If You Want A Child, Try Not To Have It In The US

The Article: American Way of Birth, Costliest in the World by Elisabeth Rosenthal in The New York Times.

The Text: Seven months pregnant, at a time when most expectant couples are stockpiling diapers and choosing car seats, Renée Martin was struggling with bigger purchases.

At a prenatal class in March, she was told about epidural anesthesia and was given the option of using a birthing tub during labor. To each offer, she had one gnawing question: “How much is that going to cost?”

Though Ms. Martin, 31, and her husband, Mark Willett, are both professionals with health insurance, her current policy does not cover maternity care. So the couple had to approach the nine months that led to the birth of their daughter in May like an extended shopping trip though the American health care bazaar, sorting through an array of maternity services that most often have no clear price and — with no insurer to haggle on their behalf — trying to negotiate discounts from hospitals and doctors.

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VICE Magazine Visits Turkish Protestors

Mistake number one: the current protests in Turkey are about a park. Mistake number two: a major news networks covers a story on penguins as Turkey burns.

Life In The Mexican Fast Lane

As politicians and DC wonks engage in the typical back-and-forth bickering regarding immigration reform, photographer Alejandro Cartagena swaps ceaseless ideological banter for an enlightened, bird’s eye view approach to the plight of many Mexican workers–many of whom come to America to seek better working conditions and more economic opportunity for their families. In his series called “Carpoolers,” Cartagena captures the risk, mind-numbing mundaneness and sacrifices that comprise the typical work day of a construction worker in Monterrey, Mexico. Could you handle this kind of commute?

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Waging War On The Unemployed

The Article: War On The Unemployed by Paul Krugman in The New York Times.

The Text: Is life too easy for the unemployed? You may not think so, and I certainly don’t think so. But that, remarkably, is what many and perhaps most Republicans believe. And they’re acting on that belief: there’s a nationwide movement under way to punish the unemployed, based on the proposition that we can cure unemployment by making the jobless even more miserable.

Consider, for example, the case of North Carolina. The state was hit hard by the Great Recession, and its unemployment rate, at 8.8 percent, is among the highest in the nation, higher than in long-suffering California or Michigan. As is the case everywhere, many of the jobless have been out of work for six months or more, thanks to a national environment in which there are three times as many people seeking work as there are job openings.

Nonetheless, the state’s government has just sharply cut aid to the unemployed. In fact, the Republicans controlling that government were so eager to cut off aid that they didn’t just reduce the duration of benefits; they also reduced the average weekly benefit, making the state ineligible for about $700 million in federal aid to the long-term unemployed.

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Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the practice of optimizing websites. This is done by creating a strong, search engine friendly, highly-targeted web design and creating useful content. You can take a look at these SEO case studies to have an idea of how SEO works.

In a nutshell, SEO refers to the process of producing a website that gives a website the best possible chance of getting the right search engine listings. It’s an area that has a lot of different things to consider.

What is SEO?

This is a technical term that defines how your website is used to rank for search engines. What are search engines? There are many different search engines and different ways to measure rankings. The most commonly used method is called a backlink profile. A backlink profile measures how links on a specific site influence a website’s ranking in search engines. In the context of SEO, backlinks are like pages on a website that your links point to. What are the different types of backlinks? There are a few different types of backlinks, which include “organic,” “affiliate,” and “paid.” Organic backlinks are links that are created by the content on a website, which is the same way that webpages are created and published. These links will have a negative effect on your website’s ranking in search engines.

Affiliate links are links that a site sends to other sites in order to get in return links. These links are not created by the content on the website. If you want to ensure that your content is in fact in the right category, and not link spam, you should create a page on the website with a link to the official website.

What are the benefits?

An affiliate link is usually a more targeted link to your website. If you are a niche site and you get a few affiliate links, that can make a lot of difference if you are selling a lot of products and/or services.

How do you find an affiliate link? Find your main product page on your website and do a search for “affiliate links” in the search bar. If you do not see an affiliate link, then you should look for product/service reviews and try to see what product or service is reviewed at an affiliate site, or contact the person. You will need the product or service page URL, or other relevant information.