Leaders vs. Followers

So what makes you a leader, and what makes you a follower?

A leader is someone who loses contentment when things get easy. A leader wants to make things

more challenging for themselves. A good leader doesn't do something because someone else has done it. A leader will set new challenges for themselves. Just like a good leader in athletics will try to beat there best times, a musician will search for more difficult music, and a business man will shoot for higher profits. A leader is always looking for more challenges and is never content with ease.

A follower isn't content with ease either. But they are not content for a different reason. A follower is not content because he wants to follow the leader. He doesn't want to fall behind the marks set by the leader. A follower will say, "I want the big screen tv that Billy has." or "I want to be able to do 10 pull ups because Bob can."  The follower moves along creating their goals based on the goals and achievements of the leaders. So he follows the leaders every move.

How do you become a leader, or a good leader? Make sure your setting your own goals. Don't do something, or say something, just because someone else does it. Always look to improve on what you've done. Be careful though, because there is a fine line between being a leader, and being a perfectionist. A good leader has people wanting to follow them. So when your trying to make something better, make sure that it's actually better. Don't give up on your morals just to get followers though. A good leader follows their moral compass, while gaining followers.

I hope this helped! Please share this with anybody you think this will benefit. Leave a comment(s) with any questions. 

Seth 
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Are Energy Drinks Like Monster Bad For You?

Are Energy Drinks Like Monster Bad For You? Drinking a 16oz zero sugar energy drink a few

time's a week isn't bad for you. Drinking 4, 5, 6, 7 a week is bad for.

Scientific studies have shown that sugar and high fructose sugar lead to diabetes, weight gain, cancer, and some heart diseases. Caffeine can cause you to crash and burn, and to much caffeine has been linked to heart disease.

There hasn't been any real scientific evidence that artificial sweeteners are bad for you. So as long as you stick to just a few every week. The one's that have zero sugar/ zero calorie, and you're spacing them out over a period of time you should be fine.

Technology isn't the only solution to surveillance problems

That’s it, I’m calling it early: this is officially the “summer of surveillance.” Especially with the latest news that due to this surveillance, not one, but two, separate companies announced they were shutting down their encrypted email services (including the one that Edward Snowden was using) this week.

“If you knew what I know about email, you might not use it either,” said the owner of one of those companies, Lavabit.

This statement, paradoxically, both misses the point and hints at the right course of action.

Because there are two separate — yet often entangled — ideologies in our discourse about the surveillance state: The first is the individualistic conception of cyber-hygiene: how you should behave to secure your own communications, protect your own data, and avoid your own tracking. The second is the notion of tech-centric solutionism (a term popularized by Evgeny Morozov): what tech hack, device, or app can I turn to for a quick fix to my privacy troubles?

The problem is that focusing on one or both of these approaches distracts from the much-needed political reform and societal pushback necessary to dig up a surveillance state at its root.

It’s a telling sign when such companies go against the prevailing instinct of developing yet another fix.
To be sure, personal protections are important. There are some easy plug-ins and simple behavioral changes people can make. And there’s no shortage of articles and how-to guides tips for securing privacy, with headlines promising “Five ways to stop the NSA from spying on you.” Through means such as end-to-end encryption, software for anonymized web surfing, and removing device’s batteries, why, you too, can enjoy secure communications. But if we really want to attempt to thwart the NSA’s spying, well, you’ll need to brush up on your computer science skills and take a deep dive into cryptographic techniques.

Here’s the thing, though: We shouldn’t resolve ourselves to a life where cyber-hygiene and an obsession with technological solutions fools us into thinking we’ve somehow preserved our privacy.

This might be sufficient if, say, we’re trying to prevent a boss or partner from snooping. But it’s always going to be a losing battle when going against a panoptic titan whose methods are wide-reaching, constantly evolving, and classified. Just look at the fates of Lavabit and Silent Circle, the two email services that shuttered last week. Despite no subpoenas, warrants, security letters, “or anything else by any government”, Silent Circle admitted “we see the writing on the wall.”

It’s a telling sign when one company is bullied — and the other preemptively so — into going against the prevailing instinct of developing yet another technological fix that provides the desired protections. (It’s also a telling sign that Obama explicitly endorses solutionism. He said in his speech Friday that people can turn to tech if they don’t like government snooping: “I mean, there may be some technological fixes that provide another layer of assurance.”)

The fundamental belief in technology’s ability to “fix” everything ignores the fact that not everything needs to be fixed in the first place. And it gives birth to questions such as what if Trayvon Martin wore Google Glass? Sure, technology could help — but such questions (and answers!) miss the larger social and cultural context that needs to be addressed here.

In fact, taking the tech-centric route can lead to even more severe, unintended consequences. There’s a feedback loop between solutionist tendencies and the growth of a surveillance state: The rapid spread and use of technologies ironically laid the very foundation for it to engulf more and more aspects of our lives. Governments around the world must be saying a prayer of thanks because most of us willingly carry, at all times, a location tracker, listening bug, camera, internet hunter-gatherer, and more in the form of a smartphone.

Except for the most cybersecurity-savvy among us (and even then not if services like Lavabit and Silent Circle continue to wane), trying to outsmart and outrun the government’s data-hungry tendrils will only leave people ensnared. This is especially true when it comes to those who do not have the privilege — knowledge, ability, or wealth — to protect their privacy.

Being a “techie” often blinds us to the plight of the majority — who, for one reason or another, don’t know they’re targets for tracking or simply can’t avoid being one. For many, the actions necessary to set up encryption or even abandon certain services are not feasible. Privacy should not become a luxury for an elite tech-savvy few; it matters far too much. Yet without structural reform those who lack cyber-privilege are often left exposed and tracked.

The what-if-Trayvon-Martin-wore-Glass questions (and answers!) miss the larger social and cultural context that needs to be addressed here.
And even if we do take the steps to have good data practices, we’re likely to run up against a precarious catch-22 where many common techniques to protect privacy can be met with legal recourse — as security expert Ashkan Soltani pointed out here in WIRED. Just using encryption can land you on NSA’s list of suspicious people.

Lest we forget, these power dynamics aren’t distributed evenly, either. Those of under-represented class, gender, race, and other minorities — who by birth or circumstance don’t have the benefit of a social network of influencers — are often the first to fall.

The Snowden leaks have led to renewed, even frantic, interest in finding the best ways to protect privacy and resist the government’s blanket monitoring and collecting of our data. A recent Pew Research poll shows, for the first time, that more people are concerned about the status of their civil liberties than about threats from terrorism.

Those who are under-represented don’t have the benefit of a social network of influencers and are often the first to fall.
Concern. It’s a great start, but preserving democratic freedoms and fighting the government’s spy-machine will mean focusing and turning concern into actionable change. It will require “coordinated dissent” from individuals, advocacy groups, and, yes, technology companies. Smart people like Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) warn that our inaction opens the door for such surveillance to become an irreversible and regrettable part of our society, but the hard truth is that citizens need to muster incredible will to demand or enact sorely needed privacy protections.

But the task of defending privacy from surveillance shouldn’t fall to a tech-savvy or solutionist few. And even then, as Michael Phillips pointed out in The New Yorker, the few dissenters “are painted as a rogue’s gallery of hackers, leakers, spies, and traitors.”

The Good of having Mentally Ill in Command

When times are good and the ship of state only needs to sail straight, mentally healthy people function well as leaders. But in times of crisis and tumult, those who are mentally abnormal, even ill, become the greatest leaders. We might call this the Inverse Law of Sanity.

Consider Neville Chamberlain. Before the Second World War, he was a highly respected businessman from Birmingham, a popular mayor and an esteemed chancellor of the exchequer. He was charming, sober, smart—sane. Winston Churchill, by contrast, rose to prominence during the Boer War and the first World War. Temperamental, cranky, talkative, bombastic—he bothered many people. During the "wilderness" years of the 1930s, while the suave Chamberlain got all the plaudits, Churchill's own party rejected him. When not irritably manic in his temperament, Churchill experienced recurrent severe depressive episodes, during many of which he was suicidal. Even into his later years, he would complain about his "black dog" and avoided ledges and railway platforms, for fear of an impulsive jump. "All it takes is an instant," he said.

Aristotle was the first to point out the link between madness and genius, including not just poets and artists but also political leaders. I would argue that the Inverse Law of Sanity also applies to more ordinary endeavors. In business, for instance, the sanest of CEOs may be just right during prosperous times, allowing the past to predict the future. But during a period of change, a different kind of leader—quirky, odd, even mentally ill—is more likely to see business opportunities that others cannot imagine.

Abraham Lincoln famously had many depressive episodes, once even needing a suicide watch, and was treated for melancholy by physicians. Mental illness has touched even saintly icons like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., both of whom made suicide attempts in adolescence and had at least three severe depressive episodes in adulthood.

In looking back at historical figures, I do not speculate about their relationships with their mothers or their dark sexual secrets, the usual stuff of "psychohistory." Instead, I base my diagnoses on the most widely accepted sources of psychiatric evidence: symptoms, family history, course of illness, and treatment. How, then, might the leadership of these extraordinary men have been enhanced by mental illness?

An obvious place to start is with depression, which has been shown to encourage traits of both realism and empathy (though not necessarily in the same individual at the same time).

"Normal" nondepressed persons have what psychologists call "positive illusion"—that is, they possess a mildly high self-regard, a slightly inflated sense of how much they control the world around them.

Mildly depressed people, by contrast, tend to see the world more clearly, more as it is. In one classic study, subjects pressed a button and observed whether it turned on a green light, which was actually controlled by the researchers. Those who had no depressive symptoms consistently overestimated their control over the light; those who had some depressive symptoms realized they had little control.

For Lincoln, realism bordering on political ruthlessness was central to his success as a war leader.

Few recall that Lincoln was not a consistent abolitionist. He always opposed slavery, but until 1863 he also opposed abolishing it, which is why he was the compromise Republican candidate in 1860. Lincoln preferred a containment strategy. He simply wanted to prevent slavery's expansion to the West, after which, he believed, it would die out gradually.

When the Civil War came, Lincoln showed himself to be flexible and pragmatic as a strategist, willing to admit error and to change generals as the situation demanded. He was not the stereotypical decisive executive, picking a course of action and sticking with it. He adapted to a changing reality and, in the end, prevailed.

As for Churchill, during his severely depressed years in the political wilderness, he saw the Nazi menace long before others did. His exhortations to increase military spending were rejected by Prime Minister Baldwin and his second-in-command, Chamberlain. When Chamberlain returned from signing the Munich agreement with Hitler in 1938, only Churchill and a small coterie refused to stand and cheer in parliament, eliciting boos and hisses from other honorable members. At dinner that night, Churchill brooded: How could men of such honor do such a dishonorable thing? The depressive leader saw the events of his day with a clarity and realism lacking in saner, more stable men.

Depression also has been found to correlate with high degrees of empathy, a greater concern for how others think and feel. In one study, severely depressed patients had much higher scores on the standard measures of empathy than did a control group of college students; the more depressed they were, the higher their empathy scores. This was the case even when patients were not currently depressed but had experienced depression in the past. Depression seems to prepare the mind for a long-term habit of appreciating others' point of view.

Great crisis leaders are not like the rest of us; nor are they like mentally healthy leaders. When society is happy, they toil in sadness, seeking help from friends and family and doctors as they cope with an illness that can be debilitating, even deadly. Sometimes they are up, sometimes they are down, but they are never quite well.

Their weakness is the secret of their strength.

Facebook and your Online Privacy

Facebook filed documents with the government that will allow it to sell shares of stock to the public. It is estimated to be worth no less than $75 billion. But unlike other big-ticket corporations, it doesn't

have an inventory of widgets or gadgets, cars or phones. Facebook’s inventory consists of your personal data

Facebook makes money by selling ad space to companies that want to reach us. Advertisers choose key words or details — like relationship status, location, activities, favorite books and employment — and then Facebook runs the ads for the targeted subset of its 845 million users. If you indicate that you like cupcakes, live in a certain neighborhood and have invited friends over, expect an ad from a nearby bakery to appear on your page. The magnitude of online information Facebook has available about each of us for targeted marketing is stunning. In Europe, laws give people the right to know what data companies have about them, but that is not the case in the United States.

Facebook made $3.2 billion in advertising revenue last year, 85 percent of its total revenue. Yet Facebook’s inventory of data and its revenue from advertising are small potatoes compared to some others. Google took in more than 10 times as much, with an estimated $36.5 billion in advertising revenue in 2011, by analyzing what people sent over Gmail and what they searched on the Web, and then using that data to sell ads. Hundreds of other companies have also staked claims on people’s online data by depositing software called cookies or other tracking mechanisms on people’s computers and in their browsers. If you've mentioned anxiety in an e-mail, done a Google search for “stress” or started using an online medical diary that lets you monitor your mood, expect ads for medications and services to treat your anxiety.

Ads that pop up on your screen might seem useful, or at worst, a nuisance. But they are much more than that. The bits and bytes about your life can easily be used against you. Whether you can obtain a job, credit or insurance can be based on your digital doppelgänger — and you may never know why you've been turned down.

Stereotyping is alive and well in data aggregation. Your application for credit could be declined not on the basis of your own finances or credit history, but on the basis of aggregate data — what other people whose likes and dislikes are similar to yours have done. If guitar players or divorcing couples are more likely to renege on their credit-card bills, then the fact that you've looked at guitar ads or sent an e-mail to a divorce lawyer might cause a data aggregator to classify you as less credit-worthy. When an Atlanta man returned from his honeymoon, he found that his credit limit had been lowered to $3,800 from $10,800. The switch was not based on anything he had done but on aggregate data. A letter from the company told him, “Other customers who have used their card at establishments where you recently shopped have a poor repayment history with American Express.”

Material mined online has been used against people battling for child custody or defending themselves in criminal cases. LexisNexis has a product called Accurint for Law Enforcement, which gives government agents information about what people do on social networks. The Internal Revenue Service searches Facebook and MySpace for evidence of tax evaders’ income and whereabouts, and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services has been known to scrutinize photos and posts to confirm family relationships or weed out sham marriages. Employers sometimes decide whether to hire people based on their online profiles, with one study indicating that 70 percent of recruiters and human resource professionals in the United States have rejected candidates

based on data found online. A company called Spokeo gathers online data for employers, the public and anyone else who wants it. The company even posts ads urging “HR Recruiters — Click Here Now!” and asking women to submit their boyfriends’ e-mail addresses for an analysis of their online photos and activities to learn “Is He Cheating on You?”


Even though laws allow people to challenge false information in credit reports, there are no laws that require data aggregators to reveal what they know about you. If I’ve Googled “diabetes” for a friend or “date rape drugs” for a mystery I’m writing, data aggregators assume those searches reflect my own health and proclivities. Because no laws regulate what types of data these aggregators can collect, they make their own rules.

In 2007 and 2008, the online advertising company NebuAd contracted with six Internet service providers to install hardware on their networks that monitored users’ Internet activities and transmitted that data to NebuAd’s servers for analysis and use in marketing. For an average of six months, NebuAd copied every e-mail, Web search or purchase that some 400,000 people sent over the Internet. Other companies, like Healthline Networks Inc., have in-house limits on which private information they will collect. Healthline does not use information about people’s searches related to H.I.V., impotence or eating disorders to target ads to people, but it will use information about bipolar disorder, overactive bladder and anxiety, which can be as stigmatizing as the topics on its privacy-protected list.

Just keep all of this in mind the next time you search for something on google, post something on a social media platform, or even send an email.