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lanaisnotwool · 4 years ago

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404 From Teacher to Investor - Interview with Todd Dexheimer

http://moneyripples.com/2020/06/22/404-from-teacher-to-investor-interview-with-todd-dexheimer/

Chris Miles, the "Cash Flow Expert and Anti-Financial Advisor," is a leading authority on how to quickly free up and create cash flow for thousands of his clients, entrepreneurs, and others internationally! He’s an author, speaker, and radio host that has been featured in US News, CNN Money, Bankrate, Entrepreneur on Fire, and spoken to thousands getting them fast financial results.

Listen to our Podcast here:

https://www.blogtalkradio.com/moneyripples/2020/05/31/404--going-from-teacher-to-investor-with-todd-dexheimer

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Chris Miles (00:00): Hello, my fellow Ripplers. This is Chris Miles. Your Cash Flow Expert and Anti-Financial Advisor. Welcome you out for a wonderful show. Show that's for you and about you. Those of you work so hard for money and you're ready for your money. Start working harder for you. Now! You want that freedom. That cash flow. That prosperity. Today! Not 30, 40 bazillion years from now, but right now, so you can live that life that you love doing what you love being with those that you love, but it's so much more than you guys. Than just having a lot of money and being comfortable and, you know, driving flashy cars and that kind of thing. Because if you're following us, we're not those kind of people. We're real people. We're sincere. We're authentic. And the truth is that you're a Rippler. That you, yes, you can create lots and lots of money create the life of your dreams, but your life is much more than that. You want to create a ripple effect through the lives of those, around you, whether it be your family, whether it be your community, the country, or across the world. And that's ultimately what this ripple effect's about. And I appreciate you guys allowing me to create a ripple effect through you because without that, we couldn't do it. And you guys have been bingeing on these shows. You've been spreading the word you've been sharing it. And I love seeing these numbers grow every single day. So thank you for being a part of this.

Chris Miles (01:20): Hey, as a quick reminder, check out our website MoneyRipples.com. You've got the great ebook on there called Beyond Rice & Beans. Seven Secrets. Free up cash today, and you can check out other information on there as well. So check it out.

Chris Miles (01:29): Alright! Today, guys, I'm bringing on another great, great investor on our show here. This is actually a guy by the name of Todd Dexheimer here. Now, Todd, like Todd's been doing real estate. He got in right during the last recession. Like he was born out of the fire, right? He was born out of those flames when everybody says real estate stinks. And that's exactly when Todd said, alright, let's do this. He actually started as a high school industrial tech teacher. Then went to real estate in 2008. Now, interesting thing about him is that he's the CEO of venture properties, LLC. Yeah. He's also been, has purchased and renovated over 800 units guys. Has focuses on syndicating value, add multifamily and emerging markets, as well as coaching other inspiring investors. He's the host of the Pillar of Wealth Creation Podcasts that actually I've been on as well. He's also been doing contributing things like Bigger Pockets. And he's been on various shows, whether it's like, you know, big real estate investing advice ever, or the Michael Blank show and many, many more. And so he lives in Minnesota, his wife, and two kids love skiing, hunting, camping, hockey running. Of course he's in Minnesota. He's got to love hockey. Right? So anyways, Todd, welcome to our show.

Todd Dexheimer (02:41): Yeah. Appreciate you having me on, I appreciate the introduction, man. I'm like, I'm pumped up. I, that intro was awesome! I'm pumped up to hopefully add some value to the show and yeah. This is, this is an exciting community. It sounds like we got here. So...

Chris Miles (02:58): Absolutely. No, these are good people. These are the best ones you'll ever, ever witness. I'll tell you that. So, you know, tell us like, how did you even go from, you know, high school teacher to real estate? Like what even sparked that because everybody's freaking out in 2008 and you're like, Hey, why not? Right.

Todd Dexheimer (03:14): Yeah. I've been, what was I going to lose, man?

Chris Miles (03:16): That's right!

Todd Dexheimer (03:18): I was making you know, not very much as a high school teacher. And I think there was, I don't, I don't know exactly what sparked it like it was, I don't know if it was just a spark, but I've always, I think had this entrepreneurial spirit with me. I actually built shipping crates for my dad's company that he worked at. He was a manufacturing engineer and they're making these vises and I built shipping crates for these vises. So I had my own decks, custom crates business that my brother and dad kind of formed and along with me, and then I took over and did that. So that was fun. And that was when I was in high school, I had the lawn mowing business, you know, but then I decided to be a teacher and just, just quite frankly, it just didn't click. Like I thought it was going to be great. And there was parts of it. That was, was great, but it just didn't click. And it wasn't for me. And I bet within like a month or two, I was telling my wife, I gotta figure out what I'm going to do when I grow up because this aint it. And so...

Chris Miles (04:26): It, wasn't a scary moment for her to say, wait, all of this to now say you want to get out. Right?

Todd Dexheimer (04:31): Well, we just started our life together, you know, as like all this. So it was kind of crazy, but at the same time I knew it wasn't for me. So it was just exploratory and just trying to figure out and real estate made a ton of sense. And like you said, it was right during that like firestorm, right. Everything was crashing. Everybody was running in the opposite direction. And I got in a little bit about, you know, I was naive. I didn't really understand a hundred percent what happened cause I wasn't involved. Like I didn't lose anything. Right? So it was a little bit of maybe me being naive, but also seeing the opportunity. Understanding like that real estate will go back up in value, even though some people sat and I heard this a lot of times real estate will never go back up to where it used to be. Never. And that's very shortsighted. And I knew that it was like, yeah, see, but these are people that got, just got burned. Right? And so it just made so much financial sense and I understood the industry being an industrial tech teacher and you know, doing construction through the summers too, work my way through high school and college. It just made sense.

Chris Miles (05:44): Yeah. So what was your first deal? Like what'd you start out doing?

Todd Dexheimer (05:48): You know what, I did three deals pretty much at one time, which is, which is crazy. And I didn't have any money, by the way. My wife and I had probably like $30,000 saved up, maybe $25,000 saved up. And so we bought a single family that we ended up living in, but it was a foreclosure. We did this 203K loan. So you can get in for very little money. And then we did the renovation ourselves, big renovation. I mean, when we moved in, there was no plumbing, water wasn't working. So like the first, like, I shouldn't say when we moved in, like probably the day we moved in, I just got it going. I can still remember working on some, we didn't have heat, which is fine. Cause we moved in in August, but we had to get heat because at Minnesota, by end of September, you need heat. So I, they like get around is we're on a time deadline. Yeah. But so that, that was one of them. The other one was a flip that I partnered with a guy that had money and we did the fix and flip. And then the other one was a single family rental house. I bought that out of foreclosure. For like 60,000, somewhere around there stuck another 10, 15,000 into it. Did all the work myself with my wife and a couple of friends came and helped me in, but that was it. And then was able to then refinance that house actually in that snowball, from there. Fix and flip, actually ended up being a flop. I bet I made a thousand dollars on it. I did all the work

Chris Miles (07:27): You got to learn pretty quickly. Like it's probably better that happened because in some people's case where they hit really big on that first flip, they think that's the way it's always going to be. Right?

Todd Dexheimer (07:35): Oh, this is easy!

Chris Miles (07:37): Yeah, exactly. And you're like, okay, that wasn't as cool as I thought that was, that was like a dollar an hour. Gosh.

Todd Dexheimer (07:43): But it probably wasn't even that much.

Chris Miles (07:47): Well, that's great. And you've done. I mean, you've done flips, you've even done mobile home, parks and you did a ski resort, is that right?

Todd Dexheimer (07:53): Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Miles (07:55): Tell us about that.

Todd Dexheimer (07:55): Well, I bought a defunct ski resort, so it was just a ski resort that, you know, we had some really bad winters in the early, the late 90's to early 2000's where there just wasn't a lot of snow. And so when that happens, these little skiers are just can't handle it. And so they ended up shutting it down. Somebody got hurt really bad too. And so there was a big lawsuit. And so it was just shut down. The guy that owned it originally passed away, handed down to his kid and grown adult, but yeah, just didn't want to do it anymore. So they ended up shutting it down and we stumbled upon it. Actually the business partner at the time was actually hunting nearby and he was seeing all these deer trails. And they all led into this property.

Todd Dexheimer (08:48): So we went and talked to the owner and then was like, Hey, what's going on here? And we ended up striking a deal. Then we ended up getting the property and we got it for such a cheap price that we had a bank that financed it a hundred percent.

Chris Miles (09:01): Wow!

Todd Dexheimer (09:02): It appraised for a million dollars and we were buying it for $450,000 and they fund us to a hundred percent of the deal.

Chris Miles (09:10): That's incredible.

Todd Dexheimer (09:12): Yeah. It was incredible. And that was 2000, maybe 13 or 14. So things, I mean still were a little iffy, you know, probably 13. Yeah. We're still a little iffy. There is banks. Weren't being super friendly. Yeah. Not like that, but...

Chris Miles (09:29): But the numbers made sense. It said, all right. Go for it.

Todd Dexheimer (09:32): Yup. Yup. So we ended up just taking that. We did some work to it. We were thinking about doing something with it, but it ended up just being more of a distraction to try to get it up and running. So we ended up selling it. So I basically flipped the ski resort. You know, I tried to convince my wife to move down there. She said, no.

Chris Miles (09:50): I'm saying it as a skier. You were probably really tempted weren't you?

Todd Dexheimer (09:53): Yeah, it was great. It was. And it's amazingly beautiful piece of property and it's just amazing.

Chris Miles (09:59): That's great. What kind of deals are you doing now? Like what kind of multifamily stuff are you doing? Cause I know with different people I've had on the show, some were kinda like, you know what, I'm getting so strict with my underwriting. Like I am almost refused things left and right, right?

Todd Dexheimer (10:13): Yup. Yup. And kind of the same actually. Things were heating up quite a bit, obviously that was pre-COVID. Things were heating up quite a bit and it was really tough to find a deal that made sense. Now people were just buying these properties for crazy amounts and we weren't willing to. So I'm buying, you know, value add, B class multifamily, typically a hundred plus units. So we can have some scale. We can have the onsite staff and, and we're buying those in a few markets cross country that are kind of emerging or markets that have some, the, all the right fundamentals that we're really looking for and we're doing the syndication. So we're raising the funds for down payment, all that kind of stuff. So that's, that's kind of our bread and butter. And I anticipate that to still be our bread and butter as we kind of emerge through this whole COVID deals will probably come out of this. You know, we don't know exactly the future yet, but I think there'll be some opportunity down the road.

Chris Miles (11:24): Yeah. I mean, not that I, I glory in people's pain right? Or do something bad, but I definitely foresee that there's a lot of deal operators that really weren't operators. They were just greedy people wanting to get in on the, on the ride. Right. And buy these properties even probably have investor's money out there. And, but they've never done a deal before and they don't know how to operate something. And I imagine that's where there could be some good opportunities coming up.

Todd Dexheimer (11:47): I think so. I think so. And like you said, we don't like for me, it's you, when you look at it and go, Oh, I really, so some people are excited. They're like, Oh, it's great. I can't wait for people to start losing their properties. It's like, well you do you understand like that, that actually only hurts you as well. Like I've got properties. So if the guys around me guys and gals around me lose their properties, those value, my property pretty value is going to go down. Right. And so it's, it's it's yeah. Well, do I wish ill will upon anybody? No. But the matter of the fact is exactly what you said, likely there's going to be people that are gonna end up maybe not losing the property, but be told to sell. Lenders have low incompetence and you are going to be told to sell if you're not hitting your numbers. And so you're going to be forced, basically forced to sell and yeah, you're right. A lot of those people had no clue what they're doing or even if they did have a clue what they're doing, they were just going about it the wrong way, or they're going after these properties for fees. I think that's a lot of things. A lot of what was happening is people are going, wow, I can do this deal. I can syndicate it and I can make $300,000 right up front on this deal. That's a great payday Al's I need to do is one to two of those each year. And I'm doing really well. And some people are doing two, maybe three deals a year, they're making 600 to a million dollars, man. They didn't care how good the deal was. That's, Unfortunately I think what was happening.

Chris Miles (13:21): Yeah. No, there's, there's definitely, I've seen that. I have definitely seen that out there and you're right. Like we don't want people to have to sell off, like in a sense of just being, you know, selling off for dirt cheap or anything like that, you know, I would more see like where's the opportunity of increasing profits and it's something that's already there. Right. It's like, you know, where they just didn't operate it well, and yeah. In your opinion, like right now, I mean, what are you seeing? Are you seeing like good deals or you see in most everything's just junk currently?

Todd Dexheimer (13:50): Yeah. So currently I would say we haven't seen much adjustment. The sellers aren't quite ready to take a discount and yeah, I don't need the salaries to take a bath. Like I don't need, in order for me to feel comfortable with the buy. It's not like I need the sellers to sell for 40% discount or something like that now would that be great? Sure. You know, I need the sellers to come off of their, their price by let's call it 10%, maybe 15% and then, okay, I'm ready to, I'm ready to start buying. For me, my company. We don't need to buy Properties, dirt cheap. Now will we? If that happens. Absolutely. But all right. It's still about the fundamentals of the piece of real estate and how the numbers work and can we get our business plan to be able to take any, can we execute it? And so that's what really important part. So...

Chris Miles (14:43): Yeah. What kind of cash flow or NOI can you get from it? Right?

Todd Dexheimer (14:46): Yup. So I've been talking to a lot of brokers that deal in my space and they're kind of the same, most sellers are looking for right now between a 10% and a 20% discount or sorry, most buyers are looking for a 10% to 20% discount. Most sellers are well expecting to sell either at the previous high or within at least 10%. So they, I have heard from brokers, but a lot of sellers are understanding. They've got to come down 5% to 10% and but most buyers are actually even more than that. So we've got a gap there eventually that'll close.

Chris Miles (15:22): Yeah. It's got to take some time before they start adjusting and believing the numbers and say, okay.

Todd Dexheimer (15:27): Real estate. It's not the stock market. I mean, you're right, Chris. I mean the stock market goes like this and actually overreacts quickly. Where real estate actually Under reacts and takes a while for those, those drops to happen.

Chris Miles (15:41): Isn't that the beautiful thing about real estate? Is that it doesn't happen overnight. Right. Where people are used to, if they'd been watching the stock market, it's, it's painful to watch. You can't watch it, you know, without freaking out, you know. Where at least the real estate there's slow adjustments typically. I mean, whether the price go down or up, usually there's there's time involved.

Todd Dexheimer (16:00): Yup. Yeah. I mean, right now I've got a property on the market and I have priced at about the 15% below where I would have expected to sell it just a few months ago and I'm kicking myself because I should have sold it in January, but I didn't know this was happening for some reason.

Chris Miles (16:16): Of course.

Todd Dexheimer (16:17): But I still want to sell the property and I'm happy to take a 15% discount because quite frankly, it's still gonna, I'm still gonna do really well on it. And I see there's opportunity potentially coming. So I'd rather take that capital, be able to have it, be able to do it. Okay. Put it out there when better deals do come. So right now, if you're wanting to be a seller, it's Still sell because real estate slowly, as you said, it's going to take awhile.

Chris Miles (16:43): That's a good point, too. Like you said, you don't always have to find bad deals. It could be someone just like you, who already bought a great deal. It's appreciated, you know, you've add value to it. And of course now price is great. Even if you have to take a discount, you're still gonna make good, good money on it. So there's plenty of those deals too.

Todd Dexheimer (16:59): Yup.

Chris Miles (16:59): Well, great. Well how like, like tell us more about your show, the Pillars of Wealth Creation Show. Tell us about that.

Todd Dexheimer (17:05): Yeah. So Pillars of Wealth Creations, mainly a real estate show, but we're, we also talk to a lot of people that not aren't necessarily real estate investors first and foremost. So we're, the show is kind of more catered towards the business side of the real estate. Like not necessarily talking the nuts and bolts of real estate. I can learn that in a book for the most part. And there's a lot of other podcasts that talk about nuts and bolts. But one of the big things that we like to focus on is how do you really build a business the right way? So how do we take cause so many real estate investors are transactional, right? They think they think about real estate as just buying a piece of property and that's it. And then we're going to, we're going to be passive, right? We're going to buy this piece of property. We're gonna buy this a hundred unit apartment. And then we're going to be able to sit back on the beach and relax. Cause now we got all this cash flow. Well, that's not how it works. If you want to do that, then you need to passively truly passively invest in real estate.

Chris Miles (18:05): That's right.

Todd Dexheimer (18:07): But, if you're going to buy the piece of property and that you're going to be a part of that deal, you've got to be an active business owner. You've got to learn how to make a business plan. You've got to learn, you know, how to set up systems and processes. And you've got to learn how to build teams. You've got to do all the things that a regular business owner does. And so many real estate investors have no clue that that's even part of what they should be learning.

Chris Miles (18:28): It's so true. Like I'm in a kind of a high level mastermind group where you usually have to have at least a hundred doors to be in that group. And it's so common even with those guys, those guys who legitimately do have a business, right. Even for them to say, Oh, like I am getting up at 4:00AM, 5:00 AM to basically get to work and just hammer this out. And I'm trying to manage everybody. And I don't know if I should have a CEO or not, or a COO or, you know, they're like going nuts. They went from just trying to make money on a few flips and deals like that. And now they're like, man, like just to make these millions of dollars, I have no life like no real passive income. And, and that's a big difference. There's a big difference in lifestyle between that active investor, right? The person that is a business owner versus those that are just passively investing in. Like some sort of what you offer.

Todd Dexheimer (19:14): Yup. Yup. Absolutely.

Chris Miles (19:17): Yeah. Well, great. So obviously like if people follow your show, you, when you talk about syndications, you're probably talking about your syndications and deals you're doing right then too. Right. If you're, if people are looking for passive investments, you've got to, you've got your own funds as well, right?

Todd Dexheimer (19:30): Yeah. You know, on the show, I try not to, I don't probably talk too much about the deals as are going, but if we, when we close on a deal, I usually will give kind of a, Hey, here's what we did. Here are the lessons we learned along the way, you know, here's maybe some things we, you know, found in due diligence and why we made adjustments. And so we'll talk about, yeah, there's a lot of mistakes and lessons learned even along active deals, I've been doing this for a while, but I still make mistakes. I still learn a lot of things on every single deal that I feel like it can bring to my audience and allow them to hopefully learn as well. From what I've learned from my mistakes. So...

Chris Miles (20:13): Well, the thing I love is what you do is you're not the kind of guy to say, Hey, this deal looks awesome. Like you're not just, you know, running around like a monkey with a machine gun. Right. You're actually like, Hey, this deal doesn't fit my parameters, next. Okay. Like takes me 30 seconds. See this, this one's a no, like you just keep passing and passing. And those are like the best investors in my mind are the ones that say no to almost everything just like Warren Buffett did. He would always say, I say no to almost everything. And yes, the very, very few things, you know, and then you have to, you have to right. Like, there's, you can't be successful if you're just chasing after every little deal, you're going to have big, you're gonna have losses and maybe some gains, but you're gonna have a lot of losses. You won't be in business very long.

Todd Dexheimer (20:52): Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah. I mean, Warren Buffett's obviously a pretty smart man. And you know, there, he says that for a reason, there's so many deals out there and those are deals for everybody else. Not for me.

Chris Miles (21:06): Yeah. I actually remember him. He said a quote. And he said that to one of my friends in an interview, he said the difference between the successful and the ultra successful is that the ultra successful say no, almost every time.

Todd Dexheimer (21:16): Yeah.

Chris Miles (21:17): You know, I know it's true. And I know you're that kind of guy too. So same way as you know, listeners, you guys, those who are following this, like check out his website, for sure. What's, do you have a website that people could follow?

Todd Dexheimer (21:30): Yeah. A couple of websites, Pillars of Wealth Creation. They can get to my podcast and then just my general website, which should, they can actually still get to my podcasts or that is at VentureDProperties.com. So it's venture and then D as in dog or Dexheimer properties.com.

Chris Miles (21:49): Awesome. Yeah. I'll definitely make sure we get to get those links in the show notes. So if you can follow you, follow your show or even check out your site and get to know you more, obviously, especially if people are looking for investing in opportunities and things of that nature, because obviously you're looking right now, you're actively looking for the right deals. Not just any deal.

Todd Dexheimer (22:06): Yeah. Looking for the right deals and there's opportunities that are going to come down the pipeline. And I think the important part for people that right now to be just thinking about is, what are the paradigms that are going to be shifting through this whole event, right? People's paradigm shift. Consumers, thoughts are going to shift, workers habits are going to shift. So there's going to be different things that are going to come out of this. And how can we make sure we're positioning ourselves to be able to take advantage of the opportunities that are in front of us. And it's not necessarily take advantage of other people. It's take advantage of the people's wants and needs that, you know, the consumers wants and needs out there. If you can best serve them. I think you're going to have a lot of success. And that's what I'm working with. Multifamily with real estate in general, I consider myself a value add real estate investor multifamily. I love a lot, but I also look at other asset classes. So we look at, you know, what are the strengths and weaknesses? What are the trends? Where do we, I think that things are going to be going, and we're trying to make the best decisions obviously for ourselves and our investors on that.

Chris Miles (23:06): Yeah. Working to improve upon something and make it better, you know, for everybody. Right. And that's...

Todd Dexheimer (23:10): Absolutely!

Chris Miles (23:12): What cooler way to make money than actually bettering people's lives and making money from that? I mean, that's the way life and that's where the world should be in my opinion. Yeah. Well, great. Hey, I appreciate your time so much Todd. Like this is awesome. Again, everybody check out the links in the show notes, you know, follow his podcast or check out his site. So everybody, you remember, it's all about patience. It's all about looking for the right thing. Not just anything but the very right thing. So follow Todd and everybody, I hope you make it a wonderful and prosperous week. We'll see you later!

#Chris Miles #Anti-financial Advisor #Cash flow #Cash flow Expert #Debts #Entrepreneur #Financial Freedom #Money Ripples

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fyexo · 5 years ago

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191009 New K-pop Band SuperM: ‘We Don’t Want to Step on Other Groups to Get to the Top’

With K-pop firmly entrenched in the mainstream, SuperM say it’s time to start raising the bar

The well-coiffed guys from the new K-pop supergroup, SuperM, are sitting around a conference room at the Capitol Records building in Los Angeles, and feeling like they may have left something on the table.

Two days earlier, the seven-piece unit — put together using members from four established K-pop boy bands — had shut down an intersection in the heart of Hollywood and made their live debut before more than 5,000 frenzied fans, some of whom had lined up for days just to get a prime spot to see the guys perform.

For SuperM, the outdoor show — which was also streamed live worldwide on YouTube — served as their official group debut as well, with the boy band finally being introduced to the world after months of secrecy.

“Going in front of our fans and performing as SuperM was nerve-wracking, and it’s not something we usually feel because we’ve all been in this industry for a while now,” says Kai, the pretty, pouty-mouthed singer who was chosen to join SuperM from the band EXO. “There were some members that felt like maybe we could’ve done better with this or stronger with that, but it’s okay,” he says, smiling. “More than anything, I was just proud that we could finally show everyone what we’ve been preparing for.”

SuperM is the latest creation of Korean management company, SM Entertainment (the band’s name is not exactly subtle). Founded in 1995 by Lee Soo-man, a man so famous in Korea he’s just known as “Mr. Lee,” SM is regarded as one of the pioneers of the global K-pop movement, having first brought Korean artists to North America in the early 2000s at the height of the teen pop craze.

SuperM is the company’s latest attempt to make a dent in the U.S. market. After years of breaking all sorts of records in Asia but remaining relatively unknown in the States, the crossover success of bands like BTS and Blackpink have given entertainment companies like SM a renewed interest in reaching the international market, with the U.S. as a pivotal launching pad.

For SuperM, it wasn’t about starting from scratch, but rather starting from the top. SuperM culled its members from some of SM’s most popular groups, who collectively have sold more than 14 million adjusted albums combined, and amassed nearly four billion views of their music videos online. SuperM’s fans lovingly refer to them as “the Avengers of K-pop,” stemming from the belief that the group features the most talented and popular members from each of the individual bands.

Baekhyun and Kai are from EXO, a stylish and well-packaged boy band that, as of 2018, had actually sold more records than BTS in Korea (the release of BTS’ Map of the Soul: Persona this past April have tipped the scales back in the latter group’s favor). At 27, Baekhyun is the oldest member of SuperM, and has unofficially acquired the title of group leader.

Taemin, the second oldest member at 26, is from SHINee, considered one of the veterans of K-pop, after having debuted in 2008. The group made news in 2017 after founding member, Jonghyun, died from an apparent suicide, which sparked a debate over working conditions and unreasonably high expectations for these young performers, many of whom are pulled from school to begin “training” for their debut.

The last four members of SuperM were culled from subunits of the massive 21-person K-pop group, NCT (Mr. Lee calls them the first “unlimited” boy band, with a constantly rotating roster of new members). Taeyong and Mark are from NCT 127, and Ten and Lucas are from NCT’s Chinese subset, WayV.

The idea for an all-star group was first discussed last year, though the seven members didn’t actually come together to record until earlier this spring. While the guys had met before — SM organizes an annual “SM Town” concert tour, similar to say, when Diddy took his Bad Boy artists on the road — they had never actually worked together until SuperM was formed.

The group’s debut EP, The 1st Mini Album, hit stores last week. The five-song set opens with lead single, “Jopping,” a turbo-charged track whose name comes from a combination of the words, “jumping” and “popping” (a publicist sighed that the name was both crazy yet catchy at the same time). The song mixes hip-hop with EDM, with the members trading verses in both English and Korean. The video for “Jopping,” meantime, was filmed in Dubai over the summer and has already amassed more than 22 million views online. Fueled by massive buzz for the song and album, SuperM announced this week that they will be hitting the road for a North American tour, kicking off November 11th in Fort Worth, Texas.

While BTS have blasted into the mainstream, with number one albums, appearances on all the late-night talk shows and even Grammy buzz, the guys in SuperM are motivated to find success on their own terms.

“Yes, the competition exists and we can’t ignore that,” says Taemin, “but we don’t want to step on other groups to get to the top. We want to stand alone as a group and bring something fresh and new to this K-pop scene.”

To that end, the group has been working on carving out a more signature sound for their debut LP, which will still sit comfortably in the hip-hop/pop/R&B arena, but also see them weaving in and out of different genres within a single song. While other groups — such as Blackpink and BTS — primarily perform in Korean, SuperM could also be releasing more English language tracks. (Though Mark was born in Canada and speaks fluent English, the band’s publicist confirms the rest of the group’s members have been taking English lessons.)

They’ve been doing their homework too, listening to the radio while they’re in Los Angeles and streaming an eclectic mix of artists like H.E.R., Ella Mai, Daniel Caesar and Billie Eilish (“Let’s get that collabo!” Taemin hollers).

And while Korean management companies are notorious for controlling their groups’ images and keeping their artists on a short leash (I once arrived to meet EXO in Seoul and was told I couldn’t interview the guys in person because they didn’t have their makeup on), from this perspective, SuperM feels a lot… looser.

On this recent swing through L.A., the young men reveal that their first stop after landing at LAX wasn’t straight to their hotel, but rather to In-N-Out. Though they’ve booked dinners in Malibu, the members also rave about the traditional Korean tofu stew at BCD Tofu House, a 24-hour Southern California chain of cheap eats (“It’s honestly better than Korea,” Taeyong says). During the interview, the guys are decked out in leather jackets and oversized sweats, sipping on iced coffees from Starbucks, and fidgeting with their phones like any other twenty-something, as they dish about trying to take a group vacation after their tour is over. They travel with a translator, but all of them try valiantly to respond to questions in English before they crumble in laughter when they lose their words. If their original groups gave them a crash course in making it in the music business, it seems SuperM will give these guys a chance to be themselves — and in doing so, a chance to grow.

“If I said I didn’t feel any pressure that would be a lie,” says Kai. “We all come from successful, established careers, but in a way, we are still unknowns, at least when it comes to this formation. But with that pressure comes this new level of excitement,” he continues, “because there’s so much more we can try and do, and the possibilities are endless.”

“There are a lot of groups out there and a lot of competition,” Taeyong admits, “but our goal is to make K-pop shine even brighter. The spirit of competition is not necessarily bad, because it pushes us to want to put out better things.”

Kai is more specific: “SuperM is here to level up the K-pop genre,” he asserts. “We are ready for K-pop to start raising the bar.”

source: Tim Chan @ Rolling Stone

#exo #kai #baekhyun #t: info #album: superm #sigh

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bestsuccessstories · 5 years ago

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STORY 1

TRUE SUCCES STORY OR “OUT OF THE WOODS”

When you decide to hunt your dream, sometimes you may feel like Prince Charming.You have to go into the dark woods alone, get lost, then climb to the tallest treetop to actually see your path (Prince Charming, as well as success hunters is not provided with a map)Afterwards, it is required to defeat several very wicked withes and train your dragon, meanwhile, the magic volcano continues erupting behind you.Only after these entertaining activities have finished could he have an entire Kingdom in addition with a pretty Princess.

Yes, a way to your dream can be covered with fear and doubt.That’s why very important to remind yourself, that this road dotted with mountains will lead you to the most beautiful destination you have ever seen and the harder your path is, the more beautiful view you will admire in the end.What truly helps success hunters, is an example of those, who managed to get out of the darkest woods and made come true the most impossible dream (leaving all very wicked witches and dragons crying behind).

This is a story like that (a real story of a successful company, try to find out the name in the end)

Once upon a time, two success hunters decided to completely change their routine and moved to San Francisco, ready to realise their dream. As it should be, when your dream is big enough, there are always difficulties arising.Without employment, it was quite hard to pay the rent and they were looking for a way to earn some extra money.They noticed that all hotel rooms in the city were booked, as the local Industrial Design conference attracted a lot of visitors.

True success hunters always sees the opportunity in every difficulty.Our heroes bought a few airbeds and put up a website. The idea was to offer visitors a place to sleep and breakfast in the morning. They succeeded and the first guests were sleeping on their floor (a 30-year-old Indian man, a 35-year-old woman from Boston and a 45-year-old father of four from Utah)

After they had those guests, they did nothing for about four months.There were no more bookings through their website, so they didn’t think the ‘airbed thing’ would work and they decided to came up with another idea.They were trying to build a roommate matching website.It supposed to be Craigslist meets Facebook, for roommates with profiles. Then one day they typed roommates into Google and realised that someone had already built that site. And this was about four weeks after they started working on it.

The main secret of all success hunters is that their dreams are bigger than any obstacles, so they kept working and returned to the original idea. Deciding to stick with the ‘airbed thing’ they found a corder and a third success hunter got to their team.

The major problem was that the site only had two users, one of them was its co-founder. First time they launched at SXSW(Conference & Festivals celebrate the convergence of the interactive, film, and music industries), and only received two bookings(almost a year they had original idea). They built three versions of a website.There is a saying: if you launch and no-one notices that, just launch again so they did.

By the third version it was the Demographic National Convention, all the hotels in Denver were sold out.They decided that was a right time to do a big launch. Barack Obama was coming to Denver, and 80,000 people were expected to visit, but there were only 27,000 hotel rooms.That weekend their website received 80 bookings. The weekend after, they received no bookings.

The same pattern repeated itself for months. They got to about 30,000$ in credit card debt. Our success hunters would go and get credit cards and max them out, and then they would keep getting more credit cards until the bank stopped giving them to our heroes. They were tens of thousands of dollars in debt.

Everybody thought they were crazy, no-one supported them, they had no money. One of our hunters would wake up in the morning and have a panic (Later, he admitted that it was the best weight lost program ever, he probably lost 20 pounds) Every morning he felt his heart pounding, but over the course of the day he would convince himself that everything is going to work out fine (I’ve got a plan, it’s all good-affirmation, he highly recommends) and by the night he would go to bed really confident. The next day, there was like a receipt button and every morning started with panic again.

The day they launched, they had a meeting with a well known investor.There site was down, they didn’t bring a slide deck and that wasn’t a super successful pitch.“It was mostly me and him staring at each other for an hour and he did not invest” will say one of our hunters a couple years later in the interview.

They reached about 20 investors about 15 even didn’t reply to their emails.

They managed to organise another meeting in the cafe.In the middle of the conversation, their potential investor gets up and leaves (that was the last time they have seen him).

They were in debt and trying to figure out how to pay the rent, after the convention they returned back to zero.They built a website, spend a year on it and no-one using it, no one want to come or list their homes because there were no travellers, no traveler want to come to the website where there are no homes.No one wants to be the first person to try the idea like this.Most people thought that was insane.

People around them were receiving funding and developing their companies. The story of our hunters was nothing like that, but they kept working when most people would give up.Very well-known fact (every success hunter must follow) that if you don’t believe in yourself, pretend that you do and, at some point you will.

One night, they were thinking how they are going to pay the rent and keep the company working. They had an idea to provide a breakfast to people going to Demographic National Convention. They were thinking that would be nice to have a branded breakfast like cereal and they came up with idea Obama’s O’s and Cap’n McCain’s cereals. The front of the box was stamped with “Hope In Every bowl” and on the back it called itself the “Breakfast of Change.” The side of the Cap’n McCain’s box sang the praise of eating squares (Os may look pretty, but have you ever noticed there’s something missing? That’s right, there’s a hole in the middle of every O. With Cap’n McCain’s you get a whole piece of cereal in every bite).They called local cereal companies which said ‘Great, we would like to work with you, all we need is non-refundable deposit’(which was a huge amount of money for young startup)

Another one success hunter’s statement claims that when one door closes, another opens. Finally, they meet a guy who has got a print shop (not a cereal company).He wanted to help and said that he could print a 1000 examples for free (If you succeed and sell this, just give me the royalty).They were literally assembling these boxes in their kitchen (thousand boxes assembling with hot glue).Sitting on the kitchen, they were wondering whether Marc Zukemberg was assembling cereal boxes when he first launched Facebook (unlikely). Was that a good or a bad sign?

So, they had to fold a thousand boxes, pack cereal in them, and sell them for 40 dollars a box. They thought, ‘who is going to pay 40 dollars a box’ but they were limited edition, and they ended up selling about US$30,000 worth of this cereal. But the money they earned only went so far, and in November 2008 the company was broke once more. It got to the point where one of the success hunter’s mother called him and said, ‘look, if you need money I will send you. You don’t need to have strangers in your home to make money’. This was the moment when he started to question the decisions he made in life to get him here. He didn’t felt successful, or smart, or talented. He only felt that the world was against him.

It was a time they decided to enter famous startup accelerator Y Combinator. When they met Paul Graham ( co-founder of Y Combinator),first question he asked was ‘people are doing this?’. They told yes, and he replied,’what’s wrong with them?’ (In the end the interview he thinks it’s the worst idea ever). About to live, they handed him a box of Obama O’s and he said,’if you convince people to buy a box of cereal for 40$, maybe you will convince them to stay in another people’s rooms’. So he let them to Y-Combinator. The company spent the first three months of 2009 at the accelerator, working on perfecting their product.

Over the course of 2010, the site’s weekly revenue doubled. Then it doubled again.They renamed the company and soon received another $600k in a seed round from Sequoia Capital and Y Ventures.

However, not everyone was as impressed with company’s business model.Even during Y Combinator, they still got rejected by investors.The young startup was turned down by Fred Wilson and Union Square Ventures—a decision he now admits wasn’t a good one (in 2011 Union Square kept a box of Obama O’s in their conference room to remind themselves not to make the same mistake again).

Also, the website wasn’t gaining much traction in New York, so our hunters flew out and booked spaces with 24 hosts to figure out what the problem was. As it turned out, users weren’t doing a great job of presenting their listings (the photos were really bad, people were using camera phones).There were no bookings because users couldn’t see what they were paying for. Success hunters got used to challenges, so they found a solution.They rented a $5,000 camera, planning to take professional pictures of as many New York listings as possible and by the end of the month startup’s revenue in the city had doubled.That’s gave them an idea to launch a photography program (hosts could automatically schedule a professional photographer to come and photograph their space).

Four years after the first air mattress guests, company was already in 89 countries. It also won the break-out mobile app award at SXSW (and that’s after its lukewarm launch at the festival in 2008).The same year, one of the valley’s biggest VCs put $112 million into the startup, valuing it at over $1 billion. That made company a “unicorn” in Silicon Valley.

After years of doubts, debt and disappointment, success hunters came out of the dark woods and showed the world what the true success supposed to mean. In 2011 startup closed a US$112 million round of venture funding. Three years later, it received US$475 million more. In 2015, it collected another US$1.6 billion dollars in the financing alone.

Company has reached a US$25.5 billion valuation. That makes it bigger than Hilton Worldwide, InterContinental Hotels Group, or any other hotel chain on the planet Earth.

Our success hunters are famous not only for disrupting an industry, changing the game in hospitality, and generated billions of dollars in revenue for themselves, and their users.The main thing, is that they gave a faith to young people all over the world.They showed us, that no matter how huge is your dream, it can become reality. No matter how difficult and hopeless your situation is, it’s all going to work out in the end if you will keep trying. Because every failure brings you closer to success.When you stop believe you actually could reach the top, remember, it always seems impossible until it’s done (Then, you can write a manual called ‘Through the dark woods’ which could help future generations).

You don’t need a supernatural power or a pixie dust to make your dream come true, just be desperate for success and success will be desperate for you, this will be a mutual love in the end. As you know Fortune, is a Lady and Ladies requires dedication.So she will need some time to check whether you are ready to keep going when things will get harder (definitely they will, because very wicked withes are payed well to do their job)but if you show a bit of persistence, she will become your Godmother.You always will hear her kind voice whispering to your year and lightening up your way in the dark woods when very wicked witches will try to lead your astray.

So be it

P.S.You probably guess that the company name was Airbnb and success hunters that inspires us are:Brian Chesky ,Joe Gebbia, Nathan Blecharczyk

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jennamoran · 6 years ago

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IOSHI (Part 1)

Hi!

So the story on this one is a little different, since (functionally) this one’s entirely written. I’ve just been wrestling with how to share it with y’all for quite some time.

So, a long, long time ago, I mean, it must have been like 2003 or something, I did some work for Ex Machina, a cyberpunk book for the Tri-Stat system. The project was brutally unpleasant on every level and then I didn’t get paid.

By, I don’t know, 2008? 2010?

By some point, it had been firmly acknowledged by Guardians of Order that the IOSHI setting and my writing for the project belongs to me, and also acknowledged by me that I don’t have anything better to do with it than share it with people, but! There’s a lot of Tri-Stat content in the text, and I can’t post those parts without infringing.

So it took me a long time to figure out what to do about that.

I’ve decided that what I’m going to do is put together a pretty rough ‘n ready system. It’s probably not going to be super-well-balanced. OTOH, it will be obvious to anyone who knows any of the HERO, GURPS, Tri-Stat variety of system how to put that in there if you really care.

Basically, I don’t think the work I did to build specific decking powers or whatever in Tri-Stat was particularly hard or valuable, so I think you aren’t losing much of the actual content when that turns into Decking skill 0-5 or whatever; and that’ll let me share this stuff with you. ^_^

Without further ado: (the) Individually Organized Science and Hobby Index, or, IOSHI.

... I’m not going to edit out the U.K. English I had to write the original in, since my brain’s spelling parser sees most of it as legitimate until I port it here and everything turns red, but I can’t promise I won’t revert to U.S. English when making editing tweaks as I go. I mean, I can remember to spell “colour” as “colour” but there are some words (I’m looking at you “manoeuvring”) where U.K. English is just clearly drunk.

OK, now without further ado:

IOSHI

In the centre of the world, the city of Tartessos stands. Its contract of incorporation does not recognize or specify a physical location. It covers most of the world’s habitable surface. In the late 21st century, Tartessos defines the world. Even those places outside it frame their existence in terms of their separation from it.

Seven years ago, the government of Malta quietly admitted its own ineffectuality and faded away. It was the last of the nations to surrender its sovereignty, and even today its people affect a certain barbaric splendour. Their demeanour reminds others that the savage blood of the early 21st century, when people drew their identities from the nations of their birth, still runs thickly in the Maltese veins.

The pre-eminent technology of the time is the Individually Organized Science and Hobby Index (IOSHI), also called “the well.” The grandchild of the web, IOSHI can restate its massive database of human knowledge in terms inherently conducive to a specific user’s understanding. Those with access to the well become savants. In months, they master their field of study to a degree essentially impossible with previous learning tools.

There are certain catches. First, IOSHI training costs money. Second, it requires legal entanglement. The corporations of Tartessos employ rather than own their staff, but most savants find themselves too hemmed in with legal obligations to sever their contracts. Many go for it anyway, saving money for years to afford their turn at the well, master the field of their choice, and live the rest of their lives happily as valuable human resources.

The third catch is more worrisome. There are rumours. None are terribly precise — just rumours that something is wrong. The term used on the street is “data taint”. If you get IOSHI training without a filter, something happens to you. Something bad.

Rules

So here’s the heart of the setting.

The standard unit of value in the late 21st century is the tab, denoted by the ‡ sign. Characters can spend ‡1.0 as a character point. Except in unusual circumstances, the character point cost of the relevant traits determines the cost of IOSHI training, cyberware and its implantation, and biotech mods.

There isn’t a skill or an ability or a power or trait out there that can’t be bought—if not from a doc, from the well.

If not from the well, from the street.

It’s all just as much for sale for money as it is for character points OOC.

I can’t share the original game mechanics with you. I’m going to provide my own.

This is going to work best with a system with tons of powers and skills and modifiers. I don’t want to build one of those for you because you have HERO (or GURPS, you heretics). So instead we’re going to do something fairly rough.

... but do note that you’ll be able to adapt the basic ideas here to any system in the general HERO oeuvre; or, for that matter, to something like Exalted.

It doesn’t really go well with most of the kinds of systems I write, alas, or you’d have seen it much sooner.

Anyway, characters will start with 80‡.

Tartessos

Tartessos is a choice and a culture. It includes all places that accept the rule of Tartessian law and all people who willingly observe its customs.

Tartessos does not employ a policy of conscription. Anyone can reject the city and declare their residence outside of Tartessian law. The city still welcomes the labour and coin of these foreigners and exiles, but a certain prejudice applies. Demographic studies show that outsiders earn an average of four fifths the income of an equally productive Tartessian.

A Map of the World

Most maps of Tartessos reflect an eccentric conceit. They show Tartessos as a fractal cross, a central district surrounded by four great branches. Each of these branches has the same shape as the whole, down to a variable level of detail. Having established this basic structure, the maps distort the physical topology of the world so that all non-Tartessian places are “outwards,” forming a fringe around the city at the world’s heart. Pedestrians must usually hunt down the rarer accurate maps to plan their travels. Those who use automated transportation can get by with a standard Tartessian map — the vehicles adjust their course to correct the system’s foibles.

Regions occupied by non-Tartessians are considered “outside,” part of the fringe. This applies equally to apartments, homes, neighbourhoods, and boroughs. Efficient transportation, communication, and virtual reality make it nearly irrelevant whether a fringe region stands at the physical edge of the city or somewhere within its mazy depths.

Beyond the fringe lies the wilderness. Again, the spatial location matters little. To reach a wild space completely enclosed by the city, one drives further “outwards” past the fringe, just as one would to reach the open ocean. Most wildernesses exist by sheer chance: Tartessos has not yet spread to occupy everything and everywhere. Landowners fund the protection of other unspoiled locations as a form of investor speculation. A few other places — such as the occasional radioactive ruin marking events no longer recorded in Tartessos’s history books, the bulk of the ocean’s surface and depths, and the upper atmosphere — have proven too intractable to tame.

The Tartessian Corporation

The Tartessian concept of employment promotes the ideal that one should divide one’s humanity strictly from one’s work. Typical Tartessians actively oppose the idea of their jobs evaluating them as people. That road, the Tartessian philosophy argues, creates a politically charged office environment and led past generations to confuse their job performance with their own worth.

Tartessians favour purely impersonal evaluations of talent and effectiveness, calculated so far as is possible by software rather than human managers. This gives them a perceived safety net — a sense that, while charm and cunning cannot make up for their personal failings, unavoidable disasters cannot damage their perceived worth. This idea affects even those citizens who come to see it as false. Most who learn to manipulate their managers, peers, and the reports themselves still think of their co-workers as a “labour” or “talent pool.” Most whose friends or relatives suffer because of this social construct find such events a necessary if uncomfortable sacrifice. The occasional victims of outright machine error, underrated by the evaluation software due to error or deliberate sabotage, usually spend years under the delusion that they can fix the situation before they finally give up either on hope or the Tartessian polity.

Since Tartessians depersonalise their working life, loyalty to their employers is nonexistent. Even as workers are a “talent pool,” the corporate structure for Tartessos represents little more than a “sponsor pool,” and which corporate entities sponsor any given effort can change overnight. This usually has minimal impact on the workplace environment. A Tartessian can easily do the same job at the same building for ten years and go through eighteen different immediate employers. Most workers consider corporate identity nothing more than part of an elaborate and meaningless game played by the upper management — the “game of sharks,” as one journalist named it. Endless corporations differentiated only by name and current assets engage primarily in the activity of trading pieces of various other companies with various other companies.

In this environment, the primary unit of employment is the Project. Example Projects include research into a new technology, development of a software upgrade package, management of an apartment complex, and maintenance on a given road system. When a collection of corporations with sufficient resources reaches a “consensus of needs,” finding a given Project worthwhile, they fission off a certain portion of resources and executives to fund and manage the Project as a subsidiary. In theory, as long as the Project remains valuable, it attracts a flow of corporate resources that sustains its operations.

Most Tartessians define Projects in a concrete sense: a Project represents a structure dedicated to achieving a specific goal. Outside the business world, this definition suffices. The middle layers of management, however, often participate in floating Projects. Floating Projects attempt to apply a certain philosophical or economic spin to the function of Tartessos and its Projects as a whole. Some floating Projects have shallow purposes, such as encouraging workers to use a certain software package for Project operations. Others pursue deeper agendas with obscure or ideological purposes — for example, driving greater integration of Tartessos and foreign communities, testing or applying certain management theories, or directing household chemical development towards militarily applicable purposes. The managers of such Projects form “floating boards.” A large number of these boards cycle through a large number of concrete Projects. As a concession to sanity, automated evaluation requires that managers successfully oversee the concrete Projects in question as well as their more abstract agenda.

Tartessian Cultural Display

Tartessian society is a patchwork. The Tartessians’ sense of national identity is secure and global, but their peer communities scatter thinly across the world. People can exchange ideas quickly over any distance. They can meet in virtual spaces. Semi-intelligent software agents help them find people of compatible personality and software intermediaries help them communicate with people of a more foreign mentality. In such an environment, most Tartessians can satisfy their social needs with a mere handful of local peers. A woman in Paraguay can wear the colours and affect the style of a New Zealand-based gang; she is as much a member as any other.

Sidebar: Avatars

In net-enabled regions — which is to say, almost everywhere — each person has an online representation. Scanning the local virtual reality, one sees these representations or “avatars” rather than the physical bodies of others. The people of the late 21st century choose their own avatars, subject to certain restraints. First, higher-class portions of Tartessos usually block public use of obscene representations. Second, if the network is aware of a character’s presence, the character must have an avatar. Third, viewers often regard both the avatar and the physical body simultaneously. Good avatars must map the character’s range of motion and emotion into actions and expressions of their own.

Cultural display influences a Tartessian’s avatar. Since most Tartessians use generic software for avatar creation, the impact is usually minimal or blatant. It might affect a few colour choices, or it might replace the character’s entire avatar with some icon from the Tartessian’s subculture. Characters with high-end software can minimize the visual impact of their avatar or even hack the local network to eliminate it. This relies on the Stealth Skill; specific software packages can add a +1 Tool bonus per 1‡ for this purpose.

Most avatars come in two forms. A “full” avatar can deviate radically from the appearance of the user. A “partial” avatar overlays occasional intimations of the full avatar onto the user’s physical form. Network users toggle their viewpoint, seeing partial avatars when they wish a realistic portrayal of the world around them and full avatars when they prefer to separate their perceptions from normal space.

End Sidebar

Subcultures and Outsider Communities

Humans in the late 21st century suffer little psychological or economic disruption from relocating their home or business. Architectural advances and ever-faster transportation contribute to this effect, but Tartessian mores push it to an unprecedented extreme. The ability to pick up one’s affairs and move five blocks or fifty miles is a necessity in Tartessian life; those who cannot do so face a severe disadvantage.

In Tartessos, the dominant factors in a region tend to become ever more so. When people living in an area dedicate themselves to a particular economic goal or social ideal, others of compatible temperament move in. Those unable to cooperate move out, either of their own free will or under pressure from others. Businesses depending on their location (such as bars, restaurants, and stores) find themselves catering to the local ideal as an economic necessity. Residents find themselves accepting it as a social necessity. The social contract for the region changes, creating a localized Tartessian subculture. If the relevant features ever lose their dominance in the local mindset or economy, the process rapidly reverses.

To function effectively in this environment, a citizen’s underlying assumptions must change to embrace the new conditions. The more these assumptions change, the faster they change, driven by the residents’ need to survive and prosper within society. In many cases, this creates a four-tiered community:

The first tier remains a Tartessian subculture, but becomes global. Tartessians in many locations draw shallowly upon the principles the community expresses.

A boundary region — a “fringe district” or “outer district,” in Tartessian terminology — shares social characteristics with both the community and Tartessos.

The region itself separates from Tartessos, becoming an “outsider community” with its own cultural assumptions.

At the community’s core, total acceptance of those assumptions — in particular, the core thesis or ideal that drove the community’s creation — creates a sharp psychological separation from normal reality.

Example of Outsider Community Development

A serious artist must generate his or her work as part of a Project. Otherwise, it is a hobby or diversion and not an occupation. This means that artists divide into two sorts: those with Projects driven by corporate goals and those who strive to create a Project with the resources available to ordinary citizens. The latter kind must cooperate to have any reasonable chance of success. This desire spawns artistic communities.

Tartessos as a whole does not provide economic infrastructure for the independent artist. Its social assumptions are broader but every bit as strong as those of its subcultures, and those assumptions have a bias towards corporate employment. When citizens pour funds into an artistic Project and create a functional set of galleries, distribution networks, marketing services, and other resources, this almost invariably leads to temporary local economic dominance. In a small region, often no larger than a few blocks, providing services to the Project becomes a socially and economically optimal activity.

Tartessos’s autonomic processes tend to crush such endeavours if at any point the artists’ influence falls too far. Conversely, growing influence tends to expand the region under the new infrastructure’s sway. To maintain viability, the community needs two things. First, its primary export must remain art. Second, it must suppress other economic processes.

A sense eventually emerges, for the artists of this localized subculture, that they must support themselves through art to the extent possible. All funds received through art support the community. Money received from other sources, if spent outside the community, represents a net drain. Spent locally, it yields no net cultural benefit. Similarly, over time, the sense that it is important to convert others strengthens. The community develops its core thesis: art and supporting art are the most important activities.

Within the region’s boundaries, work outside the arts shames an artist. Work that does not support the artists shames other members of the community. At the fringe, artists simply live with the shame, unless fortunate enough to support themselves wholly on sales. As one moves deeper into the community, one finds extremists, often quite hungry, unwilling to support themselves by other means. The local subculture respects them, however; many of the internal support services will go to keeping these people alive.

The longer the region remains in this state, the more complete the residents’ acceptance of the community thesis becomes. Soon, the subculture breaks off from Tartessos to form an outsider community. In the shadows outside Tartessos, it gestates a core disconnected and isolated from the ordinary human experience, where citizens accept its thesis as unquestionable fact. In the core, life outside of art is as shameful as non-artistic work.

In a final expression of the social themes that created the community, the residents of the core lose the ability to express themselves save within the boundaries of the art they have chosen. Some are mute save for their paintbrush. Others live their life as an often-incomprehensible performance. The worst of them engage in artistic vandalism, desecration, and slaughter. If the community’s definition of art accepts such acts, and their murderous art is of reasonable quality, they face no punishment; the core of the community is outside Tartessian law.

Global Subcultures

Despite the disconnection between outsider communities and consensus reality, ordinary Tartessians often develop a strong identification with one or more such communities. They consider themselves non-local members. They pattern their choices of fashion and speech after those communities’ ideas. Even those Tartessians that refuse to identify with outsider communities receive a large dose of non-Tartessian ideas second-hand. Since the Tartessian philosophy of personal conduct is minimal, this outsider identification serves as the primary source of Tartessian cultural display. Someone who affects clothing and speech styles as seen in a technical community expresses a leaning towards their philosophy. Someone who carefully practices the attitudes of maenadic communities displays their sense of affinity with (at least one of) those.

Average Tartessians find the details of this cultural display opaque. Who would expect a random person on the street to recognize the manners and distinctive perfume of the Harmonistic Church? Who would expect an executive to easily distinguish the members of one artistic community from the next? The overall style of a given community, however, is usually obvious. In the mannerisms and fashions they export, Tartessian subcultures establish the primary dynamics by which Tartessian society functions. A person’s observable indicators of community identification shape how others react to them romantically, sexually, and socially.

From the perspective of a true outsider, Tartessos is itself a community of this sort. Tartessos boils down to a set of cultural assumptions. It survives because its citizens, particularly its better-armed citizens, accept those assumptions. It has its own fringe, where it meets the other communities. It has its own massive middle region. It has a core, as well, a point of ultimate acceptance of its underlying assumptions. In the scattered, small regions that serve as Tartessos’s core, people that have become blind economic engines pour their lives into essentially mechanical exploitation of the inefficiencies its markets and systems; they live to be, and are evaluated as, extremely productive or extremely necessary, but their work is functionally somewhere between “pointless” and “a crime.”

(more tomorrow!)

#ioshi #patreon-supported posts

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bishreview · 6 years ago

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Top 10 Albums of 2018 (So Far. . . )

Ok, so I’ve decided I’m not going to do a top 10 singles list just because it’s too hard to cull it down, so I’m finishing albums and then going to write up Odette - To A Stranger review. This list is from albums between January and the end of June, so anything released last week isn’t included. This took me a while to cut to 10 and there’s a couple of albums that were late inclusions from albums I didn’t expect to like so much until last weekend. To be honest, this year has been kinda of average for albums, with most albums being in the B- to B+ range and only a couple reaching into the A’s. At the same time, a lot of the releases which were anticipated for me have still been enjoyable. Anyway, here’s the list.

Honourable Mentions: Camp Cope - How to Socialise and Make Friends (AUS), DZ Deathrays - Bloody Lovely (AUS), Janelle Monae - Dirty Computer (US), Middle Kids - Lost Friends (AUS), Teyana Taylor - K.T.S.E (US)

10. Pusha T - Daytona (US)

I’ll be honest when I say I haven’t always been a fan of Pusha T, mainly because I’ve never got into the timbre of his voice. On Daytona though, his flaws (almost) disappear, delivering a short but brilliant album. The touch of Kanye (you’ll be hearing a lot of him on this list) in the production is obvious, with Pusha’s voice being moulded around strong instrumentation. Lyrically is where the album finds its success though, Pusha T. flexing his ability with the pen and delivering those words with confidence.

Favourite track: ‘If You Know You Know’

9. Gorillaz - The Now Now (UK)

Squeezing just into the cut-off date, the sixth album by cartoon band, Gorillaz, is exactly what the year needed. Relaxed, low-key and contained, especially compared to last years saturated Humanz, The Now Now sees Damon Albarn bring his side-project back under his control, allowing his voice to balance delicately over dreamy synth instrumentals. Although the album does feel a bit like fan service, especially after the complaints surrounding Humanz not having enough 2-D vocals, Albarn is able to utilise his voice to create the bands most soothing album yet.

Favourite track: ‘Fire Flies’

8. Ocean Alley - Chiaroscuro (AUS)

From when I first listened to Chiaroscuro to now, I can say that the album has grown on me a lot. Ocean Alley have seemed to really layered a lot of brilliant moments on this album, often very subtly. Baden Donegal’s voice is a pleasure to listen to, his development as a lyricist and vocalist fully on show on this release. I was really unsure where Ocean Alley would go last year, ‘The Comedown’ being a track which suggest great but different things were coming up. Chiaroscuro sees them evolve as a band whilst also redefining their dub and reggae influences, becoming on of Australia’s best releases this year.

Favourite track: ‘Knees’

7. The Presets - Hi Viz (AUS)

And with the filthiest album of the year. . . The Presets seemed to be going in an opposite direction when they released Pacifica back in 2012. After popping up at nearly every festival in Australia since, their return to albums with Hi Viz is nothing short of exciting. And with this album they go completely batshit crazy, and it works. With big choruses, heavy instrumentation and a couple of good features, they release their best album in a decade and return to the top of the Australian dance scene.

Favourite track: ‘Feel Alone’

6. Hockey Dad - Blend Inn (AUS)

Hockey Dad’s rise in the Australian music scene over the last few years has been nothing short of exciting. From their humble beginnings, Blend Inn combines all their influences and builds on what their debut Boronia started. Zach Stephenson’s vocals are crisp and he writes some of the best melodies of his career, whilst their music has become thicker, louder and better. The band fully explores their influences, with shoegaze, grunge, pub-rock, and surf-rock all being on show. Blend Inn suggests they are going to be bigger and better and the product definitely proves this.

Favourite track - ‘Where I Came From’

5. Kamasi Washington - Heaven and Earth (US)

I’m not too familiar with Kamasi Washington’s work, mainly because I’ve never been a Jazz man. The only album I’ve heard was 2015′s The Epic, which I came too late and was really impressed. Despite this, I am familiar with his collaborations, with Kendrick Lamar, Thundercat and Flying Lotus being among the names I’ve heard him collaborate with. So this is why Heaven & Earth stunned me so much. The two and a half hour, two sided album is just a wondrous piece of music, combining Jazz, Blues, Soul, Funk and Neo music with political undertones. The saxophonist isn’t someone I normally end up listening to, as I said, I’m not a Jazz man. Heaven & Earth though is great and I can’t deny a great album when I hear it. Definitely my biggest and most pleasant musical surprise this year.

Favourite track: ‘Street Fighter Mas’

4. Kanye West - Ye (US)

Ye is the oddball of the Kanye discography. Like all of the other recent G.O.O.D Music, it’s seven tracks, and that both is an advantage and a disadvantage. The disadvantage though is just that it’s so short. It’s advantage is that there is no filler, all seven tracks being at least good. It also has some of Kanye’s best phrasings, especially in tracks like ‘I Thought About Killing You’, ‘Wouldn’t Leave’, and ‘Violent Crimes’. Like all of the recent releases though, the production is where the album succeeds. ‘Ghost Town’ is flawless when it comes to the instrumental and all throughout the album, it’s hard to go past how good the mixing and instrumentals are. It may not be Kanye’s best, but it continues the consistency of his discography.

Favourite track: ‘Ghost Town’

3. DMA’s - For Now (AUS)

It was always going to be hard to top Hill’s End, DMA’s brilliant 2016 debut. The singles weren’t spectacular and a sophomore slump wouldn’t have been too surprising. For Now exceeded all expectations though. With a more 80s feel to it, the three piece have crafted another solid, Brit-pop inspired release. The instrumentals are thicker, with synths added to a few tracks, and the vocals and lyrics have improved, Tommy O’Dell really letting his voice shine. For Now might not have as many big moments as Hill’s End, but it’s a more consistent and mature release for the Newtown three piece.

Favourite track: ‘Tape Deck Sick’

2. Lily Allen - No Shame (UK)

I remember sitting around one June 8th, just after midnight, checking to see if an album (soon to be mentioned) was released yet, only to see Lily Allen sitting there. I remembered the lead single ‘Trigger Bang’ (featuring Giggs) was pretty good and I frothed Lily Allen’s 2009 album It’s Not Me, It’s You when I was younger, so I checked it out. I wasn’t ready for the level of depth that the album reached, especially considering I always thought of her as this sarcastic, cynic that just ripped on anything popular. No Shame contains some of her best material, and definitely her most personal, with songs like ‘Family Man’, ‘Three’, and ‘Apples’ criticising her role as a wife, mother and person. The production is brilliant as well, with a rich, pop, sometimes dancehall soundscape which gives her voice a chance to shine, delivering her best vocal performances of her career. Although Allen does sound broken (despite the positive latter tracks), she also sounds better than ever.

Favourite track: ‘Everything to Feel Something’

1. Kids See Ghosts - Kids See Ghosts (US)

This was the album I was waiting for on June 8th. To say I didn’t have very high expectations would be badly lying. A Kanye/Cudi album has been something I always wanted to hear but never thought I would, with the two artists collaborating many times since 2008′s ‘Welcome to Heartbreak’ (off Kanye’s fourth album 808s & Heartbreak). The album didn’t disappoint either. Rich with beautiful production, especially on tracks like ‘4th Dimension’ and ‘Reborn’, and some of Kanye’s and Cudi’s finest lyrical moments, Kids See Ghosts was such a pleasure to listen to. With a lot of themes detailing personal demons, both artists discussing their own mental illnesses and setbacks in their career, the album is surprisingly energetic and upbeat. At times, especially on ‘Freeeee (Ghost Town Pt.2)’ and ‘Reborn’, it’s celebrating both artist’s ability to survive and defeat their demons, and despite the darker two tracks at the end, ‘Kids See Ghosts’ and ‘Cudi Montage’, there is still this sense of rejoice and victory. From the insane “Grrrat-gat-gat-gat-gat-gat”, to Cudi’s infectious humming in the chorus of ‘Cudi Montage’, the album has a bit of everything, not only becoming one of both’s best albums, but also my number one album of the year so far.

Favourite track: ‘Reborn’

Thanks for reading

#kids see ghosts #Lily Allen #DMAs #kanye west #kamasi washington #Hockey Dad #the presets #ocean alley #gorillaz #Pusha T #2018 music #top 10 lists #kid cudi

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junker-town · 5 years ago

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The NBA has a chemistry problem

How NBA teams struggle to create chemistry in an era when rosters are turning over faster than ever.

The NBA is a league of change. Recent roster turnover has been spurred by a number of factors, from an inflated salary cap and shorter, more exorbitant contracts, to restless owners, to star players progressively embracing their own power. Teams have been forced, at breakneck speed, to become comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Before the NBA went on hiatus due to the coronavirus pandemic, chaos was its new normal: compelling, delightful and anxiety-inducing. But the constant shuffle also sparked an existential question among hundreds of affected players, coaches and front office executives: How can chemistry be fostered in an increasingly erratic era of impatience, load management, reduced practice time and youthful inexperience?

“Every year you have six new teammates,” Houston Rockets guard Austin Rivers said in an interview with SB Nation. “It’s like gaw-lly! In some ways you wish that would stop.

“It’s a new NBA, man. Guys are playing on a new team every year now, and it has nothing to do with how good of a player you are, it’s just how the NBA is. I have teammates who’ve played on eight, nine teams. I mean, that’s fucking nuts. I don’t ever want to go through something like that.” (Rivers is 27 years old, and on his fourth team in seven NBA seasons.)

Over the past six months, dozens of players, coaches and executives across the NBA spoke with SB Nation about the state of the league’s chemistry, and why creating cohesiveness now is more difficult and demanding than ever before. Their responses sketched a blurry future for the league.

“It’s amazing how fast players change in today’s NBA,” Indiana Pacers general manager Chad Buchanan said. “From when I got over here two years ago, Myles [Turner] is the only player who’s still here.

I have teammates who’ve played on eight, nine teams. I mean, that’s fucking nuts.” - Austin Rivers

Last summer, nearly half of the league’s talent pool swapped jerseys. Seemingly every roster in the league was forced to learn complicated new personality quirks and on-court tendencies. Honed locker room dynamics and hierarchies changed dramatically.

Chicago Bulls forward Thaddeus Young has played for four teams in the last six years after spending his first seven with the Philadelphia 76ers. Few people know better just how precious chemistry can be.

“With how the salary cap is going, teams are not locking themselves into long-term deals anymore, where they have four to six guys on four-year deals,” Young said. “It’s definitely tough because you don’t know each other. The communication is gonna be off. The teams that you came from before, you might be driving the basketball and you might be used to a guy being in the corner and that guy might not be in the corner.”

The NBA may be long past being able to reverse the course of roster turnover, but teams are doing their best to mitigate any downsides. The teams that have done the best job tend to think of chemistry in two buckets: personal and performance. The former contains how players interact away from the game, and the latter contains what happens on the court. However, personal chemistry often informs performance, and vice versa. Once players are comfortable off the court, their on-court relationship improves.

Take Los Angeles Lakers forward Jared Dudley, for example.

“When I got here I’d turn the ball over throwing to our centers because they expected a lob,” Dudley said. “I don’t really throw lobs, I’m more of a bounce passer.”

Dudley solved his problem by initiating conversations with LA’s big men, verbalizing his own in-game habits so that everyone could get on the same page. Not all NBA players feel so comfortable expressing themselves, however. Especially when an on-court situation is more complex than what to do on basic pick-and-rolls.

“When the personal chemistry exists, the performance chemistry is often very easy because the performance chemistry is sometimes a function of hard conversations,” one Western Conference GM said. “The personal chemistry allows a guy to say, ‘Hey man, in the second quarter last night there were like four straight defensive possessions where four of us were back in transition and you weren’t. You really put a ton of pressure on us to cover a five-on-four when you were lobbying the officials for a call. It took you forever to get off the deck. Come on, man.’”

Over the past 20 years, no organization has been more conscious of team chemistry than San Antonio. The Spurs are also far and away the modern era’s most influential organization: Nearly one third of the league’s rival head coaches and front office executives can be traced back to head coach Gregg Popovich.

Drafting multiple Hall of Famers undoubtedly factored into the Spurs’ success, but their efforts to maintain an open atmosphere for stars and role players alike — one that obsessed over values of tolerance, respect and empathy — also separated them from everyone else.

However, San Antonio’s year-to-year continuity is also becoming progressively rarer, if not extinct. When Chicago Bulls head coach Jim Boylen was a Spurs assistant during the 2014-15 season, they had brought back 14 members of the previous year’s 15-man roster.

“And of those guys, a bunch of them had been together for years,” Boylen said. “Now there’s approximately 6.5 new guys per team. That’s unheard of.”

To ignore San Antonio’s sprawling influence would be like praising observational comedy and never once mentioning Jerry Seinfeld. But even the Spurs are vulnerable in a league where turnover is the status quo. Prior to the 2018-19 season, they traded Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green, and lost in the first round of the playoffs for the second year in a row. Prior to this season’s hiatus, they were on track for their first losing record in 21 years.

“The Spurs don’t have an advantage anymore,” Dudley said. “We all have a disadvantage. Now it’s who has the most talent. Talent is gonna win out. Talent and vets.”

Continuity is comfort

In 2012, James Tarlow was an economics student at the University of Oregon when he presented a paper titled “Experience and Winning in the National Basketball Association” at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. Tarlow wanted to know how roster continuity relates to team chemistry, so he pulled data from 804 NBA seasons played by 30 franchises between 1979 and 2008. He defined chemistry as “the number of years the five players playing the most minutes during the regular season have been on their current team with one another.”

“I got an actual measurement of how important [chemistry] is,” Tarlow said in a conversation with SB Nation in March. “And it’s pretty dang important. If you keep your team together it’s like a third of a win for a year, which, people don’t appreciate that and it doesn’t seem like much, but if you have a team that stuck together for several years, that turns into another game or two. That’s going to get you into another round in the playoffs.”

Bill Russell once wrote, “There is no time in basketball to think: ‘This has happened; this is what I must do next.’ In the amount of time it takes to think through that semicolon, it is already too late.”

It’s an intuitive idea: The longer we’re around people, the better we know how they’re going to behave under certain circumstances. Just think of the short-hand forms of communication you’ve established with your closest friends, family members and coworkers. Those subtle gestures and glances are especially helpful in sports, where a split-second miscommunication can be the difference between winning and losing.

“You go back to those San Antonio days, the winks and blinks and the nuances [where Tim] Duncan would find Tony [Parker] on a backdoor, or Manu [Ginobili] would find Timmy on a lob, that evolved over time, and lots of times [time] isn’t afforded,” said Philadelphia 76ers head coach Brett Brown, who spent nine years as a Spurs assistant. “You need time to have that sophisticated camaraderie, gut feel, instances on a court that require split the moment decisions.”

Continuity by itself doesn’t lead to winning, of course. In some cases, it might only extend mediocrity. And if winning a championship is an organization’s organization goal, then it should first pursue star power. But continuity is a boon to coaches, who can implement more complex strategies if they’re able to retain a core group of players year after year.

“Right now with the influx of new players, you’re having to really keep your playbook and your schemes at a basic level because you are teaching more,” Charlotte Hornets head coach James Borrego said. “You’re just starting almost at a ground level every single year in a lot of different ways, where the teams that have had success for years and years, they’re building on every single year.”

You never actually practice anymore … like when I first got in the league, everybody had a million plays.” — Steve Clifford

The lack of in-season practice hours only compounds coaches’ frustrations. With shorter timeframes to fold new players into their system and culture, coaches around the league feel they need to adapt quicker than they ever had before.

As Boston Celtics head coach Brad Stevens joked, “We get three weeks to get ready for a season, then we never practice again.”

Orlando Magic head coach Steve Clifford believes that the league office did the right thing by limiting back-to-backs across every team’s schedule. During his first two years as head coach of the Charlotte Hornets, they played 22 back-to-backs each season, while only 11 were on the docket this season for Orlando. But the schedule shift has hurt in unforeseen ways.

“When you play a back-to-back you usually get two days off, most times, right?” Clifford said. “So you give them a day off and then when you come in you can practice. They’re rested, you bring referees in. You practice. You actually practice.

“You never actually practice anymore … like when I first got in the league, everybody had a million plays, and you had to know the plays and stuff, and now if you do it’s an advantage but people don’t look at it like that.”

A side effect of so much player movement may be a simplification of the product. NBA teams have evolved to emphasize an up-and-down, free-flowing style of play that is largely the byproduct of an analytical revolution to prioritize threes, layups and free throws. Modern basketball is filled with pick-and-roll heavy offensive actions that don’t require the same on-court intimacy as a stockpile of elaborate set plays.

“My gut tells me that roster turnover is what’s causing the thinning of playbooks,” one western conference general manager said. “And the thinning of playbooks is what’s causing this standardization of playing style.”

Players feel it, too. “Most teams don’t do anything. Really it’s just take the ball out the basket, pick-and-roll, and run,” Rivers said. “The coaches are really here to guide you now. It’s crazy. It’s more ATO’s (after time-out plays) and out of bounds, and late clock, fourth quarter, that’s when coaching really comes in play. That’s all we go over in shootaround. Most of our stuff involves defense because our offense is fucking ridiculous, man. We don’t really do anything on offense.”

Even teams that have gone out of their way to maintain continuity—like Clifford’s Magic, which returned 85 and 82 percent of their minutes over the past two seasons, respectively—are not immune to change, and all its myriad effects on strategy.

“The game is what they wanted it to be when they changed the rules, and the level of execution is still high, obviously,” Clifford said. “It’s not nearly the gameplanning league that it was even seven or eight years ago.”

Sustained success is not possible without collaboration, and collaboration becomes habit when several contributors spend thousands of minutes battling together in the same system. The Golden State Warriors had the benefit of several superstars as they won three championships, but they also had an iron collective grasp of what they wanted to accomplish on every possession.

“I think there is a level of beauty that exists with the game that is tougher to reach with the turnover,” Warriors head coach Steve Kerr said. “For example, if Draymond [Green] ever caught the ball in the pocket off of a high screen with Steph [Curry], Andre [Iguodala] knew exactly where to go and Draymond knew exactly where he was going to be. We didn’t even have to practice it. And that’s why you saw, frequently, either the lob to Andre along the baseline or Andre spaced out.”

How teams think they can engineer chemistry

NBA teams have been thinking about how to manufacture chemistry for years, long before this accelerated era. None of these billion-dollar corporations can ever be sure how well their efforts actually work, however. Their adjustments have always been based on in-game progression, but success also depends on other obvious factors, like talent, injuries and dumb luck.

A difference between then and now is that players are driving roster decisions to a greater extent. They have much more leverage within organizations, and the biggest stars can take their talent elsewhere if the locker room doesn’t jell quickly enough. For many teams, that means they have to proactively foster strong bonds among teammates by encouraging new and returning players to stick around the practice facility during the offseason.

“The summer time is big for us,” Borrego said. “We can’t demand it, but we encourage it … Guys can really settle down and connect, really understand their teammates, understand their coaches, and it’s just a much more comfortable situation that allows for chemistry to be built and grown.”

The Hornets also organize team dinners when they’re on the road, a practice Borrego borrowed from his time in San Antonio. When asked if those dinners are mandatory, he gave a wry smile: “They are team dinners. Then there are others that happen organically on their own, and I want our players to do that. If they’re doing it on their own that’s even better than me organizing something.”

If there’s somebody in your organization that hasn’t gotten over himself or herself they’re a pain in the ass ... they can’t be happy for somebody else’s success.” — Gregg Popovich

As one former Spur told ESPN: “To take the time to slow down and truly dine with someone in this day and age — I’m talking a two- or three-hour dinner — you naturally connect on a different level than just on the court or in the locker room. It seems like a pretty obvious way to build team chemistry, but the tricky part is getting everyone to buy in and actually want to go. You combine amazing restaurants with an interesting group of teammates from a bunch of different countries and the result is some of the best memories I have from my career.”

Of course, Popovich was also good at finding players he wanted at the table.

“The more you can stay together, the more the chemistry builds. But still chemistry is more a function of the character of the players than it is anything else,” Popovich said. “I always talk about getting over yourself. And if there’s somebody in your organization that hasn’t gotten over himself or herself they’re a pain in the ass and they make it harder for everybody else because they can only feel about their success. They can’t be happy for somebody else’s success. It has to be about them. If you don’t have that then nothing else is gonna help you have chemistry. You can’t make it happen.”

Still, every coach tries to get everyone on the same page. As players digest their new surroundings, it’s important that everyone — coaches, players and executives — understand their expectations for one another. Rockets head coach Mike D’Antoni boiled his own approach down simply: “Don’t ask somebody to do something they can’t do. If you’re gonna have to change a guy, you might not want to bring him in in the first place.”

It is impossible for any team to keep all 15 players in the locker room happy at the same time; they’re human beings who are all going through their own real life issues. But a haphazard onboarding process will create headaches down the road. According to Buchanan, coaches have to be able to anticipate players’ questions.

“‘Why am I not getting to do this?’ or ‘Why am I not getting to play more?’ or ‘Why am I not playing with that guy?’ or ‘Why am I not starting?,’” Buchanan said. “You try to get that communicated up front so the player knows what he’s stepping into, because lots of times chemistry issues evolve from a lack of communication.”

When general managers and coaches are unaware of loose frustrations, they risk one player venting to another, sewing animosity that does irreparable damage to the entire team. Left unattended, a team can spiral into soap opera.

“It’s not difficult to create chemistry,” Atlanta Hawks head coach Lloyd Pierce said. “It’s more about sustaining it through the course of 82 games with so many ups and downs. Obviously [we had] some of those moments with John [Collins] being out and Kevin [Heurter’s] injury. Roles start to shift and some guys weren’t ready for it, so the frustration of that kicked in.”

The Hawks have done two things to stave off that seemingly unavoidable discomfort. The first is an all-in dedication to how they play, in which everything revolves around pick-and-rolls with Trae Young and a rim-rolling big. By keeping the gameplan simple, they can plug in pieces as needed.

“When Trae masters it and everybody else understands it, you know, you roll a little bit harder and you shake up a little bit better, and you slash a little bit better. That’s who we will become,” Pierce said. “Any big that comes to our roster [knows,] ‘I can play here because I know I’m gonna get the ball at the rim.’”

The Hawks also have a breakfast club that Pierce took from his time as an assistant under Brown in Philadelphia. Every time the club meets, players stand up in front of their teammates and discuss something that matters to them. Earlier this year, Collins enlightened the room with a powerpoint presentation about what it was like growing up in a military family. Heurter talked about growing up in upstate New York and losing high-school friends in a drunk-driving accident.

Former Hawks center Alex Len gave a particularly tender presentation last season that moved his head coach.

“You’re barking at Alex Len. ‘This fucking guy, he doesn’t compete, he doesn’t appreciate this,’” Pierce said. “Well, Alex Len talked about why he couldn’t go to the Ukraine for the last seven years. ‘Wow, I didn’t know you had such a tough time with that. I’m over here fucking yelling at you for not rolling in the pick and roll. I don’t know you’re dealing with this Ukraine thing for the last seven years and not being able to go home and see your grandparents. My bad. I’ve got to get to know you a little bit better.’”

Three years ago, Kings owner Vivek Ranadive asked a communications coach named Steve Shenbaum to work with his team. In 1997, Shenbaum founded a company called Game On Nation, which helps corporate executives, military personnel and government employees in addition to professional sports teams.

Within the past decade, Shenbaum has been brought in by the Lakers, Trailblazers, Nuggets. Cavaliers, Grizzlies and Mavericks, and agent Bill Duffy has asked Shenbaum to assist several of his clients, including Carmelo Anthony, Yao Ming and Greg Oden. He has more than 100 improvisational and conceptual exercises to help clients build self-awareness, selflessness, confidence and other traits that enable character development.

A favorite is called “last letter, first letter,” in which two teammates have a conversation with one rule: as they take turns speaking, they must start with the last letter of the other person’s last word, and keep the conversation going. The exercise forces both parties to listen, let one another finish and focus in ways they otherwise might not.

“My hope is I am planting seeds and empowering the players and the staff to take what they’ve experienced and run with it and multiply it,” Shenbaum said. “I want them to see each other in another light.”

Shenbaum has many telltale signs of good and bad chemistry, but a big one is how well veterans are buying in. In a league that’s getting younger and younger, it’s imperative that older players command respect in the locker room and impose a will to succeed.

Dudley believes veterans who might not even be in a rotation can earn their money by bringing everyone together in ways a coach or GM can’t. During his one year in Brooklyn, he organized dinners, trips to the movies, parties and other events away from the game that involved the whole team.

“Then, when we were in film sessions and I would call them out, they took it as love and not criticism,” Dudley said. “You’re developing a relationship and then you can tell them, Spencer [Dinwiddie] or a guy who thinks he should play more, ‘this is why you’re not playing. This is your role for this team.’ Rondae [Hollis-Jefferson], he got benched: ‘Hey Rondae, for you to stay in the league, this is what you gotta do. On this team you’re not a starter anymore but there’s gonna be times they call on you.’ He stayed ready.”

Almost everyone interviewed for this story agreed that chemistry can’t be forced. Players on contending teams have to go through organic hardships together before they can become comfortable enough for the difficult conversations that facilitate progress. Some teams don’t believe it’s necessary or appropriate to ask their players to spend more time together than they already do. They believe that players should figure out issues among themselves, and that a front office’s biggest role is doing good background research on everybody they bring aboard. Coaches are there to take a team’s disparate pieces and position them to succeed.

“I think everybody’s budgets on team meals now has skyrocketed league wide because of the San Antonio Spurs,” Miami Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra laughed. “The more important thing is getting a team on the same sheet of music about your style of play and an identity on both ends of the court, understanding what’s important, what the standards are, the expectations, role clarity. These things fasttrack, in my mind, chemistry. It’s always nice if guys like each other and they go out to eat on the road, have dinner together. But that doesn’t guarantee anything.”

Spoelstra knew early on that Jimmy Butler’s oft-misunderstood persona would have no trouble fitting in with several players on Miami’s roster because they all shared the same sense of duty.

It’s always nice if guys like each other and they go out to eat on the road, have dinner together. But that doesn’t guarantee anything.” — Erik Spoelstra

“I’ve noticed with Goran and Jimmy in particular, they have such a beautiful on-court chemistry because they’re in their 30s, they’re only about winning right now. They don’t care about anything else. If you want to define on-court chemistry, in my mind it’s how willing are you to help somebody else. And how willing and able are you to enjoy somebody else’s success when it happens.”

The “character vs. talent” debate isn’t new among NBA decision-makers. But going forward, we may see teams value the former more than they have.

“If you get a group of four new players who you bring onto your team and they’re all team-first, unselfish, competitive, self-motivated players, there’s a decent chance that the chemistry is gonna have a chance to be good,” Buchanan said. “Doing a ropes course, that’s great in theory and may work for a business, but professional athletes, they develop chemistry by knowing they can trust each other because they’ve been together through tough times on the court.”

Searching for answers that don’t exist

Chemistry is worth deep investment, but perhaps it can be overanalyzed, too.

“We try to make the simple complicated at times,” ESPN NBA analyst Jeff Van Gundy said. “Going out to dinner is a far different chemistry than playing chemistry. You read a lot about, ‘We play paintball together.’ Who gives a shit, you know?

“I don’t believe it’s the reason why a team is either good or not good. I think you’ve gotta get great players, and when you have them you gotta try and keep them.”

There are endless ways to cultivate chemistry, but teams can still only guess at what will work in every situation. Statistics aren’t a good guide. They can’t quantify personality flaws or gauge emotional intelligence. When intuition is the best way to make a decision, some front office executives lean too hard on what they can measure instead.

“I think a lot of these GM’s, they really don’t take [chemistry] into consideration,” Utah Jazz center Ed Davis said. “They’re starting to treat the NBA like 2K and more just looking at numbers instead of, ‘are these two players going to get along?’ And I think you’re gonna start seeing GM’s lose their jobs.”

Top-tier skill, athleticism and on-court awareness is very often the bottom line for NBA teams, but those still trying to crack chemistry’s mysteries have good reason to believe they aren’t running a fool’s errand, as vulnerable as their circumstances may make them feel.

“There’s something very powerful about newness,” Shenbaum said. “And if you embrace it early, whether it’s a new coach, five new players, the star left, if you embrace it early you can actually create a very authentic bond.”

Defining chemistry can feel like trying to catch the wind. It is omnipresent and elusive at the same time. Until the NBA’s best and brightest crack the formula, they will have to deal with increasing levels of uncertainty in what was already an uncertain business.

Time will tell if NBA teams ever learn how to overcome their mounting challenges — from the shifting ways teams are built, to how on-court strategy is implemented, to the quality of the game itself. But there’s no denying that chemistry is a force multiplier, complex and intractable. And in an era of basketball that demands urgency more than ever, that fact can be frightening.

A lot of players and teams will continue to fail in familiar ways, well-laid plans crumbling because players, coaches and executives never understood each other on or off the court. Only now, they may not realize their mistakes until they find themselves starting all over. Again.

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valuentumbrian · 5 years ago

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Op-Ed: Bail Out Boeing, No Other Publicly Traded Companies

Summary

The coronavirus was merely the catalyst to expose the fragility of this marketplace.

Should Uncle Sam bail out the airlines? No way!

What about the energy complex and theater, hotel and restaurant industries? They are not systemically important.

My point is this: Please stop bailing out the competition of small business.

Bail out Boeing and small business, and please send Americans thousands of dollars, but don’t bail out any other publicly-traded corporation.

Image: Boeing B-17E Fortress 41-2599 "Tugboat Annie"; took part in the Battle of Midway in Jun '42; later ditched at sea on 16 Jan 43. Source.

Dear Uncle Sam: Please stop bailing out the competition of small business. We need a changing of the guard. Let capitalism work.

By Brian Nelson, CFA

Let’s get this out of the way first: The U.S. government is going to bail out everybody, and that’s just how it’s going to be. It’s what we’ve become, a Bailout Nation. However, let me give you a perspective from a business owner in the financial industry.

Valuentum is an investment research publisher, and while we’re not a financial advisor or broker, our team competes indirectly with many of the investment banks and research publishers out there, many of which were bailed out during the Great Financial Crisis.

Scholars have written extensively about the causes of the Great Financial Crisis, and most of the work out there is fantastic, but there hasn’t been enough written about the real cause of the crisis. Here is the formula that killed Wall Street during the 2007-2009 crisis:

…it was hardly unthinkable that a math wizard like David X. Li might someday earn a Nobel Prize. After all, financial economists—even Wall Street quants—have received the Nobel in economics before, and Li's work on measuring risk has had more impact, more quickly, than previous Nobel Prize-winning contributions to the field. …though, as dazed bankers, politicians, regulators, and investors survey the wreckage of the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, Li is probably thankful he still has a job in finance at all. Not that his achievement should be dismissed. He took a notoriously tough nut—determining correlation, or how seemingly disparate events are related—and cracked it wide open with a simple and elegant mathematical formula, one that would become ubiquitous in finance worldwide.

For five years, Li's formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels.

His method was adopted by everybody from bond investors and Wall Street banks to ratings agencies and regulators. And it became so deeply entrenched—and was making people so much money—that warnings about its limitations were largely ignored.

Then the model fell apart. Cracks started appearing early on, when financial markets began behaving in ways that users of Li's formula hadn't expected. The cracks became full-fledged canyons in 2008—when ruptures in the financial system's foundation swallowed up trillions of dollars and put the survival of the global banking system in serious peril.

David X. Li, it's safe to say, won't be getting that Nobel anytime soon. One result of the collapse has been the end of financial economics as something to be celebrated rather than feared. And Li's Gaussian copula formula will go down in history as instrumental in causing the unfathomable losses that brought the world financial system to its knees.

On the surface, it is widely viewed that the U.S. government bailed out the banks and insurers and auto companies during the Great Financial Crisis as a result of loose lending, too much leverage, etc. But the U.S. government bailed out something more pointed, a more direct cause: The U.S. government bailed out all the “quantitative thinking” that enabled the crisis to happen. Read more here.

One of the biggest tells behind our getting ahead of the Crash of 2020 was just how poor the quantitative/indexing research we had been reading on Finance Twitter (“FinTwit”) had become during 2016-2018 (e.g. value versus growth, buybacks, interest rates, backward-looking analysis, etc), and even some of the quant work in the more prestigious publications. It was all wrong. Most of quant research out there had morphed into nonsense, and like lemmings off a cliff or pigs to the slaughter pen, the followers just kept eating it up.

They’re still eating it up.

The U.S. government bailed out all of the investment banks (research providers) during the Great Financial Crisis (with the exception of Lehman), and instead of having a cleansing that catapulted new leaders to the top, the U.S. government preserved and supported our competition.

But they even made it worse. After the U.S. government backed all the terrible quant thinking and bad policies that led to the Great Financial Crisis, when President Donald Trump took office, the administration cut their taxes pretty much in half. That hurt.

With any bailout, there are unintended consequences. In our case, the U.S. government stacked the deck against small research providers and supported quantitative thinking (what we’ve been warning about the past couple years), something that continued to proliferate into prominence as indexing and quant products proliferated. We knew this wasn’t going to end well.

The coronavirus was merely the catalyst to expose the fragility of this marketplace. Volatility has been greater than during the Crash of 1929, and all of this was preventable. We needed a change of guard during the Financial Crisis, much like we need a change of the guard today. The U.S. government shouldn’t have bailed out the “Gaussian copula function,” (“quant thinking”), but rather it should have supported more responsible thinking and expert analysis.

Now, fast forward to today. We’re in another Financial Crisis, in part made worse by the enormous volatility that is scaring mom and pop from the markets, volatility that is being created by quant algorithms chasing volatility and momentum. Most of the world is scared, and the U.S. government is now posed with the same decision. Should it bail out everybody again?

Well, based on Fed and Treasury actions, it seems like if it ever comes down to it, they will bail out the banks (they already have backstopped pretty much everything). More pointedly, however, it seems like they’re going to bail out everybody, and stick it to small businesses, and the prudent tax-payers again!

Here’s Valuentum’s perspective: Is it not enough that the U.S. government bailed out our competition during the Financial Crisis, cut their taxes, and then supported the failed quant thinking during the past decade by not putting a stop to quant and indexing proliferation that is responsible for today’s gut-wrenching volatility? Now, the U.S. government is going to do the same types of things again.

Should it bail out the airlines? No way! Everybody knows that the airlines are terrible businesses. They’ve spent tens of billions on buybacks during the past decade, and now they want more money from small-business funded tax coffers. They should have been prepared for the next big disruption in their businesses, which could only have been expected. Let them fail. Amazon (AMZN), Google (GOOG), and Apple (AAPL), all of which are huge free cash flow generators, and/or other companies with strong financial profiles can replace these failing entities with their own airlines. Let capitalism work!

What about the energy complex and theater, hotel and restaurant industries? They are not systemically important. The world is going to clean energy, streaming and Airbnb, and while theaters and hotels may fail without government assistance, let others who have been prudent and responsible during this past decade, with fresh and deep pockets take their place. Let big publicly-traded corporations that did not plan for the next recession and financial crisis eat cake!

My point is this: Please stop bailing out the competition of small business. For example, the restaurant chains absolutely destroyed the mom and pop restaurants during the past 20 years with reckless unit growth, and the government is now going to stick it to mom and pop again by bailing the big chains out? Let capitalism work. Let small business come roaring back, and let the big publicly-traded corporations fail. If you’re a public company with a deep executive bench, and you’re not ready for the next recession or financial crisis, you may have only yourself to blame.

Interestingly, while many are saying Boeing (BA) should be punished (not bailed out), it is the only public company that should be bailed out with consideration of equity holders and on friendly terms, in my opinion. Obviously, the United States needs Boeing and its defense expertise, but the company has also paid it forward. To me, we can’t afford a disruption at one of the largest aircraft makers, and it may be the only troubled equity today that has actually earned our support:

During World War II, Boeing and its partners worked together to produce staggering 98,965 aircraft, including the famed B-17 Flying Fortress. Representing nearly 28 percent of America’s total aircraft production, Boeing proved a principal contributor to industrial production during the war. These planes helped guarantee victory for Allied forces and served as a symbol of American might and innovation.

Thank you for your service Boeing. We’re here for you.

Concluding Thoughts

Let’s now bring it down a few notches. The U.S. government is going to bail out everybody, and nobody is going to be the wiser. The quants will keep winning accolades, and most all nonsensical quant research will continue as misaligned incentives proliferate.

Many small businesses that are prudent and manage their finances as they should (businesses like Valuentum) are ready for this. We’d do anything to support our employees, contractors and customers because we’ve been prepared. It’s because we’ve made sacrifices.

On the other hand, the U.S. government will continue to support the reckless competition against small business all over the country and bail them out. I say no. Bail out Boeing and small business, and please send Americans thousands of dollars, but don’t bail out any other publicly-traded corporation.

Large corporations just received huge tax breaks, and small business suffered. It’s time to make this right. What do you think? Comment below.

Disclosure: I/we have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours.

Additional disclosure: Some of the companies written about in this article may be included in Valuentum's simulated newsletter portfolios. Contact Valuentum for more information about its editorial policies.

#covid-19

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big12pickparty · 5 years ago

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Week 14 Big 12 Picks: Bedlam Edition

It’s Bedlam, y’all. This picture is from the 1985 game, known as the Ice Bowl. OU blanked the Pokes 12-0 that year. I did not yet exist. My Grandpa, Jim Knapp, had led Smithville High School to its first ever state title earlier that year. Until I went to college in Seattle in 2008, I watched Bedlam every year with him, and every chance I got--which was just 2001 and 2002--I rubbed as much salt in the wound as I could. This year I get to watch Bedlam with my dad for the first time (if I’m not mistaken) since the 2012 game, when I’d returned to Oklahoma to do my master’s degree at OSU. Grandpa was present for that game, too. That one was an all-timer. I think he was pleased.The Sooners won it 51-48 in OT.

My Grandpa loved the Sooners so much he painted his house a Sooner-shade of crimson. When my dad went to play baseball for Gary Ward, my grandpa painted the support poles holding up his balcony OSU orange.

This year’s game will be just the second Bedlam since he died. If the Pokes manage to win this one, I’m gonna do my best to send a message to him in the beyond: HEY GRANDPA. LOOK. LOOK REAL CLOSE.

I don’t think he’d mind.

Last week: 4-1 (.800)

Overall: 47-25 (.652)

FRIDAY:

Texas Tech 28, Texas 27. It feels like Bevo’s been butchered and deposited in the old freezer already, doesn’t it? I thought Texas would have more than a fighting chance against Baylor--even erroneously picked them to upset the Bears--but Texas looked dead on arrival for most of the afternoon. Tech, on the other hand, couldn’t quite get the better of K-State, falling 30-27, courtesy of a 100-yard kick return by KSU’s Joshua Youngblood. Though 4-7, and losers of 5 of their 6 games, Texas Tech hasn’t lost by than 10, and their average margin of loss has been a mere 4.2 points. So this is a team playing tough, but not quite getting there. Margins have been thin in this series, too, of late, as the last four games have been decided by 8 points or less, with Tech winning the last two in Austin.

West Virginia 13, TCU 17. TCU was one horrendous spot short of getting the ball back with about a minute to play in their 24-28 loss to OU last week. It really was one of the worst spots I’ve ever seen in a football game.

SATURDAY

No. 23 Iowa State 27, Kansas State 30. The 102nd game in a series played every year since 1917 finds these two teams perfectly matched. I expect nothing less than a hard fought battle decided in the final minutes. Despite the Wildcats having won 24 of the past 29 Farmageddons, including 10 of the past 11, Iowa State owns a narrow edge at 50-48-4.

No. 9 Baylor 38, Kansas 6. The only sure bet I’ve got this week. Baylor hasn’t lost to Kansas since a fellow named Todd Reesing was under center in Lawrence. Probably won’t this week, either, even though the Jayhawks gave ISU a run for their money in Ames.

BEDLAM. Last year, when folks thought the Sooners were gonna beat the Cowboys by something like a million points, I waited until Friday of Bedlam week and snagged myself a nosebleed ticket at Gaylord Memorial. I’d never watched a game at the so-called Palace on the Prairie. Even if I’ve always felt as if it were the locus of all my lifelong football-related misery, I’d always wanted to take in a Bedlam there, got my chance, wore orange, loaded a little whiskey into a coke bottle, and headed for Norman. It was a fantastic time. Didn’t hurt that the Pokes scared the shit out of the homecrowd. By the end of the night, when Corndog’s 2-pt. conversion pass fell to the turf, I didn’t mind. I’d had such a good time I could barely believe myself. Maybe it’s just that I’m such a deeply contrary person that it was simply fun watching all these people whose colors I hate enter into such a heightened state of anxiety that many of them seemed almost ready to shit themselves. Maybe it was that gorgeous and crisp November light that fell into the stadium just before kickoff and into the first quarter. Or the sunset I watched from the upper deck. I don’t know. It was a thrilling night, even I did get so cold by the end that my teeth were almost chattering and the Pokes lost and it took me over an hour just to pull out of the parking lot I’d used (my opinion of the Norman traffic police is far lower than that of my opinion of their football team, I’ll say that much).

Thus far, my record picking OU’s games this year is 10-1 (I missed the K-State game like everybody else). Picking OSU, I’m 7-4. That mid-point of the Pokes season was pretty tough to get a bead on. But all the evidence is on the table now. OU’s defense has come on strong over the past six quarters of play. OSU’s has turned into one of the conference’s best in the past four games. The main factor here, to me, will be turnovers. The Pokes have produced 10 over their 4-game win streak, with 9 interceptions. Jalen Hurts, on the other hand, has either thrown interceptions or put the ball on the ground 6 times in his last 3 outings. He’s a damn good player, but has looked increasingly sloppy with the ball. That ain’t gonna work against an OSU defense that has been increasingly adept at takeaways, with a safety in Kolby Harvell-Peel that has spent the entire last half of the season playing like an All-American. OSU, on the other hand, is working with one mostly unknown entity in Dru Brown, and one very widely known one in Chuba Hubbard, who only needs 168 rushing yards to break 2,000 on the year.

Turnovers will be the difference, I think. OU has been playing with fire, so much so that these Sooners have reminded me--more than any other squad--of OSU’s so-called ‘Cardiac Cowboy’ teams from 2015-2017. All those Mason Rudolph-led squads that won close game after close game but could never get over the hump in Bedlam. OSU, on the other hand, looks to me like a team playing with a kind of quiet and muscular resolve that is honestly not a very familiar look for the Cowboys. After the last four games, it seems real enough.

Plus, the Pokes are due. I mean, the Pokes have been pretty much due for the entire past century in this game, maybe ever since that first icy debacle at Island Park in Guthrie on 6 November 1904. But I think things are aligned for this Bedlam well as they’ve been for the Pokes in the past five or six years: the Cowboys defense is formidable, they have a legit Heisman contender in Chuba Hubbard, and though hugely talented and well-coached, the Sooners look iffier top-to-bottom than they have since 2014. I think Hurts gets the Sooners out front early, but finally turns it over once-too-many times, Dru Brown is proficient, Hubbard gets his yards, and a final OU drive stalls on the OSU 35 near the west end-zone. No turkey legs are tossed by the homecrowd.

Maybe it’s just a fantasy. A bit like sending a message to the beyond. But these things always are.

No. 7 Oklahoma 24, No. 21 Oklahoma State 30.

GO POKES.

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kristablogs · 4 years ago

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Astronauts explain what it’s like to be ‘shot off the planet’

The Space Shuttle orbiter lifted off for the last time in July 2011. (NASA/Bill Ingalls/)

Update on June 1: the launch and journey to the ISS was a success.

If all goes according to plan on Saturday—the new launch date for a high-profile mission—two NASA astronauts will blast off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida, bound for the International Space Station (ISS). It will be the first crewed launch from US soil since 2011, when the Space Shuttle orbiter made its last flight.

When the Shuttle made its debut on the Kennedy Space Center launchpad in 1981, it had two astronauts on board. Up to that point, NASA had never before sent a rocket system up on its maiden flight with people strapped in. (They did run atmospheric glide tests with a crewed orbiter that was hitched it to a 747, but those missions weren’t actually in space.)

To mark the Crew Dragon launch, PopSci spoke with two Shuttle-era astronauts—one who flew on that initial 1981 mission, and another who flew on the final 2011 tour. Both shared their thoughts on what it’s like to ride a space plane that’s attached to two solid rocket boosters—and how the experience might differ for those headed to the ISS on Saturday if conditions permit.

John Young and Robert Crippen (right) in 1979. (NASA /)

April 12, 1981

Robert Crippen, now 82, remembers how the first Shuttle mission rocketed off the deck only two days after the scheduled takeoff was cancelled, or “scrubbed.” “I was pleasantly surprised by that because it was a pretty complicated vehicle, and there were lots of things that could scrub it for a launch,” he says. “But it worked.” The then-43-year-old space rookie was joined by commander John Young, who died in 2018 at age 87.

Crippen and Young couldn’t draw on spaceflight history for their maiden voyage, called STS-1. “We didn’t have any idea about probability [or] risk assessment when the Shuttle was first launched,” Young recounted in the 2008 Discovery Channel documentary series, When We Left Earth - The NASA Missions. “Anybody who thinks they can statistically predict when something with two million moving parts is gonna fail is sort of smoking something they shouldn’t be, probably.”

Crippen remembers his heart rate rocketing to around 130 beats per minute at launch. “It was only when the count got into one minute that I really thought we were going to do it,” he tells PopSci. “That was when my pulse rate shot up, and it was pure excitement on my part.” He flew three more times after that inaugural mission, but of course, the initial trip stands out the most. “There’s nothing like your first flight,” he explains. “On the first flight, ascent, which lasts 8.5 minutes, seemed like it went by in 30 seconds to me.”

Now nearly 40 years later, Crippen is ready to see NASA and SpaceX set another milestone. “About darn time,” he quips, when asked about the Crew Dragon launch.

The first Shuttle flight touches down on April 14, 1981. (NASA /)

July 8, 2011

Just over 30 years after Crippen and Young’s landmark flight, Rex Walheim and three other astronauts climbed aboard the final Shuttle mission. Walheim flew on the craft three times, and still vividly remembers the liftoff sequence.

Crawling into the vehicle some 90 minutes before blastoff required some “gymnastics,” he tells PopSci, given that the giant space plane was sitting on its tail, as opposed to being parked flat on a runway. Once he got to his seat, he was flat on his back. “You pretty much feel like you’re sitting on the top of a 15-story building or something,” Walheim says. “[The Shuttle] is solid as a rock.”

But that feeling only lasted until the moment of the launch. “At T-minus six [seconds], the main engines start,” Walheim says. “And now this beautiful building that seems like it was solid as a rock, it just starts to shake like it’s coming apart.” The engines burned for just a few seconds before the solid rocket boosters kicked in. Then, there was no going back.

“At T-minus zero you get that big kick in the pants when the solid rocket boosters light,” Walheim says. The G-forces rapidly accumulated to around 2.5, which is more than twice as much gravity you feel on Earth. "You know you are getting shot off the planet really quick,” he adds.

At a certain point, the Shuttle throttled back to avoid stressing the vehicle; then it throttled up again. “When those engines come back up, it feels like you just threw the afterburner on a jet, going straight up of course,” the former astronaut explains.

As the Shuttle kept cruising upwards, the solid rocket boosters (SRBs) eventually petered out. “You feel a little bit less acceleration, and then you get that big bang when the solid rocket boosters separate,” Walheim says. That separation moment, he notes, is “kinda like a train wreck.”

“On my first mission, when the SRBs came off, this debris just went smacking against the windshield, kind of like you ran through a bunch of bugs. And it was like, ‘wow!’” The shuttle then stabilized, and the force the astronauts felt dipped back down to about one G.

But the craft quickly sped up again to continue the ascent over the next 6.5 minutes. “The G-forces build, and build, and build—the feeling is one of incredible acceleration,” Walheim says.

“You’re accelerating like you are a bat out of you-know-where,” he explains. It’s “eye-watering.”

Finally, 8.5 minutes after launch, the ride smoothed out. “The engines shut off, and it feels like you keep going,” Walheim says. The moment took him by surprise: “It felt like the Shuttle stopped, and I went straight through it. I got a tremendous tumbling sensation.”

NASA, of course, has since retired the Shuttle. “I think it’s the most beautiful vehicle ever to have a chance to fly in space,” Welheim reflects.

May 27, 2020

As for the Crew Dragon launch, the sensations on board should be different than the ones Crippen and Walheim described. “I think our expectation is that, based on our Shuttle experience, the first stage was pretty rough and rumbly,” Robert Behnken, a veteran NASA astronaut who will be on board the commercially built craft, said during a press conference earlier this month. “We expect Dragon to be a little bit of both—we expect it to be smoother, but we also expect it to be louder from that initial portion of the launch.” The SpaceX system comes with a classic, retrograde design—it involves a capsule—instead of a unique space plane like the Shuttle.

The joint SpaceX and NASA launch is expected to now take place on May 30 at 3:22 EDT. Watch it live here.

This story has been updated to reflect the new launch date of Saturday, May 30. It originally contained details about the first launch attempt on May 27, which was scrubbed because of “unfavorable weather.”

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scootoaster · 5 years ago

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Astronauts explain what it’s like to be ‘shot off the planet’ in a shuttle

The Space Shuttle orbiter lifted off for the last time in July 2011. (NASA/Bill Ingalls/)

If all goes according to plan tomorrow, two NASA astronauts will blast off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida, bound for the International Space Station (ISS). It will be the first crewed launch from US soil since 2011, when the Space Shuttle orbiter made its last flight.

John Young and Robert Crippen (right) in 1979. (NASA /)

April 12, 1981

Now nearly 40 years later, Crippen is ready to see NASA and SpaceX set another milestone. “About darn time,” he quips, when asked about the Crew Dragon launch.

The first Shuttle flight touches down on April 14, 1981. (NASA /)

July 8, 2011

“At T-minus zero you get that big kick in the pants when the solid rocket booster light,” Walheim says. The G-forces rapidly accumulated to around 2.5, which is more than twice as much gravity you feel on Earth. "You know you are getting shot off the planet really quick,” he adds.

At a certain point, the Shuttle throttled back to avoid stressing the vehicle; then it throttled on again. “When those engines come back up, it feels like you just threw the afterburner on a jet, going straight up of course,” the former astronaut explains.

“On my first mission, when the SRBs came off, this debris just went smacking against the windshield, kind of like you ran through a bunch of bugs. And it was like, ‘wow!’ ” The shuttle then stabilized, and the force the astronauts felt dipped back down to about one G.

But the craft quickly sped up again to continue the ascent over the next 6.5 minutes. “The G-forces build, and build, and build—the feeling is one of incredible acceleration,” Walheim says.

“You’re accelerating like you are a bat out of you-know-where,” he explains. It’s “eye-watering.”

NASA, of course, has since retired the Shuttle. “I think it’s the most beautiful vehicle ever to have a chance to fly in space,” Welheim reflects.

May 27, 2020

As for the Crew Dragon launch, the sensations on board should be different than the ones Crippen and Walheim described. “I think our expectation is that, based on our Shuttle experience, the first stage was pretty rough and rumbly,” Robert Behnken, a veteran NASA astronaut who will be on board the commercially built craft, said during a press conference earlier this month. “We expect Dragon to be a little bit of both—we expect it to be smoother, but we also expect it to be louder from that initial portion of the launch.” While the SpaceX system comes with a classic, retrograde design, it’s essentially a capsule, instead of a unique space plane like the Shuttle.

The joint SpaceX and NASA launch is expected to take place at 4:33 EDT tomorrow. Watch it live here.

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mikewhatthehellareyoudoing-blog · 5 years ago

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I made a “top 25 favorite albums of the decade” list, Part Three

Moving right along

15. Parquet Courts - Sunbathing Animal / Content Nausea 2014

Like a lot of music geeks, I started paying attention to Parquet Courts /Parkay Quarts when they released Light Up Gold in 2012. That album was pretty good, and it seems like anything this band puts out will have its moments. Content Nausea was released the same year, and you can get these as a two CD set, so I’m cheating a little & putting them together because of that. Forcing myself to pick one, since I doubt they were conceived as one long album, I would go with Sunbathing Animal, because it's Sunbathing Animal that made the biggest impression on me. I remember driving home from work and hearing "Instant Disassembly" for the first time, its simple repeated guitar line had its hooks in me from get go, and the way the vocals start in beat poetry territory and end in a gd sing along… Parquet Courts do a lot with a little on that song, as they do elsewhere on this album (& others). Content Nausea also has a great long track, “Uncast Shadow of a Southern Myth,” so check that out if you like “Instant Disassembly” as much as I do. I don’t want to give the impression that long=automatically good, but they do a good job slowly building up to something great while it can at first feel like they are just milking the same riff for a while. They have stand-out shorter songs too, like “Dear Ramona” and “Pretty Machines.”

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14. Laura Stevenson - Cocksure 2015

Laura Stevenson (Her backing band is usually called the Cans but that's not what the album cover says) started her singer-songwriter career out strong in 2008, and has experimented and grown with each album since (I haven't heard her 2019 album yet, so for all I know this trend continued after this one). Cocksure has gotten more plays out of me than any of her previous work. The lyrics are personal but relatable, and there is a good amount of variety in song styles (this is something that struck me about her first album, too, but some of her work in between has been more homogenous). Stevenson uses dynamic range like the Pixies did, a skill that was in danger of becoming a casualty of the loudness wars of the late 90s and early 00s.

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13. The Mountain Goats - Beat the Champ 2015

Honestly, I am having a difficult time picking among All Eternals Deck (2011), Beat the Champ (2015) or Goths (2017). I don't want to have more than one album from the same artist on the list, so I picked the one I think I replayed the most times, but really I think they are of pretty equally high quality: Darnielle has for decades been a consistently good lyricist. Beat the Champ is a wrestling themed album. I'm not even a big wrestling fan, but JD uses it more as a setting in which he explores other topics: the album is far from one-note.

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12. Myriam Gendron/ Dorothy Parker - Not So Deep As A Well 2014

It's surprising to me that this sort of approach to music is not more common: Myriam Gendron took classic poems by Dorothy Parker and used them as lyrics for her acoustic guitar-based folk songs. Most of these tracks involve some pretty intricate fingerpicking, too, so it’s not like she just strummed open chords while reciting poetry. The range of poems chosen showcase both Parker’s wistful and sad side and her more witty and acerbic side. If you are interested in hearing the results after my description, then chances are you will like this album. The CD has a couple extra songs that aren’t on the mp3 version. I guess they wanted to add an incentive for people to buy a physical copy, but that last track on the CD is a better one to end on than the one the mp3 version ends on, so it’s a bit unfortunate.

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11. Mount Eerie - Sauna 2015 I expect A Crow Looked at Me to be the Mount Eerie album that makes people's end of the decade lists, and while that album deserves its accolades, I find it to be a difficult listen. I don't know how else to say it, but while I can and do appreciate depressing art, Crow made me sadder than I want to volunteer to feel. Like, I couldn't keep it in a library with my other music because I don't want it coming up on shuffle when I'm not ready for it. So, let's talk about Sauna instead. At the time, Sauna felt like the culmination of years of Phil Elvrum's musical exploration. The waves of distortion layered on top of sustained keys which open this album even recall the sounds that opened the album Mount Eerie. Sauna's name is fitting, as the more ambient sections seem to envelop the listener in a thick, comfy cloud of sound. Short bursts of higher-tempo music flash in like a new burst of steam. While his more recent lyrical work tends to revolve around anecdotes highly specific to Elvrum’s own life, Sauna might be some of his most universal stuff.

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And with this post, we have passed the halfway point! Onwards and upwards to part four!

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prosperopedia · 5 years ago

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Homie Review – Selling My Home Using Utah’s New Disruptive Real Estate Broker

If you live anywhere along the I-15 corridor in Utah, specifically in Salt Lake and Utah counties, you’ve likely seen all the signs along the highway popping up touting the ability to sell your home without broker commissions, potentially saving tens of thousands of dollars by going around the traditional process of listing your home with a real estate agent. Homie, the breakthrough system making the bold claims, has been around in Utah for a few years, since 2015. Their system seems to have picked up a lot of momentum over the past couple years. In fact, Utah Business pointed out last year that within 18 months of its existence in Utah, Homie had become the largest brokerage in the state, with a listing inventory of 200 new homes each month.

When my wife and I decided to sell our home in Lehi earlier this summer, like many home sellers, we were not in love with the idea of giving up 6% of the value of our home, potentially somewhere in the neighborhood of $40,000 worth of our equity, to the traditional home sales process. We had sold our previous home in Spanish Fork several years ago through the “For Sale By Owner” method, and that worked out pretty well for us. Also, I had spent a short time working as a real estate agent almost two decades ago, and I wasn’t very impressed with the industry during the few months I spent working at Coldwell-Banker. In fact, I’ve written before on this website about some of the issues I’ve observed with too many real estate agents and their lack of commitment to fiduciary obligations. Needless to say, we fit the profile of a potential Homie client nearly as exactly as anyone could.

Prior to being ready to list our home for sale, we talked to some friends who were going through the process of selling their home using Homie. They had mixed reactions, but were ultimately happy with the fact that they saved a lot in realtor commissions, as most of the billboards on I-15 promise.

After doing a little more homework, we decided to make the commitment to Homie to list our home for sale.

I’m going to share with you my experience using Homie to sell our home in Utah. Since we used Home, I’ve had many people ask me (people who were also considering using Homie) to give them personal reviews and details about the pros and cons of going with Homie. I will include in this public review much of the information I included in my conversations with friends about whether they should go with Homie versus the alternatives.

Together with my wife, who worked as much as I did or more on this process, I made a quick list of the pros and cons of using Homie to sell your home. Here they are.

Pros of Using Homie

They provide a market analysis (a good one) to get you started pricing your home.

You actually CAN save tens of thousands of dollars in real estate commissions.

They take pretty good pictures.

You get a yard sign and a lock box to make your home look legit.

They review contracts, addenda, and other aspects of the sales process for you and provide some legal help.

You get some agent representation and interaction.

Cons of Using Homie

Their system likely doesn’t work as well in a buyer’s market, where it’s critical to have access to more buyers.

Interactions with Homie are highly transactional instead of relationship based.

You have to be assertive about the various aspect of selling your home.

Response times tend to be slow (sometimes materially too slow).

It can be difficult to reach an agent.

They don’t make much effort to understand your home or specific situation.

Open houses are setup and operated by home owner. Homie doesn’t help with these.

Their rules are more restrictive than alternatives (no listing of seller financing in advertisements)

The home selling process can be awkward compared to what you’re used to.

Other real estate brokerages tend to shy away from Homie because their model is so different from the traditional real estate.

My Experience Selling with Homie

Prior to listing our home for sale in May of 2019, we had been preparing to move from Utah for over a year. We spent tens of thousands of dollars putting in new carpet, re-painting the home, and updating and repairing things that needed attention, including repainting deck rails, fixing small holes in walls and doors, purchasing new door knobs, etc.

The reason I mention what we did to prepare our house for sale is because I think it would be much more difficult to sell your home with Homie if you don’t have something about your home that really stands out, including having it in its best possible shape. This obviously is going to cost you money. How much exactly it’s going to cost will obviously depend upon how efficient you are about the items that need to be updated. In any case, while doing some of these these things (painting, new carpet) should be done for anyone selling a house, in my judgment you’ll need to be extra thorough if you’re selling with Homie, because you’re selling without all the extra help that a relationship based real estate agent would normally put into selling your home.

Signing Up with Homie and Taking the Plunge

After talking to several people with experience selling home, we considered just listing our home in the KSL classifieds and on Craigslist and local Facebook groups first, then move to Homie if our home didn’t get much attention quickly. Some neighbors and others within our local network were convinced that a home listed for sale in such a seller’s market (as Utah has been for several years now, since it finally completed an inventory rebound after the 2008 housing crisis) would net pretty close to what it would get being listed on the MLS. Their reasoning was this: because of how much real estate selling fees (including with Homie, more about that later) end up costing, you still end up netting more not using a real estate agent even if you sell the home for 1-2% less than you would have with an agent.

Because we didn’t want to miss out on the hot part of the real estate sales season (May through the first part of August), we decided to go straight to Homie and get our home listed. Here’s how that went.

The current structure goes like this, when you sign up with Homie, you pay a $199 installment fee, which gives you access to the Homie system for marketing and selling a home. The first service they provide for you is the Property Comparative Market Analysis

Homie’s Property Comparative Market Analysis

Two days after we signed up for an account with Homie and input our home data, we received the following Property Comparative Market Analysis, or CMA. When you sell your home using a real estate brokerage, the agent normally provides you with a list of three homes that they consider to be similar to the one you are listing for sale. Homie provides this service as well. When you receive your CMA by email, the agent assigned to your Homie listing also calls and gives some feedback and input on your ultimate decision on what price to list your home.

In this case, the CMA showed our home to be worth in the neighborhood of $705,000 based on data from homes from three homes, two that sold for less than our recommended sales price, and one that sold for higher. Our Homie agent called and quickly reviewed the report, saying that they recommended that we don’t go above $715,000 when listing our home. Instead, we chose to stay below the $700,000 mark and list our home for $695,000.

With Homie, the interaction you have with them from the beginning, starting with their delivery of the CMA and the time they allot for discussing how to price the home, is very scaled back from what happens with a traditional brokerage, where the realtor likely spends more time getting together more appropriate comparable properties, and then spends an hour or so reviewing the information with you (as opposed to less than 10 minutes) working through a strategy for pricing your home, including what it will mean if you get to the point where you’d need to lower the price if it’s not getting enough activity.

Homie’s Listing and Sales Process

Once we decided on a listing price for our home, it was time to schedule a photoshoot to get some professional pictures for our home. For home with the square footage of ours, a professional photoshoot would normally cost at least $400. Homie includes the photoshoot cost in their listing fee. I’m guessing that they pay less than $199 (my guess is $150…see the explanation below) to the people who do their photoshoots.

How Homie’s Home Listing Photoshoot Works

When we called to schedule our home’s photoshoot, we were hopeful that we could get the photographer out to our house within a couple days of signing up for our Homie listing, so as to not delay publishing our listing and pushing back the time we’d have over the spring and summer to sell our home. We were also on a tight schedule finishing up the last few projects (baseboards and other touchup mostly) we needed to do have done to stage the house and make it ready for professional pictures.

Once we scheduled the photoshoot, two days after we opened our Homie account and started the listing, the photographer was scheduled to come out. He gave us a window of a couple hours, during which he would stop by quickly and take the pictures.

It turned out that we weren’t completely ready for him when he came. As he whizzed through the house taking pictures, we realized quickly that he was not there to chat or hang around for long. He was on a tight deadline. In fact, if you look through some of the pictures of the home shown below, you can see that the rooms weren’t all completely ready. When he had finished the entire house and yard, we were able to get him to re-take a picture of our front formal/music room since he had taken that picture first, and there were some things that were very out of place.

Bottom line: your Homie photographer also (like your agent) acts like a “transactional” photographer. He or she will take great pictures of whatever is in the room, but it’s your responsibility to make sure that the house is staged and ready to go. Your photo session will likely not be more than a half hour. However, in our case, despite being as unprepared as we were for him, our photographer produced pictures that were good enough to make the house look attractive.

Within 24 hours of finishing the photoshoot, the photographer sent us over the finished photos for our approval.

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homie-listing-lehi-basement-kids-playroom

homie-listing-lehi-basement-exercise-room

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If You Need to Cancel or Have Retakes Done

In the event you need to cancel your photoshoot appointment or decide that you want another one done, you’ll have to pay a fee of $150. Based on that price, I’d predict that a Homie photographer gets paid slightly less than that to take 30-50 or so pictures of your home and to do some minor editing on them.

Publishing Your Homie Listing

After our photoshoot was finished, it was time for us to roll out the listing. We published the listing through our Homie seller portal, and they pushed it out to their network.

In addition to putting your home on its own Homie listing, Homie broadcasts your listing to the following online real estate and classified ad listing websites:

Local MLS

Zillow

Trulia

Realtor.com

Homes.com

KSL (Utah)

Facebook

Receiving and Handling Home Tour Requests

After you’ve listed your home on Homie, if it’s priced well and your listing is attractive, you’ll start receiving tour requests. These requests can come from anyone who sees your listing, whether on Homie’s website or on one of the other places where they list your property. Home tour requests normally come in the form of a text message, to which you can reply to confirm the date/time. You can also decline or suggest another date/time. For the most part, detailed information about who is requesting a tour is not given, and a lot of the interaction is abstracted versus what you’d experience with a traditional real estate agent, who’s likely to let you know (or at least is capable of giving you that information if you ask for it) more details about each tour appointment, including how interested the buyer seems to be in your home, which brokerage their agent is with, and other information.

Because of the lack of information about who’s touring your home, it’s important that you make sure that you don’t have cash and other valuables laying out on the kitchen counter, and that your home is ready in regards to security to make sure people are not tempted to pilfer your stuff. Homie makes efforts to validate tour requests, but it’s a lower level than what you’d normally see with a traditional realtor to realtor interaction where there is more of a relationship built between the buyer’s agent and their client, and between your agent (who should be your fiduciary, looking out for you and your home) and the buyer’s agent and client.

As we found out later, although your Homie’s selling agent (remember, their involvement is minimal; that’s how they cut down the fees) doesn’t come to the showing appointment, they also don’t want you (the homeowner) to be there either. That situation can be a little nerve wracking. We were nervous about having to have our home in a near-show-ready state constantly and having our kids (6 of them, little ones included) ready to hit the road and head to the park or somewhere else for an hour or so while someone toured our house. We put together an action plan to have the house race ready in a half hour and have the kids out the door quickly, and we went over it with our kids, hoping that we didn’t have to experience this type of “evacuation” drill too many times before our home sold.

Open Houses with Homie

Homie doesn’t do much with open houses. They give a little bit of instruction, but don’t help with scheduling and marketing them, nor do they provide (similar to tours) someone to be at your home during the open house.

We decided to skip doing an open house for a couple reasons. 1) our home was under contract within two days of being on the market, and 2) we’ve heard a lot of negative about open houses, including that they tend to attract just tire kickers and creepy people who come through the home and make it messy.

If having open houses is important to you and you plan to use Homie to sell your home, you’ll want to make sure you’re prepared to do some work.

We Sold Our Home Quickly with Homie (Before the Sign Was Up)

The day after we published our home for sale, we started receiving tour requests. The first request was from a team of two agents, who were representing a client from out of state. The tour was early enough in the morning (and we hadn’t been told by Homie how important they thought it was for us to not be there during the tour; it seemed fairly optional) that we cleaned the house and planned to at least have me stick around, giving the tour and answering questions. The agents walked through the home video taping the house and yard while sending messages and spending time on the phone with their clients. Things were looking good as far as I could tell.

After giving the tour, I talked to the agents a bit about the neighborhood, answered questions about what types of fruit trees we’d planted in the back yard, and discussed the real estate industry and our choice to use Homie. These two women were nice about it, but basically told me that Homie’s not very well regarded by the traditional agents and brokerages. That didn’t come as a surprise to me, considering that Homie’s billboards and other advertising takes a lot of direct swipes at the waste associated with paying real estate commissions, essentially playing down the value that’s contributed by real estate agents.

As I had the somewhat awkward conversation with these agents about the difference between them and Homie, they pointed out that it is well understood in the Utah real estate industry that the role of an agent is to be relationship based, but Homie is simply a transactional brokerage, not intending to establish a relationship with any of their clients. This obviously causes some breakdowns in the buying and selling process and can be frustrating for people who are used to selling their homes using traditional real estate listings or even doing for sale by owners (FSBO), which doesn’t bring with it the restrictions and other baggage that Homie brings (along with its perks).

These agents who toured my home were hesitant about giving us their contact information, telling us that Homie wants to have strict control over the communication, and that they threaten agents who don’t go by their rules. I told them that ultimately it’s my home, and I’d never be willing to give up my freedom to choose who I interacted with, so we exchanged contact information.

I later discovered that this decision to be open and in contact with the buyer agent was critical for getting the deal done and our home sold. Although they do provide some value, if you rely strictly on Homie for communicating and negotiating back and forth with the buyer, it will likely cost you the sale because of delays and what appears to be a general lack of engagement.

This idea that Homie is transactional and not very engaged with any one client came out almost immediately. These agents (the first people to tour our home) submitted a full-price offer the following day, and sent me a text informing me that it has been submitted. With any real estate offer or addendum there is a time constraint for acceptance or replying in one way or another. As time drew closer and closer to the deadline for responding (which was almost a full two days later), we still hadn’t received the offer from Homie. We had already let the buyer agent know we would accept the offer, but leading up to the deadline for response, we still hadn’t officially received the offer from Homie.

Fortunately, the buyer agents emailed the offer to me and my wife, so we had the time we needed to look it over and be okay with it. The next day we finally received the offer from Homie, just a few hours before we needed to respond. My wife and I signed the offer and then followed up with our agent, asking her to make sure she submitted the acceptance to the buyer before the deadline passed. It was obvious that she was handling likely dozens of other listings, probably 4-5 times the amount a traditional agent normally handles.

We found that same delay with each of the other offers we received. If we had not been assertive about responding, even prodding our agent to keep up with the pace, the sale of our home would not have happened as smoothly, with a remote possibility that it would not have been completed.

Homie Seller Commission: $1,500; Buyer Commission: 3% of Sales Price

When you sell with Homie, don’t get caught up thinking that you’ll only pay the advertised $1,500 fee to sell your home. Only on the rare occasion that you sell to a buyer that is using Homie or a purchaser not using an agent will you come close to that cost. When you sell with Homie, you’ll most likely have to pay a buyer commission, which is typically a standard 3% of the sale.

When we initially went through the Homie signup process, we offered a buyer commission of 2%. Our reasoning was that the market was hot, our home was attractive to buyers and well-priced, and the buyer agent wouldn’t have to do much to earn a commission.

When the agents for our buyers submitted an offer, they also asked that we raise the buyer commission agreement to 3%. We obliged, considering that we’d received an offer for our full asking price.

I have found that most buyer agents don’t want to be short-changed their commissions, especially since they have to split some portion of their commissions with their brokerages. In this case, because they were working with a Homie listing, it was obvious that the buyer agents knew that they would be required to do more work than usual, filling in the gaps that were left with a one-size-fits-all, get-through-the-process listing agent, which is the model Homie typically follows.

Negotiating While Under Contract: Home Inspection

One thing we did find a bit frustrating was that the full offer we’d received ended up being a bit deceptive. Instead of negotiating on the price of the home, the buyer’s agent and their buyers began negotiating using the home inspection report, on which the inspector seem to list every possible contingency, giving excuses to expect us to concede a thousand dollars for this and a few thousand dollars for that.

With a traditional agent, they have the experience to give pushback to the buyer or to let the seller know when requests seem to be exorbitant, such as a $2,300 allotment for new range/oven although the existing one works well and looks fine. With Homie, you don’t get that expertise in your corner. If it hadn’t been for the fact that my wife and I tended to be solid negotiators, we would have easily given up close to $10,000 that was unnecessary. Instead, we were confident enough that we could find another buyer that we gave a few smaller concessions and then said, “Take it or leave it!”

They ended up taking the deal, but even that wasn’t ideal for us. We weren’t planning on moving out of the home until the end of June, after baseball season and girl’s camp were finished for our kids, and after we’d had adequate time to tell friends goodbye. We offered to rent back our property after closing on it in early to mid-June. The buyers were insistent that they move in on June 13th. Had we been working with a more relationship based agent, we might have given more pushback to that, and tipped the balance in our favor. Instead, we relented and rushed to move out more than two weeks prior to what we had planned. I also ended up feeling obligated to send $1,000 to the new owner (outside of closing) for not completing the checklist of repairs that I would have been able to finish had we stayed in the home during the time we had expected. Moving out early and having it cost me an extra $1,000 was doubly inconvenient, but that kind of lack of negotiation can often happen if you represent yourself as we were doing.

How Much Does Homie Save You When Selling Your Home?

I found Homie’s prediction of how much you’ll save to be very accurate. I’m including a screen shot of their calculation of the amount ($19,350) we saved selling our home at a sale price of $695,000.

The savings you get with Homie can be attributed directly to cutting out the 3% cost you’d normally pay to list with a normal real estate agent, and exchanging that instead with the $1,500 flat fee charged by Homie.

Homie’s business model depends upon having that $1,500 cover its costs associated with listing your home, taking pictures, and having personnel work through the process of getting your home sold. If it feels like you’re getting the bare minimum, that’s because you are. That’s the business model.

However, that business model works well for lots of people, including us in this situation. If you’re confident, assertive, selling your home in a good seller’s market, you’ll likely be satisfied with Homie, feeling confident that you saved thousands of dollars (or tens of thousands for more expensive homes) in exchange for purposefully giving up other “white glove service” options.

Should You Use Homie to Sell Your Home?

I feel like I can recommend Homie, but only for those who are willing to make up for the service gap that exists selling with Homie. If you are not confident about how real estate works and are not a great negotiator, you will likely find yourself frustrated.

Homie gives those who are the more assertive part of the population a chance to keep their hard-earned equity by working hard to keep it during the critical home sales process.

MLS Listing Alternatives to Homie

If I had it to do over again, I would likely have started out selling my home by using some FSBO (for sale by owner) options, including advertising the home on KSL, Craigslist, and in local Facebook groups. With a background in online marketing, and having experience using outside the box tactics to market and sell things, I feel like that might have saved me possibly ten thousand dollars or so. However, it would have been more work

For people like me, who are commonly do-it-yourselfers, my recommended path of escalation looks like this for selling real estate:

FSBO -> Homie -> Real Estate Agent

One of the main reasons we wanted to list on Homie was to make sure that our home made it onto the MLS. There are other alternatives for getting your home listed on the MLS though. For instance, the Flat Fee Group gives you a range of options for getting your home on the MLS starting at just $49.00.

The post Homie Review – Selling My Home Using Utah’s New Disruptive Real Estate Broker appeared first on The Handbook for Happiness, and Success, and Prosperity Prosperopedia.

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preserving-ferretbrain · 6 years ago

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Not Quite a Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

by Wardog

Friday, 26 December 2008

Wardog would have been impressed with The Pearls That Were His Eyes if she hadn't paid for it.~

The Pearls That Were His Eyes - a yarn of mythology and politics set in a baroque fantasy world, partly inspired by Shakespeare and partly by T.S. Eliot - is vanity published, which should have warned off any sensible person but since it's Xmas and I was feeling generous and it's creating something of a small-scale stir on LJ, I decided to give it a go, just on the off chance it was a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. Sigh. When I am I going to learn?

The thing is ... it's not ... bad ... actually. It's just the problem arises in that I paid money for it (and, yes, I know I that did voluntarily). It's probably symptomatic of my conventional nature or something, but I actually believe that books that don't get published don't get published for a reason. The Pearls That Were His Eyes is not a work of undiscovered genius that the publishing world is just too hidebound to recognise/appreciate - it's a promising book that needs a lot of work and a good editor. If someone (by which I mean the author, friend of the author, me - not a pirate, if you even get literature pirates) should ever giveyou this, then I heartily suggest you read it. It's well-written, imaginative, original and atmospheric. Do not, however, think about buying it because, in its current state, it's an amateur work with nothing to recommend it but potential.

The Pearls That Were His Eyes is set in the partially drowned, fog-wreathed city of Cittavecchio, which is, like most fantasy cities, a little bit of this, a little bit of that (in this case, London and Venice). It's a city with a dark, legend-shrouded past, suppressed and half-forgotten in the current Age of Reason. Needless to say the mythology of the city doesn't stay suppressed for long and rises up to consume the lives of, well, some dudes. I can't really summarise the plot much beyond that because ... it's not so much that it's incoherent as it's rather muted: there's a web of intrigue, there's a conclusion to the web of intrigue, but it's hard to really get a grip on what's going on.

Oh for God's sake: spoiler-time, let's try to untangle this:

So the City of Cittavecchio was drowned by the Old Gods for reasons not entirely specified except that they evidently didn't like it much. And The Tattered King, the Last King of the City, wanders around the edges of reality waiting for a moment to reclaim the city for himself again. And all the rich people go to parties and gossip all the time and wear masks and have masquerade balls and festivals. And all the poor people live in the Rookeries and are beggars and get killed. God knows how this city supports itself. And the Duca who rules the city is mad and corrupt - except we never really see this, so it's a bit hard to see why people are so down on the guy. And there's also a secret senate who are supposed to be the true power in the city. And there's a dude going around killing people in a particularly gruesome way. And there's this deck of tarot cards, right, called the Re Stracciati (the Tattered King) deck, that had been originally created to contain and control the spirit of the very city itself and was capable of drawing forth the spirit of the Tattered King. Wrap this all up in a motley of Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot and you get, if you'll forgive me, a heap of broken images: in short A Big Pile of Awesome with no actual structure to it.

What works about the Web o' Intrigue that leads, as you may suppose, to the very-near resurrection of the Tattered King is that it's a genuinely intriguing blending of huge political plots, personal vendettas, cruel coincidences and base human pettiness. It all comes together very satisfyingly indeed, except the journey to the point where it does is just a little bit tedious. For fantasy, it's a remarkably slim volume (weighing in at a mere 300 pages), so really you'd think, with all the necessary world and character building, it wouldn't have space to be dull. But somehow it manages. Part of the problem lies with the need to acquaint the reader with an already complicated personal/political background that has been created long before the story itself begins; therefore the book kicks off with an awful lots of "as you know your father the king" style exposition, which is both blatant and extraordinarily clumsily executed. Characters can tell other characters information they presumably already know for pages at a time. Let me quote you a chunk to demonstrate the magnitude of the problem:

'Is it worth taking [this quite significant information we've just gathered] to the Lord Seneschal yet?' 'No. Cittavecchi society is riddled with secret societies, clubs, political movements and the like. Masks breed them like flies. For the moment we have nothing more than my disquiet and a series of coincidences that seem too convenient to go on - that is not enough for any kind of legal process. If we have nothing but innuendo and we take it to the Seneschal, then he will take it to the Duca, and the first thing the Duca will do is order another round of hangings and gibbetings for no better reason than it is you and I who raise the matter. And if he executes any more members of the nobility on our say, it will probably trigger the very open revolt we seek to avoid at the moment and, worse, it will make our own position untenable. Everything is finely and I do not want to try and provoke and other of the Duca's funny turns. They are inevitably bloody in consequence.'

Aaaand breathe.

This problem is particularly marked at the beginning of the book, which is, you will agree, a particularly bad place for it to be marked. Although it eases off a bit as the plot (finally) picks up, the pacing as a whole remains awkward throughout. This isn't helped by shallow characterisation. The characters are painted in broad strokes but since they're all some variation on "courtier" (ruthless courtier, party courtier, naive courtier, hot courtier, woman courtier etc. etc.) and they all have extravagant Italianate titles, it's actually quite difficult to untangle them and their agendas. They all talk pretty much the same way and although they do have relationships with each other, it's hard to know why they think and act they way they do. Gawain, Lord d'Orlato and Xavier, Lord di Tuffatore are, apparently, in love but I never had any particular reason to believe in it or care about either the relationship or the inevitable shocking betrayal that accompanies it.

Actually since I've already spoilered this to oblivion and back, I may as well clarify. It turns that Gawain is the friendly neighbourhood serial killer, acting out of what he sees as being his "love" for Xavier, taking out those who threatened or inconvenienced his lover (handy). Their confrontation is genuinely arresting and dramatic, except it's got no context to it so it has no emotional resonance to it. Why does Gawain love Xavier enough to turn himself into a monster for the sake of it? And what on earth does Xavier see in Gawain?

This afflicts most of the characters in the book, although it seems less important for the others since they don't carry as much of the story. Essentially they're all cool but not interesting: little more than a parcel of bon mots and extravagant costuming. I know they're probably meant to be like that but it does leave the novel without any kind of emotional dimension. I think Xavier is meant to be the least psychotic of them and that we're maybe meant to like him, or at least be sufficiently invested him that his eventual fate is tragic ... but although I was sensible of the mechanics of said tragedy I didn't actually feel it.

This is not to say there's nothing to like about TPTWHE. There is good stuff in there. The city of Cittavecchio is trying very hard to be cool and, well, I have to admit it is pretty cool:

It's said ... that every night the Tattered King throws his cloak over the ancient and crumbling city, his constant lover and royal consort. Centuries ago ... the old Gods tried and failed to wash her iniquities away with the great deluge; she endured, half-drowned, half-dead, knee deep in silt water and floodwater, a sunken shadow of her Imperial past.

The whole brooding atmosphere of the book is excellent. And, despite having more than a whisper pretension about it, the Shakespeare / Eliot / tarot card motifs really contribute to it. Also Andrews writes well. I was rather taken with: "in his eyes, hysteria hovered like a solicitous relative, ready to take him by the arm and guide him into the gentle uplands of shrieking madness." And when it isn't bogging down in exposition, the rhythms of his dialogue are equally stylish:

'I have given a commitment to my brother ... and matters of policy must come before my own amusement.' 'It gratifies me nonetheless that you regard me as an amusement and not as a matter of policy...'

Unfortunately this isn't quite enough to pull TPTWHE together. It's a shame but a book I'd be willing to pay for is more than flair and imagination.Themes:

Books

Sci-fi / Fantasy

Self-Published

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Michal

at 00:52 on 2013-09-18This is an old article, but I'm gonna comment anyway 'cause that's how I roll.

I'm not sure if this restores my faith in conventional publishing as the article implies it should, since the book is, despite a shoddy cover and wandering plot, still apparently "well-written, imaginative, original and atmospheric." And this strikes me as a lot better than certain other debut novels that publishers have paid an advance for. I guess I'd want to know what the history behind this book was, if it was self-pubbed or vanity-pubbed from the get-go or if no one was interested in it or what, in that it obviously could have benefited from a professional editor or even the opinion of a good friend with an editing mind and the potential was there to make it a whole lot better. Or, in simpler terms: did Andrews simply release this book too early and should've worked on it more until he eventually found an agent, or should it have stayed in the trunk since no publisher would ever pick it up at all?

Mostly, it's a bit harsh to say "read this book if you don't pay for it" which seems to imply there some worth to the thing being printed in the first place, whereas large publishing houses have put out books where I really do wonder "what did any editor ever see in this thing?"

#Ferretbrain #Wardog #The Pearls That Were His Eyes #Ian Andrews #Self-published

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