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lavenderek · 4 years ago

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fwiw i’m an A*3 volunteer - i do tag wrangling, actually - and i really do need to emphasise the fact that we are VOLUNTEERS, and there’s really nothing we can do when it comes to bigger issues re: the core of how the site runs and the values people feel it holds.

what i am really tired of is people assuming things about me because i’m a volunteer. people can be so ridiculously vitriolic - like that anon you got who was immediately at you like ‘SO YOU’RE FINE WITH CHILD ABUSE?’ is a perfect example of what i mean. no, i’m not, but i honestly do appreciate a rare space online that is *relatively* unmoderated - which is NOT to say it isn’t completely unmoderated. like you said, there are so many cultural aspects to even simple tags, and as a tag wrangler, you’re ‘trained’ on that. that’s just tag wrangling - i’m sure higher up volunteer positions also take the time and care to educate volunteers correctly on how to manage their roles.

again, though, there is fundamentally very little us volunteers can do for parts people might disagree with. we come from all walks of life and there are so many roles and we all only have so much time. fact is, the website is the way it and it’s unlikely to change beyond perhaps adding more ‘social media’ type functions, like blocking people. if you feel that there is content that is inappropriate or commenters that are inappropriate or whatever, you can report it directly to the people running the website (which i’ve personally done before for an extreme underage fic about a real life - albeit of-age - person), and i obviously didn’t check back to see if it had been removed, but i assume it was dealt with because i genuinely do have faith in the moderators. anyway, just some insight as someone who works with the site.

hey! thanks for the info actually this is really interesting. sorry about the delayed response, i saved it as a draft to come back to it later and then i got busy at work and forgot

while you're here, you mind if i ask you some questions? feel free not to answer, you're not obligated

i separated it into sections because i’m what? longwinded and easily confused

1. can this happen (has questions for you in it)

it's my understanding that the big uproar vis a vis CP fic on a*3 is more that a*3 is inadvertently creating a space where p*dophiles feel safe and can establish a following, in turn allowing them to normalize what they're doing and gain access to potential victims.

tldr, it's less "this is inappropriate" and more "the person who made this is dangerous." like, if the person who wrote that nasty fic you reported had a whole profile full of similar content and was gaining a following from it, that would be concerning.

is the overall effect a user has something that you all take into account when you're going through content on the site, or are you instructed to take the specific piece of content at face value?

and, do you think that's something it's possible to address by moderators? regardless of whether or not it’ll actually happen, do you think that is possible on this system?

and, even more optional than the other questions, if that was possible, what do you think that would look like?

2. what is the process like on your end (has questions for you in it)

just for my own curiosity, how much leeway do you as a volunteer have over whether a fic should be reported?

is it up to your own judgment or is there like a rubric or something?

and what happens if the moderators decide that yeah, this fic can't be up anymore, do they remove the fic or kill the user's profile or what?

what happens if you report something, and the moderators decide it’s fine? does that reflect on you in their eyes?

how often do you report fic?

3. clarification of motive (does not have questions for you in it, now i’m just talking)

like i hear you that you, personally, Anon J. Wranglerton, don't have control over the site itself. the topic of CP and abuse is touchy and wigs people out because it sort of self perpetuates.

it's like that anecdote that went viral a few years ago where a bartender explained that allowing one polite n*zi into the bar leads very quickly into lots of n*zis being in the bar. people want the n*zis removed from the bar.

i'm sorry people accuse you of being an abuse apologist because of that, i think the idea that people wouldn't really see abuse as a concern is like, actually horrifying to them lmao and i can't necessarily blame them for that in and of itself

4. if i see where they’re coming from then what’s my problem (does not have questions for you in it, now i’m just talking)

i guess i don't share that reaction because disgusting content online isn't anything new for me. i accidentally came across it all the time when i was a kid going online. i nearly fell victim to an actual predator when i was 12 or 13. thankfully, once he asked me for more personal information i was able to get scared and see some red flags. (or if he wasn’t a predator then i should probably go and find my chat room boyfriend Oukami who explained “yiffing” to me and told me to send him pictures of myself so he could make me a wolf fursona)

from my perspective, the a*3 debate looks like this: predators are a concept that is deeply embedded in every corner of the internet, and very suddenly, people are very up in arms about a very specific website having predators on it. it’s like if all of a sudden people were like, “there are customers at Target who yell at the employees. if you still shop at Target, unfollow me.”

like, yeah, you’re right, and that’s bad, but why Target specifically, and why now, you know?

i think predators should be made to feel extremely unsafe in fandom spaces lmao, but i also think that’s something that can only be tackled socially. playing whack-a-mole with predators is a tale as old as time.

5. online predators (does not have questions for you in it, now i’m just talking)

this is just me talking out of my ass, but my theory is that a huge component in kids today getting caught up by predators online is that the concept of anonymity and fear of strangers online has some holes in it on here.

first of all, people just a couple years younger than i am grew up on social media. that was the entire online landscape ever since myspace.

influencers use their real names and faces, and they have millions of followers and are treated like celebrities. a lot of these social networks make it extremely difficult to hide your identity at all. you sign in to youtube with your google account, which is linked to your phone and all your other accounts. instagram, twitter, facebook, and tumblr can all be connected, and a few of those apps encourage it and will interrupt you posting to be like “do you want to also put this on twitter, Firstname Lastname?” no, janet, i’m good. thank you though

this lends a certain amount of freedom to predators, because there is nothing stopping them from assessing somebody’s vulnerability and reaching out to them.

6. online predators in fandom spaces specifically (does not have questions for you in it, now i’m just talking)

i think the fandom space cultivated on tumblr has actively contributed to that.

look at all these blogs, they’ve got “about me” descriptions with their name, their age, a blurb about their interests, their gender identity, their romantic/sexual preferences, sometimes their fuckin myers-briggs designation. this is all expected behavior on tumblr.

it starts as a sort of “this is my blog, here’s what i’m about,” and is compounded by like, “NTs can reblog this post but don’t say anything stupid,” or “minors DNI, how old are you,” like, you have to kind of verify that you’re “allowed,” in a sense, to participate in some conversations or interact with some posts.

i think there’s merit in both of those things, blogs are for self expression and for interacting with likeminded users; and i don’t think it’s “gatekeeping” to stop straighties from clowning on your post about queer issues.

but this has inadvertently created a sort of entitlement to private information. it also creates this false idea that because you and i have x and y in common, we can interact comfortably.

it’s crucial to remember that predators aren’t all scary white men who want to visit you at home. some of them are cool 20-somethings who just happen to be normalizing sexual content with children in it. and they genuinely don’t see what they’re doing as wrong. if they’re already your friend, and you see them saying shit about how they’re not hurting anybody, it’s just pretend, it’s just a kink, then you’re probably going to sympathize with them.

this isn’t to say, “stupid kids, they’re bringing this on themselves by oversharing to the wrong people,” because it’s neither kids’ fault nor unique to children. this kind of oversharing is taking place with all ages and kinds of people on tumblr.

this is to say, this is what this particular subculture has caused: healthy boundaries are kind of bulldozed to make room for a kind of disorganized sense of community and morality.

7. back to CP on a*3 (does not have questions for you in it, now i’m just talking)

i think this kind of “CP is disgusting and you’re disgusting for looking at it” shit is dangerous.

things this is NOT because of:

CP deserves a place online

It’s A Slippery Slope, What Will They Ban Next

um, kinkshaming

there is no point in even trying to get predators off a*3

i just think it’s completely unhelpful. it’s literally a waste of their time. they’re wasting their time and hurting themselves and others in the process. it’s lacking in nuance and perspective.

what we should be saying is “CP is a red flag. CP tells you something about the person posting it.”

we shouldn’t be asking “are you okay with child abuse,” we should be asking, “what does this content say about the person posting it? are they unsafe to have around? if i realize too late that they’re unsafe, who can i turn to?” those are the kinds of questions we should be asking if our goal really is to protect people.

what the collection of block lists of supposed abuse apologists says is this: “you have to choose between not having to police online behavior, and proving your morals to me, a complete fucking stranger. if your morals are lacking, you’re out, we don’t speak to you anymore, and we tell everyone who will listen that you are a bad person.”

not to delegitimize their concerns, but it’s fully just mccarthyism. like... that’s what mccarthyism was like. the fact that mccarthyism was bad isn’t even the point, it’s important to recall that mccarthyism did not work. it stopped happening for myriad reasons, one of which was that it was hurting people and wasting resources and doing absolutely nothing else.

i obviously don’t want to be labeled “anti-american pinko scum” and fired from my job and disallowed from my neighbor’s house. who would? they’re not actually weeding out anybody dangerous, they’re just rounding people up who are just as angry as they are or who are scared of them lmfao.

ever since that shitty post of mine went viral (which - “viral,” i guarantee it isn’t viral, i stopped looking at it literally that night) i’ve been terrified that one of these days i’m gonna like, comment on something and have the OP be like “wait a minute, you’re that bitch who made fun of some anti-a*3 people, unfollow me” lmfao. like, that’s what this rhetoric is accomplishing.

i’m not boohooing, i deserved a slap on the wrist for making rude comments. i’m just telling you the extent of the results they’re getting. they made me feel sad. so at least there’s that.

8. anti-a*3 people (has questions for anyone in it)

“fine, so we’re not trying to evangelize for not liking CP. so what? we don’t want people who like CP around. supporting that stuff is disgusting. we are blocking them for our own safety and don’t appreciate the tone police coming in and telling us it’s no big deal.” - an anti a*3 person, probably

yeah i mean, i get that. if i was really upset about something important and somebody told me “you’re right, but shut up about it,” i would also be pissed.

my question, though, is this: is the underage tag on a*3 the limit we want to place on our activism against predators online? at minimum, is yelling at and blocking people about it on tumblr making us feel safer?

and also: how are we going to define the things we are trying to get rid of? what is underage? how do we account for differences in culture? how do we account for nuance when we make broad judgments?

and also: who do we really hold responsible for this? who do we think is at fault and what do we want them to do?

i feel like we could all benefit from some perspective here.

9. back to you (has questions for you in it)

so like, is it fun? how’d you get the position? how long do you work typically?

do you talk directly with higher-ups or whatever? do you have coworkers?

do you have to read through lots of fic yourself or does stuff get reported to you and then you look at it?

what other stuff do you report content for, aside from abusive content? like i read a post saying people shouldn’t be advertising their paypal or whatever on their a*3, do you nip stuff like that in the bud or is that something else?

what if it’s just mistagged, presumably by human error not by a legitimate abuse of the system, what do you do? do you tag it for them or do you reach out to them and tell them to fix it or what?

who decided on the color scheme? can there be a skin that’s orange and avocado green? can you pass that on for whoever does the colors? i think i’d spend more time on any particular website if the color scheme was a nice, desaturated orange and avocado green.

nice

#haters #who is this even #anyway again PLEASE DO NOT REBLOG THIS

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criminalminds-hc-hq · 5 years ago

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Sweater Weather

Word Count: 1,408

Warnings: None that I can think of off the top of my head. Spencer and an OC go to a hockey game.

Author’s Note: I love Spencer Reid and hockey so I made this fic. I am so worried that either/both of them are going to come across as OOC, but if I keep editing it at this point I know they will. Please be kind as this is my first fic over 1,000 words.

Laura had only been dating Spencer for seven months but she had a pretty good feeling about him. He was so sweet and thoughtful. And that smile of his takes her breath away. His early Christmas present to her was a clear indication of how well he knew her already. There’s a knock on her door as she slips the sweater over her head. The excitement is bubbling over as she opens the door.

“You wore a jacket! Great,” she says while grabbing her wallet and keys. “I don’t know if you know this, but it can get pretty cold even if you aren’t in the lower bowl.” He stops her for a moment with a gentle kiss. She savors the feeling of his lips on hers for a second longer. “Hello,” Spencer says after they break apart. “And, yes, the ambient air temperature is typically between 50 and 60 degrees Fahrenheit while the ice temperature is around 24 degrees.”

“Let me guess...the NHL website? Or Wikipedia?” she laughs to herself at the fact that Spencer Reid studied for a hockey game. “Neither. There was a helpful blog where they told me what to wear. Though, it was supported by both.” Spencer takes a second to look her over before frowning. “Are you going to be warm enough though? A hockey jersey probably won’t cut it.” She looks down at the well loved Pittsburgh Penguins logo stitched and stained on the front of her sweater with a smile. “I have a hoodie underneath and I’m grabbing my jacket before we leave. Oh, and you do know they’re called sweaters, don’t you? Jeez what a newbie.”

At that Spencer starts to pull the concerned face she hates to see him wear whenever he’s nervous about doing something wrong. “I’m joking,” she clarifies and caresses his face softly. “Believe me if you wanted me to go watch chess with you I’d be just as lost. Probably more so.” Searching his eyes to make sure he knows that she has zero expectations of Spencer becoming a hockey expert, she asks, “so, are you ready to go?”

“Let’s go,” Spencer says with a smile and grabs her coat from the hook next to the door. “You’re probably going to be shouting that a lot tonight. Just remember: we’re rooting for the away team. Which means we probably aren’t going to be super popular tonight.” She locks up and follows him out toward what she expects will be her best Christmas present ever.

----------------------------

Spencer leads the way down the row to their seats while noting his girlfriend’s silence. She stares around in awe before finally breaking it. “I’ve never sat in the lower bowl before! This is awesome. You’re awesome,” she rambles before sitting down next to him. He chuckles and wraps his arm around her. “This is supposed to be one of the best places to sit according to the Internet. Apparently, if you sit too low you have trouble seeing what’s happening at the other end.” She bounces in her seat a little from her excitement.

“And you don’t mind getting here early for warm ups?” She had asked him about it when he called about his Christmas present on the way back from a case a few days ago. It was a tradition she picked up from her father when they used to go to games and it’s something that people who aren’t hockey fans didn’t seem to understand. “It’s your Christmas present,” he reminds her. “We’ll do whatever you want.” Her more reptilian brain as she likes to call it comes up with a quick response to that, but she pushes it to the back of her mind. Tonight was all about the hockey. Instead, she gives him a soft, quick peck on the lips knowing he isn’t a huge fan of PDA. “This has to be the best present I’ve ever gotten.”

The players take to the ice just as Reid begins giving her a better idea of the depth of the studying he put in on his way to her place. “Currently, Connor McDavid from the Edmonton Oilers is the points leader of the league with 55 points while the goal leader is David Pastrnak from the Boston Bruins with 26 goals,” he says as if this was information everyone should already know. “Is that how you say his name?” Laura asks about the Boston player. “I hate Boston. Almost as much as I hate the Caps. I really hope we win tonight.”

“They’re number one in the league, but according to the Penguin’s Twitter page you’re starting Tristan Jarry and he’s got both the best goals against average at 1.92 and the best save percentage at .938,” Spencer spouts off as if that’s not the hottest thing Laura’s ever heard him say. “I have never been more attracted to you than I am right now,” she deadpans. Spencer takes it for the joke it is and laughs loudly.

------------------------

The first period flies by pretty quickly and thankfully Spencer had looked up most of the rules before hand so she doesn’t have to explain many to him as the game progresses. But the darkside comes out to play when the referee (read: zebra) calls a penalty against one of her favorite players, Jake Guentzel, with 5 minutes left in the period.

“You call that hooking?! Your mother’s done more hooking than that, ref! What the fuck?!” she shouts unabashedly before remembering who she came with. Her cheeks redden as she turns to look at him with wide eyes. “Oh my god. I am so sorry,” she says quietly. “You know, I have seen you watch a game on television before,” Spencer says grinning at her with a gleam in his eye. “I know you get foul mouthed when you’re watching your team. None of this is a surprise.” Spencer leans over and kisses her warm and still red cheek. “I’m still a little sorry you had to see that,” she jokes before turning back to the game.

------------------------

For the first two periods of the game, the Penguins are losing, but as they are want to do they start making a comeback in the third. She spends more time jumping out of her seat for goals than in it. Spencer seems to be having a good time at the game despite him not being a big sports guy. With 2:25 left in the third, Guentzel gets a breakaway and goes high glove side and scores. Again, she jumps to her feet screaming like a banshee, but quickly quiets as she sits back down and grabs Spencer’s hand.

“What’s wrong?” he asks reading the look on her face. “In hockey, you can pull your goalie and put another attacker on towards the end of the game. Now that we’re up by one they’ll probably have Holtby do that so they can try to tie it up.” Laura nervously starts biting her lip.

The Capitals do just that and her grip on Spencer’s hand could not get any tighter. Nor could she be hanging on the edge of her seat any more than she already is. To her, the clock feels like it’s going twice as slow as normal. It looks like Ovechkin’s going to score until Reese steals the puck. With just 52 seconds left, he passes it to McCann who’s further up the ice and he scores an easy one on the empty net.

Laura drops Spencer’s hand in her excitement. She jumps up from her seat and shouts herself nearly hoarse. She was able to see her team win and she got to see it with Spencer. She truly feels like her night cannot get any better. Sitting back down at the puck drop, she turns to see Spencer with a giant smile on his face just staring at her. “I love you,” he says. He says it with confidence and without a trace of doubt in his voice. She feels like her heart is in her throat and feels her cheeks darkening for the second time that night. “I love you too,” she says just as the buzzer goes off for the end of the game.

As the Capitals fans start leaving, Spencer leans over and kisses her without his usual fear of PDA or a thought for anyone else. She was wrong. Her night could definitely get better than a hockey game.

#criminal minds #spencer reid #criminal minds hc hq #fic #spencer x OC #hockey #hockey fic #kind of #doctor Spencer reid #show hiatus equals writing time #please be nice #I am so freaking nervous about posting this one

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scanlonblogs · 5 years ago

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3 Methods of Handling Work-Related Mistakes

Everybody makes mistakes, but when mistakes are work-related people get beyond anxious. Nobody wants to perform poorly in their role nor do they want to be known as the one who makes mistakes. It is natural to feel this way, but being consumed by this fear is a different story. Inaccuracies are can and will occur but they neither define our abilities nor our work ethic. We need to remember this and calm ourselves down when feeling anxious over the errors made. Here are three methods of handling work-related mistakes.

1. Simplify The Problem

Most of the time, a mistake can be rectified quickly and easily. I have stressed over mistakes that were neither detrimental nor problematic numerous times. The next time a mistake is made, try and simplify it. Explain to yourself what the problem is, how it can be resolved, and whether or not it is worth stressing over. Chances are, the problem is not difficult to resolve and should not be the cause of any anxiety. If, however, the mistake is somewhat detrimental, this logic can still be applied. Simplifying the problem will give the chance to dissect the situation and create a plan of action. As a result, difficult problems become the end goal of accomplishing smaller resolutive goals.

2. Take Breaks

Work-related mistakes cannot always be resolved the same day they were made. As such, we should not overwhelm ourselves by trying to find a solution if we do not have the time to do so. However, if you find yourself in this position, remember to take a break. Too many people forget to take breaks while working due to various reasons. Whether the workload is light or heavy or the problem is large or small, breaks can calm the mind and allow the user to focus. If we do not stop looking at our computer screens, drink enough water, or eat breakfast, lunch, and/or dinner, our productivity decreases. This can lead to less focus as well as increased stress due to your inability to resolve the problem quickly. Ironically, this scenario is exactly what people try to avoid by focusing solely on fixing their mistakes and nothing else. Remember to take care of yourself and take your mind off of the problem for a little while. You will thank yourself after feeling better and now fixing the issue with a fresh pair of eyes. Sometimes all it takes is a few moments of peace to recharge an individual.

3. Ask for Help

Something as simple as asking for help can be easily overlooked. People either forget to ask, do not want to bother anybody with their problems, or are too embarrassed to tell others they made an error. There will come a time where a mistake is made and is too large for you to handle. When this occurs, do not feel the need to deal with it on your own. This just causes unnecessary stress. It can also lead to the problem not being resolved in a timely manner. Remember, everybody makes mistakes and needs help from time to time. Do not avoid asking for help and put more weight on your shoulders unnecessarily. Own up to your mistakes, ask for help, and resolve the issue. Better to fix the problem quickly than painstakingly.

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bettydgunter90 · 3 years ago

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111: How to Stay Out of Entrepreneurial Hell – Interview w/ Paul Moore

Today we’re talking with Paul Moore. Paul has found great success in multiple domains as an entrepreneur, including but not limited to the real estate investing business.

Paul has flipped over 50 homes and 25 high-end waterfront lots, appeared on HGTV’s House Hunters, rehabbed and managed rental properties, built a number of new homes, developed a subdivision, and started two successful online real estate marketing firms. After helping with three successful developments, including assisting with the development of a Hyatt hotel and a very successful multifamily project, Paul ventured into the commercial multifamily arena.

With decades of experience and an impressive resumé, Paul offers a fresh perspective on creative real estate investing and philanthropy in 2021.

Links and Resources

WellingsCapital.com (Paul’s Website)

How to Lose Money Podcast

The Fast (and Slow) Roadmap for Real Estate Investors

The One Things by Gary Keller

Who Was George Muller?

Malachi 3:10

Memos From the Head Office by Perry Marshall

Compassion International

World Vision

Anthropoid Film

Paperstac

Share Your Thoughts

Leave your thoughts about this episode on the REtipster forum!

Share this episode on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn (social sharing buttons below!)

Help out the show!

Leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts Your ratings and reviews really help (and I read each one).

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts

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Thanks again for listening!

Episode 111 Transcription

Seth: Hey, everybody. How’s it going? It’s Seth Williams here and Jaren Barnes and you’re listening to the REtipster podcast. Today we’re talking with Paul Moore. I first heard about Paul and saw his stuff, just some YouTube videos he had put together for BiggerPockets years ago. He has always just stood out as an authoritative guy who knows a lot of stuff.

Just a little bit of background about Paul. He began his career at Ford Motor Company after earning an MBA from Ohio State. And after five years of working at Ford, Paul started a staffing company with a partner. Paul and his partner sold it to a publicly traded firm five years later for $2.9 million. And along the way, Paul was a finalist for Ernst & Young Michigan Entrepreneur of the Year two years straight.

Paul later got into the real estate sector where he flipped over 50 homes and 25 high-end waterfront lots. He appeared on HGTV’s House Hunters. He has rehabbed and managed rental properties, built a number of new homes, developed a subdivision, and started two successful online real estate marketing firms.

After helping with three successful developments, including assisting with the development of a Hyatt hotel and a very successful multifamily project, Paul ventured into the commercial multifamily arena.

With decades of experience and an impressive resume, Paul offers a fresh perspective on creative real estate investing and philanthropy in 2021. Paul also is an experienced podcast guest, having appeared on over 60 shows and counting. And we’re just really glad to have him here. So, Paul, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Paul Moore: Hey, it’s great to be here, guys. Thanks for having me on.

Seth: I know we discovered a lot in that intro, but it almost makes you wonder just right off the bat with all the stuff you’ve done since… Was it like in the mid-nineties when you got into real estate and was that your first foray into real estate?

Paul Moore: I invested in commercial real estate passively in 1999, but I really started full-time into real estate in the year 2000.

Seth: With all of this stuff you’ve seen, all the different market changes, times when real estate has been in the tank and other times when real estate has been really hot, kind of like right now, what would you say are some of the lessons you’ve learned? Anything super important standout about how to handle yourself when the market is constantly changing and the rules are different from year to year?

Paul Moore: Yeah. One thing that stands out, it came from my bio and that is, I got tired and kind of bored listening to you read it. I actually used to think, I remember years ago, I’ve got this drawer in my desk where I keep all my business cards. And I’ve got business cards, I, unfortunately, don’t have one from the staffing company, but from over a dozen different things I’ve done since then, I thought I’m going to put a serial entrepreneur on the card. And another time I thought I’m going to put a full-time investor on it.

And you know what? Being a serial entrepreneur is not cool. And I’m sorry if I’m offending you guys or anybody else, it can be, Elon Musk has done it really well, but he hasn’t actually done marriage and parenting as well from what I’ve heard. At risk, as I told you before the show of the same thing, because when you’re always chasing two rabbits as Gary Keller quotes, then the one thing, you’ll probably catch neither one.

And I chased shiny objects for years, and I would be down the road with a startup and see a new opportunity and go turn my attention to that. And Barry, my business partner, who actually was in Indiana for many years and Michigan. And I know you guys both are from both those places. But Barry said, once he ran for governor of Colorado a few years ago, he said I rubbed shoulders with some billionaires and really successful people recently. He said the most successful people took Gary Keller’s advice and stayed on one thing for decades. And they became very, very good at it. And that might’ve even been boring or looked boring, but boring is cool.

In fact, I am thinking about writing a book called “The Boring Investor.” I’ve got 21 chapters outlined for it. And I started on a plane recently with this burst of inspiration. If you look at Warren Buffett’s life, guys, we couldn’t handle a week of his life. It’s so boring, seemingly. But Paul Samuelson, the first U.S. economist to win the Nobel peace prize said “Investing should be boring. It should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.”

Jaren: Yeah. I just recently watched an interview with Ramit Sethi. He was saying the same thing. He was being interviewed by Tom Bilyeu on Impact Theory. And he was asking him about finances and Bitcoin and all these hot items as it were. And he said the same thing. He said the reality is if the majority of the time, the large hedge fund companies and all these big wigs on Wall Street don’t end up beating the market, statistically, you would be better off just parking your money in an ETF or mutual fund that just matches the market. He says the exact same thing that your finances should be boring because they’re supposed to give you the resources to go live an amazing life. They themselves are not supposed to be the end all be all.

Paul Moore: Right. That’s so true.

Seth: Yeah. I don’t mean to take us off course, but I just put together a blog post. I actually did it several months ago, but it just got published last week. It’s all about the fast and slow roadmap for real estate investors. And it was based on this thing that I heard a really smart person tell me a few years ago. He told me that you make your money in your business and you preserve your money in the market, not the other way around.

Paul Moore: Oh, I love that.

Seth: Yeah. If you equate that to real estate, it’s like, if you want to get there quickly investing in passive “buy and hold” investments and that kind of thing, that’s not the fast way to get there. That is the boring way.

Paul Moore: As an entrepreneur, as this high-energy serial entrepreneur that became a full-time investor at age 34 when I sold my company, guys, I blew it. I blew it. I wanted to keep investing like I entrepreneured. I just made that word up. But anyway, the point is I guess I became an entrepreneurial investor and it was a big mistake and I lost a lot of money doing it. I mean, I’ve got a podcast called “How to Lose Money” after all.

Seth: Maybe you can explain what you mean by that. What exactly did you do wrong? Were you trying to flip properties fast or something? Let’s pick that apart.

Paul Moore: Yeah. I just chase things with little due diligence. I heard about a guy who was doing foreign exchange investing and he was able to make a 3% profit a month and he would keep a 1% and give 2% to his investors. And you know what? I did due diligence, but not much. I just trusted what another guy told me about and I invested $100,000. I actually went to see him in Charlotte to take him another $100,000. And I got this sinking gut feeling that something was very wrong. And so rather than do what I should have and pulled the $100,000 out, at least I didn’t put another $100,000 with him because a few weeks later the FBI raided him. And he’s now in year, I think, like 20 of his 158-year prison time. It was a Ponzi scheme and he still won’t tell people where he’s kept the $18 million that he stole from 2,000 to 4,000 people. I’m not clear how many.

But I just didn’t do enough due diligence. Investing is when your principal’s generally safe and you’ve got a chance to make a return. Speculating is when your principal is not at all safe and you’ve got a chance to make a big return. And either one is okay. I mean, it’s okay to speculate in Google, if you’re the Stanford professor 20 years ago or whatever. Or it’s okay to speculate in Amazon, if you’re Jeff Bezos’s parents 27 years ago, who turned $300,000 into $30 billion or whatever.

But let’s face it. There’s a lot of other people who speculate are now driving pizza for Domino’s. And so, the sure path to wealth is slow and boring. Jeff Bezos asked Warren Buffet, “Why doesn’t everybody just imitate you? It’s not that complicated.” Buffett said, “People don’t want to get rich that slowly.”

Jaren: Hey, Paul, I want to go back to a point of conversation we were having a minute ago, because you said something really interesting to me. You were talking about how you as an entrepreneur for years got the shiny object syndrome and you would be pursuing all these different opportunities that presented themselves.

One of the things that I struggle with a lot is the fear that if I give my “yes” to something, I inherently have to give my notes to a bunch of other things. You even said earlier that the guys that are billionaires, your partner Barry, was rubbing shoulders with billionaires and they just stuck to one thing and made it work.

The thing that I really struggle with is I always doubt if I am actually doing the right one thing. Because that is the million-dollar question. If I give my life to building set adventures and it’s not good soil, it’s not a good place to see, then I could legitimately ruin my entire life and waste my entire life or waste all my potential.

Do you have any insight or any wisdom that you could speak to in that kind of predicament? Because I think that’s where a lot of entrepreneurs struggle. Without me kind of catching the shiny object syndrome and doing a deep dive for a couple of months in apartment syndications, I would never learn whether or not it’s for me or not.

Paul Moore: Yeah. It’s so true. And I don’t have a great answer. I remember Gary Keller in the book “The ONE Thing” said, “Just saying yes to your one thing means saying no to a thousand distractions.” And I would say more like 10,000 distractions along the way. And that can be on an hourly basis, a monthly basis, a lifetime basis. And it is hard. And wouldn’t it be terrible to get to the end of your life and realize that you were acting in a play so to speak, but you didn’t know the plot.

That’s why I love to step back from my business. And in fact, I like to step back every morning when I get up and take some time to journal, to pray, to meditate, and to really remind myself of the plot of my life.

It’s interesting, Jaren. Like I said, we’ve had a show called “How to Lose Money” for four years. We had interviewed 230-some guests and we learned tons of lessons, but two that stood out, one was “Don’t quit, persevere.” Like all the posters on the walls of your office. “Persevere, never quit.” The frog grabbing the pelican by the throat, “Never give up.”

The other lesson we learned that stood out was “Quit quickly.” You got to know to turn it and cash in your chips soon. We interviewed lots of people who told us about ways they didn’t stop soon enough. And as a result, they lost a lot of money. We invested almost $400,000 in a wireless internet company in North Dakota that I co-founded after doing this super successful multifamily deal in North Dakota in the same town.

And about $100,000 into the burn of that $400,000, we should have pulled the plug. We could have given investors. And I was the largest investor, backed three-quarters of their money. But instead, we burned it out for about seven years and it turned into zero. And if we would have just pulled the plug on that, the first winter, when the radios didn’t work, we would have been a lot smarter.

So, I think both are true. The question is, how do you know if you’re on the right path that you need to keep persevering on or barking up the wrong tree, so to speak. And I think the answer partially comes from wisdom. wisdom of mentors, wisdom of counselors and coaches, but also your own wisdom that you gain over decades. And a lot of that comes from pain. And that’s why we called the show “How to lose money.” We tried to give people an opportunity to learn from other people’s pain.

Jaren: Yeah, that’s really insightful. It’s really hard to figure out, man, because I can be very certain on some days are even an hour of a particular day. And then a few hours later, something can derail me, and then I’ll be second-guessing the decisions that I’ve made. For me, I guess it’s a form of FOMO.

Paul Moore: It is.

Jaren: I don’t know when you should quit versus when you should double down, get gritty and go hard because there are people in ditches on both paths. So, I guess it’s just one of those entrepreneurial conundrums.

Paul Moore: It’s really tough. There was a guy named Lance Wallnau that you might’ve heard of. And Lance Wallnau has a thing where he talks about when all your education, training, successes, failures, strengths, weaknesses, the things you enjoy, the things that give you life versus the things that feel like you’re going to die to have to do it, when they all come together and you just have this moment of clarity, he calls it convergence, and you can find stuff like that on YouTube and on Lance Wallnau’s website. But convergence is when that all comes together. And when that happens, you often can tell, “Oh yeah, I’m in the zone of convergence.”

Unfortunately, he says a lot of people don’t come to that moment of clarity until their fifties or sixties. And so, eat right, stay healthy because if you are like me and didn’t really come to that moment of convergence until my mid-fifties, you’re going to have a long road ahead because hey man, I can never retire.

Seth: Yeah, totally. Paul, I know just from your bio, it sounds like you’ve got some experience with investing in vacant land. Since that’s a big part of our audience and there are a lot of them who are interested in that and I’m interested in this too, what is your experience with that? What kind of land did you buy and invest in and what was involved with that?

Paul Moore: Yeah. When we sold our company to another company in Detroit when I was 33 and 34, I moved to a mountaintop in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. We tried to start a nonprofit organization. Our neighbor had 450 acres and he was very, very old. And we asked him if he wanted to sell. And he said, yeah. So, we actually spent like $6,000 or $7,000 getting the timber evaluated without a written contract with him.

He basically said, okay, I’ll sell it to you for a thousand dollars an acre. This is mountaintop land. And that’s about right. And while the timber was worth a thousand dollars an acre, we found out that it was in a bad market in 2000. And so, we went down the row with him, but his wife caught wind of it and she shut the whole thing down. We didn’t have a signed contract. I wouldn’t have wanted to hold it to him anyway and cause marital strife, he was a friend of mine.

My son never forgot that. And actually about 15, 16 years later in 2016, he started in that business full-time. And actually, that’s what he does. He buys land that has a variety of uses. I mean, he can subdivide it. He can rent it out for hunting land. He can rent it out to a cell tower company. He can rent it out for solar. He can do carbon tax credits though we don’t know exactly how to do that yet. I know people do it and he can also cut timber. He just bought a 201-acre parcel. He’s going to select, cut the largest trees off, and let the rest grow for 25 more years. What a great retirement plan for a 28-year-old.

So, that’s my main involvement in land. The other would be I bought and flipped about 30 or 40 waterfront lots over the years at Smith Mountain Lake in Virginia. And one of them was a five-acre parcel that I had to subdivide to make work. Talk about speculation. We were counting on the market to continue to go. Well, of course, everybody does that in a sense, but we were also counting on the Vita Virginia department of transportation granting us a public road in front of the lot. No speculation there.

And after two or three years of trying to hope that would happen—hope is not a business strategy—and so, we were not able to make that happen. That almost got me to the point of bankruptcy in 2008, but I ended up actually going from $2.5 million in debt to completely debt-free through a series of amazing events that happened through the year of 2008.

Jaren: Do you mind diving into a little bit of that? That’s a major cliffhanger.

Paul Moore: Yeah. I told you, I do this morning meditation thing and it was a Sunday morning, in November of 2007. And I was sitting there one morning realizing, man, I’m $2.5 million dollars in debt. 10 years ago, to the month, I had almost $2 million in the bank and now I’m $2.5 million in debt. But I didn’t feel scared. And it’s kind of odd to me now that I didn’t. I guess it’s because I didn’t know how bad the 2008 recession would be. Of course, nobody did.

And so, we’re about to hurdle down this black hole called the great financial crisis. And I was sitting there and I had this really strong impression like “What would George Müller do?” Well, for those of you who don’t know George Müller, which is probably most of your audience, he lived through the 1800s. And he actually was a hellion in Germany as a young man. And he went to England and he became sort of a saint, so to speak. He actually housed and cared for 10,000 orphans total over his lifetime and beyond in these large orphanages he built, using the model they had at the time for orphanages.

He actually was able to raise what we believe was around a quarter-billion dollars in today’s dollars, possibly up to half a billion. And he never ever asked for a penny from anybody or told anybody he had a need. He actually just believed if he was fully aligned with God, that God would provide him every cent he needed. And apparently, he did.

So, I thought, “What would George Müller do?” Well, he was really opinionated. Like he didn’t believe in marketing and sales and all kinds of things. But he also didn’t believe in debt. And I thought, well, George Müller wouldn’t be in debt, but if he was, he would do something really crazy and outlandish to get out of debt. And so, actually that morning, the pastor of my church talked about George Müller and I’d never heard him mention his name ever in like 14 years. And so, I thought, okay, I’m on the right track. And so, I went to my family and four young kids and my wife and I said, “Hey, family gather around. We’re in a lot of trouble. We’re going to start giving our way out of debt.” And then I met with two concerned friends, me and two others. And they said, “You’re going to obviously have to declare bankruptcy, right Paul?” And I said, “Well, it would seem, but I’m going to start giving my way out of debt.” That went over really well.

On January 1st, 2008 with no idea how we’d get out of this mess, we started giving aggressively to some nonprofits, charities, et cetera we were committed to. Four weeks later, I was in a Subway restaurant and had this random conversation seemingly with an experienced real estate developer who gave me an idea how to subdivide the five acres of land into five one-acre parcels, which was my goal all along.

And I said that won’t work because of this law. He said, well, think about it. And I have this incredible moment, like, “Oh, I know what to do.” And I got out of the Subway restaurant, called my surveyor, and explained it. He thought it was a terrible idea because he said that law prohibits you. And I said let’s go to the county planning and zoning office anyway. So, two days later we’re sitting there and he’s sitting there like embarrassed while I’m presenting this outlandish plan to use their law that prohibited subdividing to subdivide the land.

And the lady looked up at me and shook her head. She said “I’ve been working here for decades. No one has ever come up with such an outlandish plan, but you somehow found a loophole in the law. You’re right. You can do this.” And I still had a lot of work ahead. I had surveyors and attorneys and soil scientists. I had to find five buyers in the midst of the worst downturn since the great depression. But I did, it happened and I was completely debt-free in 13 months.

Jaren: That is awesome.

Seth: Wow. Maybe I missed it when you were talking, but in terms of giving your way out of debt, what else was involved with that? Were you giving to a certain cause or something beyond that?

Paul Moore: No, I guess I really believe and people all around the world, believe in what some people call karma. Some people call it the law of sowing and reaping. I was just giving, believing that that would actually matter. I didn’t know what would happen. I thought we could have ended up broke and bankrupt. And for some reason, I didn’t lose any sleep over that. I didn’t think we would, but I thought we might.

Oh, and I forgot to tell you. Right in the middle of all that, my business partner quit. He had half the debt and he handed it to me. And if he hadn’t quit, I couldn’t have become debt-free because when I sold those lots, I would have split the profit with him. And I told him, I’m going to figure this out. And he said, I got to quit anyway. And he missed out on some profit, but anyway, that’s what happened.

I just really believe that the universe, God, whatever you want to call it, will all align when we give generously. And when we give of our time, when we sacrifice money and somehow or another, things come to us that wouldn’t have come otherwise. George Müller believed that. And I tell you what, I do too. And I don’t think it’s a magic formula though. I don’t think I can just put a dollar in like a vending machine and get a soda pop out of a machine. I don’t think it’s a vending machine, I think it is just a principle that’s generally true.

Seth: Yeah. There is a Biblical basis for that. And all the atheist and agnostic listeners out there are probably going to roll their eyes at this. But Malachi 3:10 says ��Bring all the tithes into the storehouse so there will be enough food in my temple. And if you do, I will open the windows of heaven for you. I will pour out a blessing so great that you won’t have enough room to take it in. Try it and put me to the test.”

God is actually challenging you. Like, see if I don’t come through for you. I think there is something to that. There’ve been a few times in my life. I wouldn’t say I was recklessly giving, but I intentionally gave to the point of inconvenience, like it hurt me to do so. It never stayed a negative thing. I don’t know where it comes from, but somehow you end up further ahead. And I think it probably has to do with giving with a cheerful heart and that kind of thing. But there is something to that. At least that has been my experience and I haven’t heard a lot of people who have done that and it hasn’t worked out for them.

Paul Moore: I know. And Seth, I’ll tell you. Actually, I shared this on a podcast a few months ago and the host said, check this out. And he showed me a study, I think it was a Catholic guy in New York. University of Syracuse did a study on this and proved that people who gave generously actually ended up wealthier. And they actually dove in deep because it didn’t make sense to him. He didn’t believe the results. He dove in deeper and pulled it apart and figured out “why”, some reasons why it could be true. And for anybody who’s listening, if you want to hear that message he gave about, it’s a short message, 35 minutes. He gave it at Brigham Young University. And I want to say 2009.

Seth: Yeah, it’s fascinating.

Jaren: It’s interesting how in life the principles of success are universal and sometimes they’re counterintuitive, but people from all different walks and all different stripes and colors and backgrounds and all of that, they all typically stumble across some version of the financial, like the tithing principle or whatever. It’s really, really interesting that even if you have no faith in God whatsoever, if you do this kingdom principle, it works and it works across the board.

Paul Moore: It’s true. AA – Alcoholics Anonymous, those principles work for people who have no faith at all. I will say that I think that there are probably deeper, longer-lasting and work better for people who really do have faith, but they do work. It’s amazing, it’s just like gravity. It works for everybody.

Jaren: Yeah. I like that. Paul, you’ve mentioned a couple of times about meditating and that’s really piqued my interest because if I’m honest, I don’t know what meditation is or what’s supposed to happen when you sit down and try to meditate. And I would love just some insight as to what your meditation practice looks like, if you have any pointers. I know that there’s a lot of diversity and all of that in wanting practices and what have you. And I’ve tried to do, there’s a really ancient type of Christian meditation called the Jesus prayer. And I’ve tried to do that and I’ve tried to do some other things, but I don’t know exactly what is supposed to be happening when I’m sitting there for 20 minutes or whatever. Can you dive into what that looks like for you and why you find it beneficial? I mean, if you’re committed to doing it every day, that’s a pretty big deal.

Paul Moore: Yeah. I’m going to show some weakness here. I don’t know what I really know. In an experiential way, the best way to do it, I sort of call it meditation. Well, I will say this. There is a form of Eastern meditation, which I’ve heard though I haven’t experienced it. It is emptying your mind of all thoughts. And I think that they’re the Western form or the Christian form would honestly be to fill my mind with thoughts, to set my gaze on heaven, and to set my gaze. I mentioned earlier, getting to the end of your life and not understanding the plot of the story. Just reading the lines as you went and not getting it.

Well, in this way in meditation, I’m actually reframing myself every day to remember the bigger story. To remember that I’m not here just to make money or succeed in business. That I’ve got kids who need me. That I’ve got people I’m mentoring who really need time with me. And though I’m tempted to work till midnight tonight, I really do need to stop at dinner time and do these other things.

So, it’s reframing practically. I’ll tell you that my meditation looks like this. It looks like having the scriptures out and having a blank piece of page on a journal and just starting to write thoughts. And sometimes those random thoughts end up with some kind of brilliance that I wouldn’t have come to otherwise. For me, my mind is racing so fast with business ideas almost all the time, I would say.

This is my own theory. No one’s ever told me this, but when I’m writing, I feel like the effort that my brain must use to write actually somehow opens up a channel for me to actually hear from my inner brain. Maybe tapping into a comment that I heard on a podcast once or a book, a paragraph of a book I read, or a scripture. I feel like when I’m writing, I get ideas that I cannot even believe sometimes how brilliant they are. And then I remember that I heard that somewhere, but I wouldn’t have remembered it otherwise.

Jaren: Yeah. That’s really interesting. I don’t know if you’re familiar with a guy named Perry Marshall.

Paul Moore: Perry and I are friends. I love Perry and I’ve got his book right over here.

Jaren: Yeah. He just came out with a book called “Memos from the Head Office.” And I actually was at one of his seminars, and he was sharing how he actually got an academic published article for the 80/20 principle in Italy. And he actually in his journaling practice, wrote down verbatim 80/20 academic articles coming out published. It’s going to be published, like all this stuff. And he actually read it and he’s like, this happened, I don’t know what the timeline was, but let’s just say for sake of examples, like six months or a year before it was even on the radar. And so, he actually has gotten a lot of insights. This new book that he just came out with, it’s probably worth dropping in the show notes, Seth.

Paul Moore: I absolutely agree. “Memos from the Head Office,” I’ve got stories of my own like that as well, including the time I tried to invest in a deal and I got a fax. I kid you not. A fax from somebody advertising something that made me want to call the number, a fax. I kid you not. And I called the guy and it turned out he knew the guy I was going to invest with that day. And he told me he was a scam artist. And I found out later he was a scam. It was true. He was a scammer.

Because I called the guy before I wired him the money. I said, “Hey, one more question.” And I asked him and he practically hung up on me because it was true. Can you imagine that talk about a memo from the head office?

But Perry’s book, I’m looking at it here, I’m guessing it’s about 190 pages. I think it’s just shy of 200 pages and it’s full of stories like that. That is absolutely impossible to explain apart from supernatural intervention.

Seth: I got to check that out, it sounds fascinating.

Jaren: What’s really interesting about Perry’s world is that he’s not exclusively Christian. I’ve been to “Memos of the Head Office” and it was really fascinating because you have people that are getting memos from the head office that have no grid for God or are completely agnostic or whatever. And they go to these things and they get radically touched and they get life-altering words from the head office.

Paul Moore: What’s amazing about that is God actually cares about everybody. He cares about people. He cares about our civilization being better. I mean, I believe he probably gave Elon Musk his ideas, even if Elon Musk has no regard for him, from what I’ve heard. It makes sense because he cares. He really does.

Jaren: Yeah, he does.

Seth: Yeah. Paul, just to turn it a little bit and pivot into a different thing. Before we started recording here you mentioned something about how you’re using real estate to fight human trafficking. That sounds really interesting. How are you doing that? What is the connection there and how can real estate be used to end that?

Paul Moore: About six years ago, someone put in my hands a copy of a documentary called Nefarious from Exodus Cry and it shocked me. And what I learned was that human trafficking is a reality, a horrible reality in our world today. Did you know if you took the record profits, not the average, the record profits from General Motors, Nike, Starbucks, and Apple combined—their record profits together, triple that number, that’s the approximate revenue they believe is generated by human trafficking every year?

I thought about it and I thought man, if I were alive in the 1800s, I want to believe I would be abolitionists fighting against slavery like William Wilberforce. And I’d want to believe if I were an adult in the 1960s, I would have been fighting for civil rights. And while this is a civil right, it is slavery and it’s happening right under our nose. And so, our company Wellings Capital does our very best to vet. The best operators to give people an easy on-ramp into commercial real estate investing.

Well, we thought, wouldn’t it be great if we could vet the best non-profits and other organizations who are effectively fighting human trafficking? And so, we’re doing that right now. In fact, I’ve got an interview with a guy today about this and we’re vetting these organizations. Our goal is in a very short time to be able to tell investors, hey, you invested with us and we’re taking money out of our pocket from your investment to invest to free one slave. And we hope to be calling you within three to six months with the story of the raid that freed a slave and what’s her status right now, typically in Cambodia or Thailand or Belize or wherever. And then we’re going to give our investors a chance to get more involved if they choose to.

Jaren: That’s awesome.

Seth: Isn’t it that a lot of that human trafficking happen in the U.S.?

Paul Moore: Yeah, it really is.

Seth: I don’t know. I mean, I don’t fully grasp all of that, but from what I know of it, it’s some sick stuff. Just talk about the rotten parts of humanity and evil inflicted upon each other. It’s messed up. I don’t know how anybody who is involved with that in any way can live with themselves, but anything that can be done to fight that is worthwhile.

Paul Moore: It’s absolutely true. I’ve seen the devastating effects firsthand of people in my family who had one or two incidents in their past, and just the years and even decades it’s caused devastation in their lives. Some of these people, including a girl I heard about the other day, who was 17, I don’t even want to say the words on the show, but she had over a hundred incidents a day, for years, she claims. And she was rescued from New York City. It’s just unimaginable the torment and what she’s going to need to heal.

Jaren: It’s really inspirational to hear how you’ve been able to use your path in business and in real estate to make a social impact like that. Because for me, maybe it’s a matter of the season that I’m in or what have you, but it’s tough because you see a lot of injustice in the world and it’s really easy to just kind of default to “I don’t have any control over these things. I can’t really do anything.” But I always tell myself when I’m in those moments, well, if I doubled down and I become ultra-successful financially, then I’ll be in the position where I can actually do something about some of this catastrophe and evil things that happen in the world. And it’s just really inspirational. This side of the conversation, to see that you actually have done that. And it’s pretty awesome. So, thank you for what you’re doing and thanks for sharing.

Paul Moore: Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. That’s very kind of you. I would say that everybody can get involved at some level in some way, wherever they are.

Seth: I remember talking to my dad about that once. Just this idea of if I want to make an impact on the world of how I want my business to be more about me just making money and then I live my life and I die and it’s all over. If I really want to make that impact, one way to think of that is, well, someday in the future, when I have money, when I’ve gotten there, then I’ll start going nuts and doing that. My dad was just encouraging me to “No, do it now and do it then. Do it before you’re ready. Make sure you go out of your way to make a difference for every day that you’re alive. Any day could be your last. So, don’t let your life end without doing something meaningful like that.”

And it’s not really that hard. There are all kinds of organizations, world vision, compassion, you can sponsor kids. It’s not so much about ending human trafficking, but just about taking people in hopeless situations and giving them a chance. And it’s not that expensive. It’s kind of amazing what you can do to change a life through just giving $40 or less per month to that kind of cause. Pick something and make a difference and don’t wait on it.

Paul Moore: Yeah, I agree. That’s a good word right there.

Seth: I know something that a lot of real estate investors are going to have to be thinking about, and probably they always did, but even more so now with a lot of money being pumped into the system from the government is inflation. How do you use real estate as a hedge against inflation? What is just the general principle that you adhere to in terms of making sure that your money is protected through real estate?

Paul Moore: Yeah. I heard for years that real estate was a great inflation hedge, but I really didn’t think it through, until it started hitting again recently. This is a $10 trillion bill from Zimbabwe. And I don’t think the United States is going to go into that type of hyperinflation. I think there’s a lot of reasons we won’t, but obviously inflation is heating up and a lot of us believe it’s worse than the government is reporting.

It’s an amazing moment in history though, guys. When I was a kid, I remember gas lines in the 70s and grandparents and neighbors having their savings account and pensions ravaged. Somebody who got a pension check that would cover two months’ rent, now it only covers half a month. And that was real.

Well, at the same time as inflation in the late 70s and through the 70s and into the 80s, interest rates were often very, very high to match. And that was done intentionally. Well, we’re in a time where inflation is heating up, but the Fed and the government are boxed into a corner where they can’t raise interest rates very high. And so, interest rates are at roughly 5,000-year low. Yep. There’s actually studies on this 5,000-year low, but inflation is heating up.

The opportunity to buy 10- or 12- or even 30-year fixed debt at like 3% for a commercial loan right now, for a mobile home park we just invested in and then see inflation increase rents and therefore revenue over the next decade or two or three, it’s creating a huge potential as a hedge against inflation and a huge potential to actually increase wealth and to at least keep up or beat inflation along the way.

Seth: Yeah. Basically, you just don’t want to hold too much cash. That is kind of the bottom line. It’s going to rapidly lose value as long as it’s in cash form versus real estate or something else that’s going up in value to beat inflation.

Paul Moore: That’s right. But the problem is, as we all know, it’s really, really hard to find deals that make sense right now in multifamily with people paying 10%, 20%, even 30% more than the sensible value of an asset. Residential, single-family, not much better. And so we’ve got to really figure out a way or partner with people who have an inside track on deals that have a lot of meat on the bone, a lot of value add left in them, or it’s going to be really, really tough to make a profit unless inflation does keep up and inflates away the risk, if you will. Which is possible.

Jaren: Yeah. That’s one of the reasons why I’m super thankful for the land flipping business. I hear from my wholesaler friends that do houses and I hear from people from a number of different types of strategies and what have you, that it’s just really, really, really tough. But in land, I’m sure in some areas, some counties, competition might be increasing or whatever, but it’s still very predictable and very feasible to get deals. Property does take a little bit longer to sell compared to some other asset classes, but it’s pretty awesome.

Paul Moore: Yeah. I don’t think there’s a better time I’ve ever seen to be in the land business because you’ve still got people who are sitting on inherited land or whatever, that it’s just a pain to them and they just love to get rid of it. At the same time, the demand for semi-rural and rural land is just off the charts. So, what a great time to be in the land business.

Jaren: Yeah, it’s really interesting because my primary market is Florida. And you just described to the T the exact situation of the Florida market, you have a bunch of people that have land out there, or have even property out there that was a secondary home, or it was intended for that, but life got in the way and they’re just wanting to get rid of it. But at the same time, you have this huge influx of people moving there. So, it’s just this weird discrepancy that is pretty easy to capitalize on.

Paul Moore: Yeah, that’s awesome.

Seth: Paul, I don’t know if you fancy yourself an expert who makes predictions about market trends and that kind of stuff, but do you think it’s going to get back to normal or whatever that is anytime soon? Or do you think this is going to continue throughout 2022? Do you have any insights on the next year or two on where things are going?

Paul Moore: Yeah. I was reading Howard Mark’s “Mastering the Market Cycle: Getting the Odds on Your Side” and also some stuff from Buffet. They refuse to make predictions, but they actually say it’s more important to behave rationally for where you can see that you are in the cycle. So, that’s my first goal is just to behave rationally for where we are, where we seem to be in the cycle.

That said, I don’t necessarily think things are going to go back to normal anytime soon. I was actually sitting in an airport in Belize, a tiny little airport getting ready to go to the real estate guys summit on sand recently. And the guy sitting next to me, I can just tell he looks smarter, successful, or something.

So, I started talking to him, it turned out it was Doug Duncan, the chief economist of Fannie Mae. And I said, “What do you really believe?” He said, “I really believe what I publish. That we’re going to see inflation of 5.5% or so this year, and back down to like 3.8% next year.” And I said, “Why do you think so low?” And he’s like, Paul. He actually didn’t say Paul. He didn’t know my name. He said, “3.8% is really, really high.” I said, “Really?” He said, “Yeah, that’s double the Fed’s target.” He reminded me of 1.9% or so he said 3.8 it’s double. He said, “That is really, really high. And I think that’s where it’ll go.” And he gave me all these reasons.

But he did say that the housing market, since 2014, he’s been crying out that there was a massive housing shortage and a growing discrepancy between the number of people wanting to buy houses and the actual number of houses. And that would include multifamily and all that as well. And so, he said, he thinks the building boom is going to go on for years, which makes me think that the inflated prices of lumber and other construction materials and construction, labor, and all that is going to continue for years as well.

Jaren: Yeah. I got a buddy who works more in the Wall Street world and he has his ear to the ground of what’s going on. He’s kind of at the forefront of the moving trends. I mean, that’s what he gets paid to do is figure out where to make people money and all that. And he says something really similar. He says there are some things that could sideswipe what his prediction is, but by and large, he thinks that the data is showing that we actually are going to be doing well for the next seven to eight-plus years. And there might be a reckoning that happens. History might be repeating itself. We might be sitting in a situation with COVID where it’s parallel to the Spanish flu or whatever. And we had the roaring 20s and then we had the great depression in 1928.

Paul Moore: It’s the roaring 20s again. Right?

Jaren: Yeah. I mean, that might be the situation. Who knows though? Who knows?

Seth: Do you ever find it frustrating Paul when you got to relearn the rules? I find it frustrating sometimes because when I first jumped into real estate seriously, it was the 2008 crash. And that was kind of a world I got to know originally where everything is cheap. No, you can’t sell real estate. It’s hard. And now it’s the total opposite and you got to just relearn what normal is and what normal prices are and competition and all this stuff.

Given how much you’ve seen in your history, is it easy for you to see the opportunity when things change, or do you get frustrated where you’re like, “Ah, man, I got to relearn all this stuff all over again”? What is your thought process there?

Paul Moore: Well, I think that that has been true overall for me over the last 20 years or so, or actually I could even say 29 years of being an entrepreneur. But actually, I think we’ve tapped into a formula that has worked really, really well. And I feel like it is sort of recession-resistant.

My company is actually investing with companies who have a long track record as in before the great recession of finding mom and pop deals. It’s sort of like what you’re doing with land. Finding mom-and-pop-owned deals where the current owner doesn’t have the desire or the knowledge or the resources to improve the income and therefore significantly improve the value.

And of course, with commercial real estate, the value is not based on emotions. It’s based on math. It’s based on a simple formula, which is sort of like the PE ratio in stocks. The value or the value change is the net operating income divided by the rate of return. So, the net income is divided by the cap rate.

And therefore, because it’s based on math, these operators are really skilled at finding opportunities where the net operating income is significantly under what it could be. Sort of like what Warren Buffet saw in Apple, when it was trading for $28 a share. And he started snatching it en masse in 2015 I believe even though he didn’t like investing in technology and he made a fortune for his investors.

While we’re doing something a little similar, we’re investing with these operators who were able to see intrinsic value where other people would just see a worn-out-looking mobile home park. Because of that, we think we’ve tapped into something that is going to do well in almost any economic cycle. For that reason, I can tell you pretty confidently that’s the track I plan to stay on for the rest of the foreseeable future.

Seth: Gotcha.

Jaren: That’s a good place to be.

Seth: Yeah. I know we haven’t gotten into a lot of the nitty-gritty of your past, like all the different projects. I’m sure we could talk for several hours about all that stuff. But when you look at everything you’ve done and everything you’ve seen, is there anything that stands out to you like, “I never should have done that. That was a bad idea. I shouldn’t have gone down that road.” And if so, what would that be and why?

Paul Moore: How many hours do we have again?

Seth: We’ll have to do a part two on that.

Paul Moore: Yeah. How to lose money again and again with Paul Moore. There were a lot of things like that. A lot of them were based on times when I didn’t do thorough due diligence. I invested based on a friend’s recommendation who I really trusted, but found out that they didn’t do enough due diligence or maybe the due diligence was done and somebody just didn’t figure out something.

Like I mentioned, the Bakken oil in North Dakota. Listen, the guy we invested with should have been as wealthy as Bill Gates right now. And I mean that literally. He had come up with a way to tap into oil reserves that nobody else had figured out yet. And that’s a fact. I have a petroleum engineering degree. It doesn’t mean I can correctly evaluate that, but that was my original degree.

I understood what they were talking about. It made total sense. He hits six out of six oil wells, these massive untapped oil reserves. Six out of six with some of the money, a bunch of us put up and he never produced a gallon of oil because it turned the tar somehow in the pipe in the 10,500 feet between below ground and the surface.

So, you never know. The due diligence was right on that one and it just didn’t work out. It had to be viewed as speculation, no matter how certain it looked. And geologists to this day say he hit it right on the nose. He did come up with some special way of doing it.

Sometimes it’s not that. Sometimes it’s just the fact that you’re out of your game. I used to try to talk to investors like these private equity firms. This was like years and years ago, building a multifamily in North Dakota over a decade ago. And they’d say, “Well, we’re not into multifamily. – Yeah, but can you see this opportunity? – Yeah. But that’s just not something we know about. We like to stay in our lane.”

Well, here I am, 11 years later, guys. I so believe in that. I know a guy right now doing an Airbnb play. He’s making a killing. He wanted me to invest with him. I believe you, but I just don’t know much about that. And I don’t want to go have to learn. People need to stay in their lane.

Jaren: But again, going back to my question at the beginning of our conversation. If you take that approach, you are inherently missing an opportunity. I guess if your current opportunity is good enough to make it worthwhile to double down and say, focus on that then cool. But for a lot of people that are just getting started in their pursuit of financial freedom, or what have you, they’re just starting their real estate journey, or investing journey, financial education. Really for those in the beginning stages to some degree, it’s like this Catch-22 thing, stay focused and stay in your lane. But on the other side, you also have to be exposed to know what your one thing is or should be.

Paul Moore: I totally agree. And the FOMO thing has been a plague for me since high school, the fear of missing out. I remember in high school, like this 12-string guitar, I got to have that one. I can’t wait until another one comes along. And I remember blowing my whole summer savings to buy that 12-string guitar.

It’s been a continual problem for me and I’ve had to learn to be disciplined. And one of the ways I did that was I brought on a business partner who was almost the extreme opposite for me. He’s very unemotional. He’s very rational. He bugs me and I say that with the dearest respect for him. Because I’ll go in with “You won’t believe what I have found.” He’ll be like, “Yeah, I will.” And I’m like, “Okay, thanks.”

But it’s really good for me because by submitting to him and by both of us mutually submitting to each other, it saves a lot of rabbit trails that I would be tempted to run down. And he also is pulled into a lot of things that are things that he would not have ever looked at. Like he didn’t want to look at self-storage and mobile home parks when we were deeply entrenched in multifamily for years. But you know what? That has been the best thing we ever did.

Jaren: Yeah. It seems like you just have to ride that tension where it’s like, I like that you have a partner that can come from the other side because then you can bring the new ideas and the opportunity and then he can shut down 90% of them and then ride the ones that are worth writing about. I like that. But when you don’t have a partner like that, it can be pretty hard to navigate those waters.

Paul Moore: I agree. When I was solo, and sometimes I’ve partnered with people who have my exact same personality. It was a lot harder.

Seth: Yeah. I can see that. Well, looking at the clock here, why don’t we navigate to our final three questions here? Paul, what we do here is at the end of a lot of our interviews like this, we go one step further beyond just real estate stuff and ask three little bit deeper questions about you and just how you think, how you operate. It just kind of gives us some more insight into your brain.

Paul Moore: Awesome.

Seth: The first question is what is your biggest fear?

Paul Moore: Amazingly Seth, when I had my back up against the wall and had $2.5 million dollars in debt, I don’t remember losing a bit of sleep over that, but I have lost sleep over the way my wife and I treat each other. And I fear that I’ll never be the husband and father that I know I’m called to be.

I’ve seen clearly what that looks like. I saw it in my dad, I’ve seen it in others and I am jealous of that. I fear that whether it’s through working too many hours, being distracted, chasing shiny objects in my personal life, whatever it is, I fear that at the end of my life, I will have not made the deep imprint on them as is evidenced by how hopefully their adult kids are going, how they’re doing. I fear that I won’t have been all I should have been in that realm. I think that’s my biggest fear.

I guess second to that would be a similar thought. And that would be that when I leave this earth, I won’t have left a history-making imprint on it. Even if it’s only with a handful of people, I want to make a difference in people’s lives.

Seth: Yeah. And difference meaning what exactly? What would you consider a good enough difference?

Paul Moore: Yeah. I just started a mentoring role at my church with six or seven other leaders. So, I’m going to be mentoring them. They are millennials, which I love. And they’re actually leaders of small groups. And those groups typically have anywhere from 6 to 12 or 15 people in them. And so, I want to leave a deep impression on them. I want to be somebody who role models being kind to the waiter or waitress, having a smile on my face when the bank account is almost empty. And not that that’s happening regularly, but it could.

I’m looking at a country that’s not the same country I grew up in, guys. I don’t know what’s going to happen next, but it doesn’t look super positive from my point of view. And I want to be somebody who boldly and bravely stands up for what I believe and doesn’t collapse in that. I just saw an amazing movie called “Anthropoid.” It’s not well-known. It should be. It’s the story of some heroes in the Czech Republic who stood up against Hitler. In the movie, the most poignant moment was when they quoted Shakespeare, I believe who was quoting Julius Caesar saying “A coward dies a thousand deaths; a hero or a brave man dies but once.”

Seth: Yeah, I know what you mean.

Jaren: I would bet money that Paul’s Enneagram is type three.

Paul Moore: It’s funny. My business partner in my former business, in the staffing company and he’s actually involved in our company Wellings Capital now. He’s an Enneagram three. I have a very good friend who’s in Enneagram three, but I can’t remember if I’m six or seven. I think I’m seven wings six, if that helps.

Jaren: Yeah. It’s just interesting. The way you are talking, it’s like you’re reading my heart. My internal dialogue and the things that I think about and value, I have the same fears.

Seth: Yeah. For sure.

Jaren: Paul, what is something that you’re most proud of?

Paul Moore: It’s so funny how similar this is going to be to the first question in my answer, I guess. And that is that even though my wife and I made a lot of mistakes in our marriage over 34 years, we have a strong marriage. And even though we made a lot of mistakes in child-raising over 28 years, 28 down to 16, four kids, they’re all doing well. And so, I’m really proud of those things. And even though my kids can readily tell me some of the mistakes we all made, me really, when they were younger, we still have a great relationship. And I just got off the phone with a friend a few hours ago who is agonizing. I would’ve said that his wife and he are better parents than us, but for some reason, their kids are really, really struggling in ways that I don’t understand. And so, I guess that would be it.

Seth: Cool. Yeah, that is something to be proud of for sure. What is the most important lesson you’ve ever learned?

Paul Moore: I think from a business point of view, it’s what I said earlier. I’m going to go back and highlight again, and that is the difference between investing and speculating. And the fact that true investing should not be entrepreneurial, it should be more on the boring side. And I think that’s most important for me, and there are so many others, of course. But that one just stands out because it has made a major difference in my investing and in my finances. And since I do a lot of podcasts, a lot of blogging, hopefully it’s helped a few other people along the way as well.

I’ll tell you, I learned that mainly from Warren Buffet. I’m actually writing a book called “Warren Buffett’s Rules for Real Estate Investors.” And I learned that concept mainly from him.

Seth: That is interesting because you never really know the future, even when you’ve done all your due diligence and you know everything front and back, you’re never a hundred percent. So, where do you think the line is between, “Okay, you’re officially speculating now”? How would you define that?

Paul Moore: If things go south, you could literally lose your money. Okay, sure. I get that that’s true. I get that Apple could go bankrupt tomorrow. It probably won’t, but General Motors. That’s one aspect of it. But I have another one that I think is a little easier to get my arms around.

And this is a little bit of a long answer, but what is true wealth? Well, true wealth is having assets that produce income. And if you have assets that produce income in a reliable way and you don’t over-leverage them, then you have true wealth. Well, I would say that the line between speculating investing is just as simple as whether it produces reliable predictable cash flow or not.

Bitcoin. I’m not against it at all, I have some. But Bitcoin doesn’t produce any reliable, predictable income. It doesn’t have any income at all unless you invest it in those certain types of ways where it somehow produces interest. So, I would say that that’s where my speculation line is, and that’s why I love commercial real estate and real estate in general.

Seth: Cool. Well, Paul, again, thanks a lot for coming to the show. It’s been awesome to talk to you and get to know you a little bit better. Hopefully, we can connect at some point in the future again. If people want to find out more about you, where should they go? What should they do?

Paul Moore: Yeah, they can go to wellingscapital.com. And I spent years, guys, trying to figure out how to get from residential into commercial real estate. And so, now I created a 60-page guide for people who want to do the same. You can get that at wellingscapital.com/resources.

Seth: We’re going to include the links to that and Paul’s website and his podcast and his books and a lot of other stuff we talked about in this conversation at retipster.com/111 because this is episode 111. So, Paul, thanks again. I appreciate you. And I wish you all the best with the stuff you’re working on and hopefully, our audience will become new raving fans to all the stuff you get.

Paul Moore: Awesome. Guys, it was really an honor to be here. Thanks, Seth. Thanks, Jaren.

Seth: All right, folks. There, you have it. That was an interview with Paul Moore. Did you have any closing thoughts on that, Jaren?

Jaren: To be honest, when I read the bio coming into the podcast today, I was like, “Oh, this is going to be just another one of those kinds of run-of-the-mill large apartment syndication kind of guys”, but he was a breath of fresh air for sure.

Seth: Yeah. It seems like there were a lot of different directions we could have gone with that. We didn’t even really get much into the land investing stuff that he or his son had done because they were just a lot of ground to cover there, but it sounds like the guy’s a wealth of information and hopefully, we can stay in touch with him in the future. Do you want to do one of our closing questions here?

Jaren: Let’s do it.

Seth: What is something that people think makes them look cool, but actually makes them look ridiculous? I guess this is probably like a fashion trend thing maybe. Maybe it’s not limited to that.

Jaren: Yeah. I don’t know. My brain just went to being braggadocious. That is where my brain went. Because you run into it a lot in the real estate world where people are just like, “Yeah, I’m the greatest thing ever.” And I think they do it to try and raise their level of the pecking order or whatever, but to me, and maybe I’m just weird and I’m like, I’m not a part of that pecking order or whatever. I just don’t operate in it. But to me, I see what they’re trying to do and I’m just like, “Dude, just calm down.”

Seth: Yeah. I have to agree with that. I don’t know if it’s like an insecurity thing. Like I better really come out quick and prove how awesome I am or people are going to dismiss me. I don’t know what the thought process is or if it’s like, “I just want to feel and look amazing. And so, I’m going to find anything I can and just make myself look as good as I can.”

There’s a book Lucas Hall recommended to us way back when we interviewed him called “How to Lie with Statistics.” It’s basically about how you can make anything sound amazing if you just focus on one metric and ignore the rest. For example, a person could say “I’ve done like 20,000 deals” or something, but they’ve lost money on all of them.

So, let’s not talk about that. Let’s just talk about the number that sounds good. And even when it’s not about numbers, but just kind of like the arrogant tone or just trying to come across as like, “Oh, I’m amazing. You’re lucky you’re getting to talk to me right now.” That kind of thing. There is a lot of that in the real estate world.

Jaren: I don’t know what fuels it, man. Maybe they don’t really have high self-esteem so they’re trying to overcompensate or something. I don’t know. I’ve just never understood it. I have vivid memories of getting started in real estate and talking to other investors and them like verbally walking over me or like putting me down or whatever, again, in the whole like pecking order thing. And I just never played the game. I don’t know what fuels it. I mean, I guess it’s kind of the same question that fuels bullying. It’s kind of a similar energy or vibe.

Seth: Sometimes I feel that too. I don’t really know how much it matters what people think about. I don’t know, money I’ve made on a deal or how many deals I’ve done or whatever. Whatever you want to tie your value to. Sometimes I feel like I need to say something to prove that just to earn reputation points in people’s brains and maybe that’s completely illogical thinking. But I’d be the first to admit, I get the pressure. I understand why people do it.

Jaren: Well, I think it depends. There is a degree where you have to let people know that you know what you’re talking about and that you are reliable and that you have a track record. But you don’t have to do it in a way where I’m like, I’m the center of attention and I’m the greatest thing ever. And I’m better than you. Some of the conversations are they are sizing you up. How many deals have you done? I remember going to some conferences with you and some of the conversations that I’d be having are weird. What investing do you do? How much money do you make? How many deals are you doing? I’m like, “Dude, my favorite color is blue. I like long walks on the beach. Let’s get to know each other before we jump in and all of that.”

Seth: Yeah. I almost feel like it takes pressure off just mentally for me, if I can just get it out there that I’m not the best. You’re probably better than me or let’s just frame it up that way so we can just establish that. I can stop comparing myself to you immediately. And maybe it’ll come out at some point that maybe I’ve done something that impresses them. And it’s just kind of like a nice little surprise, but I don’t like to lead with that. Sometimes I feel like I have to. And I don’t know if that’s flawed thinking or if that is like what you’re saying. I think there is a point where you need to establish that you are credible on some level. But I think beyond that, it’s kind of just like flexing your muscles and trying to feel more special than you are or something. It’s something that bugs me and I don’t fully have it figured out in my own mind, but I know when I see it and I don’t love it when I see that.

Jaren: These days, whenever I run into it, I’ll just egg them on. So, if they start talking like, “Oh my gosh, bro, you did that? You are so amazing. Oh my gosh, that’s so awesome.” I will be like super over the top and I don’t know if they get that I’ve been over the top, but it’s fun in my head.

Seth: Yeah, I hear you, man. I guess that wraps it up then. If you guys want to check out the show notes, again, retipster.com/111 and you can see a lot of notes and links to the stuff we talked about.

And again, if you guys are listening on your phones, feel free to take out your phones and text the word “FREE” to the number 33777 and you can stay up to date on all the stuff we got going on at REtipster. Thanks again for listening. We’ll talk to you again soon.

The post 111: How to Stay Out of Entrepreneurial Hell – Interview w/ Paul Moore appeared first on REtipster.

from Real Estate Tips https://retipster.com/111-paul-moore/

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jackcliu · 4 years ago

Text

On tokens, markets, and a path to a real-time economy

Two years ago on March 1, 2019, I posted a Letter to my future self to the Bitcoin blockchain. This is the story of that letter, one where I didn’t write a word, and how two years later, the dream is still alive. There is an actual path with tokens and markets to make utopia a reality, and my case for what that might look like.   

About a month prior to March 1, 2019, I had privately begun telling my close friends, colleagues, and family that I was going to be making a significant career and life change and dedicate the next chapter of my career towards building exclusively for the Bitcoin SV blockchain. You can guess the confused looks and concerns people had about what it was I was doing. Did I lose my mind? To be fair, I still get those messages today. I knew what I had envisioned when I first read the white paper back in 2013 and somewhere along that journey, the crypto industry had taken a path that veered dramatically from the one I had imagined. With Bitcoin having course corrected twice already via hard forks, I wanted and needed a guiding compass - a North Star. That’s when I had the idea to write a letter to my future self.

I confided in one of my best friends, Jackie to help me write it. It was a busy month for me, my mind was all over the place and I needed help. Over two afternoons, I shared with Jackie what I wanted to say, what was the possible world that I imagined. To her I must have been repeating myself since she and many of my friends had heard this for a decade. The future would bring Proof of Work from a term to describe a computer science thing to one that would describe the workings of the entire global economy and drive a seismic shift in how value was created and how we humans would interact and cooperate with one another. I wanted her to include a thank you to some people who helped me along the way - titans of the industry whom I was fortunate to cross paths and work with. Jesse Powell, gave me my first job at Kraken. CZ hired me to OKCoin in 2014. Star believed in me and gave me so many growth opportunities. At Circle, I worked with my long time friend Dan, who would go on to create CMS. A few days later, Jackie sent me a draft. I was pretty shocked at first, thinking hey this doesn’t even say Bitcoin in it. Where are all the names I wanted to include. Then I read it another time and when she asked if I wanted any changes or if the approach was right, I said, “Let’s not change a single word”. It was different, it was exceptional, to me it was perfect. I sent the letter internally as part of my Circle resignation email, flew off to San Antonio with my parents to watch the retirement ceremony of my favourite basketball player Manu Ginobili, and then a month later on April Fools Day, RelayX was launched.

Having this Letter out there has served me well. Nobody could have expected the course of events of the past two years both within BitCoin, and the world at large. Politics, COVID-19, money-printing, delistings, court cases, you name it. Without it as an anchor, I might have lost sight of the bigger picture. If you would have asked me then what BitCoin would look like today, I would have predicted a 100x rosier picture than the current situation. Despite most of the boom in the cryptocurrency industry having not occurred on the Bitcoin SV blockchain, the rapid adoption of blockchain and digital currencies from NFTs to DeFi, to institutions putting BTC on the balance sheet shows the underlying movement is in full force. Just this week, I watched sharpshooter JJ Redick utter the words “non fungible token, and blockchain technology” on his podcast talking about NBA Topshot. That’s incredible.

In the letter are the words - “Your world will be frictionless and marked by truth, freedom and fairness. Your world will truly be one that is defined by human imagination and honest work.”

I am making the case for tokens as the critical solution to a real-time economy. I want to break the spell of the narrow definition of tokens that has bounded the Bitcoin SV ecosystem. For much of the past two years, there appears to be two camps in BSV when it comes to tokens. The dominant one being we want only regulated tokens, security tokens, tokens backed by real assets, with real utility, that real businesses and enterprises can use to make their businesses more efficient. The other, perhaps out of jealousy for what’s going on in other blockchains being let’s just port those Ethereum ERC20’s over and let it run wild for it might pump the BSV price! Funny thing is neither has happened as developers are busy debating whether tokens should be on layer 0 or layer 1 or layer 100 but that’s a topic for another day. Both views are myopic.   

Tokens are going to be a much bigger deal on BitCoin than anyone might imagine.   How many websites are there on the internet? I looked it up recently and the answer is 1.7Bn. How many token contracts are there on the Ethereum chain? The answer is 350,000.   

Websites are kind of hard to set up - you have to purchase a domain name, at least use a website template creator, and there isn’t that much use for getting one for the average person. Not when you can have an Instagram page, a Facebook account, a Twitter handle, a Medium blog without having your own site. Yet there are 1.7Bn of them! Ethereum tokens are prohibitively expensive mining fee wise to generate. Out of interest, I asked one of the devs who minted the original USDC contract during my days at Circle to find the transaction. It cost 0.44 ETH. At today’s prices that’s well over $500 to create a token. Yet there are 350,000 contracts!  

I would wager there will be over 100Bn unique tokens on BitCoin and I’d guess higher but I don’t want to be outside the bounds of the very Overton window I’m creating.

It takes a few seconds to issue a token on BitCoin and at current mining fees, less than a tenth of a cent to issue. If I’m a store owner, I might issue a different gift card a week for the various deals I have going on. If I’m an artist, a different NFT for each piece of artwork. Neither the store owner nor the artist needs more than one website and you start to see the math.

If reading this, you still think tokens are going to be contained to some narrow definition of ‘security’ tokens, or NASDAQ like tokens, or fiat currency tokens, realise it’s like saying the internet will only have The New York Times or CNN or some licensed officially approved site. It’s ok if not every account on Instagram is world class photography. Not every Twitter account is going to be insightful (that’s clear) and that’s ok. In a world of 100Bn unique tokens, You bet there’s going to be a great deal of useless ones and a pretty large number of scams. Just like there are websites that are phishing for your passwords, websites with illegal content, and websites with viruses in them. Over time, services emerged to protect you by blocking, or warning you about potentially dangerous websites.

What’s the bigger picture and what do tokens have to do with a real-time economy? I’ve made the case for there being a ton of tokens. Does that mean it’s just going to be a Coinmarketcap with a lot more pages? An exchange with a lot more trading pairs? No, a lot more exciting than that.

A world with 100Bn tokens means every single asset, service, good, company, project, video, post and many more abstract things than one can imagine is going to have a dynamic, live price. It’s not about the tokens, it’s about the markets. Today, you visit a restaurant and you check Yelp to see if has a good review. BSV entrepreneurs are making some new review site but with reviews posted on the blockchain thinking this is the problem that needs solving. “Immutable reviews”. Much more valuable than a review or immutable review however is if this particular restaurant’s loyalty token is trading at a premium to the other one next door. There’s actually money on the line. Then after eating, instead of being a foodie with a blog and an Instagram to hype up such restaurant, if you’ve got that talent for knowing what’s going to be the next hot restaurant, you can just buy on the open market more of the restaurant’s tokens. Yes, a local foodie just became an crypto trader. Now you profit when you promote the restaurant on your blog. The chef who started that restaurant instead of using Groupon to attract an initial set of customers who have no loyalty to you, can instead issue 10,000 tokens, where each dish costs 100 tokens. Pretty soon if your food is delicious, those token prices are going to jump. Think Global, Live Local is not just going to do good, it’s going to now make you rich.  

 I grew up in a lower middle class first generation immigrant family. I remember being a teenager in those years where oil prices were very volatile as the world approached the idea of “Peak Oil”. We would sometimes drive by a gas station one day where prices were a few cents cheaper than the day before, and even though the tank was half full, we filled up. Other days, the warning light would be on, but we held off for another day to fill up the tank in hopes prices would come down. Is this speculation on oil prices bad? Another fun memory I had was going grocery shopping with my folks and my favourite cookies were the Chip Ahoy Crunchy chocolate. Eating those with milk is probably half the reason for my height. Once in a while they would be on sale but next to them were the No-Name brand versions of the same cookies. Chip Ahoys were definitely better but were they $2/100grams better? No. We would calculate every time to decide which we would buy. Is this speculation on cookie price bad? How come other goods and services in the economy didn’t fluctuate in price? That’s what’s always fascinated me. I knew they would if they could. With Bitcoin, it was possible.

Tokens on Bitcoin with the perpetual scaling design of Bitcoin where it isn’t the holder that’s rewarded (Proof of Stake) but rather those contributing to scaling the network (Proof of Work) will lead to the formation of markets where markets were too inefficient to exist - unlocking trillions of value in the process.   

A fully tokenised economy makes everything efficient, fair, honest, and real-time. I don’t mean efficient like fast transactions or cheap mining fees. It’s the economy that will be efficient. You won’t need to be a big grocery chain or a big oil company or big tech company with financial analysts, and big data and machine learning folks in order to know what to set the price of a Chips Ahoy or a Gallon of oil or surge pricing on a taxi ride. It’ll be orders of magnitudes better than that and for every person on earth because it’s all going to be open, issuable, transferable, tradeable. You won’t be checking page 978,950 of Coinmarketcap. You won’t be scrolling to AHOY/USDT on an exchange. I predict all of this will happen without you realising that it did and all our lives will improve as a result.

For those who immediately think of the regulatory ramifications of this, I’ve thought the same. In 2015, while leading OKCoin, I led our initiative to become the first international benefactors of Coin Center - the industry body working with regulators and governments. I am a minority seed round investor in Chainalysis which looks for criminal activity onchain. I look forward to working with all those who would like to embrace innovation while having an eye on ensuring an orderly, legal transition to this future.

I could not be more excited to support the emerging token projects on BitCoin, through building products, investment, advice, or even in spirit.   Bitcoin is plumbing - just plumbing where billions of trades and speculation down to the satoshi will be happening every second.

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treadmilltreats · 5 years ago

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60% of people lie on social media

During this pandemic I've noticed that there have been many suicides, so many people cannot face what is going on. Depression has gotten to so many people who already felt hopeless to begin with. Many times, with many people, we don't see it coming because no one talks about the issues of their lives. We look at Robin Williams. Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain and we think they had perfect lives and yet they all took their own lives.

They were all in pain and they never spoke of it, see we only see what people want us to see and most of it is lies.

I just read an article that said 60% of people lie on social media...Yes...60%, I was shocked. I figured yes, some people lie but 60%? That is a lot of bullshit out there.

I get it, on social media you can make up the life you want to have, you can appear to be richer, you can elude having a bigger house, having the perfect family, and being extremely happy.

I know when it comes to dating there is a lot of lying going on there. The statistics are definitely higher and I'll bet they didn't include that in their count, I can tell you that for sure.

In dating they lie about their age, their weight, their height, their hair. I laugh because for some men being in shape means, like a round shape. Working out means getting up and down from the couch to the fridge for more beer. And then there's the pictures from 10 years ago or just head shots...please, let me not go there!

Yes, I know for a fact more than 60% lie on dating sites. But that must have been another survey, all in itself.

Look, I know all about lying on social media, I was one of those people. I put up pictures of my "happy" family, ohhh look here we are with all our toys…

How sweet, look at all our stuff. Look at our fancy vacations, to this perfect place or that amazing place...ohhh.. aren't we just the perfect family?

When in reality my life was a hot frigging mess. I hated him, he was horrible to me and my kids were afraid of him, I hated my life. Every night I cried in my bathtub with wine and sleeping pills just to survive, but if you looked at me or saw my social media page, we were the perfect family. Please, I needed to get the Oscar for my performance...Yes, I was definitely one of the 60%.

So why did I lie? I had a big ego, I didn't want anyone to know how bad I screwed up, how I picked yet another bad one. How I moved 1500 miles, leaving everything for a man I knew nothing about. I liked the big life, showing off...look at what I got. See, I wasn't going to be stuck in that hick town with nothing, I had something to prove, or so I thought.

But as we grow and learn, we realize that the truth will set you free...well apparently I did, maybe just not quite the other 60%. It's so much better not to lie, to live real, to be your true self and it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks.

I am no longer worried about the skeletons in my closet, I let them out, there is nothing to hide and that is an amazing feeling.

Like me or not, I don't really care, you do not pay my bills.

Yes, I can raise my hand and admit that I screwed up more times than I have fingers and toes… and that's okay.

Yes, I've fallen on my face in front of the whole world...so?

Yes, I've picked the losers time and time again...and your point is?? I am human, I've made many mistakes but I am no longer afraid of the truth.

Look we've all been there and done stuff we may not be proud of and you're lying if you say no you haven't. I now chose my own my shit, to find the lesson in it, to put it out for the world to see, and to hopefully teach others lessons from my mistakes. I lived so many years in the shadows, in the dark, worrying about people finding out my truth for too long and that will never happen again!

So today my friends ask yourself are you part of the 60%?

and if you're truthful (Even just to yourself) ask yourself why?

What are you afraid of?

So what if people knew? Are they going to leave? If they do then they weren't ever really there for you to begin with.

Are you worried that you'll lose face? So what in 2 months no one will remember or care.

Is it that your real life isn't as great as your social media life?

Obviously neither is 60% of people, so you're not alone.

Let it go, live in your real life, let the skeletons out...it doesn't have to be Halloween to do so.

Free yourself, learn from your mistakes, help others come out of their closets, except others for their truths. It will blow your mind how freeing it is...live your authentic life, don't be one of the 60% of people lying on social media.

"Be the change you want to see"

"And just when the caterpillar thought his life over...he turned into a beautiful butterfly"

**Now released my latest book**

The Blessing in Disguise.... revealed

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***Now available***

My 1st book The blessing in Disguise

Selling on my website

Http://www.treadmilltreats.com

And on Amazon.com

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dirtycoolcatconfessions · 7 years ago

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COOL CAT DVD PACKAGE FULL ANALYSIS

As some of you may know, as a birthday present I have finally received the Cool Cat movie from a friend of mine. Seeing as I am the self-proclaimed front-runner of the ironic Cool Cat fandom, I feel it is my duty to provide you all with my full analysis of all that comes with this monstrosity, so strap in fellas, this is gonna be a long one.

Here's an image of the full package:

Alright, let's start off with the "Thank you for your purchase" type paper.

Right off the bat, let me say that every paper (bar the "poster", though that one is still preeeetty bad, though I'll analyze that when we get to it) is literally just standard-fare 8.5x11 printer paper. Now, let's start from the top. It says "Cool Cat Productions" as opposed to Derek Savage Productions, what he listed in the movie from what I can remember, so that's pretty strange. To the sides you can see two horrendous pictures of the cartoon form of Cool Cat, which both look like they were drawn in different art styles, with the one on the right for some reason reminding me of some kind of old 2D Chuck E. Cheese drawing, and the other on the right appears to be crying out in pain with weirdly-detailed clothes, a curly pig-like tail, and looking like a failed attempt at perspective. After that it lists the website, (nothing new here) and the email, which uses Yahoo, which I find fairly unsurprising.

Another thing I love which shows just how much love and care (sorry, "love" and "care") Derek puts into his products is the fact that it doesn't even specify what you ordered, (in addition, the fact that it lists "bookS", since Derek doesn't even have the Cool Cat books for sale, and the Cool Cat Stops Bullying book comes with every purchase of the DVD, and soundtrack, of which they don't sell at all, though I believe Derek stated something about wanting to sell it in the future) which really lets you know that Cool Cat Loves You in particular and cares who You are as a person. (The capitalization is really weird throughout the paper, especially when listing the various products you could have bought, really lending to the "Copy-paste" feel of the whole thing, and the Cool Cat Loves You part somehow evokes a ™ without one even being there.) Further down it asks you to print out free "Cool Cat Loves You" posters (instead of just saying Cool Cat posters, for whatever reason) which is strange for a vast number of reasons. First of all, the poster section of the website is NO LONGER ON THE WEBSITE, and second of all, using the Wayback Machine to go back to an instance when there was shows that the 11x17 "poster" is identical to the poster received in the movie package, which makes you wonder why you would want a second one.

(One fun thing to note about this image is the fact that promises that Cool Cat greeting and birthday cards are "Coming Soon!" which I feel really shows you just how much commitment Derek has towards his projects.)

Back to the original paper, we reach the bottom third of the page, we have Derek begging you to tell everyone you know about Cool Cat so that they know it's time to cut off all ties with you, followed by a call to follow the official twitter @CoolCatLovesYou, officially confirming that that twitter is indeed the real one, fucking weird and not-so as it may seem. Then there are a number of images of potential merchandise you can buy, mainly consisting of the horrendously drawn books that Derek isn't even selling because he's "still looking for a publisher." (Yeah, he couldn't get anyone to publish his books, what a fucking surprise, right? In addition, upon incredibly close inspection of these low-res images, I found that they don't even list the "Illustrated by" that's shown on the Cool Cat Stops Bullying book that came with the movie, since Derek wasn't actually the one who drew this shit. And it's not because it was only on the Cool Cat Stops Bullying book, since among the books on here IS that exact book, sans the "Illustrated by" like all others on the page. I just found that interesting.) Finally, reaching the very bottom of the FIRST ARTICLE OF LIKE 6 (told you it was gonna be a long one) we have a reminder to visit Cool Cat online for Game"s" (There's only one game on the Cool Cat page, "Cool Cat's Fun MatchGame") "Cartoons" (Neither of the two cartoons are accessible from the current page anymore) and More! (Which if by more you mean continuous self-advertising, shitty web design, and child-unfriendly content that can be easily clicked to from the page.)

Alright so, the next article, well, honestly I'm not sure what to call this one. It's got two sides, so let's start with the side I'll probably spend less time on.

Alright, so I guess this side is some kind of info paper? Still not sure what to refer to it as. If you notice at the top it lists the quote that's on the cover, "Cool Cat is Cooler than Barney the Dinosaur!" and I would like to bring to attention the fact that the quote is attributed to Ben Daka, the producer of Cool Cat Loves You, which helps in making the quote seem as incredibly unbiased as possible. (Also yeah, the fact that someone actually produced this steaming pile of dogshit surprises me likely just as much as it might you.) It proceeds to list the summary of the movie, saying what kinds of movies it is, etc. etc. etc. It also lists that it "Includes FOUR Original Cool Cat Songs" however as someone who has watched the movie before online when it was on Youtube for a brief day or two before getting taken down, I can say that there are only two that actually play in the movie proper, "Cool Cat Boogie" and "Cool Cat Loves To Rock", while one is only in the movie as an instrumental while the actual lyrics are only in the DVD menu from what I can remember ("Cool Cat is My Best Friend") and the other only plays during the credits, and is just the song from the now-defunct Cool Cat "cartoon" ("Cool Cat is Cool") however the one in the credits does have an instrumental track behind it, but I'm too lazy to find somewhere you can find that version at the moment.

Moving on, we have the "STARRING" portion of the page, in which it lists Vivica A. Fox and Erik Estrada despite their 2-3 minute appearances. In addition, if read from right to left, then it technically lists Vivica first, and even if you do read it from center outwards, the way it was likely intended, it still has Derek listed where you would most likely begin reading instead of Cool Cat, which I feel really shows off his vanity.

After that, we have the imperative ">Get Your COOL CAT Today<" which makes it sound like some kind of cat adoption poster or something. After that there's the blatant lie of "We Appreciate Your Business" followed by a statement saying that discounts for schools, libraries, and stores are available, which honestly makes me wonder if there are any places that even carry the movie that aren't online. Also it's kinda weird that they'd have that on one of the papers that comes with the movie. Does Derek expect people to be so blown away by their movie that they just have to bring this flyer to stores and shit so that others can feel the joy of the movie? I don't fucking know this entire analysis is just me talking to myself and probably pointing out shit you could have noticed yourself, but hey if that's not what the blog itself is I don't know what is. Anywho, another fun thing to note is the fact that according to the flyer, the runtime of the movie is 75 minutes, which actually makes it debatable as to whether or not it could actually be considered a film. Final thing to note of this side is that I was indeed correct in my previous assumption that the movie was supposedly made by "a Derek Savage Productions" as opposed to the "Cool Cat Productions" stated on the earlier paper, which is weird.

Anywho, next side of the paper, let's go.

Now this side, this side infuriates me to no end. It's pretty much one glorified advertisement for the movie you already purchased. To save on time, I think I'll probably speed through this one tbh since the last time I wrote this thing it took me like 4 hours and it mainly consisted of pointing out every little thing on the page, so I'll just give the main things. First of all, why the fuck would you advertise your own movie in the flyer that comes with the fucking movie??? In addition, why does it advertise the books? As I previously established, the books aren't for sale, since Derek's still looking for a publisher. After that, it states that there are Cool Cat eBooks, which I'm pretty sure there aren't any, and they wouldn't even need a publisher I don't think. Also, just to point out, Derek actually managed to misspell merchandise as "MERCHINDISE" at the very top.

The movie also claims to be a "DOVE AWARD" winner. After some research (I.E. one single google search) I found that the "Dove Award" is actually an award given to exceptional Christian music, so unless the soulful ballad of "COOL CAT IS COOOOOOL" won one of those, I find it highly doubtful that its correct. Next to it, you can see a logo with the words "FAMILY APPROVED" and "ALL AGES". This is the "award" Derek was actually talking about, which is really just an organization that makes sure that movies are family friendly, which sure is a real fucking accomplishment. Below that the flyer claims that it's **STARRING** Vivica A. Fox & Erik Estrada, who really nailed their 2 minute "starring" roles. After that there's some quotes, including one by the late Adam West, may he rest in peace, saying "Cool Cat is Cool!" despite the fact that on the Cool Cat site the quote from West actually says "Cool Cat is Fun!" which shows just how trustworthy this quote was, plus the fact that Derek most likely got the majority of celebrity quotes by walking up to them and asking them to say it. After that there's a quote of "I Love Cool Cat!" from Bo Derek, an actress starring in such great films as Tarzan the Ape Man, Bolero, and my personal favorite, Ghosts Can't Do It. (All of those films had incredibly negative reception btw, apparently all three of which won her three seperate Golden Raspberry Awards). Finally, below the advertisement for some hideous hats and shirts, there's the godawful pun of "Get Your Cool Cat Purr-chindise" which manages to misspell the latter half of merchandise again, though on the current website, it says "Purr-chandise" so Derek had to have fixed it sometime, but seeing as this flyer is advertising the hats which only just came out a month or two ago, this flyer was made recently, so I don't fucking know.

Moving on, we've got the Cool Cat Loves You Poster.

The first thing to note is that the poster feels like it was made on 11x17 printer paper, and all-in-all feels really low quality. In addition, it's fairly creased and banged up since Derek apparently doesn't know that you're supposed to roll up posters when shipping them. The main thing I want to note that stands out to me is the fucking background. When I first got it, I thought Derek, like, spilled coffee on it or something, but when I went to look at those posters online using the Wayback Machine, I found that it was completely intentional. I have no worldly idea why anyone would think that this would make a good background, since it gives off either an accidental coffee spill vibe or a 1984-esque dilapidated post-apocalyptic "Big Brother is Watching" sign from it.

That's about all I have to say for the poster, so let's move on to the keychain.

First of all, I'm debating whether or not to put this keychain anywhere since I would probably run a high risk of getting the shit kicked out of me. Anywho, there's not much to say here, it feels like a generic truck stop souvenir keychain, except the fact that Cool Cat is weirdly not centered is bothering me.

Here's the back side to the keychain.

Again, not much to say, other than the fact that I never want to see the question "Got Cool Cat?" ever again.

Now we have the book that came with the movie, Cool Cat Stops Bullying. Here's the front cover:

As you can see the art is fucking hilarious and it looks like Cool Cat is being held at gunpoint. And again, I'd like to point out that it wasn't even Derek who drew this, it was some guy named Robert Rainbow. Imagine paying someone to draw your book and getting this in return. Also, fun thing to note, Daddy Derek is actually a cat in this one (Yes, that is actually supposed to be Derek, since Cool Cat refers to him as Daddy Derek in the book) which poses the question of why the ever-loving FUCK isn't Derek a cat in the movie? (I'll tell you why, it's because Derek still thinks he's hot and wants to show off his "body" in the movie, plus the fact that he was likely way too cheap to have more than one costume made, though it could have easily been avoided by not having the parents, namely Derek, show up often, or in such complex scenes, etc etc. You get the drift, it's just lazy and self-aggrandizing).

Following that, there's the back of the cover.

Again, not much to analyze in detail, except for the fact that Derek would apparently charge $3.49 for this shitty thing, despite the fact that you can read it in around 2 minutes or under.

After that there's the side of the cover, which actually has some sad little tidbits of its own.

If you look closely enough, you can see that the book is fucking stapled together, which I find hilariously depressing. In addition, the publisher is sourced as "Blue Thunder Books" which from my extensive google searching towards the topic, doesn't seem to be a real publisher.

I would love to post every page of the book itself, but I feel like that might be grounds for some kind of copyright takedown from Derek, though I'll continue looking for some legal way for you guys to see each page, since each one has an illustration, and they're fucking hysterical. Here's a single image for you guys as a little teaser:

Anywho, onto what you all have been waiting for, the main attraction, the only thing that was purchased and all this other junk just came with for free: The movie. You all have probably seen the box a hundred times, so there's not much for me to analyze there, but here's the front:

One thing I'd like to point out that I haven't seen anyone else discuss is the fact that Derek and Maria, though most notably Maria, are incredibly low quality and poorly cropped in, to the point where you can't really even make out Maria's face since it's so blurry.

Here's the back:

And here's the side:

What's interesting to note here is the fact that on the top of the side there's two little icon image things, one of Cool Cat, and one of Vivica Fox, both of which are pretty low quality.

Anywho, enough stalling. Time to open this motherfucker up.

I'll be honest, when I first opened this thing up, the first thing I noticed was the smell, oddly enough. It's really hard for me to describe, though I will say it's a weirdly bitter, sour smell, maybe something like glue mixed with something else. I have no idea. Anywho, as it was previously pointed out by YMS, the image on the disc is literally a fucking sticker. Unlike YMS's, however, is the fact that it doesn't come off just by breathing on it, so I'm guessing it was just glued to the disc. In all honesty, I haven't even put the disc in my computer to play it yet, since I'm afraid I'll either somehow get a virus from it or that it'll melt inside my computer. I'll just put it in.

Okay, so after putting the disc in the DVD the Disc Drive I got this.

Alright, so there are two folders, the audio one is empty. Great. Then there's the video one.

No idea what this means. Guess I'll have to play it on a DVD player for now.

Anywho, I guess that there wraps up my analysis! It was mainly me just blabbing on and on about things you probably don’t care about, and doesn't really have a conclusive "end'' or anything, but hey if anything else pops up I'll be sure to notify you guys. Thanks for reading this far if you did, and hopefully Tumblr won't crash before I can post it this time.

#mod cool cat #cool cat #cool cat saves the kids #cool cat loves you #this took forever #I put too much time and effort into things #dirty cool cat confessions #i wonder if derek would appreciate my review of his shipment ;)

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rachello344 · 7 years ago

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RULES: You must answer these 85 statements and tag 20 people

TAGGED BY: @shizuna610

TAGGING: Uh..... @nonbinarylonk @piyo-13 @sukekou @sybilius @dont-touch-my-sons and @ascella-star

Under a read more because 85 questions isn’t that much, but it is quite a bit to scroll past.

THE LAST:

 1. drink: Diet Coke 2. phone call: Mom  3. text message: "pliroy is still the better AU tho haha” 4. song you listened to: "America’s Suitehearts” Fall Out Boy 5. time you cried: Uh... I can’t remember. I’ve teared up a lot lately, but nothing’s really kicked me over the edge  6. dated someone: Nah mate, never  7. kissed someone and regretted it: Can’t regret a kiss you’ve never had *finger guns* 8. been cheated on: That would require a relationship lol 9. lost someone special: Um, lost how? I’ve had several important friendships end, but otherwise... 10. been depressed: Uh today, I think. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if I’m lonely, melancholy, or depressed, but I think there’s some pretty strong overlap. *shrugs* It’s not a big deal. I just miss my roommie a bit, I think. Nothing new.  11. gotten drunk and thrown up: Never. I don’t drink.

 3 FAVOURITE COLOURS: 

12. Blue Violet 13. Yellow  14. Most shades of Blue

 IN THE LAST YEAR HAVE YOU :

15. made new friends: Yeah! Mostly online. I’ve joined three chat rooms for ships I like! (Shoutout to my bros in the Pliroy chat! Y’all rock!) (I’m still too new in the KaiShin and BakuDeku chats, but I appreciate you guys as well!) 16. fallen out of love: Kind of? I love a few people less than I once did, but I’ve never been In Love, technically.  17. laughed until you cried: Lol yeah. SHE’S A WOLF. IN MOUSE CLOTHING.  18. found out someone was talking about you: Uh, not maliciously? But people do talk about me, and I learned that some people even talk about my fic! ^^ 19. met someone who changed you: Not within the last year. Within the last four, yes...  20. found out who your friends are: I haven’t gone through anything especially harrowing, but I do know who I can trust and who my closest friends are. 21. kissed someone on your Facebook list: What’s a Facebook list? (I don’t have a Facebook)

GENERAL:

22. how many of your Facebook friends do you know in real life: I don’t have a Facebook, lol, but if I did they would all be IRL people, not online people.  23. do you have any pets: Yep! A dog and two cats. Plus my roommate has a cat that stays with us haha  24. do you want to change your name: No, Rachel is my name. It’s who I am. 25. what did you do for your last birthday: Dinner with my family and my roommate.  26. what time did you wake up: Uh like 1 and then I took a nap, so I wasn’t really awake until 3 p.m.  27. what were you doing at midnight last night: Driving a friend home!  28. name something you can’t wait for: Uh, next episode of BNHA  29. when was the last time you saw your mom: Looking at her right now.  31. what are you listening to right now: My mom telling a story.  32. have you ever talked to a person named Tom: Yeah, that’s my dad’s name. 33. something that is getting on your nerves: Anti blogs, usually.  34. most visited website: Tumblr and Twitter. 35. hair colour: Dishwater Blonde 36. long or short hair: Short for a girl, and loosely curly.  37. do you have a crush on someone: Nah. I mean Kento Yamazaki is a beautiful man, but no I don’t really crush. 38. what do you like about yourself: I have a lot of perseverance. Even when it’s really hard, I will keep trying. Sometimes it just... takes a while.  39. piercings: None. 40. blood type: I honestly have no idea. Probably some kinda A?  41. nickname: I use “Ra Ra” when I play games online. 42. relationship status: Happily Single  43. zodiac: Aquarius 44. pronouns: She/Her  45. favourite tv show: Uh, right now, probably BNHA  46. tattoos: None 47. right or left handed: Right-handed  48. surgery: None 50. sport: I’m not active now, but I used to fence and ice skate (neither competitively). I mean, I’ve played most sports, but those were my faves.  51. last vacation: My family and I all went to Huntington Beach!  52. pair of trainers:  Uh, like how many sneakers do I own? Like 3 pairs, because I need them for work. Unless you count Converse, in which case there are significantly more.

MORE GENERAL:

 53. eating: I just ate pasta  54. drinking: I just had a Diet Coke  55. I’m about to: Work on fanfiction ^^  56. waiting for: KS chapter and BNHA episode!! 57. want: to finish SOMETHING  58. get married: Unlikely, but not impossible. I’d be down to marry one of my best friends, but mostly for tax benefits and household expense convenience.  59. career:  Student, and I work at the school’s library.

WHICH IS BETTER:

 60. hugs or kisses: Hugs 61. lips or eyes: Eyes 62. shorter or taller: Taller  63. older or younger: For boys, older (though no more than 5-8 years older); for girls, a little younger or older (like a year younger or the same upper limit above) 64. nice arms or nice stomach: Arms  65. hook up or relationship: Relationship  66. troublemaker or hesitant: It depends. I like confidence and kindness and comfort. Probably troublemaker, but not necessarily.

HAVE YOU EVER: 

67. kissed a stranger: No  68. drank hard liquor: No 69. lost glasses/contact lenses: I would not survive if that happened. I would be unable to function without my glasses, so no. I’ve never lost them. 70. turned someone down: Yep. Twice. Once in high school and once in college. Both of them were extremely uncomfortable situations, lol I can explain more if anyone wants to know, but it’s a bit too long a story to fit into this (both are, tbh) 71. sex on the first date: No. 72. broken someone’s heart: Uh, yeah, I guess at least once? 73. had your heart broken: Yes, but not romantically. 74. been arrested: No, but I’ve gotten a parking ticket before. 75. cried when someone died: Yeah. 76. fallen for a friend: *shrugs* Kinda? The line between “I love you so much, you’re my best friend” and “I’ve fallen in love with you” is difficult for me to navigate. I just roll with it.

DO YOU BELIEVE IN: 

77. yourself: Yeah, most of the time.  78. miracles: I don’t disbelieve in them?  79. love at first sight: More in fiction than reality. 80. Santa Claus: Of course! People who don’t believe in Santa don’t get presents from him! ;D  81. kiss on the first date: I would have to trust them a lot first, especially for more than a kiss on the cheek or the forehead. Also, that would require me dating. 82. angels: I don’t disbelieve.

OTHER: 

84. eye colour: Hazel  85. favourite movie: The Princess Bride or Love Actually

#rachel answers #shizuna610

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farsfromhome · 7 years ago

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Hi I was tagged in a lot of ask tags so I'm gonna do them all in one go! Thank you @spideypooly @underose @babyparker Name: Amanda  Star sign: Pisces  Height: 5'6 Average hours of sleep: 6-8 it depends Lucky number: 8 Last thing I googled: lemme go check. Okay it was to get a hex code from an image for my mobile layout lmao. Number of blankets I sleep with: just one Favorite fictional characters: ok I have a lot. Peter Parker, Luke Skywalker, Finn, Kamala, & Katniss Everdeen Favorite Novel: catching fire in the hunger games series  What are you wearing right now?: pajama pants and an old American idol t shirt lmao  When did I start this blog?: literally yesterday  Amount of followers: 43 and I'm shook ! What do I post mostly?: tom holland & spider man stuff  Most active follower?: I think you can find that out on the real site but I'm on mobile so idk tbh  What made me get a tumblr?: I've actually had tumblr for years and I joined bc I'd always see posts from tumblr and wanted to join Do I get a lot of asks?: nope haven't gotten one but it's all good lmao Why did I get this URL?: it's supposed to be a play on homecoming but it's not amazing Alphabet Q&A Rules: Answer the questions in a new post and tag 10 blogs you would like to get to know better. A - Age: 18 B - Birthplace: New York C - Current Time: 11:31 AM D - Drink You Last Had: I think iced tea? Can't remember. E - Easiest Person To Talk To: my best friends Abby and Katie but Abby's all the way in Australia so it's a lil difficult. F - Favorite Song: hmmm I have so many but at the current moment it's touch by little mix. G - Grossest Memory: a duck pooped on my favorite shoe when I was younger and I had to throw them out smh H - Horror Yes or Horror No: No thx I don't like horror movies  I - In Love?: Uhm not really but someday I guess. J - Jealous of People?: uh yeah sometimes it depends lmao  L - Love At First Sight Or Should I Walk By Again: Walk by again M - Middle Name: Lynn  N - Number of Siblings: one. I have an older brother. O - One Wish: happiness tbh P - Person You Called Last: It was my mom  Q - Question You Are Always Asked: "are you excited to go to college?" Nope no thank u adulting????? Yikes. R - Reason to Smile: my cat. She always makes me happy.  S - Song You Sang Last: TT by Twice. T - Time You Woke Up: 10:30 I think U - Underwear Colour: black V - Vacation Destination: Tokyo, Japan. I've always wanted to go there. W - Worst Habit: biting my nails lol. X - X-rays: I had one like two years ago on my knees  Y - Your favourite food: Mac n cheese  Z - Zodiac Sign: Pisces 85 Q n A’s!! Rules: Answer these 85 statements and tag 20 people.  Last 1. drink: iced tea  2. phone call: my mother 3. text message: my gc with all my friends  4. song you listened to: TT by Twice 5. time you cried: Last week I was so sick and felt like absolute shit  6. dated someone twice: nope 7. kissed someone and regretted it: nope 8. been cheated on: nope 9. lost someone special: I've lost my grandma a few years ago f 10. been depressed: yes but not really my problem is my anxiety tbh  11. gotten drunk and thrown up: nope 3 favourite colours 12. Pink 13. Blue 14: Purple in the last year have you 15. made new friends: yes I dropped one really toxic friendship and gained a lot more friends. 16. fallen out of love: nope 17. laughed until you cried: I do this a lot but I honestly can't remember the last time I did that lmao 18. found out someone was talking about you: actually nope but I don't doubt that it happens. Listen, as long as I don't know it it's fine.  19. met someone who changed you: yes but nothing bad. Just let me out of my shell more. 20. found out who your friends are: mhhhhmmm 21. kissed someone on your Facebook list: nope. Also not a big fan of Facebook. General: 22. how many of your Facebook friends do you know in real life: i honestly can't even remember I never go on it. 23. do you have any pets: yes! I have two dogs and a cat. My dogs names are Emma & Daisy and my cats name is Meeko. 24. do you want to change your name: eh not really  25. what did you do for your last birthday: went out to Cheesecake Factory with my friends. 26. what time did you wake up: 10:30 I think  27. what were you doing at midnight last night: in my bed I'm tired lmao  28. name something you can’t wait for: the next Star Wars movie omg 29. when was the last time you saw your mom: 10 minutes ago  31. what are you listening to right now: my family talk to themselves at the dinner table 32. have you ever talked to a person named tom: Yes  33. something that is getting on your nerves: loud chewers I hate it i haaaate it 34. most visited website: Twitter tbh 35. hair colour: my hair is currently purple 36. long or short hair: it's long I'd say 37. do you have a crush on someone: I did before but not really anymore since schools ended lmao 38. what do you like about yourself: I really like my hair. 39. piercings: I have both my ears pierced and then I also have a nose ring. 40. blood type: I actually don't know.  41. nickname: panda, mandy, uhmmmm anything you can think of that works I've probably been called. 42. relationship status: single rip 43. zodiac: Pisces 44. pronouns: she/her 45. favourite tv show: The office 46. tattoos: none!!! But I really want one sooo bad. I'm just scared of the pain. I've got exactly what I want all planned out tho. 47. right or left handed: right 48. surgery: I've had my wisdom teeth removed lmao  50. sport: I don't play any but I enjoy watching hockey and swimming. 51. vacation: Tokyo! Specially Tokyo Disneyland.  52. pair of trainers: I think this means shoes? My favorite pair of shoes I think? Well my converse. MORE GENERAL 53. eating: currently haven't eaten anything yet. 54. drinking: haven't had anything to drink yet today. 55. I’m about to: probably just chill out  56. waiting for: my doctors appointment tomorrow so I can figure out what the heck my ear is doing. 58. get married: eventually  59. career: i really don't know but I'm leaning more towards social working since thats what my major is leaning more towards but idk. WHICH IS BETTER: 60. hugs or kisses: tbh neither  61. lips or eyes: eyes 62. shorter or taller: taller 63. older or younger: older 64. nice arms or nice stomach: arms  65. hookup or relationship: a relationship  66. troublemaker or hesitant: hesitant HAVE YOU EVER: 67. kissed a stranger: no 68. drank hard liquor: no 69. lost glasses/contact lenses: yup and it's super annoying  70. turned someone down: yes I think  71. sex on the first date: nope  73. had your heart broken: yeah I think so  74. been arrested: nope 75. cried when someone died: yeah 76. fallen for a friend: actually nope DO YOU BELIEVE IN: 77. yourself: it depends on the situation lmao 78. miracles: eh 79. love at first sight: not really  80. santa claus: I used to  81. kiss on the first date: I guess it depends on how good it is  82. angels: Not really OTHER: 84. eye colour: brown 85. favourite movie: I have too many but my favorite of all time is cat in the hat I know it's really bad but it's a guilty pleasure. Okay I'm gonna tag random! Sorry if you've been tagged in one before. @starryeyesandblurredlies @trashholland @spideygwen @penlsparker @pcteparker

#my post #sorry this is long n messy

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anotheruserwithnoname · 7 years ago

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85 Statements Tag Game

Rules: you must answer these 85 statements and tag 20 people.

I was tagged by @universe-on-her-shoulders

I’ve tagged a number of people repeatedly so rather than coming up with 20 specific names, in honour of my having just passed 600 followers, I’m going to tag anyone who has followed me in the last week.

Putting in a break here because, well, 85...

The last…

1. Drink: hot chocolate.

2. Phone call: my dad.

3. Text message: Haven’t texted anyone in a year so can’t remember.

4. Song you listened to: Razzle-Dazzle, Bill Haley And His Comets

5. Time you cried: A while ago

6. Dated someone twice: What’s dating?

7. Kissed someone and regretted it: Does my brother’s amorous Pomeranian count?

8. Been cheated on: N/A

9. Lost someone special: My mother, July 2013

10. Been depressed: Sort of ongoing for me.

11. Gotten drunk and thrown up: I’ve never gotten drunk, mainly because if I get tipsy #10 kicks in, so I avoid. As for the second half, I got some pretty nasty food poisoning from McD’s in the spring of 2012. I remember this because it was the same day (but fortunately hours after) the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo where I got autographs from the likes of Summer Glau.

Favourite colors

12. Orange

13. Black

14. Red

In the last year have you…

15. Made new friends: Yes

16. Fallen out of love: Neither in nor out.

17. Laughed until you cried: Happened last Saturday

18. Found out someone was talking about you: Yes (fortunately not in a bad way)

19. Met someone who changed you: I think so.

20. Found out who your friends are: Sort of, with regards to certain things.

21. Kissed someone on your Facebook list: N/A

General

22. How many of your Facebook friends do you know in real life? 100% because the only people I have on Facebook are people I already knew or are family as I’m not involved in Facebook culture. In terms of Tumblr friends, I’ve yet to meet any of them in person but I am in communication with a few of them constantly.

23. Do you have any pets? No, but my dad has a cat and my brother has three high-maintenance dogs.

24. Do you want to change your name? Nah.

25. What did you do for your last birthday? Worked. But the day after got Peter Capaldi’s autograph and a photo op at the Calgary Expo.

26. What time did you wake up? 6:30 a.m. At least that’s when the alarm was set..

27. What were you doing at midnight last night? Watching Game of Thrones.

28. Name something you can’t wait for: Second season of Victoria. John Rhys-Davies at the Edmonton Comic and Entertainment Expo in September (I’ve been a fan of his since Shogun).

29. When was the last time you saw your mum? The day she passed away in July 2013.

31. What are you listening to right now? Construction noise in the alleyway outside.

32. Have you ever talked to a person named Tom? I work with a guy by that name. He’s sitting about 10 feet behind me as I type this. And he literally spoke to me just as I was typing that last sentence. And he’s talking to me again. Guy won’t shut up! 😂

33. Something that is getting on your nerves: I’m going to hold my tongue on that. People who know me know.

34. Most visited website: Tumblr and Jenna Coleman’s Instagram and Twitter pages

35. Hair colour: Dark brown

36. Long or short hair? Short.

37. Do you have a crush on someone: A few people, plus Jenna Coleman

38. What do you like about yourself? I have a reputation for keeping my head while everyone else is losing theirs.

39. Piercings: No, and I won’t be getting any, either.

40. Blood type: I used to know. One of the regular ones.

41. Nickname: None I want to make public. On Archive of Our Own I’ve adopted The Saddleman.

42. Relationship status: Me, Myself and I. And we’re always arguing.

43. Zodiac: Taurus. Yes, I am indeed full of bull.

44. Pronouns: he/him/hey you

45. Favourite TV show: The Prisoner, Doctor Who

46. Tattoos: No, and I won’t be getting any.

47. Right or left handed: Right.

48. Surgery: Not yet, thankfully.

49. Piercing: Still don’t have one.

50. Sport: Not big into sports, though I used to do 5-pin bowling in the 1990s. That said I’ve always admired baseball. And Stompin’ Tom Connors’ “The Hockey Song” is one I often listen to, but that’s because I’m Canadian and they passed a law back in 1976 that requires every Canadian citizen to listen to that song at least twice a year. 😇

51. Holiday: Stayed at a cabin in the mountains just west of Revelstoke, BC, in May.

52. Pair of trainers: Don’t wear trainers.

More general

53. Eating: Yes, I have.

54. Drinking: Not when I’m driving.

55. I’m about to: end my coffee break at work.

56. Waiting for: A phone call.

57. Want: Money.

58. Get married: Doubtful it’ll happen at my age if it hasn’t already.

59. Career: Communications, though if I could ever get a full-time job writing Whouffaldi fan fic, I’ll be in there like a dirty shirt.

60. Hugs or kisses: Depends on the person.

61. Lips or eyes: Eyes.

62. Shorter or taller: Depends on the person. Jenna Coleman being only 5′2, I certainly have no problem with those of a lower altitude.

63. Older or younger: I often feel I have more in common with people younger than me than those of my age or older.

64. Nice arms or nice stomach: Doesn’t really matter.

65. Hook up or relationship: Relationship.

66. Troublemaker or hesitant: Depends on the topic. In recent days I’ve gone from the former to the latter on my blog. In real life I’ve seem to have gone in the opposite direction.

67. Kissed a stranger: No.

68. Drank hard liquor: A few times. Not a fan, though I do find Johnnie Walker Blue to be tasty. Given the cost of Johnnie Walker Blue, it’s not something that will be a regular part of my diet...

69. Lost glasses/contact lenses: I wear glasses and have (other than a brief misplacement at home) never lost them. The first time I wore contacts while driving, they fell out. That was the last time I wore contacts!

70. Turned someone down: Never had anyone ask.

71. Sex on the first date: What is ... nah, I’ve done that joke too many times already this post.

72. Broken someone’s heart: Doubful.

73. Had your heart broken: Oh yeah.

74. Been arrested: No. But the day is young.

75. Cried when someone died: Yes.

76. Fallen for a friend: Yes. See #73. And #68.

Do you believe in …

77. Yourself: I try.

78. Miracles: I’ve seen some odd things happen.

79. Love at first sight: Yes.

80. Santa Claus: The concept, yes.

81. Kiss on the first date: Depends how the date goes, I suppose.

82. Angels: The concept, yes.

Other

83. Current best friend’s name: I’m going to not answer that in part because I’m not really sold on the “Current” part of that question.

84. Eye colour: Blue

85. Favourite movie: Casablanca. (Yet another movie that I think Peter Capaldi and Jenna Coleman would rock doing a remake of.)

#personal #tag game

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smartphone-science · 5 years ago

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For the longest time, I boycotted palm oil. Palm oil is notorious for destroying the habitats of wildlife, especially endangered orangutans. Of course it makes sense not to support a product that is so environmentally destructive. This seems so easy and straightforward! But so much in conservation is not straightforward and I was pretty shocked to find out that what I was doing could actually be worse for wildlife.

Palm oil is a direct threat to all of these species plus more. How could anyone advocate for it? Image from the IUCN.

This blog post outlines my thought process leading to that decision and provides you with resources to make your own. Not all conservationists agree with me, and when I posted about this on Instagram and Twitter, I did get some pushback.

Photo of a palm oil plantation meeting forest. From the IUCN.

Why is Palm Oil Bad for the Environment?

I recently went to Borneo, Malaysia and saw the palm oil plantations for myself. I visited a rainforest reserve called Deramakot, home to orangutans, clouded leopards, and gibbons. On the way to the reserve, we saw miles and miles of palm oil plantations.

Basically, the palm oil industry clear cuts primary forests for palm oil plantations thereby removing habitat for endangered species like orangutans. Where once stood forests, now stands monocultures of palm oil trees.

The palm oil tree is actually native to Africa, but most of the world’s supply (~85%) is grown in Malaysia and Indonesia, which is why orangutans have become an iconic species representing the destruction of this cash crop. Orangutans need forests with old trees. They build their nests and are adapted to living their lives high up in the tress. They are the largest arboreal mammal.

Palm oil is not just bad for wildlife, it’s bad for the whole planet. To clear the land for plantations, the rainforest is burned

Clearing land for palm oil plantations involves burning rainforest, which is obviously bad for wildlife, but ultimately bad for us too. Burning trees and peatland releases carbon in the atmosphere, which contributes to climate change. Not only does the burning release large amounts of carbon, but the loss of forest and peat also prevents carbon in the atmosphere from being absorbed. Both forests and peat are major carbon sinks.

This video shows carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Check out the model at 1:02 to see the affect of trees and other plants on absorbing carbon in the spring and summer.

Why Boycotting Palm Oil Won’t Work

Now that we know how bad palm oil is, our gut reaction is to never buy this awful thing again (that was definitely mine)!

Before my trip to Borneo, I was at the International Conference in Conservation Biology in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and met experts from the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo who were at the conference to talk about palm oil. Before talking to them, I assumed that avoiding palm oil all together, or reducing your consumption, was the best thing that you could do, but they told me that was wrong. Here’s why:

1. Boycotting Palm Oil is Impossible for Most People

I tried to boycott palm oil for the longest time. For me, it was pretty easy because I don’t eat many processed foods. Or so I thought. But palm oil is in everything!

From cosmetics to ice cream to biodiesel and everything in between (I found out my skin care and makeup products contained palm oil). But I still thought I was doing good because these were the only palm oil products I thought I was using, and they are from a company that uses sustainable sourcing of ingredients.

What I didn’t realize is that palm oil could be called by so many other names! You can buy palm oil without even knowing it. Here’s a list of ingredients that come from palm oil:

Checking all of my products for these ingredient names would be extremely difficult and time-consuming for me – and I devote my whole career to nature and conservation. Even if everyday consumers had good intentions and want to avoid palm oil, this giant list makes it quite honestly, prohibitive. Palm oil really is in everything!

My mascara contains palmitic and steric acid, two ingredients that are sourced from palm oil.

2: The Alternative to Palm Oil Could Be Much Worse

Say we do all join together and stop buying palm oil. This crop is no longer profitable, palm oil plantations go out of business, and people stop planting it, which means no more clearcutting of forests. This sounds amazing, except it’s not going to happen.

The reason why people cultivate palm oil in the first place is to make money. People in Indonesia and Malaysia need to make money to support their families and options for doing so are limited. They won’t just suddenly start protecting the forests, they are going to move on to the next crop that is profitable.

Despite palm oil’s bad rap, it has some advantages over other crops. Palm oil produces at least three times as much yield as any other crop while using fewer pesticides and chemical fertilizers than other vegetable oils.

This statistic sums it up pretty well: “Palm oil makes up 35% of all vegetable oils, grown on just 10% of the land allocated to oil crops.”

More oil can be produced on less land. Image from the IUCN.

If palm oil is boycotted, global demand for an oil is not going to go down (remember that palm oil is in everything). Companies will need an alternative oil source, and this will result in MORE forest loss to plant these crops.

What Should You Do?

Buy Sustainable Palm Oil

There is an alternative – CSPO or Certified Sustainable Palm Oil. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil develops environmental and social criteria for companies to comply with to have CSPO. The World Wildlife Fund argues, that “when cultivated properly and planted in the right places, production of palm oil would not negatively impact the environment.”

The logo for certified sustainable palm oil.

CSPO palm oil has the following outcomes/requirements:

Fair working conditions

Protected land and rights for local people

No clearing of primary forest

Wildlife is protected on palm oil plantations

Reduced greenhouse gas emissions

Minimized industrial pollution

As of 2014, roughly 20% of all palm oil growers are certified, however, selling sustainable palm has been more challenging. Because palm oil is such a taboo ingredient due to its environmental destruction, companies are hesitant to draw attention to the fact that they use palm oil at all, even if it is sustainable. If the public is not actively looking for or demanding sustainable palm oil, companies are not going to pay the premium to get it, and this could increase demand for regular palm oil because realistically, most people will not boycott palm oil.

Boycotting palm oil removes incentives for companies to produce sustainable palm oil. Image from the IUCN.

How Do I Buy Sustainable Palm Oil?

Cheyenne Mountain Zoo Sustainable Palm Oil Shopping App

There are some great tools to help you determine if the companies that you shop from use CSPO. I’ve found that rarely is the RSPO logo on products. The first that I love is the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo Palm Oil app. I use this ALL theme. This app is great because when you are in the grocery store you can check products before you put them in your cart.

The Cheyenne Mountain Zoo’s Sustainable Palm Oil app. Just type in a company and it will give you a color:

The app ranks companies according to color with green being the best. If a company/product is not in the app at all, it means it is not CSPO.

WWF’s Palm Oil Buyer’s Scorecard

Another great resource is WWF’s Palm Oil Buyer’s Scorecard. Like Cheyenne Mountain Zoo’s app, you can search for your favorite brands and see how they rank.

I love this feature on WWF’s website. You can search for any company to see how they rank on palm oil sustainability.

And get detailed reports.

There’s even an option to do a social share – so you can easily tweet the report and pressure the company to be more sustainable.

If a company you love does not use RSPO, both the app and the website give you opportunities to pressure them to do so. The Cheyenne Mountain Zoo app has a sample letter that you can copy to send to companies and WWF’s website has a social share option so you can tweet their report and encourage them to switch to RSPO.

Arguments Against RSPO

It Doesn’t Go Far Enough

Some people are still not happy with RSPO and will not support it. They argue that there is no such thing as sustainable palm oil because even though wildlife and habitat is taken into account, forest is still destroyed, and it is still a monoculture plantation. Other concerns include that deforestation is only restricted to “high conservation value areas,” and palm oil that is still RSPO certified can be mixed with uncertified palm oil, yet the company can still get the certification.

Is There Evidence That it is Actually Better Than Uncertified Palm Oil?

Someone on my Twitter account doubted the actual impact of RSPO. He wrote:

is there any actual evidence "sustainable" palm oil does any good for biodiversity conservation? I haven't seen it. – https://t.co/0uFYU9OxhE

— Andy Boyce (@AndyJBoyce) October 5, 2019

And linked to this paper, which found no significant differences between RSPO and regular palm oil in relation to orangutan presence and fire (their measures of environmental sustainability. However, this study found that RSPO certification is associated with a significant decrease in deforestation, and this study found a decrease in fire incidence.

Also, although RSPO was started in 2003-2004, certifications for plantations actually didn’t start until 2009. Including deforestation and fires measures pre-2009 (pre-certification) is not a fair assessment of how well RSPO plantations perform.

Gemma Tillack wrote “Why ‘Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO)’ palm oil is neither responsible nor sustainable,” but offers no solutions.

It’s Members Aren’t Sustainable

On my Instagram, someone commented “From what I’ve heard from places like Palm Oil Consumer Action is that the Chairs of the RSPO are companies like Nestle and Unilever, which use some of the most unsustainable palm out there. For me personally, my boycott is more of a stand against those companies that until they stop being so corrupt and become truly sustainable, I can’t buy anything RSPO certified when such high up members are not actually sustainable!

This is true that the companies that are members are not the most sustainable out there, however, I strongly believe in not letting progress be the enemy of perfection. In order to move forward with sustainability efforts, we need to include big companies to be effective. Otherwise, it won’t make that much of an impact for companies to actually want to buy it if it is too unattainable and the market will be so small. It’s already harder to sell sustainable palm oil.

It’s fine that you don’t want to support specific corporations because of your opinions on their company’s sustainability, however, I wouldn’t let that write of CSPO completely. And the only other options are boycotting palm oil, which is impossible for most people, which would then make CSPO less desirable, increasing the demand for regular palm oil, or alternative oils that use more land and do just as much environmental damage.

The RSPO is a non-profit organization that is made up of big companies, but it also includes conservation organizations that are compromising with companies to make them more sustainable. It may be less sustainable or slower progress that we like as conservationists, but it’s better than nothing. For more on the RSPO, check out this video:

I Support CSPO and Won’t Boycott Palm Oil

So, in an ideal world, we would save the forests and we wouldn’t need palm oil. But life doesn’t work that way. In my opinion, sustainable palm oil is the best answer to support people and wildlife.

Michelle Desilets’, Executive Director of the Orangutan Land Trust, sums this up well: …While no monoculture could ever be considered truly sustainable, I think we must consider that there is a spectrum of sustainability, and sustainable palm oil (for example that which is not grown as a result of forest clearance) is an infinitely better option than non-sustainable palm oil.

If you want to continue to improve your diet to make it more sustainable, check out “5 Easy Changes to Your Diet to Help the Planet.”

A big thank you to Chelsea Wellmer and Emmaline Repp-Maxwell of the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo for their help with great resources to write this blog post.

The post Why I No Longer Boycott Palm Oil appeared first on Dr. Stephanie Schuttler.

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accuhunt · 5 years ago

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Travelling to Iran? Things to Know Before You Go.

I harboured a dream of travelling to Iran for a long time, but when it came down to finally planning a month-long trip in the country earlier this year, I had no clue where to begin. Iran recently started offering e-visa for Indian passport holders – but ours got rejected. I typically look at websites like Expedia, Skyscanner, Kayak and Goibibo to book flights – but none of these aggregate flights to/from Iran. I use Airbnb and Booking.com to find experiential accommodations around the world – but none of these work in Iran. I use Visa or Mastercard to pay or withdraw money from ATMs abroad – but neither of them work in Iran; to complicate matters, there are two exchange rates and two currencies in Iran. I buy travel insurance from World Nomads or Indian companies – but none of these cover travel in Iran. Hell, even Facebook, Twitter and BBC don’t work in Iran!

Slowly, we made our way through these challenges, discovering new sites and travel hacks, with a lingering concern over whether Iran was worth the trouble. Turns out, if there’s one country in the world that’s worth the pre-trip hassle, it’s Iran.

So I decided to write this detailed Iran travel blog, with all my tips on how to plan your first independent trip to Iran:

A glorious view while landing in Iran.

Why you should visit Iran in 2019

While many popular cities around the world are suffering from too many tourists, Iran is the polar opposite. Tourism is so low that you can have mind-blowing experiences across the country – from the exquisite Nasir-ol-molk in Shiraz to the Kaluts Desert near Kerman – pretty much all to yourself. On offer are bazaars dating back a thousand years, architectural marvels from ancient empires, geographically unique (and often bizarre) islands and deserts, unexpectedly well-developed infrastructure, stunning gardens and cypress groves that inspired generations of poets, and above all, local friendships that’ll help you find a lost part of your soul.

Also read: Why You Should Drop Everything and Travel to Iran Now

Is Iran safe to visit

I remember sitting in a basement resto in Shiraz, watching the local news on television. The screen was split in two: on one side, Trump was raving about how Iranians were going through complete hell because of his sanctions on the country. On the other side, streamed a live feed from Esfahan’s tree-lined boulevards, with locals casually walking and eating roasted chestnuts – just a regular day in the country.

I’ve repeatedly been asked: Is Iran safe to travel? The country’s political regime is oppressive, and its relations with the US have been deteriorating, yet life in Iran isn’t what it’s often depicted to be in Western media. I actually felt safer there than many popular tourist destinations. As with anywhere else, stay aware of the on-going political situation and speak to a local tour operator in Iran to gauge how things really are.

Also read: We Travel to Realise Everyone is Wrong About Other Countries

Iran travel tip: Connect with locals. Exploring Isfahan with a local artist.

Iran tourist visa on an Indian passport

Indian passport holders visiting Iran can now avail of a 30-day Iran e-visa – but like many others, ours got rejected without an explanation. We took the long-winded route of applying for an Iran tourist visa at the Iran consulate in Mumbai. The process is as follows:

Get in touch with an Iranian travel company and ask them to apply for a visa code on your behalf. Send them your passport copy, tentative trip itinerary and a form. We applied through Uppersia; they process visa codes if you book a trip through them.

Once you receive a visa code (takes upto 10 days), submit your documents at the embassy. The submission rules are still archaic; in addition to our travel documents, we had to submit medical tests for TB and HIV! To know the latest list of documents, call the Iranian consulate in the city you plan to apply, since they differed between Mumbai and Delhi.

We paid extra to expedite our Iran tourist visa, which then took 2-3 days since submission.

Also read: How I Manage Visas on My Indian Passport as I Travel Around the Globe

Entering the US after travelling to Iran

The good news is that the Iran tourist visa is not stamped on your passport. It is a separate physical document, and even at immigration in Iran, only the document is stamped at entry and exit. So in theory, there’s no proof on your passport that you’ve been to Iran. I haven’t travelled to the US after Iran, but I still expect to be interrogated if and when I do.

If you plan to travel to the US in the near future, I highly recommend that you apply for a US tourist visa before visiting Iran – since in the US visa application, you need to disclose all countries you’ve ever set foot in. Chances are, in a post-Trump US, this won’t be an issue.

Also read: US Tourist Visa for Indians: Tips and Requirements

Booking flights to Iran from India

International websites like Expedia, Skyscanner, Goibibo etc don’t aggregate flights to / from Iran. So we individually looked at airline websites like Emirates, Mahan Air (an Iranian carrier), Iranian Airlines – and found a sweet deal from Mumbai to Shiraz! To get the best deal, check not only flights to Tehran but also Shiraz and other cities.

Also read: How I’m Financially Sustaining My Digital Nomad Lifestyle

Iran travel tip: Go beyond the cities. An evening at Chakooh Canyon on Qeshm Island, Iran.

The best time to visit Iran

All locals unanimously agreed that spring (late March – early May) and autumn (late September – early November) are the best times to visit most parts of Iran, except the mountainous northern regions. We factored the weather into our travel plans in Feb/March, and ended up exploring the southern islands of Qeshm and Hormuz, and the Kaluts desert – too hot to visit at other times of the year.

Also read: Why You Shouldn’t Put Off Your Travel Dreams

The official and unofficial exchange rates in Iran

Since Mastercard and Visa debit / credit cards don’t work in Iran, not even in ATMs, carrying cash (US$) into Iran is the only option. Upon landing in Iran, we exchanged 50 USD at the airport’s money exchange counter, and were surprised to receive a HUGE wad of local currency – 3 times the exchange rate. That’s when we learnt that there are two exchange rates in Iran.

The unofficial exchange rate is 3 times the official one; it currently ranges from 11000-14000 rial to a dollar. This made our trip to Iran 3 times cheaper than we had originally budgeted for! It’s possible to exchange USD pretty much anywhere in Iran – at a hotel, money exchange, a random shop on the street, even with a taxi driver. Just make sure you get the unofficial rate.

Also read: 6 Months, 6 Countries: Epic Memories from Central America

Iran’s two currencies

Currency in Iran is super confusing, for there are two legal currencies – Toman and Rial; 1 toman=10 rial. Most prices are quoted in toman, but it’s always good to ask. We gradually found our bearings and also felt grateful that except for one unsuspecting encounter, no one tried to rip us off.

Also read: Creative Ways I’ve Learnt to Manage Money on My Travels Abroad

Finding unique accommodations in Iran

Since Airbnb and booking.com don’t work in Iran, we relied largely on TripAdvisor and Instagram to figure out our accommodations. Homestays, guesthouses and hotels all need to be emailed individually and paid either through bank transfer (a complicated process from India) or in cash. Thanks to a collaboration with Uppersia – a local travel company managed by an Iranian, all-women team – almost all our accommodations were arranged through them. They recommended some local guesthouses that only Farsi speakers can find, and also conveyed my vegan dietary requirements to all accommodations.

Also read: Dreamy Airbnbs to Experience Europe Like a Local

Iran travel tip: Plan your trip based on the season. The stunning salt caves of Qeshm Island are only worth visiting in winter.

Travel insurance for Iran

Most travel insurance companies -World Nomads, HDFC Ergo, Bajaj Allianz etc, don’t cover travel in Iran. We ultimately found IATI, a Spanish company that offers travel insurance in Iran. Luckily, we didn’t need to use our travel insurance, but it’s always reassuring to have one no matter where you go.

Also read: Travelling Abroad First Time? 10 Questions on Your Mind

Learning conversational Farsi to travel in Iran

Although it’s possible to get by with English in the cities, most people on the countryside only speak Farsi. We ended up learning a bit of conversational Farsi through the brilliant podcast Chai and Conversation – and practicing it with locals throughout Iran. Some basic phrases you should know:

Salam: Hello

Sobh bekher: Good morning

Chitori: How are you?

Befarmah: Welcome (you’ll hear it very often)

Merci: Thank you (like in French)

Nushe jahan: roughly translates to ‘my pleasure’

Also read: How to Earn Money While Travelling

Accessing social networks in Iran

While Instagram and Gmail can be legally accessed in Iran, you need VPN for everything else.

We ended up using Express VPN all month – safe, fast and allowed us to access everything we would in our lives outside of Iran. Make sure you download the Express VPN app and pay for a subscription before you enter Iran. One subscription allows upto 3 devices to be connected.

I also tried Nord VPN and some free VPNs, but Express VPN was by far the fastest and most reliable. Wifi is readily available at homestays, and a local SIM card is cheap and useful.

Also read: How Croatia Compelled Me to Rethink Travel Blogging

What to pack for Iran / What to wear in Iran

Unfortunately it’s true that women need to wear a hijab (headscarf), and cover their arms, butts and legs while in public spaces in Iran. Within your accommodation, it’s usually okay to let your hair loose. It’s rather fascinating to see how Iranian women transition from their often footloose, fashionable lifestyle at home to being fully covered while stepping out.

My relationship with the hijab quickly changed from nonchalance to annoyance to resentment, and finally to empathy for the women who don’t have a choice. Having said that, I must emphasize that we cannot judge Iranian women by the hijab. I met so many free-spirited, independent, badass, inspiring women across the country.

I didn’t buy any new clothes for Iran, except for a light long sleeve cardigan that covered both my arms and butt. I paired that with t-shirts, tops, even dresses while wearing leggings below. Note that Iran has a dress code for men too – shirts with sleeves (no sleeveless) and long pants. If only they’d cover their head in solidarity!

Also read: How I Fit All My Life Possessions in Two Bags as I Travel the World

Iran travel tip: Learn a bit of Farsi to make the most of your trip. Umbrella art in Shiraz.

Vegan and vegetarian food in Iran

I was quite worried about being vegan in a meat-loving country like Iran, but relieved to stumbled upon Iran Vegan Travel – a small company that aggregates vegan hosts across Iran. We ended up staying at an all vegan guesthouse in Isfahan (which has changed hands since, sigh) and with a lovely vegan Iranian family in Tabriz. That meant incredible vegan Iranian food (including vegan kebabs) and veganised traditional Iranian dishes like kuku sabzi and ghormet sabzi.

During the rest of our trip across Iran, I relied heavily on the HappyCow App to find vegan-friendly restaurants and cafes. Many of our homestay hosts were accommodating enough to customise local dishes without animal products.

Also read: The Ultimate Vegan (and Vegetarian) Survival Guide for Japan

“Tarof” and how to accept Iranian hospitality

Tarof is Persian etiquette that puts the guest first: taxi drivers refuse to accept money for a ride, homestay owners refuse to let you pay for your stay, hosts stuff you with food, strangers offer to pay for your meals or entrance to an attraction, even fresh juice shops refuse to take your money. This kindness towards strangers is deeply rooted in Persian culture (much like in Indian hospitality) – but please, don’t take advantage of it to score a free meal or stay.

The rule of thumb is that if someone refuses your money or offers to pay for you 3 times, they genuinely mean it. Otherwise it’s tarof – it’s in their culture to offer, and we should reciprocate the gesture with gratitude but insist on paying our fair share. I’ve read accounts of travellers who ended up getting their accommodation, food, even transport free – which sucks, because the Iranian economy is doing terribly, tourism is one of the few avenues to make money, and as travellers, we should really know better than to take advantage of a local’s warm-hearted hospitality. Almost everything that you would pay for abroad, insist on paying for in Iran.

Also read: Inspiring Places to Live, Work and Explore as a Digital Nomad in 2019

Iran travel tip: Connect with Iran Vegan Travel to find vegan Iranian hosts around the country.

Solo travel in Iran

Although I didn’t travel solo on this trip, I can totally imagine doing it. The locals are hospitable and always up for a conversation, hardly anyone will try to tout you, there is much to keep you occupied, it feels safe enough and it’s one of the most affordable countries to solo travel in.

Also read: What Solo Travel Has Taught Me About the World – and Myself

Where to go in Iran

Even as someone who doesn’t like spending too long in cities, I absolutely fell in love with Shiraz and Isfahan. The old gardens, stunning architecture, small-town vibe, tree-lined streets, old bazaars, nearby villages, there’s so much to love. Among other highlights of our trip were the islands of Qeshm and Hormuz, the Kaluts Desert and the cities of Kerman and Tabriz. Look out for my travel recommendations for Iran, coming soon.

Also read: A Guide to Exploring the High Tatras of Slovakia

Travelling around Iran by public transport

VIP buses are surprisingly amazing in Iran, and can comfortably ferry you across long distances. Infact, ours turned into a land journey from the Persian Gulf, via the south of Iran, to Yerevan in Armenia! It’s best to ask your host to book your bus ticket online, since websites are only in Farsi. Trains only ply a few routes in Iran.

Within cities and for short excursions nearby, we used local taxis – either booked through our accommodation or hailed directly on the street. In smaller places, many people will stop their cars to give you a taxi ride for a quick buck – which is totally safe. A little bit of haggling is common, but don’t go overboard considering the state of the economy.

Also read: What Indian Cities Can Learn from Copenhagan about Green Tourism

Getting over Iran!

For a couple of months after I left Iran, my world felt bland, soulless. I threw myself into Iranian films, Persian music, books by Saadi and other Persian poets, and began learning the Urdu script so I could slowly make my way to Farsi. Yeah, withdrawal symptoms of Iran seem to be common among travellers. The only solution is to go back, again and again

Also read: How Travelling is Breaking My Heart

Until next time… Qeshm island, Iran.

Helpful Iran travel blogs

Travestyle: An awesome travel blog run by an Iranian couple based in Iran. Their posts on offbeat Iran and what to wear in Iran were particularly helpful.

Against the compass: Offers a wealth of information about independent travel in Iran – and other countries under the tourist radar.

Books, music and movies about Iran

A small selection of Iranian books, music and movies I love:

Music: Blue Flowers (album) by Marjan Farsad.

Books: Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi; The 40 Rules of Love by Elif Shafak (based on the lives of Rumi and Tabriz).

Movies: Taxi by Jafar Panahi; A Separation and About Elly by Asghar Farhadi.

Got questions about your trip to Iran? Have experiences you’d like to share from Iran? Ask / share away in the comments.

*Note: I travelled to Iran in collaboration with Uppersia. Opinions on this blog, as you can tell, are always mine!

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Travelling to Iran? Things to Know Before You Go. published first on https://airriflelab.tumblr.com

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