adpoe

No, basically there are software add-ons to Shopify that let you import an AliExpress seller's product into your store.

Your customer never sees the original seller's listing, and therefore you can charge any price you want.

So, as long as you charge a price that is higher than the raw cost + S&H, you can then collect money from your sale, and use that to purchase the item from the AliExpress vendor (this is automated). Part of the automation process fills in your customer's mailing address, and the vendor fulfills their order directly. (So you don't have to hold any inventory, you're just the go-between.)

Your AliExpress vendors will know what's going on, but they expect and anticipate that people do this. It's how they make money.

Essentially, the service you provide is marketing, design, and salesmanship. They provide the product.

Emailed =)

Yes, here's my URL, feel free to share =) http://modshop.guitars/

For customer issues, you just need to be responsive and as helpful as you can be.

I've also had issues shipping outside the US, but Shopify (the platform that I use) lets you disable shipping outside of certain countries.

I've had some issues shipping to Canada, (never had an EU customer), so I only ship within the USA now. And changing that was only a few clicks.

There are a few good ways, but it really helps if you know the products well. For me, my site sells guitar parts and DIY kits. And I've been playing guitar since I was about 10 years old, so that helps a ton.

I had a few other stores before this that didn't sell well at all, and I have to say that's because I just didn't know the products, or what the end users really wanted/needed/cared about.

Great ways to pick products: - Terapeak (http://www.terapeak.com/), but this is paid - eBay completed listings - Or most simple (and what I use) -- once you know your products, search AliExpress and sort by "best-selling". That's my go-to.

Feel free to check my store for ideas (or if you want to buy something!). URL is: http://modshop.guitars/

Returns are a pain, yes. It'll be different for every vendor though, so you need to take it on a case-by-case basis.

Honestly, my advice is to not worry about it up front, and dive in.

You need to worry about making your first sale (which is seriously, very hard), long before you worry about returns. =)

You'll figure out it when you need to.

Yes, this is one of the bigger problems, and there's no good fix for it.

You just need to clearly state all over the site that your delivery times are 3-4 weeks.

It's unfortunate, but part of the business.

The only way around it is to have products that aren't easily sourceable via Amazon. They're out there, but mostly in very targeted niches.

You also might find that you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel for profits, but the money is still there to be had. I guess nothing ever comes easy, in any business--but there's still money to be made.

I used Shopify's drop shipping guide to get started--it really is very helpful. They're invested in making you profitable (it's in their best interest as well, since they make $$ from you), and consequently their guides are very good.

https://www.shopify.com/guides/dropshipping

Fair warning though: you'll still have a ton of problems and spend time dealing with customers.

For example, the first time I got a $100+ sale on an item, I went to ship it and found that the vendor took the product down from AliExpress... but my Shopfiy account didn't update to reflect that.

So there are tons of pitfalls and things to be careful of, but like any field, you need to experience them firsthand, it's just part of the process. You can make money at drop-shipping, but it really is not easy, and there's still risk involved, like any business.

Do you have any longtime hobbies? I've played guitar my whole life, so I sell guitar parts.

It's easiest if you can leverage knowledge you already have. I also tried stores selling items I knew very little about, and it was much harder. =)

There are many tools for finding what's selling though. The best ones are paid, like Terapeak (http://www.terapeak.com/), but you can also search eBay completed listings and get a sense for what's selling.

Finding the right product(s) is definitely the hardest part, though -- you're absolutely correct. Not only is it hard to find products, you also have to find products with margins that enable you to make money. For some of my sales, I only make about $1-2 dollars. Which is something I need to improve, for my own business.

I run an ecommerce store from Shopify which fulfills the orders by drop-shipping through AliExpress.

This is definitely doable for one person, and it isn't technically challenging for a software developer--but the hardest part (at least for me) is marketing, creating content, advertising, and so on.

Actually running a Shopify store and fulfilling by drop-shipping is simple. I would definitely recommend that as a good place to start, one person can do it.

I write software as career, but I still do art as a hobby. I actually tried making a career out of art when I was younger, but it's very very hard to make ends meet, when that's your main source of income.

It's an industry with only a handful of big winners and stars who can make it a fulltime job (at least during their lifetime). And I wasn't quite good enough to be one of them =)

It is really fun and satisfying to make art though, and I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to explore that aspect of their creativity. I feel like I gained a lot in life, qualitatively, from my time focusing on art. 'Hackers and Painters', right? '

I've decided to learn many, many things over the years: programming languages, human languages, musical instruments, drawing/painting/art, sports, math, chess, etc...

What it comes down to is spending time getting your hands dirty making things (or getting real practice), even if your output sucks for a long time. (And it will.)

Favorite personal example: One day, when I was around 19, I decided that I wanted to be an artist. I hadn't seriously drawn anything since I was about 10. My current skills were atrocious, but I started drawing every single day, anyway, undeterred.

Of course, at first I was awful. But I copied old master paintings, drew pictures of famous sculptures, etc.; all of my free-time, I spent drawing. And slowly, but surely, I got better at it. I did this every day for probably about 3 years or so, and by the end of it, I was very accomplished. But it was a constant effort that took years. I probably did over 1,000 drawings, hundreds of paintings, and so on. And about 90% of them were awful. But the good stuff, it was really really good. I guess that's the price sometimes. Nobody is a genius all the time. Even Michelangelo, or Picasso.

The thing is, if you find something you enjoy, it doesn't feel like work or drudgery. (Even though drudgery is the only way to get better.) Instead, it's an activity that you want to spend time on, and when you do--time passes so quickly you don't know where it went. It's like living life on fast forward. (Maybe that feeling's the real-life inspiration for the old trope of the training montage. A deep kernel of truth beneath the fantasy, after all?)

There are bars like this in my city, in some particularly rowdy college-bar areas. They've been open for 20+ years, most of them. So it must work out from a business POV. But never visted one to report.

However, guess it's only news because it's New York. =)

I do like McLuhan's work, and there's more to it than that sound byte--though it's very memorable.

He has a pretty wide body of literature, and some of the more interesting aspects of it are about how technology (especially media) become an extension of the nervous system and body itself. (Of course this logical extreme is hive mind, singularity, etc...)

One of the other more interesting points (that has seemed more or less accurate) is that connecting the world via communication technology returns man to a mentality more like our tribal ancestors (I.e. 'the global village').

He also has some very interesting narratives about how new technologies create pain as they are introduced to the world, going back to stirrups, the printing press, and other historical examples.

Some of his books are full of illustrations and are generally very strange and forward thinking; most of all, McLuhan was an extremely creative person with an agile mind and mischievous sense of humor. You can get the sense that much of what he did was trolling the media & academia at some level. And that's where his quirky PR personality comes in. Above all, he was enjoying himself and his 30minutes of fame. Nothing wrong with that!

Just speaking personally: for me, learning the context and history of mathematics would have made a huge difference in my motivation to learn it.

I always hated math growing up (despite being very good at it now); I didn't sit down and learn it well until I got serious about learning CS, in my 20s.

Our teachers did not contextualize why we were learning this stuff at all. It was more like: here, sit still and spend an hour drawing lines on grids and arbitrarily shuffling X's and Y's. Boring... And for me, it seemed so far removed from the reality of my day-to-day life at that age, that I just couldn't see why learning this "boring" subject was at all relevant.

In reality, math is one of the most fascinating subjects anybody could learn. But unless you know why and how it's used--there's no motivation to sit down and plug through tedious exercises about seemingly trivial subject matter. (I would have rather been playing video games. Or climbing a tree. Causing trouble. Or, yes, even reading.)

This isn't the only missing link in math education in the US -- but it's one of them.

Could there reasonably be multiple competing "internets" -- with different protocols, different 'rules', design and so on?

I don't pretend to know how to 'fix' anything (much less something as complex as the internet), but I do feel like it would be beneficial to have some competition in this space, to whatever degree it's possible.

When there's only one option, a variety of problems associated with monolithic systems and monopolies will inevitably arise--as we've seen with the current system.

Serious philosophical question: can you verify someone's ideology, their internal mental state?

If not -- then this doesn't seem possible.

If yes -- then maybe.

.....

That said, from an editorial perspective, I find this very troubling.

More and more in America, we attempt to shame others based on what we perceive as their intentions and internally held beliefs and attitudes.

In objective reality, we can never fully know or understand what someone else is feeling, or what they intend. (At least as far as I am aware.)

Yet many of us still pretend we can, denouncing and shaming others because of their perceived intolerant or hateful beliefs. And, it's becoming socially acceptable, sometimes even encouraged... forgive me, but this whole idea is extraordinarily surreal.

EDIT: What makes this doubly strange - if this were satire, it would be funny.

Black and white.

I think the issue at stake here is the nature of higher education in the US: specifically, what are its putative goals?

Is it a place for intellectual growth and experience gaining for its own sake, or is it primarily for grooming & career preparation?

With tuition costs as they are, I'd argue that college is necessarily a career investment, almost entirely. And to view it any other way is either naively Romantic or somewhat deluded.

If I could really guarantee career success, social status, and great wealth, just by attending a school--I would.

If these schools really do grant entry to coveted and lucrative positions, and that's what they're selling to potential applicants, I don't see a problem. That's the product, and as products go, that's pretty darn good.

Personally, I think if elite education as entry-way to the upperclass--of and for itself--is an issue, then you're attending one of these schools for the wrong reasons.

Right now, it is often pretended that the goal of college is to learn, to grow, and to 'get an education'. This may have been true in the past, but today it is not. The goal of college is to prepare yourself for the work force, and any other view is somewhat financially irresponsible, whether your family has the money to blow, or not.

Moreover: much of the most important learning in life (intellectual and otherwise) happens outside of academia. It always has and always will. Schools can't do it all. If you aren't already intellectually curious, 4 years at Stanford--just by itself--won't change that. But if I can find a school that will be worth the investment of time and money for my career, one that will help me build a comfortable life for myself and support my family--then I think that investment is worthwhile, and I'll be happy to make it any day.

It's very strange how memory works.

The first few paragraphs I thought - "yes, I remember this". But once I got farther into it, I realized it was definitely Shaq's Kazaam that I was misremembering.

However--I would never have thought it was Sinbad at all, if the article had not suggested it first.

I'm not sure if that says more about the nature of memory, or the power of suggestion.

Perhaps fading memory combined with strong and 'seemingly accurate' suggestion is quite a powerful thing. There are tons of examples of this.

For example, was that old Tom Cruise movie called "Interview with A Vampire" or "Interview with THE Vampire"? Like 'Shazaam', many people say that at some point the movie title changed. But there's no evidence of that at all.

Perhaps my all time favorite story about the strangeness of memory is more relevant than ever. Borges' story, "Shakespeare's Memory". Read aloud for the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/fiction-podcast-h...

Basically, a writer is magically given Shakespeare's memories. "But he soon discovers that memory is a slippery thing, 'not a summation, it is a chaos of vague possibilities.'"

The greatest labyrinth of all might just be the mind.

Yes. You can watch some researchers working an "acoustic fingerprint" in this video.

Linking to the start of that segment: https://youtu.be/eNzRHuqvMxQ?t=50m14s

Pretty cool stuff.

Yes. It's not any harder to learn this stuff as you get older, in my own experience, despite what people sometimes think.

Only personal experience, but: I found learning complex technical concepts far easier in my late 20's than I did as new college entrant at 18-19. Including all the math.

So, not sure why people like to say that you learn this stuff easier when you're younger. For me, it was exactly the opposite.

It's never too late. What matters most is that you are good at the work and can produce results.

For me, I went back to school about 5 years after a liberal arts undergrad to get a BS in computer science, and it has worked out. I was about 27, but there were numerous men and women in my classes in their late 30's and early 40's, all making the switch to CS to keep their skills sharp and better support their families. Some had been lawyers, accountants, and other white collar jobs--and they decided to make the change anyway.

So, yes, it's common, and employers understand that people are coming to programming from many different paths/backgrounds these days. (At least the ones who aren't snobbish.)

Most importantly: use what you perceive as your weaknesses as your strengths. You know a ton about accounting. Use that!

Doing programming work that overlaps with your previous career will probably yield the highest immediate pay, since you have domain knowledge in that area already. (And why waste it?)

That would be my angle to get into programming: find a company that programs accounting systems/financial software of some sort and offer your skills. Their end-users are accountants who have the same problems/frustrations as you. Why not discuss with them and help solve those problems directly? Offer them what they don't have yet, and only you do.

In a sarcastic way, yes. Obviously it's a problem that self-propagates and creates new problems. But it works for the "people in power"; those who wield influence in the literary field.

I agree that the work of Lacan, Derrida, Baudrillard, and their contemporaries do deserve study and contemplation. I've done it, and I learned a ton from it.

The problem that these generators address is much more circumscribed.

Rather, it is poking fun at the people who do not understand these literary giants, but claim to.

This kind of obscurantism is often used to hide the fact that the author doesn't fully understand what is going on.

A hallmark of deep understanding in any field is the ability to simplify complex concepts and relay them to a reader efficiently. (I'm not a physicist, but Brian Greene can explain String Theory and particle physics in a way I understand. Why can't someone do the same with Lacan?)

For example, Zizek is excellent at this. (As are many others.) If you read his papers, they do not sound like this. He uses the buzz-words necessary, but he makes straightforward arguments. And IMO, that's why he's been successful--he's helped get Hegel, Lacan, and other writers' complex philosophical ideas out to a very wide audience, efficiently--by writing good, quality prose.

Compare that with much of what comes out of undergrad/grad student writing classes, and I submit that there is a huge difference. And that's what this is poking fun at. Just my 2c.

At its deepest level, it is a question of inequality: some people are able to BS their way to tenure, fame, etc., by writing like this--because they understand the system better than others who weren't as well groomed through upbringing, good mentorship, or other circumstances. Writing this way is a strategy for certain people who know how the game is played: it has worked, and will continue to. But that's a problem, and it's one worthy of mockery.

Didn't go to grad school for this stuff, but I did study it in undergrad. I wrote dozens of papers like this, and they always got great marks.

For me, the reason I did it was simple: if you want good grades/academic-approval in this field... writing like that works!

I do think there is signaling going on--if your paper has the 'gestalt' of what a 'good paper' looks like, then you get an A. Because you 'get it'.

Similar signaling happens in all fields though, including software. For instance, when you're looking at a coder's website/github/resume, there are certain things hiring committees look for before passing on to the next level of the hiring process.

It's the same thing, I think. But the ultimate cause is most likely laziness. We use gestalt evaluation as a way to make quick judgments about whether a person understands our field. If they do--that means we don't have to read/evaluate that closely, and it's less effort for us.

Like all behaviors that are reinforced, there is motivation to encourage from both sides. Everyone wins on the deal.

Yes. I studied literature in school, and I was very guilty of writing papers like these, once upon a time. If someone gave me this and told me it was real, I would believe. Hits the mark.

I strongly agree with Cal on this. I write software and generally spend much of my time focusing on how to better design digital technologies of various kinds.

But ultimately, I think that good design is typically subtractive, not additive. The best digital products improve our lives--our lives in the physical world--while sucking up as little of our attention, mental effort, and personal information as possible.

I think it's only a matter of time before we see these attitudes become more prevalent (precisely because they are controversial/reactionary), and the general design ethos of Silicon Valley shifts as a result.

One of the key tensions of the near future may be between minimalism and maximalism in this way: should we throw more and more computation power at every single "problem", brute-forcing a solution to each for its own sake? Or should we optimize, and find the smallest, least intrusive, most elegant and simplest solution? I know which one sounds better to me. But will that drive business revenue? We'll see.

Perhaps more importantly though, at a certain point--by creating so much digital detritus and complexity, our brute-force solutions and ever-present computation create a new set of problems (such as the need to filter information aggressively to get any useful value from it--which is what minimalism is all about). So maybe this is just the realization of that. We need a new layer on top of the computation infrastructure to __reduce__, to complete our maximalist designs. Either way, interesting.

Not a physicist, but looks like this was done by researchers at a legitimate observatory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leiden_Observatory

And results published in a journal from Oxford: http://mnras.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2016/12/09/mnr...

So that's a good sign. Can't say much more than that though, since my knowledge of the field is minimal.

Have you ever read this old essay?

Masocriticism by Paul Mann: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3685366?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con...

Basically a meta-critique of the whole system you describe--saying the only reason one would engage in it at all is for sake of pure masochism. (It's meant to be both humorous and a serious critique of the seeming pointlessness that you described, but very deadpan.)

One of my profs recommended that one to me, years ago, while I was also studying literature as an undergrad, and it's always stuck with me.

Sidenote: Later, I made a career for myself writing software instead of essays. But I actually do think that my initial time spent studying literature was very beneficial--personally, professionally, intellectually, and so on.

Which brings me back to the original point--what's "wrong" with literary studies? Probably that the main focus has been studying literature for its own sake, rather than viewing how it can make a positive difference (for the most part). So I do very much appreciate what Felski is doing here. Interesting work.

To me, these attitudes (and their general acceptance + support) are just as worrying as Donald's own attitudes and supporters.

One of the strangest things about human nature--at least that I've seen--is that when we vehemently resist something we detest we often produce its mirror image.

It's honestly extremely frightening to think that making a political donation to a major-party candidate you support could cost you your livelihood in this country. Those are not the principles America was founded on. (It's not even like McCarthyism anymore where they were persecuting a small minority party. We want to blacklist people for being __Republican__? Really?)

This is exactly how Democracy becomes eroded and one party systems emerge. And the fact that more people don't see that is quite chilling.

What's that old American saying? Something like: "I disagree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." That's the America I grew up in. What happened to it?