#financial aspirations

[otherworldlyinfo]

WallyGPT: The Growth of Wally and Revolutionizing Personal Finance

The Birth of Wally: A Solution to Common WoesWally’s Early Days: Bridging the Gap with Machine LearningVersion 3.0: Automated Tracking and Global ReachWallyGPT Emerges: The AI RevolutionHyper-Personalization at Its Finest: WallyGPT in ActionGlobal Impact and Data Privacy AssuranceEmpowering Through Uncertainty: Navigating Economic ChallengesA Journey of Innovation and Empowerment with…

[dollar-and-sense]

Understanding Risk and Reward: How to Evaluate Investment Opportunities

Introduction: Welcome back, readers, to another informative blog post on personal finance and investing! In today’s article, we will delve into the crucial topic of understanding risk and reward when evaluating investment opportunities. As savvy investors, it is essential to assess the potential risks associated with any investment and weigh them against the potential rewards. By mastering this…

[triaelf9]

Hey! Let's say you're a politician or a billionaire who REALLY wants to help a set of people! Say, lower or middle class who wanna have kids, or comic creators who just wanna create! And you want to help them do those things! Wanna know how to help?

ASK THEM WHAT THEY NEED.

Especially if you're hyper wealthy, you WILL be out of touch with the average person, whether or not you're a parent or not. And if you're not a creator, you DO NOT KNOW THE SPECIFICS.

So talk to the people you want to help! They know best what they need. just ASK.

And honestly, if you ask them, and they say we need more daycare, more schools, better schools, better or free healthcare, universal income, publishers that aren't beholden to investors who just want more more MORE money, etc etc and you think "nahh I know better"?

screw you.

[freckleslikestars]

My MFA costs £14,438

My scholarship takes that down to £11,550.40

The UK student loans company offers a maximum of £12,471 to cover both the tuition fees and cost of living.

My university only allow me to have up to 15 hours of employment a week.

I earn minimum wage.

Tell me again how the UK are progressive with allowing working class people to get a higher education, because right now I don’t see it.

[thinkpink212]

♡ Taking Myself There ♡

The past few days had me wanting to gain overview over my life; specifically to look at where I am, where I desire to be, who I desire to become, all of it!

In short, for a moment I had lost track of what I wanted to do in life. I quit University 3.5 semesters in because I didn’t belive it could get me there the why I wanted & it was overall just the wrong time in my life. I lost friends, making me doubt everything even further. Covid hit, and life just sunk into more chaos. I left many people, including the person I was. With most of my family cut off, being homeless for months & staying places I wasn’t welcomed or felt entirely safe in — I’ve managed to turn my life around in such a short time. Physically, emotionally and mentally I am now ready again to fully commit to myself & the goals I’ve had since I could remember

I’ve managed to move into a place that feels like home.

I’ve managed to pass an exam I’ve been battling for 3 years.

I’ve made new friends, and met Incredible people

And most importantly, I’ve become the person I needed all those years ago. But she’s here now and now I feel ready to jump in with both feet.

My Goals have always fluctuated as I’ve never been a very ‘one goal’ orientated person. I’ve been a full time artist, worked in the receptionist world, retail & sales advisor. But all of those always felt like they lacked something or were more so a means to gain the financial stability that was needed for me to to what I truly wanted to do—

I’ve never been one that desired working, but when the work didn’t feel like work I was all on board! This goes for all things astrology, tarot readings, drawing & painting whatever I felt like creating. And most importantly, writing.

I have two main goals in this life

♡ Becoming A Publish Author

Ever since I could remember, I loved reading. I loved hearing stories and telling them! I’ve always been a very imaginative person, very creative, and I’m always told I’m great with words — and I believe it. I have tales I wish to share, tales I know will inspire more then I already have & tales to inspire myself to keep going. Nothing brings me mroe joy then when I am typing away, lost in my little worlds.

♡ Becoming Financially Secure

I do not need bilions but I know I’ll make more money then I’ll ever need. It’ll be enough money to never worry about unexpected expenses or those around me struggling. I’ll have more then enough to leave my future generations with financial security. I have known luxury, and I’ll know it again.

So now what? It’s simple really, I just need to do what I’ve always done — persist, and go after what I know is already mine. It’ll take determination, discipline, persistency, but also it’ll take for me to rest when rest needs to be had. Asking for help when help is needed.

Soon I’ll graduate and become a certified massage therapist — a job I already know is very fulfilling, and despite the physical and emotional taxation, it’s something I see myself doing while I write my stories & get closer to financial stability.

The idea of doing all of this brings me such internal peace and warmth.

The rest of the year will be a time of…

♡ Saving, living within my means and reminding myself that this is a sacrifice for a better tomorrow

♡ Making writing my all, just how it used to be. The stories are in my mind already, and many are created weekly, but focus and determination will get me there

♡ Knowing when to rest, because my sleep, sanity or overall health should not be compromised for something that can be resumed tomorrow.

♡ Continue to be my own peace, saying no more and focusing on this endeavor

I’ll be Enjoy the journey. It’ll take a while, and I know because I’ve inspired others to write. Friends, and my cousins have written and published their work (some are still not there but aren’t giving up) and seeing how long it took them, but their determination got them there, is inspirational. I planted a seed and now they all have trees and I’m so proud. Now it’s my turn to plant my seeds and watch them grow. I’m ready!

And I start today —

All updates will be made under #ThinkpinkJourney if you would like to follow along my journey to success

[blvcksoul11]

💰✨ Money flows to me effortlessly. ✨💰

[landgraabbed]

invites a guy to his place, makes out w/ him, drinks his blood, laughs at him, then gets back to work

[unexpectedbrickattack]

It’s kinda sad that in the verse or to think Noise’s show never went on air beyond the tower or pizza head was just letting him think it’s being broadcasted world wide. I could imagine how heartbroken Noise must’ve felt to discover your dream come true was an illusion someone made. but that means in the credit Noise was still able to get his footing anyways in the film industry.

(I HAVE to preface this by saying i DO like the noise, i love this little brat, but im going to dunk on him in this response 😭)

My hc is that The Noise is ALREADY rich as shit. He did not ask for that insane money split bc hes desperate to make it big, he asked for that money bc he was being greedy as hell. He already has hiring agents and commercials and he makes all kinds of gadgets to sell at ludicrous prices.

Pizzahead ‘hired’ him bc the Noise has all these weird machines and explosives and he wanted to utilize that. He was filming for his Own weird and bizarre (stalker-ish) reasons, but the Noise, being nosy, found out about these recordings and assumed (wrongly) that this was going to be like a live reality show or some shit, and jumped in to split profits before anyone else got to it. If his agents got to Pizzahead first, they wouldve found it extremely suspicious that there was no name, no deals, no contracts written up, no producers or anything that comes standard with filming anything. But the noise doesnt Know that; thats what his agents are for! If he knew that Pizzahead was recording him SOLELY to record him fighting Peppino, noise wouldve turned him down immediately; he will Not tolerate being runner up to the Star of a show.

If it means anything, he Did get an absurd amount of money for working with Pizzahead. So much so that his agent thought he literally scammed some poor soul out of their money (He would Never; hes a brat; not a thief). So he definitely came out of this entire ordeal more than okay, if not, a little confused on the situation of. Everything. But that doesnt matter bc hes got that sweet cash babey

[cainite-bite]

Im sorry but this trend of "stay at home girlfriend" that's being glorified is the saddest fucking thing.

First of all never let anyone control your finances and solely rely on another for that because if they leave you're stuck with nothing. If they die you are stuck with nothing. If they are abusive and you need to get outta dodge you got nothing. Never let anyone have that power over you whether man or woman or literally anyone else.

2ndly it's also sad to say you cook, you clean, you wash the literal smudged underwear of some schmup, you're doing the full time work in their place and all for nothing but to get to call yourself "girlfriend". You don't get paid, you don't have the same tax benefits that you might have from marriage, you can't hop onto their insurance, you don't get anything because you're stuck with a person who doesn't view you as anything more than a live-in bangmaid with little value outside of that because they know you got so little self worth that you allow yourself to get used as a doormat.

[singswan-springswan]

maybe sitting quietly at the window and staring out at the serene winter landscape beyond like my cat does will fix me

[ardentperfidy]

.

[notwiselybuttoowell]

There's a huge backlash against minimalism, but there's also a steady stream of people (some of the same people, even) extolling early online humor like Ceiling Cat. What is that if not internet minimalism?

[waterandsilver]

can't relate to those posts that are like "when my parents were my age they were buying their first house :(" bc they were poor lol

[ekingston]

SO HERE IS THE WHOLE STORY (SO FAR).

I am on my knees begging you to reblog this post and to stop reblogging the original ones I sent out yesterday. This is the complete account with all the most recent info; the other one is just sending people down senselessly panicked avenues that no longer lead anywhere.

IN SHORT

Cliff Weitzman, CEO of Speechify and (aspiring?) voice actor, used AI to scrape thousands of popular, finished works off AO3 to list them on his own for-profit website and in his attached app. He did this without getting any kind of permission from the authors of said work or informing AO3. Obviously.

When fandom at large was made aware of his theft and started pushing back, Weitzman issued a non-apology on the original social media posts—using 

his dyslexia; 

his intent to implement a tip-system for the plagiarized authors; and 

a sudden willingness to take down the work of every author who saw my original social media posts and emailed him individually with a ‘valid’ claim,

as reasons we should allow him to continue monetizing fanwork for his own financial gain.

When we less-than-kindly refused, he took down his ‘apologies’ as well as his website (allegedly—it’s possible that our complaints to his web host, the deluge of emails he received or the unanticipated traffic brought it down, since there wasn’t any sort of official statement made about it), and when it came back up several hours later, all of the work formerly listed in the fan fiction category was no longer there. 

THE TAKEAWAYS

1. Cliff Weitzman (aka Ofek Weitzman) is a scumbag with no qualms about taking fanwork without permission, feeding it to AI and monetizing it for his own financial gain; 

2. Fandom can really get things done when it wants to, and 

3. Our fanworks appear to be hidden, but they’re NOT DELETED from Weitzman’s servers, and independently published, original works are still listed without the authors' permission. We need to hold this man responsible for his theft, keep an eye on both his current and future endeavors, and take action immediately when he crosses the line again. 

THE TIMELINE, THE DETAILS, THE SCREENSHOTS (behind the cut)

Sunday night, December 22nd 2024, I noticed an influx in visitors to my fic You & Me & Holiday Wine. When I searched the title online, hoping to find out where they came from, a new listing popped up (third one down, no less):

This listing is still up today, by the way, though now when you follow the link to word-stream, it just brings you to the main site. (Also, to be clear, this was not the cause for the influx of traffic to my fic; word-stream did not link back to the original work anywhere.)

I followed the link to word-stream, where to my horror Y&M&HW was listed in its entirety—though, beyond the first half of the first chapter, behind a paywall—along with a link promising to take me—through an app downloadable on the Apple Store—to an AI-narrated audiobook version. When I searched word-stream itself for my ao3 handle I found both of my multi-chapter fics were listed this way:

Because the tags on my fics (which included genres* and characters, but never the original IPs**) weren’t working, I put ‘Kara Danvers’ into the search bar and discovered that many more supercorp fics (Supergirl TV fandom, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor pairing) were listed.

I went looking online for any mention of word-stream and AI plagiarism (the covers—as well as the ridiculously inflated number of reviews and ratings—made it immediately obvious that AI fuckery was involved), but found almost nothing: only one single Reddit post had been made, and it received (at that time) only a handful of upvotes and no advice. 

I decided to make a tumblr post to bring the supercorp fandom up to speed about the theft. I draw as well as write for fandom and I’ve only ever had to deal with art theft—which has a clear set of steps to take depending on where said art was reposted—and I was at a loss regarding where to start in this situation.

After my post went up I remembered Project Copy Knight, which is worth commending for the work they’ve done to get fic stolen from AO3 taken down from monetized AI 'audiobook’ YouTube accounts. I reached out to @echoekhi, asking if they’d heard of this site and whether they could advise me on how to get our works taken down.

While waiting for a reply I looked into Copy Knight’s methods and decided to contact OTW’s legal department:

And then I went to bed.

By morning, tumblr friends @makicarn and @fazedlight as well as a very helpful tumblr anon had seen my post and done some very productive sleuthing:

@echoekhi had also gotten back to me, advising me, as expected, to contact the OTW. So I decided to sit tight until I got a response from them.

That response came only an hour or so later: 

Which was 100% understandable, but still disappointing—I doubted a handful of individual takedown requests would accomplish much, and I wasn’t eager to share my given name and personal information with Cliff Weitzman himself, which is unavoidable if you want to file a DMCA.

I decided to take it to Reddit, hoping it would gain traction in the wider fanfic community, considering so many fandoms were affected. My Reddit posts (with the updates at the bottom as they were emerging) can be found here and here.

A helpful Reddit user posted a guide on how users could go about filing a DMCA against word-stream here (to wobbly-at-best results)

A different helpful Reddit user signed up to access insight into word-streams pricing. Comment is here.

Smells unbelievably scammy, right? In addition to those audacious prices—though in all fairness any amount of money would be audacious considering every work listed is accessible elsewhere for free—my dyscalculia is screaming silently at the sight of that completely unnecessary amount of intentionally obscured numbers.

Speaking of which! As soon as the post on r/AO3—and, as a result, my original tumblr post—began taking off properly, sometime around 1 pm, jumpscare! A notification that a tumblr account named @cliffweitzman had commented on my post, and I got a bit mad about the gist of his message :

Fortunately he caught plenty of flack in the comments from other users (truly you should check out the comment section, it is extremely gratifying and people are making tremendously good points), in response to which, of course, he first tried to both reiterate and renegotiate his point in a second, longer comment (which I didn’t screenshot in time so I’m sorry for the crappy notification email formatting):

which he then proceeded to also post to Reddit (this is another Reddit user’s screenshot, I didn’t see it at all, the notifications were moving too fast for me to follow by then)

... where he got a roughly equal amount of righteously furious replies. (Check downthread, they're still there, all the way at the bottom.)

After which Cliff went ahead & deleted his messages altogether. 

It’s not entirely clear whether his account was suspended by Reddit soon after or whether he deleted it himself, but considering his tumblr account is still intact, I assume it’s the former. He made a handful of sock puppet accounts to play around with for a while, both on Reddit and Tumblr, only one of which I have a screenshot of, but since they all say roughly the same thing, you’re not missing much:

And then word-stream started throwing a DNS error.

That lasted for a good number of hours, which was unfortunately right around the time that a lot of authors first heard about the situation and started asking me individually how to find out whether their work was stolen too. I do not have that information and I am unclear on the perimeters Weitzman set for his AI scraper, so this is all conjecture: it LOOKS like the fics that were lifted had three things in common:

They were completed works;

They had over several thousand kudos on AO3; and

They were written by authors who had actively posted or updated work over the past year.

If anyone knows more about these perimeters or has info that counters my observation, please let me know!

I finally thought to check/alert evil Twitter during this time, and found out that the news was doing the rounds there already. I made a quick thread summarizing everything that had happened just in case. You can find it here.

I went to Bluesky too, where fandom was doing all the heavy lifting for me already, so I just reskeeted, as you do, and carried on.

Sometime in the very early evening, word-stream went back up—but the fan fiction category was nowhere to be seen. Tentative joy and celebration!***

That’s when several users—the ones who had signed up for accounts to gain intel and had accessed their own fics that way—reported that their work could still be accessed through their history. Relevant Reddit post here.

Sooo—

We’re obviously not done. The fanwork that was stolen by Weitzman may be inaccessible through his website right now, but they aren’t actually gone. And the fact that Weitzman wasn’t willing to get rid of them altogether means he still has plans for them. 

This was my final edit on my Reddit post before turning off notifications, and it's pretty much where my head will be at for at least the foreseeable future:

Please feel free to add info in the comments, make your own posts, take whatever action you want to take to protect your work. I only beg you—seriously, I’m on my knees here—to not give up like I saw a handful of people express the urge to do. Keep sharing your creative work and remain vigilant and stay active to make sure we can continue to do so freely. Visit your favorite fics, and the ones you’ve kept in your ‘marked for later’ lists but never made time to read, and leave kudos, leave comments, support your fandom creatives, celebrate podficcers and support AO3. We created this place and it’s our responsibility to keep it alive and thriving for as long as we possibly can.

Also FUCK generative AI. It has NO place in fandom spaces.

THE 'SMALL' PRINT (some of it in all caps):

*Weitzman knew what he was doing and can NOT claim ignorance. One, it’s pretty basic kindergarten stuff that you don’t steal some other kid’s art project and present it as your own only to act surprised when they protest and then tell the victim that they should have told you sooner that they didn’t want their project stolen. And two, he was very careful never to list the IPs these fanworks were based on, so it’s clear he was at least familiar enough with the legalities to not get himself in hot water with corporate lawyers. Fucking over fans, though, he figured he could get away with that. 

**A note about the AI that Weitzman used to steal our work: it’s even greasier than it looks at first glance. It’s not just the method he used to lift works off AO3 and then regurgitate onto his own website and app. Looking beyond the untold horrors of his AI-generated cover ‘art’, in many cases these covers attempt to depict something from the fics in question that can’t be gleaned from their summaries alone. In addition, my fics (and I assume the others, as well) were listed with generated genres; tags that did not appear anywhere in or on my fic on AO3 and were sometimes scarily accurate and sometimes way off the mark. I remember You & Me & Holiday Wine had ‘found family’ (100% correct, but not tagged by me as such) and I believe The Shape of Soup was listed as, among others, ‘enemies to friends to lovers’ and ‘love triangle’ (both wildly inaccurate). Even worse, not all the fic listed (as authors on Reddit pointed out) came with their original summaries at all. Often the entire summary was AI-generated. All of these things make it very clear that it was an all-encompassing scrape—not only were our fics stolen, they were also fed word-for-word into the AI Weitzman used and then analyzed to suit Weitzman’s needs. This means our work was literally fed to this AI to basically do with whatever its other users want, including (one assumes) text generation. 

***Fan fiction appears to have been made (largely) inaccessible on word-stream at this time, but I’m hearing from several authors that their original, independently published work, which is listed at places like Kindle Unlimited, DOES still appear in word-stream’s search engine. This obviously hurts writers, especially independent ones, who depend on these works for income and, as a rule, don’t have a huge budget or a legal team with oceans of time to fight these battles for them. If you consider yourself an author in the broader sense, beyond merely existing online as a fandom author, beyond concerns that your own work is immediately at risk, DO NOT STOP MAKING NOISE ABOUT THIS.

PLEASE check my later versions of this post via my main page to make sure you have the latest version of this post before you reblog. All the information I’ve been able to gather is in my reblogs below, and it's frustrating to see the old version getting passed around, sending people on wild goose chases.

Thank you all so much!

[maaarine]

Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping? (Celeste Davis, Oct 6 2024)

"White flight is a term that describes how white people move out of neighborhoods when more people of color move in.

White flight is especially common when minority populations become the majority. That neighborhood then declines in value.

Male flight describes a similar phenomenon when large numbers of females enter a profession, group, hobby or industry—the men leave. That industry is then devalued.

Take veterinary school for example:

In 1969 almost all veterinary students were male at 89%.

By 1987, male enrollment was equal to female at 50%.

By 2009, male enrollment in veterinary schools had plummeted to 22.4%

A sociologist studying gender in veterinary schools, Dr. Anne Lincoln says that in an attempt to describe this drastic drop in male enrollment, many keep pointing to financial reasons like the debt-to-income ratio or the high cost of schooling.

But Lincoln’s research found that “men and women are equally affected by tuition and salaries.”

Her research shows that the reason fewer men are enrolling in veterinary school boils down to one factor: the number of women in the classroom.

For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied.

One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition! (…)

Since males had dominated these professions for centuries, you would think they would leave slowly, hesitantly or maybe linger at 40%, 35%, 30%, but that’s not what happens.

Once the tipping point reaches majority female- the men flee. And boy do they flee!

It’s a slippery slope. When the number of women hits 60% the men who are there make a swift exit and other men stop joining.

Morty Schapiro, economist and former president of Northwestern University has noticed this trend when studying college enrollment numbers across universities:

“There’s a cliff you fall off once you become 60/40 female/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.”

Now we’ve reached that 60% point of no return for colleges.

As we’ve seen with teachers, nurses and interior design, once an institution is majority female, the public perception of its value plummets.

Scanning through Reddit and Quora threads, many men seem to be in agreement - college is stupid and unnecessary.

A waste of time and money. You’re much better off going into the trades, a tech boot camp or becoming an entrepreneur. No need for college. (…)

When mostly men went to college? Prestigious. Aspirational. Important.

Now that mostly women go to college? Unnecessary. De-valued. A bad choice. (…)

School is now feminine. College is feminine. And rule #1 if you want to safely navigate this world as a man? Avoid the feminine.

But we don’t seem to want to talk about that."