What we really need is to get rid of the politicians that can't understand the Constitution & Amendments. Feinstein is near the top of the list with her failure to comprehend the 1st Amendment and 2nd Amendment as well as the basic concept of limits on government.
By all means, become a business person and start a competitor as a means of learning. Great project. Hey, you could Kickstart it!
Seriously though, the problem with starting up a competitor is lack of recognition. As a project creator why would I bother using you rather than Kickstarter? That is the first question you must ask yourself. A slight reduction in the fee doesn't do me any good if your service has less chance of making my project funding happen. And that is the reality - competitors are tiny and don't have much recog.
I get contacted by about one startup a week trying to be the next KickStarter. None of them are as well done as KickStarter. None of them have any base. Most are one man operations and I don't have any faith they'll succeed. As a project creator I need them to succeed so I can succeed. Catch-23.
That is correct, and clearly explained on the Kickstarter project and many (most? almost all?) project pages. Backers are not charged unless enough pledges have been made to meet or exceed the funding goal.
Project creators need to include in their budget:
1) Kickstarter's 5% 2) Amazon's 5% (credit card processing) 3) Marketing during the project funding drive 4) Cost to produce products to give to backers 5) Shipping costs to get products to backers 6) Development costs of the product
Wow! #6 might seem like the only purpose of the funding you say but all of those costs have to be factored in in order to bring the product to market and be able to deliver 'rewards' to the backers.
Yes, there are quite a few poorly thought out projects but the same is true off Kickstarter too. Lots of ideas and only some float to the surface, many are chaff that blows away in the wind. It takes a lot to bring a project to fruition and deliver the goods.
Projects often take longer to develop either because it is so hard to make accurate predictions of the development time even when everything goes right (not unique to Kickstarter) or because things happen - life - that slow things down.
Our family ran a successful Kickstarter project as one part of funding our on-farm butcher shop. It is really a pre-buy program, just as most Kickstarter projects are. You help pay for development and get to be near the head of the line when the product becomes available. A lot of people enjoy vicariously being part of the process. Pre-buys are not a 'walk into the store and buy it off the shelf' - important to understand. It takes time to develop and setup production - we're a little behind schedule on ours but we're making progress and will finish. Kickstarter backers helped with part of the funding and we appreciate that.
This is what I learned too. They have too few people. I agree that with the tens of millions of dollars they say they have taken from their 5% cut of projects you would think they could hire a LOT of developers to improve the system. The inability to find projects is a huge limitation of the platform.
The "Evil" was reference to Google's old saying of "Do No Evil". Sorry if you're too young to remember. It was over a decade ago. Perhaps that was before you were born. Old history. Just ignore it. Rinse and repeat.
Nickel and diming adds up when you multiply it out over all the departments and offices. $60K here, a million there, pretty soon you're talking real money. Only a moron misses that point.
The joke will be if PayPal snubs Visa and Mastercard. We don't need Visa and Mastercard anymore. They're old and decrepit, as well as greedy. PayPal's greedy too but at least they're young and nimble. They could just tell V/Mc to shove it and continue with setting their own standard. I, my wife and our business now do most of our transactions without V/Mc just using PayPal. Time to cut out V/Mc from the equation and let them sulk in the corner.
Dealing with all the localities is a paperwork and regulatory nightmare. They should not be making the states be able to do remote sales. If they want the money they should simply have a federal sales tax and then the government can divvy the money up to the states just like they do with so many other funding things. Instead they are creating more of a burden for small businesses. Once again, Big Corp has the advantage since they have the systems in place for this and can spread the overhead over many products. Big Gov loves Big Corp.
I don't have a smartphone. No reception out here so no reason. When I'm out working in the field I don't need the time more accurately than the sun tells.
Twitter, and all companies and people, should fight this sort of power grab by France hard. France is a fool to try this. If Iran uses this logic the French would scream bloody murder.
Actually there are plenty of cultures that don't imbibe or intoxicate. Since your culture does you have a hard time seeing this, you think you are the norm. Classic egocentric anthropomorphism.
But why bother. Watches are so yesterday. Just about every gadget from the microwave to the stove to the phone to thermometers to DVD players to bombs to the tablet to the computer displays the time. This is annoyingly so since so many of these devices need setting and then resetting twice a year with Daylight Stupid Time.
I don't like to wear a watch on my wrist. Even a good waterproof one gets too dinged up. I especially don't want a good one on my wrist getting manure on it.
You don't have to go that far. Just move to a third-world state like Vermont where the cost of living is a tiny fraction of what it is in the cities. No, I'm not talking about the ritzy places like Burlington, Norwich, Montpelier and Woodstock. I'm talking the real Vermont, the other 99.9%.
Wait, forget I ever said that. I don't want everyone moving here!:)
This doesn't make sense. There are a lot of people and even cultures that do not do beer or other alcohol. This article really sounds like a solution in search of a problem.
"I like the idea of controllable, long-lasting light bulbs..."
Unfortunately these LED bulbs are not so long lasting. They make big claims but in actual use I find that there are many failures. The new bulbs are certainly better than five years ago but they still have a dismal failure rate. This is poor performance on the promise.
Great extinctions are followed by long periods where life blooms and flourishes with new species appearing. You need to abandon your local, personal, egocentric timescale and look on it from the evolutionary time scale of millions of years. That's the real world.
"the body has to be kept at the temperature of a standard kitchen refrigerator, somewhere in the mid-40s."
No, store it at 27 degrees F which is -2.78 degrees C if you want to keep the meat fresh, not frozen and stop microbial action.
This is the temperature that we store fresh meat at. It is below standard refrigerator temperatures. Meat freezes at 25ÂF which is below the freezing point of water because of the salts in the blood and cellular fluid. A lot of research has been done on this - initially regarding the storage of fish for Norway's trawlers and later for the storage of pork.
For the absolute best results adjust this freezing temperature to account for the preservative solution which will likely change the freeze point downward - then stay just above that point of freezing for the meat.
There is a lot of science behind this in the meat industry that could be applied to Hugo.
I was in publishing for a long time. The whole ISBN system is a major ripoff designed to fatten their wallets. It is much like, but much worse, than the domain name scam. There is no justification for the $10/year cost of domain names and no justification for the $125 to $25 cost of ISBN numbers. That is, no justification other than that they have a monopoly and can charge dang well what they please. Time to crush these monopolies.
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What we really need is to get rid of the politicians that can't understand the Constitution & Amendments. Feinstein is near the top of the list with her failure to comprehend the 1st Amendment and 2nd Amendment as well as the basic concept of limits on government.
By all means, become a business person and start a competitor as a means of learning. Great project. Hey, you could Kickstart it!
Seriously though, the problem with starting up a competitor is lack of recognition. As a project creator why would I bother using you rather than Kickstarter? That is the first question you must ask yourself. A slight reduction in the fee doesn't do me any good if your service has less chance of making my project funding happen. And that is the reality - competitors are tiny and don't have much recog.
I get contacted by about one startup a week trying to be the next KickStarter. None of them are as well done as KickStarter. None of them have any base. Most are one man operations and I don't have any faith they'll succeed. As a project creator I need them to succeed so I can succeed. Catch-23.
This has the very badly biased thesis that ethics and morality are absolutes instead of the cultural relativism that they are in reality.
That is correct, and clearly explained on the Kickstarter project and many (most? almost all?) project pages. Backers are not charged unless enough pledges have been made to meet or exceed the funding goal.
Project creators need to include in their budget:
1) Kickstarter's 5%
2) Amazon's 5% (credit card processing)
3) Marketing during the project funding drive
4) Cost to produce products to give to backers
5) Shipping costs to get products to backers
6) Development costs of the product
Wow! #6 might seem like the only purpose of the funding you say but all of those costs have to be factored in in order to bring the product to market and be able to deliver 'rewards' to the backers.
Yes, there are quite a few poorly thought out projects but the same is true off Kickstarter too. Lots of ideas and only some float to the surface, many are chaff that blows away in the wind. It takes a lot to bring a project to fruition and deliver the goods.
Projects often take longer to develop either because it is so hard to make accurate predictions of the development time even when everything goes right (not unique to Kickstarter) or because things happen - life - that slow things down.
Our family ran a successful Kickstarter project as one part of funding our on-farm butcher shop. It is really a pre-buy program, just as most Kickstarter projects are. You help pay for development and get to be near the head of the line when the product becomes available. A lot of people enjoy vicariously being part of the process. Pre-buys are not a 'walk into the store and buy it off the shelf' - important to understand. It takes time to develop and setup production - we're a little behind schedule on ours but we're making progress and will finish. Kickstarter backers helped with part of the funding and we appreciate that.
If you're curious to see a successful project funding visit http://sugarmtnfarm.com/butchershop
This is what I learned too. They have too few people. I agree that with the tens of millions of dollars they say they have taken from their 5% cut of projects you would think they could hire a LOT of developers to improve the system. The inability to find projects is a huge limitation of the platform.
Hmm... Sounds like we don't need that department. Eliminating it will save all that paperwork.
Apparently some people don't get parody of parody. Humor isn't universal. *shrug*
The "Evil" was reference to Google's old saying of "Do No Evil". Sorry if you're too young to remember. It was over a decade ago. Perhaps that was before you were born. Old history. Just ignore it. Rinse and repeat.
Nickel and diming adds up when you multiply it out over all the departments and offices. $60K here, a million there, pretty soon you're talking real money. Only a moron misses that point.
The joke will be if PayPal snubs Visa and Mastercard. We don't need Visa and Mastercard anymore. They're old and decrepit, as well as greedy. PayPal's greedy too but at least they're young and nimble. They could just tell V/Mc to shove it and continue with setting their own standard. I, my wife and our business now do most of our transactions without V/Mc just using PayPal. Time to cut out V/Mc from the equation and let them sulk in the corner.
Dealing with all the localities is a paperwork and regulatory nightmare. They should not be making the states be able to do remote sales. If they want the money they should simply have a federal sales tax and then the government can divvy the money up to the states just like they do with so many other funding things. Instead they are creating more of a burden for small businesses. Once again, Big Corp has the advantage since they have the systems in place for this and can spread the overhead over many products. Big Gov loves Big Corp.
True, still, I would love to have an F-35. I promise to not use it for evil. :-}
Well, this is better than some of the things our government spends our tax dollars on...
I don't have a smartphone. No reception out here so no reason. When I'm out working in the field I don't need the time more accurately than the sun tells.
Twitter, and all companies and people, should fight this sort of power grab by France hard. France is a fool to try this. If Iran uses this logic the French would scream bloody murder.
I don't trust cloud apps and the like. Google is a prime example of why we should not use these.
Actually there are plenty of cultures that don't imbibe or intoxicate. Since your culture does you have a hard time seeing this, you think you are the norm. Classic egocentric anthropomorphism.
But why bother. Watches are so yesterday. Just about every gadget from the microwave to the stove to the phone to thermometers to DVD players to bombs to the tablet to the computer displays the time. This is annoyingly so since so many of these devices need setting and then resetting twice a year with Daylight Stupid Time.
I don't like to wear a watch on my wrist. Even a good waterproof one gets too dinged up. I especially don't want a good one on my wrist getting manure on it.
Many people I know don't bother with watches for these same reasons. Watches are passé. I certainly don't want to strap my phone, computer or MP3 on my wrist. The idea of putting an even more expensive gadget in the line of dirt is dumb. Add to that a tiny screen and undoubtedly short battery life that will be one more battery dying and needing replacing after a few years.
No thanks.
By the way, I just threw that bomb in to see if you were paying attention. Did you catch it?
You don't have to go that far. Just move to a third-world state like Vermont where the cost of living is a tiny fraction of what it is in the cities. No, I'm not talking about the ritzy places like Burlington, Norwich, Montpelier and Woodstock. I'm talking the real Vermont, the other 99.9%.
Wait, forget I ever said that. I don't want everyone moving here! :)
This doesn't make sense. There are a lot of people and even cultures that do not do beer or other alcohol. This article really sounds like a solution in search of a problem.
"I like the idea of controllable, long-lasting light bulbs..."
Unfortunately these LED bulbs are not so long lasting. They make big claims but in actual use I find that there are many failures. The new bulbs are certainly better than five years ago but they still have a dismal failure rate. This is poor performance on the promise.
Great extinctions are followed by long periods where life blooms and flourishes with new species appearing. You need to abandon your local, personal, egocentric timescale and look on it from the evolutionary time scale of millions of years. That's the real world.
You want him to appear to be fresh as the day he was dyed. :)
"the body has to be kept at the temperature of a standard kitchen refrigerator, somewhere in the mid-40s."
No, store it at 27 degrees F which is -2.78 degrees C if you want to keep the meat fresh, not frozen and stop microbial action.
This is the temperature that we store fresh meat at. It is below standard refrigerator temperatures. Meat freezes at 25ÂF which is below the freezing point of water because of the salts in the blood and cellular fluid. A lot of research has been done on this - initially regarding the storage of fish for Norway's trawlers and later for the storage of pork.
For the absolute best results adjust this freezing temperature to account for the preservative solution which will likely change the freeze point downward - then stay just above that point of freezing for the meat.
There is a lot of science behind this in the meat industry that could be applied to Hugo.
I was in publishing for a long time. The whole ISBN system is a major ripoff designed to fatten their wallets. It is much like, but much worse, than the domain name scam. There is no justification for the $10/year cost of domain names and no justification for the $125 to $25 cost of ISBN numbers. That is, no justification other than that they have a monopoly and can charge dang well what they please. Time to crush these monopolies.