The most revelatory morsel of Cate Blanchett’s latest interview with Variety, promoting her next film, Carol, is not that she’s had relationships with women. Rather, it’s her comment about labels:
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I wish I understood contemporary art museums. I really do. But most of the time, the creative genius behind the displays is totally lost on me. Someone can stick chewed up pieces of pink and blue bubble gum all over a light pole, and it’s an eyesore and damage to public property. But cut down that light pole and illuminate it under track lights in a contemporary art museum — and it’s a masterpiece.
I don’t get it.
But, that doesn’t mean I don’t want to get it. I just need a little extra time to understand. I need to see it differently.
It’s a commonplace saying that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” And while that obviously applies to the visual arts, it also applies to cancer. This sentiment is not one I would have understood (or even accepted) at the onset of my cancer experience. But over the years, I’ve grown to appreciate what surviving cancer has taught me. When I’m willing to see it differently, new outlooks come to life.
Instead of my worst day ever, it’s the day I started to cherish all of the ones that followed.
Instead of the bearer of barrenness, it’s the bridge to adoption and unique expression of motherhood I get to experience.
Instead of my curse, it’s my connection to millions of others who’ve faced the same diagnosis and need someone to support them through it.
Instead of my death threat, it’s my reminder that nobody lives forever.
Instead of my handicap, it’s my signal to take it slow.
Instead of my mandatory diet restriction, it’s the built-in accountability to eat healthy.
Instead of the embarrassment that cost me friends in high school, it’s the reason I appreciate true friends.
Instead of the thief that stole my youth, it’s the blessing of wisdom at a young age.
Instead of the killer that’s taken loved ones from me, it’s the cause that unifies those of us still here and in our heartache, brings us together.
Instead of the excuse to blame God for my imperfect life, it’s the fan that adds flames to my faith.
Instead of an ugly display and unsightly experience, it’s like pink and blue bubble gum on a light pole displayed under museum track lights — an inspiration to those who walk by and strive to understand.
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Last week the U.S. Senate dealt the President a temporary surprise setback on a central piece of his trade agenda, refusing to allow Fast Track trade authority to move to a vote. The Senate showdown was just a preview of the epic battle brewing in the House. Whether the President can convince enough members of Congress to go along with him will depend in large part on what horses he’s willing to trade to get a deal.
There are a huge number of issues on the table, but the make-or-break may come down to an obscure provision of international law, obliquely called ‘Investor State Dispute Settlement’ (ISDS) mechanisms. ISDS gives foreign corporations the right to bring private lawsuits through secretive supra-national tribunals when governments pass laws that protect the public interest, but might harm profits.
In the U.S., libertarians and conservatives worried about national sovereignty have joined with pro-environment, pro-labor progressives to mobilize against Fast Track, in large part because Fast Track would grease the skids to expand ISDS through trade treaties.
ISDS allows foreign companies to dodge national justice systems and sue governments in front of self-selected panels of private arbitrators (drawn from the ranks of corporate trade lawyers), whose decisions are binding and cannot be appealed. The system has already generated literally billions of dollars in frivolous claims by foreign corporations against democratic governments.
When Germany began phasing-out nuclear power after Japan’s Fukushima disaster, Swedish energy company Vattenfall sued to recover their lost projected profits.
Australia and Uruguay are now under attack by Phillip Morris for requiring health warnings on tobacco products, because the regulations, designed to save children’s lives, are cutting into profits.
French company Veolia sued Egypt after Egypt raised its minimum wage, increasing Veolia’s operating costs.
And most recently, Canada was successfully sued for refusing to grant a mining company a permit for destructive mega-blasting, in an effort to protect the ecosystem and the livelihoods of local fisherman in Nova Scotia.
The size of damages can be breathtaking. An ISDS arbitration panel ordered Ecuador to pay Occidental Petroleum $2.3 billion as compensation for lost hoped-for future profits when Occidental broke the law and suffered the fully foreseeable consequences.
ISDS threatens foundational legal principles of due process, equality before the law, and equal access to justice. “Our legal system rests on the conviction that every individual, regardless of wealth or power, has an equal right to bring a case to court”, wrote prominent legal scholars in a letter to Congress last week. “ISDS, in contrast, is a system built on differential access … Only foreign investors may bring claims under ISDS provisions. This option is not offered to nations, domestic investors, or civil society groups alleging violations of treaty obligations. Under ISDS regimes, foreign investors alone are granted legal rights unavailable to others – freed from the rulings and procedures of domestic courts.”
The purpose of ISDS is to spur foreign investment and economic growth in countries with poor records of respecting property rights and the rule of law. But extensive research by economists over the past two decades has found zero robust evidence of gains from ISDS — no increases in economic growth, no uptick in foreign investments, and no generation of the promised shared prosperity. Many emerging economies who’ve rejected ISDS, Brazil and South Africa among them, continue to receive massive capital inflows.
ISDS is also totally unnecessary to protect business investments. Foreign investors operating in volatile countries can and should hedge against arbitrary government treatment by purchasing widely available political-risk insurance. And investors in legal environments with generally predictable and independent judicial systems, like the U.S. and Germany, should play by the rules and take disputes and disappointments to court–just like everyone else.
A hallmark of U.S. investment deals since the 1960s, ISDS has slowly extended through more than 3,000 treaties worldwide. The number of corporate claims is rising fast: in the forty years before 2000, less than a hundred claims were filed; over the past ten years, that number has increased fivefold. And the relative share of cases against countries with strongly impartial legal systems is also increasing: 40 percent in 2014 compared to a historical average of 28 percent.
The blowback against ISDS is now transcontinental, threatening to derail years of nail-biting negotiations on the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Across the Atlantic, the European Commission, under siege from citizens aghast at potential threats to public health and safety, is cooking-up an alternative in an effort to thread the needle between U.S. negotiating demands and citizen pressure. Meanwhile, some brave emerging economy governments, like Brazil and South Africa, are bucking the U.S. and repudiating these secretive investor courts entirely.
Obama promises that the problems with ISDS are “fixed” in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the administration’s cherished trade deal that will follow close on the heels of a Fast Track. But that’s not good enough.
No tweaks can “fix” a private, parallel supra-national justice system that allows foreign companies to do an end-run around the rule of law. And what about the dozens of other trade and investment deals now in the negotiating pipeline, like TTIP, which will also include investor arbitration tribunals? A congressional grant of Fast Track authority would last for six years, making it virtually impossible to block special rights for foreign companies embedded in new trade agreements negotiated by future presidents.
Done right, global trade and investment agreements can be good for everyone: creating jobs and promoting fair labor and environmental protections worldwide. Obama claims those are his goals. But ISDS erodes democracy and the rule of law, and lets companies sue governments for shutting-down dangerous nuclear plants, banning cigarette marketing to children, and protecting the environment and workers’ rights. There is nothing fair about that.
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During an interview, Sara Paretsky, author of the V.I. Warshawski, was asked what she thought were the best thing, and the worst thing, about writing.
The best thing about writing is you get to explore a thousand different personalities, all by going deep into your own soul. The worst thing? You have to be alone to write… Being alone is very painful. An unsolvable conundrum.
Ernest Hemingway is quoted as having said, “Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.”
Both authors are absolutely “right about write.” Their answers are ones that are all too true for every author. Writing is solitary work because it needs concentration, quiet and commitment. Being alone to write a novel or short story requires intense alone time. It’s essential to your craft. There are times I have emerged from a day writing to find out that the day was warm and pretty and I missed seeing it!
Because your writing doesn’t always show immediate results in the form of financial gain, something we have all been led to believe is the only thing that validates our work, we are tempted to see what we are doing as non-productive. Writing is often a frustrating business combining long hours alone and little instant recognition. In our hearts we know it is not non-productive; the gain, while not always financial, is always personally and creatively rewarding. We are compelled to write no matter what, and when we have successfully completed a story, it is a joy, an endorphin high!
Still there’s the nagging fact of being alone constantly. Our work has its downfalls and some authors self-medicate to ease the loneliness. I once Googled “famous authors and alcohol” to see the connection between the two. I wasn’t surprised to note that many famous authors had had, and some still have, many encounters with alcohol and other substances. The loneliness was overwhelming at times.
So, what can you do? You know being alone to write is essential, yet a part of you desperately needs that human connection. As with any profession, there has to be a healthy balance between your job and your personal life. But making time for personal activities is not as easy for a writer as for those in other professions. First of all there’s the creative spark; it can, and does hit writers at odd moments and places. Anne Rice once said that she carries a small recorder with her in case an idea for a book or character comes into her head when she’s not near a keyboard. Before the invention of the PC, Margaret Mitchell wrote her creative sparks for the epic Gone With The Wind characters and settings on scraps of paper and even napkins.
Even when we’re in “down time” we’re still wired to create. Like a sneeze, an idea can pop up in your head anywhere, anytime. Since we’re writers, we do have to make some concessions to the creative spark. If you have to do so, it is perfectly alright to record a plot or scene for a book or story when you’re away from a computer but make it brief.
Remember that there are certain times when personal time should be sacred. Dinners out, vacation, (it is okay to make it a working vacation but only up to a certain extent; don’t spend hours each vacation day working!), exercise and just plain doing nothing. Believe it or not, doing nothing every once in a while rejuvenates the creative juices. Subconsciously, whatever story is in your head will become clearer and so will your writing.
When you are writing, make that writing time count. Treat this time as a creative business — no distractions, no web surfing, or interruptions from anyone. Remember to also take a 10-minute break every couple of hours. This refreshes your mind and gets the kinks out of your body from simply sitting at the computer or laptop. If you do all this you will be better able to attend to your personal life and enjoy quality down time from your profession.
Hemingway also made the statement that, “There is nothing to writing. All you do all you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” Leave to good ol’ Papa Hemingway to be his dramatic best, but he has a point. We bleed creativity. It is a common ailment of all artists but every once in awhile you need a transfusion of life away from the keyboard. Take a break, commune with humans, animals and the outside world. Make it count and come back refreshed and ready to “bleed” again for our chosen, beautiful but demanding, taskmaster writing.
Kristen Houghton is the author of 6 top-selling books including the PI series A Cate Harlow Private Investigation. The first in the series FOR I HAVE SINNED is available where all books are sold.
©copyright 2015 Kristen Houghton The Savvy Author all rights reserved
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In 2011, Marc Andreessen declared that software is eating the world. Andreessen (Twitter: @pmarca) noted that the new generation of technology companies will expand their capabilities, establish a sustainable competitive advantage, and grow market share value by placing more emphasis on software innovation. Fast forward to 2015 and Andreessen’s thesis is validated across all industries, including the automotive industry.
Digital transformation is affecting every industry including one of the largest, longest and most well-established industries on the planet – the automotive industry. Automotive technology touches all of us every day. For the automobile industry, digital transformation means using the vehicle as a platform to deliver software-based services based on data, sensors and analytics. In this rapid-approaching future, cars represent a shift towards a truly mobile Internet of Things (IoT) world and autonomous vehicles.
As Executive Director of Connected Vehicle and Services at Ford Motor Company, Don Butler works across product development, information technology and marketing to lead the thrust in terms of connected vehicle services and experiences and thinking differently about the products, services and experiences that Ford delivers to their customers in the context of connectivity.
Don Butler, Executive Director of Connected Cars and Services – Ford
Previously, Butler was head of marketing for Cadillac at General Motors. As a leading authority on how the auto industry will transform using technology and data, he shares his perspective on how Ford and the entire automotive industry are transforming.
5 Ways the Automobile Industry is Driving Disruption
1. A trifecta of connectivity: When it comes to connected vehicles and services, Ford divides connectivity into three facets: beamed in, brought in and built in. The most basic form is content information that is beamed into the vehicle which has been around since the days of the AM radio and today is much more sophisticated with things like satellite radio, traffic and weather forecast data and services.
Brought in connectivity is leveraging the content, the communications capability, the media and the contacts on a smart phone that you bring into the vehicle. This is something Ford has been doing since 2007 when they had the foresight to understand that consumers want to stay connected even when they’re in a vehicle environment. Ford allows them to do this in a way that is safe and seamless, by leveraging voice for instance, to allow consumers to keep their hands on the wheel and eyes on the road.
The third aspect of connectivity, built in, is the vehicle as its own independent node on the network, joining the Internet of Things and having its own independent capability of transmitting and receiving information to allow customers to remotely interact with that vehicle to do things like lock, unlock and remotely start the engine.
2. Moving from one-time transactions to building long-term customer intimacy – Butler says that historically in the auto industry it’s been “we provide customers with a vehicle and they give us money in exchange and it’s essentially a one-time transaction.” There is no real ongoing relationship through that ownership period or user period. Butler says that Ford is now trying to understand the services and experiences they need to stay connected and to develop that longer term relationship, both with the vehicle and the customer.
“It’s really about us as an industry adapting more and more to what customers are already doing and how our customers are living their lives today. Consumers are increasingly connected and living digital lifestyles so in order for us to remain relevant we need to be part of that and take advantage of the devices that they’re using and enabling experiences that wouldn’t otherwise be possible because we’ve got that connection,” says Butler
The Ford Focus Energi is a great example of that. One of the areas around electric vehicles is obviously charging so there’s increased sensitivity around the state of charge, how long it’s going to take to get to a particular destination and if the battery charge capacity enough to get to that destination. With their mobile app, Ford empowers customers to understand these things and then translate that into a meaningful way for them to understand it. For example, if they’ve got a particular route or destination, they can use the smart phone app to understand the likelihood of the battery charge being able to take them to that destination and also let them know what charging points are along the route or conveniently located.
“It’s about integrating ourselves into how our consumers are already experiencing and living life and moving that automotive context into a consumer experience, digital experience and connected lifestyle context,” says Butler.
3. The vehicle becomes a software platform – According to Butler, in the recent past roughly 90% of a vehicle’s value has been in hardware components – the power trains, the suspension, the body, the interior – and roughly 10% of it was in software and control modules. As we go forward, we will see that ratio shifting quite dramatically such that roughly 50% of the vehicle’s value will be in hardware and the other 50% will be divided between software and experiences and out of vehicle content.
As a vehicle’s value moves from hardware components to software and experiences, it enables automobile companies to have an ongoing relationship that extends far beyond just the functional drive time. This enables companies like Ford to maintain an ongoing connection and have the benefit of what software enables – capability that gets better over time.
“We will have upgradable software that empowers the consumer to have a vehicle that in two to three years from now is as good as the vehicle that someone buys new in that time frame. It also enables us to leverage the data that is a result of those interactions to enhance that experience and that relationship with the consumer to provide better and more contextual experiences,” says Butler.
4. Putting privacy and security first – Along with building innovation to bolster customer intimacy and using software technology to create stronger connections between the driver, passenger and Ford comes an awesome amount of responsibility in terms of security. Butler shares that at Ford they literally have a graphic that illustrates everything they are doing on a foundation of trust. The two components to that trust are privacy and security.
On the privacy side, Ford believes that it’s the customer’s data and they are stewards on their behalf. “We believe that giving customers control over how that data is used is absolutely the right thing to do and we believe that to the extent that we are providing value commensurate with that permission that we’ve got a balance there, and we need to always think about what is going to be valuable for the customer, not what can we do with this data,” says Butler.
On the security side, it’s understanding that as we become more connected in terms of the vehicle, the cellular networks, in-vehicle networks and mobile apps, the threat surface grows exponentially. For Ford it’s not just about best practice, but leading practice in terms of things like encryption, air-gap, signature identification and authentication. In order to learn and grow quite rapidly in terms of capability and expertise in this area Ford believes they can benefit from what’s happening around them. “Whether it’s partnering with other automotive OEM’s as a consortium to fight hackers or doing our own intrusion testing and leveraging outside parties to help us with that, it’s a never ending journey of not only prevention, but of proactive, quick response in case something does happen,” says Butler.
5. The mobility solution becomes multi-variant – “The software-based vehicle is very different, you develop it and you constantly enhance it and we’ve got to change our internal processes to move from this periodic program model to more of an on-going basis, on-going team development model that gets better over time,” says Butler.
Butler says that enabling these robust customer experiences, such as autonomous cars, that go beyond simply buying a vehicle that takes care of day-to-day needs to delivering a customer experience that evolves into an enduring relationship, is going to take working with partners and working with customers to develop and find answers to solve that multi-variant equation.
“As automobile companies move from being in control of a single-point solution to a phase of co-creation with partners and customers, they need to recognize that they don’t play the sole role in delivering the connected vehicle solution. That mobility solution becomes multi-variant, and will involve working with partners to understand how the solution is changing and in what ways they can plug into that and continue to be part of the solution to deliver that ultimate customer experience,” says Butler.
You can watch the full interview with Don Butler here. Please join me and Michael Krigsman every Friday at 3PM EST as we host CXOTalk – connecting with thought leaders and innovative executives who are pushing the boundaries within their companies and their fields.
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“Modern Family” star Ariel Winter is officially emancipated.
The actress, who plays Alex Dunphy in the series, took to Twitter on Friday to announce the news.
I am now officially emancipated!!! I’m really lucky I have an amazing support system and lovely people in my life… http://t.co/lJtlpGoEYc
— Ariel Winter (@arielwinter1) May 15, 2015
The 17-year-old actress has been at the center of a family custody battle between her older sister, Shanelle Gray, and their mother, Chrisoula Workman.
Winter thanked Gray, her father and her fans in the tweet, and said she couldn’t wait to embark on “new adventures”:
I am now officially emancipated!!! I’m really lucky I have an amazing support system and lovely people in my life who have given me the support and guidance to have been given this wonderful opportunity. Most importantly I want to thank @shanelle_gray and my father for their special support regarding this matter, I really couldn’t have done it without them. Thank you to all of my family, friends, and fans who have supported me through all of my endeavors in life, and have encouraged me. Thank you for making my life so special! I can’t wait to embark on my new adventures. ❤️ xo
The family trouble dates back to late 2012, when Winter was removed from her home following allegations of physical and emotional abuse by her mother. The Department of Children and Family Services later found evidence of the abuse. Last April, Gray was granted permanent guardianship of Winter.
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Driverless vehicles? Stop right there: a study by researchers from Euro NCAP indicates widespread use of Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) systems could reduce the frequency of rear-end crashes by 38 percent.
That’s it. GTA V is such an amazing world that it can be used to create anything. Let’s make movies and full seasons of TV shows using just GTA V graphics because this is just stunning. Here is a Breaking Bad tribute done completely with GTA V and it sums up a decent amount of the series pretty well.
We’re kicking off Saturday’s best deals with the Das Keyboard 4, the sequel to Lifehacker readers’ favorite mechanical keyboard . $125 is still a lot to spend on a keyboard though, so check out Lifehacker’s explainer to find out why a good mechanical keyboard is worth every penny. [Refurb Das Keyboard 4 Professional & Ultimate Keyboards, $125]
Controlling lights, appliances, and keeping an eye on home security has never been easier, but as smart home technology proliferates, picking the best place to start can be tough. I’ve been upgrading my apartment for the past few years, now, and I know that the first step needn’t be too risky, however. Since home automation can be intimidating, I’m going … Continue reading
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