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Work More Efficiently with Data When You Master Power Query https://ift.tt/3j4BmeU Data is essential to the world of business, informing decisions and helping companies scale responsibly. But research shows that people spend up to 80 percent of their time on data preparation, limiting the amount of time in their day that can be dedicated to data analysis and decision making. If it takes so much time to prepare data, important decisions will be delayed or missed entirely. That's where Microsoft's Power Query for Microsoft Excel and Power BI comes in handy. Power Query is one of the top data preparation tools. It acts as an ETL tool that can extract data from a wide variety of sources, transform it quickly, and load it directly into your tables and data models. That flexibility can vastly speed up your data analysis time. If you want to learn Power Query, this Power Query for Excel & Power BI Course is on sale now for just $25. Led by the experts at Yoda Training, this two-hour course has earned a 4.6-star rating on Trustpilot. Across 46 lectures, you'll learn how to get data from a single file, from the web or your current workbook, or import multiple files into a table from a given folder. You'll learn how to sort and filter columns, convert data types, merge multiple queries, add calculated columns, and many more data preparation tricks. Before you know it, you'll be able to wrangle and present data in an efficient, time-saving manner. Then, you'll be ready to start analyzing. Improve your data analysis efficiency. The Power Query for Excel & Power BI Course is on sale now for just $25. Related: Business via Entrepreneur https://ift.tt/1V7CpeP September 26, 2020 at 08:03AM
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Find The Perfect Virtual Assistant in 3 Easy Steps https://ift.tt/36ftWCd As a business owner, you likely struggle with finding time each day to do all the things on your to-do list. If you wish that you had someone that could do all the small tasks, giving you more time to focus on growing your business, you might want to consider hiring a virtual assistant. A virtual assistant is an employee or freelance office assistant that works remotely in an administrative role. They could be located anywhere and may work for you full-time or they may have several other leaders that they do work for in any given week. At my company Maui Mastermind, we teach our business coaching clients how to find and hire the perfect virtual assistant in three steps: Step 1: Get Clear on The Role DescriptionThe key is to get very clear on what tasks you would like them to do on a daily, weekly and monthly basis and put it down on paper. Be realistic about your expectations here. A lot of business owners want the perfect candidate. You want someone who is tech savvy, yet creative. Someone who follows directions well, yet needs no directions. Which is why it's imperative that you write out what tasks are expected each week. Taking the extra step will help you seperate what is needed versus what you think an "ideal" employee looks like. Here is an example of some items in a role description we recently used for a marketing virtual assistant hire:
Step 2: Get Clear on What an "Ideal Candidate" Looks LikeOnce you have a good idea of what your candidate will be doing on a daily basis, you then want to get clear on what your ideal candidate looks like. Here is what we used for the marketing virtual assistant role. The first few items are must-haves, while the remaining items are nice-to-haves. A word of caution here, as I have seen it time and time again with clients and business leaders: do not make a hiring decision based on how well you like the person. The virtual assistant could be a very nice individual, organized and well spoken. But at the end of the day, if they don't have your must-haves you shouldn't hire them.
Step 3: Come Up with 3-5 Test ProjectsGive each candidate three to five test projects to do within a certain period of time, giving every candidate the exact same tasks, and offer to pay their hourly rate for the time spent doing those tasks. For the marketing position in question, we gave the following tasks to the top five candidates:
Not only will the results of the test projects help you see if the virtual assistant is able to do the things that they said they could in their resume, but will also give you good insight into how they process information and work independently. One candidate may require additional information or details regarding one of the test projects you set forth. While this doesn't automatically disqualify them for the position, it should be something that you consider when you look at how you handle your own work flow and leadership style. Are you a hands on boss that likes to keep tabs on your employees and follow up often? Or do you like to give someone a project, and let them run with it? If you are the latter, the person who needed a lot of clarification might not be a good fit for you. A good virtual assistant can save you hours per day, freeing up your time to focus on growing and scaling your business. With a little bit of effort and the steps listed above, you can find the perfect person to compliment your leadership style and needs. Business via Inc.com https://www.inc.com/ September 26, 2020 at 07:57AM
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I had to teach my NYU psych class to 360 students from a cell phone while trapped in an elevator with my kids. It went surprisingly well. https://ift.tt/3mX7HXg
On September 23, I had to teach my afternoon Introduction to Psychology class today to over 300 students from my cell phone while I was trapped in my apartment building elevator with my two young kids. Even by the standards of 2020, this has to go down as the most stressful — and surreal — teaching experience of my life. I'm currently teaching a huge Intro to Psychology class this fall. But given the risks of the pandemic as well as public health guidelines, I was forced to teach the class virtually. For whatever reason, the class was massively over-enrolled, with over 360 students from around the world joining me every few days to learn about the science of the mind. Moving such a massive course online has been a challenge. But others have it worse, and the students are smart and engaged, so the class has truly been a blast to teach. At least, it was a blast until this week. The first problem is that the local schools in New York are closed, and I have limited child care.I have to get my kids from the local daycare at 3 p.m. and race back to my apartment by 3:30 p.m. to teach the class. My 10-year-old son loves to crash my course and share his thoughts on the brain and perceptual illusions, but the students find it funny so I don't mind. This past Wednesday, I set up my computer, walked through the city to pick up my kids, and then we arrived back at my apartment building at 3:20 p.m. We hopped in the elevator, and I breathed a sigh of relief that I was going to make it to my class on time. Class was scheduled to start in 10 minutes. The elevator closed and started moving up. Then it quickly lurched to a halt and started dropping. I got that feeling in my stomach that happens when you're in a roller coaster and it starts falling. I realize we are suddenly trapped on the 3rd floor. But I used the call button in the elevator to contact the staff. They promised to contact a repairman from the elevator company to help us escape. OK, no need to panic. I started texting people to figure out what to do. My 8-year-old daughter started getting scared, which led my son to tease her about overreacting. He's normally a cool cucumber in any situation. But this led her to start crying. Things were melting down pretty good at that point. But we rallied and calmed down. I gave them a hug. Things would be alright. It dawned on me that my students would be worried if I didn't show up for class.But my internet reception was horrible (you know when it only has one bar of reception), and I wasn't high enough to access my WiFi either. After fumbling with my iPhone, I managed to login into my NYU Classes website to contact my students. Thankfully, I managed to login and send out an email announcement to the class by 3:28 p.m. The subject line was: "Trapped in my elevator, will start class as soon as I'm rescued." By this point, a certain level of camaraderie had developed in the elevator. My kids and I had a dawning recognition that we were all in this together and would pull through. I reminisced about the time I was stuck in the elevator with my son Jack five years ago, and we laughed about those old times. We also snapped a few selfies to remember the moment. But time passed. The kids got anxious. I started to worry about my poor students and how I would manage to finish the lecture on time. The mid-term was coming up the following week and there would be no time to make up the content. After half an hour, I made an executive decision to try and teach from the friendly confines of the elevator. I desperately tried to get enough internet access to login into NYU Classes and access my Zoom link. But Zoom made this incredibly hard on my phone. They needed me to download an app and then login. In many ways, this was the biggest challenge of the entire ordeal. Eventually, I logged into my class. But the internet was so weak that I couldn't speak to the students. I logged out and logged in again using the phone link. I would just give the lecture over the phone without video or slides. It seemed like the only option. I was finally able to phone into my class. I could see there were over 200 students already in the room and they were just chatting, speculating about my new life in the elevator. They seemed strangely relaxed. Their lives seemed somehow fuller than our life in the elevator. I spoke. They kept talking. I yelled my name. "HI, IT'S JAY! I'M ON THE CALL!" They heard and recognized me. The class was afoot! I could hear my students' collective surprise — especially once they realized I was still trapped in the elevator, and the class was still going forward.I could hear one student yelling to her roommate that her professor was trapped in an elevator. Others seemed excited to give this a try; apparently they'd never been taught from a professor stuck in an elevator before. It would give the class a fresh new twist. Then it dawned on me that I had no way of showing them my carefully crafted slides on the conscious and unconscious mind. They were on my computer, in my apartment. I suddenly felt very alone. Would I be able to remember the lecture? Had I made a mistake by jumping on the call? Then I just started talking about consciousness. It went surprisingly well for a stressed-out guy giving a lecture over his phone with no notes while trapped in an elevator with his kids. Sure, I lowered my standards. But I felt it was only fair under the circumstances. As I'm talking, I realized my kids are just staring at me with perplexed looks on their faces. They weren't horrified, but seemed bemused as I raised my voice to explain how we have many mental processes that operate outside our awareness. After about 50 excruciatingly long minutes in the elevator, it jolted and then started to move. The doors opened. We could see our beautiful nondescript lobby and the sun beaming in from the front doors. We cautiously stepped out into freedom. I was able to catch the other elevator upstairs, boot up my laptop, and give the rest of the lecture from the now-seemingly-normal confines of my kitchen table. I'm not sure how this will play out my semester teaching evaluations — but at this point of 2020, who cares anyway.For anyone wondering, why didn't I cancel my class? I don't know. It all seemed weirdly normal in the moment. Each step just seemed to logically follow the prior step. This is a lesson I'll cover in a later lecture on rationalization. As I typed it all out, I'm now deeply aware of how absurd this was. With a little luck, I will not be teaching in elevators in the future. Jay Van Bavel is an associate professor of psychology and neural science at at New York University, an affiliate at the Stern School of Business, and director of the Social Identity & Morality Lab. He completed his PhD at the University of Toronto and a postdoctoral fellowship at The Ohio State University before joining the faculty at NYU in 2010. Van Bavel has published over 100 academic publications and written research essays in The New York Times, BBC, Scientific American, and The Wall Street Journal. His research has been featured in TEDx and TED-Ed videos and he's consulted with the UN, EE, and WHO on issues related to his research. He coauthors a mentoring column, entitled Letters to Young Scientists, for Science Magazine. Connect with Van Bavel on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
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Business via Business Insider https://ift.tt/1IpULic September 26, 2020 at 07:51AM
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Tesla's new 'tabless' cell design is 'brilliant,' said a top battery researcher https://ift.tt/3i74iBA
Tesla's Battery Day this week brought big news to the metallurgy and chemical-engineering worlds: the company had developed a new cylindrical battery cell, dubbed the "4680," that's much larger than the 2170 cells it's currently using. While the 4680 cells remain at the prototyping stage and shouldn't enter mass production until 2022, CEO Elon Musk and his engineers are confident enough in the new form factor to start rethinking the design of Tesla's cars, with the 4680 cells becoming a structural feature. In a nutshell, the new design does away with a "tab" that connects the battery cell and allows it to discharge and recharge energy. The bigger 4680 cell can handle more power, and Tesla maintains that it will be faster and cheaper to produce. And because it's larger than the 2170 cell, which is now arranged in elaborate packs that form the floor of Tesla's vehicles, the 4680 cell can add stiffness to the middle of a vehicle, subtracting a bunch of complicated parts in the process. The technology itself impressed at least one expert. "I give it an A-plus," said Shirley Meng, who studies nano-engineering and materials science at the University of California San Diego, where she is also the founding director of the college's Sustainable Power and Energy Center. The tab-less design of the new Tesla cell is "brilliant," she said. "It's really an engineering achievement." "The tab side used to be the weakest link," she explained. "Tesla gets a 10 out of 10 for handing this difficult issue." The new battery cell is highly innovativeMeng confessed that the 4680 design (so-named because of its 46-millimeter diameter and 80-millimeter length) had some aspects that eluded even her, a scientist who has been working in field for over a decade. "I couldn't wrap my head around the pattern," she said of the cell's spiral internal structure. "But I look forward to studying it in more detail. And I hope there will be more testing coming out. Based on physics, they have a good point." That's because, she said, having that many contact locations inside the cells distributes power better, instead of having "all the electrons rushing through a little tab." By eliminating that weak point, the cell also offers better thermal management than the 2170 cell it should replace. Meng also pointed out that the 4680 cell is highly innovative. "It's completely new as far as I know," she said. "Academic groups haven't been looking at this design. We usually don't talk about batteries of this scale." 10 terawatts of battery capacityTesla's goal for the new cell is to slash manufacturing costs by more than 50% while greatly increasing the power that cells can store. Musk and Tesla vice-president Drew Baglino said in a presentation that coming up with a new, better cell was the only way for the company to achieve an ambitious objective: produce three terawatts of battery capacity by 2023. That's a lot — all of humanity uses about 18 terawatts of electricity — and Musk estimated that to replace all current transportation with electrically-powered vehicles, ten terawatts are in order. "If we reach that scale, there will be many choices," Meng said of the various battery designs that are currently in use or being developed, including solid-state, which she called the "dream solution." She outlined a world where, if we make good progress, Tesla accounts for 2 to 3 terawatts and other manufacturers contribute an additional 2 to 3 terawatts — not quite enough to get to the ten-terawatt threshold. According to Meng, that means there should be plenty of room for other designs, including the sort of pouch-type packs that General Motors has developed to undergird its Ultium technology. "The world needs so many batteries," she said. Interestingly, for Meng, rising to the challenge isn't just about training a host of new battery-makers. "We need more government and public support," she said. "It isn't just about more engineers. It's about our whole society transforming."
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Business via Business Insider https://ift.tt/1IpULic September 26, 2020 at 07:45AM
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New York's transit system is in a financial crisis — but saving it is vital to the US economy, experts say https://ift.tt/2RYr7Nt
New York's transit system is in a financial crisis, and to anyone outside of the New York metropolitan area, that probably sounds like someone else's problem. But experts disagree. Dependable, robust mass transit is vital to New York's economic health and recovery, and if the agency is left high and dry, many say the entire country's economy will suffer. Right now, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority — which runs New York's buses, subways, and commuter trains — needs billions in federal aid. It received close to $4 billion in March through the CARES Act, but that money dried up quickly. The May HEROES Act would have given the MTA and other transit agencies a fresh round of funding, but the package stalled in the Senate. As the MTA grapples with an increasingly dire financial outlook brought on by the pandemic, the agency is sounding the alarm about extreme cost-cutting measures it'll be forced to pursue without a lifeline from the federal government. But the cuts couldn't come at a worse time, according to transit advocates and policy experts. A deterioration of the subway, they say, would have a ripple effect throughout the country. Without emergency funding, the MTA might need to decimate service, cut jobs, and stall vital construction projectsAt a board meeting in late August, the MTA warned it would need to slash service and table major infrastructure-improvement projects without $12 billion in emergency funding. The aid would carry the floundering agency through 2021 — without it, drastic changes, including job cuts, could come as soon as this fall. Under the doomsday plan, the agency would need to cut subway and bus service by up to 40%, leading wait times to balloon by up to eight minutes on subways and as much as 15 minutes on buses. An estimated 7,200 employees would lose their jobs. The city's commuter rails, tasked with transporting workers from nearby suburbs to New York's central business district, would suffer an even worse fate. The MTA said it may need to cut service in half, spacing Long Island Railroad and Metro-North trains at 60-minute or 120-minute intervals and possibly shutting down some routes entirely. Meanwhile, the MTA said not receiving the federal funding could pause projects from its $51.5 billion Capital Plan — a long-overdue investment into things like modernization, line expansions, and accessibility upgrades — scheduled for 2020 through 2024. The MTA itself, as part of its latest push for emergency tax dollars, has contended that its well-being is a national concern deserving of a federal solution. Data shows that in addition to the MTA's indirect financial impact, the agency directly does business with vendors from nearly every US state. "Not only does investment in the MTA benefit New York City, the New York City business community, New York State and the tri-state region, but it also benefits the national interest," MTA Chairman and CEO Patrick J. Foye told Reuters recently. "It's in the national government's interest to fund this because of the importance of New York and the importance of the MTA to New York." The proposed cuts reflect a severe financial crisis at New York's transit authorityThe proposed cuts, unprecedented as they may be, reflect the severity of the financial crisis New York's transit system faces. The MTA was no stranger to financial distress before the pandemic hit, but in March, its ridership plummeted virtually overnight, decimating farebox revenues and sending the agency into free fall. Subway ridership dropped by 93% at the height of the outbreak in New York. And although straphangers have slowly returned to transit as the city has creaked open, ridership on subways had only reached around a quarter of normal levels in early September, and buses were still down 50%. The Long Island Railroad and Metro-North have also been slow to bounce back, now seeing approximately 25% and 20% of their typical weekday ridership levels, respectively. The MTA received $3.9 billion in funding through the CARES Act in March, but it blew through that money by late July. Now, with the agency hemorrhaging $200 million per week and no followup stimulus bill in sight, it's pleading for another infusion of cash. The MTA is vital New York's massive economyA $12 billion allowance would be a drop in the bucket of any trillion-dollar stimulus package, and many experts and advocates say that, in this case, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Saving New York's transit system from ruin, they say, is essential to clawing the city — and the nation at large — out of the current economic recession. With its approximately $1.8 trillion GDP — comparable to that of Canada — the New York metropolitan area accounts for roughly 8% of the national economy, and the region's financial success is driven in large part by its robust transit system. In normal times, more than 3 million workers use the MTA and other smaller transit agencies to get to work each day across the New York region. Millions more take public transit for non-work-related trips. New York's strength lies in its density, multiple experts told Business Insider, and that's not possible without strong public transit. The city's jam-packed central business district only thrives because of its expansive transit system, which can shuttle vast numbers of people to lower Manhattan and between meetings. "The benefit of New York is that it's the only place where you have an abundance of face-to-face contact, and the reason it's possible is because of mass transit," Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University, told Business Insider. "In Los Angeles, you might be able to have three physical face-to-face meetings a day. In New York, you can have eight." Nicole Gelinas, a senior fellow at urban-policy think tank the Manhattan Institute, said although many white-collar workers have made due working remotely for months, Manhattan's ultra-high-density business district will remain an important driver of economic activity. "The entire point of being in Manhattan was you can walk to meetings," she said. "You can have many, many meetings every day with your potential vendors, your customers, your competitors. So if you're going to try to recreate that in suburban office parks or work-at-home, you will see a less productive economy five years, 10 years from now." Another key to New York's prosperity is that it draws its workforce not just from within the city limits, but also from neighboring areas served by the MTA and other outfits. Of the roughly 2 million people who worked in Manhattan's central business district before COVID-19, more than 600,000 commuted from New Jersey, Long Island, Southwest Connecticut, or the Hudson Valley. The overwhelming majority took transit. Transit will only become more vital to the New York economy during this time of mass unemployment, multiple experts told Business Insider. Although the city's cost of living is high, its robust, low-cost system of subways and buses creates a low barrier of entry to the workforce. In other parts of the country, Gelinas said, one might need to spend thousands of dollars annually financing and maintaining a car just to get to work. In New York, you can commute on subways and buses for around $1,500 per year. In 2018, Gelinas studied the importance of the MTA to workforce participation, determining that the subways "are both a cause and an effect of New York's labor-market boom." "New York's mass transit system — especially its subways — has been a crucial factor for encouraging and enabling more of the residents in the city's historically poorer neighborhoods to work," Gelinas wrote. "Any sustained deterioration in subway services endangers this success story." Abandoning or reducing capital projects, which the agency warned it would need to do without aid, could accelerate that deterioration. Multiple experts and activists warned of a "death spiral" — a vicious cycle of disrepair and disuse — that could hit the transit system if it winds up diminishing service too greatly. "If the system becomes far less useful and far less accessible, then it would lose more revenue," said Danny Pearlstein, policy and communications director for advocacy group Riders Alliance. "And so the MTA would find itself in an even worse position six months or a year from now. And so it might not be too long before there was no transit system." The MTA's capital endeavors constitute a significant source of economic activity for the region. The Partnership for New York City, an independent nonprofit organization, analyzed the MTA's capital investment plan for 2020 through 2024 and found it would create more than 57,000 jobs per year while spurring $62 billion in economic activity. In a recent report, the Regional Plan Association, a prominent tri-state area planning group, argued that Congress should preserve the New York region's transit investments as a way of protecting its infrastructure and putting people to work. The RPA argued that capital programs from the MTA and other regional transit agencies could be cornerstone components of a national stimulus package similar to the Works Progress Administration — a 1935 employment and infrastructure program under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, which created millions of jobs during the Great Depression. "It's essential that we continue that capital program to employ construction personnel and the other folks that make those things happen," said Brian Fritsch, a manager of advocacy campaigns at the organization. "If those things go away, it's really dire for the region economically." The widespread ripple effects of the MTA's success or failureExperts, activists, and transit officials warn that the financial damage of not funding the MTA could spread far past the city and region. In addition to propping up New York's massively important economy, the MTA contributes directly to economies across the country, according to a June report from watchdog group Reinvent Albany. From 2011 to 2018, the organization found that the MTA spent close to $8 billion on vendors in states outside of New York State, including $1.6 billion in New Jersey, $1.4 billion in Pennsylvania, and $797 million in California. During the period studied, the MTA spent money in all but three US states, as well as Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. Advocates hope that emergency aid for the MTA will make it into a reauthorization of the FAST Act -- a 2015 law that expires soon, but originally authorized $305 billion in transportation aid over fiscal years 2016 through 2020 -- or a bill to fund the federal government, both of which need congressional action by September 30. But with negotiations surrounding a second coronavirus stimulus bill stalled — Democrats proposed nearly $16 billion for transit agencies in the May HEROES Act, but Republicans' latest plan included no such funding — the MTA and transit agencies across the country face an uncertain future. At a Wednesday board meeting, MTA officials said the agency may need to borrow $2.9 billion from the Federal Reserve for some short-term relief, on top of the $450 million it borrowed from the Fed in August. "There would be global economic impacts to the fact that people can't get to work in the financial and cultural capital of the United States," Pearlstein said. "There is literally no better investment in the nation's economic recovery than keeping New York humming [and] keeping riders able to quickly and reliably get around the city by the millions. "It's a simple thing for Congress to send us $12 billion. Every other way out of this is far more complicated and painful."
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Business via Business Insider https://ift.tt/1IpULic September 26, 2020 at 07:39AM BMW's most iconic sports car wears a wild grille and starts at $69900 check out the brand-new M39/26/2020
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BMW's most iconic sports car wears a wild grille and starts at $69,900 — check out the brand-new M3 https://ift.tt/3czN4fc
First things first. Yes, the new M3 and M4 wear the big grille. Much like death or taxes, the big grille — this diptych of doom — is inescapable. But, hopefully, the high-horsepower engines and option for a six-speed manual make an attractive enough trade-off for you to get into BMW's latest rides, unveiled on Tuesday. As a quick recap, the M3 was historically the performance-version of the 3 Series. It came as a coupe, convertible, or sedan. Then BMW sectioned off the 3 Series coupe to become the 4 Series. So now we have the M3 and M4. The new M3 and M4 mark the current sixth generation of the 3 Series, internally called the G80 and the G82 for the 4 Series. (More numbers were, obviously, necessary.) More importantly, both use BMW's 3.0-liter, twin-turbo straight-six engine that produces 473 horsepower in the regular models and 503 horsepower in the higher-performance Competition models, according to a company press release. The M3 sedan will start at $69,900 and the M3 Competition sedan will start at $72,800. The M4 coupe will start at $74,700 and the M4 Competition coupe will start at $74,700. BMW also notes that a $995 destination fee will apply to all pricing. The cars will be launched globally in March 2021. Keep reading to see them both.
BMW just unveiled its new 2021 M3 and M4 sports cars.
The M3 is the sedan version, the M4 the couple. They're powered by the same engine.
That engine would be a 3.0-liter, twin-turbocharged straight-six.
It produces a claimed 473 horsepower and 406 pound-feet of torque in regular guise.
For the sportier Competition models, BMW's claimed output climbs to to 503 horsepower and 479 pound-feet of torque.
There are two screens: a 12.3-inch information display and a 10.25-inch center touchscreen.
The M3 sedan offers easier access to the rear seats, a draw for those who utilize the second row more.
M Sport seats have big side bolsters that help hold you in place under hard cornering.
On the Competition models, the quad-exhaust pipes are black chrome.
BMW says the giant front grille improves cooling for the engine.
The M4 coupe is the two-door version.
The M3 used to be both a two- and four-door model, but a few years ago BMW turned the 3 Series coupe into the 4 Series. So here we are.
If you put the car into Sport or Sport+ mode, the exhaust note will get louder.
Four cars will be available at the global launch next March.
They will include the rear-wheel drive M3 and M4, mated to six-speed manual transmissions (!).
And the M3 and M4 Competition editions with an eight-speed automatic transmission.
By the way, just LOOK AT this interior.
Next summer will bring the xDrive all-wheel drive Competition models.
The M3 sedan will start at $69,900. The M3 Competition sedan will start at $72,800.
The M4 coupe will start at $71,800. The M4 Competition coupe will start at $74,700.
BMW reminds us to apply the $995 destination fee to all prices.
And as my parting gift to you, here's another look at that GIANT GRILLE. You can't look away, can you?
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Business via Business Insider https://ift.tt/1IpULic September 26, 2020 at 07:39AM
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'Divided We Fall' author David French on why America could come apart, the loss of free speech culture, and how Trump could be the GOP's new Reagan https://ift.tt/36aeKWI
David French is a Senior Editor at The Dispatch, which launched in 2019 and describes itself as providing "fact-based conservative news." French is also a columnist for Time magazine, and previously spent four years as a writer at the conservative magazine National Review. A principled social conservative, free speech advocate, lawyer, and Iraq War veteran, French was an early Never Trumper. His new book, "Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation," was released this week. From his home in Tennessee, French spoke via Skype with with Business Insider Columnist Anthony L. Fisher about the book, the fraying of free speech principles on both the left and right, the redefining of racism, and why he thinks the US is in such danger of literally coming apart. This interview has been edited for style, length, and clarity. You've got a chapter on acceptable discourse and the moving of the Overton window. Can you talk a little bit about how you think that window has changed in recent years on the left and the right? For those people that don't know what the Overton window is, it is a term for the bounds of acceptable discourse. That there is a window that reflects where acceptable discourse happens in the US. There's an Overton window that exists on the right, and one on the left. And you can't go out of your window. What that means is in some areas, the two sides just can't really speak anymore. The possibility of compromise is often completely squelched because the very act of engaging in a compromise moves you out of your window and moves you out of your tribe. And you're sort of cast into the outer darkness. One of the areas where the Overton window has moved on the left is gender identity. Arguments or discussions that you might have five years ago, in parts of the left, you can not have anymore. On the right, one of the areas where I say the Overton window has moved a ton is in arguments around gun rights and gun control. The right's activists and the base used to be far more divided about things like gun rights. But now there is a stampede towards a further and further libertarian position on gun rights. And so what ends up happening is the two sides just can't even connect at all on these really important cultural issues. One counter-argument is these are people just holding true to their principles. If you're on the left and you believe that there are innumerable numbers of genders, then to argue otherwise is to engage in bigotry. And if you're on the right and you're for certain gun regulations, you'd basically consign yourself to being a RINO (Republican In Name Only). But the activists on both sides would argue that they're the principled ones, they're not the squishes. A lot of times if you're talking about politics, someone will say so-and-so is divisive. What they mean by divisive is that they disagree with me. So the argument in my book isn't, "Can't we all just agree?" The argument is we can hold two convictions at the same time. You can hold a specific conviction about gender identity. At the same time you can hold a particular conviction about pluralism and free speech, rather than treat a discussion as outside of the Overton window, where you cannot have it. You can have the moral conviction and yet engage, extend, expand the Overton window to where you can engage with people on the opposite side of the aisle. That's the key issue here. It isn't can't we all be more politically moderate — in the sense of sort of joining around a center-right or center-left vision of the United States. It's can we create a country in which all of these really diverse communities — some of them centered around real convictions that might be on the far-right or the far-left — can't we have a country and a culture that accommodates that? That's where I get back to Federalist Number 10, James Madison's early vision of American pluralism in both the dedication to individual liberty, and also to communal self-governance. Federalism, in other words. The most relevant government should be the government closest to you. And right now the most relevant government in many people's lives is the government farthest from them, the federal government. Losing the culture of free speechIn your writing and on your Twitter feed, I've long found you to be a pretty fair operator when it comes to the principle of freedom of speech. But in the chapter on losing free speech culture, you don't really mention the right-wing threats to free speech, particularly the bans on Palestinian activism or the Trump campaign's frivolous lawsuits against media outlets. In the book I spent a lot of time talking about the attacks on Colin Kaepernick and the kneeling NFL players. To me, that was one of the most salient examples of how the right tried to exert its own cancel culture. And I juxtapose it with the right's support for James Damore, the software engineer at Google who put out a libertarian-influenced document about how Google could increase diversity without engaging in, for example, gender discrimination. He made some arguments about why there might be fewer women in the hiring pools. If you're at all familiar with conservative or libertarian thought regarding diversity, and regarding the reasons why there are disparities in the workplace, it would have read as a pretty anodyne document. But he was fired and conservatives said, "Look, that's cancel culture. Look at the intolerance of the left." And then you have a situation where a football player kneels quietly, doesn't hurt anybody, and a few others do as well. And the President of the United States thunders, "Fire them!" And rather than saying, "No, that's cancel culture. We need to support a culture of free speech," thousands and thousands and thousands of people at those rallies and millions of people online cheered, "Yes, fire them." One of the points that I make is you're not part of the solution if you're going to find reasons to punish your political opponents for their speech and reasons to protect the political speech of your friends. I can have my core convictions regarding foreign policy, regarding domestic policy, regarding cultural issues like abortion or gender identity. But the instant I try to shut off or close down the body politic to my opponents, that's the instant that we began to unacceptably raise the stakes of political conflict in this country where what's at stake is not just the policy position, but the very structure of our constitutional republic itself. In a current like corporate or academic situation, do you think even the mainstream conservative beliefs on abortion or guns could be discussed without generating tremendous controversy or HR complaints? In some places, no, they can't be discussed without generating tremendous controversy. But here's the thing: this is not new. We kind of have a recency bias that if it's beyond the memory of Twitter, it didn't happen. But I was in law school from 1991 to 1994. And the blowback on campus for just conventional social conservative positions was enormous. In some easy, much worse than it is now for conservative students. It's just that nobody really knew about it because nobody was tweeting it with a hashtag. Now we the instant national access of social media, when we can find out within minutes,whether some kid had a MAGA hat knocked off their head in Des Moines. But in ideologically monolithic communities, a lot of this hostility to dissent is not all that new. We're more aware of it, but it's not new. Defining, and undefining, racismThis is a quote from your book: "The essence of bigotry is to look at the color of a person's skin, and on that basis alone, make malicious judgments about their character or worth." Over the past few months, the work of antiracist writers like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo have argued differently, that race is paramount and to ignore skin color is in fact, racist. Do you think the Overton window has moved to the point that the definition of racism has been irrevocably changed in American culture? No, it's splitting. The Overton window on the right does not have room for the Kendi or DiAngelo definition of racism. If you start walking around in certain right-wing circles waving Robin Di Angelo's book and talking about white fragility in the terms that she does, nobody's listening to you. And similarly if you walk into some spaces in the left and you say, "A person of any race can be a bigot. A person of any race can be a racist," they will flat out deny that because their definition of racism is fundamentally different. As I wrote in the book, Sarah Jeong was hired by The New York Times as part of the editorial board. A lot of her earlier tweets came out that were just viciously denigrating of white people. My position was that those tweets are racist. And calling them racist doesn't mean that the racism of that person is of the same magnitude and danger of the racism say of a member of the alt-right. It's a matter of degree, not of kind. And I had a lot of people write back to me and respond to me and say, "No, that's not racism. Racism has to be connected to either present or historical power to be called racism." Well, that's not the definition that most people grew up with. And it's one of the ways in which I point out that we're beginning to live in these separate communities where a word like racism doesn't have the same meaning in Brooklyn as it has in Franklin, Tennessee, for example. And that's only been exacerbated in the last several months. This is sort of the very downstream effect of clustering, and like-minded communities separating from each other geographically. It means that we learned to talk to each other and we don't learn to talk outside of each other. And what happens is we lose a common language. One of the things I've tried to do, especially in my writings on race, is to bridge that gap by trying to shed the conversation as much as possible of these various buzzwords that don't have a common meaning anymore. Talking about power and bigotry, I'm reminded of a sentiment that emerged after the Charlie Hebdo shootings, when journalists were cowering under their desks in fear for their lives. Though the magazine had lampooned Islam and other religions, at that moment, it was the terrorists who had the power. Power is both contextual and historical. There are people who belong to historically marginalized groups, but in a given context, may have a ton of power. But that doesn't change the fact that they're historically marginalized, that they belong to a group that's historically marginalized, and that many other members of that same group are historically marginalized. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina has given pretty powerful personal testimony of his experiences. On one hand, he's one of 100 senators in the United States Senate. He has an enormous amount of power. On the other hand, he has been in contexts that somebody like me, a suburban white guy from Tennessee, is rarely going to experience, like some of the dangers from unexpected encounters with police, or unnecessarily hostile encounters with police. In that circumstance, the historical weight of America's past sins comes down on him, even though he's a senator. Power is both rooted in history and rooted in present context. So in the very moment of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the most powerful people in that room were the terrorists. It reminds me of something my commander told me in Iraq. He was talking about a village that would otherwise be allied with us, but it was under the control of Al-Qaeda And he said something that I'll never forget: "In a room of a hundred people, what do you call the one man in there with a gun? A majority." How America comes apartThere's a fictitious interlude in the middle of the book that deals with Calexit and Texit, the secessions of California and Texas, which brings about the dissolution of the country. And it seems frighteningly believable. It feels like the coming Supreme Court confirmation hearings could be one of those triggering events. I think we're on a cycle of continual escalation. Now, I'm not saying that we're on the verge of dissolving, but I did write those fictional scenarios for a very specific purpose. I wanted to take the conversation out of the sort of rarefied air of "This study says this" and "This study says that," and explore how the things I talked about [in the book] would look like in the real world. Imagine you've got a pile of wood of dry wood, and you're just throwing more and more kerosene on it. If somebody comes around with the match, the whole thing can go up. What's happening is every single new cycle, if there's a choice to escalate and punch the other side in the mouth, or de-escalate and seek compromise, time and again, we're seeing escalation. And sometimes the escalation, oddly enough, is based on the presumption of the escalation of the other side. A lot of Republicans said in 2016, "If we're close to an election, don't have a hearing and a vote on a Supreme Court nominee." Flat out. It wasn't conditioned on when there's divided government. It was flat out. Rubio said if a Republican was president, I would say the same thing. Lindsey Graham said after the primary starts, we should put a hold on nominations. Ted Cruz said we haven't done this in 80 years, referring to this exact situation. I can go down the line with Republicans who said flat out they wouldn't do this. And then the time comes to keep your promise, in a time of extreme national volatility and anger, and you say, no, because I can't trust the Democrats' word, so therefore I'm not going to keep my word. So you have this preemptive escalation based on the expectation of the anger and failure of the other side and it puts you in a sort of a doom loop of escalation. If you believe that there's no cost to polarization, that people get angry but at the end of the day, they're going to swallow their defeat, take their lumps, and move on. My argument is that's ahistorical nonsense, that there is nothing so unique about the United States of America that you can't push people to want to leave this place to dissolve it. In fact, we were born into disillusion. We were born in a separation. The majority and the more powerful, more wealthy side of the British empire, pushed the colonists. The colonists were smaller and less powerful, but they said, "We're going to risk conflict with a world superpower to get out of this." And they did it for good reasons, for individual liberty. In 1861, the South did it for evil reasons. But in 1861, you had a geographically contiguous, relatively powerful, sub-part of the US that completely turned its back on the democratic process. I just think we don't have a better human nature than we had before. We don't have a greater willingness to swallow injustice than we had before. And if we keep pushing people and pushing people and pushing people, you cannot assume that they won't break. That's one of the reasons why I wrote the book and wrote the scenarios. I want people to have those scenarios in their mind as they're walking through politics. Not just, "Will my policy be enacted," but "Will this approach that I'm taking help divide or unite this country that we love. The Justice Department just designated several cities, including New York, as anarchist-run and threatened to cut off federal funding. It's one thing for Trump and his hardcore followers to fan the flames of the culture war. As a lawyer and conservative, what do you make of the Attorney General Bill Barr participating in something like this? The Trump funding threat is just flat out unlawful. It just is. And in a functioning body politic, an attorney general would say, "Mr. President, this is unlawful. I'm not going to participate in it. And I'll resign if you make me." But we're not in a very well-functioning body politic right now. And, and the priority for all too many people is, am I punching the other side in the mouth? So there's a lot of applause for things like this unlawful executive order, because it's punching the other side of the mouth. Now in all likelihood, if there's any concrete action taken beyond the Department of Justice designation, the City of New York can go straight into court and get an injunction. But why do we need to rely exclusively on the courts, which are now increasingly in contention, to protect the constitution? Everybody swears the oath who is in government. Each one of them has an independent obligation to uphold the oath. And calling New York an anarchic jurisdiction, is it just laughable. There might be areas in which they're having difficulty maintaining order, but a city of what, eight million, nine million people? Anarchist jurisdiction? It's laughable, but it's red meat for a certain part of the base. The part of the base that actually controls the GOP right now. And they love it. It's owning the libs, it's fighting back, it's punching back twice as hard. It's all of the dysfunctions rolled into one of these actions that sort of encapsulates our dysfunction. There's no Evan McMullin this year. There isn't even a Gary Johnson. What does a principled, right-of-center voter like yourself do in 2020? Well, I'm definitely not voting for Donald Trump. I think the two viable options for conservatives who've said no to Trump, that's vote third party or vote for Joe Biden. I prefer the third party option for a very specific reason, and that is, I don't agree with Joe Biden's agenda. So if hundreds of thousands of conservatives vote for Joe Biden, those are just numbers in his ledger. They're not divided out as to not supporting Biden's agenda, but opposing Trump. And Democrats would rightfully look at that vote total and say, "That's for us. That's for our agenda. That's for Biden." One of the virtues of the third party vote or write-in is it's a quantifiable way of saying, "I don't agree with either of these people." And there is an X number of people who will vote in this election who are alienated from this binary choice. And I think that's an important metric. When you're talking about me, until 2016, when I didn't vote for either Hillary Clinton or Biden, I'd never not voted Republican. I voted for every Republican nominee. So I'm the kind of vote that they should feel like they don't even have to work for. As a staunch social conservative, I should be the easiest vote in the world. So when you're removing votes like mine from the ledger, it's a concrete loss for a GOP nominee. I'm a typical Republican voter and a typical Republican voter is withholding his vote, that's minus one in the Trump column. And by adding a third party vote, it's a plus one in the column of alienated Americans who are deeply dissatisfied with what the two parties have become. The GOP after TrumpAfter the election, Trump is either an ex-president or soon-to-be a lame duck. What comes after next? What's the Republican party after Trump? There's three options. One: He wins. And then the Republican Party after Trump, barring a total disaster beyond what we've seen in 2020, you're talking about a party remade in his image in much the same way that the party was remade in Ronald Reagan's image after his successful two terms. If Trump wins. the bond between him and the GOP base will be doubly cemented because he's even more of an underdog this time than last time. It would be seen as an extraordinary triumph. Two: If it's a very narrow loss, it's still a Trumpy party. Maybe not as much devotion to Trump, the man, but I think a lot of devotion still to that nationalist populist outlook. Because the idea would be that either he was the right message but the wrong messenger, which the non-Trump family heirs in the party will say. Then the Trump family heirs would say, he had the right message and was the right messenger. He was stabbed in the back by those darn Never Trumpers in the media. And the last one is if he loses decisively, all bets are off. Every part of the Republican coalition would have an opportunity to vie for control, including the changing Reaganite wing, the nationalist populist wing, all the various strands of the Republican coalition would be fighting for dominance. And we wouldn't know who won until the primaries are decided in 2024. That hurt my head hearing you cite Reagan. Because that means there could potentially be quarter-century of Trumpism ahead. That's an awful thought. The dedication of one of our two great political parties to a nationalist pugilist style that has no regard for personal character, I think would be disastrous for our country.
Read the original article on Business Insider
Business via Business Insider https://ift.tt/1IpULic September 26, 2020 at 07:21AM
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Learn Google Ads and SEO Strategies to Grow Your Business https://ift.tt/36aNZl4 Growing your business online is easier said than done. With so many marketing channels available and so many people using the Internet, there is seemingly boundless opportunities to get eyes on your business's products and services. But marketing also gets expensive, and many small businesses don't quite have the budget to make a meaningful impact on their digital marketing initiatives. That's why organic search is so important. Google received more than 2.3 trillion searches in 2019. People use Google to find practically everything; it's their definitive source for learning and discovering new products and services. As a business, it's imperative that your website ranks at the top of Google search results pages. That's where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in. In the Ultimate Google Ads & SEO Certification Bundle, you'll learn how to make your business stand out online without spending a big chunk of your budget on paid traffic. This nine-course bundle includes almost 30 hours of training on all things SEO and Google Ads. It's led by Joshua George, founder of SEO agency ClickSlice. Here, he'll give you an introduction to Google Ads and a comprehensive overview of SEO for businesses. You'll learn how to optimize your business listings on Google to always rank when people search for what you do, including local SEO, so you'll rank as the top business in your area for a certain service. The content also covers how to create and manage webpages on WordPress that are fully SEO-optimized, how to generate new business-to-business leads through SEO, and how to improve your domain authority through link-building. There's even a course dedicated to running an SEO agency. Learn how to grow your business organically online. The Ultimate Google Ads & SEO Certification Bundle is on sale now for just $49.99. Related: Business via Entrepreneur https://ift.tt/1V7CpeP September 26, 2020 at 07:20AM
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Facebook’s Oversight Board to launch in October — but not for election cases https://ift.tt/2S1dRaA (Reuters) – Facebook Inc’s long-delayed independent Oversight Board plans to launch in mid-late October, just before the November U.S. presidential election, but a Facebook spokeswoman said on Thursday it was unlikely that the board would handle election-related cases. The board, created by Facebook in response to criticism of its handling of problematic content, will initially have the power to review decisions to take down posts from Facebook and Instagram, and recommend policy changes. Oversight Board member Alan Rusbridger told Reuters in an interview this week the board was now aiming for an October launch. A board spokesman said that the late launch, originally planned for last year, had been further slowed by the coronavirus pandemic. Potential cases would come to the board from users who have exhausted the appeals process, or be sent over from Facebook. Deciding and implementing rulings would take up to 90 days, although Facebook could ask for them to be expedited within 30 days. The Facebook spokeswoman said it was unlikely that cases related to the election would get through the process given that time frame. Rusbridger also told Reuters that cases involving President Donald Trump’s posts were not among those that the board had looked at in trial runs. “We haven’t done a Trump case,” said Rusbridger, a former editor-in-chief of Britain’s Guardian newspaper. “We have done a nudity case, we’ve done a blasphemy case.” Facebook faced employee backlash in recent months over its decision to take no action over posts from Trump containing misleading claims about mail-in voting and inflammatory language about anti-racism protests. Its smaller rival Twitter, by contrast, attached fact-checking labels and warnings to the same posts. Tech watchdog Accountable Tech, which launched a campaign asking the board’s members to demand “real authority” or resign, said in a statement on Thursday the launch would be “too late to address Facebook’s deficiencies ahead of the election.” The board will initially review only appeals over posts that Facebook has taken down, rather than content the company decides to leave up. Some experts say that means it will be of little use in addressing problems such as misinformation and hate speech. It will also at first only deal with individual posts, not Facebook ads, or groups. Rusbridger said the board had not yet made any changes to its remit. Rusbridger declined to comment on Facebook’s policy of exempting politicians’ speech and ads from its third-party fact-checking program, though he said: “I can’t imagine we won’t have a case brought to us on that.” ‘Wider resonance’Since the first 20 members of the board were announced in May, they have had virtual meetings to discuss issues such as how to select cases and deal with minority opinions, Rusbridger said. Rusbridger said the board would be looking for cases with “wider resonance,” though precedents set by decisions on individual posts would not be binding in future cases. Facebook can also ask the board for policy recommendations though it does not have to act on them, a framework that was criticized by some U.S. Democratic lawmakers. The board, which includes a former Danish prime minister, a Yemeni Nobel Peace Prize laureate, law experts and rights advocates from around the world, is expected to grow to a group of 40 members. Rusbridger said the board was thinking about how it will select these candidates but was not yet choosing more members. (Reporting by Elizabeth Culliford; Editing by Peter Graff, Tom Brown and Steve Orlofsky) Business via VentureBeat https://venturebeat.com September 25, 2020 at 03:45AM
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Starbucks, Facebook, Gap and Hundreds of Other Companies Will Pay Employees to Volunteer as Election Workers https://ift.tt/34120Po Unless you've been living under a rock you're no doubt aware this year's presidential election is going to be... contentious. That means that, in order to ensure fair, timely voting on Election Day, we're going to need plenty of volunteer election workers. There's only one problem. Many of the folks who usually volunteer for this essential but under sung job are older. This year there's a pandemic on and their age bracket is most at risk from the virus. Many fear the result will be a severe shortage of Election Day workers. But not if corporate America has anything to say about it. Hundreds of large companies have joined a campaign called Power the Polls, pledging to give their people paid time off to staff up their local polling places. Starbucks, Facebook, Gap, Nike, Twitter, and dozens more have joined the ever growing list of participating firms. Facebook is also launching a push across its platform to recruit poll workers. "We are seeing a massive shortage of poll workers to staff voting stations," Mark Zuckerberg said in a post announcing its recruitment drive. "Shortages can lead to hours-long waits at the polls, which makes it harder for people to participate in the democratic process." Should your business follow suit?This initiative is clearly a good idea for our democracy, which desperately needs the election to go smoothly. But it raises an important question for smaller businesses: should you follow suit? It's been a brutal year for many smaller businesses, so offering an additional employee benefit might be a stretch too far for many in the year of Covid. That being said, the poor government response to the virus was a major contributing factor to our economic pain. Paying a little bit now to nudge us all towards better government tomorrow might be a worthwhile investment. Plus, actively working towards a better world is one of the surest cures for despair and hopelessness. And your team will probably be more productive if they're more hopeful and feel a tiny bit more in control given the chaos swirling around us. Even if you can't afford to pay your people to help out on Election Day, you could offer them time off to vote and encourage them to make it to the polls. Each year more and more businesses are doing their part. (44 percent of firms offered time off to vote in 2018, according to Bloomberg). If you haven't already, it's worth considering if this year is the right time to join them. Or, if you are personally interested in volunteering to make sure Election Day goes smoothly in your community, you can find more information about how to help here. Business via Inc.com https://www.inc.com/ September 25, 2020 at 03:28AM |
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