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The Content Cycle, a phrase I did not just come up with right now, describes how content arises from the internet, is absorbed into cable television, and then gets redistributed back into the internet for the cycle to begin anew.

Like the water cycle, the Content Cycle provides sustenance and habitation to a multitude of organisms, and in many ways it exists independently of human thought

Stage One: Raw Content. The content cycle almost always begins with content that is freely distributed on a large social network.

Instead of self-confident and self-centered answers, the author humbly asks fundamental questions: What is economics? What is its meaning? Where does this new religion, as it is sometimes called, come from? What are its possibilities and its limitations and borders, if there are any? Why are we so dependent on permanent growing of growth and growth of growing of growth? Where did the idea of progress come from, and where is it leading us? Why are so many economic debates accompanied by obsession and fanaticism?

The majority of our political parties act with a narrow materialistic focus when, in their programs, they present the economy and finance first; only then, somewhere at the end, do we find culture as something pasted on or as a libation for a couple of madmen.

most of them—consciously or unconsciously—accept and spread the Marxist thesis of the economic base and the spiritual superstructure.

Kondratieff was a young Russian economist who died in prison in 1938. He developed an economic theory that purportedly explains both the dynamism and the destructiveness of the capitalist economic systems. The source of this explanatory power, he contended, was the existence of “long waves” or “long cycles” that bred both leaps of prosperity and spasms of instability.

Unlike normal business cycles, which lasted about a decade, Kondratieff’s long waves typically spanned 50 to 60 years. Initially, investment capital flows into new technologies. That’s the up cycle; the down cycle occurs when surplus production reduces prices and raises unemployment. Markets are saturated.

If you Google “Kondratieff cycles,” you get a concise history of the theory

If Turchin's model is right, then the current polarization and inequality in American society will come to a head in 2020. "After the last eight years or so, notice how the discourse in our political class has become fragmented. It's really unprecedented for the last 100 years," he said. "So basically by all measures, there are social pressures for instability that are much worse than 50 years ago."

Why 50-year cycles? Turchin explained that a surge of violence begins in the same way as a forest fire: explosively. After a period of escalation followed by sustained violence, citizens begin to "yearn for the return of stability and an end to fighting," he wrote in his paper. The prevailing social mood swings toward stifling the violence at all costs, and those who directly experienced the civil violence maintain the peace for about a human generation — 20 or 30 years. But the stability doesn't last.

Eventually, "the conflict-scarred generation dies off or retires, and a new cohort arises, people who did not experience the horrors of civil war and are not immunized against it. If the long-term social forces that brought about the first outbreak of internal hostilities are still operating, then the society will slide into the second civil war," he wrote. "As a result, periods of intense conflict tend to recur with a period of roughly two generations (40–60 years)."

The commissioners also call for an end to car-centric transport planning and a move towards investment decisions that “account for the true cost of car use to society”. They argue that current economic appraisal models used by the Treasury to decide whether to fund a new motorway or a segregated cycle lane “do not take full account of the negative consequences of making private car use easier, nor do they take full account of the benefits of walking and cycling on our health, wellbeing and environment”.

This approach has led to “systemic undervaluation and underinvestment in sustainable transport,” they argue, and urge the Department for Transport to change its appraisal methods “to focus on efficient use of road space and total people movement, rather than being based around capacity and journey times for vehicles”.

In Scotland, 19 local authorities are reinvesting road penalty income in safety enforcement activities, public transport, car clubs, parks maintenance, and park and rides.

Record numbers of Americans felt strongly favorable or unfavorable toward Trump during his time in office. (The strongly favorable and unfavorable was 71% in a Fox News poll last month, for instance.)

Trump's presidency drove historic turnout and record donations to political campaigns in a country whose voters have often shown a disinterest in politics.

The 2020 campaign, by comparison, had a little less than 160 million voters participate

The cost of this year's federal elections will hit close to $14 billion, shattering records and doubling the amount of money spent to influence presidential and congressional contests four years ago, according to an estimate released Wednesday.

And the 2020 election also has seen a dramatic reversal in the financial fortunes of the two men vying for the White House

Donations to the Biden campaign alone through mid-October -- the most recent public filings -- already have topped $930 million.

America is different now, more so with every election cycle. Ronald Reagan won his mandate in an America in which 89 percent of the voters were white. That number is down to 72 percent and falling. Fifty thousand new Latino citizens achieve the voting age every month. America will soon belong to the men and women — white and black and Latino and Asian, Christian and Jew and Muslim and atheist, gay and straight — who can comfortably walk into a room and accept with real comfort the sensation that they are in a world of certain difference, that there are no real majorities, only pluralities and coalitions. The America in which it was otherwise is dying, thank god, and those who relied on entitlement and division to command power will either be obliged to accept the changes, or retreat to the gated communities from which they wish to wax nostalgic and brood on political irrelevance.

Eighty years ago, the Democratic party became a national utilitarian enterprise, molding the immigrant waves of Irish and Italian and Jew into a voting bloc that stunned the political opposition and transformed American society, creating the world’s greatest economic engine in the form of a consumer class with vast discretionary income. The New Deal asserted for American progress — shaping and influencing administrations both Democratic and Republican — for three decades before running aground on the shoals of the civil rights movement, resulting racial fears and resentments, and, of course, the Southern strategy of political cynics

right now, the conservative movement in America is fleeing from dramatic change that is certain and immutable. A man of color is president for the second time, and this happened despite a struggling economic climate and a national spirit of general discontent. He has been returned to office over the specific objections of the mass of white men. He has instead been re-elected by women, by people of color, by homosexuals, by people of varying religions or no religion whatsoever. Behold the New Jerusalem. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a white man, of course. There’s nothing wrong with being anything. That’s the point.

Many nonprofit organizations stare down a shared set of challenges: In a 2013 report, the Urban Institute surveyed over 4,000 nonprofits of a wide range of types and sizes across the continental U.S. It found that all kinds of nonprofits struggled with delays in payment for contracts, difficulty securing funding for the full cost of their services, and other financial issues.

Recent years have been especially hard for many nonprofits. Most have annual budgets of less than $1 million, and those budgets took a big hit from the recession, when federal, municipal, and philanthropic funding dried up. On top of that, because so many nonprofits depend on government money, policy changes can cause funding priorities to change, which in turn can put nonprofits in a bind.

The pressure from funders to tighten budgets and cut costs can produce what researchers call the “nonprofit starvation cycle.” The cycle starts with funders’ unrealistic expectations about the costs of running a nonprofit. In response, nonprofits try to spend less on overhead (like salaries) and under-report expenses to try to meet those unrealistic expectations. That response then reinforces the unrealistic expectations that began the cycle. In this light, it’s no surprise that so many nonprofits have come to rely on unpaid work.

But in Trump’s White House, certain symptoms remain: a president who governs as if producing and starring in a reality television show, with each day a new episode and each news cycle his own creation, a successive installment to be conquered.

Facing a global pandemic, Trump still seems to lurch from moment to moment, with his methods and messages each day disconnected from — and in some cases contradictory to — the ones just prior.

Trump has focused on his self-image — claiming credit wherever he believes it is owed, attempting to project strength and decisiveness, settling scores with critics, boasting about the ratings of his televised news conferences and striving to win the cable news and social media wars.

Some big-name economists argue that the economy will soon overheat because of the Biden administration’s $1.9 trillion pandemic relief and other spending measures.

When demand for goods and services expands faster than the supply of them, consumers simply bid up the price of finite goods, and businesses bid up wages to try to keep up. This begins a cycle of higher wages fueling higher prices, which in turn fuels higher wages.Such a process began in the mid-1960s and culminated in double-digit inflation in the 1970s. But there are important differences between then and now. For one thing, unions then were more powerful and demanded steep wage increases. For another, a series of one-off events made inflation worse, including the breakdown of the Bretton Woods international currency arrangements and oil embargoes that sent fuel prices soaring.

The overheating worriers, who include prominent Clinton-era policymakers and many conservatives, believe there is a more substantial chance that one of two more pessimistic scenarios will come true. As vast federal spending keeps coursing through the economy, they fear that high inflation will come to be seen as the new normal and that behavior will adjust accordingly.

For President Donald Trump, the vacancy offers an opportunity to further reshape the court and bolster his legacy by installing a third conservative justice during his first term in office.

Democrats won control of the House in 2018, picking up a net gain of 40 seats, many in diversifying suburban districts that delivered a rebuke of the President's first two years in office. Given those gains, Democrats have a smaller universe of offensive targets for this cycle, but the party still sees opportunities across the map -- including a handful in Texas due, in part, to Republican retirements.

According to Inside Elections, six Republican-held Senate seats currently rate as Tilt Democratic or Toss-up. In Arizona, Sen. Martha McSally is running against Democrat Mark Kelly, a former NASA astronaut and the husband of former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner, meanwhile, is facing off against former Gov. John Hickenlooper in a Democratic-leaning state. Both contests are rated Tilt Democratic.

a 2022 conversation in front of a small audience with historian and demographer, Neil Howe, as we discuss: the patterns of human history, a long-view perspective on the current charge of events, and, most importantly, hope for our future.

ANTICIPATION IS POWER and PATTERN RECOGNITION is a huge key to intelligent decision making

Neil Howe’s theory is all about the patterns of the past and what they suggest we can anticipate in the future.