Poor people are cheap with their money.

Rich people are cheap with their TIME.

Read those two sentences again. (It’s okay. I’ll wait.)

‘Cause until you get that… and start living accordingly? You’ll continue to hold yourself back.

It’s funny.

Everyone’s heard the cliche: “Time is your most valuable asset.”

But nobody’s acting like it.

Instead, they’re:

> Watching three hours of Netflix a night.

> Reading celebrity gossip blogs.

> Refreshing Facebook 293 times a day.

> Worried about what Kylie just shared on Instagram.

> Monkeying around with Snapchat selfie filters.

> Doing research for their f*cking fantasy league.

> Gossiping.

> Clipping coupons.

> Driving 45-minutes out of the way to take advantage of that sale.

> Booking flights with long layovers just to save $125.

> Camping out in front of the Apple store to get the latest iPhone.

> Standing in line for an hour to get a free sample of pulled pork at the new barbecue joint.

> Sitting in traffic 90-minutes a day to get to and from some soul-sucking job.

> Rotting away in a cubicle eight hours a day… to make someone else rich.

> Going out for beers with Bob, then listening to Bob bitch about traffic and his soul-sucking job.

> Giving in to conspicuous consumption.

> Pursuing side hustles that are too competitive.

> Building businesses that pay too little, too slow… that are short-lived… and can’t scale.

> And so on and so forth.

 

You picking up what I’m putting down?

See how pathetic this looks on paper?

The rich know better. (That’s why they’re rich.)

They don’t whore out their time.

They understand: every hour counts.

So, instead of pissing precious minutes down their leg?

They’re busy building business systems that create cash flow.

(Large, controllable, scalable income streams… where the math is working for, and not against them.)

Then, instead of blowing it on material goods, they invest it… to create more income that’s entirely passive.

Toys come later, sure, but only AFTER freedom is secured.

Is this starting to make sense?

Rich people go left when poor people go right:

They’d never spend time pinching pennies; they’d rather spend money to buy back more time.

But the majority will never truly appreciate this. Which is why they’ll stay shackled to the status quo for the rest of their lives.

And continue to say things like:

“Why pay for coaching when I could find all the information for free online?”

Free? Really? So your time is worth nothing?

You’re gonna comb through billions of pages and magically piece together a process that works?

How long’s that gonna take?

How many dead-ends are you gonna go down?

How many mistakes are you gonna make?

How many YEARS might that set you back?

I’ll say it again:

Poor people are cheap with their money.

Rich people are cheap with their TIME.

This is why Jess and I continuously buy books, courses, mentoring and masterminds. We invest in shortcuts.

We get it. It costs way too much time not to.

Instead of drowning in free information, we’d rather pay someone… who already has what we want… to tell us what e can IGNORE.

Instead of cutting out coupons to save $25, we fire up ad campaigns that make us $2,500/mo.

Instead of reading about the Kardashians, we pick up a book.

Instead of long lines, rush hour traffic and unnecessary layovers, we choose to make marketing… like this… that’ll put on overalls and “shovel shit” for us, day in and day out, for years to come.

And no, we’re not perfect.

We can’t wait for the next episode of Silicon Valley. And we like material things just as much as the next person.

But we’re aware.

And we’re making fewer and fewer mistakes.

We’re getting cheaper with our time and smarter with our money.

As a result, we’ve given freedom a high-five and we’re well on our way to wealth, about 50 years ahead of schedule.

Now…

This may not be for you.

But this message is.

If you wanna live a good-ass life while you’re still young enough to enjoy it?

F*cking cherish every minute.

‘Cause sooner or later you will run out.

Invest them wisely,

What do you think after you come back from a party and you close the door?

What do you feel when there is nothing that needs to be done? Can you accept the nothing?

What is there after everything is done?

This doesn’t mean its bad to be gay; it does mean if you think you might be gay, then you really are.

Think back to your last interview, date, or business introduction. Were there any emergencies? Any crisis? Any threats to the well-being of you or anyone around you? Any opportunity for the other person to behave totally freely?

Bet the answer is “None of the Above.”

True colors come out when every path is a valid path and no judgements are expected. When the game is played for keeps. When you can see the end of the tit-for-tat game.

17 years ago I started playing the first real MMORPG out there – Ultima Online. Back then it made perfect sense that as a requirement to join some guilds/player cooperatives you were taken on a couple of “trial hunts” out in the wilderness or dungeons of the game. If you’re going to trust someone with your alter-ego-life, then you might want to put them in situations where you depend on them slowly. If the person turns out the be incompatible, your losses are smaller. It just makes sense.

Invariably during one of these “trial hunts” everything would turn ugly; this was never on purpose, just the nature of things. The monsters would overwhelm the group, or a rival group would show up and start a war. That’s when you got to see the real people you were dealing with. Did they run and hide? Did they steal from fallen comrades? Were they ninja-looting? Did they not follow instructions and cause chaos? Did they assist? How did they assist? Did they organize a rescue? How did they handle loss? How did they handle their defeat and others defeats? What were they most worried about? How did they recover? Did they enjoy the game or the final outcome? How did they measure their own actions? What did they think of others?

All these questions were easily answered after everything had gone to shit and back. Most potential “responses” to these situations were valid and acceptable – and a few were not. The keys were freedom of action and the knowledge that the game was for keeps – If they lost stuff, they lost stuff, if they were attacked they could die, if they stole something they would get to keep it. All actions were valid, but some were better choices.

You could spend six hours talking to a person in the game, or 20 minutes in a crisis situation – and the crisis would give you a more accurate readout every single time.

I don’t think we do enough of this in our daily lives. Of course we don’t live in a fantasy land, or in constant danger. Still we don’t really put anyone under any sort of stress to see how they perform. And while the military does this as routine, the goals are very different – I am not solidifying and testing conditioned responses against a set that I expect. I expect nothing – I want to see the true self of a person. I want to let them tell me who they really are.

I wish I could come up with a way to test people in the way that true emergencies test you.

I can imagine a handful of ways to test people off the top of my head. Imagine being at a job interview and then then being told some xyz emergency and they needed you. Or going on a date and leave your wallet on the table when you go to the restroom. I wonder how many more methods we could come up with.

For now you might as well flip a coin.

“The inter-company merger was motivated by a desire to provide a deeper level of services to our clients by leveraging operational efficiencies across our organization.”

How many times did I have to read and write this drivel? I thank my lucky stars every night I don’t anymore. For those not versed in Corporatese, that sentence means they merged two departments from different companies into one and saved some money by reducing the amount of people they needed, and they are going to let people in the larger company deal with the boring stuff like accounting and HR.

On one hand you can’t run a company without ‘straight talk’ – talking directly and openly about things. On the other hand you have to treat the general public like idiots and spew out this shit to make it seem like you’ve successfully executed the Picard Maneuver and destroyed the Borg while having tea that morning.

Real, and sad.

Why do people ask me this? I don’t get it. I do online marketing because its fun. I love it. Why would I ever stop?

I stopped doing what I was doing at IBM because it sucked the soul out of me. If you had asked me when I was going to retire back then, I would have answered “I can’t afford to retire, as much as I would want to quit right now.” Yet back then nobody asked me when I was planning to retire – Why didn’t anyone ask me?

Now that things are different and I really like what I’m doing…  Why the question? Pretty ironic.

I failed there in two big ways:

1 – The marketing. I only tried to market this on Craigslist. I did not stop to think about who my audience was either: Teenage/Young males – not the most affluent bunch.

2 – We were too early to the market. The “seedbox” idea (I was calling it a “NegBox”) isn’t the first venture where I anticipated the market need accurately, but a few years too early.

The lessons I took home here were straightforward: Evolve things instead of trying to revolutionize them, and focus on the sales and marketing above all.

The last question was the best one:

Q: “If you had to describe VWO to a friend, how you would do that?“

A: “Dear friend, Visual Website Optimizer is the platform that wants me to test every single combination of factors instead of providing fractional factorial testing. While they could use simple genetic algorithms to help me evolve pages, they use inefficient math that takes boatloads of clicks to come to any conclusion at all; unfortunately they don’t have a lot of competition so you’re stuck with them.”

In pacts with mere mortals you have to work your ass off for the rewards – the work itself being the payment.

This is all about delaying gratification.

Needless to say, trying to cheat reality has pretty bad consequences every single time.

Can you pass on temptations?

I never wanted to get a tattoo because it felt too “permanent” – what if I change my mind next week? Then as time wore on I realized the amount of regret possible was shrinking. If I make it to 80, I’ll probably be covered in them. Nothing to lose. I’m not sure there is anything to gain either.

I often wonder why senior citizens are not wildly out of control. What is there to lose? Can’t they see the end of the road? The closer the end is, the less there is to lose.

The US is the only country that calls “Social Security” the right term “Social Security” – other countries call it by terms related to retirement or social assistance. The US term is the right one – Social Security keeps those in dire need from breaking bad and even assembling into a revolution; Social security keeps me from getting mugged when I go out. If you didn’t pay social security, hungry people will come out to mug you for food – hunger is a powerful force. Hunger taps directly into the most basic instinct of all: Survival. There are 3,095,693,981 base pairs inside every human that scream they want to survive.

When I was 17, everything was possible. Literally, everything. I had to choose. Every year I left behind doors I didn’t open. Doors I didn’t chose. Lives I didn’t live. Deaths I didn’t die. Girls I didn’t date. Things I didn’t do. Maybe that’s why I’m so fascinated by the movie Mr. Nobody – It has been over two years since I saw that movie and I still remember it daily. You mind tricks you into believing some of those choices are still available to you. You THINK the possibility is there. Your mind makes up stories of how you can somehow magically cheat the universe and get away with it all “if you really wanted” – You could quit smoking “if you really wanted” and meanwhile you won’t get cancer so you can wait, you could finish college “if you really wanted” and meanwhile your job doesn’t suck so bad.

I asked around why don’t poor seniors or people with terminal illnesses buy AK-47s and storm our banks and cause all sort of mayhem. Found a couple of explanations – Mostly about being unable to recover from a failed gamble. Somehow this isn’t convincing. Personally I have gotten more aggressive with time. One day I will understand… Or get an AK-47.

Here’s the song:

Coney Island

I’ve tried Shazam and two more ID services and so far nothing. This isn’t some indie band playing live – this sounds well produced in a studio.

The song reminds me of Mad Men… Even the years mentioned in the song are close the the timeline of Mad Men.

http://www.bannersnack.com/

http://bannernow.com/

http://banner.fotor.com/

I’ve since gone back and forth all these stages – several times. What I’ve found amazing is how well written this is – it really reflects what happens!

What I did back in 2010 was reformat the post into a single letter-sized sheet – I printed it out and to this day keep it on my desk.

Here is the Word DOC version I created out of Mr. Green and Adam’s post: Affiliate Marketing Stages

Enjoy and thank Mr. Green and Adam for this!

I used to work at IBM.

The biggest group fired was 222 people in Software Group Marketing.

I used to work in Software Group Marketing.

They like to call it “workforce rebalancing” and internally “resource action”, and the market likes to call it “Laid off”. In the end, its “Firing” without a cause.

Its not the first time they do it and it certainly won’t be the last. It happens pretty regularly at IBM, though usually its smaller numbers.

20 Days ago I talked to a friend at IBM. She used to work on projects with me -elbow to elbow- She has two Masters degrees: An MBA from a west-coast university, an MIS degree from the University of Texas, and a bachelors from a foreign university. She speaks fluent English and Chinese. She is 10 years younger than me. She puts 110% into her work. She never-ever-ever drops the ball. She wins awards all the time – she is good and holds my admiration. Every time she was in a project, I knew it would get done. She was going places – and now she was being fired.

30 Days ago, they told these 3000+ people they were being fired effective today July 12 2013 – They used to give people more notice than 30 days – What didn’t change is that they told them they could stay at IBM if they found an open position.

That was a lie.

Every time, they lie.

The internal job database has thousands (yes, thousands) of openings at any given time. When a round of mass firings like this happens, the positions remain open – and people can still get hired on. Just not if you’re one of those selected for the firing. If you’re on the “hit list” managers with open positions cannot hire you. Sounds cynical? It is.

90 Days ago the profits and earnings report didn’t produce the right numbers. So they allocated enough money to get rid of 5,000 to 8,000 people worldwide.

180 Days ago I told IBM I wasn’t going to work there anymore for the foreseeable future, signed my resignation, returned my laptops and sent a warm thank you e-mail to all my friends of 18 years there.

If I worked with you at IBM regularly at any point in the past 18 years, and you didn’t get a thank-you e-mail from me via Lotus Notes (don’t laugh) back in February, its because I really think you’re an asshole.

I went thru all my emails – There were a lot of great people I wanted to thank.

275 Days ago I got my last paycheck from IBM and went into an unpaid leave of absence.

365 days ago I told IBM I didn’t want to do what they wanted me to do. I literally said “I feel like I don’t want to do this anymore” in a conversation that would be right at home in the movie Office Space. I just didn’t want to do yet one more PowerPoint presentation, attend yet another soul-sucking conference call where nobody was listening and pretend like I gave a damn. I didn’t give a damn anymore. My boss there is a god guy – and he concluded I was going nuts, so he gave me a time-out… A paid leave of absence for 90 days or so. He called me often to check on me – And every time I must have sounded more and more “gone.”

Before that, I was a prisoner. Working hard to keep my cell.

A prisoner with a vision.

2920 Days ago I saw today – like Mr. Nobody peering into an alternate reality, I saw myself fired from IBM.

I did a lot of things to try and prevent the train-wreck I saw coming. I did an MBA. I changed positions. I worked hard.

In the end the only way to avoid the train-wreck was to get off the train.

My key takeaway from the book so far: We are such confused creatures; I’d say hopelessly confused. Some day trans-humans will laugh at how amazingly inept we really were, or we’ll just stumble into extinction much the same way we seem to lead our days. I’m always looking for the limits of our understanding, and now I see even clearer that we don’t understand jack shit.

The “As If” Principle is all about the idea that out conscious minds read the state of the body (pulse, temperature, energy, posture) then add contextual information (what you see, hear, smell) and try to figure out what is going on, and that most of the time the machinery is so basic and crude that it gets everything wrong. Example: You’re jogging with someone and instead of attributing the increased heart rate and endorphins to the exercise, you think you love the person. You are asked to hold a pencil between your teeth and feel you’re happier. You pull a table towards you while looking at picture of someone and you like them more…. The list of these is endless yet the idea Richard talks about is constant: You minds alters how you feel about EVERYTHING based on what it reads from its surroundings and your body, and you have no control over it – Your conscious mind is more like a sportscaster than an actual player in this game. I don’t think Richard states it quite this way, yet that’s what I’m seeing so far.

Here’s an extremely short RSA-Animate style excerpt about the book. Go get it now.

Does Hypnotism work? Of course.

Does subliminal marketing work? Of course.

Years ago I pulled up two dozen research papers on suggestions and subliminal advertising. Back when I still had access to Elsevier and all the academic stuff. My quick summary: Amazed. Mostly amazed how this research isn’t more widely used.

The key element of marketing – of any kind – is understanding how ideas work in the brain. Creating an effective simplified model so you know what the heck you’re doing.

I’ll give you the two keys of my model:

1 – The core mind only works by increasing degrees of association. To make you like ice cream, I put an image/text/idea of something you ALREADY like next to it. Net result: You like ice cream a bit more and whatever I showed you a bit less. To make you hate ice cream, I put something you already hate next to it. Net result: You like ice cream less and the thing you hate you like a tiny bit more. Picking the concepts carefully you can manipulate the ideas in your audience – pick weakly anchored ideas or just plain wrong ones and it can backfire.

2 – The core mind does not understand negatives. This is ESSENTIAL. Saying “This doesn’t taste like ice cream” is the same as “This tastes like ice cream”. The mind will only really get “Taste Ice Cream”

Back to the motivation of this post… Every time I hear “When you were young” by The Killers I remember I want to write about its lyrics and how they are a PERFECT example of hypnosis. The song is like a full hypnosis session crammed into three and a half minutes. Really, brilliant. Here is a table with the original lyrics on the left side and what your mind interprets when listening to the song. Really amazing. The song basically tells you to remember when you were young, the place you used to live, and imagine a boy that looks like Jesus.

Some years ago (and while having a corporate job, now its a moot point) I decided my social media was mine and mine only and everyone that thought otherwise could go fuck themselves. In practical terms this meant I never tweeted the bullshit my employers wanted me to tweet, posted what anyone wanted and when it came to Facebook my policy was simple: People I work with directly can’t be my FB friends (especially my own business unit), people I worked with in the past yes. This was a very simple rule designed to help me be a little more free in posting what I want to post without having to stop and think if I’m writing about pansies, panties and butterflies while I’m supposed to be paying attention to a “Critical recovery action plan” phone meeting – the real problem there isn’t what I’m writing as much as when I am writing it.

What I’ve learned about the collision of social media and traditional employers can be summed up in four words: Be Yourself. Show Yourself.

Be Yourself: Be yourself – Accept yourself. Forget everybody else. Sounds retarded, yet the moment you stop to think about what others might think, you’re at risk of being phoney and losing your identity.

Show Yourself: You can’t read minds, so stop trying to imagine what others might think. It doesn’t matter if your hobby is collecting Barbie dolls and cross-dressing on the weekends, the only thing that EVERYBODY wants is to know a REAL person. Everybody loves real people because there are way less masks, facades and play-pretend.

Remember: FUCK. THAT. SHIT.

This picture today reminded me of the book. So true how we dream of release just to get to tomorrow without actually doing anything today.

I need to make one of these about ad networks instead of browsers…

Its easy to quit your day job when you’re 20-something and you are working retail jobs; or when you have your parents to fall back on; When you could live on government cheese, or when its just you with no family or kids.

In my case quitting was a little more complicated. Its not so easy when you’re already in your 30s, you have your own family, mortgages, can’t go back to your parents, and you already have a six figure salary doing something a little more interesting than Starbucks barista.

How did I do it? Luck x Effort

By 2009 I had gotten an MBA to add to my technical degree and joined the marketing division at IBM. For the first year I had a blast, over time Sandy Carter, the vice president I was working for started slowly DRIVING ME FUCKING NUTS to the point I routinely fantasized how awesome it would be to get fired. One day in August 2009 she asked me to do some shit I can’t recall with grandmaster douchebag Jeremiah Owyang who was then at Forrester, that’s when I read this article. Before learning about internet marketing there I had been selling junk on eBay (circa 2007), and before that I tried a little startup of my own (2004-2005) on the side which flopped. All in all I’ve been trying to give my corporate overlords the boot for almost ten years.

Of course I didn’t spend ten years locked in a basement trying to leave or working on affiliate marketing stuff. In those ten years I had two kids, got an MBA, changed jobs a couple of times, change wife too. The constant was simple: The writing was on the wall, I had to strike out on my own.

Why? Because I planned for greatness, and found myself stuck in mediocrity. At one point in time I was on a great career path, then something happened – I don’t know what or how, still around 2003 or so I realized I was no longer on track to be a Fortune 500 CEO – so time to clock out.

Fast-forward to 2009, that article from Jeremiah Owyang led me to John Chow. Don’t get me wrong here – I’m not endorsing John Chow in any way, hes so full of shit we could terraform Mars with it. Still… One thing led to another…

I tried doing a blog like John Chow’s. I really did. I gave it all… It didn’t work. Along the way I started reading other blogs… PPC.bz among them. The first time I read it I was sure of two things: 1 – There is something good here. and 2 – I had no fucking clue what was going on. I also started reading some of the blogs on the blogroll and slowly piecing together a larger picture of affiliate marketing.

Then every time I read a “Friday Affiliate Interview” story at JonathanVolk.com it felt like a slap in the balls: Here were people doing what I wanted to be doing, successful at what I wanted to do, and I was still sucking bottom. Jonathan Volk himself with his Christian fervor was also motivational, though not in the way he might have hoped for. I thought if someone so slow as to have invisible friends could be successful at internet marketing, that left me the one possibility that maybe, just maybe, all these folks were  smarter and generally better than me. This I refused to believe, yet it provided some serious proof that I was headed in the right direction and a boatload of motivation to prove myself – to myself.

That was 2010… What did I do between 2010 and 2012? Everything.

Top ten tips to quitting your day job with affiliate marketing, based directly on my recent experience:

1 – Focus on ONE THING. One traffic source, one niche, one offer type. Sleep, eat, drink, be the offer, the customer, the traffic – One with the matrix.

2 – The Lifecycle of an Internet Marketer from Adam Bunch and published by Mr. Green was an awesome post, so much so that I printed it out and keep it on my desk.

3 – Your head has to accept the change. I exercised listening to songs about change – Especially awesome in every way is Butterflies and Hurricanes from Muse, that song steals the show for embracing and driving radical change. It says things like “change everything you are”, “Your number has been called” and “You’ve got to be the best”.

4 – Affiliate Summit events. They are an investment, make it. I went to ASW 10, ASC 12 and ASW 13. The value I get from these events keeps GROWING tremendously. Its really not about the sessions for me – Its about the Meet Market and the social networking.

5 – Transparency. The best business relationships I’ve made have come about and are nurtured daily by being completely transparent – about what I promote, where and how. If you think someone is going to steal your stuff, you need to work on your mindset – You are the creator, you have abundance, you make one good thing after another, fear of someone stealing your stuff makes you inefficient and ineffective. At the end of the day there are real human beings behind everything – if you are clean and transparent, people compete to do business with you – because the other folks who are playing “Batman” with cloak-and-dagger hush-hush games are just plain hard to deal with.

6 – Push the envelope without breaking the rules. Forget black-hat shit. Personally, I grew up on TCP/IP Tutorial and Technical Overview original edition from 1996 and packet analyzers. So all the black-hat tricks are within arm’s reach – they will however lead you absolutely nowhere. Sometimes I see very clever black-hat tricks and invariably think to myself how that person could be stacking 10x the cash by using all their knowledge the way its supposed to work.

7 – Stop worrying about what others are doing and get busy. In the beginning I used to “protect” my landing pages, cloak, hide, log IPs and serve up dummy pages, read browser’s histories to see if you were an affiliate. Guess where that got me? Nowhere at all. It wasted a ton of time I could have used for building more campaigns or doing something else. Who’s really going to jack my campaign? Successful affiliates don’t need to jack your crappy landing page, and they will see it anyways sooner or later, because they’re watching the traffic like a cat stalks a mouse. The other folks that can jack your page are unsuccessful affiliates – and guess what they’re going to do with it? Exactly what they’ve been doing so far: Fail. …. Get busy and forget about the idiots.. When you’re too busy to pay close attention to one single campaign, when you’re too busy to work on silly cloaking, that’s when the magic happens.

9 – Understand understanding. You will not understand what the fuck is going on during your first try, or your second, or your tenth. Stare at it. Read it again. And again. And again. Think about it. Think about it again. In time you will start getting valuable insights, these insights only come if you actually do shit and fail repeatedly – They don’t come if you throw up your arms and walk away.

10 – Its all a mind game. Its you against you.

Wrap-up

If you’re willing to bust your balls, this can be very rewarding. I have only one word of warning I shared with my fellow blogging friend Mike Chiasson at ASW – I went from working a lot, to working A LOT MORE. Of course I now work for myself, and work twice as much, twice as hard, and my balls are on the line every day.

This is clearly not for everyone – If somewhere in the dark recesses of your mind you secretly believe you’ll hit a home run and walk home a billionaire with strippers lining up at your door to do tricks on your overworked appendage, you’re sorely mistaken. This is hardball, and hardball isn’t for everyone. As for me… I AM FUCKING LOVING IT!

ADHD Highlights:

• By definition “Alternative”medicine is medicine that has not been proven to work, or has been proven to not work.
• Alternative medicine that has been proven to work is called… Medicine.
• Science adjusts its views based on what’s observed. Faith is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved.
• Watch Scooby Doo. Throughout history, every mystery ever solved turned out to be… Not Magic.
• Isn’t THIS amazing natural world enough that we have to invent MORE shit?

Finally, someone shoots tobacco companies a torpedo below the water line. Removing branding elements is an idea I’m sure more than one marketer, myself included, has had in thinking how to deal with a problem like tobacco.

We’ll see how fast the rest of the world follows – because they will follow.

Would something like this actually reduce smoking? You betcha. It will destroy their ability to capture new minds.

Question 2 of 2:
Now that you passed Test #1, comes the hard part. Test #2. Can you find the odd one out of THIS screenshot:

Do you have a favorite stuck-in-time site?

Abstract

To see whether estrus was really “lost” during human evolution (as researchers often claim), we examined ovulatory cycle effects on tip earnings by professional lap dancers working in gentlemen’s clubs. Eighteen dancers recorded their menstrual periods, work shifts, and tip earnings for 60 days on a study web site. A mixed-model analysis of 296 work shifts (representing about 5300 lap dances) showed an interaction between cycle phase and hormonal contraception use. Normally cycling participants earned about US$335 per 5-h shift during estrus, US$260 per shift during the luteal phase, and US$185 per shift during menstruation. By contrast, participants using contraceptive pills showed no estrous earnings peak. These results constitute the first direct economic evidence for the existence and importance of estrus in contemporary human females, in a real-world work setting. These results have clear implications for human evolution, sexuality, and economics.
© 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
PDF download here

Skechers is about to pony up $40 Million to settle FTC charges that it claimed (unsubstantiated) their shoes would make you lose weight, increase heart health, get stronger and longer erections, grow hair, increase breast size and even whiten your teeth if you rub the insole against your gums.

Now really dear old pal’FTC… How about turning the old death ray at the beauty and cosmetics industry?

I didn’t have to go very far to research it – I personally know a couple of Starbucks baristas – and I’m sure this isn’t exclusive to Starbucks at all. Turns out it is very-very-very common for baristas to stick you with decaf if you’re a dick, with the definition of being a dick up to the barista’s particular preference that day, and your chances of getting decaffed for being a douchebag increasing somewhat if you’re going through the drive-thru .

Here’s my secret: When you are rude to service staff I know that, regardless of your present situation, your upbringing was that of a street rat, and in your heart of hearts you’ll always be that rat hoping to show the world how much better you are. This I keep a secret so I can spot the rats from afar and stay away from any dealings with them
whether personal or business – never ever deal with a rat.

Rude Customers Get Decaffed at Starbucks