Westworld Season 2

The series which many feel is more dense and complex than GOT has come back to HBO.

God of War 4 : All cutscenes

I thought the God of war is one of the best game series of the past decade and didnt require a reboot. It is like Prince of Persia series which is the iconic game of its time.This reboot seems deviate to a different genre. It felt more like a fallen hero concept in "Logan" which makes it worth buying.

WHy has the blockade on Qatar failed ?

The future of internet

Guilty : Finally a conviction in the celebrity harrasment case

I believe such convictions are imperative to act as a deterrent for other acts of coercion by people with fame or power.
By Margaret Sullivan of Washington Post

The guilty verdict against Bill Cosby might seem to say that American culture has changed overnight for women accusing powerful men of sexual misconduct.

After all, a year ago, Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose dominated morning TV. Harvey Weinstein’s movie empire seemed untouchable.

In just months, it’s all come tumbling down.

The truth is that it’s taken decades — or more — for a slow heat to finally boil over.

Anita Hill told her truths to a public unfamiliar even with the term sexual harassment in 1991, and the man she accused became a Supreme Court justice.

But since the change began, it has come fast and relentlessly.

There is now a clear shift toward believing credible accusers. This is because of the now-undeniable truth — revealed in painstaking reporting — that some of the most powerful men in American media, entertainment, business and politics for too long abused women with impunity.

“This is fast culture change and an important milestone, but it’s taken centuries to get here,” said Nancy Erika Smith, who represented Gretchen Carlson in her suit against Fox News co-founder Roger Ailes. He stepped down from his post atop the media world in mid-2016.

Once the boiling point was reached, there was no turning down the heat.

The New York Times and the New Yorker wrote their first stories about Harvey Weinstein’s accusers barely six months ago. After that, so many other stories about sexual abuse and assault quickly followed. Congressmen, comics, business moguls, actors, journalists. Across many industries and workplaces, powerful figures have tumbled, one after another, like so many highflying birds falling from the sky.

“Anita Hill suffered the horror, initially, of not being believed,” said Jill Abramson, co-author with Jane Mayer, of “Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas.” A year after the Thomas confirmation hearings, she told me, the number flipped: More Americans believed Hill than Thomas.

The scene in Pennsylvania after Bill Cosby was convicted of sexual assault

The 80-year-old comedian, once revered as ?America?s Dad,? faces a maximum of 30 years in prison after being convicted of assaulting Andrea Constand, a Temple University women?s basketball administrator whom he was mentoring.

“That was the beginning of mass understanding of how endemic the problem of sexual harassment is,” Abramson said.

Cosby’s retrial — following a hung jury last spring when prosecutors first took him to court — was the first prominent criminal trial of the #MeToo era. And though the jury was instructed not to bring recent headlines into their thinking, no one can control the effects of a culture that is righting itself.

“Things are much different now,” Steve Fairlie, a Philadelphia-area defense attorney told my colleague Manuel Roig-Franzia earlier this month.

Cosby’s defense team, Fairlie said, had to know that “the prosecution is marching into battle waving this banner of #MeToo.”


For many women — including those who have suffered harassment or abuse without being believed — the guilty verdict against Cosby seems almost miraculous. It’s a day they never thought would dawn.

Roig-Franzia wrote of the charged reaction in the Pennsylvania courtroom Thursday, relating how, as the forewoman of the jury said the words, “guilty, guilty, guilty — the courtroom rocked with emotion.”

But while there was profound relief, and release, there remains a sense of what hasn’t happened yet. What hasn’t changed.

Lauren Duca, the firebrand young writer for Teen Vogue, remained far from satisfied, tweeting that the verdict was just a start: “We’re all still part of the society that allowed him to traumatize over 60 women, silencing their stories with fear of backlash, while he thrived in the spotlight for decades.”

A memorable New York magazine cover image in July 2015 featured 35 Cosby accusers in four long rows. Its message was clear: There is strength in numbers.

That Cosby now faces perhaps decades in prison is almost unbelievable after all this time.

And within that sense of wonder, paradoxes abound.

The seismic change that seems so sudden didn’t happen overnight. And the verdict that centered on one brave woman’s truth-telling required the courage of hundreds.

Legion S02e04

This has to be one of the best episodes of Legion

Why Netflix is the future of film

Hollywood is Wrong: Netflix is the Future of Film

by Kristin Houser on April 20, 2018

The film industry has sent a clear message to Netflix: You can’t sit with us.

Industry insiders clearly think Netflix’s films are somehow “less than” those released in theaters. Steven Spielberg told ITV News the streaming service’s releases shouldn’t be eligible for Oscars. Christopher Nolan told IndieWire he would never work with the company. Cannes banned Netflix’s films from competition, prompting Netflix’s chief content officer Ted Sarandos to pull all of the service’s films from the festival, even the ones that weren’t eligible to win anything.

“We want our films to be on fair ground with every other filmmaker,” Sarandos told Variety. And why shouldn’t they be? They star A-list actors (Will Smith, Adam Sandler). They’re helmed by respected directors (Martin Scorsese, Noah Baumbach). And they truly do compete with movie-theater films, scoring Oscar nominations and winning other prestigious awards.

Film industry haters should really reconsider.

Even the snobbiest film buffs can’t deny that Netflix is bringing something positive to the world of cinema.

Instead of lashing out against Netflix, the industry could benefit by embracing some of what Netflix is doing right.

First, the film industry might want to take more risks. “Studios are lagging behind for the very simple reason that they are relying on retreads and reboots, and most of those aren’t being well received,” Jeff Bock, an expert on film industry trends at Exhibitor Relations, told Business Insider.

Sure, for every unicorn like Beasts of No Nation, Netflix releases a dozen films that fall flat. But giving lesser-known filmmakers or outside-the-box story ideas a chance has paid off for Netflix. Plus it’s helping establish an audience for the Spielbergs and Nolans of tomorrow. How could that possibly be bad for cinema?

The industry might also want to rethink its pricing model. The average cost of a movie theater ticket in 2017 was $8.97. In major cities like New York or Los Angeles, that can be much higher. For comparison, an entire month of Netflix costs between $7.99 and $13.99.

Yes, the theater has overhead to pay, but according to Variety, most of the blame for rising ticket prices belongs to the increase in IMAX and 3D screenings. In other words: it’s because of the dang screens. If Netflix’s success means anything, it’s that (screen) size really doesn’t matter.

Instead of putting money into more of these premium screenings, the industry might want to make movies more affordable. One way to do that would be by following Netflix’s subscription model.

And oh look! Such a service already exists: MoviePass.

MoviePass subscribers pay $9.95 for the ability to see up to four 2D-movies in the theater per month. MoviePass then pays the theater for every ticket, with the hope that, eventually, they’ll be able to earn a profit by selling site advertisements or partnering with theaters on special screenings.

And guess what: MoviePass now has 2 million subscribers. People want this service. The bad news is that the company is simply bleeding money.

If theaters wanted to get more butts in seats, they could consider partnering with MoviePass or creating a similar subscription service.

Ultimately, if movie theaters want to compete with Netflix, they need to look at what Netflix offers — more options, more affordably — and figure out how to apply that to the theater experience. After all, turning away the cool new kid isn’t going to suddenly make everyone else want to sit at your table.

I hope that a similar moviepass service comes to India as well .

Libertarianism

US Tax reforms impact on Apple

Apple, Capitalizing on New Tax Law, Plans to Bring Billions in Cash Back to U.S.

Inside a building at Apple’s new headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. The company said Wednesday that it planned a $350 billion contribution to the American economy over the next five years.CreditJim Wilson/The New York Times

By Daisuke Wakabayashi and Brian X. Chen Jan. 17, 2018

SAN FRANCISCO — Apple, which had long deferred paying taxes on its foreign earnings and had become synonymous with hoarding money overseas, unveiled plans on Wednesday that would bring back the vast majority of the $252 billion in cash that it held abroad and said it would make a sizable investment in the United States.

With the moves, Apple took advantage of the new tax code that President Trump signed into law last month. A provision allows for a one-time repatriation of corporate cash held abroad at a lower tax rate than what would have been paid under the previous tax plan. Apple, which has 94 percent of its total cash of $269 billion outside the United States, said it would make a one-time tax payment of $38 billion on the repatriated cash.

For years, Apple had said it would not bring its foreign earnings back to the United States until the corporate tax code changed, because such a move would be too costly. Now Apple’s bet to hold back on paying such taxes is reaping rewards under the Trump administration.

In return, Mr. Trump and other Republicans can point to Apple as having come around because of their legislative action. The $38 billion tax payment from the Silicon Valley giant is set to be among the biggest payouts from the tax bill, and Apple said it would put some of the money it brought back toward 20,000 new jobs, a new domestic campus and other spending.

“I promised that my policies would allow companies like Apple to bring massive amounts of money back to the United States,” Mr. Trump tweeted on Wednesday. “Great to see Apple follow through as a result of TAX CUTS.”

Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said in a statement, “We have a deep sense of responsibility to give back to our country and the people who help make our success possible.”

Apple estimated that its direct impact on the American economy would total more than $350 billion over the next five years, but how much that goes beyond what the company would have spent anyway is unclear. Apple’s current pace of spending in the United States is $55 billion for 2018, so it was already on track to spend $275 billion over the next five years. After the $38 billion tax payment is subtracted, that leaves its new investment at roughly $37 billion over the next five years.

A. M. Sacconaghi, a financial analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein, said Apple had consistently spent tens of billions of dollars on areas like staffing and capital expenditures in recent years. Bringing back the overseas cash, he said, does little to aid its expansion. But it makes the company appear to answer Mr. Trump’s call for more jobs to be created in the United States.

“This is Apple putting its best foot forward consistent with objectives of the administration,” Mr. Sacconaghi said.

Apple is one of several multinational giants that have kept a total of roughly $3 trillion in global profits off their domestic books to sidestep the previous 35 percent federal corporate tax rate. Under the new tax law, companies that make a one-time repatriation of cash will be taxed at a rate of 15.5 percent on cash holdings and 8 percent on nonliquid assets. That is lower than the new 21 percent corporate rate. And under the new tax code, Apple would also have been taxed whether it brought the money back or not.

By shifting the money under the new terms, Apple has saved $43 billion in taxes, more than any other American company, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a research group in Washington.

Other tech giants are set to follow suit in the coming months. Companies like Microsoft, Alphabet and Cisco also shifted their profits into offshore shell companies, avoiding billions of dollars in taxes, and are now in a better position to bring the money back.

Although Republican supporters of the tax law argued that the influx of international profits would create jobs and increase wages, many economists disagreed that a one-time repatriation would have any substantial impact on real investment.

Apple’s announcement, couched as a major investment in the United States instead of a massive financial windfall, followed years of criticism that the company did not do enough for the American economy because it makes most of its products in China and parked its profits abroad.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Apple was a frequent target of Mr. Trump, who pledged that as president he would force the company to start making iPhones and Macs in the United States. While that hasn’t happened and is unlikely to, Apple has since gone on a charm offensive to demonstrate its value to the American economy. The company has highlighted the number of jobs created by the so-called app economy, an ecosystem of software and services that run on the iPhone and other Apple products. Last year, Apple also said it was creating a $1 billion fund to invest in advanced manufacturing in the United States. On Wednesday, Apple said it was increasing the size of that fund to $5 billion and noted that it was already backing projects from manufacturers in Kentucky and Texas.

Apple, which is based in Cupertino, Calif., also took a page out of Amazon’s public relations strategy on Wednesday by saying it will open a new domestic campus in a location where it currently has no operations. Amazon garnered good will throughout the country last year when it announced plans to open a second corporate headquarters outside its home base of Seattle.

Apple currently has about 84,000 employees in the United States, so 20,000 new jobs would be a 24 percent increase. The company added that it would invest more than $30 billion in capital expenditures, or spending on parts and the equipment required to produce them, over the next five years in the United States.

For a comparison, Apple spent $14.9 billion in capital expenditures in the last fiscal year, though it did not specify how much it spends in the United States alone.

For Apple, repatriating the cash creates opportunities that could include acquisitions and higher dividends for shareholders. The company had previously chosen to borrow money to fund its stock buybacks and dividends, instead of bringing its cash back from abroad. Over the last five years, Apple has returned $233 billion in cash to shareholders through buybacks and dividends.

Paying $38 billion in taxes now is unlikely to strain Apple’s checkbook because the company had already earmarked $36.4 billion in anticipation that it would eventually have to pay taxes on its foreign earnings.

“From a financial statement perspective, it’s going to be a nonevent,” said J. Richard Harvey, a Villanova University law professor and former Internal Revenue Service official. Other companies are not as prepared, he said, and would likely have to take a significant loss should they make a one-time cash repatriation.

Apple employees will see benefits as well. Mr. Cook said in an email to staff on Wednesday that Apple was increasing investment in its employees by rewarding them with bonuses of $2,500 in restricted stock units, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because the plans were not public. Apple joins other companies, such as AT&T, that have issued employee bonuses since the tax law was signed.

Patricia Cohen contributed reporting from New York

NBA Playoffs 2018 preview - Western conference

By Rob Mahoney of SI.com

one of the four Western Conference playoff matchups were decided until Wednesday night, the official end of the regular season. Every hour since has been a mad scramble for the coaching and video staffs involved—a frantic turn from focus on their own team to a specific opponent.

The playoffs yield the best basketball because of how tailored every challenge is to the team involved. Teams no longer run a base offense or defense, but one customized to their opponents limitations. It’s a deeply personal means of competition. If a player can’t shoot, the defense will refuse to guard them, broadcasting their disrespect to a national TV audience. If a player can’t guard, they’ll be picked on relentlessly until they’re removed from the game entirely.

What makes the Rockets and Warriors so frustrating is how few weaknesses they present—and how effectively they cover for them. The Timberwolves and Spurs, respectively, will have their work cut out for them. Yet in the middle matchups, we find two series ripe for tactical experimentation. The Blazers, Thunder, Jazz, and Pelicans all wear their limitations on their sleeve; each is so reliant on their top players as to be put at a precarious balance. The coming weeks will see all four pushed from every angle, testing their balance and their capacity to respond. And the lucky winners will have the privilege of enduring that same scrutiny once more—this time from the Rockets and Warriors themselves

. Most Intriguing Storyline: Can the Thunder hit their highest gear?

No team in the West has embraced variance quite like the Thunder, who have managed to dominate and implode in almost equal measure. The best of OKC—something we haven’t seen consistently or often enough this season—would scare any opposing coaching staff. Gameplanning against Russell Westbrook is always an ordeal. The ferocity of his driving game is such a unique test for a defense, and when perfectly calibrated it can be overwhelming. Factor in Paul George, Steven Adams, Carmelo Anthony, and a punchy cast of reserves, and the Thunder have the personnel necessary to mount a challenge to any team in the field.

At issue are the conditions to make that challenge a reality. Oklahoma City’s defense has been flaky ever since Andre Roberson went down for the season with a ruptured patellar tendon. Its offense—while efficient overall—is prone to the kinds of fits and starts that can derail a playoff run. The Thunder aren’t a team waiting to flip the switch so much as one veering desperately to find their groove. If they do, it could change the outlook of the entire Western Conference bracket.

Biggest X-Factor: Rajon Rondo, Pelicans

There has never been a clean fit for New Orleans’ mercurial point guard, which makes his most effective stints all the more noticeable. His game remains fundamentally unchanged; the Rondo we’ve come to know from years of over-passing and hesitant shooting remains a glaring presence in the modern NBA. Yet when his game is working—as is periodically the case with a team that relies on his mid-play facilitation—it elevates the Pelicans beyond their standing. New Orleans needs the version of Rondo that slowed Isaiah Thomas in the playoffs last year to do the same to Damian Lillard and C.J. McCollum. They need a creator who can alleviate some of the pressure on Anthony Davis and Jrue Holiday, even if he won’t often be knocking down shots himself. Rondo coming up big could change the complexion of the Pelicans’ series—in part because the alternative would leave an already shallow team short yet another viable rotation piece.



The Wolves aren’t exactly the picture of defensive discipline, which is pretty much the only way to keep competitive in a series against the Rockets. Every layer of your coverage needs to be in order. Whichever defenders are assigned to cover James Harden and Chris Paul—or are switched into covering them mid-play—face the most challenging isolation matchups in the league. The pick-and-roll defense has to be so impeccably timed as to disrupt the rhythms of Clint Capela, but without favoring him so much as to give up lanes to Harden or Paul. The help has to come quickly, but the second level of help even more so; if you’re the sort of team that can only make one rotation reliably (as is often the case with the Wolves), you have no shot of stopping Houston’s initial actions and keeping their arsenal of three-point shooters under wraps. It’s for that reason that the Rockets literally doubled up the Wolves in made threes during the season series, turning a strength into an overwhelming mathematical edge. Whether Minnesota can keep any of these specific elements contained will dictate how long they survive in this series. Great as it is to see the Wolves in the postseason again, it’s hard to imagine they’ll be long for it. The pick: Rockets in 4.

(2) Golden State vs. (7) San Antonio: How vulnerable are the Warriors?

There is an incredible amount of respect for the Spurs around the league, and in the Bay Area in particular. Players and coaches with the Warriors have spoken candidly over the years about the trouble the Spurs have caused them—a glowing endorsement from one of the greatest teams of all time. But let’s get one thing clear up front: these are not those Spurs, in the sense that they don’t present the full-strength Warriors any real threat.

The injured, short-handed Warriors, on the other hand, have shown that they can fall out of their groove against pretty much anyone. And that’s what the rest of the league will be watching—not for a potential first-round upset, but as a stress test of a defending champion that hasn’t been healthy in months. Stephen Curry will likely miss the entire series. Andre Iguodala and Shaun Livingston are working through some nagging issues. Kevin Durant, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green are only a few weeks removed from missing time themselves. A defense like San Antonio’s will make Golden State earn everything, and it can be especially stifling with Dejounte Murray and Danny Green at the point of attack. This is a low-risk series for the Warriors, but the kind that should hint at how they might play—both with and without Curry—the rest of the way.

The pick: Warriors in 5.

NBA (3) Portland vs. (6) New Orleans: Which supporting cast shows up?

Both the Blazers and Pelicans have high-level defenders to throw at the other’s stars, but it’s telling that Davis and Lillard had 77 points between them in their last regular season meeting. You don’t hold down players this good for an entire series. You only hope to make their lives difficult enough that you can overcome them by committee. Fittingly, each defense will put that idea to the test. If you’re New Orleans, your goal is to get the ball into the hands of anyone who isn’t Lillard or McCollum as often as possible (even Jusuf Nurkic is preferable).

If you’re Portland, your aim is to deny Davis touches at every turn, thereby forcing possessions into the hands of Solomon Hill, Emeka Okafor, or Darius Miller. Those sorts of contributors will have to knock down shots, lest the integrity of the offense buckle beneath them. The scrutiny of a seven-game series will quickly decide who needs to be guarded and who doesn’t. Outstanding as Davis, Lillard, and McCollum might be, none wants to turn the corner to find multiple defenders and a crowded lane waiting for them. The winner of this series will be the team that best alleviates that pressure—whether through role players stepping up as contributors or stars, through some creative quirk, circumventing the premise entirely.

The pick: Trail Blazers in 6 (4) Oklahoma City vs. (5) Utah: Who dictates the matchup game?

What makes both the Thunder and Jazz such an interesting pair is that both teams have their options. There is the flexibility to play big and small, to cross-match between positions, and to put skilled players to use in unconventional ways. In the broadest sense, their series will be decided by the intersection of what both teams do best: OKC’s explosive offense working against the grain of one of the best defenses in the league. Yet the terms of engagement are all up for grabs, starting with how each team elects to match up. Who should guard Russell Westbrook between Donovan Mitchell and Ricky Rubio, and who should wreak havoc off the ball? How much should Paul George check Mitchell, the engine of Utah’s entire offense, after barely guarding him in the regular season? How might Derrick Favors look to attack Carmelo Anthony and vice versa?

This promises to be a fun, competitive series, which makes the strategic choices on the margins that much more meaningful—and also quite challenging to predict. The Jazz have the more trustworthy baseline, but the Thunder have more dangerous potential. My lean is toward security after watching OKC waffle all season, in particular because no matchup play on the board can easily get Rudy Gobert out of Westbrook’s way.

The pick: Jazz in 6.

The cure for plastic pollution ?

Scientists accidentally create mutant enzyme that eats plastic bottles

The breakthrough, spurred by the discovery of plastic-eating bugs at a Japanese dump, could help solve the global plastic pollution crisis

Damian Carrington Environment editor Guardian Reporter

Published: 00:30 Tue April 17, 2018

Scientists have created a mutant enzyme that breaks down plastic drinks bottles – by accident. The breakthrough could help solve the global plastic pollution crisis by enabling for the first time the full recycling of bottles.

The new research was spurred by the discovery in 2016 of the first bacterium that had naturally evolved to eat plastic, at a waste dump in Japan. Scientists have now revealed the detailed structure of the crucial enzyme produced by the bug.

The international team then tweaked the enzyme to see how it had evolved, but tests showed they had inadvertently made the molecule even better at breaking down the PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic used for soft drink bottles. “What actually turned out was we improved the enzyme, which was a bit of a shock,” said Prof John McGeehan, at the University of Portsmouth, UK, who led the research. “It’s great and a real finding.”

The mutant enzyme takes a few days to start breaking down the plastic – far faster than the centuries it takes in the oceans. But the researchers are optimistic this can be speeded up even further and become a viable large-scale process.

“What we are hoping to do is use this enzyme to turn this plastic back into its original components, so we can literally recycle it back to plastic,” said McGeehan. “It means we won’t need to dig up any more oil and, fundamentally, it should reduce the amount of plastic in the environment.”

About 1m plastic bottles are sold each minute around the globe and, with just 14% recycled, many end up in the oceans where they have polluted even the remotest parts, harming marine life and potentially people who eat seafood. “It is incredibly resistant to degradation. Some of those images are horrific,” said McGeehan. “It is one of these wonder materials that has been made a little bit too well.”

However, currently even those bottles that are recycled can only be turned into opaque fibres for clothing or carpets. The new enzyme indicates a way to recycle clear plastic bottles back into clear plastic bottles, which could slash the need to produce new plastic.

“You are always up against the fact that oil is cheap, so virgin PET is cheap,” said McGeehan. “It is so easy for manufacturers to generate more of that stuff, rather than even try to recycle. But I believe there is a public driver here: perception is changing so much that companies are starting to look at how they can properly recycle these.”

The new research, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, began by determining the precise structure of the enzyme produced by the Japanese bug. The team used the Diamond Light Source, near Oxford, UK, an intense beam of X-rays that is 10bn times brighter than the sun and can reveal individual atoms.

The structure of the enzyme looked very similar to one evolved by many bacteria to break down cutin, a natural polymer used as a protective coating by plants. But when the team manipulated the enzyme to explore this connection, they accidentally improved its ability to eat PET.

“It is a modest improvement – 20% better – but that is not the point,” said McGeehan. “It’s incredible because it tells us that the enzyme is not yet optimised. It gives us scope to use all the technology used in other enzyme development for years and years and make a super-fast enzyme.”

Industrial enzymes are widely used in, for example, washing powders and biofuel production, They have been made to work up to 1,000 times faster in a few years, the same timescale McGeehan envisages for the plastic-eating enzyme. A patent has been filed on the specific mutant enzyme by the Portsmouth researchers and those from the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado.

One possible improvement being explored is to transplant the mutant enzyme into an “extremophile bacteria” that can survive temperatures above the 70C melting point of PET – the plastic is likely to degrade 10-100 times faster when molten.

Earlier work had shown that some fungi can break down PET plastic, which makes up about 20% of global plastic production. But bacteria are far easier to harness for industrial uses.

Other types of plastic could be broken down by bacteria currently evolving in the environment, McGeehan said: “People are now searching vigorously for those.” PET sinks in seawater but some scientists have conjectured that plastic-eating bugs might one day be sprayed on the huge plastic garbage patches in the oceans to clean them up.

Microplastic pollution in oceans is far worse than feared, say scientists “I think [the new research] is very exciting work, showing there is strong potential to use enzyme technology to help with society’s growing waste problem,” said Oliver Jones, a chemist at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, and not part of the research team.

“Enzymes are non-toxic, biodegradable and can be produced in large amounts by microorganisms,” he said. “There is still a way to go before you could recycle large amounts of plastic with enzymes, and reducing the amount of plastic produced in the first place might, perhaps, be preferable. [But] this is certainly a step in a positive direction.”

Prof Adisa Azapagic, at the University of Manchester in the UK, agreed the enzyme could be useful but added: “A full life-cycle assessment would be needed to ensure the technology does not solve one environmental problem – waste – at the expense of others, including additional greenhouse gas emissions.”

UFC 223 : Collision of two worlds

This was a fight I was looking forward to since last year
Tony Ferguson who is as unorthodox a fighter as possible with wicked elbows and snapjitsu and the Eagle Khabib's wrestling. Unfortunately a circuit wire stopped the fight with a freak injury to Tony.



This was not to be ...so we had to settle for Max holloway though a full 10 pounds lighter everyone expected him to be a challenge for Khabib as he had more accolades than ay other previous opponents.


In all of this suddenly Conor Mcgregor made his presence known by attacking the Bus carrying Khabib and the other UFC fighters which ultimately led him to be arrested. The Embedded clip below clearly indicts him for criminal behavior but makes for an interesting fight when he inevitably faces Connor.



Soon after few more opponents dropped out on the Khabib fight and it ultimately fell on Al Iaquinta to lost the fight and make Khabib the undisputed 155 pound champion


Thus ended a crazy week in MMA where the off-cage action overshadowed the matches. Now the stage is set for an intriguing matchup between Khabib - Connor or Khabib - Tony. Many feel that the standup deficiencies of the Eagle showed in this match but I feel that he chose to do the standup as he felt that he can handle the striking of Al Iaquinta, if he had felt uncomfotbale he would have immediately resorted to his stifling grappling.

Billions S03 : Best dialogues

My family bred 'em, American quarterhorses.

Those babies fetch quite the price, so we were real gentle with the product.
We used teasers.
Those are stallions you put into the stall with the sole purpose of making sure the mare's in heat, primed for breeding. Now, a teaser, he doesn't get to do any fucking.
He's just there to get the mare ready.
Take her kicks.
Try to mount, take some more kicks.
By God, that teaser, he's got a rager going on the whole dang time.
But that doesn't matter.
As soon as that dam is ready, we yank that teaser out of there, lead the real stud in, and he gets to do all the fucking.
Teaser has to make do with some mangy hay and a bucket of oats.
- Brutal.
- Yeah, nature often is.


[sighs] Well, the judge we drew is Leonard Edward Funt.
Isn't that good news? Doesn't he owe you Yes, there is a debt.
I once did him a kindness.
But back then, during a case, I tried to allude to the favor in conference, and that man hammered me for even hinting at it.
[scoffs] Seemed to grow larger as he talked, the way some men can when they're not pretending to dignity and honor but they're actually made of the stuff.
You withdrew the request? I did.
And I fear it would be even worse today.
See, if he wouldn't return a favor back when it was fresh, why would he do so now? But that's not what happened, is it? He didn't actually refuse.
He didn't say no.
Not in so many words.
What he did was: spare himself the question by putting a tougher one to you.
It's about will, Chuck.
Impose your will on him until he does what he needs to and repays the debt.
Why, you are a marvel.



[siren wails in distance] [door opens] There's something I always wondered: Why aren't you Charlie? - [sighs] - Feels like you would have - been a great Charlie.
- No, I agree.
Oh, Charlie Rhoades, yeah, that guy's yer best friend.
- Yeah.
- Right? Sure.
Call ol' Charlie, see if he can fill in, uh, as a fourth for tennis or on a double date or just ride around smashing mailboxes.
Yeah.
Charlie.
The best.
But in our household, my father was Charles.
And every now and then someone, business associate, the guy who managed one of his buildings, who would get just a little casual, accidentally let a Charlie fly.

The world would stop dead.
"Do I look like a fucking 'Charlie' to you?" [scoffs] And that was that.
The guy would piss himself, and the day would continue.
So, he was Charles, and you were Chuck.
And Good Time Charlie was somewhere else out on the town having all the laughs.
Christ, man.
Don't I know it.


The bench cannot be tainted by personal debts.
Name another favor.
I know that this is the biggest case that you've ever drawn.
Well, that's something that you would think about in my shoes, but I don't.
No, you wouldn't.
And you wouldn't hide in a hallway waiting to pounce when I walked by.
But I am not the man you are.
Oh.
You're not here to ask me to shade my rulings.
You're here to ask me to step off it.
It's a hard laydown.
And I'm asking you to lay it down.
[sighs] Ask yourself who you really are, Chuck.
Are you the man that's reduced to collecting debts of the soul like like old Mr.
Scratch? Well, as with all stories about that being, the debt is due, even if, especially if, it is not fair or even right to collect it.
Believe me, my my insides hurt making this request.
Oh, I don't believe that even a little.
You like your insides just as they are.
You want to be right here, making these moves.
You need that feeling in your stomach to know you're alive.
I really think I am sorry.
Fuck you, Chuck! I'll recuse myself.
My tab is clear.

Well, then, I guess it's a gift.
Chuck.
I know his fingerprints.
Are you gonna do something about this? I'm not in the habit of rejecting gifts.
Do you know about White Day in Japan? Over there on Valentine's Day, women buy presents for their salarymen bosses, and those presents are displayed for all to see, so the most important thing is the size.

That's how others know that the recipient is valued.
A month later, on White Day, the men give a return gift of two to three times the value.

So if there's a salaryman you don't respect, you get him something small but expensive.

Chuck just gave you diamond cufflinks, and when White Day comes, you're gonna have to give him something that costs a lot more

US China Trade war : who has most to lose

Washington post article by Heather Long

As the U.S.-China trade spat gets uglier, people in both countries are asking: Who has more to lose? And how does this end?

China has more to lose economically in an all-out trade war. The Chinese economy is dependent on exports, and nearly 20 percent of its exports go to the United States. It sold $506 billion in stuff and services to the United States last year. In contrast, the United States sold $130 billion to the Chinese.

“In a serious economic battle, the U.S. wins. There is no question about it,” said Derek Scissors, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has helped advise the administration on China.

But this isn't just an economic fight, it's also political, and there’s a strong case that President Trump would be less able to sustain a protracted conflict than the Chinese — especially with the 2018 midterm elections coming.

Chinese President Xi Jinping runs a communist country that has just granted him the ability to rule for life. He controls the media in his country and is also sitting on top of about $3 trillion in surplus cash.

All of this means Xi can react quickly to Trump. He can even aid Chinese companies that get hurt in the coming months and subsidize soybean prices so Chinese consumers don't face massive sticker shock at the store. The Chinese used similar tactics during the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, spending heavily from their surplus reserves to stimulate their economy and insulate their people from pain. The Chinese cash reserves are not as large now, but they still have more than the United States has.

In 2018, “China can withstand much more than the U.S.”

Trump doesn't have it so easy. He's already getting phone calls from Republican lawmakers who are angry at what he's doing with the tariffs. On Thursday evening, GOP Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska accused the president of having "no actual plan to win right now" and "threatening to light American agriculture on fire."

Trump faces backlash from Wall Street, from executives of companies such as Boeing and from soybean farmers in the Midwest, many of whom voted for Trump and feel betrayed. Some GOP leaders fear Trump's actions could cost the party seats in the 2018 midterm elections.

“Within the next 12 months, China can withstand much more than the U.S. can withstand,” said Evan Medeiros, managing director at the Eurasia Group and a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama on Asia. “The Chinese aren't constrained by the rule of law or a representative democracy.”

While much of the focus so far has been on tariffs — Trump has threatened to put tariffs on about $150 billion worth of Chinese goods and services, and China has responded so far with threats of tariffs on $50 billion of U.S. goods — China has more levers it can pull to punish the United States.

The Chinese could stop cooperating on North Korea, they could sell some U.S. debt to roil markets and they could make life harder for U.S. companies operating in China, such as Nike, Disney or Apple. These Chinese actions are seen as unlikely, especially selling U.S. Treasurys. For the Trump administration, corresponding moves aren't even on the table, as the U.S. government doesn't have as much direct control over companies operating within its borders.

Trump is in a tricky situation. He has long argued the U.S. is already in a trade war with China and that the U.S. has been getting attacked for years. He appears ready for a right. As his press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Wednesday, "We may have a little bit of short-term pain, but we're certainly going to have long-term success."

He is also feeling confident after his administration renegotiated the South Korean free-trade deal to give U.S. automakers greater access to that market. But South Korea is the world's No. 11 economy, and the country depends on the United States for military aid. China is the No. 2 economy, and it does not feel the same degree of pressure to give in to Trump.

Domestically, Chinese politicians face pressure to project their country as a world power, making rolling over for a bellicose U.S. president a wildly unpopular proposal. “There is no way on earth China can be seen to be kowtowing to the U.S. on this. Xi cannot say: All right, Trump threatened us, so we'd better give in,” said Phil Levy, a senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

China strikes back at Trump's political vulnerabilities

The surprisingly swift and strong reaction from China this week seemed to be a message to Trump that the Chinese think they can play a long game.

Trump has now threatened just over $150 billion in tariffs -- or, to put it another way, he's threatened taxes on about 30 percent of the goods and services the Chinese sell to the United States. It's unlikely to damage the overall economy significantly, but it's getting to the point where American consumers are likely to face higher prices on televisions, shoes, clothes and possibly even iPhones.

And certain places in America are about to feel great pain if the Chinese follow through with their threats to retaliate. It's hard for farmers and winemakers to understand why they are casualties in a supposed fight against China stealing intellectual property and industrial know-how.

The Brookings Institution looked at all the products China has threatened to put tariffs on so far. They would affect about 2.1 million jobs that are spread across 2,783 U.S. counties. Eighty-two percent of those counties voted for Trump in the last presidential election.

“Xi is probably doing a more rationale analysis of the situation than the Trump administration seems to be doing,” said J. Stapleton Roy, who was U.S. ambassador to China under presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. “The Trump administration doesn't seem to grasp the fact that they are damaging the wrong people (the farmers)” in this fight.

China's strategy appears to be: Get farmers, business leaders and Republicans in Congress angry enough to pressure Trump to back down. This strategy seemed to work for many countries with Trump's steel and aluminum tariffs. When Trump first announced the metal tariffs, they were supposed to apply to every country in the world. By the time they went into effect, 63 percent of imports were exempt from the tariffs, according to Chad Bown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

What does “winning” look like?

A key problem for Trump is that he doesn't have clear and coherent demands of China. He and his team talk about three problems: the trade deficit, Chinese intellectual property (IP) theft, and China's industrial policy (known as “Made in China 2025”).

But there's no specific request, and the lack of one is allowing the Chinese to play the victims in a scenario where the United States is supposed to be trying to correct years of wrongs. “I want the U.S. to do more against China, but I want the U.S. to do more with a plan,” Scissors said. “We need very specific asks of the Chinese. Instead, we just say, ‘we want you to change.’ ”

The president and his team sometimes say different things about trade and what the goals are. Trump likes to use confusion as a negotiating tactic, but it also opens up more ways to “win.”

“What counts for success for Trump is going to be very different than what his advisers want. Trump can probably be bought off with some package of goods to reduce the trade deficit. His advisers want China to rewrite its entire industrial policy,” Medeiros said.

What the endgame looks like

Trump has famously said a trade war will be “easy to win.” Xi isn't saying that. Xi has made it clear he doesn't want a trade war, but he will respond to anything Trump does. Xi seems to be setting himself up for an easier political win if anything goes sour on the economic front. But in politics, Trump has proved himself a skillful salesman. Many strategists and longtime foreign policy experts say the most likely scenario is Trump gets a few small concessions from China and declares victory.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said last week that China is prepared to ease market access for U.S. companies and stop forcing foreign companies to transfer technology. If Trump gets those kinds of concessions in writing, he would be able to say he did more for America against China than Obama, Bush or Clinton. But those changes would do little to alter the record U.S. trade deficit with China or to deter China from plans to go head-to-head with the United States in many high-tech sectors soon. If Trump wants those major concessions, he has to be ready to go much harder against the Chinese.

So far, Xi appears to be betting that Trump will cave to political pressure before that happens. R

Legion : Visual Storytelling

Judicial reforms in India

Legion Season 2 preview

Cant wait for it !!!!

Aniihilation (movie) - too smart for the audience ?

This is what I felt after watching the movie. It is not a movie which needs to be viewed as an entertaining product but rather a very philosophical/realistic look at the other worldly genre. It started with "Arrival" which questioned the possible intentions of the close encounter of a third kind i.e aliens.This delves deeper into the same school of thoughtand makes us ponder on the possibility that science and hollywood was completely off in their portrayal of an entity from other worlds/dimensions.

This is the review by Emily Yoshida of Volture

The tower, which was not supposed to be there,” is not even a full opening sentence, and yet the first nine words of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation told the reader at least nine things within a second. There are obviously things you can get away with more easily in a book than in a film, but that anonymous AirDrop into the mysterious Area X, whose uncanny nature becomes the focal point for a trilogy of novels, is something Hollywood could learn from. It also sets up a trilogy in which perception, and the inevitable breakdown of something like a shared reality — as emblematized by that very tower (or staircase, if you like) plays a central role.

The tower is in fact not there in Alex Garland’s adaptation of VanderMeer’s novel, both literally and in a more spiritual sense. At first this feels like a lost opportunity; how cinematically fun would it be to play with the book’s warped perspective, its narcotic disorientation? But Garland has used Area X as a jumping-off point for something like a companion to VanderMeer’s work, or a deeply personal-feeling interpretation. Whereas the book comes off as more of a portrait of an ecology in psychedelic decline, Garland’s film is about a personality undergoing the same kind of breakdown. Maybe that distinction feels traditional in the sense that Hollywood movies are financed because of movie stars, not radical biomes. But by its end Annihilation is anything but mainstream.

The film opens with a fiery, asteroid-like body striking a lighthouse somewhere on the Gulf Coast, leaving not destruction and calamity in its wake, only a prismatic, oily aura. (Right then and there, Annihilation announces itself as less of an explosion movie and more of an unexplainably unsettling oily aura movie.) We then meet Lena (Natalie Portman), a biology professor miserably unaware of anything having to with lighthouses or heavenly bodies, who is grieving her missing-in-action military husband. Then, after six months with no word, he appears in their bedroom in the form of a dead-eyed Oscar Isaac. Lena grills him about where he’s been, but he’s a disoriented shell of a person; all that’s missing is a lime green jacket. Then all his organs start failing. On the way to the hospital, a squad of black cars and helicopters intercepts the ambulance, Lena is sedated, and when she wakes up, she’s in a cell with Jennifer Jason Leigh.

This all sounds like a very different kind of movie than Annihilation ends up being — all black ops and missing spouses and Homeland-esque intrigue. The lengthy setup and stakes-laying is at once impressively slow and contemplatively paced and also completely lacking in any faith that we could invest our interest in a woman without some drama involving her husband. It’s portentous without seeming to know what it’s portending. Pretty soon Lena is on an expedition — the same expedition, she has learned, that her husband was on — into “the shimmer,” a slowly expanding, seemingly unsurveyable zone expanding through the swampland of Florida. She’s accompanied by Leigh’s Dr. Ventress, a psychologist whose job overseeing all prior expeditions seems to have left her shattered, to put it mildly; also Anya, a medic (Gina Rodriguez); Josie, a physicist (Tessa Thompson); and Cass, an anthropologist (Tuva Novotny). They dive into the shimmering barrier which gives the zone its name, and immediately things start to get weird.

What makes a good drug movie? Can it be about nothing, or does it need to be about so much that you need to be on a controlled substance in order to think you’re accessing all its layers of meaning? Does it just need to make you feel like you’re on drugs? In another era, Annihilation would feel destined to be a dorm room classic, to reside in a realm of trippy shit alongside Jodorowsky and Gilliam. Now movies are pliable enough that it may live on as a handful of GIFs and clips of its malevolently lush visuals as a get-high-and-check-this-out spectacle. That aspect of the film is clearly in a fight with all the “why did you come here” Syd Field motivational padding between its troubling setpieces, and it’s a very studio-suit move to assume that the only way to give “meaning” to a film is to have people talk about it. (It’s also a studio-suit move to cast Portman and Leigh in films that were written, however non-centrally to the plot, as Asian and Native women respectively.) Garland is telling the story through visuals, and through a cell biology thread most producers would not have faith in an audience to follow.

But to mistake Garland’s succession of haunted-house-like spectacles as Acid: The Place would be missing out on so much emotional work that he’s doing. (Although, the squeamish should be warned those spectacles range from mildly disturbing to gory and disgusting to absolutely terrifying.) The annihilation of the film’s title is the self-directed kind, and it’s working on a molecular level, even when the Hollywood narrative trappings of the film let it down. The film is drastically different from VanderMeer’s book, but it’s also about something that can’t be uttered, and, accordingly, Garland goes silent for the film’s stunning finale. Something at the intersection of the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey and modern dance, it left me breathless with its unforgiving depiction of the relentless weight of depression; the impulse to self-destruct. The film has one eye on the “final girl” structure of horror films throughout its expedition, and the ending takes that phrase, turns it inside out and shatters it into a thousand refracted points of light. Like all things this cosmic, it will certainly be snickered about as “trippy shit.” But I suspect a sizable portion of the audience will see themselves there. T

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind

Never forget this movie