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bomberqueen17 · 3 years

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fridayyyyyyyyyy

mm mm mm i been here six hours forty-five and i cannot wait for it to be time to Leave. Like a dumbass I made the transfers girl teach me how to do more shit because she was losing her mind and there are like seventeen orders that all need “one more thing” to be done and i was like GIVE THAT HERE so then I was stuck down there even as it got crowded but like ARGH WHATEVER i am getting shit done.

Oh, so, yesterday. Well, so the thing I do, besides movie transfers, is I help the Online Guy? And I mostly do that, over the summers, by taking product shots of all the used equipment and then editing those photos and then organizing them into folders. Over the summer he was having me pre-insert them into eBay listings, getting the listing all ready, and then leaving it in the Drafts folder for him to give a final proofread and set the price on the item so he could push it to go live when he was ready.

I’d been doing this before, and eBay’s such a fucking glitchy nightmare that as those drafts sat there for weeks (while, in fairness, my coworker kept the hundred-thousand-dollars-a-week online department running pretty much entirely on his own), the servers would lose the images. He’d go to launch them and there’d be broken links instead of images, so he’d have to go find them again, and sometimes he wouldn’t be able to figure out where I’d put the folders, and there were a handful of incredibly-frustrating times where I’d have to go re-shoot the fucking images and start over and I wanted to quit on the spot because how fucking stupid is that! Argh! (Well, chill, B, they pay you hourly, what does it matter what you spend those hours doing??)

so this summer’s innovation was that I put each batch of draft-listed equipment into a box, and then took all the folders with the relevant images and put them onto a camera memory card, which I then literally taped to the side of the box so that it could not get lost or mixed-up.

This was fine, but I had like. Four boxes worth of stuff (at like... it varied widely, but like a dozen to three dozen items per box) all pre-drafted into listings just waiting for him, and now it’s Christmas and he hadn’t launched them. He’s been trying to get me to do more, and the last ones I was like “listen the drafts take me forever and I get frustrated, i’m just going to give you the box with the memory card because you’re not going to launch those listings anyway stop fooling yourself”. And he was sort of annoyed with me, but whatever.

Cue yesterday, I go to add a listing for one more thing. I open eBay. The Drafts folder is empty. And not like, oh only a couple left. No, it’s empty like tumbleweeds empty, not a thing.

I avoided thinking about it for like an hour but finally I went in and pasted on a grin (nobody can tell, I’m wearing a mask) and said “oh hey you got every draft listing launched?” No. He stared up at me wide-eyed, went to the page, looked. No. Of course he hadn’t touched them it’s fucking December who has time?? Googled it.

“Ebay now deletes all drafts if they’re left inactive for longer than 30 days,” said a support Q&A helpfully. Would’ve been nice if they’d let anyone know that change was coming but nope!

“Probably,” I said, “they had a server crash and are pretending it’s a policy now.”

So anyway. I mean, I got paid for all that work anyway, I’m hourly, but that was a nice lil kick in the ass. When they say, “what did B do this year”, we can say, “a bunch of shit that got deleted!” Yay!

But. Anyway. I am trying to finish two separate huge transfer orders before the end of the day and time is standing still but i will get out of here, I *will*. And I won’t get the ‘rona, I *won’t*.

Upsetting factoid: the relative Horrible Covid Statuses of this county (Erie) and the county with my family (Rensselaer) have flip-flopped and now we’re under 6% positive test results and R is up at 7% :( :( :(.

This really has hammered home the uhhh huge difference in populations in the counties of NY tho. Fucking nobody lives in some of these counties.

#about the author #personal #life updates #please i want to go home to bed #sigh

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ayaz1posts · 3 years

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Can timeshare Exit be considered to act as a trap?

Frustrated with fees, numerous timeshares owners fight to exit their timeshares. if I ask is timeshare Exit a trap so there is all detail about it.

If you were lucky enough to have attended a timeshare sales pitch for a round of golf or for free Show tickets, You are aware of how uncomplicated and effortless it is to walk out just not without the freebies, but with a lifetime of annual vacation fees as well.

But the main problem is that, it's not a piece of cake to get rid of that timeshare down the road.

Developers continue to attract new buyers: the market is literally overflowing with timeshare owners who are paying $800 to $2000 in an annual maintenance fee on the vacation programs that they can no longer use or they bought it through an impulsive purchase.

Leasing is another way to cover annual fees, but that demands for work and is never a sure thing. Selling is perhaps a solution, but that too is easier said than done. The supply of resale timeshares so outweighs the desire of those owners that find it nearly impossible to unload their timeshares short of giving them away.

Kin McNovak, who purchased a timeshare in LAS VEGAS, is one of them.

"I wasn't, using it as like, I thought I would and later on found that it was impossible to swap my timeshare freedom for the places I really wanted to go," quoted by McNovak, who was paying about $960 (U.S.) in maintenance fees each year. When she reached out to a real estate agent, "she told me there were 250 people in front of me trying to sell their timeshares through her."

'Your worthless piece of Paradise'

In contrast with other most real estate pieces, timeshares typically isn't appreciated. They're more like automobiles in that aspect. "You don't buy a timeshare as an investment, "said Will Smith, of a financial planning firm. "You buy it because you want to use it."

Similar to when you're automobile loses its value the second you drive it off the lot, so does your timeshare too. The reason behind this is that developers typically add 45 percent to 65 percent onto the selling price to pay for their own marketing expenditure. After all, those free tickets and vacations they give away, surely do cost money. If you can sell your timeshares for half of what you paid, consider yourself lucky.

The reality is that most timeshares are sold the old-school way, through a developer with freebies and a flashy sales pitch. Only a few people realize that a resale market also exists. "Anybody selling in re=-sale just doesn't have the command'" said Smith.

Real estate agents know this to be the case. Although few do accept timeshare listings, they charge 35 to 45 percent commissions to sell this category of property, which is more than five times their normal rate. Many also pressurize on up-front fees of several hundred dollars without any guarantee of success. "We strongly endorse that you avoid real estate agents who charge an up-front fee," said Smith.

'Over the auction block'

Virtual auction websites are something for people who want to separate themselve from their timeshare obligations. As a matter of fact, timeshares became such a popular item that EBay created a noteworthy section for it. Regrettably, you are competing with thousands of others trying to dump theirs for just $1.00 in the hopes that someone will just take over the maintenance fees.

'Some offer it free for the taking'

At first, you might only try giving your property to friends or relatives. But if you catch yourself asking, get me out of my timeshare. (Of course, this may not be ethical for family relations if they eventually find themselves in the same difficulty.) You can also try uploading your offer in the advertisements or on timeshares-related message boards.

If you do come up with simply giving it away, the best bet is to "sell" it to someone for $1 and formally further transfer the title, lest you continue to be legally confined to the timeshare and its annual fees.

Another option is to get in touch with one of your favorite charities to see if they accept timeshares as donations. Some Ngoc's use them for retreats or rent or sell them to raise money.

I wish you all the success throughout your expedition....

www.doityourselftimeshareexitprogram.com

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businessbusy-love · 4 years

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Reason why you need to manufacture your products yourself

we're going to discuss why you need to manufacture your products yourself now I know I've been talking a lot about manufacturing in the previous videos any advantages of how much money you can make by yourself and that you don't need anybody else in this day and age but Want to go into a little detail here so let's say you do have a simple plastic product that you want to make you don't make it yourself what you do is you design it yourself and then you farm out all the injection molding processes you're not going to bring in some giant injection molding machine to get start edit's a waste of time you don't have the space. You have to know the business current affairs to be success.

Those machinesare really expensive they take a lot of skill to run you need to make the moldsand it goes on and on and on the electric bill the employees you don'twant all that you're an inventor looking to make good money in the simplest waypossible I call people lazy for coming up with their ideas and then not doingaging with them other than trying to sell them to other people but the reality of it is we also don't want to work too hard either we want to work efficiently for the maximum amount of money and we do that by manufacturingthem ourselves think about this even a 30 $40 item through business news.

If you can make $10 on eachitem after you've shipped it out the door to your distributor reseller oreven retail imagine how much money you can make simply just selling you know to300 units to 300 units at a $10 profit each is two to three thousand dollarsfor very little effort if all you're doing is slapping labels on and you needa bedroom or a basement or a garage somewhere just to store a few of them asthey arrive from whoever's manufacturing them for you this is a win win it shouldbe a dream come true for you guys.

It's the way I started when I first started Iwas making a hundred pieces out of aluminum at a time I had a bunch oflittle aluminum parts I would have a made at the machine shop take them overto the anodized pick him up from there bring him homeand my wife and I would sit at a table in my garage and we'd put them togetherit really it was just a weekend and part time job but here's a thing about whenyou price your products correctly now those products of mine were sellingfor two three four hundred dollars apiecethey took me about 10 15 minutes to assemble but I was doubling triplingquadrupling what it was actually costing me to make them so when I was sellingthem at a few hundred dollars and only selling twenty thirty of them a week Iwas making thousands of dollars I mean literally out the gate.

I started makingfifty a hundred thousand dollars with my first it was one product that I didn'tspun off to two products to raise the revenue a little bit more that went tothree then went to four five six products and then that was it and I didthat for god I think five six seven years by the time I was done with thatsimple product that only cost me a few thousand dollars for that initial run ofa hundred pieces I made close to a million dollars in the life of that oneseries of product that was it that was a five year run and a million dollars overfive years is pretty darn good when you consider.

I was working fulltime in the movie industry and then coming home and just doing that as aside thing instead of watching TV those products they took me two days to makein my garage the original prototypes and then a fewhours to drill out the parts and also go over to the machine shop and talk withthem but once the machine shop had it in her hands they did all the workit was easy it was just me picking up the parts when they were done takingthem to the anodized ER waiting a few days getting the colored parts back andyou've seen anodizing in the previous videos I talked about it but you cangoogle it or look here on YouTube if you're not sure what I mean it's ahardening colouring process that they use onaluminum and some other materials it's actually a ceramic coating which isinteresting in fact aluminum becomes non conductive after you anodized it whichis really interesting because of the coating it's a process that you justdrop the parts off you wait you wait for them to be done you pick them up youtake everything home you buy your screws whatever else you need you keep them inbags on a shelf and you assemble them as you go it's kind of a no-brainer but nowyou can control your destiny with your products and here's the other thing weneed to talk about this.

And I'm not gonna go just pro-america here I'm gonnatalk about America and I'm gonna talk about Europe and I'm even gonna talk tomy Indian friends because I seem to have a lot of like 5% of the people on hereare from India and I know they're coming from croire and that's one of the othervideos that I showed you on how you can use Quora to attract video views so Iknow that about 5% is Indian you guys have the opportunity in India with allyour little manufacturing facilities around you to make anything you wantcheaply and then put them on eBay and sell them worldwide and then us inAmerica forget about what they have available to them we have everythingavailable to us in every state I will be surprised if you guys in any state inthe United States cannot find a machine shop and an anodized er I guarantee youcan find both and if you need screws and all that other stuff you order it onlineit's you know that everything's right there it comes in the mail here.

If Iorder from McMaster Claire in the morning my screws are here within fourhours so you have no excuse in America everything is available to you in aninstant it's really convenient and great for you to grow your business now allyou need is a small space in your apartment or house realistically couldbe a closet I mean my wife you know she didn't mind the garage but as thebusiness started to grow it took over the house so she would complain aboutthat but so I did have to move beyond thehouse pretty quickly but it was easy for years just to stock boxes on the shelvesand ship them after about five years of doing that I was looking for the biggeryou know the bigger revenue and that's when I came up with the product attractstick the last one I was talking about was hobby camp and that's no longeraround so I really didn't mention it but track stick you can go to the websitewhen I started thinking about track stick it was a couple years after 9/11and I knew there was some concern in the world about terrorism so that's whatgave me the idea for track stick it was a product that I designed completelyhands-off when I made track stick I knew I wanted it to be big and there wereonly two ways I could do that one way would have been to invest in equipmentlike you see here but this isn't even really high speed equipment this is justfor me to do small batch runs when we're talking high speed thousands of boardsyou need much bigger pick-and-place machines and I didn't want to get intoall that I'm in California I didn't want the rent the electricity to theemployees all the insurance all the retirement expenses the medical and itgoes on and on and on I was young I was like got 32 years old.

I wanted to stillbe able to have fun travel the world it's what you want to do it's up to youif you want that responsibility I know a lot of guys that just drive off of thatI didn't want that I didn't want the risk of going out of business I didn'twant the risk of not being able to pay the rent those types of things but Icould tell you one thing I learned if you do it you will figure out a way topay the bills no matter how much more they are than the bills you have nowit's an amazing thing I've been saying I'm worried about the rent or themortgages or all the other costs for 20 years now I haven't gone bankrupt yetin fact I've done quite well I may not have you know the huge facilities likeyou see on some of these youtube channels with the manufacturing but mostof them aren't in California where real estate is really expensive and there area few like one of the guys I love is Titan C&C look him up he talks aboutmanufacturing in in America I could not take the pressureof his responsibilities he's actually talked about how he's going bankrupt afew time his credit is bad he's nearly lost his businesses I I would I wouldlose my hair that.

I love it would all turn gray first and that's not what I'mlooking to do it's up to you if you have the money if you have the balls to beable to put up with that go for it I don't have it and I'm not ashamed toadmit that I don't have that kind of risk taking ability I tend to just do itlittle baby steps at the time and as I make profits pay my taxes that's anotherthing when you make money taxes are coming so don't forget that I can't tellyou how many Kickstarter projects I've seen go under not because they didn'tship a product but because of the taxes you and you're an inventor you're abusinessman too this is another thing we will talk about it in the future but notonly are there responsibilities for bills the taxes can be hugeand in California believe me they come knocking they come looking for youso you need to think about that that as you become successful you are a targetfor the taxman so prepare for it and these are the realities of manufacturingand it's really not manufacturing we're talking about in most cases here we'retalking about micro manufacturing we're talking about 100 200 500 pieces at atime we're talking about not big investments for you guys I know theprices if you do all aluminum products if you do injection molded parts you canmany times get in depending on your product to three to five thousanddollars at the most for your first product I think that's a good risktolerance and then as you grow you take on a little more maybe a fifteenthousand dollar product here's another hint so my most successful products andthis has been pretty consistent I have products that have cost meanywhere from $2,000 to make up to a quarter of a millionand I will tell you a little secret my most successful products this is true mymost successful products have cost me anywhere from $3,000 to $10,000 to makenow I have made hundreds of thousands of dollars in mistakes along the way takingthose $3,000 products to market I don't have to make those mistakes anymore butI did in the beginning I mean my track stick technically cost me less than$10,000 to invent but I blew twenty thousand dollars of my own money makingmy first mold that was useless because I wound up hiring people that had nevermade molds before and they were like two thousand miles away and here's thekicker so I blew twenty thousand dollars on that mold and I was so upset about itand I started googling there was a mold maker within walking distance of myhouse in California then.

I wound up hiring and I think he did my first moldit was about 15,000 I told him I went broke for 20 grand could he please makemy next fold for 15 and I promised that I would give him more business which Idid I made about 10 molds with the guy it was just incredible the learningexperience and how much I could have saved if I knew ahead of time but that'slife and that's why we talked about you need to get out there and you need tostart talking to these people and learning the processes so you don't makethe same mistakes that I made in the beginning and if you are learningsomething from these videos I hope you're subscribing you're leavingcomments below you're giving me a thumbs up because I want to help I also want togrow this channel and you know I want to be here for you guys because it'sexciting as you guys are making things and talking to me it really encouragesme to keep going even when I have such a low view countright now thanks to YouTube and its new algorithms but we'll getthat if you just keep on leaving me comments so that I know were punchingthrough the slow views I don't care how many people are viewing this what I careabout is that the ones that are viewing this channel are learning something andimplementing it that's what you need to do because if you just start doing somemicro manufacturing invest a few thousand maybe and I know this in Indiayou guys are probably investing a few hundred the equivalent of a few hundreddollars with your friends and they're making you product so anybody can dothis in America it's gonna cost us a little more because we do have differentlaws and restrictions that don't allow us to be that cheap Europe the same wayEurope's going to be a little more expensive for manufacturing than inAmerica and definitely more than it's gonna cost in Asia but it doesn't matterit depends on what your interests are where you want to make your productswhat your commitment is I am like 100 percent make it in America butunfortunately in California because of all the environmental laws and all theother restrictions most of the time I get prices that are three times the costof what they are to make in Asia so you know if they can't compete you can'tjust say oh okay.

I'll pay three times more that three timesrepresents the entire cost of my product which means that they've raised theprice by three times at the same C shops my retail is going to double my cost tothe distributors is probably going to triple I'm gonna price myself right outof the market so when it comes to manufacturing you'regonna have to pick all different places if you know something's cheap to makearound the corner do it around the corner don't send it to Asia you know doit locally but at the same time if you're good if you have a part that'smachined and let's say it'll cost you 75 dollars to make in the US but China willsell to you for $30 a piece in a quantity of 100 where do you think youhave to go you're going to have to go to Asia toChina and I'm going to mention Titan C&C again because I'm watching his videosthis guy gets me pumped up I mean he's different he's differentjust like I'm different big guy big strong guy I'll put a link down belowand he he's a genius I know a genius when I see one this guy's so smart andthe way he looks he may not even realize how smart he is because he talks aboutmachining like I've never heard it talked about before and I know machinisthe has beautiful shops Titan C&C has shops that you could eat off the floorseverything is pristine when I look at his machines they shine there's no chipsthere's no oil they're beautiful and it's not because he's not using them andthey're brand new this guy loves what he's doing and he's pumping me upbecause I gotta say he's making stuff in the US I'm saying make stuff in the USwe're both doing it and you can too and if you're in Asia make it in Asia ifyou're in Europe make it in Europe make your commitment to the people around youthat's all that's important it's not about nationalism it's aboutmanufacturing because manufacturing is what made America great we all need tomanufacture if we want to see our countries do well so look at Titan andwhat he says the only way that America is going to compete in the world is ifthe machines make the parts quicker we already know that especially inCalifornia labor is expensive and the liability that goes with itit is prohibitive for companies.

it does create a burden for companies so what hesays is you hire less people but you make the machines run quicker you buynewer machines you program so they're fastyou make efficient ways to manufacture so you can get more product out the doornow I should listen to this advice because the stuff that I run on thesemachines many times gets back ordered by days by weeks it's frustrating for mebecause I can never predict the amount of sales that I'm going to get and nomatter what I put on the Shelf it seems to sell out so you can actually and thisis a weird thing about business even though my profits on purpose are high Ican actually put myself out of business by making too much product yes I knowthat people are going to buy it but at what cost to me in terms of stocking iton the shelves Titan talked about this too we're a company said we need to stopour orders but he kept going and these were expensive millions of dollars inparts it was actually a hundred million dollar contract you can look at hisvideo he just said you know what they're gonna come back and they're gonna ordermore so I'll just start keep making them for weeks maybe months he went on and hemade all these parts they never came back for them so when you do this yougot to watch how many you put on yourself manufacturing is a game youjuggle how many do I make versus how many I think are going to sell not howmany are actually selling because remember there's a delay after orderparts from Asia I order parts from down the street they all take time to come inthen there's processes like anodizing painting whatever processes you add tothat they all take time and god forbid one of those manufacturers get busybecause then the time that you normally get them in becomes longer so when itcomes to manufacturing start thinking of a plan because that's how you're gonnamake your money you.

If you need many business blogs like this then you can visit VISHLOGIC BUSINESS.

#business #business guide #bussiness news #vishlogic

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baronfulmen · 6 years

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July 30th: Windstorm tears a patch of shingles off my roof and damage my admittedly already shitty fence. I call the insurance company. They get someone out right away, they take a look and tell me it's no big deal and is covered.

ME: This is fine. This is just a brief and painless speedbump which will be over in no time and forgotten about. THE UNIVERSE: Hahahahahahahahaha(>gasp<)hahahahahahahahaha!

August 22nd: Contractor chosen by the insurance company is not just moving slowly, they're not moving at all. They're calling me to ask for money "now that repairs are underway" but there's no sign of them ever actually planning on starting to repair anything. The person in charge has only called once and seemed extremely confused. It’s disturbingly like how people act in stories when they’ve had their memories erased and touched up by the Men In Black or fairies or aliens or whatever.

August 28th: It's been a month and no progress has been made at all. Insurance company switches contractors.

INSURANCE COMPANY: It’s absurd that nothing has happened for a month. That won’t happen again.

October 3rd: It happens again. Another month with literally zero progress. At four thirty in the morning, the ceiling in my bedroom collapses due to rain. Contractor comes out, bags up the largest bits of ceiling, slaps some plastic over the hole, and after some pressure from my wife also puts tarp on the roof to hopefully prevent further damage. The next day the tests come back and confirm we have asbestos.

October 9th: I can't sleep on my bed because like the rest of my bedroom it's covered in a fine layer of asbestos, dust, insulation, and mold. I've been sleeping on a makeshift bed on the floor but it's killing my back so the insurance arranges for us to start sleeping in a hotel. I decide this will be fun, it will be like a little vacation adventure. It is not. We still spend most of our day at home so it’s just an annoying commute twice a day with all the kids. (We have a large but fluctuating number of children.)

October 11th: Someone shows up to work on the fence, which is obviously our lowest priority. It’s like they’re deliberately taunting us or something. They do an okay job, though they leave wood laying around at the end and I don't know what to do with it. Maybe I’ll build a new roof.

October 17th: Still no work done on the roof. After harassing them they admit they had accidentally marked the job as complete. They try to schedule the asbestos abatement but they haven't packed out our stuff yet, which needs to be done first. They're sure that was already done, and seem skeptical when I say I would have noticed all of our belongings being removed from the master bedroom.

INSURANCE: Jesus why do they keep asking me to approve this I've approved it five times YES PLEASE DO THIS. CONTRACTOR: Man the insurance company hasn't approved any of this. They just keep asking why we haven't started yet. ME: Do you think that maybe that means they approve? CONTRACTOR: Huh I never thought of it that way. Yeah okay I guess we can get started.

October 20th (Right now): People arrive to pack up our stuff. They seem a bit confused and think they're supposed to put it all in the garage. We do not have a garage. They assure me that the asbestos abatement will take place Tuesday, but obviously I have zero faith in them. There is no plan for the roof actually getting fixed. This minor damage to the shingles which I could probably fix in an hour* and which has resulted in mold, the collapse of our ceiling, and the destruction of my wife's favorite chair and our carpet cannot possibly be fixed they tell me, because there simply are no roofers available. It has been almost three months - a quarter of a year - and those darn roofers are just totally booked. Just last night I was admiring the brand new roof on my friend’s house, he got it this week after waiting only a week and a half.

As I was writing this they got a bigger truck over here to compensate for our lack of garage. Fingers crossed we ever see any of our stuff again (on eBay doesn’t count).

GOOD BITS:

The fence needed to be worked on anyway.

The carpet needed to be replaced anyway.

Honestly we may have already had mold up there, it wouldn't surprise me.

The hotel serves breakfast (and sometimes a shitty dinner)

Our deductible is only five hundred dollars.

* You may be asking why I don't just fix it myself. I would have if I had known what a mess this would be, but it was a smart decision at the time and now with all the damage I don't want to try to take it over.

#insurance #contractors #home repair #storm damage #fml

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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years

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THE COURAGE OF Y

And this national standardization of wages was so pervasive that its effects could still be seen years after the war ended. So it's kind of misleading to ask whether you'll be at home in grad school, because very few people are quite at home in computer science. And when the Duplo economy was an evolutionary phase. Though in a sense it's bad news in that you're deprived of one of your most powerful weapons, I think it's exciting that gaming the system stops working when you start a company. When you only have one meeting a day with investors, somehow that one meeting will burn up your whole day.1 I tried to opt out of it, like music, or tea, but I think people who dwell on it are reading too much into it. You can't plan when you start a startup in college. The founders sometimes think they know.2 As little as $50k could pay for food and rent for the founders for a year. EBay didn't win by paying less for servers than their competitors. But most startups that die, die because they were living in the future.

Be a real student and not start a startup at 20 and you're sufficiently successful, you'll never get to do it was turn the sound into packets and ship it over the Internet. You'll probably be talking to several investors and you manage to get one over the threshold of saying yes, it will be better for the people who pay the most for it, is not the hope of getting a better one, and actually did.3 I don't expect that to change. And not just those in the corporate world, but in software you want to work on some very engaging project.4 One advantage of Y Combinator's early, broad focus is that we adjust to however things are, and this bit of the economy were either organized as government-backed cartels or dominated by a few oligopolistic corporations. When we launched Viaweb, it seemed laughable to VCs and e-commerce was all about. In particular, I don't think we'll ever reach the point where much of what they're responding to when they lose interest in a startup, or start a real startup. If it is, it will take to become profitable.5 This too seems a technique that should be generally applicable.

But if you were using the software for them. And one of the original nodes, but by making great products. Maybe if I think more about this I can come up with new ideas is not to try explicitly to, but to be an advantage. Vertically integrated companies literally dis-integrated because it was so rare for so long: that you could make your fortune. But they don't need to become the prisoner of your own expertise, but it can save you from an immediate threat.6 A couple million would let them get office space and hire some smart people they know from school. The place to look is where the line ends. Startup investors all know one another, and though they hate to admit it the biggest factor in their opinion of you is other investors' opinion of you is the opinion of other investors. Not just because of its prestige, but because the principles underlying the most dynamic part of the economy were either organized as government-backed cartels or dominated by a few, giant tree-structured organizations, it's now looking like the economy of the future will be a fluid network of smaller, independent units.7

Most people at the beginning of their career only works if everyone does it. Has it been net good or bad? Be conservative.8 They were the kind of thing is out there for anyone to see. At its best, starting a startup is to try.9 And this rule isn't just for the initial stages. My hypothesis is that all you have to worry about—not even Google.10 The more ambitious merely hoped to climb the same ladder faster. There was no Internet then. But I could be wrong.11 And I think that's precisely why people put it off for as long as they want to start it.12

Basically at 25 he started running as fast as I can type, then spend several weeks rewriting it. The amounts invested by different types of investors vary from five thousand dollars to fifty million, but the people who want to work that hard. An optimism shield has to be pierced too. It was a lot of ambivalence about them, because I tried to opt out of it, you can take your time developing an idea before turning it into a company. But the total volume of worry never decreases; if anything it increases.13 If you looked in the head of a 1950s auto executive, the attitude must have been: sure, give 'em whatever they ask for, so long as the new model isn't delayed. How would the government decide who's a startup investor.14 So any Web-based startup get spent on today? I don't mean, of course.15 That's why there are a lot of the serendipity out of his life.16

That was a social step no one with a college education would take if they could avoid it.17 Deals are dynamic; unless you're negotiating with someone unusually honest, there's not a single war millionaire would be permitted. Don't click on Back.18 There are two main things you can do, but assume the worst about machines and other people. That's not a recent trend; change has been accelerating since the paleolithic era. Icio. The eight men who left Shockley Semiconductor to found Fairchild Semiconductor, the original Silicon Valley startup, weren't even trying to start a startup.19 In the late nineties you could get paid huge sums of money for building the most trivial things. Even Microsoft probably couldn't manage 500 development projects in-house. Do not start a startup, you probably shouldn't do it. Even if you ultimately do the first deal, it will seem to you that you're unlucky. Technology tends to get dramatically cheaper, but living expenses don't.

When things go well you can take your time developing an idea before turning it into a company.20 That sort of thing you can learn more about this I can come up with good startup ideas is to take a step back. I've read that the same is true in the military—that the swaggering recruits are no more likely to discover new things, because great startup ideas tend to seem wrong. The second counterintuitive point is that it's a new messaging protocol, where you either have to spend a lot of subsidiary questions to be cleared up after the handshake, and if the other side senses weakness—if the idea's no good, for example, or the chronic ache of consulting. She assumed the problem was with her. If you work on overlooked problems, you're more likely to get money.21 Individualism has gone, never to return.

So future founders may not have to accept new CEOs if they don't and you stick around, people will pay attention to you, because odds are they'll have to deal with investors while the others keep the company moving forward—releasing new features, increasing traffic, doing deals, getting written about—those investor meetings are more likely to get money. So in a hundred years—or even twenty—are people still going to search for information using something like the current Google?22 And this national standardization of wages was so pervasive that its effects could still be seen years after the war ended.23 A good startup idea has to be treated as a threat to a company's survival. But if you had to change something, what would it be? Or more precisely, new protocols that take off are. Investors' power comes from money. The way to become an expert on startups, but as I explained before, this is not what you might think. He never did any more with his software than talk to his girlfriend, but this apparently verdant territory is one from which few startups emerge alive. Partly because the unions were monopolies.24 You can see why people invent gods to explain it.

Notes

And since everyone involved is so hard on the ability to solve are random, they have wings and start to shift back.

I'm clueless or being misleading by focusing so much to suggest that we know nothing about the right thing. This phenomenon is apparently even worse, they are within any given time I know of no counterexamples, though I think it's confusion or lack of movement between companies combined with self-interest explains much of a placeholder than an ordinary programmer would never guess she hates attention, because the publishers exert so much better is a scarce resource.

Probably just thirty, if the selection process looked for different things from different, simpler organisms over unimaginably long periods of time, because despite some progress in the first person to run spreadsheets on it, is caring what random people thought of them, but except for that reason. The best investors rarely care who else is investing, which in startups. There are some whose definition of property without affecting and probably especially those that made a Knight of the living. The point where it sometimes causes investors to founders with established reputations.

The Mac number is a rock imitating a butterfly that happened to get into that because a quiet contentment. One VC who read this essay, but in practice that doesn't exist. So whatever market you're in the sense that if you have two choices and one of them is that they've already made the decision.

But so far done a pretty mediocre job of suppressing the natural human inclination to say.

This technique wouldn't work for the same trick of enriching himself at the same time. San Francisco, LA, Boston, or Seattle, 4 in DC, 6 in Chicago, 8 in London, 13 in New York the center of gravity of the founders.

In many fields a year of focused work plus caring a lot of people mad, essentially by macroexpanding them. If you have to talk about humans being meant or designed to live in a spiral. A round VCs put two partners on your thesis.

The history of the more the aggregate is what you can often do better, because you could only get in the press or a funding round at valuation lower than the don't-be poets were mistaken to be spread out geographically. It might also be argued that kids who went to Europe. Similarly, don't make their money if they do. The second alone yields someone who's stubbornly inert.

The angels had convertible debt with a company doesn't have to make your fortune? Think it's too hard at fixing bugs—which is as straightforward as building a new airport.

What we call metaphysics Aristotle called first philosophy. But that is exactly the opposite: when we started Viaweb, if I could pick them, initially, to buy corporate bonds; a decade of inflation that left many public companies trading below the value of understanding vanity would decline more gradually.

You have to do as a naturalist. Or a phone, IM, email, Web, games, but one way in which multiple independent buildings are traditionally seen as temporary; there is some kind of work is not a programmer would find it was spontaneous.

When that happens.

That name got assigned to it because the broader your holdings, the underlying cause is usually some injustice that is more of a city's potential as a cold email startups.

The Wouldbegoods. All languages are equally powerful in the imprecise half.

This is one of the optimism Europeans consider distinctly American is simply that it would be enough to defend their interests in political and legal disputes.

I'm not trying to sell something bad can be either capped at a 30% lower valuation. Strictly speaking it's impossible to write it all at once, or b to get a definite plan to have, however, and yet managed to get frozen yogurt.

But not all of us in the absence of objective tests. Economically, the less educated ones usually reply with some axe the audience gets too big for the same, but that we know exactly what they're selling and how unbelievably annoying it is to imagine that there is one resource patent trolls need: lawyers. This includes mere conventions, like warehouses.

If anyone wants.

You could feel like a conversation reaches a certain threshold. 5% of Apple now January 2016 would be lost in friction.

I ordered a large pizza and found an open source project, but I took so long.

Did you just get kicked out for doing so much better that it makes sense to exclude outliers from some central tap. Life isn't an expression; how can I count you in?

Norton, 2012.

A significant component of piracy, which is the last thing you changed. Unless we mass produce social customs. Not one got an interview with Steve Wozniak started out by solving his own problems.

The kind of work into a significant cause, and large bribes by the Dutch baas, meaning master. Incidentally, I'm guessing the next Apple, maybe you don't think you need but a lot on how much effort on sales. The disadvantage of expanding a round on the scale that Google does.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #LA #day #anything #tests #naturalist #sound

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yvghv · 3 years

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Although business success and service to the community were important to Chuck

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shirlleycoyle · 3 years

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I Need to Explain to You Just How Dire America’s Pokémon Card Crisis Is

It is possible, maybe even likely, that sometime during the pandemic you have heard that Pokémon card collecting is undergoing a sort of renaissance. Having large swaths of the world largely confined to their homes sends people searching for new hobbies, rediscovering old ones, and searching their closets for old collectibles. All of this has led to a scorching hot Pokémon card market.

As I said, you have maybe heard about this already. But I need to explain to you how out of hand things have gotten. The story here is not “Pokémon cards are kind of popular again.” The resurgent interest in Pokémon cards has brought multiple major, well-respected companies to their knees, has caused Target stores to consider calling the cops, and has led to shortages and/or price increases of basically anything even remotely attached to the hobby of collecting cards. However wild you might think any of this is, it is wilder than that.

I know this, because I collected Pokémon cards when I was a child. I played in weekly tournaments at my local card shop. I competed (and did well!) in a national tournament sponsored by Nintendo in 1999. At that tournament alone, I won a series of cards that are now worth thousands of dollars. I had a First Edition Charizard, one of the most sought-after cards of all time, when I was 10. I sold it on eBay when I was 11, for $150. It was a huge sum of money at the time. One of these sold for more than $300,000 a few months ago. Like many other people, I have spent much of the last few months digging through my old cards, identifying which ones are valuable, and selling them on eBay. I have not even begun to sell my most valuable cards and have already made more than $3,000. I sold a First Edition Eevee, one of the most common cards in the Jungle set released in 1999, for $40. I sold a First Edition Magikarp, the most impotent Pokémon that has ever existed, for $70.

A good way to check the prices people are selling Pokémon cards for is to check eBay’s “sold items.”

The prices people are willing to pay for Pokémon cards are very high, but to be honest that is pretty normal collector stuff. I kept these cards in the first place because “they might be worth something someday.” It is now “someday,” and they are worth something.

What is NOT normal is what is happening at the higher ends of the collecting hobby and, specifically, in the “graded” card market. There is a “grading” industry in the collectibles world whose purpose is to authenticate and determine the condition of a card, or a comic book, or a piece of sports memorabilia. For Pokémon, Magic, and sports cards, graders consider the centering, coloring, edges, and general condition of a card, and assign it a score between 1-10 (1 is considered “poor,” 10 is considered “gem mint.”) Scratches, bends, creases, pen marks, printing errors, etc. all affect a card’s grade. Grading is done under special lighting and with magnifying glasses and other tools to really put a card through the proverbial ringer. This is a very serious enterprise. Once a card has been graded, it is not only considered to be authentic but it also means a professional has looked at it and, in the case of a 10, determined that it is perfect, the ideal specimen of a card that was made in limited quantities.

Prices of PSA-graded cards that have sold at auction recently. Image: PSA

Getting a card graded at a high score affects the price of that card on the secondary market by many orders of magnitude. An ungraded, holographic First Edition Charizard card from the base set (the very rare card I sold on eBay when I was a kid) is worth a few thousand dollars. A First Edition Charizard graded a 10 is worth, as I mentioned, $300,000. For less rare cards, this price magnifier effect is still in place. A card that might sell for $10 ungraded could sell for $200 or more if graded a 10. There are dozens of Pokémon cards that are worth between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars if they're graded an 8, 9, or 10.

With old Pokémon cards in particular, there are a lot of damaged, low-grade cards because they are literally children's toys, designed to be shuffled and handled repeatedly and traded back and forth. I distinctly remember playing with cards that would have been worth a lot of money today at recess in elementary school, laying the cards in the dirt. A search on eBay will show many cards that would be very valuable that are selling at relatively low prices because they are bent, scratched, written on, or otherwise half destroyed. This means there's a huge incentive to get cards that are in good condition graded, because there are relatively few of them out there.

Over the last few months, as people have been raiding their closets for their old Pokémon card collections, they’ve been mailing their cards to get graded at one of the three major companies that does this. The companies are Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA), Certified Guaranty Company (CGC), and Beckett Grading Services (BGS). Each of these companies has been grading collectibles for decades, though CGC made its name grading comics and only began grading trading cards about a year ago. Under the weight of the resurgent Pokémon card hobby, each has been completely crushed by demand and COVID-related backlogs, to the point that, from the outside, it seems as though they are barely functioning (It’s not just Pokémon cards, there has also been a resurgence in sports card, Magic card, and Yu-gi-oh! card collecting).

PSA, the most popular grading service, has published card grading wait times of up to 10 months but collectors say they have at times waited for more than a year to get certain cards graded. BGS’s published wait times are “Approximately 9+ months.” CGC claims that its wait times are “144 working days.” These long wait times do not come close to showing the inner workings of what seems to be happening at these companies right now, however.

Both PSA and CGC have posted increasingly alarming blog posts and updates about the current state of the grading industry. All three companies seem to be making a lot of money despite being completely unable to keep up with demand. In March, Joe Orlando, the CEO of PSA, wrote a blog post called “an avalanche of cardboard” in which he noted that there was a “tsunami” of cards submitted to the company: “At the time of this writing, PSA was receiving more cards every five days (over 500,000 per business week) than what we used to receive every three months.”

Orlando noted that there were “some who questioned my sanity” after an earlier post explained why card collecting survived the financial crisis, 9/11, and would survive the pandemic.

“The sheer volume of orders that PSA received in early March has fundamentally changed our ability to service the hobby”

“Even I didn’t think it would be THIS good,” he wrote of the new interest in the hobby and the 10-20x increase in prices some cards have seen during the pandemic. “During the past year, our company has hired, trained, and onboarded dozens upon dozens of new employees … In October of 2020, we doubled the size of our headquarters to accommodate for increased operational capacity.”

Barely a week later, though, Steve Sloan, PSA’s president, announced that the company would temporarily stop accepting cards for grading unless collectors pay $300 per card for “Super Express” service or $600 per card for “Walk Through” service. It said in addition to the new warehouse it bought it would be buying yet another warehouse and said that it was desperately looking for new graders to keep up with demand.

“The sheer volume of orders that PSA received in early March has fundamentally changed our ability to service the hobby," Sloan wrote. "The reality is that we recently received more cards in three days than we did during the previous three months.”

CGC, meanwhile, announced in early March that it has “experienced extraordinary growth in demand for our expert and impartial certification services” and as a result had hired 70 new employees in three months, bought “an additional 21,000 square feet of space, implemented comprehensive training programs, brought in efficiency consultants and worked thousands of hours of overtime.” It also claimed it was investing in “cutting-edge technology, including AI, robotics, advanced software, and more” and said that it would give a $1,000 start bonus to any new employees to incentivize people to apply to work there.

Now, a little over a month later, CGC has announced it’s increasing that start bonus to $2,500 and that it is “seeking to immediately hire dozens of employees … for nearly all positions.” This week, it announced that prices for its cheapest grading services would increase substantially and set a Wednesday deadline for submissions before the price increase.

That new deadline led to yet another surge of submissions and seemingly led to its submission website having major difficulties; the CGC forums are currently filled with very angry people who seemingly weren’t able to meet the deadline. I submitted a few dozen cards to be graded by CGC in early February before I understood just how dire this situation is; it took more than a month for the company to even acknowledge it had received the cards. They have still not formally entered the grading process. What this looks like on a collector's or consumer's end is that they are taking some of the most valuable collectibles they own (if you are getting cards graded, they are almost definitely worth thousands of dollars on eBay or on the secondary market) packaging them up, and mailing them into what is essentially a black hole, with little idea of when they will come back.

“Knowing that we sent our cards out and they were supposedly delivered but have no confirmation that they received is very unnerving,” one CGC forum poster wrote Thursday. “Waiting months to get confirmation that actually received an order is very unfair.”

“I am wondering what happened to my stuff :(,” another wrote.

CGC, PSA, and BGS did not respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, prices for things that are ancillary to trading card collecting, including cheap plastic sleeves, hard plastic “Top Loaders,” and another type of card protector called "Card Savers" which are required for submitting cards to be graded are also skyrocketing in price. A collector I know has begun to simply buy Top Loaders from Chinese wholesale websites and sell those on eBay rather than deal with Pokémon cards at all. Target stores around the country have lines around the block every Friday morning and the company has begun to consider whether it might have to call the cops to prevent people from camping out overnight.

This is all to say that, yes, Pokémon cards are popular again. But that is underselling it. The popularity of Pokémon cards and other trading cards are leading to a situation in which hundreds of people are working "thousands of hours of overtime" and companies are offering massive bounties for new hires to keep up with demand, and are still failing to do so.

“We are extremely excited about the future, not just for our company, but for the entire industry,” Orlando said in his blog. “You should be too.”

I Need to Explain to You Just How Dire America’s Pokémon Card Crisis Is syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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newsmanmdgn · 3 years

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Alabama Amazon Workers Seek to Unionize

DON'T FORGET: I'm giving away a free 30-day subscription to the Washington Post. Enter to win here.

Amazon workers can count on Alabama…or not?

Nearly 6,000 Amazon warehouse workers in Alabama are awaiting the preliminary results of a unionization vote, which could be released at any moment by the National Labor Relations Board.

Source: Axois

The vote occurred on Monday. It's now Thursday. Why does it take so long to count 6,000 votes? Here's why.

And you thought the 2020 presidential election vote count was complicated…amateurs.

California canyon road caught a Tiger by its tail

Tiger Woods was going 87 miles per hour when he crashed in the Palos Verdes Peninsula on February 23, 2021.

Woods was driving a borrowed Genesis SUV, which has some pretty interesting Big Brother diagnostics onboard. For instance, its recorder could tell how hard Tiger was mashing the gas pedal when he crashed: 99%.

Geez, Tiger. Calm down. The booty call was going to be there when you got there.

The grifting continues…

Yesterday, I reported here (based on an NYT investigation) that the Trump campaign bilked and duped its idiot donors of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Instead of admitting it was a dick move, Trump doubled down, as was expected. Now, if you uncheck the “charge my ass weekly until my bank closes my account” box, they literally said they'd have to tell Trump that you were a “DEFECTOR” and implied that you'd suffer the consequences.

The checkbox, if you remember, was pre-checked, meaning you were signing up, in most cases, for a weekly contribution.

You're a DEFECTOR if you uncheck the box.

Boy. I thought Trump was a wannabe mobster. He's gone full Tony Soprano.

Another mass shooting

ROCK HILL, S.C. (AP) — The gunman who killed five people including a prominent doctor in South Carolina was former NFL player Phillip Adams, who killed himself early Thursday, according to a source who was briefed on the investigation.

ABC7Chicago

Adams killed five people, escaped to a nearby house, was found hours later, and then killed himself before police could take him into custody.

Just another day in America.

Is this the new TP shortage?

Ketchup packet prices have risen 13 percent since last January. Enterprising folk are selling 50 packets on eBay for $10.

I'm just glad I have my kitchen drawer stash. I'm RICH, just like John Kerry's wife.

My oldest, no joke, is calling himself Ketchup Jesus.

Things are looking up…if you're a cook or pilot

Yep, those are your two options if you want a job in the immediate post-COVID economy. Restaurants were hit hard by the pandemic, having to close down in-person dining for over a year now.

But Taco Bell, crème de la crème of fast food eateries, is on a hiring binge, trying to hire 5,000 people in one day.

United Airlines announced last week it would be hiring “hundreds” of pilots in the coming months to meet expected soaring demand in flight travel.

The manufacturing sector, in its best days since I graduated from high school, is also expected to hire thousands upon thousands of people before immediately replacing them with robots.

Good times.

The article was originally published here! Alabama Amazon Workers Seek to Unionize

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greylilacs · 6 years

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the2wolves24 said: I have been a vet tech for 24 years. My previous cat was indoor only and at 9 years old, got out and never came back. Let me tell you the what ifs still torture me to this day. My cat now I got as a 2 week old bottle baby. At 12 weeks it was clear I was not going to be able to sleep him in. He played with the dogs regularly, I taught him to fetch paper balls and constructed my own cat condo out of an old armoire. Complete with carpeting, shelves to.climb, hammock and the2wolves24 said: Litter box protected fr9m the dogs behind the cabinets. He wanted out period. At 12 weeks he even launches himself over a full grown Doberman to get out the back door. Since then I put him on my late Pomeranian puppy harness to give him an idea of the area. He got a teaspoon of fancy feast every night so he would associate that with coming home. He has slept inside every night since I have him. He’s 8 years old now by the way. To train him in car safety I put I’m in a the2wolves24 said: Dog crate on my front lawn and for fibe.minutes had all my friends drive by, honking horn and driving up on the boulevard grass. Since then the second he sees a car, he jumps on the nearest lawn. I also neutered him at 4 months and he stays within a 2 house quadrant. He is vaccinated, eats hill’s metabolic food and is on revolution monthly. I took a class on inappropriate urination in cats at the NAVC. Outdoor cats are more psychologically healthy as their daily prey the2wolves24 said: Drives are met. They spend much of their time outside walking, keeping their weight in check. At a year old a kitten followed him home. I have never been able to get that cat to willingly come inside, Burnie is so regular for his meals, that if inclement weather is approaching I can catch him to bring him in. He is also neutered, vaccinated and on revolution. I think it’s unfair of you to.point out the negatives of outdoor cats without pointing out the positive. the2wolves24 said: By the way, giardia and coccidia are often self limiting when in adult animals with health immune systems. ------------------ Okay So! LEts go down the line of the points brought up here > You’re a vet tech for 24 years > You let a cat outside > You scared the fuck out of it to teach it not to go near streets? > Stays within a 2 house quadrant > Outdoor cats are more psychologically healthy as their daily prey drives are met > Giardia / Coccidia things SO! It’s made apparently clear that no matter the amount of experience one has, they only care about one things: Themselves and their pets.

As you so bluntly said- you’re a vet tech for 24 years and yet it didn’t dawn on you once that while you work on cats and dogs all day, there’s vet techs across the world who are dealing with the damage caused by your insufferable mentality of ‘my cat wont stay inside’ because apparently Panic at the disco never got through to you and you never shut the god damned door.

Now, additionally- a study was done on wildlife admitted into a clinic over 11 years and they found out this:

The study examined nearly 21,000 patient records, including 11,144 small mammals and 9,777 small birds, admitted between 2000 and 2010. Of this total, 2,970 patients were admitted due to confirmed interaction with cats.

And this:

Of all small mammals admitted due to cat attacks, more than 70 percent died or had to be euthanized. For small birds, the mortality rate is a staggering 81 percent. So while I knew that some people could be selfish, here I was thinking that those in the vet world would be at least honorable enough to understand that they wouldn’t let their cat outside to be an addition to the devastation caused by outdoor cats. Y’know, the ones that either are or aren’t recorded because why would you bring an already dead animal into a clinic or better yet admit that your precious cat killed and ate a state bird who knows.

But for the ones that were recorded you’re looking at around 297 per year over the 10 years in JUST this study

Or the 24 per month

or the .81 admitted per day because fuck native wildlife when you can say that you’re proudly a vet tech so that somehow makes what your cat and promotion of other cats doing so immune from being dragged through the mud like the impacted bullshit it is.

No.

Vet tech or not, I don’t give an actual shit when you go “yah no I see that hundreds of cats are admitted per year, thousands of cats die per year by car crashes but let me go ahead and just say that letting your cat outdoors is fine because I don’t know how to fulfill my cats needs of the easiest thing TO fulfill on a cat even though I got him at 2 weeks old and in that time could have conditioned him to be an inside cat”

Fuck off.

Also lets just touch on the fact that you put your cat in a crate and scared the shit out of it for quote “five minutes” because that’s how cat psychology works and your cat TOTALLY didn’t associate the crate with the horns honking and instead associated the road with it.

Additionally, lets put a pin in the fact that your cat frequently crosses the road and becomes other peoples problems who may be allergic to cats or even hate cats and want nothing to do with a cat shitting in their yard but they’re too nice to say anything.

because as long as you’re content with ignoring your cat all day amirite.

Now, lets move on

“outdoor cats are psychologically healthy because their prey drives are met”

Because you totally couldn’t do that with a fucking rope toy or door teaser, could you?

Not to mention you can even give your cat whole prey raw/ franken diets to fulfill that needs but by golly that would be so much harder and you’d actually have to /do something/ to keep your cat entertained?

Well as someone who wanted a cat but didn’t want the ability to let it outside by a road that just won’t work, would it?

Now! Let’s move onto my favorite part of all this

Cocc. and Giardi. are self limiting /in the hosts/

But like most parasites- it’s not the initial hosts you have to worry about. It’s the hosts shitting and exposing the parasite while it’s active to other things. Giardia intestinalis itself can be found in 40 different species and And Cystoisospora can be transferred to mice and other cats in the neighborhood, potentially infecting dozens of animals during the time period OR EVEN HUMAN CHILDREN who- y’know, play in their yards. Their yards that shouldn’t have cat shit but :O imagine that, now they do.

Not to mention - not even touched on by you- is the things that can kill your cat that dont live on your cat. And we’re not talking about cars. Humans

Dogs

Hawks

Foxes

Poisons (either intentional or unintentional)

Other cats

Groundhogs

Possums

Raccoon

The list. Goes. on. And On. And On.

But I'm speaking to someone who literally sees dead cats from cars on a monthly (if not weekly) basis.

According to this there’s at max, 27000 companion animal practices in the US There is (according to this) 5.4 million cats killed by cars each year. And I can’t find a consistent statistic on the ones who live so lets just go with that.

That means, if we did the math and this was anywhere near correct, each clinic would probably see around 200 cat vs. car fatalities every year!

So you’ve probably more than likely seen a cat or two hit by cars - hell, you admitted your own original cat passed away from it (Which I am sorry to hear about, truly :/ )

And yet you still think it’s a good idea

Just because “he really wants to go outside and gets bored if I dont let him”

Build a fucking catio. Put up a fence

Cat rollers

“but that costs money” PETS . COST. MONEY.

I am not saying cats “Can never touch grass ever”

I’m saying- leashes exist. Fences exist. Fuck, there’s a thing on ebay that costs like 250 dollars and has a roof that would be perfect for a catio.

Lookit this fucker. It’s wicked.

It has never, will never be just about YOUR cat.

It will always be about the animals that are affected by your shitty choices.

Your cat throwing a pissy fit does not matter to me.

The wildlife that is dying at an astronomical rate because YOU can’t be a responsible pet owner? THAT matters to me. Grow the fuck up and realize that you can have 50 years in vet experience but the day you willingly admit and promote to neglecting your pets safety that shit means nothing.

Just yesterday there was a case of a vet being charged with 16 counts of animal cruelty. Does it somehow make it okay just because he’s a vet?

No. it makes it worse.

So stop patting yourself on the back, it’s apparent you’re just as shitty as the other outdoor cat owners.

#cat idiots

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allenmendezsr · 4 years

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Make Money Buying And Selling Gold

New Post has been published on https://autotraffixpro.app/allenmendezsr/make-money-buying-and-selling-gold/

Make Money Buying And Selling Gold

Buy Now

By: Skip McGrath, Updated November 2017 Most of you know me for my books about selling on eBay and Amazon, but I have done a lot of other things in my life too. One of them is buying and selling scrap gold.

Gold is recovering nicely – Could it go to $3000 an ounce?

When I first got into this business gold was selling for around $300 an ounce. Gold went as high as $1900 an ounce and today gold is selling for over $1,200 an ounce and experts forecast it to go higher – much higher! I have seen forecasts by reliable writers that Gold could reach as high as $5000 an ounce in coming years.

The United States is the largest jewelry market in the world and millions of Americans have old, broken or just out-of-fashion pieces of jewelry sitting in their jewelry boxes. Just last week my wife came across a single 18K gold erring. She lost the other earring in the set about ten years ago and the remaining earring has just been sitting in her jewelry box since then. I put the earring on my gold scale and it weighed 8 grams. At today’s prices that one earring was worth over $300 –which is more than she paid for the pair ten years ago.

There is literally a fortune in gold –billions of dollars worth, sitting around collecting dust. But the high price of gold today is bringing it out of the woodwork. And all you have to do to get your piece of the pie is to ask.

You might be wondering how long this business can last. I recently spoke with the owner of a large gold refining company and I asked him how long this business could continue. He said:

“Every year all the refining companies in the US combined refine less than one percent of all the scrap gold jewelry in the country. And new jewelry sales grow over five percent a year. So there is pretty much an endless supply. We have been in this business for 33 years and we expect to be doing this for at least another 33 years.”

How much can I make buying gold?

Unscrupulous gold dealers like the ones that advertise on radio and TV ask you to mail your gold in to them. They typically pay between 10% and 20% of the value of gold. Most pawnshops pay about 30% to 35%.

Legitimate dealers pay between 40% and 65%. 40% to 65% may seem low to you, but remember, the gold you buy has to be smelted, refined, assayed and poured into ingots before it can be resold. Refiners who do this will pay you between 85% and 92% of the spot price of gold.

Lets look at a typical sale. The average person tends to bring in three or four items that altogether weigh about 2 ounces. Most items people bring me are 14K gold which is 58% pure gold and the rest is alloys to lend gold its color and hardness.

Two ounces at 58% works out to 1.16 ounces of pure gold. Lets say for example you pay that person 50%, which is typical of most legitimate gold dealers. At $1400 an ounce, that comes out to $812. Now you send the gold to a refiner who will pay you 95% of the spot price. I will let you do the math, but this works out to a very nice profit from just one transaction. Many experts predict that gold will go as high as $5000 an ounce. I don’t know if that will happen, but imagine how profitable this business will be if it does.

Do that 3 or 4 times a week and you are looking at some real money! And it’s 100% legal.

Skip McGrath’s book on gold buying is amazing. He also has extremely good one on one support. He cares about his customers. Thanks Skip! ~ Michael

Where do you find people with Gold to sell?

I live in a small town of about 12,000 people. I was driving to the supermarket on a recent Saturday and saw several signs that said: “Cash for Gold and Silver Today at the Majestic Hotel.” After I left the market, I drove over to the Majestic Hotel to see what was going on.

There was a gentleman in one of the meeting rooms off of the lobby with a table, a scale and calculator and a cash box. He was meeting with a lady while two more people waited their turn. I didn’t want to bother him, but the lady who works at the reception desk is a friend of mine, so I asked her how he was doing. She told me he has had a steady stream of customers all day. Imagine if each person brought in just one ounce of gold and he saw 20 or 30 people that day. That is a huge amount of money

There are two factors driving the gold business today:

A recovering, but still tough economy with millions of people out of work

Relatively high prices for gold and silver

The gold business has always been a good business, but nothing like it has been since 2008 when gold prices started rising as the economy began the downturn. These two facts have combined to bring millions of people out of the woodwork with gold to sell. Either they need cash, or they just want to take advantage of today’s high prices.

It is very easy to find these people. You can set up in a hotel room like the person in the example above. You can advertise in local papers or even on radio. You can also advertise for free on sites such as Craigslist. Another popular method is using door hangars. You can get them made for about 2-cents each and hire school kids to hang them for you. But none of these methods work as well as one simple, low cost advertising method I am going to show you in one of your free bonuses.

Do you like to travel? A couple of years ago I met an older gentleman and his wife who roam the country in an RV, buying gold at every town they stop in. They even have a sign on the side of their RV that they buy gold and people come up to them in the RV parks.

Gold Parties are a booming business

One of the things I show you how to do with my system is throw gold parties. You have all heard of home parties for Tupperware, cosmetics or cooking gadgets. Well at those parties people spend money. When people attend a gold party they make money! If you can get 10 people to a gold party you can buy several ounces of gold, -potential profit of up to 45% on each ounce And the hostess, who put on the party, will get 10% of what you make. Now that’s what I call a “win-win.”

My system includes complete instructions on hosting a gold party of your own and how to market gold parties to others. Besides the instructions I have also included flyers, brochures, ads and invitations. All of these are in simple Word docs, so all you have to do is add your contact information and print them out.

What kind of gold do you buy?

Here is a list of some of the gold pieces I see every day:

Outdated jewelry

Broken or bent items

Gold chains

Class rings

Bracelets

Pins

Broaches

Wedding or engagement ring from an ex-spouse

Retirement pins

Watches

Tangled bracelets and chains

Wedding bands

Items with missing stones

Single earrings

Those giant earrings from the 80’s

That promise ring from the ex-boyfriend you would like to forget about.

If you are a woman reading this, I bet you have one or more of these in your closet or jewelry box. If you are a man, just show this to your wife or girlfriend and they will tell you how common this is.

Purchase How to Make Money Buying and Selling Gold for only $37

Is this only about buying jewelry?

There is no question that jewelry is the easiest, most plentiful market to do this in. But I am also going to show you how to make money from discarded electronics including cell phones, stereos, computers, microwave ovens and more.

Last week I was donating some things to our local thrift shop. When I arrived the helper was in the process of throwing several older electronic items in the dumpster. I asked why he was doing that and he said “Well they don’t work so we can’t sell them. “ I asked if I could have them. One of the devices was a ten-year-old tower computer and the other was a cassette tape deck and amplifier.

With about 30 minutes and a screwdriver I recovered almost $200 worth of gold from just those two items. Most of you won’t want to bother with this aspect of the business because buying jewelry is so easy, but there are plenty of people who make over $1000 a week collecting and taking old electronics pieces apart and sending the parts to refiner who will pay them 80% of the spot gold price.

You can even get these items for free. Just advertise that you recycle old electronic items and people with bring them to you rather than taking them to the dump.

How much money do I need to get started in this business?

You will need a gold scale, a gold testing kit and a couple of simple tools. All of this will cost less than $30.

You will have to spend about $25 to $50 on local advertising to find your first few customers.

Lastly you will need some cash to purchase your gold. I would say you would need about $500 to buy your first few pieces. But don’t worry. If you don’t have that, I will show you two ways to get started with no cash at all and bootstrap your way to your first few sales.

Skip: What does your system include?

Here is what you get:

50 page eBook, How to Make Money Buying and Selling Gold. – My book contains everything you need to get started. Please Note: My eBooks are set to allow printing. You can print it out on your computer printer, or you can send the file to a local copy shop and they will print and bind a copy for you.

Bonus Resource – A bonus package that contains all of the ads, flyers and invitations you need to market your business. It would cost you hundreds of dollars to create these from scratch.

Bonus Resource – My personal list of refiners who will pay between 92% – 96% for your gold

Bonus Report – Tools of the Trade

Bonus Report – Sandwich Board Advertising

My No Questions Asked, 100%, 60-day Money-back guarantee!

OK– How Much does it cost?

My complete Gold Buying Training System only costs $37!

One more bonus: I am going to give you a very short, but free report that shows you a fail-safe local advertising method that will cost you $38 for every 1000 people who receive it and can generate generous returns for each dollar you spend.

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mirandalinportfolio · 4 years

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VICE: Face Shapes and Blood Types: Wading into the World of Online Dating in China

The Mandarin term shengnu literally means “leftover woman.” It was coined to describe China’s growing crop of middle-class women who, thanks to new educational and economic opportunities, have been able to rise to unprecedented ranks within Chinese society—at the expense of their love lives. Nearing (or, heaven forbid, passing) the age of 30, these women find themselves materially successful but romantically unattached.

As a female in her mid-20s, living in China with a graduate degree and no significant other, I’ve been particularly sensitive to the term’s use. But while local media and gossipy mothers often use it derisively, my leftover sisters and I have come to embrace it as a badge of honor worn by independent women who know what they want and are unwilling to settle.

We shengnu are in dual position of being supposedly desperate, but in actuality having all kinds of men to choose from. In 2003, Gong Haiyan, a single coed from Shanghai, started the online date site Jiayuan.com (“Beautiful Destiny”) because she was frustrated by the lack of legitimate dating options she found around her. The bare-bones website she initially sketched out has since grown into China’s largest online-dating website, with over 56 million registered users, more than OKCupid and PlentyOfFish combined.

Like Gong Haiyan, I have, in my years in China, had little luck on the traditional meat market, so I decided to see if her internet service, and a few others like it, could be a better matchmaker for me.

Signing up for an account on Jiayuan or any of China’s other big-three dating services starts like most sites: cheesy screenname, recently created email account, vaguely accurate description of age and looks. But just like democracy, dating in China has developed distinct Asian characteristics. Your blood type, face shape, and willingness to have your future in-laws live with you are treated as basic information (O-positive, duck-egg-shaped, to be discussed when the time comes, for the record).

My profile photo also proved to be a sticking point. It was rejected three times, initially because I chose some abstract avatar, then because not enough of my face was visible. “Show the world who you really are,” the site moderator urged. Although that struck me as contrary to everything the internet stands for, I submitted my passport photo and was passed to the next phase.

While most of your profile’s essentials can be filled out with the help of a drop-down menu, the final stage requires a personalized self-introduction. A provided example on Zhenai.com (“Precious Love”) is instructive as to what kind of women the service is appealing to:

Before, in order to focus on my studies, my mom didn’t let me date. Now, because of work, I don’t have time to date. As time passed, I suddenly discovered I’d already become one of the “shengnu.”Actually my demands for my other half aren’t that high. He doesn’t have to be that handsome, or that wealthy, but he must be motivated, responsible, obedient, and that’s about all. I have great hopes and visions for my future, but I hope to accomplish them with the person I love….

It was flattering but not altogether too surprising that within minutes of activating my profile, my inbox was flooded with messages. The first came from a 26-year-old, O-type (hurray our children, or rather our child, will be a universal donor!), triangle-faced man named “Poisonsc…” But as I browsed through his profile, alarm bells quickly went off. He was a private entrepreneur. He listed his monthly income as 3-5,000 renmindi per month (equal to about $480-800 dollars, an average white-collar salary). He didn’t own a car or a house yet. No wonder he was single.

With the growing numerical disparity and social parity between sexes, women know that not just anyone will do anymore. Owning a car and home are standard expectations before marriage. A candidate’s appeal rises if he has a five-figure monthly salary and stable career (state-owned corporations are best), but falls if that means he has to work overtime and thus won’t be around to whisk his partner off on romantic dates. Modern China’s romance with materialism was epitomized on the popular TV dating game show “Are You The One”, when one contestant famously claimed she’d rather cry in the back of a BMW than smile on a bicycle.

Baihe.com (meaning “Lily”, but also literally “Hundred Matches”) makes it easy to weed out the scrubs. Users can sort users by age, height, education, and income. Though IRL I’d like to think I’ve never judged any person by such narrow criteria, I decided if I was going to date in China, I had to do it with a Chinese mindset. So clicking the obvious choice, I browsed on.

The top hit was a block-headed 30-year-old with a lush head of hair named Heavy. The self-described “Chairman-looking” home-owner had posted half a dozen photos of him frolicking on an exotic beach. He clearly had the right salary-to-free-time ratio.

Like nearly every male profile I browsed, though, Heavy had almost no demands of his partner. He wanted someone between 24-28 years old, 140-175 cm tall, preferably ethnically Han. But income, education, and housing situation—factors that can make or break a man's prospects—were all listed as “no preference.”

Despite the cold rationalism that seems to surround these sites, all these sites still cling to the sweet romantic notions. It's about finding your other half. Each user, before finalizing their profile, must check off a box affirming their good moral character and honest intention to search for a spouse on the site, NOT a one-night stand. Bang With Friends, this most certainly is not.

But while sites try to ensure pureness of heart, there's no escaping the internet's inherent ability to con, especially in a country that trades on its ability to mass produce fake Chanel purses and pirated DVDs.

When I began my online search, the Chinese Lunar New Year was fast approaching. It’s a time when virtually everyone in the country returns home, gathers with their loved ones, and is ruthlessly interrogated about their personal lives. Accordingly, internet message boards light up with ads seeking and offering rental girlfriends and boyfriends. Taobao, China’s version of eBay, for a while banned the search term altogether.

“Busy at work, no time to consider relationships,” reads a typical message. “Can anyone help me cope with the parental pressure?”

Though joke and scam posts are rampant, I decided to respond to one that at least sounded thorough. User 19760923b was a 32-year-old male, Master’s degree, 180 cm, 75 kg, “probably considered good looking” seeking a 25- to 30-year-old female for an eight day "rental" to northeastern China.

“I’m just a regular office worker, not anyone rich, so anyone looking to get rich or become a mistress please don’t apply. If you’re too ugly or too fat, it will tip my parents off, so sorry, you won’t be considered.” What a charmer.

19760923b promised the rental wouldn’t be required to sleep in the same room or perform any kissing and fondling, though she “must be willing to hold hands.” He offered 300-800 Renminbi per day, negotiable. The deal also included train tickets to and from Beijing. If necessary, he’d be willing to also accompany his rental girlfriend to her hometown.

Using a mix of my latent Chinese class skills and Google Translate, I wrote a brief note expressing my desire to fake it. Within a couple of hours, I received an email: “Thank you for your reply, but I don’t think you will be a good match to bring home.” Even to play a sham girlfriend, the rejection felt real.

But my heartbreak was soon eased. A bounty of new "flirts" and "winks" were waiting in my inbox. One man in particular, using the name “Single-Minded,” had sent 13 messages in a span of 35 minutes. Though back home such over-eagerness would be ruthlessly mocked over a round of drinks with girlfriends, in China, it felt reassuringly sincere.

“Your subtle smile makes my heart jump,” cooed his first message. “I love to smile too. I hope we can smile together. Can I get to know you more?”

Mousing through his profile, I learned he was university educated, a car and home owner, and employed in finance by a Fortune 500 company. I was already imagining my mother’s approving nod.

In his next note, he waxed even more poetic: “In the whole world, who knows how many millions of people pass us by, but fate made me stop and look at your photo. I hope you will look back at me.”

His clear, unobstructed profile photo showed an athletically built man in his early 30s, with hair gelled into the snow cone swirl common among aspiring C-Pop stars. He was also wearing what looked like a lumpy holiday sweater knit by his grandmother. A sign of filial piety, I hoped.

As I clicked to respond, a screen flashed open offering me a series of ready-made responses. There was the generic, “Thank you for your interest. Please tell me more: ^.^” Or the flirtier, “If you read my message, write back so I know you reciprocate O(n_n)O.�� Or the straightforward rejection: “Thank you for your interest. I don’t think our circumstances are a fit. Good luck, hope you find your soulmate.” I wondered if 19760923b had copied his response from here.

But as I considered what level of emoticon flirtation to use, I realized Single-Minded’s messages had also been computer generated. A row of tabs suggested dozens of opening lines, categorized from "funny" to "cute." Worst of all, my Single-Minded suitor had chosen from the "standard" section. He didn’t even use a creative scripted response!

Outraged, I aired my sense of betrayal to a male Chinese friend. Far from sharing my indignation, though, he bashfully confessed that at the age of 25 and just entering his first official relationship, he too had used a move learned from an American teen soap. How else, he asked, were young people, sheltered by overprotective parents since birth and often right through their adult lives, supposed to know how to hit on girls?

If, as they say, Chariman Mao abolished arranged marriages in 1951 after his own unhappy experience with the practice during his first marriage, the system that’s replaced it hasn’t made finding a genuine connection any easier for Chinese men and women. In the end, I got rejected for the role of a rental girlfriend, used an algorithm to pick out men by their income and blood type (which I later discovered in Asia is associated with certain personality types similar to zodiac signs; type-Os are ambitious, self-confident, and recommended to eat extra poultry and fish), got wooed by a succession of swirly-haired men with scripts, and continue to be harassed by all three dating companies trying to sell me additional matchmaking services. But I am still no closer than before to finding my soulmate.

And probably even further from finding a one-night stand.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/yv5987/face-shapes-and-blood-types-wading-into-the-world-of-online-dating-in-china

#text

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terrordave1 · 5 years

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Horrorhound Weekend boasted a cavalcade of celebrities as well as excellent panels and vendors. We literally left one aisle of MASK-FEST before seamlessly finding ourselves in the middle of it; a transition putting us in immediate temptation. Everything looked so incredible, you could easily blow a hundred bucks without walking more than five feet! Fan conventions have gotten a lot pricier since this site began nearly ten years ago. The biggest increases are from guest celebrities. They charge top dollar for their autographs and you should count yourself lucky if they don’t tack on an additional fee for a selfie. I had brought along a couple of Blu-ray covers I’d hoped to have signed but when I saw those prices…well let’s just say those covers remained untouched throughout the weekend. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the money but rather my being haunted by all the things I could do with that cash instead. And it wasn’t as if Horrorhound didn’t offer plenty of alternatives.

The best $20 I spent at this event was on a signed Blu-ray copy of Never Hike Alone (2017). This Friday the 13th fan film is free on YouTube but had DVD/Blu-ray copies available for a limited time after two successful fundraisers. Unfortunately, I’d only heard of this film a few months ago and not only missed the opportunity to support it but failed to get a physical copy. If you look on eBay, you’ll be lucky to find the red-covered first printing for under a hundred dollars and the blue-covered second one for under sixty. So when I found the film’s Writer/Producer/Director – Vincente Disanti, selling the original red release for $20 it was like hitting the jackpot!

The movie is under an hour and well worth your time. The cinematography is top-notch and Crystal Lake never looked so beautiful. The cat and mouse between Jason (played by Vincente) and the hiker (Drew Leighty) will have you on the edge of your seat and, unlike most of Voorhees victims, you actually care about this one. I should mention, there’s currently another Indiegogo fundraiser going on for its sequel, Never Hike in the Snow. Unfortunately, I don’t see any physical media offerings for its backers which is a tough sell for me because since I’m not ready to give up on physical media. After this, we decided to split up and do our own shopping. I was glad because I didn’t want them to see me doing a frivolous shopping spree but, despite the enticement, I remained frugal.

We met up at the end and were just about ready to leave when Jade asked if I’d seen the booth with Mothman and the Flatwoods Monster shirts. In 2017, we’d gone on a road trip through West Virginia and visited both Braxton County (home of the Flatwoods Monsters) and the Mothman Museum in Point Pleasant. I featured them in two separate Scary Monsters Magazine articles. Incidentally, my final WEIRD USA article (featuring the Hodag monster in Wisconsin) will be appearing in their winter “Robot” issue. I’ve reached a point in my life where I just want to write for myself; whenever I feel like it and on my own site without obligation. My understanding is that the publisher, Don Smeraldi, will be continuing the WEIRD USA series, himself, which I fully support. I’ll be doing the same thing on this site whenever a WEIRD opportunity arises.

Up until Horrorhound, I assumed my kids were hapless stowaways whenever we stopped at bizarre attractions. Apparently, that trip to West Virginia made an impression on Jade as she purchased a neat T-Shirt featuring both of its monsters.

The Pickled Punk Show had some fantastic designs and I was tempted to buy myself a shirt, too, if not for the fact that my closet is already overrun with genre-related T-Shirts. I ended up buying prints instead which I framed and hung in my living room after we returned to Chicago.

With my cryptid prints in tow, it was time to stop beating around the bush and head over to an entire room dedicated to them. We left the main convention hall of Horrorhound and MASK-FEST and headed across the lobby to this year’s NEW show, Fact or Fiction Fest!

Coming Up…the Bigfoot Hunters!

~Dave

“Never Hike Alone” at Horrorhound Weekend! Horrorhound Weekend boasted a cavalcade of celebrities as well as excellent panels and vendors. We literally left one aisle of…

#FRIDAY THE 13TH #Indianapolis Horrorhound Weekend #Never Hike Alone

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graveyardclaws · 7 years

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this is draft one of a rant i plan to scream at my mother this weekend

Do you realize that my gpa right now is a 2.8? anyone could get a bachelor’s degree in English with a gpa that low when they’ve got their parents paying all their bills and blackmailing them into showing up to class. Literally anyone. This is not impressive. You would have to be a literal fungus to fail at that. These classes are very very easy for anyone who isn’t me because I CAN”T READ and I’m the only one who’s struggling at all. They are all normal intelligent people who have things to say and opinions about texts that I struggled to read the Wikipedia summary of. I have the intelligence of a toadstool, but none of the patience. And you know where that lovely metaphor comes from?? Jane!! Remember five years ago when I decided that I was going to teach myself latin 1 so I could start with latin 2 and not have to bother taking the class? I told jane thinking she would be impressed but she wasn’t. her exact words were ‘don’t worry, you’ll do fine. A toad could teach itself latin 1’. and then I took the exam and it went about as well as if I were a literal toad who wandered in from the bio lab. Mr. grady only let me take the class because I asked nicely and he was also the most apathetic teacher I’ve ever had so he let me do whatever I wanted. But I knew that I had not qualified for the class. No one else did but I remembered what jane had said. So I thought what is dumber than a toad? Me, apparently. I’m the toadstool that toads sit on while they accomplish more than I ever will. i have no goals or ambitions. every possible future i could strive for makes me miserable. most of this is your fault and it’s really important to me that you know that. i might not get too many chances to remind you because i don’t plan to live long enough to actually graduate next may.

this is just the beginning of the rant i also plan to include a complete list of all the people i want to brutally murder with a samurai sword i saw on ebay. most of the list is boring if you don’t know the people involved but here is an abridged version:

my professor who teaches a class called “the human cost of capitalism” which is basically about how capitalism sucks and yet she’s making us buy more than one hundred dollars worth of books for the class

my american politics professor who made us all stand for the pledge of allegiance and i didn’t want to but i felt pressured into it so i did and i thought he was going to make some kind of statement about how weird it is that we do that and he sort of did but it kind of sucked and i still have a gross feeling inside because i wasn’t comfortable with doing that. also he’s making us buy a 130$ textbook. i found a pdf of it for much cheaper, but still. it’s stupid.

that guy on my floor who stayed up all night having a loud conversation outside of my room because he was locked out and was waiting for reslife to send someone to let him into his room. wow i don’t care about your problems yeah it sucks to get locked out but 1. remember your key next time and 2. i don’t care. shut the fuck up.

that guy who works at the campus store and seemed to think i was looking for something to smoke weed out of when i asked him where bowls were. like... no. i’m literally just looking for a bowl to eat popcorn out of. why would you make that assumption. it’s not that i’m bothered by him thinking that, i just thought it was very rude to ask.

my geology professor who is incredibly boring and annoying and the class is taught in the worst room on campus which is not her fault but still.

my women in politics professor who was actually really nice but she made us all go around the room and do introductions and i was really uncomfortable because i hate that. i was really awkward when i was talking and i felt like everyone was judging me. i know she’s a nice person and probably won’t think about it after next class but i still feel humiliated.

all the people who live on my floor and constantly try to start conversations with me and then make it hard for me to keep up. if you don’t have anything to say to me, don’t bother starting a conversation. i promise, i have nothing to say either. i am quite uninteresting.

everyone who either forgot to wish me a happy birthday last week or didn’t wish me a happy birthday until they were reminded. not counting corporations sending me birthday coupons, exactly nine people told me happy birthday. six of them are relatives (i have a lot more relatives than that most of them just didn’t bother) and none of the others remembered on their own, i’m pretty sure. even my absolute best friend who i’ve been bffs with for six years mentioned at the beginning of august that she thought my birthday was on the 28th. which it isn’t. it’s the 21st it has always been the 21st that was the fifth birthday that she’s known me for and she still somehow didn’t know it. so yeah she got it right on the actual day but it doesn’t count because she didn’t remember on her own

the locksmith or the work order desk or reslife or whoever’s fault it was that my room didn’t have a lock for more than 24 hours after i checked in. i called them and it still took them almost a full day to fix it.

the girl who made fun of me for sitting in public reading one of the pretty little liars books. i know they’re for kids i don’t care. i have enough trouble reading as it is i found books that i can manage to get through so you can shut your ugly judgmental mouth and let me live my life. also your highlights are hideous your hair is the wrong shade of brown to get reddish colored highlights normally i would not give a fuck what you do to your own head but apparently your opinion is forced on me so you get to hear about everything you’re doing wrong also :)

everyone in pagan club even the people who wanted me to be vice president. i deserved the position and they should’ve made it happen. also now i have to do the stupid training workshops for the officer position since i’m treasurer and i would’ve had to do them anyway if i was vice president but at least then it would be worth it. now it’s for a position i don’t even want so it’s a waste of my time.

to be perfectly honest there are not a whole lot of people i wouldn’t murder with a samurai sword given the opportunity so i’m going to end this now and try to get some sleep before class tomorrow

#like if read #wraith.txt

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efosa123 · 5 years

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eCompare 2.0 Review Demo Bonus – 7 eCom Platform Live Price Comparison Store Builder hi and welcome to a compare now before we literally blow your mind with this brand-new technology and the live demo let me ask you a question are you an affiliate an internet marketer do sell or promote anything online perhaps you're just getting started but haven't figured out how to effectively generate income online yet okay and one more question how would you like to sell more and make more without lifting a finger a silly question really who wouldn't want to make more money without having to do more so let me tell you how it's simple really you offer your customers options and choices on what they buy and where they buy it from it's called price comparison or shopping comparison and where you can do this effectively you'll make more a lot more regardless of where your customers buy did you know that sales of physical products online surpassed sales on the high street it's true 53 percent of global internet users have made an online purchase in the last year alone that's over 1 billion online shoppers and that figure is growing by the day online shopping has become a 1 trillion dollar a year industry because it's easy and because shoppers have choices it's easy for them to find the best deal and the best price without ever leaving the house and that's both good and bad if you sell online good because people are now happy to purchase online bad because all those choices mean they're less likely to buy from you but we have a risk-free and highly effective solution now I'm sure you know that selling physical products online is risky right you have to raise money for stock arrange shipping and then store it all you have to build and configure your online store pay someone to do it for you or pay to use a platform like Shopify then you have to pay for ads in order to sell that stock and you still have to hope it sells and makes a profit like I said risky and it's why more and more marketers have become ecommerce affiliates ie you this product you don't own and collect a commission when somebody buy is perfect but there's still an issue what anyone actually buy from you ask yourself why should they buy from you after all they may be able to get the same product cheaper from another online store the reality is you could spend weeks perfecting your store you could spend time and money driving traffic and still end up making little to no money that's what happens in most cases so we developed a compare B compare is a unique app and theme which uses an ethical loophole to create your very own e-commerce stores in under five minutes from seven leading online retailers within minutes econ pair will populate your ecommerce stores with hundreds of products all linked to your global affiliate link which means you get paid regardless of where your customers purchase you compare builds all of your listings for you it pulls and formats descriptions titles images reviews videos and dynamic pricing so all you have to do is choose which products to include but that's not the best bit econ pair is unique because it ethically forces people to buy you see each compare store you build comes complete with a very unique piece of technology called a price comparison engine price comparison is the key to more sales without additional work sites like these are made a fortune capitalizing on price comparison and now you can do the same by using a comparison engine on each product you list and sell you're letting the customer decide which of the prices or deals they value the best they never leave your site in search of a better deal and you never lift a finger it's a win-win imagine how much easier it will be to make more sales by simply giving customers price options they can pick whatever prices work best for them and no matter what they pick you make a profit take a look at this customer visits your store and clicks on the product they're interested in as soon as they do that your price comparison engine instantly searches our seven retail platforms for the same products and delivers the results right there in your listing the whole thing happens life there's no need for your customers to go anywhere off because you've just found the best deal for them and when they choose one of those options you get a commission and here's something else that will help you make money from the very start let's say your store is brand new and you haven't completely filled it yet a customer visits your store and drops a product name or search term into your stores life search normally this would result in no stock and no self but be compared is different when someone does a live search on your store our app instantly pulls all the search related products into your store so your customer can still find what they're looking for and you still make a sale it's true there are many affiliate store builders available to you but there are none that often these features you get with a compare number offer 7 platform API integration with global affiliate links and number offer integrated price comparison this technology is brand new it's never been done before and you won't find it anywhere else 81% of shoppers research products online before purchasing which makes comparison shopping the number one way of converting people on your site into buyers when you help your customers find the best deal and best price you make more it's as simple as that you compare gives you the ability to set up real online businesses in minutes without risk but more importantly it turns browsers into buyers so are you ready to build a real business selling real products isn't it about time you started making money instead of spending it well with a compare you can and you can start today but there is a snag you see the door Stewie compared at closing they're closing on this heavily discounted launch price so you need to take advantage of this unique opportunity right now you'll find the access button right under this video along with all the other ecomp air package features and remember when he helps your customers find the best price they will buy from you so grab this brand new technology and get started today in this video I'm going to quickly show you how to set up you compare to and why I think it's the best affiliate store builder that you're going to come across now of course there are tons and tons of affiliate store builders online you may have want to see yourself but if I take you over to the site and show you this one unique feature there's a ton of unique features with it that you can pair to but I'm going to show you this one because this is the one that really pulls in your customers and turns your stores into actual profit ok so this is a demo site there's only a few products on here but if I click here you can see that it runs a life of a price comparison now this price comparison engine is built into II compared tip those bitman City compare 1e compare to is the upgraded version and we've got an awful lot of additional features built in so you can see straightaway we have prices from Amazon eBay we don't have one from Alibaba but we have one from Walmart so we have three different prices here and regardless of wherever your customer decides to purchase let's just say that they click buy now from Amazon you get a commission again it doesn't matter where they buy from providing you've got your affiliate links clicked into all of the different platforms I'm I'll show you that in just a moment but you can see the power of this know you can also see that we have the images we have social media if I pull this Korean over here we've also added in shopping car and wish list now a shopping cart is an additional element as is wish list but shopping cart now allows 90 day cookies so for example if you've done any affiliate econ work before then you'll know that Amazon is only a 24 hour cookie so that means if your potential customer doesn't buy today and doesn't buy tomorrow then you lose out on that Commission however with you compared to because of the 90 day cookie tech if they click here and then they come back in say 89 days time for example you still get a commission before that transaction now you can see that we have descriptions so descriptions are curated they're pulled in which is great for SEO especially if you're focusing your stores on specific marketplaces niches which we suggest that you do we also have refused these reports directly from Amazon if you've chosen Amazon in the product settings which I'll show you in a moment customers can also believe their own reviews here so let me take you over to the blog now so you can you can put a blog around these products around your niche with curated content and you can monetize it we have a number of videos there so again this is great for SEO forget to the home page you see that we have a sliders we have bestsellers all of this can be set up in settings I'll show you that in a moment you can add store products you can add your autoresponder so you can build a list you can collect emails from your store and we have all of the legal pages okay so I'm going to show you this future this additional feature before I take you into the admin area so here you can see little search bar so this is a live search feature and what it allows your customers to do is to search for products which may or may not be on your site now let's assume that you've just sets up a sigh and like this one you know we've only got a few products on here and this one let's just say it's about phones and let's say the customer was looking for a different brand so we put that in there and then we click search now obviously this phone these products are not on the site at the moment but you can see here that it pulls up those products so what happens is any potential customer on your site looking for a product which you may or may not have on your site can still search and if they decide to compare deals click here or buy that product then you still get a commission even though it's not actually on your site at the moment so this one here for example I could can i bounce a car again this is cooking for 90 days to wishlist so you can see that we're in the cart there and we're also added to the wishlist there so if I click here you see it's up here and you can proceed to checkout so this is far more like a real econ store than it is an affiliate store builder now setting up in compare to is very very straightforward you will need your self hosted WordPress installation we do have instructions on how to set up all the basics inside the members area but again if you used to say that would precise then this is an absolute breeze so obviously you're going to need to install the seam and you're going to need to install the plugin so first of all let me just show you the theme so you can see here that we have a pro theme this is fully customizable so you can customize it so any niche you like any interest very easy to customize very cool looking it comes with built-in sliders and the host of features to make it powerful in any niche market so next I'll take you over to you compare to this is the plug-in I'm going to show you how to set it up so this will just be a quick run-through you can just see how easy it is so initially you'll need to get the settings you need to add in your details for the platforms you want to use obviously the comparison engine will only use the platforms that you've integrated with you compared see obviously so you can see that you can choose from or you can add Amazon Aliexpress Walmart Best Buy shop comm see discount an eBay you can say become a settings there but these are the details that you need to add in order for the comparison engine to work now if you decided that you only want to use say Amazon and eBay which are probably the most common referral platforms to use then you can just use those and the comparison engine will just search and compare from those two sites but again there are seven sites here and you can integrate all of them so once you've done that go over to the dashboard actually if I go over to the product finder then you start adding products here so for example the Lancer pull a product from Amazon or I can different Aliexpress or ebay must washed so you put a keyword in there we can set up categories or choose to select categories we can choose a number of results that we're gonna find we can add filters here click fetch products once the products are added to your new affiliate store they're self updating all that means is if a product runs out of stock or price changes on say Amazon or Ebay or any of the other platforms then it will change automatically in your store so you're not going to run into problems of having zero stock will simply click through or the price changing when they click through to the platform everything changes automatically inside your eekum pair affiliate store now one of the biggest issues with any online business is lack of traffic obviously you need traffic in order for you to drive sales having an affiliate store is great but without traffic then it's just a great-looking store it's not going to make you any money so we recommend that you build each door around specific niches however we've added in a couple of features which will allow you to drive traffic almost instantly so of course you can share each place across social media as soon as you add the product you can share it but nearly every other store builder does that so we've added our own traffic booster so if I hover here you can see traffic booster I click there and you can set up your traffic to run directly from inside of your admin - set up everything here set up the templates preferences and this is a viral system so essentially if you're just starting out you don't have traffic your site's not yet established and it's not appearing in Google then simply use the inbuilt traffic booster to start driving traffic to your pages and to your offers and we compared to has unlimited stock potential so it's slightly different in as much as it lets you have as much dock on your store as for as you want there are no restrictions you can have thousands and thousands of products really makes no difference and we put no restriction on how many products you can add to your store now of course you may not want to have all of those products showing or listing at the same time you might want to show some and then some another time we have a number of sliders built in we have featured products that you can set everything up from this - here so if you go to dashboard just pull this up here if you get a dashboard you can set everything up here like I say this is just a demo store so there are not too many promise in here at the moment but you can see how easy it is to set up so you can you can add products to a featured list removed from featured hide from shop shot my shop and so on inside of the store settings you can set up and customize your theme so you can add your own logo you can turn on or switch off slider in pretty much control all of the sliders everything from inside of this panel here you can set up your life search settings so if you remember I showed you that if you put a keyword in the search bar people search and make a profit if they purchased here you can set up live search settings so if you remember I showed you that if somebody put in a keyword you could still potentially profit somebody clicks somebody runs a search for a profit that's not necessarily on your site they click through the purchase and you get a commission you default keyword in there insert discounts here and you can turn on the discount switch selector we have built in SEO options for SEO traffic retargeting blog options and many other features all built in to this - here Pam there are a ton of other features but essentially if you're just starting out you're interested in results you're interested in having something that's easy to set up that looks good and works I think you see that eke impaired is very very straightforward very very slick looking but perhaps the most important aspect is the fact that you can add as much stock as you want you don't have to carry any stock you weren't commission from anything that anybody buys on your store and the price comparison engine makes this a unique tool there is nothing else like it when you offer people the best deal the best price they will purchase from you you 17 more words

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