time with Steve Jobs, albeit too brief.
Although owned as a trade name by IBM, it is Steve Jobs with Steve Wozniak who can be credited with creating the first real personal computer.
Jobs made computers usable for ordinary, non-technical people and in a sense that was scary to IT professionals. Jobs was the smartest and most insightful CEO ever known. More than that, he was a passionate believer in bringing computing to the masses. This started with the first Apple computer.
Quality for Jobs was defined in terms of the user experience. This meant he drove Apple's industrial design so that the products looked great but were also technically excellent but not necessarily the best.
He understood corporate employees were also consumers and it was providing the best consumer experience that resulted in Apple as a provider of products to most to the Fortune 500 companies in the world.
He also understood that innovation was about enhancing yet simplifying the user interface. The MAC was born in 1984. When Apple's board disagreed with some of the direction Jobs was giving he was pushed out of Apple in the early 1990s.
Jobs was brought back to Apple on a trivial nominal salary when the company was close to bankruptcy later in the 1990s.
Yes he had some failures – oddly enough because the technology wasn't up to it, such as was the case with the Apple Newton (the first personal pad with a pen).
Jobs took Apple into the music market creating the total experience by having a service and a product (the iPod).
This experience provided apple with the understanding in this market to bring out the iPhone in a declining smart phone market.
The three families of products, namely iPod, iPhone and iPad have one thing in common: a total user experience with great looking and products that meet the needs of most consumers without technical sales points.
It is Jobs's visionary consumer-driven approach that took the share price from single digits to well over $300. More importantly, he made a major contribution to society by enabling a whole range of new ways of doing things.
Sometimes individuals emerge in society at a time ripe for change. These individuals seem to be in harmony with those changes and, critically, both accelerate and enrich those changes through vision, persistence in the face of societal inertia coupled with a unique ability to engage with a wide spectrum of that society.
Steve Jobs was such an individual. With no regular "qualifications", he showed what an earth-shaking effect a clever intellectual can have when that cleverness is combined with vision, lateral thinking, business acumen and determination. His genius was to assemble ideas and things in innovative ways, imagine the way people would use them before they had even thought about it, reinvent the whole thing, and then to wrap it up in products people wanted.
Jobs was a superlative synthesiser. Some of his earliest studies were in typography. And this impacted the life of one of us [RS] in a fundamental way. I [RS] used to teach Russian at the University of Melbourne. In those days DOS could not display non-Roman scripts on the screen with Roman. Russian was a huge problem. Then came the Fat Mac, with a whole garden full of character sets.
Steve Jobs was uncannily good at synthesis like this. And more particularly with the fusion of personal and subsequently mobile computing devices. This, with the emergence of the web, provided the perfect potpourri for (i)nnovative thinking - iPod, iMac, iPhone, iTunes, iPad, iCloud. And so iSteve – vale and well-played.
I first took notice of Steve Jobs in the early 1980s when I was living in the USA and Apple, under his leadership, "dared to be different".
He set a vision then to change the world of computing, to challenge the status quo, dominated at that time by IBM and later by Microsoft, and he had the vision, passion and inspirational communication skills to see it through.
We who study leadership and management or who practise profesional management and leadership have much to learn from Jobs and his achievements. These lessons include "lead from the front", which he always did, and "have the courage of your convictions".
He was also inspirational in being able to balance the needs of many stakeholders, and in doing so, led a company from nowhere to industry leadership status, not once but twice.
Jobs was able to cleverly assess challenges and set strategy and vision, then implement those strategies hard, which is a rare combination.
Steve Jobs was a college drop-out who began his computer company in his parent's garage in 1976. His brilliance was not really technical, but in his ability to combine a number of innovations together into products that not only had great usability, but also inspired devotion to the Apple brand.
It was his philosophy that the user should not learn how to use his products, but that the products had such immediacy that the user would already know how to use the product without instructions.
His first great success was with the release of the Apple Mac in 1984. Though the Apple Mac was not the first computer to use a mouse or graphic user interface (GUI), the all in one design almost looked like a little face and this friendly appearance opened up personal computing to a whole new audience (Microsoft computers still used a command-line interface).
Apart from the early to mid 90s, when Jobs was absent from Apple, this philosophy remains true for all Apple products. His return to Apple as CEO resulted in the iMac released in a range of jelly-bean colours (and the beginning of the i-Something naming protocol).
Since then the product range from iPod to iPad have all strived to put the user at the centre of design. The products should be as easy to pick up and use as if it were a pencil or pen.
They should be completely task oriented, so the design of the device does not get in the way of its function. The final design is the result of rigorous user testing and application of guidelines including the "80% rule" which considers that if 80% of your target audience is satisfied, this should be enough to keep the design simple for most to use.
Steve Jobs left an indelible mark on the profession of computing. His journey as a visionary, entrepreneur and astute business leader inspired many people in academia and industry. He had a deep understanding of the technology combined with a canny ability of predicting market shifts. I am sure his memory will live with us for a long time and inspire future researchers and entrepreneurs. He will surely be missed.
Mr Steve Jobs was a visionary leader of Apple Inc. for more than 25 years and possessed extraordinary skill in technology innovation.
He will be remembered for the Apple and Macintosh computers, his time at Pixar Animation Studios (Toy Story) and the iPod, iPhone and iPad among a raft of other technology success stories.
As a young engineer in the early 80s, I took possession of an Apple computer and my future was shaped by what I was able to do and learn with this computer. From that time, my life and the lives of many others have been positively affected by Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs, as with the Apple empire, was often accused of being too innovative – it's far easier to be a fast, or not so fast, follower and let the bleeding-edge work to be done by others. This was what Clayton Christensen called the innovator's dilemma.
Apple almost bottomed out without Jobs, but with his second coming it grew to its present status as the one company that has, thus far, worked out how to make the transition from "analogue dollars" to "digital cents" in the creative economy.
In doing this, it has laid down a significant challenge to the mass media barons – and in doing so, has become a bullying baron itself.
IT entrepreneurs come and go … most end up as footnotes in dissertations and (with luck) as a plaque on a "named" building on campus and a substantial endowment.
Some are remembered both for marvellous technical achievement and problematical philosophies or pseudo-scientific enthusiasms.
Jobs will live on because he had style (an important attribute in a world of black T-shirted kiddies with over-large egos and money to match) and because he was an exponent of user-centric personal computing.
Ultimately, the end-user should drive IT, and this was certainly Jobs's philosophy.
Steve Jobs wanted to change the world and he did. He was a true visionary and will be remembered for the way he inspired a generation. RIP Steve and thank you for creating so many amazing tools that have positively shaped the way I work, live and create.
Has Steve Jobs had an impact on your life? Leave your comments below.


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All filing cabinets are Australian-made and constructed from pine timber. 2 filing drawers=$375 (760h), 3 filing drawers $495 (1070h).
We use solid pine drawer bases and strong metal runners. This style is a modern design best suited for home offices using quality timber pieces.Match it with the many other Tuscan pieces we sell in our store.
They are also available in Tasmanian oak at an extra cost and there is an extensive range of stains to choose from. They all come in a variety of standard sizes and we can also make to measure, so please call in for a free quote.
Colours may vary to those seen on this website. All measurements are approximate & prices are subject to change.


2018 brings you the Surrey Food Festival in Richmond Upon Thames for the 3rd year running. It is common knowledge that everyone loves food so why not come and visit the Surrey food festival on the 21st April 2018 so you can experience all different types of foods in a relaxed environment. We will have a couple of rides and inflatables for the children to enjoy but not taking away our main focus which will be all about the food and drink. Let yourself walk around and see all the different local traders as well as traders from far showcasing their products and answering any questions you might have about the product or dish.
This year All In One Events bring you the 3rd Surrey Food Festival on Saturday 21st April.


I don't think I've ever experienced so many emotions while to listening to just one album. Carrie Underwood's latest album, Blown Away, literally has blown me away. Early on in the album, we get a feel of some of the darkest numbers in Underwood's entire career. "Blown Away" depicts a story of a girl who wants her sin filled house and her abusive father to be destroyed by violent tornados. In "Two Black Cadillacs", the listeners get in on a dark secret that two women share about a man's death. One of them is the late man's wife, and the other his mistress. We get a lighter feel when the sweet twang of the guitars in "Do You Think About Me" start in, and a tale of how young and genuine love becomes only a memory as time goes by is told. Underwood's raw vocals and emotion brings the song to life, and you can just see the bittersweet scenes as the song goes on. "Forever Changed", a tender story of a woman's happy life that ends in the tragedy of alzheimer's, easily brings tears to the listener's eye. "Good In Goodbye" does not trail far behind when it comes to the same effect. More emotions are sparked with "Thank God For Hometowns". It reminds the listener of the truths regarding their origins. The three chords in the beginning of "Wine After Whiskey" are enough to enthrall any listener. After all the heaviness of the powerful and emotional numbers, moods brighten with the catchy chorus of "Leave Love Alone" and the pun-tastic "Cupid's Got a Shotgun". Carrie Underwood has matured as an artist and has released an album that will be timeless in no time.
This album is awesome! Like if you agree!
I am sincerely BLOWN AWAY.
Blown Away, Carrie Underwood's fourth album, is by far her best album to date. Up until this album, her debut album, Some Hearts, has always been my favorite. I felt as if Carnival Ride and Play On were rushed and that they were overproduced. In Blown Away, her voice really shined through and the songs are absolutely incredible.
We all know that Carrie can BELT songs out. For instance, I Know You Wont off of Carnival Ride is a masterpiece, and her rendition of How Great Thou Art. But on this album, there are no power ballads. But sometimes, less is more. This is one of those times. LESS is MORE on Blown Away. There are not many albums where I thoroughly enjoy each and every song on the album. This is an exception. I love each song.
9/10 - Good Girl - This is a really rockin' country hit. It's lyrics are so catchy and will instantly get stuck in your head. Very difficult song to sing because of all of the higher notes in it, but Carrie does it flawlessly.
10/10 - Blown Away – This song is a masterpiece. I don't know what else I can say. It is absolutely, positively amazing.
11/10 – Two Black Cadillacs – a very deep and dark song. It really leaves it up to your imagination as to what really happened. VERY ADDICTING SONG. Carrie's really upped her game in writing songs. One of my favorite songs on the album.
9/10 – See You Again – it was originally written by Carrie for the Narnia soundtrack, but they chose There's A Place For Us instead…. And I am SO glad! THIS SONG IS AWESOME! Love it! Very soothing, inspirational, and soaring!
9.5/10 – Do You Think About Me – wow. I just love this song. Such a cute, sweet, and loving song! So so so so SO cute!
8.5/10 – Forever Changed – this is a song that is near and dear to Carries heart. It is about a woman going through life, getting married, having a baby, then growing old and dealing with Alzheimers. Very sad. Very well written and sung beautifully.
7.5/10 – Nobody Ever Told You – a very inspirational, uplifting song. This one is probably my least favorite song off of the album. It's cute though.
9/10 – Thank God For Hometowns – love this song! For anyone that moved away – you will love this! Such a sweet song.
9.5/10 – Good In Goodbye – love this song as well. A good song about breaking up and moving on. Very positive message.
8.5/10 - Leave Love Alone – so country! So awesome! Definitely a foot tapper!
9.8/10 - Cupid's Got a Shotgun – LOVE THIS! One of Carries most creative songs yet! SO redneck and SO fun to listen and jam out to!
10/10 – Wine After Whiskey – MUST BE A SINGLE! Such an amazing ballad. Very country, sweet, reminiscing song about lost love.
7.6/10 – Who Are You – this song is growing on me. A song about Carrie's faith in her savior. Wasn't too fond of it at first, but like I said, its growing on me!
Maybe I'm being modest, but I don't think I am. This album is a MUST BUY. It is GREAMMY worthy!


We count Memorial Day weekend as the official start of summer (forget that solstice thing), so in our minds, the dog days are nipping at our heels! Or vice versa? In the spirit of looking ahead, we're planning for the glorious summer bounty that's to come in the next 14 weeks (and rounded up some Shop favorites to help you show off the season's best). Save the date for strawberries, corn, tomatoes—coming to a farmer's market near you.
Consider this your summer spoiler alert.
A nonstick pan guaranteed to slip that cake out perfectly intact, and a sunny stand to display the masterful results.
Your asparagus will stay snappy with clever fridge storage bags and you'll scoop with snazz when scooping your hard-boileds out of the pot.
Pile crunchy salads into single-serving bowls wearing pastels for summer and match with vintage flatware that's always in season.
Jam like a pro in a roomy extra heat-conductive pan, then preserve the best of summer in classic Weck jars.
Plan a bread baking project for a long weekend and use a chunk for homemade crumbs! And these bowls' shred-in-bowl action saves you from one more dirty dish.
A company-worthy summertime meal demands a pretty, handmade platter and vintage-classic serving utensils.
This wok gets screaming hot for a nice scorch on those string beans—serve them in a deep, woodsy bowl (that will come in handy for every summer salad).
Simple glassware for simple summer coolers, plus a juicer 'cause you'll get hooked on having the fresh stuff around for cocktails.
For this stew, there's a fair bit of slicing and stirring ahead, but it's made all the easier with handsome Italian knives and a gang of wooden spoons.
Never skimp on the fresh pepper, and never skimp on everyday bowls.
Make your own pasta with the kids. Serve it up in a gorgeous handmade bowl to impress the adults.
A go-to pie plate and a pie server that says "I heart tomatoes".
Make quick work of those egg whites with a handmade separator and ridged baking sheets guarantee no stuck pavlova.
More ice cream inspiration from our cookbook, and the only scoop worthy of summer's golden child.
Grilled Peach, Halloumi, and Mint "Caprese"
Start with a never-fail charcoal chimney, add grilling grids that ensure not a peach will be sacrificed to hot coals, and end with a summer salad that whistles.
Here's to the best summer ever!
What summer fruit or vegetable are you most looking forward to welcoming back into your kitchen? And what's the first thing you do with it?


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Category Archives: politics
New Socialism – On Class and Intergenerational Mobility
Class is central to the Marxist view on history but seems to have lost the focus of many socialist and social-democratic policies. Revisionism and liberal fiscal theories dominate even the views of traditional socialist parties, whose policies are often reduced to limiting income disparity and preserving public services.
Class cuts across generations stifling individuals with the inheritance of ownership of capital. The origin of the class conflict of capital interest is the loss of the means of subsistence by the working class and the subsequent accumulation of capital by capitalists. Even in our time, the income gap continuous to grow and the accumulation of capital continues to rise. This law of capitalism resists most efforts to level distribution of capital in revisionist socialist countries. Old Socialism reacts to this inequality by attempts to disown property owners and nationalize wealth, and considered class over individual. Since private property lies at the root of the class conflict between those with and those without, those with should be disowned in order to create a new society where capital ownership is socialized. New Socialism considers class and group identity only as an attribute of the individual, not as an independent entity.
Central to the new socialist debate on class is the intergenerational mobility or persistence of wages. Capitalism despite its promise of individual liberty, traps the individual in their class and intergenerational mobility is the lowest in those societies where capitalism has progressed furthest, in the US (defying the American Dream) and the UK. Many of the public services policies are not aimed to liberate the individual from this capitalist class trap, but only to sooth the disparity stemming from it by lowering access to basic education and healthcare. Revisionism has suffocated the aspiration of the traditional working class to free themselves from the class funnel.
NYTimes – Class Matters: An Overview
A Family Affair: Intergenerational Social Mobility across OECD countries
The Lancet – Child Development in Developing Countries
This entry was posted in politics, sociology on September 27, 2011 by remkohdev.
The Greek Brigands – The Culture of Financial Crisis
"But what about the Greeks? Their national character is based on the idea of the impoverished and downtrodden little man getting the better of the world around him by sheer cunning."
Lawrence Durrell, Prospero's Cell (1945)
The Greek crisis has exposed existential weaknesses in the Greek economy and revealed shortcomings in the larger European system of financial checks and balances. But the often emotional responses have also proven a cultural polarity between north and south. The German magazine, Focus, captured this antagonism by an image of the Venus of Milo suggestively sticking up the middle finger at Germany. Angered Greeks in return reminded Germans of the Nazi looting of Greek gold reserves and unpaid war retributions.
Beyond this populism in the media, there exists a fundamental rift in policy views between Mediterranean countries on the one side and Atlantic countries on the other side. In his influential book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), the German sociologist Max Weber studied already the relationship between culture and economic performance. Weber considered the Protestant working ethic a pivotal element in the development of capitalist modernity. Behind the state of affairs of the Greek crisis lie causes rooted deeper in Greek culture than the immediate problems of government and economic structure. The traces of these historic roots carve an individual psychology and shape social norms that are difficult to change with measures of policy by politicians responding to the market's wits.
In traditional Greek dances a group of dancers, interlocked arm over shoulder, form a circle and move with a set of prescribed steps. The Greeks do not easily break with their tradition and they do not possess an innate curiosity for the new like Western culture. Greeks depend on the bonds with family and their community. Arms locked, only the leader of the dance improvises, while the rest do not break the line of the circle.
The eyes of the international financial markets are on the fiscal measures announced by George Papandreou, the first citizen of Athens, and the reforms to be implemented by the central government. The response of Greek society and the economic support by the European Union members will be decisive in their success. The question is if the government can enforce the new policies in a country so geographically scattered and with a history of tax evasion as Greece. Historically Greeks dislike central government and have relied primarily on local self-governance, strengthened by the geographic distance of the islands from Athens and the isolation of mountainous villages. Not even the chief-god Zeus could rule the lesser Greek gods from the peaks of Mount Olympus, the highest mountain in the country. Greek history justifies mistrust in a Greek success. Measures to centralize government and constitute an efficient modern state have always been resisted, from classic times with the Delian League that ended in the Peloponnesian War, the occupation by the Ottoman Empire that gave birth to the palikare, the Greek folk hero, or the rise of the current government for which corruption and tax evasion are emblematic.
When the Persian empire threatened the independence of the Greek city states, Athens and the allied Greek city states formed the Delian League in 487 BCE. Members of the League were obliged to contribute soldiers for the defense of Greek democracies or could alternatively pay taxes to the League. When Athens started to control the League, Athens forced other city states to continue paying taxes to the League solely for its own benefit. When cities refused, they faced the wrath of the Athenian army and were simply annexed by Athens. But when the famous statesman Pericles moved the treasury holding the paid tax contributions, from the island of Delos to Athens, the rest of the Greeks defied. The resistance against dominance by Athens resulted in the Peloponnesian Wars and finally in the defeat and surrender of Athens in 404 BCE. Can Athens ensure a different outcome now?
Already under the Ottoman empire the Greeks resisted taxation, which was a symbol of oppression. From the fifteenth century they suffered heavy taxation by the Ottomans. As Christians under Islamic rule they were obliged to pay a land tax and the jizya, a tax for non-Muslims which was symbolic for subjection to the Ottoman rule. Heavy taxation reduced most Greeks to subsistence farming, while large estates fell into the hands of Ottoman nobles. Resentment against such taxation accumulated over almost five hundred years of occupation. The problems of modern Greece cannot be understood without understanding this Ottoman occupation of Greece and the long struggle for independence that lasted over a century, only ending bitterly for the Greeks in the disastrous defeat of 1922 against the forces of Atatürk's modern Turkish state. The 1922 defeat meant an end to the Greek megali idea or great idea of a larger Greece that included Asia Minor and Constantinople, current day Istanbul. This defeat of the Greek state in Asia Minor was a failure by the central state with traumatic consequences.
The Museum for the Macedonian Struggle in Thessaloniki is a very small museum but with a deeply significant meaning for Greeks. In a corner mansion behind Aristotle Square, it showcases the history of the Macedonian Struggle, the guerrilla war against the Ottomans from 1900 to 1908, which annexed the Greek populace in Macedonia to the independent Greek territory. In 1821 the Greeks had won independence but it did not extend far beyond the Peloponnesos and Attica. The annexation of Macedonia gave the Greek state a renewed confidence that defined the Greek national identity and placed a claim on all territory in the greater region with Greek populations.
One room in the museum is devoted to Pavlos Melas who fought in the Macedonian Struggle. Behind a vitrine lay on view relics of Melas and part of his former personal belongings, a Smith and Wesson 38 revolver, an invitation card to his wedding, ribbons from his memorial wreaths, and a tin cup. He is a national symbol for the enosi or union of Greece that was hard fought and thereby of the Greek national identity. He is the embodiment of the traditional Greek folk hero, the palikare. As a lieutenant he left the regular service in the new army of the Greek state in order to fight as a brigand or irregular fighter against Ottoman occupation in Northern Greece. Greece was confined largely to the Peloponnese and consisted of a patchwork of people with different dialects. The irregular fighters became folk heroes to the Greeks, where the regular Greek army seemed incapable to protect the occupied Greeks in the north.
The irregular fighters fought in the same tradition as the Greek Klepths. These men had fled to the mountains in the eighteenth century to avoid the rule of the Ottomans and had formed bands of outlaws that later fought in the Greek War of Independence from 1821 to 1829. But also the Ottomans had used irregular forces to control impenetrable mountain areas. They allowed powerful local captains in these lawless areas to rule at will under oversight of distant Ottoman overlords. Even in our time, the use of irregular fighters was widespread during the recent Balkan Wars.
The palikare was in essence not more than a small brigand, who in groups roamed the mountains under the banner of irredentism and liberation of the Greeks. They evaded the rule of law and depended often on captains that exercised local power. The Greek national writer, Nikos Kazantzakis, describes this archetype colorful in his novels. In Freedom and Death the palikare Captain Michales refuses to swallow the occupation of Crete by the Turks, and the unruly Zorba is described in the novel Zorba the Greek, brilliantly enacted by Anthony Quinn in the 1964 film. The mountain freedom fighter, evading authority and growing a beard in defiance, this is the Greek traditional spirit.
The palikare is a symbol of the current Greek financial crisis, reflected in a popular sentiment that rejects the centralized modern state and commends the outlaw. The Greeks do not identify with the politics of central government, despite the fact that one out of every four Greeks is a public servant and is directly dependent on the government for their income. The central government is considered wasteful and corrupt, from which it is justified to extort money. While the citizen rejects subjection to the rule of the central state, the central state is a corrupt body that accommodates a game of lies in order to accumulate monetary gain.
The Greeks cunningly receive an income from government, while evading taxes and participating in the informal economy, defrauding the central state. This lack of loyalty extends to the even more remote European Union. Greeks gladly accept the EU subsidies paying lip services to its demands, but resent any interference in their lives. This practice goes back to the times of the Ottoman state, where Greek subjects evaded being taxed but sent representatives to Constantinople to request fiscal favors. While Ottoman rule had instituted local self-governance as the means for tax-assessment and tax-collection, the system developed local councils that were dominated by powerful local captains and wealthy families with a patron-client dependence.
Since its independence in 1821 the modern Greek state that emerged out of the Ottoman system has not been able to eradicate this local patron-client system which depends on counter dealings and favoritism. On the contrary, it could only emerge and survive by favoring such interests of the powerful local patrons or captains in return for their support, in a similar process as the centralized power of the European Union only is advanced by returning political favors.
Prime-minister George Papandreou understands the Atlantic European perspective and sensitivities. Like many Greeks who worked in Germany or America for the best part of their lives, he lived and studied in America and in Sweden during the formative years in his life. But although George Papandreou calms European suspicions by vocalizing a firm though nothing but verbal promise of reform, he himself is a vested representative of those powerful families that are symbolic of the centuries-old formalized corruption. Papandreou's grandfather was three times prime-minister of Greece, his father founded the social-democratic party PASOK and also served as prime-minister, while the Nea Democratia party has been dominated by the patrons of the Karamanlis family.
Greek promises and measures of reform have pacified international markets and appeased European political leaders for the time being. Since Greece's accession to the EU, however, Greek promises and assurances have been provided continuously under very similar scandals, and there has been little assurance from recent developments in Greece that this time will be different. The cotton-growers of Thessaly are perhaps exemplary for the problems of the Greek economy which is simply not compatible on the international market and for Greek fraud. Cotton growers depend heavily on subsidies for profitability, not shunning fraud and corruption, like wetting the cotton crop with water to increase the weight of the cotton. In 1992, for instance Greek farmers invented one fifth of its cotton crop in order to claim extra EU subsidies, and in Greece cotton farmers recently blocked most of the highways in Northern Greece, demanding payments from the government to offset loss of income from falling cotton prices on the international markets, while having resisted agricultural reforms for decades.
And even while prime-minister George Papandreou was on a credibility-building tour around European capitals, among other speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos to calm unrest on the financial markets and restore political credibility, his own Minister of Agriculture Katerina Batzeli reached an agreement with protesting farmers to provide financial compensation. Among the key measures was the injection of five and a half billion Euro by the Greek state to boost incomes and liquidity, promising little change in policies at home. And ask a Greek for an analysis of the current crisis, they will without exception point at the corruption of remote politicians, only admitting to some blame themselves in a delayed sub-clause.
But Europe has always been blinded by its love for Greece and one must fear that this will not change overnight. It has always admired Greece as the ideological and cultural foundation of European values. We learn from Greece the principles of Athenian democracy and copy Greek architecture, our secular thinkers study Heraclitus and Parmenides, our Christian moralists study Aristotle, Plato and Socrates, we learn the mathematics of Pythagoras, Euclid and Archimedes, our intellectuals learn by heart the Iliad and the Odyssey, even European cynics and stoics cling to the Greek. But this impression of Greece is overly romantic and Byronic, and one must hope that it is soon replaced by a more northern sense for Real-Politics.
The Philhellenic idea of a pastoral Greece in perfect harmony with nature disputes the complex reality of a twenty first century Greece. The sentiment of betrayal felt in Europe is as much a self-betrayal by a European Byronic complex. As Greece struggles to reconcile Western austerity with its Orthodox Byzantine generosity.
So, the Greek suitors have feasted and the time for reckoning has come. The return of order must be considered without sentimental attachments or unreasonable demands, while Europe must not be blinded by Greek cunning and abuse. The Greeks must decide to either be part of Europe and respect its fiscal rules or return to the Drachma as a political currency and loose its place at the European table.
"I detest that man, who hides one thing in the depths of his heart, and speaks forth another."
Homer, Iliad IX, 312-13
This entry was posted in articles, essays, politics and tagged economy, greece, politics on June 7, 2010 by remkohdev.
Sacrificing to the Minotaur
In the current economic crisis people are tempted to fall back to conservative ideologies affirming the existing capitalist system. With the fall of the Stalinism any ideological alternative has evaded people's imagination. People suffered the consequences from the greatest economic crisis since World War II, in which global banks, the flag ships of world capitalism, collapsed and governments had to intervene with unprecedented measures using public funds to prevent a total economic downfall. And as people fear the threats of economic downfall, politicians within the social-economic status quo advertise two responses. The first Keynesian reflex is to spend money and stabilize the turning of the economic wheels, preventing them from further slow-down. The second response is a reflex to the former and advocates a fiscal conservative policy of cutting budget deficits resulting from the Keynesian reflex. Within the economic wisdom of the existing system these are both established outcomes.
The political debate surrounding the state of the economy has one central question: how much will be cut where? Not even socialists, not christian-democrats or social nationalists, not liberal capitalists doubt the economic necessity of budget cuts. Any person however should be confused, because while everyone made the right analysis of the financial crisis within the status quo of the existing capitalist system, no one is suggesting or considering even any alternative.
The blame points according to all and without doubt at the American investors who sold subprime mortgages with the expectation that their value would continue to rise in the future. The European banks, pension funds and private investors saw rainbows at the horizon and chased after the pots of gold, lured by the same American investors who had invented the subprime mortgages. Following, American investors started speculating on a failure of the mortgage packages by buying default swaps against the same products they were now selling to their own customers. Problems started years ago with the process of globalization of corporations and the relentless expansions that were necessary and financed by loans. Some of these loans were directly at the costs of employees' pension funds, which were depleted and collapsed when financing fell short. But the crisis exploded only full scale with the financial crisis in 2009.
And what else could government, this servant of their electorate, do than intervene? In Amerika it was said that the banks were 'Too Big to Fail'. In this process, governments bought the shares of banks against a generous price that lay above their real value, and in order to keep the all but in name bankrupt banks alive the worthless risky loans were sold with risk guarantees to investors (the same investor that had invented, speculated, sold and undermined those packages), while an injection of capital was considered necessary to supply the emptied banks with new cash. All this was unavoidable, finance ministers told the people. This scenario was followed alike in all countries within the American sphere of influence.
In reality, this necessity was also an invention of American capitalism, which was believed without scrutiny by the rest of the western world, perhaps overwhelmed by shame for being taken in, blinded by fear of cataclysmic events, perhaps driven by bad intention, or perhaps out of simple stupidity. The investors who are to be blamed for the crisis (those who enriched themselves by this pyramid game of selfish greed ravishing future increase of value) only accumulated more wealth in the process. They speculated on the failure of subprime mortgages, and turned those failures into huge profits. In the meantime, governments intervened and sold underpriced risky loans to private equity firms without risk with underlying risk guarantees, and injected further tax payers' cash into fallen and stumbling banks. But instead of passing on these cash reserves to companies and private households in order to keep current accounts at the root of economic activities funded, these banks kept cash in house to increase interest rates by limiting supply. Again capital earned more capital with the higher interest rates, pushing profits ever higher and higher in a speculative spiral in which the rest of the world economy was sucked down. Governments ended up short of capital as interest on capital increased. In response, governments issued new bonds to pay short term expenses, all adding continuously to the profits of investors.
Those same investors started to speculate now on credit default swaps against those governments from which they had bought bonds in order to stimulate government spending, helping to dig their own holes, in which public money was thrown deeper and deeper. Thus they continued a perpetual speculative game of buying, packaging, selling, insuring and undercutting. It is hard for voters to imagine the numbers, the size and the speed by which financial products are created, bought, sold, in every second, every minute, fictive hundreds of millions shoot like electric currents via bank accounts and computers all over the world, allowing only the profits to be skimmed by a small fraction of the population, and en-debt the others in economic bondage.
Greek socialists are a rare bulwark of resistance in Europe, still prepared to literally fight and revolt against the greedy influence of world capital, the institutions that it controls and which accumulates ever more capital and power, leaving less choice and freedom to the lower and middle classes. The ordinary Greek is one of the few European citizens that is not fooled, even if it goes at the cost of the other Europeans, but now the Greeks too are pushed into the fangs of the American IMF, and Europe is selling itself short to the American financial imperium. The unique feature about the current decapitalization of the majority of the people is that it is not the labor classes that are the target of world capitalism, but it is the middle class that is pulled into submission to the influence and power of world capitalism. While in the 1980s the middle management and middle segments of the economy were pushed out of the economic center of power, now it are the middle classes who are voided of economic and political interest in shaping and directing the existing system.
The accumulation of capital no longer takes place mainly or especially by the classic Marxist method of replacing manual labor with machines, the automation of production processes with computers or robots, or by relocating production to low wage countries. This accumulation mainly occurs by borrowing from the future, by speculating on the value of future increase of value, the borrowing from future generations, and shifting the costs of payments to the tax payers. The 'Verelendung' or impoverishment of the laborer and accumulation of capital is paid with public money that has been extorted from the employees and independent small entrepreneurs, causing enormous public deficits that are left to be paid by low and middle incomes. The capitalists want us to believe that there is only one single remedy against the threat of this crisis: cutting back public services! Everyone and all have to cut back, these after all are just the laws of the market. Wages, health care, education and social services, all will be cut, while jobs will be relocated to low wage countries, because the hunger of the capitalist minotaur must be fed. There is always something bigger to be feared than these sacrifices, always a bigger doom hanging over us, to make these sacrifices inevitable.
Regardless how clever you think you are, how self righteous you can feel, how much confidence you take from your career, no matter if you are on top of the markets managing your portfolio of petty capital, if you are afraid to lose your new car or to lose your first home, what you should really fear is to be owned by the scale of world capital. It is in this water that you swim: the larger processes of the long term, controlled by the currents and waves that are caused by speculators and private equity firms that sluice money through invisible channels back and forth to and from barely regulated businesses, minority shares, internationally operating companies that only exist on paper and dodge taxes through shell-companies in profit tax paradises like the Netherlands.
What people should fear is not to loose the little they have, but contributing to a system that serves largely the super rich who evade their obligations in return, who launder money via postal addresses on tropical islands or Swiss bank accounts, and who pull the strings of the docile common citizen in their grand stage plays. People with light shoulders carry the heavy burden that the whole system depends on, while those with the most means enjoy the greatest pleasures. What you should fear however, is that you no longer see an alternative, that you believe there is simply no other choice than to bow under the weight. You should fear to lack the courage to strike back, to say enough is enough, and not to live your life as the little man trampling the grapes for the banquets of your lords. If you are only allowed to play another man's game, you should not continue to gamble for small gain. Retirees have seen their pension savings being annihilated, their pensions frozen or cut back with increasing inflation, young workers have seen future debt accumulating while the perspective of opportunities have disappeared to countries with less worker protection, where workers bow even deeper for the power of world capitalism, disrupting existing economical and social structures, to break the capacity for alternatives.
The power of the status quo lies not in the enforcement against people's will of an economic system that serves the interest of a small class of the people. The real power lies in the ability to void people of the capacity to think of alternatives. The criticism in the media has been directed at the perverted psychologies of individuals like Nick Leeson or Bernard Madoff. But the root of their perversion lies not in the individual behavior, but in the system that provokes it, tolerates it and promotes it. When the system permits a consistent and continuous stream of faults, the system itself is at fault. While the leaks in the system that allow the occasional outpouring are patched, the system itself that exercises the high pressure on the fragile casing of ethics that surrounds it, remains intact.
See also: Agenda 2010: Life in the Endtimes according to Slavoj Zizek, Slavoj Zizek in VPRO Tegenlicht.
This entry was posted in columns, politics on May 1, 2010 by remkohdev.
Hollandic centricism, fear of Islam and the Limburgic Renaissance
In 1992, the Dutch government and other European governments signed the Treaty of Maastricht, which concluded the transfer of many policy responsibilities from the national European governments to the centralized institutions of the European Union. There was a minority of intellectual skepticism against this centralization of national autonomy but a much broader popular sentiment feared the loss of national cultural identity. Fifteen years later in 2007, this popular sentiment culminated in the rejection of the European Constitution in a referendum by the Dutch voters. But we can also conclude that although the Treaty of Maastricht did weaken national governments, it strengthened the popular awareness of regional identity at the cost of national identities that have been promoted especially in the nineteenth century. At the same time, a more abstract European identity also emerged, and this is paradoxically used against new cultural influences from recent Muslim immigration. In the Netherlands, these anti-Muslim sentiments are vocalized by the flamboyant neo-right politician Geert Wilders. Wilders was born and raised in Limburg, the most southern province in the Netherlands, and it is his political heartland. Wilders' party the PVV won twice as many votes in Limburg as the national average, 11% versus 5.8%. What are the underlying historic roots beneath this Limburgic phenomenon? Continue reading →
This entry was posted in politics, sociology, Thinking of Holland on February 17, 2008 by remkohdev.
Bag the Flag
"Must the citizen even for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward."
When I went running at McCarren Park this morning the zone behind the goal on the west side was occupied by a company of cadets. These fresh bodies still have minds and remnants of independent critical thought, a vague sign of a free citizen. However, all wore the same uniform dress already, shiny marine training pants, some in red t-shirts with yellow text circled on their chests, others in gray army t-shirts with stout black ARMY capitals and an amputated Adidas logo on their backs, symbol for their enslavement to the commercial interests of the government. At least they were to look ready for compliance.
McCarren Park is a public park of course, so everyone is allowed, although to hold military exercises in the heart of Williamsburg, is obviously a provocation by the Imperial Army. For the group of cadets it is of course a day of low-pressure training, but to plant the company's flag in the park's black soil, militarizing the public space by uniforms, is just another step of this standing army to occupy the public mind. The credo to "Support our Troops" is to the shallow thinker a very sympathetic slogan, but it assumes the relief of the citizen who joins the standing army of his moral duty and the release from the obligation of consciousness that the free individual serves. But at no point, can an individual citizen be relieved of his own judgment at all times, and the contractual obligation of duty to a government at no time overrides the call of freedom. No man can be denied to refuse an order by an equal man at any time.
When Henry David Thoreau wrote his essay "Civil Disobedience" in 1849, shortly after the war of aggression against Mexico Continue reading →
This entry was posted in politics, sociology on June 24, 2007 by remkohdev.
The metamorphoses of American leadership in the 20th century
The Wilson Vision
On 8 January 1918 the American president Woodrow Wilson before a joint session of US Congress outlines his famous Fourteen Points as a basis for a lasting peace in Europe. At the heart of this speech was the idea of the self-determination of all people. The principle of self-determination could not stand on its own, and to guarantee a framework for such balance of powers Wilson added restrictions on armament, that were designed for national security a priori. Not even 90 years later, the Republican president George W. Bush formulates his policy of pre-emptive strikes in the aftermath of 9/11 which allowed the US to strike first and 'pre-emptively'. There could hardly be a greater world apart between the principle of self-determination and the policy of pre-emptive strikes. The question that should be asked is if this development from one to the other is a historic evolution or a sudden, drastic shift in policy under influence of dramatic contemporary events?
The Truman Conditions
In 1944/45 the Americans liberated the world from fascism and established democratic regimes. The years of the Cold War, were in retrospect perhaps the zenith of American power. Never before, were countries around the world indebted to the US as during the Cold War. Continue reading →
This entry was posted in politics, the berlin notices on July 31, 2004 by remkohdev.
Happy holidays all my friends and other. This is a
#brueghel in #nyc
#workingfromhome #wfh #2020
#fallfoliage in #centralpark #newyorkcity #hallowe
In his young life, my son's first harvest celebrat
Separation from the Past
Complexity and Economics by NAF-Biz NY (Nov 16, 2017)
La Condition Humaine
Salman Akhtar, Selma Kramer, The Seasons of Life (1997)
The Sommelier


Today, Monday June 15th we conducted our live Forex scalping session for anyone that had signed up for the live session (free), we announced it on our Forex group on Facebook (click HERE to join).
Our goal was to show how to scalp with a naked chart (no indicators) and also show how to scalp with 3 indicators that could help any trader to scalp on Forex and also use it as a tool for binary trading signals.
If you like our content and our live session, please subscribe to our YouTube channel; now without further delay, here is the video.


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Q: PhantomJS font not render for some text Partial Text is not rendering correct on a site.
From browser:

From phantomjs:

Machine :Fedora 64 bit
Phantomjs version : 1.9.7
Dependencies already installed :

*

*yum install urw-fonts

*sudo yum install fontconfig freetype libfreetype.so.6 libfontconfig.so.1 libstdc++.so.6

On another Windows platform works fine, only issues with Linux environment. What am i missing?

A: I was having a problem with phantomjs and rendering of fonts for special characters (Japanese, Chinese, Hindi, etc.), and that's how I solved the problem:

*

*Download the corresponding .ttf Unicode fonts file. There are several free sites on the web, but you have several Unicode fonts free files for several different character maps here.

*Save the .ttf files in your server/machine either in the directory /etc/fonts or in the directory ~/.fonts. The latter is also a unix directory, if it does not exist, create it, and you need it if you have no root privileges (shared server for example)

*Run either fc-cache -fv /etc/fonts or fc-cache -fv ~/.fonts/ accordingly. This fc-cache command scans the font directories on the system and builds font information cache files
Then in the phantomjs code, use always utf-8 either for file system
var HTMLfile = fs.open(path + file_name, {
    mode: 'r', //read
    charset: 'utf-8'
});
var content = HTMLfile.read();
HTMLfile.close();

or for webpage
var webPage = require('webpage');
var page = webPage.create();
var settings = {
  operation: "POST",
  encoding: "utf8",
  headers: {
    "Content-Type": "application/json"
  },
  data: JSON.stringify({
    some: "data",
    another: ["custom", "data"]
  })
};

After long search, it worked for me.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Natural Stone Veneers represent a growing trend in hardscaping materials. They are currently being used both indoors and outdoors for residential and commercial applications. Stone Veneers look identical to full-scale stone construction but are actually 1/3 of the depth of a typical stone. This thin stone veneer has many benefits including: lower cost, lighter weight, lower transportation costs, limits environmental impact and creates a simpler installation process. If you want the look of a stone facade without the costs or headache, look no further than natural stone veneers.


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Boris vows to press on with Thames estuary airport plans
September 2, 2014 - Martin Hoscik@martinhoscik
The commission is considering proposals to expand Gatwick and Heathrow airports. Image: Gatwick.
Boris Johnson has claimed that the Government's airport commission will become "increasingly irrelevant" after it ruled out building a new airport in the Thames Estuary.
On Tuesday morning the commission confirmed rumours reported on Monday that it was not shortlisting the Mayor's 'Boris Island' scheme which would see flights into Heathrow moved to a new airport in Kent.
Commission Chair Sir Howard Davies said: "There are serious doubts about the delivery and operation of a very large hub airport in the estuary.
"The economic disruption would be huge and there are environmental hurdles which it may prove impossible, or very time-consuming to surmount.
"Even the least ambitious version of the scheme would cost £70 to £90 billion with much greater public expenditure involved than in other options – probably some £30 to £60 billion in total."
Sir Howard added: "There will be those who argue that the commission lacks ambition and imagination. We are ambitious for the right solution.
"The need for additional capacity is urgent. We need to focus on solutions which are deliverable, affordable, and set the right balance for the future of aviation in the UK."
The commission will now continue to assess 3 shortlisted proposals – a new runway to the south of Gatwick Airport, an extra runway to the north west of the existing northern Heathrow runway, and an extension to Heathrow's northern runway – before publishing its appraisal for public consultation in the autumn.
Responding to the decision, Mayor Johnson said ruling out the estuary scheme meant the commission's work would become "increasingly irrelevant" because, he claimed, no Government would back Heathrow expansion.
He said: "In one myopic stroke the Airports Commission has set the debate back by half a century and consigned their work to the long list of vertically filed reports on aviation expansion that are gathering dust on a shelf in Whitehall.
"Gatwick is not a long term solution and Howard Davies must explain to the people of London how he can possibly envisage that an expansion of Heathrow, which would create unbelievable levels of noise, blight and pollution, is a better idea than a new airport to the east of London that he himself admits is visionary, and which would create the jobs and growth this country needs to remain competitive.
"It remains the only credible solution, any process that fails to include it renders itself pretty much irrelevant, and I'm absolutely certain that it is the option that will eventually be chosen."
City Hall says the Mayor "will continue to make the case for a new airport to the east of London".
London Assembly Conservative spokesman Richard Tracey has accused the commission of "heading down a blind alley, whilst wasting time and taxpayer cash."
He called on ministers to "pull the plug and adopt the Mayor of London's Estuary airport solution."
Labour's London Assembly transport spokesperson, Val Shawcross AM, said the Mayor owed Londoners an apology for spending £5m of their money on a scheme he knew would not happen.
Ms Shawcross said: "Boris Johnson has long known that an estuary airport option was simply not viable, but has ploughed on regardless and wasted more than £5m of taxpayer money pursuing this pie-in-the-sky vanity project.
"If anything, Londoners now deserve an apology from their Mayor. He has wasted valuable public money promoting an estuary airport to raise his profile, when the expert evidence all along suggested the idea was environmentally and financially doomed."
Liberal Democrat AM, Caroline Pidgeon AM, said: "The Mayor of London has shown immense folly and wasted immense amounts of public money in pursuing the fantasy of a Thames Estuary airport.
"On grounds of practicality, cost and environmental impact the airport commission have rightly thrown out his proposal.
"It is time the Mayor finally accepted defeat and stopped wasting Londoners' money."
Green party AM, Darren Johnson, said: "The commission has finally sunk Boris Island once and for all.
"The Mayor, has already squandered three million pounds of his five million budget on this non-starter. He must stop wasting any more money on it."
"Expanding Heathrow is not the solution either. For anyone who genuinely cares about the future, the only sensible solution is no expansion at all. London is already served by five airports and six commercial runways.
"Further aviation expansion would be madness, causing further noise misery and undermining efforts to tackle climate change."
On Monday, Croydon North MP Steve Reed said the "obvious answer is a 2nd runway at Gatwick," adding that the proposals mean fewer people would be "affected by noise" while offering "big benefits for Croydon"


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Home » Lifestyle » Kanye West Gave Julia Fox a 'Suite Full of Clothes' for Date Night: 'Dream Come True'
Kanye West Gave Julia Fox a 'Suite Full of Clothes' for Date Night: 'Dream Come True'
A dream date night! Kanye West gave new flame Julia Fox a night to remember. The 44-year-old rapper surprised the Uncut Gems actress with an entire room full of designer clothes in advance of their date in the big apple.
Everything Kanye Has Said About Kim Kardashian Since Their Split
And according to Fox, 31, the entire ordeal was a "real Cinderella moment." "I mean, I'm still in shock," the star wrote in a Thursday, January 6, letter penned for Interview Magazine. "Ye had an entire hotel suite full of clothes. It was every girl's dream come true."
While the clothing was much appreciated, the logistics were all kept under wraps. "I don't know how he did it, or how he got all of it there in time," Fox wrote. "But I was so surprised. Like, who does things like this on a second date? Or any date!"
While there were plenty of options to choose from, the No Sudden Move star settled on a Balenciaga ensemble complete with black pants, gloves and a solid T-shirt for evening with West, in which they saw the Broadway show Slave Play and dined at Carbone.
How Kanye West Influenced Kim Kardashian's Style Through the Years
A source exclusively told Us that the pair are "having fun" and that the Yeezy founder "wanted to get to know" Fox better. Despite the lavish dates (they also enjoyed a night out in Miami), the pair is "not serious," according to another insider. Rather, West is "living his best life" amid his divorce from Kim Kardashian. (Clearly, Fox is thriving, too).
Wooing women with fashion is par for the course for West. In fact, it's apparently how he won over the 41-year-old Skim founder at the beginning of their relationship. In the second part of his podcast interview with Drink Champs circa November 2021, the Donda singer revealed that styling is his "language of love" and is how "bagged" Kardashian at the start of their relationship.
Take a Look Back at Kim Kardashian and Kanye West's Best Style Moments
"I pulled up, I had the Balmains and the jackets and stuff, I pull the jackets and the shoes," he said. West went on to explain that he would always pop over to Kardashian's former apartment to show her new shoes he made in collaboration with designer Giuseppe Zannotti.
"I would take a shoe and there would be one person I would think about that I want to show these show [to]. It would be Kim. And I would go to her house and have her try on the shoes. And one of the shoes actually came out," West added.
I gave birth to the UK's smallest baby – her foot is smaller than my thumb
How anti-vax Novak Djokovic believes he can detoxify water with MIND and diagnose allergies by pressing BREAD on stomach
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