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As the open enrollment period for 2016 health insurance draws near, you may be re-evaluating the Affordable Care Act and how it affects you. It is easy to start a spirited argument on the subject, but one thing is not up for debate: multiple surveys and articles report that the cost of health care insurance plans is on the rise again.

Shoppers on the exchange can expect to see a crazy quilt of price increases as insurers assess the true costs of the mandated coverage properties of the ACA and medical care consumption over the past year. There are cases where exchange-based health plans are not increasing, but according to multiple sources, many exchange plans are asking for significant price increases.

Double Digit Rate Increases

A recent analysis by Agile Health Insurance said that insurers are requesting double-digit rate increases for almost one-third of the plans sold on HealthCare.Gov, and that every plan offered for three states (Delaware, South Dakota, and West Virginia) are asking for double-digit increases. Two of the larger state-run exchanges, California and New York, have shown more modest rate increases of 4% and 7%, but they are increases all the same.

It may not be as bad as it sounds for consumers. State insurance regulators are not going to approve all the requested increases and not all of the costs will translate to the insured, thanks to subsidies. A Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) analysis shows that the most popular "silver" plans, the benchmark for subsidy calculations, will undergo moderate price hikes, likely producing a moderate rise in subsidies.

Employer-based plan costs are also rising. KFF's 2015 Employer Health Benefits Survey conducted during the first half of 2015 concluded that the premiums for single coverage as well as family coverage rose by 4% on average. Unfortunately, deductibles are increasing significantly, resulting in more out-of-pocket costs to employees.

Effectively, cost sharing is being shifted more toward employees in employer-based plans. That puts an even greater burden on employees since wages have not kept pace. KFF reports that over the last five years, the deductibles paid by employees across the U.S. have increased over six times faster than wages have increased.

"Cadillac Tax" To Kick In

Meanwhile, the "Cadillac tax" kicks in starting in 2018, and employers are already starting to adjust their plans to stay below the threshold level. Individual plans with premiums over $10,200 or family plans with premiums over $27,500 will be subject to a 40% tax. KFF suggests that as employers make adjustments to stay under the thresholds, costs will continue to be shifted toward employees.

Are federal employees getting a better break? Not really. The government recently announced that the enrollee portion of health insurance premiums for federal employees would increase by 7.4%. That is the largest increase in five years. Overall plan costs will be rising 6.4% on average.

Keep in mind that background reinsurance programs called "the 3 R's" are subsidizing the insurance companies during the Obamacare transition: risk adjustment, reinsurance, and risk corridor. Two of those three functions go away in 2016, meaning that most analysts expect the "true" rates of Obamacare to show up in the 2016-2017 prices -- and they will likely be considerably higher regardless of the other market factors.

"A" in the ACA stands for Affordable?

As you search for your own plan in the exchanges or deal with deductible increases in your employer-supplied health plan, just remember that the first "A" in the ACA stands for Affordable. If all these reports and surveys are correct, it is going to be increasingly hard to remember that.

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More than seven in 10 Americans now believe in climate change, up from just over half in 2010, according to a multi-year survey by the University of Michigan. This new perspective coincides with an ethical shift that is driving change in the way we produce and consume energy worldwide.

Religious leaders are calling for action, including Pope Francis who recently said a "cultural revolution" is needed to care for the planet and its people and for fossil fuels to be "progressively replaced."

Last year, half a million protesters gathered in cities around the world for the People's Climate March, the largest environmental rally in history. This global action brought together diverse groups sharing a common belief: "We must change how we produce and use energy to preserve our future."

This is today's "energy ethic," an ideal enabled by affordable clean energy. And it is unstoppable. As Victor Hugo once said, "You can resist an invading army; you cannot resist an idea whose time has come."

The movement has extended to the capital markets, where steps to divest from fossil fuels are now common. Hundreds of financial, educational and religious institutions have signed up to exit investments in carbon-intensive industries.

Meanwhile, the energy ethic and consumer behavior are amplifying each other. People are responding to today's new energy options by installing solar panels and buying electric cars; they are insulating their homes and consuming less. These are smart decisions: energy efficiency and solar panels deliver a return on investment, and electricity used for transportation is three times cheaper than gasoline. The trends are evident: in the United States, a new home or business goes solar every three minutes, and global electric car sales have doubled for each of the past three years.

The democratization of energy is profound. In the past, centralized decisions made sweeping changes to our energy system slow and difficult. But now, for the first time, the power to change energy generation and consumption is in the hands of ordinary citizens. Homeowners can put solar panels on their roof; communities can put them on public buildings. As a result, affordable clean energy is growing much faster than experts predicted.

Since 2008, wind energy has tripled and solar has grown tenfold. Combined, these technologies now supply five percent of the energy in the United States. Last year, half a trillion dollars were invested in new clean energy capacity worldwide. The rapid growth is not surprising; clean energy is now cost-competitive.

The company I head, Apex Clean Energy, is building nearly $2 billion in wind facilities this year, which has created over 1,000 new jobs. We're working on new development projects nationwide. The fact is, wind and solar energy generation create more jobs per unit of power than fossil fuels, and the solar industry alone employs more people today than the coal industry.

The energy ethic draws on values deeply held by many Americans: independence, self-reliance, and a sense of responsibility to future generations. Collectively, we are changing our energy future by adding more clean energy to the grid, using less gasoline, and embracing efficiency. These changes strengthen our energy ethic. We become more empowered, we refuse to be demoralized by climate change, and we reach for solutions we can implement today--in our own lives--to address carbon pollution.

So in the campaign year ahead, question the presidential candidates on energy and climate change. Let them know that an "all of the above" energy policy is not consistent with our energy ethic. We need leaders who will put a price on carbon emissions and stop fossil fuel subsidies. Together, our collective pressure will drive change and determine outcomes.

How we think and talk about energy is important. We need to share our energy ethic and the success and viability of clean energy solutions. With new technologies, individuals have the ability and responsibility to create a better energy future and a livable environment.

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With a dark cloud on its head, a massive PR nightmare, and billions of dollars at stake, Volkswagen could not have seen any worse days. This is probably as bad as it gets for any car manufacturer, and it definitely is a problem that the German car giant has brought on itself. With a broken promise, and a future that at the best can be called squeamish, Volkswagen has much larger issues at hand than to think about how the brand broke its promise. But after the media nightmare, the legal battles, recalls and fines are all set and done with, what then should be Volkswagen's plan to get back on its feet and become a true example of a legendary car company that it has always been?

More than anything else, Volkswagen has violated the trust that so many people put into it. A brand promise is the most sacred thing any company can hold with its followers and breaking it is a big taboo. Consider the examples if your most favorite company tomorrow says that all its promises were fake and lies, I am sure you would be heartbroken as well as angry. That is the case with VW right this very moment. Here is a three point plan for the global car giant to go beyond its mistakes and create a true brand. This is based on a post aftermath and assuming the company comes out of this mess in one piece.

Make Right what Has Been Wronged
It is absolutely a necessity that every single car that has been produced by Volkswagen that has been affected by the scandal must absolutely be fixed. Yes it probably going to cost them a few billions of dollars but in the long scheme of things, covering this loss is far better than losing their reputation and then going bankrupt. Keep in perspective as well that not only would this help establish Volkswagen's credibility but also help their customers, who are in the millions to accept their apology.

Think Customer First
Whether it is investments in technology, new cars, a new electric car line or whatever, think customer first. This translates not only in helping customers with their complaint, but being able to think how to make the world a better place through new technologies. VW should also invest into making new technology affordable and prove that being a giant of an organization also means making a larger impact on the world around them. As a mega large company that has traditionally had good quality products used by millions of consumers, Volkswagen can be at a unique point in influencing the way the industry works.

Go Back to your Roots
Going back to your roots helps. Tapping deep down into what really created Volkswagen the company that it is, or well what it was a few weeks ago, would mean going into the history of the organization. Retelling the story from the initial days when it was founded may evoke a sense of nostalgia for its customers and while the new generations may not identify with something that happened decades ago, the values will still resonate. One of the biggest problems VW has at this moment in time is the journey to rebuild the trust and what better way to do it than to tell where it all started. Tell the story again but the meaning it was created. I strongly believe that true regret with a new promise that shows commitment and integrity is a sure way to go.

Businesses of all sizes face many challenge. What matters is how companies at their worst stage are able to change the tide by going back to the principles they were built on. At the end, integrity, dedication and passion are well respected and admired by everyone. Whether Volkswagen will evolve as a brand that was trusted will depend on how the company addresses its challenges. Its definitely a story that will continue to be in the media over the next few years.

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Ross Baird, Executive Director of Village Capital, and Joseph Steig, Senior Advisor, Curriculum and Instruction, wrote the following post in conjunction with The Lemelson Foundation, who celebrated their 20th anniversary this past week.

It seems like starting a company has never been easier. And for software startups, that's probably true. But what if your business is hardware-based?

Current entrepreneurship programs work well--for software

In the last decade, entrepreneurial leaders have created dozens of open-source startup courses. Many stem from the popular "lean startup" methodology, developed by Steve Blank and Eric Reis, based on the idea that startups achieve "product/market fit" best when they develop a "minimum viable product", test it with customers, and iterate quickly towards a product that truly solves customer needs.

At my firm, Village Capital, we've incorporated elements of this thinking into our curriculum, emphasizing hypothesis testing as a key tool for startups to test their ideas with customers and move forward on their products. What we've found is that this customer discovery process, influenced as it is by its Silicon Valley origins, is tuned for software companies.

But what if your business isn't software-based?

Over the last five years, Village Capital has developed a unique process for supporting all types of entrepreneurs--peer-selected investment. Our core thesis is that when entrepreneurs make seed investment decisions, it creates more effective businesses.

In our work we've seen that software companies and hardware companies differ greatly in their capacity to iterate towards product/market fit. When software and hardware companies evaluate one another in our program, we have to make sure they appreciate their differences. For example, a healthcare software company could have 50 people test its prototype inside a week and quickly refine their product. A medical device company on the other hand can't do this customer discovery process in the same way for many reasons, including that hardware takes longer to create and testing of a prototype is likely to be highly regulated.

The majority of entrepreneurship training and investment focuses on the relationship between the entrepreneur and her or his product with the customer. However, with hardware companies, building a relationship with tangible products is more complicated.

While software entrepreneurs can readily understand a market--and pivot swiftly by radically changing the product if they don't--hardware entrepreneurs struggle to find product-market fit as rapidly. Hardware companies face the challenges of (a) creating a tangible prototype because of the complexity of design, manufacturing, and usability testing and (b) iterating on their product after they do get customer feedback because expensive and slower product iteration relative to software. Finding product/market fit simply isn't as quick.

Further, improperly engineered hardware can literally put people's lives at risk. No one was ever harmed by testing a website. And finally, software can be easily distributed to anyone, anywhere. Hardware can't. A physical prototype can be demonstrated by video but seeing, handling, physically inspecting a product--and having potential customers actually use it--is often critical.

The startup development needs of a hardware company--which our partners at The Lemelson Foundation call an "invention-based business"--are fundamentally different than a software company. Over the past five years, we have been lucky to work with groups like the Lemelson Foundation--which, last week, celebrated its 20th anniversary since its founding by inventor Jerry Lemelson and his wife Dorothy--in supporting hardware companies.

We've also been lucky to learn from other great organizations such as Greentown Labs, BOLT, BSP Fund, and VentureWell in the US, GearBox in Kenya, and Villgro in India--all of which have extensive experience with hardware--to develop a better understanding of the challenges unique to hardware companies.

Through our work, we've identified four principles--our "Four Ps"--for anyone who wants to support hardware companies to follow.

1. People

Identifying whether the inventor can also be the CEO is central to supporting hardware-based companies. Sometimes, this is the case--like Johnny Park, CEO and inventor of Spensa, a precision agriculture technology company in our portfolio. But more often the inventor is an engineer or a university professor with a passion for the product--but little interest in running the business.

We have been working on ways to help teams evaluate whether the inventor should also be the CEO. In September, we started testing with the Gallup organization a method to help a national group of inventors in water technology identify their strengths and gaps.

In addition, while the concept of "mentorship" is core to nearly all entrepreneur support programs, we see an absence of discussion about access to the right kind of mentors for hardware entrepreneurs. The critical advisors for hardware startups understand not only business, but the specifics of the domain/product sector of the specific company. This is critical at the business level to understand product/market fit, at the production level to understand manufacturing and supply chain and at the technical level to figure out how to make products work. Smart generalists are helpful, but not enough.

Finding the right "people" requires a well-defined framework of analysis, honest and transparent conversations about early management, and sufficient support to the inventor in building and resourcing a team.

2. Prototype Development

Even though new technology has significantly reduced barriers to hardware prototyping, it's still an expensive and time-consuming process. Testing a prototype and further, designing it for manufacture is challenging but critical in bringing a new hardware product for market.

Capital restricts hardware companies in ways that it does not restrict software companies. "Bootstrapping" as a hardware company, when entrepreneurs need raw materials, lab space, and manufacturing capacity, is much more cost-intensive than writing code.

Fortunately, resources exist for hardware entrepreneurs. People who want to support "impact inventors" must be aware of grants and non-dilutive funding from government agencies such as USAID-DIV, SBIR, and NSF-I-Corps, along with support from organizations such as the Shell Foundation and VentureWell's E-Team grants and training program. Grants for prototype development play a disproportionately important role for hardware startups.

3. Place

We define "place" in two ways.

First there's the physical space where inventors can make and manufacture their prototypes. While co-working spaces are becoming ubiquitous, maker-spaces are less common, especially internationally. Inventors need access to facilities like BOLT, Greentown Labs and Gearbox, along with labs such as NREL in Colorado and Los Alamos/Sandia/US Air Force Research Labs in Albuquerque.

Second, there's geographic location. Three-quarters of startup investment in the U.S. goes to three states--California, New York, and Massachusetts. While software entrepreneurs tend to cluster in software hubs, we have found that inventors are disproportionately dispersed. They may be emerging from specific engineering and manufacturing clusters or be tied to research labs but often they don't have sufficient engagement from a surrounding business community. Some of the best invention-based businesses in our portfolio come from places like Purdue and Oklahoma State, solving problems in agriculture and energy that emerge from those locations. Such problems are not "native" to MIT and Stanford. Investors interested in hardware need to think more critically about opportunities to source deals outside of the software hubs.

One opportunity is that specific cities and regions have assets of particular value to invention-based businesses. For example, we've been working with the city of Albuquerque to take local expertise in water technology--and the largest pool of brackish water in the US--to support inventors working on water sustainability. Potential mentors in such communities with sector expertise are often not used to supporting entrepreneurs in their communities. One of our challenges and opportunities is to make these connections.

People who want to support invention-based businesses need to pay attention to the place that the inventors are coming from--product/market fit has a place-based component.

4. Policy

Regulatory issues have a dramatic effect on invention-based businesses--and navigating this landscape is challenging. Policy and regulatory issues can have dramatic impact upon sales processes and profound business strategy implications--from the IP registration of a single company to the regulatory framework of a company's value chain. Yet, few inventors initially pay enough attention to that link--and few entrepreneurship programs highlight policy. We have found that working with our companies to provide more specific policy guidance has significantly paid off.

People who care about invention-based businesses need to pay attention to the IP and policy gaps--and help entrepreneurs close them. Further, as noted, hardware isn't as transportable as hardware. This constraint introduces other hurdles such as trade tariffs that hardware companies have to face and software companies don't. Ultimately, this aspect of policy affects where hardware is manufactured, how it is supplied, and its distribution chain--a critical consideration both for how the hardware gets to the customer and the impact the production of the hardware has. An understanding of manufacturing and trade policy is far more important for hardware than software.

Roadmap for invention-based companies?

The world has a long way to go to support invention-based companies at the same level as software ventures, but the new trends are promising. On our part, this fall we are working with The Lemelson Foundation to pilot a new curriculum specifically targeted at invention-based businesses.

These businesses create manufacturing jobs, reward innovation in universities and labs everywhere, and ultimately create products that transform society.

We encourage investors everywhere to understand the impact--both in production and distribution--that hardware companies can to have. By addressing the "Four Ps," we can take a huge step forward toward creating a new generation of inventors worldwide.

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By Susan Manber, EVP, Brand Strategy & Planning, Digitas Health LifeBrands

Emerging technology is a hot topic in our constantly evolving work. A lot has been written on how new tech - wearables and mobile apps- will empower people to improve their health. When used well, those technologies can create tighter, stronger relationships between patients and their physicians and caregivers, too. In fact, technology that was designed specifically for mainstream consumer use has powerful health applications.

Recently, I experienced three instances in which technology improved health and caregiving.

A few weeks ago, my 89-year-old father called from his Manhattan apartment to let me know that his Access-a-Ride van had not shown up, and he was going to have to cancel his cardiologist appointment. He had been short of breath and unsteady on his feet, so this appointment was important for his wellbeing and my piece of mind. I called an Uber, and a few minutes later, he was on his way to his appointment. Dad didn't need to understand how Uber worked; he just needed to get to the cardiologist. A second car easily returned him home. As it turned out, Dad needed to have his medication adjusted and was soon feeling much steadier on his feet. Uber as a healthcare service? Absolutely!

While leading a workshop in San Francisco a few weeks ago, my daughter (at home in Westchester) texted me a picture of her severely swollen ankle, asking if she should go to the ER. During her appointment, I used my IPhone's FaceTime app to speak with the doctor. Remotely, I gave permission for the physician to examine my daughter's swollen ankle. We discussed his recommended treatment of a brace, ice, and three weeks of rest. This instance alone saved an emergency room visit, cost to the system, and hours of anxiety.

Closer to home, I got a bad case of what I thought was poison ivy. The following day, it started to hurt. I thought to myself, that the pain was odd because poison ivy shouldn't hurt, and a quick search showed that I could have shingles. I sent pictures to my allergist who told me to come in right away. Sure enough, she soon diagnosed me with shingles. Luckily, I contacted her within the 72-hour window to receive the proper antiviral treatment. Sending pictures was cost-efficient, quick, and provided me urgent care that I would otherwise have to wait to receive.

One family + every day technology = major health benefits.

Oh, The Possibilities

Two new apps, Periscope and Meerkat, enable real-time live video streaming on Twitter. Now, imagine you can use your Twitter account to share and learn from health experts around the world? What kinds of effect does this technology have on our understanding of medical education and knowledge sharing?

Concerns over language barriers will be erased with the continued advancement of Google Translate. Image not having to be worried about travelling to a different country and having to visit an emergency room if patients and experts can communicate effectively.

A new smart phone app called "Vula" was developed by a doctor in South Africa to diagnose cataracts. Previously, people in remote areas went undiagnosed and never knew a simple surgery could save their eyesight.

In today's world, it's a challenge for even the best doctors to keep abreast of all the advances in treatment. As one doctor put it "I'm up to date if I'm only a week behind." So don't be afraid to experiment or suggest using existing tech to make your relationship with your physician that much better. Technology has the power to connect us to better care if we use it to advocate for our families and ourselves.

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An excerpt from Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice

The United States is among the richest countries in all of history. But if you're not a corporate or political elite, you'd never know it.

In the world working people inhabit, our infrastructure is collapsing, our schools are laying off teachers, our drinking water is barely potable, our cities are facing bankruptcy, and our public and private pension funds are nearing collapse. We - consumers, students, and homeowners - are loaded with crushing debt, but our real wages haven't risen since the 1970s.

How can we be so rich and still have such poor services, so much debt and such stagnant incomes?

The answer: runaway inequality - the ever-increasing gap in income and wealth between the super-rich and the rest of us.

This isn't the first time that a tiny elite has gained extraordinary control over economic and political life. Ancient Egypt had the Pharaohs. Medieval Europe had feudal lords and kings. We Americans had industrial robber barons.

And today, we've got financial and corporate elites.

Runaway inequality is upending how we see ourselves and how we govern. It is upending the American Dream (the cherished idea that life gets better and better with each generation). And it is upending the practice of democracy and the very idea that each of us has roughly equal influence in governing our country.

It's time to face up to runaway economic inequality - what causes it, what it's doing to us, and what we can do about it.

This book has four aims:

1. Shine a light on economic inequality: It's worse than you think
For all the talk about economic inequality, most of us have no idea how bad it really is. It's as if our native sense of justice won't let us comprehend how outrageously unequal our economy has become and how much worse it's getting day by day. Maybe we're just too fair-minded to wrap our minds around the level of systematic greed that now permeates society's top echelons.

We'll look at just how wide the gap is between the super-rich and the rest of us, and how rapidly it is accelerating. A very small group of economic elites is accumulating more and more of the country's resources while the rest of us stand still or fall further behind.

But the problem goes beyond how many dollars we have (or don't): Runaway inequality is tearing apart the fabric of our soci¬ety. The super-rich live in a world that no longer requires mutual reliance on common public services. Elites generally don't use our schools, our roads, our airports. They don't really care if our infrastructure collapses. We are cracking into two separate societies.

At the same time, the super-rich are able to park trillions of dollars far from the reach of the tax collector. By avoiding and evading taxes, with help from an army of lawyers and bankers, the rich are undermining the government services that the rest of us need. So our roads and bridges crumble, our environment becomes contaminated, our children crowd into our rundown schools. We pay a fortune out of pocket for higher education and poor quality health care. And some of us with darker pigmentation are targeted for arrest and fines in order to help fund local government, while also facing poverty and police violence.

Runaway inequality undermines the practice of democracy. As the rich get richer and richer, it gets easier and easier for them to buy political favors. They can twist the media, elected officials, and government agencies to do their bidding. They vote with their money, which makes a mockery of our democratic "one vote, one person" creed. We'll see data showing that elected officials rarely act on the agenda most Americans support. Instead they represent the wishes of the affluent.

Using over 100 easy to read charts and graphs as well as text, we will demonstrate that as bad as you think it is, it's worse.

2. Examine the Fading American Dream

We'll take an honest look at how we compare to other developed nations.
Most of us still view our country through the lens of the Amer¬ican Dream and American "exceptionalism." We see ourselves as leading the world in just about everything that is good and just. As virtually every politician likes to say, we are the shining light of freedom and prosperity, blessed by God.

Most Americans believe that the U.S. has the most upward mobility and highest standard of living in the world. We think that the U.S. is the fairest nation on Earth, offering the best prospects for everyday people. (And for anyone who isn't moving up, it's their own fault.)

But the facts in this book will undermine that perspective. While America may have had the most prosperous working class from World War II to 1980, it doesn't anymore. In fact, today the U.S. is the most unequal country in the developed world. We have the most child poverty and homelessness. We have more people in prison than China and Russia. And Americans are less upwardly mobile than most Europeans.

We'll see that our public services don't stack up either. Our health care costs more, covers fewer people and produces worse outcomes. And we are nearly last among developed nations in energy effi¬ciency and overall infrastructure.

No question about it, the top 1 percent never had it so good. But the rest of us are losing sight of the American Dream as runaway inequality accelerates.

3. Empower ourselves with the big picture
From years of conducting economic workshops for adults, we've learned that having a clear overview of what is going on is remark¬ably empowering for people. When you can step back and see how it all fits together, the world makes more sense.

We'll work hard at presenting that big, wide view, because most of us never have a chance to see it. You just can't get an accurate picture of the economy as a whole through the everyday media or the jumble of internet sources. We hear snippets about stock markets, government debt, trade, unemployment and inflation. What we don't hear about is the context, substantive explanation, or critical questioning about why any of this is happening and how it relates to our daily lives.

Most of all, the media turns a blind eye to the fact that we live in a capitalist system. We're never allowed to get outside that box so we can look at it and see how it ticks. So we never hear about the fundamental conflict that capitalism creates between the needs and wishes of privately owned corporations and our health and well-being - or the well-being of the planet that sustains us. We don't hear about how the corporate owners' and financiers' insatiable drive for profits is eroding our standard of living. Yet these conflicts are key to understanding our new era of runaway inequality.

The picture of the economy that nearly all of us share turns out to be wrong. We are told in many different ways that the econ¬omy is like a complex machine that functions beyond the reach of human control. This machine metaphor frames our view of the economic world: It makes us think that everyone is just doing their thing in the machine, and that we each get what we deserve, more or less. It obscures the reality that there is, in fact, a fundamental conflict between employees and owners, between the rich and the rest of us.

The big picture we'll present makes a lot more sense than the chopped up version that bombards us each day. Yes, the economic system is complex and yes, it is very hard to control. But its funda¬mental direction is set by humans who serve particular interests. We will see how powerful people chose to dramatically change the economy's direction a generation ago, and how working people have been paying the price ever since. Runaway inequality is not an act of God. It is the result of a system designed by and for wealthy elites.

4. Come to a common understanding so we can build a common movement
We offer this, our most ambitious goal, with the utmost humility: We aim to help build a broad-based movement for economic and environmental justice.

Right now, we lack a robust mass movement with the power to reclaim our economy and our democracy to make it work for the 99 percent.

Instead, we have thousands of individual groups working on every issue from fracking to a living wage. We have unions fighting for their members and worker centers fighting for immigrant rights. We have protests ranging from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter to climate justice. We have hundreds of progressive websites and jour¬nals to cover all this activity. But we do not have a coherent national movement with a clear and bold agenda that links us together.

We will show that runaway inequality is at the root of many of the problems we face, including the meteoric and disastrous rise of the financial sector, defunding of the public sector, environmental destruction, increased racial discrimination, the gender gap in wages and the rise of our mammoth prison population. And we will posit that if we share a clear understanding of runaway inequality - and the basic economic situation we face - we can begin to build a common, broad-based movement for fundamental economic justice that will take on America's economic elites.

The political system will not move unless we organize on a mass level like the Populists did over a hundred years ago, like the trade union movement did in the 1930s and like the Civil Rights movement did in the 1950s and 1960s.

Some liberal economists and politicians appeal to the self-inter¬est of the super-rich. They argue that the rich would be (even) better off if they would just allow a fairer distribution of income and wealth. We disagree. Expecting the wealthy to help us secure basic fairness is a losing proposition.
Economic elites will only give up power and wealth when they're forced to do so by a powerful social movement.

So this book has far-reaching but difficult to achieve goals. It outlines an economic analysis and economic solutions that can connect us and enable us to build a broad, common movement. Such a common economic analysis does not by itself bring us together. But it will be very hard to create a powerful mass move¬ment without one.

To achieve these goals the book is divided into four parts:

Part 1: Causes of Runaway Inequality analyzes how wealth is extracted from all of us by Wall Street.

Part 2: The Decline of American Exceptionalism examines America's ranking on key economic and social issues in comparison to other developed nations.

Part 3: Separate Issues, Common Cause shows the major impact of runaway inequality on a series of issues that often are viewed independently.

Part 4: Solutions reviews a range of policies and actions that will be needed to bring more economic and social justice to America.

In the end this book makes one essential point again and again. Runaway inequality comes at a steep price. The money that enriches the few is extracted from all that we hold dear - our public life, our incomes, our health and the education of our children. It is making poor the richest country on Earth. . . . Until we do something about it.

Les Leopold, the director of the Labor Institute in New York, designs educational programs on economics, health, safety and the environment for unions, worker centers and community organizations. He also is the author of three previous books on labor and financialization. This book, which to date has more than 20,000 copies in circulation with worker and community organizations, is available at runawayinequality.org (free shipping). For bulk orders contact him at LesLeopold@aol.com

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The characters in Orhan Pamuk's novels are complex, hybrid identities. They are neither purely Islamic traditionalists nor secular fundamentalists, but, as Turkey's most celebrated writer and Nobel laureate has put it, of "two souls." "To have two souls," Pamuk once told me, "is a good thing. That is the way people really are. We have to understand that, just like a person, a country can have two souls."

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's military-allied, authoritarian and Western-oriented modernization from above bolstered one aspect of that soul in the last century. Over the last 13 years, current Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Islamic-based AKP has bolstered the other aspect through democratic modernization from below. In the process, political space has opened up not only to the influence of conservative rural Anatolia but also for other plural constituencies from Kurds to the gay community.

By trying to close that plural space now through increasingly autocratic tendencies -- in the midst of the Syrian civil war spilling over its borders -- Erdoğan has polarized the "two souls" of Turkey. For Pamuk, "to have democracy is precisely to have a dialogue between these two souls." "I am worried," he says, "because I know that in the end Erdoğan wants to govern alone at all costs. He does not want to share power."

Writing from Ankara in the wake of the horrific terror attack, the Turkish-British journalist Alev Scott reviews Pamuk's new novel, "A Strangeness in My Mind." "This is not an intentionally political novel," she notes, "but if there is a political message, this is it: Turkey needs to recognize its universals, not its differences." Prominent Turkish novelist Elif Shafak says in an interview that the tensions over the civil war in Syria are conjoining with the victim mentality of those in power in Turkey to create "a loss of collective reason" and "the erosion of empathy." Also writing from Ankara, Suat Kiniklioglu, once a spokesman for the AKP, worries that if the November elections don't enable formation of a coalition government we will see the "Pakistanization of Turkey."

WorldPost Middle East Correspondent Sophia Jones reports from Ankara on the trauma suffered by the victims there. Jo Confino asks activists on the ground in Turkey what they want to create a better world. Dutch journalist Fréderike Geerdink, who was recently deported from Turkey because of her reports on the Kurds, similarly argues that polarization in the country today can only be repaired by "a new Turkey based on pluralistic citizenship." Writing from Istanbul, Behlül Özkan says that the Ankara bombing suggests Turkey is now paying the price for turning a blind eye to the presence of the Islamic State on its territory. Also writing from Istanbul, Mustafa Akyol sees that the "Syrian civil war is [now] spilling into Turkey."

Writing from Paris, philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy turns his attention to Putin's role in Syria: "The goal of Russia's intervention is therefore not to contribute to the 'struggle against terrorism,' as the Kremlin's propagandists claim, but to restore political control, at any cost, to the regime that spawned the terrorism in the first place." Sarwar Kashmeri disagrees. "Mr. Putin has made a strategic, well calibrated and thought out move on the Middle East chessboard and will soon reap significant geopolitical rewards from it," he writes. "For Americans and Europeans, the Russian offer will be a lifeline they cannot refuse." In an interview, Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat says the citizen journalist network platform he has set up to geolocate Russian airstrikes in Syria confirms that "Russia is not targeting the Islamic State ... but rather an array of Syrian rebel groups fighting President Bashar Assad, an ally of the Kremlin."

Jeffrey Mankoff writes that Moscow has "calculated correctly" that the U.S. and its allies are not going to commit real forces to the fight in Syria and is thus setting an agenda to which the West must respond. Historian Niall Ferguson scores President Obama's notion of "strategic patience" that is allowing Syria to burn. (Also, watch here the WorldPost conversation between Charlie Rose and Ferguson on his new book, "Kissinger 1923-1968: Idealist.")

Turning to the impact of the Syrian crisis on Europe, German Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier write that Germany can't indefinitely absorb refugees and must now "fight the root cause of the refugee crisis" by seeking political solutions in the Middle East and North Africa. In these photo essays, we look inside a refugee center in Germany and see desperate parents carrying their children ashore in Lesbos, Greece. Miguel Urban, a Podemos delegate to the European Parliament, compares Spain's Mellila refugee camp to Guantanamo. We report as well on a "Thank You Concert" in Munich by the so-called Syrian refugee "piano man," Ayham Ahmad, who has played for audiences along his route to Europe. Also from Munich, Sophia Maier describes what it was like to take in four refugees. In an act of "joy without borders" we report on a Jordanian couple who invited over 200 refugees to their wedding feast.

From Athens, Danae Leivada reports on how non-profit organizations are "bringing hope and care" to senior citizens who have suffered years of cuts on social services during Greece's sovereign debt crisis. In a new series, Dominique Mosbergen examines the struggle for LGBT rights across Southeast Asia.

As a new Palestinian uprising seems in the works, Daoud Kuttab writes from Amman that, without a concerted strategy to unify the Palestinians, "there is a real worry that this wave of opposition to occupation will fizzle out." David Polumbo-Liu attributes the spark in violence to the "destruction of religious sites and 'extrajudicial executions' of Palestinian teenagers." Mohammed Suliman argues that "Israel finds itself pitted against no particular Palestinian group or leadership, but primarily against [the entirety of] Palestine's younger generation in the West Bank, inside Israel and in the Gaza Strip." Former Israeli diplomat Josef Olmert asks about the president of the Palestinian Authority, "Why Does Abbas Lie?" World Reporter Charlotte Alfred tells the story of a Palestinian living in Tel Aviv who defused his neighbors' fear of Arabs with a humorous retort that went viral. Amal Clooney protests the "arbitrary arrest" of former Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed and calls for his release.

Writing from Moscow, Georgy Bovt hails the Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to Svetlana Alexievich at a time when the "'Russian world' is standing at the threshold of the deepest crisis of its long history." This week's "Forgotten Fact" looks at the recently released report by a Dutch commission that concluded that the Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 shot down over Ukraine was hit by a Russian-manufactured Buk missile -- and how few Russians believe that to be true.

From Qin'an Country in China, WorldPost China Correspondent Matt Sheehan reports how eye exams are improving the prospects of rural schools. Angus Deaton, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics this week, writes that poverty is more than the lack of money.

In a beautifully written and illustrated essay on the Zen qualities of Japan, Pico Iyer examines the disappearance of the ego and the relational identity of the person. In a series of stunning images, we present the winners of this year's microphotography contest hosted by Nikon and the winners of the global urban photography contest. Other photo essays this week feature the celebration of Navratri, the Hindu festival this week of nine nights dedicated to the glorification of Shakti, the feminine form of the Divine, a Stalin theme park in Lithuania and the exceptional pictures taken by the celebrated 90-year-old Italian farmer-photographer Ulisse Bezzi.

Fusion looks at the tailgate parties along the U.S.-Mexico border where people gathered together to watch the recent soccer match between the two countries. Our China in Africa Podcast explores the controversy over Niger's Chinese-built oil refinery. Finally, our Singularity series this week shows how a brain scan can tell if you are "naughty or nice."

japan boat lake reflect

A fishing boat on a lake near Mount Fuji, Japan, circa 1910. (Photo by Spencer Arnold/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

WHO WE ARE

EDITORS: Nathan Gardels, Senior Advisor to the Berggruen Institute on Governance and the long-time editor of NPQ and the Global Viewpoint Network of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate/Tribune Media, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. Farah Mohamed is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. Kathleen Miles is the Senior Editor of The WorldPost. Alex Gardels and Peter Mellgard are the Associate Editors of The WorldPost. Katie Nelson is the National Editor at the Huffington Post, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost's editorial coverage. Eline Gordts is HuffPost's Senior World Editor. Charlotte Alfred and Nick Robins-Early are World Reporters. Rowaida Abdelaziz is Social Media Editor.

CORRESPONDENTS: Sophia Jones in Istanbul; Matt Sheehan in Beijing.

EDITORIAL BOARD: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Arianna Huffington, Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.), Pierre Omidyar (First Look Media) Juan Luis Cebrian (El Pais/PRISA), Walter Isaacson (Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN), John Elkann (Corriere della Sera, La Stampa), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Dileep Padgaonkar (Times of India) and Yoichi Funabashi (Asahi Shimbun).

VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS: Dawn Nakagawa.

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Moises Naim (former editor of Foreign Policy), Nayan Chanda (Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review) and Katherine Keating (One-On-One). Sergio Munoz Bata and Parag Khanna are Contributing Editors-At-Large.

The Asia Society and its ChinaFile, edited by Orville Schell, is our primary partner on Asia coverage. Eric X. Li and the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai and Guancha.cn also provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content of China Digital Times. Seung-yoon Lee is The WorldPost link in South Korea.

Jared Cohen of Google Ideas provides regular commentary from young thinkers, leaders and activists around the globe. Bruce Mau provides regular columns from MassiveChangeNetwork.com on the "whole mind" way of thinking. Patrick Soon-Shiong is Contributing Editor for Health and Medicine.

ADVISORY COUNCIL: Members of the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council and Council for the Future of Europe serve as the Advisory Council -- as well as regular contributors -- to the site. These include, Jacques Attali, Shaukat Aziz, Gordon Brown, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Juan Luis Cebrian, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, Francis Fukuyama, Felipe Gonzalez, John Gray, Reid Hoffman, Fred Hu, Mo Ibrahim, Alexei Kudrin, Pascal Lamy, Kishore Mahbubani, Alain Minc, Dambisa Moyo, Laura Tyson, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Raghuram Rajan, Nouriel Roubini, Nicolas Sarkozy, Eric Schmidt, Gerhard Schroeder, Peter Schwartz, Amartya Sen, Jeff Skoll, Michael Spence, Joe Stiglitz, Larry Summers, Wu Jianmin, George Yeo, Fareed Zakaria, Ernesto Zedillo, Ahmed Zewail, and Zheng Bijian.

From the Europe group, these include: Marek Belka, Tony Blair, Jacques Delors, Niall Ferguson, Anthony Giddens, Otmar Issing, Mario Monti, Robert Mundell, Peter Sutherland and Guy Verhofstadt.

MISSION STATEMENT

The WorldPost is a global media bridge that seeks to connect the world and connect the dots. Gathering together top editors and first person contributors from all corners of the planet, we aspire to be the one publication where the whole world meets.

We not only deliver breaking news from the best sources with original reportage on the ground and user-generated content; we bring the best minds and most authoritative as well as fresh and new voices together to make sense of events from a global perspective looking around, not a national perspective looking out.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

The following post was excerpted from
RAW DEAL: How the "Uber Economy" and Runaway Capitalism are Screwing American Workers
Reprinted with permission from St. Martin's Press
(c) 2015 by Steven Hill, published on October 20, 2015

*****

The third actor in this passion play is Mr. Brian Chesky himself, Airbnb's 34 year old CEO and co-founder. A former bodybuilder and graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Chesky's rise to the ranks of billionaire hospitality mogul has been remarkable. A video floating around online of Chesky's commencement speech that he gave at his college graduation shows, if nothing else, major amounts of chutzpah. The future Airbnb chief struts on stage in full cap and gown to the throbbing bass line of Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean," and proceeds to rip off his black graduation gown, revealing a white tuxedo underneath. He starts clumsily moonwalking and crotch-grabbing to the beat, egged on by the cheers of his classmates, before delivering his address to the graduates, families and faculty. His speech is more entertaining than profound, mixing quips, funny one-liners and even occasional bodybuilder flexes with a 22-year-old's version of wisdom. The young man in the video is working hard to be liked, is slightly grandiose but also self-aware enough to say that he is uncertain of his future (with an art and design degree, after all). He is confident enough to relish his moment on the graduation stage, and displays definite leadership qualities, kind of like a head cheerleader urging on his homies at their final big hurrah.

That was in 2004, and now in his new role, the chutzpah, leadership and cheerleading have remained and come to the fore. When Chesky spoke at a hospitality conference sponsored by the University of San Francisco in April 2014, he offered no acknowledgement of the complexities, much less the downsides, of his business model. People like Theresa Flandrich and her elderly and disabled neighbors who are being evicted under the pressures of the assault on the San Francisco housing market, which Airbnb's service has greatly contributed to, are not on his radar. Instead, rather unbelievably, he cast his company into another role in this script--that of the blue helmets saving the world.

"[Airbnb] is like the United Nations at every kitchen table. It's very powerful," said Chesky. In the masthead of his company, Chesky has assumed the role of Ideologist-in-Chief. His early interviews as CEO, viewable on YouTube, show an awkward young man, wide-eyed, hands flailing, who scarcely can believe his and his cofounders' good fortune. He has an "aw shucks" charm. But several years later, as the same old questions became more pointed and specific, Chesky's vague responses come off as evasive.

It's not just that Airbnb refuses to be responsive to the increasingly wide path of destruction it is hewing. It's also that Chesky wraps it all into a New Age-y kind of rap about trust, sharing, community and belonging. In early 2014, Chesky and his cofounders took a deep breath from their incredible success story to reconsider their mission. Chesky posted his thoughts about the newly revamped Airbnb, an 1100-word sermon to his public that, like his college graduation speech, was another revealing moment into this young phenom.

"Joe, Nate, and I did some soul-searching over the last year," wrote Chesky. "We asked ourselves, 'What is our mission? What is the big idea that truly defines Airbnb?' It turns out the answer was right in front of us. People thought Airbnb was about renting houses. But really, we're about home. You see, a house is just a space, but a home is where you belong. And what makes this global community so special is that for the very first time, you can belong anywhere. That is the idea at the core of our company: belonging."

Like that young, slightly presumptuous college speaker holding forth at center stage, Chesky then goes on to wrap his company's growing commercial empire in a grandiose vision that he positions as a solution to a civilization gone awry, indeed as a reaction to the wrongful drift of history.

"We used to take belonging for granted. Cities used to be villages," wrote Chesky. "Everyone knew each other, and everyone knew they had a place to call home. But after the mechanization and Industrial Revolution of the last century, those feelings of trust and belonging were displaced by mass-produced and impersonal travel experiences. We also stopped trusting each other. And in doing so, we lost something essential about what it means to be a community... Belonging is the idea that defines Airbnb. . . Airbnb is returning us to a place where everyone can feel they belong."

Like a newly converted evangelical, Chesky explicitly tries to tap into a rich, red vein filled with the loneliness and isolation of this modern life. He does this as a bid to position his company as more than simply a hospitality business: it's a vehicle for building a global movement, a community of trust and sharing. But not over religion or to provide humanitarian aid, or to end human rights abuses, as previous visionaries have tried to do - no, Chesky is no Albert Schweitzer. Instead, in a sign of the times, his revolutionary act involves. . . a commercial transaction . . . providing short-term rentals to tourists.

Chesky's Hallmark greeting card homily to his public was brilliant, akin to channeling John Lennon's "Imagine" and merging it with a hotel business. It's even more audacious than Nike's "Just Do It" or Apple's "Think Different." It simultaneously attempts to mine feelings of loneliness and isolation, a longing for community, a sense of history and an economy gone off the rails, as well as the desire for travel to exotic places--and merge it all with a real financial need among Airbnb hosts in difficult economic times to use their own homes to earn income. To "monetize" their lives and their loneliness. It is one of the most audacious marketing pitches ever deployed.

Like any true evangelical, Brian Chesky seems to sincerely believe his newfound faith. But like so many fundamentalists of one kind or another, he is blinded by it. He deletes from his picture whatever fact or story doesn't fit. In his talk at the University of San Francisco conference, Chesky crowed, "For us to win, no one has to lose," and like that college commencement speaker he championed his "on-message" message with such a boyishly good-natured enthusiasm that audience members keyed into the hipness and coolness of his rosy version of the world. Yet sadly, Chesky has rendered invisible all those people like Theresa Flandrich and so many others across San Francisco--across the world--who in fact are not winning because they are being evicted under the housing pressures that Airbnb has helped unleash. He ignores all the upset neighbors who have some pretty strong feelings about the hotelization of their neighborhoods, with complete strangers and their rollaway luggage now traipsing in and out at all hours. He slickly hides the fact that increasingly "regular people" renting spare rooms are not the core of his business -- instead it comes from professional landlords and multi-property agents, some of whom have converted entire apartment buildings into tourist hotels, even if they have to evict elderly and sick people to do it. Indeed he ignores all the disappearing housing stock and rising rents for local residents, not all of it attributable to Airbnb but his company has become a key catalytic factor.

Brian Chesky and the rest of Airbnb's executives and venture-capitalist backers seem to feel little responsibility for upending so many people's lives. Their company is like a rumbling jetliner that flies low overhead, but doesn't want to be blamed for its noise. They are either oblivious to their impact, or they have rationalized it away as the necessary collateral damage for their "sharing revolution." The contradiction between his professed mission and his investors' demands and ambitions seems not to have dawned on him--that a true community often breaks down as it scales and grows larger, until finally it reaches the point where it makes a mockery of what it believes and the reasons for which it was founded.

Perhaps the biggest tragedy in all this is that at the core of Airbnb is a really good idea-it has cleverly used Web- and app-based technology to bust open a global market that connects tourists with financially strapped homeowners. After interviewing some of Airbnb's "regular-people" hosts, I'm convinced that this service legitimately does help some of them make ends meet. But by taking such a hands-off, laissez-faire attitude toward the professionalization of hosting by greedy commercial landlords and multiproperty agents, Airbnb has become its own worst enemy. As the number of victims piles up, it undermines its own "sharing and trust" ethos.

If Airbnb and Chesky really believed in that ethos, the company could partner with local governments and tenants associations to draft laws that take account of this new business model. Chesky could delist the professional landlords and multi-property agents from the Airbnb site, severely limiting their ability to turn badly needed housing into tourist hotels. He could forbid any professional property agency from managing the listing of another person on the Airbnb site, which would crack down on absentee hosts. He could cooperate with cities like San Francisco and Portland, that require hosts to register with local officials, by delisting any unregistered hosts. Airbnb has the data and knows who all of these violators are. Indeed, its website is a virtual advertisements for its hosts' criminality, with homes brightly photographed and openly displayed, even though most of them are breaking the law.

Chesky's company also could pay hotel taxes in all 34,000 cities in which it operates, or collect it from the hosts and hand it over to local authorities. He could stop refusing to supply the data that cities need to enforce regulations and taxation, including the number of rental nights and rates charged by each host. This is not rocket science, all that's needed is the will.

The clear and simple truth is that Airbnb has drifted very far from its origins, and is no longer simply a platform of "regular people" hosts. It has morphed into a giant loophole for professional real estate operatives. Brian Chesky can preach all he wants about sharing, trust and belonging, but he and his investors have shown no willingness to kill their golden goose, despite the damage that greedy professional landlords and multiproperty agents are causing to the very fabric of the cities where they operate. That's not "sharing," it's just raw, naked capitalism.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

If China fails to turbocharge its capacity to innovate, the country will experience a hard economic landing and social stability will be threatened. But can China evolve into an innovation powerhouse? The jury is out.

Innovation elevates labor productivity which provides resource flexibility -- air cover -- to implement fundamental structural reforms which center on two inter-related planks: a) shifting reliance from exports and increasingly-inefficient investment to value creation in service and consumer sectors, and b) maintaining smooth urbanization in an era of pinched labor supply.

The success of companies such as Alibaba, the world largest business-to-business e-commerce site, not to mention a dynamic private sector boasting millions of new online enterprises, are grounds for optimism. WeChat's micro-lending and customer relationship management (CRM) services are testaments to corporate experimentation and economic dynamism.

But a commercial landscape still dominated by sclerotic state-owned enterprises locked in cozy relationships with opaque government entities suggests otherwise.

The Chinese have always been masters of "incremental" innovation.

More than ten years ago, I was taken on a tour of the product development laboratories of Lenovo, now one of the world's largest producers of mobile phones and personal computing devices. Engineers were proud of product enhancements such as spill-proof keyboards to 360-degree swivel screens. Chinese products' relentless crawl up value chains -- from unreliable commodities to affordable and dependable goods with new features -- is proof of intelligent perseverance.

Huawei, a leading telecommunications component manufacturer, has achieved success around the world through what Joy Tan, President of Global Media and Communications, terms "step by step" innovation. In a recent panel discussion sponsored by the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong, she attributed her company's overseas 3G penetration to a "small invention" that lowered site acquisition costs by reducing the size of component boxes.

Lei Jun, the quintessentially imperial chief of gadget maker and "China Dream" brand du jour Xiaomi, is also a proponent of incremental -- or micro-targeted -- innovation. In a recent Wall Street Journal interview, he asserts, "In the past you made a phone, hoping to sell it to billions of users in the world. Now you can't think in this way. You'll have to design different phones for different crowds in different scenarios." In the same article, Lei Jun cites Xiaomi's newly launched model 4C, which enables better Internet connections on high-speed trains, and newly announced virtual SIM cards that offer cheap roaming rates for international travelers. He then asks, "Wouldn't you call this innovation?"

Well, yes and no. It's innovation alright. But not the type of mould-breaking, value-creating innovation Lei Jun claims to admire in brands such as Muji and Uniqlo, Japanese companies that redefine "everyday style" in home furnishing and fast fashion.

China needs non-incremental innovation to escape a middle-income trap and living standard stagnation. The country's growth model is bogged down by structural tensions -- recently manifested as abrupt exchange rate lurches, worrying capital outflows and ham-handed stock market interventions.

"Innovation traditionalism" is no longer enough.

China's economy, not to mention its burgeoning middle class, demands qualitative, not quantitative, evolution. This will require a gradual, albeit fundamental, shift corporate mindset that reveres low price as the ultimate competitive advantage. Industry and government leaders must now focus on margin elevation.

This is not happening, even in new generation sectors. Scores of "online to offline" apps have lost funding because of price war burn out. Theoretically, these services put excess human capital to more productive use and could become platforms of mold-breaking innovation. But most still root appeal in satisfying the Middle Kingdom's most timeless urge: bargain hunting.

I am neither economist or political scientist. Many are more qualified to limn the structural barriers that preclude liberation of China's creative spirit. They are omnipresent, baked into the warp and woof of China's social, political and industrial fabric. They include: non-existent intellectual property protection; defanged commercial courts beholden to local party interests; ambiguous eminent domain regulations; a rigid financial system designed to advance state interests; massive state-enforced capital misallocation; and media controls that pre-empt free flow of information, the life blood of creativity ideation.

China's elemental problem, however, is cultural -- a national "trust deficit." For thousands of years, China has been closed society and, today, so are its corporations. The Middle Kingdom lacks dynamic "networks" that stimulate new ideas and the dynamic collaboration required to harvest them. A few years ago, New York Times columnist David Brooks put his finger on an enduring American competitive advantage:

"The United States is a universal nation. There are already people there with connections all over the world. A nation of immigrants is more permeable than say, Chinese society...Americans build large, efficient organizations that are not bound by the circles of kinship and clan. Study after study finds that Americans are not hierarchical. American children are raised to challenge their parents. American underlings are relatively free to challenge their bosses. In this country you're less likely to have to submit to authority."

The Chinese, defensive and protective, are culturally -- and, therefore, institutionally -- averse to ideas that buck against convention. Chinese CEOs surround themselves with yes-men, allied by blood or geography. The boards of, say, Fujian-based private enterprises are dominated by Fujianese. Within organizations, territorialism is rife. Sales managers vigilantly protect turf, minimizing cross-department teamwork. Resources are rarely pooled for innovation, leading to chronic short-termism. Subordinates, anxious about losing face, never counter senior managers, particularly on "subjective" matters impervious to "proof." Deals with foreign joint venture partners are tortuously negotiated because a win-win mindset is never taken for granted.

China's ossified institutions are reinforced by Xi Jinping's anxiously aggressive regime. But sustainable value creation will depend on the Communist Party resisting an instinctive urge to control -- to have the final say on -- every matter of strategic significance.

Today it's still, "Patents, yes; ideas, no so much."

It can only be hoped the China's summer of tribulation has spurred the central government to reassess is current repressive -- and actually fear-driven -- course.

In Confucian societies, the need to maintain stability is not up for debate. Jeffersonian democracy, born of the Enlightenment, has little relevance, even among internationalized "Post 9os" youth. But the country's institutions need to evolve with the times, lest the Chinese people lose faith in government's ability to slowly but surely implement an economic agenda that bets on genuine innovation to improve the lives -- and the economic prospects -- of both the ambitious middle class and the striving masses.

In paternalistic China, change has to start at the top. If Xi Jinping can be, against all odds, persuaded to dilute Party omnipotence, China might indeed become a place where new ideas flourish to achieve critical mass. If not, let's fasten our seat belts and prepare for a bumpy ride.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

This is part of the Startup Mentor Series -- featuring founders and successful entrepreneurs who share their advice in building successful businesses.

Statistics suggests that 92% of startups fail. What could be the reasons behind, you might ask.

Today we'll dive deep into this matter with the help of serial entrepreneur, investor, mentor and the award-winning co-author of Small Business, Big Vision: Lessons on How to Dominate Your Market from Self-Made Entrepreneurs Who Did it Right, Matthew Toren.

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2015-10-17-1445094241-8366263-MatthewTorenofYoungEntrepreneursStartupMentorAdvice.jpg

Matthew Toren, Entrepreneur, Mentor and YoungEntrepreneur.com Co-Founder

He shared that funding and hiring are the two biggest out-of-the-gate mistakes entrepreneurs make with their startups and having vast expertise in those areas, he shared some of his funding and hiring advice for startups:

Debunking the Funding Myth

"Many startups make the mistake of thinking they need to have a big chunk of capital, or investors, to get started on their business and by and large that simply isn't true." Toren, also one of the co-founders of the Kidpreneurs project, said there are plenty of self-funding options that entrepreneurs might want to explore. That includes working a "day job" while building your business outside of it and even structuring small private loans from a family member if you're really in a cash crunch.

"The leaner you can keep things when you're starting out, the better. It keeps you hustling and it gives you more focused lens of perspective on costs", Toren continued.

Explore Outsourcing Rather than Hiring

When asked about what are the most common mistakes startups do, he shared that "some startups see hiring as a benchmark to success and I think that's a mistake".

He emphasized that while hiring will be necessary at certain points in startup growth cycle, just like having children, having employees is a lot more expensive than startups accurately account for usually.

"Employees need benefits, they require different taxes from your business, and they need equipment, and physical location space, and parking spots and benefit plans: the list of halo expenses go on and on."

With all of the expenses in hiring staff for your business, Toren recommends outsourcing as much labor as possible to have capital you could be driving back into your business.

As an investor himself, he shared some sort of criteria investors specifically look for before they decide on investing.

We found out that he is a big-believer in the bottom-line.

"I want to see that the business is handling their operational cash flow and managing their burn rate effectively," he added.

He also likes to get a sense of the entire ecosystem of a potential investment. Aside from all of these, here are a few more factors that Toren considers before investing on a business:

1. The company's management team.
"These are the leaders at the helm of the startup, are they going to have the skills, stamina and technical acumen are what it takes to get this business to success?" he noted.

2. The team's exit strategy.
"Have they planned one and how are they looking to execute on it? Will their team be able to get them to an exit?" he asked.

3. Their growth strategy and their relative market size.
As a big believer in what Peter Lynch says, he sticks to investing in what he knows. "I need to understand the business," he emphasized.

4. The company's valuation and how the deal structure itself measures up against others in the industry.
"Does this have the potential to be something big and what does the potential return on investment look like?" he noted.

Toren believes that each individual investor or venture capitalist is going to have their own unique set of must-haves when seeking funding; he highly recommends doing their homework ahead of time. This is to make sure they're prepared to pitch and discuss in detail how their business will meet an investor's criteria.

The Qualities of Most Successful Startups

Toren believes that the success of startups depends on great leaders who have these qualities: vision, tenacity and discipline.

"A startup needs a big lofty goal to go after or else why be there to begin with?", he asked.

But beyond just a big vision, he also said that startup leaders are going to the generals that have the discipline and the tenacity to take themselves and the whole team to the finish line. "Great leaders keep pushing through the ambiguity and times of uncertainty to find a way forward. When you're just starting out you need the vision to hold onto because that sets the course forward, but ultimately an end goal without the hustle to move towards it won't amount to anything." According to Matthew, there has to be the big idea, but the idea needs action.

Words from the Wise

Matthew Toren shared how his grandfather taught him what he needed to know about running a business.

"He taught my brother Adam and I young how to have fun selling and the value of working hard, working together and loving what you do. He was an incredible example to me and I feel really grateful I was raised an entrepreneur from a young age thanks to the example of my grandfather." he said. That's one of the biggest reasons behind the passion he and Adam have for teaching entrepreneurialism in kids.

Matthew proudly tells me that they both have instilled that love in their own kids, but they have seen a lack of that training in the schools and culture at large.

That became his inspiration to write a book and companion parent/teacher's guide called, Kidpreneurs: Young Entrepreneurs with Big Ideas. The two brothers' whole philosophy with entrepreneurialism and their kids is "it's never too early." "Entrepreneurialism teaches kids self-esteem, basic business skills, how to have ideas and problem solve, it's a great set of life-long learning skills kids will benefit from whether they become entrepreneurs or not and something we feel really passionate about sharing with the world, just like our grandfather shared it with us," he ended.

To learn more about Matthew connect with him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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This interview is part of a series on Trailblazing Women role models (Entrepreneurs and Leaders) from around the world and first appeared on Global Invest Her. You have to see what you can be.

"If you are somebody who is incredibly passionate about something, you have the potential to leave a huge mark on the world that will impact people's lives. That is what it ultimately means to be an entrepreneur - you are building something today that is going to impact people's lives tomorrow."

Prior to Techweek, Katy was the President and Founder of SocialKaty, Inc, Chicago's largest social media marketing agency. Founded in 2010, SocialKaty exploded, offering a rich set of services to a diverse portfolio of over 60 full-time clients, including AAA, Spartan Race, Beanie Babies, O-Cedar, ServiceMaster, and Firestone Tires. In July of 2014, Katy excitedly announced the merge between SocialKaty, Inc and Manifest Digital, a Chicago-based experience design agency. This combination created one of the largest social and content marketing teams in the U.S.

Starting her Social Media career in 2008, Katy was Social Media Manager of Where I've Been, Facebook's largest travel application. With almost 10 million members, Katy developed Where I've Been's online community for over 2 years. Subsequently, Chicago Tribune named her one of the most Influential 'Tweeters' in Chicago.

She is also involved in Mark Zuckerberg's immigration reform organization, FWD.US and in 2012 was named a Top 50 Tech influencers by Crains Chicago and placed on Thrillist's Top 50 Twitter Feeds To Follow.

Visit her website at www.techweek.com and follow her on Twitter @TheKatyLynch or @TechweekCHI

Who is your role model as an entrepreneur?

I really love Elon Musk. I saw him speak in Chicago a few years ago. I love his story and hearing about his journey. He is such a great businessman, an awesome technologist and a fearless leader. The thing I find most admirable, is that he is bold and not afraid to take risks.

What is your greatest achievement to date?

"Starting, growing, raising money for and ultimately selling my social media marketing company, SocialKaty, was an awesome achievement. The most important job as a CEO is hiring the right people. Being able to choose exactly who I wanted on my team, train them and set them up for success and put all the right processes in place - those are the things I believe led us to our success."

You should always hire smarter people than you. You want to be able to work with someone who is charismatic, hard working, shares the same passion as you, who understands and believes your company values.

What has been your biggest challenge as a woman entrepreneur?

Honestly, my challenges don't boil down to me being a woman, they just boil down to me being an entrepreneur. When I first started Social Katy, hiring people was a challenge. Ultimately it's hard to find great people that you like, that you trust with your brand and are going to take your brand to the next level. I definitely wouldn't say that I've had challenges as a female entrepreneur.

What in your opinion is the key to your company's success?

The 2 P's - People and Processes. Both are valuable for different reasons and you can't have one without the other. Hiring A+ players is really key to the success of your business, but at the end of the day you also need processes, and you need those smart people in place to be able to execute your processes.

If you could do 1 thing differently, what would it be?

"I wouldn't change a thing! I think that's part of the beauty of being an entrepreneur. There is no right answer. Learn from your actions, whether it is positive or negative."

What would you say to others to encourage them to become entrepreneurs?

Now's the right time to be one. There are so many resources out there. I'm very lucky to be living in Chicago where is a thriving tech community and so many resources like 1871, the ITA, Women Tech Founders, MsTech... There are so many organisations. The other thing I would say is:

"If you are somebody who is incredibly passionate about something, you have the potential to leave a huge mark on the world that will impact people's lives. That is what it ultimately means to be an entrepreneur - you are building something today that is going to impact people's lives tomorrow."

Take that risk! There are a lot of people who want to be entrepreneurs and being afraid to take that risk is the one thing that's holding them back.

"Especially for young people, who don't yet have big responsibilities yet, take the risk now! Do it! You really don't have that much to lose."

How would you describe your leadership style?

I am a visionary. I know how to create and articulate our goals and our vision and how to get people excited about those goals. Positive reinforcement is something that is very important to me, and I think my whole team would agree. They would say that I am positive, charismatic and know how to get people fired up. When everyone has that shared vision and are working towards the same goals, it creates a strong loyalty and work ethic.

What advice would you give to your younger self?

"Trust your gut and don't be afraid to take risks."

When I was younger, I spent too much time 'humming and hawing and hesitating' around things. If I could go back, I would shake myself and say 'Katy - trust your gut - go with it!'

"Never use excuses to hold you back from being an entrepreneur. Never use your gender, age, background or where you are from, to stop you from starting and leading a business".

What would you like to achieve in the next 5 years?

I have been with Techweek for 5 months now and everything is going very well. We are currently in 6 cities. As I look forward, one of the things I'm excited about it expanding the business internationally and domestically. I want to take Techweek from 6 cities, to hundreds of cities. That is what I'm focused on and excited about for the future.

3 key words to describe yourself?

Charismatic

Passionate

Positive

Watch Anne Ravanona's TEDx talk on Investing in Women Entrepreneurs.

For other interviews with Trailblazing Women leaders on Huffington Post Read More Here

Follow Anne Ravanona at @anneravanona, and check out other interviews in the Trailblazing women series on Global Invest Her blog

Learn more about Global Invest Herwww.globalinvesther.com

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Take a look at your paycheck. I'm willing to bet there's a huge deduction on every paycheck stub for FICA. And I'm also willing to bet that most people don't know what that is and can't tell you what "FICA" stands for! Yet they allow the company to take that money right out of their take-home pay!

Give it a thought. I ask that question at most of my speeches: "What does FICA" stand for?" And I almost always get an audience of blank faces and wrong guesses.

OK, FICA stands for Federal Insurance Contributions Act. And that's the official name of the legislation that established Social Security. Those huge withdrawals from every paycheck are your "contribution" to Social Security.

Not your own Social Security check -- but the money that is being paid out to today's retirees. The time has long passed when people believed there was a "shoebox in Baltimore" with money in it for their eventual retirement. (Yes, ask your grandparents, that's what they thought.) Now we know that the Social Security trust fund is a giant shoebox filled with "special purpose" Treasury bonds.

All of the money that comes into the government from your Social Security "contributions" pays for current beneficiaries, with any excess funds going into the trust funds in the form of government IOUs. But since, for "counting" purposes, the "surpluses" that are supposed to be building up in Social Security for your retirement are co-mingled with the Federal budget deficit, the concept of a trust fund is a bit of a fiction. Even so, according to the latest government projections, the Social Security trust fund is expected to be depleted around 2033.

So where will the money come from for your Social Security check -- the one you expect to start receiving in 20 years? It's a frightening thing to contemplate. And it should make you start thinking about hedging your bets on your future Social Security income. You can do that by creating your own "social security fund."

Matching FICA

In 2015, your employer will take out up to $7,347 during the year for FICA. (And the employer will make an equal contribution, and send it to the government.) That maximum amount is taken out of income up to $118,500 in 2015. If you make less than that amount, the total deduction for your contribution will be proportionately less.

You have no choice. You can't tell the HR department that you "can't afford to contribute this year" because you have other pressing needs, like paying off credit card bills or saving for your child's college. The FICA deduction is the price of employment -- and it's not optional.

But will it be worth much when you retire? And don't you think you owe it to yourself to hedge that bet?

Perhaps your company has a 401(k) plan that is voluntary. The easiest way to hedge your FICA bet is to contribute an equal amount, automatically, to the 401(k) plan as you do for FICA.

That's a tough decision to see that money disappear from your take-home pay. But really, it's no tougher to swallow than the original FICA deduction. And look how much better you could do with that money than the government!

Suppose you take that annual $7,347 "contribution" and invest it in your retirement plan, in an S&P 500 stock index fund. According to Ibbotson, the statistical division of Morningstar, the historic average return of the S&P 500 (or its equivalent), including reinvested dividends and dating back to 1926, is 10.1 percent.

So let's suppose you start work in your early 20s, and invest an amount equal to the current $7,347 annual deduction in that diversified stock market mutual fund. Do it every year -- the same amount -- for the next 50 years, and your retirement account would be worth approximately $10 million!

In fact, if you work for a company that matches your retirement plan contribution dollar-for-dollar, you would have to invest only half that amount out of your paycheck!

Yes, there are a lot of caveats. Inflation will eat away at that nest egg, and your FICA "contribution" is likely to rise each year. And who knows what the United States will look like in 50 years, when today's twenty-somethings retire?

But, still, young workers are letting the government take that FICA contribution out of each paycheck. They have no choice but to hope that it will provide at least a basic retirement income. There will no doubt be changes in Social Security in coming years. Benefits are likely to be "means-tested" -- with those who have done a good job of saving other assets receiving less in benefits. That's all the more reason to hedge your Social Security bet.

The only way the government can "means test" your own savings is to tax it away. And at least you'll get a vote on that! That's the Savage Truth.

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Click for Verizon's "Trust the Facts".

Verizon created "Trust the Facts", a fact sheet and talking points for the Verizon staff. It appears to be based on statements made by senior management, including Verizon's testimony presented at a recent New York City Council meeting which is investigating Verizon's NYC FiOS cable deployment and franchise agreement.

The memo attempts to supply information that sounds almost plausible, but it is just filled with faux-facts and partial truths. Moreover, in the memo, Verizon tells the staff to accuse the press of being inaccurate.

"Recently, there have been inaccurate statements in the press about our FiOS build. The information below will help you understand the reality of our success and ongoing commitment to FiOS."

Let's address some of these 'faux-facts' with actual facts.

2015-10-19-1445228296-233379-VerizonchartfauxFiOSshort.png

Quoting Verizon's Faux-Facts:

"Over 2 million customers can get FiOS service now (in New York City) and that number grows every day."

"We completed our prems (premises) passed requirement in October of 2014."

"We passed all prems, in all five boroughs of NYC."

"In New York City, we've invested3.5 billion in FiOS."

"Our commitment to other cities such as Philadelphia, Newark, Paterson, Pittsburgh and Washington DC is equally strong."

Note: "Prems" is slang for 'premises', i.e. the home or business that is supposed to be upgraded.

Our Talking Points

Verizon has completed only 46-65 percent of their FiOS cable franchise commitment in New York City.

No. Verizon did not complete anything. The requirement, written into the agreement, is to have 100 percent -- "available to ALL residential dwelling units".

Verizon never invested an additional3.5 billion on FiOS. The fiber optic deployments came out of normal utility construction and maintenance budgets -- and paid for, in a large part, by local phone customers via multiple rate increases.

Verizon failed to upgrade Pennsylvania and New Jersey based on previous commitments to fiber-ize the states. By 2010, 100% of Verizon New Jersey should have had a fiber optic service capable of 45Mbps in both directions, and in Pennsylvania, Verizon was to have 100% completed by 2015. In both states, laws were changed to fund these networks via rate increases and tax perks.

Let's go through some of the details.

VERIZON: "Over 2 million customers can get FiOS service now and that number grows every day."

FACT: By the end of July 2014, Verizon NY was supposed to have completed 100 percent coverage of New York City's residential dwelling units, based on a franchise agreement signed in 2008.

This is a chart built from US Census data pertaining to New York City.

First some terminology:

The Census has specific meanings for the words 'households', and 'residential housing (dwelling) units', and there are a few different definitions that slice up the common term 'business', as well.

(Please note that in the above quote, Verizon claims that there are 2 million 'customers' that can get FiOS. The problem with this is -- a 'customer' would be someone who is already a Verizon subscriber, and doesn't represent all residential dwelling units.)

Turning to another quote, Verizon's Leecia Eve, vice president (State Government Affairs for the NJ, NY & CT region), testified in front of the New York City Council, and Ms. Eve used the term 'households'.

According to Metro, Leecia Eve stated:

"We have 2 million households than can request FiOS today and get installed tomorrow."

Notice the word 'household' because another term, 'residential dwelling units', is used in the NYC FiOS franchise agreement and the accounting is actually different based on the Census definitions.

PUBLIC FACT: Only 46-65 Percent of New York City's Residential Housing Units and Businesses Can Get FiOS.

Using this last quote, if Verizon claims it has 2 million households covered, there's a serious problem. Returning to the chart, the Census data shows there are 3.1 million households (homes) in New York City. However, there are 3.4 million 'residential dwelling units' and 4.3 million 'housing units and businesses' in the Big Apple.

PUBLIC FACT: Verizon's FiOS Cable Franchise Is for All Residential (Housing) Dwelling Units.

The numbers to use in evaluating Verizon's coverage should be based on the actual New York City FiOS franchise agreement language which focuses on 'residential dwelling units'.

Thus, Verizon's NYC FiOS deployments should cover 3.4 million residential dwelling units, not 2 million households in order to be 'completed'.

PUBLIC FACT: Businesses Not Included

We need to also stress that Verizon was able to get out of doing commercial spaces in New York City, so businesses are not properly serviced. This means that if we examine "residential dwelling units and businesses", the actual coverage drops to around 46 percent of the City. Most people are unaware of this important caveat.

PUBLIC FACT: Verizon Claims that They have Passed All "Prems": They have Not.

Verizon writes:

"We completed our prems passed requirement in October of 2014."

"Verizon: We passed all prems, in all five boroughs of NYC."

The term of the contract is for 100 percent of "all residential dwelling units" to have the service 'available'. Period. "Prems-passed" is hand waiving to obfuscate the primary issue -- Verizon has only 46-65 percent done, depending on which metric you rely on, and therefore Verizon isn't even close to finishing New York City.

PUBLIC FACT: Verizon New York Did Not Invest $3.5 Billion in New York City.

Verizon claims:

"In New York City, we've invested $3.5 billion in FiOS."

PUBLIC FACT: There are at Least Five Things Wrong with this Statement.

In 2005, Verizon convinced the NY State Public Service Commission (NYPSC) that the fiber optic wires that the FiOS services ride over are part of the state telecommunications utility, which gave them the utility rights-of-way and the ability to use the local utility construction budgets.

Starting in 2006, Verizon got the NYPSC to agree to a series of rate increases on basic local service for the "massive deployment of fiber optics".

From 2006 through 2014, local phone customers paid over760.00, total, per line extra for basic service based on the changes in state regulation for this deployment.

Customers who paid these rate increases, including low income families, seniors, or just basic residential customers, may never get upgraded.

There is no sign of this3.5 billion investment in the construction budgets. There was no extra 'bump' in new construction.

PUBLIC FACT: Verizon Investors Didn't Invest Most of the Money. Customers Were Charged Rate Increases of Over $760.00.

In 2006, Verizon cut a deal with the NY State Public Service Commission to raise local phone rates, and this was repeated multiple times. By the 2009, local phone customers had been hit with 84 percent rate increases to fund a "massive deployment of fiber optics".

These increases on just basic phone service added about $760 per line, (including taxes, fees and surcharges) in New York City if the customer had service since 2006, or a fraction of this excess as everyone who had service during 2006-2015 got hit with these rate increases. Also, each add-on service, from inside wire maintenance to nonpublished numbers, all had increases of 100-300 percent, adding hundred of dollars extra per additional service.

PUBLIC FACT: There Is No Sign of this $3.5 Billion Investment in the Construction Budgets.

Spending $3.5 billion for FiOS in New York City sounds great in the aggregate but it doesn't exist; it came out of the utility construction budgets that low income families, grandma, business and all phone customers paid for if they had basic local phone service.

This next chart supplies Verizon NY's construction expenditures for the FiOS years, 2008-2014, taken from Verizon NY's own financial reports. As that old commercial goes: "Where's the Beef?"

Verizon claims to have spent $3.5 billion over seven years, about $½ billion a year. However, if you look at this chart, there is NO extra financial spending. The "FiOS Bump Missing" is what should have been added to the Verizon New York construction expenses if this was new, additional funding for FiOS.

The fact is, the construction budgets for the NYC FiOS franchise were just pulled directly out of the normal 'business as usual' construction budgets for the state utility's upgrade and maintenance.

For the record, the revenues for Verizon NY were about $40-50 billion in just New York State over this 7 year period. In terms of population, New York City is a little less than half, but in terms of revenues, Verizon's New York's NYC operations should have generated at least $25-$30 billion over this period, $27.5 billion on average, not counting the Verizon Wireless revenues. (Note: The variables of the revenues are because Verizon New York is not required to show all of the revenues coming into the company.)

The $3.5 billion spent against the average, $27.5 billion in revenues, is only 12.7 percent or chump change for a major build out. In the previous decades from 1984-2000, construction expenses would average 18-22 percent of revenues.

We are not arguing that Verizon didn't spend money on FiOS in New York City. The problem is--it's not 'new' or additional investment, just a restatement of monies that would have already been spent on network upgrades and maintenance.

And we are not arguing that the aging copper networks shouldn't be replaced with fiber optics. The problem is -- you can't charge utility phone customers hundreds of dollars for the creation of a cable service or charge them for fiber optic upgrades when they may never get upgraded.

Verizon:

"Our commitment to other cities such as Philadelphia, Newark, Paterson, Pittsburgh and Washington DC is equally strong."

PUBLIC FACT: This is a joke, right?

Philadelphia and Pittsburgh were supposed to have fiber optic broadband starting in 1996, as then-Bell Atlantic went to the Pennsylvania Public Service Commission and made an agreement to wire the entire Verizon state territory by 2015.

And this was happening, in varying degrees, in every Verizon East Coast state. This 1996 Bell Atlantic (Verizon) press release claims that it was going to wire 12 million homes and small businesses with fiber optics, starting in Philly--starting almost 20 years ago.

"Later this year, Bell Atlantic will begin installing fiber-optic facilities and electronics to replace the predominantly copper cables between its telephone switching offices and customers...Bell Atlantic plans to begin its network upgrade in Philadelphia and southeastern Pennsylvania later this year. The company plans to expand this Full Service Network deployment to other key markets over the next three years. Ultimately, Bell Atlantic expects to serve most of the 12 million homes and small businesses across the mid-Atlantic region with switched broadband networks."

Almost a decade before FiOS deployment, state laws were changed in the 1990's to fund the replacement of the aging copper wiring with fiber optics -- and, of course, charge customers. (New York had fiber optic plans but there was never a specific state requirement at this time.)

In New Jersey, Newark and Patterson should have already been wired with fiber optics based on the changes in New Jersey state law, way back in 1993. It required Verizon New Jersey's territory (about 95 percent of the Garden State), to have 100 percent of completed by 2010,

To update this, in 2014, Verizon was able to get the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities to erase the laws and commitments via a stipulation agreement so that Verizon would be able to stop the fiber optic build out, and instead replace the commitment with wireless at slower DSL speeds. DSL is a limited broadband-Internet service that uses the old copper wires.

Verizon New Jersey's commitment is for 45Mbps in both directions and as of 2015, the NJ consumer advocate's office (Rate Counsel) has filed an appeal to stop the stipulation agreement and return to the commitments.

But the kicker--in both states, laws were changed to raise rates and give the company tax perks to fund this new construction, and neither State government went back to either get a refund or do the actual build outs. Instead, the increases were built into rates and we estimate that starting around 1993-1994 through 2014, customers paid an estimated $4,000-$5,000 per household, extra.

We estimate that Verizon, in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, respectively, received $15-$18 billion extra for these build outs -- and counting.

And the irony is -- Verizon's claims a strong commitment to a few cities -- but the previous fiber optic deployment commitments were for the entire state territory, including rural areas.

Can you imagine if Verizon had actually been held accountable for this fiber optic future over the last two decades -- or told the truth about their deployment plans?

For full documentation see: The Book of Broken Promises

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The U.S.-based online news site Quartz is among a growing number of international media companies that is investing resources to better cover Africa. The company launched Quartz Africa in June 2015 with the opening of a new bureau in Nairobi and the deployment of a small team of journalists.

Among those assigned to Kenya was Lily Kuo who previously reported for Quartz from Hong Kong. As a former China-based journalist who now lives and reports on Africa, Lily is among the first reporters on the continent with a distinctive background in Sino-African relations. Although she doesn't focus exclusively on China-Africa stories, it is most definitely a prominent theme of her coverage.

Lily joins Eric & Cobus -- in the podcast above -- to talk about the opportunity and challenges of covering the China-Africa story.

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It's not what you think.

On October 14th, Wal-Mart conducted its 22nd Annual Meeting for the Investment Community, featuring 5 of its top management, and 14 analysts from companies like Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, and Wells Fargo.

In his introductory remarks, CEO Doug McMillon referred to creating "more ownership among our associates." He was not talking about actual financial ownership, in a company that is tightly controlled by the Walton billionaires. McMillon meant more "buy-in" from his workers--but even that would be inaccurate. McMillon described "ownership" this way: "When our department managers take ownership and run a store within a store, that part of the store looks better and runs better, it drives more sales, has happier customers. That ownership is what we are after."

Wal-Mart is focusing on the lower level managers, not the frontline cashiers and clerks.

The Wal-Mart narrative for this analysts' event repeatedly focused on what Doug McMillon called the "significant commitment" the retailer had made to its "store associates." Wal-Mart announced several months ago that starting wages at Wal-Mart would be pegged at $9 and hour this year, and $10 an hour next year. But retail workers months ago began campaigning for a minimum of $15 per hour---leaving Wal-Mart workers at 66% of the goal. McMillon said increasing wages was necessary to "get the talent we need," and it was "the right thing to do." But the timing for $15 per hour is apparently not "the right thing" yet.

Wal-Mart CFO, Charles Holley, made it clear that raising wages has hurt Wal-Mart's stock value: "This program will result in increased cost of about $1.2 billion this year and an incremental $1.5 billion next year. Now this is $2.7 billion of investment over a two-year period. In fact, in fiscal year 2017 this wage investment represents approximately 75% of our earnings per share reduction."

Last February, McMillon told his workers: "We're also strengthening our department manager roles and will raise the starting wage for some of these positions to at least $13 an hour this summer and at least $15 an hour early next year." "As important as a starting wage is," he added, "what's even more important is opportunity, and we'll continue to provide that ladder that any of you can climb... Today's cashiers will be tomorrow's store or club managers. Today's managers are tomorrow's vice presidents. Tomorrow's CEO will almost definitely come from inside our company."

But Wal-Mart's career ladder is missing some rungs. At the analysts' meeting, McMillon described his company's upward mobility this way: "Ideally this starts to look like a ladder...We want people to join the Company and have an opportunity to move up. We want to create a meritocracy...some of the longer-tenured associates, we are trying to guide them towards running one of the departments because that gives them an opportunity to move up...We really want to develop a pipeline of talent and to some extent have. But with our growth we have stretched that and needed to come back and put some of the rungs in the ladder in the right place."

What Wal-Mart is really doing is bulking up on low-level managers. Greg Foran explains Wal-Mart's strategy: "We have added in the last few months 8,000 department managers who are empowered to run their departments and be great merchants." He then listed all the reasons why Wal-Mart has a huge stretch to make its bottom tier workers satisfied: "If you pay your people competitively, if the managers are really engaged and they are good, if you train people, you give them the right schedules, you're going to see happier associates, you will see a marked improvement in the shopping experience."

But Associates aren't going to be "happy" that Wal-Mart is forcing some of its workers to jump off the ladder. U.S. stores CEO Greg Foran used the metaphor of a waterfall: "What is happening is that as we are making these changes it is cascading down. And we are seeing turnover in some of the areas, which, once again to be candid, we are forcing in some cases." In other words, some workers are being pushed out of their job.

Foran also candidly noted that when the retailer ranked its 4,597 American stores last February, based on a metric they call their "clean, fast and friendly" scores, that only 16% (735 stores) were at their initial goal. As of October 1st, Foran boasts that 67% (3,080) meet their initial goal. That means 1,517 Wal-Mart stores don't meet Wal-Mart's clean, fast and friendly measures. "I want to be clear," Foran said, "we've still got lots of room to improve." Is the world's largest retailer admitting that 33% of its stores are dirty, slow and unfriendly? Foran concludes that his research has found "a really good correlation" that "the higher your score is in clean, fast, and friendly, the higher your sales." Any shopper could have correlated that.

Greg Foran left the Wall Street analysts with an idyllic vision of what they would find if they visited a Wal-Mart store "on one busy afternoon." "I think you'll see we've got clean floors. We've got better fresh...There's a better in-stock. Store managers and department managers are visible on the sales floor. Associates are more friendly. They are wearing their vests and they've got their new name badges on that say Our People Make the Difference."

Better wages, better health and retirement benefits, better schedules, better training---these are what make "happier Associates." It will take more than clean floors and new name badges to increase worker "ownership." It does not appear that Wal-Mart is anywhere near ready to climb that ladder.

Al Norman is the founder of Sprawl-Busters. His most recent book is Occupy Wal-Mart.

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When children are young, they're playful, unself-conscious, and uninhibited. That's one reason why they're such fast and voracious learners, constantly seeking out new experiences to engage their minds and imaginations. In that sense, play is productive for kids. As grownups facing bulging inboxes, overflowing calendars, and a whole range of adult responsibilities, playing around isn't something we do much of, to say the least. But new research is tapping into the relationships between play, performance, and productivity -- and showing us there may be real value to taking a break from our work to, well, go out and play.

WHY PLAY IS PRODUCTIVE

Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play, has spent his career studying play and its positive effects on adults. He's consulted for Fortune 500 companies on how to incorporate play into business settings and has used play therapies to help people struggling with clinical depression.

In his book, Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul, Brown argues that play even has the power to make you smarter.

"During play, the brain is making sense of itself through simulation and testing," Brown writes. "Play activity is actually helping sculpt the brain. In play, we can imagine and experience situations we have never encountered before and learn from them."

Playing, in other words, has a direct role in creativity. "The genius of play is that, in playing, we create imaginative new cognitive combinations," Brown continues. "And in creating those novel combinations, we find what works."

Most complex problems adults face in life as well as work require creative solutions, even if we don't see them that way. Not only can play help jumpstart that creative problem-solving process, it can shake us out of the cognitive habits that are holding back our performance at so many other levels.

To be fair, advising grownups to go out and play will elicit some giggles -- "Come on, you want me to stop working so I can do what?" -- but if you get into the habit of incorporating play into your life, the results might speak for themselves. Here are a few super-simple ways to start.

1. PLAY TETRIS

Download Tetris to your phone. Each time you feel the impulse to check your social media feeds, go play a five-minute game of Tetris instead. Why? Not only is it fun, but playing games can help you maintain focus and lengthen an attention span that your Twitter feed is out to relentlessly shorten.

According to Jane McGonigal, Ph.D. and author of SuperBetter: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver and More Resilient -- Powered by the Science of Games, getting a firmer control on your powers of attention is a crucial first step to improving your productivity. "Playing games is not a waste of time," she writes. "It is a skillful, purposeful activity that gives you direct control over your thoughts."

2. COLOR

Adult coloring books have stormed the market this year -- and for good reason. Picking up some crayons, markers, or colored pencils is a tamer way to unlock your play impulse. And like playing certain games, it can also help you refocus your attention.

As Brown explains, play is a state of mind, not a specific activity. As long as it's absorbing, essentially purposeless, and lets you enjoyably suspend your self-consciousness and sense of time, it counts. Go pick up a coloring book, turn off all your push notifications, and color one picture. After all, when was the last time you did that? It will take less than five minutes to complete, and chances are you'll feel a little restored and relaxed when you go back to your tasks. Not to mention you'll now have some art to put up on the fridge.

3. HAVE A SOLO DANCE PARTY

Yes, you read that correctly. It turns out science has finally vindicated what just about every romantic comedy of the past several decades has understood about the cathartic power of dancing alone. Crank up your favorite song and just dance it out. The point isn't to showcase your Beyoncé-level talents or shame your lack thereof -- it's just to let yourself be uninhibited without fearing anyone else's judgment.

When you dance alone, simply for the sake of play, your body will take the lead over your mind. As Brown explains it, play is one of the most basic evolutionary impulses, and physical movement can be a powerful mechanism to recall it. So get up and dance. You'll not only feel better, you'll be doing your brain a favor as well.

4. SING IN THE SHOWER

Same principle, different activity. Turn on the water, pick the first song that comes to mind, and start singing as loudly as you can. It sounds silly, and it should -- that's the point. Singing in the shower is a purposeless activity that provides enjoyment, a suspension of self-consciousness, and time. If you're stuck in traffic, it works almost as well.

Here's the thing: As adults, one of the biggest roadblocks to being playful is that we worry that we'll look undignified, irresponsible, or immature. But you can't be open to spontaneity if you aren't comfortable with testing new ways of expressing yourself--even the most unserious of them. And when you foreclose that possibility, you miss out on a whole host of cognitive benefits children access multiple times each day.

5. HOST A GAME NIGHT

Watching Game of Thrones is entertaining, but it's a passive experience. To be sure, sometimes those are good, but they won't re-energize you in quite the same way as a play-based activity can. Invite some friends over for charades (just like your parents' generation used to do, before they invented HBO), or just play "Go Fish" with your 5-year-old. Whatever it is, you want to find yourself absorbed in the game. In fact, it only has to last five or 10 minutes in order to stimulate your brain.

The fact is, play is powerful. According to Brown, psychologists are even uncovering a correlation between resistance to neurodegenerative disease and sustained use of puzzles, playful exercise, games, and other activities. On a more immediate level, it taps into parts of your brain that, when you make time for play more regularly, can improve your performance and productivity in other areas of life.

As we figured out when we were children -- before we forgot about it -- play is joyful, energizing, and helps us learn. It was our primary language for making friends, telling stories, and solving problems. Imagine if you brought that power back into your life. In fact, don't imagine it -- go out and play.

This post was originally published via Fast Company on October 1, 2015.

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The Elusive Formula For Growth - by Jerry Jasinowski

Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers says the dangers facing the world economy today are more severe than at any time since the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in 2008, and we all know how that turned out. "The problem of secular stagnation - the inability of the industrial world to grow at satisfactory rates even with very loose monetary policies - is growing worse in the wake of problems in most big emerging markets, starting with China," he said in an op-ed in The Washington Post.
The respected economist David Malpass, president of Encima Global LLC, is fixated on the same problem. "The International Monetary Fund lowered its estimate for world GDP to $73.5 trillion for 2015 and $76.3 trillion for 2016," he wrote in The Wall Street Journal. "That's down a combined $18 trillion from estimates a year ago. The bottom line is that the IMF now believes the world economy will be smaller in dollar terms in 2016 than it was in 2014."
Both Summers and Malpass lament the Federal Reserve's failure to offer a coherent strategy to revive economic growth. "After seven years of emergency policies, it is vital that the Fed try something new," Malpass said. "If not a rate increase, it should consider other growth-oriented options: tapering its huge bond reinvestment program to free up collateral for credit markets; shifting some of its borrowing away from banks to encourage bank lending; or shortening the maturity of is bond portfolio to relieve some of the illiquidity in bond markets."
"The central banks of Europe and Japan need to be clear that their biggest risk is a further slowdown," Summers said. "They must indicate a willingness to be creative in the use of the tools at their disposal. With bond yields well below 1 percent, it is doubtful that traditional quantitative easing will have much stimulative effect."
"The Fed has tools that would help," Malpass said. "Commercial and industrial loan growth surged to a 20 % annualized rate in April 2014, when the Fed was reducing its bond purchases and borrowing more from repo markets instead of banks. Using repos the Fed can borrow more cheaply from money-market funds, as well as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, than it can from banks. That saves taxpayers a bundle and returns cash to the banking system for lending to small borrowers and job creators."
Summers says long-term low interest rates radically alter the possibilities of fiscal policy. "The case for more expansionary fiscal policy is especially strong when it is spent on investment or maintenance." The problem before 2008 was too much lending, he said, but "many more of today's problems have to do with too little lending for productive investment."
One way to interpret that is that this is an excellent opportunity for government at the federal and state levels to crank up investments in infrastructure which is sorely needed. The money spent on highways, bridges, airports and waterways does more than create jobs directly. It pumps money into the economy that supports all manner of consumption and investments and makes us more competitive.
Both Summers and Malpass make a compelling case that we have to get away from traditional thinking about the economy - and embark upon new, more daring approaches. That goes against the political grain in a time when our political system is in disarray. But we have to take dramatic action lest we sink into an endless quagmire of lackluster growth.
Jerry Jasinowski, an economist and author, served as President of the National Association of Manufacturers for 14 years and later The Manufacturing Institute. Jerry is available for speaking engagements. October 2015

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Embedded image permalink China claims their GDP is growing at 6.9%.

This is, of course, complete and utter BS but even if you accept this BS, it's still unsettling how fast the GDP growth has contracted over the last 18 months. Still, this is just silly because China is claiming 6.9% GROWTH when dozens of other economic indicators out of China are showing CONTRACTION.

You won't get any serious analysis of China's economy from the US Media, who are so beholden to China and Chinese companies that you may be completely unaware that the Chinese Government has recently "unleashed an extraordinary assault on basic human rights and their defenders with a ferocity unseen in recent years — issuing directives insisting on “correct” ideology among party members, university lecturers, students, researchers, and journalists." In fact, according to Human Rights Watch's 2015 Report:

China remains an authoritarian state, one that systematically curbs fundamental rights, including freedom of expression, association, assembly, and religion, when their exercise is perceived to threaten one-party rule.

Yet China's leaders were just greeted with open arms in the US and now the IPhone makers are heading off to England where, Liu Xiaoming, China’s ambassador to the UK, said British people“know how to behave” and the topic of human rights would not be raised at the dinner on Tuesday. As a Jersey boy, I also "know" mafia-style intimidation tactics when I hear them!

Meanwhile, let's not get off the topic of fake, Fake, FAKE GDP numbers since we follow the market and the underlying assumption that China is growing at 6.9% is being used to justify a lot of insane corporate valuations - especially in China.

Embedded image permalink Capital Economics has a thing called the China Activity Proxy which is considered a much more realistic view of China's GDP and, as of Q1 - it was at 5%, which is it's lowest level since 2003 and much worse than the recent collapse in 2008, which helped trigger a global recession.

Now, I know it was a long time ago and many of you may have forgotten but, way back in August of 2015, the Shanghai composite fell 30% and, as of September 30th (the end of Q3) it was still 27% below the June 30th close - which market the end of the 2nd quarter and the beginning of the 3rd.

Across the board, the statistics don't look good with everything from steel to rail freight to electricity consumption showing big drops. China's manufacturing sector looks especially weak - sentiment just hit its lowest level in six years. The "flash" measure of sentiment among manufacturing purchasing managers fell to 47.1 in August, the worst figure in 77 months and a decline from the index's final reading of 47.8 in July, according to Caixin Insight and Markit Economics. Any number below 50 indicates a deceleration in the manufacturing sector. Here's a few pictures that save 1,000 words:

There are lots and lots of charts like this but you get the idea. All measurable indicators show decline yet the Government claims +7% - it's just too much of a gap in logic to accept. Another cause for doubt, according to the Financial Times, is that provincial figures and national data don’t always add up. Nor, often, do Chinese trade statistics matched against those of its trading partners. Such discrepancies are partly down to the sheer difficulty of measuring activity in such a vast country. Partly, though, they result from perverse incentives through which officials have been rewarded according to crude measures of growth.

Work by Harry Wu, an economist at The Conference Board, an independent research institute, concludes that, from 1978-2012, China grew at 7.2 per cent a year. While that is spectacularly fast, it is 2.6 percentage points below the official 9.8 per cent estimate.

Mr Wu finds that China overstates productivity growth and underestimates inflation, measured by something called the GDP deflator. If the deflator is understated, “real” growth, adjusted for inflation, will be overstated.

So, for goodness sake, do not fall for the streaming BS coming from the US Media, who are completely in bed with China and would do nothing to upset them. If everything were so great in China - then what's up with all the emergency stimulus, rate easing and market halting? Those are not the kinds of things that are usually necessary when the economy is actually growing at a 7% pace.

That brings us back to our stance, which is "Cashy and Cautious" because the US, Europe and Japan are also manipulating their economies - just a bit more subtly than China. That doesn't make it any less wrong or any less dangerous for investors and, as I noted in our October Portfolio Review this weekend, just because we keep our cash on the sideline doesn't mean we can't have fun - it's just a selective sort of fun that takes full advantage of the market manipulation - without having to commit to any particular direction.

Our new Options Opportunity Portfolio begins it's 3rd month already up 16% and one of our short positions happens to be the China ETF (FXI) Nov $40/$38 bear put spread, which closed Friday at 0.75, down from the $1 we paid back on 10/12. The Nov $40 puts we are long on are still $1.60 so we will cash those in (0.60 more than we paid for the spread) and invest another $1.60 to roll to the FXI Jan $41 puts at $3.20. That will give our FXI premise more time to play out as more economic reports fail to match the GDP figures.

China has their plenary session this month and it will run through about Nov 10th after which there are HUGE expectations for lots more stimulus. Anything less than that will lead to a major sell-off (again) in the Chinese markets. Meanwhile, it's not like the data out of the US or Europe has been trilling either and this week we'll get earnings reports from 116 of the S&P 500 companies (23%) with another 160 reports next week (32%) reporting next week.

As you can see from the US calendar, there's not much in the way of economic news to distract us this week but add to this list, on Tuesday, Fed speak from Carney (BOE, actually - 6 am, EST), Dudley (9:00), Powell (9:15) and Yellen (11:00) and I tend to get very worried when the Central Banksters suddenly feel the need to spin the crap out of a morning, which leads me to think the September Housing Report is going to be a big miss (1.15M pace expected).

Canada has a Monetary Policy Report 10 am Wednesday with a rate decision and their Governor (Poloz) speaks at 11:15 and then Carney (BOE) is scheduled again at 1pm, EST. We get UK Retail Sales on Thursday morning and then the ECB rate decision at 7:45, EST and then Canadian Retail Sales at 8:30 - so a very busy morning ahead of China's sure to be negative PMI report that night (9:45). We'll close out the week on Friday with all sorts of EU manufacturing reports - the same reports that sent the Global Markets into freefall last month (in case anyone remembers that far back).

Please, be careful out there!

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What a goddamn shitty title. That's the sort of BS that is everywhere on the Internet these days.
Like, someone gets on a pedestal and teaches people how to be happier and then that same person goes to a motel owned by killers and smoke crack with hookers.

Then go to their kids school plays. I know. I've seen it.

People are often happy when something happens outside of themselves that they pre-judged would be "good".

Like: having more money, or having the object of your infatuation fall in love with you. Or getting that big career boost. Or having that lawsuit be over. Or getting out of that relationship you got "stuck" in.

I don't judge. That's fine. But all of that comes and goes. What if the infatuation doesn't like you? Are you then sad? I know I get sad.

We live in the light of a fucking STAR in the middle of the galaxy and we have the nerve to be sad if someone doesn't kiss us back.

Ok, I've been there. I've had that nerve. She didn't kiss back. She said, "I have to go to the bathroom and then I never saw her again."

I want to be my own star. I want the nuclear fusion to come from inside of me. Then I know I can do anything I want.

That doesn't mean: walk on Mars or have 10 private jets. I don't want those.

I just want to do anything I want to do. Freedom. Is this selfish? Maybe it is. Some people think it is. I don't kill people with my freedom. But still...some people correctly think it's selfish.

And what is productivity? It's getting things done in less time. Why should this matter? Because then I have time to do what I want.

Freedom again.

Here's what I do:

WANT LESS

The fewer things I want, the more I love what I have.

SAY NO

Steve Jobs used to ask his man designer Jonny Ive (the designer of your iPhone), "how many times did you say No today?"

DO A LITTLE OF SOMETHING I LOVE A LOT

I love to write. I love to talk to friends. I love to kiss and to hug. I love to read and to laugh. Oh, and I love to play games.

And maybe that's about it. It's nice to make money. But I don't necessarily love it. I lose money also. I don't love that either.

If every day i do a little of something I love a lot, then I feel like inside I'm growing.

A tiny leaf that might grow into a beautiful plant. And then the plant drops more seeds on the ground and more plants grow.

I don't even fucking know what I'm talking about. Do plants even drop seeds? Or is that flowers?

Are plants flowers? Or are they vegetables. Where is Doctor Science when you need her.

READ AN ARCHIVE

Here's what I do each day. Find a blog from someone interesting. Read a post at least a year or five or six years old.

If it's a good post. I send a note and say, "That was a good post".

The archives of yesterday are the secrets of today.

Because people are very busy and they forget and nobody read that old article in the first place.

So I learn something new at the same time I send a nice note to someone at the same time I find material to steal for myself for later.

I plant a seed (see above).

I DO WHAT YOU CAN'T DO

Most people have their own rules about what you can't do.

You can't start two businesses at once. You can't have a certain opinion.

You can't make a movie without experience. You can't start a business with no experience. You can't fall in love with someone "out of your league".

You can't call the President and ask him to be on your podcast. You can't run a marathon without preparing.

I like to do those things. And you know what? Most people are right. I can't do them.

But sometimes people are wrong.

I OVER DELIVER

Give people what they deserve, not what they expect.

Most people have been served shit all of their lives and told, "this is the way it is. Deal with it."

One time I asked for a bonus at job. I knew the bonus was available. But my boss decided to give himself extra. Out of my bonus.

"Welcome to the real world," he said when I asked what happened.

That's not the real world. That's the fear world.

Where people are afraid of running out of things. People are afraid that the world is over unless they take what they can.

Give what you can. Give until you are left with nothing. And even when you are left with nothing, find more to give. You can make someone laugh, even though you started with nothing.

Why does over delivering make me more happy and productive? I have no idea. I do it and it works.

SING, PAINT, LAUGH, WRITE, CELEBRATE

A friend of mine stuttered. But when he sang he didn't stutter.

How come? Because it's two different parts of the brain. Most of the time, we don't activate many parts of the brain.

We activate the part that gets us to the factory, gets us the hammer, and hammers the nail all day long, and then goes home.

I understand. That's what I do most of the time also.

But I like to make my brain super powerful. So I like to do things that activate parts of my brain that are usually dormant and atrophied.

What are the new things you can do that will wake up parts of you that have been long dead.

Welcome to life outside the Matrix.

SHOULDN'T

There are a lot of things you should think, do, feel, believe. We're told all of our lives what is "good" and what is "bad".

Some of those things are political. Some are emotional. Some are religious. Some are taught us so were can fit in and "play well with others".

None of those things are TRUE, in the sense that they are universal facts that are never wrong.

Ants don't care about elections. Elephants don't care about the after-life. Flowers don't care if they fit in with a crowd. They just want the warmth of the sun to kiss them.

I'm not saying, "don't love your family". Or "don't care about nuclear waste".

Just double-check who programmed you. It's ok for you to rewrite the program that makes your brain run every day.

The other day I wrote about why people shouldn't buy houses.

I got some funny comments. One woman said, "James makes some good points here but, anyway, I hate James."

Ok, she is allowed to. Part of the fun for me is getting those comments and telling myself it doesn't matter. Do they hurt? Every single time. But I know it's also foolish to think about it for even a split second.

Feels like practice.

All of the above feels like practice.

Practice for what? I don't know. It doesn't make happy or productive to think about it.

Ugh, there are more things. Like: brush your teeth. Or: sleep more. Or: breathe deep.

I'm going to take a deep breath. I'm scared. Later today and then later this week I have to give a talk. I'm scared of people and talks.

Good thing is: in 10,000 years all of human society will probably be dead and nobody will ever care other than the aliens who are reading the archives.

Kim, I don't know why you hate me. But I can't control you into liking me.

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"This is not working out for me," is a hard thing to say. Yet it is the most constructive way to start the process of resolution.

You are not saying that this is wrong. You are not saying that your counterpart shouldn't have done it, or shouldn't do it. You are not blaming her. You are not intruding into her space. You are simply saying: "This is not working for me, I'd like to change it, and I'd like your help to do it."

Speaking in the first person, taking ownership for your experience and opinions are the secret of presenting confronting information in a constructive manner.

In the following video, you can find more information on how to do it:

9.4 When Things Are Not Working from Fred Kofman

Should you have any difficulty viewing the video please click here to view on Slideshare.

Readers: What is not working out for you about the way one of your colleagues is behaving, and what would make that collaboration better in your view?

Fred Kofman is Vice President at Linkedin. This post is part 9.1 of Linkedin's Conscious Business Program. To find the introduction and full structure of this program visit Conscious Business Academy. To stay connected and get updates, please join our Conscious Business Friends group. Follow Fred Kofman on LinkedIn here.

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