CosmicShadow

But what kind of staff or funding does it take to say literally different words out of your mouth like, you are fined $5B instead of $5MM? I can do that for free, especially if they are already at the point where they are making the charge. Every fine should be devastating so that they either barely survive or die, and every other company shits themselves for life and we solve the problem.

St. Thomas is a small city (less than 50k, and it's not a suburb of a bigger city) in Ontario, Canada that is probably almost devoid of any tech or startup action, so it's cool to see one that stuck there and made it work instead of moving to Toronto or SF.

I would doubt anyone in that city isn't aware of the one big success in tech they have going right now and are probably happy to see them actually giving back to help out the folks who live there (which likely include the founders and employees). It's not like they are buying the naming rights to an arena in downtown Miami, it's a small park on the outskirts of their hometown.

I live an hour away in Kitchener-Waterloo, we have RIM park and there has been a culture around these parts of companies putting money back into the community, sponsoring events and helping develop areas and I would view this more in that realm than anything shady. I've been all over South Western Ontario and I still haven't made it to St. Thomas because it's out of the way (even when visiting nearbyish London) and there is like nothing there, so I don't see this as something dirty or they would have spent their money on somewhere that it would make any marketing impact at all.

Good on them for trying to help out their own community.

Just start with the word "downloadable" in the Etsy search bar, you'll get quite the wide variety of random crap. Page through it and you can start rabbit-holing down different keyword combinations. It's vast. Most people don't even know you can get digital downloads on Etsy and we are still surprised all the time at the new things people sell (and that people are actually buying them and finding them! how???). We sell some SVGs and PDFs on one of our shops, but we haven't actually put any effort into it last year. Based on the handful of listings we already had up we made $3k USD in 2022 with like 20 minutes of work for the year.

Yeah, you have to put in the work, read all the descriptions, look at the images, see their bio, look at their location, and the tricky, yet most obvious thing, is if they have a "production partner", which you are supposed to specify if you don't make the thing yourself. Even if people fill it in, Etsy makes it purposely hard to find that info and anyone not using Etsy as a seller wouldn't even know it's a thing to look for.

If something looks too good or too produced in images, and the cost seems too good, it probably is to good to be true. You can Google image search their main picture and find where else it's being sold. If they have a lot of sales (like thousands), look much more closely as most artisans don't get that high unless they are pretty good.

Clothing is nearly impossible to find anything that isn't just a drop shipper. Anything from a country that you think would be sketchy is 90% of the time, which sucks for the amazing people there, but it's such an easy signal to see. Asia, Russia, Eastern Europe, almost always all scams, dropship or ripoff factories.

It's sad and frustrating just how much worse Etsy gets year after year. We've got 5 shops on there and see all the BS and how it hurts us. My wife can't even shop on the platform anymore because it's too hard to find actual handcrafted type stuff and we know what we are doing. If they'd let people report shops it would get cleaned up fast, but they'd lose so much money they'd rather kill themselves first, they are incredibly greed oriented.

They make farrrrrrrr more money by actively not-trying.

If you want to have a more enjoyable time with business, if you can do this, it is probably the best way to go, although it's definitely not easy and you are probably not bothering with Etsy.

There is a maximum anyone will pay for a certain type of good, no matter how great it is, and that is the sad truth you learn when turning hobbies into businesses on Etsy. You can be an expert in something, make something absolutely amazing, 10x better than the next, but people still won't pay more than $40 for it because it's just an XYZ.

If you can make the type of Art that someone is willing to actually pay whatever you charge for it, you have a chance to go up market because you've overcome the first obstacle of picking the right product. 95% of people on Etsy will not or cannot achieve this based on what they sell (or know how to do, or enjoy doing), but many can still be successful.

There are a hell of a lot fewer people who will buy something expensive than something cheap, and having run 5 different Etsy shops selling different handmade items from $3 up to $475 I can tell you it's so nice to get those big sales, but they don't come nearly as often as you'd hope. I make over 6 figures selling an average order value of $20. I still have to make and ship a LOT of stuff and I've optimized on the businesses that are the easiest to make and ship with the highest margin over the big sales that take lots of work.

We'll do craft shows and sell $20 items like hotcakes all day, while the depressed folks in the booth across from us selling expensive art make maybe 1 sale a day, and usually not for an expensive piece. Our $475 item that takes a week to make will turn heads and bring people in all day and we might sell one of them, and 5 other folks will just say they can't justify the cost, despite how unique and big and amazing they think it is. On the other hand, we'll sell wedding invitations that take 10 minutes to print for $500 and people won't even blink when we name the price, and then they'll re-order again because they changed the date. It's shocking.

There are tons of digital download shops that makes 10k-100k sales a year on Etsy at $3-$15/sale and they only need to do the work of producing an item once. Those are amazing businesses and 100x times easier to run than trying to convince someone to buy a $x,000 item via social media and paid channels.

There are ways to make money, it requires work and cleverness and staying on top of things. You can go upscale and play the sales/marketing game. You are better off just starting from the point of already being a marketer/sales person and find something to sell, because trying to do that from just being an artist is not going to be easy. You can sell stuff people want that aren't that hard to make, but certain markets get flooded or less popular and you need to find a good niche and keep on evolving, but it's doable and can be fun. People underestimate how good the long tail is on Etsy and how much they can market for you with the right product. Even with crappy SEO people can just find and buy your stuff, which is mind blowing, but it doesn't work well when what you sell is just "crochet hat" or "pikachu shirt" or "watercolour lilies".

Yeah, that's a big part of it! It also reduces the amount of work/BS you have to deal with each week as well, so you don't get as exhausted both mentally and physically. Going from 5/2 to 4/3 really changes the balance in work/rest to almost even in comparison. My wife noticed she never really felt like she had to take vacation days or was dying for time off the way she was before, you can actually get enough time to recharge that it's not like you are crawling to that distant finish line.

Definitely not, they won't even include a way to report these folks. We run multiple Etsy shops and would report all day if we could because it's not hard to identify them at all.

1. You won't regret going to a 4-day work-week even if you do nothing that makes you money with the extra time. My wife did it over a year ago and she still talks about how it's the best thing ever and can never go back. We are a bit poorer, but quality of life went like 300x for that one extra weekend day.

2. Etsy is flooded, true, but it doesn't mean people still don't find you and buy your stuff if it's good and unique (and you put effort into learning how to do Etsy SEO). If you make something that no one else has, you can charge a proper amount for it, people will buy it and leave you great reviews.

We make nearly 6 figures on Etsy as a side-business across 3 different Etsy stores for crafts/handmade/digital goods we produce. I can tell you that we used to make a lot of money with our laser-cut wood shop when it started, it was a wonderful learning experience and trip, but after 2 years or so everyone and their dog had a laser cutter, ripped off our designs, and sold them for less than half of what we did (and they weren't making any money at those rates). We had a Chinese scam ring rip off our most expensive item featuring pictures of my wife's face in them and use them as facebook ads to try and sell our $500 item for $79.99 on pop-up stores. Nothing you can do about that, but it shows that we reached a success point to be targeted like that. There are so many niches and things you can make and sell on there it still blows our mind. People sell literal PDFs of a piece of paper with an image of a piggy bank repeated like 500 times that people buy, print out, and cross out 1 by 1 as they add $10 to their vacation fund knowing that at the end they'll have finally saved the $5k they need. These stores will have like 30k+ $3.99 sales for 20 minutes of work.

It sucks that you can't report shit stores, they are frustrating, but even though they are there, the long tail is real, you can find anything from any niche, the trick is finding out what people will type in that search bar that you actually make or can make, because that will filter out most of the crap.

Yeah, who'd think a business would try and not spend money on something they don't need in a cut-throat industry.

If there were, they'd do it, but it doesn't help their business, so they don't.

I can't say I know much about ships or naval life, but those berths look so small and uncomfortable with a lot of places for your arms to get caught or places to bump your funnybone off of. And those lockers look so skinny! Do you just hang one hanger in there with one pair of clothes on it?

When you keep refreshing the home page and are sick of half the articles that you don't care about, hide it!

Does a duplication of information need to exist? Definitely not and I don't want to do it (especially if I have to do it shittily with bad info via AI), however the only way to show up in a google search result for what I want is to include this information to trick Google into thinking I offer unique and relevant information so I can help rank up my offering and play the game like every other site fighting to be found online.

I am self-employed and run my own online business that requires traffic and sales. Apart from wasting a ton of my money into ads, I can work on SEO, which only costs time and some effort. I've done this and found that after 6-9 months many of my desired search queries put me in the first 10 results (and without AI or spamming crappy content).

In order to go further and attempt a longtail strategy I offer something customizable and relevant to the fan of every single band and artist out there, so Googling "Band Name [my offering]" would ideally lead to my result being one of the first and having it precustomized to that band. This is how every result is ranked for the biggest players that take up page 1.

Do I want to make the web a shittier place? Definitely not, and unlike many other folks I'm very hesitant to just throw thousands of crap articles that can't provide any value out there to try and get a few ad clicks. I don't have ads on my site. I want to help fans of an artist find the offering they are looking for. I often get amazing feedback and love letters from customers who are so thankful they've found what I sell, but the problem is how to get found, especially when competing for search relevance against some of the biggest websites on the internet. If I can do this instead of giving money to Facebook, I'd be much happier and more profitable.

Our dog really doesn't like going in the buggy, but it's actually the best way to keep him walking along instead of endlessly sniffing and truffling for tidbits to eat. We just ask him if he wants to get in the buggy and he start motoring. He'll last for a little while in there before he starts crying to get out, unless he's really cold or hurt. A backpack would be awesome, but it'd be like trying to stuff a squirrel in your pants.

This is the annoying thing I've found about AI writers past and present.

Maybe almost a year ago I was playing around with Rytr.me (and their competitors) trying to generate factual content I could use for SEO purposes on hundreds or thousands of band specific pages. Many top sites already have this, a bio of the band, list of albums, awards, some random Q&A's, etc.

This should be an easy job for an AI to do, yet in many cases it was plausible, yet not always accurate. They would miss key facts, point out songs, albums, events that weren't really that important (despite the info being there). Sometimes the data would be off, and I'd have to go look it up, and if I'm going to do that, I might as well just do it all by hand, because I can't trust anything generated. It is a pain enough to do for bands I think I know, but for bands I couldn't care less about, blech.

In theory it would have been good enough, but I didn't want to associate my site with that kind of crappy or incorrect data. Being dated info as well, it felt wrong publishing a page about an artist that died like a year ago and not mentioning it.

I've since circled back around and played with ChatGPT for this, but it's still just off enough that I don't want to use it.

The thing about playing with these tools is that you get really good at recognizing content written by an AI and you really start questioning a lot of things you read online for misinformation. It's kind of gross and scary to see these simple answers appearing at the top of Google for any question and realizing they could be completely wrong, but people don't know.

Just the other day we cut our dog's nail and hit the quick and he started bleeding like crazy, so we look up what to do and find a content blog with what appears to be a few paragraphs with a clear solution, but it also had like 7 other articles showing up with similar queries that all had different answers. I scrolled to the bottom of the Wordpress site and it had 7000+ pages, I go to the last one, they were all added to the site on the same day. Almost every query I typed into Google lead me to this site as one of the first results. It's fucked.

We bought a dog stroller, which helps for when he stops wanting to walk, or is too bad, but it's a pain to take when he does go the whole way (it's a cheap one that has many design flaws). I kind of wish I got the backpack, but I think he would have hated it and made it unusable.

This is in Canada. Bosses will always defer to legal/HR and it's usually just BS. Oh this isn't policy, but policy is just made up for the company so they a) don't have to think, and b) can refer to the policy and say it's iron clad rule. businesses can do almost anything, it's that they _don't want to have to do the work_ to figure it out for you. Maybe they'll actually miss some rule where you are now "part-time" vs "full-time" if there is a legal distinction in your country based on hours worked and you can catch them in some loop hole or something and they don't want to try and figure it out, but in 99% of cases, it's just that they don't know what to actually do without thinking or researching, so they won't do it. If they make a mistake it's their ass on the line, and they don't know or care about you.

The best way to get away with this is to find an employer who is open to it from the start (good luck), or be so valuable that if you threaten to quit if you don't get it, they'll relent and do it for you. In my wife's case, they can't afford to lose her so they'll push HR into making the change. It wasn't painless and there was some annoyances and nuances to fix in the HR system, but it was worth it.

I've been self-employed for almost 15 years so that I would never have to deal with this kind of bullshit. I do consulting and work on my own business ideas. I've run several startups in the past, some of which were funded, so I've seen the back end of all this kind of stuff. My wife makes more money than I do and I work on finding businesses that can free us both from having to work. It sucks that she is making less now and we can feel it a bit, but it's not a huge blow as we aren't big spenders. It was 100% worth it, she is by far happier than she has been in years. They did a very poor job of reducing her workload with her time though, so watch out for that if you can get your 20% reduction. They'll pay you less, but expect you to work the 5th day in the 4. This is mainly a staffing issue on her team however.

I do feel some pressure to finally get something working so she can just leave her employment and in the last year I've managed to grow my latest business to twice her annual gross salary. If I can keep it up we'll be able to meet our goals, but a business is an ongoing monster with it's own risks and expenses, so it'll take some time before the leap can be made.

I hope you can achieve what you want, sometimes it takes some serious pressure to get your way, or you have to be willing to walk if they don't agree, but man that 3 day weekend every week is that much better and she still talks about how great it is a year later.

I remember when a now very large startup cold emailed me to try and recruit me (I'm self-employed). Lots of new funding, out of the Valley, I asked if they paid Valley wages since I wasn't living there, and they said, "oh, if you care that much about the compensation and not the mission, then you are the wrong type of person to join our team". LOL, sorry for not wanting to give my life for _your_ dream and not be paid fairly.

Startups are some of the worst abusers of people's time and effort and they hide behind the trope of extreme effort and long hours for little pay that people come to just expect with the territory. I imagine nowadays they are having a bit of a harder time then they once did, but there are always dreamers and fools and examples of those that did and came out very well.

My wife works a decent white-collar job at a giant company and negotiated a 20% pay decrease to go down to 4 days a week. She's never been happier, she doesn't even feel like she needs to take vacations very often as that simple switch is life altering. She's the only one she knows that will say No to overtime. If she wasn't so valuable, she wouldn't have been approved at a company like that, and even now it still seems unheard of to do such a thing, but people are finally starting to try.

Her boss is asking her quarterly about her goals with the company and more specifically about taking over his director level job, to which she says "no way" every time. She can see how shittily bosses are treated at the company, they are forced to work insane overtime without pay, deal with personnel issues, eat shit from above constantly, deal with all issues, can't fire the dead weight (which is everywhere), are expected to work over lunch every day and be available to work on vacation, which they usually can't take. Yet they don't seem to grasp that anybody with a brain can see this is an awful trade off for like 10-30% more pay, which just gets taxed away anyway and which you never have time to spend.

You can see it in the faces of these folks, they look prematurely aged. You know how you see a picture of someone's face and say "they look like they had a hard life"? Yeah, go on facebook and see which of your colleagues took the management job and go back 5 years and be blown away at how they aged. It's both sad and shocking.

Misery loves company, why wouldn't young employees want to be as "successful" as us?

The fucked thing about this is that as it's normalized and justified it allows companies and venues to start blocking people it doesn't like for whatever reason and essentially banishes them from society for life.

Critical of Ticketmaster online and they start to take notice? I guess you wont' be allowed into most venues or concerts for life on this continent. We also won't tell you why you were banned or offer a way out (because that's how Google and Facebook operate and it suits us). It's allowing people to be kicked out of "real world" walled gardens.

Watching Twitter has been like watching a country get taken over by a dictator. You insult me? Ban. You track my personal movements (jet)? Ban. Share better alternatives? Ban. New horrible law here, new horrible law there, I don't like this so it's now law. At least it's not a country and just a useless sandbox, but it's surreal to watch the despot simulator live.

If I vote yes, do I get banned later? Is he going to leave and then blame/rewrite history to make it looks like the new leader is at fault? I'm afraid to post anything to the platform for fear of losing my account and premium handle to a ban from an insane leader.

Seems like a stretching propaganda hit piece from the anti-abortion crowd stretching into calling the "current" Canadian Government in power a "regime" that kills poor people by...get this...convincing doctors to convincingly get poor and unhealthy people to go past every fucking alarm bell and human instinct and literally kill themselves with their assistance to somehow be less of a burden on the state? Somehow a small group of people killing themselves will make any difference financially or politically somehow to a country or party? And every comment against it seems downvoted, yeah ok....

I'm still not sure who buys a car that expensive with cash, seems sketchy, inconvenient and unsafe. I wouldn't take cash if someone wanted to pay me that much, in fact someone did, they paid me for a contract with $5000 in used 20s and it was really fucked up, I didn't know how to get it into a bank or use it for anything without setting off alarms.

As soon as I got to the first example, ANIMATION, I stopped reading. If this guy is trying to figure out how to do animations and is getting mad at Tailwind, he shouldn't be using Tailwind, he's not the target market.

The call sign of a happy Tailwind user is someone who doesn't want to use Bootstrap anymore, switch tabs constantly to their CSS file, ever have to learn how the fuck animations work, and who instantly falls asleep when trying to learn the proper way to do CSS, even after having to deal with it for 20 years. SCSS? God no, just give me something where I don't have to think and I can make it instantly do what I want. I'll try random stuff for an hour until it works before I have to try and understand and take in something new, the resistance is real. I don't care if it's ugly, I don't care if it's MORE WORK, because for ME, it's not, and I can read the classes quickly and know what is going on and adjust it in real time alongside my content. Do I augment with regular CSS where needed? Yes, because the limitations can be frustrating, but I've only got like a handful of extra classes I need.

I'm one who hates to say I like it, because I hate the hype around it, but by god it works so well for me compared to anything else I have to do and I'm able to deploy and edit sites that look decent without being or having access to a designer, and those sites make money for me and pay my living.

Can I ever hope to compare to a proper designer or someone who has a solid command and understanding over what to me amounts to the most boring and droll thing ever: CSS? No way, they are wizards and they should hate this impure garbage, but for the rest of us it just works good and gets results with the least amount of thinking, which is all we really wanted.

I got shit to do, and it's the fastest, least resistant way to let me do it in the way I know how. It's not for everyone, but it fits the way I currently work, think, and how I value tradeoffs in speed, effort, debt, cleanliness and results. YMMV.

Yes, it was a nonsense example brand name meant to look like how they are all 6 capital letters.

Scamazon just sucks now. It was once good, but every time I go to use it I waste time and get frustrated. I now only seem to buy stuff where the trade off on research vs going to store is not worth it and buy their probably crappy prime brand batteries.

I've been floating like $100+ of amazon credits for months because I keep getting damn gift cards and more credit from returns. Sure there is things I kind of want, but I end up saving it for things I need, and then when I waste time researching what to buy on Amazon, I end up not buying it on Amazon because of their awful fake reviews and cloned YGGFSS named brand items.

It's a real shame that brick-and-mortar stores don't realize their advantage is that I'd rather pay more and drive to pick something up TODAY than waste time waiting and risking garbage on prime, yet they flood their own stores with "online seller marketplace items" or nothing is ever in stock.

So much for tech working for us, even in the slightest. "We know what you want, and it's what we want to show you"

But can they hire at least 1 person who can fix all the glaring user interface bugs on their core web app? The trade would be worth it.

That thing nobody wants is for some reason on a chat app now