Monday, February 15, 2016

Modeling Advice

Read our modeling advice and tips to help you with your modeling career.

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Can’t Find a Dream Job? Create Your Own


I was once unemployed, and I know the debilitating depression and the feelings of frustration and helplessness that can come with that. I’ve been stuck in a job I hate, and I felt imprisoned, trapped doing work that bored me while following orders of others and helping them achieve their goals.
Those times were … less than ideal. In fact, those were some of the worst periods in the story of my life.
Luckily I rose above those traps, but I have to admit it wasn’t easy. The solution has been one of the most liberating, empowering, joyous things in my life.
I wanted to share that little secret with those of you who are having a hard time finding a job, or who feel trapped in a job you hate:
Create your own dream job. Don’t wait for someone to hand it to you. Don’t hope that you’ll win the lottery. Don’t give up and consign yourself to a fate of misery and (worse) dullness.
Create your job! It might sound far-fetched for some of you (while others have already done it) but it’s very possible. Not easy, mind you: it takes hard work and smarts and passion and a crap-ton of learning and a willingness to take risks and make mistakes. If that sounds like you, read on. If not, stop reading.

Your Big Idea

You might already know this but if you haven’t given it much thought, start to consider: what do you truly love doing? What are you passionate about? If you’re lucky you’ll have multiple answers. If you have no answers, it’s time to start finding things to be passionate about. Read more: The Short But Powerful Guide to Finding Your Passion.
If you have multiple answers, just choose one. Or find ways to combine two of them (if you love sewing and Star Wars, sew Star Wars costumes and put them on Etsy). Don’t be paralyzed by this choice: if it turns out this isn’t what you want then you can always start another business later. You learn by doing and making mistakes, not by analyzing every possible outcome and factor.
This passion will become your dream job.
This is how I did it. I love writing and I love taking steps to change my habits and my life. I started Zen Habits just for fun and it turned into my dream job.

How to Find Funding

You need a lot of money to get started, right? No. I explicitly reject the idea that “you have to spend money to make money”. Sure, that can work, or it can lead to a mountain of debt and monthly expenses that greatly exceed your income and possibly failure before you’ve had the chance to succeed.
I started my business with nothing. Zero dollars. In fact I had less than nothing: I was highly in debt and broke. I started with free online services (there are plenty — I used Blogger.com and Google Adsense and Google Analytics, but those are just a few examples). I refused to even buy my own domain until I made more money from my business than the cost of that purchase. I refused to pay for my site design or to use a paid host until I was making much more money than those purchases required.
My rule: spend much less than you make. It works for personal finances too.
Actually I didn’t start with nothing. While I had no money, I had some pretty big assets: my mind and talents and hard work and life experience. Those translated into a strong business, it turned out.
How can you start your business with nothing? I won’t create an exhaustive list but here are some examples:
  • Someone I know wanted to start a marketing business. She didn’t need an office and staff and stationary — all she needed was her laptop (she had one), her skills (she had the experience), her contacts (she had a lot of them), and for people to know she was out there. And for that last bit, it just takes some … marketing skills. Hit businesses up and offer her services. Network online and gain clients that way. If she has expenses for a job she can charge those to the client.
  • My sister wanted to start a ballet school. I suggested instead of building a studio and being hugely in debt, she start by going to private schools and offering to create an after-school ballet program at the schools. Parents would love it, the schools would benefit because parents want services like that, and she has practically no expenses.
  • My other sister wanted to become a personal trainer. I encouraged her to start in her home, with minimal equipment, or go to her clients’ homes and businesses, or do outdoor bootcamps. She did and is amazing at it.
  • Love to play video games? Start a site where you show people how to become elite players. Offer coaching.
  • Start an online store where you sell stuff you make.
  • Teach people how to do whatever you’re good at. They’ll pay you.
  • Want to be a chef? Host dinner parties with gourmet cuisine, and charge $50 a head. Sell tickets in advance and use some of that money to buy the food and some dishes.
Again, these are just a few ideas. Sure, there are some businesses that require an initial investment but I suggest you find ones that don’t. Start free or cheap, borrow space from friends if necessary, and get started.

Get Good

If you want to make a living at what you love doing, you need to get good at it. Some of you are already good at what you love — you’ve been doing it for years, either on the job or as a personal passion. Others are just starting out, but that’s not a barrier — you just have to put in more time and effort.
I was already an experienced writer when I started Zen Habits (I’d been a journalist for about 18 years), but I didn’t know a thing about blogging or teaching people to simplify, improve their lives, change their habits. I knew about how to do that myself (though I was still learning) but I’d never taught anyone. So I learned: I read other blogs, read personal development sites and books, read blogs about blogging, studied the best, figured out what they did that made them successful. It takes a lot of study, a lot of analysis, a lot of trying and doing and seeing what works and what doesn’t.
I made a ton of mistakes. That’s a good thing. You can’t get good at anything without making a huge amount of mistakes. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes — they’re stepping stones to greatness. Try everything, see what works, see what doesn’t. Stick with the things that work.
Put in a lot of hours of practice and doing. The more, the better. Reflect on what you’ve done and what you’ve learned, write it down. Put it in your blog so you can help others learn, but more importantly you’ll force yourself to learn from your own experience.
Get good. Others will gladly pay you if you’re good.

Build an Audience

Any business, big or small, benefits from an audience. That’s different than a customer base — an audience is a group of people who you help and who love you. They might not pay you. Some will want to pay you for more of what you offer, but many will just love you, and that’s a great thing.
The best way to attract an audience is to provide really valuable content. It’s that simple. Help people solve their problems, give away lots of powerful information to do so.
Building an audience is tough. It takes time, it takes a lot of giving, it takes a willingness to wither criticism and to learn from that criticism (though ignore the idiots).

Build Income

OK, you’re pursuing your passion, you’ve developed your skills, you’ve built an audience. Now what? How does that pay your bills?
You build income streams. There are many, many ways to do that, including:
  • Give away free articles but charge for ebooks or other digital products (that’s what I do).
  • Create a subscription or membership service for powerful content.
  • Create online courses.
  • Sell ads or run ads from ad networks.
  • Do consulting or freelancing.
  • Do speaking engagements or training seminars.
  • Sell physical stuff online or on a site such as Etsy.
  • Create an app and sell it on the Apple or Android platforms.
  • Build a web app and charge for the premium version.
  • Provide a service where you go to people’s houses and do something for them (yardwork, massage, fitness training, houspainting, etc.).
  • Sell T-shirts or coffee mugs or stickers with your slogan or logo.
  • Sell other people’s stuff as an affiliate and get commissions.
Which of these should you do? Try one, see how that works, then try another, then another. See what works best and be willing to build multiple income streams.

The Empowerment of Creating Your Own Job

I’ve only given you a rough outline but if I gave away every step that would be taking away all the fun. The fun is learning how to do it yourself!
There is something incredibly empowering about seizing control of your life and creating the job you want, rather than waiting for it to happen or waiting for someone to give it to you. You are no longer a passive viewer of the world, but someone actively changing it. You become your own boss, pursuing your own goals. That’s incredible.
If you’re out of a job or stuck in a lousy job, I feel for you. But look at your horrible situation as a wonderful opportunity to change your life and do something great. It could be the best thing you’ve ever done.

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China's Undeclared Cyber War on the U.S.

https://vimeo.com/147268642

At the next CNN/Salem Radio Republican debate on December 15th at the Venetian Hotel in Nevada, moderator Hugh Hewitt rolls out this question for frontrunner Donald Trump:
Should China’s repeated cyber attacks on the Pentagon and its theft of major weapons systems like the F-35 stealth fighter be treated as acts of war?  If not, why not?
Four days later at the Democratic debate in Manchester, New Hampshire, ABC moderator Martha Raddatz asks former Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:
Why has the Obama Administration, including during your tenure as Secretary of State, allowed China to so freely launch cyber attacks on American businesses and consumers?
These are good questions that American voters deserve better answers to as Chinese hackers continue to launch thousands of attacks on American strategic and economic interests. CNN and ABC, are you listening?
In fact, Chinese state-sponsored hacking is under the full control of the People’s Liberation Army. According to the watershed Mandiant Report, China’s cyber command consists of over 100,000 soldiers and is stretched across 12 bureaus and three research institutes. 
On the industrial front, these cyber thieves steal not just the obligatory blueprints, research and development, and proprietary manufacturing processes of American businesses large and small. They will also vacuum up everything from emails, contact lists, and test results to pricing information and partnership agreements. The economic goal is to provide China’s state-owned companies with the weapons they need to steal US jobs and profits from American competitors – even as such thefts weaken the US manufacturing base.
On the military front, there is also the massive theft of US weapons systems like the F-35 stealth fighter – now flying in cloned form as China’s Chengdu J-20. According to the Washington Post, the full list of purloined weapons includes the PAC-3 Patriot missile, the army’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, the Navy’s Aegis ballistic-missile defense system and vital combat aircraft and ships, including the F/A-18 fighter jet, the V-22 Osprey, and the Black Hawk helicopter. 
Still a third major cyber warfare front involves attacking critical infrastructure such as America’s electricity grid, water purification plants, air traffic control, subway systems, and telecommunications. The twin goals here are to sow chaos among the US populace as well as to bring our economy to its knees in time of war – or perhaps the goal is to simply blackmail the US into inaction should a revanchist China move on Taiwan or the Senkaku Islands or Second Thomas Reef.
Finally, the Pentagon is now being forced to increasingly defend against Chinese attempts to implant “Trojans” and other malware into the computer and electronic circuitry of American’s weapons and logistics systems.  Now that China has become the world’s factory floor, this has become far too easy to do.  However, as defense analyst James Lewis has warned: “If you mess with that software, the airplane won’t fly, the missile will miss its target, and the ship might not get to where it was intended to go.”
Of course, the Chinese government – right up to President Xi Jinping’s straight face and lying eyes – continues to insist it is not involved in cyber warfare against America. This blanket denial raises yet another very good question for presidential candidates: How can you ever really trust the Chinese in any negotiation if its President will lie right to your face?
Here, American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Auslin has the last word on the cavalier attitudes that persist inside the Beltway when it comes to China’s hacking:
"We don't take cyber security seriously, and we don't take defense secrets seriously. The Chinese stole reams and reams of data on our missiles back in the 1990s under the Clinton administration. All of a sudden they had intercontinental ballistic missiles that could effectively reach the United States. During the Bush years they stole information on the F-35 and other things. During the Obama years, they've stolen information on our drones. I mean we just think we're so big and we're so sophisticated and we're so technologically advanced that whatever we build is going to beat the other guy; and they've been robbing us blind and robbing the American taxpayer blind of billions of dollars of development and research money for decades."
Such Chinese robbery may well be just one more reason why outsiders like Donald Trump and Ben Carson appear to have more appeal to voters than insiders like Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio who have long records of doing nothing to protect the American people from China’s relentless cyber assaults.
Peter Navarro is a professor at the University of California-Irvine.  He is the author of Crouching Tiger: What China’s Militarism Means for the World (Prometheus Books) and director of the companion Crouching Tiger documentary film series.   www.crouchingtiger.net
Follow the 2016 Presidential race at Real Clear Politics.

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Sunday, February 14, 2016

How cheap oil may ruin your life


With the price of oil sliding, you might expect demand for oil would be rising. Not so much. Demand is rising, but at a rapidly decelerating pace, roughly two-thirds lower than last year. That’s not good news, especially for jobs, which have grown in the U.S. for a record 71 straight months.
That the growth rate for oil consumption is down sharply tells us a lot about the global economy and the likelihood of continued market volatility. Companies and countries with the financial muscle to buy oil cheap and store it until prices rise have been taking the excess supply, but that must end soon because we are running out of places to store oil.
Underground storage, the cheapest way to hold oil once it gets past the wellhead, is pretty much full. The U.S. government’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a giant salt dome, can hold about 715 million barrels of oil. It’s at about 695 million barrels right now.
Aboveground oil storage tanks are so close to full that some companies and countries are storing oil at sea. More than 100 million barrels of oil are being stored at sea, sending the price of oil tanker charters soaring. Very large crude carriers have been renting for as much as $111,000 per day, up from a daily average around $20,000 in recent years.
We can expect panic selling once the world runs out of storage, especially expensive storage at sea. Unless some major oil producers shut down a lot of wells, at some point the owners of oil in the most expensive storage will be forced to sell, prompting a brief but dramatic drop in oil prices.
The price for a barrel of West Texas intermediate crude, an industry benchmark, fell below $28 in the spot markets this week. That’s tantalizingly close to the 1986 price of $22 in today’s money. Don’t be surprised if the spot price falls, briefly, under $20. (Wyoming sour crude, so called because it is laced with sulphur, is under $11 a barrel.)
Falling prices are destroying the fortunes of those who borrowed lots of money to cash in on oil prices when they were over $100 a barrel eight years ago. Banks are writing off billions of dollars of imprudent loans — a cost borne not by bankers but by investors in bank stocks. Wells Fargo, for example, has set aside $1.2 billion to cover expected defaults on $17 billion of oil loans. That 7 percent default rate will almost certainly worsen if oil prices fall further. 
Oil company investors are getting pummeled too. A troubling sign of what may be coming can be seen in the latest financial report by Anadarko Petroleum. It rang up sales last year of $8.7 billion but lost an astounding $6.7 billion, or $13.18 per share. The stock trades at about $40, down 63 percent from its high in August 2014. CEO Al Walker warned shareholders last week that “for 2016, greater market dislocation appears likely,” so the company is slashing spending even more.
The awful news from Anadarko suggests that many more good-paying oil industry jobs will vaporize, at least until oil prices recover. Expect more announcements like this not just in the oil industry, suggesting that job growth is slowing and may even reverse for a while.
"Even if your job is as far from an oilfield or an oil company’s headquarters as snowfalls are from Florida, pay close attention to the price of oil. As oil jobs go away, so may yours".
Individual producers face a choice between trying to make some money from oil at low prices, which may stave off bankruptcy, or shutting down production until oil prices rise. While some wells have been shut and the number of rigs drilling wells in the United States has fallen about 70 percent since 2008, global production is up. Saudi Arabia has kept production going full tilt, hoping to force out high-cost oil producers such as fracking wells in the U.S. With Iran about to resume large-scale oil exports, the global oversupply may continue for several years.
This downward trend will likely cause disruptions around the world. Countries that depend on oil revenue to fund their budgets — Middle Eastern countries, Mexico, Russia, Venezuela and Norway prominent among them — face hard choices about cutting domestic spending, which runs the risk of social unrest. Some may be forced to sell assets held in their sovereign wealth funds.
Consider the effect of panic selling on the world markets if Norway, with just 5.2 million people, has to convert a significant share of its stocks, bonds and real estate to cash. Norway is tiny by population, but it owns about 1.3 percent of the world’s securities.
Perhaps the most volatile country, as I noted in this column a month ago, is Russia, which counts on oil companies for 98 percent of big company profits. Whether the Kremlin will cut oil production, in the hope that higher prices will make up for the loss of volume, is one of the biggest guessing games in energy markets and diplomatic circles.
In the U.S., residents of states that depend on oil revenues — Alaska, California, Texas and Wyoming — will face either cuts in state spending that will damage the economy or higher taxes. Alaskans get a check from the state each year based on oil royalties, and they should expect their wallets to be much thinner in the years ahead.

If prices at the pump are so low, why aren’t people buying more gasoline? A big reason that abundant supply has not been matched by increased consumption is a core concept of modern economic theory known as elasticity. 
Some products are highly responsive to changes in supply. A bumper crop of any vegetable typically results in sharply lower prices. People load up on asparagus and tomatoes when supply is abundant, passing by more expensive Brussels sprouts and zucchini. That’s price elasticity.
Oil and especially gasoline and diesel fuel are not like that. When the price of gasoline is high, people still have to get to work, and goods still have to be moved, so spending is cut back in other areas. Even with gasoline at $1.76 per gallon, the latest national average, people don’t drive more during the workweek and only a bit more on weekends and vacations. That’s inelasticity.
The world, particularly the United States, has become much more efficient in the use of fossil fuels generally and oil specifically since the price shocks of 1973, when the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries showed it could drive up the price of oil by restricting supply. The U.S. is one of a handful of countries with fuel economy standards for automobiles, for example. That, too, contributes to the slowing growth of demand for oil.
Because oil remains central to human economic activity, weak demand in a period of gushing supply (even before Iran resumes shipping into the world oil markets) spells pervasive disruption of global economic activity. Even if your job is as far from an oilfield or an oil company’s headquarters as snowfalls are from Florida, pay close attention to the price of oil. As oil jobs go away, so may yours.
David Cay Johnston, an investigative reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize while at The New York Times, teaches business, tax and property law of the ancient world at the Syracuse University College of Law. He is the best-selling author of “Perfectly Legal,” “Free Lunch” and “The Fine Print” and the editor of the new anthology “Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality.”

February 11, 2016 2:00AM ET
by David Cay Johnston   @DavidCayJ



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