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Complaint Review: Crescent Processing Company - Park Central Company - Dallas Texas
- Crescent Processing Company - Park Central Company 12700 Park Central Place, Dallas, Texas 75251 Dallas, Texas United States of America
- Phone: 214-271-8075
- Web: www.crescentprocessing.com
- Category: Credit Card Processing Companies
Crescent Processing Company / Park Central Company Jon Frankel Why always hiring? Why do they charge fees before even use cc machine? Dallas, Texas
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What you will find is that the FTC raided his company and took it over due to adding fees to applications AFTER the merchant had signed. They were taking additional fees out of the merchant's checking account without the merchant's knowledge. Frankel was fined millions of dollars but sold the company to First American Payment Services.
He literally made millions off of the deal. He is not supposed to own any company in the credit card processing industry but gets away with it by forming a company called SonJack Consulting. His "company" is on the payroll of Crescent and Park Central Company but in reality he owns both of these companies.
I highly suggest that you do not do business with these companies because if he did it before, he will do it again. Also, because of all the ripoff reports out there about Crescent he is going by different names as well. Along with Crescent, they go by Atrium Processing, Diamond Processing, and Park Central. Why so many names? Are they trying to hide something? Yes, they are trying to hide what they are doing to innocent small business owners all over the USA!
If you look on Monster.com, you will see that they are constantly running ads for Inside Sales Managers which are called Corporate Managers. These Corporate Managers are nothing but people who belittle the merchants if the merchant does not say yes today. They are very much high pressure sales and berate anyone who does not do business with them. These CM's also treat their sales team very unprofessionally.
As a sales person, if you like being treated like a two bit hustler and a nobody, then go to work for them. They talk a good game over the phone when recruiting you but all the recruiter is doing is trying to make their numbers of recruits in a week so they can bonus and they care nothing about you as an individual. All the recruiters want to do is get you through laptop training and get you to run your first appointment. If you do that and then quit, they still bonus.
They promise two to four pre-set, twice confirmed appointments. If they had such great appointments, then they would not have to run ads every week in just about the same cities week after week because none of their reps would quit. Most reps last less than two days. Sure some are successful and Crescent makes money but how much is it legit profit or illegal fees?
As someone who is looking for a job, do not quit a job to go work for this company. They will take advantage of you and it will cost you a lot of money. If you a merchant, do not do business with this company because it will cost you even more money and they get you to sign a contract that will cost you at minimum of $495 to get out.
Read the fine print when talking with this company. DO NOT take them at their word. They will lie to you just to get your dollar.
This report was posted on Ripoff Report on 05/22/2011 02:04 PM and is a permanent record located here: https://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/crescent-processing-company-park-central-company/dallas-texas-75251/crescent-processing-company-park-central-company-jon-frankel-why-always-hiring-why-do-731970. The posting time indicated is Arizona local time. Arizona does not observe daylight savings so the post time may be Mountain or Pacific depending on the time of year. Ripoff Report has an exclusive license to this report. It may not be copied without the written permission of Ripoff Report. READ: Foreign websites steal our content
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Carhartt Men's Sandstone Full Swing Active Jacket
Brand: Carhartt
- Mighty back bi swing between shoulders for instant recovery
- Flex elbow for less restriction
- Freedom gusset under the arms. Inside pocket with hook-and-loop closure and zipper
- Rugged flex stretch sherpa lining in upper body and fleece lining in lower body
- Attached, fleece-lined hood with adjustable draw cord closure
Publisher: Carhartt Sportswear - Mens
Details: Looks traditional, feels exceptional. Engineered design provides stretch without bulk, and every element works with you so you can work easier. This full swing jacket's features work hard, so you're more comfortable doing hard work. Made from 12- ounce sandstone, 100 percent cotton sandstone duck and features mighty back bi-swing between shoulders for instant recovery, flex elbow for less restriction, freedom gusset under the arms helps stops ride-ups, rugged flex stretch sherpa lining in upper body and fleece lining in lower body, corduroy trimmed collar with under-collar snaps for optional hood, zipper with inside storm flap, left-chest pocket with zipper, two lower-front pockets, internal rib-knit storm cuffs with ergonomic shaped sleeve hem, inside pocket with hook-and-loop closure and zipper, bottom hem bungee and triple-stitched main seams for durability.
Package Dimensions: 1.0 x 1.0 x 1.0 inches

subset: commoncrawl


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Silk and Tulle Camo Trench Coat
$398.00 Regular price
A shimmery and multi-layered trench coat in an all over blue camo pattern and lots of fun details, like the fringe of ribbons seen through a layer at the back. Made in China from a layer of 72% silk and 28% polyester, with another layer of 100% polyester. Please dry clean.


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Thinking of Solutions In The Engineering Market
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Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes and How to Correct Them: Lessons from the Life-Changing Science of Behavioral Economics288
NOOK Book(eBook)
Available on Compatible NOOK Devices and the free NOOK Apps.
In their fascinating investigation of the ways we handle money, Gary Belsky and Thomas Gilovich reveal the psychological forces—the patterns of thinking and decision making—behind seemingly irrational behavior. They explain why so many otherwise savvy people make foolish financial choices: why investors are too quick to sell winning stocks and too slow to sell losing shares, why home sellers leave money on the table and home buyers don't get the biggest bang for their buck, why borrowers pay too much credit card interest and savers can't sock away as much as they'd like, and why so many of us can't control our spending. Focusing on the decisions we make every day, Belsky and Gilovich provide invaluable guidance for avoiding the financial faux pas that can cost thousands of dollars each year.
Filled with fresh insight; practical advice; and lively, illustrative anecdotes, this book gives you the tools you need to harness the powerful science of behavioral economics in any financial environment.
Product Details
|Simon & Schuster
|Publication date:
|Sold by:
|NOOK Book
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About the Author
Thomas Gilovich is a professor of psychology at Cornell University and author of The Wisest One in the Room (with Lee Ross), How We Know What Isn't So, Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes, and Social Psychology. He lives in Ithaca, New York.
Read an Excerpt
By the third day of their honeymoon in Las Vegas, the newlyweds had lost their $1,000 gambling allowance. That night in bed, the groom noticed a glowing object on the dresser. Upon closer inspection, he realized it was a $5 chip they had saved as a souvenir. Strangely, the number 17 was flashing on the chip's face. Taking this as an omen, he donned his green bathrobe and rushed down to the roulette tables, where he placed the $5 chip on the square marked 17. Sure enough, the ball hit 17 and the 35-1 bet paid $175. He let his winnings ride, and once again the little ball landed on 17, paying $6,125. And so it went, until the lucky groom was about to wager $7.5 million. Unfortunately the floor manager intervened, claiming that the casino didn't have the money to pay should 17 hit again. Undaunted, the groom taxied to a better-financed casino downtown. Once again he bet it all on 17 and once again it hit, paying more than $262 million. Ecstatic, he let his millions ride only to lose it all when the ball fell on 18. Broke and dejected, the groom walked the several miles back to his hotel.
"Where were you?" asked his bride as he entered their room.
"Playing roulette."
"How did you do?"
"Not bad. I lost five dollars."
This story told in some parts of Nevada as the gospel truth has the distinction of being the only roulette joke we know that deals with a bedrock principle of behavioral economics. Indeed, depending on whether or not you agree with our groom's accounting of his evening's adventure, you might have an inkling as to why we considered a different title for this chapter, something like "Why Casinos Always Make Money." The conventional answer to that question that casinos are consistently profitable because the odds for every game are stacked in favor of management does not tell the whole story. Another reason casinos always make money is that too many people think like our newlywed: because he started his evening with just $5, he felt his loss was limited to that amount.
This view holds that his gambling spree winnings were somehow not real money or not his money, in any event and so his losses were not real losses. No matter that had the groom left the casino after his penultimate bet, he could have walked across the street and bought a brand-new Rolls-Royce for every behavioral economist in the country and had enough left over to remain a multimillionaire. The happy salesman at the twenty-four-hour dealership this is a Vegas story, after all would never have thought to ask if the $262 million actually belonged to the groom. Of course it did. But the groom never really saw it that way. Like millions of amateur gamblers, he viewed his winnings as an entirely different kind of money and was therefore more willing to make extravagant bets with it. In casino-speak this is called playing with "house money." The tendency of most gamblers to fall prey to this illusion is why casinos would likely make out like bandits even if the odds were stacked less heavily in their favor.
The "Legend of the Man in the Green Bathrobe" as the above tale is known illustrates a concept that behavioral economists call "mental accounting." This idea, developed and championed by the University of Chicago's Richard Thaler, underlies one of the most common and costly money mistakes the tendency to value some dollars less than others and thus to waste them. More formally, mental accounting refers to the inclination to categorize and treat money differently depending on where it comes from, where it is kept, or how it is spent. To understand how natural, and tricky, this habit can be, consider the following pair of scenarios. Here, as in similar mental exercises you'll find sprinkled throughout this book, try as best as you can to answer each question as realistically as possible. The more "honest" your responses, the more you'll learn about yourself.
Imagine that you've bought a ticket to the Super Bowl or a hit Broadway play. At the stadium or theater you realize you've lost your ticket, which cost $150. Do you spend another $150 to see the game or performance?
Now imagine the same scenario, but you're planning to buy the $150 ticket when you arrive. At the box office, you realize you've lost $150 somewhere in the parking lot. Still, you have more than enough in your wallet to buy the ticket. Do you?
If you're like most people, you probably answered "no" to the first question and "yes" to the second, even though both scenarios present the same dilemma: a loss of $150 and the subsequent prospect of spending another $150 to be entertained. The reason for this seeming inconsistency is that for most people the first scenario somehow translates into a total entertainment cost of $300 two actual tickets, each costing $150. This might be too much, even for a Super Bowl or hit play. Conversely, for most people the loss of $150 in cash and the $150 cost of the ticket are somehow separated mentally into two independent categories or accounts. They are unfortunate but unrelated. This type of thinking treating two essentially equal $150 losses in very different ways because they occur in different manners is a classic example of mental accounting.
The notion of mental accounts is anathema to traditional economics, which holds that wealth in general, and money in particular, should be "fungible." Fungibility, at its essence, means that $100 in roulette winnings, $100 in salary, and a $100 tax refund should have the same significance and value to you, since each Benjamin (as the kids like to say) could buy the same number of Happy Meals at McDonald's. Likewise, $100 kept under the mattress should invoke the same feelings or sense of wealth as $100 in a bank account or $100 in U.S. Treasury securities (ignoring the fact that money in the bank, or in T-bills, is safer than cash under the bed). If money and wealth are fungible, there should be no difference in the way we spend gambling winnings or salary. Every financial decision should result from a rational calculation of its effect on our overall wealth.
If only this were the case. In reality, as you probably have noticed, people are not computers. They lack the computational power and the strength of will necessary to manage all their finances on a consolidated balance sheet. It would be intellectually difficult, and emotionally taxing, to calculate the cost of every short-term transaction (buying a new compact disc, for instance, or going to a movie) against the size of every long-term goal or need (planning for retirement or saving for college). So to cope with this daunting organizational task, people separate their money into mental accounts, necessarily treating a dollar in one account differently from a dollar in another, since each account has a different significance. A vacation allowance, for instance, is presumably treated with less gravitas than the same amount of money socked away in an Individual Retirement Account.
But what's wrong with that? The average person, more self-aware, perhaps, than the average economist, knows that he or she is not as smart or as iron willed as economists maintain. And that's why people set up mental accounts in the first place. Thus, rather than being illogical or irrational, the ability to corral money into different mental accounts often has beneficial effects. Most important, perhaps, it allows you to save effectively for future goals. After all, "house money" for many Americans is not casino winnings, but the money they manage to squirrel away for a down payment on their dream home. Even profligate spenders manage to avoid tapping into these savings, often for no other reason than that they've placed it in a sacred mental vault. Certainly mental accounting is not always effective, given the problems human beings have with self-control. That's one of the reasons certain tax-deferred retirement accounts such as IRAs or Keogh plans penalize early withdrawals, and it is why they enjoy such popular support. And that is why, when attempting to balance and evaluate their investment portfolio, people often err by failing to knock down mental walls among accounts. As a result, their true portfolio mix the combination of stocks, bonds, real estate, mutual funds, and the like is often not what they think, and their investment performance often suffers.
In any event, the sometimes useful habit of treating one dollar differently from another has a dark side as well, with consequences far more significant than simply increasing your willingness to make risky bets at roulette tables. By assigning relative values to different moneys that in absolute terms have the same buying power, you run the risk of being too quick to spend, too slow to save, or too conservative when you invest all of which can cost you money. We'll get to all of that shortly, but the easiest-to-explain instance of mental accounting's harmful effects is the different value people place on earned income as opposed to gift income. That is, we'll spend $50 from Mom (or $50 we find in the street) with less thought than $50 we've earned on the job. Still, while such distinctions may be illogical from a strict economic point of view, they seem reasonable and harmless enough. After all, gift money or casino winnings, for that matter is generally "found" money. You didn't have it one second before you got it, so what's the harm in not having it again?
True enough. More troubling, though, and potentially more costly, is the tendency people have to "deposit" money in certain mental accounts when that money is actually part of another. Consider tax refunds, for example. Many people categorize such payments from the government as found money and spend it accordingly even though a refund is nothing more than a deferred payment of salary. Forced savings, if you will. If, on the other hand, those same people had taken that money out of their paycheck during the course of the previous year and deposited it into a bank account or money market mutual fund, they would most likely think long and hard before spending it on a new suit or Jacuzzi. However, because the "bank account" in which those funds have been sitting is run by Uncle Sam, taxpayers' mental accounting systems attach a different value to those dollars.
Another way mental accounting can cause trouble is the resultant tendency to treat dollars differently depending on the size of the particular mental account in which they are stashed, the size of the particular transaction in which they are spent, or simply the amount of money in question. Here's an illustration of what we mean:
Imagine that you go to a store to buy a lamp, which sells for $100. At the store you discover that the same lamp is on sale for $75 at a branch of the store five blocks away. Do you go to the other branch to get the lower price?
Now imagine that you go to the same store to buy a dining room set, which sells for $1,775. At the store you discover that you can buy the same table and chairs for $1,750 at a branch of the store five blocks away. Do you go to the other branch to get the lower price?
Once again, studies tell us that more people will go to the other branch to save on the lamp than would travel the same distance to save on the dining room set, even though both scenarios offer the same essential choice: Would you walk five blocks to save $25? You probably don't need to think long or hard to come up with instances in which this tendency can become quite costly (for you, that is it's generally quite profitable for some salesperson). We certainly don't. As a struggling college student in the early 1980s, Gary had decided against replacing his car radio with a new cassette deck, for the simple reason that he couldn't justify the $300-$400 it would cost to buy the new piece of equipment. In his last year of college, though, Gary finally bought a new car (with the aid of a hefty auto loan). The cost: $12,000 plus another $550 for a cassette deck to replace the optional AM/FM radio. Three months earlier before his car broke down Gary had shopped for cassette decks and deemed $300 too extravagant. Yet a car salesman had little trouble convincing him to spend almost twice that amount for the same product, even though Gary's finances were presumably more precarious now that he had to make $180 monthly payments for the next four years.
The main culprit, of course, was mental accounting $550 seemed to have less value next to $12,000. But also contributing to Gary's decision was the subconscious preference, shared by most people, to "integrate losses." Translation: When you incur a loss or expense, you prefer to hide it from yourself by burying it within a bigger loss or expense, so that the pain of spending $550 for a cassette deck was neutralized to a great extent by the larger pain of spending twelve grand.
Businesses, by the way, understand this tendency only too well. That's why consumer electronics stores sell extended warranties or service contracts with major purchases. Would anyone buy what is essentially an insurance policy for a CD player or TV at any other time? And it's why insurance agents sell exotic "riders" at the same time they're pushing broader policies. Would any rational person buy life insurance for, say, their young children if the policy was offered to them separately?
Mental accounting helps to explain one of the great puzzles of personal finance why people who don't see themselves as reckless spenders can't seem to save enough. The devil, as they say, is in the details. Although many people are cost-conscious when making large financial decisions such as buying a house, car, or appliance mental accounting makes them relax their discipline when making small purchases. The cost of such purchases gets lost among larger expenses, such as the week's grocery bill, or charged against a lightly monitored "slush fund" account. The problem, of course, is that while you might purchase a car or refrigerator every few years, you buy groceries and clothes and movie refreshments every week or every day. Being cost-conscious when making little purchases is where you can often rack up big savings.
The principles of mental accounting are governed not only by the size of a purchase or investment, but also by the size of a payment received, be it a bonus, rebate, refund, or gift. Thus, a payment that might otherwise be placed in a discretionary mental account a bonus at work, say, or a tax refund will be deposited in a more serious, long-term account if it is big enough (and vice versa). That's curious, when you think about it. If you get a fairly small refund or bonus let's say $250 chances are you're far more likely to buy a $250 pair of shoes with it than if you get a $2,500 bonus or refund, even though you can presumably afford it more in the second instance. Somehow, a bigger chunk of found money makes it more sacred and serious and harder to spend, actually lowering your "spending rate" (or what economists call the "marginal propensity to consume"). Understanding this concept can help you understand why it may be difficult for you to hold on to money and why a bonus or a gift may actually do you more harm than good. (Don't worry, though our advice won't be to stop accepting gifts.) Your spending rate is simply the percentage of an incremental dollar that you spend rather than save. So if you receive a $100 tax refund and spend $80, your spending rate is .80 (or 80 percent). You might think, therefore, that the highest spending rate you can have is 1 that is, for every incremental dollar you receive, the most you could spend is a dollar. Alas, you'd be wrong. Let us explain.
About thirty years ago, an economist at the Bank of Israel named Michael Landsberger undertook a study of a group of Israelis who were receiving regular restitution payments from the West German government after World War II. Although these payments could without exaggeration be described as blood money inasmuch as they were intended to make up for Nazi atrocities they could also fairly accurately be described as found money. Because of this, and because the payments varied significantly in size from one individual or family to another, Landsberger was able to gauge the effect of the size of such windfalls on each recipient's spending rate. What he discovered was amazing. The group of recipients who received the larger payments (which were equal to about two-thirds of their annual income) had a spending rate of about 0.23. In other words, for every dollar they received, their marginal spending increased by 23 percent; the rest was saved. Conversely, the group that received the smallest windfall payments (equal to about 7 percent of annual income) had a spending rate of 2. That's correct: for every dollar of found money, they spent two. Or, more accurately, for every dollar of found money, they spent $1 of found money and another $1 from "savings" (what they actually saved or what they might have saved).
Obviously we can't explain this curious phenomenon with certainty. Perhaps restitution payments were made in proportion to a family's earlier earnings in Europe. If so, it may be that people who earned a lot before the war were also earning a lot in Israel and therefore had less pent-up "need" to spend their restitution checks. In Israel, like everywhere else, the wealthy save a higher proportion of their income than the poor. But this cannot explain why the spending rate of those receiving the smallest restitution payments was a whopping 200 percent. The poor are not helped by spending twice as much as they receive. A clearer understanding of this phenomenon may be obtained by considering the recent experience of a friend. This friend, let's call him Peter, works overseas for a small U.S. company. While on vacation in America, he stopped by corporate headquarters to say "hi" and, to his surprise, received a $400 bonus. Lucky, eh? Well, maybe not. By the end of his trip, Peter realized he had spent that $400 about five times over. It seems that every time he went into a store or restaurant, Peter and his wife used that $400 bonus to justify all manner of purchases. Not only was that bonus mentally accounted for as found money suitable for discretionary spending, it also sucked in $1,600 of the couple's money that had been accounted for otherwise.
Americanesia Expressaphobia, n 1. Financial affliction, first diagnosed in late twentieth century, in which the sufferer forgets the amount charged on a credit card but is terribly afraid that it's way too much. Closely related to Visago, n, in which a high level of debt prompts feeling of nausea and dizziness.
There's one more thing we ought to tell you about Peter's vacation saga, not least because we in no way want to discourage any bosses who might be reading this book from continuing to hand out bonuses, large or small. Much of Peter's shopping spree was abetted by credit cards, one of the scariest exhibits in the museum of mental accounting. In fact, credit cards and other types of revolving loans are almost by definition mental accounts, and dangerous ones at that. Credit card dollars are cheapened because there is seemingly no loss at the moment of purchase, at least on a visceral level. Think of it this way: If you have $100 cash in your pocket and you pay $50 for a toaster, you experience the purchase as cutting your pocket money in half. If you charge that toaster, though, you don't experience the same loss of buying power that emptying your wallet of $50 brings. In fact, the money we charge on plastic is devalued because it seems as if we're not actually spending anything when we use the cards. Sort of like Monopoly money. The irony, of course, is that the dollar we charge on plastic is actually more valuable, inasmuch as it costs an additional sixteen cents to spend it 16 percent or so being the typical interest rate for such borrowing.
Irony aside, we're not likely to surprise many readers by pointing out that credit cards play directly into the tendency to treat dollars differently. Because they seem to devalue dollars, credit cards cause you to spend money that you might not ordinarily spend. So common is credit card use and abuse today at this writing the average U.S. consumer with revolving loans has more than $7,000 in credit card debt that you've probably suffered a bout or two of Americanesia Expressaphobia yourself. No revelation there. But you may be surprised to learn that by using credit cards, you not only increase your chances of spending to begin with, you also increase the likelihood that you will pay more when you spend than you would if you were paying cash (or paying by check).
Want proof? Consider an experiment conducted several years ago by Drazen Prelec and Duncan Simester, marketing professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The pair organized a real-life, sealed-bid auction for tickets to a Boston Celtics game (this was during the Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Robert Parish era, so the tickets were especially valuable). Half the participants in the auction were informed that whoever won the bidding would have to pay for the tickets in cash (although they had a day to come up with the funds). The other half were told that the winning bidder would have to pay by credit card. Prelec and Simester then averaged the bids of those who thought they would have to pay in cash and those who thought they could pay with a credit card. Incredibly, the average credit card bid was roughly twice as large as the average cash bid. Simply because they were dealing with plastic with money that was devalued in some way the students became spendthrifts. Put another way, credit cards turn us into big spenders in more ways than one. We become poorer because we're more likely to spend, and more likely to spend poorly.
One final thought about mental accounting (at least for now). We've noted that the tendency to categorize, segregate, or label money differently can have the side effect of causing people to be more reckless with their money. Dollars assigned to some mental accounts are devalued, which leads us to spend more easily and more foolishly, particularly when dealing with small (though not inconsequential) amounts of money. But there's a flip side to this coin that can have the opposite effect the tendency to mentally account for money as so sacred or special that we actually become too conservative with it.
The best way to demonstrate this phenomenon is with a story about a woman in her thirties named Sara. Sara is actually a fairly sophisticated investor, with a well-diversified portfolio of stocks and stock mutual funds. Good for her, considering that stocks have offered the best average annual return of all the major savings and investment categories over the past seventy years about 11 percent a year on average, vs. 5 percent a year for bonds and 3 percent for cash in the bank. Several years ago, however, Sara inherited about $17,000 from her grandmother. Although she didn't need the money for any particular short-term or long-term goal, Sara parked her grandmother's inheritance in a bank account paying about 3 percent a year in interest. Her grandmother, whom Sara adored, had worked and saved all her life to scrape together the money that she eventually left to Sara and her four siblings. As a result, Sara was hesitant to put her grandmother's money at risk in the stock market, not least because Sara was raised by parents whose memory of the Great Depression and the stock market crash of 1929 made them and their daughter overly fearful about the risks of stocks. In any event, it didn't seem right to Sara, who would have been far more crushed if she lost "Grandma's money" than if she lost her own.
Her hesitation was costly. If Sara had simply invested that money as she does her other savings in mutual funds that roughly approximated the overall performance of the stock market she would now have more than $37,000. Instead, earning a meager 3 percent, she has just $18,600. Now it would be one thing if Sara had decided that she needed her grandmother's money for a specific short-term goal such as a down payment on a house, which would justify avoiding the stock market for fear of needing the money at just the time when stock prices were experiencing one of their inevitable dips. But Sara had no such constraint. Although other factors may cause people to be overly conservative with their investments, Sara's mistake was to mentally account for the $17,000 as "Grandma's money," or at least as money that was more sacred than her own savings and thus money that shouldn't be risked. In reality, of course, the money was hers, and the cost of her mental accounting was about $19,000.
Sara's mistake, we should add, is replicated by millions of Americans who choose the most conservative investment options in their 401(k), 403(b), and 457 plans at work because they mentally account for those funds as too sacred. This kind of thinking "I have to be careful with my retirement money" exposes you to a far more dangerous risk than the short-term ups and downs of the stock market: you run the risk that you won't have saved enough when your retirement finally rolls around.
You may be prone to mental accounting if...
* you don't think you're a reckless spender, but you have trouble saving.
* you have savings in the bank and revolving balances on your credit cards.
* you're more likely to splurge with a tax refund than with savings.
* you seem to spend more when you use credit cards than when you use cash.
* most of your retirement savings are in fixed-income or other conservative investments.
How's this for practical advice about mental accounting: Stop it! If you charge too much on credit cards, cut'em up. If you blow tax refunds at the track, cut it out. If only it were that easy. The difficulty with trying to remedy your tendency toward mental accounting is that you don't want to throw out the baby with the binge borrowing. For people who generally can't seem to control spending, mental accounts can often be the most effective way to ensure that the mortgage gets paid, the kids' colleges get funded, or there is enough money to live comfortably in retirement. And, of course, for every Sara who is too conservative with windfall money, there is someone else who would mentally account for an inheritance as gift money and blow it impulsively on a new stereo system. In fact, those two people may be one and the same Sara may put inheritance money in one mental account, while stashing a tax refund or gambling winnings in another.
So in order to begin to eliminate the harmful elements of mental accounting, while preserving its benefits, you have to audit your own internal accounting system. We'll give you two ways to begin this process, one that's fun and one that's a bit more serious. First the fun stuff, in the form of another set of scenarios.
Imagine that you're at the racetrack for a day of gambling or at your favorite store shopping for a suit. Yesterday you won $1,000 from your state's instant lottery game. Will you bet more tonight than you would otherwise, or will you buy a more expensive suit?
Now imagine that you're once again at the racetrack for a day of gambling or at your favorite store shopping for a suit. Yesterday you realized that you had $1,000 in a savings account that you had forgotten about. Will you bet more tonight than you would otherwise, or will you buy a more expensive suit?
If you answered "yes" to the first question and "no" to the second as most people would you're prone to mental accounting, which means you're prone to wasting money because you wrongly put different values on the same dollars. No doubt skeptics will say that it is perfectly logical to be more reckless with lottery winnings than rediscovered savings, so what is Belsky and Gilovich's problem? Our problem is that while it may not make a difference if you blow a Lotto payoff, this habit can cost you money in ways you might not even think about. Our second test should help doubters see the light.
All you need to do is review your finances and answer two questions: 1) Do you have emergency or other nonretirement savings?; and 2) Do you carry balances on your credit cards from month to month?
If the answer is "yes" to both, you're a victim of mental accounting. Why? Because you've placed an inappropriately high value on your savings dollar and too low a value on your borrowed dollars. As a result, you're likely earning 5 percent a year on your emergency savings, while paying 16 percent a year in credit card interest. For every $1,000 on your credit card, that's a yearly loss of roughly $110. If you do nothing else after reading this but pay off $1,000 in credit card balances with short-term savings, then you've earned the price of this book about five times over. And for those people who say that emergency money should be left just for emergencies, our response is that if you pay off your credit card balances with short-term savings, you could always fill up those same credit cards in the event that you or your spouse is laid off or laid up. Believe us when we tell you that your credit card company won't cut or eliminate your access to their high-rate loans if you pay off your balances. More than likely they'll raise your credit limit, so that you'll be that much more prepared for "emergencies." And all the while you'll be saving the difference between the money you would have been paying in interest and the money you would have earned from a money market account.
Imagine a world without plastic. No, we're not suggesting you deep-six your Visa or Sears card. We're just recommending that you start asking yourself how much you would pay for a prospective purchase if you were paying cash out of your pocket. You might answer that you would pay a lot less than you're willing to charge or even that you wouldn't make the purchase at all.
See the trees for the forest. That's another way of saying that when you make a big purchase or investment such as a car or a house break every deal into its component part. Would you, say, pay $3,000 to put a skylight into the den of your current house? If not, then don't tack on that extra when contracting for a new home $3,000 may not seem like a lot when you're buying a $150,000 home, but it buys just as much as $3,000 in your checking account (more, actually, when you count the interest you'll pay over the course of your loan).
Hurry up and wait. To the extent that you fall prey to the tendency to view windfall money tax refunds, gifts, inheritances, or bonuses as found money that can be spent relatively carelessly, our advice is to train yourself to wait a while before making any spending decisions. In other words, tell yourself that you can do whatever you want with that cash, but in three or six months. In the meantime, park it in a bank or money market account. Make that the rule. At the least you'll have a few extra dollars for your trouble. More than likely, by the time your deadline rolls around you'll view this money as savings hard earned and not to be wasted.
Imagine that all income is earned income. This idea for dealing with money that you didn't earn or even money for which you did work may be the best way to train yourself to view all your money equally. Basically, the trick is to ask yourself how long it would take you to earn that amount of money after taxes. Quite often the answer will clear up your accounting problems faster than you can say "marginal tax rate."
Use mental accounting to your advantage. This kernel of counsel is essentially an endorsement for payroll deduction plans. Folks who have difficulty holding on to small amounts of money often have difficulty saving, for the obvious reason that small amounts are what are left in our paychecks after we pay the bills. That's where labeling tricks can help. By funneling money into a mutual fund or savings account directly from your paycheck, $50 that you might have accounted for as bowling money and spent easily is mentally (and physically) accounted for as savings and thus less likely to be wasted and more likely to be around when you need it.
There is another reason that payroll deduction plans are a good idea, one that involves an important psychological principle we discuss in the next chapter. Psychologically it's much easier to part with your money to set it aside this way than by writing a check to your savings account. Let us explain why.
Copyright © 1999 by Gary Belsky and Thomas Gilovich


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PESHTIGO — Back-to-back Packerland Conference co-champions in baseball, a regional title and the first sectional berth since 2011 showed just how successful the Peshtigo Bulldogs baseball team was this season.
Far from a fluke, that success was led by many stellar performances on the field and the Bulldogs were well represented by earning two first-team and three second-team all-conference player selections.
Leading the way on the first team was senior Brandon Eick and junior Nick Nielson, who both played their best when the Bulldogs needed them most.
This was the second-straight first-team selection for Eick, who at first base was a vacuum while helping anchor the middle of Peshtigo's batting order.
Peshtigo coach Neal Henrigillis couldn't say enough about how much respect he had for Eick and what he provided the Bulldogs as a two-year starter on varsity.
"Brandon fits the mold of what we're looking for as a Peshtigo Bulldog," Henrigillis said. "He always hustles. Backs up every play and just takes on the Bulldog mentality to the fullest."
Henrigillis stated one of the highlights of Eick's season was when he hit a three-run home run against Sturgeon Bay and its top pitcher Jake Schneider, who shared the Packerland title with the Bulldogs.
Nielson, who was a second-teamer a season ago, took on the role as staff ace on the mound while toting the best batting average on the team in the No. 2 hole.
Finishing with a .467 batting average, Nielson had an earned run average of 1.30 and consistently took down the top opponents in a talented Packerland Conference.
"Nick took on the top-level teams in our conference and was at his best," said Henrigillis. "He got on base a ton and was a heckuva center fielder. He could have easily made first team in multiple positions. Just a complete player."
Earning spots on the second team were a trio of seniors in Darren Dionne, Travis Plym and Nolan Lemke.
After making the first team last year, Dionne's role shifted to being more of a closer, something he became very dominant at, which was evident in his shut-down performance against Bonduel to help guide the Bulldogs to a regional title.
Henrigillis would have loved to see both of his top pitchers on the first team, but with such a talented conference, it was difficult to pull that off.
"Nick and Darren were 1A and 1B and we felt very good when both of them had the ball," Henrigillis said. "Darren is one of the top pitchers in this area and he continued to get better throughout the year."
Both Plym and Lemke played instrumental roles in Peshtigo's success as well.
A three-year starter, Plym grew from a solid defensive shortstop as a sophomore to someone Henrigillis could count on offensively as a senior while Lemke played six different positions for the Bulldogs, while starting primarily in left for the first time in his career.
"Travis went from a defensive shortstop that was DH'd for as a sophomore; our No. 8 hitter as a junior; to our lead-off hitter this year and someone that consistently got on base and made other teams work to get him out," said Henrigillis. "For Nolan, he was a Swiss army knife that did anything asked of him. Coaches around the league really took note of that and appreciated his approach to the game."
Henrigillis also noted that the senior class, which had several three-year starters, went from the first playoff victory for the school since 2012 as sophomores, to a second playoff win last year and ultimately a regional title as seniors.
"Our seniors set the standard of where we want to be as a program," said Henrigillis. "To win five playoff games in three years is an impressive feat and I'm very proud of them."
Oconto's Bennett Frazer and Zach Sherman also earned first-team honors. Frazer made it as an infielder for his consistent play at short and Sherman was a utility player.
Both Nielson and Eick were also honorable mention All-District selections.


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First you should check out NPR's Six-Word Memoir page. Go ahead. I'll keep busy for a few minutes.
Hey, you're back! That didn't take as long as I thought it would. Hold on, now I need to play this Scrabulous turn…
While not as challenging as the Haiku that Beca is fond of writing (and is very good at writing), these micro memoirs are pretty neat.
Here's one for me:
Good living from spaceships and aliens.
or perhaps:
Paper Spaceships, plastic spaceships, pixel spaceships.
or maybe:
Was one, met another, had third.
OK, maybe haiku memoir would be better. I'll work on it.


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BY NIELS VELDHUIS and ELMIRA ALIAKBARI
Ontario Premier Doug Ford recently warned a carbon tax "will be a total economic disaster" and the "risk of a carbon-tax recession is very, very real."
Predictably, media outlets across blasted Ford. Global News went so far as to say: "Doug Ford is making it up as he goes — especially the facts."
The trouble is, media outlets relied on economists that have a long history of supporting and advocating carbon taxes. The overwhelming consensus of such economists is that there's no compelling evidence to substantiate Ford's claims and that the likely economic impacts of carbon-pricing will be modest.
Consider, however, an analysis by the federal government's Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO). The PBO forecasts economic growth to slow from 1.9% this year to 1.5% from 2020-22, which "reflects, in part, the impact of the gradual increase in the carbon pricing levy."
When the $50-per-tonne federal carbon tax is fully implemented, the PBO estimates it will reduce the annual level of economic activity (GDP) by 0.45%..
It's easy to disregard a 0.45% reduction. But consider that over a five-year period this works out to $52 billion in lost economic activity. For an average Canadian family of four, that means a loss of nearly $5,500.
It's also important to consider that the PBO estimate likely underestimates the economic impact of the carbon tax because it "assume(s) that revenues generated by the levy will be returned to households as lump-sum payments."
This is a fine assumption for an academic exercise. But when you deal with the real world, that assumption has no merit since there's never been a stable "revenue neutral" carbon tax.
British Columbia is a great example. In 2008, when B.C.'s carbon tax was introduced, the B.C. government promised it would be permanently revenue neutral.
Unfortunately, that promise did not survive real-world politics.
Within five years, B.C. had a new premier and had abandoned revenue neutrality so it could use the revenues to finance new spending. All of this to say that the economic damage from the carbon tax will likely be greater than PBO estimates.
Despite Ford's clumsy language, in reality, the introduction of the carbon tax could be the last straw that pushes Canada into recession. That's particularly true given all the other economically damaging policies implemented by Ottawa over the past three years, including significant deficits with no apparent interest in balancing the budget, tax increases, and more complex and uncertain regulations (particularly for the energy industry), which makes it more difficult to do business in Canada.
It's no wonder economic forecasters are increasingly pessimistic about the Canadian economy and are beginning to use the "R" word.
Canadians would do well to listen tor Ford's warning.
For carbon pricing to be economically benign, it must replace regulations — not layered on top of them. And the revenue must be used to lower other more distortionary taxes such as personal and business income taxes.
Unfortunately, that fantasy world does not exist. The economic impact of the carbon tax will be real, and as always, regular Canadians will pay the price.
— Veldhuis and Aliakbari are economists with the Fraser Institute.


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Assistant or Associate Professor of Animal Behavior and Welfare Amarillo 20957BR Veterinary Medicine Position Description The Texas Tech University (TTU) School of Veterinary Medicine (the School) is seeking to fill a faculty position to provide clinical expertise toward teaching, research, and service needs of an exciting, innovative, and fully funded new veterinary education program located in Amarillo, TX. The new School will be first veterinary educational program established in Texas in a century. It is specifically focused on the veterinary medical and educational needs of rural and regional communities of Texas, and to provide access to affordable education.Applications are welcomed beginning June 1, 2020 (see below for instructions on how to apply). Application packages will be reviewed semi-weekly and candidates will be invited for interviews when the review of packages indicates that an adequate pool of candidates have applied. Major/Essential Functions
Required Qualifications D.V.M. (or equivalent) or a PhD in a discipline related to animal behavior and welfare is required. Board certification (ACVB) or advanced degrees are preferred but not required. Subject matter expertise can be demonstrated for those without board certification or advanced degrees with at least 5 years of successful academic, public, or private practice in the area of animal behavior/welfare in rural or regional communities. Expertise – and the direction of future scholarship – may have been developed in specific species such as companion animals or cattle. It is expected, however, that the successful candidate will contribute broadly to didactic- and hands-on instruction in animal welfare and behavior across species. Preference will be given to candidates who have a successful track record of teamwork. The successful candidates must share and foster the School's core values; annual evaluation of faculty includes evaluation of academic performance as well as contribution to fostering the School's core values. Adaptability, persistence, and resilience will be important attributes for success in the evolving dynamics that are characteristic of a developing program. Texas Tech University is a Hispanic Serving Institution and has a long history of serving first-generation students. A commitment to working with diverse student populations and first-generation students is required. Preferred Qualifications To apply, visit workattexastech.com As an Equal Employment Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer, Texas Tech University is dedicated to the goal of building a culturally diverse faculty committed to teaching and working in a multicultural environment. We actively encourage applications from all those who can contribute, through their research, teaching, and/or service, to the diversity and excellence of the academic community at Texas Tech University. The university does not discriminate on the basis of an applicant's race, ethnicity, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, genetic information or status as a protected veteran. Texas Tech welcomes consideration of dual career and professional couple accommodations. Copyright ©2017 Jobelephant.com Inc. All rights reserved. Posted by the FREE value-added recruitment advertising agency jeid-fbb98ef1bffec140a808ea8cc8306e63
© Copyright 2020 Association of Veterinary Technician Educators. All rights reserved.405 North Stanwick RoadMoorestown, NJ 08057888-859-8832 [email protected]AVTE is professionally managed by TVD Associates, Inc.


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This week Laleham Gap School became the very first in East Kent to have students graduate in the Prince William Award. The school gaining a trophy that will now go up on display.
In the upbeat Assembly Simon Roser, who had delivered the award over an entire year of Thursday afternoons, was able to show a video from Prince William congratulating the children for passing. Simon said he hoped the children felt proud. All of them had 'dared to do your best.' They had all "challenged themselves" and shown new qualities of 'self-confidence, discipline, courage and resilience.'
24 pupils started out on the course a year ago and amazingly all 24 graduated! All the children got 2 certificates: The Prince William Explorer Award and a Sports Leadership Certificate. The 24 children were Year 5 and 6 pupils from 3 different classes in the school.
Simon Roser added "It was amazing that all the children from different classes worked together to overcome everything and pass the award. It was great to see by the end the children had become a tight unit with a real team ethic. All of them were looking out for each other. I was so proud of all of them and all they have learnt."
Primary Resources Manager Natalie Hewitt-Zarb thanked Mr Roser for his work with the children explaining how much they had enjoyed and learnt from the award. The children had really enjoyed the team building, the tug of war, drag the bag and the opportunities to overcome difficulties to graduate.


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Pride Month, COVID comes a knockin and Queen Bee Beyonce
Our Newest Blog is up and it is a MUST READ!!!!
I am a bit messed up. I live in a fantasy world. But i feel
I am a bit messed up. I live in a fantasy world. But i feel like the real world doesnt matter at all. It's like this mirage, an illusion. And I just keep wanting someone to kill me. I walk around aimlessly. Im not attached to anyone, anything, I drink lattes and read books, and I want my loneliness to swallow me whole because there is no point. It's like a kid when youd play alone for hours and hours and hours, and you sort of feel numb after a while and talking feels unnatural. Im there. I feel unworthy, like an alien. I cant fit in woth my "friends", I dont have the same sense of humor, I dont like fashion, I dont like movies or pop culture, I look down on everything because it all feels so shallow. But I have to pretend I dont look down on it. All the corruption, and the lies, the selfishness of the people around me. Everyone feels like theyre just transactional beings. I want to throw up. I sound like a narcissist myself, rigid, looking down on others, thinking people should fit this box I have for them. I want to barf, Im disgusted with myself. This need for perfection is strange. I feel like nothing and no one will ever fulfill me. I keep wanting to be ejected from this planet. Ill try to have babysteps, first Ill pay the bill. Start there. Buy onions. Eat selenium, maybe it's my hormones. Just this heaviness. A big weight. This city is so ugly, disgusting. Trash everywhere, on every level. Why do I have to live amongst the dirt??? Disgusting. Strip clubs, pure objectification and dehumanization glorified. Garbage everywhere people go do environmental marches while drknking from straws, rich peoplr who are miserable, no one DARES to smile at a stranger and looks away from fear. The noise. Drilling, birds who squawk to hear eqchother becausr it's so loud theyve lost all birdsong, the sound of sirens wake me up every morning. It's really disgusting tbh. I dont know how I get dragged to these **** places, when I have no interest in being here. The only explanationbis the gods and predetermined destiny because Ive had no interest ever moving here and yet here I am. Maybe I can apply for jobs somewhere but I dont think I qualify for anything. I should get a masters degree? But thats just more money. Mostly I want to throw up. Not much else to say really. Better go shower.
[1255]Nov 5
@Blueberries1234 I get that completely
[59105]Nov 6
@Hopeful100 those are HUGE accomplishments! You faced life, your feelings, crusty old makeup brushes:D Thats really awesome, makes me happy you shared that because tbose little things are big things when we are feeling down. And about the relationship, if it's a bit rocky then it takes courage to face that, to speak up and be honsst to yourself, to stand up for yourself instead of dust it under the rug you know? And that feels GOOD when youve been true to yourself. It foesnt matter if you can count on others, if you can count on yourself.
[59105]Nov 6
@cantletgo222 I love it here for that reason too. But for me, I grew up having a narcissist parent, so I have learned that if I can make my mother happy and not suicidal, I feel happier too. By helping others look on the bright side I tend to look on the bright side as a biproduct... so I actually need to help myself FIRST rather than help others, I need to give to myself directly rather than indirectly. To act from a place of intentionality, rather than reactivity/seeking to change another person's state and as a bonus change my own (fear response & codependency).


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Lubbock, TX WM, 49 shot to death defending his neighbors from negro home invaders
Two arrested after victim killed in Saturday home invasion
LUBBOCK, Texas -
Two suspects have been arrested and charged in a home invasion Saturday night that left a man dead.
Police report Kyi Baker, 20, and a 14-year-old male are accused of murdering Robert Dendy, 49.
Police responded to reports of two men trying to break into a home near Auburn Street and North Toledo Ave.
Dendy confronted the suspects in an alley and pointed a gun at them and told them to freeze, according to a police report. Investigators report Dendy was shot in the chest by the 14-year-old. Dendy was taken to UMC where he later died.
LPD patrol officers were able to quickly identify the suspects. By 10:30 p.m., less than two hours after the original call, officers located Baker and the 14-year-old at an apartment complex near 11th street and Bangor Ave.
Wife heartbroken after husband murdered trying to stop a home invasion
Updated July 11 at 10:55 PM
LUBBOCK, Texas (KCBD) - It hasnt even been a week since a Lubbock man was killed trying to confront the two suspects to protect his family and neighbors. Robert Dendy, 49, was shot in an ally on the 4700 block of Auburn Street after trying to defend his neighbors from home invaders. Now days after all this unfolded, KCBD is hearing from Dendy's wife for the first time.
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We've done the 6000 mile goodbye for many years now. But we have never done it with each other. until this year.
I took one last picture of my five kids together at the airport.
We got them checked in and all the bags dropped off, then it was time to say goodbye.
In the car, CC told the kids what he thought when Firstborn first entered the world. After they'd placed her in her little bed and all the doctors and nurses had left, he thought, "If I can just get it right with this one, I believe whatever other children God gives us will fall in line, too." And he told Firstborn, "I got it right. I'm so proud of you."
They will see each other again at Christmas. Four months.
As we drove back to my parents' home together in the rain, I was reflecting on the Lord and His goodness. He brought to mind how very close my children are to each other. Isn't it interesting that the Lord's last words to his disciples were to love one another? When I think of what I would want to say to my children should the Lord take me to Glory one day, leaving them behind, it would be the same. I'd want the exact same thing. Take care of each other. Love each other. Overlook each other's faults. Strengthen each other.
I do believe my kids are exceptionally close to each other. And I don't believe it is because I've read the right parenting book or listened to the right parenting talks. It's not because of personalities. It's not because of creative ideas we have had. It's because we used God's words to parent them. Turn the other cheek. Love keeps no record of wrongs. Prefer one another in honor. A soft answer turns away wrath. And somehow through their growing up years together, those truths became part of who they are. And that is due to God's grace. So, that's why this sibling goodbye was so hard. But that's good.


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John Lennon on Evolution
- Suggestions for a newbie? - May 21, 2020
- Astrid Kirchherr, 1938-2020 - May 15, 2020
- A bolt of insight! - May 3, 2020
I'm still collecting my thoughts about The Fest for Beatles Fans, but in the meantime wanted to pass along this hilarious quote from our own John Lennon. I was editing a humor piece for a friend of mine, and went to Wikiquote to confirm that Lennon did in fact say, "There are no problems, only solutions." (In the piece, I attributed it to Vince Lombardi — a little Easter Egg joke for Beatlepeople.) Along the way I found this priceless snippet of John Lennon on evolution:
Nor do I think we came from monkeys, by the way… That's another piece of garbage. What the hell's it based on? We couldn't've come from anything–fish, maybe, but not monkeys. I don't believe in the evolution of fish to monkeys to men. Why aren't monkeys changing into men now? It's absolute garbage. It's absolutely irrational garbage, as mad as the ones who believe the world was made only four thousand years ago, the fundamentalists. That and the monkey thing are both as insane as the apes standing up suddenly. The early men are always drawn like apes, right? Because that fits in the theory we have been living with since Darwin. I don't buy that monkey business. [Singing] "Too much monkey business…" [Laughing] I don't buy it. I've got no basis for it and no theory to offer, I just don't buy it. Something other than that. Something simpler. I don't buy anything other than "It always was and ever shall be." I can't conceive of anything less or more. The other theories change all the time. They set up these idols and then they knock them down. It keeps all the old professors happy in the university. It gives them something to do. I don't know if there's any harm in it except they ram it down everybody's throat. Everything they told me as a kid has already been disproved by the same type of "experts" who made them up in the first place. There.
This was edited out of the Playboy interview done with David Sheff in September 1980 (published December 1980). It was included in the book-length transcript, "All We Are Saying," published by St. Martin's in 2000. Here's an interesting article on Scheff and Lennon, done by NPR in 2010.
Here's where I usually attempt to open up John Lennon's head and get inside, but instead today I'll just say this: one of the things obscured by the world's grief over John Lennon's murder was how strange a guy he was. At places like The Fest for Beatles Fans, there's an almost palpable sadness over the long, contented life we imagine John lost — but the future we fans imagine for him has everything to do with us, and little to do with him. Lennon's was not a white-picket-fence life, or mind, and his murder spared us watching him (for example) give $10 million to prove the existence of a face on Mars. "Look, Yoko's been saying that for 20 years, but because she's a woman, nobody listened to her. Now this NASA guy says it, everybody's all the sudden, 'Oh, face on Mars, face on Mars.' I'm glad everybody's finally coming around. The picture is there, it's indisputable. And those are only the ones they're letting us see!… So the album has a double point: one, to wake everybody up to the reality that some of us have been living for years, and two, to give Yoko her rightful credit."
Losing John Lennon when we did, in the way we did, allows us to imagine whatever future he would've liked if he were us. But if he had lived, it strikes me just as likely that he would've gotten into Scientology or championed the anti-vaxxer movement or turned up dead at Burning Man under mysterious circumstances, as the more benign cuddling-with-Yoko-in-Ireland futures we usually imagine. John Lennon was not likely to become the world's gentle countercultural grandpa. He would've gotten into plenty of trouble, done plenty of stupid things, and been just as divisive at 70 as he had been at 30. He would've followed the rest of the counterculture into the wilderness, and probably come out much like Paul, George, and Ringo did — an eccentric billionaire with a fundamentally unknown personal existence, and a penchant for flashing the peace sign.
It's cold comfort indeed, but Lennon's death at 40 allows Lennon fans to delude themselves about who he really seems to have been — not just (as a friend of mine recently put it) "a thoughtful seeker," but an irritant, a holy fool, and instinctual provocateur. A man who didn't give a damn what people thought, for better (which we remember) and worse (which we too often don't).
11 Comments
I agree with John. I think the situation with evolution is akin to that of physics. Newtonian physics looked good: it made sense. Then came Einstein and Quantum Physics and we saw that something the conventional mind finds harder to grasp underlies the Newtonian world. The Newtonian world wasn't so much proved wrong as shown to operate only at a certain level–or as a kind of rough approximation of reality. In the same way, I think something richer underlies evolution. What I admire about John, which this quote illustrates, is how much a creature of the gut he was. As you say, he didn't care if what his gut told him was at odds with, well… anything! He wrote songs instinctually, intuitively–his best ones anyway. He was in touch with that underlying reality, which is far richer than science can say. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio/ Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
You're right. But perhaps more fundamentally, underneath these undeniable personal "issues," Lennon was, like other great spirits, a creator of worlds and not an acceptor of them. His songs created worlds—Strawberry Fields, Imagine—and the same urge flowed into his brand of activism. Part of forging new worlds is being a provocateur, which he also was. He liked that in Yoko and then provoked the other Beatles by bringing her into the studio. Perhaps his last act of provocative world-creating was to die early, leaving us to create our own idea-worlds of what he would have become.
Lennon was a born troll. I'd love to be able to follow him on Twitter.
Same here, @Michael. He was good at making people uncomfortable 😉
of course he said there are no problems only solutions.it's in one of his songs.sheesh.why do you need to say he said it like it's in question?
An interesting piece in the Atlantic "The Technical Constraints That Made Abbey Road So Good."


text: On Fri, Apr 22, 2016 at 9:13 AM, Stephen Canon via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote: > > On Apr 21, 2016, at 9:13 PM, Jordan Rose <jordan_rose at apple.com> wrote: > > [Proposal: > https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/master/proposals/0067-floating-point-protocols.md] > > This is super impressive. I do have several bits I'm uncomfortable with, > however. I'll try to separate that into "semantic" and "naming" sections. > > Semantic > > static var radix: Int { get } > > > Does it ever make sense to have a model type that allows different instances > to have different radices? > > > No. > > Is there an algorithm that makes use of a model's radix, or is this just in > here for "completeness"? > > > If you know ulp, radix, and exponent range, you can infer basically all the > other numerical details of the type. One good example would be the constant > that Dave mentioned, "maxResultOfAdding1". You can compute this if you know > radix and ulp. The radix is also the bound on how large the relative > spacing between consecutive numbers can get, which is sometimes important > for computing accurate bounds. These are all somewhat niche, but the > problem is that there's no good way to get this value if you don't have it, > and it imposes "zero" implementation burden. > > /// A signaling NaN (not-a-number). > @warn_unused_result > static func signalingNaN: Self { get } > > > I'm not sure it really makes sense for a Bignum / APFloat type to support > such a value. But really I think this is just underspecified. What does it > mean, in terms of this protocol and its uses, for a NaN to be signaling? Is > it just a specific "color" of NaN, with no semantic requirements other than > being distinguishable? > > > There are a variety of means that a softfloat type could use to implement > signaling NaNs. Here are two of the simpler ones: > > (a) if running on HW with hard-float support, use native-precision > hard-float instructions to set flags as needed. > (b) provide operation variants that take an inout flags / parameter: > > mutating func add(rhs: Self, inout flags: Flags) > > (Also, is 'signalingNan.isNan' true? I assume so but since 'nan' is implied > to be a non-signaling NaN I'm not sure anymore.) > > > Yup, that should be clarified. > > var signBit: Bool { get } > > > Unlike Chris, I'm strongly against this property as it stands. You should > not be able to write "if someValue.signBit"; a bit is not a boolean value. > (Citation: "Uses of Boolean methods and properties should read as assertions > about the receiver.") > > I'd be okay with Greg's idea of changing the type to an enum. I'd also be > okay with renaming this to a predicate, whatever the name ends up being. > ("isSignBitSet", "isSignNegative", etc.) > > > Making it a predicate is weird, because then the three properties making up > the number become `isSignBitSet`, `exponent`, and `significand`; one of > these things is not like the other ones. If `signBit: Bool` were ruled out, > I would rather go with Greg's enum proposal. > > var exponent: Int { get } > > > Nitpick: it's probably worth noting in the doc comment that this is the > unbiased exponent value. > > Also, does it matter that this is insufficient for bignums, which may have > an exponent of greater than `sizeof(Int.self)` bits? (This is also a concern > for a number of members of BinaryFloatingPoint, like 'significantBitCount'.) > > > An exponent of Int.max encodes a number >= 2**Int.max. This is a > staggeringly huge quantity, even when Int is 32 bits (it's approximately > 1e646456992). There are a few extremely niche applications that require > numbers with greater magnitude, but they are *extremely* rare. To a good > approximation, `Int` is more than enough bits, and a reasonable tradeoff. Naive question: is it necessary to make a trade-off here? Why not an associated type Exponent that's Int for Float, Double, and Float80, allowing for something else for bignums? > Ditto `significandBitCount`. I haven't seen usage of floating-point types > with more than a few thousand significand bits; billions of bits is enough. > It is plausible that one could build a type that runs into this limit on a > 32-bit system, but it wouldn't be very useful; on a 64-bit system, you can't > allocate the storage for even one such value. > > Naming > > On "NaN" vs. "Nan": I'm not convinced that ignoring the case is the right > way to go here. IMHO the clearest lowercase form is "nan" and the clearest > capitalized form is "NaN". > > The current draft API guidelines don't cover this case, but if I were to add > something for this, I'd say "when a word is normally written with mixed > case, the lowercase form should be fully-lowercased if the first letter is > naturally uppercase, and the capitalized form should have the first letter > uppercased only." That rule produces "iPhone/IPhone", "next/NeXT", and > "nan/NaN". (The "if the first letter is naturally uppercase" could be thrown > out as well.) > > > Yup, this seems like a sensible rule to me. > > On 'isLessThanOrEqual(to:)': I agree with Xiaodi that the argument label is > problematic here. I think the problem is that we have two prepositions that > apply to the argument, and "pick the second one" leaves the base name > feeling unbalanced. (Remember that we allow referring to a method by its > basename alone when using it as a function value.) > > On 'isTotallyOrdered(with:)': I lost track of who said it, but I agree that > this sounds like it's "!isUnordered(with: other)". The only name that's > coming to mind is 'isTotallyOrderedBefore(_:)', which isn't great. > > On 'binade': At first I thought this was a confusing term and there had to > be a better one, but now I think it's an "if you don't know what this is, > you don't need to use it" case. :-) > > > Yup. > > – Steve > > > _______________________________________________ > swift-evolution mailing list > swift-evolution at swift.org > https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution >


text:
At-Home Relief for Tooth Pain
It is believed that one of the worst possible pain that one can be afflicted of are toothaches. They can be severe enough to get your head and ears throbbing along with the excruciating toothache and set you completely off gear.
Toothaches can be attributed to different reasons. It can start with simple symptoms and develop into something more serious. Before you know it, a visit to the dentist is inevitable. The most common causes for toothaches are:
- Decay and cavities
- Eruption of wisdom teeth
- Sudden cracks or chips in the dentures and infection within
- Bacteria attack
It is always advisable to see a dentist even if there's only tingling or light pain in or around the teeth. Sometimes the problem may be too deep rooted to understand, and may be in need of x-rays or a deeper analysis of the problem. The tooth pain associated with each problem is different and can be at different levels. If one has cracked or chipped teeth the pressure can cause pain. On the other hand, pain caused by cavities can be very painful as it may have reached the nerve endings of the teeth. Until one gets to the dentist, one can take small steps that are simple yet assured to give some relief until you can see the dentist.
At-Home Relief for Tooth Pain
- Rinse your mouth properly and floss well in order to remove food particles from the crevices of the teeth. This often gives some relief.
- Hold a couple of cloves where it hurts the most. The clove softens up and the oil so secreted from the spice will seep in relieve you of the pain and provides temporary relieve with its medicinal qualities.
- Purchase over the counter pain relief gel and apply according to the directions.
- Rinse your mouth at regular intervals with a concoction of Epsom salt or regular salt and warm water. The warm salt water concoction will help disinfect the area and helps to reduce inflammation. The pain subsides temporarily and provides comfort.
- In terms of medication, aspirin or ibuprofen can help reduce inflammation as well. It is also believed that a mix of 500 milligrams of calcium and 200 to 300 milligrams of magnesium will help provide relief immediately before you can run to the dentist.
- One can also resort to herbal means for relief. Warm Chamomile or Echinacea tea will help provide relief from the pain. The tea also soothes the nerves and relaxes you physically.
Once you have been able to control the pain temporarily, seek an appointment with the dentist to get the necessary medications or procedures done for permanent relief.


text:
Ken Bond is now friends with Daryl Dawkins
Ken Bond
Think I paid $150 about 2 years ago. When I saw him, I had to have him!! I've not seen another with his coloring Yellow & brown. All the other ones I've seen are white & black. The guy who sold it to me has been trying for more, but no luck. He said he only had 2, I got the last one.
I figured he would be pretty expensive, he looks expensive anyways lol. Usually the case with the really amazing looking species that they come at a price. I am gonna check with my lfs and see what kind of price they can give me, if they can even order this. I haven't ever seen one of these guys in ...View More
Ken Bond
Thats the most I have spent on one fish. Yes, he is still my favorite! Told the wife he was $40 LOL! If she only knew half of what I spend on this hobby, she would loose her mind!


text:
There is no doubt that stress can affect your mental and physical state. Anxiety can result from either an actual stressful situation or from the anticipation of a stressful event. Researchers have found that anxiety has a demonstrable effect on the decision-making process in your brain. The more anxious you are, the more sensitive you are to potentially bad outcomes associated with specific situations. In other words, if you are worried about something, you tend to act a bit more cautious.
This actually can work in your favor. For example, in one experiment, researchers found that subjects who worried about losing money actually came out ahead when playing games for real money. It was their anxiety over losing money that made them play in a more precise and strategic way.
The downside comes when the level of anxiety increases to a point where it makes a person too sensitive, altering their rational behavior. If anxiety makes a person avoid certain normal situations or other people, it can keep a person from living a normal life.
So, if a little bit of stress is good for you, but a lot is bad, how do you know if you striking a balance? Researchers are looking at this very issue, with an eye towards helping those who have trouble keeping excessive anxiety in check. It is important to remember that you know yourself best. If you feel out of control or find you are unable to feel comfortable in your everyday life, you may need help to control your anxiety. Otherwise, know that most anxiety is temporary and, if you trust your intuitions, it can sometimes steer you in the right direction.
At Juban Courts Apartments in Denham Springs, Louisiana, we believe it's important to live life vigorously. In order to do so, you must educate yourself regularly with lifestyle-enhancing tips such as these. With this blog post, we seek to improve your way of life through education that promotes self-care.


text:
We can't say enough about this place! Do not miss it. The servers were amazing, Joey was amazing. We loved it and will be back.
Great staff, nice menu, and good value for large gatherings. They have a very loyal following.
Excellent on all counts! Superb food and service. Highly recommended!
Great location, plenty of early bird choices, beautiful atmosphere...would go back in an instant. No wait with our reservation & the outdoor seating was really lovely.
Very nice restaurant.We ate on the outside.The dining room closed because of COVID.Lots of choices of appetizers and great sandwiches.Fun restaurant and nice views.Anxious to try dining room when they open again.Different menu in dining room.
Couldn't wait to get back to the North End but with Covid it took a little longer. Finally open for outside dining and we were so happy! Never disappoints. They kept apologizing because it started to rain.. we reassured them it was fine but so so nice... as always! Now just waiting for the full...
Food is really good, especially the ribs. If you go on Wed or Sunday then you can get the all you can eat rib special with a couple of delicious sides - corn bread, plantains, Mac and cheese, etc. Very reasonable prices. You can eat outside or in.
Service is hit or miss - just seems...
We stayed at Icona Diamond Beach so restaurant was very convenient. Good food, nice ambiance.
Coming Soon!
We have an excellent dinner this evening ! The pre-fix has some great choices. They even have gluten free pasta which was a plus for my boyfriend ! The outdoor dining was very enjoyable. We have a great view of the marina. They even have love music.
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text:
Iulius Mall Cluj celebrates International Coffee Day
The first week of October has the aroma of coffee, at Iulius Mall Cluj. To mark the International Day of Coffee, Iulius Mall spoils its customers with prizes for mornings full of energy.
Iulius Mall Cluj is currently celebrating International Coffee Day with those who love the energizing drink. From Saturday until Sunday, between the 1st and 9th of October 2016 customers will be rewarded with surprises to highlight their relaxing time in the company of a cup of hot coffee. Everyone who comes to the Info Center with a shopping receipt that includes a coffee-based product or accessories for the preparation of the celebrated beverage can enroll in the campaign and have the chance to win an instant prize. The first 100 customers who meet the criteria for participation will receive a scratch coupon with a guaranteed gift: french press machines, shopping vouchers at Coffee Beans, Donuterie, Subway and Sweet Caffe, or cans of Illy coffee.


text:
Custom Search
_here_search_with_expressions_from_this_page ... (_text_below_will_NOT_disappear)
Rating system for politicians, political parties, election candidates
,,Democracy'': Every ,,normal'' citizen can obtain the power over a nation.
Also foos.
Every citizen can ask for votes and can be elected. A nice idea - as long as there were no mass media to manipulate the voter behaviour. In the past, let us say until 1920, a person had to pass a lot of qualification control barriers on the way to power.
This changed with the increasing impact of mass media, like radio, TV, superficial segments of the printed press...
... and now in addition the Internet news sites which reduce political analysis mostly to excited repetition of unevaluated superficial short ,,main news''.
Persons without sufficient professional knowledge and organized groups of them can manipulate the opinions of most electors, if backed by such less critical media journalism and by enough money support.
The rules of democracy do not any more fit to this changed election situation. They have been established before the age of mass media. Modern democracy has become extremely vulnerable.
LIBRA is the answer: A rating system for politicians and political parties.
LIBRA started June 2003 in Germany. LIBRA offers German electors from now some form of rating system for election candidates and political parties. For Germany, LIBRA was created under the aspect of critical opinion related to the intellectual or moral or professional qualities of some of those who govern.
As far as specific political opinions and goals are involved, the LIBRA concept can not be suggested for other countries, due to the general rule of non-interference.
But the basic idea of a universal abstract qualification rating system in the field of elections is considered to be interesting for all democracies. While political opinions and value systems are an internal subject of every nation, the superficial mass media influence on elector behavior is a generally recognized problem for all democracies.
The general framework of the LIBRA rating system is from now explained in its basic rules in English and French language, too. This is only an abstract shell in a very reduced form.
There is no intention to back this for specific countries by adding political opinion or goals or by creating some organisation. If you want to see how this is done for Germany, just switch on the menu to the German language section of this site.
The goal is: Tools how to elect good politicians for good government.
Journalists and citizens of all countries are invited to help to finance this concept. The goal is to fill it with evaluation criteria fitting to the domestic political discussion. This can only be done by some citizens of a specific country: But the software and some basic rule concept should originate from vox7.com. This is in order to keep it coherent and to submit it to a basic structure of worldwide universal criteria and values.
Nobody can be opposed to the idea of qualification criterias in the field of politics. It is a barrier against opinion manipulation, ideologies and all those errors which were the origin of 2 world wars during the last century. This caused approximately 120 million victims of war and irrational unrealistic ideology - due to lack of qualification and/or moral standards in the minds of those who governed various countries.
LIBRA and the example Germany
Germany is the origin of the LIBRA concept, and this is easy to explain. Germany was 1995...2005 for the first time since 1945 on a downwards road. Economy is collapsing, and government behaved frequently far away from minimal standards of knowledge and science... low wisdom level... lack of profound understanding how humans have to be organized for intended goals.
Germany was during these years among others governed by good school teachers, or good journalists, or people who were unable to terminate their professional studies, and similar lack of minimal qualifikation for the major political responsability in he country. Probably two third of the government members of 1998...2005 did not study professional knowledge related to the domain for which they were the nations top decision-makers.
Close to 100 % of German parliament members are either civil servants (most) or lobby members. This did not change until now.
Every country has its specifics related to democracy.
Churchill said democracy would be a very bad system of government, only justified by the fact that so far there was no better system.
So there is only one option left: To improve by selection during elections the average qualification of those who govern and who decide on laws.
Conforming to general rules, such efforts can only be carried out inside a specific country, mainly by the journalists, citizens and opinion-based associations of the country.
news & intelligence
knowledge lobby - truth lobby - optimized government
LIBRA Liberal-Social Citizen Co-operation
Texts from 2003 ... 2007. - Since May 2017 actualization + improvement of everything. Quality deficits of texts should be fixed in a few weeks. Goal: "Coherent definition of optimal policies ".
"!!" = waiting for
» your_? financial contribution
to finance a translation from German to English
Welcome! /
!! now do the rating
!! instruction / how-to
rating candidates
rating parties
concept LIBRA
!! 1 billion x laws violated
your financial contribution
optimized politics / basics
election candidates: qualific.
!! democracy
!! referendum
!! trauma / nations
optimized politics / economics
!! tolerable taxation level
!! "totalitarian capitalism"?
!! small businesses
!! regional differences
!! pensions, retirement
!! labor / regulation: limits
!! labor unions
!! minimum wage: rules
!! financial markets: regulation
!! how to reduce poverty
!! debt consolidation
optim.politics / subsidies
!! reduce IT monopolies
!! media financing
!! subsidies: regulation
!! reduce bureaucracy
!! punishm., rehabilation
optim.politics / citizens
!! money for parents, children
!! health & insurance system
!! discrim.: Man? Woman?
!! prostitution
!! privacy protection
opt.polit./ labor
!! VOX concept
!! unemployment: reasons
!! new dynamics
other sites
Publi-Media busin.
Amigos! parody ami7.com
!! vox7.com : about
Dieser Website-Ableger für rationale Politik von wissenschaftlicher Qualität wird gesponsert durch einen Betreiber innovativer Internet- Koop- Marktplätze und durch eine Vereinigung für rationale Politik- Lösungen. - Bitte besuchen Sie vielleicht auch die Startseite aha7.com für mehr.
(für Mängel-Info zur Site - Inhalte, Funktionen - und für Förderangebote)
Für Werbeagenturen:
Das Ende der Menu-Zeilen oben markiert Werbemöglichkeiten:
Meinungs-Seite o.ä. (keine Werbung).
Werbung nur für Seitenende buchbar.
Werbung frei buchbar.
LIBRA CONCEPT Libra Concept libra concept
-ana-pubcc-pha11565# D=19c02 F=vak-conc-en.htm


text:
Long before dawn, Callie was awake, dressed and headed to her car. The night's light snowfall and freezing temperatures meant she needed to clear the car windows. She shivered as she crunched across the parking lot, adjusting her hood to shield herself from the biting wind.
The long frigid days, dark gray skies and never-ending work hours left her weary. This morning she had been reluctant to leave her warm bed. She fantasized, imagined pulling the covers over her head, forgetting her responsibilities and letting sleep take her. The boss would not approve, and her meager paycheck would be lighter than she could afford.
The car blasted freezing air through the heater, and she hit the button for the rear defogger. It would clear the back window while she chipped ice and snow from the windshield. She worked quickly, eager to avoid the wind and blowing snow.
The door squeaked as Callie tossed the snow scraper in the back seat and slammed the door closed. She blew on her hands, creating heavy clouds in the still cold car.
"The forecast calls for another cold day, today," the voice chirped from the radio.
"Who would have guessed?" Callie responded as she drove.
"Didn't the groundhog predict an early spring?" the voice continued.
"Could have fooled me."
"Don't hold your breath, but we're predicting a warm-up for next week."
"Promises, promises," Callie grumbled.
"No, really folks, it looks like we might be able to shed a few layers by next Tuesday or Wednesday."
"You're pretty optimistic. Besides, aren't you guys wrong half the time?"
The station switched to music and Callie noticed a slight orange glow of dawn tinting the sky.
Darkness ebbed as she drove. Her car was almost lukewarm when she pulled into the work parking lot. She hunched, head down, as she braved the walk to the entrance.
Beside the door, a purple splotch lay on the ground.
"Why can't people put their trash in the bin?" she wondered as she stooped to grab it.
But it wasn't trash. Confused, Callie brushed back the snow. There, sheltered from the worst of the weather, purple crocus emerged from their hibernation. The tiny heralds boldly proclaimed winter's end. Hope washed the bitterness from her soul and buoyed her tired body.
"Spring is here," she whispered.
Keep on writing.
Jo Hawk The Writer