Times Square

Times Square

The most famous square in the world Times Square is the the heart of New York. Originally known as Long Acre (also Longacre) Square after London’s carriage district, this square served as the early site for William H. Vanderbilt’s American Horse Exchange. 

In the late 1880s, Long Acre Square consisted of a large open space surrounded by drab apartments. Soon, however, the neighborhood began to change. Electricity, in the form of theater advertisements and street lights, transformed public space into a safer, more inviting environment. Likewise, the construction of New York’s first rapid transit system, the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT), gave New Yorkers unprecedented mobility in the city.

All the pictures illustrating this text have been taken by Elena.

Times Square in its glorious hour.

The Square.

Big Fat Hit. Rotten.

Granny's Rental and other pubs.

Skycrapers.

Broadway and Times Square.

Imposant New York.

Bank of America.

7th Avenue

The Lion King.

Times Square Fun Home.

A hand over our heads.

Hershey's, GrayLine and other needful things.

M&M Pub.

The Lion King once again.

H&M.

Times Square screens.

The most famous street in the world.

The Year of the Flood

The Year of the Flood

By Margaret Atwood

Then he started bringing a woman – an Asian Fusion body type with a foreign accent. He said she wanted to familiarize herself with Scales because ReJoov had picked us as one of their primer test venues, and she'd be explaining a new product to us – the BlyssPluss pill, which would solve every known problem connected with sex. We had been awarded the privilege of introducing it to our clients. This woman had a ReJoov executive title – Senior VP Satisfaction Enhancement – though her rel job was Glenn's main plank.

I could tell she'd been one of us: a girl for rent, of one kind or another. It was obvious if you knew the signs. She was acting all the time, giving nothing away about herself. I<d watch them onscreen: I was curious because Glenn was such a cold fish, but he could have sex all right, just like a human being. The girl had more moves than an octopus, and her plankwork was astonishing. Glenn acted like she was the first, last, and only girl on the planet. Mordis used too watch them too, and he said Scales would pay this girl top dollar. But I told him he couldn't afford her: she was way out of his price range.

The two of them had pet names for each other. She'd call him Crake, he'd call her Oryx. The other girls found it strange – the two of them being lovey-dovey – because it was so out of character for Glenn. But I thought it was kind of nice.

“That Russian or something?” Crimson Petal asked me. “Oryx and Crake?”

The Year of the Flood. Photo by Elena. Three Barbies.

“I guess,” I said. They were extinct animal names – every Gardener had to memorize a ton of those – but if I said it the girl would wonder why I knew.

The first time Glenn came to Scales I recognized him right away, but of course he didn't recognize me, in by Biofilm Bodysuit and with green sequins all over my face, and I didn't let on. Mordis told us not to forge personal bonds with the customers, because if they wanted a relationship they could get one elsewhere. He said that Scales customers didn't care about your life history, they just wanted epidermis and fantasy. They wanted to be carried away to Never-Never Land, where they could have sinful experiences they'd never, never be able to have at home. Dragon ladies winding around them, snake women slithering over them. So we should save our private emotional crap for people who actually cared about us, like the other Scalies.

One night Glenn arranged an evening of extra-special treatment – for an extra-special guest, he said. He ordered up the feather room with the green bedspread, plus the most powerful Scales and Tails martinis - “kicktails,” they called them – plus two Scalies, me and Crimson Petal, Mordis picked us because Glenn said this extra-special guest preferred the slender body type.

“Does he want the schoolgirl sailor suit thing?” I asked; sometimes that's what “slender body type” meant. “Do I need to bring my skipping rope?” If so I'd have to change, because right then I was in full glitter.

Insurance

Insurance

When people think about finance and financial institutions, their minds most often focus on banks, but insurance companies are also financial business entitities and insurance comprises a large part of finance. For example, in Canada, some of the largest insurance companies include Standard Life, Manulife Financial, Sunlife and Industrial Alliance, all handling billions of dollars, some on a yearly basis.

Also, mergers and acquisitions are typical in the insurance industry. On a more practical note, insurance is known to most people as, more often than not, mandatory, car insurance; home insurance and life insurance. For instance, when a new homeowner buys a house, he or she must not only ensure the mortgage (provided there is a mortgage on the house) with a corresponding life insurance, but also insure the house and its contents. Typically, standard home insurance includes coverage for civil liability, as well as the property and the contents.

The contents are valued by the insured, but it remains advisable to keep receipts and/or photographs of valuables, jewelery, furniture, electronics, designer handbags and other expensive items in case a claim must be filed. By the same token, standard insurance clauses include theft, fire and water damage, but as with all contracts reading the fine print may save one a lot of time and money in the long run. Additional coverage may be purchased if desired, which is usually discussed with the insurance broker or sales agent at the time of purchase. Interestingly, a person with a criminal record may be denied life or home insurance. Similarly, and naturally, a falsely filed insurance claim is a serious criminal offense and in addition to being prosecuted under the law precludes one from getting insurance in the future.

Fun is like life insurance; the older you get, the more it costs (Kin Hubbard, an American cartoonist). Illustration: ©  Pizza Pasta. New York. Photo by Elena.

Alternatively, life insurance quotes differ significantly based on the amount insured. Of course, similar to mortgages, pesonal income from employment and other sources, as well as, total wealth and assets are taken into account when calculating the amount available to the insured person.

The premium is the amount paid at regular intervals (usually bi-weekly, monthly or annually) by the insured on the policy (the insuranc contract). Along these lines, the beneficiary is the person to whom the funds (the amount of the insurance to be paid in the case of death of the person’s whose life is insured) will go to, after the insured person’s death; but, the beneficiary may also be the insured’s estate. Moreover, insurance coverage may also be joint, such as in spousal or family contracts, or in cases of business partnerships. Finallly, the term annual premium should not be confused with annuity, which is a different contract an individual may enter into with an insurance company, which guarantees him or her an income in case of disability, or simply represents a form of income under several conditions and in exchange for payment.

All Our Wrongs Todays

All our wrongs todays

A novel by Elan Mastai

Materializing in the past, there's this initial synesthesia, my senses scrambled, touch into taste into scent into sound into sight into touch, and then everytrhing contracts in on itself, like gelatin setting in a mold. Although my father's invention makes time travel feel instantaneous, it comes with a visceral kick that makes a routine teleport to the moon seem like a foot massage. I just became history's fist time traveler, but I'm not really feeling the grandeur of the moment because I'm tying so hard not to throw up 2016's breakfast onto 1965's floor.

I take a few seconds to get steady oin my feet and orient to my surroundings, and that`s when it hits me - I'm in the actual laboratory where the future was born. he whole building has of course been maintained as a permanent museum exhibit, with the original Goettreider Engine still in operation in the windowless 500-square-foot basement lab in section B7 of the San Francisco State Science and Technology Center. But visiting it in my time is not the same, obviously, as being here.

I can smell the industrial cleaner wafting up from the chipped tile floor. The lighting, incandescent bulbs Under metal cages, warm and steady, casting every surface with a coppery glow. The machinery is state-of-the-art for the time period but looks adorably archaic, like watching heart surgery conducted with sharp sticks.

And there's the Goettreider Engine itself. It`s thick and clunky compared to the sleek, refined iterations that, in the last weeks of his life Goettreider designed to be constructed posthumously. The housing is dull steel, hand-tempered by Goettreider to fit his specifications. The absorption coils are wound up in thick rolls of springy filament.

Faculty of Architecture of Toronto University. Photo by Elena.

The gauges have actual arrows wobbling in their dials and the indication counters have tiny numbers punched into metal rings that revolve around an axis point. The gears look comically large and cumbersome and the venting stacks might as well be Victorian-era chimneys belching smoke. The key component, the Radiometric Pulse-Field Emitter, is the only thing that looks remotely modern - because its innovative form, with the graded angles and undulating petals and interlocked segmentation, became so influential on contemporary style, spilling from the lab into architecture, industrial design, fashion, art, cuisine, everything really.

Standing in the room looking right at it, the machine that changes the world looks hilariously handmade. It's a miracle Goetttreider got any reaction from the assembled observers other than eye-rolling condescension.

Goettreider's work was considered vaguely interesting from a theoretical perspective but not exactly promising. A bureaucrat with just enough authority to approve minor grand had taken a shine to Goettreider because he'd filled out the administrative funding forms in fastidious detail and the bureaucrat was a man who appreciated neat paperwork above all other virtues.

The Goettreider Engine itself is quite compact, but the venting shafts and thick clusters of coolant tubes fill up the space, ready to gear down the device if it malfunctions and safely release any accumulated energies - so the Engine doesn't erupt in, for example, a fury of global destruction.

A I get my bearings, I realize I'm not alone in here. Someone is hunched over a Notepad, scribbling equations with a pencil. I recognize the Notepad before I recognize the man because I've seen it in an impenetrable display case in the Goettreder Museum - it's the Notepad in which Lionel Goettreider wrote his final calculations before he switched on the Engine.

Which means the person currently writing down those famous figures with a half-chewed yellosw pencil is Lionel Goettreider.

Managerial Measures

Managerial Measures

Any introductory accounting course will explain that assets and expenses have a debit balance; while liabilities, income and equity have a credit balance. Subsequently, here are some of the basics of managerial accounting.

Corporations usually have a decentralized structure. Therefore, the division of a company can be a cost, profit or investment center. As their names indicate, the cost centers only incur costs, the profit centers revenues and costs, and the investment centers have control over cost, profits as well as invested funds. The distinctions come in handy in responsibility reports; obviously, it would be unfair to judge a manager based on circumstances absolutely outside his or her control. Hence, the controllable margin (CM = the amount of profit remaining after all variable but only controllable fixed costs have been deducted) is used in judging management’s performance. The judgment is based on whether there were any discrepancies from budget, and if so, were they favourable or unfavourable. A word of caution: at the corporate level all costs are controllable by top management, so CM becomes interchangeable with operating income (OI).

The emphasis on costs is clear from the economic underlying principles. Since a free market is regulated by demand and supply, in a competitive market a firm is a price taker and its only way to secure a profit is to control costs (i.e. target cost = market selling price – desired profit). Of course, these constrictions are lifted if a business is a perfect monopoly.

Managerial measures needed. Photo by Elena.

Return on investments (ROI) is calculated by dividing CM or OI by the average operating assets. For purposes of convenience the assets are averaged over the year. Another measure is residual income (RI), which is obtained by subtracting from the CM or OI, the minimum required rate of return (RRR) multiplied by the average operating assets. In a sense, it is a better measure than ROI because since any investment project with an ROI > RRR will increase the firm’ income, it would be deemed acceptable, an alternative often foregone if the overall ROI is decreased. However, the method lacks precision in that RI can be equal for two options greatly differing in amounts invested.

Asset turnover is computed by dividing sales by average operating assets, whereas to get the profit margin one divides the OI by sales.  Other popular measures are return on assets (ROA = OI /Total assets) and return on equity (ROE = OI/Shareholder’s equity).

Gross profit, also called gross margin, refers to sales minus cost of goods sold. The contribution margin equals sales minus variable costs. One of the main aspects to remember about fixed versus variable costs, is that fixed costs must be covered by the company whereas it is producing (manufacturer) or selling (merchandiser) anything or not.