lprubin

I was playing online poker professionally during the peak of that craze.

Thats a good start. What about telling them to never answer a call from an unknown number. Any legit call will leave a voicemail and that will weed out a large number of scammers.

Next, if the voicemail is clearly a robot voice, make sure they don’t respond until checking with you first. That should weed out another big chunk.

If you have excess income, consider committing to give X% of your salary/income away to charity.

You might find researching effective charities that you are passionate about to be an interesting endeavor which might satisfy the "shopping" itch if that's part of what motivates you to buy things you don't need.

And if status symbols is your game, going to charity gala events and showing off your donations on social media can take the place of instagramming your new car or gadget.

I think then the discussion would be around why only minimizing suffering for humans. If minimizing suffering is a good thing, why is there not also value in minimizing suffering for all beings that can suffer?

> There is some legitimacy to the idea that we should eat whatever we please because we are the apex predator.

Many men are strong enough to forcibly overpower many women and therefore there is some legitimacy to the idea that they should rape whoever they please.

Might does not make right.

I’d just like to point out that Shopify isn’t a closed platform. Shopify has the concept of a private app that is not in the app store and not approved by Shopify. So a store can either build/hire an agency to build their own unapproved app using a wide variety and growing set of shopify apis. I’ve made a lot of money doing exactly that.

There also are a number of apps who choose not to be in the app store and not give up 20% of their revenue and instead market on their own.

According to this survey, 68.1% of people's main reason for going vegan was "for the animals" while "health" was only 17.4%.

https://vomadlife.com/blogs/news/why-people-go-vegan-2019-gl...

That being said, the question was "What is the main reason" so people who said "for the animals" might also care a lot about health.

I had never heard that animal corpses were used in a large scale industrial farming fertilizer so I just looked through the most common soil fertilizers, at least in the U.S. I don't believe a single one of them uses animal corpses.

It seems that the common types of fertilizer[1] are:

- anhydrous ammonia (Nitrogen pulled from the air[2])

- urea ammonium nitrate (Nitrogen pulled from natural gas and plants[3])

- granular urea (Nitrogen pulled from natural gas and plants[3])

- ammonium nitrate (Nitrogen from mixing ammonia [5] and and synthesized nitric acid [4])

- diammonium phosphate (Nitrogen from ammonia and phosphoric acid [6])

You may be correct that small farmers use animal corpses, and you may be correct that using artificial nitrogen is bad for the soil, but 97-99% of the plant foods grown in the U.S. appear to use non-animal based fertilizers. Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong about the science of this.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-explosion-ammonia/fac...

[2] http://www.greenvalleychemical.com/Green_Valley_Chemical/Anh...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urea#Production

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonium_nitrate#Production

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia_production

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diammonium_phosphate

Anywhere from 2 to 20 hours. Average is probably 4-5. But I have a ton of other proposals now that I copy and paste from and just fill in relevant details. Used to take me longer.

It's all about getting to a point where I can write a proposal that will blow away the competition. I believe a great proposal includes:

1. A deep understanding of why the client is doing this project and how it delivers value to the client. Stating specific estimates of dollars this project can create/save or time/hassle it can save is a great thing to try and figure out and include. But be sure to state these are estimates and use large ranges. The goal isn't to be specific, just to illustrate the scope of the problem/opportunity. Most proposals DON'T have this. This alone will let you stand out from the crowd.

2. Understanding key stakeholders. Who will be involved in the project on the clients end and how will you bring them into the process in a way they'll be comfortable with.

3. Outline processes to get to success. What will the project look like from the day to day. How will you project manage? How will you communicate. What meetings will be needed? Will there be user testing? Who will do what - on your team and theirs?

4. Break up the project into larger chunks/variations. What is the smallest chunk that can deliver value ASAP. How can additional chunks be added in a modular, step by step approach that can bring value? Monolothic Yes/No proposals having a lower conversion rate than a "Menu of Options" the client can mix and match to their liking. Get creative!

5. What support options will you offer after the project ends? Will you disappear on them and leave them to fend for themselves? Will you train their team? Will you help them hire/transition to internal tech teams?

6. Include case studies for clients you've done something similar for before. This de-risks the project from the clients end and a big part of vendor decision making is de-risking.

So my speccing process is asking a bunch of really specific and pointed questions so I can make a great proposal. Sometimes I send them an online survey to fill out before our first speccing meeting. Sometimes it's just a meeting. But I've honed a long set of questions over time that get me the answers I need to write a great proposal. Then really listen to answers to those questions.

Somebody in this thread asked if I make wireframes in my speccing process. I prefer a collaborative whiteboarding session in the speccing meeting if it will help flesh out what the project is. It's much more fun and allows you to demonstrate your ability to work with them and incorporate their feedback on the fly.

But your proposal should be more about the problem you're solving and how you're going to solve it than about the lines of code/screens you're going to create. Don't be a craftsperson. Be a problem solver!

Depends on the the size of the new project. If the project is small, I usually don't. If the project is large, I tend towards a new speccing project.

Correct, this is definitely very draining. My solution was to add a marketing wing to my consultancy. That marketing wing is hyper focused on launch and growth strategy. A high percentage of my clients purchase this "upsell" and the projects go much better post launch. Win/Win. More successful projects = better case studies + more tech work on those successful projects + more marketing work, etc etc etc. It becomes a virtuous cycle.

If you don't feel up to adding this offering, partner with another agency who already does it.

If I could give you one piece of advice it would be this: Charge a small but reasonable fee for speccing a project. (My fee is $500 based in NYC).

There is nothing more demoralizing then spending a bunch of time and effort speccing out a complicated tech project and then getting ghosted by the potential client once you deliver the estimate. Once I started charging for speccing, this never happened again.

And, once I started charging for this process, my conversion rate on proposals delivered went up a tremendous amount.

I think a couple things are at play.

1. Many clients leads aren't actually serious but it can be difficult to figure that out, especially when you're new to the game. If somebody is willing to pay for this process, they're clearly serious about the project.

2. People respect you when you charge for your time like this. My agency got taken much more seriously by prospective clients as soon as we mentioned that we charge for this process.

3. By charging for it, it forced me to create a clear process and clear set of deliverables for that fee. Clients LOVE clear processes and clear sets of deliverables. It makes it much easier for them to say yes. They are like a warm security blanket for the decision maker.

4. I believe it was HN's Patio who taught me that as long as your offering is below $1000, it usually falls under the discretionary spending threshold for most departments, meaning it doesn't require boss/committee approval.

If a prospective client was surprised by this fee, I took them through my process of all the things I'd help them figure out along the way that they clearly didn't have figured out yet, and make it clear they were free to go with a different agency after this process was complete. No strings attached.

I believe that clients who understand the business value of that work are much better clients than the ones who do not.

Shoutout to Brennan Dunn for the idea to charge for scoping.

Definitely not. I frequently use landing page tools with built in templates, analytics, and A/B testing tools such as Unbounce, Leadpages, Webflow or one of the many others. Many email platforms such as Mailchimp are starting to offer integrated landing page builders as well.

With those tools I can build multiple variants of a responsive MVP landing page in 2-3 hours.

This company does that with extra office space: https://liquidspace.com/share-office-meeting-space

They have a Slack integration that can ping you when somebody places a request that matches your availability.

$2.25/hr for 8 hours is $18. I don't know about the SF prices but in Manhattan you can get a "hot desk" for $30/day at some fairly nice places. I'd guess in Brooklyn you can probably find/negotiate something comparable to $18/hr.

I did it at burning man at night and it was simultaneously one of the most exhilarating and terrifying things I’ve ever done. I feel extremely lucky to have not crashed.

About 2:50 of this video gives some sense of how chaotic and distracting just walking around there sober is. Adding a bike plus strong entheogen was truly nuts.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qNrEqSAviTI

My friend launched EnvKey (https://www.envkey.com/) completely solo and grew it slowly over time. He eventually went through YC and took on investment but the first few years were bootstrapped. But he's still solo with a few freelancers.

Here is some data showing 70% by the second generation and 90% by the third:

https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/time/money/392530...

Perhaps you just met some of the exceptions.

Another factor to consider with cows is large scale cattle farming, grass fed or not, releases huge amounts of methane gas into the atmosphere. Methane gas is estimated to be 28[1] times worse for climate change than C02.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane

I’ve seen it estimated that it takes 2,000 gallons of water to produce a gallon of cow milk which would be twice what it takes to produce almond milk.

This has to be a big component of it. Working 16 to 28 hour consecutive shifts, often over night, where a mistake can potentially be fatal, with very irregular sleep hours. That has to be a recipe for disaster. After I learned that was what residents’ schedules were like I was terrified of going to the hospital.

I say yes. Can we breed humans as slaves and say “would it be better that they didn’t exist than live a horrible existence?” to justify breeding them? Because that is the exact logic slaveowners used.

Same with dogfighting. If we breed dogs for dogfighting that wouldn’t otherwise exist, does that make dogfighting acceptable?

I believe the important distinction is not whether or not pigs and cows are sentient/language capable. Instead the real question is can they suffer. And if they can is it acceptable to cause that suffering simply for entertainment value?

Ask yourself if dog fighting is acceptable. That is clearly animal suffering for purely entertainment purposes. If you live in a situation where you can survive and thrive without eating meat, how is eating meat any different than watching dog fighting? It’s animal suffering for enjoyment purposes.

An estimated $2.11 billion U.S. sales. I would think that has to impact milk sales. [0]

In their market research of consumers, the same article found that many people are intentionally consuming less dairy.

...nearly one in five (19%) Americans claims to be consuming less dairy for health reasons.

[0]http://www.nutritionaloutlook.com/article/us-non-dairy-milk-...

It sounds like these dairy subsidies fluctuate greatly.

In 2016, the dairy industry asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for a staggering $150 million to buy their excess cheese. A spokesperson for the National Farmers Union said they were disappointed to receive “only” $20 million. [0]

And according to this 600 page Canadian report, indirect subsidies are also a huge factor and contribute to 73 percent of producer returns coming from subsidies. [1]

The American government contributed around $22.2 billion in direct and indirect subsidies to the dairy sector in 2015.

[0] https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/377406-dairy-...

[1] https://www.realagriculture.com/2018/02/u-s-dairy-subsidies-...

The legality of mushrooms is fairly varied around the world. If you're willing to travel you've got some options. However, if you have no prior experience, I'd recommend bringing a friend to be your sober sitter, ideally somebody who has their own prior experience.

https://thethirdwave.co/legality-psilocybin-mushrooms/

I'm a big fan of Kōbō Abe. The Woman In The Dunes is probably his most famous and easiest to read of the ones I've encountered. For a more dream-like, trippy experience, try The Box Man or The Ruined Map.

A huge amount of the plastic in the ocean is discarded fishing gear as well. [0]

[0] - https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/03/great-pacific-ga...