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The Crown - About the life of Queen Elizabeth

If you are looking for a job do not contact a recruiting agency.

What they’ll do is drag you in for an “interview.” Then make you an “MPC” — most placeable candidate— and literally try to sell you as a commodity with a huge fee tacked on your back. This makes it much more expensive to hire you.

If a company actually expresses interest in hiring you they’ll throw as many candidates “like you” into the mix to compete with you so they can get a hire (commission). This screws you, the candidate, in so many ways.

Job hunting? Contact an internal recruiter at the company you want to work for. They can tell you if you’re qualified.

Big external recruiting firms require that their recruiters have upwards of 10 of these fake “MPC” interviews a week in hopes that they might sell you or someone like you for a huge fee somewhere. It's deceptive and despicable. Recruiting agencies should only be used when they contact you for an actual open job that is interviewing.

That’s what they are supposed to be doing.

Sure, Snap offers a new cast of dancing Bitmojis every time you hit “update” (that’s not gonna change). But with this new Netflix-style algorithm, the news on your Discover feed will be vetted and tailored specifically to your content-consuming history.

And as Spiegel explained, it will put a 1,000-foot pole between Snap and other social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, where a friends-sharing-algorithm has populated newsfeeds with Fake News. And let’s face it, did Bethany really root out the source before sharing “7 Things Ryan Gosling and Your Cat Have in Common”?

The new design/PR stunt comes at a pivotal time for Snap. Shares are down 45% since its IPO, Instagram Stories has almost lapped it in users (300M vs. 178M), and rev growth per user has been sluggish ($1.17 vs. $1.30 expected).

Let’s hope weeding out Fake News is the real answer.

BuzzFeed showed ESPN it’s not the only media company that can give employees the boot, laying off 8% of its U.S. workforce (mainly from its ad sales unit). Yes, there arestories BuzzFeed doesn’t want trending. 

But CEO Jonah Peretti suggests there’s more to the madness than meets the eye. BuzzFeed is merely diversifying from its tried-and-true method of native advertising, and focusing on revenue drivers like e-commerce and video production (BuzzFeed Studios, it’s a real thing).

As for the shift, it’s no secret: Facebook and Google have cannibalized 63% of the market for U.S. digital ad spend. So much so that BuzzFeed will miss revenue expectations of $350 million this year by up to 20% (not to mention, it’s delaying a planned 2018 IPO). 

Still, with a “more diverse and balanced” business, Peretti is hoping to keep that $1.7 billion valuation. Until then? He’s in a corner office somewhere, watching Tasty videos till it all blows over.

• A computer glitch has left 15,000 American Air flights without a pilot in December.

• Uber lost $1.46 billion in Q3 (h/t Reuters).

This time, a female colleague brought a complaint against Matt Lauer, the 23-year veteran of the “Today" show on NBC. The details aren’t public, but we know the alleged incident dates back to NBC’s coverage of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. Two more complaints shortly followed. 

Lauer joins other media bigwigs sent packing for similar allegations: Charlie Rose (CBS), Mark Halperin (NBC), Bill O’Reilly (Fox), and, just yesterday, Garrison Keillor (Minnesota Public Radio).

But Lauer may be the most high-profile of them all. He was the biggest name on the "Today" show, a morning tradition as popular as the snooze button. It generates $500 million for NBC and tops competitors ABC and CBS in the key 25-54 demo. And, hey, even we’d wake up at 2 AM every morning for Lauer’s salary of ~$15 million (the highest of any NBC journalist).

Now, he’s just another name on a list that’s growing by the day.

As the weather continues to drop, e-commerce price wars are heating up. A new study found that goods on Walmart’s (+0.01%) online store cost only 0.3% more on average than those on Amazon (+0.83%)...much tighter than the 3% gap last year. 

We submit wearables (fitness trackers & smart watches) as evidence: last year, Walmart’s prices came in 12.6% above Amazon’s. This time around? They were 6.4% lower. 

And it’s not a moment too soon for Walmart

As the holiday shopping season kicked into gear (right when you kicked someone to reach the last remaining 4K TV), online shoppers stuffed stockings in record numbers. Just look at this latest Black Friday: in-store shopping fell 4%from 2016 while online sales jumped 18%. Not to mention yesterday’s Cyber Monday mania, which brought in ~$6.6 billion (17% YoY growth).

Numbers like these seem to justify Walmart throwing the piggy bank at e-commerce. To compete with Amazon, the retailer acquired Jet.com for $3.3 billion, moved to two-day delivery, and spent $1 billion to slash prices. And it’s paying off: Q3 online sales grew 50%.

But don’t get the impression Walmart is even remotely close to touching Bezos’ online empire. This year, Amazon will grab 43.5% of U.S. online sales. Walmart will take only 3.6% of the pie. 

And online bargain-basement prices won’t close the gap on their own

Walmart’s got a tricky balancing act on its hands. While it wants to carry its reputation as the “low price leader” to the online marketplace, it doesn’t want these low prices cannibalizing its higher-margin, brick-and-mortar stores. 

Because as much as online shopping generates media buzz, physical stores still account for more than 90% of all retail sales. And with 4,700 locations in the U.S., Walmart plans to keep them busy this holiday season.

http://morningbrew.cmail20.com/t/j-l-odrujjd-yhyuhjkhdk-m/

And while we have no idea what’s driving this price up, down, or sideways each day, we certainly can speculate:

Is it the (now) 13 million active accounts on Coinbase driving demand? Charles Schwab only has 10 million. 

Is it Japan putting its finger on the crypto-trigger? 60% of Bitcoin is now traded in yen.

Is it hedge fund manager Mike Novogratz predicting the currency would hit $10,000 last month? He and his $500 million new crypto fund might agree.

For now, we’ll just strap in and enjoy the ride.

The Hughes Film

New documents have been released on the JFK assassination; this decision was made in 1992 after the movie “JFK” was released in 1991. Trump was advised not to release everything (although he claims this was his doing). Those files have been gone over thoroughly and I doubt anything new will be found in them. If the government killed Kennedy, and I think they did, theyÂ’ve had these documents all along—and plenty of time to alter and redact.

The Nix Film

The Kennedy Limo DID SLOW down just before the final shot:

Sorry... I was messing with the coding of the website and disabled a setting earlier affecting your view of this website.

You can toggle between three different views by selecting one of these three buttons to the upper right of this post on any forum view page.:

They are now all enabled again.

My apologies.

@Noble Berean  What does it look like? Can you post an example?

The Church in Mexico has recently consolidated dozens of wards and branches in several major cities during the past four months. As a result, there has been a net decrease of approximately 30 wards and branches during this time - the largest net decrease in congregations in Mexico ever reported by the Church. Although this may sound like a large number, this decrease constitutes only a 1.5% decline in the number of wards and branches in Mexico during this period. 

Local members report that the primary reason that these congregation consolidations have occurred has been due to efforts by the Mexico Area to better utilize meetinghouses (e.g. church attendance filling 80% or more of available seating). Members indicate that the Church has many meetinghouses that are not fully utilized by congregations due to a lack of active members. The number of active members in the Church in Mexico has not appeared to noticeably increase or decrease within the past five years based upon hundreds of reports I have received from returned missionaries and local members in Mexico. However, the Church in several areas of the world has recently placed an increased emphasis on the organization of wards with larger numbers of active members in order to better staff leadership positions and meet member socialization needs. Thus, these recent changes appear to reflect a movement to have the size and functionality of international LDS congregations to become more comparable to those in the United States (e.g. 150-300 active members per ward). In the past, the Church has generally maintained significantly smaller congregations outside of North America (e.g. 50-125 active members per ward).

These congregational consolidations in Mexico indicate significant, ongoing concerns in regards to member activity, convert attrition, and leadership development. Unlike many other Latin American countries, the Church in Mexico has appeared unable to postpone the creation of new wards until congregations increase in the number of active members to the point that meetinghouses are better utilized. These developments are even more considering when considering that the Church in Mexico operates 34 missions and has not yet reported any noticeable improvements within the past five years in regards to growth. The Church in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador has appeared capable of postponing the creation of new units, and usually avoiding the consolidation of smaller or weaker units, until membership maximizes meetinghouse space so that congregations become more analogous in size and functionality to those in the United States and Canada. For example, reports from members in Peru note that most wards currently have 100-250 active members, whereas in the past most wards had significantly fewer active members (e.g. usually 50-125 active members). These recent growth trends in Mexico will likely significantly affect worldwide LDS growth trends, especially considering that the Church operates 6.5% of its worldwide congregations and claims 9.0% of its worldwide membership in Mexico.

http://ldschurchgrowth.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/congregation-consolidations-accelerate.html

As you may have noticed I have simplified the default view on the front page. We call this the "fluid view" versus the grid view we are all used to.

Alternatively, you can always still choose the other views you were accustomed to. All the forums and posts are still here.

Enjoy!

@Bible Speaks  Thank you for the suggestion and idea. However as the .ORG is in reference to TheWorldNewsMedia.org ;-)

I also changed the color scheme to that of Facebook. I figure since they are by far the world's leader in forum / social media they would know the best combinations of colors. I'm sure they have A/B tested everything to the nth degree.

What we really need now is an app.... and eventually "Live Video" and possibly chat.

Live video is probably to technologically difficult for me to take on right now... but the chat I can do easily if people want it.

The app.... well... let's just say the jury is still out on that one.