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https://thedailyjava.medium.com/is-there-a-coffee-shortage-looming-ahead-b636f17c121f
|
medium.com
|
Is there a coffee shortage looming ahead?
|
Nearly 2 years after declaring a worldwide pandemic, most industries are only now starting to experience the ramifications thereof on the…
|
daily java
|
https://medium.com/@thedailyjava
|
b636f17c121f
|
2 min
|
2021-09-15T11:23:02.816000
|
2021-09-15T00:00:00
|
2022-01-05T11:06:09.585000
| 1 | 1 |
en
|
Coffee,Coffee Shortage,Coffee Crisis,Coffee Industry,Ground Coffee Industry
|
<section>
<p>Nearly 2 years after declaring a worldwide pandemic, most industries are only now starting to experience the ramifications thereof on the global economy. The coffee industry has this year seen the highest price surge in nearly a decade, but does this mean we have to cut down on our daily coffee intake? Let’s review the facts to determine how this will affect specialty coffee brewers and coffee lovers alike.</p>
<p>In July this year, several reports confirmed that Brazil’s rainy season suffered a significant shortage causing trees to produce inferior coffee beans, if any at all. Added to this was the onset of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frost#Effect_on_plants">frost </a>which left plants brown, without leaves and almost certainly without any coffee beans to harvest and export. It has been reported that some of the damage was so severe that farmers will have to replant trees, which will then only produce a beneficial harvest in 3 years! While Brazil may not be the only coffee supplier in the world, they are the world’s largest supplier of premium Arabica coffee beans, a popular coffee amongst established coffee roasters. According to Kona Haque, head of research at an agricultural commodities merchant, the long-term effects of this shortage will only be known by the end of September.</p>
<p>Although the Brazil coffee shortage is a concern, the coffee industry is now teetering on panic following COVID-19 restrictions in Vietnam which led to disruptions in the supply chain after exporting came to a complete halt in Ho Chi Minh city. <a href="https://www.businessinsider.co.za/covid-19-lockdown-vietnam-threatens-to-cause-global-coffee-shortage-2021-9">Vietnam is the world’s second largest producer of coffee</a> and a major supplier of Robusta; a bitter, more hardier coffee bean, popular amongst dark roast coffee lovers. Owing to the urgent requests from the Vietnam Coffee-Cocoa Association, transport minister Nguyen Van has appealed to officials to ease restrictions on the transportation of rice and coffee. Yet despite this, there are still concerns surrounding the production and transportation of coffee as these incidents have placed an immense pressure on coffee roasters and speciality coffee suppliers to increase their prices, an act which could in turn lead to a decrease in sales.</p>
<p>Shipping ports all over the world have been experiencing chronic <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/e1263950-1173-4832-a011-ada04df1e93c">shipping bottlenecks</a> during the past year, resulting in delays that have now evolved into months. This was mainly caused by lockdown restrictions, and then aggravated by further lockdown restrictions at ports which have reopened and then closed again due to high COVID-19 infection numbers and reports of new variants. Consequently, this has led to a rise in shipping costs, added to the increase in costs of goods that are being imported and exported.</p>
<img src="https://miro.medium.com/max/1024/0*8T0JSLHQ4zkDH86E.jpg" width="1024" height="683" loading="lazy" />
<p>The coffee industry may be just one of many industries hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, but it might be the industry who will suffer the most loss. As shipments are delayed, coffee beans are being spoiled, damaging its quality as well as the reputation of the businesses needing to use the product to service its customers. And while major coffee retailers such as Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts order their coffee beans months in advance, it is the smaller coffee roasters that may now be concerned over the dwindling levels of coffee stocks. However, this could also be a good opportunity to start cultivating a local coffee farming culture that could potentially prevent shortfalls in future.</p>
<p>Despite the negative reviews of the current situation, coffee lovers have no cause for concern just yet. If anything, the stark reality of the situation should motivate each of us to appreciate every sip of our beloved coffee beverage.</p>
<p><em>Originally published at <a href="https://dailyjava.co/2021/09/is-th</em>ere-a-coffee-shortage-looming-ahead/">https://dailyjava.co</a> on September 15, 2021.</p>
</section>
|
Is there a coffee shortage looming ahead?
Nearly 2 years after declaring a worldwide pandemic, most industries are only now starting to experience the ramifications thereof on the global economy. The coffee industry has this year seen the highest price surge in nearly a decade, but does this mean we have to cut down on our daily coffee intake? Let’s review the facts to determine how this will affect specialty coffee brewers and coffee lovers alike.
In July this year, several reports confirmed that Brazil’s rainy season suffered a significant shortage causing trees to produce inferior coffee beans, if any at all. Added to this was the onset of frost which left plants brown, without leaves and almost certainly without any coffee beans to harvest and export. It has been reported that some of the damage was so severe that farmers will have to replant trees, which will then only produce a beneficial harvest in 3 years! While Brazil may not be the only coffee supplier in the world, they are the world’s largest supplier of premium Arabica coffee beans, a popular coffee amongst established coffee roasters. According to Kona Haque, head of research at an agricultural commodities merchant, the long-term effects of this shortage will only be known by the end of September.
Although the Brazil coffee shortage is a concern, the coffee industry is now teetering on panic following COVID-19 restrictions in Vietnam which led to disruptions in the supply chain after exporting came to a complete halt in Ho Chi Minh city. Vietnam is the world’s second largest producer of coffee and a major supplier of Robusta; a bitter, more hardier coffee bean, popular amongst dark roast coffee lovers. Owing to the urgent requests from the Vietnam Coffee-Cocoa Association, transport minister Nguyen Van has appealed to officials to ease restrictions on the transportation of rice and coffee. Yet despite this, there are still concerns surrounding the production and transportation of coffee as these incidents have placed an immense pressure on coffee roasters and speciality coffee suppliers to increase their prices, an act which could in turn lead to a decrease in sales.
Shipping ports all over the world have been experiencing chronic shipping bottlenecks during the past year, resulting in delays that have now evolved into months. This was mainly caused by lockdown restrictions, and then aggravated by further lockdown restrictions at ports which have reopened and then closed again due to high COVID-19 infection numbers and reports of new variants. Consequently, this has led to a rise in shipping costs, added to the increase in costs of goods that are being imported and exported.
The coffee industry may be just one of many industries hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, but it might be the industry who will suffer the most loss. As shipments are delayed, coffee beans are being spoiled, damaging its quality as well as the reputation of the businesses needing to use the product to service its customers. And while major coffee retailers such as Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts order their coffee beans months in advance, it is the smaller coffee roasters that may now be concerned over the dwindling levels of coffee stocks. However, this could also be a good opportunity to start cultivating a local coffee farming culture that could potentially prevent shortfalls in future.
Despite the negative reviews of the current situation, coffee lovers have no cause for concern just yet. If anything, the stark reality of the situation should motivate each of us to appreciate every sip of our beloved coffee beverage.
Originally published at https://dailyjava.co on September 15, 2021.
|
5c01167e-1343-5524-9c97-88ded603b384
|
25/08/2025 15:56:59
|
|
https://ericdhepburn.medium.com/mothers-lost-mothers-found-73542b010d51
|
medium.com
|
Mothers Lost, Mothers Found
|
Mother’s Day started as a Peace Movement. Between it’s lost roots and fraught gender-roles, can we find a place to struggle with hard truths
|
Eric Hepburn
|
https://medium.com/@ericdhepburn
|
73542b010d51
|
15 min
|
2024-05-10T20:46:17.788000
|
2024-05-13T17:01:39.159000
|
2024-11-26T15:43:44.604000
| 0 | 0 |
en
|
Mothers Day,Sermons,Speaker For The Dead,Misogyny
|
<section>
<img src="https://miro.medium.com/max/800/1*yu_o_wG1ZbUlsjMBCvuZKA.jpeg" width="800" height="800" loading="lazy" />
<p>Mother’s Day grew out of the history of two American Civil War matriarchs in Appalachia, Anne Reeves Jarvis and Julia Ward Howe. They were early feminists looking to provide women with better lives and to end the horrors of war. The federal holiday, championed by Anne’s daughter Anna M. Jarvis, centered the honoring of mothers, and especially her own mother, discarding the anti-war aspect. So, again, we are drawn into this observation — with which we struggled last month — the distinction between deep esoteric religion and shallow exoteric religion: I would argue that using reflections on motherhood and by mothers as an interrogation of the human condition and as a healing unguent for the causes of war or a well of deep gratitude for the gift of life and those whose labor delivers that gift… Well, those are pretty deep. But, humankinds’ predilection for the exoteric has made of Mother’s-Day another excuse for buying cut-flowers and gifts, another saccharine feel-good bromide where pro-forma gratitude replaces deep reflection and any acknowledgement of indebtedness. A shift so great, that even Anna M. Jarvis was repelled by the level of commercialization. Don’t get me wrong, I think that shallow gratitude is a significant improvement over no gratitude, and a major improvement over being taken-for-granted. But I’m not here, writing this, to improve your bromide supply — I’m here to invite you deeper into the work of being human — that is my calling, and I’m inviting you to discover yours.</p>
<p>With that background in mind — let’s get to the title of today’s episode: <strong>mothers lost, mothers found</strong>. I am going to share with you stories of four generations of mothers in my family — all of them lost, all of them deceased, all of them known, personally, by me. Through this storytelling, I am hoping to find them again. In the spirit of Orson Scott Card’s beautiful concept of a <em>Speaker for the Dead</em>, I hope to tell you some truths about their lives that, while they may be hard to hear, honor them — as human beings, as women who did the best that they could with what they had, as mothers, as daughters, as sisters, as siblings… about how their best intentions sometimes went sideways, about how they sometimes didn’t recover from adversity. And, in the end, I hope — an invitation to deep lessons that we can take away from these stories, lessons to help us heal ourselves, our families, our communities, and, indeed, the whole world. Let’s get started.</p>
<p>The earliest generation of my matrilineage that I knew personally was my great-grandmother Lorraine Cain. Now as great-grandmothers are prone to be, even to their eldest great-grandchildren — which I was — mine was already old when I was born, and was older still by the time I got old enough to remember her. She died when I was about 14, but not before I got to spend back-to-back summers in church with her when I was 12 and 13. I was first saved in a Free-Will Pentecostal Church that summer when I was 12, a church whose pastor was her youngest son and my great-uncle Wilber (though we all called him Web). But my most powerful memory of her was this: at the age of 13 I received the gift of healing in my church — and for those skeptics out there, I do mean faith-healing — and, as is customary upon such occasions, the pastor asked if anyone in church was afflicted. Well, my great-grandmother raised her hand and said she’d had a headache for two days that she couldn’t get rid of. So she stepped up to the pulpit and I laid hands on her, and I prayed hard for her well-being, for her to get some relief from this pain. And when she stepped back, she testified that the pain was gone, and she praised Jesus for the healing. Well, I was relieved — but still, in part of my mind, skeptical too. So, I casually cajoled my grandfather into bringing me around to her house later in the week, which was in the next town over, and I gently asked my great-grandmother if she was for real — if her headache really went away. She looked at me surprised at first, then with a look of gentleness, and she said that it had gone away, and that it hadn’t come back yet. A few weeks later she confided in me that the relief had lasted two whole weeks before she even had to take her pain meds again. I was happy for her. I was even more happy that she seemed to be proud of me, and mostly I tried not to be too incredulous or skeptical, which, even then, I recognized as something that short-circuits whatever gratitude we can muster in this life. She died the next year and I never saw her again after that summer.</p>
<p>Let’s move forward now one generation: with a favorite quip from my maternal grandmother: Erma Jean Baker:</p>
<p>If you’re dealing</p>
<p>and you’re not winning.</p>
<p>That’s on you!</p>
<p>I played poker, weekly, for about 18 years before the pandemic ended our habit, and when I’d share this tidbit with my fellow players, it never failed to get both a laugh and a look of incredulity — your GRANDMA used to say that? It just doesn’t fit in with most people’s stereotype of a grandmother. Well, that was my grandmother too… there were a number of stereotypes that just didn’t fit her.</p>
<p>Now look, there are a number of stereotypes that she did fit — stories I can tell you of her teaching Sunday school or helping out neighbors in a pinch with money or free childcare… but I think y’all are beginning to know me better than that. Everyone in my family will tell you THOSE stories, everyone likes telling the stories that support and bolster what they WANT, sometimes what they NEED to believe. I’m more interested, not in the salacious or in the defamatory, but I am more interested in the stories that help us grapple with the transmission of intergenerational trauma that keeps us stuck in adolescence and thwarts our efforts to ripen into the wise elders that future generations deserve.</p>
<p>So, I have to tell you the story of trauma that lies beneath my grandmother’s funny and oft-repeated witticism. I have to tell you about how she was the eldest daughter growing up in a rural alcoholic home with eight younger siblings — and how different her experience of her mother was, from my experience of my great-grandmother.</p>
<p>Now, according to my grandmother Erma, Lorraine Cain, as a young woman and mother, was a drinker and a carouser, a fierce card player and a sore loser. So, as soon as Erma was old enough to hold a deck of cards, she was roped into the card games whenever they needed a fourth. Lorraine would pair up with whoever the guest was, usually a relative or neighbor, and Erma would be teamed up with her father Archie. As she retold it to me, her instructions from her father were this: <em>We have to lose, but your mother can never know that we lost on purpose.</em> You might have to be a long-time card player in order to understand just how difficult and demanding this request is. You can’t play badly or ignorantly, that will get you scolded and criticized. You must learn how to win, to give every appearance of making it look like you are trying to win, but you must, instead, lose.</p>
<p>I need to pause here, I need you to hear this truth — I have had a very difficult time mourning my grandmother since she died last November. I’ve had a hard time grieving the woman who, the last time we visited with her, screamed — literally screamed! — at my wife for misplaying a card as we were trying to teach her how to play a friendly game of canasta… But as I wrote this story, as I imagined sharing it with you, I was able to deeply grieve her for the first time… not as the woman she had become, but as that little girl put in the nearly impossible position of throwing a card game to her drunk mother — not once, but over and over again, put in a position where YOU JUST CAN’T WIN. I was able to weep for her then, because no little girl deserves that… and when that sort of thing happens, some folks never recover.</p>
<p>…and as I was grieving I was gifted with another insight, a flash of memory of an offhand comment about how they’d play the radio while they played cards. And another mystery that’s always troubled me about my grandmother felt solved, the mystery of a person who didn’t and seemingly couldn’t enjoy music. How deep must have been the trauma of those nights that they destroyed both her ability to enjoy card games and her ability to enjoy music? How tragic is it for any human being to lose access to such powerful vehicles of play and joy in life? Like I said, I have struggled to find compassion for the difficult and bitter woman that my grandmother became — but when I pictured her as this little girl, caught between a rock and a drunk hard place, asked to do the impossible without recognition or hope of reward, well, it became a little easier to see THAT little girl inside of my grandmother, it became a little easier to see how the fear and the anxiety and winlessness of that story calcified into what she became. And I’m grateful for that. And I’m grateful for this: despite all of the hardness and difficulty and disconnect that I’ve struggled through with with my grandmother — I am deeply grateful for her unconditional love, and I’m deeply grateful that I was able to return that unconditional love. Even in the many times when we found it impossible to approve of each other, that love made it possible for us to be together anyway.</p>
<p>It’s time to jump again, another generation, to my own mother. Cheri O’Brien. She was the eldest child of an eldest child, which make me the eldest child times-three (at least) and if that isn’t a recipe for Type-A behavior, I don’t know what is. So it was with my mom. Despite dropping out of high school to give birth to me, and despite having no college education to speak of, she had, by the time I was in college, worked herself from the secretarial pool all the way up to being one of a handful of senior executive secretaries at the Kennedy Space Center. And while I was in college, her boss, the Senior Vice President of something, decided to retire — and his gratitude for my mother and all they ways that she had helped him and made him successful at his job was such that he told her, “You need to put your talents to work for yourself, not just making guys like me look good.” Now, for the 1990’s that was some pretty good feminist allyship. So he helped her identify some jobs that fit her skills and he advocated for her, and she landed a big promotion — she became the head of logistics for the Space Shuttle Landing Team. And it wasn’t just a gift, it was an acknowledgment of her intelligence, both emotional and intellectual, and her hard work and her ability to get things done. And, a few years after she got that promotion, there was an accident and the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated on reentry — spreading debris across the southeastern United States. It was a landing gone wrong, and my mother’s team had a new job. A huge multi-month search party was organized that covered parts of five states including Texas and whose mission it was to recover every bit of debris from that accident that could be recovered, and my mom ended up running logistics for THAT. From warehouses to rental cars to hotels to flights to transport to reassembly, the weight of the Columbia recovery effort landed on her desk, and she <em>handled</em> it. She won a prestigious manned space flight award for her work on that project. (Don’t say I didn’t give you any happy stories.) But there’s a dark thread in this pattern that I have to reveal. On the day she received that promotion, a day when I’m sure she was plagued by the same imposter syndrome that haunts many of us when we take on a new challenge, on that day when she was filled with pride and excitement and a fair portion of fear, she went to tell her mother, Erma. She hoped for congratulations, she hoped for pride or approval, she hoped for support, what she got was this, “I hope you haven’t bitten off more than you can chew.” She called me in angry tears that night, that’s been hard to forgive.</p>
<p>Look folks, I’ve been a devout feminist since the early 90’s — you can thank my first wife for that, I do. But what I want to talk about today, what’s calling this episode forth from me, is the observation from within my own family of what I can only call woman-to-woman misogyny. This is not to give men or patriarchy or any other misogynist current a pass of any kind, but it is to notice that some significant portion of the cultural oppression of women is propagated by women against each other. I say this also because I have faith that women can and will answer the call to end this misogyny, the call to heal, the call back into right relationship: mother to daughter, daughter to mother, sister to sister, sibling to sibling. I wish that my family was an outlier, a big exception, in a world where women are united in solidarity against their own oppression. Sadly, this is no more true in feminism than it is in anti-racism work or within any other oppressed group that I’ve studied. Let me be clear — I am not ‘calling out’ my great-grandmother or my grandmother, I am not shaming them or blaming them. I am telling their story as honestly, earnestly, cogently, and compassionately as I can — because I wish to learn from it, because I wish to heal from it… and because I wish for that learning and healing for you. Will listening to my story be enough for you? I don’t know. You may have to find your own story, or that of your mother, or of your mother’s mother… and you may have to sift that story for hard truths and tiny cracks that might let the light and compassion seep in… maybe, who knows, there are more stories…</p>
<p>Four years after Challenger they found that my mother had brain cancer, stage 4, two years later — just six weeks after Christie and I adopted our son Simon — she died.</p>
<p>I have two younger sisters: one born when I was eight, Kelly, and the other born when I was twelve, Erin. Since I was significantly older and since I started working while going to school at age 15 and since I moved away to college when I was 17 — I didn’t spend a lot of childhood time with my sisters. I feel like I was, for them, the almost mythological older brother who rolls into town for Christmas on his motorcycle — and I did do that a few times. But I assumed, partly because I didn’t pay attention — or enough attention — or the right kind of attention — and partly because I wasn’t there, but anyway, I assumed that they had received from our mother, the same kinds of things I had received from her — at least in terms of the things I was grateful for:</p>
<ul>
<li>My mother loved me unconditionally and she expressed that love frequently and intensely and earnestly.</li>
<li>My mother had faith and confidence in me: supported me, believed in me and in my ability to ‘be anything I wanted to be’, and she expressed that support frequently and earnestly — often at times when I needed it most.</li>
</ul>
<p>Of course, I thought — from my position of eldest-born-male-child-privilege — of course my mother would unconditionally love my sisters in the same way she had me, of course she would support them and believe in them the same way she had for me… In hindsight, I can’t believe how long I was able to sustain this fiction, the evidence was there, early on.</p>
<ul>
<li>When I was young, say first grade, I fell behind in reading. I just wasn’t getting it like the other kids, whatever it was, when the teachers brought it to my parents, they insisted I get extra help and I did. And then they insisted that I get tested for the gifted program, because they thought that my exceptional-ness was being misinterpreted as a learning problem. So, I got tested and I got tutored, and I didn’t get held back a grade and I did get put into the gifted program — what was a tremendous relief, one day a week, from the normal tedium of grade school… and so it went, with me, through grade school and high school and college and graduate school — on the honors track, on the smart track, on the going-somewhere track. And just like any adolescent would, I gave my-SELF full credit for all of it.</li>
<li>When my sisters were in a similar situation — early school, struggling a bit for reasons no one could quite put a finger on. Something different happened. There was no “maybe they are too smart for that classroom, maybe they are bored.” There was no advocacy, no gifted testing… I remember arguing with my parents about it. I remember saying it was a mistake. I hadn’t yet studied how tracking works in school systems, but I new intuitively that this decision would last… almost forever. I knew it was wrong, I knew that my sisters deserved the same benefit of the doubt, the same unrelenting advocacy that I had gotten, but they were denied. They were, each of them, four years apart, held back a grade. Tracked into the not-honors group, the not-so-smart track, the not-going-anywhere track.</li>
</ul>
<p>My sister Kelly didn’t make it through high school. At 14 she ran away from home, out of state, she was gone for two years before we heard from her. For many years, if the phone rang in the night my first thought was that her luck had run out. She struggled with drug addiction. She had a daughter Chloe (who is graduating from high school in two weeks) and she placed a few more kids through adoption. Chloe was raised by my mother and step-father for a bit, then by her father for a decade or so, then by my grandmother Erma, until she died last year. My sister Kelly was the kind of mother they tell cautionary tales about. The kind of daughter who wasn’t welcome at my mother’s deathbed because she just couldn’t take another dose of heartbreak. The kind of sister you want to help, but can’t figure out how. The kind you keep wishing will get clean and stay clean long enough that she might get used to it, might finally find a way out of that maze she wandered into too young. That didn’t happen for her, a little over two years ago the call I had long feared finally came. She’d run out of luck and died of a fentanyl overdose. She was 40 years old.</p>
<p>I went to Florida to deliver her eulogy, as I had done for my mother. I refused to play the game that some in the family wanted, the one where we pretended she wasn’t an addict, the one where we pretended that she hadn’t died of an overdose. I delivered a powerful and honest eulogy — it brought most of the assembled to wracking sobs — I felt I had done my work. But it wasn’t the greatest blessing that day, not even close. As you can imagine, given what I’ve shared about my sister, I didn’t think much of her friends and companions. She had a friend, Larry Paciorek, who, from what I could tell, did his best to be a good friend to my sister. As is the tendency with protective older brothers, I was wary of this older man’s interest in my younger sister. Larry died about a year before Kelly and Larry’s sister was at the my sister’s memorial. She came up to me afterwards and said this, “That’s the second best eulogy I’ve ever seen, but the one your sister did for my brother was better.” She then went on to describe, as best she could through her own tears, the renditions of Shakespeare that my sister wove together for her friend Larry in remembrance of him… I didn’t even know that my sister liked Shakespeare, half-less that she had committed enough of it to memory to perform it unscripted and interwoven in honor of her friend… that was the blessing, that was the hard lesson — the demolition of any residual doubt that my sister Kelly had deserved any less advocacy and faith in her early years than I had received. She was a human miracle who couldn’t live with the diminished expectations the world had of her.</p>
<p>On the second anniversary of her death, just this past spring, my living sister Erin and I met at a cabin in the woods, and for the first time in our lives — as kids or adults — it was just the two of us, in a world made smaller by the deaths of so many mothers we had loved. We gathered, dedicating some time and attention to strengthening our own relationship, remembering together the people and situations we had lived through. In our conversations that weekend, what I had suspected and should have known was made clear: if my inheritance from my mother had been unconditional love and unconditional faith — my sisters, both of them, had only received half of that inheritance.</p>
<p>I asked, “Didn’t mom used to tell you, as she did me, that you could do or be anything you wanted to be?”</p>
<p>“No.” my sister answered, “Mom would look at me with a bit of pity in her eyes and say, ‘Sorry Sis, but your brother got all the brains.’”</p>
<p>The stories we tell matter, not least because we believe them.</p>
<p>Now, I won’t tell you the story of my sister Erin — she is alive and well — and her story is hers to tell. I’ll confine myself to this: she has also proven in recent years, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that she should have been granted the same unconditional support in her youth that I received. I’m proud that she is also a human miracle, one who’s figured out how to defy the world’s diminished expectations of her. Nor can I tell you the stories of my nieces Chloe and Kayleigh — who are still just writing the first chapters of their own stories. But what I hope for these women in my matrilineage, this mother, these two daughters, is that they will hear these stories I’ve shared today. That they will BE the generations that break the cycle of trauma and misogyny in my family — and that the next generations of women in my family and beyond will stand together.</p>
<p>Mothers, daughters, and siblings united in unconditional love, in unconditional support of one another, free from the toxic influence of misogyny, and free from every type of dehumanization.</p>
<p>May it be so.</p>
</section>
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Mothers Lost, Mothers Found
Mother’s Day grew out of the history of two American Civil War matriarchs in Appalachia, Anne Reeves Jarvis and Julia Ward Howe. They were early feminists looking to provide women with better lives and to end the horrors of war. The federal holiday, championed by Anne’s daughter Anna M. Jarvis, centered the honoring of mothers, and especially her own mother, discarding the anti-war aspect. So, again, we are drawn into this observation — with which we struggled last month — the distinction between deep esoteric religion and shallow exoteric religion: I would argue that using reflections on motherhood and by mothers as an interrogation of the human condition and as a healing unguent for the causes of war or a well of deep gratitude for the gift of life and those whose labor delivers that gift… Well, those are pretty deep. But, humankinds’ predilection for the exoteric has made of Mother’s-Day another excuse for buying cut-flowers and gifts, another saccharine feel-good bromide where pro-forma gratitude replaces deep reflection and any acknowledgement of indebtedness. A shift so great, that even Anna M. Jarvis was repelled by the level of commercialization. Don’t get me wrong, I think that shallow gratitude is a significant improvement over no gratitude, and a major improvement over being taken-for-granted. But I’m not here, writing this, to improve your bromide supply — I’m here to invite you deeper into the work of being human — that is my calling, and I’m inviting you to discover yours.
With that background in mind — let’s get to the title of today’s episode: mothers lost, mothers found. I am going to share with you stories of four generations of mothers in my family — all of them lost, all of them deceased, all of them known, personally, by me. Through this storytelling, I am hoping to find them again. In the spirit of Orson Scott Card’s beautiful concept of a Speaker for the Dead, I hope to tell you some truths about their lives that, while they may be hard to hear, honor them — as human beings, as women who did the best that they could with what they had, as mothers, as daughters, as sisters, as siblings… about how their best intentions sometimes went sideways, about how they sometimes didn’t recover from adversity. And, in the end, I hope — an invitation to deep lessons that we can take away from these stories, lessons to help us heal ourselves, our families, our communities, and, indeed, the whole world. Let’s get started.
The earliest generation of my matrilineage that I knew personally was my great-grandmother Lorraine Cain. Now as great-grandmothers are prone to be, even to their eldest great-grandchildren — which I was — mine was already old when I was born, and was older still by the time I got old enough to remember her. She died when I was about 14, but not before I got to spend back-to-back summers in church with her when I was 12 and 13. I was first saved in a Free-Will Pentecostal Church that summer when I was 12, a church whose pastor was her youngest son and my great-uncle Wilber (though we all called him Web). But my most powerful memory of her was this: at the age of 13 I received the gift of healing in my church — and for those skeptics out there, I do mean faith-healing — and, as is customary upon such occasions, the pastor asked if anyone in church was afflicted. Well, my great-grandmother raised her hand and said she’d had a headache for two days that she couldn’t get rid of. So she stepped up to the pulpit and I laid hands on her, and I prayed hard for her well-being, for her to get some relief from this pain. And when she stepped back, she testified that the pain was gone, and she praised Jesus for the healing. Well, I was relieved — but still, in part of my mind, skeptical too. So, I casually cajoled my grandfather into bringing me around to her house later in the week, which was in the next town over, and I gently asked my great-grandmother if she was for real — if her headache really went away. She looked at me surprised at first, then with a look of gentleness, and she said that it had gone away, and that it hadn’t come back yet. A few weeks later she confided in me that the relief had lasted two whole weeks before she even had to take her pain meds again. I was happy for her. I was even more happy that she seemed to be proud of me, and mostly I tried not to be too incredulous or skeptical, which, even then, I recognized as something that short-circuits whatever gratitude we can muster in this life. She died the next year and I never saw her again after that summer.
Let’s move forward now one generation: with a favorite quip from my maternal grandmother: Erma Jean Baker:
If you’re dealing
and you’re not winning.
That’s on you!
I played poker, weekly, for about 18 years before the pandemic ended our habit, and when I’d share this tidbit with my fellow players, it never failed to get both a laugh and a look of incredulity — your GRANDMA used to say that? It just doesn’t fit in with most people’s stereotype of a grandmother. Well, that was my grandmother too… there were a number of stereotypes that just didn’t fit her.
Now look, there are a number of stereotypes that she did fit — stories I can tell you of her teaching Sunday school or helping out neighbors in a pinch with money or free childcare… but I think y’all are beginning to know me better than that. Everyone in my family will tell you THOSE stories, everyone likes telling the stories that support and bolster what they WANT, sometimes what they NEED to believe. I’m more interested, not in the salacious or in the defamatory, but I am more interested in the stories that help us grapple with the transmission of intergenerational trauma that keeps us stuck in adolescence and thwarts our efforts to ripen into the wise elders that future generations deserve.
So, I have to tell you the story of trauma that lies beneath my grandmother’s funny and oft-repeated witticism. I have to tell you about how she was the eldest daughter growing up in a rural alcoholic home with eight younger siblings — and how different her experience of her mother was, from my experience of my great-grandmother.
Now, according to my grandmother Erma, Lorraine Cain, as a young woman and mother, was a drinker and a carouser, a fierce card player and a sore loser. So, as soon as Erma was old enough to hold a deck of cards, she was roped into the card games whenever they needed a fourth. Lorraine would pair up with whoever the guest was, usually a relative or neighbor, and Erma would be teamed up with her father Archie. As she retold it to me, her instructions from her father were this: We have to lose, but your mother can never know that we lost on purpose. You might have to be a long-time card player in order to understand just how difficult and demanding this request is. You can’t play badly or ignorantly, that will get you scolded and criticized. You must learn how to win, to give every appearance of making it look like you are trying to win, but you must, instead, lose.
I need to pause here, I need you to hear this truth — I have had a very difficult time mourning my grandmother since she died last November. I’ve had a hard time grieving the woman who, the last time we visited with her, screamed — literally screamed! — at my wife for misplaying a card as we were trying to teach her how to play a friendly game of canasta… But as I wrote this story, as I imagined sharing it with you, I was able to deeply grieve her for the first time… not as the woman she had become, but as that little girl put in the nearly impossible position of throwing a card game to her drunk mother — not once, but over and over again, put in a position where YOU JUST CAN’T WIN. I was able to weep for her then, because no little girl deserves that… and when that sort of thing happens, some folks never recover.
…and as I was grieving I was gifted with another insight, a flash of memory of an offhand comment about how they’d play the radio while they played cards. And another mystery that’s always troubled me about my grandmother felt solved, the mystery of a person who didn’t and seemingly couldn’t enjoy music. How deep must have been the trauma of those nights that they destroyed both her ability to enjoy card games and her ability to enjoy music? How tragic is it for any human being to lose access to such powerful vehicles of play and joy in life? Like I said, I have struggled to find compassion for the difficult and bitter woman that my grandmother became — but when I pictured her as this little girl, caught between a rock and a drunk hard place, asked to do the impossible without recognition or hope of reward, well, it became a little easier to see THAT little girl inside of my grandmother, it became a little easier to see how the fear and the anxiety and winlessness of that story calcified into what she became. And I’m grateful for that. And I’m grateful for this: despite all of the hardness and difficulty and disconnect that I’ve struggled through with with my grandmother — I am deeply grateful for her unconditional love, and I’m deeply grateful that I was able to return that unconditional love. Even in the many times when we found it impossible to approve of each other, that love made it possible for us to be together anyway.
It’s time to jump again, another generation, to my own mother. Cheri O’Brien. She was the eldest child of an eldest child, which make me the eldest child times-three (at least) and if that isn’t a recipe for Type-A behavior, I don’t know what is. So it was with my mom. Despite dropping out of high school to give birth to me, and despite having no college education to speak of, she had, by the time I was in college, worked herself from the secretarial pool all the way up to being one of a handful of senior executive secretaries at the Kennedy Space Center. And while I was in college, her boss, the Senior Vice President of something, decided to retire — and his gratitude for my mother and all they ways that she had helped him and made him successful at his job was such that he told her, “You need to put your talents to work for yourself, not just making guys like me look good.” Now, for the 1990’s that was some pretty good feminist allyship. So he helped her identify some jobs that fit her skills and he advocated for her, and she landed a big promotion — she became the head of logistics for the Space Shuttle Landing Team. And it wasn’t just a gift, it was an acknowledgment of her intelligence, both emotional and intellectual, and her hard work and her ability to get things done. And, a few years after she got that promotion, there was an accident and the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated on reentry — spreading debris across the southeastern United States. It was a landing gone wrong, and my mother’s team had a new job. A huge multi-month search party was organized that covered parts of five states including Texas and whose mission it was to recover every bit of debris from that accident that could be recovered, and my mom ended up running logistics for THAT. From warehouses to rental cars to hotels to flights to transport to reassembly, the weight of the Columbia recovery effort landed on her desk, and she handled it. She won a prestigious manned space flight award for her work on that project. (Don’t say I didn’t give you any happy stories.) But there’s a dark thread in this pattern that I have to reveal. On the day she received that promotion, a day when I’m sure she was plagued by the same imposter syndrome that haunts many of us when we take on a new challenge, on that day when she was filled with pride and excitement and a fair portion of fear, she went to tell her mother, Erma. She hoped for congratulations, she hoped for pride or approval, she hoped for support, what she got was this, “I hope you haven’t bitten off more than you can chew.” She called me in angry tears that night, that’s been hard to forgive.
Look folks, I’ve been a devout feminist since the early 90’s — you can thank my first wife for that, I do. But what I want to talk about today, what’s calling this episode forth from me, is the observation from within my own family of what I can only call woman-to-woman misogyny. This is not to give men or patriarchy or any other misogynist current a pass of any kind, but it is to notice that some significant portion of the cultural oppression of women is propagated by women against each other. I say this also because I have faith that women can and will answer the call to end this misogyny, the call to heal, the call back into right relationship: mother to daughter, daughter to mother, sister to sister, sibling to sibling. I wish that my family was an outlier, a big exception, in a world where women are united in solidarity against their own oppression. Sadly, this is no more true in feminism than it is in anti-racism work or within any other oppressed group that I’ve studied. Let me be clear — I am not ‘calling out’ my great-grandmother or my grandmother, I am not shaming them or blaming them. I am telling their story as honestly, earnestly, cogently, and compassionately as I can — because I wish to learn from it, because I wish to heal from it… and because I wish for that learning and healing for you. Will listening to my story be enough for you? I don’t know. You may have to find your own story, or that of your mother, or of your mother’s mother… and you may have to sift that story for hard truths and tiny cracks that might let the light and compassion seep in… maybe, who knows, there are more stories…
Four years after Challenger they found that my mother had brain cancer, stage 4, two years later — just six weeks after Christie and I adopted our son Simon — she died.
I have two younger sisters: one born when I was eight, Kelly, and the other born when I was twelve, Erin. Since I was significantly older and since I started working while going to school at age 15 and since I moved away to college when I was 17 — I didn’t spend a lot of childhood time with my sisters. I feel like I was, for them, the almost mythological older brother who rolls into town for Christmas on his motorcycle — and I did do that a few times. But I assumed, partly because I didn’t pay attention — or enough attention — or the right kind of attention — and partly because I wasn’t there, but anyway, I assumed that they had received from our mother, the same kinds of things I had received from her — at least in terms of the things I was grateful for:
My mother loved me unconditionally and she expressed that love frequently and intensely and earnestly.
My mother had faith and confidence in me: supported me, believed in me and in my ability to ‘be anything I wanted to be’, and she expressed that support frequently and earnestly — often at times when I needed it most.
Of course, I thought — from my position of eldest-born-male-child-privilege — of course my mother would unconditionally love my sisters in the same way she had me, of course she would support them and believe in them the same way she had for me… In hindsight, I can’t believe how long I was able to sustain this fiction, the evidence was there, early on.
When I was young, say first grade, I fell behind in reading. I just wasn’t getting it like the other kids, whatever it was, when the teachers brought it to my parents, they insisted I get extra help and I did. And then they insisted that I get tested for the gifted program, because they thought that my exceptional-ness was being misinterpreted as a learning problem. So, I got tested and I got tutored, and I didn’t get held back a grade and I did get put into the gifted program — what was a tremendous relief, one day a week, from the normal tedium of grade school… and so it went, with me, through grade school and high school and college and graduate school — on the honors track, on the smart track, on the going-somewhere track. And just like any adolescent would, I gave my-SELF full credit for all of it.
When my sisters were in a similar situation — early school, struggling a bit for reasons no one could quite put a finger on. Something different happened. There was no “maybe they are too smart for that classroom, maybe they are bored.” There was no advocacy, no gifted testing… I remember arguing with my parents about it. I remember saying it was a mistake. I hadn’t yet studied how tracking works in school systems, but I new intuitively that this decision would last… almost forever. I knew it was wrong, I knew that my sisters deserved the same benefit of the doubt, the same unrelenting advocacy that I had gotten, but they were denied. They were, each of them, four years apart, held back a grade. Tracked into the not-honors group, the not-so-smart track, the not-going-anywhere track.
My sister Kelly didn’t make it through high school. At 14 she ran away from home, out of state, she was gone for two years before we heard from her. For many years, if the phone rang in the night my first thought was that her luck had run out. She struggled with drug addiction. She had a daughter Chloe (who is graduating from high school in two weeks) and she placed a few more kids through adoption. Chloe was raised by my mother and step-father for a bit, then by her father for a decade or so, then by my grandmother Erma, until she died last year. My sister Kelly was the kind of mother they tell cautionary tales about. The kind of daughter who wasn’t welcome at my mother’s deathbed because she just couldn’t take another dose of heartbreak. The kind of sister you want to help, but can’t figure out how. The kind you keep wishing will get clean and stay clean long enough that she might get used to it, might finally find a way out of that maze she wandered into too young. That didn’t happen for her, a little over two years ago the call I had long feared finally came. She’d run out of luck and died of a fentanyl overdose. She was 40 years old.
I went to Florida to deliver her eulogy, as I had done for my mother. I refused to play the game that some in the family wanted, the one where we pretended she wasn’t an addict, the one where we pretended that she hadn’t died of an overdose. I delivered a powerful and honest eulogy — it brought most of the assembled to wracking sobs — I felt I had done my work. But it wasn’t the greatest blessing that day, not even close. As you can imagine, given what I’ve shared about my sister, I didn’t think much of her friends and companions. She had a friend, Larry Paciorek, who, from what I could tell, did his best to be a good friend to my sister. As is the tendency with protective older brothers, I was wary of this older man’s interest in my younger sister. Larry died about a year before Kelly and Larry’s sister was at the my sister’s memorial. She came up to me afterwards and said this, “That’s the second best eulogy I’ve ever seen, but the one your sister did for my brother was better.” She then went on to describe, as best she could through her own tears, the renditions of Shakespeare that my sister wove together for her friend Larry in remembrance of him… I didn’t even know that my sister liked Shakespeare, half-less that she had committed enough of it to memory to perform it unscripted and interwoven in honor of her friend… that was the blessing, that was the hard lesson — the demolition of any residual doubt that my sister Kelly had deserved any less advocacy and faith in her early years than I had received. She was a human miracle who couldn’t live with the diminished expectations the world had of her.
On the second anniversary of her death, just this past spring, my living sister Erin and I met at a cabin in the woods, and for the first time in our lives — as kids or adults — it was just the two of us, in a world made smaller by the deaths of so many mothers we had loved. We gathered, dedicating some time and attention to strengthening our own relationship, remembering together the people and situations we had lived through. In our conversations that weekend, what I had suspected and should have known was made clear: if my inheritance from my mother had been unconditional love and unconditional faith — my sisters, both of them, had only received half of that inheritance.
I asked, “Didn’t mom used to tell you, as she did me, that you could do or be anything you wanted to be?”
“No.” my sister answered, “Mom would look at me with a bit of pity in her eyes and say, ‘Sorry Sis, but your brother got all the brains.’”
The stories we tell matter, not least because we believe them.
Now, I won’t tell you the story of my sister Erin — she is alive and well — and her story is hers to tell. I’ll confine myself to this: she has also proven in recent years, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that she should have been granted the same unconditional support in her youth that I received. I’m proud that she is also a human miracle, one who’s figured out how to defy the world’s diminished expectations of her. Nor can I tell you the stories of my nieces Chloe and Kayleigh — who are still just writing the first chapters of their own stories. But what I hope for these women in my matrilineage, this mother, these two daughters, is that they will hear these stories I’ve shared today. That they will BE the generations that break the cycle of trauma and misogyny in my family — and that the next generations of women in my family and beyond will stand together.
Mothers, daughters, and siblings united in unconditional love, in unconditional support of one another, free from the toxic influence of misogyny, and free from every type of dehumanization.
May it be so.
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61254c2a-11f7-54cb-9b5e-fdc972630af1
|
25/08/2025 15:56:59
|
|
https://deviasme89.medium.com/at-the-edge-of-my-story-9a8fd5f7dadd
|
medium.com
|
At the Edge of My Story
|
At the edge of my story, I take tiny, tender-brave steps. Every step takes me into a story that’s larger than the one that has been…
|
Debasmita Chatterjee
|
https://medium.com/@deviasme89
|
9a8fd5f7dadd
|
1 min
|
2021-02-03T05:40:43.283000
|
2021-02-03T05:46:13.521000
|
2021-12-29T13:26:57.410000
| 3 | 68 |
en
|
Human Parts,Becoming,Healing,Divine Feminine,Inner Child
|
<section>
<img src="https://miro.medium.com/max/2048/1*OT7fAUPL7r0nAwqLlJahIw.jpeg" width="2048" height="1466" loading="lazy" />
<p>At the edge of my story, I take tiny, tender-brave steps. Every step takes me into a story that’s larger than the one that has been perpetuating my wounds. Yet, the wounds need to be tended too.</p>
<p>I see parts of me coming alive like a million lavender flowers springing out from a lush green bush, or a glittering star-studded charcoal black sky. I provide myself with the nourishment I needed from my mother. I lead myself, embodying the stewardship I have longed for. Deep love pulsates in my heart, bringing forth so many facets of me together, the attentive lover, the soothing friend, the nurturing teacher, but each separate from the other.</p>
<p>We hold together in me, the scared one, the one who is hurting, shivering, the one who is reluctant to grow, always wanting to shrink into its shell of believing she is good for nothing.</p>
<p>“I am tired of this story and this pain”, says a sad voice “it has been so long, we have lost so much time”.
“It’s okay, we can take as much time as we need to” the wise one reassures.</p>
<p>I hold the fear on the palm and breathe safety into it. I hold the hurt as it surfaces and allow the balm of my loving attention to heal it.</p>
<p>Pain holds its own medicine. I witness this alchemy in reverence. The heart melts in devotion.
“This devotion, is it my true essence?”, I wonder.</p>
<p>It seems like I have been forever walking in the dark alleyways of the psyche; untangling some stories, getting caught in a few. What comes next, is never known.</p>
<p>At the edge of my story, I pause. I make this moment sacred with my breath.</p>
<p>At the edge of my story, I learn to accept uncertainty as my ally.</p>
<p>At the edge of my story, I embody calm within the eye of raging tempest.</p>
</section>
|
At the Edge of My Story
At the edge of my story, I take tiny, tender-brave steps. Every step takes me into a story that’s larger than the one that has been perpetuating my wounds. Yet, the wounds need to be tended too.
I see parts of me coming alive like a million lavender flowers springing out from a lush green bush, or a glittering star-studded charcoal black sky. I provide myself with the nourishment I needed from my mother. I lead myself, embodying the stewardship I have longed for. Deep love pulsates in my heart, bringing forth so many facets of me together, the attentive lover, the soothing friend, the nurturing teacher, but each separate from the other.
We hold together in me, the scared one, the one who is hurting, shivering, the one who is reluctant to grow, always wanting to shrink into its shell of believing she is good for nothing.
“I am tired of this story and this pain”, says a sad voice “it has been so long, we have lost so much time”.
“It’s okay, we can take as much time as we need to” the wise one reassures.
I hold the fear on the palm and breathe safety into it. I hold the hurt as it surfaces and allow the balm of my loving attention to heal it.
Pain holds its own medicine. I witness this alchemy in reverence. The heart melts in devotion.
“This devotion, is it my true essence?”, I wonder.
It seems like I have been forever walking in the dark alleyways of the psyche; untangling some stories, getting caught in a few. What comes next, is never known.
At the edge of my story, I pause. I make this moment sacred with my breath.
At the edge of my story, I learn to accept uncertainty as my ally.
At the edge of my story, I embody calm within the eye of raging tempest.
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0fd9f0a6-32c7-536c-bf2e-196aa0ebe5e7
|
25/08/2025 15:56:59
|
|
https://davewshanahan.medium.com/check-out-our-weekly-windows-10-mobile-news-recap-series-where-we-go-over-the-top-stories-of-the-9803b91ea451
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medium.com
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Check out our weekly Windows 10 Mobile news recap series, where we go over the top stories of the…
|
Originally published on Wordpress
|
Dave W Shanahan
|
https://medium.com/@davewshanahan
|
9803b91ea451
|
https://miro.medium.com/max/2000/0*0Qvr-gDupNBy9RSW.
|
1 min
|
2016-12-03T18:29:27.270000
|
2016-12-03T18:29:27.963000
|
2016-12-03T18:29:27.963000
| 0 | 0 |
en
|
Latest News,Adduplex,Fl Studio Mobile,Hp Elite X3,Microsoft
|
<section>
<img src="https://miro.medium.com/max/1024/0*XoMrWUvLh9dQAcvJ." width="1024" height="512" loading="lazy" />
<p>Check out our weekly Windows 10 Mobile news recap series, where we go over the top stories of the past week in the world of Microsoft’s mobile operating system.</p>
<p><em>Originally published on <a href="</em>http://ift.tt/2fTawKd">Wordpress</a></p>
</section>
|
Check out our weekly Windows 10 Mobile news recap series, where we go over the top stories of the past week in the world of Microsoft’s mobile operating system.
Originally published on Wordpress
|
fbe6864d-f8b4-5dde-9b30-1518c9c69ea2
|
25/08/2025 15:56:59
|
https://medium.com/@harpertom888/and-expecting-different-results-89069e96a0df
|
medium.com
|
And Expecting Different Results
|
Voting for Democrats and Republicans is voting to keep us all imprisoned. An allegorical plea to vote third party in 2020.
|
Tom Harper
|
https://medium.com/@harpertom888
|
89069e96a0df
|
5 min
|
2019-03-04T03:31:28.777000
|
2019-03-04T22:01:01.226000
|
2021-12-08T19:10:54.314000
| 0 | 0 |
en
|
Politics,Democracy,Third Party,Elections,Donald Trump
|
<section>
<h1>And Expecting Different Results</h1>
<p>Imagine that you live in a 200 meter by 200 meter square cage of solid walls with a ceiling 10 feet above you and a dirt floor. This stone ceiling contains two barred openings in two of the corners, which allows you to see the sky and obtain water from the rain. One of these barred openings 100 feet by 100 feet, the other is only 10 feet by 10 feet.You have no idea how you got into the cage, why you are there, or even really how long you have been there.</p>
<p>Now imagine that you are not the only one living in this cage. There are nine other people living in the cage with you, none of them knowing how they got there, either. As far as any of you know, you have always lived in this cage. Out of the ten total people, including yourself, two groups have formed. Each group has four loyal members, led by one charismatic leader. You and one other person are only loosely tied to your respective groups. The group you are in has taken residence in the corner of the cage with the 10 foot by 10 foot opening in the ceiling, while the other group was able to take the prime real estate near the 100 foot by 100 foot opening, where they have had success in farming the dirt floor, while your group has had only modest success. This has created an imbalance within the cage, where your group would depend on theirs for food.</p>
<p>But there are also four barred doors that lead to the outside the cage, one on each wall of the cage. Outside these bars there is also a solid door that can be open or closed. The people inside the cage can determine whether these solid doors are open or closed. Whether the people within the cage have a tenuous connection to the outside. But the doors only seem to open into a large, dark, and empty corridor. And yet, mysteriously, if the solid doors are open, food rations are deposited at the doors seemingly at random. But necessity is the mother of all invention. As the other group is content to farm, whenever those solid doors are open, your group stakes out the four doors and retrieves the rations when they appear.</p>
<p>The result is that when the solid doors are closed, the other group thrives; when the solid doors are open, your group thrives.</p>
<p>Every year, on the year, ten consoles raise from the floor in the middle of the cage. The consoles contain three buttons, labeled Open, Close, and Leave. If most people vote Open, the solid doors will be open, allowing for outside food to come in and your group to thrive. If most people vote Close, the solid doors will be closed, making it so only food grown inside the cage is available, allowing the other group to thrive. If most people vote Leave, the solid <em>and</em> barred doors will all open, allowing you and everyone else in the cage to leave to an unknown fate. If it is a tie, the previous years’ state of affairs will remain in effect.</p>
<p>Finally, one year, just days before the election, you bring up the strange fact that nobody has ever voted “leave” before to your group. The others scoff at you. You’re that disloyal person anyway, who has voted for closing the solid doors a few times in the past. You did this because you saw the devastation of the other group when the doors were open and you were sympathetic. Their crops dried up, the people begrudgingly taking scraps from your group rather than put in the effort to make their own. But, of course, the other group has one person who has voted to open the solid doors a few times. The two of you have been chastised for being ‘undecided’ and ‘independent’ before, so your bringing up the third option is not all that surprising to your group.</p>
<p>“Leaving might be better than either other option,” your group leader points out, “but it will never win. Voting to leave is the same as voting to close off those solid doors. It’s throwing your vote away. It’s more important to make sure <em>they</em> don’t win, because closing those solid doors would be worse than having them open.”</p>
<p>“But having the solid doors open is worse than being able to leave,” you point out.</p>
<p>“We don’t know what’s outside the cage,” your group leader says, “for all we know, it might just be more cage, or someone out there might just trap us in another cage that’s even worse than the one we’re in.”</p>
<p>“But if we keep voting for the same two options every time,” you argue, “there is a <em>one hundred</em> percent chance of us being trapped in a cage. If there is even a <em>one</em> percent chance of no longer being in a cage by voting to escape, isn’t that worth pursuing?”</p>
<p>“It’s just not going to happen,” your leader says in a condescending tone, “this is just the way it’s always been.”</p>
<p>“But everyone agrees that they would rather not be stuck in the cage,” you say, “so why can’t we have bipartisan support for Leaving? If we all decided not to conform to the Open-Close duopoly, there wouldn’t be a need to vote strategically for the lesser evil in which every choice you want, Open or Closed, is still being inside the cage.”</p>
<p>“By voting Open or Closed,” you continue, “you are essentially voting for me, and everyone else, to <em>remain inside the cage</em>. The real choice isn’t between Open or Closed, but between Imprisonment and Freedom.”</p>
<p>“That something has been the way it is for as long as you can remember,” you plead, “is not a good reason to continue keeping it that way. Besides, there must have been a time in the past when we were not inside the cage, even if we don’t remember being outside, nor how we got inside, which was almost certainly not voluntary on our part. Someone put us here, and we have the means to escape, yet we choose not to. We continue choosing the same two options, but the ultimate result is that we remain in this cage, telling ourselves that we are free as long as it is <em>our side</em> who wins the next vote.”</p>
<p>“But this is a lie,” you say, “<em>our side</em> is the side that gets all of us — our group and theirs — out of the cage. There is no freedom for us if the solid doors are open, and there is no freedom for them if the solid doors are closed. We all know the two options are not good, yet we keep <em>ourselves</em> imprisoned merely to stop the people we think are our enemies from falsely believing they won. We think that ‘winning’ the next vote will make us free. But insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”</p>
<p>In 2020, why don’t we try a third party option?</p>
</section>
|
And Expecting Different Results
Imagine that you live in a 200 meter by 200 meter square cage of solid walls with a ceiling 10 feet above you and a dirt floor. This stone ceiling contains two barred openings in two of the corners, which allows you to see the sky and obtain water from the rain. One of these barred openings 100 feet by 100 feet, the other is only 10 feet by 10 feet.You have no idea how you got into the cage, why you are there, or even really how long you have been there.
Now imagine that you are not the only one living in this cage. There are nine other people living in the cage with you, none of them knowing how they got there, either. As far as any of you know, you have always lived in this cage. Out of the ten total people, including yourself, two groups have formed. Each group has four loyal members, led by one charismatic leader. You and one other person are only loosely tied to your respective groups. The group you are in has taken residence in the corner of the cage with the 10 foot by 10 foot opening in the ceiling, while the other group was able to take the prime real estate near the 100 foot by 100 foot opening, where they have had success in farming the dirt floor, while your group has had only modest success. This has created an imbalance within the cage, where your group would depend on theirs for food.
But there are also four barred doors that lead to the outside the cage, one on each wall of the cage. Outside these bars there is also a solid door that can be open or closed. The people inside the cage can determine whether these solid doors are open or closed. Whether the people within the cage have a tenuous connection to the outside. But the doors only seem to open into a large, dark, and empty corridor. And yet, mysteriously, if the solid doors are open, food rations are deposited at the doors seemingly at random. But necessity is the mother of all invention. As the other group is content to farm, whenever those solid doors are open, your group stakes out the four doors and retrieves the rations when they appear.
The result is that when the solid doors are closed, the other group thrives; when the solid doors are open, your group thrives.
Every year, on the year, ten consoles raise from the floor in the middle of the cage. The consoles contain three buttons, labeled Open, Close, and Leave. If most people vote Open, the solid doors will be open, allowing for outside food to come in and your group to thrive. If most people vote Close, the solid doors will be closed, making it so only food grown inside the cage is available, allowing the other group to thrive. If most people vote Leave, the solid and barred doors will all open, allowing you and everyone else in the cage to leave to an unknown fate. If it is a tie, the previous years’ state of affairs will remain in effect.
Finally, one year, just days before the election, you bring up the strange fact that nobody has ever voted “leave” before to your group. The others scoff at you. You’re that disloyal person anyway, who has voted for closing the solid doors a few times in the past. You did this because you saw the devastation of the other group when the doors were open and you were sympathetic. Their crops dried up, the people begrudgingly taking scraps from your group rather than put in the effort to make their own. But, of course, the other group has one person who has voted to open the solid doors a few times. The two of you have been chastised for being ‘undecided’ and ‘independent’ before, so your bringing up the third option is not all that surprising to your group.
“Leaving might be better than either other option,” your group leader points out, “but it will never win. Voting to leave is the same as voting to close off those solid doors. It’s throwing your vote away. It’s more important to make sure they don’t win, because closing those solid doors would be worse than having them open.”
“But having the solid doors open is worse than being able to leave,” you point out.
“We don’t know what’s outside the cage,” your group leader says, “for all we know, it might just be more cage, or someone out there might just trap us in another cage that’s even worse than the one we’re in.”
“But if we keep voting for the same two options every time,” you argue, “there is a one hundred percent chance of us being trapped in a cage. If there is even a one percent chance of no longer being in a cage by voting to escape, isn’t that worth pursuing?”
“It’s just not going to happen,” your leader says in a condescending tone, “this is just the way it’s always been.”
“But everyone agrees that they would rather not be stuck in the cage,” you say, “so why can’t we have bipartisan support for Leaving? If we all decided not to conform to the Open-Close duopoly, there wouldn’t be a need to vote strategically for the lesser evil in which every choice you want, Open or Closed, is still being inside the cage.”
“By voting Open or Closed,” you continue, “you are essentially voting for me, and everyone else, to remain inside the cage. The real choice isn’t between Open or Closed, but between Imprisonment and Freedom.”
“That something has been the way it is for as long as you can remember,” you plead, “is not a good reason to continue keeping it that way. Besides, there must have been a time in the past when we were not inside the cage, even if we don’t remember being outside, nor how we got inside, which was almost certainly not voluntary on our part. Someone put us here, and we have the means to escape, yet we choose not to. We continue choosing the same two options, but the ultimate result is that we remain in this cage, telling ourselves that we are free as long as it is our side who wins the next vote.”
“But this is a lie,” you say, “our side is the side that gets all of us — our group and theirs — out of the cage. There is no freedom for us if the solid doors are open, and there is no freedom for them if the solid doors are closed. We all know the two options are not good, yet we keep ourselves imprisoned merely to stop the people we think are our enemies from falsely believing they won. We think that ‘winning’ the next vote will make us free. But insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
In 2020, why don’t we try a third party option?
|
4178bedc-1cb3-58eb-84ae-655ef7d2712f
|
25/08/2025 15:56:59
|
|
https://medium.com/bupublication/what-poverty-taught-me-about-humanity-dc21a538bf8e
|
medium.com
|
What Poverty Taught Me About Humanity
|
Poverty taught me how to see people. Like it or not.
|
Chrystal —Mommas Twin Adventure
|
https://medium.com/@chrystalbrotherson
|
dc21a538bf8e
|
https://miro.medium.com/max/2000/0*TII3-MmdM0K5rG3u
|
2 min
|
2025-05-25T00:03:24.509000
|
2025-06-19T19:32:58.400000
|
2025-06-19T20:28:37.171000
| 0 | 29 |
en
|
Poverty,Humanity,Wealth,Life,Buhub
|
<section>
<h1>What Poverty Taught Me About Humanity</h1>
<h3>Poverty taught me how to see people. Like it or not.</h3>
<img src="https://miro.medium.com/max/3032/0*TII3-MmdM0K5rG3u" width="3032" height="2021" loading="lazy" />
<p>Not their clothes.
Not their titles.
Not the car they pulled up in.
But how they looked at the janitor.
How they treated the cashier.
How they spoke to someone who couldn’t offer them anything in return.</p>
<p><strong>Poverty sharpened my instincts.</strong>
I learned to read silence like a second language.
To hear tension behind kind words.
To know who would judge me by my shoes before I even opened my mouth.</p>
<p><strong>It taught me compassion.</strong>
Because once you’ve been hungry,
you don’t question someone else’s need.
You just pass them the plate.</p>
<h3>But it also took things from me.</h3>
<p>It took safety — the kind you feel when you know there’s a backup plan.
It took innocence — the kind that lets you believe effort always equals reward.
It took time — years spent surviving instead of dreaming.</p>
<p><strong>Poverty stole moments I didn’t know I was supposed to have.</strong>
School dances.
Sleepovers.
Doctor visits without calculating the cost.</p>
<p>I am proud of how I turned out.
But I’m not grateful for the struggle.
That’s where people get it wrong.</p>
<p>You can honor your resilience
without romanticizing what forced you to build it.</p>
<p><em><strong>Poverty taught me how to care</em> deeply.</strong>
To notice. To give.
To hold space for people with complicated stories and quiet hurts.</p>
<p>But it also taught me loss —
Not of stuff,
but of softness.</p>
<p>And I’m still working to get some of that back.</p>
<p>ARE YOU?</p>
<p>— Thank you For READING</p>
<h3>✨ Chrystal Brotherson ✨
Writer | Threads Growth Coach | Storyteller
👬 Momma of Twin Boys | Gamer | Queer Poly Wife
Follow for fire, receipts & resistance from the kitchen floor.</h3>
<img src="https://miro.medium.com/max/249/0*qSmL7YtMJE7QqX4G.png" width="249" height="40" loading="lazy" />
<h2>Chrystal Brotherson</h2>
<p>P.S. Thank you for following my journey. You can find more of my motherhood experiences right here on <a href="https://medium.com/@chrystalbrotherson">medium</a>.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://medium.com/bupublicat</strong>ion/be-unlimited-hub-guidelines-69162d1c4367">Be Unlimited Hub Submission Guidelines
<em>Join Us On A Mission To Change Lives One Read At a Time</em>m</a>edium.com</p>
</section>
|
What It (Poverty) Took From Me
What Poverty Taught Me About Humanity
Poverty taught me how to see people. Like it or not.
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash
Not their clothes.
Not their titles.
Not the car they pulled up in.
But how they looked at the janitor.
How they treated the cashier.
How they spoke to someone who couldn’t offer them anything in return.
Poverty sharpened my instincts.
I learned to read silence like a second language.
To hear tension behind kind words.
To know who would judge me by my shoes before I even opened my mouth.
It taught me compassion.
Because once you’ve been hungry,
you don’t question someone else’s need.
You just pass them the plate.
But it also took things from me.
It took safety — the kind you feel when you know there’s a backup plan.
It took innocence — the kind that lets you believe effort always equals reward.
It took time — years spent surviving instead of dreaming.
Poverty stole moments I didn’t know I was supposed to have.
School dances.
Sleepovers.
Doctor visits without calculating the cost.
I am proud of how I turned out.
But I’m not grateful for the struggle.
That’s where people get it wrong.
You can honor your resilience
without romanticizing what forced you to build it.
Poverty taught me how to care deeply.
To notice. To give.
To hold space for people with complicated stories and quiet hurts.
But it also taught me loss —
Not of stuff,
but of softness.
And I’m still working to get some of that back.
ARE YOU?
— Thank you For READING
✨ Chrystal Brotherson ✨
Writer | Threads Growth Coach | Storyteller
👬 Momma of Twin Boys | Gamer | Queer Poly Wife
Follow for fire, receipts & resistance from the kitchen floor.
signature from Canva made by Chrystal — Momma of twins — Thread’s Growth Coach
Chrystal Brotherson
P.S. Thank you for following my journey. You can find more of my motherhood experiences right here on medium.
Be Unlimited Hub Submission Guidelines
Join Us On A Mission To Change Lives One Read At a Timemedium.com
|
dee4a4b5-cf85-55e8-8d7a-7408ed65eebc
|
25/08/2025 15:56:59
|
https://mdakashahmedseostrategist.medium.com/ecommerce-seo-case-study-215c2b3e7e1
|
medium.com
|
Ecommerce SEO case study
|
This time ranking #5 for competitive keyword, KD = 36, Search Volume =1300.
|
Md Akash Ahmed
|
https://medium.com/@mdakashahmedseostrategist
|
215c2b3e7e1
|
0 min
|
2023-07-31T18:35:08.364000
|
2023-07-31T18:37:02.505000
|
2023-07-31T18:37:06.338000
| 0 | 0 |
en
|
SEO
|
<section>
<p>This time ranking #5 for competitive keyword, KD = 36, Search Volume =1300.</p>
<p>Always focus on content rather than backlinks.</p>
<p>0 backlink have done.</p>
<img src="https://miro.medium.com/max/857/1*v-i-YvT3bv0QwdABxQTPSg.png" width="857" height="776" loading="lazy" />
<img src="https://miro.medium.com/max/990/1*G_1e4EgKmKiSSK-0r-Vnww.png" width="990" height="495" loading="lazy" />
</section>
|
Ecommerce SEO case study
This time ranking #5 for competitive keyword, KD = 36, Search Volume =1300.
Always focus on content rather than backlinks.
0 backlink have done.
|
5a12d3a4-f562-5fb3-89bf-f81d8cb01f4b
|
25/08/2025 15:56:59
|
|
https://medium.com/@rajithayashod/serious-polymorphism-be0f170832f4
|
medium.com
|
Serious Polymorphism
|
Chapter 8 of Head first Java Book
|
Rajitha Yashod
|
https://medium.com/@rajithayashod
|
be0f170832f4
|
4 min
|
2022-07-16T03:19:15.473000
|
2022-07-16T04:25:33.229000
|
2022-07-16T04:45:38.548000
| 0 | 0 |
en
|
Abstract,Interfaces
|
<section>
<p>Chapter 8 of Head first Java Book</p>
<img src="https://miro.medium.com/max/981/1*1Wlpn8AVV1VHAXdLkNZZNg.png" width="981" height="492" loading="lazy" />
<p>In previous article, we have discussed Animal superclass can be extended to subclasses like Dog, Tiger, Cat l likewise. And also we can make objects like this.</p>
<img src="https://miro.medium.com/max/851/1*OrWJFshLS1sstvtr9RVsBw.jpeg" width="851" height="661" loading="lazy" />
<p><em>Create a new object of Dog with dog reference.</em></p>
<img src="https://miro.medium.com/max/303/1*3z5ohyDpdpwAAyOBJMbUbQ.png" width="303" height="80" loading="lazy" />
<p><em>Now we can create Dog() object with animal reference.</em></p>
<img src="https://miro.medium.com/max/305/1*xg2YmAF5rn3rVk1EKE9VVA.png" width="305" height="82" loading="lazy" />
<p>But we cant do belove one, because animal is abstract.</p>
<img src="https://miro.medium.com/max/525/1*dh9SYNiYx0Pms9-vbsg9KQ.png" width="525" height="78" loading="lazy" />
<h1>What does a new Animal() object look like?</h1>
<p>How do we deal with Animal class? we need an Animal class, for inheritance and polymorphism. But we want programmers to instantiate only the less abstract subclasses of class Animal, not Animal itself. we want Dog, Cat, objects. Not Animal.</p>
<p>Fortunately, there’s a simple way to prevent a class from even being instantiated. In other words, to stop anyone from saying “new” on that type. By marking the class as <strong>abstract,</strong> the compiler will stop any code, anywhere, from ever creating an instance of that type.</p>
<p>So, we can still use that abstract type as a reference type. When we are designing the class inheritance structure, we have to decide which classes are abstract and which are concrete. Concrete classes are those that are specific enough to be instantiated. A concrete class just means that it’s okay to make objects of that type.</p>
<img src="https://miro.medium.com/max/385/1*cgluqRQdULZRJjiD1ERQTw.png" width="385" height="82" loading="lazy" />
<h3>The compiler won’t let you instantiate an abstract class</h3>
<p>An abstract class means that “nobody can ever make a new instance” of that class. but, we can only use this abstract type class as a “declared reference type”, for the purpose of polymorphism.</p>
<p>See the below example to understand this.</p>
<img src="https://miro.medium.com/max/621/1*Vo2pfURtWvLbMJkHOrmeEg.png" width="621" height="256" loading="lazy" />
<p><em><strong>Firs</em>t step:-</strong>
we have declared the Animal reference object.
<em><strong>Secon</em>d step:-</strong>
we have assigned a new Dog object to animal reference.
<em><strong>Thir</em>d step:-</strong>
we tried to create a new Object of Animal but it gives us compile error saying we cannot create object of Abstract Class.</p>
<h3>Abstract vs. Concrete</h3>
<p>If a class is not abstract, it is a concrete class in above example ( In the animal tree) abstract class is the Animal class and other subclasses of it all becomes concrete classes. Also, the abstract class means the class must be extended. and abstract method means the method should be overridden.</p>
<p>Abstract methods do have not a body because no point in having a body of superclass (abstract class).</p>
<p>If you declared an abstract method, you MUST mark the class abstract as well. You can’t have an abstract method in a non-abstract class.</p>
<p>If you put even a single abstract method in a class, you have to make the class abstract. But you can mix both abstract and non-abstract methods in the abstract class. What we have declared as abstract methods all the abstract methods should be implemented in the subclass. Implementing an abstract method is just like overriding a method.</p>
<h3>Can multiple inheritances achieve in java?</h3>
<p>No, we cannot extend two classes at once in java. that is called the diamond problem in java. what if there same two methods in both superclasses when extending both superclasses to the subclass the subclass will be confused about which method to be called that’s called the diamond problem in java.but, Java solves this problem by using the interface. A java interface solves your multiple inheritance problem by giving you much of the polymorphic benefits of the multiple inheritances without the pain and suffering from the Demand problem.</p>
<p><strong>Java interface</strong>
the way in which interfaces work is surprisingly simple. making all the methods abstract. that way, the subclass must implement the methods, so at runtime, the JVM isn’t confused about which of the two inherited versions it’s supposed to call. an interface is simply a contract that asks for subclasses to implement the methods. and the JVM understands the method at runtime according to the class object it is implemented.</p>
<p>interfaces are the same as classes? we can simply make an interface just by replacing the class keywords with an interface keyword so it becomes an interface. interface methods are implicitly public and abstract, so typing in public and abstract is optional.All interface methods are abstract, so they must end in semicolons. Remember, they have no body.</p>
<img src="https://miro.medium.com/max/425/1*05GyYtL2rHanPKqzeK_r5w.png" width="425" height="145" loading="lazy" />
</section>
|
Serious Polymorphism
Chapter 8 of Head first Java Book
In previous article, we have discussed Animal superclass can be extended to subclasses like Dog, Tiger, Cat l likewise. And also we can make objects like this.
Create a new object of Dog with dog reference.
Now we can create Dog() object with animal reference.
But we cant do belove one, because animal is abstract.
What does a new Animal() object look like?
How do we deal with Animal class? we need an Animal class, for inheritance and polymorphism. But we want programmers to instantiate only the less abstract subclasses of class Animal, not Animal itself. we want Dog, Cat, objects. Not Animal.
Fortunately, there’s a simple way to prevent a class from even being instantiated. In other words, to stop anyone from saying “new” on that type. By marking the class as abstract, the compiler will stop any code, anywhere, from ever creating an instance of that type.
So, we can still use that abstract type as a reference type. When we are designing the class inheritance structure, we have to decide which classes are abstract and which are concrete. Concrete classes are those that are specific enough to be instantiated. A concrete class just means that it’s okay to make objects of that type.
The compiler won’t let you instantiate an abstract class
An abstract class means that “nobody can ever make a new instance” of that class. but, we can only use this abstract type class as a “declared reference type”, for the purpose of polymorphism.
See the below example to understand this.
First step:-
we have declared the Animal reference object.
Second step:-
we have assigned a new Dog object to animal reference.
Third step:-
we tried to create a new Object of Animal but it gives us compile error saying we cannot create object of Abstract Class.
Abstract vs. Concrete
If a class is not abstract, it is a concrete class in above example ( In the animal tree) abstract class is the Animal class and other subclasses of it all becomes concrete classes. Also, the abstract class means the class must be extended. and abstract method means the method should be overridden.
Abstract methods do have not a body because no point in having a body of superclass (abstract class).
If you declared an abstract method, you MUST mark the class abstract as well. You can’t have an abstract method in a non-abstract class.
If you put even a single abstract method in a class, you have to make the class abstract. But you can mix both abstract and non-abstract methods in the abstract class. What we have declared as abstract methods all the abstract methods should be implemented in the subclass. Implementing an abstract method is just like overriding a method.
Can multiple inheritances achieve in java?
No, we cannot extend two classes at once in java. that is called the diamond problem in java. what if there same two methods in both superclasses when extending both superclasses to the subclass the subclass will be confused about which method to be called that’s called the diamond problem in java.but, Java solves this problem by using the interface. A java interface solves your multiple inheritance problem by giving you much of the polymorphic benefits of the multiple inheritances without the pain and suffering from the Demand problem.
Java interface
the way in which interfaces work is surprisingly simple. making all the methods abstract. that way, the subclass must implement the methods, so at runtime, the JVM isn’t confused about which of the two inherited versions it’s supposed to call. an interface is simply a contract that asks for subclasses to implement the methods. and the JVM understands the method at runtime according to the class object it is implemented.
interfaces are the same as classes? we can simply make an interface just by replacing the class keywords with an interface keyword so it becomes an interface. interface methods are implicitly public and abstract, so typing in public and abstract is optional.All interface methods are abstract, so they must end in semicolons. Remember, they have no body.
|
fa129465-b1b3-567c-8bf6-271addbecc08
|
25/08/2025 15:56:59
|
|
https://medium.com/@mahadehasanmizu/a-great-tip-on-how-to-drink-more-water-daily-drink-more-water-easiest-way-to-drink-more-water-11174cb087e4
|
medium.com
|
A Great Tip On How To Drink More Water Daily !Drink More WATER!Easiest Way to Drink More Water
| null |
Mahade Hasan Mizu
|
https://medium.com/@mahadehasanmizu
|
11174cb087e4
| null |
0 min
|
2017-04-03T17:50:54.958000
|
2017-04-03T17:50:55.641000
|
2017-04-03T17:50:55.641000
| 0 | 0 |
en
|
Health Information
|
<section>
<p>original posted from <a href="https://youtu.be/uQF3THuzGrM">https://youtu.be/uQF3THuzGrM</a></p>
</section>
|
In This Video We Know About A Great Tip On How To Drink More Water Daily !Drink More WATER!Easiest Way to Drink More Water.And I Think You Can Enjoy This.Water Is more Important For our Daily Lives And You Also A Great Tip On How To Drink More Water Daily !Drink More WATER!Easiest Way to Drink More Water Subscribe ****** https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXnFFPhtkEo0yDAPFGA0R6A?sub_confirmation=1 Our Site — — -http://www.letsread.me Like Our FB Page — — -http://ift.tt/2nPTFuU Tumbler — — -http://ift.tt/2nDXHG8 Medium — — -http://ift.tt/2oCH6QH Reddit — — -http://ift.tt/2gWRHqg Twitter — — -https://twitter.com/Sandraabir10?lang=en Wordpress — — -http://ift.tt/2oCLq22 Blogger — — -healthinformationlove.blogspot.com Diigo — — -http://ift.tt/2nDUWUU Buffer — — -http://ift.tt/2oCCSbx Linkedin — — -http://ift.tt/2nE7bkp Thanks For Watching This Video
original posted from https://youtu.be/uQF3THuzGrM
|
34df62be-341a-50a0-bb4d-844862f10f04
|
25/08/2025 15:56:59
|
https://brace.medium.com/i-trained-for-a-half-marathon-using-an-app-19fb4b8fd0a
|
medium.com
|
I Trained for a Half-Marathon Using an App…
|
Back in 2018, I began using the Nike+ Run Club App to track my running journey. I’m not sure why I chose that app over any other app, but…
|
Brace
|
https://medium.com/@brace
|
19fb4b8fd0a
|
6 min
|
2021-02-11T15:35:45.514000
|
2021-02-11T17:44:42.460000
|
2021-12-30T10:45:24.145000
| 0 | 0 |
en
|
Running,Marathon Training,Black Runners,Self Improvement,Love
|
<section>
<p>Back in 2018, I began using the <strong><a href="https://www.nike.com/nrc-app">Nike+ R</strong>un Club App to track my running journey</a>. I’m not sure why I chose that app over any other app, but at the time I knew I didn’t have much idea about how to run effectively and was looking for some kind of an expertise to assist me on this new endeavor.</p>
<p>Now, if you have been following me on social media for a bit of time, you will know I am really into running. I ran often during my time in the United States Marine Corp, but I wasn’t a big fan of it until a few years ago after my USMC career. Why now? Well, in the Corp, our runs usually began at an ungodly hour of the day (0430) in a variety of environments and for stretches of distance that seemed to go on forever. I just never was a fan of it — seemed so unnecessary at the time. Little would I know that those runs and the reasons why would become so spot on once I began running a few years ago. I often post about my running journey on my social media pages along with little tips and learnings I’ve acquired a long the way. I also post my mood and feelings on certain days, because not every day am I in the mood to be running. Nevertheless, if you found this post because you too are interested in running or wondering what the Nike Run Club (NRC) app is all about, you’re in the right place.</p>
<p>Initially, it all started when I was trying to find ways to juggle taking care of my newborn son and also the demands of supporting my wife’s new job. Between the two, it didn’t leave me much personal time for the things I used to do at the end of the day (ie- weightlifting). One morning, I got up 30 minutes before she needed to leave for work and I thought, “what can I do here in this amount of time that will give me a good workout?” I went to the gym in our building and stepped onto the treadmill and I decided I would do one mile and see where that led me. I got on and ran that mile and some change in a little under 18 minutes. I did some pull-ups and some sit-ups and felt good about what I was able to accomplish in that short amount of time. That night, I wanted to cease the momentum, so I started looking up running apps. I saw so many people talking about the NRC app, so I downloaded it and the next day, I tried it. I used the “First Treadmill Run” Guided Run featuring the coaching of Coach Chris Bennett of Nike. While I was running<strong> <a href="https://www.talkspace.com/blog/why-you-should-celebrate-</strong>small-wins/">he celebrated the fact that I had committed to making a run today</a> and talked about the<strong> <a href="https://</strong>www.mensjournal.com/health-fitness/25-reasons-running-better-gym/">beauty of running</a>. He then began walking me through how to think about my time on the treadmill. He talked about my running form and how my posture and placement on the treadmill could help make my run easier and more effective. He talked about my breathing and my mindset and how those things can make the time on the treadmill unbearable or more intentional and purposeful over the course of the time I was there. He then talked about the functionality of the treadmill and how raising the elevation can not only add a little more anaerobic activity to my run, but also simulate the experience of running outdoors into the wind. In that first run on the app I learned some really key things.</p>
<p>After a few more runs using the “Guided Run” portion of the app, I then looked into some of the training plans and selected the training for a 10K race. I love running the Turkey Trots each year during the Thanksgiving Holiday, so I thought this would be a great way to test out the app and its effectiveness. I selected the 10K training regimen and put in the details of the race along with some particulars about me at the time (ie- height, weight, longest distance run, pace, how many times I run per week) and it immediately generated a schedule for me. What I loved about it was that the plan wasn’t assuming that my running expertise or rigid in its approach of preparing me for my race. It started off with some very basic runs — a 2 mile long run, a timed tempo run, and a speed run of 4x 400mm runs. The next week, it adjusted my workout regimen accordingly based on those results. The next week it adjusted them again based on the results from that week. It even accounted for days that I couldn’t get down to the treadmill or outside to run and allowed me to move those workouts to other days. It also adjusted the next week to fit days that seemingly worked better for me in prior weeks.</p>
<p>But, the thing I loved most about the app is the coaching. If you have ever started something new — whether, its running or a new job or hobby, having someone experienced and wanting to see you have success is invaluable in those early stages. <strong><a href="https:</strong>//citiusmag.com/podcast/citius-mag-podcast-chris-bennett-nike-run-coach/">Chris Bennett’s</a> calming, upbeat voice, which has the same sort of enthusiasm that a fresh first-year Kindergarten teacher has when reading a fairy tale to a group of children. Its as if he were born for the job as the world’s most thoughtful running guru. The tone of his guided runs is perfectly calibrated so you feel like you’re with a coach who really ‘<em>gets’</em> it, which makes sense because Bennett has a hefty foot-to-ground résumé. He captained both high school (Christian Brothers Academy) and college (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) track. He’s coached teens who were also dealing with problems at home (divorce, abuse) and through the highs and lows of high school (homework overload, young love). And he can run a four-minute mile! He joined Nike in 2014 as a head coach, and started the Nike Run Club series in the summer of 2017. “I had walked out of a meeting and the conversation was, ‘Why don’t more people run, and why do a lot of people who run think running sucks?’” says Bennett. “More people don’t run because it’s really hard to start a run. And most people, when they do start running, they run the wrong way. So all you have to do is get someone to run the right way.” (Lest you think that means a certain technique or form, the “right” way, at least according to Bennett’s remote coaching, means running relaxed.) Bennett figured he could motivate more runners by running “with” them. Soon after, he recorded the first four episodes as a batch: First Run, Next Run, First Speed Run, and Comeback Run.</p>
<p>Overall, the goal of the app, is to prepare the body best for the race and it adapts to the runners progress. This was good, because at the time I was very goal-oriented and that causes a lot of stress and anxiety for me when I don’t meet those checkpoints and numbers.</p>
<p><strong>So, did I progress? Absolutely!</strong></p>
<p>Not only did I complete my first half marathon, but I also left each marathon and that race looking forward to my next race and next workout. Not only that, but:</p>
<p><em><strong>My cardio improved trem</em>endously</strong>. I found myself with better breathing and a better measured heart rate when at rest. Metabolism improved where I ate more of the things that my body needed and could feel when I ate things that weren’t beneficial.</p>
<p><em><strong>More strength in my lower body from the runs and w</em>orkouts.</strong> Like many adamant amateur bodybuilders we can tend to put more emphasis on one body part over another. I was an upper body person. After running for a year, I found myself having less heaviness in my back and thigh area and more overall energy during off days.</p>
<p><em><strong>Learned something new about myself and </em>training</strong>. I love learning and learning in an environment where it isn’t prohibitive or condemning. I’ve been in both environments and this wasn’t it. I felt good about completing each week and looked forward to each workout. With this training I never felt like I was pushing past my limits, but in reality I was.</p>
<p><strong>Did I complete my half-marathon?</strong></p>
<p>You bet I did!</p>
<img src="https://miro.medium.com/max/2848/1*whf094tUDzYhpdu9EAuURA.jpeg" width="2848" height="4272" loading="lazy" />
<p>While I was running alone, I never felt alone. I felt connected to a running community, but through my work towards joining them on race day and giving my best effort on that day. Sort of like showing up to a test prepared as best as you can and understanding that its a journey and not an ending. I felt so proud and after a couple months of rest, I began preparing for my next race.</p>
<h1>Is Nike Run App good to train for Marathon?</h1>
<p>Yes, it is! The guided runs by Coach Bennett are probably the best part of the training program. I also appreciated the tailored weekly schedule. I definitely believe that you need to have either a level of commitment to the training or attention to detail (ie- good calendar) to be able to stick with it over the training time frame. However, if not, you aren’t losing any money by doing so as you would with a personal coach or paid plan.</p>
<p>I hope this <a href="#">Medium</a> post has helped you and has answered your questions about the training plan for my marathon! If you have questions, please ask in the comments below and I’ll do my best to get back to you.</p>
<p><strong>Please join <a href="https://www.instagram.com/brace_carlos/">me on Instagram</a> to follow along with my running journey</strong> and see the cutest 3 year old boy you have EVER seen!</p>
</section>
|
I Trained for a Half-Marathon Using an App…
Back in 2018, I began using the Nike+ Run Club App to track my running journey. I’m not sure why I chose that app over any other app, but at the time I knew I didn’t have much idea about how to run effectively and was looking for some kind of an expertise to assist me on this new endeavor.
Now, if you have been following me on social media for a bit of time, you will know I am really into running. I ran often during my time in the United States Marine Corp, but I wasn’t a big fan of it until a few years ago after my USMC career. Why now? Well, in the Corp, our runs usually began at an ungodly hour of the day (0430) in a variety of environments and for stretches of distance that seemed to go on forever. I just never was a fan of it — seemed so unnecessary at the time. Little would I know that those runs and the reasons why would become so spot on once I began running a few years ago. I often post about my running journey on my social media pages along with little tips and learnings I’ve acquired a long the way. I also post my mood and feelings on certain days, because not every day am I in the mood to be running. Nevertheless, if you found this post because you too are interested in running or wondering what the Nike Run Club (NRC) app is all about, you’re in the right place.
Initially, it all started when I was trying to find ways to juggle taking care of my newborn son and also the demands of supporting my wife’s new job. Between the two, it didn’t leave me much personal time for the things I used to do at the end of the day (ie- weightlifting). One morning, I got up 30 minutes before she needed to leave for work and I thought, “what can I do here in this amount of time that will give me a good workout?” I went to the gym in our building and stepped onto the treadmill and I decided I would do one mile and see where that led me. I got on and ran that mile and some change in a little under 18 minutes. I did some pull-ups and some sit-ups and felt good about what I was able to accomplish in that short amount of time. That night, I wanted to cease the momentum, so I started looking up running apps. I saw so many people talking about the NRC app, so I downloaded it and the next day, I tried it. I used the “First Treadmill Run” Guided Run featuring the coaching of Coach Chris Bennett of Nike. While I was running he celebrated the fact that I had committed to making a run today and talked about the beauty of running. He then began walking me through how to think about my time on the treadmill. He talked about my running form and how my posture and placement on the treadmill could help make my run easier and more effective. He talked about my breathing and my mindset and how those things can make the time on the treadmill unbearable or more intentional and purposeful over the course of the time I was there. He then talked about the functionality of the treadmill and how raising the elevation can not only add a little more anaerobic activity to my run, but also simulate the experience of running outdoors into the wind. In that first run on the app I learned some really key things.
After a few more runs using the “Guided Run” portion of the app, I then looked into some of the training plans and selected the training for a 10K race. I love running the Turkey Trots each year during the Thanksgiving Holiday, so I thought this would be a great way to test out the app and its effectiveness. I selected the 10K training regimen and put in the details of the race along with some particulars about me at the time (ie- height, weight, longest distance run, pace, how many times I run per week) and it immediately generated a schedule for me. What I loved about it was that the plan wasn’t assuming that my running expertise or rigid in its approach of preparing me for my race. It started off with some very basic runs — a 2 mile long run, a timed tempo run, and a speed run of 4x 400mm runs. The next week, it adjusted my workout regimen accordingly based on those results. The next week it adjusted them again based on the results from that week. It even accounted for days that I couldn’t get down to the treadmill or outside to run and allowed me to move those workouts to other days. It also adjusted the next week to fit days that seemingly worked better for me in prior weeks.
But, the thing I loved most about the app is the coaching. If you have ever started something new — whether, its running or a new job or hobby, having someone experienced and wanting to see you have success is invaluable in those early stages. Chris Bennett’s calming, upbeat voice, which has the same sort of enthusiasm that a fresh first-year Kindergarten teacher has when reading a fairy tale to a group of children. Its as if he were born for the job as the world’s most thoughtful running guru. The tone of his guided runs is perfectly calibrated so you feel like you’re with a coach who really ‘gets’ it, which makes sense because Bennett has a hefty foot-to-ground résumé. He captained both high school (Christian Brothers Academy) and college (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) track. He’s coached teens who were also dealing with problems at home (divorce, abuse) and through the highs and lows of high school (homework overload, young love). And he can run a four-minute mile! He joined Nike in 2014 as a head coach, and started the Nike Run Club series in the summer of 2017. “I had walked out of a meeting and the conversation was, ‘Why don’t more people run, and why do a lot of people who run think running sucks?’” says Bennett. “More people don’t run because it’s really hard to start a run. And most people, when they do start running, they run the wrong way. So all you have to do is get someone to run the right way.” (Lest you think that means a certain technique or form, the “right” way, at least according to Bennett’s remote coaching, means running relaxed.) Bennett figured he could motivate more runners by running “with” them. Soon after, he recorded the first four episodes as a batch: First Run, Next Run, First Speed Run, and Comeback Run.
Overall, the goal of the app, is to prepare the body best for the race and it adapts to the runners progress. This was good, because at the time I was very goal-oriented and that causes a lot of stress and anxiety for me when I don’t meet those checkpoints and numbers.
So, did I progress? Absolutely!
Not only did I complete my first half marathon, but I also left each marathon and that race looking forward to my next race and next workout. Not only that, but:
My cardio improved tremendously. I found myself with better breathing and a better measured heart rate when at rest. Metabolism improved where I ate more of the things that my body needed and could feel when I ate things that weren’t beneficial.
More strength in my lower body from the runs and workouts. Like many adamant amateur bodybuilders we can tend to put more emphasis on one body part over another. I was an upper body person. After running for a year, I found myself having less heaviness in my back and thigh area and more overall energy during off days.
Learned something new about myself and training. I love learning and learning in an environment where it isn’t prohibitive or condemning. I’ve been in both environments and this wasn’t it. I felt good about completing each week and looked forward to each workout. With this training I never felt like I was pushing past my limits, but in reality I was.
Did I complete my half-marathon?
You bet I did!
While I was running alone, I never felt alone. I felt connected to a running community, but through my work towards joining them on race day and giving my best effort on that day. Sort of like showing up to a test prepared as best as you can and understanding that its a journey and not an ending. I felt so proud and after a couple months of rest, I began preparing for my next race.
Is Nike Run App good to train for Marathon?
Yes, it is! The guided runs by Coach Bennett are probably the best part of the training program. I also appreciated the tailored weekly schedule. I definitely believe that you need to have either a level of commitment to the training or attention to detail (ie- good calendar) to be able to stick with it over the training time frame. However, if not, you aren’t losing any money by doing so as you would with a personal coach or paid plan.
I hope this Medium post has helped you and has answered your questions about the training plan for my marathon! If you have questions, please ask in the comments below and I’ll do my best to get back to you.
Please join me on Instagram to follow along with my running journey and see the cutest 3 year old boy you have EVER seen!
|
2fdb169f-fbd0-5468-9f36-bc38b8b5b610
|
25/08/2025 15:56:59
|
|
https://devisha-singh.medium.com/what-is-healthtech-and-why-does-it-matter-to-all-of-us-unthinkable-b80bc76d2006
|
medium.com
|
What Is Healthtech and Why Does It Matter to All of Us | Unthinkable
|
Technology is shaping every industry, regardless of the work involved. The healthcare industry, setting trends for technological shifts…
|
Unthinkable Software
|
https://medium.com/@devisha-singh
|
b80bc76d2006
|
3 min
|
2020-11-13T06:59:40.370000
|
2020-11-12T11:36:37
|
2021-12-16T13:32:31.060000
| 0 | 0 |
en
|
Healthtech
|
<section>
<img src="https://miro.medium.com/max/700/0*2a469OVEAUuyZxB_.png" width="700" height="300" loading="lazy" />
<p>Technology is shaping every industry, regardless of the work involved. The healthcare industry, setting trends for technological shifts and changing consumer behaviour, is being disrupted by innovative tech solutions to accomplish automation and scale for businesses. Health technology (or healthtech) is applying organized knowledge and skills in digital devices, medicines, procedures, vaccines, and healthcare systems to solve health problems and improve quality of life. It helps in:</p>
<ul>
<li>Reducing healthcare/medical costs</li>
<li>Predicting epidemics</li>
<li>Avoiding preventable deaths</li>
<li>Improving the quality of life</li>
<li>Reducing healthcare waste</li>
<li>Improving care efficiency and quality</li>
<li>Producing new drugs and treatment procedures</li>
</ul>
<p>Over the past few years, healthtech has grown tenfold and has been adopted largely by every medical firm. As per reports, in 2018, 70 percent of healthcare organizations invested in mobile medical apps, which is estimated to be nearly USD 1.5 trillion. Even in India, the future of healthtech is expected to soar higher. By 2022, experts predict that the Indian healthtech market will reach USD 372 billion.</p>
<p>And the reasons for such advancements are clear; healthtech has developed personal technology to digitize healthcare facilities, fundamentally transforming the entire medical decision dynamics. Treatments are conducted through a combination of health monitoring technologies, including telemedicine, at-home diagnoses, and even pop-up retail settings. Healthtech developers have begun to identify the specific benefits of remotely treating patients.</p>
<p><strong>How is tech impacting healthcare?</strong></p>
<p>In every possible way you can imagine. The medical sector’s need for healthtech is to provide an easy and improved alternative to hospital-run healthcare programs.</p>
<p>Patients even consult healthcare professionals on social networks and share information from their automated readings. They can seek consultation from a physician during Q&A sessions or even reach for emotional support. Technology, such as big data, offers a safer and reliable alternative to patient care with better data management and security. For instance, doctors and nurses employ portable devices, such as tablets or computers, to document a patient’s medical history and deliver the right treatment. Additionally, patients may use apps to detect the correlation between their condition and medication interaction to make decisions on how to improve their health.</p>
<p><strong>Why does healthtech matter?</strong></p>
<p>The world is growing older day-by-day, and technology helps every person lead a comfortable and safe life.</p>
<p>The doctor-patient relationship’s new dynamic requires collaboration and business models and a revised understanding of the healthcare company’s role in a value chain that helps healthtech development. Moreover, healthtech development is the source of connecting health organizations, which plays a vital role in making things easy for health practitioners and hospitals.</p>
<p>By implementing EHR (Electronic Health Record), doctors can measure and track patient data for an extended period. It helps to identify the people whose medical and preventive check-ups are due. Alongside this, EHR also helps monitor each patient’s certain requirements around vaccinations and blood pressure readings. Similarly, HIMS, Pharmacy Management Software (PMS), Medical Practice Management Software (MPMS), and more telemedicine offerings help healthcare companies manage their key operations and stay compliant with standards, such as HIPAA, HHS, ONC-ATCB, HITECH’s MU-1 and MU-2, and HL7.</p>
<p>Healthtech also provides critical and urgent help to patients who live in backward and rural areas. Healthtech improves healthcare delivery quality, increases patients’ safety, reduces medical errors, and improves healthcare providers’ and patients’ interaction. On a similar note, the future of healthcare will likely be a consumer-driven market with a holistic approach to health and personalized treatment.</p>
<p><strong>Read More Blogs:</strong> <a href="https://www.unthinkable.co/speed-is-the-key-the-rising-significance-of-telemedicine-amidst-the-covid-19-outbreak/">The Rising Significance of Telemedicine Amidst the COVID-19 Outbreak</a> <a href="https://www.unthinkable.co/5-key-ingredients-of-the-modern-healthcare-services/">5 Key Ingredients of the Modern Healthcare Services</a></p>
<p><em>Originally published at <a href="https://www.unthinkable.co/what-is-heal</em>thtech-and-why-does-it-matter-to-all-of-us/">https://www.unthinkable.co</a> on November 12, 2020.</p>
</section>
|
What Is Healthtech and Why Does It Matter to All of Us | Unthinkable
Technology is shaping every industry, regardless of the work involved. The healthcare industry, setting trends for technological shifts and changing consumer behaviour, is being disrupted by innovative tech solutions to accomplish automation and scale for businesses. Health technology (or healthtech) is applying organized knowledge and skills in digital devices, medicines, procedures, vaccines, and healthcare systems to solve health problems and improve quality of life. It helps in:
Reducing healthcare/medical costs
Predicting epidemics
Avoiding preventable deaths
Improving the quality of life
Reducing healthcare waste
Improving care efficiency and quality
Producing new drugs and treatment procedures
Over the past few years, healthtech has grown tenfold and has been adopted largely by every medical firm. As per reports, in 2018, 70 percent of healthcare organizations invested in mobile medical apps, which is estimated to be nearly USD 1.5 trillion. Even in India, the future of healthtech is expected to soar higher. By 2022, experts predict that the Indian healthtech market will reach USD 372 billion.
And the reasons for such advancements are clear; healthtech has developed personal technology to digitize healthcare facilities, fundamentally transforming the entire medical decision dynamics. Treatments are conducted through a combination of health monitoring technologies, including telemedicine, at-home diagnoses, and even pop-up retail settings. Healthtech developers have begun to identify the specific benefits of remotely treating patients.
How is tech impacting healthcare?
In every possible way you can imagine. The medical sector’s need for healthtech is to provide an easy and improved alternative to hospital-run healthcare programs.
Patients even consult healthcare professionals on social networks and share information from their automated readings. They can seek consultation from a physician during Q&A sessions or even reach for emotional support. Technology, such as big data, offers a safer and reliable alternative to patient care with better data management and security. For instance, doctors and nurses employ portable devices, such as tablets or computers, to document a patient’s medical history and deliver the right treatment. Additionally, patients may use apps to detect the correlation between their condition and medication interaction to make decisions on how to improve their health.
Why does healthtech matter?
The world is growing older day-by-day, and technology helps every person lead a comfortable and safe life.
The doctor-patient relationship’s new dynamic requires collaboration and business models and a revised understanding of the healthcare company’s role in a value chain that helps healthtech development. Moreover, healthtech development is the source of connecting health organizations, which plays a vital role in making things easy for health practitioners and hospitals.
By implementing EHR (Electronic Health Record), doctors can measure and track patient data for an extended period. It helps to identify the people whose medical and preventive check-ups are due. Alongside this, EHR also helps monitor each patient’s certain requirements around vaccinations and blood pressure readings. Similarly, HIMS, Pharmacy Management Software (PMS), Medical Practice Management Software (MPMS), and more telemedicine offerings help healthcare companies manage their key operations and stay compliant with standards, such as HIPAA, HHS, ONC-ATCB, HITECH’s MU-1 and MU-2, and HL7.
Healthtech also provides critical and urgent help to patients who live in backward and rural areas. Healthtech improves healthcare delivery quality, increases patients’ safety, reduces medical errors, and improves healthcare providers’ and patients’ interaction. On a similar note, the future of healthcare will likely be a consumer-driven market with a holistic approach to health and personalized treatment.
Read More Blogs: The Rising Significance of Telemedicine Amidst the COVID-19 Outbreak 5 Key Ingredients of the Modern Healthcare Services
Originally published at https://www.unthinkable.co on November 12, 2020.
|
52805546-fdef-5023-8257-31a642a87a37
|
25/08/2025 15:56:59
|
|
https://medium.com/@petershand_78162/are-politics-overrated-97972a17a0fd
|
medium.com
|
Are politics overrated?
|
Vote now?
|
Peter Shand
|
https://medium.com/@petershand_78162
|
97972a17a0fd
|
1 min
|
2017-01-13T12:27:25.883000
|
2017-01-13T21:39:22.121000
|
2017-08-10T09:13:41.647000
| 0 | 1 |
en
|
Politics,Elections,Donald Trump,Labour Party,Democratic Party
|
<section>
<blockquote>Vote now?</blockquote>
<img src="https://miro.medium.com/max/506/1*YyQxTXXic77dtJkPkyI9Dg.jpeg" width="506" height="253" loading="lazy" />
<p><strong>Forget</strong> how the media portrays the voting process or what the most popular twitter hot take is at the current time, but ask yourself are they overrated? (Take a second)</p>
<p><strong>We</strong> hype our favourite candidates up not only in the idea that they will change problems that have lingered for decades but also to end the current chapter of greed, treachery and misspent tax money, while surging into a new beginning which we presume will start a clear, clean an far less corrupt one.</p>
<p><strong>We</strong> tell all our friends, family, neighbors who we are going to vote for an why truly believing every word that comes out of their <em><a hre</em>f="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/brexit-nhs-350m-a-week-eu-change-britain-gisela-stuart-referendum-bus-a7236706.html">mouths</a>.</p>
<p><strong>All</strong> media platforms cover the grand finale on election night while we spend the final few hours going over all the candidates polices one final time, in hopes of finding some affirmative attachment within ourself’s convincing us that we are making the right decision.</p>
<p><strong>As</strong> quick as a bursting bulb its over.. leaving us to pick up the pieces caused by a world wind of confusion and discontent, leaving the only postive outcome being the guaranteed chance to do it all again in <em><a href="https:/</em>/www.nytimes.com/2016/11/09/us/politics/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-president.html?_r=0">four years time</a>.</p>
</section>
|
Are politics overrated?
Vote now?
Forget how the media portrays the voting process or what the most popular twitter hot take is at the current time, but ask yourself are they overrated? (Take a second)
We hype our favourite candidates up not only in the idea that they will change problems that have lingered for decades but also to end the current chapter of greed, treachery and misspent tax money, while surging into a new beginning which we presume will start a clear, clean an far less corrupt one.
We tell all our friends, family, neighbors who we are going to vote for an why truly believing every word that comes out of their mouths.
All media platforms cover the grand finale on election night while we spend the final few hours going over all the candidates polices one final time, in hopes of finding some affirmative attachment within ourself’s convincing us that we are making the right decision.
As quick as a bursting bulb its over.. leaving us to pick up the pieces caused by a world wind of confusion and discontent, leaving the only postive outcome being the guaranteed chance to do it all again in four years time.
|
a560ed53-9b95-5c1a-b378-f951444b259a
|
25/08/2025 15:56:59
|
|
https://finage.medium.com/financial-data-industry-overview-and-7-best-stock-apis-in-2021-d0bbf9abf690
|
medium.com
|
Financial Data Industry Overview and 7 Best Stock APIs in 2021
|
Financial data obtained through stock APIs explain the quality, development and how these data can benefit your algorithms.
|
Remzi Gökhan Uçkan
|
https://medium.com/@finage
|
d0bbf9abf690
|
8 min
|
2020-12-24T11:17:22.517000
|
2020-12-24T11:23:51.615000
|
2021-12-25T05:04:35.078000
| 1 | 57 |
en
|
Stock Market,Finance,API,Trade,USA
|
<section>
<img src="https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*isTouKcurdwSnipMzp4UIQ.png" width="1400" height="1000" loading="lazy" />
<p>Financial data obtained through stock APIs explain the quality, development and how these data can benefit your algorithms.</p>
<p>Until recently, the financial data industry has experienced a digital revolution with the first cloud-first application programming interfaces (APIs) owned by major companies such as Bloomberg and Reuters Eikon.</p>
<p>In this article, we will focus on the features that should be in the stock data provider and which features make this system reliable and robust. In addition, the top 5 Stock API features in 2021 will be reviewed.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://</strong>www.alphavantage.co">1-)Alpha Vantage</a>: A globally open source financial data provider powered by Y-Combinator and created for investors and software developers.</p>
<p><strong><a href="h</strong>ttps://finage.co.uk">2-)Finage</a>: offers global stocks, forex, cryptocurrency and basic financial statements with its API, and real and historical data using Websocket.</p>
<p><strong><a href="ht</strong>tps://www.xignite.com">3-)Xignite</a>: An enterprise data provider that can be used for very important financial applications.</p>
<p><strong><a href="htt</strong>p://iexcloud.io">4-)IEXCloud</a>: It is a subsidiary of the famous IEX exchange, called the “Swiss knife” of market data.</p>
<p><strong><a href="htt</strong>ps://intrinio.com">5-)Intrinio</a>: Basic and alternative data provider that you can customize according to your business strategies</p>
<p>The data providers briefly described above will be examined in detail in the article. But before this review, we will examine what to look for when choosing a reliable Stock API, as well as some common tricks or issues. First of all, the first thing you should know is that free Stock APIs are not the best.</p>
<h1><strong>Common Pitfalls to Avoid when Choosing the Stock API</strong></h1>
<p>Programming interfaces used to connect financial market data consumers to relevant data sources are called Stock API. These APIs are very useful for software developers and investors because they have a simple to use, predictable and unified structure that contains many data at the same time to view financial data in a processed form.</p>
<p>Someone who needs financial data needs to write complex code to process and parse the raw data to understand the data of more than 10 stock markets in the US. But each of these exchanges speaks a different language, so to speak, to convey trade data. Therefore, without using a Stock API, this data will become unscalable quickly.</p>
<p>Apart from processing raw financial data to make it understandable, simple and free of unnecessary information, not all APIs on the market are designed in the same way and may contain traps that you may not notice at first glance. To give an example, we can think as follows;</p>
<p>For example, before you start trading, imagine collecting stock data and signals from the market for hours of study and research. Finally, you started trading with all your courage and confidence in your research. Then you suddenly saw that the investment you made caused you to lose 5% of your portfolio. When you research a little further to stop this loss, and you find that your Stock API is giving you data fluctuating between 1% and 5% margin of error, it may be too late for you.</p>
<p>This is why it is necessary to identify a good financial data source provider and know what type of data you obtain from these sources, how to best work with that data, or how to choose a different data provider if it is not suitable for your needs.</p>
<h2><strong>Adjusting historical price data</strong></h2>
<p>Stocks can have things called “corporate actions” that can affect the closing price of a stock. If these actions occur, they should be compensated by updating all historical data of the share. This transaction is called the “adjusted price” or “adjusted close” and is considered the “true closing price” of a share.</p>
<p>To give an example of corporate action, stock split would be a good example. If the stocks are split by 2–1, the number of shares owned by everyone in a company doubles, while the price of that share is halved. So why would they want to do this? For example, if you own 10 shares of APPL at $ 100, you now have 20 shares at $ 50, but the total value of each is still $ 1,000.</p>
<p>If this happens, a Stock API provider will need to come back and adjust to halve all prices for this corporate action. An ideal Stock API should provide both “adjusted close” and “unadjusted close” as well as when corporate actions occur. When you create a trading strategy around unadjusted closing prices, you may see price changes that will cause your price prediction to go crazy</p>
<p>Examples of market data providers with adjusted price: Alpha Vantage, IEXCloud, Finage, Intrinio, Xignite, Tiingo</p>
<h2><strong>Aggregation and Exchange specific</strong></h2>
<p>When you retrieve data from Stock APIs, you need to know whether this data is from a specific stock exchange or from aggregation. If you buy prices from an exchange and never trade on that exchange, your data will always be closed.</p>
<p>However, if it is not important to you which exchange you trade on and you get aggregated data, it will probably be cheaper and a better representation of the market. Aggregation can give you an advantage because it gives a better price indicator of the market as a whole as opposed to where the price is on a particular exchange, but maybe if you’re looking for an arbitrage strategy, exchange specific might be more ideal.</p>
<p>That’s why it’s important to know which data provider to choose based on your trading strategy.</p>
<p>Sample providers with consolidated data: Alpha Vantage, eodhistoricaldata</p>
<p>Sample providers with exchange-specific data: Intrinio, Finage, Xignite</p>
<h2><strong>Current Prices vs Historical</strong></h2>
<p>After building your strategies based on historical data, you should test them with real time data. However, the API you use may not have this feature. This is something you can easily look out for, but if you have a provider for historical pricing, you should also check if there is some kind of current endpoint to stay consistent.</p>
<h2><strong>Always look for quirks or patterns</strong></h2>
<p>Each stock market API platform can have a few quirks of its own. For example, the price of global exchanges can be in the currency of that exchange or it can always be in US dollars. Or there is a field in the API that shows the currency.</p>
<p>These APIs do not receive data from public sites and you can obtain highly unreliable data. It can even be illegal most of the time. In general, this information is not readily visible on sites, so be sure to ask before you buy.</p>
<p>Perhaps the time zone may change so look for a time zone field. After the quirks that APIs have, you should focus on your own quirks. Determine how and when you collect your data. If you are looking for the opening prices 30 minutes after the market opens, you can get these data a little earlier.</p>
<p>There are so many factors and oddities about knowing the data. The aim of this article is to draw some attention to these.</p>
<h2><strong>Yahoo Finance API and Google Finance API</strong></h2>
<p>If you are particularly interested in investment business for the past decade, you are aware of the two most important companies that have been on the scene in this digital transformation. Yahoo Finance and Google Finance. Although both companies used to have very popular APIs, there are different rumors that they no longer have official and public exchange APIs. One of them is this; Google and Yahoo provide a significant portion of their revenue from digital advertising. Incompatibility between advertising and API resulted in the suspension of official support for Google Finance API and Yahoo Finance API.</p>
<p>Yahoo Finance and Google Finance exist in the form of websites with advertisements for financial market information. Even for some market data, Yahoo Finance still has a download button. However, financial data websites and financial data APIs are different from each other. The former facilitates web browsing, while the latter provides programmatic access to the market.</p>
<p>Now that we’ve summarized what it takes to choose a reliable and robust API, we can review the 5 best Stock APIs available on the market.</p>
<p>Best Stock APIs on the Market</p>
<p><strong><a href="http</strong>s://www.alphavantage.co">Alpha Vantage</a></p>
<img src="https://miro.medium.com/max/3232/1*iVK96X4lQ1Gw2c3nEDlQvg.png" width="3232" height="1530" loading="lazy" />
<p>Unlike many fintech firms that originate from Silicon Valley and are based on Wall Street, Alpha Vantage graduated from the Y Combinator program in 2018 and is more culturally compatible with Silicon Valley. It is a company that is more engineering and product oriented. The most important goal of the firm is to be the most accessible and developable API for software developers and technology-oriented investors worldwide. Has derived data such as stocks, ETFs, mutual funds and forex (FX) and technical indicators in its product portfolio</p>
<p>Alpha Vantage ensures that the API is as seamless as possible with other tools. GitHub has stock APIs in Python, Javascript, PHP, Java, and other programming languages in more than 400 open source repositories. In addition to these, it has official add-ons for Excel and Google Sheets for users who want to access market data via spreadsheets.</p>
<p><strong><a hre</strong>f="https://finage.co.uk">Finage</a></p>
<img src="https://miro.medium.com/max/3216/1*uxsJqZAYqbZN77yfb6hE3g.png" width="3216" height="1798" loading="lazy" />
<p>Finage offers global stocks, forex, cryptocurrency and basic financial statements with its API, and real and historical data using Websocket. One of the major advantages of Finage is that subscription prices are the same for both individual investors and large financial companies. The server, whose motto is “financial data for everyone”, provides the opportunity to trade financial data, applications, investor financial software and tools for those who want to create financial applications and platforms.</p>
<p>Financial data business is usually owned by giant corporations and companies are monopoly in this industry, so when you want to get US stocks, forex or Cryptocurrency data in real time you have to pay high fixed prices from them, but Finage has a post modern platform and easy-to-understand documentation. It also provides easy, modern, affordable and instant access to all financial data sets.</p>
<p><strong><a href</strong>="http://xignite.com">Xignite</a></p>
<img src="https://miro.medium.com/max/3200/1*Xs9QPstMVszUZ28JqwuuRA.png" width="3200" height="1638" loading="lazy" />
<p>High profile fintech and asset management companies such as Robinhood, Wealthfront, Betterment, Addepar, MoneyLion use Xignite as their financial data providers.</p>
<p>Founded in 2000, Xignite has become the referral financial data provider for corporate clients up to the renowned Fortune 500 level. It offers cloud-based, enterprise-level APIs and unlimited API request quota. This allows you to load the load you want on the Xignite server while scaling mission-critical business applications.</p>
<p><strong><a href=</strong>"https://iexcloud.io">IEXCloud</a></p>
<img src="https://miro.medium.com/max/3126/1*N4xA1T5Fd-1irjkslaU-AA.png" width="3126" height="1798" loading="lazy" />
<p>IEX Cloud is the market data service of IEX company. It covers both IEX exchange data and non-IEX information.</p>
<p>IEX Cloud covers stock data, news, forex, options, commodities, economic data and other alpha generating datasets. Thanks to all these multiple features, it can be nicknamed the “Swiss knife” among market data providers. In terms of data delivery tool, IEX Cloud offers REST endpoints in JSON and CSV formats, and Server Sent Events (SSE) streaming service as a Web Socket alternative.</p>
<p><strong><a href=</strong>"http://intrinio.com">Intrinio</a></p>
<img src="https://miro.medium.com/max/3218/1*t6auH7MQz4zvu3SNZyw-cw.png" width="3218" height="1794" loading="lazy" />
<p>Generally, the data provided by the previously reviewed Stock APIs are presented to the purchaser in bulk. But unlike other data providers, Intrinio offers a new and different product. With this data provider, you only pay for the data products and packages you want. Thus, your investments and applications can become more focused and planned. You won’t have to pay for data you don’t use.</p>
<p>Intrinio has an excellent range of data packages and bundles. It also has a rich alternative data set. Delivery tool includes REST and WebSockets. Intrinio founder Rachel Carpenter is considered an opinion leader and inspiring speaker in the field of fintech.</p>
</section>
|
Financial Data Industry Overview and 5 Best Stock APIs in 2021
Financial data obtained through stock APIs explain the quality, development and how these data can benefit your algorithms.
Until recently, the financial data industry has experienced a digital revolution with the first cloud-first application programming interfaces (APIs) owned by major companies such as Bloomberg and Reuters Eikon.
In this article, we will focus on the features that should be in the stock data provider and which features make this system reliable and robust. In addition, the top 5 Stock API features in 2021 will be reviewed.
1-)Alpha Vantage: A globally open source financial data provider powered by Y-Combinator and created for investors and software developers.
2-)Finage: offers global stocks, forex, cryptocurrency and basic financial statements with its API, and real and historical data using Websocket.
3-)Xignite: An enterprise data provider that can be used for very important financial applications.
4-)IEXCloud: It is a subsidiary of the famous IEX exchange, called the “Swiss knife” of market data.
5-)Intrinio: Basic and alternative data provider that you can customize according to your business strategies
The data providers briefly described above will be examined in detail in the article. But before this review, we will examine what to look for when choosing a reliable Stock API, as well as some common tricks or issues. First of all, the first thing you should know is that free Stock APIs are not the best.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid when Choosing the Stock API
Programming interfaces used to connect financial market data consumers to relevant data sources are called Stock API. These APIs are very useful for software developers and investors because they have a simple to use, predictable and unified structure that contains many data at the same time to view financial data in a processed form.
Someone who needs financial data needs to write complex code to process and parse the raw data to understand the data of more than 10 stock markets in the US. But each of these exchanges speaks a different language, so to speak, to convey trade data. Therefore, without using a Stock API, this data will become unscalable quickly.
Apart from processing raw financial data to make it understandable, simple and free of unnecessary information, not all APIs on the market are designed in the same way and may contain traps that you may not notice at first glance. To give an example, we can think as follows;
For example, before you start trading, imagine collecting stock data and signals from the market for hours of study and research. Finally, you started trading with all your courage and confidence in your research. Then you suddenly saw that the investment you made caused you to lose 5% of your portfolio. When you research a little further to stop this loss, and you find that your Stock API is giving you data fluctuating between 1% and 5% margin of error, it may be too late for you.
This is why it is necessary to identify a good financial data source provider and know what type of data you obtain from these sources, how to best work with that data, or how to choose a different data provider if it is not suitable for your needs.
Adjusting historical price data
Stocks can have things called “corporate actions” that can affect the closing price of a stock. If these actions occur, they should be compensated by updating all historical data of the share. This transaction is called the “adjusted price” or “adjusted close” and is considered the “true closing price” of a share.
To give an example of corporate action, stock split would be a good example. If the stocks are split by 2–1, the number of shares owned by everyone in a company doubles, while the price of that share is halved. So why would they want to do this? For example, if you own 10 shares of APPL at $ 100, you now have 20 shares at $ 50, but the total value of each is still $ 1,000.
If this happens, a Stock API provider will need to come back and adjust to halve all prices for this corporate action. An ideal Stock API should provide both “adjusted close” and “unadjusted close” as well as when corporate actions occur. When you create a trading strategy around unadjusted closing prices, you may see price changes that will cause your price prediction to go crazy
Examples of market data providers with adjusted price: Alpha Vantage, IEXCloud, Finage, Intrinio, Xignite, Tiingo
Aggregation and Exchange specific
When you retrieve data from Stock APIs, you need to know whether this data is from a specific stock exchange or from aggregation. If you buy prices from an exchange and never trade on that exchange, your data will always be closed.
However, if it is not important to you which exchange you trade on and you get aggregated data, it will probably be cheaper and a better representation of the market. Aggregation can give you an advantage because it gives a better price indicator of the market as a whole as opposed to where the price is on a particular exchange, but maybe if you’re looking for an arbitrage strategy, exchange specific might be more ideal.
That’s why it’s important to know which data provider to choose based on your trading strategy.
Sample providers with consolidated data: Alpha Vantage, eodhistoricaldata
Sample providers with exchange-specific data: Intrinio, Finage, Xignite
Current Prices vs Historical
After building your strategies based on historical data, you should test them with real time data. However, the API you use may not have this feature. This is something you can easily look out for, but if you have a provider for historical pricing, you should also check if there is some kind of current endpoint to stay consistent.
Always look for quirks or patterns
Each stock market API platform can have a few quirks of its own. For example, the price of global exchanges can be in the currency of that exchange or it can always be in US dollars. Or there is a field in the API that shows the currency.
These APIs do not receive data from public sites and you can obtain highly unreliable data. It can even be illegal most of the time. In general, this information is not readily visible on sites, so be sure to ask before you buy.
Perhaps the time zone may change so look for a time zone field. After the quirks that APIs have, you should focus on your own quirks. Determine how and when you collect your data. If you are looking for the opening prices 30 minutes after the market opens, you can get these data a little earlier.
There are so many factors and oddities about knowing the data. The aim of this article is to draw some attention to these.
Yahoo Finance API and Google Finance API
If you are particularly interested in investment business for the past decade, you are aware of the two most important companies that have been on the scene in this digital transformation. Yahoo Finance and Google Finance. Although both companies used to have very popular APIs, there are different rumors that they no longer have official and public exchange APIs. One of them is this; Google and Yahoo provide a significant portion of their revenue from digital advertising. Incompatibility between advertising and API resulted in the suspension of official support for Google Finance API and Yahoo Finance API.
Yahoo Finance and Google Finance exist in the form of websites with advertisements for financial market information. Even for some market data, Yahoo Finance still has a download button. However, financial data websites and financial data APIs are different from each other. The former facilitates web browsing, while the latter provides programmatic access to the market.
Now that we’ve summarized what it takes to choose a reliable and robust API, we can review the 5 best Stock APIs available on the market.
Best Stock APIs on the Market
Alpha Vantage
Unlike many fintech firms that originate from Silicon Valley and are based on Wall Street, Alpha Vantage graduated from the Y Combinator program in 2018 and is more culturally compatible with Silicon Valley. It is a company that is more engineering and product oriented. The most important goal of the firm is to be the most accessible and developable API for software developers and technology-oriented investors worldwide. Has derived data such as stocks, ETFs, mutual funds and forex (FX) and technical indicators in its product portfolio
Alpha Vantage ensures that the API is as seamless as possible with other tools. GitHub has stock APIs in Python, Javascript, PHP, Java, and other programming languages in more than 400 open source repositories. In addition to these, it has official add-ons for Excel and Google Sheets for users who want to access market data via spreadsheets.
Finage
Finage offers global stocks, forex, cryptocurrency and basic financial statements with its API, and real and historical data using Websocket. One of the major advantages of Finage is that subscription prices are the same for both individual investors and large financial companies. The server, whose motto is “financial data for everyone”, provides the opportunity to trade financial data, applications, investor financial software and tools for those who want to create financial applications and platforms.
Financial data business is usually owned by giant corporations and companies are monopoly in this industry, so when you want to get US stocks, forex or Cryptocurrency data in real time you have to pay high fixed prices from them, but Finage has a post modern platform and easy-to-understand documentation. It also provides easy, modern, affordable and instant access to all financial data sets.
Xignite
High profile fintech and asset management companies such as Robinhood, Wealthfront, Betterment, Addepar, MoneyLion use Xignite as their financial data providers.
Founded in 2000, Xignite has become the referral financial data provider for corporate clients up to the renowned Fortune 500 level. It offers cloud-based, enterprise-level APIs and unlimited API request quota. This allows you to load the load you want on the Xignite server while scaling mission-critical business applications.
IEXCloud
IEX Cloud is the market data service of IEX company. It covers both IEX exchange data and non-IEX information.
IEX Cloud covers stock data, news, forex, options, commodities, economic data and other alpha generating datasets. Thanks to all these multiple features, it can be nicknamed the “Swiss knife” among market data providers. In terms of data delivery tool, IEX Cloud offers REST endpoints in JSON and CSV formats, and Server Sent Events (SSE) streaming service as a Web Socket alternative.
Intrinio
Generally, the data provided by the previously reviewed Stock APIs are presented to the purchaser in bulk. But unlike other data providers, Intrinio offers a new and different product. With this data provider, you only pay for the data products and packages you want. Thus, your investments and applications can become more focused and planned. You won’t have to pay for data you don’t use.
Intrinio has an excellent range of data packages and bundles. It also has a rich alternative data set. Delivery tool includes REST and WebSockets. Intrinio founder Rachel Carpenter is considered an opinion leader and inspiring speaker in the field of fintech.
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13f27ae3-3b45-5ba4-bef4-4edaca337fd2
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25/08/2025 15:56:59
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https://medium.com/hackernoon/a-brief-history-of-security-token-offerings-how-did-we-get-here-b9a2cfade9f3
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medium.com
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A Brief History of Security Token Offerings: How Did We Get Here?
|
By John Wu
San Francisco, CA
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John Wu
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https://medium.com/@John1wu
|
b9a2cfade9f3
|
7 min
|
2018-07-30T07:52:44.229000
|
2018-07-30T15:56:01.352000
|
2018-07-31T11:46:10.414000
| 1 | 192 |
en
|
Blockchain,ICO,Tokenization,Cryptocurrency,Security Token Offerings
|
<section>
<img src="https://miro.medium.com/max/4032/1*ZuKimUQJFQdbEgOgxhNuxA.jpeg" width="4032" height="3024" loading="lazy" />
<p><em>By <a href="https://www.link</em>edin.com/in/johnwu87/">John Wu</a>
San Francisco, CA</p>
<h3>Table of Contents</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://medium.com/p/b9a2cfade9f3#fc87">Introduction: Raising from Sand Hill VC’s</a></li>
<li><a href="https://medium.com/p/b9a2cfade9f3#a350">Enter: The Problem with Venture Capital</a></li>
<li><a href="https://medium.com/p/b9a2cfade9f3#19d8">Enter: The Rise of Crowdfunding Platforms</a></li>
<li><a href="https://medium.com/p/b9a2cfade9f3#769a">Enter: The Rise of the Initial Coin Offering</a></li>
<li><a href="https://medium.com/p/b9a2cfade9f3#9126">Enter: Munchee and the SEC’s Cease and Desist Orders</a></li>
<li><a href="https://medium.com/p/b9a2cfade9f3#52e2">Enter: The Howey Test</a></li>
<li><a href="https://medium.com/p/b9a2cfade9f3#a05e">Enter: The Birth of the Security Token Offering</a></li>
<li><a href="https://medium.com/p/b9a2cfade9f3#4330">Enter: The Marketplaces That List Security Tokens</a></li>
<li><a href="https://medium.com/p/b9a2cfade9f3#b68e">Enter: The Rise of Security Tokens</a></li>
<li><a href="https://medium.com/p/b9a2cfade9f3#3669">Enter: When Security Tokens Look More Like Traditional Investments</a></li>
</ul>
<h1>Introduction: Raising from Sand Hill VC’s</h1>
<p>Sand Hill has long been legendary for having the smartest “value-add” investors that will help any entrepreneur make the right hires and secure their first couple of marquee customers. With the likes of the legendary John Doerr and Mary Meeker, investors at Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers and Steve Jurvetson of DFJ, every entrepreneur who wanted to “make it” knew the pecking order in the world of venture capital and sought to obtain investments from the brand name funds.</p>
<h2>Enter: The Problem with Venture Capital</h2>
<p>With the growth of the VC industry as well as the establishment of well-known firms which raised larger and larger funds, the size of unicorn companies that venture capital liked to fund became larger and larger and many repeat “serial” entrepreneurs already familiar to these reputable VC firms became the same likely recipients of a majority of checks from venture firms.</p>
<p>With a growing number of studies and statistics around those who received funding, the conclusions seemed to be that venture capital was not able to properly allocate funds to underrepresented minorities such as females or new entrepreneurs that were not part of the existing “in-crowd.” Ultimately the personality-driven industry of venture capital and the ability of investors to allocate capital may not have been the most meritocratic way to allocate capital to the best and brightest projects without personal bias that would allow minorities, females, and first-time entrepreneurs to start companies.</p>
<p>Darlings of Silicon Valley such as Juicero and Luxe, backed by the legendary firms on Sand Hill, also simultaneously laid off scores of employees as these companies failed to break even and achieve profitability.</p>
<p>News outlets mused — had Silicon Valley lost its touch? How did these companies obtain hundreds of millions of dollars from Sand Hill VC’s for selling $400 juicers and on-demand parking valet services which would never be practical or affordable to the average middle-class consumer? Had Silicon Valley VC’s lost touch with the wants and needs of the average consumer and instead, decided to fund projects that they and their peers, the top 1%, would find valuable or had popular “celebrity” CEO’s at the helm?</p>
<h2>Enter: The Rise of Crowdfunding Platforms</h2>
<p>Hardware companies, infamous for their required upfront capital expenditures and high failure rates, had long been able to circumvent the VC route by using crowdfunding as a strategy. The great thing about crowdfunding was that your backers were also your initial customers who were pledging to pre-order the product that you were trying to build — a great way to prove out demand and the existence of product market fit.</p>
<p>It was easier for those who did not fit the Silicon Valley entrepreneur stereotype to appeal to a wider audience on the Internet using advertising and social media. Not necessarily constrained to appealing to the select few VC’s who invested in hardware in Silicon Valley, a cottage industry sprouted up of agencies that helped these companies make sleek marketing videos and viral social media posts to promote their crowdfunding campaigns.</p>
<h2>Enter: The Rise of the Initial Coin Offering</h2>
<p>With the launch of the idea of “Bitcoin” and alternatively “Ethereum,” blockchain technology platforms with ecosystems where tokens were a means of payment or other utility were created from what seemed to be thin air, with early backers of projects showing their support by buying tokens that were native to their respective platform. In the same way that crowdfunding platforms allowed aspiring entrepreneurs to raise money from potential users of their product, simultaneously achieving “product market fit,” these Initial Coin Offerings allowed companies to engage with token buyer participants who would also be potential users of their products. Blockchain technology and smart contracts allowed for the token buyers to claim ownership to these digital assets / virtual currencies without the involvement of a third party doing the accounting to prevent double spending.</p>
<p>Initially, companies were able to raise millions overnight with a theoretical “white paper” and little to no progress on an actual product with little need for investment banks or private placement agents and no need to make the rounds on Sand Hill. In this unregulated industry, the cost of capital from raising money using utility tokens was significantly cheaper than raising money via the traditional equity route.</p>
<p>With any profit opportunity in an industry that lacks regulation, unscrupulous characters can target the amateur consumer. With the increasing frequency of “scam” coins that did not deliver the product detailed in their white papers, the CFTC and SEC took a more active stance and increased oversight of the industry.</p>
<h2>Enter: Munchee and the SEC’s Cease and Desist Orders</h2>
<p>The SEC was destined to make an example of someone, so when a company called Munchee (an Instagram meets Yelp) on the blockchain stated that it would guarantee listings on exchanges in order to provide investors liquidity and also stated that the price of the Munchee token would grow as a result of the company’s hard work (as opposed to any actions taken by the token holder), the SEC deemed the token to be a security rather than a utility token. The executives of the company were given a cease and desist order by the SEC and were ordered to halt their token sale and refund the funds that they had raised so far.</p>
<h2>Enter: The Howey Test</h2>
<p>After Munchee’s demise, companies placed even more emphasis on consulting with law firms such as Cooley, the creator of the Simple Agreement for Future Tokens (“SAFT”) that was piloted with the debut of Protocol Lab’s Filecoin ICO. The SAFT itself was a security that had to be marketed to accredited investors, however, once the tokens were minted in the ecosystem and the product was mature, the tokens would gain “utility” and would be able to be sold to the public in a crowdsale.</p>
<p>The utility of the token was crucial, especially since most cryptocurrency exchanges did not have the proper broker-dealer and ATS registrations to list security tokens and trade these unregistered digital securities. After doing an initial coin offering, purchasers of tokens that were not utility tokens would not be able to recognize any “profits” or capital appreciations if their tokens were not listed on exchanges.</p>
<h2>Enter: The Birth of the Security Token Offering</h2>
<p>Early investment firms such as Science Blockchain were able to raise money by “tokenizing” their funds or raising money from investors through tokens in order to use these funds to invest. With the success of the initial coin offerings invested in by Science, Science token holders would be entitled to the tokens of each of Science’s portfolio companies, similar to being entitled to a dividend. The only piece missing was the fact that token holders were not able to recognize any capital appreciation by selling their security tokens to other buyers on a secondary market, due to the lack of exchanges with the proper registrations to trade security tokens.</p>
<h2>Enter: The Marketplaces That List Security Tokens</h2>
<p>In 2018, companies such as Templum, T-Zero, Coinbase and Sharespost announced their progress in being closer to listing security tokens on their respective exchanges. Companies such as Sharespost were uniquely positioned to take advantage of this opportunity with an existing broker dealer and ATS registration and the ability to offer the opportunity for any exchange to compliantly settle security token transactions in the U.S. through Sharespost’s GLASS Settlement Network.</p>
<h2>Enter: The Rise of Security Tokens</h2>
<p>With the rise of security token liquidity, companies are now considering raising funds using security tokens. These assets are “securities” and are only legally marketable to accredited investors ($1M+ net worth or $200K+ annual salary for two years). Therefore, the pool of security token buyers is much smaller than utility token buyers. These security token offerings must have their primary issuance conducted by those who are registered as broker-dealers. With this higher barrier to entry and increased “professionalism” for those who wish to facilitate security token offerings, the competitive landscape of vendors is less crowded than for utility token offerings and vendors can charge more, charging from 3–10% on average for all funds raised for their clients plus monthly retainers, success fees, etc.</p>
<h2>Enter: When Security Tokens Look More Like Traditional Investments</h2>
<p>Although mentions of blockchain or cryptocurrency may elicit doubt and skepticism in many circles on Main Street due to the scams that have plagued the Initial Coin Offering ecosystem, once security token offerings start to look more like stocks, bonds and alternative investments, the security token may become the next new asset class that rounds out a well-diversified portfolio.</p>
<p>I predict that security tokens will usher in the participation of hedge funds, wealth management platforms, and many traditional institutional investors and in the process, make blockchain-related technologies more mainstream. It will behoove exchanges or virtual currency platforms to adopt the same kind of user interface that Robinhood has by allowing users to trade digital assets and regular stocks easily in one place and also integrate the appropriate digital asset wallets into one easy-to-use platform.</p>
<p>I am very bullish on the blockchain-enabled ecosystem and believe that “security tokens” will help cryptocurrency lose the stigma currently associated with the term that has prompted popular thought leaders such as Warren Buffett and Jamie Dimon to issue statements indicating skepticism toward cryptocurrencies. The answer to many of the struggles of blockchain-related digital assets is to gain mainstream adoption and acceptance. This is the first of many blog posts where I will write about the security token ecosystem, and I hope we will be able to continue our dialogue around the topic — please do not hesitate to comment on this post or any subsequent posts on my <a href="https://medium.com/@John1wu">Medium </a>or <a href="https://twitter.com/John1wu">Twitter</a>.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Thank you kind reader for taking the time to read through my blog! If we haven’t met yet, it’s an honor to make your acquaintance. My name is John Wu and I am currently CEO of Sharespost’s Digital Assets Group. My primary aim is to bridge the gap between professional “institution-grade” asset management and cryptocurrency/blockchain investing.</p>
<p>As a tech investor and entrepreneur, I have always strived to identify disruptive trends before they are well-discovered and well-understood. In the last three years, I have focused on digital assets and blockchain technology. I have invested in cryptocurrencies, and tokens — as well as VC equity of startups building the financial system of the future using blockchain and distributed ledger. I started my investing career at Tiger Management. Later, at Kingdon Capital, I invested in companies across Technology, Media, Telecom, FinTech, and Services. I founded Sureview Capital in 2010 with a strategic investment from Blackstone and raised approximately $400M in AUM. If you’d like to connect, please drop me a line on LinkedIn <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnwu87/">here</a>.</p>
</section>
|
A Brief History of Security Token Offerings: How Did We Get Here?
By John Wu
San Francisco, CA
Table of Contents
Introduction: Raising from Sand Hill VC’s
Enter: The Problem with Venture Capital
Enter: The Rise of Crowdfunding Platforms
Enter: The Rise of the Initial Coin Offering
Enter: Munchee and the SEC’s Cease and Desist Orders
Enter: The Howey Test
Enter: The Birth of the Security Token Offering
Enter: The Marketplaces That List Security Tokens
Enter: The Rise of Security Tokens
Enter: When Security Tokens Look More Like Traditional Investments
Introduction: Raising from Sand Hill VC’s
Sand Hill has long been legendary for having the smartest “value-add” investors that will help any entrepreneur make the right hires and secure their first couple of marquee customers. With the likes of the legendary John Doerr and Mary Meeker, investors at Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers and Steve Jurvetson of DFJ, every entrepreneur who wanted to “make it” knew the pecking order in the world of venture capital and sought to obtain investments from the brand name funds.
Enter: The Problem with Venture Capital
With the growth of the VC industry as well as the establishment of well-known firms which raised larger and larger funds, the size of unicorn companies that venture capital liked to fund became larger and larger and many repeat “serial” entrepreneurs already familiar to these reputable VC firms became the same likely recipients of a majority of checks from venture firms.
With a growing number of studies and statistics around those who received funding, the conclusions seemed to be that venture capital was not able to properly allocate funds to underrepresented minorities such as females or new entrepreneurs that were not part of the existing “in-crowd.” Ultimately the personality-driven industry of venture capital and the ability of investors to allocate capital may not have been the most meritocratic way to allocate capital to the best and brightest projects without personal bias that would allow minorities, females, and first-time entrepreneurs to start companies.
Darlings of Silicon Valley such as Juicero and Luxe, backed by the legendary firms on Sand Hill, also simultaneously laid off scores of employees as these companies failed to break even and achieve profitability.
News outlets mused — had Silicon Valley lost its touch? How did these companies obtain hundreds of millions of dollars from Sand Hill VC’s for selling $400 juicers and on-demand parking valet services which would never be practical or affordable to the average middle-class consumer? Had Silicon Valley VC’s lost touch with the wants and needs of the average consumer and instead, decided to fund projects that they and their peers, the top 1%, would find valuable or had popular “celebrity” CEO’s at the helm?
Enter: The Rise of Crowdfunding Platforms
Hardware companies, infamous for their required upfront capital expenditures and high failure rates, had long been able to circumvent the VC route by using crowdfunding as a strategy. The great thing about crowdfunding was that your backers were also your initial customers who were pledging to pre-order the product that you were trying to build — a great way to prove out demand and the existence of product market fit.
It was easier for those who did not fit the Silicon Valley entrepreneur stereotype to appeal to a wider audience on the Internet using advertising and social media. Not necessarily constrained to appealing to the select few VC’s who invested in hardware in Silicon Valley, a cottage industry sprouted up of agencies that helped these companies make sleek marketing videos and viral social media posts to promote their crowdfunding campaigns.
Enter: The Rise of the Initial Coin Offering
With the launch of the idea of “Bitcoin” and alternatively “Ethereum,” blockchain technology platforms with ecosystems where tokens were a means of payment or other utility were created from what seemed to be thin air, with early backers of projects showing their support by buying tokens that were native to their respective platform. In the same way that crowdfunding platforms allowed aspiring entrepreneurs to raise money from potential users of their product, simultaneously achieving “product market fit,” these Initial Coin Offerings allowed companies to engage with token buyer participants who would also be potential users of their products. Blockchain technology and smart contracts allowed for the token buyers to claim ownership to these digital assets / virtual currencies without the involvement of a third party doing the accounting to prevent double spending.
Initially, companies were able to raise millions overnight with a theoretical “white paper” and little to no progress on an actual product with little need for investment banks or private placement agents and no need to make the rounds on Sand Hill. In this unregulated industry, the cost of capital from raising money using utility tokens was significantly cheaper than raising money via the traditional equity route.
With any profit opportunity in an industry that lacks regulation, unscrupulous characters can target the amateur consumer. With the increasing frequency of “scam” coins that did not deliver the product detailed in their white papers, the CFTC and SEC took a more active stance and increased oversight of the industry.
Enter: Munchee and the SEC’s Cease and Desist Orders
The SEC was destined to make an example of someone, so when a company called Munchee (an Instagram meets Yelp) on the blockchain stated that it would guarantee listings on exchanges in order to provide investors liquidity and also stated that the price of the Munchee token would grow as a result of the company’s hard work (as opposed to any actions taken by the token holder), the SEC deemed the token to be a security rather than a utility token. The executives of the company were given a cease and desist order by the SEC and were ordered to halt their token sale and refund the funds that they had raised so far.
Enter: The Howey Test
After Munchee’s demise, companies placed even more emphasis on consulting with law firms such as Cooley, the creator of the Simple Agreement for Future Tokens (“SAFT”) that was piloted with the debut of Protocol Lab’s Filecoin ICO. The SAFT itself was a security that had to be marketed to accredited investors, however, once the tokens were minted in the ecosystem and the product was mature, the tokens would gain “utility” and would be able to be sold to the public in a crowdsale.
The utility of the token was crucial, especially since most cryptocurrency exchanges did not have the proper broker-dealer and ATS registrations to list security tokens and trade these unregistered digital securities. After doing an initial coin offering, purchasers of tokens that were not utility tokens would not be able to recognize any “profits” or capital appreciations if their tokens were not listed on exchanges.
Enter: The Birth of the Security Token Offering
Early investment firms such as Science Blockchain were able to raise money by “tokenizing” their funds or raising money from investors through tokens in order to use these funds to invest. With the success of the initial coin offerings invested in by Science, Science token holders would be entitled to the tokens of each of Science’s portfolio companies, similar to being entitled to a dividend. The only piece missing was the fact that token holders were not able to recognize any capital appreciation by selling their security tokens to other buyers on a secondary market, due to the lack of exchanges with the proper registrations to trade security tokens.
Enter: The Marketplaces That List Security Tokens
In 2018, companies such as Templum, T-Zero, Coinbase and Sharespost announced their progress in being closer to listing security tokens on their respective exchanges. Companies such as Sharespost were uniquely positioned to take advantage of this opportunity with an existing broker dealer and ATS registration and the ability to offer the opportunity for any exchange to compliantly settle security token transactions in the U.S. through Sharespost’s GLASS Settlement Network.
Enter: The Rise of Security Tokens
With the rise of security token liquidity, companies are now considering raising funds using security tokens. These assets are “securities” and are only legally marketable to accredited investors ($1M+ net worth or $200K+ annual salary for two years). Therefore, the pool of security token buyers is much smaller than utility token buyers. These security token offerings must have their primary issuance conducted by those who are registered as broker-dealers. With this higher barrier to entry and increased “professionalism” for those who wish to facilitate security token offerings, the competitive landscape of vendors is less crowded than for utility token offerings and vendors can charge more, charging from 3–10% on average for all funds raised for their clients plus monthly retainers, success fees, etc.
Enter: When Security Tokens Look More Like Traditional Investments
Although mentions of blockchain or cryptocurrency may elicit doubt and skepticism in many circles on Main Street due to the scams that have plagued the Initial Coin Offering ecosystem, once security token offerings start to look more like stocks, bonds and alternative investments, the security token may become the next new asset class that rounds out a well-diversified portfolio.
I predict that security tokens will usher in the participation of hedge funds, wealth management platforms, and many traditional institutional investors and in the process, make blockchain-related technologies more mainstream. It will behoove exchanges or virtual currency platforms to adopt the same kind of user interface that Robinhood has by allowing users to trade digital assets and regular stocks easily in one place and also integrate the appropriate digital asset wallets into one easy-to-use platform.
I am very bullish on the blockchain-enabled ecosystem and believe that “security tokens” will help cryptocurrency lose the stigma currently associated with the term that has prompted popular thought leaders such as Warren Buffett and Jamie Dimon to issue statements indicating skepticism toward cryptocurrencies. The answer to many of the struggles of blockchain-related digital assets is to gain mainstream adoption and acceptance. This is the first of many blog posts where I will write about the security token ecosystem, and I hope we will be able to continue our dialogue around the topic — please do not hesitate to comment on this post or any subsequent posts on my Medium or Twitter.
___
Thank you kind reader for taking the time to read through my blog! If we haven’t met yet, it’s an honor to make your acquaintance. My name is John Wu and I am currently CEO of Sharespost’s Digital Assets Group. My primary aim is to bridge the gap between professional “institution-grade” asset management and cryptocurrency/blockchain investing.
As a tech investor and entrepreneur, I have always strived to identify disruptive trends before they are well-discovered and well-understood. In the last three years, I have focused on digital assets and blockchain technology. I have invested in cryptocurrencies, and tokens — as well as VC equity of startups building the financial system of the future using blockchain and distributed ledger. I started my investing career at Tiger Management. Later, at Kingdon Capital, I invested in companies across Technology, Media, Telecom, FinTech, and Services. I founded Sureview Capital in 2010 with a strategic investment from Blackstone and raised approximately $400M in AUM. If you’d like to connect, please drop me a line on LinkedIn here.
|
e66ca048-df69-59db-b76c-16ade508f0ac
|
25/08/2025 15:56:59
|
|
https://medium.com/@Psn8ldy/why-its-hard-to-hear-your-intuition-and-what-to-do-about-it-d27eb3386aff
|
medium.com
|
Why It’s Hard To Hear Your Intuition — And What To Do About It
| null |
Linda Allen and Guests
|
https://medium.com/@Psn8ldy
|
d27eb3386aff
|
2 min
|
2017-03-18T15:22:27.680000
|
2017-03-18T15:22:28.416000
|
2017-06-05T01:02:26.080000
| 0 | 2 |
en
|
Couples Counseling,Dating,Dating Advice,Dating Tips,Ending A Relationship
|
<section>
<h3><strong>Why It’s Hard To Listen To Yourself</strong></h3>
<p>I shared in a previous <a href="http://www.mscareergirl.com/2016/02/05/interview-7-coaching-questions-relational-coaches/">post</a> that knowing yourself and your relational preferences via something like Myers-Briggs personality assessment can increase your self-awareness. Is being able to listen to my inner voice as simple as knowing that I am an ESFJ with a preference for “sensing” instead of “intuiting”? No. Just because you <em>know</em> your relational preferences does not mean you are <em>doing</em> anything with this information. In previous relationships, it was hard for me to speak up and honor my intuition because of fear. I was afraid of confrontation, afraid that it would lead to breaking up, afraid of the other person “getting mad at me.” Fear is one of the biggest reasons WHY it is so hard to listen. And courage is the antidote. More on this thread from a previous column here: <a href="http://www.mscareergirl.com/2016/04/15/5-signs-you-have-courage/">5 Signs You Have Courage.</a></p>
<img src="https://miro.medium.com/max/480/0*K-yZhrijNwXCYT-r.jpg" width="480" height="640" loading="lazy" />
<h3><strong>What To Do About It</strong></h3>
<p>Practice makes better! In this <a href="http://tinybuddha.com/blog/hear-intuition-dont-know/">post</a> from Tiny Buddha, Kathryn Hall encourages you to step away from the situation, be honest with yourself and trust your journal. All great ideas. To add on, for those of you like me, with a tendency to <a href="http://www.mscareergirl.com/2014/08/15/4-ways-people-pleasers-can-help-themselves/">people please</a>, getting to a place where you can quiet your mind and become an objective observer of your thoughts will be helpful. This way, non-judgementally, you can get a realistic grasp on the situation. You can give your little voice inside the mic. And when you turn inward and listen, you can hear your own feelings. And then determine how best to express your internal thoughts externally. By respecting your inner voice, you are honoring yourself … even if it means facing the music.</p>
<img src="https://miro.medium.com/max/640/0*7fKqjhMWthbVOE_L.jpg" width="640" height="435" loading="lazy" />
<p>. Image credits. <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrcupofcoffee/">Fear.</a> <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/allkindsofnew/">Listen.</a> <a href="http://www.mscareergirl.com/2017/03/18/why-its-hard-to-listen-to-your-intuition-and-what-to-do-about-it/">http://www.mscareergirl.com/2017/03/18/why-its-hard-to-listen-to-your-intuition-and-what-to-do-about-it/</a></p>
</section>
|
We live in a word filled with wonderful exterior distractions with which to let ourselves get swept away from interior thoughts. Sounds kind of romantic, doesn’t it — to be carefree, caught up in news, social media, the arts, movies or a great book. However, after you’ve enjoyed spending your time enjoying the music of the world, when you ignore your intuition, muffling your innermost feelings, it turns out that this is just you, disrespecting yourself. Ugh. Not what you want! Would you ignore a loved one when they come to you to share something important? Hopefully not! You would hear them out. So why is it so hard to listen to your OWN intuition?
Why It’s Hard To Listen To Yourself
I shared in a previous post that knowing yourself and your relational preferences via something like Myers-Briggs personality assessment can increase your self-awareness. Is being able to listen to my inner voice as simple as knowing that I am an ESFJ with a preference for “sensing” instead of “intuiting”? No. Just because you know your relational preferences does not mean you are doing anything with this information. In previous relationships, it was hard for me to speak up and honor my intuition because of fear. I was afraid of confrontation, afraid that it would lead to breaking up, afraid of the other person “getting mad at me.” Fear is one of the biggest reasons WHY it is so hard to listen. And courage is the antidote. More on this thread from a previous column here: 5 Signs You Have Courage.
What To Do About It
Practice makes better! In this post from Tiny Buddha, Kathryn Hall encourages you to step away from the situation, be honest with yourself and trust your journal. All great ideas. To add on, for those of you like me, with a tendency to people please, getting to a place where you can quiet your mind and become an objective observer of your thoughts will be helpful. This way, non-judgementally, you can get a realistic grasp on the situation. You can give your little voice inside the mic. And when you turn inward and listen, you can hear your own feelings. And then determine how best to express your internal thoughts externally. By respecting your inner voice, you are honoring yourself … even if it means facing the music.
. Image credits. Fear. Listen. http://www.mscareergirl.com/2017/03/18/why-its-hard-to-listen-to-your-intuition-and-what-to-do-about-it/
|
f550c3b4-b05c-5b56-b80d-c0c15d1d0724
|
25/08/2025 15:56:59
|
|
https://medium.com/@terrencetaylor_36500/black-and-blue-lives-matters-5550408b8e82
|
medium.com
|
Black and Blue Lives Matters
|
Like many, I have been emotionally disconnected from the current events going on in our country in the past few weeks. I have been feeling…
|
Terrence Taylor
|
https://medium.com/@terrencetaylor_36500
|
5550408b8e82
|
4 min
|
2020-07-05T17:47:34.535000
|
2020-07-05T17:59:29.054000
|
2022-03-30T21:17:34.286000
| 0 | 0 |
en
|
BlackLivesMatter,Bluelivesmatter,Alllivesmatter
|
<section>
<img src="https://miro.medium.com/max/512/1*Zd9E0YDcOIV1kymdSaNgFA.jpeg" width="512" height="458" loading="lazy" />
<p>Like many, I have been emotionally disconnected from the current events going on in our country in the past few weeks. I have been feeling hopeless about the idea of a positive outcome, so why should I invest emotional currency into the situation. I could only allow myself feel hopeless for a short period of time. I knew I had to deal with with those emotions, so that I could be a part of the solutions or by default, be a part of the problem.</p>
<p>Black Lives Matter</p>
<p>BLM is defined as an international human rights movement, originating in the African-American community, which campaigns against violence and systemic racism towards black people. I was raised to respect authority. Meaning you show respect so that respect will be shown to you. I lived by that truth, and that’s how I carried myself. One night, I was with a large group of my friends (a group of young black males.) I was in high school, and there was a parking lot carnival at the Metro Center Mall in Jackson, MS. It was about 10–15 of us, and our intentions were genuine. We were teenagers out on a Saturday night trying to have fun.</p>
<p>We walked in as a group, and there was a group of police officers standing at the entrance. My friends made an attempt to avoid them, but I walked right by them and said, “hello officers.” They said hi, I continued to walk, then the officer said, “you all don’t get into any trouble.” I replied, “yes sir.” Another officer asked, “where are you all from?” I replied, “Flora.”</p>
<p><strong>PAUSE</strong></p>
<p>Flora, MS is a small town 25 minutes north of Jackson, MS. The population of Flora is about 2,500 people compared to Jackson population of about 200,000 people. We went to Jackson for entertainment because there was not many things to do in our town.</p>
<p>The officer said, “you all need to leave.” Thinking he was joking, we smile and said yes sir, as we continued to walk in. The officer started to walk toward us in an aggressive posture and said, “YOU ALL NEED TO GET YOUR COUNTRY A%% BACK TO FLORA.” There was no mistaking how he was feeling at that point. Someone from the group said, “we didn’t do anything wrong.” That’s when all the other officers start coming our way. They said, “you leave, or you go to jail.”</p>
<p>I was driving, so I told the ones that were with me, that we are about to go and I started walking to my car. A few others argued with the officers and were removed with force. No one was arrested, but all of us were mad. Mad at the fact that we were maltreated by the people who should be protecting us. I can see how that anger could fester and develop into rioting and chaos. But I made a choice then to be the change that I wanted to see. 5 years later, I became a police officer in that same city of Jackson, MS.</p>
<p>Blue Lives Matter</p>
<p>This is a countermovement in the United States advocating that those who are prosecuted and convicted of killing law enforcement officers should be sentenced under hate crime statutes. I have been in Law Enforcement since 2007, this year makes 13 years. I got into Law Enforcement to gain a better understanding of police officers. I wanted to work with them and not against them. My goal was to do three years in Law Enforcement and then find a career that pays really well. Three years turned in 13 years because I fell in love with the job and the people I worked with. I got the opportunity to serve and protect my community. Now this is not an easy job, but it’s a rewarding one.</p>
<p>I have seen a lot in my 13 years in Law Enforcement; there is evil in this world with a thin blue line putting their lives at risk to keep it under control. I have worked with bad cops, I have got the pleasure to serve with good cops, and I have also known cops who made the Ultimate Sacrifice. We are not perfect, but we have a job to do and families, friends, hobbies, and dreams to get back to at the end of the shift.</p>
<p>So, what do I do when I understand the anger and fear of my black brothers and sisters. When they feel like their life could be taken by those who are placed in charge to protect them. At the same time, I know the pain and frustration of my brothers and sisters in Blue. Whose jobs it is to serve and protect, but their cities are being burned and looted while their hands are tired because it could be seen as excessive force if they try to enforce the law.</p>
<p>This verse comes to mind, “trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to Him, and He will make your path straight.” I have to give God what’s in my heart, the anger, the fear, the pain, and the frustration to God. I have to trust that He will take those emotions and give me HOPE. My understanding of being harassed while being young and black can’t be what I focus on. My understanding of Law Enforcement can’t be what I focus on. I have to submit all my ways to the Lord, so He will make my path straight. He will show me the direction I should go, and He will give me a vision of hope to focus on.</p>
<p>Yes, Black Lives Matter and yes, Blue Lives Matter because ALL LIVES MATTER if we trust in the Lord and have HOPE for a better future.</p>
<p><em><strong>You Find Wisdom when you Trust in t</em>he Lord.</strong></p>
</section>
|
Black and Blue Lives Matters
Cartoon by Bryant Arnold — http://www.cartoonaday.com/black-blue-lives-matter-cartoon/
Like many, I have been emotionally disconnected from the current events going on in our country in the past few weeks. I have been feeling hopeless about the idea of a positive outcome, so why should I invest emotional currency into the situation. I could only allow myself feel hopeless for a short period of time. I knew I had to deal with with those emotions, so that I could be a part of the solutions or by default, be a part of the problem.
Black Lives Matter
BLM is defined as an international human rights movement, originating in the African-American community, which campaigns against violence and systemic racism towards black people. I was raised to respect authority. Meaning you show respect so that respect will be shown to you. I lived by that truth, and that’s how I carried myself. One night, I was with a large group of my friends (a group of young black males.) I was in high school, and there was a parking lot carnival at the Metro Center Mall in Jackson, MS. It was about 10–15 of us, and our intentions were genuine. We were teenagers out on a Saturday night trying to have fun.
We walked in as a group, and there was a group of police officers standing at the entrance. My friends made an attempt to avoid them, but I walked right by them and said, “hello officers.” They said hi, I continued to walk, then the officer said, “you all don’t get into any trouble.” I replied, “yes sir.” Another officer asked, “where are you all from?” I replied, “Flora.”
PAUSE
Flora, MS is a small town 25 minutes north of Jackson, MS. The population of Flora is about 2,500 people compared to Jackson population of about 200,000 people. We went to Jackson for entertainment because there was not many things to do in our town.
The officer said, “you all need to leave.” Thinking he was joking, we smile and said yes sir, as we continued to walk in. The officer started to walk toward us in an aggressive posture and said, “YOU ALL NEED TO GET YOUR COUNTRY A%% BACK TO FLORA.” There was no mistaking how he was feeling at that point. Someone from the group said, “we didn’t do anything wrong.” That’s when all the other officers start coming our way. They said, “you leave, or you go to jail.”
I was driving, so I told the ones that were with me, that we are about to go and I started walking to my car. A few others argued with the officers and were removed with force. No one was arrested, but all of us were mad. Mad at the fact that we were maltreated by the people who should be protecting us. I can see how that anger could fester and develop into rioting and chaos. But I made a choice then to be the change that I wanted to see. 5 years later, I became a police officer in that same city of Jackson, MS.
Blue Lives Matter
This is a countermovement in the United States advocating that those who are prosecuted and convicted of killing law enforcement officers should be sentenced under hate crime statutes. I have been in Law Enforcement since 2007, this year makes 13 years. I got into Law Enforcement to gain a better understanding of police officers. I wanted to work with them and not against them. My goal was to do three years in Law Enforcement and then find a career that pays really well. Three years turned in 13 years because I fell in love with the job and the people I worked with. I got the opportunity to serve and protect my community. Now this is not an easy job, but it’s a rewarding one.
I have seen a lot in my 13 years in Law Enforcement; there is evil in this world with a thin blue line putting their lives at risk to keep it under control. I have worked with bad cops, I have got the pleasure to serve with good cops, and I have also known cops who made the Ultimate Sacrifice. We are not perfect, but we have a job to do and families, friends, hobbies, and dreams to get back to at the end of the shift.
So, what do I do when I understand the anger and fear of my black brothers and sisters. When they feel like their life could be taken by those who are placed in charge to protect them. At the same time, I know the pain and frustration of my brothers and sisters in Blue. Whose jobs it is to serve and protect, but their cities are being burned and looted while their hands are tired because it could be seen as excessive force if they try to enforce the law.
This verse comes to mind, “trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to Him, and He will make your path straight.” I have to give God what’s in my heart, the anger, the fear, the pain, and the frustration to God. I have to trust that He will take those emotions and give me HOPE. My understanding of being harassed while being young and black can’t be what I focus on. My understanding of Law Enforcement can’t be what I focus on. I have to submit all my ways to the Lord, so He will make my path straight. He will show me the direction I should go, and He will give me a vision of hope to focus on.
Yes, Black Lives Matter and yes, Blue Lives Matter because ALL LIVES MATTER if we trust in the Lord and have HOPE for a better future.
You Find Wisdom when you Trust in the Lord.
|
6a1b0b6e-85ac-56af-a615-e9fb36b47c51
|
25/08/2025 15:56:59
|
End of preview. Expand
in Data Studio
Medium Articles Corpus (10K Sample)
The Medium Articles Corpus is a massive, clean dataset of articles scraped from Medium.com. This sample version contains 10,000 articles + and is designed to showcase the quality and structure of the full corpus for researchers and developers. This is the subset from the large dataset https://crawlfeeds.com/websites/medium/articles
Dataset Features
This dataset includes the following key features, provided in a single, well-structured CSV file:
title: The headline of the article.content: The full body text of the article.tags: The topics and keywords associated with the article.author: The name of the article's author.date: The publication date of the article.claps: The number of claps (upvotes) the article received.
Use Cases
This dataset is ideal for:
- Language Model Prototyping: A manageable corpus for quickly testing and validating language model architectures.
- Topic Modeling: Discovering popular and emerging trends on the platform using unsupervised learning methods.
- Text Classification: Training small-scale models to automatically categorize articles by topic, genre, or sentiment.
- Exploratory Data Analysis: Getting a feel for the dataset's structure, quality, and content.
Dataset Structure
The data is provided in a single CSV file with the following columns:
| Column Name | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
title |
The article headline | "How I Built a Recommendation Engine" |
content |
The full article text | "In this article, I will..." |
tags |
Comma-separated list of tags | "AI, Machine Learning, Python" |
author |
The author's name | "Author Name" |
date |
Publication date | "2023-10-27" |
claps |
Number of claps | 1500 |
How to Use
You can easily load this dataset using the Hugging Face datasets library.
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