Do you have kids? I would love to move out to the country but I'm really worried about impacting my kids ability to develop skills and build a business/social network.
My parents moved out to a very small town from Toronto, Ontario when I was small. There was nothing for me there when I grew up, and all of the friends I had that stayed in the area are struggling. I went away to school and never really returned. I found that I was at a real disadvantage by having zero network and no relevant job skills pre-university. I've since made up for it and am doing quite well now, but I have 2 kids and them going to a good school is very important to me. I always wonder how people do it well, so I'm looking for information.
What state/city? I'm assuming you live in the US. I live in Canada and I've never heard of a poor kids childcare of free summer camp paid for by the city even here.
People talking about saving money by not spending money on clothes and toys really don't know what they're talking about. Brand new clothes and toys today are super cheap compared to what they were when I was a kid. For example, I just bought some brand new baby shoes and shirts on sale for $2 at the grocery store. If I was poor it would cost me more in bus fare to get to the used clothing store than I would have saved had I just bought stuff new at the grocery store. The biggest cost for me _by_far_ is childcare and summer camps.
Sorry, I'm not sure if you want me to address the colloquialism or the statement so I'll address both.
"The bar is higher" essentially means that a task is more difficult than it previously was.
In the past it used to be easier to create low-medium quality content around a subject and be ranked well for specific phrases in search engines. This has gotten progressively harder to do and will likely only get harder going forward.
However, if you create high quality content in the area around your product then people will seek it out and you will also get the benefit of good search engine ranking.
High quality content can vary, but it is essentially stuff that truly adds value in the area of your product.
You can look on Hacker News and other similar sites for companies that are doing this well. In some extreme cases you even have companies generating content that doesn't seem to be remotely related to their product, but it is still getting eyeballs and very likely sales (e.g. http://priceonomics.com/ and their blog).
In addition to blogging and generating content you should also be spending time cultivating and nurturing an email list of potential prospects.
Does this take a lot of time? Yes. I believe that it is a generally accepted rule that you should spend as much time marketing as you do developing. This is something that is easy to say and hard to do though. I know that even I, a full-time digital marketer in my day job, spend more developing my product than I do marketing it.
I have high hopes that the time I'm investing in my kids will not only benefit them, but long term will benefit me as well.
At 5 my oldest son is doing a lot of small chores around the house. He just passed the tipping point of where I can spend less time giving him directions than it would have taken for me to just do the job myself. I see this scaling over time.
A part of the "playing" that I do with him is building and repairing stuff around the home. He loves it. It takes much longer to complete anything that if I was just doing it myself, but I'm doubling up "play" and "chores" so it works out. For things that he can't help with I try to outsource.
I like some of the ideas of past generations who often viewed kids as resources.
Opportunity cost and the potential of leaving a good company for a potentially toxic work environment are two bad outcomes that I can think of off the top of my head.
I'm not saying you shouldn't try to better your position, but saying that there isn't a possibility of a downside is not fair.
I'm not the GP, but I've helped others by sending them market rate stats etc, and talked about negotiations generally (e.g: ALWAYS negotiate an offer).
Jealousy is real, it will impact your day to day relationships with people.
I'm very curious what your take is on revealing your current salary to recruiters/potential employers early.
Do you tell them early to avoid wasting your time?
For myself I'll just say that I've done well since I realized that I should negotiate for EVERY offer I'm given no matter how high. There are no more exploding offers after you've had a couple jobs - we're not in kindergarten and our parents aren't going to take things away because we're acting selfishly.
You are doing these guys a favour, but it is also very beneficial to the company in the long run. If they are good and aren't treated well then they will leave. It is as simple as that.
I'm also guessing that since you're getting them so cheaply to begin with then they're likely still under market rate with a ~75% bump in pay.
I'm not arguing that users blocking ads is an issue. To me that is the same as someone deciding to not look at an ad in a magazine or tear them out/cover them up before reading the article. What they decide to do it up to them.
See my billboard example reply to the comment above to see why I believe that Privdog and Superfish are run by thieves.
It may be easier to think about this in meatspace.
Is it a crime for someone walking around to not look at a billboard? Of course not.
Is it a crime for someone to plaster over an ad on a billboard with their own ad? It isn't explicitly theft, but it is certainly a crime, and the end result is nearly the same (in the meatspace example it is the advertiser that gets the shaft, and in the digital example it is the billboard maker that gets the shaft).
I'd argue that this is also stealing from the content creators or other people/companies that added actual value (e.g. group running a forum that pays for hosting with ads).
What about pellets/implants? Aren't they supposed to release more consistently over a longer period?
Please excuse my ignorance on this, I am in Canada, have been blessed with naturally high T levels, and have no experience with anti-aging clinics, but I'm fascinated by the subject.
Unfortunately the problem is that they work too well. Every time they are legalized in a limited capacity they are abused in professional sports.
The effect is massively amplified if you give women drugs because they don't have testosterone levels like men do. Those records that were set in the 70's pre-testing will likely never be broken.
The issue is that if it is legal, there is a huge incentive to take it to an abusive point especially in a celebrity economy like what exists is professional sports.
In some sports, professional athletes are almost constantly injured. Off the top of my head I can give you MMA (UFC) and american football as examples but I'm sure there are many others.
Healthy sports end where competitive sport begins.[1]
Right now we have an arms race that barely keeps it at bay. It's not an ideal solution but I think its better than athletes fully abusing their bodies with massive amounts of drugs like they did back in the East German Olympic days.
For non-professional athletes, I agree with you. It should not be demonized to the extent it is.
My parents moved out to a very small town from Toronto, Ontario when I was small. There was nothing for me there when I grew up, and all of the friends I had that stayed in the area are struggling. I went away to school and never really returned. I found that I was at a real disadvantage by having zero network and no relevant job skills pre-university. I've since made up for it and am doing quite well now, but I have 2 kids and them going to a good school is very important to me. I always wonder how people do it well, so I'm looking for information.