#'some money' aka a metric shit ton

[againaweasel]

I'll never forget that time like 2 years ago someone on TT told me I was lying about being queer and trans because I said I didn't ship wolfstar

firstly wat. If that’s not indicative of problems in this fandom I don’t know what is.

And secondly because of the mental image of sitting in my [very expensive] therapy session to diagnose gender dysphoria and having them pull out wolfstar fanart is fucking hilarious.

Being forcibly detransitioned because I love Moonchaser

[hausofmamadas]

Miguel y Mín | Pt 3 - Un regalo extravegante!

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A gift that would make the Tiger King himself, Joe Exotic, proud: the one eponymous tigre, referenced in the episode’s title Salva El Tigre, is the Sinaloa faction’s lavish birthday gift to Miguel.

And Güero, Cochi, and Chapo take the opportunity to stop the entire gotdamn party to put on their cartoonish tribute containing only a smattering of ass-kissery

Güero raises a glass to toast Miguel, whom he also dubs their allegorical “king” of the cartel jungle. In essence, this is Güero’s version of kissing the ring on the hand of the king.

In any case, it’s a savvy move on Palma’s part and contextually it makes sense. As we later find out, around this time, Miguel has been favoring Sinaloa, giving them more product to distribute than the Tijuana plaza despite the fact that TJ already has the equipment and infrastructure to transport everything themselves.

To add insult to injury, Miguel allows Güero & Co to use the Arellanos’ trucks and warehouses, so long as they pay a toll/tax for moving their shit through the plaza

Sinaloa is making money hand over fist or so it seems, based on this grand display, so it stands to reason they have no problem paying the tax and they additionally benefit from the lack of overhead costs that come with maintaining the infrastructure of an established distribution network that the Arellanos’ have.

So, basically TJ is getting fucked in two ways: the tax isn’t enough to cover overhead, and sharing all their equipment with Sinaloa means they’re stuck holding a bunch of product making them more likely to get caught with the metric-fuck-tons of Sinaloa’s coke sitting in their warehouses.

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This isn’t explicitly stated but I always got the vibe that Miguel did this intentionally in an effort to put Mín in his place, after he conspired with Isabella assume leadership of the plazas in Miguel’s (potentially permanent) absence.

Throughout Güero’s little toast, Mín throws some shady lewks go ahead…try and convince me. Say it to my face that this isn’t the hottest Min has ever looked. Ever. I quadruple dog dare you. No wait, don’t bother wasting your precious breath on lies across the lake to Miguel who’s standing with Amado, looks that seem to suggest he’s either:

a) embittered by the gift’s extravagance because it’s just further proof that the Sinaloa has boo-coo bucks to pay for a FUCKING TIGER, the gleaming, gold cage the poor thing is imprisoned in, along with a gilded, life-size wagon-wheel train and accompanying jazz band.

b) privately disgusted by the sycophantic way it’s presented

c) probably both because our sweet Mín isn’t short on emotional range and like porque no los dos? amiright folks.

Fast forward to Mín’s birthday party in S3’s Los Juniors, where Ramón and Panchito surprise him with an entire ass boat, full fucking fireworks, pyrotechnics, and a team of Laker girls performing a coordinated dance routine to boot that you know Ramòn prob choreographed or at least insisted on overseeing that process.

It’s a complete 180 degree turn from their status in Salva, especially in light of Chapo’s imminent attack on Christine’s which is the culmination of the deep, abiding inferiority complex that has developed within the Sinaloa group since Miguel’s downfall and the dissolution of La Federación.

S3 Guero and Chapo have assumed the roles once occupied by Mín, Món, and Dina, of resentful onlookers watching Tijuana’s success from afar, and Mín ostensibly now wears Miguel’s crown, the new king of the cartel jungle.

Although, unfortunately for the Arellanos, Sinaloa now has free reign to retaliate because the plazas are no longer mutually dependent as they’d been under the Guadalajara umbrella.

And that’s how we get the infamous and hands-down BEST scene that will EVER exist of the entire Narcos franchise yes, I said it, best scene out of both OG and Narcosmx. Whatever. Fight me

A scene that I fondly refer to as “Attack! On Christine’s” .. aka the alternate video for Depeche Mode’s Enjoy the Silence cuz guess Wagner Moura wasn’t available to direct when the song was initially released ..aka when we learned how well and truly fuckable our boy, Barron is

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taglist: @criatividad-e @tinylittleobsessions @artemiseamoon @narcos-narcosmx @narcolini @thesolotomyhan @ashlingnarcos @carlislecullenisadilf @curaheed @narcosmx (<- not all of you asked to be tagged but just. here, have some gifs)

[heartofsnark]

Random Post Recovery Saeran Headcanons (SFW)

I just know I’m gonna post these and then something in the Ray route is gonna make some of them completely impossible or something, but either way. Here it is.

*I’m still unsure of how I’m formatting these, oh well.

-          Saeran debates for a while of what to do with his hair color, post recovery. Eventually it starts to grow out and it looks kind of weird; bright red roots, stark white, and then a bit of pink. He ultimately does decide just to dye it back as closely to his natural red as he can. When he first saw himself with it again, it honestly just felt kind of right, he might have teared up a bit.

-          Saeyoung was pretty emotional when he first saw it, kind started babbling, Saeran told him he only dyed it back because he didn’t want to keep killing his hair with bleach, idiot brother.

-          He keep the contacts much longer, he likes still being distinct from Saeyoung.

-          Once he’s relatively stable, Saeyoung starts trying (desperately) to bond with him. Saeran sometimes feels a bit overwhelmed by it, but he tries to remind himself that Saeyoung is trying his best to make up for lost time. He does sometimes blow up and locks himself up in his room to be alone.

-          Saeyoung tries to teach him how to play LOLOL, Saeran does not like it. He doesn’t like playing with strangers and he gets frustrated, inevitably trying to kill Saeyoung’s guild members instead of any enemies. Friendly fire is a very real danger when playing with Saeran.

-          So, Saeyoung tries to play other games with him that are just two player co-op.

-          Kirby’s Epic Yarn is the big winner, it’s so cute and relaxing and they both sort of have a moment of “I’m playing video games with my brother, like normal brothers do.” Somebody tears up, maybe both of them. They don’t discuss it, just let the moment sit.

-          Binge watching Disney movies also occurs, Lilo and Stitch hits them both right in the heart. Ohana man, ohana.

-          Saeyoung eventually starts trying to get Saeran more friends, so when he wasn’t feeling the brother bonding, he’d have someone else to spend time with rather than isolating himself.

-          Connecting with the RFA is weird and awkward. Saeran’s apologized a thousand different times, but he still feels like shit about it all.

-          So, his first official friendship is with Vanderwood, it’s just less awkward for him. He didn’t try to absolutely destroy their life and they both enjoy talking shit on Saeyoung. So, win-win.

-          The first person from the RFA Saeran starts to spend time with is Yoosung, he’s the closest with Saeyoung and the least intimidating, so it works. Saeran still doesn’t get the LOLOL fascination, but he finds he’s pretty comfortable around Yoosung.

-          Yoosung actually tries to teach Saeran how to cook, cause Saeran wants to be more self-reliant and is sort of sick of surviving off garbage.

-          It has varying results, Saeran feels really skittish with cooking anything involving hot grease/oil. Burns don’t seem like a fun time.

-          Saeran doesn’t really like Honey Buddha Chips, or any chips for that matter, just not his junk food of choice.

-          He also has a strong dislike of spicy food and is pretty sensitive to it, “Why would you want your food to hurt you, that’s stupid.”

-          Sweets are the love of his life, he actually gain a bit of a tum post recovery, but he eats so much ice cream and candy.

-          He’s naturally kind of skinny, shorter and skinnier than Saeyoung anyway, but his stomach develops a bit more squish.

-          Saeran is always cold, always, it could be hot as hell and he’s snuggled into a sweater.

-          Sweaters are his favorite, doesn’t matter what color or pattern, does it make him feel all cozy. Good enough for him,

-          In general, if you need a gift for Saeran, cozy warm clothes. After sweaters, he loves fuzzy warm socks. His feet are the coldest part of him.

-          Though, be prepared to see him get a bit emotional if you’re getting him a gift. That little tsun side will try to hide it, but he’s so overwhelmed that someone actually cares enough and thinks about him enough to warrant getting him a gift.��

-          Saeran likes animals and unlike his brother, he’s very gentle with them, he’s scared of hurting them. Because of this, though initially reluctant, Jumin does let him pet Elizabeth 3rd. Much to Saeyoung’s dismay.

-          Him and Jaehee bond over their love of sweets, once Saeran is more acclimated and officially an RFA member, they’ll sometimes be gushing over café desserts. “Have you been here, they have this amazing chocolate cake!” Jaehee even gives him baking tips, which goes better than cooking with Yoosung. Partially because he likes baking better, partially cause Jaehee’s a better teacher.

-          They do not agree on coffee though, Saeran only drinks coffee if it’s filled with a metric ton of sugar and cream. It’s so bitter and gross. He does really like tea either. At home it’s mainly pop and water, but if it’s available at a restaurant, he’s getting a milkshake.

-          No alcohol whatsoever, that’s a biggie for him and Saeyoung, neither feel comfortable with the idea of drinking. Saeran doesn’t even really like being around people when they’re drinking, the smell alone makes him feel a bit sick, physically and mentally.

-          Even after officially joining the RFA, he rarely goes to the parties. They overwhelm him, too many people, too much noise, the smell of alcohol, it just makes his skin crawl sometimes. The few times he does go, he inevitably ends up sneaking off to get away from it all. He likes going to the roof of the building and stargazing while everyone else parties. When Saeyoung comes to get him at the end, they usually wind up lying there just relaxing together for a bit.

-          Saeran is kind of particular about movies, it’s either have to be really amazing or an absolute failure. If it’s not good, it better be bad enough to laugh at. No middling.

-          He loves so bad they’re good movies, just sitting around making fun of people who failed, yes please. In the same vein, he’s developed a fondness for playing shitty games to make fun of them.

-          This actually becomes his bonding moment with Zen, the bad movies, Zen loves them too. They’re biggest proponents for having bad movie nights, Saeyoung and Yoosung obviously join in. Jaehee and Jumin aren’t that into it, not that Zen would invite Jumin anyway. And well, Jihyun and Saeran are still in a weird place.

-          Saeran is picky with horror movies, he really likes the good ones, but he hates jumpscares so fucking much.

-          Screamers and jumpscares the bane of his existence. He doesn’t like the jolt it gives him and he doesn’t like feeling embarrassed over getting scared by something stupid.

-          Also, in the same vein of him being startled, if you want his attention than call his name. Don’t randomly touch him when he’s not expecting it or can’t see you. It will scare him and he might almost hit you.  Just don’t startle him, it’s bad for everyone.

-          The twins do gang up to prank Yoosung, but Saeran also helps Yoosung get back at Saeyoung. Double agent.

-          Pretty far down along the recovery line, Saeran does decide to get job. Saeyoung insists it isn’t necessary, between saved up secret agent cash and his new toy store they’re doing fine financially.  But, it’s more about feeling a normal functional adult, not the need for money. Plus, when everyone else in the chatroom is talking about their jobs or college, he wants to say he did more with his day then go on a walk and eat some sweets.

-          He gets a job at a flower shop, he’s a natural at flower arrangements.

-          He isn’t great about dealing with customers, he gets frustrated and anxious kind of easy, but most days are easy going.

-          A love of nature and a lot of personal growth is what starts to heal his relationship with Jihyun.

-          Jihyun get him little plants and Saeran lets him know when they have new kinds of cacti in the store.

-          Jihyun even invites him on a nature hike, they both like it, but…. They’re also both in pretty awful shape, it’s kind of hilarious. They’re trying to bond, but neither of them can fucking breath.

-          Saeran decides short walks in botanical gardens or parks are more his speed than full hikes. He enjoys not feeling like he’s on death’s door, think you very much.

-          His favorite color is pink, I feel this is canon but I’m including it nonetheless. Soft baby pinks and pastels in general are very comforting colors for him.

-         Doesn’t like face masks or really putting much on his face, Zen is appalled by his skin care routine, aka not having one. Washing his face is all he does. He doesn’t like the feel of goopy or cold wet gunk on his face. Even when he decides to wear makeup all he usually does is eyeliner, no concealer or foundation. Just feels gross to him.

-          His immune system is still a bit iffy, it’s definitely not as bad as when he was a kid, but he gets the sniffles more often than most. Which he freaking hates, he such a grump when he’s sick.

[seo78580]

a16z Podcast: Why paid marketing sucks, Network effects, Viral Growth, and more

Dear readers, It was my pleasure to be on my first ever Andreessen Horowitz podcast! if you haven’t checked it out, you can subscribe here. I’ve linked to the Soundcloud and included a transcript below.

In the podcast, we cover a broad overview of growth/marketing topics, including:

The natural “gravity” that slows down high-growth businesses

What’s really happening beneath the surface of exponential growth curves

Organic, paid marketing, and LTV/CAC

Why blended CAC numbers are misleading

Why offline products are so compelling for acquiring customers

Cohort analysis and looking for “smile curves”

The Power User Curve aka L28

Why onboarding is so important for retention/churn

Phases of growth- why early companies focus on acquisition, but big companies focus on churn

High frequency versus episodic usage products

Why adding lots of spammy email notifications decreases your DAU/MAU

Network effects and why different products’ network effects are different from each other

Why Google measures many short sessions, versus other products focus on long sessions

Hope you enjoy it!

And thank you to my colleagues Sonal and Jeff for making this happen :)

Andrew Palo Alto, CA

Part 1: User Acquisition

Hi everyone welcome to the a16z Podcast, I’m Sonal. Today’s episode is all about growth, one of the most top of mind questions for entrepreneurs — of all kinds of startups, and especially for consumer ones.

So joining to have this conversation, we have a16z general partners Andrew Chen and Jeff Jordan. And we cover everything from the basics of growth and defining key metrics to know, to the nuances of paid vs organic marketing and the role of network effects and more.

Part one of this conversation focuses specifically on the aspect of user acquisition for growth, and then we cut off and go into the aspects of growth for user engagement and retention, in the next episode. But first, we begin by going beyond the concept of growth hacks — and beginning with the fundamental premise that businesses do not grow themselves…

Sonal: So the topic we wanted to talk about today is growth, which is a big topic. What would you say are the biggest myths and misconceptions that entrepreneurs have about growth? Andrew: You know, not only is there the misconception that it happens magically, then the next layer I think is that it’s really just like, oh, a series of, you know, tips and tricks and growth hacks that kind of keep things going as opposed to like a really rigorous understanding of, you know, how to think about growth not just, as kind of the top line thing but actually that there’s acquisition, that there’s engagement, that there’s retention, and each one of those pieces is very different than the other and you have to like tackle them systematically.

Jeff: It is a scientific discipline, done right, because it requires you to understand your business and business dynamics at this incredibly micro level.   Sonal: I love that you said that because one of the complaints I’ve heard about “growth hacking” is that it’s just marketing by a different name, and what I’m really hearing you guys say is that there’s a systemic point of view, there’s rigor to it, there’s stages, there’s a program you build out.

Jeff: If you’re fortunate enough to achieve product-market fit and your business starts to take off, typically, you know, when in the wonderful situation do you get this hyper growth where you’ll grow year over year, you know, it’s triple digits. It’s just exploding. And then gradually the law of the large numbers starts to kick in and maybe the 100% growth becomes 50% growth the next year, and then the law of large numbers continue to kick in and there’s 25% and then it’s 12.5% and so growth tends to decay over time even in the best businesses. And so the–   Sonal: — Didn’t you use to call it like “gravity”?   Jeff: I called it gravity, you just would…it comes down to earth. And then the job of the entrepreneur is to be looking years down the road and say, “Okay, at some point growth in business A is going to stop and so I want to keep it going as long as I can and there’s a whole bunch of tactics to do that,” but then the other tactic, the other strategies, okay, I need new layers on the cake of growth.

At eBay the original business was an auction business in the U.S. and so, you know, some of the things we layered on early days we layered on fixed price in the U.S. — it’s not revolutionary but it really did grow then we went international. And then we layered in payment integration and each time we did that the total growth of the company would actually accelerate which is very hard to do at scale.   Sonal: That’s the whole point… like there’s intentionality to it. It’s not an accident that you guys introduce new businesses, new layers on the cake.

Jeff: Businesses don’t grow themselves, the entrepreneur has to grow them. And, you know, occasionally, you stumble into a business that seems to almost grow itself but they’re just aren’t many of those in the world and that growth almost never persists for long periods of time unless the entrepreneur can figure out how to continue its growth.   Sonal: Right. I remember a post you wrote actually a few years ago on “The ‘Oh, Shit Moment!’ When Growth Stops” because people are a little blindsided by it.   Jeff: And that’s the flip side of it. You know, early on you get this great growth, you had to keep it going. When it stops your strategic options had been constrained dramatically.

Andrew: A lot of times when you’re looking at what seemingly is an exponential growth curve. In fact, it’s really something like, oh, you’re opening in a bunch of new markets, right, so there’s sort of a linear line there, but then you’re also introducing products at the same time and you’re also reducing friction and, you know, sign-ups or retention or whatever, and so, the whole combination of those things is really kind of like a whole series of accelerating pieces that looks like it’s, you know, this amazing viral growth curve. But it’s actually like so much work underneath.  <Sonal: Right.> You know, that makes that happen. Sonal: I’ve also heard you [Andrew] talk about, being able to distinguish what is specifically driving that growth, so you don’t have this like sort of exponential-looking curve without knowing what that lever that you’re pulling to make that happen or knowing what’s happening even if it’s kind of happening naturally or organically. Can we break down some of the key metrics that are often used in these discussions including just what the definitions are and maybe just talk through how to think about them?   Andrew: Right. Yeah, so when you look at a large aggregate number like, you know, total monthly active users, right, or you’re looking at like —    Sonal: — “MAUs”   Andrew: –Yeah, MAUs, right. Or you’re looking at, you know, the GMV like all the…adding up all the transactions in your marketplace–

Sonal: — So, “gross merchandise value”. Andrew: Yup. And so, you know, when you look at something like that and if it’s going up or down, you don’t have the levers at that level to really understand like what’s really going on. You want to go a couple levels even deeper: How many new customers are you adding? As you’re growing more and more new customers, a bunch of things happen. If you’re using paid advertisement channels, things tend to get more expensive over time because — you know, your initially super, super excited core demographic of customers — like they’re gonna convert the best and as you start reaching into different geographies, different kinds of demos, all of a sudden they’re not gonna convert as well, right?

Sonal: Just to pause in that for a quick moment, you’re basically arguing that growth itself halts growth in that context. Andrew: Right. Yeah. So the law of large numbers means that you know there’s only a fixed number of humans on the planet, there’s only a fixed number of people that are in your core demographic, right? Once you surpass a certain point, it’s not like it’s it falls off a cliff, it’s just more gradual that you know that the customer behavior really changes.   Sonal: How do you determine what’s what when you don’t have product-market fit? Sometimes aren’t these metrics ways to figure that out or is this all when you have product-market fit… like is there a pre- and a post- difference between these?

Andrew: Very concretely, you want to understand how much of the acquisition is coming from purely organic (people discovering it, people talking to each other), as opposed to, oftentimes you’ll run into the companies that have over 50% of their acquisition coming from paid marketing and that tells you something that you’re, you know, needing to spend that much money to get people in the door.   Sonal: Yeah. So CAC, “customer acquisition cost”, that’s what you’re talking about when you talk about acquisition.

Jeff: CAC is what it cost to acquire a user, “blended CAC” is what it costs to acquire a user on a paid basis plus then also what free users you acquire. So if you’re acquiring half your users through paid marketing you’re paying a $100 to acquire a user but half of your users are coming at zero, paid CAC is 100, blended CAC is 50.

I think blended time is a really dangerous number. Most of the best businesses in the internet age of technology haven’t spent a ton on paid acquisition. And so the truly magical businesses, you know, a lot of them aren’t buying tons of users… Amazon’s key marketing right now is free shipping. And then, yeah, the economics of paid acquisition tend to degrade overtime.   Sonal: As it grows. Jeff: As it grows and you just try to scale it and, you know, largely you’re cherrypicking the best users and then you’re trying to also scale the number you get to grow. I need twice as many new users this year as last year and you typically pay more so that magical LTV to CAC ratio which early on says, “Oh, we are three to one, you know, in two years it’ll probably be one and a half to one if you’re lucky,” or something like that. So we typically do try to look for these other sources of acquisition be it viral, be it, you know, some other form of non paid <crosstalk>

Sonal: I want to quickly define LTV — it’s “lifetime value” of the customer, but what does that mean?   Jeff: When you’re showing an LTV to CAC ratio you have no idea of what you’re seeing essentially given all the potential variations of the numbers. So we will almost always go for clarity. LTV, lifetime value, should be the profits, the contribution from that user after all direct costs.

Sonal: How do we define the LTV to CAC ratio? What do the two of them in conjunction mean?   Jeff: Well, let’s break them down. LTV is lifetime value. What you’re describing there is the incremental profit contribution for a user over the projected life of that user. So not revenue per CAC is that you know typically there’s cost associated to user. What’s the incremental contribution that the user brought from that <crosstalk> <Sonal: And that you mean the user brought to your company’s value.> To the company, yeah. Sonal: So it’s a value of your customer to the bottom line?   Jeff: It’s the value of each customer to the bottom line, and then you compare that to the CAC or “cost of acquired customer” to understand the leverage you have between what I need to spend to acquire a customer and how much they’re worth. If your CAC is higher than your LTV you’re sunk. Because it’s costing you more to acquire a user… Sonal: Than the value you get out of it. Now I get it. Jeff: …then you’re going to get out of that user. Sonal: Yeah.   Jeff: If it’s the opposite, at least you’re in the game. You know, I get more profit out of the user than I get the cost to acquire that user. And then there’s this dynamics on how does it scale over time, CAC tends to go up, LTV tends to go down. Because you’re, on the CAC side, you’re acquiring the less interested users over time. So they cost more to acquire and they’re worth less, and so that the LTV to CAC ratio, in our experience, almost always degrades as over time with scale. And so, you know, when you’re in that conversation, you’re in a very specific conversation of, “Okay, how much room do you have?” “How is it gonna scale?” “You know, what’s gonna impact your CAC like a competitive thing?” So there has to be a lot, it had to be like 10 to kind of get you over that concern that oh, my goodness, those two were so close, that you have no margin for error. Sonal: Right. This also goes back to the big picture, the layers on the cake, because if you have other layers you don’t have to only worry about one layer CAC to LTV ratio.   Jeff: It really does affect the calculation. If it’s, I’m in a new business, and I have a whole different CAC versus, you know, LTV ratio then that’s a different conversation as well.

Sonal: And the big picture there, is that if you don’t know the difference of what’s doing what when you may get very mistaken signals, mixed signals about your business, and so you guys don’t want blended CAC because you want to know what’s driving the growth.

Andrew: I think what blended CAC gives you is it gives you a sense for at this particular moment in time, you know, what’s happening. The challenge is that when it comes to paid marketing, in particular, it’s easy to just add way more budget and a scale that than it is to scale organic or to scale SEO. So your CAC is giving you a snapshot, but then as you’re trying to scale the business you’re trying to increase everything by 100% over the next, you’re trying to double everything then all of a sudden, you know, your blended CAC starts to approach whatever your dominant channel actually looks like.   And so if you’re spending a bunch of money then it’ll just approach whatever is your paid marketing, you know, CAC. What entrepreneurs should think about is what is the unique organic new thing that’s gonna get it in front of people, without spending a bunch of money, right?

Jeff: A lot of the best businesses have this very interesting, I’ll call it a growth hack. I mean OpenTable, when I was managing it, did not pay any money at all to acquire consumers. Like how can you do that? You know, it had millions of consumers. The restaurants would mark it OpenTable on our behalf.   Sonal: Right. Jeff: They go to The Slanted Door website like when they were an OpenTable customer and you’d see, you’re looking…you go there to try to get the phone number to make a reservation and they’d say, “Oh, make an online reservation.” And we then got paid to acquire that user in its core form. But that hack was a wonderful thing. It scaled with the business and got us tons of free users.

Sonal: To be fair, and this is another definition we should tease apart really quickly before we move on to more metrics, that also had a quality of network effects which we’ve talked a lot about in terms of these things growing more valuable to more people that use it… is that growth? What’s the difference there?   Jeff: Well, the business grew into the network effect. The key tactic to build the network effect was that free acquisition of consumers that the more restaurants we had, the more attractive it was to consumers the more consumers who came, the more attractive it was to restaurants. So there is a wicked network effect. Sonal: Like a flywheel effect, right. Jeff: If you’re not spending anything on paid acquisition of consumers, how do you start it? And the placements that OpenTable got in the restaurant book both physically in the restaurant but particularly in the restaurant’s website was the key engine that got the network effect started. You had to manually sell some restaurants come for the tools, stay for the network, but then once the consumers got enough of a selection and started to use it, it was game over.   Sonal: Right, that was one way of going around the bootstrapping or the chicken-egg problem and seeding a network.

Andrew: Network effects have…there’s a lot of really positive things about them and one of the big pieces is that virality is a form of like something that you get with the network. You know, the larger your network is, the more surface area, the more opportunities you have in order to encounter it, right. And so, you know, in the case of Uber (where I was recently), by seeing all the cars with the Uber logo like those are all opportunities to be like, “Oh, what is this app? I should try it out.” And so it’s mutually reinforcing: then you get more riders and then you get more drivers that are into it and so, I think all of that kind of plays together.

Jeff: I’ll bring two examples up, the pink Lyft mustache when I first got to San Francisco.   Sonal: I remember that. Jeff: You can see it once in the car and you’d go, “Oh, that’s pretty weird.” You see it twice in the car and you say, “Something is going on here that I don’t know about, and I have to understand what it is.” Lime is the same kind of thing. Sonal: Right. Jeff: They’re bright green and they glow essentially. So when someone sees one in the wild, someone bolts by them in a glowing green electric scooter and you’re just like, “Okay…what is that?” And Lime hasn’t spent a penny on consumer acquisition. <Sonal: Right.> Because their model is such that physical cue in the real world leads to it.  

Andrew: The other one I’ll throw in as well is within workplace enterprise products there’s a lot of kind of bottoms-up virality that comes out of people, you know, kind of sharing and collaborating.   Sonal: Like with Slack. Andrew: Yeah, like for example Slack is a great, it’s an example of this. And so, these are all kind of really unique ways that you can, you know, get acquisition for free. And so then your CAC is, you know, “zero” as a result. Sonal: Yeah.

You guys have talked a lot, about organic. It makes it sound to me as a layperson that you don’t want paid marketing! Like what’s your views on this — is it a bad thing, is it a good thing; I don’t mean to moralize it but — help me unpack more where it’s helpful and where it’s not. Are they any rules-of-thumb to use there? Jeff: I mean a lot of great businesses that have leveraged paid marketing. The OTA sites (online travel agencies – Priceline and Expedia) just spends, you know, they spend a GDP of many large countries in their acquisition; and then it’s often a tactic in some good business. But if it’s your primary engine, a couple of things happen: One is it tends…the acquisition economics tend to degrade over time for the reason we’re saying…  <Sonal: Right this is…> And it leaves you wide open to competition. Sonal: It gets commoditized basically. Jeff: If you need to buy users, I mean if you’re selling, you know, the new breed of mattress and you need to buy users and early on, you’re the only person competing for that word, flas-hforward a year or two, they’re like six new age mattress manufacturers with virtually identical products competing for the same consumer. The economics are not going to persist over time. And so, you know, one of the key questions in businesses driven by heavy user acquisition is how does the play end? You know, it usually looks pretty good at the beginning of the play but in the middle it’s starts getting a little complex and there’s tragedies at the ends.   Sonal: There’s literally an arc.

Andrew: And I think, you know, if it is something that you’re using in conjunction with a bunch of other channels and you’re kind of accelerating things, that can be great. For example when Facebook in the past broke into new markets they started with paid marketing to get it going. And so in a case like that really paid marketing is a tactic to kind of get a network affect jumpstarted right? <Sonal: Gotcha.> And then you can kind of like pull off from that if you’d like. <Sonal: Right.> Andrew: But if you’re super, super dependent on it and you don’t have a plan for a world that you know all the channels atregonna degrade [in] then you’re gonna be in a tough spot in a couple of years.   Sonal: Totally. Do you have sort of a heuristic for when to stop the paid? Is there like a tipping point, you know, THIS is when you move?

Andrew: I think in terms of how much paid should you do as part of your portfolio, I think that’s the right way to think of it is it’s one out of a bunch of different channels, right? And so I would argue the following: First is you really have to measure the CAC and the LTV and be super disciplined about not spending ahead of where you want it to be and not to do it on some, you know, blended number that doesn’t make any sense. <Sonal: Right.> And then I think the other part is you really want it to be kind of a small enough minority of your channels. Such that if you were to get to a point where it turns out to be capped that you’re okay, that you can live with that.   Sonal: Your business will survive and you continue to grow and be healthy.   Andrew: Right, exactly, and you can still get the growth rates you want and you can still, you have such strong product-market fit that you’re able to maintain that. Jeff: Take a couple of sector examples. You know, ecommerce, a lot of companies..

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Tanner Larssen – Ecom Insider 1 Year Membership

WARNING: The ‘Hidden Enemy’ That Can Destroy Your Ecommerce Business Overnight! Let Me Show You Everything You’ll Receive When You Join Ecom Insider Today! So here’s the deal. When you join Ecom Insider today you’re going to get ALL of the following goodies inside professional Build Grow Scale branded packaging. I’ll rush it straight to your door and then every month after that I’ll send you another package… and another. Membership is $197 a month… but during our pre-launch (AKA, right now!) you can lock up one of our charter memberships for 50% to 66% off the normal price. It will be like marketing “Christmas Morning” every single month. So, what’s in the first package? Glad you asked. Here’s Everything You’re Getting Today… Ecom Insiders Monthly Print Magazine When you join Ecom Insider today, I’m going to send you the “kick off” issue that will teach you my presell page strategy that raked in over $450,000 in 3 months. And inside this full color magazine I show you the exact pages we use, our statistics and a complete step-by-step tutorial on how to implement this strategy into your business. Also inside this issue you’re going to get access to an interview I did with Black Label Mastermind Member Matthew Stafford on how he took a struggling ecommerce brand and turned it into a $2,000 per day profit business in less than 14 days. It’s an amazing story and the interview is packed full of golden nuggets you can immediately leverage in your own business. All of that is just in your first issue. Each month you will receive a new issue of Ecom Insider that is packed to the gills with cutting edge, tutorial based training you can use to build grow and scale your ecommerce store. Proven $450K Presell Page Template

I’m also giving you my personal presell page templates that you can deploy immediately into your own business. This is the same plug and play presell page that you will learn how to use in the Ecom Insider “Kick Off” issue. This template can be used in any niche to boost conversions on any type of product. Simply swap out the text and images with your own and you’re off to the races. This template has generated millions of dollars in extra sales for us this year and it’s something I’ve never shared before outside of our coaching program.

Ecommerce Business Calculator Collection

“These 9 Tools Form The Dashboard Of My Business!” I’m giving you access to my private ecommerce “calculator” and spreadsheet collection. These are the 9 tools I use every single day to track performance, calculate metrics & KPI’s, evaluate product and profit potential and a ton of other critical aspects of our businesses. Including: ADVERTISING SPEND CALCULATOR – This calculator will help you determine how much you can actually afford to spend on your advertising based on the product(s) you are selling and whether or not you are using a sales funnel. Enter your data and it will calculate the Max CPC, CPM and CPA you can afford. CONVERSION METRICS CALCULATOR -When you enter your information into this calculator it will tell you what your actual conversion metrics are through your entire funnel as well as calculating lead costs, earnings per click and your average customer value at each step of your sales process. FREE+SHIPPING CALCULATOR – Free+Shipping is a tricky type of offer to dial in and run profitably. This calculator does all the heavy lifting and gives you all the numbers, metrics and ratios you need to determine how best to optimize your free+shipping offer. LEAD GENERATION BREAK EVEN CALCULATOR – This calculator takes the guesswork out of using paid media to build your prospect list. Enter your list details and your offer details and the calculator will tell you exactly how much you can afford to spend to acquire a prospect lead. PRODUCT EVALUATION & PROFITABILITY CALCULATOR – This calculator will help you weed out the products that are not worth it. After filling out the requested fields with the products information you will be able to immediately determine if a prospective product is worth your money and time. PRODUCT PRICING CALCULATOR – This calculator will help you ensure that your products are always priced correctly in the marketplace and that with that pricing you also know exactly what your gross, working and net profit margins are. BUSINESS SCALING CALCULATOR – Exponential growth can be very exciting, but it can also potentially put you out of business if you aren’t aware of all the additional costs. This calculator will help you avoid the hidden costs that you need to be aware of and have a plan for dealing with. PRODUCT RE-ORDER CALCULATOR – This calculator will determine your product run rate, and production lead times to tell you when you need to place your product re-orders to avoid running out of stock. WAREHOUSE INVENTORY TRACKER – This tool will keep track of all the product you currently have in inventory (you should track this even if you use 3rd party or FBA fulfillment) as well as when you need to re-order, the inventory valuation and how much money you have tied up in inventory. I shared these calculators with my Black Label Mastermind Members and I was blown away by how many of these 7 and 8 figure businesses were not tracking this data. I don’t want you to make the same mistake, which is why I’m giving them to you free inside your Ecom Insider membership.

$100 Build Grow Scale Live Event Gift Certificate

I’m giving you a $100.00 Gift Certificate (with no expiration date) that can be used for any Build Grow Scale Live workshop or Event. I want to meet you and I’m going to incentivize you to make it happen! Let’s be real for a second. Thousands of people are going to buy Ecommerce Evolved, but only a tiny percentage will ever do anything with it. By joining Ecom Insider, you are signaling to me that you are serious about business and that you are one of those action takers who make things happen. And because you are that kind of person. I want to meet you! There’s not enough people like you and I out there and we need to stick together. And for that reason I’m going to incentivize you with a $100 discount to make that happen and the best place to do that is at one of our live events or workshops where you can not only meet me, but also talk shop with your fellow ecom insider members. All That Is JUST What You Get TODAY To “Kick Off” Your Ecom Insider Membership! And Then… Each Month Like Clockwork, You Will Also Receive: Ecom Insider Monthly Print Magazine Every month I’m going to send you the newest issue of the Ecom Insider Magazine. Each full color issue, is packed to the gills with cutting edge, tutorial based training you can use to build grow and scale your ecommerce store. Before I say any more, let me address what you are probably thinking… I know there are other monthly magazines or newsletters out there, that “promise the world” but under-deliver when you get them in the mail. They are either too generic, try to cover too many topics, or worse they use huge images and big fonts to pad out the page counts. Plus most of them look like shit in the presentation department. That is NOT the case with Ecom Insider. Each issue focuses on one strategy or topic so we can dive in deep and give you the actionable info you need. And I can’t cover everything you need inside the magazine, I’ll include additional training videos or supporting PDF’s to make sure you are never left wondering what to do or how to implement.

And EVERYTHING shared with you inside each monthly issue is 100% backed up by real world results generated by me and my companies. If we don’t do it, I won’t teach it. EVER. You will be blown away by the value & insights you’ll receive from each and every issue.

PLUS, Each Issue Also Includes “Ecommerce Gold” From The Black Label Mastermind… The Black Label Mastermind is comprised of some of the most talented 7, 8 and 9 figure per year ecommerce business owners on the planet. And each month a different Black Label member contributes a “Insider’s Only” interview/training on what is working the best for them in their ecommerce businesses. This is high level insight you won’t find anywhere else!

Monthly “Ecom Anatomy” Breakdowns

Every month, myself and the BGS team search out and dissect the most successful ecommerce stores and funnels we can find. And if there is a specific site or brand, you’d like to see dissected, you can request it! Much like an iceberg, which only has a small portion of its mass visible above the surface, The same is true for a business, over two thirds of what makes it successful is not visible at the surface level. And that’s exactly what we show you inside these Ecom anatomy breakdowns. We deep dive into the inner workings of successful ecommerce business and show you the good…the bad and the awesome.

Not only do we analyze the inner functions of the site, we also show you what they are doing right and what they are doing wrong. And then we buy their products and go through the entire sales process from beginning to end AS a customer and show you what they are doing right and wrong at each step of the customer journey. We spend thousands of dollars a month reverse engineering successful ecommerce stores with the goal of learning one or two things from each that we can implement into our businesses to help them grow. As an Ecom Insider you now get to do the same.

“Live” What’s Working Now Call’s

During our Insider’s Only “Live” What’s Working Now call, myself and the BGS team will show you exactly what we’re currently having success with and what is no longer working or has lost effectiveness in our Ecom businesses. As well as any new or upcoming changes or you need to be aware of in the world of Ecommerce. We’ll also show you any new methods or tricks we’re currently testing out. All in all this means that everything we know, you will also know with nothing held back. During this live monthly call you will also be able to ask questions and get them answered live as well as have the opportunity for myself and the BGS team to critique your business to make sure you are on the right track. Ecommerce is all myself and my team do 24/7. So it’s easy for us to keep our finger on the pulse of the industry. But that’s not the case for most people. And if you still work a job or are only doing ecommerce part time then access to these calls could be the catalyst to helping you turn your part time biz into a full time profit pulling machine. These calls are worth their weight in gold, because all it takes is one little tip or getting one question answered to give you the “ah ha” moment you need in order to create massive growth in your business.

Tanner Larssen – Ecom Insider 1 Year Membership published first on http://ift.tt/2qxBbOD

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Expert: Human Evolution of the Mind Is Like a Hind Teat on a Texas Bull… Here we are witnessing The Great Collective Amnesia of the Western World…. The great Forgetting, from the political crass class (total), intellectual wanderers (not all, but mostly all) and the general public (most, and these huge blocks against intelligence follow from generation to next generation with a fluidity equal to the amount of information – mostly junk – exponentially increasing on the world wide web and the number eye gazes at the weekly sales worldwide a la eBay, Amazon.dot.steal and any other number of aggregators and on-line scams) is like bubonic clouds in our industrial and post-industrial nations’ cortexes. The lack of intelligence is deep, to include all those drone makers, the data collectors, the A.I. freaks, the robotics innovators (AKA, people killers), the war makers, the profiteers of toxicity, and any other shill in the giant Facebook-Mass Suicide (intellect) Media Kingdom with their legions of grovelers in their armies of financial and investment classes. Forget History and Forego Other Peoples. This lack of humanness, which is defined by forced and accepted agnotology – large portions of the human fabric and the positive human condition propagandized into complete lies or chopped into meaningless vestiges, remnants of a complete whole – makes daily the thrust of thinking and saying in this country almost like peering into the looking glass. Confusion and anti-thought, anti-knowing. Thus, the deadening of intellect, atrophying of those so-called smarts, that is, as we hear and see from those Hollywood and Wall Street scum deeming what is and is not smart which includes anyone displaying electronic-coding-algorithmic skills or tinkering or hedge funding acumen, whatever modern business groper brings to the table. They are vapid, lacking true intellect which has always been tied to understanding history and knowing what is right and how to wrest control from the wrong-doers, and, of course, understanding the world, from sea to shining seabed, to lost tribe of Ecuador, to every beetle yet cataloged by science and shaman kind. The depth of stupidity and genuflecting to all-encompassing consumption (suicide) is astounding in its coverage and voracity. It’s a total great collective forgetting that is both serendipitous and planned, and our dementia has created untenable damage to the rest of the globe. Call it Stockholm Syndrome tied to our murderers’ well-being, their own sustainability while we frog-march into oblivion death marches. We just cannot keep from fawning and vaunting corporations and chemical eaters, war mongers, money cachetting freaks, living off the flesh of humanity. This is US, us-ay, USA, this overvalued by every measure exceptionalist country of the so-called tuned-in, wired-up, and dialed-in leaders of the Western World. Our collective raping and then impregnating the rest of the world with Disneyfication stupidity, and then riding that ol’ train a slow time comin’, but rest assuredly comin’ to all corners of the globe with the splash-splash of glaciers Humpty-Dumpty-ing into their own march to catastrophe, oblivion –this DEFINES us, USA! You Shit Here, Piss Here, Dump Your Dump Your Carcinogenic Offal Here . . . And We Get to the Now Generations! The gut reaction and media devolution around probably one of the most coalescing written pieces in the past few years on climate change-global catastrophe caused by humans polluting the planet with cooked up fossil fuels and the various feedback loops of methane releases and the reflectivity (albedo effect) of the earth’s surface going negative (our land masses and oceans sponges for heat, now) are in real time despicable. The flinging shit and mud against the writer and his written facts and projections are now embedded in the very nature of how humanity in this western dystopian paradise of constant growth (with entropy quickly back-filling that sickness) puts the he and the her and the they smack in the middle of creation, which is the middle of destruction. The amount of ire, hate, and condemnation tied to his thinking and pseudo marketing-psychology-rhetoric vilifying the piece by David Wallace-Wells (“The Uninhabitable Earth,” New York Magazine, 7/9/2017) is reflective of the insipid quality of thinking that has come to define the consumer-capitalist-predator investing/divesting society we have shaped and embraced for more than 60 years. This piece by Wallace-Wells has garnered absurd critiques in the so-called liberal-left greenie press, and the mainstream disastrous press, the pseudo journalism of the big great and digital kings on the east Coast vying for a new Zion in every nook and cranny of the bankster world. The usual libertarian and conservative suspects are trying to burn Wallace-Wells at the stake, for sure, since his article compiles thousands upon thousands of researchers’ work – that is, evidence and prognostications based on those many webs of writing about the research on climate change (which is a catch-all phrase for global warming, weather destabilization, climate uncertainty, geo-engineering, greenhouse gas expulsion through fossil fuel burning and the various parallel defamation of the earth mostly through deforestation and hyper urbanization/ consumption/over-population of Homo Erectus/ Sapiens/ Consumopithecus). Do we need a list of those thinkers and doers years ago who predicted the outcome of the despoiled commons and over-impregnating Homo Sapiens eating the edges and now the center of all the other species, who, in a quick nod, have so-so much to give than a billion “I Wanna Be A Star” cretins who can’t wait for the next and the next bloody mess viewable in the next Netflix world of lies. The subtitle of the piece, “Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think,” has bristled the hackles of the me-myself-and-I bros and sisters, all from the various stripes of the political quagmire. Imagine, truth to power, truth to stupidity, truth against the prevailing Cellophane-wrapped essence of nano-particle humanity. Then the greenies start shedding their thin epidermis of green-o-atic colors to show the real flavor of their existence – eating cool, living cooler and propping up everything that is American. I’ve heard crap from Grist and so many other naysayers splaying (attempting, though) David Wallace-Wells’ thinking; many parts of the many numbers of NGO-like, non-profit “looking” environmental concerns (most are money-making harbors of war-loving, capitalism S & M driving nuts who love Hillary or even think Bernie is twenty-two degrees removed from the party he ran under) think going truthful and objective with the reality of the many dynamics tied to climate disruption which Wallace-Wells does, is worse than being a denier, than a Pence or Trump or any color of them ruling DC and the palaces of the stupids. I’ve been listening to our local Pacifica Station, KBOO-Portland, and today (7/19/17), on one show, Robert Hunziker, who wrote a piece, “Unhabitable Earth?” over at Dissident Voice talked about Wallace-Wells’ piece with Paul Roland, and, Hunziker is more or less right on, spot on, agreeing (to a degree, though) with the predictions and creative thought experiment David Wallace-Wells unfolds in a very prescient piece. Hunziker still has qualifiers, as is the style of the day – you know, us digital kings and writers having so much more with it and together than the real hard researchers and satirists. You have to give it to the ameliorating masses in the liberal class, the so-called environmentalists, and the shills that play this marketing/narrative framing/meme-ing game, saying that “too harsh a picture on the global negative implications of climate disaster can cause people to turn off and do nothing . . . scare them into paralysis . . . push them back to the all-you-can-eat/buy/consume/burn/immolate /dump/throw-away ways.” Yep, the so-called environmental b.s.-pushers, the majority of which are happy campers in their Subaru-tooling, Prius-loving, eco-capitalist REI lovefest, go on hyper-drive attack of this man’s well-reasoned and fabulously important piece of climate change writing. Hunziker and Roland on KBOO talked it out, about the Wallace-Wells piece, and the fallout. The call-in folk, well, they have so-so much mixed-up hope, and some cited Bill Gates as savior (those corporate Nazi saviors, don’t you know), or others talking geoengineering, you know, iron shavings by the millions of metric tons, dumped into the oceans, to, as most readers know, human engineer the planet to absorb CO2 – **“Iron fertilization is the intentional introduction of iron fines to iron-poor areas of the ocean surface to stimulate phytoplankton production. This is intended to enhance biological productivity and/or accelerate carbon dioxide (CO2) sequestration from the atmosphere.” ** The absurdity of this human ecocide on the oceans is telling, very telling. How we are living in our own shit and waste, tailings from the crimes of resource theft, the burning and slag piles smoking and curing our unborn, the stripped soils and exploded mountains beautiful images of earth gas chamber, diverted rivers to bred desertification, chemicalized water systems to cause death and migration, the entire mess of genetic engineering ready to latch onto the gene codes of the earth eaters, so perfectly captured in macrocosm with the example of salmon crossed at the DNA level with fat ass bass, and penned by the hundreds of thousands forced to eat soy and chicken entrails tablets. One good fishy example of humanity’s human shit and total species hate makes for emblematic ways to really show how warped a species we are. The ever-increasing Franken-fish/Franken-food/Franken-people experiments funded by tax monies, pushed by the controllers, yet average Joe and Jane Blow think this is the new normal. Then we have confused Rachel Maddows and Al Gores and the lot of them on their Van Jones high horses, empty of intelligence, blasphemers of the precautionary principle, small-minded and closed-headed people who look at a climate change article (which should be a triple-clarion call out) with real mettle, real predictions, not only poo-pooing it, but downright eviscerating the facts in order to play some full-of-shit narrative framing, shit, a la Freud and Bernays and Madison Avenue Zionist slave to consumerism shit. How much shit makes hubris and delusion capitalism? Imagine, the pencil necks at Grist (“Stop Scaring People About Climate Change: It Doesn’t Work”) attacking the reality, calling this man to task, for his look inside and outside at the real and unfolding possibilities of this that’s world a comin’, like a fast freight train a thousand miles long with every species ready for the Mother of All Dachaus — every species but that lying, raping, murdering, polluting, insane, blubbery, superstitious, vapid, inelegant Hominoid of modern atrocities. These people, advertising-seeking, for sure, and vetted by that political and non-profit enviro class so easily despised for their hypocrisy, they are grandstanding saying scaring doesn’t work? What sort of Wallace-Wells work is this writer leaning on, or wanting? It’s not his job to get people to revolt, overthrow, throw down, end the entire shooting match. “Quit scaring people” is so-so telling of the liberal class who gives shit about the illegal wars, the massive murders of millions by this empire, the massive deportations, massive destabilizations, massive inequities within their own shores. Almost anything coming out of their people’s cloud-digital-print asses is worth less than that one political orifice’s total value. Sanity Found Not Between the Lines, but in the Alarms and Emergency Sirens Apparent in the Words To give us a bit more to chew on without replicating the piece, here, the sectional titles of Wallace-Wells’ article: I. ‘Doomsday’ — Peering beyond scientific reticence. II. Heat Death — The bahraining of New York. III. The End of Food — Praying for cornfields in the tundra. IV. Climate Plagues –What happens when the bubonic ice melts? V. Unbreathable Air — A rolling death smog that suffocates millions. VI. Perpetual War  — The violence baked into heat. VII. Permanent Economic Collapse  — Dismal capitalism in a half-poorer world. VIII. Poisoned Oceans — Sulfide burps off the skeleton coast. IX. The Great Filter — Our present eeriness cannot last. Even the climate change piece looks at the rotten form that is capitalism, and the great day trading of the commons, the willingness of man to barter for more money with the future commons of ancestral havens. We’re talking war, too, rarely mentioned by greenies. War is the power, the engine, of greed, destabilization, the end of food, the lack of preparedness for everyone to adapt and adjust to the impending collapsed societies. Wallace-Wells nails it. Then, look at these opposing points of view, sick, really, spewing liberal elites with their pedigrees, whatever that means in this sell-out science landscape: “Doomsday Scenarios Are as Harmful as Climate Change Denial” By Michael E. Mann, Susan Joy Hassol and Tom Toles Analysis of “The Uninhabitable Earth” Published in New York Magazine, by David Wallace-Wells on 9 July 2017: Sixteen scientists (all male, all White/Christian/Jewish) analyzed (attacked) the article and estimated its overall scientific (what is this, really, in a sell-out world of science for their own profits) credibility to be ‘low’. (yet more mumbo-jumbo from the science arena). A majority of reviewers tagged the article as: Alarmist, Imprecise/Unclear, Misleading. This grouping of puke scientists, who we all must bow to, don’t you know, with their Ivy-League and powerhouse Stanford and Big 20 university laurels, well, they are vapid, untenable when you think about their own contexts – first world, elite, white, privileged, ivory towered, and never grasping the reality of an uneven world for not only their fellow billions, but for the entirety of the wild world. Hmm, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has been reporting a huge loss of population in thousands of vertebrate species. Researchers have studied 27,600 species of birds, amphibians, mammals and reptiles, finding huge losses in over 8,000 species. The animal species are not yet technically extinct, but the loss of numbers is severe enough to collapse breeding, viability, and their own roles in their eco-webs, let alone their own rights to exist on this planet. The findings mean that billions of animal populations that once roamed the Earth are now gone. This is the great Sixth Great Extinction of animal species caused by climate change and loss of habitat – all perpetrated by Man and Woman and ��they”. “The sixth mass extinction is already here and the window for effective action is very short.” Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, continues: “If we continue the trend we’re on, we’re going to be looking at 50 to 75 percent of our species lost over the next hundred years.” Here’s what the capitalism-adoring Atlantic magazine says of the work of Wallace-Wells: It’s into that morass that this week’s New York magazine walks. In a widely shared article, David Wallace-Wells sketches the bleakest possible scenario for global warming. He warns of a planet so awash in greenhouse gas that Brooklyn’s heat waves will rival Bahrain’s. The breadbaskets of China and the United States will enter a debilitating and everlasting drought, he says. And millions of brains will so lack oxygen that they’ll slip into a carbon-induced confusion. Unless we take aggressive action, “parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century,” he writes. “No matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough.” It’s a scary vision—which is okay, because climate change is scary. It is also an unusually specific and severe depiction of what global warming will do to the planet. And though Wallace-Wells makes it clear that he’s not predicting the future, only trying to spin out the consequences of the best available science today, it’s fair to ask: Is it realistic? Will this heat-wracked doomsday come to pass? Many climate scientists and professional science communicators say no. Wallace-Wells’s article, they say, often flies beyond the realm of what researchers think is likely. I have to agree with them. This is the tribe of elites, the publishing mainliners, the gatekeepers, controllers, the myopics and the critics of anything outside their own narrative frames – America good, or inherently good and all-knowing, all-solving, leaders of the world and technology and in ideas. Words like scary and vision and morass, oh, those wordsmiths, oh those literary kingpins of the big East Coast tribe. Humanity’s chosen people, these publishers and writers and editors and pundits and cultural icons. Here, from Wallace-Wells in an updated and annotated version of his piece: Since the article was published, we have made four corrections and adjustments, which are noted in the annotations (as well as at the end of the original version). They are all minor, and none affects the central project of the story: to apply the best science we have today to the median and high-end ‘business-as-usual’ warming projections produced by the U.N.’s ‘gold standard’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But the debate this article has kicked up is less about specific facts than the article’s overarching conceit. Is it helpful, or journalistically ethical, to explore the worst-case scenarios of climate change, however unlikely they are? How much should a writer contextualize scary possibilities with information about how probable those outcomes are, however speculative those probabilities may be? What are the risks of terrifying or depressing readers so much they disengage from the issue, and what should a journalist make of those risks? The End Game is Capitalism-Delusional Thinking-Soylent Green is People! Now, let’s get really real. How many minds were talking about no-growth, steady-state economics, the three e’s of sustainability (environment, equity, economy, in that fucking order!), small is better, de-industrializing, eco-socialism, and on and bloody on? Forget Muir, or Pinchot or Stegner or Rachel Carson or Mumford or Kunslter or Jane Jacobs or any number of proponents of fair and environmentally gauged communities. One part Wallace-Wells, another part, hmm, Derrick Jensen? While we face ‘hard choices’ about which species and ecosystems to conserve, it’s odd how we face no such quandaries over which of our frivolous luxuries to refrain from, or what murderous weapons system not to build, writes Derrick Jensen. This look at the hard choices of species and ecosystems, over pornography, sweat-shop clothes, next generation iPhones, animal-shit coffee, Ikea lasting six months, endless cruises and buffets, disposable internal combustion vehicles, jets and satellites and drones and backyard pools and chemical trails circling the globe and, well, you know what humanity is not willing to sacrifice! Sure, we’re supposed to choose whether to extirpate or save Bulmer’s fruit bats or Sumatran Rhinos, wild yams or hula painted frogs (with the default always being extirpate, of course); and we’re supposed to make careful delineations of how we choose who is exterminated, and who lives (at least until tomorrow, when we all know there’ll be another round of exterminations, complete with another round of wringing our hands over how difficult these decisions are, and another round of heartbreak; and then another round, and another, until there is nothing and no one left). But just as after Fukushima a Japanese energy minister said that nuclear energy must continue to be produced because no one “could imagine life without electricity”, so, too, entirely disallowed is any discussion of what technologies should be kept and what should be caused to go extinct. There’s no discussion of extirpating iPads, iPhones, computer technologies, retractable stadium roofs, insecticides, GMOs, the Internet (hell, Internet pornography), off-road vehicles, nuclear weapons, predator drones, industrial agriculture, industrial electricity, industrial production, the benefits of imperialism (human, American, or otherwise). That’s the rub, every single SOV day (single occupancy vehicle). I can’t even help my homeless and beaten-down young foster kids without being forced to drive miles upon miles and meet them at the quintessential rot gut everything that is bad about society Starbucks, because that’s company policy. I drive in a rural area near Oregon City, Estacada, and daily, the number of sacrifices on the road, AKA road kill, is in the dozens. Daily. We cut and maul and pave over and build over and divert and seed with invasives, and daily, hourly, each minute, on this planet, not one shit product or idea or lifestyle is sacrificed, but each and every square inch of soil and cubic meter of river and 2000 foot of altitude is raped and re-raped. By us, the supremacists. The dunces. The ones sitting, lying and sleeping in our own shit, using the cadavers of the real world – ecology, environment – as our rationale for putting us at the top of the dung heap. The murder of the planet is not some tragedy ordained by fate because we’re too damn smart. It is the result of a series of extremely bad social choices. We could choose differently. But we don’t. And we won’t. Not so long as the same unquestioned beliefs run the culture. Don’t get me wrong. Anyone who is working to protect wild places or wild beings from this omnicidal culture is in that sense a hero. We need to use every tool possible to save whomever and wherever we can from this culture. But it’s ridiculous and all-too-expected that while there’s always plenty of money to destroy the Tongass and every other forest, and there’s always plenty of money for various weapons of mass destruction (such as cluster bombs or dams or corporations) somehow when it comes to saving wild places and wild beings, we have to pinch pennies and ‘make difficult decisions’. Also, I need to say that the whole Ark metaphor doesn’t work. In the original story, God saved two of every species (as He, like the humans who created Him, destroyed the planet). Here, modern humans are going where even God didn’t tread, and explicitly not saving every species, but instead deciding which species to save, and which species to kill off. This is, of course, both pleasing and flattering to human supremacists: they’re making decisions on questions even God punted. How cool is that? http://clubof.info/

[morrighan-in-wonderland]

What the actual fuck is the 4th crusade: a summary

Okay so there was this one asshole who got made pope back in 1198 and called himself "Innocent." (compensation much?) And he released a ‘miserably’ shitty proclamation (Post Miserabile) which declared the 4th crusade. Because he said so. All of the European monarchs said fuck no, because they had their own shit to be getting on with, wars and such. 

Finally he manages to get a guy to lead it. That dude dies. The second guy takes over and says "okay guys lets go to Venice and buy a shit ton of boats with all the money we don't have." They give Venice a year to make a zillion boats. 

Eventually (most of) the crusaders make it to Venice. Some of them got lost along the way. They arrive in Venice with less than half of the money they owe, and the Doge is like, "No fuck you you can't have the boats. We spent a year making your goddamned boats and you have to pay us!" The Venetians then throw (all) of the main crusaders into debtors prison. (The guy who had made the deal for all of the boats fucked off to Constantinople around this time, managing to escape those consequences and leaving the army without a leader again.) At this point the Doge, a blind dude named Enrico Dandolo, is like, "okay fuck. We can't keep all of these assholes in jail how will we feed them?" So he joins the crusade, takes over the fleet that he built in the first place, and decides that instead of going to invade Palestine for Jesus, they’re gonna be pirates for a while until he gets his money back. They kind of suck at being pirates, and the Pope finally notices that they aren't where he told them to be and sends Dandolo a letter: "guys stop killing Catholics. We die too often as it is guys stop or you'll go to hell because I said so. I’m gonna excommunicate you if you keep that shit up." Dandolo says "fuck that" and doesn't tell anybody what the Pope said. They proceed to keep looting their own allies, and the pope excommunicates the entire fucking army. Which, you know, doesn't actually mean anything in a practical sense, but he feels good about himself for it. So Venice and Constantinople were really shitty neighbors, and when the deposed prince of Constantinople hears that Venice has a pirate fleet, he offers them a metric fuck ton of money and trade and other goodies, if they'll go overthrow the guy that overthrew him. Dandolo says yes, but then decides to just sack the city instead because he was having fun being a pirate and exiled princes can’t exactly back up their promises of enough money to swim in. It takes a couple of years but eventually they fuck up Constantinople but good. There’s like... a lot of looting.  Pope Innocent facepalms, but they buy him off with some of their pirate loot and what remains of Constantinople, so he lets them come home and go to heaven and stuff. They then attempt to swear off Crusades, which goes about as well as an alcoholic quitting cold turkey. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the 4th crusade. AKA the biggest clusterfuck in the history of Catholicism. 

Can someone please tell me why it’s not an HBO series yet?