Nice idea, I will start trying this. Exercise saves lives.
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Nilofer Merchant – Got a meeting? Take a walk
Posted in Soul Brother Presents
Tagged employment, excercise, health, jobs, meeting, productivity, TED, video
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It’s Not a Housing Boom. It’s a Land Grab
By Imara Jones
As Americans took to their backyards and beaches to celebrate the unofficial start of summer this week, America’s housing industry—for the first time in years—is celebrating right along with them. In the past two months, home sales reached a level not seen since before the financial crisis in 2008, and the price of new homes—taken as a sign of the real estate market’s resurgence—reached their highest level in 20 years.
Many in the political and financial class are holding up this relatively positive new housing data as proof that the country has reached an economic oasis. And at first blush, the situation can be construed to be positive. The value of the U.S. housing market has climbed back to $16 trillion, exactly where it was before the economic crisis. Home prices and permits for new construction are up by double digits nationwide.
But rather than an oasis, these new gains might be an economic mirage. The reality of the current real estate renaissance is that the rich and those on Wall Street are raking in the cash while large segments of the population—especially historically marginalized communities—remain stuck in a downward, alternate housing reality.
Generally, housing recoveries are fueled by millions of Americans with new jobs, higher wages, available credit from banks and overall confidence that things will get better. But the real economy that most people live in day-to-day is too weak for all of that. Jobs are in short supply, wages are at historic lows and credit for middle and working class Americans is tight. With their economic ladder into homeownership taken away, many Americans can no longer participate in the housing market.
In their absence, financial firms and rich global jetsetters are snapping up hundreds of millions of dollars of property each week.
Read More It’s Not a Housing Boom. It’s a Land Grab – COLORLINES.
Choice..Chance..Change
Posted in Soul Brother Presents
Tagged chance, change, choice, inspiration, life, message, self-care, self-improvement
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Never get a bad seat on a Southwest flight again
By Jason Cipriani
One of the most anxiety-inducing moments you’ll hear a Southwest customer talk about is the process of checking in as close to 24 hours before a flight, hoping to see a boarding priority number prefaced with an A. The lower the number, the sooner you get to board the plane and pick a seat of your choosing.
A new service, originally covered by Lifehacker, will automatically check you in at exactly the right time, ensuring that you are on the elusive A-list. The name of the service: Southwest A-List, of course.
Here’s how it works:
After booking your flight with Southwest, you’ll receive a confirmation e-mail containing an itinerary number.
Forward this e-mail to sw@to.andyjiang.com.
Your e-mail will be scanned, the important information will be pulled out and the server will set a time to check you into your flight. You’ll also receive a confirmation e-mail from the service outlining all of your information and giving you the time the service will check you in.
Read More Never get a bad seat on a Southwest flight again | How To – CNET.
***I’m interested in seeing if this actually works. Let me know. ~ SB***
Posted in News from the Soul Brother
Tagged Aviation, CNET, seating, Southwest Airlines, Transportation
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On Victory Drive, Soldiers Defeated by Debt
By Paul Kiel and Mitchell Hartman
Seven years after Congress banned payday-loan companies from charging exorbitant interest rates to service members, many of the nation’s military bases are surrounded by storefront lenders who charge high annual percentage rates, sometimes exceeding 400 percent.
The Military Lending Act sought to protect service members and their families from predatory loans. But in practice, the law has defined the types of covered loans so narrowly that it’s been all too easy for lenders to circumvent it.
“We have to revisit this,” said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who chairs the defense appropriations subcommittee and is the Senate’s second-ranking Democrat. “If we’re serious about protecting military families from exploitation, this law has to be a lot tighter.”
Members of the military can lose their security clearances for falling into debt. As a result, experts say, service members often avoid taking financial problems to their superior officers and instead resort to high-cost loans they don’t fully understand.
The Department of Defense, which defines which loans the Military Lending Act covers, has begun a process to review the law, said Marcus Beauregard, chief of the Pentagon’s state liaison office.
The act mainly targets two products: payday loans, usually two-week loans with annual percentage rates often above 400 percent, and auto-title loans, typically one-month loans with rates above 100 percent and secured by the borrower’s vehicle. The law caps all covered loans at a 36 percent annual rate.
That limit “did do a great deal of good on the products that it covered,” Holly Petraeus, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s head of service member affairs, said in an interview. “But there are a lot of products that it doesn’t cover.”
Representatives from payday and other high-cost lenders said they follow the law. Some defended the proliferation of new products as helpful to consumers.
Read More On Victory Drive, Soldiers Defeated by Debt – ProPublica.
Backlash greets Cheerios ad with interracial family
By Mary C. Curtis
Here we go again, with more proof, if anyone needed it, that the post-racial American society some hoped the election of an African American president signified is far from here.
Who would have thought that breakfast cereal would trigger the latest racial battle line? In this case, a Cheerios ad much like every other homespun Cheerios ad — with a heart healthy message and loving family – ran into trouble from some commenters because of the kind of family it featured. Mom is white, dad is black and their cute little daughter is a mix of the both of them.
That’s it.
Cheerios had to disable comments on YouTube – I’m not going to repeat them but you can imagine the general witless racism with stereotypes about minorities and warnings of race-mixing as the end of civilization. Late Friday night, after a day of widespread news coverage, the ad had more than 8,400 thumbs-up votes on YouTube, versus about 900 thumbs-down.
I didn’t take any of it personally, though my family’s morning breakfast ritual – black mom, white dad, son who is a mix of both of us – looks a lot like the ad if you subtract the general cheeriness before we get that first cup of coffee down.
The point is, it’s no big deal. Richard and Mildred Loving didn’t intend to start a legal case that made to the Supreme Court, which in 1967 struck down the bans against interracial marriage that still stood in 16 states. The white man and black woman from Virginia just wanted to get married and raise their family in their Virginia home.
The parents of Barack Obama married in one of the states where it was legal – that’s Hawaii, not Kenya – and his extended family portrait reflects the world.
The 2010 U.S. Census showed interracial or inter-ethnic opposite-sex married couple households grew by 28 percent over the decade, from 7 percent in 2000 to 10 percent in 2010. But feelings don’t always follow the law or the reality of the lives people now live. When a no-longer-enforced state law was placed on the ballot in South Carolina in 1998, 30 percent still favored the ban while 62 percent voted to get rid of it.
The holdouts have to realize that the numbers are hardly going to start moving in the other direction in our increasingly diverse society.
For its part, Cheerios has said the ad stands. Camille Gibson, vice president of marketing for Cheerios, told Gawker, “Consumers have responded positively to our new Cheerios ad. At Cheerios, we know there are many kinds of families and we celebrate them all.”
In making this ad, Cheerios is just reflecting the new reality, and might be gaining themselves many more customers than those inclined to punish them – if those folks even ate the cereal to begin with. Just as young people today think living in an America with a black first family in the White House is simply the way it is, children who see a family like their own on TV will hardly give the ad a second glance.
Read More Backlash greets Cheerios ad with interracial family.
***General Mills needs to be applauded for their stance! ~ SB***
Posted in News from the Soul Brother
Tagged african american, Barack Obama, bi-racial, Cheerios, commercial, Ethnicity, General Mills, race, South Carolina, television, United States, Virginia, White House, YouTube
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Listen
Posted in Soul Brother Presents
Tagged inspiration, life, listen, message, self-esteem, self-improvement
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soulbrotherspeaks.com 
The Banality of ‘Don’t Be Evil’
By Julian Assange
“THE New Digital Age” is a startlingly clear and provocative blueprint for technocratic imperialism, from two of its leading witch doctors, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, who construct a new idiom for United States global power in the 21st century. This idiom reflects the ever closer union between the State Department and Silicon Valley, as personified by Mr. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, and Mr. Cohen, a former adviser to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton who is now director of Google Ideas.
The authors met in occupied Baghdad in 2009, when the book was conceived. Strolling among the ruins, the two became excited that consumer technology was transforming a society flattened by United States military occupation. They decided the tech industry could be a powerful agent of American foreign policy.
The book proselytizes the role of technology in reshaping the world’s people and nations into likenesses of the world’s dominant superpower, whether they want to be reshaped or not. The prose is terse, the argument confident and the wisdom — banal. But this isn’t a book designed to be read. It is a major declaration designed to foster alliances.
“The New Digital Age” is, beyond anything else, an attempt by Google to position itself as America’s geopolitical visionary — the one company that can answer the question “Where should America go?” It is not surprising that a respectable cast of the world’s most famous warmongers has been trotted out to give its stamp of approval to this enticement to Western soft power. The acknowledgments give pride of place to Henry Kissinger, who along with Tony Blair and the former C.I.A. director Michael Hayden provided advance praise for the book.
Read More The Banality of ‘Don’t Be Evil’ – NYTimes.com.