@ZackP

Honey where is our money?? Ever wondered where your tax money is gone? That is if living is US. Below are just a few, very obvious and common dark money pits. *Disclaimer: all numbers shown here are public knowledge only calculations are mine. If you have an issue with that you are welcomed to check out numbers and come up with own calculations to correct me.* There must be many reasons why in USA there is no enough money. I daresay that a lot of money gets deducted and wasted through the tax system. So who earns or gets money? Employed people + retirees. That would be 129 Million + 47.8 Million people. We’ll round it up to **177 Milion** people. Obviously, retirees get much less money than fully employed workers. How much is the average salary for US workers? Salaries vary based on gender, education, occupation, industry, geographical location, ethnicity, and other factors. Bureau of statistics says that average wages per fully employed person are **$44564.00** a year. Retirees average pension is about **$15576.00** a year. Take home money are different numbers. Lower. Taxman takes his cut right from the top. Armed with those 3 numbers lets see who is blowing money away. ***US military bases*** Did you know that the USA has about 800+ active bases around the world in 80+ countries? Those bases are stuffed with an excess of 160 thousand military personnel. They have their families with them living nearby. That must cost some nice coin. “Naturally” all this is paid by the taxpayers. I was always wondering what average Joe or Jane has out of it? Imagine some base in Philippines or Latvia or anywhere. Do you even know where those places are? Could you pinpoint the even general geographical area where the hell that is? No? I didn’t think so. Based on online interviews on the streets I would say that 1 out of 20 or 30 people could possibly show those places on the map. For comparison, all other countries like Russia, France, UK combined have 30 bases only. Next question that comes to mind is why would anybody want to blow 160 to 200 billion yearly to maintain those bases? It turns out to be a pretty expensive real estate proposition. Every politician you would ask that question would come back with a universal answer that bases are necessary to protect the homeland and project US power around the world. Both parts of that explanation are total bullcrap, thinks I. Think about it. How can you protect the territory of USA by running base in let’s say Indonesia? That place is about 12000 Miles away and as we already established most of the Americans don’t even know where that is. It can very well be on Mars. Would not make any difference. And the second part of the answer is a totally invalid reason. Means that the USA is running aggressive and threatening policies scaring people and their neighbors in their own countries. Do you really believe that they want jets, bombs, rockets, naval fleets, nuclear submarines on their soil? Not a chance. That is shoved into their throats. We could discuss this a whole day long. In my mind, it is money thrown out of the window. All 200 Billion of it. Americans have absolutely nothing good out of it. If that money is split between our money earners it would be: **$1129.94** more a year or $94.16 more per month for every worker and a retired person in America. In other words, every money earner pays $1129.94 per year for the military bases which existence is baseless. Imagine having 900 dollars pension and suddenly there are 100 bucks more added on top of it. Every month. If your roof is leaking or home needs repairs and improvements keep in mind that your money keeps roofs and homes in far away lands in perfect order. No leaks there even that Home Depot is tens of thousands miles away. So much about bases let’s move on. ***Veterans Affairs*** There are about 21 Million veterans living in the USA and around the world. If you didn’t know veteran is every person who at one point of life served in or around military services. So we are not talking about fighting men and women only but everybody who was even close to the military. Those people have special privileges in regards to the healthcare. Again, there is a relatively small number of wounded soldiers as a result of combat operations. Physically and mentally affected would be maximum of about 500 thousand men and women. The rest are simply all others just mentioned, not affected by war operations, maybe never moved from offices and bases in the USA. Every state has a VA dedicated hospital, at least one. If veteran happens to live in Thailand he or she is entitled to all health care provided on American soil. That means VA pays those bills coming from overseas no questions asked. Also, if veteran somehow doesn’t like VA hospital services that Government specifically assigned for the veterans he/she can go to any hospital of their choosing. VA authority pays all outside services bills, all 8 Billion dollars per year of them. I am not suggesting that VA should forget about wounded soldiers. It is a consequence of wars. More about that below. Their mandate is to provide lifetime healthcare for those in need. How much that costs? About 185 billion per year! Quite pricey. Consequences of wars are very extensive and again taxpayer is hit in the wallet. How much? **$1045.19** a year or $87.09 a month per every money earner. ***Aircraft carriers task groups*** While we are going to work, shopping, school, college, sitting at home or doing really just about anything there are people on the move 24/7. That duty falls on the shoulders of servicemen on aircraft carriers. There are 20 active aircraft carriers in US Navy crisscrossing the oceans at any time. Each has about 70 airplanes and about 6000 personnel working around the clock to keep all that machinery moving. The aircraft carrier is never alone at sea. There are at least 6 to 8 other ships surrounding it at all times. That group of ships represents a strike group. There are also supply ships that meet strike group from time to time and bring in everything from toilet paper to aircraft to replace or replenish. Whom will strike group strike? Almost no one. Strike group is rarely used in operations. Probably 99.99% of war operations are on hard land, not at sea. So why do they exist at all? Popular answer is "to project US military power". In plain English, it is to instigate fear into people of far away countries. To scare shit out of them. There you have it. Let’s see some numbers. The aircraft carrier is the biggest and most complicated ship in the navy. It costs 9 to 13 Billion. For purpose of easy calculations, we’ll average it to 10 Billion each. There are 20 active ones and that makes it 200 Billion of floating hardware. And what hardware that is! It is stuffed with modern jets at about 20 Million each. A full load would be 1.4 Billion of flying machines. Don’t forget destroyers and frigates. At 2 Billion each it makes it about 12 Billion of additional ships in the strike group. Again, so whom they strike anyway? A bad guys. Means enemies of United States. That is a very, very, loose term. Apparently, it is very easy to become enemy of United States but that is a story for another day. Still, they keep busy by doing what the military knows the best, blowing money. Literally. If you thought that your Ford F150 is blowing too much gas try to fill up F-16. 5290 lbs per hour of jet fuel. With maintenance costs each hour of the jet flying around carriers costs about $15000. And boy do they fly? They are flying like there is no tomorrow. Day and night. Training. No wonder that a strike group costs about 6.5 Million per day in running expenses. The lifetime of a carrier is about 40 years and we’ll take the same number for smaller ships. It costs about 468 Million per year of hardware per task group. Multiply by 20 it comes out to 9.36 Billion for all of them. Add everyday expenses for all task groups we come to extra 47.45 Billion. The total bill comes out to about 57 Billion per year. Back to taxpayers. **$322.03** a year or $26.83 a month pay for fleet cruising high seas. Sure changes life for better to average Joe or Jane at home, right? ***Military budgets*** Americans are in love with the military. Looking from a side it is very hard to comprehend why? Pushing aside the discussion about the morals of it one thing is true. *It sure ain’t cheap by any measure*. Yearly military budget is around 540 Billion but that is always considerably exceeded and real numbers come to about 800+ Billion expended. Let’s be clear about something. There are no real limits in military budgets. Whatever they want that is what they get. How can you argue with national security needs? We’ll take 800 Billion as a very conservative number. A quick visit to calculator tells us that the taxpayer pays **$4519.77** per year or $376.64 a month for the military. That is a mighty sum if you ask me, but let us move on. ***And there are the wars*** Wars are on the top of the money blowing list of any mankind activities. Destruction, hurt and death on the massive scale are a theme of the day. There is nothing good to look for. People try to ignore it as long as nobody from close family and friends is killed or crippled. Then it becomes very personal. All wars could be placed in only 2 categories: aggressive wars and defensive wars. Attacker brings the aggressive war to other country forcing it to wage defensive war in order to defend from aggression. By default defending country always suffers catastrophic destruction in infrastructure and human lives. There is an injustice of astronomical proportions right there! We can’t put a cost on human life so we will not even try. We’ll just look as the wasteful monetary economics of it. If somebody thinks that war is occasional thing let me blow that bubble with absolutely amazing fact. Since it’s inception, from the year 1776 United States were in wars for 222 years. So out of 242 years of existence, there were only **20** **years of peace**! If that is not a mind-boggling I don’t know what is? If the United States as a country was in any other place on Earth you could argue that location is an absolute hornet’s nest and the US was simply forced to defend. Truth is completely opposite. The USA is almost like an island and thousands of miles of the vast oceans are separating it from other humanity. In respect to aggression neighbors like Canada and Mexico are simply the best neighbors anybody would ever want. Neither one would never attack the USA in any way. Both mind their own business. In such unlike event, both would be simultaneously defeated in one weekend. I mean we are talking stupid now so those possibilities are utterly irrelevant. We can agree that USA will never, ever be attacked by it's only neighbors. The only conclusion is that that **United States is actively searching for troubles**. Aggression and bullying other nations into armed conflict are what the US does. With no exceptions. Theater of war is always conveniently located on another side of the Earth. Destruction is always reserved for some away land. No bomb was ever dropped on US territory by other nation. The exception could be about 25 minutes of the attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii almost 80 years ago. That is all. Considering the fact that the US is never in danger of anybody attacking it, 99% of nations in the world are minding their own business, taking in account huge expenses that come attached with every war common sense tells us that the US would never be involved in any wars whatsoever, right? Again, nothing is further from the truth. Both Democrats and Republicans seem to have no problems sending Americans to wars. The concept is: shoot first and we’ll worry about consequences later. As usually, a taxpayer pays out of the pocket for US military adventures overseas. Looking at 2 recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq there is a price tag of 2.4 Trillion dollars of direct costs! Untold Billions in indirect costs. Yes Sir, 2,400,000,000,000.00 dollars worth literally blown to smithereens. Now I had to grab scientific calculator because a regular one simply can’t handle such large numbers. Calculation says that each money earner paid so far **$13,559.32** financing those 2 wars alone. There were more wars before and likely will be more in the future. Jack the Taxpayer is on the hook for that from the first paycheck to the last pension he will ever receive. The question that should follow should be: “What benefit (if any) did American citizens experience out of those wars? Did cost in American lives and expense justify it?”. An answer to those questions require a whole new article. But we can say this: before sending men and war machines into the action bear in mind that military hardware is pricey to play with: F-16 airplane = 19 Million, each hour of flying it will set you back for $7,000 to $22,000 A-10 airplane = 11.8 Million Abrams tank = 8.92 million, $450 per mile costs, each round fired is about $6,900 Maverick missile = $110,000 ea. Cruise missile = $1,600,000 ea. 1000 lbs dumb bomb = $3,100 each Laser guided bomb = $40,000 each Needless to say that in war expenditure of weapons and munitions is just astronomical. Nobody is even keeping a count. Just keep firing, the cost is the last thing on their minds. Also, don’t call Pentagon to find out about numbers. Accounting is not their forte. What they know is just to ask for more money and resources. Next time before sending fleet off from San Diego or waving American flag to soldiers leaving Fort Bragg to keep in mind how much will those adventures cost you! Is dropping a bomb on somebody’s head really so appealing that you, American taxpayer, that you are so ready to pay for it? ***And there is a NASA*** Mankind has a bug up their asses. It is called curiosity. We have to see and know everything there is to see and know. Including going into far away space and peek into it. NASA site has thousands of photos of space objects. There is nothing more thrilling than receiving photos from spacecraft passing by some unknown asteroid or for example Pluto. Pluto is 2.7 Billion Miles away from Earth. It is hard to fathom the distance. I must admit I can’t even imagine how far that is!? But it seems that little satellite cost is directly proportional to distance it will try to travel. And Pluto is our backyard, a Solar System. Everything else is way, way, way farther. Remember yellow text at beginning of every Star Wars movie? It starts from the bottom of the screen, goes under angle like a carpet and disappears in the far distance. That is how I see truckloads of money disappearing into dark space. At the danger of many readers jump at my throat and choke me I will say that space exploration is a very expensive adventure that we really don’t need. The basic cost of running NASA is 20 Billion per year. That is **$113.00**per year for taxpayers or about $10.00 per month. My beef with that is more of the practical nature. Don’t get me wrong. I could watch “Cosmic vistas” or “Smithsonian channel” about space a whole day long. It is very interesting. Stars and planets. Those little robotic vehicles crawling on Mars and sending thousands of images. It is quite amazing and helluva captivating. But at the end of the day I ask myself “How is my life, or lives of any other persons living on Earth better now after we saw those images?” Other than having a nice paycheck if working for NASA there is nothing good out of it. Elon Musk showed off everybody in just in a few short years with his SpaceX agency that flying rockets can be done for less and better than before. He competes with NASA. It is clear to me that Elon Musk or his crew will be on Mars before anybody else. But why? Travel 7 months with one-way ticket and land there makes no sense whatsoever. Every breath of air, every drop of water, every swallow of food, every freaking minute of just being there is extremely expensive and outright dangerous. Drinking own filtered urine to minimize water loss is the smallest problem. There are thousands of challenges to overcome every day. Thousands of chances to die. X rays bombarding everything day and night. I really don’t need anyone to go there … at my expense, thinks I. As usually taxpayers will feel hit where it hurts. In the wallet. And what benefit will be there for them? Try none. There are millions of activities and places on Earth that need utter improvements and they are not happening because of lack of interest and money. Go and travel from Detroit on I75 to the South. First of all, Detroit looks like a city after the war. Then comes thousands of potholes in Michigan. Then there are potholes in Ohio. Worn out bridges. Unregulated waterways. Underfunded schools. Expensive and overstretched healthcare. Railroads in ruins. Airports needing improvements. Millions of citizens on food stamps. Billions of dollars in student loans. Animal species disappearing from the face of Earth. A few days ago there was a news on TV that made me really sad. Last white rhino in the world died. Poor guy had every right to live in peace but didn’t survive. Now no money in the world can bring that specie back. And many others. I feel for animals. What chance do they have with us? Back to space exploration. The thing is, space is 15 Billion years old. We are exploring it for the last 50 years. Trust me on this, space will be there for other Billions of years so give it a rest. Let us explore and fix our own planet first before going to other planets. If we spend next 50 or 150 years repairing our home planet there will be plenty of time left to reach for the stars. ***Conclusion*** I still have in my drawer a Sarasota County (Florida) tax bills. Everything is broken down into bits and pieces. County general revenue, Bonds debt service (?), mosquito control, Memorial hospital, water regulation, police, coast inland navigation, firefighters, school board, school district fund, school improvements, emergency medical services, solid waste management, storm water utility. One can kind of understand what is what there. But every man and his dog knows that personal income tax is where a total bust is. Nobody ever asks taxpayer do they approve certain expenditures. For starters, according to articles of the Constitution personal taxation is not allowed! Only corporate activity is to be taxed and personal labor not. Tax money grab trend started in 1913 together with another “great invention”, the Fed Bank. Both enslaved American people forever. Comes hell or high water it boils down to endless taxation for everything you stand on, drive, eat, drink, put on yourself, live in, touch and see. Government grew out of every reasonable proportion and citizens have to finance its existence. Not only that but also have to pay for military adventures, banks gambling out people’s money, failed projects, stupid researches, pseudoscience and really everything under the sun. Don’t fall for an explanation that the war machine creates jobs. Few hundred Raytheon workers assembling bombs with big wages doesn’t make up for the rest of 320 Million Americans who pay for that. Also don’t fall for words that large and powerful military is a must. Most of the countries in the world have small military and don’t blow too much money on it. For example Canada, the second largest country in the world has about 100,000 people in the armed forces. About 55,000 of that are soldiers., the rest supporting personnel. To compare sizes I learned that there is about of same number of police in New York city! Do you think that Canadians are upset for not having more military? Not a chance! They want it even smaller. Money can always be spent on better things. The list above is not by any means an exhaustive list of hits onto taxpayer’s wallet. It is annoying, tireless and powerless feeling. Government hand in your pocket at all times. Everybody who is working or is retired on pension deserves more. Not only more money but also more decision power. Next time when you see on TV jets screaming around, navy ships on the blue ocean, tanks speeding through the desert that is your well deserved money being blown up. Literally. Video of the bomb dropped on some poor people heads. There is your 40 thousand dollars worth. Waiting forever for CT scan or social assistance? Need medications you can’t pay for? Medical insurance expired or unable to pay for? Not enough money to send kids to the college? You will "feel better" thinking about that shiny 20 Million dollars F-16 jet ripping through the skies of some exotic unknown country. There are your medications built into that war machine. Unpaid insurance bills coming out through exhaust of the jet engine. Unpaid college funds being dropped as high explosives bombs. Need to repair or replace old clunker on your driveway? You will sleep better knowing that all Government fleet limos, Humvees, APCs, tanks, trucks are well taken care of, fueled, oiled and in good shape. Talking about war material. Just few days ago US left Afghanistan to the Taliban and rewarded enemy with 83 Billion worth of the finest military equipment. They were well armed before, but boy they are equipped now as never before. Former, present and future terrorists won that war. Would you like to get $594.72 check in your name every month? That is summed up amount just from expenses listed above. Need more incentive? Still into deadly fireworks even at your own expense? Tank firing a $4,000 round bringing down somebody’s home and everybody inside. Must be thrilling experience. There is a cancer chemo drugs for someone you love gone through the flat bore 120 mm main gun. Must be worth it.

12 Simple rules for investing in stocks How to invest and not lose a shirt doing it? The thing is people who never invested money are afraid to do so. It may look too hard to start. Too complicated. Intimidating. It sounds almost like a casino where you could gamble out your hard-earned money in a very short time. You put money on red, 12, and seconds after that is swooped away in one smooth motion. Next bet, please! Let me tell you that it doesn’t have to be like that. By following simple rules investments could be a rather pleasant experience and quite profitable one as well. What we learn in school sucks Part of the problem is the schooling system. They don’t teach kids much there. I am talking about real-life skills and knowledge. What the hell is “interdisciplinary studies” doing in high school? Here is another one: “Cooperative education”. OK “Guidance and career education” maybe something somebody could use later in life. Maybe, most likely not. But what about finances? No subject like that in curriculum and in my opinion it is needed, badly. Money matters accompany us from an early age up to the last days of life. We ought to know more and better how to handle our own money. Earn it, protect it, spend wisely, invest with confidence, make smart choices and not to waste it. Nobody wants to be a village idiot and walk into the Suckersville where a fool and his money are soon parted! Let’s examine investing Investing can take many forms. Real estate, precious metals, mutual funds, GICs, bonds, ETFs … there is no shortage of ways to invest money. For the purpose of this article, we’ll concentrate on real McCoy only, **stocks.** Stocks represent the most common opportunity to invest money into commercial activity and hopefully earn more. Investing in stocks is open to everyone who wants to put a small effort to establish an investing account. Stocks also allow Average Joe to have a piece of any big company he wants. That is exciting, empowering and profitable. Why more people don’t buy stocks? There are many reasons and I know what you are thinking: How do I even start? Opening account must be freaking complicated? Is brokerage like a bank? How do you select the right one? Process looks intimidating! Shouldn’t buying stocks be left to professionals only? There are more than 10000 stocks in the USA how do I select the right ones? Isn’t it like the casino, you bet and lose money? Is it like betting odds, you lose some and gain some? `Apple — another super stock on grand scale` Finally: “Fuck, I can’t risk my hard-earned money. I ain't doing it!”. Slow down buster. We’ll address everything. We’ll list step by step and walk you to the sweet end. ***Rule #1 — select stock brokerage*** First thing first. Find a stock brokerage. Here you should not take an obvious choice, like a bank where you already have a checking account. Usually, they charge too much per trade counting on the idea that you will be too lazy to search for better. Go for a low-cost brokerage like E-Trade, TD Ameritrade, Ally Invest and similar. In Canada, I would go for Questrade or Interactive Brokers if you aim to be an advanced investor. Common for those brokerages is that they are simple and secure to do business with. No monthly fees, just per trade fee of $5.00 to $7.00 which is very reasonable. That means whenever you buy shares or sell them you pay a trading fee. They say that Robin Hood in the USA has no trading fees whatsoever at all which is great. Most of the brokerages have mobile apps, some don’t. I wouldn’t recommend using mobile apps to trade for beginners. It is easy to make a hasty decision and a small screen may create finger trouble. You might sell when you wanted to buy and do similar damage to your portfolio. So at least for starters do your trading from desktop, laptop or tablet. After some practice you will master trading from mobile phone later. ***Rule #2 — open account*** After selecting a stock brokerage that you like you will want to open the account. Everybody is eligible. Trust me it is not hard to do it, even that it is a bit annoying. Remember you are doing it only once. Go on-line and click OPEN NEW ACCOUNT button. You will be guided through several screens. They will ask a lot of questions. Like the name, address, EIN or SIN, ask about assets, employment, and similar stuff. Don’t get mad at the brokerage for asking those things. They are not pain in the ass, the Government is. Brokerage, banking and everything with money is highly regulated and they must collect those details. That is a famous KYC at work. As for me, I hate it. When it comes to question, what kind of account you want just to take a regular trading account. Forget everything else for now. Easy peasy lemon squeeze is your choice for the day. Don’t worry, it is a computer on another end. As long as they are not asking you to pee in the cup or provide blood for DNA you are good. On the last page, the computer will congratulate you on your new trading account. Things from here are looking much brighter. You will be provided with login info + your own password. Keep that one secure and handy. ***Rule #3 — fund your account*** Now after you joined millions of other investors you can buy any stock offered through your stockbroker. Wait, there is a simple matter of having some money in the account before starting trading. So you must send some money to your new account. There will be several options. A most used one will be to transfer money from your bank account using ACH or check or Interac or something like that. Use the method you are comfortable with. Forget credit cards, they won’t take them. A debit card will do. Usually, the minimum is $100, but for all practical reasons send 500 dollars or 1000 just to kick start your trading. You will want to add later, this is just testing the water. Most of the legwork is already done under item #2 so this is something you are doing for yourself. **You** are investing your **own** money. Remember, this is not gambling, but investing. You are putting your money to work to bring you more money. Money sitting in the drawer, bank account or mattress is doing nothing for you. It’s actually losing value. Slowly but surely, eaten away but ever persistent inflation. Everybody and his dog know that inflation is your enemy. It is lost value in time. For example $1.00 from 1913 by today lost more than 98.5% of its value. Today 1 dollar is worth only 1.5 cents compared to the “old” dollar. That’s terrible. By now you must be pretty excited. I remember the same situation some 24 years ago, I was as very excited as well. Ready to buy first stock. You are about to become a real investor. It is not only a nice water cooler story but it means reinforcing financial security and ensuring a brighter future. Now when you become a stock investor you will learn things about companies and economy and currencies and return of investment and many other things you never thought about before. You will likely talk and exchange opinions with your friends, relatives, co-workers and unknown people on forums. You will learn fast and be eager to do it. It is not a chore but actually may turn into a passion. The fact that you are learning things about economy, companies, trends, industries are amazing benefit by itself. Never forget that by buying a single share of some company you are becoming a part-owner and that is not a small thing. The stock market is giving you the chance to be part-owner of the Apple, Tesla, GE, Pfizer, Boeing, Raytheon … you name it, you can buy it. ***Rule #4 — read ground rules first*** A few simple rules first, we’ll elaborate later: The stock market is open from 9:30 AM EST to 4:00 PM every day except weekends and holidays. Don’t buy less than maybe 200 dollars worth of stock at the time. Nobody will stop you from buying a single share but the simple reason why not are the trading fees. You shouldn’t be buying stock with debt instruments, like credit cards. Don’t start things up by buying speculative stocks. Don’t even try day trading. Leave that adventure for later, maybe never. You should set yourself for long term goals. Stock fluctuations in value are normal. Don’t fall for crap where “somebody” heard from “friend of the friend” that specific stock will skyrocket soon. Do NOT buy Bitcoin or any crypto. It is not investment, it is speculation that will end up badly. There is sure more but that’s enough for starters. ***Rule #5 — select your first stock to buy*** So you have an account opened. You have a software platform loaded into your device of choice. And there are funds in the account. Before buying the first bunch of shares lets first select one out of 10000+ available ones. We want to make a responsible choice right from the start, right? Even that first order is just to see mechanics of it we don’t want to lose money on it. That means we need a safe investment. I like to drink Coca Cola, how about you? Yes! Every day a 1.9 Billion Coca Cola drinks are consumed and you may be one of the users. So Coca Cola it is! `Trading screen with a lot of info about stock you are interested in` You can’t go wrong with KO. A stock ticker is KO. Type it into the BUY order form. The software will most likely Immediately present the current price and populate other relevant info. If you have 500 dollars ready to buy some stock at a present cost of $53.84 today you will be able to buy 9 shares of KO. Remember, you must be logged into the WEB or dedicated trading platform you have access to. It has to be during stock market working hours (9:30AM — 4:00PM). Enter a number of shares you want and can buy. 9 in this case. Default purchase is a market, meaning your shares will be purchased at the present price asked by sellers. Click OK or BUY Voila! What do you know, less than a second later you purchased your first shares! That is great and it feels good. You just invested in American iconic company and your future financial well being. KO is a real McCoy and you are unlikely to regret buying it. Remember that you can sell any stocks you own within seconds at will! ***Rule #6 — types of traders*** Now when you got wind of it, how easy and simple it is to buy stocks you are ready for more action. You should fund your account with more money and decide about investment strategy. Basically, there are 3 types of stock investors: Day trading It’s really a job. Complete dedication, focus, a bunch of money, research, fastest live feed from your brokerage. Day trading means buying a stock now and selling it in the next few minutes, or 10 minutes, sometimes even under a minute. Day traders usually watch only 1–3 stocks and look for volatility. Buy at small lows and selling for profit and first peak (opportunity). That peak may be as low as 4 cents or 10 cents. By the end of the day, they are finished. Sold all positions and go to sleep quietly. It is important to say that day traders use tens of thousands of dollars per trade. The simple reason is that they are after small changes expressed in cents so the amount has to be relatively large to produce meaningful gains. Example: any stock that moves in a zig-zag pattern with identifiable bottoms and peaks. Stock cost is $10.00, day trader buys 1000 shares for $10000. The stock goes up to $10.10, day trader sells it immediately. The profit is $100. Not bad for maybe a minute or two of trading effort. My advice; don't try it! Maybe you will be lucky, likely not and you will lose money. Stick to investing. Swing trading Swing traders would watch more different stocks than day trader. When an opportunity arises and the trader believes that there is an uptrend possible he will buy a stock. A swing trader may keep it for a few days or weeks. His best friend is local or global events that affect certain stock or specific groups of stocks. Swing trader never buys single stock with all money and waits what will happen. He will do that with several different stocks. Also, he will never invest all the money available because you never know when an amazing opportunity comes up. `Buy or Sell screen with various ways to do trade` Example: troubles brewing in the Strait of Hormuz. XOM (Exxon) stock goes up as well as all other oil stocks. Swing trader picks up the first bad news, buys XOM and hangs on the position until he feels that crises blew up all steam. Oil stocks start dropping to normal levels but he already sold his position with a profit. Long term trading That would be me and millions of other small investors who can not risk and do not want to risk hard-earned money. We invest conservatively, into “safe” stocks and are not selling it at first hiccup. We are into it for the long term, years and possibly decades. Take a word from Warren Buffet, the most recognizable investor in the world. He buys rarely but then keeps stocks forever. For example, the Man is the largest single shareholder of Coca Cola, ticker KO. Example: let’s take Johnson and Johnson, ticker JNJ. You buy it today and hold it forever. Why? Do you ever go to the supermarket into a section with household cleaners, baby products, hygienic products? Most prominent stuff there is all made by Johnson and Johnson. 8 out of 10 your wife will pick up something they make. There you have it. The flow of customers all but guaranteed. That company is a leader in it's field and it is unlikely that anybody else will dislodge it from that position any time soon. Besides that they sell all over the world. Very importantly, you as an investor know that they pay dividends and that is a good thing. But we’ll come back to that later. ***Rule #7 — how many stocks investor should have?*** There are three schools of thought: One preaches very few selected stocks. Warren Buffet does that, but he is a Warren Buffet. The second one is more about diversification, spreading a risk over several industries and various stocks. Let’s say about 15 stocks max. The third teaching emphasizes diversification over many or all industries and buying 40, 60 or more stocks. Here is what I think about that. To do the first one you must be knowledgeable or just damn lucky to hit jackpot with each stock. I am not that guy. I can’t select 3 stocks and say that they will thrive under any circumstances. That would be all my money (and there is no much) relying on only a few stocks. I can’t take that risk. “B” is my cup of tea. At this time I have 9 stocks and when there is money I add to existing positions, not really buying more different ones. The idea is if let’s say oil is going down that stock or maybe two of them will stagnate or even go down. But I can take it. I’ll not run to sell them but hang onto them and happily watch other ones doing better. “C” would be too much for me. It is not very hard to find 50 good stocks out of 10000 but it is hard to watch your flock for performance. It’s simply too much information and things that could go wrong. Besides that, by diversifying risk so much you are also diversifying a profit. Example: you have $100000 to invest. You find 50 stocks and buy $2000 worth of each. By sheer mathematical probability, some of the stocks will do well, some very well and some will be dogs. If one of them is 40% up you are making $800 on it. But the other 15 stocks are marginally good or even losers. Profits on good stocks will simply be drowned in the sea of other stocks. I am sure that many people will still like this strategy. Maybe the answer is adding more money to gainers while keeping the rest stagnant? It’s not for me, but feel free to test it and explore it. It is not wrong to think that way. Tell us about it here on Read.cash. The first rule I like to use is: buy only what you understand! For example, Cisco is a good company, probably. They make network equipment, but what the hell is it? I don’t understand it, I don’t know their products. I am not saying it’s a bad choice by any means, but it’s not for me. But Tyson Foods (ticker TSN) is different. I have to eat every day, 3 times a day most of the time. Other people as well. Tyson is in the food processing industry. Thousands of trucks leave their plants every day delivering food across the Continent. When you go shopping groceries a good chance is that you will buy their meat products. That is probably a good choice. Then there is a Pfizer (ticker PFE). They are in pharmaceuticals. Every man and his dog know that medications are expensive and still most people need them. It is unlikely that people will stop buying medications. I guess that would be another good stock choice. ***Rule #8 — buy what you can understand*** I think you are getting a point. Stick to what you know and understand. You are a taxi driver and you are sitting in the same damn yellow taxi cab the whole day long. A Lincoln. It is not easy job, but wait, it is the same car for the last 5 years and it has 400000 miles and keeps going. It’s built like a tank. Never left you at the curb. Lincoln is made by Ford company (ticker F). They must be doing something right and maybe deserve your investment, right? There you go. May be another winner. You also want to check the fundamentals. This is typical info about stock — company. It shows technical details about a specific stock. Just google company you want to invest in. I am not emphasizing this step since you may not understand most of the parameters, but you will learn in the process. Investing is like a hobby that makes you money It is interesting and engaging. Especially if you are successful that you see your gold nest grow before your eyes. ***Rule #9 — buy leaders*** There is nothing wrong with startups, the only thing is, they are risky. Yes, a new fertilizer producer may be in for big gains, but it may also fail. At the same time, there is Agrium that is a leader in that industry. Buying it is no brainer. Or you want to invest in the world of big machines. You believe that construction business building highways will take off. You want to look at Caterpillar stock, not some startup from fantasyland. You are positive that electric cars will take off. Tesla comes to mind. The wind is in the wind. Wind turbines everywhere. Get yourself GE. Basically, your long term financial goals are best served with companies that are on the market for a very long time. The ones that survived through thick and thin. Young companies may be promising high returns but can also tank. Much later in the game, you may want to try to risk some money on the speculative side but not now. ***Rule #10 — kings of all stocks, dividends payers*** For every long term investor this is an absolute most important rule that will propel you into being a successful investor: *Must pay dividends!* In my books, every stock I buy is a dividends payer. If a stock is not paying dividends don’t even consider it. Not only that but I don’t buy a stock that pays less than 4% dividends. There are many solid stocks that pay around 3% but I am a bit greedy there, I want more, so 4% is my absolute minimum. What does that mean? Simply, if you have $100000 invested you will receive at least $4000 cash per year, usually in quarterly distributions. Not only is the investor rewarded for holding a stock of specific company but the company that pays a healthy dividend is paying it for reason! Companies that are in deep doo-doo are not paying dividends. Companies with no profits don’t pay dividends. Companies with a lot of debt can’t pay dividends. New companies can’t pay dividends. You got the picture, right? Only old companies, established, profitable, well managed, have excess profit can pay dividends. In the long term, dividends make all the difference in the world. Companies that pay dividends do it like clockwork. Usually quarterly but some do it monthly. If you have even a single share of some stock you will get a dividend. How great is that? More shares you have dividends payouts will become significant. Dividend is a fixed amount of money paid to stock holders per share. For example dividend of $0.70 per share. More shares you have, more cash you will get on your account. ***Rule #11 —you can have your cake and eat it too!*** In my opinion, the best stocks to have are REITs and utilities. Every investor, new or old should have some or all of those. Here is why: REIT = Real Estate Investment Trust. It is a special kind of company that has apartment buildings, plazas, business buildings, malls, medical buildings, parking lots and whatnot. The company is regulated in a special way. It has to pay up to 85% (generally accepted figure) of income, which is basically renter’s money to the shareholders. Every month. How great is that? **YOU** **get paid** a part of rents straight to your brokerage account. `NorthWest Healthcare with substantial dividends in the store` Most of the people dream about having some condo or house and rent it out. But remember you must buy a damn thing in the first place. Put down at least 25%, mortgage out the rest. Look for tenants. Vet them. Repair and renovate the place. Collect checks. Handle small or big repairs. Evict non-payers … and more. On the other hand, you buy as much REIT stocks as you want with funds available and they do the rest. That is what they do, manage properties. You get paid. And it is maybe a hefty dividend, in 6% — 8% range. UTILITIES = very similar to REITs. You should have utilities in your portfolio. You are at home. Turn on the light, you are using a power feed handled by the power utility. Then you go to tap and pour a glass of water. It is provided by your water utility. Furnace turns on, there is your gas utility at work. You can not live without utilities! Even when you are in Florida on vacation and not using any of those utilities at the moment you are paying monthly subscription kind of payments to each of them to keep things alive. They are smart, they have you by the balls. They can put a lot of shit into the bill and you will swallow it and pay it. You simply can’t not to. You will not buy a new iPhone or go ski in Colorado or get new shoes but you WILL pay utilities. Find stock of your local utilities and buy it. Not only local. Get any. Like Florida FPL or DUK for Duke Energy. It’s all good. They pay dividends and likely will never, ever, go out of business. ***Rule #12 — use autopilot, stupid!*** Finally last advice. If Tesla has autopilot so could you. Not only could but should. Remember item #10 and #11? You follow the simple rules and now dividends start coming in. Then you call your brokers and say magic words: “Please enroll all my eligible stocks into DRIP, … ciao!” DRIP is a Direct Reinvestment Plan. Every stock that you have, and remember it should be all of them, sends you dividends. For example, you get 85 dollars for having a Duke energy and stock is currently $20.00 a brokerage computer will buy 4 shares for you automatically as soon as money lands into account. It can’t buy a fractional share so $5.00 will remain as a cash in the account. You can buy manually whatever you want when you notice that there is a dividend cash hanging around. This is important concept to grasp, example: you have 100 shares of some company. Dividends arrive and the DRIP computer buys you 3 shares. Now you have 103 shares. Next month (REIT, remember, pays monthly) comes new dividends and now it’s paid on 103 shares. You get 4 more this time. Now you have 107 shares. Next month … same thing … forever. It’s your personal money-making machine. It will be running forever and you don’t have to do a damn thing. Just watch your holdings grow. At any time you can sell some of the stocks and withdraw the money. It’s your show and you are in the driver’s seat! Also, it is important to know that DRIP shares are purchased with no trading fees! When you are trading manually you must pay trading fees when buying or selling a stock. Imagine having 10 different stocks and all of them paying dividends (good man!) and all of them get reinvested. That would be 50–70 dollars for 10 trades if you were to do it manually. But not with DRIP, “Look ma’ no hands”, no fees. Conclusion Everybody should be involved in investing. They didn’t teach you any of that in basic school, neither in high school, none in college or university. The government wants a sheep, not a financially educated population. Like that they can walk you thirsty over the water and you will take it. It is time to educate yourself. Remember, it is your own money. It didn’t fall from the trees. Come hell or high water by investing in stocks that money will work for you and will earn more money. Think of children to put through schools, get a decent life, live in a nice place, think of retirement. It is inevitable. Starting investing in stocks may be the best and most wise financial decision you ever made. You’ll thank me later 🙂

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Kicked in the ass by Amazon For a long time, Amazon vendors were having a bad gut feeling about a whole thing. Something stinks there but it is not easy to put your finger on it. Old saying is that every fish stinks from the head so in this case, the head is Amazon itself. Isn’t Amazon built on the backs of countless vendors and re-sellers offering their products on their platform? No doubt it is, but why would Amazon want to work against own vendors? Doesn’t make sense, right? No, and yes, it is more complicated than that. ***“First of all, how hard could it be?” thinks I*** Amazon is a trillion dollar company. Amazon platform and overall presence dominate the Internet. Google any product imaginable and there will be Amazon selling it at a low price. You would think that means if you are part of Amazon FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon), you have a good product that people want and it is priced right you should be selling truckloads, right? Eeeeeee (baaad tone), not exactly. I can speak for ourselves. A company I work for sells items that one can also find on Amazon. “Thanks to Amazon” we are experiencing a dramatic decrease in sales. We sell uncommon products, smart cards, and readers and there are no overly many competitors. Still, after a noticeable drop in monthly sales we searched on Google and sure enough, whatever you write to find there is an Amazon page selling it. ***Joining the enemy*** There is also an old saying "When you can’t beat them, join them". So we decided to join the enemy, signed up, sent 5 items in sufficient quantity and started every working day by opening fulfillment by Amazon page. For starters, their warehouse lost 2 of our selling items. Each box we sent contained 10 small packages. 2 were lost right at the receipt process. Never to be seen again. How hard it could be? Open a brown box and count 10 small bags with parts. They were properly packed and labeled by the bar code as requested. Still, whoever opened boxes couldn’t complete even that simple task. Actual sales was more like throwing shit at the barn door and see if it will stick. In 3 months we sold 2 (two!) items at an average total price of about 30 dollars. During that time we were promptly deducted storage, shipping, and monthly fees. After 3 months we decided that enough is enough, pulled remaining stock back and closed FBA account. Our experiment cost was about 300 dollars. It is far cry from what other people lost but we learned a valuable lesson. Amazon selling is not for us as it is not for 99% of other sellers as well. It is like super sport, or entertainment industry where only top few make all kinds of money and everybody else lingers on the edge of profitability or disappears in obscurity with a bitter taste of losses. ***Where did we fail?*** Again, not easy to pinpoint. We searched through our own moves and looked at possible mistakes. We had FBA account with free next day delivery. We priced products less than other vendors. We had inventory available in an FBA warehouse. We tried to the everything right. We did not advertise with Amazon. Our impression was that the same product will be listed on the Amazon search page in ascending order according to price. That should take care of product listing being on proper place positioned right. It doesn’t even have to be on top but at least there on the first page and let the buyer decide. ***And then there are experts*** YouTube is full of videos of people who made hundreds of thousands on Amazon and they are so inclined to share their success secrets with the whole Internet. Just recently I read an article about a couple of “wizards” like that selling courses how to successfully sell on Amazon to the public. They made money selling some stuff so why not help others do the same? Just follow easy steps and advice to the letter and success is all but guaranteed. Oh yes, first pay thousands for the course. The article was properly titled as “How to lose tens of thousands of dollars on Amazon” Medium link HERE. https://medium.com/the-atlantic/how-to-lose-tens-of-thousands-of-dollars-on-amazon-a1aadad458cb I urge everyone who wants to sell on Amazon to go to YouTube and NOT look for “wizards” like Behdjou and Gazzola described in that article but rather watch videos of people who reveal how they were cheated in process and mistakes they made. Search on Google will reveal plenty of forums and articles like this one. Please do it BEFORE you sink your last money or worse, dip into credit cards to pay for dubious advice. ***Amazon is running an unfair business*** Over months we learned about Amazon unfair practices among many is competing with own sellers and what not. Word “unfair” proved to be a gross understatement. We found that Amazon is actively copycatting reseller products. What that actually means? Vendor develops a product. Let’s say as simple as a stand for a tablet computer or fancy looking sunglasses. A $9.99 thing. Whoever created anything knows how expensive and complicated it can be to create a product from scratch. Make tools, find a manufacturer, organize production, control over the manufacturing process, pay through the nose for samples, travel, market it, create WEB site, social media sites, scrap bad batch, ship good product, send payments to everybody and his dog. Now product is ready for the sales. Finally, somebody throws in a brilliant idea: “We should do it through FBA. We’ll sell a shitload of this on Amazon, right?” Sure enough, the product is in some ways innovative, dirt cheap (otherwise it will not be anywhere close to first page results) and sells like hotcakes. Exciting times, finally success! But have to pay all those expenses and fill up holes in credit cards used to prop up a product sales. It seems like it doesn’t matter that Amazon makes money from the moment products enters the FBA warehouse. Sales will set everything right. Then sales start lagging. Reduce price yet again, post better images, better description. Still no avail. Product sales lingers. Was all this a good idea? It is true, nobody put a gun on your head that it has to be done through Amazon. You just go with the flow. You are actually feeding a monster. It is truly very hard and risky. Amazon system is rigged in such a way that it destroys small businesses, not builds them up. It is not a business opportunity like Uber, where every participant has a pretty much same chance to make money as a next driver. Model is such that it forces vendor into razor-thin margins. Amazon acts as a search engine for products. If you are not on the first page you are pretty much nowhere. Irrelevant to the buyer. Bleeding money on every level. Monster is out there to destroy you. How? They don’t have geniuses sitting at PC stations inventing great new products. What they have is the best sales reporting money can buy. That means some little guy runs the report and gets a listing of the best selling products in any category. Then other guy picks up that list and says: “Oh, we can do that!”. He calls China: “Can you make such tablet stand for less, 100000 pieces?”. Chinese are everything but fools, “can’t” is not in their vocabulary. Sure they can, especially if Amazon is buying. They’ll make it, Amazon will sell it effectively screwing up the original vendor. If you think this scenario is far fetched read this … ***Amazon India caught red-handed and ordered to remove 400000 products from shelves!*** There you have it! It wasn’t really advertised in media but we got wind of it. It is actually a huge thing confirming everything bad and more. Indian Government recognized that Amazon is killing their small businesses effort and commerce on the large scale. They issued regulation where: Amazon is declared as a sales platform, service provider Sales platform like Amazon cannot compete with own vendors by manufacturing products Sales platform like Amazon cannot have an ownership stake with own vendors and give them an advantage in the selling process Example of other sales platforms that are not doing this? eBay. They are running re-sales and marketing platform and act as a middleman in process of sales. That’s it. They don’t manufacture a diddly squat. Amazon on other hand is a different story. ***How much is enough?*** You see, Amazon is run by cunning foxes. They thought of everything and enabled every possible venue to squeeze the last cent from the process. Not only that now there are Amazon manufactured and branded products, like batteries, computer parts, bulbs … but they also invested in various vendors that proved to be successful in the first place. So now by having a stake in those companies they are getting indirect profit from sales. The single small vendor simply cannot compete with machinery like that. They sink into oblivion slowly or fast, still paying fees while clutching on Amazon platform by fingernails. I am glad to say that at least authorities in India weren’t fooled enough to let everything go on. In very commendable effort they recognized a scheme Amazon is running and issued regulations to put things right and give vendors a fighting chance. Amazon tried to weasel their way out of that mess but Indians would have none of it. Also there is a stir in the EU where they found product imitations to be so clear that the EU has launched an investigation to examine the ethical and legal implications of Amazon copying its own customers. Hopefully similar things will happen in USA and Canada. **IMPORTANT STORY EDIT** A reader wrote a comments to this story. Ticked off by my views he took time and effort to write what exactly happened. I found his personal experience honest, compelling and telling even more than what I wrote about Amazon. It’s probably similar to what thousands of merchants experience dealing with Amazon but others are yet to come forward and say what is there to be said. I daresay that language is perfect and reflects the mood correctly. I want to share it with you, so this is contribution from Josh 12: “We sell retail furniture from a real world store and tried using Amazon, we ended up losing money on every sale. Closed the acct after a month and Amazon tried to charge us some kind of $30 dollar fee. I just closed the bank acct they had and told them to go fuck themselves. The only way to make money on Amazon is to be Bezos or an investor, long term they will fuck us all. I won’t buy or sell anything with scum like that. Sooner or later the pitchforks and torches will come out, I’d be very afraid if I was Jeff ‘all for mezos’” “Haha, nope, I know a few stores who tried and failed, I don’t know anyone who has made any money selling on Amazon. Some of the wholesalers we used to deal with did well, but only because they sold below the wholesale cost they gave the retail partners, like us. So basically they made money by selling below the retail price, had almost no employees and only had to pay for a warehouse. Most of them ended up getting screwed in the end because they burned us so we wouldn’t carry their stuff, and as soon as Amazon saw what was selling well they just started selling that below the cost the wholesaler got, Amazon can buy way more from the manufacturer and got a better price. *It’s a race to the bottom that only Amazon can win.* We know some manufacturers that ended up out of business because Amazon was demanding lower prices then they able to produce for and once all their other customers were gone, because they couldn’t compete with Amazon’s buying power, all that was left was Amazon demanding below cost pricing. *It’s crazy that we let this happen, as a society, eventually there won’t be any local retail and that means no local whole sale, no local or national manufacturers means no jobs, and no jobs means no money. How are municipalities supposed survive once that happens?* Need to crush this thing, but its already out of control and almost no one will boycott Amazon because it has scammed the system to have the lowest prices, and it’s so misunderstood people love it. Also they built all of this on a business model of not having to collect sales tax, and now that they finally have to collect it’s too late, so many local businesses are already wiped out. There you have it. I hope you learned something from this contribution because I did! Thank you for fighting this behemoth with me and the few of us who don’t want to let our lives be taken over by huge corporations with no sense of social responsibility.” And don’t you worry about results from this article, no Amazon was hurt while writing it.

Why airlines have crazy pricing? `Canadian Dash 8 airplane in Zagreb — Croatia — leaving for Frankfurt, Germany` First and foremost question should be: why are airlines jerking us around when it comes to the airfare tickets? Straight answer: because they can! That explanation is enough to stop 99% of the people from poking further into the hornet’s nest. Not me. I am in that 1 % that can’t just take such a laconic answer as a definitive truth. Let me clear about something: I am not an economist or I have any connection with the air travel industry or anything. I am simply paying customer who doesn’t like to be taken for a fool. One of the main mantras of capitalism is “Charge as much as you can”. Airlines sure took that golden rule to the heart and are all beating same drums, or are they? Further below we’ll find out more. ***If airlines sold paint*** There was an article by Alan Hess in 1998 called something like “If airlines sold paint”. Search the Internet and you will find it instantly. I found it very amusing and Hess managed to point out many wrong things with airlines pricing on a single page. Today, 20 years after an initial write up everything said still stands true, maybe even more than at that time. It goes something like this, a phone call where a person calls the airline and wants to buy paint: > How much is a paint? > There is no simple answer to that question. Depends on many factors > Isn’t paint a paint? OK, give me an average price > We have $10 and $30 per gallon First strike. This would not be a difference between business class and economy class, but really range of prices between lowest cost and highest cost ticket for the economy class. > What is a difference? > There is no difference. It is all same paint > WTF? Right, that is the second strike. Basically, costs for the same seats cost vary wildly. If you would ask each person in an airplane how much exactly they paid for the ride it would be an appalling mix of numbers. `Toronto — Munich flight ready to leave` > I want $10 paint > Price depends on many factors, for example, which day you are going to use it? > How that can make any difference, but I want to start tomorrow > It is $30 You heard it right, the closer you come to departure more expensive ticket becomes. Wait for a second, that means there is unsold seats and airline is making even more expensive? This one beats my logic every time. How is it better to fly with empty seats if you could sold them for at least “regular” price? But airlines do actually opposite of that. Instead of selling out what is left they raise prices and let unsold airplane go. > I called on Tuesday and could not wait on hold anymore, could the price be different? > Definitely, it changes not only by day but by a time of the day Yeah, you heard it right. Price doesn’t only depend on where and when you are going to but also **when** you are buying tickets. Internet sources say that best time to buy airfare tickets is on Tuesday or Wednesday morning, definitely before noon. Don’t hold me up on that, none of it makes any sense so that may be BS by itself as well. Check for yourself. > What if I start painting on Saturday? > That is definitely different than painting on Wednesday or some other day. It costs more … actually price just gone up to $15.00 Here I kind of can understand the price point. Most of the people want to travel on weekend, so why not make them pay more? What a hell? > What do you mean price went up, we are still talking? > Prices change all the time, you should buy paint immediately, may go up again at any moment `Somewhere in the middle of Atlantic — 3 AM` It is crazy how airline ticketing computers are rigged. Prices change many times per day, seemingly erratically but that is never the case. Computers don’t make errors, they follow programs that instruct them to do something and that is exactly what happens. Maybe another 5 people who want to buy the same ticket showed up and the computer goes for the kill and increases a price of a ticket. You are bidding against machine and machine will always win. It happened to me many times, even during checkout online. > This is crazy, more expensive by the minute. I better buy some cans right away. I’ll give it to my brother if I can’t do it on that stupid day > What?! That is not allowed. Only you must paint, nobody else can take your place Here is another mystery of the world. It is an electronic record but it seems like passenger list is chiseled into the granite. Cannot be changed under any circumstances. In my mind, you paid for a person to be transported in safety and comfort from New York to Los Angeles. Doesn’t matter who that person is, won’t make any difference to the airplane, costs, crew really anybody, right? Wrong. It may be a non-issue if you travel by bus or train but it’s no no for air travel. Anyway, quite hard to comprehend. > ?? Not transferrable? > No > Don't tell me that it matters who paints, me or my brother? > Exactly right, it does! > OK, but if I can’t paint that day I will have to return a can of paint for the refund! > No > How no? If I see that I can’t make it I’ll call in advance for return > You have to pay extra and buy insurance for that possibility No refunds. If you don’t take a flight money is wasted. And ridiculous as it sounds you have to pay insurance for a possibility to exchange the ticket for another day. Plain and simple a full refund does not exist in airline vocabulary. > All this is a nightmare. I may skip first room and paint only second one > What? That also is not allowed. You MUST paint first room first and second room second. If you skip first room you are not allowed to use paint on the second one! > Khhhh (caller choking) ***It is much easier to explain UFOs, life on Mars, quantum physics or women than airline rules*** Let’s say you are flying from Toronto to Sarasota with a layover in Atlanta and back the same way. In their eyes, it is perfectly normal that if you don’t board an airplane in Toronto a whole trip is forfeited. I had situation myself where friends asked me to drive with them to Sarasota and go back on the already purchased ticket. I thought it was a great idea until I told them about my ticket. “Luckily” they knew about “airline rules” and told me outright that ain’t happening. If I showed up in Sarasota in 10 days they would tell me that there is no flight for me. I would have to buy a new ticket. `Morning in Munich` ***There are more rules*** We just skimmed over very basic scenarios. There are tons of other ways airlines (over) charge their services. Lately, you buy a ticket at the price you consider reasonable and proceed with seat selection page. Surprise, surprise! Little airplane plan reveals that every seat has a premium attached to it. As you move a mouse around the small pop up balloons reveal +$40, +$70 and + whatever amount they think of. It’s not like you can seat on the floor. You must hunt for the least expensive, unoccupied seat. ***Then there is charging for the bags*** This one is old as air travel. Bags can be up to allowed size and weight. That much we can understand. A friend of mine flew to Halifax by West Jet and there was a charge for having luggage brought onto an airplane. That is a new one. ***The price difference between airline and airline*** Airlines have seemingly plenty of customers. Still, they have to watch the competition in order to stay realistic. Still, there is no real life comparison. This boggles my mind. A few days ago in my other article, I used the following example, USD shown >> Flying in Europe with a distance of 400 kilometers, Airbus A-320, ticket one way = $58.70 Let me expand here with few more rates: >> Toronto to Ottawa with a distance of 400 kilometers, A-320 or similar, ticket one way = $175.00 >>Boston to Washington DC with a distance of about 640 kilometers, A-320 or Bombardier Regional Jet, ticket one way = $296.00 >> New Delhi to Mumbai with a distance of 1400 kilometers, Boeing 737, ticket one way = $40.77 I think you are catching my drift. Something stinks here! How the hell is even possible that a ticket price difference is range from 1 to 5 up to 1 to 7.4 for the worst case scenario? Yeah, you will say, but that is in Europe or even India and this is America! That’s it? That is best you got? Only because of that, a price should be more and that is perfectly justified? Let me burst that bubble with a street logic. You noticed that I mentioned exact types of airplanes used. Everybody on the list has the **same airplane** and shelled out tens of millions for it. It’s not like in India or Europe they have wooden airplanes. The distance was about the same but with exception of Indian flight which was 3.5 longer than other flights. They used more fuel and incurred more costs. Still, their ticket was the lowest by a far margin. Maintenance costs are about the same, expensive. Maintenance, parts, and procedures are prescribed by the manufacturers of the airplanes and international standards. There are no ways around it. Airlines must comply with all regulations. Maintenance is costly for everyone. Fuel costs. Our jets run on jet fuel and theirs on water so it’s cheaper for them to fly around? Ain’t happening. It is very possible that they pay for gas much more than US or Canadian airlines do. Crew costs. Short range crew is 2 pilots and 2 stewardesses (attendants). It is possible that the US crew gets 40% — 50% bigger paycheck than the same crew in India or Austria but that is chicken change considering that 160 passengers are transported in all examples. Meaning if one crew costs airline 800 dollars or 1200 dollars for that flight it is a chicken change. There is a matter of airport fees and ground handling. There may be a 2 thousand dollars difference for that single flight. OK, we’ll allow for that. “But, but those travelers in India can’t pay tickets we pay in North America!” you could say. Remember answer at the beginning of this article? They charge that much because they can. People will pay inflated prices because seemingly they don’t have other choice. The fact is airline in India has jets, crews, pay all bills and fly people around for 4–7 times less than in NA. And they are profitable otherwise would be long gone. I think I proved my point. Everybody and his dog can see that we are getting ripped off. Air travel does not have to cost arms and legs. `Empty your wallet for the best rum there is — Duty Free shop in Montego Bay — Jamaica` ***A difference in price from economy to business and first class is exorbitant*** You can fly to Germany and back for about $1200 economy. A business class is about $4000 — $5000 so about 4 times more. A first class comes at $8000+ premium. That is about 7 times more than economy. I find it fascinating. Is that service really 4 or 7 times more valuable? Seats are bigger, champaign instead of Coke, lobster instead of chicken and rice. I wish I am there, but I am not. Rather behind in row 34 cramped in my child sized seat. Who pays for those expensive flights? Rich and famous. Managers of successful companies. Politicians that are not crazy about mingling with their voters. Here there are no grounds to a complaint. Toronto to Sydney first class — $40000. You can buy a mid-sized car for that money. Yes, it is awfully expensive but there are people who want to pay it so can’t blame airlines to charge a lot. ***Traveling by bus, train or ferry*** Buying those tickets may be a refreshing experience. Prices are fixed and published for maybe a year ahead. They may have season pricing, first class, and economy and that’s about it. No surprises or smoke and mirrors. Straightforward prices are the least they can do for their customers. `Ferry in the port of Split` Make no mistake, trains cost millions, ferries also cost millions, buses cost maybe 200000 dollars a piece and they all burn expensive fuel. They pay people, pay maintenance, pay port or station fees. Pay insurance, administration and what not. It is not cheap or simple to move people around. Still, everybody else except airlines has no big problem publishing fare pricing. `Train Split — Zagreb, Croatia taking a 20 minutes break in Gracac` We are sure taken for a ride by airlines, literally and figuratively. Read other two travel articles: > Travel by air Nazi style — Part 1 of 2 https://medium.com/@zack_canada/travel-by-air-nazi-style-is-there-a-better-way-part-1-of-2-71b1b4f8c782 https://read.cash/@ZackP/travel-by-air-nazi-style-158192b2 > Travel like a King (or Queen) and it’s not by air — Part 2 of 2 (coming up soon)

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Cashless society monster coming to a digital wallet near you Lately, I read several articles about the cashless society. Quite a stories. One person reported about amazing experience going whole month around with plastic money and never using any cash. Even small expenses like a bottle of water or coffee. A real achievement for the whole world to know about. Then comes even better one. Just 2 days ago somebody wrote a lengthy post about abandoning cash. The writer wrote a whole tirade about certain cashless future. He mentioned Bitcoin in one paragraph. Other than that it was all about the practicality of plastic money and the cost of making and handling paper money and coins. Cashless future was glorified in such a way that I suspect the guy who wrote that article is a banker. Let’s just say that neither writer got thumbs up from me even that others approved his views a lot though. I was surprised and hurt. Surprised about acceptance. Hurt about my stories never get so many reads. A number of thumbs up I get are not even worth mentioning. Embarrassing, right? Thumbs up are sure not a reason why I am writing about cashless future. **It really worries me. A lot.** Approval means more and more people accepting that path without questioning it and with no resistance. Writer I just mentioned articulated tons of reasons why plastic money is our bright future. Some of them are logical and valid. Like there is a cost of printing and handling coins and paper money. Also, one long paragraph explained that old good paper money is also the preferred method of payment for the criminals. Since cash is pretty much untraceable, wads of cash are apparently guaranteed signal of criminal activity. Interestingly enough Bitcoin didn’t get the same bad treatment. Being practically anonymous and untraceable it must be bursting of criminals moving digital currency around. A writer was definitely more concerned about getting rid of coins and paper cash. ***Where is all this going to?*** Did you notice lately articles and news about a proliferation of the cashless payments? Sweden and Denmark are being mentioned as advanced societies where paper money is all but abolished and kicked out of everyday life. Did you notice that banks and Governments love and support those ideas? When was the last time banks had the population’s best interest in mind? Probably never. Governments? Even worse. They are in the business of controlling people and their money. Sucking out every penny fits that agenda perfectly. Everything and everybody is taxed to the death and beyond. Did you know that until 1913 there was no income tax in the USA? Actually, US Constitution, Amendments 16 and 17 say that person earning for living by laboring is not to be taxed. Only companies are to pay tax for commercial activity. Interpretation of those and some other amendments is a matter of court arguments by IRS and those who oppose personal taxation. Incidentally, in the same year, there was another “invention” that sealed the financial affairs of every person in the USA living and yet to be born. Private bankers helped by then President Woodrow Wilson established the Fed Bank. Fed lends money to US Government at a cost thus enslaving the population to their agenda. Big squeeze started at that time and never stopped. Did you know that 1 dollar issued in 1913 until today lost more than 98.5% of its original value? It’s worth less than 1.5 cents today. Then and now is a difference like a day and night. Here are just a few numbers to boggle your mind. The average income a hundred years ago was $1,033. A gallon of gas (3.785 liters) previously cost seven cents, a loaf of bread 5 cents, woman’s dress 4 dollars, a medium-priced home was $2,750. House for 3000 dollars or less! Are you kidding me? Sounds like a science fiction, right? So where is a rest of the money? Gone. Eaten and stolen by inflation, banks, and Government. A person has to pay more and more for the same things. It is like catching a runaway train. ***So how this rant explains a cashless society?*** Not yet but it is a prelude for other bad things. Governments grew out of the proportion. It’s like a genie out of the bottle that will never get back but will rather become bigger and bigger. Rules and laws were passed a long time ago and are being added as we speak where every dollar is tracked down and a better part of it taken away as a taxes. Criminals get smaller sentences for violent crimes, even murders than accused of hiding money from the taxman. Their own money I daresay. Out of that twisted idea comes absolute must to track the flow of the money. Banks are forced into a position to police own clients. If you bring 10000 dollars into the bank they will ask you where it came from. Must be some illicit reason. Can’t be just by saving money into the shoe box. Cashless environment fits Government and bankers plans perfectly. Money is a bunch of numbers flowing through computers. You buy a car or house it is like an e-mail sent from your account to seller’s account and money is there. Quick, easy and clean. And traced. The only thing you can buy these days at your own accord is an old bike for 50 dollars at Kijiji. Coffee, newspapers, small amount of groceries basically things from chewing gum to small value items. Few tens of dollars tops. For everything else, there is a plastic money. Debit card or credit card. Checks as well but disappearing. While in Europe I asked about checks and they said that nobody is using them anymore. They transfer money using personal IBAN bank accounts and SEPA. That would be like Interac of ACH transfers account to account here. There are also Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay. Payments using an electronic watch or mobile phone. Easy and practical you could say. It is just another form of a credit card payment. ***Is a cashless next best thing after sliced bread?*** The first rule is: ”Money in the bank is not yours, it’s bank’s”. Ever controlling Government and banks are working on making cashless society a stark reality. There is nothing great about it. In that “great” new world you will not be able to go to pee in public washroom or buy a bottle of water without that be logged in and approved or disapproved from powers above. Payment server might have limits or filters simply refusing payments to take place. Now what? If you think Google and Amazon know every step we make in digital life you ain’t see nothing yet. Now the picture will be complete. A flow of YOUR personal money will be known up to the last cent. Not only for tax purposes but intrusions in YOUR life will get to a new level. With cash in the pocket, you can buy a bottle of booze or a box of condoms without anyone knowing. You can buy that old car for 500 bucks from your friend. Fill up gas without somebody knowing where and when. Then just drive off into the sunset. And if you don’t play nice they’ll simply shut down your account and freeze your existence. You will not be able to buy a bread let alone iPhone. When you go to the doctor he will say: ”You had 36 Cokes last month, sugar is bad. No more insurance coverage for you”. The biggest beef I have with cashless payment setup is a total loss of privacy. As with any other banking kind of transaction everything is recorded and tracked down. ***First, let’s talk about tax*** I feel this has to be said since I have a strong impression that most of the people are ignorant of or oblivious to the amount of taxation that is imposed on every citizen. Take any product, really anything, and analyze it all the way from the moment of inception to the moment when it was purchased or consumed in some way. It can be anything from the pencil to a locomotive. Size and price do not really matter at all. For example can of Coke. It starts its life as a municipal water entering Coca-Cola production facility. It was paid and tax charged on it. Then there was a Coke secret mixture of sugar, chemicals and whatever is in the mixture. Farmer growing sugar cane purchased seeds, fuel for tractor, paid workers and tax charged and collected every step of the way. Same with all other ingredients. They didn’t fall from the trees. Everything was purchased and taxes paid for. Coke powder is now mixed with water, carbonated and filled into cans that were purchased from aluminum cans supplier, painted by some other contractor or within the production line. Every little thing was purchased, a tax charged again and again. Now Coke is in the can, packed with nylon foil and cardboard, loaded into trucks and driven to the wholesale center. Drivers, trucks, diesel, parts, warehouse floor space, electricity for lights, heating and cooling all paid tax on every bit and piece or person that came even close to our can of Coke. A truck has 10000 parts and every single screw and nut had a tax attached to it. Same with every other piece of equipment involved. Smaller truck now takes a load for Coke to the store or variety store. Same story there. A building, space, lights, people, security, accounting, cash register everything in sight was paid for and tax paid. Finally comes you and buys cold Coke for $1.00 + sales tax. When dissected like this it is obvious that at least 90 cents of that dollar went into Government greedy hands to finance their financial failures. Doesn’t matter if an item is a Coke or locomotive. Taxes are percentages and are applied to everything. Keep that in mind; EVERY little thing surrounding us is a taxable item. Including land, we are standing on. ***How this relates to cashless payments?*** It shows the importance of tracking every dollar. Government and banks love the concept of cashless society. Every person will have a plastic card in his/her pocket and kiss goodbye any privacy still left. People like writers mentioned before are already delighted with it and will greet it with open hands! With cash out of the picture, every expense will be done electronically. Buying anything from chewing gum to car it will be all electronic and only way. No other option will be allowed. Government sanctioned and enforced. Cash abolished and gone forever. Banks will rub hands with the windfall of money coming their way. Remember: no cash to handle, no coins, no ATMs to maintain, no vaults to build, most of the workforce will get fired. Computers will take the brunt of work. Bankers wildest dreams fulfilled. All transactions electronic. There is a charge however small attached to every transaction. This time it will not be only merchant paying to credit card companies and bank but everybody will pay for everything. Things paid cash in direct buyer-seller contact and transaction will be a matter of past. It will not be only matter of hiding purchase of joint of marijuana or box of condoms for Saturday night fun, but buying an old bicycle on Craig’s list will be also subject to tracking. I bet you dollars to donuts that bank charges will be just a beginning. Wait until IRS or CRA lays their greedy hands on every personal expense shown in the report. It will be tax galore. Similarly to carbon tax which is plain and blunt money grab, there will be tax on everything. The wording doesn’t matter. Money grab left, right and center does. Spoils of war (on your digital wallet) will be enourmous. But there is more. ***Here comes the worst part*** If you thought that Google and Facebook tracking our spending habits across the Internet is bad, you have seen nothing yet! When everything goes cashless those records will be brutally comprehensive! Every single purchase and expense will unveil all aspects of personal and intimate data. Medications, alcohol, going places, eating, entertainment habits, everything will be open book for one who can and want to look into it. Willy-nilly banks will be policing every client for “financial crimes”. Those crimes are of the “highest level”, spending own money. They already do that but when things go completely cashless it will take a whole new level. Even today. Give it a shot and go to the bank and ask to withdraw 6000 dollars of own money. There is no way in hell that you will walk out of the bank with money in your pocket! First, there is no so much cash in the bank. Cash capitalization of the banks is probably the lowest in the known history.  For example, Norwegians banks have about 12% cash capitalization. That is a lot compared to one of the 5 largest Canadian banks has less than 0.5%! Think about it. It is crazy. If clients brought in 100 million dollars in any form bank will have less than 500 thousand dollars in their vaults spread over hundreds of branches. Where is the rest? Just a bunch of numbers shown in the ledger. Money is created out of the thin air. They’ll hand you a draft check or anything else but cash. It is almost like asking for the rock from Mars. Secondly, if the amount you want is 10000 dollars or more, in any form, you will have to explain bank what a hell you want to do with your own money. Pay hookers won’t cut it. Go to Las Vegas and have fun either. ***It is happening already!*** Recently we had a customer from Belize who wanted to buy demo bus ticketing that uses smart cards. Bank flatly refused to wire out $3400.00 to us to Canada. Explanation? They didn’t like what he was buying. Bitch at the counter sent him an e-mail saying that purchase is not approved by the bank. WTF? Since when bank clerk approves what client will buy or not? Imagine when everybody is 100% on a cashless system. Banks and Government will want form F-YOU-55 filled up for every expense above 500 dollars. For 10000 dollars you will have to pee in the cup and give a blood sample so they can check DNA before handling such outrageous request. When picking up medication in pharmacy they may say something like: ”No insurance for you, after eating so many burgers last month you got exclusion”. ***Total shutdown looming on the horizon*** Still, the worst thing can happen is when a computer or big bad wolf Government turns off your payment card. A person will find himself in the impossible situation where there are funds in the account but it is frozen due to a thing you said, purchased, paid or not paid. The myriad reasons, single outcome. It would be so easy to do that there are no doubts in my mind it would become the weapon of choice. Some little creep sitting in Government or bank’s office will play with people’s lives. Click of the mouse is all it takes to exclude someone from society. No money, no food, no housing, no transportation … Everybody will have to play by the rules. And rules are created and enforced by the Government. Total domination comes to mind. Have to check definition of word “fascism”. ***And then there are audits*** Being audited or scrutinized by the Government is no fun. A company I am working for we got audited for tax collection for merchandise sold. Audit lasted almost 10 months. 2 years of sales were dissected and scrutinized. Cost us money, effort, time, endless digging into accounting files, bank reports, calls to the accountant and a lot of nerves. I could write a whole post about that but that is not the purpose of this article. The worst part of it is feeling like a criminal, being on a constant defense. Explaining every financial move. You always think and hope that now it’s over but taxman keeps coming back for more. Last he asked for were personal bank records for every major shareholder. Being a family business that practically meant all of us had to go to the bank and pay for old reports. Hand them to the taxman. He comes back in a week or two and asks for an explanation of every amount found in the deposit column. As you can guess it is easy to explain monthly paycheck entries but almost impossible anything else. The reasoning was that we, the owners, could be stealing money from (own) company. Now imagine a few hundred million people being controlled and audited that way! Remember a big squeeze started in 1913? Well, this is a mother of all big squeezes! Constant, relentless pressure 24/7. Can’t remember what was those 200 dollars deposited into your account 2 and half years ago? Too bad. No more (your own) money for you! The account is frozen until further notice or until you refresh your memory and admit to the horrible crime committed! Remember how just a search for anything on Google produces an avalanche of ads no matter which WEB site you visit. Those ads follow you for months. Google, Amazon, Facebook, and others are known for that. Knowledge what you actually buy for everyday living will worth pot of gold. There will be no guessing but exact numbers, quantities, locations all recorded in your file. Don’t count on privacy and secrecy. Information like that will be the ultimate advertiser’s galore. It will be exposed, sold, stolen, hijacked, hacked … whatever it takes. Science fiction? Stupid? Outrageous? Fascistic? Impossible? Wake up. Impossible things happen every day. Especially when Government is involved. Nobody is asking me or you for approval. They’ll do what they want to do and outlaw every other actions or behavior no matter how reasonable they may be. ***Cryptocurrencies*** And don’t think that cryptos will save anybody. Generally speaking, cryptos may be a thing of future but not the way it is logical and makes a perfect sense. I don’t think Bitcoin will disappear but it will be suppressed. Same for Ethereum or any other crypto for that matter. Cryptos are practical, portable, fairly secure, technologically advanced. People like it and will widely accept it in the future. They have a lot of good things going. The government will sure play a crypto card to prove how advanced and acceptable they are for progress. But they will do it with a twist. It will be newly created crypto. Controlled and sanctioned by the Government. Every other crypto shall be declared a danger to the financial system, outlawed outright and holders declared as enemies of the state. Good luck finding exchanges or doing any transactions in such environment. `Cash, credit cards and ePurse cards` ***A cashless system as it should be done*** Money and financial transactions are quite a personal affair. Nobody wants to talk about it, let alone let the whole world know what you are doing with the money. Cash is perfect for that. The electronic system may be the answer but when done in the right way. We know a thing or two about cashless payment systems. Our company makes something like that based on the smart cards. Privately owned payment system like that is totally opposite of intrusive and controlling. A consumer gets a card and loads it with electronic money. Yes, it is based on the prepaid smart card. It is not a credit card. A consumer can spend only what he has available. From that point cash is in the card and transactions are cashless. Anonymous? Absolutely! The consumer controls his own card, PIN, balance in the card and re-charges the card when needed. The system really doesn’t care about cardholder’s identity. He or she is a valued consumer and that is all that matters. Electronic money can be re-charged into the card using cash, credit card, debit card or any other way accepted by the merchant. For the merchant, money is money is money. Name and form are not important. Cashless makes it easier, safer, more practical to handle and buy things. And notice lack of bank in that equation. It is not needed. The merchant doesn’t pay any fees to anyone since he owns the system. No leaches involved. The government still gets tax charged on merchandise. Buyers spend their after-tax money they way they want to and nobody ain’t tracking nobody. Example for usage would be a gas station (chain) with fleet customers where company they drive for hands a card to drivers to pay for gas. For example taxi cabs. Or delivery trucks. No money was stolen or misspent. Talking about taxi cabs. In the city of Sao Paulo driving a taxi was the most dangerous job one could have. Robberies and murders of taxi drivers were a daily occurrence. That is until smart card-based payment system was introduced. From that day until today no taxi driver will accept anything but cashless payment via smart card. After working day driver goes home to a happy wife and his cut gets transferred to his account. No cash involved. Or children in the school getting a hot meal and instead of paying every day with pocket change use the pre-paid smart card. By loading card once a month parents never forget to hand daily change for a sandwich. Money can’t get lost, stolen, bullied out or spent in variety store for something else. School restaurant doesn’t have a problem handling change and cash register. No bank, no Internet, no rentals of the payment terminals, no bank. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. ***There are no unbanked people*** Notice that systems just described doesn’t have banks in the picture. Establishments own their systems and pay no fees. Even more importantly everybody is eligible for such a cashless system as a user. No applications to be filled up, no credit history checks, no lineups, no spilling over personal information. It is plain simple, secure, easy to understand and use. Again, the main goal is practicality and security. Not intrusion of privacy or tracking of personal spending. ***Conclusion*** Cashless future is coming upon us and is not something to look for, let alone encourage it. Who wants to be cashless can do it today using debit or credit card. Same with mobile phones and electronic watches equipped with NFC and software. For the rest of us, and that is about 4 Billion people, leave the cash fuck alone! If people want to use cryptos let them. Criminalizing methods of payments is not a solution.

Travel by air Nazi style Disclaimer for the readers who don’t recognize themselves here If you don’t recognize yourself in at least 50% of experiences listed here you may be first class only traveler, or better, a private jet owner. No need to read further. It may make you buy a second or a bigger jet. This is for the common smallfolks filling up economy seating to capacity. ***Why airplane in the first place?*** Right of the bat, air travel has only speed on their side. Everything else about airplane traveling sucks big time. That is what we know. Ever since I was a small boy i was looking forward to fly somewhere by airplane. It was a positive excitement. Couldn’t wait for the trip. As every other kid I wanted to be a pilot. Girls wanted to be a stewardesses. By the way, they hate that name. Now it is a flight attendant. If you ask me it’s same thing. These days I am a passenger and I just want to use damn thing to get where I am going. I hate air travel. It subjects me to the physical and psychological stress so I use airplane only when forced to. ***Pain starts in the pocket*** When I need to buy airfare tickets I go on-line as everybody else does. I use various sites to see what is a best and most economical way to go from place A to place B. I guess going to travel agent is thing of past. At the end I always end up on BMO (my credit card) travel site. Buying tickets is pain in the ass and hurts the wallet. Did you ever experience finding a suitable flight on Kayak or Expedia or wherever and when you actually want to buy ticket that flight or price is not there any more?! Or you want to fly on Wednesday, flight is $570.00 and it’s kind of OK with you. Then you want to check same flight on Thursday and Friday. Naaah, no good. You go back to Wednesday and suddenly ticket costs $750.00? WTF?! Yes, I know the feeling. By some black magic it’s freaking new price there. It took only 3 minutes of undecidedness and now as a true sucker you have to pay more. Airline computers are rigged that way. I think nobody, even airlines themselves, don’t exactly know how damn thing works. But that may be another article. I thought I caught up on that dirty airline trick so now when I see price and flight it’s now or never situation. I just go for it. How hard it could be, just fill up goddamn screen form and pay. Yeah, right. Last screen is sometimes screen of death. I fill up credit card info and click BUY or PAY NOW. Then there is a spinning ball, or spinning hourglass or airplane flying across the screen. And then comes announcement: “Flight you wanted to reserve is not available any more, please make your search again!” Damn! How is that even possible? In few minutes while filling up endless forms flight is all gone. That always means the higher price. A few times I called BMO travel customer service to complaint but not any more. Standard answer is that it may be sold out or try later. I simply don’t buy that explanation. I even selected seats and there were few left a minute ago. ***Talking about the price*** Prices people pay for air travels is one of the biggest mysteries in the world. How in the world they come up with it? Every other means of travel has fixed pricing even for year in advance but airfare may change every minute. It is so complicated and frustrating. Again I may write another article about that issue alone. So we’ll leave that can of worms for now. `Frankfurt, Germany` ***Names of the passengers are set in the stone*** When I successfully buy a ticket e-mail comes with details. That is a relief. So I got it. It is point of no return. Literally. Now you go or ticket is wasted. No refunds allowed. You can buy 50000 dollar car, change your mind within 24 hours and get all money back. It happens. Not with airlines. I envision ticketing guy spinning on his rotating chair backwards and screaming: ”Got another one, Joe Schmuck, flight AC772”. In the back there is a hall filled with rows of granite slates. Like on HGTV when they want granite for new kitchen. There is a granite slate with large AC772 flight in-scripted on the top. Rough looking guy in overalls takes chisel and hammer and hammers traveler’s name on the passenger list. From now on until end of the world your name is on that flight. It cannot be changed under any circumstances. Yes, you paid for one adult airfare from Toronto to Atlanta but it must be you and only you taking the flight. Even if it is in 3 months and you need to change a person traveling. No matter. It probably takes 0.00001 seconds of the microprocessor time to change the name they won’t do it. It doesn’t really matter who is traveling. Buy another ticket. Another score for the airline. ***No return flight allowed even that you paid for it*** Once I got my tickets to travel to Florida and back home. It happened that my friends were going by car and asked me if I would join them for trip down. You know, I could pitch in for driving. It is 24 hour long ride so extra driver is welcomed addition to the team. I thought it was a great idea. Have a fun driving there and go back by plane. So I told them so. Good that I have friends who are smarter than I am. She said: “You can’t do that! You must go and come back to use the ticket. If you don’t go there return ticket will be cancelled”. “That is absurd”, I said, “Flight down is one thing and 10 days later flight back is another thing!”. Impossible. And Darija says: “It sure is but this is what airlines do”. That is: a pretty much whatever they want. ***It’s time to go*** Pack up your bags. No liquid with more than 100 ml is allowed in the hand bags. If you travel lightweight like me hand luggage is only thing I take. So no mouth wash, no favourite after shave, no anti cough syrup. Won’t make it through security. So keep that in mind or item will end up in the garbage. That is how I lost present of Canadian Maple Syrup going to Europe. Garbage can. I saw the same syrup in duty free shop right at the gate for twice as much as in my local supermarket. I could take as many as I wanted. Whiskey liter bottles as well. So much for the 0.1 liter rule. It didn’t matter any more. Airports are usually far from town. Toronto Pearson is 45 minutes drive away from my house. So I leave house at least 3 hours earlier than flight is for North American flights and almost 4 hours earlier for across the pond flights. In my mind that is already ridiculous. It is like travel on top of the actual travel. ***Wait for check -in*** Be ready to spend 30–60 minutes, moving bit by bit to the counter. Kicking or dragging bags you have to make it to the check-in counter. No, it is not pleasant experience by any stretch of imagination. While standing in line you see people with carts and mountains of bags. You ask yourself how that works but goal is just to get rid of your own bag and rush to the security. ***Security Nazi style*** After first line up this one is always much worse. Doesn’t matter how many lanes are open it’s never quick. When you finally get in front of the X Ray machine it’s time to strip body of anything metal, watch, jewelry, mobile phone, belt, coins, badges, remove shoes and barefoot step through metal detector gate. Now TSA will pat you down, X Ray your luggage, metal detector swipe you and burn your balls or ovaries. All under pretence that they are protecting you and worst part is you are actually paying for it. How much? On Toronto airport they charge between $7.50 for local and up to $25 for international flights. I saw video on YouTube and many other videos on YouTube of a little girl, maybe 4 years old standing still with arms outstretched and big TSA lady touching her everywhere to find bombs and other weapons. It went on for several minutes and little one started to cry. Finally father stepped in and said that it is enough of that. Mom filmed whole thing. I guess they will be taking bus next time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKZH2Y0f-7M In USA and many other airports in the world they want you to take full body scan so they can see what you have in your guts. I never take that neither my family members as well. Other choice is that they will male or female officer will pat you down touching almost all body this way or another. So damned if you take body scanner and damned if you don’t. Clearly, TSA prefers body scanner machine. Last time when I was leaving Sarasota, Florida (SRQ) a “friendly” TSA officer advised me to take body scanner. “It’s nothing, not dangerous at all”. “Says who?” thinks I, “The same guy who said that tasers are not dangerous?”. Ask 1000+ people who are in the graveyard killed by tasers how that worked out for them. I told him: “My man, I’ll rather take strip search. And you should not hang around damn thing whole day long”. He just smiled and called another guy to pat me down. If you know anything about radio waves you will know that shorter wave is, higher frequency is and it becomes more penetrating into human flesh. In it’s extreme it’s called X Ray. Everybody and his dog knows that X Ray is extremely dangerous. Person should not take even medical X Ray more than maybe twice a year. Using that body scanner a millimeter length radio waves are penetrating your body to the level where TSA guy looking at the screen can see your last beer still sloshing inside your guts. He can count every screw in your leg courtesy of ski accident in Colorado or toy your kid swallowed before trip. Must be great for your balls or female ovaries like usual wear and tear is not enough. Not dangerous my ass! I ain’t taking that shit, ever. Busy airport in Frankfurt, Germany ***At the gate*** So you finally were let go by TSA Nazi and rush to the gate. Most likely than not it is early. Flight is late, no boarding yet. Hurry up and wait is theme of the day. ***Finally in the airplane*** Some people take their sweet time to get seated. They are kind of people not in rush for anything. They have all time in the world. No respect for other people’s time whatsoever. They are even worse when airplane arrives to destination. But you must go first. Let me throw in the biggest wisdom I ever learned: *Time is the most precious commodity anybody ever has!* Think about that. Most often than not people will come in with several bags and fill up overhead bins. Late comers have no space for their hand bags. So you are finally seated and everybody else was as well. Seats deserve post by itself. They are razor thin. Seating cushion is properly sized — for a child. Not for average adult. I am average male. At 180 cm tall (6 feet), 87 kg I could be a model traveler from airplane point of view. But I am not. Person next to me is REALLY close next to me, we are almost touching shoulders. Hand rests are very narrow. It’s either me or other person can rest elbow on it. I guess who comes in first claims that precious few square centimeters of space. I raised armrest for my wife only. She could touch me or lean on me all she wanted. I like that. Otherwise armrest is down. I don’t want other people to invade my personal space. I believe that is a mutual idea. Did you notice that there are rails going along the whole airplane cabin. They hold rows of seats. Those rails are perforated all the way enabling airline to move seats closer together by sliding whole rows along the rails. Then they lock seats in place. Do they pack them up or what!? Distance between two seats is called pitch. There is a standard that says it should be 29” to 32” (74 cm to 81 cm). In reality you can expect normal leg room in business or first class only. Kettle class is packed like sardines and often my knees touch seat in front. That is a bitch way to travel. I clearly see airlines point of view. One more row of seats means another 4 or even 11 passengers more. More money for them. But I am here to demand reasonable comfort. I don’t care about airline shareholders. Give me my legroom. You have to endure wait before takeoff + flight time in discomfort. Typical flight times are: Toronto — New York = 1:15, to Florida = 3:20, to Caribbean = 3:45, to Europe = 7:30–8:00 hours. For me everything above 2 hours becomes pain in the ass. Literally. Back stiff, ass hurts, neck. When given chance I watch movies all the way, one after another to get distracted from uncomfortable position I am at. That works for flights to Europe. I never traveled to Asia and Australia which is like 15–20 hours. That is a really scary thought. To travel across North America bring your own entertainment. I take Kindle and read all the way. A small win for passengers is that one is allowed to use electronic devices all the time. Before cabin Nazis were screaming at me to put Kindle away. I don’t know how is with other people but after hour or two I get cramped in seat. Get legs restless. Reading and watching movies works only so much. I need to stand up, go to the back or to door isle and stand for a bit. For that reason I always want to be in isle seat. I can stretch at least one leg a bit and get up when I want to. I never take window seat. There you can see something like this at best: `Somewhere above Denmark` ***In flight service*** In short haul flights more likely than not you get nothing. No soft drink or juice. No pretzels or peanuts. Air Canada is like that. Bring your own stuff. Peanuts are another paradoxical situation as far as I am concerned. Sometimes in flight stewardess comes on speakers and says something like: ”Today we will not serve peanuts since one person reported allergy. Sorry about that”. Call me un-compassionate pig but I don’t get that one? I don’t care much about peanuts. I usually don’t take them anyway, but I can’t comprehend that somebody could die if I just open small bag of peanuts 10 rows behind or in front of that person. Is that even possible? Is that allergy that deadly? I may be ignorant about poisons but are peanuts really worse than cyanid? If it is, that person should be in self imposed confinement at home. It seems to me impossible to avoid being in vicinity of nuts whole life in every situation. Restaurant, travel, bus, dinners, celebrations … whatever. I feel sorry for those people but isn’t this a bit over the board? Nobody in restaurant can’t order anything with nuts. For example Asian cousin is all based nuts. I understand that person like that has to protect himself but does it have to be at expense and inconvenience of other 200–300 people? Anyway, this is taking us away from the airplane. I never complaint about dinners on long flights. It is what it is, given the situation that food is brought in from ground and served on 11km (33000 ft) of height. You can’t expect gourmet meal and space to eat it comfortably. You will eat with elbows glued to the ribcage and manage precious tray space best you can. There will be dropped food and spilled drinks. Can’t wait for stewardess to take away garbage to reclaim back that little space. ***Also while in flight*** You can stand up and go to pee or go to the back and ask for drink of water. That is about it. Airlines clearly prefer passengers strapped in their seats and do not encourage standing or walking ones. They’ll flash “Seat Belts” sign into your face quite liberally. Airplanes are built like cages with narrow isles, children sized washrooms, no places really to stand or hang around. ***No complains allowed or Nazi hammer will squish you like a bug!*** As soon as traveler entered an airport he is on “their” turf. New rules apply, old ones are thrown out of the window. Airport Nazi will get you if you went wrong way, said wrong thing, carry wrong t-shirt. Liberties severely limited. That is on the ground. It is worse in the air. Passing through the cabin door you get under jurisdiction of cabin crew and they may turn Nazi on you in a heartbeat. No wrong moves or even words allowed here. No raising voice. No complaints allowed. You can ask for salt or ice. That is about limit of complains. Otherwise you will be labeled as a “threat for security” and dealt with swiftly. If there is a flight marshal on board you are instantly screwed. Under no circumstances you ever say word “terrorism” or “bomb” or “gun” or whatever, even in casual conversation with person seating next to you. I guess everyone saw movie “Anger management” with Adam Sandler. That is what we are talking about. In the air everything is emphasized, wrong way. `Finally arrived` ***Finally arrival!*** Trip is over, airplane is at the gate. I stand up and have very primal wish; I just want to get out. You would think it’s over. Not so fast buster! Two things happen: Often it takes a long time until they open cabin door. Even that jetway is already in place. Like they are looking to roll out red carpet or something. They like you sweating. When they finally open door people start moving out. Some of them not so fast. They stand up, look for jacket, talk to other people, then they search for baggage in overhead bin. Why rush, there are only 100–200 people behind wanting to get out. It takes frustratingly loooong time to deplane. ***At the belt*** If you were lucky to have hand luggage only you can skip this part. Otherwise it is another 25–35 minutes wait to get your bags to magically appear on the belt. Overseas flight warrants about 50–60 minutes. There are hundreds of bags to handle. ***So how long it takes?*** Let’s say trip from Toronto to New York. 45 minutes drive to airport + 2 hours at the airport + 1:30 flight time + 20 minutes to get out of the airplane + 25 minutes to get to the belt and get baggage + 40 minutes drive to downtown. There is also border part either done in Toronto or in USA. We will not count it into the overall time. That’s it! 500 dollars and 6 hours later you are there! Let me just throw in one option. Ride Greyhound bus from Toronto to NYC. It takes 12 hours and 40 minutes. That is at cost of $46.00 only. Soon you will see people you want to see and forget about trip experience. Still there must be a better way. We’ll leave that for part 2.

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Ma and Pa store Vs. mighty Amazon `Ma’ and Pa’ Store front — Photo by Eric Muhr on Unsplash` Do they even have a chance? It has been known fact that newly opened Walmart store kills all small businesses in a few miles range circle around it. Obviously, that applies to the merchants that offer the same or similar kind of merchandise that Walmart has on shelves. For a long time, food stores were “safe” from competing with Walmart but now almost every Walmart has extensive food section so nobody is spared. This way or another, stores around Walmart face a slow death. According to Internet sources it takes anywhere from 6 months to 2 years for businesses like that to close doors forever. ***And then there is Amazon!*** But as we are finding out there are worse things than that. A true behemoth that can spoil everybody’s day in moments is Amazon. So if you thought that Walmart is bad for brick and mortar businesses just watch to see impact of the Amazon on ALL businesses! Jeff Bezos created an online monster and that monster is coming to shopping site near you. That means it impacts everybody, everywhere, at any time. First of all, I must remove my hat to him. He is about 191 Billion times better businessman than me. That is how much that man worths today. He is the richest person in the world and I am … well, nobody. But things change don’t they? Yeah right! In his favor, I may add. He makes 215 Million a day for the last 12 months! 8,961,187.00 per hour. People with bigger calculators than mine figured out those eye-popping amounts. I never held in my hands more than 10 thousand dollars in cash and that guy makes 8.9 Million per hour. More than I could make in 4 lifetimes. Crazy right? Nothing good came out of that admiration. Maybe only will persist. Compared to Amazon we are running a micro business. A speck of dust in the grand scheme of things. And we are not asking for much. Just to survive and sustain what is going on for the last 31 years. ***When you can’t beat them join the enemy!*** Everybody is making money on Amazon, right? So we decided to listen to the common wisdom and did exactly that, sell through Amazon. It didn’t end well. We promptly lost money and got out from Amazon FBA screaming. What happened were a series of small and larger mishaps that killed it for us. We sell smart cards and accessories. As part of “how hard it could be” test, we opened FBA (Fulfilment by Amazon) account with Amazon Canada. After the account was established we shipped a sample of most commonly sold items. 5 of SKUs in sufficient quantity. It was more complicated than it sounds but we went through all the steps. We had to purchase unique bar codes. Pre-package items and label them with proper labels. Each box we sent contained 10 small packages. Two were lost right at the receipt process in FBA warehouse. Never to be seen again. How hard it could be? Open a brown box and count 10 small bags with parts. They were properly packed and labeled by bar code as requested. Still, whoever opened boxes couldn’t complete even that simple task. Setting a proper price for each item was a scientific project requiring many calculations. Price had to be just right. Not too high and not really low. Just a notch above loss. We agreed that we are OK breaking even just to prove a concept. Next time we’ll get some profit going. In 3 months we sold 2 (two!) items at an average total price of about 30 dollars. During that time we have promptly deducted storage, shipping, and monthly fees. After 3 months we pulled remaining stock back and closed FBA account. Our experiment cost was about 400 dollars in loss. It is far cry from what other people who lost thousands. Still, we lost money and learned a valuable lesson. Amazon selling is not for us as it is probably not for 98% of other sellers as well. It is like supersport, or entertainment industry where only top few make all kinds of money and everybody else lingers on the edge of profitability or disappears in obscurity with a bitter taste of losses. `Photo by Mike Petrucci on Unsplash` ***Where did we fail?*** Again, not easy to pinpoint. We searched through our moves and looked at possible mistakes. We had FBA account with free next day delivery. We priced products less than other vendors. Or at least that is what we believed so. We had inventory available in an FBA warehouse. We did not advertise with Amazon. Our impression was that the same product will be listed on the Amazon search page in ascending order according to price. That should take care of product listing being on proper place positioned right. It doesn’t even have to be on top but at least be there on the first page and let the buyer decide. Still, we failed miserably. ***Amazon is running an unfair business*** Bezos created a monster selling machine. Again, that is to his astronomically sized benefits but everybody else is thrown into the shithole. As time was passing by we were glued to FBA admin screen but also read many stories and watched many videos about the dark side of Amazon. For many reasons, Amazon is treating own vendors quite badly. Over months we learned about Amazon unfair practices we didn’t have a clue about. Among many is competing with own sellers. It did not happen to us since we sell something Amazon can’t manufacture, but it happened to many other vendors. How they do it? I am sure that they have the best reporting software money can buy. They also have a room full of analysts who look into those reports. They take notice of bestsellers, being that a sunglasses or battery cell or beach umbrella it doesn’t matter. They then call China and ask for a competitive quote for that kind of product. Sure enough Chinese welcome such inquiries and better themselves with ever lower prices. For them, the Amazon purchasing agent could be their most valuable caller in the world. For example, Tesla uses famous 18650 battery cell in all cars they make. About 7000 of them per car. If it’s good enough for the Elon Musk must be good for the rest of us. People buy those for their projects. In thousands. But wait now there is an Amazon 18650 cell … you guessed it right, for less. Suddenly all vendors that sell similar product fall into the precarious position. They already negotiated their costs with manufacturers. Went through initial orders, problems with shipping and whatnot. They have stock of parts in FBA warehouses. Margins are already razor-thin since they must be listed on the first page of search to start with. And now there is vendor whom they stand little chance of beating. Vendor, WTH, Amazon is now a vendor? What kind of crap is that? Are Is they a selling platform or they are vendors? Can’t be both. Actually, the ugly truth is that Amazon is a vendor when they want to be therefore competing with own vendors who brought them a success in the first place. ***We are feeding a monster*** You are feeding a monster that will eventually destroy us. It is truly very hard and risky. Amazon system is rigged in such a way that it destroys small businesses, not builds them up. Even big businesses have a beef with Amazon. Just yesterday FedEx announced that it will no longer carry packages for Amazon. One has to ask himself why would they do that? Surely not lightly. Business is business but they maybe had a similar dilemma as we do. It is a damned if you do damned if you don’t. I guess little birdie told FedEx that Amazon will compete with them … when? … soon … how soon? … very soon. Keep in mind that Amazon is not a business opportunity like Uber, where every participant has a pretty much same chance to make money as a next driver. Model is such that it forces vendor into razor-thin margins. Amazon acts as a search engine for products. If you are not on the first page you are pretty much nowhere. Irrelevant to the buyer. Bleeding money on every level. Monster is out there to destroy you. How? They don’t have geniuses sitting at PC stations inventing great new products. They don’t spend a dime on R&D. They don’t have to. You are doing it for them! They may just copy it if they chose so. Sales platform like Amazon cannot have an ownership stake with vendors and give them an advantage in the selling process. But they do that as well. `Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash` ***How much is enough?*** You see, Amazon is run by cunning foxes. They thought of everything and enabled every possible venue to squeeze the last cent from the system. Not only that now there are Amazon manufactured and branded products, like batteries, computer parts, bulbs … but they also invested in various vendors that proved to be successful in the first place. So now having a stake in those companies they are getting indirect profit from sales. The single small vendor simply cannot compete with machinery like that. They sink into obscurity slowly or fast, still paying fees while clutching on Amazon with fingernails. ***Ma and Pa fighting back*** So after all that doom and gloom what can brick and mortar or cyberspace store do to fight against mighty Amazon? ***Find niche products or activity*** As life is not hard enough already now business owner must find products that are not being sold by Amazon (yet). Special niche products would fare well in that space. It is easy to check, just type it in Amazon and if it is not there you may have a winner. ***Strike special relationship with manufacturers*** That is if they are not on Amazon already. Many of them are not and they are pissed at Amazon for killing their business as well. I wanted to give you an example of 50 caliber bullet bottle opener made by small manufacturing production in the USA. And what you know, there is a full page of those products on Amazon! So not that, something else :( ***Emphasize your expertise like there is no tomorrow!*** I like this one a lot and honestly, it keeps us busy. There are tons of products that require a certain level of expertise to be used. Let’s say we sell smart cards and if you don’t know what you are doing they are useless. People call in or write an e-mail and ask for advice before buying. Just remember Amazon comes with ZERO knowledge about anything! They advertise millions of products that are either easy to use or self-evident like a t-shirt. You can’t call anyone to get advice which water filter model is most suitable for your house. You must know that already or know whom to call to acquire that knowledge. ***Give good advice*** This one is very similar to one above. Here is an example. Close to home where we live, Stoney Creek, we have a Home Depot (who doesn’t?) nearby. Before moving into the new house we renovated a lot and I had to go to Home Depot and buy parts every day, sometimes 2–3 times a day. We did a lot of reno on plumbing and I go straight to guy in the plumbing section. His name is Steve and he hangs around plumbing and electrical sections. Exactly what I need the most. Far-right corner in the Home Depot. He is giving away a piece of good advice effortlessly. I like him so much! Sometimes there is a crowd around him and I have to wait my turn. He saves me money, time and nerves. I show him a picture of the problem on my cell phone and he walks to the shelf and says like “ … you need this and this and don’t forget to put this before …”. I don’t know how much they pay him but he worths every penny. Because of Steve, I am always back to Home Depot. Otherwise, I could order on Amazon, could I? So try to talk to the customer from the position of knowledge and give a bit of good advice. Don’t forget to say at this end magic words: “… take this part we have right here and you solved your problem …”. Customers will appreciate it and buy a solution to their problems from you. You don’t want them to walk away and search for it on the Internet. `You can not put price on history. Photo by Danica Tanjutco on Unsplash` ***Service business*** You are pretty much safe from Amazon behemoth. You can sell parts that you want to sell and charge for service at the same shot. ***Software business*** About the same. The customer gets a custom solution and is pretty much chained to your supply. Gives you a healthy leverage. Lucky you! ***Give rewards and incentives*** Doesn’t have to be something big but token of appreciation to keep old customers and win new customers. Like percentage discount on repetitive buys or small present, coupon, a gift card, free pop… something. ***Be more flexible than Amazon*** It is very hard to be better than them. It is a 24/7 store, polished to perfection, unlimited resources, fast delivery, easy returns … hard to beat. But not impossible. You can beat them in small things. Have extended working hours. Answer every call that comes in. Amazon customers can’t call anyone. Answer every e-mail, immediately. Amazon doesn’t do that either. Consider investing in on-site chat software. You know, somebody is dying to find out about the product. Why not. You could provide sales information even after regular business hours. ***Sell only real McCoy*** Sell quality products only, backed up by good warranties, made by known brands. If you are selling garbage it will not last long. I am not talking about fly by night companies, but ones that want to be in business forever. The company I work for is in business from 1990. That means something. We sure didn’t survive that long by selling bad products. ***Manufacturing something?*** Hopefully, it is something cool and unique. Possibly complicated enough that can’t be easily copied. Before you had a whole China to worry about, but now Amazon may be lurking from the shady corners as well. You MUST put some serious thoughts in the design of the product to make it very hard to copy or emulate. It doesn’t have to be a full-blown invention that is patentable but if you were genius enough to make something nice and useful you should make an extra effort to protect it against copycats. ***Complaint!*** Amazon probably has a building full of lawyers but that doesn’t mean they are immune against prosecution that has a solid grounds. Here is an example that you didn’t expect. In India, sellers complained to the Government about Amazon running unfair business practices competing with them. Sure enough, Government caught Amazon red-handed and ordered them to remove more than 400000 products from the shelves.  A similar trend is noticeable in Europe as well where the EU is curbing monopolistic and unfair business practices by Amazon. The truth is that even in US legislators are interested to let all businesses grow not only one. Monopolies are not good for anybody. `Photo by Riley McCullogh on Unsplash` ***Write about it on write.cash*** Please do. Share your story on write.cash . As simple or complicated story can be. Amazon pissed into everybody’s boots and all business owners will gladly read your story. I know I will. And will give you a clap for contribution. ***Conclusion*** You will notice that I didn’t mention a word about social media. Two reasons, everybody is already doing it. Secondly, we had several Facebook business sites and Twitter accounts. Do you know what came out of it? Absolutely nothing! We spent a fair amount of money and time building those resources, advertising and still nothing. At least we learned to know when enough is enough. We shut down all that and closed all accounts and profiles. The conclusion was that what we sell is not something that you would go to Facebook to find about. So that’s that. If social media is working for you, all power to you, keep doing it. Here is a bottom line. Amazon wants to own sales of everything. From needle to a locomotive. Very soon healthcare, also soon banking, like mortgages. They want to run courier service bigger and better than UPS and FedEx. There is another very, very scary thought: **Amazon wants to own food sales**. Step by step they’ll own everything. That’s no good. It’s actually troublesome and quite wrong. What do you think?

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Collecting worthless crap? 16 reasons for collecting silver instead! `Lead image: old cameras as a collectible items, photo by Viktor Forgacs on Unsplash` People all around collecting something but is it a good thing? ***Short story first*** A few years ago a family friend passed away at the age of 92. His name was Vladimir K. After some time of mourning his wife and family contacted me asking for help and ideas what to do with Vlado’s collections. I knew about those collections from before because he told me about it a long time ago while in good health. Basically, those people moved to Toronto about 55 years ago. He worked a whole his life as a construction engineer for Ontario Hydro. He had a good position and was well paid. Madam was a chemical engineer and worked at a Toronto university. Also well paid. They weren’t rich but money was never an issue. So quite early they decided to invest money into the stock market. They did and over decades it served them well. But Vlado was passionate about some other things and he split his investments funds into almost 3 equal amounts. We are talking about tens of thousands of then dollars spent. To put things into some perspective, at that time their 4 bedroom house cost was about $12k (I know!?). So what was he buying for next 15–20 years? I rather not say but I have to blurt it out: postage stamps and coins! Thousands of postage stamps neatly aligned up in albums and paper baggies. And also coins of all kinds, not really silver or gold ones but regular editions that people carried in their pockets at the time. That was his thing. Him coming from Eastern Europe it was not a total surprise to me. Those kind of collections were kind of common for the era and place he came from. People collected badges, books, beer coasters and what not. While alive and well we were discussing stocks many times and he told me: “I wish I was buying stocks instead of postage stamps and coins. Simple, no brainer things, like Coca Cola, Johnson & Johnson or General Electric”. He said if he did, they would have been millionaires at the age of retirement. But he didn’t. He told me that he thought that postage stamps and coins will worth increasingly more as time passes by. He was subscribed to magazines and showed me rare stamps that sold for millions. I was nodding and admitting that I don’t really get it. I admitted not getting many things, like art, jewelry expensive paintings, but again that’s me. He was just grinning at me probably thinking “A poor fool”. ***So what happened, in the end?*** His grandchildren tried to sell his collections. Very quickly postage stamps ended up in a dumpster. Nobody wanted them at any rate. Then they took a plastic box full of coins to the biggest coin shop in Toronto. A guy there cherry-picked a handful of coins there were silver and paid the few hundred dollars for those. Again trip to the dumpster and box with rest was gone. Tens of thousands of dollars spent and almost life long effort could be condensed into short advice: Please don’t collect a worthless crap! Those were collections meant to be investments as well. Only kids collect game cards or postcards as a pure hobby for the heck of it. Everybody else collects things to build some kind of future value. Maybe not to get rich but pull solid profit one day out of it. `Plastic cars as a collectible items (?), photo by Alev Takil on Unsplash` People collect all kind of things: beanie babies, baseball hats, baseball balls, glass shots, beer caps, beer coasters, wine bottles, postcards, keychains, and bottles, rocks, cuckoo clocks, cell phones, running shoes, jerseys, sports cards, snow globes, small metal soldiers, crystal clusters, watches, books, cigars, seashells, bars of soap, paperweights, comic books, drinking glasses, sunglasses, coffee mugs, Matchbox cars, Star Trek figures, GI Joe, Barbie dolls … and many, many other things. Again, in my mind, at danger of somebody grabbing me by the throat, I’ll go out on the limb and say that 98% of that is simply a worthless crap! It should not be mixed with large items like classic cars or paintings from a known artist. Collectors buying those have a lot of money to blow and it is more like a business for them rather than a hobby. I wouldn’t have been if there are no expectations to sell it one day for a lot of money. If it is just a hobby then it’s fine. If you are collecting coasters from all beer bars you have ever been. It costs nothing to do it, no big aggravation to do it and worst it can happen is when you are moving your collection will end up in recycling bin. No harm is done. I would be very reluctant to collect even objects that are collectible by design. Like baseball player’s cards. `Valuable collectibles or nicely painted junk? Photo by Vanessa Bucceri on Unsplash` Collecting wrong things creates big financial, space and psychological burden. In the beginning, it’s nothing, just a few pieces of whatever. As collector starts adding pieces amount of money spent goes up creating the illusion of the future value being build up. Space becomes a problem. Cards are easy to store but anything else, even like model cars (Matchbox) start taking space rapidly. Then it goes into boxes, basement, attic, garage … wherever. ***Another example of people collecting wrong things*** On “Pawn Stars” TV show I saw a guy from Las Vegas who was purchasing running shoes for years! Every model that Nike made, in a single size (11" I think). Everybody knows that running shoes are not exactly cheap so it strained his regular life and spending. Obviously soon enough collection became a size burden and he ended up renting warehouse space and buying a whole bunch of steel mesh shelves. He didn’t just stash individual shoe boxes on top of each other but rather spread them around with one shoe in front of the box as a display. “Pawn Stars” guy walked through, heard a price which was if I remember correctly about $30000 — $40000 and laughed it off. He said like: “What a hell I will do with all those shoes? Who will buy them? What are the chances that somebody wants that specific size? It will take me 20 years to sell them all piecemeal.” So he left on a double. His jobs are collectibles but that was ridiculous even in his opinion. He left a collector confused and with recurring billing for warehousing that junk. He never said if collecting running shoes was his bright idea or somebody suggested it but he sure as hell jumped in head first. The fact that he likes a game of basketball and knows all players by name didn’t help him at all. It actually confirmed an old saying: *“Soon fool and his money are parted!”.* ***Collections are hard to collect and even harder to sell*** If you are collecting silk ties you would have probably hundreds of ties in all colors and color patterns. Nobody will buy a complete collection. The money would be in the fact that individual ties could be sold for more money than as a whole collection with a low average price per unit. But who the hell has that kind of time and patience to advertise and sell everything piece by piece? I don’t and 99.99% of people sure do not as well. Breaking up a collection and selling it in pieces certainly kills the general idea of the collection. After selling some of the best pieces the owner will likely end up with the rest as a dead weight. Nobody will buy those pieces and they will inevitably end up in the garbage. Enough ranting, I think you completely understand what I am talking about. ***So what is the solution?*** I wouldn’t be starting this article just to bash collecting crap if I didn’t have a solution in mind. Here is a suggestion: if you want to collect something really good, **collect silver coins**! `Collection of assorted 1 ounce silver coins. From top left to bottom right: US Eagle, Barbados Trident, Australian Kangoroo, UK Britannia, Canada Maple Leaf, Cayman Marlin, South Africa Krugerrand` ***Before we start*** First of all, let’s explain one simple difference between coins and rounds. The same rule applies to gold and silver ones. Besides pure weight and purity coin will have embossed value in currency and round will not. So for example, 1-ounce silver coin face will say something like $10 or 10 Peso while round will not say that. For the collector that fact means really nothing much. **Weight and pureness are really all that matters**. That will be explained more below. Coins are the common name for those pieces so we’ll call everything coins but again same applies to rounds. How is collecting silver coins great in 16 points or less? ***Why silver and not gold coins?*** By all means, go for gold however be aware that concentration of value is about 80 times higher. Expect to pay about $1300 for a single gold coin while silver coin may cost around $16 only. Oooops! That was in time of initial writing. Today same coin costs more than $1830 (official spot price of 1 oz. of gold) and in reality you can't find it for less than $1900! `Beautiful 1 oz. US Gold Eagle` ***2. Silver coins are beautiful!*** Beautiful is an understatement. It is a work of true art. A special artists work on the creation of silver coins. Just look at a design. It is a small picture of animal, or symbol, or person or state coat of arms embedded forever in a silver coin. 2 sides of it. 2 pieces of art to admire too. `Nice Australian 1 oz. Silver Kangoroo` ***3. Silver coin feels good*** Buy one 1 ounce coin. Hold it in your palm. Does that feel good or what? It feels great! It feels substantial. It feels valuable. Nobody needs to explain to you that. **Silver IS valuable**. How plastic toy feels in hand or collectible card? Right, like nothing or next to nothing it actually is. ***4. Silver coins have numismatic value*** While there is nothing wrong in collecting silver bars collector generally opt for coins. Bars are pretty much flat, smooth chunks of metal with some insignia. Coins have an intricate art embossed in. 2 sides of the coin are physically small but art minted there may be astonishing. `Beautiful Cayman Islands 1 oz. Silver Marlin` At the moment of this writing spot price of 1 ounce of silver is $14.60. Yeah ritht! It is actually about $28.00. Thanks for that numismatic value added to the base intrinsic (weight) value coins fetch more. A quick glance at offerings produced pricing ranging from $32 to $100 for single 1 oz. silver coin. ***5. Coins have intrinsic value*** Take a look at sports player cards or plastic action figure or something in that line. Every man and his dog will realize that those things do not have any value. How much does it cost to print a small piece of thin cardboard? It is mere cents! Well, an oiled printing press in China can make probably a million cards a day and they will sell to tens of thousands of kids or adult kids for real money. `Gorgeous Barbados 1 oz. Silver Trident` It is self-evident that the value of those objects is very, very subjective and it is inflated beyond any reasonable proportions. Opposite to that the silver coin has a weight of precious metal as a base value. That value can **never** diminish. It is always there. True value can easily be checked by looking at precious metals spot price that is usually expressed as a currency value per 1 ounce. It represents the minimum price your pieces can fetch if sold. ***6. Collecting silver coins makes a collection and investment*** Collecting anything else may be like throwing shit at the barn door and see if it will stick. While collecting silver coins is a guaranteed investment. Never forget that silver was an everyday method of payment representing perfect money. `Beautiful South African 1 oz. Silver Krugerrand` ***7. Bits and pieces still have the same value as a full piece*** This comes from intrinsic value. If you crush or cut your other collectible piece you will immediately render it worthless. Trip to garbage can is the only recourse of action you can do. For example, cutting collectible baseball bat into 2–3 pieces makes it good for firewood only. Nobody in the right mind would go and cut silver coin in half or little chunks. Still, if you did it you would ruin the appearance of the coin, but the value of little chunks would still be **fully preserved**! Silver is a basic earth element. It is a precious metal and value of silver is in every, even the smallest bit. Even silver dust is valuable. It is not uncommon to melt silver and shape it into something else. Jewelers do that every day. They buy scrap gold and silver, melt it and make rings, bracelets or whatever will sell. `Austrian 1 oz. Silver Philharmonic coin looking great` ***8. I have a piece of "news" for you: coins are indestructible!*** Not only paper cards could worth today $5 and tomorrow nothing they can also be burned into the crisp. Matchbox car can be crushed. China tea cup shuttered. Almost all collectibles must be cared for, stored in a special way. A worn edge, a barely visible crease ruins the value of a collectible item. Just watch “Pawn Stars” and you will learn quickly how collectibles are appraised. A scratch can easily disqualify it and get your expensive item totally rejected. Many collectibles simply can’t survive the test of time. **The silver coin is** **literally indestructible**! Gold the same thing! You think I am full of it? `Hundreds of kilos of the silver bars recovered from the bottom of the sea — Key West` Remember Spanish ships found around Key West with many silver and gold pieces spread over the sea floor? I am happy to report that all that value was sitting on the sea bed for 3–4 hundred years. It was recovered and didn’t lose any of the initial luster! Gold and silver don’t rust! They are not called precious metals for nothing. `Absolutely beautiful pot made of 999 pure gold after 400 years sitting in the sea mud — Key West` A whole Titanic weighing 52310 tonnes will completely disintegrate. Half of it is already gone in 100 years, but gold and silver in its vaults will stay intact. Actually all those coins and bars worth more because of historic value. I dare you to show me any other collectible that could worth anything after 300 years under the sea. `This fine officer protecting treasures above. Look closely at a front wheel bender on his Harley, says “Protecting Paradise”, how appropriate! — Key West` ***9. You probably didn’t know about this one: silver coins have antibacterial properties*** Yes, you heard it right. Silver has verified medicinal properties. It kills bacteria on contact. Heard of colloidal silver? Check it out, may surprise you. Remember scare when parents learned that children were sucking on toy cars and what not made in China. Not a big deal ... until they found out that the paint used was a lead-based! Collecting and handling little toys painted with harmful chemicals is the last thing you want to do. On the other hand, sucking on your collection of silver teaspoons is not only totally harmless but may solve your bad throat ache. I bet you didn't know this. During medieval times, mid last Millennium European countries were decimated by plague. Least amount of deaths where between nobility and doctors were scratching their heads for long time to explain why. Finally key reason was found in **silver**. Rich people where eating and drinking using silverware. Silver is the only metal that kills bacteria. There you have it. Use silver spoons. ***10. Silver coins are perfect for meaningful education*** Even a very young collector will get interested to learn more about that particular coin. What will kid learn from glass snowball, or hockey pack or Star Trek plastic space ship? Absolutely nothing. Waste of money, time and effort. On the other hand with silver coin child can learn about the value of silver. Origins of payments and how it was used as money throughout thousands of years. Who created that particular coin? Which country? What does it represent? What is the value of it? Are there more coins from the same mint? How does silver get to be? Why there are whole countries that hoard precious metals? `Congo’s 1 oz. Silverback gorilla coin` And many more useful things. A child will learn to recognize and appreciate true value. ***11. It is easy to start collecting silver coins*** It sure is. Price is still very low right now. In a range of $30 dollars for the 1-ounce coin. Sure there are more expensive pieces, like limited editions that cost more. It is up to you to decide what to take. Start with a single coin. I guarantee you will like it! You will want more. From different countries, various mints. And buying multiples of the same thing is another advantage of collecting silver coins. With every other collection every piece must be different, but from the same kind. Here, not so much. In essence, value is always the same and overall value of the individual pieces just adds value to the collection. ***12. There is no tax!*** When you buy any collectibles, regardless if it is a printed cardboard or baseball ball there is always tax to pay. On $1000 dollars spent on something like that, a collector in Canada would pay another $130.00 (13%) in tax. In Florida, it would be like 7% but nevertheless, there is always a tax. Tax means money wasted! Increases a cost bottom line. You will be happy to know that in the USA and Canada there is no tax on investment-grade silver or gold bullion! Investment grade is 999 or 9999 fine silver or gold. More money left in the pocket to buy real McCoy, right? ***13. Your collection of silver coins will live forever!*** Not only regular collectibles are just a matter of trend that lasts for a limited time but they will also wear out and become worthless during the time. It is like a short-lived fashion. Did you ever inherit let’s say a collection of coffee mugs or GI Joe figures? No? I thought so. On the other hand, silver coins are forever! Figuratively and literally. If not sold they can be inherited over many generations. Actually, there is no time limit for that. In 300 or 800 years it will still be the absolutely the same thing. Same appearance, same weight. Likely will worth an astronomical amount. It will easily outlive everything else one may collect. It is truly forever collectible that will never run out of fashion. `Beautiful UK’s 1 oz. Silver Britannia` ***14. Silver coins are the perfect present*** Next time when giving a present instead of giving something of dubious practical value try silver coins. A person who gets it will be intrigued and compelled to find out more. Adults will likely immediately understand the value and store present with other valuables. A few words about it will go a long way. 9 out of 10 recipients will appreciate such present and want more. ***15. Silver coins represent universal value*** You will agree that baseball hat or comic book here and in the foreign country are perceived like night and day. Even two persons sitting side by side will have an interest or no interest at all in value that collectible may represent. It is very, very subjective. In simple words, the same object is seen appreciated differently in America, Brazil, Congo, Japan, China, Island, Indonesia, Hungary … well, you got the point, right? If you believe that your collection of hockey packs is great value person in Indonesia would consider it as a utter crap. You can see where I am going with this. Silver coin will be appreciated and accepted as value *ANYWHERE*. How would you explain to somebody in India about the value of Barbie and Ken? With silver, you don’t need to explain anything to anybody. The chances are they will know more about it than you do. ***16. When SHTF*** In SHTF situations silver coin collection may save your bacon. Not only yours but a whole family existence. There are articles that say more about that unpleasant situation but rest assured when inflation hits and hyperinflation follows your paper dollars will turn into worthless shit. Merchants will keep boosting prices for everyday goods until they stop. Trust in paper money will disappear like water in the desert. Only value left standing will be the very same as for last 4–5 thousand years, gold and silver. Coin paid $19 dollars year ago will worth a large amount. You will be able to buy food, gas, shoes or maybe whole properties with it. `Things of past — read in-scripts on top and bottom` And forget about buying silver and gold at **that** time. There won’t be any to buy. Precious metals dealers will have their shelves cleaned out. Everybody will want silver or gold but it will be late. ***Conclusion*** If after reading this 16 points why to collect silver didn’t convince you just continue with whatever you are doing. Maybe beanie babies or shot glasses you have on the shelf will look even more appealing. OR You could open Internet browser and order your very first silver coin. Something beautiful like this: `Beautiful Congo 1oz Silverback gorilla coin, back side` I hope you enjoyed the article. If you decided to collect silver you **will** thank me later.

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Space exploration in 12 easy steps or less These days we live in exciting times. New dawns of space exploration are upon us. Nobody cares about Moon any more and all eyes are turned towards Mars. Moon is close by but boring and there is nothing there. We are all captured by Mars. It is not like landscape is much nicer there. No lakes, no lush green surfaces, zero animals. A moreless barren planet with bacteria for life at best. Red in color though. Still, it is certain that in the next 4–5 years people will land there. It won’t be NASA, Russians or Chinese. NASA is mandated to do it by 2033. I am pretty sure that Elon Musk or his crew will be first people walking on Mars. I am convinced that they will beat NASA pants down and by 2033 will already have something like Tesla Mars X vehicle assembling line there. According to announcements from Musk’s camp, it won’t be just a few people but more like 16–24 members in the crew. Supposedly 200000 people from all over the world already signed up as candidates. So far 100 were chosen. By any rate, there is no lack of interest to staff the rocket ship with ready and willing explorers. ***It will be Elon Musk’s show*** What Musk decides to make that is what he does! The man like that gets born every 100 years and more. On the other hand I know almost nothing about space. I am just simpleton from Stoney Creek, Canada but have few pointers to give to Musk the Genius. We all want him to succeed and never in the history of mankind were so many stakes put on the shoulders of such a small group of people so I decided to pitch in. ***Proper crew selection is critical for success!*** I cannot emphasize enough how important is proper selection of crew. Well, everybody knows that. My recommendations would be not to load space ship full of scientists, biologists or experts of all kinds. When did such highly trained people did anything useful, let alone flew ship to another planet? I suggest that the crew should be staffed by simple people with practical skills. The kind of people that will make things happen. Use their own hands and skills that will be in demand on such mission. Did some science doctor discover America? No, it was a sailor, Christopher Columbus. Was West explored by chemists, technologists, engineers? Eeeee, wrong. There were cowboys, blacksmiths, farmers, carpenters. Are rockets made by engineers? No way. Engineers are useless. They have 2 left hands, sit a whole day at meetings, drink a lot of coffee and talk themselves important. Rockets are made by sheet metal workers, welders, trade specialists. Here are my recommendations: ***1. Get steam under control*** First and foremost, watch your steam! By now every man and his dog know that all spaceships run heavily on steam. People are misled to thinking that rockets need rocket fuel and plasma burners or nuclear energy to move through space. Nothing is further from the truth. Aren’t you people paying close attention because I sure do?! Ever since Alien, Star Wars, Star Trek and every other serious space ship movie we can see that almost every scene of the interior shows clouds of the hissing steam powering the ship. And being wasted, thinks I. Now that’s clearly no, no. That kind of behavior has to stop. A trip to Mars will take place over 7 months. They ain’t get there even in 10 years losing steam foolishly like that. So please engineers, watch what you are doing when creating a space ship machinery. The problem of steam naturally leads to the selection of stokers. Since it will be 24/7 job 3 stokers would be better. I know, boiler room operation could be automated but I wouldn’t trust electronics that far. There are places where man is not replaceable and this is that place. I would also introduce a crucial change to ensure utmost smooth operations. I would actually keep the same tradition like on the old British navy and get stokers a well measured portion of rum every day. I am not a drinker but they say that Appleton rum from Jamaica is the best rum money can buy. So I trust Elon to have well-stocked storage of Jamaican rum on board. ***2. The most important crew member is a plumber*** Secondly, the same scenes and interiors are showing a lot of plumbing problems. You would think that advanced space ships technology would provide a desert dry interiors. However you could see yourself piping dripping all over the place, wet surfaces everywhere, slippery, promoting mold and possible accidents at work. Those space ships look more like submarines that leak water everywhere. That leads us to the selection of maybe the most important person after ship commander, a plumber. Right on! A good plumber with tool box full of seals and caulking gun and big freaking pliers will make a rocket squeaky dry. I can see him walking around with headsets in his ears and toolbox with a big pipe wrench fixing leaks. ***3. Issue with lighting*** Is it just me or every space ship that comes along has flickering fluorescent tube lights? The funny part is that some of the spacecraft are presented as 400 or 1000 years in the future and still don’t have working lights. I mean what a hell? So space travel, checked! Moving at speed of light, checked! Space ship miles long, checked! Working lights so you can see where you are freaking going, no can’t do! If I was commander I would hire an electrician and get him to repair fucking flickering lights all day long. Wait, there are no days in space, so whole shift long. If you think this is foolish just read on and you will see how important details like that are! ***4. Frozen meat operator*** Here we come to a very important recommendation. It probably won’t apply for a trip to Mars but to anywhere else sure will. Since our propulsion still has a lot to desire for all travels will be a quite long. As nicely shown in “Passengers” crew will be frozen in individual fridges and woken up when the spaceship is about to arrive at destination. There is nothing to it, even Ripley did it in the end of the first “Alien”. She went to sleep for a few hundred years together with ship’s cat. It is evident that there must be a specialist on board for cryogenic life. Somebody with hands-on experience with refrigeration. I can’t think of nobody better than some guy from Tyson Foods meat packers or similar place (there are plenty to choose from) working in the frozen meat storage facility. Right? For him it is easy peasy lemon squeeze thing to do. Here you can’t go wrong and let crew lives depend on some obscure biologist with no experience. I am happy to report that there are a plenty of frozen meat operators available around so mission control won't waste time with that. ***5. Travel in style*** This one is also very important. Traveling in comfort and style will make the crew happy and enthusiastic about the mission. Leather seating, large screen 4k TVs, hot water showers, FaceTime to loved ones … and yes, live feed to **read.cash** is a must. I trust Elon to make accommodations better than Tesla S. He will get creative here I am sure. It is a really long ride, so if you really want to pamper the crew couple of hookers could be thrown into the package for the male crew members. That would solve the problem of long, lonely nights and kill boredom for good. I am sure that some kind of corporate rates could be worked out so everybody walks away with the money’s worth. For ladies in the crew, it could be a chip and dale dancer with good interpersonal skills. Same deal and chance of adventure of the lifetime. ***6. Pull your shit together!*** You could probably hear that in army, at work or at though jobs. It is unpleasant and a bit offensive to be on receiving end of such directive. On Mars, however, it shall be a completely different story. “Pull your shit together!” will mean that you are going to sow potatoes. On Earth, it’s called farming and on Mars that will be survival on the highest level. Yes, there will be a handling shit, a lot of it, but I trust there will be a supply of rubber gloves handy. Just remember Matt Damon as Mark Watney in “Martian”, there you have it. If he could do it you can as well. Potatoes mean food, mashed potatoes, fries or whatever menu calls for. I bet you dollars to donuts that fries will never taste sweeter. ***7. Duct tape*** Talking about “Martian” we got next super important clue right there: you can not have too many rolls of duct tape! Home Depot or Lowes will not be around a corner … yet. It is yet to be seen who will setup their store first. Whoever it is going to be I predict bright future and killer profits. Building something on Mars will probably start from the second day and never stop. Repairing washroom leak, run to Home Depot. Building hen house, Home Depot. Need some tools, Lowes. Need 2 by 4, Lowes. Drywall, Home Depot. You got the picture. Also, if builders are like me they will be at the store a 3 times a day. Whatever I repair I break 2 other things so have to go 3 times to the Home Depot. At least. Going back to original thought, space travelers must load on duct tape. They are essential repair tool. Don’t leave a home planet without it! ***8. Selection of weapons*** Space is a peaceful place … most of the time. But here and there our crew will run into space pirates, predators, aliens, and other cosmos scumbags. Leaving well-stuffed armory at home is an uneasy thought for every man in the crew. Female crew members may feel differently about this, but chances are that shoot first and ask questions later rule shall apply. So some well-chosen fighting hardware is desirable. Here my vote is split between 2 choices. First one would be a barker. A Colt 1911, 0.45 caliber. It is a 100+ year-old handgun and still going strong. I know that Dirty Harry would think differently but it seems to me that Colt 1911 will never go out of style. It is combination of stopping power, beautiful design, reliability and it gets job done so you can’t go wrong with that piece. On the second thought, my money is actually on longswords. Just ask Jon Snow or Sandor Clegane from “Game of Thrones”. They would know a thing or two about it. It is a simple, sharp and idiotproof weapon. Kind of when properly swung produces flying heads or arms. Let’s face it. Laser gun ain’t kill no aliens. A longsword will. Especially in close quarters. Sigourney Weaver knows. She had to endure monsters over several occasions and it wasn’t easy. However, there was nothing that longsword could not slice into pieces. And don’t think that aliens don’t know that. Remember “Predator”? His favorite weapon was an expandable lance. When needed, a cutlass like blades would protrude from that lance and he would slice through people, aliens, and things. So longsword it is. Somebody, please take care of that. And by the way. A crew has to have the smallest and weakest woman they can find. At least one. That’s the one who kills the alien in the end, not the big hunks. That concept is proven in about every Sci-Fi movie we watched. So swim with a stream and not against it. Get small and weak women on the crew list pronto! That leads us to the next issue … ***9. Watch your 6!*** Space ships are built with long corridors, many turns, doors, and passageways. Sooner or later when walking through, there will be a monster creeping from behind. That is like an inevitable thing to happen. So my advice is loud and clear: watch your 6! Now you see how important were previous selections of a good plumber and electrician! All monsters start their life as small ugly worms or leach like slimy creatures. They thrive in the wet and low light environment. If go unchecked they grow into big and troublesome forms. Maybe unstoppable monsters. Then they search for victims trying to creep up from behind. Almost sure than not lights in that place will flicker so crew member will see a shit. Again a whole situation could be prevented from the beginning so you don’t get jumped in some dark, wet corner of the ship. I am thinking, with good old American ingenuity a glasses with small rear view mirrors could be developed. So a person walking could constantly check his back for dangers lurking from behind. Actually, I saw similar rear view mirrors on bicycle helmets so there you go. Pennies to pay and prevents crew being wiped out one by one. ***10. A medic*** Selection of medic is also absolutely critical for mission success. Mission managers could be easily tempted into taking 2–3 doctors on board to care about the crew health issues. I wouldn’t do that. Doctors are good only when they have a whole hospital and supporting teams behind them. Otherwise, they are pretty much useless. Can’t say: “Jane, hand me a biceps” because nurse he is usually banging is not there to jump on every request. So forget doctors, they would be a dead weight and we can't allow that. No sir. I would actually take US Marine corpsman, a sergeant like Desmond Doos from “Hacksaw Ridge”. A guy who will run into thick and thin and not ask for special privileges first. Practically that would be any situation, with a medical bag on his shoulder and patch up wounded crew member. It doesn’t matter if laser beams are slicing air or hot lead is flying around you could count on medic coming to the rescue. He doesn’t need 3 meetings, papers signed, a report from the anesthesiologist, biochemist’s lab results or X-Rays. No sir, corpsmen like that and his bag is a whole nine yards as far as healthcare is concerned. On the way to Mars and there my money is on efficiency, practical knowledge and hands-on experience tending crew in need. Comes hell or high water I am for USMC medic. ***11. Autopilot*** Here again, my money is on Elon Musk. He created an autopilot for Tesla cars that can drive the car safely in Los Angeles kind of chaotic traffic. If it works there it will work in space where there are no nearby cars or trucks to wreck your ship. Here and there will be meteorite or space debris to avoid and I am sure Tesla kind of autopilot will know how to handle that. So as soon as leaving Earth proximity they will just press a button and relax. After that, it will be smooth sailing. Navigation and autopilot will find the way to Mars and relieve people from the burden of steering the ship. There are enough cameras and sensors on Tesla cars already so getting to Mars is going to be a piece of cake and avoid trouble on the way. ***12. Finding water immediately after landing*** I daresay that after landing the first course of business should be finding a water. The crew will surely be sick and tired drinking own pee for over 7 months. Yes people, even big sacrifices have their limits, right? A good supply of shovels and picks shall be present on space ship because crew will want to dig for water next day after landing. You may ask yourself a question "Where to dig?". In medieval times water seeking begun with looking for an underground water by dowsing-rod. There you have it! Why fix what ain't broken? That simple looking but still sophisticated instrument will undoubtedly find water pronto. I know, some mislead people may say that NASA should deploy a robot - explorer that is specialized in finding water on Mars. That is a multi billion dollar piece of machinery we are talking about. On other hand carefully cut piece of branch fork will solve that dilemma. When found frozen or liquid water shall be run through reverse osmosis filters to produce drinking water. I bet you dollars to donuts that it will be of better quality than municipal water we drink from the tap. And please be responsible and protect that pile of red rocks. No plastic water bottles, and straws please. We can't risk that future animals get choked on that shit. Every bird and animal life matters. There you have it. Following those rules and guidelines trip and exploration of Mars will be an astounding success. If somebody is a personal friend of Elon Musk please forward this article’s link to him. Man is a pure genius but he will surely appreciate good advice and fresh perspective view at things.