how amusing to see first world people complain about how hard it is :1orglaugh if you can not make it in your super economies then its really nobody's fault but your own :2 cents:

the rich do not have the time to "keep you down" they are busy getting their dicks polished :2 cents:

doesn't that show that sky isn't falling like many have claimed?

anyone with basically zero investment, can go to a library now and start one of 100s of different online businesses...

all it takes is some effort...

i'm talking about before you ran your own business, you obviously worked for someone else...why weren't your parents born with the mindset to succeed? do they look to their betters for guidance as you suggest so many on here do?

really, thats all it takes is effort? so anyone who puts 'effort' into what they are doing should be successful? :helpme

Scumbag, why did you follow in the idiot footsteps of YOUR parents and aspire to mediocrity?
Both of my parents dropped out of school to help support their fatherless families (both dead young) after marrying, they moved out of the inner city, worked hard, and become comfortable middle class. They didn't need advice from their betters any more than I did.
I also owned my business at 25.

Again, your idiot questions merely cement my opinion of you. You're a failure imagining your betters got lucky.

We didnt

Instead of bad mouthing effort, you should instead try it.

i owned my own business at 20, so suck it. i'm sure your parents worked hard and are great people. i just wanted to turn it around on you so you can see how it feels.

oh i do, every fucking day. i just think it takes a lot more than that and to make it seem so simple is a joke.

Sorry, my parents never whined about people who had more than them nor did they take government handouts. They worked hard and got ahead.

And save us the BS about your Internet "business"

You've never worked a hard day in your life.
Certainly not hard enough to be called successful.
But we've been down this trail before. If you spent ad much effort working as you do making excuses, you'd be far more successful than you are

pretty much...

one idea might not work out, so one tries another and then another... one eventually has to work out... it's not like one is burning through his/her life savings during the process... and even if none of them work out, one would LEARN something in the process, one's SKILLS would improve, etc....

...but why bother with that when football is on? 100x easier to pick up a 12 pack, and have a little fun... and then go back to one's deadend job on Monday...

You would be surprised what you can accomplish in life when you actually bother to commit to something. That can be said for an education, a better career, acquiring skills or trade craft. All of this takes time, dedication, and commitment to accomplish. You then need to apply what you have learned, which also requires effort.

Sadly, you do not DESERVE a better life unless you actually work for it.

:2 cents:

Agreed.

When I wanted to get involved online, I had to learn HTML to do it myself, along with some basic level of design work. I made my first website all by myself by reading forums and books. It was terrible, but it did get traffic and eventually made money when I turned it into a pay site.

Not every website and idea I have ever tried has worked or been good. Like anyone successful, you have failures, learn from them, and apply that knowledge on your next plan or tweak your existing one. Again, all of this requires effort, the commitment to learn, and time to make it work. Something few are truly willing to invest. That is why many wash out in 3-6 months as a newbie.

:2 cents:

Pick up the phone and start dialing...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9GR6wvoPOY

Sorry to all you yanks here - Your fucked. You let China take all your jobs and industry, and now your up shit creek without a paddle.

Although im sure your new red Chinese masters will give you jobs :)

the UK holds a massive trade deficit with the rest of the world, second only to the US. In 2012, UK imports were worth $646 billion with exports valued at only $481 billion.


In recent years, the UK has run the largest trade deficits with Norway, Germany, China, Hong Kong and Netherlands. This is mainly due to increase in demand of consumer goods, a drop in UK manufacturing and a decline in local oil and gas production.


http://www.economywatch.com/world_ec...rt-import.html

and how is someone supposed to get by while trying all these ideas that apparently require no start up funds?

anyways, you guys will never understand what im trying to say or care. i'm better off working than circle jerking in these pointless conversations.

Doesn't anyone ever think that the truth might be somewhere in the middle?

You absolutely have to be self-motivated, aggressive and work really hard in order to really make it big today. This is a 1099, work for yourself world we now live in.

On the flip side, things have changed a whole lot in a few short years. Not everyone can or should be a self-starting entrepreneurial millionaire. It doesn't work. Some people are just not cut out for it and there needs to be a "general population" of workers to consume the work we all produce.

It's easy to say that kids today are pussies and lazy, and many of them are, but I'm also not sure what they should be doing with their time. Not a whole lot of jobs at Blockbuster video any more. The once-packed shopping mall in my city is now half-vacant.

The limited manufacturing we have in my area doesn't hire unskilled workers to sweep the floors for $10 an hour, they hire back the people who used to run the machines first.

What should an average person with average intelligence and average drive aspire to do these days? Be a real estate agent? Travel agent? I book on Expedia and found my house on an online MLS.

Bank teller? I haven't been to the bank in over 6 months. I do it all online and now I can even deposit my checks by taking a picture of them with my smartphone.

When I was growing up, I worked part-time at a video store for a while (renting VHS tapes) and part-time at a PRINT newspaper. If I was 15 or 16 and looking for an introductory, low-skill job... I don't know what I'd do.

Also... if I had access to PornHub at 15, I think my dick would have broken off. :1orglaugh

This is actually nice point, it is so easy to make at least upper middle class in lets say USA that it is not even funny.

greenleaf, your last post is right on the money.

That's why I am thinking that it would behoove our country to make this THE most business friendly place on Earth.

A good start would be making the United States a place that corporations would want to move BACK to and bring all those jobs that are currently overseas back to the U.S.

I'm not in the govt. or an economic guru...but there are many ways to do that.

But right now, there is such an anti-business atmosphere on the left side (you can read it in their posts that are always talking negatively about corporations) that I don't know if that's going to happen.

I do know that IF we could bring all those jobs back...giving business tax incentives for example...we could put those "average" people back to work making a decent living.

I watched it happen in the late 1990's when I lived in upstate South Carolina and BMW put a plant there to build cars.
It was non-union & the state gave them massive tax incentives.

The entire area was hurting because it used to be a textiles industry center.

But once BMW moved in...hundreds of people got high paying jobs. And the surrounding food establishments, housing, etc. all profited from it and the entire area took off economically.

If the unions in Detroit were out of the picture then the same thing would be happening for that god-forsaken place.

So it is possible. It just takes the govt. creating the correct environment for business to thrive.

Good pointers, Robbie, unfortunately more and more people are those from "47%" and they are all against "evil" corporations and against the fact that unions are bad. And politicians try to cater to majority and majority is that peasant mentality left/democrat crowd.

I don't think that unions are "bad".

But they've gotten too big and powerful and it has cost people jobs instead of creating them.

That's why these foreign car companies are able to build plants in places like Tennessee and South Carolina. And they pay top dollar to their workers AND manufacture their cars much, much cheaper than Detroit can.

I believe that unions did lot of good in the past. And they COULD do good things now. But, in the case of Detroit, MI and the U.S. automobile industry...it has been disastrous over the last few decades.

The proof is in the pudding.

Unions haven't gotten too big and powerful. They were MUCH bigger and MUCH more powerful 50 or 75 years ago.

They've just outlived their usefulness in most fields.

Unions worked before technology made it possible to get almost anyone, anywhere in the world to do the same job. It's impossible for labor to bargain when they have no bargaining power.

Except for the NFL Players Union. They can still strike and actually shut things down. :)

greenleaf you may be right about that.

Perhaps it's time for unions to "adapt or die".

I don't know if they're deliberately waging a war on the poor, as much as poverty is just a by-product of their way of doing business. Corporate greed is just one of many variables that help keep people down.

There's a few large companies that believe in treating their employees like family members, and realize that a healthy, happy worker will pay more long term dividends than just having borderline slave laborers. But most of them only think about the short term, and that means paying as little as possible, and having a constant merry-go-round of losing, and re-training new slaves.

I don't agree with everything that Henry Blodget has to say here, but this is a thought provoking article in response to the oft-repeated claim that rich people must be protected because they create all of the jobs for the little people.

http://www.businessinsider.com/rich-...e-jobs-2013-11

Toe hee!

The general idea of what you're trying to get across is this: it's hard.

Wow. Shocking. Success takes some sacrifice and struggle, who would have thought?

You can choose to go through the sacrifice, the struggle? Persevere and come out on top. Or you can use the sacrifice and the struggle as an excuse as to why you were never "lucky" enough.

The choice is all yours.

If we're going to get into the pissing contest I was 15 when I started slangin porn for $10k a month and being a real dick about it :1orglaugh

There really are valid arguments on both sides, but I will tell you luck has more than anybody admits to, and that goes for people on both sides of the aisle. Poor people will tell you they're being intentionally repressed by a system that was designed to enslave them. Successful people will tell you that they are successful because they made the obvious right decisions and worked hard.

Now I'm 30. When I was in high school they said if I like computers I should do IT and make a starting salary of $80,000 a year doing CISCO networking. I blew off college, just kept on learning computer science, hustling and wound up able to demand as much money as I want. Let's be real though, that's what I wanted to do. I didn't predict that with all those people going into IT sysadmins wouldn't be worth shit in 2014. I also wouldn't have told you all the people working hard to get degrees to work in the media, newspapers and all that would have their whole industry collapse and wind up working at Starbucks. Nobody can predict the future, and it's nobody's fault, but their are plenty of people who did the right things and still wound up struggling right now.

Now I'm a real software engineer. I still do web stuff, but I've also done massive enterprise software in manufacturing, logistics and finance. I can measure success in the amount of people who get laid off when I make something awesome. There are dozens of companies right now that have zero people working in logistics because I personally did the math to take them out of the equation. That's $50,000,000/year for one service where 5 engineers replaced? I don't know? obviously a few times more than $50,000,000 worth of white collar jobs. That was at the very start of the full automation too, lord knows how much it's worth now (if they haven't imploded, but that's a whole other thing).

Now I don't feel guilty, but I feel bad. These weren't dumb people. They were hard working, had great organizational skills, mediated between hundreds of companies at a time making things happen. They had lots of money riding on their performance, but now they're unemployed. I get when people are really upset and they want to blame us, because it's hard to look at the guy who is replacing you with an algorithm and not think he's motivated to end your career. It's very real that there's a conspiracy to get a result (a profitable business that can compete in the future) that necessarily means a massive amount of financial hardship for a lot of people.

Just saying, give each other a break and stop trying to put such a disproportional amount of blame on people. Things are the way they are, it's the way the universe works.

Also, watch out you guys. Adult is always way behind the curve because it's a microcosm with tiny profit margins, but in mainstream web publishing we're all working on artificial intelligence that makes editorial staff obsolete. Most of the stories about finance and sports you see on big news sites in the top 10 Google results on any given day are written entirely by computers. We are destroying the idea of the small web entrepreneur, blogger, the niche ecommerce business, all that. All it would take are a few of the people from the valley or the alley to actually attack porn and everyone on here would feel like the guys running the porn theaters must have.

I already wrote a big ass TL;DR thread, but it's just a fact that luck has a lot to do with it and there's no guarantee that you won't work hard, struggle, do what you're supposed to and end up in a gutter. Despite that, it never pays to place blame on your luck when you could be working. It does, however, pay to give credit to luck where it's due. There's a saying that geniuses see the same amount of patterns that super geniuses see and the difference is that a super genius will dismiss half of them as coincidence. Twice as many experience points with each effort.

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

I guess those guys in the "valley" must have not heard the news that selling porn is already dead.
But I guess they are welcome to come in and see how their genius ideas will do any damn thing at all against an industry that is crippled by hundreds of thousands of completely FREE scenes on thousands of tubes and torrents.

Good luck with that all you guys in the "valley".

By the way, I get what you were trying to say in your post. You just kinda jumped the shark on "bragging" when you went with that last bit. :)

Hey that's why I stopped adult in the first place. I actually hate the valley, I'm in the alley where it's a little more in touch with reality.

What I envision happening as far as ruining it though is someone coming in and wrecking all the current tube sites with something like the Amazon of tube sites. Even on the really massive tube sites the UX is terrible, the SEO is horrible, they're still monetizing with dick pills and dating and now here in new jersey, gambling. Somebody somewhere will come in with some data scientests, UX and SEO guys, do some faceted search for endless free porn of whatever weird specific fetish you can think of and get Axe Body Spray or Red Bull to pay $1,000,000 for a subtle week long branding campaign.

Luck has a little to do with it, and it's called 'perfect timing' not luck, at least in regards to business. No one just tripped over a rock and fell into a million dollar business, or rolled out of bed into a $10,000 pay site. Playing a scratch off is luck. Anything that requires work isn't. :2 cents:

There is no guarantee you will wake up tomorrow. Life is not fair. Buy a helmet.

:pimp

That would be an awesome song lyric! :)

I can't change your mind, nor do I want to. The more people that think they can't succeed, the easier is becomes for those that think they can.

Keyword: think.

watching the beatles show from last nite, McCartney talked about the incredible amount of luck and coincidences they had that significantly contributed to their success.

He also mentioned hard work.

Indeed. Those guys had little to no talent at all, nor changed the music industry in any way.

:winkwink:

You'd have to argue that with him, He said it about his and their success, I'm the messenger.

:)

The harder I work, the "luckier" I get.

Funny, isn't it?

There is no such thing as luck. Sending the message to anyone that "luck" matters is the worst possible message to send.

If "luck" is important in success ... Maybe we should change school curriculums to help kids develop their luck?

I can't imagine a more corrosive idea as it pertains to success and the drive to succeed than telling people "it's luck".

That's like attributing success to unicorns and elf's

No I agree with you there. Regardless of luck feeling sorry for yourself can only lead to wasted time. If you get a bad hand you just have to keep moving. The victim mentality causes a lot of people to turn setbacks into defeats.

I've noticed though that the harder I work, the "luckier" I get! :pimp

There's no hard work in the happenstance of attending the same school or living down the street from one another.

How the Beatles Went Viral: Blunders, Technology & Luck Broke the Fab Four in America

Six weeks is all it took for the Liverpool foursome to go from unknowns to the biggest pop stars in the USA. Here's an exhaustive look at how it happened

http://www.billboard.com/articles/ne...n-america-1964

Talented musicians + perfect timing.

I'm a big believer in the notion that luck is where preparation meets opportunity.

But I also have to recognize such things as McCartney pointing out lucky coincidences playing a factor for them. It's not something to count on, rely on or teach in schools.

Nevertheless, McCartney is aware of his own talents and still recognized the luck involved with the Beatles. That's reality.

If there's no such thing as luck, then lotto winners are hard workers.