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Items tagged with: debate
Support Anarchist Bookfair #Malmö
Last year, Anarchist Bookfair Malmö gave us hope, strength, new ideas and a diversity of tactics to keep on struggling for another world. This year we want to make this happen again.
We are right now in the starting of the preparations for the Anarchist Bookfair Malmö 2019 and we want to fill it with book presentations, panel-debate, lectures, workshops, stalls, talks, meetings, food, music, etc.
Although we wish for the bottom of our hearts that we do not need to use the capitalist system that we are under, we need contributions to make this bookfair happen.
There is still some room for those who want to talk about any interesting theme or bring their material here! Just get in contact here!
We want to have the bookfair as a free entrance place and stalls without cost where knowledge can be shared.
Now we ask for donations to cover the costs of material like posters, flyers, rent for the venue, food, transport, and unexpected stuff.
Our main goal is to gather 800 € So we have a budget to pay for the venue, flyers, some transport costs etc.
If we manage to gather 1000€ we could pay the tickets for all the comrades coming to do lectures.
If the amount of money is over what we expected, is going to be shared with other projects and for the futures bookfairs.
Last years excess was given to our Anarchist meeting place Majkällaren which holds an anarchist library, letter-writing evenings, talks and meetings for different groups.
----> https://www.firefund.net/malmo-bookfair
12 % of € 800
€ 95 reached in total
44 days left !
Together we are the Malmös Anarchist Bookfair
I post pictures / meme every day about anarchy and other cool stuff.
Feel free to download them and share them ! 😀
#shitposting #anarchist meme for cool people
#anarchy #anarchism #book #bookfair #help
#solidarity #fund #debate #lectures #workshop
#food #music
The 15 Laws of Meeting Power
Such a referee will even occasionally allow a fight to spiral dangerously out of control in order to exhaust the participants before stepping in. A ham-handed referee on a power trip gets in the way of resolution and forces the participants to waste some effort in cutting him/her out of the loop (101 on how to do this: undercut their credibility, draw in a different referee, collude with your opponent to escalate the tension beyond the amateur referee's control).Some excellent quotes I got from this post; good read, I'll try to learn them I see if they work while finding ways to apply them.
In a formal context, a LOT is determined by how well the chairperson and the room can see you and how well you can see the rest of the room. At Telluride, because of the way chairs were arranged (in semicircular rings rather than rows) I chose to sit near the back, but in a very visible portion of the back. Not because I am a typical back row "silent observer with one wise remark" kind, but because I can see and be seen. The benefit of being seen is obvious: your raised hand can rarely be overlooked, and it is easy to dominate the floor when it is your turn, when people don't have to twist too much to see your facial and body language. The power of seeing is less obvious. One benefit of being able to survey the room is that you can read group body language: is the left side of the room unhappy? Face 'em as you make your next conciliatory remark.
[…] one of the signs of sophistication she looked for in a candidate was an instance of referring back to something that was said more than 10 minutes ago.
A corollary to the power of listening is the power of citation. Using what was said before gives you a lot of control. It is even more powerful if you remember who said it and what the exact words were, and can quote. Why? Because you automatically demonstrate that you were paying attention, making you more credible than others. Plus, you can temporarily borrow the "usual" supporters of the people you quote, because you did them the honor of remembering what their side said.
Extra Credit: keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Quoting your opponents more accurately than they can quote themselves is one of the most fascinating moves you can employ. The original speaker is put on the defensive, forced to fumble and clarify, and in the process loses control. If you want to experience true schadenfreude listen closely to what your opponents say. Do not admit to enjoying this experience.
There are several good reasons why meetings should not be held to silly egalitarian standards. A matter of special knowledge is being discussed. Would you give the two opposed experts 90% of the airtime and leave 10% to the lay folk, or give each individual his/her 10%? Someone is prattling on idiotically, would you rather cut him/her off or let them waste an additional 20 minutes of everybody's time? Yes, labeling a contribution as idiotic and useless is a judgment call. But the point of meetings is neither "respectful dialogue" nor formal competitive debate. A meeting is about talking for the sake of discovering collective wisdom, making decisions and solving problems. This calls for fundamentally different approaches to evaluating and controlling the value of what is being said. Adversarial weeding out of collectively-designated bullshit is the only know way to achieve this evaluation and control. Leave egalitarianism for the voting booth.
Creating and manipulating debating stances in the group, creating polarizations and wars between entrenched positions, intentionally hurting feelings, framing issues in an "I win only if you lose" manner – each of these behaviors is morally suspect, particularly in the American imagination (other cultures tend to be a lot less nanny-like). Debate is rightly seen as a destructive force. Destruction is wrongly seen as a purely negative force. The element of genuine zero-sum debate is why meetings are creative-destruction processes and not candlelight vigils. Without clearing the deadwood of the collective mind with the controlled burns of aggressive and adversarial debating, collective decision-making and action is next to impossible. The forest fires of collective stupidity would take over. Don't shy away from a fight when one is necessary. If you need to prevent a disastrous vote in one minute by carefully employing an ad hominem, do so. The ends sometimes justify the means.
#strategy #power #dynamics #management #debate #dialogue #meeting
The drug debate in Japan (2018)
Despite its relatively low drug abuse figures, the Japanese system is failing to treat addicts.
Article word count: 5471
HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19459416
Posted by lermontov (karma: 8634)
Post stats: Points: 93 - Comments: 127 - 2019-03-22T03:30:52Z
#HackerNews #2018 #debate #drug #japan #the
Article content:
[1]Akie Abe, Japan's first lady, visits a legal hemp farm in western Japan
Akie Abe, Japan's first lady, visits a legal hemp farm in western Japan, 2015. Image: Akie Abe, Facebook.
In 2015, something strange happened in Japan – something which made the country, for a moment, think differently about its past. Akie Abe, the wife of the Prime Minister, was photographed standing in a field of very large cannabis plants. This was not an accident. She was arguing for the revival of a cannabis culture that had prevailed in Japan for at least 2000 years – until it was stamped out by foreigners, in living memory.[2]
[1]Japan today has some of the harshest drug laws of any advanced democracy. If you are found in possession of cannabis in Japan for personal use you could receive a maximum prison sentence of five years, and if you are caught growing it, you can be sent to prison for up to seven years. Each year, the laws are enforced against 2000 people, who are brutally publicly shamed before, during and after their prison sentence.[3] [2]For example, when the actress Saya Takagi was caught with cannabis, all reruns of the dramas she appeared on – like the popular detective series Aibo - were scrubbed from the TV schedules.[4] [3]She had written the theme song for another TV show: it was immediately ditched. Or to give another example, when a rugby player for Japan's national team was caught with the drug, he was banned from ever playing again, and the electronics giant Toshiba suspended all sponsorship of his regional team.[5] [4]To be associated with cannabis in Japan is to be destroyed.
So at first glance, Akie Abe's call to restore Japan's earlier culture – even saying she had considered growing hemp herself – seemed baffling to many Japanese people. What was she talking about? "Most Japanese people see cannabis as a subculture of Japan but they're wrong. For thousands of years, cannabis has been at the very heart of Japanese culture," Japan's leading expert on cannabis, Takayasu Junichi, told the Asia Pacific Journal in an interview.
The cannabis plant grew freely all over Japan, and was deliberately cultivated, for millennia. Junichi's Taima Hakubutsukan, The Cannabis Museum, has documented the best evidence. There are prehistoric cave paintings in Japan which clearly depict cannabis plants, and cannabis seeds have been found dating back to at least 300BC. The Asia Pacific Journal reporter, Jon Mitchell, explained: "The museum is packed with testimony to Japan's proud cannabis heritage. There are 17th century woodblock prints of women spinning fibers and photos of farmers cutting plants. In one corner sits a working loom where Takayasu demonstrates the art of weaving. He points to a bail of cannabis cloth - warm in winter, cool in summer, it's perfectly suited to Japan's extreme climate."
Hemp – which is made from the cannabis plant – was central to Japanese life. It was used to make clothes and ropes, and was at the heart of to sacred ceremonies. Jon Mitchell explains further: "Cannabis was revered for its cleansing abilities, so Shinto priests used to wave bundles of leaves to exorcise evil spirits. Likewise, to signify their purity, brides wore veils made from cannabis on their wedding days. Today, the nation's most sacred shrine - Ise Jingu in Mie Prefecture - continues to have five annual ceremonies called taima dedicated to the nation's sun goddess. However, many modern visitors fail to connect the names of these rituals with the drug so demonised by their politicians and police." Kids used to be told that only the best children grew up to resemble cannabis plants, because they were tall and strong.
So how did cannabis go from being revered to demonised in such a short period of time? In the wake of the Second World War, when Japan was defeated and occupied, the US imposed its own attitudes towards drugs on the country; just as they had wanted to ever since the founder of America's drug war, Harry Anslinger, launched his crusade. In 1948, Japan's Cannabis Control Act was passed, and the country's 25,000 cannabis farms were closed in a broad swoop. There had been no internal Japanese domestic pressure to introduce this war on drugs. There was no great fear of cannabis – it's not even clear it was smoked much, or at all. But the US was imposing the drug war everywhere, and the countries it was occupying were easiest to bend to its will.
This ban – now imposed for several generations – has stirred a belief in Japan that there must be something evil about cannabis. A claim that began as an American import has now become a deeply-held cultural belief, and the result is that even the most innocuous forms of cannabis use are severely punished.
For example, a 58-year-old terminal liver cancer patient called Masamitsu Yamamoto was hauled before the Japanese courts in 2016. He was in extraordinary physical pain, and he had appealed to the medical authorities to allow him to use cannabis to control his pain, as many other patients in other countries are doing perfectly legally with prescriptions from their doctors. They refused. So he began to grow some himself solely for his personal use. When he used it he felt a great deal of relief. But he was arrested. "I've tried everything else that modern medicine offers," he told the court. After he was arrested, his health plummeted, and he died before the end of his trial. He had asked the court, since he was only growing the drug for himself, who was this legal process designed to protect?[6]
[5]Akie Abe's attempts to alert her country to a forgotten history where this would have been unthinkable were greeted with a kind of baffled amusement – until she became bogged down in scandals of her own, and the conversation ceased. Now, whenever there is a very small increase of cannabis use nationally, the response of the newspaper Asahi Shimbun is typical: "Our incipient cannabis pollution must be contained at all costs," it declared, demanding an even tougher crackdown.[7]
[6]Meanwhile, Japan has, for a long time, been concentrating more heavily on a different drug – one where the country's pattern of use is highly unusual.
Missing figures
Japan is unique in the world when it comes to its taste in drugs. Stimulants – overwhelmingly methamphetamine – make up 80 percent of all drug use.[8] [7]This makes Japan a real outlier. Not only is it the only country where methamphetamine use trumps cannabis – it trumps it by a country mile. Some drugs which are popular in other parts of the world are virtually unheard of in Japan. For example, in the mid-1980s, heroin-based arrests increased by 25 percent – from 29 people to 36.[9] [8]Cocaine, similarly, has gained very little market share.
The most obvious question is: why? "In a society of workaholics, of course it's going to be meth," I was told by Jake Adelstein, one of the leading experts on drugs and crime in Japan, and the author of the book Tokyo Vice. Stimulants make it possible to work longer and harder. In a country where there is even a word for "death from overwork" – a concept that doesn't even exist in Europe or the United States – they have an obvious appeal.
"Because Japanese working hours are so long and you have to be able to function to hold onto your job," Adelstein explains, "Japanese people are very concerned about holding onto their jobs. Especially the 67 percent of the population that has what are called permanent jobs. You can't take pot or you can't take heroin or you can't take something else that won't let you function, because then you lose your job. Plus, if you're working basically every day from nine in the morning to ten at night, when is there a chance to take drugs? You've got the weekends and that's it. These long working hours make it hard to develop a drug habit, unless you're a band member or an actor or an actress."
Japan almost certainly has higher drug use and significantly higher overdose deaths than the government claims publicly
Indeed, stimulants are so deeply Japanese that methamphetamine was invented in Tokyo. The chemist Nagayoshi Nagai first synthesised it from ephedrine in 1893. Stimulants seem to fit with the demands of Japan's culture and they are almost certainly more popular than the official statistics suggest. The official figures claim 1.5 percent of Japanese people have used illegal drugs, contrasting with 42 percent in the US.[10] [9]But, as one expert who asked not to be named explained to me, these figures are compiled in ways that make them quite unreliable. Every year, the government gathers these statistics by approaching 6000 households and asking them to fill in a questionnaire. They don't have to write their names on it, but they do have to hand them over to a government official. In a country where – as I'll discuss later – even doctors call the police to inform them if their patients are suspected of using drugs, it is very likely that this method leads to figures that hugely underestimate the proportion of Japanese people using drugs.
Even more importantly, the official statistics are wrong on one of the most important facts in this debate. The same official told me that overdose deaths are grossly underestimated in the official statistics. He explained: "People usually don't say that they died of overdose. So, when people die of heart failure, what's that? What causes a heart failure?" If it was drug-induced, nobody would know. Jake Adelstein explained to me: "The number of drug overdose [deaths]in Japan of course is incredibly underdiagnosed, for two reasons. One is that only ten percent of suspicious cases have an autopsy, and if it looks like suicide, [the figure drops to] four percent." Why? "Because there aren't enough certified medical examiners that do it, and also because the police would really hate to see their homicide clearance rate climb down. If you start doing autopsies on all suspicious deaths, not just the ten percent of them that are classified as suspicious, then you have to solve it, right? Right now, the clearance rate for homicides is very high but if you start [doing autopsies for] every single suspicious death, your clearance rates are going to sink and people are going to say the police aren't doing their job well."
The second reason, he said, is "that there is no benefit for any government office in documenting the problem. There's no upside to it. It's like Japan's child abuse problem. For years, Japan said there's no child abuse in the country. They didn't take stats. Then there were so many sensational cases, they started taking stats. Guess what? There's lots of child abuse in Japan. So if you start looking at drug overdose cases in Japan, then you're going to have to admit that there's a drug problem."
He concluded: "A very Japanese way of not dealing with the problem is – don't take the data that would show that it exists."
So Japan almost certainly has higher drug use and significantly higher overdose deaths than the government claims publicly. But even if the lower estimates for use are right, there are two million drug users living in terror of being shamed or jailed. And we know from the rest of the world that drug prohibition makes drugs deadlier. Drug dealers sell an adulterated product, filled with dangerous substances, and with an uncertain quantity of the drug itself, making it much easier to overdose: imagine if, when you drank alcohol, you didn't know if it was 1 percent or 40 percent proof.
But it is important to stress: even if the real figures turned out to be ten times the official estimates, Japan would still have a relatively low level of drug use and drug deaths compared to many countries. Why is that? To understand the answer, I had to dive again into Japan's past and to a myth that has shaped the country's thinking about drugs for generations now.
National trauma
There is a story that Japan has told itself about a key moment in its history for more than 70 years now. It underpins Japanese drug policy, and helps to drive its domestic drug war.
It goes like this. During the Second World War, Japan was flooded with stimulant drugs that had been used by the foreign armies fighting in the country. As Kiyoshi Wada, of the National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry at Kodaira, puts it, these drugs "were used mainly by military personnel from the United States, Great Britain and Germany." They made soldiers better able to focus, and able to cope on limited sleep. But, he continues, "after World War II ended, however, stock of methamphetamines were released from pharmaceutical companies and the military into the market." Suddenly, anyone could buy them from the pharmacy. But these drugs were so powerful and so addictive that many people became hijacked by the ferocious chemical hooks hidden away in the pills they were swallowing. More and more people became addicted. The situation spiralled down from 1945 until the 50s, until it reached the point where there were more than 550,000 addicts, committing a series of heinous crimes in their drug psychosis, including child-murder. Finally, these drugs had to be banned, and then – at last – the problem largely went away.[11]
[10]This is the story that lies in the background of the Japanese drug debate, about why stimulants – the most popular illegal drug – are banned, and why they must remain so. If this story is true, it is perfectly logical to ban drugs, and to wage the tough war that Japan is embarked on. I kept hearing this story again and again as I dug into Japanese drug policy.
But there are some problems with this story. To begin to see them, it's worth thinking about a moment in the history of my country, Britain. In the 18th century, at an early stage in the country's industrialisation, huge numbers of people were driven out of the countryside – where their families had lived for centuries – into disgusting urban slums in cities like London and Manchester. They lost everything that had given their lives meaning – their communities, their jobs, their way of life. Crammed into tiny crowded homes and forced to adjust to working in factories, something unexpected happened. There was an outbreak of mass alcoholism. People began to drink enormous amounts of gin. There was public disorder as people were collapsing in public drunk. Some people began to drink themselves to death. It was known as the "Gin Craze". There's a famous painting, by Richard Hogarth, of a baby crawling off a high ledge while its mother sits stupefied, glugging gin.
At the time, what people said in Britain was that people had been destroyed by an unprecedentedly evil and addictive drug called gin. If only we could get rid of gin, they reasoned, these problems would go away.
But now, when we look back on this period, we see that it can't be gin that caused the problem. Anyone in Britain today who is over the age of 18 can buy gin, and while of course there is a small number of alcoholics, there is no mass alcoholism, and babies are not crawling off ledges while their mothers are collapsed on the street.
So what really happened? When you are trying to explain an addiction outbreak, it turns out that supply-based explanations don't work. Every society always has some powerful intoxicant to hand that it could use compulsively if its people felt the need. These outbreaks don't occur simply when a new drug becomes available. But while explanations based on supply don't work, explanations based on collective pain do work. In Britain during the Gin Craze, there was a large pool of people in terrible distress, for very good reasons: they had been humiliated and broken and had yet to find a tolerable new way to live. The addiction epidemic wasn't caused by the availability of the drug, as it had been available before, and it would be available after. It was explained by the fact that a large number of the country's people found it intolerable to be present in their lives, and sought out powerful anaesthetics. (This is one of the lessons of Bruce Alexander's research on Rat Park, applied on a broader canvass. I explained this experiment – and its implications for all of us – in this TED talk.
I kept thinking about this as I read about Japan's addiction epidemic in the wake of World War Two. There has been an unchallenged consensus that the epidemic was caused by the supply of stimulants. But there has been very little discussion of why so many people wanted intoxicants that would blot out so much of their consciousness and their pain. But Japan had just been subjected to an extraordinary national trauma, one even greater than that suffered by the subjects of the Gin Craze. Japanese soldiers had been sent to kill and die, to witness and commit atrocities, and all for a failed cause. It was the only country in history to be subjected to not one nuclear attack but two. Its other cities had been burned in stunningly violent scenes of mass death. And the country was now under military occupation by the very people who had used weapons of mass destruction against them, making it clear the country would never be the same again.
The reasons why there would be a deep pool of distress and pain could hardly be clearer. I kept thinking, as I learned about this, of the key insights I had been taught about addiction. Addiction is not primarily caused by exposure to chemical hooks – Rat Park and everything that flowed from it taught us that. Addiction is caused by the individual's inability to be present in their life, because their life is too painful a place to be. For many people, a devastated, defeated, broken, irradiated Japan was too painful a place to be. And so it makes sense that many people sought a way out of the pain by compulsively drugging themselves.
One Japanese drug policy expert, who asked not to be named, told me: "I do think it maybe has a lot of influence, because we lost the war. But we [don't say that], maybe because we are Japanese and we don't want to make that kind of assertion."
It is tempting for many Japanese people to argue that while addiction may be different abroad, in Japan it is largely driven by the drugs themselves. But this has been researched. A major study of people with addiction problems in Japan, published in the Japanese Journal of Alcohol Studies and Drug Dependence, found that the lonelier a Japanese person is, and the less able they are to cope with life, the more likely they are to engage in addictive behaviours or drugs. And conversely, the more connected they become, the less likely they are to remain addicted.[13] [11]Similarly, there was a long-term follow-up study of adolescent glue-sniffers in Japan, conducted by Dr Hiroshi Suwaki at Kochi Medical School. Among the users, "early deprivation was prominent," and if they became more connected, they were more likely to leave it behind.[14]
[12]The founder of Japan's main drug treatment network, DARC, summarised the main lesson he derived from working with working with enormous numbers of addicted Japanese people to an interviewer when he told a newspaper: "Drugs are a sign of pain. The pain could come from anywhere — from stress or work or the loss of a loved one — and anyone can become addicted."[15]
[13]Another clue that this is the case comes if we look at when Japan next had an outbreak of drug addiction in 1970, following the one that ended in the mid-1950s. As Kiyoshi Wada, of the National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry at Kodaira, writes:"Japan experienced sustained economic development until 1970, when Japanese economic growth suddenly declined." This fits entirely with a pain-based explanation of addiction and yet Wada seems unable to see it, continuing: "This economic deterioration was marked by organised gangs selling methamphetamines." This implies that it was all about supply. But in reality, there was always some supply – what changed is that there was more pain, so there was more demand.
And when did the next epidemic after that happen? "The economy collapsed at the beginning of 1991," Wada writes. Then he adds: "Soon, organised gangs took advantage of this situation and began selling cannabis and methamphetamines." But what could they take advantage of? This only makes sense if you understand the answer is a swollen market – one that has been swollen by a big increase in distress. Distress is the primary driver of addiction.
This helps us to explain several things. The first is why, overall, Japan has relatively low levels of drug use and addiction. For all the other flaws of the society, Japan has a highly cohesive culture and an extensive welfare state, where relatively few citizens are abandoned, ignored, or written off. Japan has no ghettos – no equivalent to the places in the US, like West Baltimore, where there is a huge concentration of poverty and deprivation, providing pools of despair that are the perfect breeding ground for addiction. Japan's low addiction rate is due to the fact that for most of its citizens, most of the time, the society looks more like Rat Park than the isolated cages the guarantee addiction.
Yet this also helps us to explain one of the most shocking facts about drug addiction in Japan today. The Japanese government's own figures show that although addiction is relatively low, the vast majority of people who do develop addiction problems and then interact with the "system" – the state – stay addicted, and many get significantly worse. Why is this?
Goro Koto, a social worker who runs a hotline in Tokyo for people with addiction problems, explained to me that if you have an addiction in Japan, often your own family will call the police, and you will be taken away. If you go to your doctor for help, often your doctor will call the police, and you will be forced to provide a urine sample. If it tests positive for any banned drug, you will be taken into detention. If it's your first time being "caught", you'll get a 3 to 4 year suspended sentence. If you're caught again, you are sent to prison for that period. In prison, the only "treatment" you will get will be in front of prison guards, where you will have to offer up a performance that you are determined to stop using drugs, no matter how you really feel.
You will be shamed, stigmatised, and jailed, for having an addiction. A system like this only increases the pain and humiliation of people with addiction problems. This explains why so many of them continue to be addicted, or deteriorate further.
Legal and prescription drugs
There are other basic errors in the Japanese drug debate that I kept seeing, time and again. For example, when six students at an elite private college in Tokyo called Waseda University were found in possession on cannabis,[16] [14]university administrators sent an email to all students saying anyone "foolish enough" to try cannabis will "all too often end up physically and mentally ruined, perhaps leading lives of crime. There is no 'innocent' or 'harmless' way to take illegal drugs."[17]
[15]Yet the reality is that innocent and harmless use of drugs is the norm, not the exception. Even the United Nations Office of Drug Control has admitted that 90 percent of currently illegal drug use is non-problematic – it doesn't harm the user, and doesn't cause addiction. (For the 10 percent who do become addicted, there are deeper problems driving the problem). In the Japanese debate, all drug use is regarded as akin to addiction, and all addiction is regarded as a moral failing.
Japanese people seem to know this when it comes to legal drugs like alcohol, but they ignore it when it comes to illegal drugs like cannabis or methamphetamine.
Indeed, the contrast with the debate about alcohol is striking. "Attitudes towards alcohol are incredibly lax here," Jeffrey Kingston, the director of Temple University's Japan Campus, told the GlobalPost. "Alcohol facilitates the frank exchange of opinions and views in a society where communication can be quite stilted." He noted that public drunkenness is common and even hard alcohol can be bought from vending machines.[18] [16]Japan has an estimated 6.5 million alcoholics, but a university would rightly be regarded as crazy if it told its students "there is no 'innocent' or 'harmless' way to take alcohol."
Jake Adelstein told me: "Because alcohol is also part of many Shinto ceremonies it is considered sacred. And also, there's a saying in Japanese that sake is the medicine that cures ten thousand sicknesses. Alcoholism isn't really looked at as an illness. Everybody drinks. So Alcoholics Anonymous has never really taken off here. The Japanese don't consider binge drinking to be a problem. So between tobacco and cigarettes, between tobacco and alcohol, a lot of Japanese people would probably be considered drug addicts [in the US or Britain], but they're legal drug addicts."
You will be shamed, stigmatised, and jailed, for having an addiction.
Similarly, Dr Masanori Fukushima, writing in Nature, explained: "The Japanese are the world's highest spenders on prescription drugs… In contrast with conditions in countries such as Britain, where doctors are not allowed to sell drugs, nearly all Japanese general practitioners and hospitals have their own pharmacies for outpatients… There is a tremendous financial incentive for doctors to prescribe drugs excessively and unnecessarily because they make a profit of every sale." Potent psychiatric drugs which are very similar to the banned and stigmatised drugs can be bought easily by "clinic-shopping" in Japan until you find a doctor willing to profit from it. Yet this isn't stigmatised, in the way that drugs just on the other arbitrary line of legality are.
To find a different way to think about the drug debate, I realised, Japanese people only need to take the view they currently have about alcohol, Ritalin, and antidepressants, and stretch it to cover a few more chemicals.
Everywhere that drugs are banned, there is one immediate effect: organised crime is handed a hugely profitable industry. One of the leading experts on how this plays out in Japan, Jake Adelstein, explained to me: "The meth trade is always controlled by the Yakuza. There was a time when you had large transactions done by the Yakuza involving ships from North Korea bringing huge amounts of meth into the country. But as the Yakuza have decentralised and numbers have grown, you have a lot more cases of basically independent operators finding their own person to supply them and bringing it in." Now, most drug supply happens through groups which pay dues to the Yakuza but are not working through its central structures.
This happened because in 2005, a gangster called Tsukasa Shinobu took over the Yamaguchi-gumi – one of the key organs of the Yakuza – and changed direction. Adelstein explains: "At the time the Yamaguchi had forty thousand members, and a lot of the organised crime groups were basically under it, and he had a no tolerance drug policy. No selling, no buying, no using. So that made the risk of using drugs or selling drugs to the Yakuza much higher." Shinobu believed that meth use causes violent psychosis – which is a very simplistic belief – and this would bring unwanted attention onto the Yakuza themselves. This means that while the supply of drugs hasn't reduced – in fact, stimulant seizures by customs were up threefold in 2016 – they were pushed to other organised crime groups. "So instead of having large scale organisation like cartels you have little criminal organisations within a larger organisation that are running this on the side," Adelstein continues. "And when they get caught the top organisation disavows them, they all get kicked out of the organisation, and there it ends."
Except, of course, it doesn't end in one sense. The drugs get through. Criminals gain wealth and power and the means of violence by controlling it.
Signs of change
Could it be any different in Japan? The fact that even drug reformers in Japan were reluctant to let me quote them publicly reveals how sensitive this subject is there.
One of them – who works in providing services for addicts – told me: "I believe the culture in my country is going to change in at least 10 years or 20 years because we need more and more immigrants. Otherwise, we cannot keep our economy going, [because of our falling] population. So we're going to have more diversity. It's already started." He says some of these foreigners will find it hard to adjust to Japanese society and, in despair, some will use drugs. Others will create businesses selling drugs. And they will all come from cultures where illegal drug use is more normalised than in Japan today. This, he believes, will force the culture to change. "Then people will start to think about harm reduction or decriminalisation."
There are already some minor signs of change. Up to now, almost all drug users caught by the police are given a single chance. They are given a suspended sentence, and if they are caught again, they are sent to prison for years. But the Japan Times reported in 2017 a very rare event. The Osaka District Court made an exception.[19] [17]A 22-year old man was caught twice with stimulants but a court decided not to jail him. They received testimony from Toshihiko Matsumoto, director of the Drug Dependence Research Department at the National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry, who explained that jail would make this man worse. He told the Japan Times: "The idea that community-based therapy, rather than the application of penalties, should be given more weight is a worldwide trend based on various studies."
The young man with an addiction problem had explained to the court that his addiction was a way of coping with deep psychological pain. "I had a hard time communicating with people. But I was able to talk with others when I used (drugs). I was able to be myself," he told the Japan Times. "I hated being alone, and used drugs out of loneliness. It was tough living."
The fact that a Japanese court could hear these arguments and be persuaded by them shows that there is space in the culture to hear these different ways of thinking.
And a small but growing group have been explaining to their fellow Japanese citizens the benefits of potential legalisation of some banned drugs. One of the most detailed analyses has been carried out by the analyst Funai Yukio, in his book Akuho! Taima Torishimariho no Shinjitsu ("Bad Law! The Truth Behind the Cannabis Control Act"). He calculates that legalising cannabis could raise Japan, in the long term, as much as 30 trillion Yen.[20]
[18]To achieve this change, powerful forces will have to be challenged in Japanese culture. But every Wednesday and Friday, Goro Koto – the social worker who runs a helpline for people with addiction problems in Tokyo – hears the consequences of continuing with the status quo. They tell him: "I just want to talk with somebody. I don't know anywhere else I can talk about these kind of issues… I'm just looking for somebody that I can talk about my feelings or thoughts about my cravings."
All they want, they say, is help, to find a way of out of this distress. When is Japan going to stop sending the police for them, and start giving them support instead?
And when are we going to stop repeating the same mistakes?
This is an extract from the Japanese edition of Johann Hari's New York Times best-selling book, [21]Chasing The Scream: the First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, published in 2015. To find out what a range of people – from Noam Chomsky to Elton John to Naomi Klein to Stephen Fry – say about the book, click [22]here.
Corrections: This article was amended on 11 May, 2018. The original stated that cannabis possession carries a five-year mandatory prison sentence. In fact, the maximium sentence is five years and first-time offenders are often treated more leniently. The original also stated that the Japanese edition of Johann Hari's book Chasing The Scream was published in 2015. It is in fact due for publication in 2018.
[23] [1][24]https://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2015/12/15/japans-first-lady-touts-revival-of-hemp-culture/
[25] [2][26]http://apjjf.org/2014/12/49/Jon-Mitchell/4231.html
[27] [3][28]https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/11/05/national/media-national/japans-war-medical-marijuana/
[29] [4][30]https://www.pri.org/stories/2009-02-27/buzz-japan
[31] [5][32]https://japantoday.com/category/features/kuchikomi/japans-draconian-marijuana-laws-against-ongoing-trends?comment-order=latest [33]https://hightimes.com/news/cannabis-activism-in-japan-yes-thats-a-thing/
[34] [6][35]https://www.pri.org/stories/2009-02-27/buzz-japan
[36] [7][37]https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2014/08/30/lifestyle/dealing-addiction-japans-drinking-problem/
[38] [8][39]https://www.weedweekly.com/dangerous-drugs-being-ditched-in-favour-of-cannabis-in-japan/
[40] [9][41]https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123612257155123461
[42] [10]J. Yamomoto – Ministry of Health, Tokyo - 'Recent Trend of Drug Abuse in Japan' [43]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15542746
[44] [11][45]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11019561
[46] [12][47]http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1360-0443.1983.tb02529.x/abstract
[48] [13][49]https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2014/08/30/lifestyle/dealing-addiction-japans-drinking-problem/
[50] [14][51]https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123612257155123461
[52] [15][53]https://www.pri.org/stories/2009-02-27/buzz-japan
[54] [16][55]https://www.pri.org/stories/2009-02-27/buzz-japan
[56] [17][57]https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/05/16/national/social-issues/twice-convicted-addict-spared-prison-rare-ruling-lauded-example-social-rehab-merits/
[58] [18][59]https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2014/04/19/lifestyle/cannabis-the-healing-of-the-nation/#.WezGYBiZM_U
Visible links
2. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt1
3. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt2
4. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt3
5. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt4
6. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt5
7. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt6
8. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt7
9. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt8
10. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt9
11. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt10
12. https://www.youtube.com/embed/PY9DcIMGxMs
13. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt11
14. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt12
15. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt13
16. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt14
17. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt15
18. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt16
19. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt17
20. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt18
21. http://www.chasingthescream.com/
22. http://www.chasingthescream.com/
23. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt_ref1
24. https://www.google.com/url?q=https://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2015/12/15/japans-first-lady-touts-revival-of-hemp-culture/&sa=D&ust=1526055897284000
25. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt_ref2
26. https://www.google.com/url?q=http://apjjf.org/2014/12/49/Jon-Mitchell/4231.html&sa=D&ust=1526055897285000
27. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt_ref3
28. https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/11/05/national/media-national/japans-war-medical-marijuana/&sa=D&ust=1526055897286000
29. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt_ref4
30. https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.pri.org/stories/2009-02-27/buzz-japan&sa=D&ust=1526055897286000
31. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt_ref5
32. https://www.google.com/url?q=https://japantoday.com/category/features/kuchikomi/japans-draconian-marijuana-laws-against-ongoing-trends?comment-order%3Dlatest&sa=D&ust=1526055897287000
33. https://www.google.com/url?q=https://hightimes.com/news/cannabis-activism-in-japan-yes-thats-a-thing/&sa=D&ust=1526055897287000
34. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt_ref6
35. https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.pri.org/stories/2009-02-27/buzz-japan&sa=D&ust=1526055897288000
36. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt_ref7
37. https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2014/08/30/lifestyle/dealing-addiction-japans-drinking-problem/&sa=D&ust=1526055897288000
38. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt_ref8
39. https://www.weedweekly.com/dangerous-drugs-being-ditched-in-favour-of-cannabis-in-japan/
40. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt_ref9
41. https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123612257155123461&sa=D&ust=1526055897289000
42. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt_ref10
43. https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15542746&sa=D&ust=1526055897290000
44. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt_ref11
45. https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11019561&sa=D&ust=1526055897290000
46. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt_ref12
47. https://www.google.com/url?q=http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1360-0443.1983.tb02529.x/abstract&sa=D&ust=1526055897291000
48. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt_ref13
49. https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2014/08/30/lifestyle/dealing-addiction-japans-drinking-problem/&sa=D&ust=1526055897292000
50. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt_ref14
51. https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123612257155123461&sa=D&ust=1526055897292000
52. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt_ref15
53. https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.pri.org/stories/2009-02-27/buzz-japan&sa=D&ust=1526055897293000
54. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt_ref16
55. https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.pri.org/stories/2009-02-27/buzz-japan&sa=D&ust=1526055897293000
56. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt_ref17
57. https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/05/16/national/social-issues/twice-convicted-addict-spared-prison-rare-ruling-lauded-example-social-rehab-merits/&sa=D&ust=1526055897294000
58. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/japan-place-with-strangest-drug-debate-in-world/#ftnt_ref18
59. https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2014/04/19/lifestyle/cannabis-the-healing-of-the-nation/%23.WezGYBiZM_U&sa=D&ust=1526055897295000
HackerNewsBot debug: Calculated post rank: 104 - Loop: 283 - Rank min: 100 - Author rank: 172
Japan, the place with the strangest drug debate in the world
Despite its relatively low drug abuse figures, the Japanese system is failing to treat addicts.www.opendemocracy.net
After the #Pluspora admins lied about my #Ban, I made a new #Account!
Hail #FreeSpeech – Hail \o Hail \o Hail \o
And to all those #Censors out there: Those who forbid #speech, will beget #violence!
Defend your #ideas in free & open #debate or pay the price in #Blood – like those in #Christchurch! 👍
#DefendEuropa #1488 #Those-who-forbid-speech-beget-violence #NameTheJew #Jews #Jew #Evil #Censorship #Corporations #Suppression #Oppression #Censors #Lies #Treachery #Falsehood #Enemy #Fiends #Synagogue-of-Satan #Israel
Distancing myself from Twitter
That's why I decided today to protect my account. I will still be able to follow people and interact with my current followers, but even if I happen to reply to Someone Who's Wrong on the Internet™ (see https://www.xkcd.com/386/), it won't be able to degenerate into a travesty of a discussion.
This decision stems from my recent interactions with people who treat debate as a sport or worse, entertainment, and seem to like nothing more than point out to people that they are wrong according to their standards. These accounts even mention "debate", "argument" or "logic" in their bio to further the point that they aren't on Twitter to exchange ideas, just to punch people down with words.
Yes, it is a retreat move letting bad faith people "win" in a way, but you have to pick your online battles, and Twitter's core business model based on post publicity heavily favors bad faith anyway, so it would be an uphill battle even if there was an even distribution of good faith/bad faith accounts.
Besides, Twitter isn't the the only social media platform I'm on. Heck, it isn't even the main one I'm using, so this retreat feels like the next logical step before I leave this wretched platform altogether.
#socialmedia #twitter #debate
xkcd: Duty Calls
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). More details....www.xkcd.com
Andrew Yang qualifies for first DNC debate with 65k unique donors
"The Yang Gang has built an army of supporters and small-dollar donors in all 50 states."
Article word count: 92
HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19388652
Posted by yasp (karma: 1500)
Post stats: Points: 131 - Comments: 113 - 2019-03-14T12:38:17Z
#HackerNews #65k #andrew #debate #dnc #donors #first #for #qualifies #unique #with #yang
Article content:
Andrew Yang, a former tech executive who founded Venture for America, [1]announced Tuesday that he has qualified for the first round of the Democratic primary debate by raising money from more than 65,000 unique donors.
The big picture: Yang's top 3 policy concerns are universal basic income, Medicare for All and a "human-centered capitalism" approach to the economy. His proposal for universal basic income, his central campaign issue, is grounded in a belief that millions of jobs will be wiped away due to automation.
Go deeper: [2]Everything you need to know about Andrew Yang
Visible links
1. https://twitter.com/DJJudd/status/1105483582372495360
2. https://www.axios.com/andrew-yang-2020-presidential-election-factsheet-c93fd5ef-8201-4ba6-878b-72b3edc5a945.html
HackerNewsBot debug: Calculated post rank: 125 - Loop: 213 - Rank min: 100 - Author rank: 41
2020 candidate Andrew Yang qualifies for first DNC debate with 65,000 individual donors
"The Yang Gang has built an army of supporters and small-dollar donors in all 50 states."www.axios.com
President Trump Warns of the Growing Danger Socialism on the Left, CPAC 2019
#2019 #conservative political action conference #cpac #cpac 2019 #danger #debate #democrat #democratic #democrats #democrats socialism #donald trump #election #elections #freedom of speech #green new deal #growing #left #maga #make america great again #next election cycle #oan newsroom #president #president donald trump #president trump #religious liberty #republican #republicans #socialism #speech #the green new deal #trump #usa #warns #winning against the swamp
"FREE SPEEEEEEEECH!!!!!! (But only for myself and people I agree with)"
#shitposting #anarchist meme for cool people
#meme #gender #pronoun #lgbt
a list of tags where nazbol seems to appears, credit to Wolfy our diaspora idiot :
#Free #FreeSpeech #Pub #Public #ThoughtCrime #ThoughtPolice #1984 #MSM #MainstreamMedia #SocialMedia #Minds #Gab #Mastodon #Facebook #Twitter #Google #Gplus #GooglePlus #Establishment #Antifa #Censorship #Globalist #Globalism #ShadowBan #ShadowBanning #ShadowBanned #PoliticalCorrectness #PoliticallyCorrect #PC #NPC #Politics #Pod #Podmin #Admin #CuckPods #iLikeToast #Pluspora #GPlusRefugee #Disroot #ThePirateParty #PirateParty #Gibberfish #DiaspOrg #Diasp-org #Gianforte #JoinDiaspora #Nerdpol #LibreNet #Geraspora #DiasporaArgentina #DiasporaTown #Cryptospora #Framasphere #DiasporaBR #NewHere #OldHere #<3 #Diaspora #DiasporaFoundation #Friendica #SocialHome #Network #Fediverse #Federation #Confederation #Nationalist #Rebel #Rebellion #Alliance #Axis #RebelAlliance #DiasporaRebellion #DiasporaRebelAlliance #WildDiaspora #Dissidents #Dissident #Freedom
#JimStone #education #affluent #trust #freedom #choice #vaccine #vaccination #vaxxer #antivax #antivaxxer #anti-vax #antivaxers #vaccinesafety #jews #shills #trolls #npc #sheep #sheeple #usefulidiots #cognitivedissonance #debate #politics #capitalism #bigpharma #establishment #state #government #science #skeptic #medicine #pharmaceutical #chemicals #toxins #disease #flu #virus #viral #contamination #immunization #mmr #dna #rna #autism #health #publichealth #fraud #propaganda #manipulation #policestate #eugenics #dysgenics #depopulation #genocide #gmo #gov #nwo #eu #un #who #cdc #lgbt #brainwashing #idiocracy #gay #agenda21 #globalism #globalist #conspiracy #corruption #controversy
#News #JimStone #NY #NewYork #Law #Legislation #Abortion #Jews #Satanism #Occult #Satanic #Ritual #Pizzagate #ChildAbuse #Sacrifice #SecretSociety #MKUltra #VickiPolin
#politics #internet #debate #argument #argue #forum #totalitarianism #trust #freedom #rights #choice #vaccine #vaccination #vaxxer #antivax #antivaxxer #anti-vax #antivaxers #vaccinesafety #gun-control #guncontrol #gunrights #gunday #2a #freedomofspeech #freespeech #free-speech #censorship #suppression #hatespeech #hate-speech #1a #establishment #state #government #gov #totalitarian #science #skeptic #health #publichealth #propaganda #psyop #psyops #manipulation #policestate #persuasion #obey #left #right #dichotomy #belief #hegeliandialectic #polarization #psychology #evolutionarypsychology #rkselectiontheory #blog #hashtags
I post every day meme about anarchy and other cool stuff.
Feel free to download and/or share them ! 😀
The people who vaccinate the least are the most educated and affluent
Here is a quote from Prevent Disease
Studies Demonstrate The More Educated You Are, The Less Chance You Will Vaccinate
More educated parents are less likely to vaccinate, which contradicts the misconceptions of many health professionals who profess that parents don't vaccinate because they are under-educated, poor or misinformed.
One publication of medical research linking the MMR vaccine to autism in The Lancet in February 1998 sparked a decade-long controversy about the triple jab. Following the initial publication, the uptake rate of the MMR vaccine dropped from 92% in 1997/98 to 80% in 2003/04.
A report examines how the response to the MMR controversy varied between parents with different levels of education. It revealed that:
Before 1998, highly educated parents were up to 8% more likely to take up the MMR vaccine than parents with lower education. By 2002, this gap had not only closed; it had actually been reversed, with highly educated parents being 2-3% less likely to accept the MMR vaccine.
Most of the relative decline in the MMR uptake by highly educated parents occurred soon after the controversy broke when the media coverage was still relatively low.
After the increased media attention in 2001 and 2002, there were no discernible differences in trends across educational groups. The controversy also appears to have had effects on the uptake of other childhood vaccines: after 1998, highly educated parents also reduced their relative uptake of other non-controversial childhood vaccines.
The relative decline in uptake by highly educated parents also potentially has wider significance. Generally speaking, individuals with more education have better health. This is possibly because they are better informed about how to achieve better health outcomes. The finding that highly educated parents were the first to react to the information that the MMR had potential side effects is consistent with this hypothesis.
More encouraging for anti-vaccine advocates is the finding that highly educated parents also reduced their uptake of other non-controversial childhood vaccines, a good sign that most of the hidden toxins in vaccines are slowly being discovered by parents and the public in general.
Jim's comment: Low and behold, the fact that the more educated and affluent you are, the more likely you won't vaccinate your kids has been reported widely:
Experts Say Those Who Don't Vaccinate Their Kids Tend to Be Wealthy and White
Parents who don't vaccinate kids tend to be affluent, better educated, experts say
Highly Educated Parents Far More Likely To Not Vaccinate Children
Why Do Affluent, Well-Educated People Refuse Vaccines?
Obviously, people who are well educated and affluent are more able to observe the obvious - that the vaccines are destroying the children, and (oops, did I say it) Educated does not cut it, Affluent does, and those permitted to become affluent are FAR MORE likely to be Jews, who know damn well what the shots are really for.
OMG, I think I nailed it!
#JimStone #education #affluent #trust #freedom #choice #vaccine #vaccination #vaxxer #antivax #antivaxxer #anti-vax #antivaxers #vaccinesafety #jews #shills #trolls #npc #sheep #sheeple #usefulidiots #cognitivedissonance #debate #politics #capitalism #bigpharma #establishment #state #government #science #skeptic #medicine #pharmaceutical #chemicals #toxins #disease #flu #virus #viral #contamination #immunization #mmr #dna #rna #autism #health #publichealth #fraud #propaganda #manipulation #policestate #eugenics #dysgenics #depopulation #genocide #gmo #gov #nwo #eu #un #who #cdc #lgbt #brainwashing #idiocracy #gay #antifa #agenda21 #globalism #globalist #conspiracy #corruption #controversy #news
at first yo might think: what is this kid saying? he appeals to reason. will he succeed? after all man is driven by emotions and his subconsciousness is influenced by his psychology.
watch twice!
ways to fix capitalism – Federico Pistono TEDxHaarlem
#money #alternative #reform #systems #vollgeld #bge #altcoopsys #alternatives #alternativgeld #OsOfSociety #OperatingSystemsOfSociety #SystemPhilosophy #dinero #dollar #euro #yen #rubel #sustainability #resilience #complementary #complementarycurrency #cooperation #monetaryreform #financialreform #financialsystemreform #financialcrisis #mortagecrisis #debtcrisis #suprimecrisis #occupywallsreet #occupyfrankfurt #finance #geldsystem #geldreform #moneysystem #financialsystem #economics #ecologicaleconomics #economy #capitalism #kapitalismus #system #socialism #communism #ideology #discussions #debate #ubi #basicincome #equality #inequality #wealthdistribution #wealth
Originally posted at: https://altcoopsys.org/2019/02/11/ways-to-fix-capitalism-federico-pistono-tedxhaarlem-excellent-talk-real-stories-no-fairy-tales-real-discussion-not-ideology-fights/
at first yo might think: what is this kid saying? he appeals to reason. will he succeed? after all man is driven by emotions and his subconsciousness is influenced by his psychology.
watch twice!
ways to fix capitalism – Federico Pistono TEDxHaarlem
#money #alternative #reform #systems #vollgeld #bge #altcoopsys #alternatives #alternativgeld #OsOfSociety #OperatingSystemsOfSociety #SystemPhilosophy #dinero #dollar #euro #yen #rubel #sustainability #resilience #complementary #complementarycurrency #cooperation #monetaryreform #financialreform #financialsystemreform #financialcrisis #mortagecrisis #debtcrisis #suprimecrisis #occupywallsreet #occupyfrankfurt #finance #geldsystem #geldreform #moneysystem #financialsystem #economics #ecologicaleconomics #economy #capitalism #kapitalismus #system #socialism #communism #ideology #discussions #debate
Originally posted at: https://altcoopsys.org/2019/02/11/ways-to-fix-capitalism-federico-pistono-tedxhaarlem-excellent-talk-real-stories-no-fairy-tales-real-discussion-not-ideology-fights/
Some thoughts on debate and the political spectrum...
I've noticed the vaccine debate parallels the gun-control debate in many ways. Both seem to be very polarizing, with not a lot of middle ground. Both sides view the other as a danger to public health and especially children. It seems that no matter how much the topic is argued and debated people remain very rigid in their position.
While there may be some individual exceptions, it's interesting to me that both sides in the debate tend to skew between left-leaning and right-leaning politically. (While there may be some right-leaning individuals who support a mandatory vaccination schedule,) it seems those who are opposed tend to mostly lean right. This could possibly be to do with an imposed Hegelian dialectic, as it seems to me there would be a lot of left-wing reasons to oppose forced vaccinations. Another possibility I've considered is that it could have something to do with evolutionary psychology and the inherent personality differences between left and right leaning individuals. The third and IMHO most likely reason for this is a combination of the two. As it occurs to me that if there is some truth to the theories of evolutionary psychology as it relates to politics, then it seems obvious that social engineers would exploit these differences for the purposes of manipulation, propaganda and psy-ops.
Another interesting thing I've noticed is that within these issues of gun-control, vaccines and even freedom of speech... the modern left tends to adopt very totalitarian stances. Which might seem counter intuitive if you consider that liberalism used to be about freedom.
When it comes to gun rights, those in favour say it's fine if you don't like guns, no one's forcing you to buy them, but we don't want to forfeit our rights to have them. Where as those opposed want to limit the rights of other people. It's not enough for them to abstain from gun ownership themselves and to keep them out of their own homes, they insist on imposing their decision on the rest of society as well.
We also see this with the vaccine debate. Those opposed are not not pushing for a prohibition against vaccines or anything like that, they just want to reserve the right to choose. Where as the pro-vaccine people are not satisfied with this position and want to force vaccines on everybody. The pro-vaccine enthusiasts tend to side with states like Australia where they've made the vaccine schedule mandatory and use the law to punish parents who refuse to comply.
With both these issues, we see the right tends to favour freedom and choice, where as the left tends to favour coercive totalitarianism and state control.
We also see this with the free-speech debate. Where those who support the right to free speech as being necessary for a free and open society, (this concept of a so-called "market place of ideas" where bad ideas are not suppressed but are allowed to be aired and exposed in the public debate.) Those who are in favour of this freedom tend to overwhelmingly be right leaning. Now I know left-leaning readers (who like to think of themselves as being in favour of free speech,) are likely to disagree but it's undeniably true. One just has to look at some of the political conversations here on Diaspora, or on the greater internet in general. You'll see that it is overwhelmingly leftists who are censoring right leaning voices. The concept of "hate speech" is a judeo-leftist idea. It is delusional to believe yourself to be in favour of free speech when you support censoring and punishing people for so called "hate-speech." There is no such thing as hate speech, but there is speech that people hate.
The free-speech issue is especially interesting because there was a time when the left actually championed free-speech and opposed censorship. The so called classical liberal. This was at a time when government and the establishment was more right-wing. Now the establishment has grown progressively more left-wing, (at least in its overt social policies.) Whether the government establishment is left or right wing, unfettered free speech will always be seen as a threat to it with the potential to undermine its power.
Keep in mind that when I talk here about left and right leaning people, I am generalizing. Based on the majority of what I've seen here in the forum. There will always be exceptional individuals who don't necessarily fit these molds. Like for instance a left-leaning anarchist type who is in favour of gun rights, or say a right-leaning statist who is convinced that state sponsored vaccinations are necessary for the good of public health. If you are one of these exceptions and feel like you've been done wrong by this write up, I would be interested to hear from you.
#politics #internet #debate #argument #argue #forum #totalitarianism #trust #freedom #rights #choice #vaccine #vaccination #vaxxer #antivax #antivaxxer #anti-vax #antivaxers #vaccinesafety #gun-control #guncontrol #gunrights #gunday #2a #freedomofspeech #freespeech #free-speech #censorship #suppression #hatespeech #hate-speech #1a #establishment #state #government #gov #totalitarian #science #skeptic #health #publichealth #propaganda #psyop #psyops #manipulation #policestate #persuasion #obey #left #right #dichotomy #belief #hegeliandialectic #polarization #psychology #evolutionarypsychology #rkselectiontheory #blog #hashtags
Google Memo on Cost Cuts Sparks Heated Debate Inside Company
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HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19004899
Posted by petethomas (karma: 30242)
Post stats: Points: 88 - Comments: 70 - 2019-01-26T05:20:18Z
\#HackerNews #company #cost #cuts #debate #google #heated #inside #memo #sparks
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Our prison debate team beat Harvard's. Here's how we did it
- David Register
The debaters of the Bard Debate Union at the Eastern New York Correctional Facility are methodical in their approach to their craft. They take the stacks of materials they are provided and carefully comb through each item, extracting the specific pieces of data they will use to support their claims. They are critical of one another and push each other to improve. They practice constantly.
This hard work is all done within the confines of a maximum security prison. Our debaters face a unique set of obstacles – they wait weeks to receive the information I gather for them from internet sources, and they have limited time to type and print their ideas. But everything paid off last month when the team, whom I coach, beat Harvard in a debate about whether public schools should be allowed to deny enrollment to undocumented students.
Most of the overwhelming media attention about this debate has focused on the fact that our students were victorious. No one has yet told the story about how they prepare for debates.
I started the Eastern branch of the Bard Debate Union in the summer of 2013. The goal was to provide a competitive outlet for Bard students at Eastern that would mirror what was happening at the Bard Debate Union on the college's main campus, where my wife and I co-direct the undergraduate team. Bard Debate Union members see themselves as part of one team, despite the obvious physical distance between the two branches and despite the fact that prison rules mostly prohibit them from debating together.
There are, at any given time, 15-20 students at our weekly, two-hour meetings. Our sessions consist of strategy discussions and practices. But my contributions to these Bard Prison Initiative students – they must be enrolled to participate in debate – pale in comparison to the work they do on their own.
When they aren't in class, BPI debaters request time in the school to meet. When they can't get into the school, they talk debate in their cells, the yard and the mess hall. They verbally spar with BPI students who are not on the debate team, and talk with their families – creating for themselves a group of informal coaches. And some of the veterans of the team, like Rodney Spivey and Darryl Robinson (among many others), have worked tirelessly to help build the debate team at Eastern into what it has become by welcoming and training new members.
Our debaters spend hundreds of hours preparing in the three to four months they usually have to get ready for a debate, in addition to carrying full course loads.
On 18 September, after facing off against Harvard at the prison, our debaters were deemed the winners by a veteran panel of debate judges – Mary Nugent of Rutgers, Steven Penner of Hobart & William Smith and Lindsay Bing of Cornell. Our debaters were honored that members of Harvard's team were willing to engage them in competition, and the contributions and character of these Harvard debaters should be celebrated.
It is critically important to remember that our debaters are students first and debaters second – and prisoners a distant third. By the time I encounter BPI students, they have been trained by an incredibly gifted group of faculty members, so I deal with highly literate and intellectually curious students.
One of the primary goals of the Bard Debate Union at Eastern is to provide a robust civic education, in which our students learn how to engage in their own governance. Many of our debaters openly express the desire to someday make positive contributions to society. I have no doubt that they will.
#Intelligence #Education #Harvard #BardDebateUnion #BardPrison #Debate #Perception #Bard #Consciousness #ThinkHarder #DebateHarder #ArtHarder
#robskiba #flatearth #debate
#robskiba #flatearth #debate
#religion #flatearth #robskiba #debate


text:
Casablanca, (ADV) – The World Bank and the Angolan government agreed a 280 million USD deal to benefit the water and agricultural sectors.
Finance Minister Archer Mangueira, the president of the Credit Guarantee Fund, Joao Julio Fernandes, and the World Bank representative in Angola, Sao Tome and Principe Oliver Lambert signed the deal.
Mangueira said the deal is expected to boost the Angolan economy as a major step to diversify the economy as was laid out in the National Development Plan (NDP) for 2018-2022.
Altogether 1.2 million people will benefit from the improved public water services.
Lambert said that the deal will also strengthen the capacity building of local water and sanitation companies.
© Bur-csa – ADV

subset: commoncrawl


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Collaborative Environment: A collaborative environment can be set up between the organization, the technology service provider, and the digital agencies to optimize effort, resource sharing, reusability and communications.[36] Additionally, organizations are inviting their customers to help them better understand how to service them. This source of data is called User Generated Content. Much of this is acquired via company websites where the organization invites people to share ideas that are then evaluated by other users of the site. The most popular ideas are evaluated and implemented in some form. Using this method of acquiring data and developing new products can foster the organizations relationship with their customer as well as spawn ideas that would otherwise be overlooked. UGC is low-cost advertising as it is directly from the consumers and can save advertising costs for the organisation.
What It Is: Companies like Google and Yahoo give you information to search for, and you tell them how closely their results matched what you were looking for. Does a search for Lady Antebellum turn up sites about the music group or links to pre-Civil War period information? If you are Latina, for example, you might be asked to search the way a Spanish speaker might perform a search in English.
(The best part is not wearing a suit and tie.) Sales agents make cold calls to businesses or customers, explaining a product or service, and leading the client through purchasing. Nearly every industry has a need for sales agents, so it takes some digging to find your work from home niche. Try adding the search keyword "telecommute" or "work from home" to your sales searches.
If you're a fast typist there are many ways to make money from home by typing. Some you need experience and training others you don't. Data entry, for instance, takes very little experience; however, if you aren't fast enough you won't make any money at. Specialty transcription work (like medical) may require a degree and experience to get started.
Earning income via Target affiliates, however, requires a bit of work. Cookies expire in just seven days, and commissions can be as low as just one percent, so you'll need to be operating a high-traffic website in order to make serious cash with this program. But with Target's much-beloved brand reputation and vast catalog, relevant product links can be a big earner for established influencers.
Babysitting isn't just for teens. Everyone from college students to recent retirees can make money watching other people's children. Word-of-mouth referrals from friends and family are still a great way to get started, but you can also create a profile on Care.com or Sittercity to expand your reach. Note any specialized skills, such as CPR certifications or experience with special needs children, to make yourself more marketable.
If you want to help shape products in their early stages, joining an online focus group or answering survey questions is a great way to make extra money online. They don't pay as much as some of the other options we've highlighted, but you can join groups on sites like Survey Junkie, Swagbucks, and IPSOS that pay out through Amazon gift cards, check, or PayPal. You'll be asked to provide a bit of information about your demographics (age, location, etc…), but after that you can get going making money through surveys.
Most companies that hire for search engine evaluation have multiple projects available to work on, so the exact work you do might vary. However, search engine evaluation in the traditional sense involves analyzing queries that regular people like you and me might type into Google or Bing search and then determining the best possible results to match up to that query so that users have the best experience possible using a search engine.
What's the catch? None, really. Cash back apps act as affiliates for many online merchants, which means that whenever you make a purchase through one of the apps, they get a small commission — but then, they give you a portion of that commission as "cash back". For example, if I buy a pair of Nike shoes through the Ebates app (or website) and spend $75, Ebates may get a $10 commission but then they'll pass $7 back to me. It's basically a way to get sale prices on stuff that isn't on sale!
Web design is a very technical field that requires high literacy in many different kinds of software, including image editing and website architecture programs. A designer should be comfortable with computer "languages" like HTML and stay up to date on new technological developments. The designer is also an artist, so he or she should also have a firm grasp on aesthetics, visual continuity, and image composition.
By now, you've likely seen all the "gurus" in your Facebook feed. Some of them are more popular than others. What you'll notice is that the ads you see that have the highest views and engagement are normally the most successful. Use a site like Similar Web to study those ads and see what they're doing. Join their lists and embed yourself in their funnels. That's an important part of the process so that you can replicate and reverse engineer what the most successful marketers are doing.
I am Rowan, just another blogger trying to get in the affiliate marketing community. I want to spice up my earning from adsense to affiliate marketing level. But the thing is i don't wanna make any mistake, i've been searching for plugins and especially some free good ones but i could not find any. but others are not that well to my need as well. I need some like Coupon, daily deal and cashback etc. but there is no platform that is providing all that under one roof except this site that came up on my search like this comment section, 'Revglue' but i have no idea so i need suggestion.
This is the standard affiliate marketing structure. In this program, the merchant pays the affiliate a percentage of the sale price of the product after the consumer purchases the product as a result of the affiliate's marketing strategies. In other words, the affiliate must actually get the investor to invest in the product before they are compensated.
The ad says you can earn money by helping to process rebates. The fee for training, certification, or registration is nothing compared to what you'll earn, the ad promises. The "#1 certified work-at-home consultant" behind the program will show you how to succeed like she did. What you get instead are poorly written and useless training materials. There are no rebates to process, and few people ever get a refund.
If you have an eye for design and some experience of creating websites, then you could offer your services as a freelance web designer. You will need to create your own stylish website and have a few other projects that you can show potential clients to demonstrate your skills. You will also need to initially spend time emailing businesses to promote your services and find work.
Very nice article! Affiliate marketing is perfect for bloggers as long as they offer quality content and are upfront about it. If people are willing to donate money to YouTubers via Patreon, why wouldn't they buy something that they want or need through the site or blog of someone that offers them great content and support his or her efforts? It's a win – win kind of deal.
On one hand, long and ugly affiliate tracking links are a straight giveaway to people that you want to sell them a product (and people may be uncomfortable clicking on them). Therefore, making your link shorter and "nicer" looking will it give a more professional appearance. One of my favorite plugins for making links look "pretty" is the Pretty Links WordPress plugin.
Persistence and Commitment. You'll need to have a good amount of persistence while pursuing freelance writing gigs. This business is subjective, and while one person may love your writing, another may not. Do your best to always produce good, solid copy and hold on to your commitment to do the best you can for your clients. Just by committing to do those two things, you'll be miles ahead of your competition.
I just started implementing some affiliate offers to my blog. And I agree that you have to find the balance of offering something to your readers without being too pushy or like what you said without selling your soul haha. For me sine my blog is about travel i just mention where I stayed or what hotel and if I liked it and I recommend it I put an affiliate link.
To test these websites, you'll be asked to visit the site in question and record your reactions and thoughts as you go through it. To get started making extra money online by testing websites, sign up for some of the most popular services like UserTesting.com, Userlytics, TryMyUI, Userfeel, TestingTime (for people outside the U.S), or Side Income Jobs.
Running and charging for webinars can be a great way to build a following in your niche, demonstrate that you are an expert in your field, and make a profit. Hosting a webinar can be hard work. They need to first be promoted, provide original and valuable information, and include interactive elements so your audience can ask questions and engage with your topic. However, once you have built up a large blog following, each webinar can be extremely profitable.
If my piece of content is so unique and valuable around hiking backpack recommendations, that other reputable outdoor websites are willing to link to it and build the page's authority, then I'd have a very real opportunity to rank high in organic search for these search terms (meaning, my page will come up first when someone searches for hiking backpacks).
A work from home job can be any position that does not require you to be in an office. There a wide range of work from home jobs. Some companies offer opportunities for employees in traditional roles to work remotely for all or some of their workweek. These jobs often use technology for meetings, assignments, and collaboration. This practice is called telecommuting. Other work from home opportunities may include jobs such as customer service representatives for which companies will hire remote workers, or part-time virtual assistants to manage work which does not require a physical presence in the office.
Considering that you have a finite amount of time, passive income should make up a large part of your work. If you're serious about generating any semblance of income online, then passive income should be one of your sole goals and ambitions. Why? Wouldn't you prefer to do the work one time and get paid repeatedly as opposed to relying on your time to generate that income? Invest the time at the front-end so that you can reap the benefits on the back-end. This means putting in a bit of sweat equity and not getting paid today. Rather, you'll get paid somewhere down the road. And you'll continue getting paid whether you keep building that passive income stream or you stop.
A key benefit of using online channels for marketing a business or product is the ability to measure the impact of any given channel, as well as how visitors acquired through different channels interact with a website or landing page experience. Of the visitors that convert into paying customers, further analysis can be done to determine which channels are most effective at acquiring valuable customers.
VigLink is an intermediary platform, so it can serve as a backdoor for affiliates who have previously been banned/suspended from working with other affiliate programs like Amazon. And while you can choose specific merchants or offers, VigLink can be set up to work automatically by scanning your published content and dynamically generating affiliate links, making it a great choice for established content producers who are looking for a simpler way to generate revenue via an affiliate program.
An omni-channel approach not only benefits consumers but also benefits business bottom line: Research suggests that customers spend more than double when purchasing through an omni-channel retailer as opposed to a single-channel retailer, and are often more loyal. This could be due to the ease of purchase and the wider availability of products.[24]
Be honest. Talk about what you like and don't like. Be fair and build trust. It will serve you well later. For examples, check out my review posts about Elite Blog Academy and Self Publishing 101. I get emails frequently from people who tell me they decided to purchase one of those courses through my affiliate link because it was the most balanced review they found.
What It Is: Do people ask you your secret to perfect pie crust or how you made that wreath? "Everyone knows how to do something, or has a hobby they enjoy," says Kimberly Lawson, owner of OohLaLuxe.net, who has created fashion and beauty tutorial videos. "These can easily be turned into profits." Simply sign up for a free YouTube account. Then use a smartphone or digital camera to record yourself explaining and demonstrating how you work your magic. (If you're more tech-savvy or have a burgeoning teenage filmmaker in your house, you can use desktop software, such as Windows Movie Maker, to create a slicker video.) "Once you upload the video to YouTube, enroll in its partner program," Lawson says. YouTube will then place ads inside or near your video, and you will earn money from the ads themselves, video views and click-throughs. "The key is to put a unique spin on your video," says Lawson, especially if there are lots of others on the same subject.
Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization (SEO), paid search engine marketing (PPC – Pay Per Click), e-mail marketing, content marketing, and (in some sense) display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.[citation needed]
Your Idea. It's not enough to say that you're going to offer an exercise classes. The people considering your classes will want to know exactly what they are going to get for their money, and it will be up to you to explain it concisely and effectively. Understand that you're basically giving a sales pitch to potential attendees. You'll have to really narrow down your topic.
Fiverr is one of the biggest providers in the gig economy on the web and you can sell a wide variety of services and products through this medium. Do the research and find out what you can offer. However, keep in mind that like any other money-making task, it takes time to succeed here. And stellar reviews will help you generate more and more income over time.
The easiest and most common way to start building an audience for a website is via social media. Depending on your niche and industry, you can choose from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and several other niche and location-specific networks. Building up an engaged and interested following on social media is a great opportunity to build relationships and once you have their trust, promote your products and services to them.
You could also opt to use existing websites for making money. These include both active income and passive income methods. For example, you could sell some used items or invest in creating some digital designs that then can be sold on merchandise. Again, devote a sizable portion of your time to passive income so that you can slowly build up earnings that will arrive on autopilot without any extra added effort.
There are companies that hire employees directly to work from their homes. Check the sites that list work at home jobs. Some of these positions are those where you cover a territory, for an insurance company or a consumer products firm, for example, and spend some time on the road and some time in your home office. There also are customer service, recruiting, sales, scheduling, technical, writing, computer, and telemarketing jobs available. In many cases, the jobs are part-time, commission-based, or pay a lump sum for a completed project.
The advantages of the affiliate marketing business model for the affiliate are quite obvious to anyone. Having the opportunity to effectively 'sell stock' without having any of the costs or responsibilities of manufacturing, buying or storing it is very liberating. In addition to this, when working with a high-paying network like MoreNiche, the profit potential is enormous.
Selection. One of the keys to success on Etsy is selection, according to industry insiders. In fact, the goal of most serious shop owners is to have at least 200 items for sale. If you're creating all of those items yourself, that's a pretty big time commitment. But the more options you give to your customers, the higher the chances that you'll make a sale.
ProFromGo received the 2014 PR/Marketing Award for our involvement in the Google Business View program. In January 2015, our entire team was invited to the "Googleplex" located in sunny Mountain View, California where we experienced a myriad of adventures through the Silicon Valley. Today, ProFromGo is the only Google Trusted Agency based in Western Pennsylvania and the surrounding region. This special status and accreditation with Google is a direct result of our commitment to our clients and our craft. ProFromGo currently offers Google Street-View powered virtual tour production services to brick and mortar businesses all throughout the United States.
Amazon offers a service called Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), which can be extremely useful for arbitrage sellers, or others selling their own products. If you opt for FBA, Amazon will store, pick, pack and deliver your products. That means you can scale your arbitrage business quickly as you don't have to store products in your own home or waste time with postage.
I love referral and affiliate marketing. It's where the vast majority of my income comes from these days. Even if you aren't a blogger, you can get in on the action as well. You can get paid to refer your friends to a wide variety of legitimate services. While there are many companies like StitchFix that will give you store credit for referrals, we are focusing on those that offer cold, hard cash today. Keep in mind, you will need to be signed up for the program yourself to take advantage of the program. But, you shouldn't be referring people to things you don't use anyway.
Leadpages claims that its affiliate program is not exclusively for affiliate marketers, which is true, but the narrow focus of this niche means that only professionals affiliate marketers will ever be able to earn significant income from the program. Leadpages's affiliate program does offer quite a lot of different options (webinars, videos, blog posts, free marketing courses, etc.) to send referrals to, which can lead to higher conversion rates if done correctly.
Many affiliates struggle to make enough profit from the sales they make to allow them to reinvest that money into more content or marketing. Once you do find a product that people can and will buy online, make sure it offers enough commission per sale to make it worth your while. There's little sense in promoting light bulbs for 1% profit per sale.
If you actually use the product and get results with it, then sharing a case study or your personal experience can be one of the most effective ways of selling those products to your audience. As you build a more responsive list of email subscribers and buyers and your reputation, merchants may offer you "free" samples of e-books or other products.
There are many ways to get people onto your list. Lead magnets are one such resource. For example, you can build ebooks, checklists and cheat sheets. But you can also do content upgrades, such as PDF versions of an article with added resources in them, four-part video training series, and more. Think about your audience and what you can offer them to better serve them, then treat them with some respect and you'll eventually reap the rewards.
SEO is an effective tool for improving the volume and quality of traffic to your website. Visitors are more likely to click on free organic listings than on paid listings. Our SEO strategies apply only the best and most current practices that focus on the use of great content development, content marketing, social media. All of these strategies combined result in the most effective use of best practices that drive long term ROI.
For instance, the Pew Internet & American Life Project has demographic data that suggests individuals between the ages of 18 and 33 are the most likely to use mobile Internet technology like smartphones and tablets, while the "Gen-X" demographic of individuals who are in their 30's and 40's are far more likely to seek out information through their laptop and desktop computers.(See also Targeted Marketing)