Neverending Story Turning Points Essay

Defining moments Battle for the Ivory Tower In the novel The Neverending Story, the fight for the Ivory Tower between the two heroes; Bastian and Atreyu is a significant occasion to the plot of the novel. They were fighting for the ownership of the Childlike Empress’ special necklace, AURYN: Atreyu attempted to safeguard himself with his own blade. Yet, used by Bastian, Sikanda cut in two and struck Atreyu in the chest. Blood erupted from the vast injury. Atreyu lurched back and toppled from the divider (Ende 370). The fight for the Ivory Tower is a significant occasion to the plot of the novel ecause one of the significant characters in the story is wounded. Bastian is so self-important and childish that he cut his own companion to make sure he could keep AURYN for himself and be the Childlike Emperor of Fantastica. Atreyu just removed the special necklace so Bastian wouldn’t lose any longer of his recollections. In any case, Bastian was excessively self consumed to un derstand that Atreyu was just attempting to support him. The fight for the Ivory Tower is additionally imperative to the improvement of Bastian as a character. Bastian experienced a change because of the fight. He began exceptionally furious at Atreyu:Bastian pointed his blade at the load of flaring vestiges and his voice broke as he announced: â€Å"This is Atreyu’s doing! For I will seek after him as far as possible of The world! † (Ende 371-372). Be that as it may, Bastian started to feel remorseful about what he had done: Over and over he experienced the second when Atreyu had set the purpose of his blade to his chest. What's more, just because he wondered why Atreyu faltered. Why, after all that had occurred, couldn’t he force himself to strike bastian and take AURYN forcibly? Also, out of nowhere Bastian thought of the injury he had incurred n Atreyu and the look in Atreyu’s eyes as he stunned and fell (Ende 375-376). After Bastian considered the ho rrendous wrongdoing he had submitted, he came to understand that what he did was exceptionally off-base. Atreyu dithered on the grounds that he felt compassion toward his companion considerably after all that Bastian had done to him. Bastian changed from being angry at his companion for the harm he had caused to feeling regretful for egotistically cutting Atreyu. The fight for the Ivory Tower likewise added to the message that what Bastian did to Atreyu was off-base and he ought to be disgraceful, â€Å"His triumph left him with an itter taste in his mouth, and yet he felt fiercely triumphant† (Ende 371). What Bastian did was a childish and horrendous intention for somebody who is simply attempting to support him. This occasion gets over the message that in spite of the fact that Bastian vanquished Atreyu, he ought to be gigantically disrespected of the repulsive thing he did. The City of Old Emperors The City of Old Emperors is a significant occasion in the plot of the novel . In the City of Old Emperors, Bastian realizes what befalls the entirety of the people who come to Fantastica and attempt to crown themselves Emperor:Bastian saw a kid with a substantial mallet attempting to drive nails into a couple of socks. A husky man was attempting to past postage stamps on cleanser bubbles. They continued blasting, yet he continued blowing new ones (Ende 381). The City of Old Emperors is a significant occasion in the plot of the novel since that is the place Bastian discovers that in the event that he keeps making wishes, he will lose the entirety of his recollections. Without any recollections, Bastian can’t make any longer wishes. Without any desires, AURYN vanishes. In the event that AURYN vanishes, at that point Bastian will wind up in the City of Old Emperors with no memory of anything.The City of Old Emperors is additionally essential to the improvement of Bastian as a character. Bastian experienced a change when he found out about the City of Ol d Emperors. He began exceptionally befuddled: For some time Bastian stood still. He was so paralyzed by what he had recently heard that he couldn’t choose what to do. Every one of his arrangements had crumpled at one stroke (Ende 384). When Bastian understood that he was exploiting Moon Child’s forces and AURYN, he considered what he had done to Atreyu at the fight for the Ivory Tower: Bastian delved into the earth with both hands.When the opening was large enough, he unslung the blade Sikanda and put it in. â€Å"Sikanda,† he said. â€Å"I am withdrawing from you until the end of time. Never again will anybody draw you against a companion. Nobody will discover you until what you and I have done is forgotten† (Ende 385). After Bastian by and by pondered the terrible thing he had done to Atreyu, he found that the correct activity was covering Sikanda for eternity. Bastian changed from being exceptionally befuddled and uncertain of what he ought to do strai ghtaway, to somebody who knew precisely what the proper activity is.The City of Old Emperors added to the message that Bastian discovered that he was utilizing AURYN to make an excessive number of wishes: Batstian watched a man who had washed a mirror and was beginning to shave it. When that may have struck him as amusing; presently it made him break out in gooseflesh (Ende 380). Since Bastian has made numerous desires, he has lost a great deal of recollections from his own reality. Seeing the man attempting to shave a mirror since he had no recollections, gave Bastian goose pimples since he is concerned that it could transpire. This occasion gets over the message that Bastian has discovered that he has made an excessive number of wishes.

Free

Through and through freedom and Divine Foreknowledge Essay Through and through freedom is the capacity to settle on our own decisions in issues with respect to all parts of life. It is a force that empowers us to settle on our own decisions that are not influenced by outside components, for example, awesome will. In this way, every one sins by his/her own will. While, divine foresight is the way that God has total information on what will occur later on. In â€Å"On Free Choice of the Will†, St. Augustine talks about a basic issue which is the contrariness of man’s choice and God’s premonition. So the inquiry is, do we truly have through and through freedom notwithstanding the way that God foreknows everything? In the event that God realizes what should essentially occur straightaway, at that point how have the unrestrained choice to settle on our own decisions? Augustine concocts a progression of contentions to demonstrate that we sin by our own will with no mediation of the celestial prescience. Augustine initially contended an attribute of God that He has unrestrained choice, and that He has prescience of his own activities. In this way, both God’s will and foresight oblige one another. Starting here he at that point expect that man’s will and God’s foresight are both good. In any case, would we be able to contrast God and man? What's more, is this contention persuading enough? More elaboration must be provided so as to make it all the more persuading. Augustine at that point continues to do as such. He expresses that individuals who don't have confidence in the similarity of through and through freedom and perfect premonition are the individuals who â€Å"are more anxious to pardon than admit their sins† (p. 73). That implies that individuals who constantly censure others for their own off-base doings instead of letting it be known are the individuals who guarantee that we have no unrestrained choice and that everything is as of now known by God, and that nothing can be changed, which they likewise use as a legitimization for their off-base activities. These individuals carry on with their life by some coincidence, leaving everything as indicated by the conditions as opposed to attempting to take great activities. A model for that is the homeless people, who consistently attempt to take cash from individuals without giving anything consequently or in any event, having work, in spite of the fact that they can do as such. But since of their lethargy and their conviction this is the thing that they were made to be, they leave everything to occur by karma and as per God’s prescience that couldn’t be changed (p. 73). Augustine at that point moves to another point which is the connection between the will and the ability to accomplish that will. He expresses that the will itself is inside our capacity. Hence, our craving to submit certain demonstrations is a force that we own. In any case, on the off chance that we will something that isn't inside our capacity, at that point it isn't considered as a will since we can just will what is inside our capacity. Augustine at that point talks about that in the event that something great transpires, at that point it is understanding to our will, not against it. So for instance, being cheerful, in spite of the fact that God foreknows that you will be along these lines, doesn’t imply that we are glad without wanting to. Consequently, God’s foresight of our bliss doesn’t remove our will to be cheerful (p. 76). Thus, he presumes that on the off chance that God foreknows our will, at that point unquestionably this will happen, thus it will be a will later on. Thusly, his foresight doesn’t remove our will. What's more, since that what we will is in our capacity, God foreknows our capacity and He won't remove it. Henceforth, we will have that power since God foreknows it (p. 77). So Augustine made it understood â€Å"that it is fundamental that whatever God has foreknown will occur, and that he foreknows our transgressions so that our wills stay free and are with in our power† (p.77). Nonetheless, the way that God’s foresight of our transgressions is steady with our through and through freedom in erring despite everything remains faulty. Contemplating the way that God is simply, so how can He rebuff our wrongdoings that occur by need? Or on the other hand is God’s foresight not a commitment? The theme is as yet befuddling so Augustine at that point continues to make it more clear. He clarifies that on the off chance that we are sure that somebody is going to sin, at that point we have premonition with the bad behavior that he/she will submit. This premonition didn’t drive them to do as such, however it was finished willingly. As needs be, their will to sin is reliable with our foresight of that transgression. Consequently, â€Å"God powers nobody to sin, despite the fact that he anticipates the individuals who are going to sin by their own will† (p. 78). Augustine at that point contrasts prescience and memory. He expresses that our â€Å"memory doesn't constrain the past to have happened†, and correspondingly God’s premonition of things to come doesn’t drive it to happen (p. 78). What's more, we recall things in the past that we have done however didn’t do everything that we recollect, moreover God foreknows everything that He will cause later on, yet doesn’t cause everything that is inside His foresight (p. 78). Accordingly, God rebuffs our transgressions that we do by our own will and which He didn't cause, as God is known by his equity. Augustine at that point thinks of a decent contention for each one of the individuals who are still somewhat befuddled, that on the off chance that God ought not rebuff us for our wrongdoings that He predicts, at that point He additionally shouldn’t reward us for our great work that He likewise anticipates (p. 78). To finish up, Augustine prevailing with regards to thinking of a decent contention demonstrating that man’s unrestrained choice and God’s prescience are both good. The arrangement of his thoughts made his contention reasonable and persuading for any peruser. As a peruser, I’ve consistently contemplated that subject yet didn’t get any answers. In any case, perusing â€Å"On Free Choice of the Will† made everything understood for me and made me all around persuaded that God’s prescience doesn’t intercede with our own decisions that we make. Works Cited Williams, Thomas. On Free Choice of the Will. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. , 1993. 129. Print.

DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we are at New York City interviewing Digital Ocean. Ben, who are you and what do you do?Ben: I am Ben Uretsky and I am CEO of Digital Ocean.Martin: Great. When did you start this company and what is your background?Ben: I started DigitalOcean in 2011 and my background; I have a Bachelor’s Degree here from Pace University in information systems which I basically got to show my dad that I can finish college but I have been working since I was 15 years old in high school. So my background is I thought myself Linux and networking and servers and then ultimately joined a bunch of Tech Companies starting out into the voice over IP space, and then transitioning to hosting, and then ultimately starting my own company.Martin: Okay and in parallel you did study.Ben: Oh, yes. I did study, I finished. So when I started working in high school, I graduated from there and then went to University and was able to actually start my first business at 21 before graduating from University.Martin: Great. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the similarities of those business models because most entrepreneurs have some area which are very like, and they tweak around and have some different business model in that kind of area.Ben: Yes, that’s definitely true. The business model that we use is a recurring subscription is really the heart of the engine. So the first company that I started in 2003 was called ServerStack and it managed hosting, just taking care of customer environment online. So let’s say you generate some revenue because you are a retailer, so e-commerce or you drive some sort of a subscription network maybe it’s video ads or advertising in general, in other words you are generating revenue online, you want to make sure that your website stays active. And so we monitored and took care of that entire environment, provided a 100% uptime SLA, took care of back up security, capacity planning, network expansion, just everything that falls within IT management and helped our customers grow their business. And so what was great about that business was that as you sign up that first customer, more often than not, they continued to grow their business, so each month, each account produces more revenue and the goal is to get as many more accounts as you can.BUSINESS MODELMartin: And how is the current business model of Digital Ocean working?Ben: It’s similar. It’s interesting because we are a utility cloud provider. So customers can use as much or as little as they want. Our billing today works on hourly basis but the majority of our customers run what we call sticky infrastructure. So once they set it up, they won’t tear it down, it will continue to exist for months and essentially even for years. Although they have the luxury if the demand changes or they need to make a modification, they can pay by the hour and make those changes in real time. Nonetheless, each customer continues to spend more money every single month because they create a business which finds traction and attracts new users and so they need to grow the server foot print to keep up with demand. And so even though it’s not a traditional subscription model, based on that sticky usage, they wind up paying more every single month but that’s tied directly to their success and usage.Martin: And did you transition DigitalOcean directly from your former company because the business model is quite similar but you are coming from managed hosting to cloud hosting?Ben: Yeah. We had an opportunity to step back in 2011 and really think about where our first business was headed. And we had some concerns about dedicated servers, many other providers came out with virtualized solutions where you can purchase these systems online. Some of them sold the fraction of the server, so it seemed like price was substantially less but that’s also because you’ve got substantially less resources. Nonetheless, a consumer, the person who†™s actually going to use those recourse, didn’t pay as much attention to the unit economics, they just thought, ‘Oh wow, I can spend $20 bucks a month, instead of two or three hundred. So in general customers really began to adopt cloud based servers and wanted to make sure that we stayed relevant within the market place. We had a good grasp on business operations as well as the technical sides, so the servers and the networks. Where the first business didn’t find traction was actually in its unique value proposition. So we were selling support like many other companies and it was hard to differentiate ourselves and stand out in that crowd of market.So as we began to analyze what the new business would be all about. We started reading a lot of books on marketing, on positioning, there is actually a book literally called, ‘Positioning’. I think it’s Al Ries and Jack Trout if I remember correctly. It talks about finding a unique value proposition that fits within the custo mer’s mindset. So if you have to re educate them, it’ll be a very difficult proposition and you also can’t compete against any of the existing values or opinions that they have. So you have to try to find a way to squeeze into all of that and still stay relevant.And so as we started thinking about building Digital Ocean the other concept that we really kept in mind is brand extension. And sometimes that works for example, perhaps you make a toothbrush and you decide to extend into the tooth paste business. It could work but it could also create some confusion. And what we see so many times in our industry is companies create brand extensions and so first they are dedicated server provider, then they become a managed service provider and then the cloud comes and around and all of a sound they offer virtually cloud offerings. But as the customer evaluates that front home page, they are confused, it’s like, ‘Can I buy this server or that server’? It’s a mixed message. So what we realize is, we could not extend our original business to provide cloud servers.So we decided to start a company from the ground up with a single laser focus on providing the best cloud server experience that we could, that levered on nearly a decade of running the first business, going through a lot of growing pains in helping our customers achieve scale. So we took that operational experience and we created a product. And that’s another huge distinction between the first company which was a services based business and essentially there, I like to say you tell the customer, ‘Yes’ and you then you go home or you go back to your office and you try to figure out how to deliver that service. In a product based business it’s the exact opposite. You build a product that has certain characteristics and that’s all that you can actually deliver because product developing takes a much longer time to actually achieve that new product version.So that really was the basis for D igital Oceans, all of these ideas floating around in our heads. We had access to couple hundred customers in our first company but we also did survey the market. And what we recognized is that no one was really focused on the developer. Everyone was focusing on larger scale businesses and the way that they thought about their companies was through technology lens. So they said, ‘Hey, we can deliver and build these features and this is what you guys will use’. And for a larger size business that actually works well because they understand their requirements, they have the necessary teams to manage that complexity and so access to this scalable infinite infrastructure is a great way for many companies to build their business. But if you take a look at the opposite end of that spectrum it’s an individual user, a developer who is just getting started, maybe they are learning a new language or they are pushing their application for the first time into a beta phase, trying to find t hat initial traction, create a start up that’s ultimately going to scale, that user was neglected. We decided to focus digital ocean on providing the simplest cloud infrastructure experience possible catered to the developer rather than to a scaling business.Martin: Ben when somebody is thinking about ‘what type of server hosting I am using?’, you said that it’s quite hard to distinguish the unit economics, can you walk us through the unit economics for the different type of segments like dedicated, managed, cloud hosting?Ben: Yes. So dedicated servers are fairly straight forward because you can a la carte pick and choose your processors, memory, storage and all of that gets bundled into a monthly price tag. And then typically you also pay extra for bandwidth and you have a lot of customization on dedicated server side. So anything that fits into the chassis you can probably get from a provider.Once you go into a cloud environment, it becomes a little different. Most cloud p roviders bundle a specific set of resources together, so you will receive one or two CPUs with a couple of Giga bytes of memory and some storage space. Now, some providers charge separately for bandwidth. We actually include an allotment of network transferred bandwidth with that original plan as well, so that customers don’t have to worry about, how much will I actually pay at the end of the month. The majority of our users fit within the allocated bundle and so they know exactly how much they are going to pay in advance. And with cloud, the business unit economics have become much more granular. So we see companies nowadays that are doing not only hourly billing but even per minute and I think we are even starting to see some come out that are gauging by the second. So that’s great from environments where you have high volatility. A great example would be a news website, some event happens, everyone rushes to the website, you get 10x or 20x of traffic and then a day later you need to return back to that original amount. So in those cases the elasticity of cloud is a great fit for that use case.Martin: Okay great. What experiments did you do in order to understand how best to reach your customers? So what marketing channels did you test, and what have been your hypothesis, and how did you test them?Ben: The hypothesis for the most part we developed behind closed doors because we had almost a decade worth of experience working in this industry and understanding what our customers wanted. So in some regards it’s almost 10 years of continual customer development that gave us a really good foundation to work from. But as we created that initially hypothesis we then ran some very focused user groups. So we brought in one person at a time so that you don’t create a group think environment and sat them down behind an alpha version of our product and ask them to use it. And we were looking for two things:Can they successful launch a virtual server?What are th e adjectives or how would they describe the experience of using our product?And I think every single person successfully created a server which is not the case with all providers. Sometimes people get stuck in that creation process, so we hit simplicity there. And two is the experience, they were actually quite pleased with what they say. So very intuitive straight forward control panel language that isn’t confusing, keywords that resonate with their understanding of the market, and they also pointed out a bunch of mistakes or oversights on our part. Like you can only log in and sign up from the home page none of the other pages that we had provided those links. They helped us with a little bit of the user navigation to create a smoother flow. But that I think is actually very important. And we felt extremely challenged when we first said, ‘How are we going to get people to come into our office and actually provide this feedback?’Because you don’t want to take a stranger fro m the street who might be doing grocery shopping to evaluate a cloud server business. So we placed an Ad on Craigslist and decided to pay $100 for this 1 hour session and the criteria was that you would need to use a competitor service to prove that you are a potential customer for our product. And I think that that experiment thought us a lot about where our customer’s heads were at, but the fundamental framework was really developed over that decade working in the first company.Martin: How did you evaluate whether the customer will use your service? How did you try to estimate the willingness to pay for example?Ben: I don’t think we really estimated that, it wasâ€"Martin: Just taking competitive prices, or so?Ben: Yes. Although our pricing we actually developed in a very interesting way, we are a price leader in the industry today and we approached it bottoms up. So we calculated how much it would cost to deliver this basic unit of compute and we created a healthy margin with which we could run the business successfully. It just turned out that price point was substantially less than our competitors. And that’s a great question because why are we able to offer such a different price compared to the industry veterans?We do have a late comer advantage.We are extremely focused, so we only provide cloud servers.That means we don’t have to worry about legacy business or competing interests when we are able to really optimize the entire operation to deliver that as cost efficiently as possible, plus we have the industry of experience from the first business to understand the right relationships that we should build with vendors and the proper financing terms to makes all of this happen, so it was an unfair advantage.CORPORATE STRATEGYMartin: When I am look at this business model from the outside, I see mainly three steps:the one customer acquisition,then this type of technology which means hosting, infrastructure, etc., andthen the last part this kind of c ustomer service.In what parts do you think is your completive advantage?Ben: Yes, I mean our competitive advantage stems from the actual customer. Most infrastructure providers care more about the infrastructure more than the customer. So you see them leading with the what, like we sell this amount of resources with these features at this price. We like to lead with why. Why are we doing this is to create a simple infrastructure experience that developers love and who do we focus on, we focus on people rather than the technology. Everyone has access to virtualization, to the same silicon that is used to build the microprocessor, RAM, storage, network, we are all plugged into the same internet. Those are the commodity components. But what we try to do is create an experience based around the actual needs of a person to empower them with these tools so that they can build and easily manage their infrastructure and dedicate it and really focus their attention on the application. Becaus e that’s what creates their business, it’s not the server underneath. It’s like if you turn on the light switch, you expect the electricity to work so the only time you actually think about the infrastructure is when it doesn’t work. We try to really keep that analogy. We want to get out of the way our customers so that they don’t have to think about us and can actually focus on their business building heir applications, getting user tractions and growing their companies on top our cloud.Martin: Imagine a young developer is currently hosting a Bluehost or somewhere else. Now you want to target this kind of person in using your service. How do you minimize the switching cost, is there some kind of automated process where he can just say I’ve got a blue host account or Go Daddy account, whatever and then just click this button, you take care of the rest, etc.?Ben: Well we are working on the easy button, it’s not ready just yet. What we do is slightly different, we lead w ith the education approach. So we have written almost a thousand tutorials to date that talks about how to use the latest and best open source technology, but also educate users on best practices in the industry. So a portion of topics go towards migration, so how do you take a database and move it from one server to another? How do you migrate a web server? Or how do you actually migrate an entire configuration across multiple machines. And a savvy developer will recognize, ‘Hey I can actually use this information to migrate my service from Bluehost or any other host to DigitalOcean’ what’s great is, it’s not proprietary, it’s not locked information it will be applicable to any provider on any server. And that’s really something that we see lacking in the industry today.We have some great community sites like Stack Overflow but they limit the conversation to, here is a problem that I encountered and the community will provide solutions or answers but there is no open en ded conversation around, if I want to build a highly available low balanced, fault tolerant website, what are the technologies? How do I go about actually building this environment and then maintaining it? So you would have to dive deep into Google, find a couple of blog posts and use the spare piece of information to try to glue this together. And that’s what we are trying to create with our DigitalOcean Community, is to be seen as the place where developers can go to conversate about these topics, to accelerate and improve their infrastructure, whether they are a host with us or not.Martin: And by doing this you do two great things:one thing, you generate trust between your potential customers, customers and you andsecond thing is I assume you lower you customer acquisition cost because there is some kind of network effect and SEO as well.Ben: Yes, absolutely. We are ranking in the top 5 or 6 results across many different terms on Google. But what’s great about it is it’s va lidation from our customers because they succeed at deploying those applications and installing that software, it is also validationâ€"what does Google try to do? They try to surface the best content and we fall into the top 5 or 6 because we do invest a lot of dollars into making sure that the content that we produce is top notch. That it is both technically accurate but then it’s also written in a way that, someone new to the technology perhaps they are coming from a shared environment where they did not need to install all these different software packages, they can actually make the switch relatively easily based on the information they find in our community.But yes, it also attracts a lot of people to our website that learn about DigitalOcean, Ultimately go on to try it but the community is just one part to our success. The real reason why we have this phenomenal rate of growth is when customers use DigitalOcean for the first time, they truly encounter a unique experience tha t they can’t get anywhere else. And it’s exactly what they expect. It’s really quick and easy to use. And ultimately it leaves them with the feeling of satisfaction that they want to go and share it with someone else, whether it’s a friend, another developer or even just write a blog post about their experience using DigitalOcean. And that speaks to the original mission that we set out on, it’s to delight our customers, to simplify infrastructure because it’s not complex, at the same time it is growing more complex everyday. And that’s where we really want to use the community, as new projects come out, 4 west being a great example, a new product release that we just did last month. We are able to talk about it, educate our user base, and teach the best practices on how to deploy that in the cloud.Martin: When you are looking at your product and every entrepreneur that has some kind of vision and says ‘Okay’ this is where I want to go’. What do you think is still missing in your product that you say, ‘I want to do that!’Ben: Quite a few features are not present in the product just yet. So the challenge that we have is, we decided to write the software in house and that has created the experience that we have been able to deliver to our customers. Without writing it and owning the code there is just no way that we would have been able to deliver the intuitive interphase that we have. The other side of that sword is that we are responsible to develop the rest of the features as well. So I know our customers desperately want additional storage capacity. So it could be something like an object store, especially if you have a user generated content so someone that uploads pictures or media. You need a place to store that data and we provide only a limited amount with the droplet which is our virtual machine today. So there is no easy way to scale out storage. And the other component, I think that a lot of customers are asking for is more adv anced network services related to high availability. So as you develop a production website and want to ensure as close to 100% uptime as possible, taking advantage of low balance and to create full tolerance, or truly private and secure networking with access list and firewall policies. Those are the features that our customers would love to see us develop as quickly as we can. And a lot of where our investment dollars are going is into the engineering team and the efforts behind pushing those features to market.MARKET DEVELOPMENTMartin: Ben, let’s talk about the market development and the hosting segment. Imagine some kind of matrix where you have on one side the small companies and the larger companies. You are one of I would say the smaller companies, then you have something like Go Daddy or so on the larger spectrum. And then on the other hand you have the different kinds of hosting products that we talked about before like managed hosting, cloud, etc. What kind of trends can you identify in this? Is there some kind of migration from a lot of hosting users from the big ones to the small ones or the other way around? Is the hosting market in general growing in terms of total sales or is it more constant and just migration between the different services, what trends can you identify?Ben: Well, I think definitely the market is growing every single year, more users are coming online, more businesses are being built online and you might start out and host it from your apartment but as you gain revenue you quickly realize that’s not reliable. So you look to a data centre so that your application can live in a true 24/7 uptime environment. So there is no doubt that the market is growing.I think that the cloud providers probably represent thisâ€"one of the newer trends that we are starting to see is: before 2010 we may have only had one or two people in the space, today as we look around we have nearly 10 cloud providers that are trying to compete for busines s. And the majority of them are not able to differentiate clearly and I think that customers at that point then begin to look at things like price and convenience. The other trend that we are also seeing is the tools that are becoming available are actually starting to become much more complex, that complexity is really hitting away. So you have these frameworks for how to deploy larger applications so things like Docker. Platforms that are being open sourced so how do you run a Heroku inside of your own environment that allows you a quick and easy way to deploy a reels application.And I think in general we are starting to see that users care less and less about infrastructure and servers and more about the application that lies on top of it. So how can I really deliver my application as quickly as possible to the market and then ultimately maintain it with the least amount of resources and management that goes into it. So that’s certainly a trend that we picked up on and are tryi ng hard to stay ahead of. You can almost phrase it like: ‘By using DigitalOcean, you can delay the need for people that work in the developer operations segment, the SREs to ensure that your infrastructure is online. So we pour a lot of dollars into building a highly redundant environment from the start. Other cloud providers take a slightly different approach and say, these instances are ephemeral and they are here today, they could be gone tomorrow, so you really have to architect and application that can withstand a high level of failure. And we are not immune to issues and so we would always encourage customers to build availability into their applications, but we also have a better basis from which for them to get started. So in the early days when they are still relatively small they don’t experience that issue as much, obviously when you scale to thousands of nodes failure rates, even if it stays at relatively small percentage still creates a lot of issues.So I think that ’s another trend in general is that the software is finally beginning to catch up to these much larger distributing environments. The database has always been one of the biggest issues there with running a huge monolithic application on a single server that you scale horizontally. First you start out with two CPUs and then your business grows and you need a new chassis with 4 CPUs, and then it gets tricky after that. And some companies have actually been forced to re-write their application for months or a year to get out of that dependency and now what we are seeing is distribution and availability built into the software from the start so. NoSQL is a great example of that and many distributed Databases that have come as a result of it which inherently are a great fit for cloud providers because of the large number of nodes over disparate machines and resiliency to failure.The last thing on the trends, I think as a result of, I don’t want to take too much credit here, but Digit alOcean coming in with a great price point, an easy to use interphase and the education. I think we have enabled a whole new set of users to come online, so people from countries that are really developing nations and are beginning just to have their people get on the internet from Asia, within Europe, south America as well, are able to take advantage of DigitalOcean because of it’ price point and ease of use and finally start building something online. Whereas in the past they would need to wait much longer, develop on their home computer or laptop and perhaps never even take the step to publish their application live. And I am very proud of the tens of thousands people worldwide that have access to the server resources as a result of our company. We have also enabled thousands of students whether it’s through hackathons orâ€"we even sponsor our high school that I attended here in New York City so we provide them with a ton of resources every year for students to do their final term project and we do that across the nation and even internationally. These education facilities can actually request resources and sponsorship from DigitalOcean. We want to enable the next generation of developers and we don’t think there is any better way than getting your hands dirty, partially that’s how I learned, so I would love to see other students start out the same way.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS In New York (NY), we meet DigitalOcean CEO Ben Uretsky. He shares how he came up with the idea for his fast-growing company, how the current business model works, as well as provides some advice for young entrepreneurs.The transcription of the interview is provided below.INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we are at New York City interviewing Digital Ocean. Ben, who are you and what do you do?Ben: I am Ben Uretsky and I am CEO of Digital Ocean.Martin: Great. When did you start this company and what is your background?Ben: I started DigitalOcean in 2011 and my background; I have a Bachelor’s Degree here from Pace University in information systems which I basically got to show my dad that I can finish college but I have been working since I was 15 years old in high school. So my background is I thought myself Linux and networking and servers and then ultimately joined a bunch of Tech Companies starting out into the voice over IP space, and then transitioning to hosting, and then ultimately starting my own company.Martin: Okay and in parallel you did study.Ben: Oh, yes. I did study, I finished. So when I started working in high school, I graduated from there and then went to University and was able to actually start my first business at 21 before graduating from University.Martin: Great. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the similarities of those business models because most entrepreneurs have some area which are very like, and they tweak around and have some different business model in that kind of area.Ben: Yes, that’s definitely true. The business model that we use is a recurring subscription is really the heart of the engine. So the first company that I started in 2003 was called ServerStack and it managed hosting, just taking care of customer environment online. So let’s say you generate some revenue because you are a retailer, so e-commerce or you drive some sort of a subscription network maybe it’s video ads or advertising in general, in other wo rds you are generating revenue online, you want to make sure that your website stays active. And so we monitored and took care of that entire environment, provided a 100% uptime SLA, took care of back up security, capacity planning, network expansion, just everything that falls within IT management and helped our customers grow their business. And so what was great about that business was that as you sign up that first customer, more often than not, they continued to grow their business, so each month, each account produces more revenue and the goal is to get as many more accounts as you can.BUSINESS MODELMartin: And how is the current business model of Digital Ocean working?Ben: It’s similar. It’s interesting because we are a utility cloud provider. So customers can use as much or as little as they want. Our billing today works on hourly basis but the majority of our customers run what we call sticky infrastructure. So once they set it up, they won’t tear it down, it will con tinue to exist for months and essentially even for years. Although they have the luxury if the demand changes or they need to make a modification, they can pay by the hour and make those changes in real time. Nonetheless, each customer continues to spend more money every single month because they create a business which finds traction and attracts new users and so they need to grow the server foot print to keep up with demand. And so even though it’s not a traditional subscription model, based on that sticky usage, they wind up paying more every single month but that’s tied directly to their success and usage.Martin: And did you transition DigitalOcean directly from your former company because the business model is quite similar but you are coming from managed hosting to cloud hosting?Ben: Yeah. We had an opportunity to step back in 2011 and really think about where our first business was headed. And we had some concerns about dedicated servers, many other providers came out wit h virtualized solutions where you can purchase these systems online. Some of them sold the fraction of the server, so it seemed like price was substantially less but that’s also because you’ve got substantially less resources. Nonetheless, a consumer, the person who’s actually going to use those recourse, didn’t pay as much attention to the unit economics, they just thought, ‘Oh wow, I can spend $20 bucks a month, instead of two or three hundred. So in general customers really began to adopt cloud based servers and wanted to make sure that we stayed relevant within the market place. We had a good grasp on business operations as well as the technical sides, so the servers and the networks. Where the first business didn’t find traction was actually in its unique value proposition. So we were selling support like many other companies and it was hard to differentiate ourselves and stand out in that crowd of market.So as we began to analyze what the new business would be all about. We started reading a lot of books on marketing, on positioning, there is actually a book literally called, ‘Positioning’. I think it’s Al Ries and Jack Trout if I remember correctly. It talks about finding a unique value proposition that fits within the customer’s mindset. So if you have to re educate them, it’ll be a very difficult proposition and you also can’t compete against any of the existing values or opinions that they have. So you have to try to find a way to squeeze into all of that and still stay relevant.And so as we started thinking about building Digital Ocean the other concept that we really kept in mind is brand extension. And sometimes that works for example, perhaps you make a toothbrush and you decide to extend into the tooth paste business. It could work but it could also create some confusion. And what we see so many times in our industry is companies create brand extensions and so first they are dedicated server provider, then they become a m anaged service provider and then the cloud comes and around and all of a sound they offer virtually cloud offerings. But as the customer evaluates that front home page, they are confused, it’s like, ‘Can I buy this server or that server’? It’s a mixed message. So what we realize is, we could not extend our original business to provide cloud servers.So we decided to start a company from the ground up with a single laser focus on providing the best cloud server experience that we could, that levered on nearly a decade of running the first business, going through a lot of growing pains in helping our customers achieve scale. So we took that operational experience and we created a product. And that’s another huge distinction between the first company which was a services based business and essentially there, I like to say you tell the customer, ‘Yes’ and you then you go home or you go back to your office and you try to figure out how to deliver that service. In a product b ased business it’s the exact opposite. You build a product that has certain characteristics and that’s all that you can actually deliver because product developing takes a much longer time to actually achieve that new product version.So that really was the basis for Digital Oceans, all of these ideas floating around in our heads. We had access to couple hundred customers in our first company but we also did survey the market. And what we recognized is that no one was really focused on the developer. Everyone was focusing on larger scale businesses and the way that they thought about their companies was through technology lens. So they said, ‘Hey, we can deliver and build these features and this is what you guys will use’. And for a larger size business that actually works well because they understand their requirements, they have the necessary teams to manage that complexity and so access to this scalable infinite infrastructure is a great way for many companies to build the ir business. But if you take a look at the opposite end of that spectrum it’s an individual user, a developer who is just getting started, maybe they are learning a new language or they are pushing their application for the first time into a beta phase, trying to find that initial traction, create a start up that’s ultimately going to scale, that user was neglected. We decided to focus digital ocean on providing the simplest cloud infrastructure experience possible catered to the developer rather than to a scaling business.Martin: Ben when somebody is thinking about ‘what type of server hosting I am using?’, you said that it’s quite hard to distinguish the unit economics, can you walk us through the unit economics for the different type of segments like dedicated, managed, cloud hosting?Ben: Yes. So dedicated servers are fairly straight forward because you can a la carte pick and choose your processors, memory, storage and all of that gets bundled into a monthly price tag. And then typically you also pay extra for bandwidth and you have a lot of customization on dedicated server side. So anything that fits into the chassis you can probably get from a provider.Once you go into a cloud environment, it becomes a little different. Most cloud providers bundle a specific set of resources together, so you will receive one or two CPUs with a couple of Giga bytes of memory and some storage space. Now, some providers charge separately for bandwidth. We actually include an allotment of network transferred bandwidth with that original plan as well, so that customers don’t have to worry about, how much will I actually pay at the end of the month. The majority of our users fit within the allocated bundle and so they know exactly how much they are going to pay in advance. And with cloud, the business unit economics have become much more granular. So we see companies nowadays that are doing not only hourly billing but even per minute and I think we are even starti ng to see some come out that are gauging by the second. So that’s great from environments where you have high volatility. A great example would be a news website, some event happens, everyone rushes to the website, you get 10x or 20x of traffic and then a day later you need to return back to that original amount. So in those cases the elasticity of cloud is a great fit for that use case.Martin: Okay great. What experiments did you do in order to understand how best to reach your customers? So what marketing channels did you test, and what have been your hypothesis, and how did you test them?Ben: The hypothesis for the most part we developed behind closed doors because we had almost a decade worth of experience working in this industry and understanding what our customers wanted. So in some regards it’s almost 10 years of continual customer development that gave us a really good foundation to work from. But as we created that initially hypothesis we then ran some very focused use r groups. So we brought in one person at a time so that you don’t create a group think environment and sat them down behind an alpha version of our product and ask them to use it. And we were looking for two things:Can they successful launch a virtual server?What are the adjectives or how would they describe the experience of using our product?And I think every single person successfully created a server which is not the case with all providers. Sometimes people get stuck in that creation process, so we hit simplicity there. And two is the experience, they were actually quite pleased with what they say. So very intuitive straight forward control panel language that isn’t confusing, keywords that resonate with their understanding of the market, and they also pointed out a bunch of mistakes or oversights on our part. Like you can only log in and sign up from the home page none of the other pages that we had provided those links. They helped us with a little bit of the user navigat ion to create a smoother flow. But that I think is actually very important. And we felt extremely challenged when we first said, ‘How are we going to get people to come into our office and actually provide this feedback?’Because you don’t want to take a stranger from the street who might be doing grocery shopping to evaluate a cloud server business. So we placed an Ad on Craigslist and decided to pay $100 for this 1 hour session and the criteria was that you would need to use a competitor service to prove that you are a potential customer for our product. And I think that that experiment thought us a lot about where our customer’s heads were at, but the fundamental framework was really developed over that decade working in the first company.Martin: How did you evaluate whether the customer will use your service? How did you try to estimate the willingness to pay for example?Ben: I don’t think we really estimated that, it wasâ€"Martin: Just taking competitive prices, or so? Ben: Yes. Although our pricing we actually developed in a very interesting way, we are a price leader in the industry today and we approached it bottoms up. So we calculated how much it would cost to deliver this basic unit of compute and we created a healthy margin with which we could run the business successfully. It just turned out that price point was substantially less than our competitors. And that’s a great question because why are we able to offer such a different price compared to the industry veterans?We do have a late comer advantage.We are extremely focused, so we only provide cloud servers.That means we don’t have to worry about legacy business or competing interests when we are able to really optimize the entire operation to deliver that as cost efficiently as possible, plus we have the industry of experience from the first business to understand the right relationships that we should build with vendors and the proper financing terms to makes all of this happen, so it was an unfair advantage.CORPORATE STRATEGYMartin: When I am look at this business model from the outside, I see mainly three steps:the one customer acquisition,then this type of technology which means hosting, infrastructure, etc., andthen the last part this kind of customer service.In what parts do you think is your completive advantage?Ben: Yes, I mean our competitive advantage stems from the actual customer. Most infrastructure providers care more about the infrastructure more than the customer. So you see them leading with the what, like we sell this amount of resources with these features at this price. We like to lead with why. Why are we doing this is to create a simple infrastructure experience that developers love and who do we focus on, we focus on people rather than the technology. Everyone has access to virtualization, to the same silicon that is used to build the microprocessor, RAM, storage, network, we are all plugged into the same internet. Those are the commodit y components. But what we try to do is create an experience based around the actual needs of a person to empower them with these tools so that they can build and easily manage their infrastructure and dedicate it and really focus their attention on the application. Because that’s what creates their business, it’s not the server underneath. It’s like if you turn on the light switch, you expect the electricity to work so the only time you actually think about the infrastructure is when it doesn’t work. We try to really keep that analogy. We want to get out of the way our customers so that they don’t have to think about us and can actually focus on their business building heir applications, getting user tractions and growing their companies on top our cloud.Martin: Imagine a young developer is currently hosting a Bluehost or somewhere else. Now you want to target this kind of person in using your service. How do you minimize the switching cost, is there some kind of automated process where he can just say I’ve got a blue host account or Go Daddy account, whatever and then just click this button, you take care of the rest, etc.?Ben: Well we are working on the easy button, it’s not ready just yet. What we do is slightly different, we lead with the education approach. So we have written almost a thousand tutorials to date that talks about how to use the latest and best open source technology, but also educate users on best practices in the industry. So a portion of topics go towards migration, so how do you take a database and move it from one server to another? How do you migrate a web server? Or how do you actually migrate an entire configuration across multiple machines. And a savvy developer will recognize, ‘Hey I can actually use this information to migrate my service from Bluehost or any other host to DigitalOcean’ what’s great is, it’s not proprietary, it’s not locked information it will be applicable to any provider on any server. And that’s really something that we see lacking in the industry today.We have some great community sites like Stack Overflow but they limit the conversation to, here is a problem that I encountered and the community will provide solutions or answers but there is no open ended conversation around, if I want to build a highly available low balanced, fault tolerant website, what are the technologies? How do I go about actually building this environment and then maintaining it? So you would have to dive deep into Google, find a couple of blog posts and use the spare piece of information to try to glue this together. And that’s what we are trying to create with our DigitalOcean Community, is to be seen as the place where developers can go to conversate about these topics, to accelerate and improve their infrastructure, whether they are a host with us or not.Martin: And by doing this you do two great things:one thing, you generate trust between your potential customers, customers and you andsecond thing is I assume you lower you customer acquisition cost because there is some kind of network effect and SEO as well.Ben: Yes, absolutely. We are ranking in the top 5 or 6 results across many different terms on Google. But what’s great about it is it’s validation from our customers because they succeed at deploying those applications and installing that software, it is also validationâ€"what does Google try to do? They try to surface the best content and we fall into the top 5 or 6 because we do invest a lot of dollars into making sure that the content that we produce is top notch. That it is both technically accurate but then it’s also written in a way that, someone new to the technology perhaps they are coming from a shared environment where they did not need to install all these different software packages, they can actually make the switch relatively easily based on the information they find in our community.But yes, it also attracts a lot of people to our web site that learn about DigitalOcean, Ultimately go on to try it but the community is just one part to our success. The real reason why we have this phenomenal rate of growth is when customers use DigitalOcean for the first time, they truly encounter a unique experience that they can’t get anywhere else. And it’s exactly what they expect. It’s really quick and easy to use. And ultimately it leaves them with the feeling of satisfaction that they want to go and share it with someone else, whether it’s a friend, another developer or even just write a blog post about their experience using DigitalOcean. And that speaks to the original mission that we set out on, it’s to delight our customers, to simplify infrastructure because it’s not complex, at the same time it is growing more complex everyday. And that’s where we really want to use the community, as new projects come out, 4 west being a great example, a new product release that we just did last month. We are able to talk about it, educate our user base, and teach the best practices on how to deploy that in the cloud.Martin: When you are looking at your product and every entrepreneur that has some kind of vision and says ‘Okay’ this is where I want to go’. What do you think is still missing in your product that you say, ‘I want to do that!’Ben: Quite a few features are not present in the product just yet. So the challenge that we have is, we decided to write the software in house and that has created the experience that we have been able to deliver to our customers. Without writing it and owning the code there is just no way that we would have been able to deliver the intuitive interphase that we have. The other side of that sword is that we are responsible to develop the rest of the features as well. So I know our customers desperately want additional storage capacity. So it could be something like an object store, especially if you have a user generated content so someone that uploads pi ctures or media. You need a place to store that data and we provide only a limited amount with the droplet which is our virtual machine today. So there is no easy way to scale out storage. And the other component, I think that a lot of customers are asking for is more advanced network services related to high availability. So as you develop a production website and want to ensure as close to 100% uptime as possible, taking advantage of low balance and to create full tolerance, or truly private and secure networking with access list and firewall policies. Those are the features that our customers would love to see us develop as quickly as we can. And a lot of where our investment dollars are going is into the engineering team and the efforts behind pushing those features to market.MARKET DEVELOPMENTMartin: Ben, let’s talk about the market development and the hosting segment. Imagine some kind of matrix where you have on one side the small companies and the larger companies. You are one of I would say the smaller companies, then you have something like Go Daddy or so on the larger spectrum. And then on the other hand you have the different kinds of hosting products that we talked about before like managed hosting, cloud, etc. What kind of trends can you identify in this? Is there some kind of migration from a lot of hosting users from the big ones to the small ones or the other way around? Is the hosting market in general growing in terms of total sales or is it more constant and just migration between the different services, what trends can you identify?Ben: Well, I think definitely the market is growing every single year, more users are coming online, more businesses are being built online and you might start out and host it from your apartment but as you gain revenue you quickly realize that’s not reliable. So you look to a data centre so that your application can live in a true 24/7 uptime environment. So there is no doubt that the market is growing.I th ink that the cloud providers probably represent thisâ€"one of the newer trends that we are starting to see is: before 2010 we may have only had one or two people in the space, today as we look around we have nearly 10 cloud providers that are trying to compete for business. And the majority of them are not able to differentiate clearly and I think that customers at that point then begin to look at things like price and convenience. The other trend that we are also seeing is the tools that are becoming available are actually starting to become much more complex, that complexity is really hitting away. So you have these frameworks for how to deploy larger applications so things like Docker. Platforms that are being open sourced so how do you run a Heroku inside of your own environment that allows you a quick and easy way to deploy a reels application.And I think in general we are starting to see that users care less and less about infrastructure and servers and more about the applicat ion that lies on top of it. So how can I really deliver my application as quickly as possible to the market and then ultimately maintain it with the least amount of resources and management that goes into it. So that’s certainly a trend that we picked up on and are trying hard to stay ahead of. You can almost phrase it like: ‘By using DigitalOcean, you can delay the need for people that work in the developer operations segment, the SREs to ensure that your infrastructure is online. So we pour a lot of dollars into building a highly redundant environment from the start. Other cloud providers take a slightly different approach and say, these instances are ephemeral and they are here today, they could be gone tomorrow, so you really have to architect and application that can withstand a high level of failure. And we are not immune to issues and so we would always encourage customers to build availability into their applications, but we also have a better basis from which for them t o get started. So in the early days when they are still relatively small they don’t experience that issue as much, obviously when you scale to thousands of nodes failure rates, even if it stays at relatively small percentage still creates a lot of issues.So I think that’s another trend in general is that the software is finally beginning to catch up to these much larger distributing environments. The database has always been one of the biggest issues there with running a huge monolithic application on a single server that you scale horizontally. First you start out with two CPUs and then your business grows and you need a new chassis with 4 CPUs, and then it gets tricky after that. And some companies have actually been forced to re-write their application for months or a year to get out of that dependency and now what we are seeing is distribution and availability built into the software from the start so. NoSQL is a great example of that and many distributed Databases that have come as a result of it which inherently are a great fit for cloud providers because of the large number of nodes over disparate machines and resiliency to failure.The last thing on the trends, I think as a result of, I don’t want to take too much credit here, but DigitalOcean coming in with a great price point, an easy to use interphase and the education. I think we have enabled a whole new set of users to come online, so people from countries that are really developing nations and are beginning just to have their people get on the internet from Asia, within Europe, south America as well, are able to take advantage of DigitalOcean because of it’ price point and ease of use and finally start building something online. Whereas in the past they would need to wait much longer, develop on their home computer or laptop and perhaps never even take the step to publish their application live. And I am very proud of the tens of thousands people worldwide that have access to the server re sources as a result of our company. We have also enabled thousands of students whether it’s through hackathons orâ€"we even sponsor our high school that I attended here in New York City so we provide them with a ton of resources every year for students to do their final term project and we do that across the nation and even internationally. These education facilities can actually request resources and sponsorship from DigitalOcean. We want to enable the next generation of developers and we don’t think there is any better way than getting your hands dirty, partially that’s how I learned, so I would love to see other students start out the same way.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURSMartin: Ben over the last 15 years can you share what things have you learnt about how to start a company and what’s better not to do?Ben: Yes. I chased lucrative opportunities, so I started when I was 15. My first job was in a appliance store and I worked there for two weeks before I quit. But at that point I had saved enough money that I could buy a server online and from that server I started to generate revenue online, initially with advertising then obviously in the infrastructure space and today in the cloud space. So I think these opportunities present themselves and that’s what I love about New York City is the exposure to different industries. You should follow your passion and surround yourself with people, join a company or business that you are really interested in and let the business create itself. An opportunity will strike you, you will recognize that this is something that you feel passionate about and chase that dream. But I would say don’t quit your day job. How can you use a lean model to interate quickly? Try to build a business on the side. When that responsibility becomes too great for you to manage as side project you know you have something that’s worth investing into and I would recommend making the transition at that time. I have had a number of employees though out the years look up us as role models and say, ‘Wow, it’s fantastic that you are able to start this business, I am going to quit and I am going to go ahead and start my own company’. And I always tell them the same thing, I’m like, ‘Are you going to quit and disappear into a vacuum to try to create something or you are leaving because you have an idea that you want to pursue?’. And unfortunately so far those businesses haven’t survived. So I would say surround yourself with the right environment, learn from it, see what you become passion about.Martin: Great. Thank you very much for your time, Ben.Ben: Yes. Definitely.Martin: And the next time you think about starting a company, you should think about whether you need some external funding and if that’s the case maybe then you should quit the company and then start your business, or if you don’t need very much money and you don’t need to talk to clients all the time but having an online business then yo u can think about bootstrapping in parallel to your employment. Thank you very much.Ben: Yes. Thank you, nice to meet you.Martin: Thanks.

Analysis Of The Book The Great Gatsby - 928 Words

The American Dream and Paths to Happiness According to Jim Cullen in the â€Å"History of the Dream†, the American Dream is enshrined as our national motto. The American Dream lives in each and every one living in the United States. However, there are different variants that described it. For example, in the movie The Great Gatsby the main characters portrayed his dream as the acquisition of properties and money. While similar in the movie The Wolf of Wall Street alcohol, drugs, sex and wealth are the epitome of the American Dream. When one thinks about the American Dream the word happiness comes along with the definition. Although there are sacrifices and sometimes illegal actions that are required to follow the main goal. In these two†¦show more content†¦Nevertheless, when he finally obtained his goal. Daisy decided to stay with her husband instead of Gatsby. At that point Gatsby’s dream broke down, and happiness disappeared. This roller-coaster of events th at make up that dream, are exhibit in the song American Dream by Casting Crowns. This song narrates the story of a father who is working hard to give his family the best and he barely has time to spend with them. However , â€Å"he worked and he built with his own two hands and he poured all he had in a castle made with sand But the wind and the rain are coming crashing in time will tell just how long his kingdom stands†. Just like Gatsby after he obtained everything a person could possible imagine, his dream disappeared like sand. Similarly, The Wolf of Wall Street a movie that also included Leonardo DiCaprio as the main character, shows another side of the American Dream. The Wolf of Wall Street is one of those movies where every vice is shown, from sex, alcohol to drug overdose. The Wolf in the hopes of obtaining the American Dream got caught in illicit trade in the stock market. He used to sell and re-sell owned stocks to other customers. In a sense he was selling those c ustomer’s hopes of also obtaining the American Dream. While climbing the stairs of success he motivated and also humiliated his staff. This type of behavior he used to empower

Contemporary Moral Issues Essay Topics Guide

Contemporary Moral Issues Essay Topics Guide In addition, it would likewise be better to select one where you have some experience in. Some students utilize the very first idea which arrives in their head and work on it, but the outcome isn't successful. Naturally, you can pick any other topic. Following are a few of the suggested sociology essay topic for those students that are unable to choose a great topic for their assignment. There's an array of essay types, and every one of them is able to assist you in developing your abilities and widening your knowledge. No other considerations will be utilised to learn your semester grade. To put it simply, an outline is a concise review of your work, which highlights its major points. So don't forget to take this supreme excellent service to acquire the ideal score in your college essays and papers. Imagine the caliber of writing you'll receive from a low-cost essay writing service. You can go on the internet and hunt for contemporary history thesis topics. Narrative papers are a sort of writing which captures an experience in a particular time. The social issues research papers may appear easy to write in comparison with different topics, but still it demands an extremely creative strategy, an enormous quantity of curiosity and capacity to think beyond the box and search data in unconventional sources. Each time you log onto the net and visit an on-line retailer, news company or perhaps a social networking site, computer internet businesses gather information about you. The absolute most important element of a thriving work is choosing a great topic to talk about and to defend by arguments. Many advertisements don't take into consideration the matter of ethics. Try out anything which broadens your understanding of expected topics. In the event you are in need of a moral value speech, you should produce the presentation of the key points using speaker's notes along with add the sentences addressed to your audience. The list below is supposed to be evocative instead of comprehensive. You ought to carefully look at creating an informative case list that's simple to defend. Below, you will locate a list of pop culture topics of distinct categories. Religion can develop into the reason for civil war in a nation. Regardless of the sort of society one was born into, the concept of morality is going to be one that draws attention. Explain your Modern society has proven that reading is linked to development in many regions of the human life. The Debate Over Contemporary Moral Issues Essay Topics If you still doubt whether you're able to deal with this kind of assignment for a definition essay alone, we're delighted to inform you that there's a superb solution! You've just checked a superior instance of moral values essay. You should first determine the reason behind your essay, before you are able to write persuasive content about it. Among the different sorts of essay, there's a definition essay that could appear to be among the most simple assignments. Thus, understanding of the way to compose an analytical essay is important. Be conscious of the size it must be and begin writing the narrative essay outline. A thesis isn't a slight or insignificant assignment. Your thesis has to be clear and easy. Religion is certainly an important supply of moral values. Morality has a collection of unsolved problems, the solution on which usually presents a selection. Now the question is the way to turn into sincere if you previously believe you're sincere. Pure thought is the capability to command. Sincerity increases with the decrease of false personality. Freedom makes man accountable for his acts to the extent they are voluntary. Life is made up of choices. It does not have wrong choices.

The Effects of Music in the Mind Free Essays

The effects of music on the mind are profound. Music is a vital part of the General Education programs all through a student’s education, regardless of grade level. Many studies have shown that the effects of music on everyday studies are significant. We will write a custom essay sample on The Effects of Music in the Mind or any similar topic only for you Order Now Not only that, but also that the earlier a child starts learning about or performing music, the more quickly his or her mind starts to develop. â€Å"Studies show that classical music can stimulate brain development in babies, helping them appreciate relationships of sequence and time that will prove useful later when they study math and science.† The fact that music enhances learning is proven, yet funding is still cut very significantly, sometimes even completely, in many schools throughout the United States. There are many theories as to why this is happening; it could be inadequate education of today’s general music teachers, or it could be that there is priority in another department that takes more of the school’s funding. For whatever reason, it has to stop. Music is just as important as any other subject taught in school, or any other extracurricular activities. How to cite The Effects of Music in the Mind, Papers

prescription drugs Essays (400 words) - Isotretinoin, Retinoids

i have been prescribed to OC 80's for 6 years now for my debilitating pain. i started snorting them about a year back when i learned that it works much faster and better. i'm currently up to 4 a 5 a day. yesterday i got my script filled to learn that they had come out w/a new generic replacement that has OP on the side that used to say OC. i've tried everything in my power from hose clamps, to files to try to crush these damn things down to a powder to snort them and nothing seems to work. taking these pills orally does NOTHING for me except make me feel tired and sick to my stomache and i had to stay home from work today because of this. i know there has to be a way to break down these new generic pills and separate the plastic from the oxycodone, but have yet to learn what that way is. so far, i got instructions from another site to microwave and freeze repeatedly a couple times but am still not satisfied w/the results. someone please, how do i break these new generic pills down to a snortable form? 122 Replies Accutane And Infertility Monday, 12/6/2010 12:10:26 PM in Accutane I took accutane almost 14 years ago as a teenager. I am now a 32 year old woman who has just been diagnosed with infertility that they believe is linked to autoimmune issues. I truly believe that accutane is the cause of this; from the research that I have done it seems that accuntane has been linked to other thyroid-related diseases, but that they have not yet been able to prove a link between accutane and infertility. There are, however, actually more people like me out there than I originally thought. Being diagnosed with ovarian dysfunction has been a horrific, horrific blow. And while there was plenty of information about accutane and birth defects, no one ever mentioned a possibility of future infertility. I was a teenager! This is a tragedy and I believe something should be done about it. If you too have been affected diagnosed with infertility and have taken accutane, please email me. There are plenty of class action suits against accutance. If there are enough of us, we can come together to do the medical research and get the help we now need. 19 Replies

A Violent Society (media violence) essays

A Violent Society (media violence) essays The American society, it seems, is often depicted as violence portrayed at its best. As a people we obviously do not condone or accept this form of action yet we know it is among us. Everyday we see or hear about an evil occurring, whether it is a hit and run, a robbery, or a murder. Because of the consistency of these events in our country, many people have sought to answer the question, Why? Why do people become so infatuated with wrong doing that they perform such violent crimes? Some have come to believe that our own entertainment industry is at fault. More often than not, in television and cinema there are themes and messages involving violence. Can these enjoyable experiences make us feel as if we need to act them out? I believe not. It seems that the average person who enjoys this entertainment may come to appreciate violence, yet still will never think of acting as a part of it. Although I will also suggest that violence on television can and has pursued those who already hav e the sort of behavior and mind-set to produce cruelty. Another question to ask is, when will the creators of this leisure activity take it to the point where it will create a desire to act out what we see and hear? First we heard about violence, then we got to see it, and now we get to control it in games. Is this far enough? Whats next? Some see this entertainment as simple pleasure, others can see it as a push to evil, and still others say it just shouldnt go any further. Everyday there becomes more and more violence in our entertainment. We see the new action-packed good guy bad guy T.V. show or we buy tickets to the latest horror film. Our minds are already set that anything with immoral scenes has got to be good. Some then begin to enjoy crime filled content so much that theyll never miss anything new. Yet, when they watch the news alert on the latest murder. They become just as sympathetic and dis ...

Virginia During the Civil War

Virginia During the Civil War The Confederate States of America (CSA) was founded in February 1861. The actual Civil War began on April 12, 1861. Just five days later,  Virginia became the eighth state to secede from the Union.   The decision to secede was anything but unanimous and resulted in the formation of West Virginia on November 26, 1861. This new border state did not secede from the Union.  West Virginia is the sole state that was formed by seceding from a Confederate state. Article IV, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution provides that a new state cannot be formed within a state without that state’s consent. However, with Virginias secession this was not enforced. Virginia had the largest population in the South and its  storied history played an enormous role in the founding of the U.S. It was the  birthplace and home of Presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.  In May 1861, Richmond, Virginia became the capital city of the CSA because it had the natural resources that Confederate government so badly needed to effectively wage a war against the Union.  Although the city of Richmond is situated only a mere 100 miles from the U.S. capital in Washington, D.C., it  was a large industrial city. Richmond was also the home to Tredegar Iron Works, one of the largest foundries in U.S. prior to the onset of the Civil War.  During the war, Tredegar produced over 1000 canons for the Confederacy as well as armor plating for warships.  In addition to this, Richmond’s industry produced a number of different war materials such as ammunition, guns and swords as well as supplied uniforms, tents and leather goods to the Confederat e Army. Battles in Virginia The majority of the battles in the Civil War’s Eastern Theater took place in Virginia, mainly due to the need to protect Richmond from being captured by Union forces. These battles include the Battle of Bull Run, which is also known as the First Manassas. This  was the first major battle of the Civil War fought on July 21, 1861 and also a major Confederate victory. On August 28, 1862, the Second Battle of Bull Run began. It lasted for three days with over a combined 100,000 soldiers on the battlefield.   This battle also ended with a Confederate victory. Hampton Roads, Virginia was also the site of the first naval battle between ironclad warships. The USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia fought to a draw in March 1862.  Other major land battles that occurred in Virginia include Shenandoah Valley, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville. On April 3, 1865, the Confederate forces and government evacuated their capital at Richmond and troops were ordered to burn all of the industrial warehouses and businesses that would be of any value to Union forces. Tredegar Irons Works was one of a few businesses that survived the burning of Richmond, because its  owner had it protected through the use of armed guards.  The advancing Union Army began to quickly extinguish the fires, saving most of the residential areas from destruction. The business district didn’t fare as well with some estimating at least twenty-five percent of the businesses suffering a total loss.  Unlike General Sherman’s destruction of the South during his March to the Sea,  it was the Confederates themselves who destroyed the city of Richmond. On April 9, 1865, the Battle of Appomattox Court House proved to be the last significant battle of the Civil Was as well as the final battle for General Robert E. Lee. He would officially surrender there to Union General Ulysses S. Grant on  April 12, 1865.   The war in Virginia was finally over.

Christianity and the World of Faith Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Christianity and the World of Faith - Essay Example Same is the case with love and tolerance which needs to be set in free so that people can understand how it is essential to inculcate a society which bases itself on growth and productivity of its own people. If they interact freely, it is taken as a plus point, and even Christianity accepts it with both arms wide open. Similarly, making education and healthcare free throughout the world will help the cause of any society of the world and hence help us get across the dictum of difficulties that have more bearing on the lives of the people that are seen possible (Rolfe, 2004). I opine that Christianity allows people to live freely and understand the real value of love, tolerance, compassion, and empathy. Christianity helps the people to evolve in a positive fashion which indeed is a good thing. Hence I see these three issues currently being signed for the different societies that exist within the world in the present times. My own core beliefs regarding Christianity surround the basis of doing well on to others so that it comes back in some form. Also, believe in God that he knows about everything and that Jesus was the noblest of men amongst all mankind. I base my beliefs on Christianity with what I have learned over the years as well as what my elders have told me over the years. I have seen devoted Christians during my lifetime who have always believed the basis of their religion because they tend to feel it this way. I am confident that Christians all over the world are proactively driven to bring goodness forward and this is one aspect that has been documented time and again (Emmett, 2011). From my perspective, Christianity is very close to being good to one’s own self as well as to the people who come in contact with this individual. I feel confident about Christianity because it provides peace of mind and heart.  

Project II Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Project II - Essay Example alize that there is actually a net surplus that is left after accounting for all the fixed expenses, which represented about 40.48% of net income; and the variable expenses amounting to 47.62%. It simply gives the family more leeway in terms of adjusting the variable expenses when time comes that we need to minimize some expenses to give way to more important priorities. The projected income is easy to determine as no other sources were currently eminent. The income from salaries of both my husband and me as teachers comprises the basic cash in which is easy to establish on a monthly or yearly basis. On the other hand, cash expenses are composed of several different items, and the expenses are clearly classified into fixed and variable expenses. Some could be established as regular fixed expenses which do not differ on a monthly basis. On the other hand, other expenses such as food, savings for emergency purposes and miscellaneous expenses differ depending on diversity of needs and requirements of family members across time. I therefore learned that a substantial portion of our family income is spent on different needs but somehow, by managing to allot a small amount for emergency purposes and still be able to maintain some surplus, we could be able to meet unforeseen and unanticipated expenses and could plan for future financial goals. From the income and expense developed in September, the same income and expenses are expected in October, except for the additional savings needed as outlined in the financial goals worksheet in Part I, where the long term goal of a vacation in Hawaii, life insurance of children, and funds to be earmarked for the coming Christmas vacation need to be allotted as additional savings. These amounts were taken from the net surplus of $750. When the additional savings are taken out, only $54.17 will remain. One intends to use a computer spreadsheet (Excel) to record and continue monitoring the income and expenses, as well as managing

The state of human nature

The state of human nature Assignment The State of Human Nature The conflict on the ideas between Thomas Hobbes and Rousseau in terms of the definition of human nature is seen like a state without social structure. In his book â€Å"The Leviathan†, Hobbes wrote that all condition of the people is one in misery wherein we are compelled to act violently and compete with each others to be able to attain their desired goals in life (Green 1993). As such, men are naturally violent and greedy wherein if they want something, they will do their best to obtain such thing. Thus, the result is that men becomes more inclined towards giving importance to themselves rather than to the general good which they sometimes try to portray. Moreover, as for Jean Jacques Rousseau, men are naturally peaceful and only wishes to live like that as this is what is important in his life. The claim of this paper is that men are naturally violent and we tend to be defensive on things that usually affect our interest. The human nature presented in The Leviathan is based on a society where there is no government to administer the people. As such, people tend to become more aggressive protecting their interest and will not be in accord to anybody that will intend to destroy such interest. The paper presents two types of government which are democratic and authoritarian rule. The way human nature will be influenced will be discussed on each regime to show that we humans cannot live peacefully without the intervention of the government. The Human Nature Philosophy As Human nature ideas grew, philosophers would try to integrate Human nature teaching with government and society. The result threatened the very core of different ideas. Today, we see increased pressure to water down orthodoxy and integrate it with current philosophy and teaching (Schopoenhauer 2012). Much of what passes for teachings today is nothing but different diverse perspectives that states we possess the divine and all we must do is realize that secret. But human nature is not about humans becoming something which they originally are not. Two types of government will be presented which somehow affects human nature. Democratic government in affecting human nature A large number of nations have already adopted a democratic government. A democratic government aims to improve the freedom of the people. The structures of the government and the frameworks serve as guide to the acts of the people. The government, the constitution and the system are the composition for executing the principle within a country. The government as the structure, the constitution as the framework and the system as the means if implementation. The government has proven itself on serving its people at its best. The roles are fulfilled well and it has developed further to the changing times (Dickson 2014). However, the criticism on its process as not following the majority rule questions the democratic principle that the majority should be followed. Due to the idea that the people are influenced by the society, the idea of majority rule is associated with basic principles that could touch human rights to also protect the minority. With this belief, the diversity of the peo ple, which follows pluralism, is observed. The constitution that serves as the fundamental law of the land was amended in accordance of the developing times. Basically, the constitution is the declaration of rights of the individuals and the principles of the state. Rooted from the ideas of English Magna Carta and the principle of the balance of power, the constitution continues to be the guidelines for the state to assure that human rights are being considered. The democratic notion is seen on how it gives freedom to the people. For instance, the press shows how freedom is given importance in a nation. To determine the different rights of the people the government usually use the media. As an effective medium, television, newspaper, radio and the internet are the popular ways to express public opinion. It is use to educate as it gives information to the people. It gives the people a sense of political involvement and socialization which is good because it shows that the people participate in political issues. It serves as the watchdog on government activities ensuring that the rights are observed. However, as the basic principle on freedom of expression is applied, certain laws are imposed to observe responsible use of media. It is also important that human rights violations are being watched so that proper authorities will know it. Schmitter (2010) states that the consequences of democracy brings about significant changes in power relation s, properly rights and social status within a society. Human nature can be influenced by what the people hear and do within the society. Moreover, despite of the success of this type of government, some criticizes it. Most experts on divided societies and constitutional engineering broadly agree that deep societal divisions pose a grave problem for democracy, and that it is therefore generally more difficult to establish and maintain democratic government (Lijphart 2004). Different factions in the government results to different views within the society. The separation in the nation somehow shows the divisiveness in the system that can affect the decisions made by the country, but somehow it is useful for an atmosphere of competition and improvement between the parties. Democracy is a richly textured and complicated concept and scholars have often argued the manner of its measurement. There are only a few sets of information on political regimes that can be deployed as the foundation for the exploration of issues on democratization. Most significant are the data on civil liberties and political rights developed by Freedom House, a US nongovernmental organization covering the period of 1972 to 2011 and the project known as Polity IV which presents data on political regime transitions and characteristics, with information on every country that can be trace way back in 1946. Both sources of data have numerical scores that specify where a country belongs either in a dictatorship or in a liberal democracy. Authoritarian Rule influence on Human Nature This government is one that imposes authoritarian rules are seen on countries in the Arab nation. Hybrid regimes in the Arab world are considered to be electoral authoritarian, competitive authoritarian and partly-free authoritarian. Iraq, Kuwait and Lebanon are often considered as regimes that are democratizing with their hybrid nature going on the side of complete democracy. However, several obstacles will be faced by these countries for them to evolve into stable and full-fledged democratic systems. For instance, Lebanon was a democracy with free elections from 1972 to 1975. Despite of the presence of democratic institutions within Lebanon, the possibility of significant change is inhibited because these institutions have a framework of sharing their powers. Another typical example of a hybrid regime is Kuwait that applied political liberalization in the year 1992 and was praised as a classic instance of the manner states can remain democratize and be stable gradually (Vannelli 20 01). However as of today, the authorities that were elected by the people had too little authority for the political system to be considered as a democracy. Specifically, there are still institutions in Kuwait that do not respect popular rule and hinders the cause of political liberalization. The family of al-Sabah holds the authority to rule while the Congress plays the role of a watchdog and with the limited authority to restrain the cabinet. What makes such authoritarian countries become firm and resolute is because this type of regime goes with the culture of the country. The people within the said country are disciplined and properly follow the law. These kinds of people are usually found within pure authoritarian countries in the Arab world include Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, Qatar, Oman and Jordan. Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE are considered by experts to be â€Å"dynastic monarchies† which means that the rules of the family govern instead of a sole individual and power is distributed among the members of the family. Succession to the throne is normally decided by the members of the family and a ruler can be removed from the position if he or she loses the allegiance or faith of the family. In Arab monarchies that are nondynastic like Morocco, Oman and Jordanthe monarch can select his successor and has absolute power over the government. In these countries, the members of the royal family could rule at the pleasure of the reigning monarch. Different theorists states that due to the strict policies implemented within the country, the people does not resort to violence and they only do this in a collective manner. The major explanations can be grouped into four aspects: those related to the cultural requirements of a democracy, those that pinpoint the location of the Arab world, those that involve foreign policy and those that highlight the significance of government agency. Scholars referring to the lack of cultural requirements to achieve democracy in the Arab world can be traced to the Arab or Muslim cultures that run contrary to the values associated with democracy. In particular, individual rights and participatory government are unknown to the political tradition of the Muslim world because the Islam religion considers God as the sole authority and that society must be guided by the laws of God. As a consequence, there is no legal basis for a representative government, civil codes or the mere sovereignty of a man. Meanwhile, the prevalence of oil in the Arab world significantly pushes authoritarianism since oil revenues goes directly to the government that allows it to distribute sizeable patronage to the population without the need for taxation. This rentier effect allows the public to enjoy quality public services and goods without the need for taxation that hinders their demands for reform within the government. Conclusion: In terms of the way people respond to their environment, it is but necessary to note that the government where one lives in usually affects the nature of the people. This is because the rules force people to become disciplined or to become free and do whatever they want. The philosophy had given much to the shaping of human history, and one important part of it is the contribution of well known Human nature thinkers. The main ideas were focused on men and spirit, wherein it is based from different aspects of society such as the ethical norms of humanity (Rogoff 2003). The flourishment of these teachings had an influence to the warring nations on that time, the thinking of the people and the decisions of leaders from different nations. These schools of thoughts contributed to the development of each of them, making each of the schools competent sources of philosophies and teachings.