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"I got so freaking jacked that I seriously started to feel like I was losing my peripheral vision," Musk told Inc. He claims his office now has caffeine-free Diet Coke.
Sure, we're all guilty of craving a coffee pick-me-up, but that is a ton of caffeine.
Most adults can safely consume 400 mg of caffeine each day. Diet Coke has 42 mg of caffeine in each can (more than any other type of Coca-Cola), which means he was consuming 336 mg in just soda drinks.
Adding coffee into the mix likely put him over than 400 mg max. A tall coffee from Starbucks has about 260 mg of caffeine per cup.
Musk isn't alone in his unhealthy eating habits.
Warren Buffett, who is 86 years old, has a McDonald's breakfast sandwich every day. On days when the market is down, Buffett claims he is more frugal and opts for the $2.95 Sausage McMuffin with egg and cheese. On good days, he'll order the bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit for $3.17. Every morning, he tells his current wife, Astrid, to put the exact change in the center cup holder of his car.
When Buffett arrives at his desk at Berkshire Hathaway in Omaha, he sits down to eat his breakfast with a glass of Coke. He drinks five Cokes per day.
Fruita Mayor Joel Kincaid presents Tuesday morning to attendees at the third Colorado Rural Academy for Tourism (CRAFT) Studio 101 at Colorado Northwestern Community College. Kincaid spoke about how Fruita has developed itself into a mountain biking destination and attracted tourists to bolster its economy.
CRAIG — On Tuesday, Oct. 9, Fruita Mayor Joel Kincaid gave a presentation to attendees of the third Colorado Rural Academy for Tourism (CRAFT) Studio 101 about how the city has developed itself into a mountain biking destination and attracted tourists to bolster its economy.
The workshop, held at Colorado Northwestern Community College, focused on visitor readiness and adventure tourism. Katelin Cook, economic development coordinator for Rio Blanco County, presented in the afternoon about how the community is growing outdoor recreation and building its visitor experience.
Future workshops in the program are planned for Oct. 25, Nov. 8, and Nov. 16. The workshops are offered through a program of the Colorado Tourism Office, with local sponsorship by the Moffat County Tourism Association and Craig/Moffat Economic Development Partnership.
For more information or to RSVP for the upcoming workshops, call MCTA at 970-824-2335.
Thomas More’s 1516 book Utopia included an idea that sounds a lot like universal basic income. Jane Bradley says Scotland should give it a try.
In Thomas More’s 16th century novel, Utopia, philosopher Raphael Hythloday plants the seed of the concept of a minimum guaranteed income.
At a dinner party, he tells the other guests that giving everyone a basic amount of money on which to live would be a novel way to prevent theft. If everyone had enough to eat, he argues, they would not need to resort to taking from others.
The idea – of providing everyone with a basic minimum amount of money every month, regardless of their employment status or financial situation – is an interesting one.
Many countries have trialled it, as well as charities, such as US aid organisation GiveDirectly, which has piloted a scheme in Kenya offering villagers a basic income for the next 12 years. The 4,000 participants in the Canadian state of Ontario’s 2017 Basic Income Pilot Project received a stipend of at least $10,000 per year, in monthly installments. Despite being successful, it was discontinued in August last year, mainly because of a change of local government.
Meanwhile, Italy’s populist government recently introduced its new citizens’ income, where households earning less than 9,360 euros a year are given a stipend, while perhaps most recently and most famously was the trial in Finland, where for two years, 2,000 citizens were given a basic income of €560, regardless of whether they worked or not. However, the country, which is known for its forward-thinking liberal policies – it was, afterall, the pioneer of Nicola Sturgeon’s beloved baby box – decided earlier this year that it would not continue the idea.
A study carried out on the participants and a control group found that the number of days in employment, and total labour market earnings, were no higher for those receiving the basic income than for those who did not.
However – and this is where the decision to stop it has been heavily criticised – they were happier.
People who took part, who were all unemployed at the start of the trial, said the scheme gave them freedom to be brave and try new ways of making money through selling their art, or taking a low-paying job that might ultimately open the door to an entire career. If it didn’t work out, then it was not the end of the world: basic bills could be paid, groceries could still be bought.
Scotland is currently considering its own version of the scheme, albeit somewhat watered down compared to its Scandinavian neighbour.
The Scottish Government last year committed £250,000 of funding to four councils – Fife, Edinburgh, North Ayrshire and Glasgow – to work on a pilot project investigating the idea of a “Citizens Basic Income”. The group, which also included government experts as well as representatives from local authorities, is due to report back by September this year – with a final draft of the report to be published next March. The outcome of the study will decide whether a “universal income” should be introduced in Scotland and what the potential costs to the Government would be. Taking on the idea is not a given. Sturgeon has admitted that such a scheme “might turn out not to be the answer, it might turn out not to be feasible”.
A report by independent thinktank Reform Scotland claimed that a lot of the costs of providing a basic income for every adult of £5,200 – around £1,500 more than the basic annual amount obtained through only Jobseekers Allowance – could be offset by money saved on benefits bureaucracy and scrapping the personal tax allowance.
Having written a number of stories about the bureaucracy of the benefits system, I can well believe that removing the nonsense could save a fortune. I heard about a chap who had his Jobseekers’ Allowance sanctioned because he failed to turn up for the multiple interviews set up for him that week – because he was in hospital, unconscious after a heart attack. When he began his recovery at home, he discovered no money had been paid into his account since he was admitted to hospital, leaving him unable to buy so much as a can of beans. Another man was sanctioned because on arriving at an interview for a security guard job, he discovered that the role required him to have a level of security clearance which he did not already have – nor was there time for him to obtain before he would be needed to start. He agreed with the company that going ahead with the interview would be a waste of his time – and theirs – so left. The next month, his benefits were docked to reflect the fact that he had “not turned up” to an interview.
All of this is costly and bureaucratic – not to mention unbelievably stressful for those who have to navigate what appears to many to be an entirely unavigable system.
A basic income is worth a try even if it does not end up being a long-term solution. If it gives some people that financial freedom to take an entrepreneurial risk or to train part-time in a new career, it is worth it. If it takes away the stress of the system from people doing their best to find a new job, then it is worth it. I’m looking forward to seeing how it works out.
Sam goes undercover after an investment banker with ties to a Russian oligarch is killed.
Larry causes trouble with Sammi’s fiancé, and tries to make things right by his mail carrier.
In the series’ third-to-last episode, Gamby deals with unexpected company on spring break. Meanwhile, Amanda finds inspiration on a writer’s retreat.
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Tropical Depression Gordon moved north on Thursday, threatening central U.S. states with heavy rain, while Hurricane Florence churned toward Bermuda, packing maximum sustained winds of 115 miles per hour (185 kph), forecasters said.
Some parts of northwest Mississippi and much of Arkansas could receive up to seven inches (18 cm) of rain, totals that could reach up to 10 inches through Saturday in some areas, raising the risk of flash flooding, the National Hurricane Center said.
The storm, which left flooded streets in Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi, has caused minimal property damage since it made landfall late on Tuesday. A two-year-old girl was killed, however, when a tree fell on a mobile home in Pensacola, Florida, authorities said.
Hillarie Jones, manager at Bob’s Downtown Diner in Mobile, Alabama, said she shut down the restaurant on Wednesday but that luckily the storm did no damage to the business.
“The reason why we closed yesterday was so our employees wouldn’t have to travel to work during the storm,” Jones said.
As of Thursday morning, fewer than 1,000 homes and businesses remained without power, according to PowerOutages.us, as utility companies restored service for tens of thousands of customers across the region.
Energy companies and port operators along the Gulf Coast worked to resume normal operations after Gordon shut 9 percent of the region’s oil and natural gas production.
Oil prices fell about 1 percent on Wednesday, after fears about the storm eased.
In the Atlantic Ocean, Hurricane Florence, a Category 3 storm on a five-step scale, headed for Bermuda, forecast to affect the island’s surf by Friday. It was too early to say whether the storm would hit land, the NHC said.
Florence, the first major hurricane of the Atlantic season, was 1,170 miles (1,885 km) east-southeast of Bermuda on Thursday morning.
Florence is expected to weaken but remain a strong hurricane for the next several days, the NHC said.
These days, I rarely feel like thanking the Government for anything. It squandered the opportunity it had post-war to push through a deal with the TNA and put the country on a new and more productive, forward-looking track, preferring instead to focus on consolidating its own power. Now the discussion is back to its old pattern, with neither side trusting the other and neither side feeling like compromise. Meanwhile, it has allowed the law and order situation to get out of control, dependent as it has become on thugs. Politics hasn’t become any cleaner or less violent with peace. The Government is quite happy to associate with thieves, rapists and murderers so long as they agree to join the UPFA. As a result, anybody who disagrees with one of its policies is liable to be threatened or worse, as I said last week.
However, the Government’s stupidity is sometimes quite helpful. We can learn a lot from its mistakes.
Its decision to raid two news websites, for example, was of great use to those of us interested in finding out what is going on in the country. The last few years have seen amazing growth in the number of sources on the internet, and it is quite impossible to read all of them – I would like to thank the Government for pointing us in the direction of the most interesting.
This is exactly what happened with TamilNet when it was blocked during the war, then with LankaeNews. They suddenly developed even greater followings.
The claim is that these internet sources publish stories that aren’t true. The Government calls it mudslinging, which is certainly not a good idea unless the slinger is already wallowing in mud.
I must say that the first bit of mud that caught my eye while checking out the latest targets of the Government’s ire wasn’t all that exciting. Who cares which minister has been having an affair with a ‘popular teledrama actress’. Not me, certainly. Their personal lives are matters for their families, not the nation – people have enough to worry about with what they get up to at the office. Still, I have high hopes that I will eventually find some important mud in the mix.
A unique feature of the Government’s attempts to control the internet is its uncanny ability to attract highly embarrassing condemnation from across the globe while achieving absolutely nothing. Witness the most recent episode, in which the police swooped into the offices of the Sri Lanka Mirror and Lanka X News, arresting everybody in sight (including the tea lady, according to Jehan Perera) and finding precisely nothing incriminating – what, they don’t keep proof of the untruth of their stories in a filing cabinet marked ‘Our Dastardly Scheme To Tarnish The Image Of Sri Lanka And Its Patriotic Leaders’? Even better, they did it using a law that was repealed several years ago! Very professional.
This provided the perfect excuse for all those countries who are far more cunning in their suppression of matters inconvenient to the establishment to issue sanctimonious statements warning the Government about media freedom. Extraordinarily, they are yet to learn that such utterances only persuade people in this country that the Government might not have done what it is accused of and even if it did this might not be such a bad thing.
Still, the Government is concerned about its image, as it needs to be if it wants to avoid action being taken against it internationally. The number of sanctimonious statements is an indicator of how keen the issuers are in their efforts to chastise the Government.
The Government has now compounded its foolish decision with yet another one. It has announced that it is going to levy fees on news websites – Rs. 100,000 for registration and Rs. 50,000 annually thereafter. The suggestion is that these charges will dissuade mudslingers.
Of course this is also very silly. Mudslingers are not short of money, and they will happily pay several times these amounts for the pleasure of attacking the Government. They are also perfectly capable of moving their operations out of the country should that become necessary.
This is on par with the blocking of TamilNet and LankaeNews. Note to the Government – we all know how to use proxy servers!
The Government will not succeed in controlling internet sources, no matter how much time and energy it dedicates to the task. It is not China. Even there total control has proven impossible to sustain (despite a 30,000 member internet police force, as reported in The Guardian), and Sri Lanka’s culture makes it ridiculous to even think of trying to replicate the Chinese model here.
If mudslinging is a problem, the best way of dealing with it would be to encourage the print media. News websites only really become popular when people believe that newspapers don’t contain everything they need to know. For a start, newspapers are better written. Newspapers are also more responsible. Although of course there are exceptions to every rule, the fact that the print media is subject to a certain amount of regulation is reassuring for readers. While over-regulation is clearly also a problem, readers do want to know that some kind of standards apply. We don’t actually want to be told untruths.
However, the Government shows no signs of enlightenment on that front either. Last week’s verbal abuse of a well known editor by the Defence Secretary makes this clear. While people who appreciate Gotabhaya Rajapaksa for his role in crushing the LTTE have fallen over themselves trying to excuse his outburst, presenting it as understandable in the circumstances, the circumstances actually make it inexcusable. Undoubtedly it must be very annoying for one of the most powerful people in the country to be questioned about his request to have the national airline use a particular pilot to fly in a puppy from Geneva, especially if he didn’t know that this would result in passengers being offloaded and revenue lost. (By way of an aside: can foreign dogs actually tell who is flying the plane?) We all know Gotabhaya Rajapaksa has a terrible temper. But that is not the point.
The point is that Lasantha Wickrematunge was killed and his killers have not been found. Journalists, especially those occupying the position he once held, are right to be wary of threats. They have not always been empty. The Government claims that it is unable to solve all crimes, which is fair enough, but it is perfectly capable of reassuring journalists that it is at least trying to ensure that no further damage is done. Responding to queries in a measured tone would be a minuscule yet useful step in that direction.
What does it say about the Government that it cannot even be bothered to pretend to be tolerant? Gotabhaya Rajapaksa is not the only guilty party – others who made absolutely zero contribution to the war effort are allowed to talk at will of breaking the limbs of journalists.
Now a journalist associated with one of the raided news websites claims to have narrowly escaped abduction – or as the Government put it to the United Nations with regard to Prageeth Ekneligoda, transport to a heavenly existence elsewhere. I expect the Attorney General has been reliably informed that the people who tried to bundle Shantha Wijesuriya into a van in Nugegoda were just trying to offer him a ride home since it looked like rain.
Prageeth Ekneligoda’s case is another of the Government’s mistakes that we must learn from. He disappeared more than two years ago, and some people have wasted a lot of ink in discussing his capabilities as a correspondent and cartoonist and his extra-curricular activities of various kinds, when they should have been looking for evidence of his incarceration or murder. It was easy for the Government to get away with its barefaced lie that it knew very well that he had left his family and gone overseas.
It was the unusual specificity of its denial of responsibility that was eventually its undoing, since it could not substantiate its statement when questioned during the hearing into Prageeth Ekneligoda’s disappearance – I don’t mind thanking the Government for that too.
Such moments of truth help us to see things more clearly. They show that there’s a lot of mud to be cleaned up.
What I find most extraordinary in all this mess is the lack of confidence it seems to indicate on the part of the Government. The vast majority of people in this country were one hundred percent behind it at the end of the war, and most of them continue to support the administration despite the numerous problems that have emerged, including the rising cost of living. This has now been proven in many different elections. The UNP has been caught up in a desperate and frankly very dull leadership tussle for years, meaning that it constitutes very little of a challenge to anybody, while the JVP too has lost its momentum after its latest split. The Government ought to be feeling free to move ahead with a positive, visionary plan that will guarantee its popularity into the next decade, instead of flailing around like a drowning man. I can only assume that it has run out of ideas and it is afraid of being found out.
Tu Pan Fang-ko, third from left in back row, poses for her high school graduation photo.
Last month, the family of the late poet Tu Pan Fang-ko (杜潘芳格) donated 340 manuscripts to the National Central Library. The three languages these documents were written in — Japanese, Mandarin and Hakka — represent Tu Pan’s literary journey through Taiwan’s turbulent history.
Living through the Japanese and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regimes, the political climate dictated what language Tu Pan wrote in for most of her life. It wasn’t until she was in her 60s that she began to use her native Hakka.
Writers like Tu Pan are often included in the “translingual generation” (跨語言的一代), a term coined in 1967 by poet Lin Heng-tai (林亨泰) to describe those who were educated in Japanese but were forced to pick up Mandarin under KMT rule. He specifically referred to those who came of age under the colonial government’s Japanifcation policy, which officially began in 1936.
“When Japanese rule ended, we were in our 20s. Unlike the older generation who may have had some exposure to an education in Chinese, we were strictly educated in Japanese since childhood. While we were no longer forced to speak Japanese, it was the language we were most comfortable writing in. We had to be determined enough to make another shift, which was to learn Chinese,” he wrote.
But like other members of this generation, being forced to use a new language did not dampen Tu Pan’s literary passion.
Born on March 9, 1927 to wealthy and educated parents, Tu Pan’s family moved to Japan when she was an infant. They returned when she was about six years old, and enrolled in Japanese schools up to the college level. Her work is shaped by many conflicts in her life — being bullied by Japanese schoolmates, questioning the role of women in society, defying her parents’ wishes by choosing her own husband and losing several family members in the 228 Incident.
The KMT banned writing in Japanese in 1946, and Tu Pan did not publish anything for more than a decade. She was also busy helping her husband and raising seven children during this time. In 1966, she published her first Mandarin poem, written in Japanese and translated by fellow writer Wu Cho-liu (吳濁流).
Most of her early works in Mandarin were translations of Japanese originals. Lee Yuan-chen (李元貞), a professor of Chinese literature, writes that they often suffered at the hands of various translators, who were often male and did not grasp the nuances of the female perspective.
After the lifting of martial law in 1987, Hakka intellectuals founded Hakka Affair Monthly magazine (客家風雲) and held a “Return My Native Language” (還我母語) march on Dec. 28, 1988.
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In an effort to tackle rising undeclared work and the shadow economy, the Italian government introduced in 2008 the Buoni Lavoro, a system of “job voucher” payment.
Its initial objective was to provide a form of regulation of wage payments to seasonal agricultural workers and occasional work in family businesses.
For example, employers could buy vouchers, via the post, and provide them to workers as payment. Workers could get 75% in cash while the rest was for social security.
But things changed when successive government reforms of the scheme gradually helped it expand to other sectors as well, and missed its initial goal. Instead of using it on an occasional basis, Italian employers made a regular use of it and in some cases, it led to a replacement of work contracts.
According to the Fair Labor Association, more and more Italian garment and footwear manufacturers started taking advantage of the job voucher system instead of providing their short-term workers with legal employment contracts.
“Their use has recently skyrocketed, from around a half million vouchers used in 2008 to 115 million in 2015,” the FLA noted.
The Italian Confederation of Labor (CGIL), which is the largest union in the country, gathered three million signatures and asked for a referendum to abolish voucher payment. The vote was due on 28 May, but bowing to the pressure, the government issued a decree last week (17 March) and imposed a total ban on the scheme with a transitional period until the end of the year.
Contacted by euractiv.com, a European Commission official stressed that the executive was aware of the situation and focused on the advantages of positive voucher use.
“The Commission considers that vouchers if properly used, can bring more people into the labour market,” the EU official noted, citing as an example the “titres services” in Belgium and in France.
The European Federation for Services to Individuals (EFSI), which represents stakeholders involved in the development of personal and household services (PHS) including domestic services, gardening, ironing, cleaning, and childcare services, believes that the Italian case should not undermine the multilevel benefits of social vouchers as implemented in countries like France and Belgium.
Moreover, the EFSI points out that a clear distinction among different vouchers’ schemes should be made.
“Social vouchers, including PHS vouchers, are based on key characteristics and should not be mixed up with other systems, also called vouchers,” EFSI’s Director Aurélie Decker said in a statement.
Social vouchers are coupons usually granted as a “reward” by employers or public authorities to citizens, providing them with access to predetermined goods or services. They are not exchangeable for money and can only be used within a limited network of merchants who are contractually linked to the issuer.
An EU programme intended to slash youth unemployment has fallen short of expectations and failed to help enough young people get jobs and training posts, the bloc’s watchdog said in a new report.
Backers of social vouchers claim that the working environment is improved and workers have the free choice to pick quality food. In addition, they stress that the whole system is transparent and helps governments have a closer taxation monitoring.
According to EFSI, social vouchers differ from the Buoni Lavoro scheme. “Each voucher programme is based on a specific national legislative framework, which is usually fine-tuned over the years to ensure that it meets its initial objectives,” Decker emphasised.
Regarding PHS activities, she highlighted that social vouchers help tackle challenges in the sector.
“They can render these activities more visible and make formal employment as well as administrative duties much easier for PHS users and workers,” the EFSI director noted.
La Repubblica: Aboliti i voucher. La Camusso: "Ora fuori dai referendum"
Actors are the face of the celebrations in Hollywood around awards season; they are the most visible representations of the movies being honored. But the Screen Actors Guild Awards—more than any other event—are their night and their night only.
Given that both film and television work is considered, certain stars on the broadcast side have historically cleaned up. Some trivia: last year at the 24th ceremony, Julia Louis-Dreyfus of “Veep” earned her eighth and ninth statues, beating Alec Baldwin and Julianna Margulies’ record of eight. And Edie Falco holds the distinction of most nominations ever, with 22.
To celebrate and prepare for this awards season, Backstage is rounding up all the basics you need to know about the big awards ceremonies. Here’s everything you’ve ever wondered about the wonderful SAG Awards.
When did the SAG Awards first take place?
When and where are they held this year?
What is the complete list of SAG Award categories?
How can I join the fun?

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