You talkin’ to me? Home automation with Amazon – Colorado Springs Independent

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Ever get the feeling you are being listened in on? I'm referring to home automation and devices like Amazon's Alexa technology. Amazon's platform has multiple home automation devices that can play music, offer up entertainment, local weather forecasts, news and much more when given voice commands. The devices are known as Echo productsand can also be controlled by a cell phone, tablet, or another Internet-connected device.

I bought into Amazon's offering of Echo and the Echo Dot, a smaller version,last year, and glad I did even though I find it a stretch on claims you can save you money over time, more on that in bit.

One of the favorite features is the vast music libraries that are available, and being able to play any music you can think of by asking the device. The original Amazon Echo has a built in speaker, but if you want to rock the house, as they say, you're better off getting the cheaper Dot and connecting your own speakers.

Having dabbled with music services like Pandora, I ended up with Amazon's Unlimited package based on price and usage. It comes in a bit cheaper if you're an Amazon Prime member, but there are other options to suit what you're looking for. As of 6/23/17, Amazon is now offering the option to stream your Sirius audio subscription right to your Echo for you "Stern" lovers. All-in-all music features are a driving force behind home automation's growing popularity, and I can see why.

I have found, though, that you end up spending more money on necessary additions to take full advantage of Amazon's home automation features. For example, I had to upgrade my thermostat to be able to change the temperature in the house with the system, same goes with the lights separate devices are needed for each lamp, or you go a little more expensive with a hub covering an area of your home.

There are some great add-on devices that can control your home security, ceiling fans and more. Add-ons for lighting are probably the most diverse and fun to play with, with options ranging from standard overhead light to colored track lighting controlled with simple commands. I run with the TP Link bulbs (cheaper) as they handle my basic lighting needs. The TP Link is a modest but more affordable way to turn on anything plugged into it, like a lamp you want to turn on and off. The lighting features and remote control options are great when you're controlling lights from afar.

Lastly, unless you're living in a smaller home or apartment, you will want more than one Echo device, or at least a portable accessory so you don't have to shout your requests and can hear the output another extra cost.

Amazon is rolling out a video version of its home automation system called Echo Show in summer 2017. Echo Show displays a video screen showing video messages, photos, security cameras, and and more, according to the Amazon website. It sounds intriguing, and perhaps a necessary product given growing competition in home automation systems. Google's offering, Google Home,which provides many of the same features, adds the ability to do simple searches on queries similar to using their search engine,a feature that needs more attention in Amazon's system.

My overall take on Amazon's Echo and the whole home automation movement is that it's coming your way, and if you can afford to make the plunge, it's a prime time to do it.

Brian Koch is an avid techie who's worked in the tech field for dozens of years with Compaq/HP, his own pc business Techpertise, outdoor photography, and more. He has lived with his wife Stacy in Colorado for over 16 years. E-mail questions, comments, suggestions to Brian: info@techpertise.com and follow him on Twitter @Techpertise.

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You talkin' to me? Home automation with Amazon - Colorado Springs Independent

‘Modern-Day Slavery’: Many Southern States Have Prison Inmates Working in Governor’s Mansions and Capitol Buildings – AlterNet

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Photo Credit: Sean Pavone/Shutterstock

When activist Sam Sinyangwe was awaiting a meeting with the governors office at the Louisiana state capitol building in Baton Rouge, he noticed something odd.A black man in a dark-blue jumpsuit was printing papers while a correctional guardwith a badge and gunstood watching over him. The pair stood out against the white, middle-aged legislators populating the building.

Sinyangwe said he did not know exactly what he was looking at, until he saw another black man in the same dark-blue outfit serving food at the capitol buildings cafeteria. This time, Sinyangwe noticed that the man had a patch on his chest labeling him a prisoner of the Louisiana State Department of Corrections, complete with an identification number.

Sinyangwe realized that the server, the man printing papers and the other people working in the lunch line were all prisoners.

Inmates working at the capitol building in Baton Rouge is a common sight. Prisoners work in the Louisiana governors mansion and inmates clean up after Louisiana State University football games as well. But the labor practice of having inmates work in state government buildings extends beyond Louisiana; at least six other states in the U.S. allow for this practice: Arkansas, Alabama, Missouri, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Georgia.

The inmates allowed to work in the capitol or at the governors mansion are fairly low in number and are carefully screened. According to NOLA.com, about 20 to 25 people work daily in the capitol, and 15 to 18 other inmates work as groundskeepers outside the building. The inmates may not be serving a sentence for a sex crime or a violent offense like murder and must have a history of good behavior while incarcerated and display good work ethic. Furthermore, only inmates at the Dixon Correctional Institute (a men-only facility) can work at the capitol, as it is only 30 miles away.

A similar process occurs in Georgia, where inmates must receive a referral from the Board of Pardons of Parole or the Classification Committee within a state prison. Working at the governors mansion in Georgia is contingent upon an inmates criminal history, their behavior while incarcerated and their release date, among other factors.

The inmates perform janitorial tasks such as cleaning the floors or the offices of state legislators. In the Louisiana capitol, inmates also perform small tasks for legislators like grabbing lunch for them.

While inmates working in state government buildings are dutifully screened, they are not much better paid than prisoners with other jobs. In Louisiana, inmates in the capitol are paid between 2 and 20 cents per hour. They could opt for earning good-time credit toward early release, but only if they qualify. And with a normal workday of at least 12 hoursfrom 5 in the morning to at least 5 in the afternoon, barring legislative sessions when inmates work more than 12 hoursthe prisoners make between 24 cents and $2.40 a day. Inmates working in the governors mansion in Missouri recently got a small pay raise to $1.25 an hour to make about $10 per day. With the previous arrangement, prisoners earned $9 a day. In Arkansas, the prisoners are not paid at all.

History of the practice

The practice of using prison inmates as laborers stretches back to the end of the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation. As more black people were freed from slavery, the plantation economy of the South began to falter with the loss of their primary form of labor. The result was the establishment of vagrancy laws, which specifically targeted black communities, in an effort to incarcerate more black people and force them to work once again.

Even the name given to prisoners who work as servants in governors mansions and capitol buildings in some statestrusteeis the same title that was given to prisoners who worked as overseers on infamous prison plantations such as Angola and Parchman. Prison plantations began replacing the convict lease system in the 1920s as a way for prisoners, an overwhelming majority of whom were black men, to work. Back then, it was considered a privilege to be an overseer on a plantation, and the same narrative goes for inmates working in governors mansions today.

All of this, it looks very familiar: having black laborers toiling in the fields under the eye of overseers and having a white governor served by people drawn from that same forced labor pool, said Carl Takei, a staff attorney at the National Prison Project of the ACLU.

Since then, prisoners have been used as underpaid and unpaid laborers, from private companies to state government buildings. The legal loophole that allows this practice to continue is the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. While the 13th Amendment is best known for abolishing slavery, a clause in the amendment stipulates for the continued legality of slavery within the criminal justice system.

The clause reads: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

If somebody is being subjected to forced labor as part of their sentence in a criminal proceeding, then that is outside the scope of the 13th Amendment, Takei said.

Modern-day slavery?

Hillary Clinton made waves for a passage in her 1996 book It Takes A Villagewhen a Twitter userposted photosof a passage in the memoir where Clinton talks about the prisoners who worked in the governors mansion. The passage quickly spread through social media, with many people criticizing Clinton and calling the practice a form of modern-day slavery.

Both Sinyangwe and Takei agree that the current system is exploitative in that inmates who work are barely paid.

When you lock people up and force them to work without providing them a fair wage, thats called slavery, Takei said.

Despite scrutiny from criminal justice advocates, many corrections departments in states that still use this practice have justified it on the grounds that having inmates work reduces recidivism rates and is more beneficial to them overall.

Joseph Nix, director of executive security at the governors mansion in Mississippi, told the Los Angeles Times in 1988 that the inmates tend to make the best workers.

George Lombardi, the Missouri Department of Corrections director, defended the departments work release program, in which one of the jobs includes working at the governors mansion. About 700 of the 30,000 inmates in the states prison system are part of the work release program.

Lombardi told Missourinet the program instills great work ethic, pride, self-esteem and compassion in offenders.

It really cuts to the core philosophy of our department, which is in addition to the time you have to serve, you have another obligation to help your community if possible, Lombardi said. So we present you with opportunities to do that in the form of work release and/or our restorative justice efforts that we have throughout the system.

Paula Earls, executive director of the governors mansion in Missouri, told the Los Angeles Timesin 1998that there have been no problems with inmates and touted the benefits of having inmates work at the mansion.

"We're their last leg before they get out to society," she said. "I treat them like staff. I appreciate the work they do. They are ready to go back out and make something of themselves and we hope we help with that."

Sinyangwe said these justifications for using inmate labor share similarities with the justifications people used for slaverythat it helped civilize black slaves and increased their work ethic.

When you read the history books about the Antebellum South, those are the same arguments being used, he said. So Im not persuaded by them. I dont think theyre original or new.

Arguments that inmate labor can prepare prisoners for integrating into the outside world once they are released also lose weight because of how difficult it is for former prisoners even to get a job to begin with. The hiring practice of asking applicants to indicate their criminal history on job applications has a harmful effect on ex-convicts, as they are less likely to get called back. These results skew along racial lines, as a study by Harvard sociologist Devah Pager found that only 5 percent of black men with a criminal conviction hear back from potential employers. The research also showed that black men with no criminal convictions are less likely to get hired than white men with criminal convictions14 percent for black men with no record compared to 17 percent of white men with a criminal record.

Wendy Sawyer, a policy analyst at the Prison Policy Initiative, said a larger issue than recidivism are the economic and racial barriers inmates face once they are released.

Everyone's upset about recidivism rates, and it's all about trying to keep people out once they're out, she said. But then we make it as impossible as we can for that to work for people....We set up all these barriers that make it difficult for people to get their lives back together.

Arguments about recidivism and psychological benefits aside, another factor driving this practice is its cost-cutting benefits for the state. Because inmates are severely underpaid or not paid at all for their work, the state saves money on every prisoner working in the capitol or the governors mansion by not having to shell out the minimum wage to compensate them. This was the case in Louisiana when inmates began working in the capitol in 1990, as the state was experiencing a financial crisis. Inmates working at the governor's mansion were also employed as a cost-saving measure.

Takei said these arguments made to justify the practice do not excuse the fact that it is a deeply exploitative system.

The fact that performing particular tasks may be part of a rehabilitation strategy doesnt excuse the fact that the people in these positions are denied a fair wage and the labor protections they would be entitled to if they were performing the same work on the outside, he said.

Sawyer noted that the greater underlying problem is that the prison system in the U.S. is hardly rehabilitative. It's really just punitive, she said. It's just people sitting there, kind of locked out of society.

Remembering the big picture

While the practice of using inmate labor in capitol buildings and governors mansions largely stays under the radar, it speaks to a larger issue in the prison labor system. As a whole, inmates who work while incarcerated, whether for a private company, for the state or even within the prison, make little to no money. This is despite the fact that in federal prisons, 100 percent of able-bodied inmates are required to work, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. In addition, the average rate of minimum wage for inmates paid by the state is 93 cents, while the average maximum wage is $4.73.

Takei said prisoners working in the governors mansion or the capitol building are caught between a rock and a hard place.

If your choice is between getting paid zero dollars an hour or being paid 25 cents an hour, oftentimes youll choose 25 cents an hour because you need that money, he said.

Sinyangwe said that at the very least, prisoners who are working should get paid a minimum wage for their labor. He noted that reducing recidivism rates could be better accomplished if prisoners earned an adequate wage and could either save the money or spend the money while incarcerated on services like calling family members or buying commissary items. He added that in states like Louisianaone of the poorest states in the countryfamilies of inmates are often financially struggling and shoulder many of the costs their family member incurs while in prison.

I think it would be incredibly impactful to reduce the recidivism rates by making sure that when people get out of jail, they actually have money to actually start a life, he said. That they are not forced to go back into the informal economy or committing crimes just to make a living.

Takei echoed this sentiment. I doubt that if you talk to any of the people who are working as servants in the governors mansion that they would object to the idea of actually being paid a fair wage for their work, he said.

Takei acknowledged that reforming the prison labor system would be difficult, given the precedent set by the 13th Amendment that legalizes this form of modern-day slavery. A number of courts around the country have also affirmed that prisoners arenot protected by the Fair Labor Standards Act or the National Labor Relations Act.

There is also the complacency of state legislators and governors who interact with these inmates every day, but have not taken any action to better their circumstances.

These were the legislators who had the power to change those dynamics, and yet who are benefiting by preserving them, Sinyangwe said.

Sawyer added that the issue has become a missed opportunity for progressives in particular to draw more attention to a practice that is essentially hiding in plain sight.

They're in the state buildings. They're in our places of government, she said. And we're accepting that that's how this country's going to be.Our state governments are going to benefit from that kind of labor. It feels like kind of a passive acceptance.

Since witnessing the inmates working in the Baton Rouge capitol building, Sam Sinyangwe said he has been looking at methods of reform, whether that involves administrative regulation, a legislative change or even a constitutional amendment to revise the loophole in the 13th Amendment. But he has not lost sight of the broader goal: ending mass incarceration.

What I would like to see, one, is that we are moving to end mass incarceration, he said, to repeal the policies and the draconian sentencing laws that got us to this place.

Celisa Calacal is a junior writing fellow for AlterNet. She is a senior journalism major and legal studies minor at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York. Previously she worked at ThinkProgress and served as an editor for Ithaca College's student newspaper.Follow her at @celisa_mia.

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'Modern-Day Slavery': Many Southern States Have Prison Inmates Working in Governor's Mansions and Capitol Buildings - AlterNet

Abolition Of Work | Prometheism.net – Part 26

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No one should ever work.

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil youd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.

That doesnt mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution. By play I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than childs play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isnt passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act.

The ludic life is totally incompatible with existing reality. So much the worse for reality, the gravity hole that sucks the vitality from the little in life that still distinguishes it from mere survival. Curiously or maybe not all the old ideologies are conservative because they believe in work. Some of them, like Marxism and most brands of anarchism, believe in work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else.

Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marxs wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists except that Im not kidding I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. Theyll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists dont care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.

You may be wondering if Im joking or serious. Im joking and serious. To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesnt have to be frivolous, although frivolity isnt triviality; very often we ought to take frivolity seriously. Id like life to be a game but a game with high stakes. I want to play for keeps.

The alternative to work isnt just idleness. To be ludic is not to be quaaludic. As much as I treasure the pleasure of torpor, its never more rewarding than when it punctuates other pleasures and pastimes. Nor am I promoting the managed time-disciplined safety-valve called leisure; far from it. Leisure is nonwork for the sake of work. Leisure is time spent recovering from work and in the frenzied but hopeless attempt to forget about work. Many people return from vacations so beat that they look forward to returning to work so they can rest up. The main difference between work and leisure is that at work at least you get paid for your alienation and enervation.

I am not playing definitional games with anybody. When I say I want to abolish work, I mean just what I say, but I want to say what I mean by defining my terms in non-idiosyncratic ways. My minimum definition of work is forced labor, that is, compulsory production. Both elements are essential. Work is production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick. (The carrot is just the stick by other means.) But not all creation is work. Work is never done for its own sake, its done on account of some product or output that the worker (or, more often, somebody else) gets out of it. This is what work necessarily is. To define it is to despise it. But work is usually even worse than its definition decrees. The dynamic of domination intrinsic to work tends over time toward elaboration. In advanced work-riddled societies, including all industrial societies whether capitalist or communist, work invariably acquires other attributes which accentuate its obnoxiousness.

Usually and this is even more true in communist than capitalist countries, where the state is almost the only employer and everyone is an employee work is employment, i.e., wage-labor, which means selling yourself on the installment plan. Thus 95% of Americans who work, work for somebody (or something) else. In Cuba or China or any other alternative model which might be adduced, the corresponding figure approaches 100%. Only the embattled Third World peasant bastions Mexico, India, Brazil, Turkey temporarily shelter significant concentrations of agriculturists who perpetuate the traditional arrangement of most laborers in the last several millennia, the payment of taxes (= ransom) to the state or rent to parasitic landlords in return for being otherwise left alone. Even this raw deal is beginning to look good. All industrial (and office) workers are employees and under the sort of surveillance which ensures servility.

But modern work has worse implications. People dont just work, they have jobs. One person does one productive task all the time on an or-else basis. Even if the task has a quantum of intrinsic interest (as increasingly many jobs dont) the monotony of its obligatory exclusivity drains its ludic potential. A job that might engage the energies of some people, for a reasonably limited time, for the fun of it, is just a burden on those who have to do it for forty hours a week with no say in how it should be done, for the profit of owners who contribute nothing to the project, and with no opportunity for sharing tasks or spreading the work among those who actually have to do it. This is the real world of work: a world of bureaucratic blundering, of sexual harassment and discrimination, of bonehead bosses exploiting and scapegoating their subordinates who by any rational-technical criteria should be calling the shots. But capitalism in the real world subordinates the rational maximization of productivity and profit to the exigencies of organizational control.

The degradation which most workers experience on the job is the sum of assorted indignities which can be denominated as discipline. Foucault has complexified this phenomenon but it is simple enough. Discipline consists of the totality of totalitarian controls at the workplacesurveillance, rotework, imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching-in and out, etc. Discipline is what the factory and the office and the store share with the prison and the school and the mental hospital. It is something historically original and horrible. It was beyond the capacities of such demonic dictators of yore as Nero and Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible. For all their bad intentions they just didnt have the machinery to control their subjects as thoroughly as modern despots do. Discipline is the distinctively diabolical modern mode of control, it is an innovative intrusion which must be interdicted at the earliest opportunity.

Such is work. Play is just the opposite. Play is always voluntary. What might otherwise be play is work if its forced. This is axiomatic. Bernie de Koven has defined play as the suspension of consequences. This is unacceptable if it implies that play is inconsequential. The point is not that play is without consequences. This is to demean play. The point is that the consequences, if any, are gratuitous. Playing and giving are closely related, they are the behavioral and transactional facets of the same impulse, the play-instinct. They share an aristocratic disdain for results. The player gets something out of playing; thats why he plays. But the core reward is the experience of the activity itself (whatever it is). Some otherwise attentive students of play, like Johan Huizinga (Homo Ludens), define it as gameplaying or following rules. I respect Huizingas erudition but emphatically reject his constraints. There are many good games (chess, baseball, Monopoly, bridge) which are rule-governed but there is much more to play than game-playing. Conversation, sex, dancing, travelthese practices arent rule-governed but they are surely play if anything is. And rules can be played with at least as readily as anything else.

Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who arent free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or-else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.

And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace. The liberals and conservatives and libertarians who lament totalitarianism are phonies and hypocrites. There is more freedom in any moderately de-Stalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or a monastery. In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and factories came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each others control techniques. A worker is a part-time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called insubordination, just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation. Without necessarily endorsing it for them either, it is noteworthy that children at home and in school receive much the same treatment, justified in their case by their supposed immaturity. What does this say about their parents and teachers who work?

The demeaning system of domination Ive described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes its not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or better stil l industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are free is lying or stupid. You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid, monotonous work, chances are youll end up boring, stupid, and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education. People who are regimented all their lives, handed to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home in the end, are habituated to hierarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias. Their obedience training at work carries over into the families they start, thus reproducing the system in more ways than one, and into politics, culture and everything else. Once you drain the vitality from people at work, theyll likely submit to hierarchy and expertise in everything. Theyre used to it.

We are so close to the world of work that we cant see what it does to us. We have to rely on outside observers from other times or other cultures to appreciate the extremity and the pathology of our present position. There was a time in our own past when the work ethic would have been incomprehensible, and perhaps Weber was on to something when he tied its appearance to a religion, Calvinism, which if it emerged today instead of four centuries ago would immediately and appropriately be labeled a cult. Be that as it may, we have only to draw upon the wisdom of antiquity to put work in perspective. The ancients saw work for what it is, and their view prevailed, the Calvinist cranks notwithstanding, until overthrown by industrialism but not before receiving the endorsement of its prophets.

Lets pretend for a moment that work doesnt turn people into stultified submissives. Lets pretend, in defiance of any plausible psychology and the ideology of its boosters, that it has no effect on the formation of character. And lets pretend that work isnt as boring and tiring and humiliating as we all know it really is. Even then, work would still make a mockery of all humanistic and democratic aspirations, just because it usurps so much of our time. Socrates said that manual laborers make bad friends and bad citizens because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and citizenship. He was right. Because of work, no matter what we do, we keep looking at our watches. The only thing free about so-called free time is that it doesnt cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor, as a factor of production, not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace, but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair. Coal and steel dont do that. Lathes and typewriters dont do that. No wonder Edward G. Robinson in one of his gangster movies exclaimed, Work is for saps!

Both Plato and Xenophon attribute to Socrates and obviously share with him an awareness of the destructive effects of work on the worker as a citizen and as a human being. Herodotus identified contempt for work as an attribute of the classical Greeks at the zenith of their culture. To take only one Roman example, Cicero said that whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves. His candor is now rare, but contemporary primitive societies which we are wont to look down upon have provided spokesmen who have enlightened Western anthropologists. The Kapauku of West Irian, according to Posposil, have a conception of balance in life and accordingly work only every other day, the day of rest designed to regain the lost power and health. Our ancestors, even as late as the eighteenth century when they were far along the path to our present predicament, at least were aware of what we have forgotten, the underside of industrialization. Their religious devotion to St. Monday thus establishing a de facto five-day week 150-200 years before its legal consecration was the despair of the earliest factory owners. They took a long time in submitting to the tyranny of the bell, predecessor of the time clock. In fact it was necessary for a generation or two to replace adult males with women accustomed to obedience and children who could be molded to fit industrial needs. Even the exploited peasants of the ancien rgime wrested substantial time back from their landlords work. According to Lafargue, a fourth of the French peasants calendar was devoted to Sundays and holidays, and Chayanovs figures from villages in Czarist Russia hardly a progressive society likewise show a fourth or fifth of peasants days devoted to repose. Controlling for productivity, we are obviously far behind these backward societies. The exploited muzhiks would wonder why any of us are working at all. So should we.

To grasp the full enormity of our deterioration, however, consider the earliest condition of humanity, without government or property, when we wandered as hunter-gatherers. Hobbes surmised that life was then nasty, brutish and short. Others assume that life was a desperate unremitting struggle for subsistence, a war waged against a harsh Nature with death and disaster awaiting the unlucky or anyone who was unequal to the challenge of the struggle for existence. Actually, that was all a projection of fears for the collapse of government authority over communities unaccustomed to doing without it, like the England of Hobbes during the Civil War. Hobbes compatriots had already encountered alternative forms of society which illustrated other ways of lifein North America, particularlybut already these were too remote from their experience to be understandable. (The lower orders, closer to the condition of the Indians, understood it better and often found it attractive. Throughout the seventeenth century, English settlers defected to Indian tribes or, captured in war, refused to return to the colonies. But the Indians no more defected to white settlements than West Germans climbed the Berlin Wall from the west.) The survival of the fittest version the Thomas Huxley version of Darwinism was a better account of economic conditions in Victorian England than it was of natural selection, as the anarchist Kropotkin showed in his book Mutual Aid, A Factor in Evolution. (Kropotkin was a scientist a geographer whod had ample involuntary opportunity for fieldwork whilst exiled in Siberia: he knew what he was talking about.) Like most social and political theory, the story Hobbes and his successors told was really unacknowledged autobiography.

The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, surveying the data on contemporary hunter-gatherers, exploded the Hobbesian myth in an article entitled The Original Affluent Society. They work a lot less than we do, and their work is hard to distinguish from what we regard as play. Sahlins concluded that hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society. They worked an average of four hours a day, assuming they were working at all. Their labor, as it appears to us, was skilled labor which exercised their physical and intellectual capacities; unskilled labor on any large scale, as Sahlins says, is impossible except under industrialism. Thus it satisfied Friedrich Schillers definition of play, the only occasion on which man realizes his complete humanity by giving full play to both sides of his twofold nature, thinking and feeling. As he put it: The animal works when deprivation is the mainspring of its activity, and it plays when the fullness of its strength is this mainspring, when superabundant life is its own stimulus to activity. (A modern version dubiously developmental is Abraham Maslows counterposition of deficiency and growth motivation.) Play and freedom are, as regards production, coextensive. Even Marx, who belongs (for all his good intentions) in the productivist pantheon, observed that the realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labor under the compulsion of necessity and external utility is required. He never could quite bring himself to identify this happy circumstance as what it is, the abolition of workits rather anomalous, after all, to be pro-worker and anti-workbut we can.

The aspiration to go backwards or forwards to a life without work is evident in every serious social or cultural history of pre-industrial Europe, among them M. Dorothy Georges England in Transition and Peter Burkes Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Also pertinent is Daniel Bells essay Work and Its Discontents, the first text, I believe, to refer to the revolt against work in so many words and, had it been understood, an important correction to the complacency ordinarily associated with the volume in which it was collected, The End of Ideology. Neither critics nor celebrants have noticed that Bells end-of-ideology thesis signaled not the end of social unrest but the beginning of a new, uncharted phase unconstrained and uninformed by ideology. It was Seymour Lipset (in Political Man), not Bell, who announced at the same time that the fundamental problems of the Industrial Revolution have been solved, only a few years before the post- or meta-industrial discontents of college students drove Lipset from UC Berkeley to the relative (and temporary) tranquillity of Harvard.

As Bell notes, Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, for all his enthusiasm for the market and the division of labor, was more alert to (and more honest about) the seamy side of work than Ayn Rand or the Chicago economists or any of Smiths modern epigones. As Smith observed: The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations has no occasion to exert his understanding He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. Here, in a few blunt words, is my critique of work. Bell, writing in 1956, the Golden Age of Eisenhower imbecility and American self-satisfaction, identified the unorganized, unorganizable malaise of the 1970s and since, the one no political tendency is able to harness, the one identified in HEWs report Work in America, the one which cannot be exploited and so is ignored. That problem is the revolt against work. It does not figure in any text by any laissez-faire economist Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Richard Posner because, in their terms, as they used to say on Lost in Space, it does not compute.

If these objections, informed by the love of liberty, fail to persuade humanists of a utilitarian or even paternalist turn, there are others which they cannot disregard. Work is hazardous to your health, to borrow a book title. In fact, work is mass murder or genocide. Directly or indirectly, work will kill most of the people who read these words. Between 14,000 and 25,000 workers are killed annually in this country on the job. Over two million are disabled. Twenty to twenty-five million are injured every year. And these figures are based on a very conservative estimation of what constitutes a work-related injury. Thus they dont count the half-million cases of occupational disease every year. I looked at one medical textbook on occupational diseases which was 1,200 pages long. Even this barely scratches the surface. The available statistics count the obvious cases like the 100,000 miners who have black lung disease, of whom 4,000 die every year. What the statistics dont show is that tens of millions of people have their lifespans shortened by work which is all that homicide means, after all. Consider the doctors who work themselves to death in their late 50s. Consider all the other workaholics.

Even if you arent killed or crippled while actually working, you very well might be while going to work, coming from work, looking for work, or trying to forget about work. The vast majority of victims of the automobile are either doing one of these work-obligatory activities or else fall afoul of those who do them. To this augmented body-count must be added the victims of auto-industrial pollution and work-induced alcoholism and drug addiction. Both cancer and heart disease are modern afflictions normally traceable, directly or indirectly, to work.

Work, then, institutionalizes homicide as a way of life. People think the Cambodians were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we any different? The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred, of an egalitarian society. We kill people in the six-figure range (at least) in order to sell Big Macs and Cadillacs to the survivors. Our forty or fifty thousand annual highway fatalities are victims, not martyrs. They died for nothing or rather, they died for work. But work is nothing to die for.

State control of the economy is no solution. Work is, if anything, more dangerous in the state-socialist countries than it is here. Thousands of Russian workers were killed or injured building the Moscow subway. Chernobyl and other Soviet nuclear disasters covered up until recently make Times Beach and Three Mile Islandbut not Bhopallook like elementary-school air-raid drills. On the other hand, deregulation, currently fashionable, wont help and will probably hurt. From a health and safety standpoint, among others, work was at its worst in the days when the economy most closely approximated laissez-faire. Historians like Eugene Genovese have argued persuasively thatas antebellum slavery apologists insistedfactory wage-workers in the Northern American states and in Europe were worse off than Southern plantation slaves. No rearrangement of relations among bureaucrats and businessmen seems to make much difference at the point of production. Serious implementation of even the rather vague standards enforceable in theory by OSHA would probably bring the economy to a standstill. The enforcers apparently appreciate this, since they dont even try to crack down on most malefactors.

What Ive said so far ought not to be controversial. Many workers are fed up with work. There are high and rising rates of absenteeism, turnover, employee theft and sabotage, wildcat strikes, and overall goldbricking on the job. There may be some movement toward a conscious and not just visceral rejection of work. And yet the prevalent feeling, universal among bosses and their agents and also widespread among workers themselves, is that work itself is inevitable and necessary.

I disagree. It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of free activities. To abolish work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done. At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand and I think this the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes except that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that shouldnt make them less enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other.

I dont suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isnt worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Thirty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes.

Forty percent of the workforce are white-collar workers, most of whom have some of the most tedious and idiotic jobs ever concocted. Entire industries, insurance and banking and real estate for instance, consist of nothing but useless paper-shuffling. It is no accident that the tertiary sector, the service sector, is growing while the secondary sector (industry) stagnates and the primary sector (agriculture) nearly disappears. Because work is unnecessary except to those whose power it secures, workers are shifted from relatively useful to relatively useless occupations as a measure to ensure public order. Anything is better than nothing. Thats why you cant go home just because you finish early. They want your time, enough of it to make you theirs, even if they have no use for most of it. Otherwise why hasnt the average work week gone down by more than a few minutes in the last sixty years?

Next we can take a meat-cleaver to production work itself. No more war production, nuclear power, junk food, feminine hygiene deodorant and above all, no more auto industry to speak of. An occasional Stanley Steamer or Model T might be all right, but the auto-eroticism on which such pest-holes as Detroit and Los Angeles depend is out of the question. Already, without even trying, weve virtually solved the energy crisis, the environmental crisis and assorted other insoluble social problems.

Finally, we must do away with far and away the largest occupation, the one with the longest hours, the lowest pay and some of the most tedious tasks around. I refer to housewives doing housework and child-rearing. By abolishing wage-labor and achieving full unemployment we undermine the sexual division of labor. The nuclear family as we know it is an inevitable adaptation to the division of labor imposed by modern wage-work. Like it or not, as things have been for the last century or two it is economically rational for the man to bring home the bacon, for the woman to do the shitwork and provide him with a haven in a heartless world, and for the children to be marched off to youth concentration camps called schools, primarily to keep them out of Moms hair but still under control, but incidentally to acquire the habits of obedience and punctuality so necessary for workers. If you would be rid of patriarchy, get rid of the nuclear family whose unpaid shadow work, as Ivan Illich says, makes possible the work-system that makes it necessary. Bound up with this no-nukes strategy is the abolition of childhood and the closing of the schools. There are more full-time students than full-time workers in this country. We need children as teachers, not students. They have a lot to contribute to the ludic revolution because theyre better at playing than grown-ups are. Adults and children are not identical but they will become equal through interdependence. Only play can bridge the generation gap.

I havent as yet even mentioned the possibility of cutting way down on the little work that remains by automating and cybernizing it. All the scientists and engineers and technicians freed from bothering with war research and planned obsolescence should have a good time devising means to eliminate fatigue and tedium and danger from activities like mining. Undoubtedly theyll find other projects to amuse themselves with. Perhaps theyll set up world-wide all-inclusive multi-media communications systems or found space colonies. Perhaps. I myself am no gadget freak. I wouldnt care to live in a pushbutton paradise. I dont want robot slaves to do everything; I want to do things myself. There is, I think, a place for labor-saving technology, but a modest place. The historical and pre-historical record is not encouraging. When productive technology went from hunting-gathering to agriculture and on to industry, work increased while skills and self-determination diminished. The further evolution of industrialism has accentuated what Harry Braverman called the degradation of work. Intelligent observers have always been aware of this. John Stuart Mill wrote that all the labor-saving inventions ever devised havent saved a moments labor. Karl Marx wrote that it would be possible to write a history of the inventions, made since 1830, for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working class. The enthusiastic technophiles Saint-Simon, Comte, Lenin, B.F. Skinner have always been unabashed authoritarians also; which is to say, technocrats. We should be more than skeptical about the promises of the computer mystics. They work like dogs; chances are, if they have their way, so will the rest of us. But if they have any particularized contributions more readily subordinated to human purposes than the run of high tech, lets give them a hearing.

What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to discard the notions of a job and an occupation. Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced to jobs which certain people, and only those people, are forced to do to the exclusion of all else. Is it not odd that farm workers toil painfully in the fields while their air-conditioned masters go home every weekend and putter about in their gardens? Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the Golden Age of the dilettante which will put the Renaissance to shame. There wont be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them.

The secret of turning work into play, as Charles Fourier demonstrated, is to arrange useful activities to take advantage of whatever it is that various people at various times in fact enjoy doing. To make it possible for some people to do the things they could enjoy, it will be enough just to eradicate the irrationalities and distortions which afflict these activities when they are reduced to work. I, for instance, would enjoy doing some (not too much) teaching, but I dont want coerced students and I dont care to suck up to pathetic pedants for tenure.

Second, there are some things that people like to do from time to time, but not for too long, and certainly not all the time. You might enjoy baby-sitting for a few hours in order to share the company of kids, but not as much as their parents do. The parents meanwhile profoundly appreciate the time to themselves that you free up for them, although theyd get fretful if parted from their progeny for too long. These differences among individuals are what make a life of free play possible. The same principle applies to many other areas of activity, especially the primal ones. Thus many people enjoy cooking when they can practice it seriously at their leisure, but not when theyre just fueling up human bodies for work.

Third other things being equal some things that are unsatisfying if done by yourself or in unpleasant surroundings or at the orders of an overlord are enjoyable, at least for a while, if these circumstances are changed. This is probably true, to some extent, of all work. People deploy their otherwise wasted ingenuity to make a game of the least inviting drudge-jobs as best they can. Activities that appeal to some people dont always appeal to all others, but everyone at least potentially has a variety of interests and an interest in variety. As the saying goes, anything once. Fourier was the master at speculating about how aberrant and perverse penchants could be put to use in post-civilized society, what he called Harmony. He thought the Emperor Nero would have turned out all right if as a child he could have indulged his taste for bloodshed by working in a slaughterhouse. Small children who notoriously relish wallowing in filth could be organized in Little Hordes to clean toilets and empty the garbage, with medals awarded to the outstanding. I am not arguing for these precise examples but for the underlying principle, which I think makes perfect sense as one dimension of an overall revolutionary transformation. Bear in mind that we dont have to take todays work just as we find it and match it up with the proper people, some of whom would have to be perverse indeed.

If technology has a role in all this, it is less to automate work out of existence than to open up new realms for re/creation. To some extent we may want to return to handicrafts, which William Morris considered a probable and desirable upshot of communist revolution. Art would be taken back from the snobs and collectors, abolished as a specialized department catering to an elite audience, and its qualities of beauty and creation restored to integral life from which they were stolen by work. Its a sobering thought that the Grecian urns we write odes about and showcase in museums were used in their own time to store olive oil. I doubt our everyday artifacts will fare as well in the future, if there is one. The point is that theres no such thing as progress in the world of work; if anything, its just the opposite. We shouldnt hesitate to pilfer the past for what it has to offer, the ancients lose nothing yet we are enriched.

The reinvention of daily life means marching off the edge of our maps. There is, it is true, more suggestive speculation than most people suspect. Besides Fourier and Morrisand even a hint, here and there, in Marx there are the writings of Kropotkin, the syndicalists Pataud and Pouget, anarcho-communists old (Berkman) and new (Bookchin). The Goodman brothers Communitas is exemplary for illustrating what forms follow from given functions (purposes), and there is something to be gleaned form the often hazy heralds of alternative/appropriate/intermediate/convivial technology, like Schumacher and especially Illich, once you disconnect their fog machines. The situationists as represented by Vaneigems Revolution of Everyday Life and in the Situationist International Anthology are so ruthlessly lucid as to be exhilarating, even if they never did quite square the endorsement of the rule of the workers councils with the abolition of work. Better their incongruity, though, than any extant version of leftism, whose devotees look to be the last champions of work, for if there were no work there would be no workers, and without workers, whom would the left have to organize?

So the abolitionists will be largely on their own. No one can say what would result from unleashing the creative power stultified by work. Anything can happen. The tiresome debaters problem of freedom vs. necessity, with its theological overtones, resolves itself practically once the production of use-values is coextensive with the consumption of delightful play-activity.

Life will become a game, or rather many games, but not as it is nowa zero/sum game. An optimal sexual encounter is the paradigm of productive play. The participants potentiate each others pleasures, nobody keeps score, and everybody wins. The more you give, the more you get. In the ludic life, the best of sex will diffuse into the better part of daily life. Generalized play leads to the libidinization of life. Sex, in turn, can become less urgent and desperate, more playful. If we play our cards right, we can all get more out of life than we put into it; but only if we play for keeps.

Workers of the world relax!

This essay originated as a speech in 1980. A revised and enlarged version was published as a pamphlet in 1985, and in the first edition of The Abolition of Work and Other Essays (Loompanics Unlimited, 1986). It has also appeared in many periodicals and anthologies, including translations into French, German, Italian, Dutch and Slovene. Revised by the author for the Inspiracy Press edition.

Part I: The Abolition of Work

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Abolition Of Work | Prometheism.net - Part 26

Despite Republican opposition, Dodd-Frank not going anywhere – San Francisco Chronicle

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The Republican-controlled House of Representatives recently passed a bill meant to repeal a landmark law enacted under President Barack Obama.

No, Im not referring to the Affordable Care Act but rather the Dodd-Frank Act. The law, passed in 2010, was designed to prevent another banking meltdown like the one that precipitated the Great Recession, the worst economic crisis in the United States since the 1930s.

But no matter how much President Trump wants to unravel his predecessors legacy, he and his allies must know that even outright repeals cannot negate the new realities unleashed by the laws. Because of the Affordable Care Act, health care has morphed from just another cog in the U.S. economy to a fundamental expectation that all citizens, regardless of age, income or geography, should receive some level of care.

Similarly, Dodd-Frank has created new facts: mainly, the belief that banks must not again become too big to fail and that taxpayers must not bail them out if they do. That mind-set will remain no matter what happens to the law.

Dodd-Frank is not going away, said Jackie Prester, a former federal bank examiner who now chairs the financial services transactions group at Baker Donelson law firm in Memphis. And while Congress will probably wind up just tweaking Dodd-Frank, the real issue is not the law itself but rather how the regulatory agencies implement it, she said.

One of the core principles of Dodd-Frank was that large banks like JPMorgan, Citibank and Wells Fargo in San Francisco must carry more capital on their balance sheets against liabilities like loans and mortgages. The Federal Reserve is implementing international standards that require banks to possess enough highly liquid assets (things they can quickly turn into cash) to cover obligations over a 30-day period sufficient time for the feds to take action to stabilize the industry.

The idea is to not only prevent a panic and a run on the banks but also to discourage banks from risky behavior. Requiring banks to put up more cash to cover risk means they will be less likely to do something risky.

Dodd-Frank is very, very big on strong capital requirements, said Clifford Rossi, a former chief risk officer at Citigroups consumer lending unit who now teaches finance at the University of Maryland. You can cure a lot of sins by pushing the industry to take smaller risks.

The House bill, however, provides an off-ramp for banks to get exemptions from these Dodd-Fank requirements providing they maintain high levels of capital.

That worries Rossi, who fears that banks will go crazy again.

Banks dont need a lot of encouragement to say, We can push the pedal to the metal, he said.

Its not clear whether this provision will survive the Senate. Because of Dodd-Frank, the industry is now well capitalized, which has significantly reduced the prospect of another banking crisis.

Increased capital requirements and stronger regulation and supervision has created a much safer financial sector, according to a report by the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington.

The other enduring feature of Dodd-Frank is the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. To conservatives and Republicans, the agency is just another example of yet another unnecessary federal bureaucracy stifling the economy.

But the House bill does not call for the abolition of the agency just greater control over it.

For that reprieve, supporters of the agencys work can thank Wells Fargo.

In September, the agency fined the bank $100 million because employees opened savings, checking and credit card accounts in the names of customers, without their consent, to meet aggressive sales goals. Wells Fargo eventually admitted that a wayward sales culture had prompted employees to create up to 2 million fraudulent accounts.

That led to CEO John Stumpfs sudden retirement and instituted reforms throughout the company to prevent another such scandal.

Although several agencies, including the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve, already regulate banks, it was the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that brought the scandal to the attention of Congress and the broader public. Which begs the question: Without Dodd-Frank, would Wells Fargo employees have gone on engaging in fraud unchecked?

Thats a fair question, said Prester, who previously worked at the Office of the Comptroller. Why didnt any of the other regulators see it before Dodd-Frank?

In other words, the agency did exactly what Dodd-Frank created it to do: focus on protecting consumers in a way other regulators couldnt or wouldnt.

So Dodd-Frank may get chipped away. But the laws legacy is intact: higher expectations of our banks, and higher expectations of their regulators. Those are written in our minds, not in the text of any bill.

Thomas Lee is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: tlee@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ByTomLee

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Despite Republican opposition, Dodd-Frank not going anywhere - San Francisco Chronicle

Why Women Are Booking More Adventure Travel Than Ever – Travel+Leisure

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It was New Year's Day 2012, and Allison Fleece was feeling unmoored. On a whim, she e-mailed a group of her most intrepid friends. "This time next year," she wrote, "I want to be standing on the roof of Africa." The following winter, she was on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, exhausted and giddy, with nine women beside her. She turned to Danielle Thornton, a climbing buddy who would soon become her best friend. "This is what all travel should be like," she said.

The next year, Fleece and Thornton headed back to Kilimanjaro this time leading a group of 29 women from 11 countries on the first trip of WHOA Travel, their fledgling adventure-tour company for women. In their previous lives, Fleece, now 31, had been an education advisor and Thornton, 34, a creative director at an ad agency. But a few months after their Kilimanjaro expedition, they'd quit their jobs, Googled how to form an LLC, and launched a travel business. WHOA stands for Women High on Adventure or Women Hooked on Awesomeness, depending on whom you ask.

It's one of the latest additions to the growing list of women-only adventure companies outfitters that cater to a generation of female travelers who prefer surf weekends and mountain-climbing expeditions to the spa weekends of old. The idea goes back to the late 1970s, when women who'd come of age in the era of second-wave feminism began starting scrappy adventure programs, outdoorsy relatives of the feminist music festivals and conferences that were then sprouting up around the country. By the late 90s, upscale operators had joined the fray, courting luxury travelers often widowed or divorced retirees who had the time and money to travel but didn't want to be the loner in a group of couples. More recently, with a certain demographic of women rebranding feminism as less a political calling than a lifestyle choice one focused on personal empowerment and self-care female-centric travel companies are retooling and expanding once again.

"We were around back when women-only travel was kind of a joke," says Jennifer Haddow, who seven years ago took over Wild Women Expeditions, a Canada-based company founded in 1991. "People didn't really see why it was valuable." Now veteran outfitters like Haddow are diversifying their offerings to take advantage of a growing market. Wild Women has added horseback riding in Mongolia and cycling, trekking, and rafting in Thailand to its original roster of kayaking and canoeing trips in Ontario and British Columbia. Adventure Women, a 35-year-old Massachusetts company that changed hands last year, has begun catering to younger clients with its "adventurettes" bespoke getaways, like long weekends of riding, river floating, fine dining, and massages in Montana, for women who don't want a traditional bachelorette party in addition to its bucket-list journeys to places like Ireland and Nepal.

Some lifestyle companies outside the travel industry see all-female trips as a way to extend their brands. REI's recently expanded Outessa program brings women to different U.S. mountains for long weekends of yoga, hiking, and bonding. The sporting-goods giant has also ramped up its backpacking- and camping-centric REI Women's Adventures, which offer rugged outdoor experiences in locations ranging from Africa to America's national parks. For the crystals-and-Coachella crowd, the bohemian apparel brand Free People operates FP Escapes. Its wellness-focused itineraries, including superfood cooking classes in the Andes and yoga workshops in Yelapa, Mexico, come with cleanses, meditation rituals, new-moon ceremonies, and Instagram-ready accommodations like tepees and tree houses.

For some upstart outfitters, personal growth is as central to the mission as having fun. Damesly, founded last year, emphasizes professional networking and skill building, combining volcano hikes in Iceland and surfing lessons in Hawaii with workshops on topics like video editing. Fit & Fly Girl's health-focused retreats come with daily workout classes and nutritious meals. Explorer Chick has several offerings for beginners to develop wilderness survival skills and learn backpacking basics.

But for all the attention these programs devote to women's individual well-being, many also emphasize social responsibility and making lasting connections in the places they visit. "You can't just show up to sell women stuff. You have to be participating in the communities and engaged in their issues," says Wild Women's Haddow. "Clients respond to authenticity." For her company, that means striving to partner exclusively with women even in places like Nepal, where female guides are hard to find and supporting social-justice groups. On its Morocco trips, Adventure Women brings guests to a women's textile cooperative outside Fez to speak with the artisans about their lives and work. Before its Kilimanjaro treks, WHOA puts guests up at a nonprofit hotel that funds a primary school for area children; travelers' fees also help sponsor two local women to join the group on every climb. The company operates a similar program for its Machu Picchu treks.

Despite the wide range of experiences offered by these companies, all tend to attract travelers who, whatever their age or background, have reached a turning point in their lives. If you can handle whitewater rafting down a Peruvian river or summiting a 10,000-foot peak, a cross-country move or a divorce doesnt seem quite so insurmountable. Physical challenges expunge emotional pain, and many women find it more comfortable to tackle them in the company of their peers, even if theyre strangers.

Kelly Luck, 42, booked her Kilimanjaro trip with WHOA after a grueling battle with breast and thyroid cancer. On a cold, clear night this past March the 8th, International Women's Day Luck summited the mountain with 30 other women. "I don't think I could've done this with my husband," she says. "Being there with this powerful collective of women was the only way for me to go. It makes you so strong."

The kind of sisterhood Luck and Fleece both found on Kilimanjaro is one that more and more women seem to want. "We as a gender are done compartmentalizing ourselves," Fleece says. "We like to go out for a nice dinner in heels, but we can also put on hiking boots and camp on a mountain for seven days. And women are realizing that there are others out there who want the same thing."

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Contractors Unleash their Beasts at CEO Warrior event held in new training facility – Contractor Mag

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EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J. More than 80 home service business owners, including plumbing, HVAC and electrical contractors, from across the U.S., Australia and New Zealand attended the CEO Warrior Circle Mastermind event Unleash the Beast June 13-16. This was the first event to take place at the new CEO Warrior 10,000-sq.ft. training facility.

CEO Warrioris a business consulting, training, and mentoring firm, providing tested and proven methods to defeat the roadblocks that prevent small to mid-sized businesses from achieving their ultimate success. The new training facility houses three separate training quarters, so different events can occur simultaneously. In addition to the Warrior Fast Track Academy and CEO Warrior Circle training events for business owners, there are new one- and two-day course offerings in leadership, sales, marketing, service management and customer service for staff members of all levels.

CEO Warrior Circle event draws business owners from the plumbing, HVAC and electrical industries.

This is going to take our warrior movement to the next level, said Mike Agugliaro, founder of CEO Warrior. We can now offer 10,000 square feet of the greatest business training on the planet. I saw a need for more training that would make a real difference and help business owners become warriors at home and at work.

According to Shayna Shadowen, owner and office manager of Service Detectives, Energy, Illinois, workshops are meant to help you better yourself personally. Shadowen has attended seven CEO Warrior events, starting in May 2016.

Shayna Shadowen and Judy Giannone.

Mike really helps you to face your fears and personal roadblocks head on, explained Shadowen. Every exercise is about learning and growing and bettering yourself. It doesn't matter if you have a service company, a dog training company, or a consignment company, it all boils down to becoming a better you. Then you take back your growth to your business and apply the practices in your everyday life. Your company can't fail.

What Mike has created in this CEO Warrior event is powerful beyond measure and this is built for serious CEOs interested in moving the needle of their service businesses, said O.P. Almaraz, CEO of Allied Restoration Services Inc., Los Angeles. After being a part of CEO Warrior for four months, my company had a record breaking $1,000,000 month. Mikes mentorship has propelled me to grow from $4 million to a projected $6.5 million in my first year. There is nothing more powerful than a changed mind.

Breakthrough limiting beliefs

Contractors stood holding a cup filled with water for as long as 25 minutes. This is tougher than what you realize.

The Warrior Circle event, Unleash the Beast, featured a combination of training sessions on leadership skills, proven business strategies and personal empowerment exercises. The CEO Warrior training system has a unique approach, inspired by Agugliaros straightforward style and martial arts training, to help business owners create mental focus, strategic thinking, resiliency, respect and a warrior spirit to take their own businesses to the next level. Business owners participated in personal empowerment activities such as fire walking, fight training and board breaking exercises.

This is a roll-up your sleeves, get dirty and get information type of event, said Agugliaro. Everybody has a bigger purpose in life, but at the end of the day, most people are not doing the things they need to do to fulfill their bigger purpose. When the attendees leave, they can take strategic steps to change their businesses, their relationships and their lives.

Agugliaro lead individuals through a meditation practice at the beginning of the event, so each person could dig deep and uncover within themselves unconscious barriers that are affecting their lives and businesses.

After the meditation practice and before diving into the first days empowerment activities, Agugliaro asked business owners to focus on a few critical ideas presented during the event and to focus on only those few not the many of ideas and to be candid during the event and play full out. Agugliaro also instituted that each team use a talking stick to improve communication.

Often times, people try to communicate a message when there is distraction happening, said Agugliaro. This can create confusion, which can be a shared issue. Once confusion is shared this can lead to delusion, and now the confused employees are stuck. Often people in this position end up frustrated and may even get angry this is a bad place to be.

A talking stick is a foundation for improved communication. The talking stick first creates boundaries only the person with the talking stick can talk, explained Agugliaro. Without boundaries you end up with something like Animal House.

Tuesdays empowerment activities consisted of the Weakest Link and breaking boards. The Weakest Link challenged business owners strength and balance. Business owners stood holding a cup of water with foam numb chucks for as long as possible. During the board breaking, everyone wrote down on their boards what is holding them back in business and life (hopefully they were able to uncover these barriers during the meditation earlier in the day). Agugliaro then lit the boards on fire each person taking their turn to break through their board with their bare hand, thus breaking through their limiting beliefs.

Candace Roulo breaks through a board on fire with assistance from Mike Agugliaro.

Motivation was key during these empowerment activities. At one point a business owner told their teammate, I have your back I am not going to let you fall.

After the activities Agugliaro asked, What would it be like if you said that [I have your back] at your business? How would that change the overall culture?

At the end of the day, teams shared their thoughts on what they learned the first day of the Warrior Circle event. Some of those thoughts include:

The second day of the CEO Warrior Circle Mastermind event, teams had more activities to complete, which included a fire walk at night.

Walking on fire is an amazing parallel to life, said Almaraz. Every human being was born with an immense amount of potential, yet somewhere in our adolescence we shirk ourselves to fit in. We condition our minds to think that we're not good enough or not worthy, so we stop trying new things. The inward self-reflection, before the firewalk, writing down our own limiting beliefs, and acknowledging our past does not determine our future this part of the fire walking practice is the ultimate game changer. And walking over hot coals, something that seemed impossible, is now my reality. And if I could do that, I can certainly breakthrough my past limiting beliefs!

I had my biggest breakthrough when we did the fire walk, said Kelley McKay, president of McKays Heating & Cooling. I had to be fearless to walk across the 1,200 degree coals, and when I entered that state of mind I realized that's the state of mind I should be entering when it comes to growing my business.

Dean Jackson talks marketing at the CEO Warrior Circle.

Create an experience for the customer

During the CEO Warrior Circle event, Agugliaro had a guest speaker, Marketing Guru Dean Jackson, visit to talk business and marketing strategies.

Jackson said business owners need to stop thinking of their business as one thing, but as three separate divisions: the Before Unit, During Unit and After Unit.

During the Before Unit we are looking to get into the customers home for the first time here and get them into home management, explained Jackson. While in the Before Unit you need to think with the end in mind. What is it that you want to do? What kinds of clients would you love to have? Here you identify your dream clients and target audience and figure out the range of budget for the Before Unit. How much would you pay to get these clients? Its important to narrow your focus here (segment and avatar) and select one target at a time.

Then there is the During Unit, when contractors deal with jobs all day long and create the experience for the customer, then they go to the next job. Jackson advised that contractors should look at all the customer calls that come in on a daily basis to find out how many are emergency calls and how many are proactive calls (when a contractor goes to a job to prevent emergencies from happening).

The During Unit is the core experience you have with the customer, said Jackson. Establish that when they have a need they will call you. While you are in their house you need to establish additional opportunities.

According to Jacksons and Agugliaros book Breakthrough DNA The Service Code; 8 Profit Activators You Can Trigger in Your Business Right Now, this is delivering a dream come true experience designed from the clients/customers perspective and providing an after sale service (even after you have already been paid).

Also while in the During Unit you need to establish that you are the customers plumber/HVAC tech for life. You need to say to your customer, While I am here lets do an HVAC audit. At this time contractors can point out potential issues that are coming down the road, which can be dealt with in a proactive away before there is an emergency.

You need to have the mindset that you will take the customer under your wing and give them opportunities to prevent problems, said Jackson. If you have a lot of repeat business this means that you are the customers person to call back. You created some sort of impression for this to happen. The greatest asset is being an incumbent in someones home.

And last, but not least, there is the After Unit, which focuses on nurturing lifetime relationships.

The After Unit is a thriving part of your business, explained Jackson. These customers already like and trust you.

According to Jackson this is where you nurture customers and referrals.

You always have to generate referrals, explained Jackson. How and why do referrals happen? The reality is people refer companies or other people they know because it makes them feel good. We are wired to share things and steer away from bad things.

My biggest take away from this event came from Dean Jackson, said McKay. He gave us a new way to think about our business. He explained a before unit, during unit and after unit. Viewing each individual step and creating a timeline of each step has opened my eyes to new ways of delivering the ultimate customer experience.

Brian Kurtz was also a guest speaker at the event. Kurtz has been a serial direct marketer for over 35 years. During his career, he was responsible for the mailing of close to 2 billion pieces of direct mail and the distribution of millions of impressions and promotions on a wide variety of offline and online media.

To download and read Breakthrough DNA The Service Code; 8 Profit Activators You Can Trigger in Your Business Right Now visit: http://breakthroughdna.com/.

CEO Warrior

CEO Warrior teaches business owners how to achieve wealth, freedom and market domination by using the tools and skills Mike Agugliaro, founder of CEO Warrior, used to build his home service business into a $32 million-plus business in 10 years. The Warrior system uses a unique approach to training, inspired by Mikes straightforward style and martial arts training to create mental focus, strategic thinking, resiliency, respect and warrior spirit to take business owners to the next level. CEO Warrior targets the specific areas each business needs to address, eliminate, enhance or add in order to reach their business goals and attain what every business owner want in the end: financial independence. For more information about CEO Warrior, visit CEOWARRIOR.com.

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Contractors Unleash their Beasts at CEO Warrior event held in new training facility - Contractor Mag

Budget increases outpace growth in enrollment; LPS cites technology, new schools, greater needs of students – Lincoln Journal Star

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In the span of five years, spending at Lincoln Public Schools will increase 27 percent if the proposed $420.8 million budget is approved while enrollment will increase by half that.

The 13.5 percent enrollment increase, an additional 5,000 students walking the halls of LPS schools over five years, is an ongoing challenge for district officials. In the 2015-16 school year, only nine of the state's school districts enrolled more than 5,000 students.

But the disparity in LPS between increased spending and enrollment growth and the fact that the district proposes leaving the tax rate unchanged in the face of the biggest increase in property valuations in a decade gave some pause.

LPS board member Matt Schulte called it out of whack, which motivated a guy named Brad to stand outside the district offices on at least a couple of mornings last week holding a sign that said LPS is greedy.

Leaving the district's general fund tax rate at the state-imposed lid of $1.05 per $100 of valuation means LPS will being in an additional $18.2 million in property tax revenue. While the districts overall tax rate would remain essentially unchanged, many homeowners will see their property tax bills rise.

It means the owner of an average $163,457 home, if faced with a 9 percent increase in property valuation, will pay an additional $185 to LPS next year, hiking the annual tax bill going to K-12 schools to $2,235.

While the increase in state aid to LPS this year is small $271,000 more the district has enjoyed a 52 percent increase in state aid since 2012-13.

While much of the growth in state support is because of growing enrollment and increasing percentages of students living in poverty, the state-aid formula isnt fully funded nor does it take into account all the classroom needs of students living in poverty and English language learners, said Liz Standish, associate superintendent for business affairs.

LPS officials say the $90.5 million spending increase over five years assuming the proposed budget is approved includes the supplies, personnel and utility costs for new schools, major initiatives in technology and the more-complex needs of students.

Looking only at spending and enrollment increases ignores updates and changes the community expressed support for, as well as the cost of educating more students with serious behavioral problems, mental health issues, those living in poverty and those who don't speak English, Standish said.

You would have to assume the district did nothing different from year to year,said Standish, who joined LPS in 2013-14. And in the last five years, the district has taken on some pretty major community initiatives.

Those include the Career Academy, a one-to-one computer initiative for students, moving to a digital curriculum and investments in early childhood education, she said.

Since 2012-13, LPS has or will open five new buildings the Career Academy, Wysong Elementary, Moore Middle School and two buildings with programs for students with serious behavioral problems.

While bond issue revenue pays for the buildings, the district budgeted an additional $4.1 million in one-time start-up costs of those buildings and $4.7 million in operational costs. The latter, including increased utility costs for additions to existing schools, becomes an ongoing cost.

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The bulk of the budget is always salaries, and this year included paying more than 5,700 employees. In 2016-17, the district budgeted $351.5 million for salaries. Next years budget adds $10.4 million to pay for the negotiated 3.19 percent compensation package increase for teachers. That doesnt include adding staff.

Schulte declined to say how much he wants to lower the tax rate, or what he would cut from the proposed budget. He plans to discuss specific details at a Tuesday work session, he said.

But he said lowering the tax rate in the face of a 9 percent increase in overall property values would be a show of good faith, especially because the district will need to ask voters to approve a bond issue in the coming years to pay for more schools. It would not have to be much to appease taxpayers, Schulte said.

This is a good opportunity to show to Lincoln we are ... good stewards to set up a bond issue in the coming years, he said.

Lincoln Independent Business Association President Coby Mach said LPS decision not to offer some property tax relief could influence a proposal by a state senator to float a constitutional amendment limiting how much local governments can collect from taxpayers.

He said hes unsure if LIBA will offer more specific recommendations about how to reduce the proposed LPS budget.

LPS has demonstrated to us over the course of the last four or five years that they will not accept recommendations or input, and at this point Im not sure well take the time to go though every line by line budget item, he said.

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Budget increases outpace growth in enrollment; LPS cites technology, new schools, greater needs of students - Lincoln Journal Star

The EPA Quietly Approved Monsanto’s New Genetic-Engineering Technology – The Atlantic

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DvSnf7 dsRNA is an unusual insecticide. You dont spray it on crops. Instead, you encode instructions for manufacturing it in the DNA of the crop itself. If a pesky western corn rootworm comes munching, the plants self-made DvSnf7 dsRNA disrupts a critical rootworm gene and kills the pest.

This last step is called RNA interference, or RNAi, and the Environmental Protection Agency last week approved the first insecticide relying on it. Just a few years ago, RNAi was the hot, new biotechnology generating both hype and controversy. But its first approval as an insecticide has been surprisingly low-key. The EPAs decision attracted little attention from the press or even from environmental groups that reliably come out against new genetically modified crops.

The first product DvSnf7 dsRNA will show up in is SmartStax Pro, a line of genetically modified corn seeds made in collaboration between two agricultural giants, Monsanto and Dow. The RNAi part comes from Monsanto, which has its eye on a number of RNAi applications. Monsanto expects corn seed with RNAi to be on the market by the end of this decade.

For some corn farmers, this cant come soon enough. The western corn rootworm is known as the billion dollar pest because of the damage it wreaks on cornfields. And it keeps becoming resistant to the toxins farmers throw against it. First it was spray-on pesticides; then it was corn genetically modified to make the Bt toxin, a technology also commercialized by Monsanto. When I go out and I talk to farmers, says Joseph Spencer, an entomologist at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, you talk about Bt resistance and invariably the moment will come where they say, Well have the RNAi soon and thatll take care it. To cover all the bases, SmartStax Pro will contain both Bt and DvSnf7 dsRNA.

RNAi is useful because it can be highly specific: Its supposed to, in theory, turn off one specific gene in one specific species while leaving others unharmed. Plants and animals naturally use this process to silence their own genes. And scientists have previously harnessed RNAi to create genetically modified crops, like apples and potatoes that dont brown because their browning gene is silenced. With Monsanto and Dows genetically modified corn, however, the DvSnf7 dsRNA is actually silencing a gene in another living organism, the western corn rootworm. Rather than modifying itself, it modifies its environment.

The Center for Food Safety, along with other groups, vocally opposed the apples and potatoes modified through RNAi. Bill Freese, CFSs science policy analyst, admits they were caught a bit off guard by the EPAs decision with RNAi in corn. The EPA only allowed for 15 days of public comment, and the agency did not post its proposed decision in the Federal Register. Its not the first time the EPA has approved pesticides quietly like this, but Freese argues the unprecedented use of RNAi as insecticide should have merited more public scrutiny.

The EPA was the last of three agenciesalong with the FDA and USDAthat signed off on the safety of DvSnf7 dsRNA. Critics often point to a 2011 paper to question the safety of tinkering with RNAi. In that study, Chinese scientists found naturally occurring RNA molecules from rice circulating in the bloodstream of people eating it. That paper has gotten a lot of criticism, and scientists have had trouble replicating its findings.

The real problem, says Freese, goes beyond RNAi itself. Theres faddish interest in the latest technology, says Freeze. It often neglects the basic issues of the unhealthy practices used in planting corn. Rotating crops, for example, rather than planting corn multiple years in a row in the same field can cut down on the western corn rootworm problem.

Spencer, the entomologist in Illinois, also stresses the importance of rotating crops and planting refuges of non-genetically modified corn. Hes seen what happened to Bt, when overplanting of Bt corn led to resistance.With RNAi, farmers get a new tool and a fresh start. We need to treat these things carefully because we really cant just afford to throw them away, he says. (Spencer has received funding from Monsanto for his research into western corn rootworms.)

CRISPR Could Usher In a New Era of Delicious GMO Foods

Western corn rootworm is just the beginning of Monsantos ambitions for RNAi. Robb Fraley, the companys chief technology office, ticked off the other RNAi products in the pipeline: a soybean that makes oil containing omega-3 and an insecticide that kills mites harming honeybees. I would put RNA in the suite of really advanced, next-generation technologies that are adding to the excitement from a research perspective, he says.

In recent years, CRISPR has displaced RNAi as the newest darling of genetic engineering. (Monsanto has licensed CRISPR, too.) Getting technology from the lab into the field takes time. SmartStax Pro, when it is on the market in a few years, will finally be RNAi pest-control technologys entry into the real world, and it could just be the beginning.

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The EPA Quietly Approved Monsanto's New Genetic-Engineering Technology - The Atlantic

Can modern technology save rhinos from poachers? – Telegraph.co.uk

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More broadly, he has developed an intelligence network in the villages around the park, and pays for information leading to a conviction. He has forged alliances with the many private conservancies that border Kruger, effectively pushing its borders outwards. He has helped persuade South Africas government to impose substantially tougher penalties for poaching, and to open a permanent court in Krugers Skukuza headquarters whose judges understand whats at stake.

In neighbouring Mozambique, poaching was not even treated as a crime until 2014, but under international pressure its government has introduced stiff penalties, which are being enforced with varying degrees of rigour.

Joostes subordinates speak of him with admiration. He took us from having no direction and approach to the onslaught we were trying to deal with and guided our whole anti-poaching effort into a solid spear, Charles Thompson, the helicopter pilot, declared as we swept over Krugers seemingly infinite bush. Everyone was basically a nature lover and had never been in the military and he taught us how to fight in a guerrilla war.

His efforts have certainly slowed the carnage. Kruger lost a record 827 rhinos in 2014, 826 in 2015, and 662 last year, and the downward trend continues. The number of poachers arrested inside Kruger has risen from 123 in 2013 to 281 last year.

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Can modern technology save rhinos from poachers? - Telegraph.co.uk

Netflix Launches Groundbreaking Interactive Branching Technology – Madison.com

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When Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX) CEO Reed Hastings appeared at Recode's Code Conference in May, he talked about the high success rate of the company's shows and the need to be more aggressive and more experimental. "I'm always pushing the content team," he said. "We have to take more risk; you have to try more crazy things."

Longtime investors in the video-streaming pioneer know that the company runs experiments involving its subscribers fairly regularly. Several meaningful changes to the service have been the result of such experiments. Netflix's post-play feature, which begins playing the next episode in a series once you've finished the current one, was the result of just such an experiment. Allowing subscribers to download content for offline viewing was another. Its most recent experiment could revolutionize the streaming concept it created.

In its latest move, Netflix will roll out its groundbreaking branching technology, in a bid to make programs interactive. Only the newest smart TV's, iOS devices, Roku boxes, and game consoles will work with the technology for now. Using a remote, touchscreen, or controller, viewers will have the option during the story to determine the next move the characters make in the program. Each choice leads to more potential choices down the line, producing myriad ways for the same story to unfold.

Netflix announced this week the first in a series of interactive branching narrative programs, beginning with children's content. The animated programPuss in Book: Trapped in an Epic Tale launched on June 20, and Buddy Thunderstruck: The Maybe Pile will make its debut on July 14. Stretch Armstrong: The Breakout will arrive next year.

Here's how Netflix sets the scene:

You sink into the sofa and fire up Netflix. You settle in to watch everyone's favorite swashbuckling feline, Puss in Boots. You chuckle as Puss in Boots finds himself in the story of Goldilocks with the Three Bears staring at him.

And then... you're asked to make a choice:

Should these bears be friends or foes?

Children will then decide how the story unfolds. In a blog, Carla Engelbrecht Fisher, the director of product innovation at Netflix, pointed out that children brought up with touchscreens are already engaging with them. "They're touching every screen," she says. "They think everything is interactive." This move, then, merely puts interactive television on equal footing with mobile apps and video games.

Filmmakers are excited by the concept of branching programs. Image source: Netflix.

Netflix enlisted the show's creators and conducted extensive research with kids and parents to ensure the best possible outcome, while using the overriding mantra "Wouldn't it be cool if... ?" Netflix approached DreamWorks Animation executive producer and writer Doug Langdale with the idea. "I didn't really know it was a possibility before," he stated. "As soon as it came up as something we could do, I desperately wanted to do it."

The programs took two years to develop, and the end result is 13 decision points in Puss in Book, resulting in a story that spans 18 to 39 minutes, depending on the choices made. The streaming giant is eager to learn how members engage with the experience, and to understand if they watch an episode multiple times, since each set of choices leads to a different adventure. If the initial trial with children's programs is successful, the trial will probably expand beyond animated kids' fare.

Netflix is known for taking chances on programs that wouldn't have otherwise seen the light of day, and that strategy is paying off. Netflix recently exceeded 100 million members, and it continues to look for ways to differentiate its content from competitors such asAmazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN). In its most recent quarter, Netflix surpassed $2.5 billion in quarterly streaming revenue for the first time. The company will want to continue to develop innovative content if it wants to retain the streaming crown. Hastings wants the content team to push the boundaries, and this endeavor seems to fit the bill.

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Netflix Launches Groundbreaking Interactive Branching Technology - Madison.com

RC Hospital considers robotic surgery technology – West Central Tribune

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Board members for the county-owned hospital have been exploring the possibility and are expected to make a decision next week, according to Blad.

If approved, Blad said officials believe the hospital would become the first critical access hospital in Minnesota to invest in the new technology.

Critical access is a designation given to certain rural hospitals by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

There is a "high price of admission" in terms of the investment needed to acquire the technology, according to Blad. He said the hospital has been discussing the possibility with a supplier and has been "able to get costs down significantly to where it is in the realm of reality.''

The hospital's general surgeon, Dr. Jared Slater, M.D., has experience with robotic-assisted technology while serving at the Mayo Clinic Health System in Rochester. His skills as a surgeon, and the hospital's modern surgical suites developed with the construction of the new hospital, are also very important in the hospital's ability to consider this technology, the CEO told the commissioners.

Blad said the new technology would benefit patients. The improved care made possible by the technology can result in shorter recovery times, he said.

The technology being eyed by the hospital is identical to that which Rice Memorial Hospital in Willmar recently adopted, he said. Rice began robotic-assisted surgery in 2015.

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RC Hospital considers robotic surgery technology - West Central Tribune

How the Trump Administration Is Reversing Progress on HIV | Time … – TIME

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As an HIV researcher and clinician, I have seen firsthand the viruss disproportionate devastation of sexual minorities, the poor and many people of color. Nevertheless, steady research progress during recent years has allowed us to envision and work toward the end of the epidemic . Until recently, our efforts were effectively guided by the first-ever National HIV/AIDS Strategy, released seven years ago next month.

But the gains we made can easily be lost, and they are in grave danger. The Trump Administration and some Congressional leaders have chosen to abdicate governments responsibility for the poor and disadvantaged and devalue the health of the American public. They have proposed stripping Medicaid from millions of low-income people, leaving them without access to healthcare or other essential services. They want to bar federal funding for Planned Parenthood, which provides women with HIV and STD prevention services. And they've hampered efforts to develop cures and improve prevention and treatment by proposing to cut funds for research.

MORE : 6 Resigned from Trump's HIV/AIDS Advisory Board. Heres Why One Doctor Stayed

Even actions that may not seem directly related to health would have a large impact, like slashing funding for federal housing programs, education, food assistance and other social welfare programs, and reinstating previously failed policies that harm public health, like incarcerating drug users instead of treating them and promoting abstinence-only sex education programs. Since January, each new policy announcement has threatened our fragile success in beating the HIV epidemic.

My hope is that we can make the nation great for everyone rather than returning to the days when it was great for only a few. If the Administration and the Congress do not reverse the direction we are headed, Americas prognosis is grim.

The HIV and public health communities have our work cut out for us. Here's how to get started:

The annual number of new HIV infections in the U.S. fell by 18% from 2008 to 2014, saving treatment costs of $14.9 billion. The percentage of people with an HIV diagnosis who are effectively treated increased to 55%. The uninsured rate among people with HIV dropped by 6% in states that expanded Medicaid, and the percentage of people with HIV who were effectively treated in these states increased significantly after just one year.

Unprecedented research advances over the last three decades have driven our progress, resulting in more effective and less toxic treatment. There is now overwhelming evidence that effective treatment keeps people with HIV healthy and reduces their risk of transmitting the virus to near zero. On the prevention front, considerable evidence supports the effectiveness of interventions, such as syringe exchange and comprehensive sexual education, and new tools, such as Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, known as PrEP .

The Trump Administration and members of Congress can still make a course correction and prevent national public health crises on a number of fronts, including HIV, opioid addiction and hepatitis C. Rather than leaving millions of Americans without health care coverageincluding many who count on the Medicaid programpolicymakers should work with healthcare providers, patient advocates and others to reduce healthcare costs and build on, rather than reverse, the gains of the last few years. They should prioritize the health, wellbeing and education of the most vulnerable when making federal funding decisions and abandon their resurrection of policies that have failed in the past and sabotage public health.

MORE : 4 Ways the Senate Health Care Bill Would Hurt Women

We cannot turn back; 45% of people diagnosed with HIV are still not effectively treated for it. More than 200 U.S. counties are at risk for serious HIV outbreaks linked to injection drug use. Research indicates that as many as one in two black gay men could be diagnosed with HIV in their lifetime. We need strong political leadership at all levels and activism to educate those in power about whats at stake.

Adimora is professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a member of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA). The views expressed in this commentary are her own and do not necessarily represent those of PACHA.

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How the Trump Administration Is Reversing Progress on HIV | Time ... - TIME

New reports find little progress on 45th anniversary of Title IX – The Daily Pennsylvanian

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Ivy League receives highest grade in Women in College Coaching Report Card By Yosef Weitzman 8 hours ago

As a national power,Penn women's lacrosseis one of several sports to benefit from Title IX but while that squad is led by renowned coach Karin Corbett, other women's teams continue to lack female coaches at a highrate.

For all the time that has passed since Title IX first made its way into federal law 45 years ago,a new report suggests that improving the status of women in intercollegiate athletics has largely stalled.

According to the report, which was commissioned by the NCAA'sCommittee on Womens Athletics, the Minority Opportunities and Interests Committee, and the Gender Equity Task Force, the numbers of female head coaches and athletic directors have actually declined in the last 45 years.

For some, this finding may come as a surprise. Although Title IX was not explicitly designed to increase female participation in athletics, that has been one of its most visible effects. But at the same time, it seems likely that these increases in female participation have also driven more men towards coaching womens teams. In 1972, the vast majority of womens teams were coached by women. In 2014, the percentage of womens teams coached by women was measured at about 43 percent.

While that number is based on national averages,another new study titled, Gender, Race and LGBT inclusion of Head Coaches of Womens Teams: A Report on Select NCAA Division 1 Conferences for the 45th Anniversary of Title IX, examines data for eight specific athletic conferences. The Ivy League was included as one of the conferences in the study because its executive director, Robin Harris, is a woman.

According to the report, which was produced by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) at the University of Central Florida, the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota and LGBT SportSafe, the Ivy League had the highest percentage of womens coaches for womens teams. At 55 percent, the Ivy League was the only conference that earned a B in the Women in College Coaching Report Card.

At Penn specifically, seven of the head coaches out of 16female varsity teamslisted on the Penn Athletics staff directory are women. Penns athletic director, M. Grace Calhoun, is also a woman.

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New reports find little progress on 45th anniversary of Title IX - The Daily Pennsylvanian

Rail Trail Progress Chugging Along – ithaca.com

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The weather is warming up and so is progress on the Dryden Rail Trail initiative, which gathered 40 people from around the community Saturday, June 17, in a workshop to present ideas for the trails thematic elements and design components.

The basic premise that were coming at here is that this is a trail that should reflect our community and show the different aspects of the history, culture, and other aspects that really make this area special, David Cutter, a Cornell University Landscape Architect and Vice President of the Task Force, told the group at the beginning of the workshop.

Cutter then broke up the group into several planning groups to generate ideas that would steer the trail thematic moving forward.

The trail should have an overall name but allow communities to name their individual section, said Judy Auble-Zazzara, a resident who lives along the planned route in Etna.

Freeville resident Amy Dickinson agreed

And I think thats so important to allow all those communities while having their own specific individual identities that make them unique, she said.

Nobody can doubt the area has a rich history, and residents have agreed portraying this along the trail is a high priority. The trail itself would mostly follow the route of the old Lehigh Valley railroad that chugged across the Dryden town limits for more than 100 years from the late 1800s. Shut down in 1972 following the damage dealt by Hurricane Agnes, the land from the railroad was sold back to surrounding land owners. Now in 2017, the Dryden Rail Trail Task Force is looking to trace those same tracks and restore those roots once more.

Most of the group agrees that the trail should be divided into several sections to reflect not only the encompassing town of Dryden, but also the hamlets of Etna and Varna and villages of Freeville and Dryden as well. Signage to interpret the historical nuances along the trail are a point of almost unanimous consensus among the groups.

Dozens of ideas were brainstormed for the physical use of the trail as well. Hiking, bird watching, exercise, community development, picnics, cross country skiing, snowmobiling, horseback riding and biking are all ideas that the breakout groups developed.

Ill definitely be using it for hiking and walking my dog and horseback riding. Weve submitted a letter asking for that to definitely be included as well, said Alice Walsh Green, of Freeville.

Ive been looking to buy a bike for years now and this would finally give me a reason, David Fogel, the mayor of Freeville added.

Some residents advocated for a broad range of activities allowed on the trail, but some others preferred to restrict some activities such as horseback riding and any kind of motorized transport. Other ideas for amenities along the trail included benches, nature walk guides, land owner appreciation, opportunities for local business sponsorships, and a mobile app for users.

Many of the attendees also brought up other opportunities the trail could present for the area including providing an alternative way for transportation to Cornell University or side trips to other local businesses like ice cream and coffee shops.

Those decisions will ultimately have to be worked out by the task force in coordination with the town after all the easements from land owners are granted and before shovels hit the dirt.

The event, hosted at the Dryden Fire Company, continued a discussion that has been going on since 2015 when Design Connect, a student led project at Cornell University, presented opportunities for recreation development in the area. That opened up the idea for the rail trail and formation of the Dryden Rail Trail Task Force. The group has been operating since early 2016 and has made significant progress in that time.

Bob Beck, chair of the task force, told the group that of the 36 land owners between Ithaca and Dryden Village all but a handful have granted easements for the trail.

Is George Junior the only obstacle? one resident asked.

We're not an obstacle! Pat Foot, Director of Facilities for The William George Agency for Childrens Services, known as George Junior, chuckled from the other side of the room.

Rail Trail Task Force members said the agency is the only land owner left who needs to give permission for the trail between the Village of Dryden and Freeville. Foot said the agency and the Rail Trail Task Force are very close to coming to an agreement on an easement.

However, other land owners have expressed their disagreement on the trail in general. One resident voiced her concerns over a large map at the meeting telling organizers that the trail ran right behind her house and it would not happen. Another resident addressed the group at one point, concerned with the visual aspect of having a trail through his back yard and even discussed potential legal action.

The rail trail task force looks to move forward and continue chugging through these pennies on the track and working with all concerns to create the best possible recreational experience.

What were looking for today is input on what is it that we want the trail to look like, Cutter told the group. Things like names the trail and those types of things so that it works for you, for what you want to do on the trail, for you as a neighbor and it reflects what were proud of here as a community.

The current track of the trail would tie it into the East Ithaca Recreation Way, proceed across Game Farm Road, through Varna, across Route 13 at Monkey Run, through Etna, making a sharp turn in Freeville where it would head down to the Village of Dryden and connect with the existing Jim Schug Trail.

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Rail Trail Progress Chugging Along - ithaca.com

EU Agrees to Defense Cooperation, Little Progress on Migration, Brexit – Voice of America

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LONDON

With snipers on the roof and armored vehicles surrounding the Council building, Europes leaders met in Brussels with security topping the summit agenda. EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said leaders had agreed on greater cooperation in intelligence sharing and defense spending.

We are spending half of the military budget of the U.S. but our efficiency is 15 percent. So there is room for improvement and thats exactly what we decided today, Juncker said.

Migrants issue

Outside a band of refugees called Syrians Got Talent aimed to send a musical message to EU leaders that they should stand up for migrant rights.

Not all of Europe shares that sentiment. The EU is taking legal action against Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic for refusing to accept refugee quotas.

More than 81,000 migrants have crossed the Mediterranean to Europe in 2017, and close to 2,000 have died so far.

French President Emmanuel Macron, attending his first EU summit, said Europe would look to address the causes of the crisis.

He said it is a long-term challenge whose long-term solution is to stabilize Africa, and the near and Middle East.

WATCH: EU agrees to defense cooperation

Optimism in the EU

Despite the challenges there is a renewed optimism in the bloc, says Professor Anand Menon of the U.K. in a Changing Europe program at Kings College London.

And the Eurozones growing again. So all that looks good, Menon said. But what I would say is the fundamental structural problems that confront the European Union, whether its the migration crisis, whether its the Eurozone crisis, whether its the problem of democratic backsliding in countries like Hungary and Poland, are no nearer being solved than they were last year. And they will come back again.

Britains exit from the bloc was also discussed. EU leaders described Prime Minister Theresa Mays offer on the future rights of European citizens living in Britain as below expectations, signaling tough negotiations ahead.

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EU Agrees to Defense Cooperation, Little Progress on Migration, Brexit - Voice of America

Watch: Paul Mason turns on the Blairites at Progress event ‘form your own party and get on with it!’ – Spectator.co.uk (blog)

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Well, that didnt last long. The uneasy peace between the Blairites and the Corbynites since the snap election has come to an abrupt end. At todays Progress conference, Paul Mason sat on a panel chaired by Progresss Richard Angell, alongside fellow Corbynite Emily Thornberry and centrist MPs Wes Streeting and Liz Kendall. The guestsattempted to discuss in a comradely manner how best to build on Labours snap election result and win the next election.

However, things soon struck a sour note when an audience member challenged Mason over a tweet he had sent claiming Labour could have won if it wasnt for the moderates running a defensive campaign. Its fair to say that his comments went down like a lead balloon with guests at the Blairite think tank event:

The question for people in this room is: it is now a left-wing Labour party. It is a Labour party led by a man vilified in the Daily Mail and the Sun as a terrorist sympathiser and we got 13million votes. Do you want to be part of it or not?

Because there is an alternative. There could be a British Macron.

At which point, the crowd started to boo Mason.

PM: Yeah, go on, keep going. There could be a British Macron, you could have a British end Brexit second referendum party run with it. It could do much better than the Lib Dems did. Nows the time.

RA: But when you did your politics outside the Labour party, you got very small numbers of people voting for you. You did it by entering the Labour party and doing it behind Jeremy Corbyn.

PM: Why do you accuse me of entering the Labour party. I joined it at age 19, my grandfather was that generation which founded the Labour party. Im not a Marxist, but real Marxists have a place inside Labour and always did have.

RA: But so does everyone else in this room.

PM: Good. So, do you want to be part of this party or not?

Mason finished by telling the audience they should look elsewhere if they are intent of being a part of a party thats in favour of illegal war:

If you want a centrist party this is not going to be it for the next ten years. if its really important to you to have a pro-Remain party thats in favour of illegal war, in favour of privatisation, form your own party and get on with it!

So much for offering an olive branch to moderates

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Watch: Paul Mason turns on the Blairites at Progress event 'form your own party and get on with it!' - Spectator.co.uk (blog)

Coverage Losses Under the Senate Health Care Bill Could Result in 18100 to 27700 Additional Deaths in 2026 – Center For American Progress

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One Republican member of Congress, defending the GOP health care planthe American Health Care Act (AHCA)suggested that concerns that the loss of health care coverage leads to death are overblown. However, the scientific literature on the effects of insurance coverage on mortality shows that the coverage losses from the AHCA would result in tens of thousands of deaths.

The secret Senate bill was finally released today, and it is broadly similar to what passed in the House: It ends Medicaid expansion and makes further deep cuts to the program; eliminates the individual mandate; and reduces funding that helps low-income Americans afford health coverage. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has not yet released its score of the Senate bill, although it is expected to do so early next week.

The CBO, however, has released a score of the Houses version of the AHCA, which is largely similar to the Senate bill. The score projected that, by 2026, 23 million more Americans would be uninsured under the House bill compared to the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Using estimates of mortality rates from Massachusetts experience with health reform, we estimate the number of additional deaths resulting from coverage losses from the Senate bill under three scenarios: one scenario in which coverage losses from the Senate bill are the same as under the House version, and two scenarios in which those coverage losses are modestly reduced by changes from the House bill.

Allocating these coverage losses among the states, this analysis also presents estimates of additional deaths by state.

A significant body of research has demonstrated the health benefits associated with health insurance expansion, including reducing the rate of death among the population. One study found that state Medicaid expansions that preceded the ACA were associated with a significant reduction in mortality. A recent analysis of these pre-ACA Medicaid expansions demonstrated a 6 percent decline in all-cause mortality due to Medicaid expansion. Another analysis showed that following implementation of the ACAs provision that allows young adults to remain on a parents health insurance until age 26, mortality rates decreased among Americans ages 19 to 25. In particular, mortality caused by diseases amenable to health care dropped among young adults, while trauma-related mortality did not. And a study of patients with cancer between the ages of 20 to 40 found a statistically significant association between insurance coverage and reduced mortality from any cause.

The result most relevant to the ACA and its repeal comes from a study examining the effects of the Massachusetts health care reform on all-cause mortality and on mortality due to causes amenable to health care. The study found that expanding insurance coverage was associated with a 2.9 percent decrease in all-cause mortality and a 4.5 percent reduction in deaths from causes amenable to health care. Because Massachusettss reform was used as the model for the ACA and included a coverage mandate, Medicaid expansion, and private insurance expansion through the individual market, the data is more representative of the effects of ACA insurance gains than studies looking solely at Medicaid expansion or narrow demographic groups. Furthermore, observers have noted that the studys quasi-experimental study design is of high quality and the next best thing to a randomized control study.

Other parts of the scientific literature have shown how having health insurance, unsurprisingly, results in better health. A recent study of three years of ACA data demonstrated that uninsured people who gained coverage through the ACA experienced a 23 percent increase in self-reported excellent health. One analysis found that the ACA coverage expansion was associated with reductions in self-reported fair or poor health and days with activity limitations due to ill health. Another analysis showed that ACA insurance gains were associated with an increased share of respondents reporting excellent health. And a recent study of ACA-facilitated Medicaid expansions found that they modestly improved self-reported health.

Other insurance expansions produced similar results. Massachusetts insurance expansion was associated with improvements in self-reported general, physical, and mental health. Data from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment showed that expanding Medicaid was associated with improved self-reported physical and mental health and reduced depression.

Insurance coverage also improves childrens health and access to care. Research shows that when parents have insurance coverage, their children are more likely to be covered, maintain stable coverage, and receive needed care. According to the Institute of Medicines systematic review, insured children are more likely to gain access to well-child care and immunizations, appropriate care for asthma, and basic dental services, as well as have fewer avoidable hospitalizations, improved asthma outcomes, and fewer missed days of school.

Taken as a whole, the research strongly suggests that health coverage has a significant positive effect on health. However, a few studies have found more limited health impacts of insurance expansion. While the Oregon study found improvements in self-reported health, it did not detect clinical improvements other than depression reduction. Another study showed no changes in self-reported health resulting from the ACA, although a subgroup analysis did show improved self-assessed health among older nonelderly adults, especially in expansion states. And an early observational study of the ACAs Medicaid expansion comparing low-income adults in expansion and nonexpansion states found no differences in self-reported health between the groups.

There may be several reasons for these outlier results. The studies in question looked at time frames too short or sample sizes too small to capture more significant health impacts. In addition, insurance is a necessary but not sufficient factor to receive quality health care. Receiving high-quality health care requires access to providers, institutions, and services; access to consistent primary care and referral services; choice of providers and institutions; and the delivery of high-quality services. It also requires that insurance policies cover basic and vital services.

Drawing on the Massachusetts experience, we estimate that there would be one excess death for every 830 people who lose coverage as a result of the AHCA. The CBO projections of coverage reductions under the House version of the AHCA would equate to 217,000 additional deaths over the next decade, including 27,700 additional deaths in 2026. (see Table 1) To put this in perspective, that is approximately the number of people in the United States who died from opioid overdoses in 2014 and about twice the number of deaths by homicide that same year.

We also estimate the additional deaths in 2026 resulting from coverage losses from the Senate bill under three scenarios: one assuming coverage losses equivalent to the House bill and two scenarios that show modest reductions in coverage losses. If the Senate bill results in coverage losses of 19 million that would result in 22,900 additional deaths in 2026. If the Senate bill results in coverage losses of 15 million that would result in 18,100 additional deaths in 2026.

In addition, drawing on the Center for American Progress estimate of state-level coverage reductions in 2026 under the House version of the AHCA, we estimate additional deaths by state in 2026 as a result of coverage losses from the Senate bill under the three scenarios. Under the scenario assuming coverage losses of 23 million, annual additional deaths would range from 36 in North Dakota to 3,111 in California in 2026. Under the scenario assuming coverage losses of 19 million, annual additional deaths in 2026 would range from 30 in North Dakota to 2,570 in California. Finally, under the scenario assuming coverage losses of 15 million, annual additional deaths in 2026 would range from 24 in North Dakota to 2,029 in California.

Given the overwhelming weight of evidence, there should be no debate: Health care coverage has an impact on whether Americans live or die. Our data estimates show that under any of the scenarios we analyzed, a significant number of American lives are at stake in this debate. Legislators considering whether to support this bill should keep in mind and soberly consider the catastrophic effect the AHCA would have on so many Americans and their families.

We calculated national excess deaths per year by dividing the estimated coverage losses by the estimated numbers needed to treat (NNT) to prevent one death, based on analyses of the Massachusetts health care reform. Treatment in this instance refers to the number of individuals who would need to receive insurance coverage in order to prevent one extra death. The Massachusetts study found that there was one fewer death for every 830 people who gained coverage; that NNT was consistent with a 30 percent relative reduction in individual-level mortality for persons gaining insurance.

We estimate that there would be one excess death for every 830 people who lose insurance coverage, which assumes that the Massachusetts result would be symmetric for health insurance gains and losses. Of note, our approach is similar to that taken by the White House Council of Economic Advisers to calculate the mortality reductions from the ACA.

Our estimate of the national number of excess deaths each year under the AHCA is then equal to the CBO-projected coverage reduction under the House bill divided by 830. We calculated state level estimates by applying the same methodology to state-level health insurance losses from the Center for American Progress state-level analysis, which combines data from the CBO, the Kaiser Family Foundation, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the American Community Survey to calculate anticipated insurance losses by coverage type.

We also included estimates of the number of excess deaths in 2026 if national coverage losses under the Senate bill were 15 million or 19 million that year. For our state-level estimates, we assume that each states coverage reductions and excess deaths are 65 percent and 83 percent of our estimates of the effects under the House-passed bill, respectively.

Recent debate sheds light on different approaches to estimate the mortality impacts of insurance loss. Bearing this debate in mind, we designed our approach using the most accurate, rigorous studies. We base our calculations on estimates of AHCA-related coverage losses from the CBO and the Center for American Progress, and on Benjamin D. Sommers, Sharon K. Long, and Katherine Baickers 2014 quasi-experimental study of the effects of Massachusetts Health Care Reform on mortality. We chose this study due to its sample size and power, and because Massachusetts health reform, which expanded both private and public coverage, was used as the model for the ACA.

One limitation of our analysis is that the same NNT was applied to all states, although the estimate was derived from the Massachusetts health care reform. There are demographic and health care infrastructure differences between Massachusetts and other states. The Massachusetts population has a higher per capita physician rate, lower baseline mortality rate, higher income and baseline insurance coverage rates, fewer racial and ethnic minorities, and more women, compared to national averages. Some of these factors suggest that Massachusetts may have a higher NNT than other states, meaning that our estimate of the number of excess deaths under the AHCA would be too low, while other factors suggest the state may have a lower NNT.

In addition, the NNT was calculated from mortality decreases associated with insurance expansion. There is uncertainty as to whether withdrawing insurance will cause the equal and opposite effect of providing insurance. Lastly, our estimates capture only the impact of increased uninsurance under the AHCA and do not take in to account possible mortality effects among people who would remain insured but lose certain benefits or encounter worse access to care due to the bill.

We calculated a 95 percent confidence interval around our estimates of excess mortality. The confidence interval contains the range of reasonable values that include our estimate of excess mortality, with 95 percent confidence. Within this range the best estimate for the actual number of excess deaths is the point estimate. The point estimate is the mean and represents our best prediction for annual excess mortality rates, given the current evidence and available data. For instance, in the year 2026 and assuming 23 million more people are uninsured, we estimate that 27,711 excess deaths will occur, and we are 95 percent confident that the true number of annual excess deaths will be between 9,583 and 46,000.

Ann Crawford-Roberts is a medical student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and a graduate of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Nichole Roxas is a medical student at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry and a graduate of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Ichiro Kawachi is a professor of social epidemiology and the chair of the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Sam Berger is the senior policy adviser at the Center for American Progress. Emily Gee is the health economist for the Health Policy team at the Center.

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Coverage Losses Under the Senate Health Care Bill Could Result in 18100 to 27700 Additional Deaths in 2026 - Center For American Progress

High school boys basketball: Huntley makes progress, falls in Crystal Lake South Shootout semis – Northwest Herald

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Huntley boys basketball coach Will Benson wants his players to understand that a lot can happen between now and the start of the high school season.

I always tell them, You may be somewhere now, but its June. You still have until November, Benson said. If you want to get better, you have plenty of time to get better.

That said, Benson likes what the Red Raiders have accomplished from the end of last season to this point in the summer. Huntley finished 5-1 in the Crystal Lake South-Gary Collins Shootout on Saturday, falling in the semifinals to Larkin, 57-29.

McHenry also made the semis, losing to Rockford East, 61-38. Larkin then beat East, 58-45, for the title.

Wins and losses dont really portray what a team does, no matter what, Raiders guard Cory Knipp said. We moved the ball well this weekend. Were at our best when we make the extra pass, and we did that for the most part. Were playing a lot better in terms of passing the ball and talking on defense.

Huntley finished 7-20 overall and 5-11 in the Fox Valley Conference last season for seventh place. With the bulk of their roster returning, the Raiders are determined to change that next season. The upcoming senior class, along with some juniors and sophomores, played AAU basketball this spring for LifeZone 360 in West Dundee, with Al Knipp (Corys father) doing the coaching.

In the morning, three times a week, we come [in before] school and get some shots up with (trainer) Zac Boster (of Pure Sweat Basketball), forward Zach Loveisky said. Its been paying off. In all five games here, we didnt really shoot the ball well, and that hurt. But our penetrating to the rim, getting fouls was good. We did a very good job passing the ball and finding the open man.

Cory Knipp agreed that the ball movement was key for the Raiders.

Weve been working hard all spring and summer on moving the ball, getting to know each other, Knipp said. Were playing a lot better together in terms of passing and talking on defense. The more you play together, the more you know your role.

The Raiders did not have any big scorers last season, as points were spread around. Knipp, Loveisky, Brett Bigden and Andrew Fulcer, who all played over the weekend, saw significant minutes last season. Senior Trevor Sloth, juniors Nate Draper and Nolan Engmann and sophomore Ryan Sroka also played through this spring and were at South.

Huntley won its pool Friday at South, then beat Prairie Ridge, 51-36, and Bartlett, 39-28, in Saturdays single-elimination bracket play. Although it may not be a harbinger for the regular season, it is progress.

Were starting to get some answers to some questions we had with guys coming back, Benson said. A lot of them have improved individually, for sure. Were definitely ahead of where we were a year ago. Its like we took another step forward, like you take a step from November to February, we took another step from February to June now.

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High school boys basketball: Huntley makes progress, falls in Crystal Lake South Shootout semis - Northwest Herald

Portugal progress to Confederations Cup semi-finals after beating New Zealand – Eurosport.com

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Portugal coasted to a 4-0 win over New Zealand in St Petersburg and secured their place in the semi-finals of the Confederations Cup.

The win, however, came at a cost as Manchester City-bound midfielder Bernardo Silva substituted because of an ankle injury.

With hosts Russia losing against Mexico in Kazan, Portugal progressed as Group A winners, while the All Whites finished bottom following a third straight defeat.

Captain Cristiano Ronaldo put Portugal ahead from the penalty spot on 33 minutes.

Bernard Silva - set to leave Monaco in a 43million deal - swiftly doubled the lead with a close-range finish, but in doing so landed awkwardly on his ankle and was taken off at half-time.

Forward Andre Silva wrapped up the comfortable victory with a fierce angled finish on 80 minutes and Nani added a fourth in stoppage time.

New Zealand, the OFC Nations Cup winners, had made a positive opening with Leeds forward Chris Wood seeing his shot saved.

Ronaldo rattled the crossbar before Ipswich defender Tommy Smith bundled over Danilo Pereira following a corner and the Real Madrid forward scored the resulting penalty .

It was soon 2-0 when Bernardo Silva converted a low cross from Pereira Eliseu after 37 minutes.

However, the attacking midfielder turned his ankle as he landed ahead of a sliding challenge from Tom Doyle, which saw him replaced by Luis Pizzi after the break.

Just before half-time, Portugal forward Andre Silva lashed out at Michael Boxall after a tussle with the New Zealand defender, which left him with a torn shirt - but could easily have also resulted in a red card.

New Zealand almost pulled a goal back on the hour when Doyle's ball across the face of goal from the left found Wood at the far post, but Portugal goalkeeper Rui Patricio recovered to make a sliding block on the line.

Marinovic had produced a string of decent saves at the other end during the second half.

However, the All Whites keeper could do little when Silva, who cost AC Milan some 33million from Porto, darted into the right of the penalty area before crashing the ball into the top corner.

Nani drilled in a fourth goal for Portugal during stoppage time.

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Portugal progress to Confederations Cup semi-finals after beating New Zealand - Eurosport.com