#40-50 HOURS A WEEK AND NOT PAID A PENNY IN FOUR YEARS

[jatamansi-arc]

Okay so like... I sent a message to @illusivexemissary​ about how I watched Gabriel’s introductory episode the other day and was just sort of fucking laughing at it? Because I just... I worked as a caretaker for an apartment building for four years. 

Every single one of those tenants would tell you, and I’m not kidding, “This is a really quiet, nice complex.” It’s a lie. It’s a terrible fucking lie. An apartment complex is never quiet. There’s always weird shit going on. Too many people in too close of a space. You may think it’s peaceful but you have become complacent. 

It’s worth noting that our complex also had a contract with a few agencies to rehome severely mentally ill people permanently, as a means to keep them in the community. So there are some stories here that reflect that fact and, at worst, most of them were just memorable for harmless, if not interesting, quirks. Our cookiecutter tenants were the strangest ones. So let’s jump into my fond memories.

I literally just spent like... an hour digging out my pictures for this, so you’re gonna have a time.

To begin with, before I moved into this apartment complex, I lived in New Jersey. I was the oldest person in the house, at 18 years. This was in 2004. 

My house caught on fire in November of that year. It was also Joe’s fault. Joe was not well liked. We declared war on him shortly thereafter.

But we did drink well under age and party in the house after it caught fire, ‘cause fuck the police.

We also did awful things to people who came to the house for any reason. This is why you don’t let 14-18 year olds live in a house unattended by any parental supervision whatsoever.

But I couldn’t get a job, so I ended up moving back home to Minnesota. I lived in a house for awhile, but shit happened and we ended up losing the housing when my mom got incredibly sick. So, being homeless, we hit the pavement and tried to find cheap living arrangements we could get into ASAP.

We found an apartment complex composed of six buildings that required a caretaker. We paid $250 in rent and worked about “ten hours a week” and it would cover the cost of the rental’s deduction. Seems legit, right? 

No, it was a lie. it was indentured servitude. It was never 10 hours a week and things were always going wrong. But that’s neither here nor there, we decided to take the apartment under the guise of a “it works until something better.”

This was where I moved to:

See all that sidewalk? I had to shovel that five times a day in winter. It was hell. I could have lifted fucking giraffes, okay. Sometimes it snowed clear up to my second floor balcony.

Like what is this madness? This was six feet off the ground, y’all.

Damn right, sad snow blob. But that’s neither here nor there. There was also an exquisitely nice pool:

Oh wait, that was what the pool looked that when I wasn’t the one taking care of it. Five teams of caretakers and not a bloody one of them but me could do this. This is what it looked like when I was in charge of it. 

Do you see anything wrong with this picture? Anything at all? Look at the writing. In the four years I was in this hell, not once did this rule ever come to apply to me. I never was accompanied personally by a jovial Scottish man to the pool. The only eventful thing that ever happened to me was that I caused an elderly Russian man to have a heart attack. Why? Things frequently went wrong with the pool. Sometimes they were minor.

That’s the chemical reader. It’s not supposed to be in the middle of the pool. One of the other caretakers wasn’t paying attention and kicked it in. At least it can be fished out with a net. That yellow cord you see? That’s a vacuum. You attach it to the pool’s natural suction and vacuum the floor and wall of the pool to clear out debris. The pole is literally like 18 feet long, if not more. Our pool vacuum was ancient. It was awful. Literally, it would break constantly and the actual suction device would get stuck on the bottom of the deep end of the pool and someone would have to jump in and get it.

One summer, my boss decided to keep the pool open beyond labor day. In Minnesota, this is an odd decision as September temperatures are only around 40-60 degrees at best, and this story takes place in the first week of October. It’s 7am, the pool opens at 10am, and I’m out trying to do my gig. Vacuum breaks and I scream at whatever gods will hear me because I don’t want to jump into 20 degree water nobody is even using to retrieve the thing. Without any choice, because I can’t jab it unstuck, I strip down to my bra and panties. Outside. On a frigid October morning. I take a deep breath because I know what’s coming, and then dive in. It’s like hitting a brick wall and I finally manage to get the thing unstuck, and surface to discover this 90 year old Russian guy named Petyr standing out on his balcony, giving me a huge thumbs up. I stare, mortified. He stands there the rest of the time, minding me. I rush through everything and go to turn in all the supplies. I come out of the office and there’s an ambulance at the building across the way from the pool. Run over there, still wet but at least with my overclothes on, and try to become informed of the situation. 

Petyr had suffered, most likely, a fatal heart attack. I was the last person to see him alive. I think I may have accidentally killed him. Awkward.

And this is only one thing I experienced, mind you. As the wifi in our building used to say, and it was apt:

Because this apartment complex existed in some sort of quasi-dimension of its own creation, and because why not, there were high amounts of two things. One was white squirrels.

The other was mormons. There were always mormons in the courtyards. Much like kin, their crisp whites, too, dotted the space starting early in the morning. They played soccer. Every day. It was very strange. I had a photo of this but I can’t find it, and that is immensely disappointing because it’s nothing short of hilarious. There was one thing that made them different in my mind, and it was that you weren’t punished with picking up the corpses of the mormons when you were not perky enough for the upper management.

Upper management also learned very quickly that this was a terrible punishment for me, because I wasn’t bothered by it. I once got into a huge fight with the proper manager for this building and she told me I had to pluck out all the dead animals from the pool for my “attitude.” I did this and threw them on her deck, the squeal thud of bloated dead things colliding with the door to her porch echoing through the courtyard. 

She could have fired me for this, but I was the most reliable and dedicated employee she had, so it put her in a bad row if she did. So she tolerated my dead animal rebellion and gave me a set of master keys instead. We would come to blows again a month later, where, as obsessed with cobwebs as she was? Her full moon ass on displace, panties half exposed, as she complained about a missed set on the basement stairs. Asking me, with attitude, and repeatedly if I had seen what she meant. 

It was probably not a wise decision to say, “Not around your fat ass, no.”

Eventually we forged a surprisingly decent relationship where she left me alone and I did my job and was Captain Reliable If Not Disgruntled, and my problems with Management diminished outside of Upper Upper Management. Who was I fairly convinced wanted us to die at any given moment sooner than cost than any more money.

This was a notice we were given when we had to clean and paint four apartments on a July day. It was 98 degrees. I turned on the AC anyway and dealt with the very irate CEO of the company two days later, a man named Ira.

They also seemed perfectly okay not labeling any of the chemicals we used so it was like “hey, want a chemical burn?” No? TOO BAD.

You may be saying, “Felicia, this is pretty funny but I thought this was relevant to the antics that Gabriel was up to in his introduction episode.” Listen, y’all, I’m just getting started. Like, you want some antics? Let’s talk about my coworkers. ‘Cause after being there for awhile, I was entrusted to handle a lot of money and do paperwork. This included filling out and processing applications for both new tenants and our hires. 

We had someone come to do an application for the latter, as a previous coworker got fired for having a lot of sex with the tenants. I probably don’t have to talk about how that was against the rules. But I did the application for this lady that comes in to replace him. Processing said app, after I collected payment and she had left, I noticed this:

I had reservations about this one. Stripper was probably the most legitimate part of her application. Boss hired her due to us absolutely needing someone, but my reservations were correct when she got wasted on cocaine and whiskey and thought she was apparently a superhero and jumped off her third story balcony and broke her leg.

This is just one of them. I saw many coworkers come and go of various lifestyles and interests. We had drag queens who did all their work in full costume. There was another one who was a 4′11″ redhead named Joie that pulled a gun on her boyfriend and then ran him over with her car and then was arrested for possession of meth (and my character, Joie, is named for her.) One, Carleton, was fanatically obsessed with his pet piranhas. It goes on like this.

Bethany, for example, ate crayons and was obsessed with true crime. Andrew had OCD and routinely dismantled the locks on the doors at all hours, and had to hammer a new nail into the wall every day. I know this because I lived above him and heard all of these things. Cameron addicted half of our coworkers on meth, and slept with two of them. Pamela had a nervous breakdown. Rachel was mild mannered and was fired for oversleeping through a shoveling time around 6am on accident, which seemed incredibly pale in comparison to everyone else. And Cathy, the only coworker who seemed to last longer than a year, cut her own fingers off in a freak accident and we had to rush her to the hospital. 

It goes on like this. There are more. There are so many more.

I was painting an apartment once with Cathy, for example, and Teresa, another coworker of mine. We were attacked by a SWAT team breaking in the door. Apparently someone had tipped them off that there had been a meth lab in operation by the past tenants. I don’t know if that was true, but having the SWAT team pointing lazer-guided sights at you is pretty terrifying.

And then there were the tenants. I loved a lot of them, and others I was glad to see go. There were several with alcohol problems that would come to my door at all hours, thinking that my apartment was there’s, and I would have to escort them home. 

There was a man named Mark who had been relocated into his unit by a local rapid rehousing organization. Schizophrenic and without a good response to medication, Mark could be a handful. I never got mad at him outside of his calls at 3am, which I was required by law to get out of bed and investigate, because I come from a family ravaged by the same disease. Mark wasn’t a bad guy by any stretch, but his complaint calls and quirks were amazing. In the four years I was there, I can tell you that he had Star Wars playing 24/7/365. Loudly, to boot, because he was mostly deaf. When I cleaned the building he was in, with him living on the third floor, he would oftentimes come out any say hello.

One time I pulled my egregiously heavy vacuum up the six flights of stairs and pulled open the third floor fire doors, only to discover his entire fridge sitting outside of his apartment. I knock on his door and a disheveled Mark opens the door. I ask why his fridge, obviously, is located out of his apartment. Mark tells me that it is haunted. So at 8am, I offer to bless his fridge to cleanse it of spirits and we move it back into his apartment. He never had a problem with it again. 

A couple weeks later, however, Mark tells me that the apartment across the hall from him is constructing the Death Star and I need to tell them that is a very dangerous course of action. I investigate this complaint, as I was required to, and discover that the tenant across from him has been hanging a few new pictures. I commend them for their good humor on it, talk to Mark and tell them that I’ve talked them out of this, and he is content.

I will field at least five more calls from Mark over the years about various Star Wars battleships being built in apartments.

In the same building, many other strange happenstances came to pass. The #01 building seemed to be a strange place onto itself. 

Birds nested in the windows and would get stuck in the stairwells.

Ants would appear out of nowhere in swarms of the thousands.

There was a strange child in one of the units known as Igor and routinely caused problems for management. 

Someone died and was not found for almost four weeks. Everyone else on staff was too afraid to field this call about an unusual decaying smell in the first floor hallway coming from an apartment, and so it fell to me. I, awkwardly familiar with the odor of decay, did a wellness check. Tenant was not well. Tenant was black and bloated and very much in the worst stages of decay. Upper Management was too scared to handle it, so I was forced to do paperwork and wait for the police and the hazmat team to remove the body. We ended up ripping out the entire apartment from head to toe.

Another time, an apartment next to Mark’s (a third floor studio), was rented by teenage tenants who had clearly never lived alone before. They made macaroni and cheese and caused and oil fire. They then threw water on it and spread it elsewhere. They call me, in their on fire apartment, and tell me exactly that. I ask them if they had called 911, and they inform me that no, they are still standing there in the apartment and just letting me know. I have to, in my booty short pajamas, run barreling through the apartment building while managing a call to 911, evacuating tenants. 

Oh, here’s a squirrel nest. That happened too.

And these are just a few of the weird things. I also found an early 1900′s sewing machine just sitting in the stairwell, abandoned.

My building was another strange place. Perhaps it was because we were the closest to the #01 building that some of the weirdness wore off. Because when we first moved in, our apartment had roaches. It should have been a sign. We didn’t take it seriously. We had it taken care of and never had a problem afterwards, but that’s only because the Universe had other ideas.

Like that there was a transformer looked directly behind the building, that you could see from my window, that routinely blew during any major storm. And not only just exploded like a gunshot, I mean that it routinely exploded and fell down and power lines were down. It was a mess.

Not once, but twice, the lines would push down the wooded area’s branches into the #00′s building. This meant trees and shrubs caught on fire behind the building. Thankfully our buildings were brick and therefore hard to ignite, otherwise this was two opportunities for the goddamn building to catch on fire.

My apartment was also a weird place. And I’m not referring to the complex here. This is my apartment. Beaten and abused by so many caretakers before it, the patio doors constantly would fly open even upon a gentle breeze that was stronger than normal. Which is something considering a paranoid motherfucker lived there before me at some point, and there were at least six locks on the patio doors themselves. And another three on the door.

Oh, and one time a glass panel fell out. I had to rescreen the actual doors, too, no less than four times. Because the wood was fucking rotting away.

This is how my cats escaped several times. Because having four bloody patio doors isn’t enough to keep out drafts, let alone anything else. Furthermore, inexplicably, Virginia Creeper lived in my patio structure, and no matter what we did, and we pulled it out dozens of time and even tried to have it professionally removed, it came back and would repeatedly just take over everything. Slowly climbing the building and compromising the structural integrity of my deck.

It produced berries in the late summer and kids would eat them and then end up sick. Kids are so dumb, I swear. Eventually I stopped warning them about this because they kept breaking everything I would put out to try and make the apartment feel a bit more like home. 

Or at least something slightly less like a personal Hell I was financially trapped in for four years.

We had a strict rule that nobody was, obviously, allowed to drive up on the property to unload trucks or moving vehicles. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was the white dudes who thought this one didn’t apply to them. Here’s someone moving into my building. 

There were other buildings, too. There was an ICE raid in the #08 building at one point, though I’m not sure why. And there was a single mom of like eight who lived on the third floor who was fucking hilarious but otherwise this was where the caretakers lived, usually. You already know how that goes.

#16 was there the Upper Management lived, so she kept it quiet. The absolute worst offender was a chronically ill man who would frequently have severe seizures and we would have to keep a close eye on him for his own health and safety. #16 was a great building. The bottom floor was entirely boilers, laundry, and the Assistant Manager’s apartment. Most days she slept late and donned velour track suits, and usually was in charge of changing locks around the complex and occasionally she would bang the vents to try and get the heat to kick on. Kim was great. I loved Kim. Always getting in trouble with Stella, our Manager, for doing the logical thing, she had developed an apathy the rest of us could only admire.

#17 was where most of the rapid rehousing folks were placed. Petyr lived in this building. We had a few other people of note in #17; John was a man who lived in his unit for 3 years and his walls were so dark with nicotine that you’d thought they were just brown. We prayed every day that John would never move out, for as nice as he was. Socheeta stole plants. There was a lady named Kimberly who was a srs artist and had a giant wall sculpture of a vagina as the central focus of her apartment. The most notable tenants were the Ficus family, who would complain about everything. If someone coughed at 2am, the wife would call. If a piece of mail was discarded out of the trashcan, instead of picking it up, she would complain about it. 

There was a woman named Bernice who moved into #17 my second year there. She was a “retired prostitute” as she put it. I literally have no problem with sex work, mind you, but I was called to her apartment about two months later because she had slept with someone and his heart had given out. Apparently this was where the older dudes went to have heart attacks after experiencing something too sexy to handle.

#09 was the last building. Located between #17 and the quasi-dimensional #01, it followed a similar pattern to the two of them. The side closer to the later was generally quiet and the latter was full of oddities. We had one rapid rehouse that was removed after a couple of months for chasing other tenants through the parking lots and throwing patio chairs off his balcony. He called me a kike at one point so I didn’t feel so bad about his eviction. The apartment underneath him, for most of the time I lived there, was occupied at an elderly lady who we never saw. One day, shortly after going on oxygen, she lit a cigarette and her existence was abruptly ended. Cleaning her apartment afterwards was a level of odd and terrifying. I kept finding hair. Everywhere. It never stopped. It seemed weird it survived the explosion, but it did. 

The apartment under her, later, caught on fire. They left a spatula in their oven and also called our office line instead of calling 911. For some reason they felt the need to push the smoking oven out into the hallway where it proceeded to burn away until I could extinguish it, while my mother evacuated the building. We also had a tax agent come every winter and stay to the summer, and she always stayed in the #09 building. She was meticulous. She slept in a sleeping bag. Never had any cookware. It was very strange. We never had to even clean her apartment because the only things in it were a phone, desk, and sleeping bag.

Oh, and there were twins in this building. They were kids. They were named Feloni and Misdermeaner. My mom worked at the closest school back then, but I didn’t, and Misdermeaner’s classroom roster was listed outside. 

Was there any other weird stuff that happened? Oh hell yes. I could write so much more. Like how it would rain on only specific parts of the complex and not others all the fucking time.

Oh, and the day I gave my 30 day notice, there was a double rainbow over my building. Which is a testament to the amount of bullshit I survived for four years. Nonstop, awful bullshit. That was mostly from management.

Like that I was expected to come back even after I was no longer employed there and vacuum and clean buildings. Like, you know, fucking load all that on a bus after walking a half mile with it and back. What.

AND I FEEL LIKE THIS POST IS LONG ENOUGH SO IF YOU WANT MORE STORIES ASK BUT I’M SHUTTING UP FOR NOW I WANT TO EAT DINNER.

[cherryberrynice]

wip wednesday

it's not actually wednesday any more here because timezones, but have some mary and benny being buddies because i am having a hard time making more words happen

Mary’s sitting alone in a motel room. Except for the flatscreen tv, the decor feels comfortable and familiar and modern to her, which probably means it’s dated as hell. The flickering light of the television fills the room, movie trailer casting moody blues and greys against the fading light against the setting sun.

She picks up her phone, adds its flat light to the room as she makes a call.

“Did you have colour television before you died?” Mary asks. Direct. Benny huffs out a laugh. It’s refreshing, having someone with whom she can discuss the complete weirdness of change. Dean, especially, gets tight around the eyes when she or Benny start talking about being dead. Sam and Dean have each died more times than she and Benny put together, but it was never for long. There is a decades-long disruption of the world Mary and Benny have to find their way in. Sam and Dean have died and more times than she can count - more times than they can keep track of, too, she thinks. It’s normal to them; the way their hearts go out, the following gasp of first breath hours or months later. Scars falling from their skin where hers picked up damage from years and years of sunlight she never actually got to tilt her face toward.

“Some,” Benny says. “Remember seeing one in a store window when Andrea and I got stateside. Nothing on that last tour of South America. Didn’t have one ourselves - they were a pretty penny. Andrea had the money, wanted to get one, but it didn’t seem worth it. Not with the broadcasts still mostly in monochrome, and us having better things to do.”

On the tv, the movie trailer ended when she wasn’t paying attention. Mary nods. Thinks of the slow bloom of television to colour throughout her childhood. She can’t pinpoint a tipping point in the way you can never really feel the slow change of an ecosystem you’re immersed in, but she thinks she was out of elementary school before black and white began to wane. “Took a while to catch on,” she says.

“We were going to come back to the idea in a couple of years,” Benny says. “Didn’t happen.”

“Yeah,” she says. Pauses. Thinks about the flickering light of the movie trailer that had her reaching for her phone. “There are eight Star Wars movies,” Mary says.

“So Dean and Charlie tell me,” Benny says. “Though if I recall correctly, they have an ongoing argument about if they should pretend some of them don’t exist.”

Mary laughs a little. Benny likes to pretend fond exasperation at Dean and Charlie’s pop culture arguments but she knows he stores their fond, easy bickering away close to his heart.

A woman with too-white teeth has a bottle of brightly coloured syrup and is playing doctor mom to her children and husband. She thinks of the mothers on the shows she grew up with in the 50s and 60s.

“Return of the Jedi came out when Sam was three weeks old,” she says. John had paid a girl from three doors down $5 to babysit the kids so they could have the night out, and they’d taken the Impala to the drive-in. They’d both fallen asleep before the previews were over, popcorn falling sideways on the front seat between them as exhaustion clawed behind their eyes and titled them away from each other and into the rolled-up windows.

“I’m sure Dean and Charlie would be willing to set up a movie night, if you wanted to watch it,” Benny says. Pauses, when she doesn’t respond.

Sam is four months old. Sam is 36. Return of the Jedi came out when he was three weeks old and she hasn’t gotten a chance to see it yet.

“Sure,” Mary says, feeling stiff and out of place. She is 28. She is 40-something. She doesn’t know how she’ll feel watching a movie with her grown children, not one she was supposed to see a few months ago when Sam was asleep, burbling, in his crib. Mary exhales. Behind her eyes, she can see Dean colouring at the kitchen table with the babysitter while at the drive-in she and John slept, exhausted, while the movie played around them. The drive-in speaker echoing explosions and lasers not near enough to wake them, their children were safe in a home with only weeks left before it burned.

“Or I could watch it with you sometime,” Benny offers.

Mary feels like she should push through, ignore the pain. It’s been decades. It’s only been a few months. “I’d like that,” she says. “It’s not--”

“You don’t have to explain yourself to me,” Benny says. Of everyone she knows, he understands about how time goes funny.

Mary takes a deep breath. Tries to figure out if she <i>wants</i> to explain herself. Honestly, she’s tired of it. “We could get them to set something up for the rest of the movies,” she offers.

“They’d like that,” Benny says, softly.

They talk for a while after that. Nothing heavy. Blades and guns and possible monster murders and the most ridiculous lyrics they’ve found in new-old pop music.

Eventually, Benny says “Pardon me a second,” and Mary can hear Dean’s voice, muffled and filtered through Benny’s hand over his phone. It sounds warm and lazy, no strident urgency or sharp command or threat-response in it, and she bites her lip and grins. Benny’s voice comes back on the line. “Sorry, but--”

“Go,” Mary says. Waves her hand like she can see him. “I’ve had a long day here, should probably turn in anyway. Tell him I send my love.”

[whatdoesshedotothem]

Thursday 5 November 1835

7 50

1 ½

A- at Cliff Hill - ready in 40 minutes - snowing at 8 - 1st snow this season - the ground white now at 8 ½ at which hour F42 ½°  - dusting and arranging my books till 11 ¼ then breakfast till 11 55 then went out into the Saddle room Booth and Cockroft there the former smoothing the flags to amuse himself should charge me nothing - he sent his masons home at 10 and the 3 farmyard wallers - Robert Mann + 3 came but went away before noon - saw James H- about between 8 and 9 - out in the farmyard and about till 12 20 - then note from A- Cliff Hill by Mr Washington’s servant to say she should not be at home till Saturday - the horses to be ready for her at 3 ½ pm on that day -  Enclosed a letter to ‘Mr Barker ‘ (should have been Barber) the schoolmaster at Leeds (altered the name on the address of the letter to Barber) asking him to come over on Monday -  wrote 3 pages of ½ sheet note in answer to A- disappointed at her not returning this afternoon - should ½ of us be dead of ennui on the spleen if she disappointed me on Saturday..... the letter tout ce qu’il faut [everything that is necessary] and shall be despatched tonight - enclose her a printed note and Throp’s bill, and the letter to her aunt from her sister that came last night - had kept Mr Washington’s man waiting 40 minutes - then wrote the above of today till 1 ¼ - till four and a quarter writing rough draft of long letter to Lady Stuart - had William Keighley at 2 for ¼ hour came to beg off till Monday going to A- tomorrow - said he had better go - well he could if he might be let off at noon - so he is to go to Cliff Hill tomorrow if fine - told him about the Spiggs Loose - that I should try again and put down sluice this time so that I could not obliged the Spiggs co. about the water even if I would - he seemed to think me quite right - said his brother Joseph did not at all like coming the day he came with Thwaite and Cricley Holt - and he (William) had given them up and had done with them long since - he said he should not tell Holt (my agent) but he meant to bid at my new colliery - I said I hoped it would be ready in 18 months - said I would  not have his (William’s) intention of bidding - sold him the trees he felled for me a little while ago at his own valuations - to be taken away by and by and paid for at the rent day 1st Wednesday in January - price £9.1.6. Had Charles H- about 3pm will finish at Walker pit tomorrow - will be wanted then 2 or 3 hours - then in about 4 days will finish for Mark Town at Barraclough cottage - then will take him 3 days for finish Hopkin’s cowhouse - will have all done by next Monday or Tuesday week - and then we will side up for the winter at home - he is to put Lower Place [spouts] amongst hands - next week - wrote the last 17 lines till 4 35 - then went out

SH:7/ML/E/18/0125

sometime talking to Frank in the farmyard - then went to the Conery and gave Matty Pollard 2 ½ sovereigns for Luke Greenwood’s widow for her oven 10/ gooseberry bushes etc in the garden 20/ set-stones that partly fence off the garden 10/. + 10/. a gift for her leaving the cottage to readily - looked over the cottage 2 rooms a cellar and back kitchen in very decent repair - William Pollard told me he had asked Miss Holdsworth what she would take for her 4 Godley cottages and offered her £200 - must he bid anymore? I said I should it was as much as they were worth - perhaps he might get them for that sum and I would buy them of him and give him something for his trouble - said he should have one of them if he liked, to live in at the same rent he pays now 45/. a year and each of the cottages is let at £4 - I asked what I should give him for his bargain - he said he would leave it to me - Matty said I had already promised them one of the cottages at 45/. yes! but said I, William must have a fastening penny - and there the matter ended -  I must give him a sovereign - I had not asked him to buy the cottages for me - he had heard me mention them and spoke about them of his own accord - home at 6 20 - some while with my father and Marian - sealed my aunt’s note to the Vicar enclosing him 2 sovereigns from the family towards the £14.14.0 he has paid Mr Binns for copying his likeness of Mr Sunderland to be put up at the Dispensary - sealed and sent (too) A-‘s letter to Mr Barber of Leeds, and my own note to ‘Mr Joseph Simpson, Iron Founder King Cross lane’ saying I was sorry I could not accommodate him as I did not wish to have foundry near the Northgate hotel - dinner at 7 - coffee - sat reading Michelet’s abrégé of the history of the modern ages - very good - got it when last in Paris - an hour with my father and Marian - read over the newspaper while with them and skimmed over the Gentleman’s magazine - came upstairs at 9 5 - cut open a Frenal work volume 1 and went to my aunt at 9 50 for 20 minutes then wrote so far of this page till 10 40 - Snowy wintery day till between 1 and 2 pm then damp and small snow or rain for an hour or 2 afterwards fair for the rest of the day - F47° now at 10 ¾ pm - Writing out George’s account for the last 6 weeks and looking over bills till 12 ½ - had Firth this afternoon ordered 5 yards inch bore lead pipe 14 lbs to the yard to come on Monday - the town’s inch bore-pipe Firth says is 13 lbs to the yard - he will make me pipe of any weight and lay it at 3d. a lb.

[exactlyinstantcollective]

Biggest Slot Machine Payout

Biggest Slot Machine Payout Ever

Biggest Slot Machine Payout In History

She'd won big money before: hitting a $680,000 jackpot on a Wheel of Fortune slot machine, also at the Palace Station. It marked the first time Megabucks had surpassed $20 million. Well, it appears that the biggest slot machine wins also cannot go without Vegas casinos, so the fact that the largest slot machine payout in history happened in one doesn't surprise us at all. The biggest slot machine win of $39 million (and change) went to a 25-year-old software engineer from Los Angeles who, one day, decided to try his luck.

It only took 20 years, but the Lion’s Share slot machine at MGM Grand finally gave it up. In one of the most followed slots stories of 2014, a New Hampshire couple strolled into the MGM Grand on August 22 and won not only the $2.4 million jackpot, but also the machine itself. The payout finally allowed MGM Grand to decommission the Lion’s Share, which had been there since the casino opened in 1993.

Getting a seven-figure payday is always nice, but it doesn’t come close to being the biggest jackpot in slots history. The really big money comes courtesy of the massive progressive jackpots on the Megabucks machines. This is a network of 60-payline, five-reel slots with around 700 machines at 133 different locations. The odds of hitting the minimum $10-million jackpot in one play are nearly one in 50 million. With that in mind, here are the five biggest Vegas slots paydays on record.

$21.3 Million

Sometimes, all it takes is one spin. On June 1, 1999, a 49-year old self-employed business consultant from Illinois put $10 in the Megabucks machine at Caesars Palace. Moments later, he was over $21 million richer. He also won a $5,000 secondary jackpot. According to a spokesperson for IGT, the company that makes the Megabucks machine, the winner’s first wish was to pay off his credit card debts.

$22.6 Million

The Megabucks kept on flowing on March 27, 2002. Seventy-four-year-old Johanna Huendl of Covina, California put about $170 in the machine at Bally’s on her way to breakfast, and she ended up bringing home the bacon. Huendl, a Vienna native who came to America in 1956, thought at first that she had won a $2-million prize. She was off by one zero.

$27.5 Million

On November 15, 1998, an unnamed 67-year-old retired flight attendant from Vegas was playing the Megabucks machine at Palace Station, and she accidentally put in $300 when she intended to put in $100. She couldn’t have been upset for long because she won the first Megabucks jackpot to top $20-million in history. It wasn’t her first big slots win; she also took down a $680,000 prize playing the Wheel of Fortune machine at the same venue.

$34.9 Million

The previous record was held by Cynthia Jay-Brennan, a 37-year-old cocktail waitress from Las Vegas who played the Megabucks at the Desert Inn on January 26, 2000. Unfortunately, six weeks later, a drunk driver rear-ended Jay-Brennan’s Camaro, leaving her a quadriplegic and her sister dead. The 58-year-old driver was given 28 to 92 years in prison.

$39.7 Million

On March 21, 2003, a 25-year-old software engineer from Los Angeles (who chose to remain anonymous) put $100 in the Megabucks machine at the Excalibur. He ended up winning the biggest jackpot ever, paid out in 25 annual instalments of $1.5 million each.

You may have seen the news story a few years ago about a woman in Queens, New York who almost won the largest slot machine jackpot in history. Unfortunately, the nearly $43 million win was a machine malfunction that went well above the $6,500 max payout.

A new record may not have been set, but there have been a number of huge casino jackpots throughout history. If you’re gearing up for a trip to Vegas or a casino party, check out these stories of life-changing, mind blowing jackpot wins.

Biggest Slot Machine Jackpots

Think you can’t get lucky on a slot machine twice? In 1998 a retired flight attendant proved that lightning can strike twice at the casinos. The unnamed woman first won $680,000 on a Wheel of Fortune slot machine at Palace Station. She decided to keep trying her luck and months later she won $27 million on a Megabucks machine at the same casino!

Elmer Sherwin is undoubtedly a lucky guy. He also hit not one but two of the largest slot machine jackpots in history! The first win of $4.6 million was on a Megabucks slot machine at the Mirage in 1989. Sherwin decided to visit Cannery Casino in North Las Vegas in 2005 to test his luck again. There he won again on a Megabucks slot machine, but this time he walked away with $21.1 million. Mr. Sherwin was in his 90s when he hit his second jackpot.

A few years early a 25-year-old software engineer won the highest slot machine payout in history. In 2003 the young man won $39.7 million playing a Megabucks machine at Excalibur. He decided to take an annual $1.5 million payout for 25 years instead of one lump sum payment. That means he’ll be raking in the dough for another decade.

In 2000 Cynthia Jay scored the largest jackpot at the time. She won nearly $35 million at a Megabucks slot machine in the Monte Carlo Casino in Vegas. But less than two months later Jay was in a horrible car wreck that killed her sister and left Jay paralyzed from the chest down.

In August 2016 a resident of Hawaii came to the mainland for a Vegas vacation and traveled back home with a lot more money. What was really impressive is that the woman was playing penny slot machines at the Wynn casino when she won $10,777,270.51.

While it isn’t the biggest slot machine jackpot win in history, a Florida man identified as only Fred S. did get very lucky in July 2018. He hit not one but two big jackpots at the Hard Rock Biloxi within a matter of minutes. First, Fred got a massive $1,291,918 win with a $20 bet. While he waited on the casino to verify the win he got a $14,000 win on another slot machine to bring the total winnings over $1.3 million.

Biggest Hands at the Poker Table

Hands down, the World Series of Poker (WSOP) is where you’ll find the biggest Texas Hold’em jackpots. Once the field gets narrowed down to just two players, a single hand can bring in millions. After 10 hours of heads up poker playing, John Cynn was named the 2018 WSOP winner and received $8,800,000. His opponent Tony Miles didn’t do so bad himself. Even though he lost, Miles received $5 million for second place.

But that wasn’t the biggest payout in the history of the tournament or even that year. Four other WSOP winners have won more:

Jamie Gold - $12 million in 2006

Martin Jacobson - $10 million in 2014

Peter Eastgate - $9,152,416 in 2008

Jonathan Duhamel - $8,944,138 in 2010

In 2018 Justin Bonomo won $10 million in the World Series of Poker's $1 million buy-in Big One for One Drop. But by far the later poker jackpot ever was $18,346,673 when Antonio Esfandiari won the 2012 Big One for One Drop.

Highest Payouts at the Craps Table

Patricia Demauro is easily one of the most successful craps players in history. In 2009 she famously won 154 consecutive throws while playing at the Borgata in Atlantic City. The actual amount was never disclosed, but based on the minimum buy-in of $10 the payout would likely range from well over six figures up to $1 million or more.

Not long ago a player won over $5.3 million at the Tropicana Casino and Resort, mainly at the craps tables. The unidentified man had a 6-hour hot streak, but he had to bet big to win the millions. At one point he was placing $100,000 bets.

Huge Win at the Roulette Wheel

Biggest Slot Machine Payout Ever

In 2004 Ashley Revell made a huge gamble. He sold everything he owned, headed to Vegas and put his entire life savings on a spin of the roulette wheel. Crazy – yes. But it paid off. Revell put just over $135,000 on a red bet and won over $270,000. The whole thing was filmed and eventually became a short reality show called Double or Nothing.

Biggest Blackjack Winners

The most infamously successful blackjack players were a group of MIT students who used card counting to win around $100 million. However, this situation was unique because the mathematical geniuses worked as a team so their winning streaks wouldn’t get noticed by dealers.

But one man bested the MIT players. Gambler Don Johnson made millions at blackjack tables over a six-month period in 2011. Instead of card counting, Johnson sought out casinos that had the most favorable rules, like being able to split a hand up to four times.

Another thing Johnson looked for were casinos that offered a guaranteed payout, which refunds part of what’s lost on a hand. All that research paid off to the tune of $15 million in half a year of playing.

A billionaire by the name of Kerry Packer also won big at the blackjack tables. During a trip to Vegas in 1997 he reported won somewhere in the range of $20-40 million. The winnings came from a combination of black jack and baccarat.

Want to be a winner? Casino Knights Inc. can help you throw a casino fundraiser, corporate event or private party where everyone wins. Call us today to learn how we can help treat guests to a night of entertaining casino games!

Biggest Slot Machine Payout In History

Orignal Source: https://casinoknightsinc.com/casino-101/jackpot-highest-casino-jackpots-history/

[ilgiovaneneil-blog]

How to Manage the modern pizzeria

Introduction The notion that you can be lax at all in the way that you run a pizzeria today is totally untrue. Pizzas like the 14" pepperoni pizza are a commodity. When you have pizzerias like little Caesars selling large pepperoni pizzas for $5.00 every day, it creates real turbulence in the pizzeria market. During the Monday through Thursday sales period it creates a real problem in the local pizzeria market. During this period you don't want your pizza maker just sitting around so you are forced to compete by having a cheaper pizza during this period. On the weekends consumers buy more multi ingredient pizzas, and this takes some of the pressure off for that time frame. However you have to maintain good control over both food and other costs to remain profitable over the longer time frame in your local pizzeria. With this mind we will now look at managing food costs. Controlling your food costs When I owned my last pizzeria in the late 1990s I understood the idea of controlling food costs very well. I knew the price each week on cheese, pepperoni, sausage, flour and pizza boxes very well. If any of those prices went up a few pennies I was really searching for a better price. By the way pizza boxes are a very important component of your final price on carryout pizzas. In a single ingredient pizza the only items that cost more than the pizza box are the cheese and the single ingredient you put on the pizza. In New York city they recycle used cardboard into new pizza boxes, because it helps to cut back on the mountain of garbage they generate each day in that city. The cost of cheese is the one item over which you have the least control, it varies with the price of milk many times a year. The price of your pizza has to be figured according to what you believe the high price of cheese will be for the year. Then when the cheese is enough lower in price you can pursue more marketing with coupons.

The next item that has been increasing a lot over recent years is the cost of flour. This causes some pizzeria owners to switch types of flour to save money. As a new pizza business owner you need to understand that if you are serving a regular thin style of pizza you need to be using high gluten flour. If you don't your customers will notice the difference, and go somewhere else. If you are using all purpose flour because it is a couple dollars cheaper per bag, that is a false economy. The next area to consider is your cost of labor. Controlling your labor costs The cost of labor is a very important segment of your overall cost structure. As a percentage you are looking to keep your cost of labor below 20 percent. That means the use of a lot of part time labor during busy periods, and scheduling long workdays for some part timers that doesn't put them over 40 hours in any week. You need to understand that you only need to have workers on the job when they are really needed for producing pizzas. That is the only way to keep your labor cost below 20 percent. The next thing to understand about controlling your labor costs are your hiring and firing practices. You need to learn to hire slowly, and to fire fast. If any employee gives you a reason to fire them you do it quickly, and then mark their file so that you don't rehire them. That way you keep improving the overall quality of your employees, and eventually you will end up with a good crew of employees that work good when you need them. However you will have to go through a lot of employees to get to that point. To get one good long term employee you will probably have to go through 25 to 50 workers that won't be able to make the grade long term. You will hire lots of workers that only want to work when they want to, and this doesn't work in the pizza business. Your major need for labor is on the weekends, and this is the time when most workers want to go out and have fun, not have to work. The workers that don't want to work weekends you need to get rid of fast. The next area of labor cost to deal with is the delivery drivers, and this job calls for hiring what are called independent contractors. They are paid a delivery charge by the customer, and that is what makes up their wages. When they come to work they have to prove that they have a drivers license and that they have their vehicle insured. You then charge your customers within a three mile radius a standard delivery charge of $2.50 to $3.00 which goes to the delivery driver. When you collect from the driver for the delivery it is always minus the delivery charge which goes to the driver. That way you don't have to keep track of how much your delivery drivers make. The next area to consider is your fixed expenses, and the percentage of gross sales that fixed costs should be. Controlling pizzeria fixed costs The fixed costs of a pizzeria include the rent, the utilities, insurance, and bookkeeping. You should strive to keep the fixed costs of your pizzeria between 15 and 20 percent of gross sales. The hardest part of controlling these expenses is controlling what you need to spend on the utilities especially on the electric. That is why you need to install a walk in cooler to supply most of the refrigeration, it helps keep the overall refrigeration cost down. The rental cost is set in place when you sign the lease and take over the store. That is why it is so important to keep your rental cost at about $1.25 a sq ft, and the space at about a thousand square feet. That way your rental cost is about $1,250.00 a month, and you need to do about twenty thousand a month to support that rental cost. When you combine the rental cost, utility cost, and the other fixed costs you have a total of about $3,000 a month this means that you need sales of twenty thousand a month to make sure the fixed costs come out at 15 percent. Managing the marketing of your pizzeria Managing the marketing function is the most important job the modern pizzeria manager has to deal with You can have the best pizza available, and without proper marketing you will struggle over the years to maintain adequate sales growth with the proper amount of gross profit. How you market a modern pizzeria has changed a lot over the last 20 years. When I ran my pizzeria in 1995 you passed out fliers on a daily basis, and worked with local schools that were having pizza parties, and this was the major share of how you marketed your pizza place. Now you have to have POS systems and be involved with online ordering, email marketing, SMS text messaging, have a good website, and be involved with social media in order to properly market your pizzeria. If you are not involved with all these different marketing platforms you won't get the best sales results for your pizzeria. Having a good POS system that is closely associated with an online ordering site that supplies smartphone apps for your customers is absolutely essential from your opening date. This however is just the start, because you also need the ability to do email marketing with customers. Having the ability to send text messages that offer pizza specials to customers is also essential. Dealing with customers through social media sites to not only offer pizza specials, but to resolve complaints that customers have is also very important. These are all components of modern pizza marketing, and they are all needed to run a successful pizzeria. Summary There are four areas of management in a pizzeria that are very important to your success. We have looked at each one in this article and explained how you need to be proficient in each area. Becoming good in each one of these four areas is absolutely necessary if you want to run your own pizzeria. You cannot depend on anyone else to supply the needed knowledge, it is something you need to understand yourself. With the proper knowledge you have a much better chance of running a successful local pizzeria.

[how-queerious]

you mean the agreement that no operators were informed of before it was rolled out and they were told to sign?

the one that will fuck any and all for-profit centres out of funding, grant money, subsidy, wage enhancements?

that will make anything new and fun for the kids a bureaucratic nightmare to get, as all centres will either have to become government/non-profits or drown?

that will ignore the underlying huge disparity between the physical/emotional labour of childcare workers and their pay? because these centres will have a choice in the end: afford the best quality product to care for the children, or the best quality educators. because they get paid pennies. my mother, in 2014, was given a full time position (that meant 40-50 hours a week) in a preschool room where she (as the job requires) was on her feet all day, working directly with the children, interacting with parents, sweeping, mopping, cleaning tables, and program planning. she was paid minimum wage for this job. minimum wage for all of that labour (a hell of a lot more than you think), and with a four-year bachelor of applied arts degree in child and youth studies and nearly 20 years working in the field. two decades.

nova scotia treats its ECEs and childcare providers like shit, and does not pay them nearly enough for the work they do. what they are doing to "create new spaces" is taking over and fucking over private centres, inevitably providing a substandard level of care due to the fact that all of the people making the spending decisions don't know shit about the kids or about what the age group actually needs to meet all of the childrens needs in a suitable manner. these spaces are not being "created", they are being ripped out from under private centres. they're old ones being stolen, veneered, and reaold at a higher price for a shittier piece.

now truth be told i don't know the business well enough to be an authority on this. however, i can and will ask my mother (who worked in ns daycares and ran her own in home centre for nearly 20 years before moving to bc, where she now owns her own centre in our community) and my aunt (who currently owns and runs a centre in ns, based out of her home with her as the educator).

Daycare operators get more time to sign onto federal-provincial agreement

The Nova Scotia government is offering daycare centres money to offset rising costs and giving private operators at least a year to decide whether they want to be part of the major expansion planned as a result of the $600-million, federal-provincial deal reached last summer.

from CBC | Nova Scotia News https://ift.tt/s0JLW1X

[brajeshupadhyay]

Over 2 lakh farmers in Maharashtra sit on piles of unsold cotton due to COVID-19 lockdown; stock worth Rs 5,500 crore yet to be procured

The last five days have been chaotic for farmers in the small town of Pathri in Maharashtra's Parbhani district. Four hours, from 7 am to 11 am, see a deluge of farmers frantically lining up to sell their harvested cotton to the local traders.

Gajanan Ghumbare, a farmer with 10 acres of land where he grows cotton, says, "The procurement of cotton began last week for the first time since lockdown. 60 quintals of stock is lying in my farmland since the harvest in January. Farmers are panicking at the thought of being unable to sell their crop."

Among the several constituencies of people struggling due to the lockdown enforced in India since 25 March to contain the spread of COVID-19, cotton farmers in Maharashtra are not left behind. Much of the harvest, which begins at the end of November and goes on for two months after that, remains unsold even by the end of April.

Govind Wairale, former general manager of The Maharashtra State Cotton Growers' Marketing Federation Limited, a cooperative body involved in procurement of cotton, said about 25 percent of cotton in Maharashtra is just lying in farmlands, waiting to be sold, due to the lockdown.

“The expected production of cotton in Maharashtra was supposed to be 400 lakh quintals,” he said, “but about 100 lakh quintals are yet to be sold." If one goes by a liberal estimate of 50 quintals per farmer, it means 2 lakh farmers and their families are still waiting for their returns. The minimum support price (MSP) of cotton is Rs 5,500. In other words, stock worth Rs 5,500 crore is yet to be procured from farmers.

The farmers stuck in this quagmire are mostly from Vidarbha, a huge cotton belt, and from districts like Parbhani, Aurangabad and Jalna in Marathwada. Being a labour intensive cash crop with an investment of Rs 25,000 per acre, the delay in procurement makes cotton farmers even more vulnerable.

Under normal circumstances, the procurement concludes by the end of April. The past few years indicate there is a rise in the price of cotton in the first week of April due to international fluctuations. Farmers keep a bit of their harvest handy to benefit from that boom. It leaves enough time for them to invest in preparations of their land, which begin in May.

However, coronavirus has rendered all of these calculations useless. "The cropping season begins mid-June," said Ghumbare, "but we need money to buy seeds, fertilisers and pesticides. We need to plough the land ahead of the sowing. If we do not sell our cotton as soon as possible, the entire upcoming season would go down the drain."

Being a labour intensive cash crop with an investment of Rs 25,000 per acre, the delay in procurement makes cotton farmers even more vulnerable. Reuters

The Cotton Corporation of India (CCI) is a government body, which works under the Union Textile Ministry and, is responsible for the procurement of cotton across India. After the MSP is decided, it acts as an implementing agency. The cotton federation of Maharashtra is a sort of its sub-agent. "The CCI’s working capacity is down to 20 percent of what it used to be due to the lockdown. At the rate with which they are going they will take another three months to conclude procuring," said Wairale, who is based in Nagpur.

But farmers cannot wait that long. After the procurement opened up in Parbhani, Ghumbare said that 35,000 farmers have registered to sell their harvest. “More than half of those farmers will sell it to a trader because of the waiting period," he said.

The traders have exploited the situation of the farmers during the lockdown. Ghumbare said they have been procuring cotton from farmers in Parbhani at only Rs 3,100 per quintal, even when the MSP stands at Rs 5,500. "In fact, we paid Rs 1,400 per quintal just to the labourers at the time of harvesting the crop. It is a big loss to the farmers, but many have resorted to panic selling at a throwaway price," he said, "the traders, however, are making windfall gain."

Wairale said the traders are not confident of selling it further to the factories. “The factories require 40-50 workers," he said, "and for the workers to practice social distancing and also to work, is a difficult task. Therefore, even the traders are not keen, and are playing it safe."

The moderate procurement because of coronavirus is likely to have a larger trickle-down impact across the hinterlands of Maharashtra. If the harvest goes well, they use the money from the season not just to buy inputs for the next farming season, but also to buy clothes, invest in two-wheelers and maybe invest in a television set.  The money comes back in the market. The lack of procurement means a slowdown in the rural economy.

Last year, the same cotton was sold at Rs 6,250 per quintal, said Ganesh Nanote, a farmer in Vidarbha’s Akola district. "The government should urgently do something to streamline the procurement process during lockdown," Nanote said,"otherwise, we will have to borrow money for the upcoming season. I already have a crop loan of Rs 2.5 lakh. I am hoping to repay that by selling the 100 quintals of cotton I have in my farmland."

Agriculture Minister of Maharashtra Dada Bhuse said that he spoke to the union ministry ten days ago and made it clear that all the cotton should be procured irrespective of its grade. "We need more CCI procurement centres, and I have already made that demand," he told Firstpost.

The pressure on government agencies to procure cotton had not been as great in the last season as the difference between the MSP and traders’ price was not much. The farmers, therefore, sold their harvest to the trader quite happily. This season, though, with the lockdown, the traders are procuring at anywhere between Rs 3,000-4,000 per quintal, which is a huge drop from the MSP of Rs 5,500. Farmers, therefore, are keener to sell to the government agencies as much as possible.

However, even among the farmers who have sold their harvest to CCI, some of them have not received their payments. Totabai Rathod, 65-year-old farmer from Yavatmal, sold 32 quintals of cotton on 10 March. She was supposed to get Rs 1.75 lakh. But she has not received a penny even after over a month and a half.

Bhuse said he was unaware of such cases, but assured that he will inquire into pending payments.

Nagpur-based farm activist Vijay Javandiya said the recession in the international market is also one of the reasons behind the declining cotton prices. “The situation was not great before coronavirus either. But it has worsened further with coronavirus,” he said, "because of the dwindling price of cotton (lint) in the international market, the traders here are not buying it for more than Rs 4,000 per quintal."

Javandiya said the price of cotton had shot up last year because of drought, which meant inadequate fodder. “Cottonseed is used as fodder for livestock. The demand soared, and the seed was sold for Rs. 3500 a quintal. That increased the price of cotton as well. This year, cottonseed costs only 1700 per quintal. We are in the middle of a serious crisis," he said, "and the state must procure quickly from the farmers at MSP. The government can bear a bit of loss. Farmers cannot."

via Blogger https://ift.tt/3cVXzIE

[the-record-columns]

July 24, 2019: Columns

‘Finders Keepers?’

By KEN WELBORN

Record Publisher

In the news recently there was a survey reported on in which wallets were left where people could find them — some with money, some with no money, but all with a name and a way to contact the person who "lost" the wallet. 

The statistics were interesting, noting that more folks tried to find the owner of the wallets with money in them as opposed those who were broke.

Go figure.

Then, in the past week or so an armored car on an interstate in the Atlanta area had a side door swing open and $175,000 fell out, making a blizzard of currency.  At least 50 cars stooped to help themselves, many posting their finds on social media.

Big mistake there.

The cops are using those posts to track down the money — it is a misdemeanor or a felony, depending on how much you find, if you know who it belongs to. 

All this brings me to "Moose" Robinson. 

I know no other name than Moose, a ragged sort of character who lived in Wilkes for many years.  One fateful day in the early 60’s, I was drinking a Cherry Coke at the counter of the Brame Drug Store and Moose was there as well.  For whatever reason, as we talked he said he had some advice for me — to always look down at my feet as I walked, because there was no telling what I might find, and he smiled. "Listen to old Moose," he said, "...you will be glad you did."

He was right.

It may seem silly, but lo nearly 60 years later, I still do what Moose said, and, when I notice a piece of treasure — even a penny — I always look to the sky and say, "Thank you Moose."

Sometimes I even say it out loud.

Which brings me to a story. 

In the 1970’s, I worked in advertising for Paul Cashion at WWWC Radio, when it was a little Top 40 station that could be heard almost to Cricket. In those days there was a big Easter Sunrise Service at Mount Lawn Cemetery and we carried it live on the radio. The narrator spoke in hushed tones as he read the script of everything that was going on in front of a huge crowd each year.

Those of is who worked on the event would meet at the then Holiday Inn on 268 in Wilkesboro where they who had 24-hour room service, and would let us in at about 2 a.m. and fix us a big breakfast. There were five of us to meet there and I was the last one in. They were all standing on a rug which said Holiday Inn on it as I came in.

By this time in the mid 1970’s, I had been heeding Moose Robinson’s advice faithfully for over 15 years, and, as I glanced down walking in, I saw what I thought was money folded up.  I leaned down and palmed the money and asked if anyone had lost any money.  Lo and behold, they had all lost money — at that very moment — one had lost a 5, one a 10, one a 20, and the big loser lost a 100 dollar bill.

Yeah, right.

I turned my back to them and realized that I was holding four neatly folded 100 dollar bills so new they stuck together.  I told my cohorts that they were out of luck and walked over to the front desk where the man on duty told me just to give it to him and he would put it in their vault until someone asked for it.  I didn't tell him how much I had found either, and gave him my phone number if someone reported losing some cash.

But what to do now. On Monday, I locked the cash in a file cabinet at the radio station and waited for the Holiday Inn to call.  I figured no one could lose that much cash and not be retracing their steps. Thirty days went by with me looking at the money about every day, but no call.

Unsure of what to do, when I ran in to the Wilkesboro Police Chief Delbert Wilson in the post office one morning, I buttonholed him and told him my story, and asked him what I should do.  He didn't bat an eye and said that after 30 days if no one had come forward, I should just take my kids to the beach and enjoy it.

I took his advice, and, as I paid the room rent at the old Blockade Runner Motel near the Cherry Grove Pier in North Myrtle Beach, I took a moment to look up to the sky and once again say a hearty, "Thank you, Moose!"

Note:  Finding $400 in 1975 is like finding nearly $2,000 today.

No kidding.

To the moon and back, from North Carolina

By HEATHER DEAN

Record Reporter

Apollo 11’s 50th anniversary was last week any many a fascinating science fact have been shared.

But did you know that a small town about 35 minutes from where I’m sitting at my desk was integral in the mission? The special nylon material of the U.S. flags that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planted on the Moon in1969, was woven at Burlington Mills in Rhodhiss, N.C.

Rhodhiss gets its interesting moniker from John M. Rhodes and George B. Hiss who partnered and built a cotton mill in Caldwell County in 1902 called Rhodhiss Manufacturing Company.

Then they constructed the village of Rhodhiss, which included a horseshoe-shaped dam, electric generator, and mill, general store, and worker houses with Rhodhiss incorporating as a town in 1903.

Workers were offered comfortable housing, some health care, schooling and credit at the company store. A two-room school house was built soon after.  Within the next decade, the Town of Rhodhiss would expand into Burke County, courtesy of a new steel bridge that spans the Catawba River, cementing North  Carolina’s place in the boom that made our state the textile capital of the world. The small town has a total area of 1.3 square miles, including the river, has only one traffic light, a cautionary flashing yellow light, not a stop light. As of the last census there is only one police officer for the 366 people, (112 families) that reside in the town. It was the perfect place to make a flag representing small town American ingenuity, I would say.

Of course there were some naysayers and critics as these things often go.

Being an employee at a mill that made flag fabric, one tends to focus on the job at hand, not about the next plant the material would end up in. For goodness sakes, they were a supplier to hundreds of companies and agencies, including NASA. It wasn’t until a few weeks after the moon landing that a company memo was put up in the weaving room about the part they played in history. Even then, there were some Burlington Mills employees who thought the moon landing was staged, but that didn’t stop them from partaking of the celebratory steak dinner with all the trimmings for every employee.  

According to Rhodhiss Town Historian Sherrie Sigmon, the flag material wasn’t the only item prepared for NASA in the plant. In a magazine article, she wrote that Burlington Mills contracted with NASA and the military for bulletproof vests during Vietnam, and material for the nose cones and heat shields on the U.S. Navy’s Polaris and Trident missiles as well as NASA’s Mercury, Gemini and Apollo spacecrafts.

Burlington Mills closed in the early 80’s.  

In 1995, a NASA administrator presented the town with a plaque and a small North Carolina flag that had been flown to the moon and back on Apollo 16, a thank-you for the mill’s many contributions to the space program.

Rhodhiss’ first town seal has an image of an Apollo astronaut standing next to an American flag. Town leaders ordered green signs to place at the town limits that include this picture, along with the words: “U.S. Moon Flags Woven Here.”  

Though there is still some historical question about the nylon material coming from this particular plant, the good people of Rhodhiss are not dismayed and even added a little extra to their towns celebration last week, with fireworks beginning approximately the same time that Aldrin posted the flag. These citizens are pretty sure about where the facts of history lie — after all, a National Space Agency simply doesn’t end up in a one- square mile town by accident…

  True Christians support Israel

By EARL COX

Special to The Record

The influence of Evangelical Christians - those who regard the Bible as the ultimate guide for life and stalwartly regard their Messiah as the way, truth and life - is declining. Why it is falling is complex, but boils down to accommodating the current culture resulting in confusion concerning matters of faith. Coupled with the rising population of the post-modern generation in an increasingly hedonistic culture, immoral secular education, embracing the faulty concept that there are no absolute rights or wrongs, a lack of respect for authority, a high degree of self-absorption, and the list goes on, leads to the conclusion that society's downward slide toward apostate thinking is practically inexorable.

An internet search today for articles that have “Evangelical” in the search engine is shocking due to the malice the public media has for Evangelicals. Even more jaw-dropping are insinuations of contempt toward Evangelicals from those proclaiming themselves to be Christians.   

Such adversity is disheartening because of what it means for both Christianity-at-large, and Evangelical Christianity in particular, and their respective stance regarding Israel and the Jews. Evangelicals are considered pro-Israel whereas many others who claim to be Christians embrace anti-Israel policies and attitudes including anti-Semitism and BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions). 

The Evangelical church has largely repented of the sins and atrocities of Christian history as it relates to hatred of the Jews having come to realize that Christians have not replaced the Jews. The modern witness and revelation that God stills loves His Chosen people, the Jews, and the Holy Land He speaks so much about in the Bible, is undeniable to those who are Evangelical. In contrast, many mainstream denominations hold anti-Semitic views and Millennial churches often have no opinion about why Israel and the Jews matter nor do they understand their importance to God as plainly expressed in His Word. This all stems from the liberal education being taught at many theological seminaries.

The post-modern church totters on its understanding of Jewish-Christian relations including the Jewish connection to land of Israel, and it is certainly not Evangelical in practice. Some mega church pastors are minimizing Hebrew scripture from the pulpit in an attempt to make a case for a more modern, accepting Christianity within their church walls. Such tactics may bring in people and improve attendance, but they are left bereft of the fuller teaching of ethics and morals for life, and judgement awaits those who oppose instructions as taught by our Creator who is the God of Israel.

It’s no wonder that churches, and even whole denominations, support boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaigns against the apple of God’s eye (Israel) and harbor anti-Semitic attitudes and practices, though many would deny it.

Such teaching about Israel and the Jews is compounded by a failure to understand the history of both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for example. This is where post-modern thought in the 21st century manifests a major defect, i.e., forgetting that history begins before a person is born. Such forgetfulness and omission results in poor judgement.

Judging by media double-standards and hypocrisy, this will not bode well in the future for Israel and Jews. The non-Evangelical will be less sympathetic to Israel and her people. Regardless of Israel being the sole democracy with freedoms unheard of in the other countries in the Middle East, the self-interests of modernity versus Israel is ambiguous at present.

Today, Evangelical Christians are a tour d'force, influential in the defense of Israel and the Jewish people. They understand God’s love for the Jewish people and the land of Israel. They understand modern history as well as they do ancient history. These are the people who support Israel by visiting the Holy Land by the millions each year. They prayerfully support the Israeli government just as they support their own government. Evangelicals have contributed millions of dollars to help support the return of Jews from all over the world to their ancient homeland. New arrivals are helped in a variety of practical ways by Evangelicals as they integrate into Israeli culture and society.

Because of the sincere and enthusiastic support from Evangelicals toward Israel and her people, an unbreakable bond has been formed.  We must be sure that no one breaks it. 

The Watermelon People

By CARL WHITE

Life in the Carolinas

You never know for sure what’s going to happen when it comes to an outdoor summer festival in the Carolinas.

It might be clear, it might rain, it might be hot, or it might be hotter, you may have long lines, you might have shorter lines. However, if it’s been going for many years and at approximately the same time every year you have a good idea about what’s going to happen.  

Not so long ago I traveled to Pageland, S.C., about producing a segment on the long running Pageland Watermelon Festival.

I met with Tim Griffin, the festival director and Sherri Honeycutt, a committee chair. They are, as are all the other committee chairs and members, volunteers.

The festival has been going for 68 years. For the most part it is a year-long planning process with only a short break just after the festival ends each year. I’m sure everyone needs a break.

My original thoughts were to produce a standard six-minute segment on the festival which would include about a half-day visit. The show had visited the festival for a segment about eight years ago so I had a reasonable idea of what would be happening.

As our conversation progressed, I begin to hear a much bigger story developing. It was more than a festival; it was about a community working together for the benefit of their hometown. A celebration of heritage, agriculture, beauty queens, entertainment and yes, the humble watermelon.

The decision was made to work toward the develop of a special that will highlight the people of Pageland and others who have chosen to be part of this massive project, now and over the past 68 years.

The decision was also made for Life In The Carolinas to go Live for the Parade. This task would require a great deal of support including fiber installation to handle our data streaming requirements. Sandhill Telephone was able to step in and make this happen — once again demonstrating community support.

The 2019 festival would have a few new things and a few older traditions added back to the festival lineup. The watermelon relay race was brought back and would proceed the highly anticipated Watermelon Festival Parade.

A new “dance-off” was added at noon on Saturday, shortly after the parade. Two music stages would feature almost nonstop entertainment on both Friday and Saturday until the festival ended.

The week before the big festival, the plans called for the selection of the official Watermelon Festival Beauty Queens, an airplane fly-in, a golf tournament, and a Sunday Gospel singing. All being administered by volunteers and secured by approximately 50 members of the Pageland Police Department and Chesterfield County Sherriff’s Department.

Tim is the president of the Pageland Chamber of Commerce; he lives in Pageland and has long been a tireless promoter of the good in Pageland. It was Tim who contacted our TV show several years ago about visiting Pageland.

Sherri is the Clerk of Count in Pageland; she is not a resident, but she loves where she works. She said it’s because of the people.

Pageland is a special place and like the Watermelon there is debate as to what it is. Is it a fruit or a vegetable? It really depends on who you ask.

Is Pageland a good place to visit because of the Watermelon Festival, or is the Watermelon Festival a great event to visit because of the people of Pageland?

From my observations it’s the people. So, visit the festival for sure, but then plan your travels to visit Pageland at other times. Slow down and visit with the merchants and maybe catch a movie at the historic Ball Theatre.

Take a little time and get to know the colorful people in this little Southern town with a few hidden treasures worth looking for.

It’s worth the effort, because I think they have figured out a few things along the way, but they will be the first to let you know they are still working on it.

I’ll let you know when we finish the special, I know there will be lots more to share.

By the way, the 2019 Pageland Watermelon Festival was a big success and we had a great time.

See you at the Watermelon Stand.

Carl White is the Executive Producer and Host of the award-winning syndicated TV show Carl White’s Life In The Carolinas. The weekly show is now in its 10th year of syndication and can be seen in the Charlotte market on WJZY Fox 46 Saturday’s at noon and My 12. The show also streams on Amazon Prime. For more information visit www.lifeinthecarolinas.com. You can email Carl at Carl@lifeinthecarolinas.com

[kennethherrerablog]

6 People Who’ve Earned a Total $3,750 Sharing Opinions Tell Us Their Secrets

Online survey sites sometimes get a bad rap. And sure, some of them are scammy. Some are shady. Some are iffy.

What about the sites that are legit, though? How can you maximize your earnings on those? How can you make the most possible money while chilling on your couch, sipping your favorite beverage and clicking away at surveys on your laptop?

To get you some insider knowledge, we spoke with six Penny Hoarder readers who consistently earn real money on three survey sites — Swagbucks, InboxDollars and MyPoints.

These people are players. They know these sites inside and out. They’ve collectively invested hundreds of hours in this, so they’ve learned the innermost secrets.

Click, click, click. Here’s what they had to say:

How 2 Women Earned a Collective $1,800 on Swagbucks

Jessica Maloy and Carolinda Hendrickson call themselves Swaggernauts.

Maloy, a secretary, and Hendrickson, a day care provider, live in different parts of Pennsylvania. They know their way around the survey site Swagbucks.

Each of them sign in every day, sometimes more than once. Persistence and strategy are how they make it pay off.

Maloy looked for ways to earn extra money when her son turned 16 and she realized how much it was going to cost to send him to college. In her first seven months on the Swagbucks, she earned $600 in gift cards.

She starts about 40 surveys a day but doesn’t end up qualifying for most. Still, she just sticks with it and usually completes one or two.

She picks up tips on a Facebook group called the Swagbucks Swaggernauts. In an area on Swagbucks called “Discover,” she signs up for various offers and free trials in exchange for rewards.

“I hop on and off all day,” she said. “It really doesn’t take much to earn money that you normally wouldn’t have.”

Hendrickson scans Facebook groups for Swagbucks tips as well. She hits Swagbucks early in the morning before her job takes over her day.

She operates a day care center for special needs children in her home, where she cares for three little ones. “I sign in at 6 a.m., and I’m done by the time the kids get here,” she says.

She’s learned to do only the surveys she likes — nothing about cars or banking. Her goal is to make $25 a week. In a year, she’s earned $1,200, which she exchanges for gift cards for her grown children.

How 2 Women Earned a Collective $750 on InboxDollars

Sarah Houston and Heidi Irvine have become experts on the survey site InboxDollars.

Houston, a nanny and business student in Virginia, has gotten into the habit of logging on to take surveys in the morning, then doing it again while she’s watching TV at night.

“It sounds like a lot of work,” she said, “but once you’re in a routine, it’s a mindless, easy way to earn extra money.”

She’s earned $600 in three years by constantly taking surveys that run the gamut from financial services to radio music to food to restaurants to shopping. She also referred her mom, so she gets a bonus equal to 10% of her mother’s rewards.

Based on qualifying surveys on InboxDollars, she ended up doing some product testing and focus groups that paid $50 or $100 — “Double win!” she says, because she’d also been paid just to qualify.

Irvine lives in Detroit, delivers cars around the country, and has been using InboxDollars for five years. She got into the habit of reading InboxDollars emails on her Mac for 2 cents a pop. The emails often lead her to surveys. She’s earned nearly $150 so far.

“My favorite, and fastest, go-to to earn money is simply opening the emails they send me,” she said. “Each email only pays 2 cents, but I get at least two to four emails a day that take less than a minute to open and click on the link they send me. I check my email daily, so it’s convenient.”

How 2 Women Earned a Collective $1,200 on MyPoints

Joe Dozier and Kimberly Ritze know the survey site MyPoints backwards and forwards.

Ritze, who has earned about $300 on the site over several years, notes that its home page lists ways to earn points quickly, and its Facebook page often has codes she can use to gain extra points. She can exchange points for gift cards to popular retailers — 480 points equates to a $3 Amazon gift card, for example.

Here’s how Ritze got started: “When we [she and her husband] were new homeowners with a tight budget and Christmas was on the way, I had my eye on a kids’ kitchen playset on JCPenney.com,” she said. “As I racked up points taking surveys on Mypoints, I earned enough to purchase the playset.”

Dozier, a 70-year-old North Carolina author who uses Joe as her first name, has been a MyPoints member since 1998. She uses her points on gift cards for Christmas or on gas cards.

“I cashed in for gas cards for one whole year and never pulled a cent out of my pocket when filling my tank,” she said.

She has earned 145,628 points, which equates to more than $900.

“Since most of my points are earned reading email, I start my day by checking my email and voting in the daily poll,” she said. “I always tell newcomers not to get discouraged — five points for reading an email isn’t much, but it only takes seconds. There are usually three or more emails per day.

“You won’t get rich, but an extra $100, $200 or $300 per year is not something I would throw away.”

Mike Brassfield (mike@thepennyhoarder.com) is a senior writer at The Penny Hoarder. He’s a natural for survey sites because he has so many opinions.

This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, which helps millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. The Inc. 5000 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the fastest-growing private media company in the U.S. in 2017.

6 People Who’ve Earned a Total $3,750 Sharing Opinions Tell Us Their Secrets published first on https://justinbetreviews.tumblr.com/

[tradingprotools-blog]

[GET] Ryan Deiss and Perry Belcher – Traffic and Conversion Summit

http://www.tradingprotoolsnews.com/2018/03/02/get-ryan-deiss-and-perry-belcher-traffic-and-conversion-summit/

Ryan Deiss and Perry Belcher – Traffic and Conversion Summit 2 (2010) | 10.1 GB Just One Short Weekend You’ll Discover How You Can Now MASTER Online Traffic and Conversion – Using Our Hottest New Strategies, Tatics and Tricks – So Powerful and Cutting Edge We Will ONLY Share Them Face-to-Face Finally,You’ll Get Unprecedented FACE-TO-FACE Access to Me, Ryan Deiss and My Trusted Team for 3 Full Days – Plus You’ll Get a “License to Legally* Steal” Our Little-Known and Most Jealously Guarded Traffic and Conversion Secrets in – This Private “Closed-Door” 100% Content” Brain Dump 100% Plug and Play Money Pumping, Models, Tactics and Tricks The vast majority of what you’ll learn during the 3-day event are what I call “Plug and Plays”. Quick fixes and tweaks that take minutes each to implement in your business, but when used in concert have a compound effect. You can easily double your business or multiply it 3X, 5X, 10X even 20X by the end of the weekend. And if you haven’t started yet that’s even better! Why? Because I can’t even begin to tell you how much money I’ve LOST by not using my S.M.A.R.T. Tactics. MILLIONS! You have an advantage. You’ll start right the 1st time and insure that even your earliest projects will be positioned for success. PLUS, you won’t have any bad habits to break or crap to un-learn. What Will One Weekend in Austin Do For You? Answer: A Lot! DAY ONE: TRAFFIC Session One: Boomerang Traffic “Re-Targeting is changing EVERYTHING about online advertising once you understand it you could easily TRIPLE your sales – You’ll learn exactly how it works and our best strategies like…” “Buyer Tipping” How to bring back buyers to your site that almost ordered and just needed a tiny push. “Big Deal Status” How to appear the “obvious expert” in your niche and rub out your competitors at the same time with FREE re-targeting. “No Opt-In Lists” How to create a brand new list without EVER a single new opt-in. “The Webinar Wheel” Re-targeting in this manner can generate big ticket sales of $1000 each or more 100% on autopilot. “The Big 5” The 5 Biggest bribes to bring back your buyers and how to impliment all 5 in about 30 minutes. Session Two: Dirt Cheap Traffic “MAJOR Changes in Google and the merger of Yahoo and Bing have opened up new opportunities for dirt cheap paid traffic as low as 2-3 cents a click – here’s how we are taking advantage of it…” “Make Google Your Affiliate” ONLY pay for ads when you make a sale using these little known “commission only ads” “Green ROI Keywords” How to divine overlooked “MONEY” keywords that make 5 to 1 ROI sales common place. “Red Pinning” Find EXACTLY where your customers live and how to target them on a LOCAL level for 10% of the cost of National Ads. “Tweet 2 Bing” How to leverage the new Twitter/Bing partnership using your own Twitter account even if you have 3 followers. “Magnetic Ads” How to create ads that ONLY draw customers to to click and keep the tire kickers from costing you a bundle. Session Three: Fusion Marketing 2.0 “Mail2Web is maybe the most overlooked area of traffic generation today. One of my associates built just built a list of 50,000+ buyers in a VERY competitive market using just postcards – I’ll share…” “Old Yeller” The 2 cent UGLY postcard formula that simply CAN’T be beat for lead generation from direct mail – you get the template. “Classified Ad Traffic” Turn dirt-cheap national classified ads that run for pennies a paper per week into “solid gold” green buyer leads for almost any niche. “My, Drop Me a Line” Trick that increase offline opt-ins by 1000% instantly. (I absolutely guarantee you’ve never heard about this sneaky little trick until now.) “Mail to VM” How to use a simple voice mail system as your 24 hr a day pitch man and how the “Press One” feature closes 20% of the calls. “Rip-Out the page” On simple little trick that triples the response rate for every single person that uses it. This one is shocking – Again, you get the template. Session Four: Mass Media Blueprint “One of the biggest mistakes marketers make is NOT maximizing winning campaigns. Did you knowthere is as much a 500X more traffic available from buying media than there is in PPC, It’s TRUE But you have to know how to play the game. In this module you’ll…” “The Big Boy Method” How to get the media rates of $1,000,000 company by uttering 3 little words to any sales rep. Guess what they are? “CPV Domination” How to swipe customers from right under your competitor’s nose. Imagine walking into a store, lining up all the customers and walking them across the street to your place… with their credit cards in their hands… We’ll lead the way. “Starve the Ponies and Feed the Stallions” 18,000 sales a month! Imagine. That’s what happens when you hit a winner in the CPA networks. It’s kind of like an Internet marketer winning “American Idol” only it ain’t that hard. This is where the whales swim. “Page Leaping” Most people glaze over content advertising because they don’t understand it or have screwed it up in the past. Here is a FACT: Content accounts for a full 2/3 of our traffic on Google Bing and Yahoo. Best of all, it’s wicked-cheap and it converts better than search. “Billy Club Ad-Buying” Got a winning offer? Don’t even screw with PPC. There is 20X – 50X more “Placement” traffic available online than PPC. Here’s how you can CRUSH IT in even hyper-competitive niches like FOREX (not for the faint of heart). Session Five: SEO Brain Suck! “This will be a heavily moderated multi-speaker PANEL talking about what’s working TODAY in SEO, both black hat and white hat. Yes, I said black hat, I didn’t say you have to use it, but it’s good to know what’s going on. You will leave with some information ONLY inner circle SEO’ers have, including…” “Link Buying the RIGHT way” Yes, you can BUY your way to the top of the search engines if you are in a big hurry. It’s real easy to make unforgivable mistakes here. Pay attention! “Automation Nation” Here which SEO Automation tools will get you on top and which ones will get you sand-boxed from real SEO experts that use these tools every single day. “Press Release Secrets” How would you like 1000 “Instant Links” from authority news sites for just a few bucks? This is a GREAT way to get some instant authority to your site. “The PDF Project” The best kept secret in Article SEO. This little trick can get you on top of Google for almost any niche term, sometimes in as little as 24 hours. PDF Files have a a HUGE shelf life that can get you clicks and opt-ins for years. “Back Link Boosting” Getting links is simply not enough, the real SEO pros know that by boosting the quality of the links coming in to you, your positions will increase 10 FOLD! DAY TWO: CONVERSIONS Session Six: Proven Conversion Boosters “Ok, I’m a testing maniac and if you have ever seen my “43 Split-Tests” know that my positive results combined can boost conversions over 1000%. YES 10 TIMES. I’ll be revealing live, tons of new conversion boosters that we have proven in large volume split testing.” “Talking Heads” This one is tricky. It can increase sales 50% or more or totally destroy them. The message is key and you will never guess the one that wins in a million years. Invisible Buy Button Trick” This one really shocked us with a HUGE bump and it only takes 30 seconds to set-up. I’m gonna give you the code. “Found Money” 34% of all online orders decline on the first attempt. Do this one simple thing and watch your declined orders drop by half overnight. “Domainer NO Brainer” Reduce your advertising cost by 40% -90% while watching your sales boost by as much as 50% using this new domain strategy. “Piggy Backing Competitors” This ‘brand” marketing strategy will increase your sales in highly competitive markets, drop you ad costs buy up to half and improve your reputation in the market. “Sticky Mails” Discover two simple messages that you can send out to your customers after they’ve already bought that were reduced return rate by 17% and increase your testimonials by as much as 300% Session Seven: Undercover Listbuilding 2.0 “BIG LIST = Power. That’s a fact and over the last year we have uncovered several new “covert” methods of list building that you may have seen us using but didn’t even notice. I have to admit some of these are pretty sneaky but all 100% above board. In this segment you’ll discover…” “Ninja Conversion Models” Understanding our two ninja conversion models will help you a ton. Either one of these produces an average of 10X the result of the ordinary list building pages. “Red Hot Lead Magnets” Want to convert 5X as many opt-ins? A hot lead magnet is the answer. This one change will easily double most businesses overnight. “Selling The Opt-In” 5 Simple bullets that sell your prospects on becoming customers, plus our proven and tested TEMPLATE to go along with it. “Kiss Pages” This little known tactic from the dating market crushes over free, ebooks, videos or mini-courses and only takes 5 minutes to create. “Sniping Leads From Google” You can GAME Google for leads, even though people say Google hates salesletters and squeeze pages we have proven both are WRONG! “Blogging for Opt-ins” I get tons of opt-ins from my blogs and you can’t hardly find the form. Less is more when it comes to blogs…but it has to be done just right. “NLP Arrows” We have proven in several of our niche markets that subtle arrows that you may not even see with the human eye effect opt-in rats by up to 50%. We’ll show you how to use them and give you our graphics TEMPLATES to rip-off for your own. “Free Standing Report Sites” Creating landing pages designed 100% to give away a lead magnet got me 22,373 new leads on my last launch with just two mails. [DESIGN TEMPLATE INCLUDED] “Opt-In Action Triggers” Opt in borders, placement, form fields and action button can sway an offer by 50% easy. Session Eight: Amazon Marketing “I predict that leveraging “The River” will be the #1 online marketing strategy for the next 18-24 months. Almost NOBODY really knows how to harness the power of this giant, but we do. Information products, hard products, even your own book… Amazon can change EVERYTHING for you in the instant that you “Get It”” “Free Google Ads from AMAZON” Yes, Amazon will buy ads for your products on Amazon, but you have to know the one hidden button that makes this happen. Of course we’ll share this with you. “High Ticket Amazon” Most people use AMAZON to sell books, music and low cost products, but did you know that you can sell $1500 high end trainings on AMAZON using their traffic and borrowing their credibility. Yes you can! “Amazon Strong Arm” This one really turns me on! Discover how AMAZON will help you to SEO your products in Google and with this 5 minute lesson you can get on page one for Google on Amazon for almost ANY term in 24 hours or less… Using Amazon’s strong arm. “The Selection Secret” By making this ONE tweak in AMAZON you can TRIPLE your sales of any item and it only takes a few seconds. This seems so basic, but I screwed it up and it cost me a FORTUNE to fix. “Amazon Warehousing” The Amazon FBA program can move your product above 100’s of competitors and reduce your workload by 95% all at the same time. AMAZON without this is just plain DUMB! You’ll get the whole system. “Amazon Domains” This one is for AFFILIATES! One simple domain trick that can turn a $12 domain into $12,000 a year in affiliate revenue with ZERO financial risk. Just 3 quick steps. You’ll get them all. Session Nine: Triple X Method 2.0 “Upsells, downsells, cross sells, and click button upgrades can make you TEN TIMES as much money as your core sales do – Marketer’s who don’t uses these actions are amateurs. Don’t be a chuckle-head…you can do this!” “Checkbox Ad-On Sales” Simple checkbox add on can pay ALL your overhead every month. This is a simple change to make no matter how non-technical you are. “Single Click Upsells” The BIGGEST news in the “A” list Internet marketing world. Understanding how to put the upsells in place will be critical to your SURVIVAL in the future. Who else is going to show you this? “Physical Copy Upsells” 40% conversions on an upsell? Yes! If you sell digital information you NEED this upsell, but if you over do it you’ll screw it up for sure…we’ll show you the right way. “The Bucket Offer” If apples cost $1 wouldn’t a basket-full for $2 be a slam-dunk sale? That’s the bucket offer, our second best converting upsell. (HINT: It works because people can easily do the math in their heads.) “Slack Adjusters” Big ticket upsells and downsells can totally change a slow day into a major victory. We are currently offering $1000 upsells on $27 product sites with a 4% conversion rate. Do the math on that. “Instant JV Backend Promotions” Don’t have a high-ticket backend product? Promote someone else’s and start raking in cash on the back end of your sales. We’ll show you where to find the highest converting offers and make the JV deals to assure the highest payout. “Webinar Trials” Webinar registrants buy BEFORE the webinar. I can show you how to make big money before your webinars even air. This is simple…but VERY easy to screw up. “The Un-Coaching Model” High ticket coaching makes tons of money but usually is a giant time suck. We have perfected a coaching model that our students love but requires only 4 hours a month to maintain no matter how many students you have. We’ll show you how to set one up in your own business… Session Ten: The Machine 2.0 “We automate EVERYTHING! If you think you have to do all the work you couldn’t be more WRONG! In the Machine, we’ll explain how we continue to build a set it and forget it business that works for us 24/7 and why you should too.” “Atomic Email Followup” The 15 part follow-up system that we use that generates 66% of all our sales! Learn this and triple your income OVERNIGHT! “Flipping The Affiliate’s Switch” Our #1 source of new affiliates are customers. This can be a delicate transition but you will never find a better affiliate than an uber-satisfied customer. I’ll show you how… “Membership Uprising” This simple strategy can take a reasonable number of your email subscribers to paying members and paying members to VIP level members every month on auto-pilot. Really slick and man does it ever work! “Evergreen Webinar Replay Traffic” How to get affiliates to promote webinar replays forever and keep s****** leads from their lists… “Mock Up Signups” Use our G2W clone webinar sign-up template to generate fresh leads for old webinars. “Rolling Launches” This is a BIGGIE! Imagine a product launch in your business going off every single week. This requires software [INCLUDED] and just a little planning (we have three every weeks). You’re gonna love this… DVD List DVD 1 The State of Online Traffic DVD 2 Traffic Boomerang DVD 3 Perry’s Picks and Proen Conversion Boosters DVD 4 List building Loopholes DVD 5 SEO Round Table DVD 6 More Perrys Picks and Boosters DVD 7 Reading Customers Minds DVD 8 Triple X Method DVD 9 Fusion Marketing Panel DVD 10 Still More Perrys Picks and Mobile Advertising DVD 11 Mobile Advertising Continued DVD 12 The PPC Guru

[takenews-blog1]

Byron Allen on "Chasing Studio Crumbs," Weinstein's Future and Christian Bale's 'Hostiles'

New Post has been published on https://takenews.net/byron-allen-on-chasing-studio-crumbs-weinsteins-future-and-christian-bales-hostiles/

Byron Allen on "Chasing Studio Crumbs," Weinstein's Future and Christian Bale's 'Hostiles'

At age 14, Byron Allen was already doing stand-up, and one evening on the Comedy Retailer, Wayne Kline, a author on TV’s Good Occasions, occurred to see his act. “He stated, ‘Can I get your telephone quantity? I do know any individual that may be keen on working with you,”’ Allen remembers. Two weeks later, he was sitting in star Jimmie Walker’s condominium alongside Jay Leno and David Letterman, writing materials for the present. He received $25, the primary cash he made writing jokes, which paid lots higher than working as a paper boy. “I needed to throw two papers to make a penny,” he says. “So, I needed to throw 5,000 papers to make that.”

Allen, now 56, spent 18 years as a comic and host of tv hits resembling Actual Folks earlier than launching Leisure Studios in 1993. He owns 100 % of the corporate, which he says has $1 billion in property and boasts
 41 TV reveals and 7 24-hour HD networks — together with Pets.TV and Comedy.TV — that attain almost 80 million subscribers. And Allen grabbed consideration within the movie world after his first function launch, the June shark thriller 47 Meters Down — which he rescued from a straight-to-DVD destiny on the Weinsteins’ Dimension Movies — grew to become 2017’s most profitable indie with $44 million home. He then acquired three splashy movies in Toronto, together with the $50 million awards hopeful Hostiles (in theaters Dec. 22), a Western starring Christian Bale.

Since 2007, Allen has been married to Jennifer Lucas, govt producer at Leisure Studios, and the couple, who reside in West L.A., have youngsters ages 9, seven and 5. He invited THR to his Century Metropolis workplace, from the place he oversees a workers of 200 and a 75,000-square-foot studio in Culver Metropolis, to debate what different property he is eyeing.

You bought to know the common leisure shopper from doing Actual Folks for 5 years. Out of your vantage, do Hollywood decision-makers lack that perception?

I additionally was on the highway as a comic for greater than 22 years. I made my residing and fed myself by standing onstage in entrance of an viewers all throughout this nation. And if I did not know tips on how to make them snigger each six seconds, I did not eat. Lots of people in Hollywood, within the studio system, are smug. They fly over America in non-public jets, they usually just about assume they’re smarter than the individuals between [the coasts]. They attempt to get the viewers to purchase in to their style and get the viewers to purchase what they like. As a comic, you rapidly be taught it’s a must to give them what they like. I opened for Lionel Richie and Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton. Once you stand in entrance of their viewers for half an hour, you are like, “Yeah, I do know what you want.”

You purchased 47 Meters Down from The Weinstein Co. Have you ever thought of shopping for the studio?

No. We have not actually checked out it. No want. I imply, it is an ideal acquisition for any individual who needs to get a relationship with the theaters. We have already got that. We purchased Freestyle Releasing in October 2015. That is how we received into the film enterprise. We now have an output cope with Netflix, and Lionsgate handles our dwelling leisure. Our infrastructure is constructed and up and operating. So, for us, it isn’t a match.

I purchased 47 Meters Down off of Bob [Weinstein]. I by no means handled Harvey on that in any respect, as a result of Harvey wasn’t on that facet of the home. This film was on a truck and headed to the DVD retailer. We had been in a position to cease the vans from delivering it to the DVD shops, and it ended up being the largest indie launch of the 12 months.

What do you assume will occur to TWC?

I do not know. So far as any curiosity in shopping for their completed films piecemeal, we have a look at whoever brings a film to the desk. However I am guessing that they might wish to preserve the flicks intact for a sale.

What’s the most worthwhile a part of your online business?

Our tv enterprise. We predict being within the film enterprise can be an exquisite pathway to being in enterprise with expertise that may develop our TV facet, as a result of a few of this expertise will lend itself to tv. We simply wish to be in enterprise with the most effective of the most effective. And we noticed that the highest of the pyramid, that expertise pool very often sits within the film sandbox.

What makes a movie proper for Leisure Studios?

We’re actually centered on films that we imagine warrant a large launch of two,000 to four,000 [theaters] and may do wherever from $40 million to $70 million on the field workplace. We’re chasing what the studios do not essentially need. Their ambitions are a lot increased. So, we’re staying in our weight class. And we’re chasing the studios’ crumbs. Mainly, we’re chasing box-office failures for a studio. However their box-office failure is our success. Their crumbs are our gourmand meal. Once you try this throughout 15 to 20 films a 12 months, it is an actual enterprise.

For an indie distributor, you might be spending large on prints and promoting. It labored on 47 Meters however not on horror entry Pal Request. Are you rethinking that technique?

You understand, Hollywood is a on line casino. You need to put your chips on the desk and hope for the most effective. It is a large gamble. However I imagine it is actual easy. Primary, you want 
 film. Quantity two, you want launch date. After which quantity three, it is advisable spend sufficient cash to inform all people you might have film. We all know there is a built-in viewers for horror films. We simply did not do effectively with our first horror outing.

You’ve got pledged to spend $16 million to market the Ted Kennedy scandal movie Chappaquiddick. Nonetheless the case?

Sure.

How will you make it related? Will you lean in to the present intercourse scandal local weather along with your advertising?

It is very well timed. What occurred then could be gargantuan information at the moment. On the finish of the day, the touchdown on the moon actually did a tremendous job of maintaining him off the entrance web page.

You probably did the courtroom present We the Folks With Gloria Allred. Any plans to reteam amid this #MeToo second?

She was nice to work with, and I’d like to work along with her once more. She was as skilled and as centered as they arrive.

As a longtime stand-up, is there an excessive amount of political correctness in comedy at the moment?

Once you begin punishing and censoring comedians, that is an actual dangerous signal of us as People shedding our First Modification rights. As a comic, I am gonna push the boundaries. Some issues you are going to love, and a few issues you are going to hate. However that is America. Nice individuals died for us to have this proper. And do not ever let anyone lose one drop of blood over one thing that’s rightfully yours. Particularly comedians.

This story first appeared within the Dec. 18 concern of The Hollywood Reporter journal. To obtain the journal, click on right here to subscribe.

[rollinbrigittenv8]

U.S. Workers Are Taking a Bit More Vacation Despite Their Employers

Washington, D.C. was the top city in the country for most unused vacation days in 2016. Pictured is a tourist taking a photo of the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C. Mike Boening Photography / Flickr

Skift Take: The U.S. vacation deprivation phenomenon is a nationwide, coast-to-coast problem but seems to be especially apparent in large east and west coast markets that are often the bread and butter of many travel brands' business.

— Dan Peltier

The United States’ no-vacation nation problem was slightly softened last year: The average American took 16.8 vacation days in 2016 compared to 16 days in 2014, a 5 percent increase.

But vacation benefits and actual workplace cultures around paid time off are often a horse of a different color, and a new survey from a vacation research organization show that U.S. cities and states with the worst vacation track records also have many employers who don’t like giving their workers vacation time.

That’s according to U.S. Travel’s Project: Time Off coalition, which found that in 2016, 662 million vacation days were left on the table.

Many of the vacation days left unused can’t be rolled over each year — and that costs a pretty penny. The time that cannot be rolled over, banked or paid out is down eight percent from 2015 to 206 million forfeited days.

Last year, United States employees gave up $66.4 billion in lost vacation benefits, about $604 on average per employee.

But if those vacation days had been used, they would have helped generate $128 billion in direct spending and an overall economic impact of $236 billion for the U.S. economy, according to Project: Time Off.

The group worked with market research organization GfK to conduct an online survey of more than 7,300 U.S. workers from January 26-February 20, 2017. Respondents were ages 18 and older and worked more than 35 hours a week and received paid time off from their employer.

Data represent all 50 U.S. states and the 30 largest metropolitan statistical areas in the country.

The U.S. isn’t the only country with an increasingly prevalent round-the-clock work culture, but with dozens of different labor laws across the nation, for example, it lacks uniform vacation policies compared to other countries.

“Across America, vacation has become the unintended victim of a 24/7 work culture, but there are specific parts of the country living on the edge of burnout where employees particularly need to take time off,” said Katie Denis, senior director of Project: Time Off, in a statement.

Some 17 percent of all respondents said their company sends negative or mixed messages about taking a vacation. “The states and cities that have the dubious honor of being at the top of the unused vacation list would do well to realize that employees who take time off are happier, healthier, and more productive,” said Denis.

The top 10 states with the most unused vacation days in 2016, based on how much vacation time respondents left unused, have rural populations and are mostly plains states, such as Idaho, Wyoming and Nebraska (see chart below).

Top 10 U.S. States With Highest Percentages of Unused Vacation Days in 2016

Rank State Percent of Unused Vacation Days 1 Idaho 78% 2 New Hampshire 77% 3 Alaska 73% 4 South Dakota 73% 5 Oklahoma 69% 6 Montana 67% 7 Wyoming 66% 8 Nebraska 66% 9 Kansas 64% 10 Vermont 64%

States with the fewest unused vacation days are more spread out, but four states are in the U.S. south and two states, Michigan and Wisconsin, are in the Midwest/Great Lakes region.

Still, these particular states shouldn’t be applauded as their percentage of unused vacation days are near 50 percent in some cases.

“The places where employees use the most vacation tend to have work cultures that encourage time off, enjoy lower fear and anxiety about being away, and are less susceptible to the stress and pressures of being away,” Denis said.

Top 10 U.S. States With Fewest Unused Vacation Days in 2016

Rank State Percent of Used Vacation Days 1 Maine 38% 2 Hawaii 39% 3 Arizona 41% 4 Alabama 41% 5 Wisconsin 44% 6 Arkansas 45% 7 Pennsylvania 45% 8 Michigan 46% 9 Tennessee 46% 10 Louisiana 47%

On the city level, Washington, D.C. tops the list leaving 64 percent (17.3 million) of unused vacation time or $3.8 billion on the table. Most of Washington’s workforce is in government, an industry which typically has more-generous-than-average vacation rollover policies.

Some 37 percent of government workers in the survey said they can roll over 21 or more vacation days each year, while 38 percent of overall respondents said they can roll over one to five days a year and only 16 percent said they can roll over more than 21 days.

Salaried workers are more likely than those paid an hourly wage to leave vacation time on the table (57 percent to 49 percent), the survey found. Washington and Boston, two cities in the top 10 list of most unused vacation days, have the highest percentage of salaried workers of all the cities that are part of the survey (79 percent and 77 percent, respectively).

Los Angeles’ direct spending potential from its unused vacation days, or the amount of money that Project: Time Off projects travelers would spend had they taken those vacation days, is the highest for any U.S. city at $6.4 billion.

New York City, the most populated U.S. city, had the highest number of unused vacation days (37.5 million).

Top 10 U.S. Cities Using the Fewest Vacation Days in 2016

Rank City Percent Leaving Unused Vacation Time Vacation Days Left Unused Direct Spending Potential of Unused Vacation Days 1 Washington, D.C. 64% 17.3 million $3.8 billion 2 San Francisco-Oakland, California 64% 12.8 million $3.1 billion 3 Tampa, Florida 62% 5.1 million $1.2 billion 4 Los Angeles, California 62% 32.5 million $6.4 billion 5 Boston, Massachusetts 61% 11.6 million $2.4 billion 6 Denver, Colorado 60% 6.7 million $1.3 billion 7 Riverside-San Bernardino, California 59% 7.7 million $1.3 billion 8 Portland, Oregon 58% 5.4 million $756 million 9 San Antonio, Texas 58% 5.7 million $1.1 billion 10 Las Vegas, Nevada 58% 5.4 million $4.6 billion

Some 43 percent of respondents said the top challenge to taking time off is the mountain of work they return to. But of the top five cities using the most vacation time (see chart below), respondents from all five said they were less intimidated by their workload —Pittsburgh at 37 percent, Chicago at 40 percent, Phoenix at 38 percent, Orlando at 37 percent, and Miami at 40 percent.

Top 10 U.S. Cities Using the Most Vacation Days in 2016

Rank City Percent Leaving Unused Vacation Time 1 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 40% 2 Chicago, Illinois 44% 3 Phoenix, Arizona 44% 4 Orlando, Florida 45% 5 Miami, Florida 45% 6 Kansas City, Missouri 48% 7 Charlotte, North Carolina 48% 8 Atlanta, Georgia 49% 9 San Diego, California 50% 10 Detroit, Michigan 51%

The U.S. vacation picture remains flawed from coast to coast, but it’s clear that the problem is most acute in the plains states and in west coast cities.

The big blow to many travel brands is likely seeing that large markets on the east and west coast — where much of their marketing and advertising efforts are concentrated and where most business comes from — aren’t taking all of their precious days and leaving valuable dollars on the table rather than spending on hotels, airlines, resorts, or restaurants.

Source: Project: Time Off/U.S. Travel

[touristguidebuzz]

U.S. Workers Are Taking a Bit More Vacation Despite Their Employers

Washington, D.C. was the top city in the country for most unused vacation days in 2016. Pictured is a tourist taking a photo of the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C. Mike Boening Photography / Flickr

Skift Take: The U.S. vacation deprivation phenomenon is a nationwide, coast-to-coast problem but seems to be especially apparent in large east and west coast markets that are often the bread and butter of many travel brands' business.

— Dan Peltier

The United States’ no-vacation nation problem was slightly softened last year: The average American took 16.8 vacation days in 2016 compared to 16 days in 2014, a 5 percent increase.

But vacation benefits and actual workplace cultures around paid time off are often a horse of a different color, and a new survey from a vacation research organization show that U.S. cities and states with the worst vacation track records also have many employers who don’t like giving their workers vacation time.

That’s according to U.S. Travel’s Project: Time Off coalition, which found that in 2016, 662 million vacation days were left on the table.

Many of the vacation days left unused can’t be rolled over each year — and that costs a pretty penny. The time that cannot be rolled over, banked or paid out is down eight percent from 2015 to 206 million forfeited days.

Last year, United States employees gave up $66.4 billion in lost vacation benefits, about $604 on average per employee.

But if those vacation days had been used, they would have helped generate $128 billion in direct spending and an overall economic impact of $236 billion for the U.S. economy, according to Project: Time Off.

The group worked with market research organization GfK to conduct an online survey of more than 7,300 U.S. workers from January 26-February 20, 2017. Respondents were ages 18 and older and worked more than 35 hours a week and received paid time off from their employer.

Data represent all 50 U.S. states and the 30 largest metropolitan statistical areas in the country.

The U.S. isn’t the only country with an increasingly prevalent round-the-clock work culture, but with dozens of different labor laws across the nation, for example, it lacks uniform vacation policies compared to other countries.

“Across America, vacation has become the unintended victim of a 24/7 work culture, but there are specific parts of the country living on the edge of burnout where employees particularly need to take time off,” said Katie Denis, senior director of Project: Time Off, in a statement.

Some 17 percent of all respondents said their company sends negative or mixed messages about taking a vacation. “The states and cities that have the dubious honor of being at the top of the unused vacation list would do well to realize that employees who take time off are happier, healthier, and more productive,” said Denis.

The top 10 states with the most unused vacation days in 2016, based on how much vacation time respondents left unused, have rural populations and are mostly plains states, such as Idaho, Wyoming and Nebraska (see chart below).

Top 10 U.S. States With Highest Percentages of Unused Vacation Days in 2016

Rank State Percent of Unused Vacation Days 1 Idaho 78% 2 New Hampshire 77% 3 Alaska 73% 4 South Dakota 73% 5 Oklahoma 69% 6 Montana 67% 7 Wyoming 66% 8 Nebraska 66% 9 Kansas 64% 10 Vermont 64%

States with the fewest unused vacation days are more spread out, but four states are in the U.S. south and two states, Michigan and Wisconsin, are in the Midwest/Great Lakes region.

Still, these particular states shouldn’t be applauded as their percentage of unused vacation days are near 50 percent in some cases.

“The places where employees use the most vacation tend to have work cultures that encourage time off, enjoy lower fear and anxiety about being away, and are less susceptible to the stress and pressures of being away,” Denis said.

Top 10 U.S. States With Fewest Unused Vacation Days in 2016

Rank State Percent of Used Vacation Days 1 Maine 38% 2 Hawaii 39% 3 Arizona 41% 4 Alabama 41% 5 Wisconsin 44% 6 Arkansas 45% 7 Pennsylvania 45% 8 Michigan 46% 9 Tennessee 46% 10 Louisiana 47%

On the city level, Washington, D.C. tops the list leaving 64 percent (17.3 million) of unused vacation time or $3.8 billion on the table. Most of Washington’s workforce is in government, an industry which typically has more-generous-than-average vacation rollover policies.

Some 37 percent of government workers in the survey said they can roll over 21 or more vacation days each year, while 38 percent of overall respondents said they can roll over one to five days a year and only 16 percent said they can roll over more than 21 days.

Salaried workers are more likely than those paid an hourly wage to leave vacation time on the table (57 percent to 49 percent), the survey found. Washington and Boston, two cities in the top 10 list of most unused vacation days, have the highest percentage of salaried workers of all the cities that are part of the survey (79 percent and 77 percent, respectively).

Los Angeles’ direct spending potential from its unused vacation days, or the amount of money that Project: Time Off projects travelers would spend had they taken those vacation days, is the highest for any U.S. city at $6.4 billion.

New York City, the most populated U.S. city, had the highest number of unused vacation days (37.5 million).

Top 10 U.S. Cities Using the Fewest Vacation Days in 2016

Rank City Percent Leaving Unused Vacation Time Vacation Days Left Unused Direct Spending Potential of Unused Vacation Days 1 Washington, D.C. 64% 17.3 million $3.8 billion 2 San Francisco-Oakland, California 64% 12.8 million $3.1 billion 3 Tampa, Florida 62% 5.1 million $1.2 billion 4 Los Angeles, California 62% 32.5 million $6.4 billion 5 Boston, Massachusetts 61% 11.6 million $2.4 billion 6 Denver, Colorado 60% 6.7 million $1.3 billion 7 Riverside-San Bernardino, California 59% 7.7 million $1.3 billion 8 Portland, Oregon 58% 5.4 million $756 million 9 San Antonio, Texas 58% 5.7 million $1.1 billion 10 Las Vegas, Nevada 58% 5.4 million $4.6 billion

Some 43 percent of respondents said the top challenge to taking time off is the mountain of work they return to. But of the top five cities using the most vacation time (see chart below), respondents from all five said they were less intimidated by their workload —Pittsburgh at 37 percent, Chicago at 40 percent, Phoenix at 38 percent, Orlando at 37 percent, and Miami at 40 percent.

Top 10 U.S. Cities Using the Most Vacation Days in 2016

Rank City Percent Leaving Unused Vacation Time 1 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 40% 2 Chicago, Illinois 44% 3 Phoenix, Arizona 44% 4 Orlando, Florida 45% 5 Miami, Florida 45% 6 Kansas City, Missouri 48% 7 Charlotte, North Carolina 48% 8 Atlanta, Georgia 49% 9 San Diego, California 50% 10 Detroit, Michigan 51%

The U.S. vacation picture remains flawed from coast to coast, but it’s clear that the problem is most acute in the plains states and in west coast cities.

The big blow to many travel brands is likely seeing that large markets on the east and west coast — where much of their marketing and advertising efforts are concentrated and where most business comes from — aren’t taking all of their precious days and leaving valuable dollars on the table rather than spending on hotels, airlines, resorts, or restaurants.

Source: Project: Time Off/U.S. Travel

[brajeshupadhyay]

The last five days have been chaotic for farmers in the small town of Pathri in Maharashtra's Parbhani district. Four hours, from 7 am to 11 am, see a deluge of farmers frantically lining up to sell their harvested cotton to the local traders. Gajanan Ghumbare, a farmer with 10 acres of land where he grows cotton, says, "The procurement of cotton began last week for the first time since lockdown. 60 quintals of stock is lying in my farmland since the harvest in January. Farmers are panicking at the thought of being unable to sell their crop." Among the several constituencies of people struggling due to the lockdown enforced in India since 25 March to contain the spread of COVID-19, cotton farmers in Maharashtra are not left behind. Much of the harvest, which begins at the end of November and goes on for two months after that, remains unsold even by the end of April. Govind Wairale, former general manager of The Maharashtra State Cotton Growers' Marketing Federation Limited, a cooperative body involved in procurement of cotton, said about 25 percent of cotton in Maharashtra is just lying in farmlands, waiting to be sold, due to the lockdown. “The expected production of cotton in Maharashtra was supposed to be 400 lakh quintals,” he said, “but about 100 lakh quintals are yet to be sold." If one goes by a liberal estimate of 50 quintals per farmer, it means 2 lakh farmers and their families are still waiting for their returns. The minimum support price (MSP) of cotton is Rs 5,500. In other words, stock worth Rs 5,500 crore is yet to be procured from farmers. The farmers stuck in this quagmire are mostly from Vidarbha, a huge cotton belt, and from districts like Parbhani, Aurangabad and Jalna in Marathwada. Being a labour intensive cash crop with an investment of Rs 25,000 per acre, the delay in procurement makes cotton farmers even more vulnerable. Under normal circumstances, the procurement concludes by the end of April. The past few years indicate there is a rise in the price of cotton in the first week of April due to international fluctuations. Farmers keep a bit of their harvest handy to benefit from that boom. It leaves enough time for them to invest in preparations of their land, which begin in May. However, coronavirus has rendered all of these calculations useless. "The cropping season begins mid-June," said Ghumbare, "but we need money to buy seeds, fertilisers and pesticides. We need to plough the land ahead of the sowing. If we do not sell our cotton as soon as possible, the entire upcoming season would go down the drain." Being a labour intensive cash crop with an investment of Rs 25,000 per acre, the delay in procurement makes cotton farmers even more vulnerable. Reuters The Cotton Corporation of India (CCI) is a government body, which works under the Union Textile Ministry and, is responsible for the procurement of cotton across India. After the MSP is decided, it acts as an implementing agency. The cotton federation of Maharashtra is a sort of its sub-agent. "The CCI’s working capacity is down to 20 percent of what it used to be due to the lockdown. At the rate with which they are going they will take another three months to conclude procuring," said Wairale, who is based in Nagpur. But farmers cannot wait that long. After the procurement opened up in Parbhani, Ghumbare said that 35,000 farmers have registered to sell their harvest. “More than half of those farmers will sell it to a trader because of the waiting period," he said. The traders have exploited the situation of the farmers during the lockdown. Ghumbare said they have been procuring cotton from farmers in Parbhani at only Rs 3,100 per quintal, even when the MSP stands at Rs 5,500. "In fact, we paid Rs 1,400 per quintal just to the labourers at the time of harvesting the crop. It is a big loss to the farmers, but many have resorted to panic selling at a throwaway price," he said, "the traders, however, are making windfall gain." Wairale said the traders are not confident of selling it further to the factories. “The factories require 40-50 workers," he said, "and for the workers to practice social distancing and also to work, is a difficult task. Therefore, even the traders are not keen, and are playing it safe." The moderate procurement because of coronavirus is likely to have a larger trickle-down impact across the hinterlands of Maharashtra. If the harvest goes well, they use the money from the season not just to buy inputs for the next farming season, but also to buy clothes, invest in two-wheelers and maybe invest in a television set.  The money comes back in the market. The lack of procurement means a slowdown in the rural economy. Last year, the same cotton was sold at Rs 6,250 per quintal, said Ganesh Nanote, a farmer in Vidarbha’s Akola district. "The government should urgently do something to streamline the procurement process during lockdown," Nanote said,"otherwise, we will have to borrow money for the upcoming season. I already have a crop loan of Rs 2.5 lakh. I am hoping to repay that by selling the 100 quintals of cotton I have in my farmland." Agriculture Minister of Maharashtra Dada Bhuse said that he spoke to the union ministry ten days ago and made it clear that all the cotton should be procured irrespective of its grade. "We need more CCI procurement centres, and I have already made that demand," he told Firstpost. The pressure on government agencies to procure cotton had not been as great in the last season as the difference between the MSP and traders’ price was not much. The farmers, therefore, sold their harvest to the trader quite happily. This season, though, with the lockdown, the traders are procuring at anywhere between Rs 3,000-4,000 per quintal, which is a huge drop from the MSP of Rs 5,500. Farmers, therefore, are keener to sell to the government agencies as much as possible. However, even among the farmers who have sold their harvest to CCI, some of them have not received their payments. Totabai Rathod, 65-year-old farmer from Yavatmal, sold 32 quintals of cotton on 10 March. She was supposed to get Rs 1.75 lakh. But she has not received a penny even after over a month and a half. Bhuse said he was unaware of such cases, but assured that he will inquire into pending payments. Nagpur-based farm activist Vijay Javandiya said the recession in the international market is also one of the reasons behind the declining cotton prices. “The situation was not great before coronavirus either. But it has worsened further with coronavirus,” he said, "because of the dwindling price of cotton (lint) in the international market, the traders here are not buying it for more than Rs 4,000 per quintal." Javandiya said the price of cotton had shot up last year because of drought, which meant inadequate fodder. “Cottonseed is used as fodder for livestock. The demand soared, and the seed was sold for Rs. 3500 a quintal. That increased the price of cotton as well. This year, cottonseed costs only 1700 per quintal. We are in the middle of a serious crisis," he said, "and the state must procure quickly from the farmers at MSP. The government can bear a bit of loss. Farmers cannot."

http://sansaartimes.blogspot.com/2020/04/over-2-lakh-farmers-in-maharashtra-sit.html

[kennethherrerablog]

Need Extra Income? One of These 10 Best Side Hustles Can Help You Out

Is your financial situation making you think about starting a side hustle?

Side hustles, also known as side gigs, are jobs you do outside your primary day job. These gigs can be a great way to pay off debt or earn some extra spending money. They can also be a means to tap into unused skills or explore passions.

So if you’re about to start searching for a side hustle, you’ve come to the right place. Here are some tips on what makes a great side hustle, what qualities workers need to have for success and 10 gigs to consider.

What The Best Side Hustles Have in Common

Not all side hustles are the same. To help you choose the 10 best side gigs, we researched numerous jobs and found some commonalities such as having a low barrier of entry, flexible schedules and availability in most areas. Here are some tips on what to look for in a good one.

Schedule Flexibility

Rule No. 1 when starting a side hustle: Don’t let it interfere with your day job. The last thing you want to do is mess up your primary source of income, as some companies may have policies in place that prevent employees from taking on extra gigs. If you’re cleared to do side hustles outside of your 9-to-5, make sure the gig allows for a flexible schedule.

By day, Brandon Ballweg works in the Kansas City, Missouri area as a marketer for an e-commerce business. At night, he runs a photography website and works app-based gig jobs. He says he enjoys app-based jobs like ride-share driving and meal delivery because there’s no set schedule.

“When you get off your regular job, you can just turn on the app and go,” he says. “It gives you a lot of flexibility, and that’s a big thing for me.” So find a job that works with your schedule.

It’s Something You Enjoy Doing

No matter what you end up choosing for your side hustle, pick something you enjoy doing. Seek out a gig that fits your personality and interests because it’s going to take up a lot of your free time. Krystal Covington, CEO of the networking service Women of Denver, has worked several side hustles over the years and currently puts in between 15 and 20 hours per month as a freelancer on Upwork doing marketing, public relations and internal business communications.

“If you have a [day] job and you’re side hustling, that’s a lot of work to be doing,” she says. “You’re not getting as much leisure time, so if you hate it, it’s going to be a terrible life.”

Low Cost of Entry

Another thing to factor in when choosing a side hustle is how much it’s going to cost to get it off the ground. Some gigs, such as those that are app-based, can be done right away, while others, like selling goods online, may need more time and money upfront. The cost of running your business will eat into your earnings as a self-employed worker. “If the side gig costs more money than it makes you, then it’s a problem, and I’ve seen people get into that trap,” Covington says.  

The 10 Best Side Hustles

No gigs coming to mind? Below is a list of the 10 best side hustles that can be done outside your regular 9-to-5. Some gigs are easily obtainable, some provide passive income and others offer opportunities to use specialized skills.

1. Ride-share Driving

Your car can be a valuable asset in the gig economy. Ride-share companies, such as Uber and Lyft, are always looking for drivers interested in making extra money. To become a ride-share driver, you need to be at least 21-years old, have a valid U.S. driver’s license, proof of car insurance and vehicle registration, a four-door vehicle that seats five people, and pass criminal and driving background checks.

The earnings potential of ride-share drivers varies depending on how often and when they drive. Driving at peak “surge” times can put more money in your pocket. Drivers can earn $18 to $40 per hour, with many earning around $25 per hour.

2. Meal Delivery

If driving around strangers in the back of your car doesn’t sound appealing to you, then try meal delivery. Services like Uber Eats, Grubhub and DoorDash, allow people to order takeout and have it delivered to their door. One difference between traditional Uber and Uber Eats is that you’re not required to have a four-door vehicle. Drivers can use two-door cars, motorized scooters and bicycles. Uber Eats drivers earn pickup, drop-off and trip mileage fees, plus tips. Also, like traditional Uber, surge pricing can boost your payout during peak times. Here’s how you can learn more about delivering for Uber Eats.

3. Freelance Work

If you have a particular set of skills and want to make some money using them, join a freelance network. Services like Fiverr and Upwork connect people with freelancers specializing in fields like copywriting, graphic design, coding, digital marketing, financial consulting and much more. Freelancer decide how much to charge for their services. Fiverr user Charmaine Pocek started writing resumes and cover letters for $5 a pop. Now she charges about $30 to $800 to write resumes, cover letters and optimize LinkedIn profiles. According to Fiverr, she’s earned more than $2 million using the site. Check out how she made her first million. It’s free to join Fiverr, and users keep 80% of your earnings made using the service.

4. Renting on Airbnb

Have a spare room? Might as well try to earn some money by listing it on Airbnb.

If you’re a good host with a desirable space, you could add hundreds — even thousands — of dollars to your savings account with Airbnb.

A few simple steps can make the difference between a great experience and a less-than-satisfactory one. We talked to Terence Michael, an Airbnb superhost based in Los Angeles.

Here are some of his tips:

Break out the labelmaker. “I have the entire house loaded with labels,” Michael says. “They look nice; they’re modern. This helps people feel less helpless.”

Be a good host, and stock your place with the toiletries you’d expect at a hotel — toilet paper, soap and towels. Here’s a little hack from Michael: “I order on Amazon and have it delivered when people are there.”

Be kind to your neighbors. “I say, ‘I’m not going to put anyone here who I think won’t be good for you,’” Michael explains. “And I turn a lot of big groups away, especially in Nashville. I don’t want anyone going to the cops or the city.”

(Hosting laws vary from city to city. Please understand the rules and regulations applicable to your city and listing.)

5. Online Tutoring

If you have teaching experience, then here’s an opportunity to make some extra money from home. Online tutoring companies such as Tutor.com, Brainfuse and TutorMe allow people with teaching or tutoring experience to instruct K-12 students and adults on different topics. These topics include your basic grade school subjects (math, English, science, reading and social studies), SAT/ACT prep and college-level courses. Online tutors can earn anywhere between $9 and $25 per hour depending on the service, and sometimes the subject. Here’s a roundup of 10 online tutoring companies.

6. Teaching English as a Second Language

This is another opportunity for teachers looking for work-from-home opportunities. Companies like VIPKid, QKids and Italki connect U.S. instructors with students wanting to learn English as a second language. Jennifer Ross, a former schoolteacher from Mount Dora, Florida, told The Penny Hoarder in 2018, that she earns $520 working 24 hours a week as a VIPKid instructor.

“And now I can live the stay-at-home dog-mom life,” Ross says with a laugh.

7. Selling Craft Goods

Not all side hustles have to be service jobs. Consider making some money using your craft skills. Thanks to online platforms such as Etsy, eBay, Shopify and Amazon Handmade, artists have several outlets to sell their items without leaving their home or studio.

Each selling platform comes with its own pros and cons. Selling on Amazon, for example, gives you access to a huge online marketplace, but crafters will be up against stiff competition. Etsy seller Katrin Lerman told The Penny Hoarder in 2018 she has shops with Amazon Handmade and Shopify, but Etsy is her favorite platform.

“Etsy really caters to the handmade,” she says. “They understand [handmade] better than Amazon… [which] is very strict with all the rules.”

8. Delivering Groceries

Some people hate going to the supermarket, which is why grocery delivery services are on the rise. Instacart and Shipt employ gig workers who go shopping, pick out requested items and deliver them to customers’ homes. Shipt shoppers are paid per order — the price is higher for bigger orders — and they also receive tips. Destiny Firth, a Shipt shopper in Nashville, told The Penny Hoarder in 2017 she makes $17.50 an hour.

9. Creating Online Courses

If you’re a master of a topic and wish to make some passive income, then consider creating an online course. Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, provided by companies like Udemy allow teachers and professionals to instruct students wanting to broaden their skills.

Instructors create the courses, which consist of audio, video, a PowerPoint-style presentation, practice assignments and exams, then charge a fee to enroll. The longer the course, the higher the pay. According to Udemy, the site keeps 50% of the cost if the student finds the class on their platform, but the instructor keeps 97% of the course cost when the student signs up using an instructor coupon.

10. Selling T-Shirts Online

If you’ve got ideas for catchy slogans or eye-catching graphics, why not put them on a T-shirt? Print-on-demand services such as Merch by Amazon, Printful and Redbubble allow people to upload their designs and sell products without dealing with the hassles of inventory and shipping. Each shirt is made to order, and the designer receives a percentage of the sale.

Stacy Caprio, a former designer who made shirts from April 2017 to Feb. 2018, says she still makes between $200 and $300 per month in passive income from T-shirt sales.

“I think it’s cool that there are so many platforms you can put your designs on,” she says. “There’s a lot of opportunity, especially for people who spend the time making high-quality designs.”

What Skills Do Side Hustlers Need to Have?

Finding a great side hustle is important, but that’s only half the equation. Each side hustler needs to have a set of intangible qualities to succeed.

Being a Self-Starter

A significant adjustment newbie side hustlers need to make is learning how to be a self-starter. Covington says you get used to the systems and workflows of your day job because they have always been there. It’s up to you as the sole employee to create your workflow and stay motivated so your products or assignments get done on time.

Keeping Things in Perspective

Side hustlers need to have realistic expectations. Ballweg says it’s most likely going to take awhile before your side hustle gets up to full speed and — hopefully someday — makes you a lot of money. “Keeping that in the back of your mind is a healthy way of looking at it,” he says.

Always Willing to Learn

You’re never too old or too experienced to learn something new. Covington listened to podcasts and audiobooks about side hustles to learn how to improve her businesses when juggling multiple side gigs. She says side hustle-focused podcasts can be a great place to gain inspiration and learn about the different ways people make money during their off hours.

Being Able to Forgive Your Mistakes

You’ll be better off knowing from the beginning that you’re going to make mistakes. This may be your first attempt trying to do a side hustle while balancing a day job and a personal life. Covington says there will be long nights and a lot of trial and error when learning how to run your business the best way possible. She says you have to be willing to forgive yourself if any setbacks occur.

Matt Reinstetle is a staff writer at The Penny Hoarder.

This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, which helps millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. The Inc. 5000 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the fastest-growing private media company in the U.S. in 2017.

Need Extra Income? One of These 10 Best Side Hustles Can Help You Out published first on https://justinbetreviews.tumblr.com/