All of the names, characters, places, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher. Information regarding permission, write to: Entropy Publications, LLC, San Francisco, CA, query@entropypublishing.com. It was Billy's idea to rip off the liquor store. He heard brotherabe on his cell say the place was ripe. Heart of the hood, where this kinda crap happens all the time. And Lucky Liquors is run by this old chink. Gook's at the mart from opening til closing cuz he too damn cheap to hire help from the Projects. Serves him right getting tagged every couple of months. Slide convincing Ty to do the deed. Bluds since Sunshine Daycare, they bled enough and shredded enough to earn respect as the cracka/nigga posse not to jack. Lunchroom Thursday, Billy goes on spouting about taking what they deserve for being dissed since they was kids. From jacking construction sites at seven, to ripping music, movies and apps off the net and selling it on Craigslist at eleven, Tyron is always angling for money. To Ty, it buys respect. He be flipping off his hammered old man and dick-head brother on the way outta town, and his mom too, if she'd stuck around. "One strike gets us a sled and elevates us the rest a high school, blud. Then we outta here, down to Hollywood, man, do some rappin, some actin, be whoever we wanta be, Ty. And even if we get caught, but we won't, the most we'd get is maybe a short stint in juvie since we ain't got no rap sheets. And if we don't get caught, and we won't, I heard Chris say the gets around five large." Tyron stares at Audrey, the hoodrat who brought him out, across the lunchroom, now slumming with the cracka slanger, Baker. "Five grand would get us some respectable treads," Ty says. "We be legally stylin by the weekend if we did the deed this week." "Late afternoon, tomorra," Tyron says. Hoodies and caps, keep our mugs down, away from cameras, and we golden." "We ain't gonna just glide in there and ask for cash, blud. And copin a gun's gonna take time, and it ain't gonna be cheap," Billy feels a need to reality check him. "We don't need no gun. No shit Tyron hated guns. Took his old man out in a drive-by in their driveway when he was nine and his dad's brains landed all over him.

Small and medium-sized businesses are getting their 2018 plans under way, putting ideas in motion to attract new customers, grow revenue and profits, and ride the waves of change in their industries. They are also likely considering the IT investments they will need to make to do all of that. How will SMBs approach technology in 2018, and how will the changing IT landscape affect business decisions? Radical changes are unlikely next year, as trends that suffused 2017 will evolve, according to small business IT analysts. Next year, artificial intelligence applications will become a larger part of small business' cloud usage, according to surveys and analysts, as SMBs take advantage of AI advancements from Microsoft, Google, IBM and others.

A hotel manager was circling the Polo Lounge, surveying the stately dining room, when he suddenly did a double take. I thought I saw you come in," he said. "Mind if I sit -- just briefly?" Stephen Boggs, the director of guest relations at the Beverly Hills Hotel, slid into the booth where Bloom was having breakfast. The two had met in the early 2000s, when she began hosting underground poker games for the entertainment industry elite in the hotel's private bungalows. She'd returned to the venue last month to talk about a new Aaron Sorkin movie based on her life, "Molly's Game," which follows her journey into the secretive world of high-stakes poker -- one that ultimately led to her arrest by the FBI in 2013. Bloom says that the celebrities who frequented her games -- Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Todd Phillips -- have never reached out to her following her brush with the feds. But Boggs, at least, seemed ready and willing to welcome her back into the Hollywood fray. After chatting with her for a few moments, he offered her his business card and urged her to follow up with him. "It's so great to see you," he gushed. "You look terrific, and congratulations on everything.

Arithmetically, the problem is a combination of collapsing productivity and insufficient capital investment. On February 19, 2017, the New York Times ran a feature story on recent changes in the United States oil industry.2 The focus was on the recent "embrace" of technological innovation in the industry after the 2014 plunge in the global oil market. This was just one of a rash of such pieces in the popular press, relying, as is typical of such writing, on a smattering of skewed, decontextualized data, a healthy serving of the anecdotal, and a host of the worst tech journalism clichés ("a few icons on a computer screen," "a click of the mouse," video game marathons as job training, a compulsory reference to drones). Zeroing in on the effects of these changes on workers in west Texas, the article's upshot is unobjectionable enough: as oil prices recover, output rises, and production becomes more capital-intensive, many workers who lost jobs in the downturn will be replaced by machines. These workers, often Latino, are sure to be forced out of these semi-skilled, relatively well-paid jobs into other sectors of the labor market, where their skills and experience will serve little purpose. At first blush, the situation seems dire. We are told that some 30% of jobs in the industry were lost after the oil market crash of mid-2014, when employment in the industry was at its peak.