Sam Francis Fitness

Archive for the ‘General’ Category

What really is Urban Farming? One definition says that Urban Farming is the practice of cultivating, processing and distributing food in the community by increasing the supply of food, fresh vegetables and fruits and making them available and obtainable to local urban consumers.

The realization that 50% of people live in urban areas with the majority of low income urban dwellers spending 40% to 60% of their income on food resulted in increased demand of Urban Farming methods and techniques. Because Urban Farming responds to the nutritional demands of the city, local authorities have adopted measures to promote Urban Farming. City government claim that the benefits derived from Urban Farming outweighs the cost in the long run. What city will not want better health and nutrition for the community? What government will not want increased income by having increased employment? Who will not want food security in all the households under its jurisdiction and what city will not want a socially active and productive life? What city will not want all these achievements by simply adopting the Urban Farming way.

The perfect working clothes can make a huge difference in your work performance, and also keeping yourself safe and away from injuries.  You just can’t wear anything in work areas such as construction sites, keeping you safe is what work clothes are designed to do, they can even help you do your job more efficiently.

One of the famous brand is Carhartt clothing such as Carhartt pants and Carhartt coveralls.  Known to provide and design top of the line work boots, and construction clothing, you will be more than just assured of safety and efficiency.  Another more casual working clothes are sweatshirts, since they can be used for additional warmth in many work environments, particularly field works during the winter.  You can even have custom made sweatshirts specific for your company.   Aside from protecting our bodies and keeping ourselves warm, our hands, the main tools in any work environment, should also have special protection, this is where work gloves come into the picture.  Work gloves are made from various materials that are specifically designed to suit various working conditions.  Don’t let the nature of your work harm your greatest investment, your body, with the perfect working clothes and accessories, you will be able to protect and keep it safe.

Identity theft is becoming the bread and butter of many identity thieves around us these days and we should protect our identity and know the value of life lock. Many of us are still unaware about identity theft and that is why thieves can easily steal our identity. LifeLock is the nation’s first and only company that prevents identity theft from happenings, and backs that up with a one million dollar guarantee. This can really give us peace of mind and they also make us aware about identity theft.

Aside from protecting us from identity theft, they also gives us information about the risk of identity theft. I also read LifeLock Reviews and LifeLock Promo Codes at their site that explains how important the LifeLock is and how can it protect our identity. Thieves have different things that they are stealing and identity is one of the important things that they can steal on us. After being aware about identity theft is really a necessity for us to protect our identity. If we are not aware about identity theft, thieves can easily make their way to steal our identity. I already witnessed a person who is close to me that was a victim of identity theft and I never want that to happen to me as he also don’t want it to happen to him again.

When it comes to interacting and getting to know women, some guys have it and some, just don’t! Well, if picking up women is not innate for you, then be the best pickup artist that you can be! And how can you be the perfect pickup artist? Simple. You can be one by learning from those who are! And believe me, most pickup artists are not that good looking, so don’t ever think physical attraction is the main deciding factor!

So, where can a guy get the tips and techniques to become a certified pua or pickup artist? Where else?! The internet! There are forums you can log into and get great tips and advice on pick up lines, dating, flirting with women and making them laugh! There are a lot socializing techniques you can learn for guys who are considered as  masters when it comes to women, and you can also learn from guys such as  yourself.   Such tips would include improving your fashion statement, you should be comfortable and act natural around women, have the perfect pick up line for the situation, flirt and perfect the act of seduction! With all of these in mind, you are definitely on the right track to the become a great pickup artist.

Once you’ve gone through the process of understanding where your money goes every month, it’s time to start thinking about saving for your future. Everyone needs a rainy-day cushion to soften the impact of unforeseen life events such as illness, accident, or loss of a job. This comes under the heading of “first things first.” Therefore, before you become an investor, make sure that you build up an emergency reserve that will cover at least two to six months of living expenses. This is the portion of your assets that you don’t want to lose—ever. As you’ll see later in this chapter, my father and I believe that cash-equivalent investments such as money market funds are good places to stash this cash. It’s crucial to realize, though, that saving for the future and investing for the future are two different things. Saving implies putting money aside in a safe place, such as a federally insured bank account. Investing, on the other hand, generally refers to uninsured brokerage accounts and products. As strange as it may sound, you can save too much. If you focus too much on short-term safety and limit yourself to savings accounts, you could end up depriving yourself of the long-term growth potential the stock market can provide. Inflation can eat away at your purchasing power if you don’t put that money to work. That’s why we say that saving is smart, but in the long term investing is smarter.

Sharing the ABCs of investing can be a wonderful way to home in on your family’s dreams and financial priorities. As you probably already know, however, simply bringing up the topic of finances can easily be misconstrued by family members as a lack of trust. So getting your loved ones to the table to talk about investing and money requires that you clearly articulate what the discussion is designed to accomplish (getting everyone to participate in planning for the future) and what it’s not (taking anyone to task). The toughest part will be getting over the initial hump. Not many people are comfortable doing something for the first time. Co to a new aerobics class, and you feel like a klutz. If you’ve never taken an aerobics class at all, figuring out the steps seems that much harder. But when you hang in there, you soon find that it gets easier. Then you realize that it’s not
so bad after all, especially in light of achieving your goals. Puffing a face on investing by defining those values and dreams you want your money to support will help overcome the inertia most unseasoned investors experience. So will avoiding technical jargon. The concepts are really simple when the investment-speak labels are omitted. So keep it simple—but not too simple. Just because your friends or family aren’t familiar with investing doesn’t mean they’re stupid, so don’t talk down to them. Respect will get you a lot further than condescension. Finally, whether you’re talking to your spouse, your best friend, your parents, or your kids, avoid assuming an advisory role. In her book You Just Don’t Understand: Men and Women in Conversation (Quill, 2001), Deborah Tannen warns that providing counsel effectively puts you in a power position. And that will do absolutely nothing to propel the conversation forward. A better bet: Ask whomever you’re talking with for their opinion on the subject at hand, or to state their desires or concerns. Listen to what they have to say. Answer any questions. Then create a plan together.

In a study reported in Beisky and Gilovich’s Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology auctioned off a pair of hot basketball tickets to two groups of volunteers. In both cases the auction was sealed, and the tickets went to the highest bidder. But here’s the difference: The first group was told that the winner would have to pay for the tickets in cash, within the next twenty-four hours. The second group was told that the winner could put the expense on a personal credit card. If you guessed that the second group bid higher, you’re right. But did you guess that they bid twice as much? Does this kind of reasoning sound familiar? Join the crowd. Most of us tend to devalue the money we spend on credit—a familiar but dangerous trap.

As Lauren found out, sometimes the hardest part of investing is “putting your mind to it” and just getting started. Most of us don’t realize how much money regularly slips through our fingers, money that could be invested in our futures. Not long ago one of my colleagues realized that he and his wife had been paying $50 a month for a DSL connection that they never installed and therefore never used. What with work and family, the couple was so busy that they simply hadn’t taken time to carefully examine their bills. They just paid them. ‘that’s six hundred dollars a year!” he confided in an appalled voice. “If we invested that, it could grow into a tidy sum!”
Most of us are guilty of that same lack of attention—if not about bills in particular then about where our money goes in general. Many of the day-to-day “needs” in which we indulge may be day- to-day luxuries that are sapping our bank accounts of potential investment funds. The Schwab Center for Investment Research calls this the “Doughnuts to Dollars” savings theory. For example, let’s say that instead of buying an eighty-cent doughnut twice a week (at a savings of $83.20 per year), you invest that money. If you did this for twenty years and got a hypothetical 10% return, you would earn about $5,240. Or as another example, let’s say you save $13 a week by not ordering an appetizer and dessert when you go
out to eat; that amounts to about $675 per year. If you did this for twenty years and again earned a 10% return, you could have close to $42,000. Of course, all of us have spent unwisely from time to time. For one thing, it’s easy to get distracted by our immediate desires. Caught up in the moment, we can lose sight of our long-range goals, so we buy on impulse. We figure that the purchase is insignificant, and that the amount spent won’t change our lives or our fortunes to any great degree. That’s where we’re wrong. All too often the little things become missed opportunities to invest, and consequently our ultimate dreams remain unfulfilled. The bottom line? By reviewing your outgoing cash with your family members, you too can save money without giving up too much in the way of enjoyment. The returns could be well worth the negligible sacrifice.

Although the experiences and memories most of us have of chickens are colored by ill-founded biases, it is hard to forget the feeling of seeing freshly-hatched baby chicks, their little yellow heads pushing out from under their mother hen’s feathers, their tiny yellow beaks just beginning to peck about. To many of us, freshly-hatched baby chicks are the very picture of innocence and adorability. Yet perhaps they also speak of something deeper, something inspirational. In pecking their way out of the egg, they can seem as well to symbolize our ongoing need to outgrow old limitations, our deep need to push against and expand beyond boundaries which have served a needed purpose, but which now must be left behind. In this, the little ones stand for the very opposite of the guilessness we have been conditioned to think of as “chicken.” They stand for courage. They peck their way out, not knowing what will await them. And when they emerge, they stand naked and new amidst the ruins of a past to which they can never return, having undertaken an irreversible journey into the unknown, simply because it is their destiny to do so.
Somehow these little chicks remind me of the bravery of the human spirit, and as well, of our situation as a species. Are we not also driven by an evolutionary imperative, by the call of our own growth and potential for expansion? Are we not, as a race, standing now amidst the slime and eggshells of our primeval past, not knowing what will become of us, yet already dreaming of the stars?
One thing’s for sure. Chickens are far more sensitive than most of us give them credit for. A study at Virginia Polytechnic Institute found that chickens flourished when treated with affection. Researchers there spoke and sang gently to a group of baby chicks. As a result the chickens were friendlier, and put on more weight for the amount of feed consumed than did chickens who were ignored. The well treated birds were also more resistant to infection than the other chickens.7

Like the most people, I would like to minimize the unnecessary suffering in the world. I want to eliminate needless violence and pain and I give my support, wherever I can, to a positive approach to this goal. But like most people I never gave much of a thought to the impact my way of eating had on the world. Sure, I knew animals were killed for meat, but isn’t that the way of nature? Isn’t that the way of life’s food chains?
But I’ve learned that the animals used for food in the United States today are not just killed; something else happens to them. And finding out about it has changed me forever.
The more I’ve learned, the more I’ve felt that if people knew what really goes on they would make major changes in their food choices. Major changes that would go a very long way, not only towards improving their own health, but towards reducing the suffering in the world as well.
Let’s start with chickens. In order to understand what happens to these animals, it helps to have a feeling for what kind of beings they are. Unfortunately, most of us have rather stereotyped visions of them. The word “chicken” is often used as a synonym for “coward.” But that is a human moniker. Chickens, while high-strung and quick to startle, are anything but gutless, timid creatures. Roosters are renowned for their pride, ferocity, and the adamant assertion of their power. Many cultures have exploited this fact in the so-called “sport” of cock fighting. And throughout the world a wide variety of cultures have acknowledged the potent spirit of the cock by using his name as a synonym for the male penis.’ In languages all over the world the word for the male chicken is also used to signif’ human male sexual potency.’
Female hens are likewise not the craven creatures we’ve been conditioned to think they are. They can be absolutely fierce in defending their little ones, even against terrible odds and much larger predatory birds. A scientist who studied chickens for years, E. L. Watson, watched a mother hen defend her little chicks against the awesome attack of the dreaded raven.