Because retailers don’t have to make products, they can often instantly take sales and turn it into new inventory. If they can sell things quickly, this cycle can happen many times per year. Even a very low rate of return can make for a huge return by year’s end. Compound that return over several years and the retailer explodes into global existence from its humble beginnings of it being a guy working in his garage.
In the chart, I have outlined a scenario where such a guy started with $1000 worth of inventory. After eating and what not, he managed to pull just a 3% operating profit, every two weeks. He turned all of it into more inventory, which he successfully turned again.
When 3% is compounded 26 times in a year, that works out to a 116% return. If a retailer can keep this going, the results become dramatic.
In the Chart, you can see this play out. For the fist 5 years, I showed the growth in inventory each 2-week period. Then I showed each year up to year 23. The guy starts out in his garage with $1000 in inventory and by the end of year 23, he has nearly $48 billion in inventory.
The math that makes this possible can also undo a retailer very quickly. To get to this level, with such a tight margin, means very tiny changes in the return per turn or of the speed of the return can have dramatic effects on the results.
For example, if the inventory turn rate slowed to once a month instead of once every two weeks, you’d have half as many inventory turns. That would not cut the size of the inventory in half. It would be much more dramatic. That would be equivalent to taking the chart back where it was in year 11.5 at the end of year 23. Inventory would be around 6 Million instead of 48 Billion.
Now you understand why there is such a thing as 50% off sales when season ends and stores are sitting on inventory they could just hold for a year and sell for much more. They need their money so they can turn it.
If you took the rate of return from 3% to 2% the year 23 inventory is 139 million instead of 48 billion. In our mind, because 2 is 66% of 3, we imagine a 33% difference. In reality 139 million goes into 48 billion 345 times.
If the profits per turn should ever go negative, a retailer can go under very quickly. This example doesn’t even include the use of debt financing. Debt financing multiplies all of this math. It ads a layer of risk on top too. If a retailer borrows money to buy inventory, then they lose money on that inventory, they are in real trouble really fast.
I’m so glad that the IRS is using its own armed men instead of just outsourcing it to marshals, police, and FBI. So often I try to explain that taxation is taking money from people at gunpoint, to get things they or others want. They come back and say they have never had a gun pointed at them. Yeah, that’s because they have always paid.
Beyond taxation being theft, I’d argue that it is the definition of the state. Lots of people want to define the state as that organization that seeks to maintain a monopoly on violence in a given territory. Sure, it does that but why? Why does the state exist? Why did it ever come to be?
The state is just that gang of thieves that settled in among the people to rob them repeatedly over time, instead of just pillaging them and running off. That gang’s primary reason for existing is this robbery. The weapons have evolved over time but the purpose has not.
The primary purpose of the state has been clouded by 6,000 years of pomp and propaganda. They have bought people’s loyalty by spending much of the stolen loot back on them. They have spent 6,000 years telling the people their purpose is something else.
Make no mistake though. Even if the state buys you a sandwich with the money it carjacked from you, (kidnapped you in your car and forced you to pull it out of the ATM) it’s still an organization of theft. That theft isn’t some side gig–Some thing the state happens to do. It’s what the state is.
Romance is men doing things for women, that cost the men. The greater the benefit to the woman and the greater the cost to the man, the more romantic it is. Death for life is the highest form of romance that exists. This is why The Titanic was the number one grossing movie of all time, when it came out.
At the time, I couldn’t understand why my friend’s wife was so in love with the movie. I felt bad at the end. I really wanted him to get on that board with her. I was so frustrated.
My friend’s wife, on the other hand, loved love loved the movie. She’d play the song and sing along. I didn’t know this at the time. It’s because she identified with the woman and was in love with the idea of her getting the ultimate sacrifice for her benefit.
It’s no wonder why romance appeals to women more than it does men.
There is a person in my life who has taught me about people. He constantly lies. I almost think he believes them. I say that because he lies in situations where he knows people will later come to evidence of what the truth is. It’s like he wants something that is not true to be true so bad, even though it’s not, that he just says the thing anyway.
Later, when people figure this out, the gloves come off. He gets sued or the people try to screw him over as much as they possibly can. They do this, even to the point of doing wrong themselves. It’s like they feel right in doing wrong to the person who tried to or did do them wrong.
The lesson, of course, is to verify, any time you are doing business with a stranger. I know, I know–you already know that. I already know that. Everyone already knows that. Do you though? Do you really? Do I even–even now? Until you are faced with a person like this, day in and day out, it’s hard to imagine this kind of deception. Even now, I’m surprised by it.
How long after I’m no longer exposed to this person, will it take me to forget?
When I set this site up, I checked a box that said, make it a WordPress Multi-site. I wanted to do that with a site I set up before, so I thought “hey, why not?” What multi-site does, is it allows you to run a single install of WordPress to run many blogs. Essentially, you could have many people writing separate blogs for one website or you could have several blogs based on several topics.
The whole point of this site is for everyone to have their own content, so I don’t want to host a bunch of other people’s content. but it was just a box to click right? Not really.
Multi-Sites Work Differently from Single Sites
Right away, I noticed that I had no access to install new plugins. Plugins are bits of software that control all kinds of things for your site, from appearance to functionality. I also had no access to install new themes. Themes are also software but they are bigger than plug-ins. You can only run one at a time, and they are the overall structure of your site. Changing these on a multi-site works differently and I didn’t want to do this process.
I’ll Just Convert The Site, Instead of Learning Anew How to Run one.
Import Export From WordPress
To convert the site, I needed to uninstall WordPress and re-install it. I asked support for help with this. They were of no help at all at getting me started. I Searched some things online and got started. I exported my entire site. Yay! The whole things is backed up. More on this later. Now I just need to delete the site.
This is what I contacted support for. I told them what I was doing and asked them if I could just delete it from the file system. They said yeah, just do that. This was the wrong advice but it turns out to have been the wrong / bad advice that saved me.
Oh NO!
After figuring out the proper way to uninstall a site by google searching and finding my own hosts information on this, I got it done and I installed WordPress Anew. It worked and I no longer had a multi-site. I could add plug-ins and themes the way I already knew how. Yippy pippy yeah yeah!
Now, I’ll just import my site. I click on the import button, tell it some things, and it goes to work. So far, so good. Then I saw this…. The blanks are the names of all my image files.
Failed to import media ________
Failed to import media ________
Failed to import media ________
Failed to import media ________
Failed to import media ________
Failed to import media ________
Failed to import media ________
Failed to import media ________
Failed to import media ________
Failed to import media ________
Failed to import media ________
Failed to import media ________
Failed to import media ________
…
It turns out, when you export a WordPress site, it only exports the html text of your content and nothing else. Within that text is all of your writing and instructions for formatting your content, which includes pointing to images that are stored elsewhere and not in the content its self. Since the images were deleted, they were no longer stored where the instructions said to look for them.
Support Was of No Help
I spent basically a day and a half with support. Normally, I very much like my host’s support. This time, it just wasn’t working. I had two problems with support.
The first problem was that they were having tech issues of their own and I could only talk to a support team member for about 40 minutes. Then it would automatically switch support team members and I’d have to start over with someone else.
The second problem was that they seemed to be suffering reading comprehension issues. None of them seemed to fully grasp what I was saying to them. Maybe it’s because they were constantly switching clients and their focus was ruined. This is part of how I ended up with the errors above.
One thing support asked me was if I still had the images. I had half of them, maybe. Some of the images, I saved to my computer. Some of them were copied and pasted in WordPress. Still, even if I had all the images, there was more than just images there.
Every image had meta data that I hand typed. Also, there is the matter of those html instructions. The images are mostly parts of blog posts. If I were to manually add them to my media library anew, I’d have to open every post and re-attach them and re-add the meta data. No. I had to automate this process somehow.
I Figured It Out, On My Own, Without Support’s Help
I started putting things together. The html was pointing to images, named certain things, located in a particular place on the internet. This place, I have control over.
Now I’m getting back to how support accidentally helped me when they failed to tell me the proper way to uninstall my website. Remember, before uninstalling my website, I deleted it on the back end. The back end of a website is just a file system like any you’ve seen on any computer.
When I deleted the files, instead of uninstalling them, they ended up in my trash folder to be wiped later. This means I still had the files, with their name file names, in a folder named the same as those html instructions said to look for.
Back End File System For my Hosted Content
The Process of Restoring The Files
At this point, my website had been blown out by me doing things support said to do. It was nonfunctional. I could probably have undid those things and continued on but I decided to just start over. I would uninstall the website again.
Before doing that, I wanted to get those files out of the trash. I couldn’t put them in a folder I was about to uninstall though. So, I made a copy, which you can see circled in the image above.
I uninstalled and reinstalled WordPress. Then, I went into the layers of folders and moved the one called WP Content, over the top of the new WP Content folder on the new website.
Finally, I ran import again. It was a little buggy. I ran it 3 times. Maybe I was just inpatient. Eventually though, it finished the job. VOILA! It worked. All my posts were back, with images in them with meta data and comments.
It Didn’t Do EVERYTHING Though
It turns out this export feature doesn’t include your site’s appearance and layout. Nor does it include the set up of all of your plug-ins, though it does include the plug-ins. Also, because it was a new install, I ended up with a sample page again, the hello world post.
I lost my site logo. I have the image but it is not in the logo area. Instead the logo area just has the name of my site. I also ended up with the privacy policy and sample paged linked in the top bar, instead of my post about why I own my own content. I also lost my site icon, (the J in the browser tab), which I decided to restore. This is how it sits at publication time of this post.
Top of My Website
What’s to Come
I’m not so upset about loosing my appearance settings. I plan to completely redo all of that anyway. The whole purpose of going through this exercise was to make doing that easier. I want to remake the look of this website. I want to build something that inspires others to follow me in what I did.
I want to give this site a look, feel, and function that is familiar to people who post on social media. I am going to add a page for photo galleries; for example. I’m going to add a banner image at the top, at least one side bar, and something bigger than my site logo area for a “profile picture.” I am going to add ways for people to subscribe to this site, other than waiting for posts to appear on social media.
Finally, I want to add functions to monetize this site. I can post adds in my side bar, links in individual posts, or offer products of my own. Facebook is monetizing my content, why shouldn’t I?
The reaper came for my Laptop. Now I need a new one. It has a completely dead battery but I know the laptop runs without the battery so it’s not that.
That laptop was a HP EliteBook 8770w Mobile Workstation Core i7-3720QM 8GB RAM 256GB SSD NVIDIA 2G that I bought on eBay for $449.10, 2 years ago. Then I added 16 GB of ram. It was a 17 inch Laptop
Things I loved
It started lightening fast
It ran well, with almost no glitches
It did not overheat
The hardware was powerful enough to not lag on anything I did
17″ Screen
Sharp display
I could open it to add the memory
Blue tooth
Things I Didn’t Love
It was a beast of a machine.
The cord pulled out of the back too easily
The power supply was also a beast
Abysmal speakers — They didn’t just sound bad. They simply didn’t produce enough volume to use — ever, not even in a pinch.
What I want
I want all the things I love and something without the things I didn’t
I want it to not break the bank. I am willing to purchase a used machine on eBay again.
I would like to emphasize that I want something I can carry on an airplane and not have it weigh 97 pounds. It’s amazing this thing was so big and the speakers were so bad.
3.5 mm audio jack. I don’t know if those are going away. I suppose I could buy an adapter for USB, if I need to.
The cover photo is from Annie on Facebook. Below is our brief Conversation about that.
Me: Politics is the use of violence to take money from people and to control their behavior. It makes perfect sense that at some point, the violence and the rhetoric of it would filter down to the individual
Annie:Joe you’re right. I’ve been loving the no name calling political debates for about 2 years now, (they’re almost addictive!) but I might need to upgrade my thoughts to what you just said. If I did, I would no long care and only be concerned with what’s in front of me… I love doses of reality and maturity. Its all evil in the end I know that.
Me Expanding on This
Why can’t we have a peaceful / civil discussion about how I want to have your door beaten down with a battering ram, a flash grenade thrown at your baby and your dogs shot (maybe your girlfriend too) if you refuse to pay for killing 1 million brown people in the middle east or for my sister’s birth control pills?
The more in the face government gets, the more of our lives it controls, the more violent people are going to be with each other over controlling who is in charge of that government. I first noticed this in 2016, when people were punching each other in the streets over who they were voting for. Wear a MAGA hat and a fight breaks out. This is why.
George Orwell writes “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” When he wrote that, he was writing to an audience, whom he assumed would understand what he meant because of course 2+2=4. Now, even math itself is being called into question by these lunatics.
Over and over we have been subjected to blatantly false claims that are browbeaten into us as if they are true. We must accept them or face conquenses. The idea that a man becomes a woman when he decides to, for example. We are supposed to just sit there and deny the truth.
I think that when Orwell was using math as an example of something true, he didn’t really think people were going to attack the truth of math itself. He was using that as a metaphor for an obvious truth being supplanted by force.
To Attack The Idea Of Truth Itself
I think that these people, who are saying that math has human bias are doing this, not to attack math, but to attack the idea of truth itself. Math is the most logically provable thing we have. If they can undermine that, they can undermine the whole of the human brain.
People do this because they are wrong; they want to control people; and the truth is in their way. So, they want to destroy, not only knowledge of the truth, but the idea that there is such a thing as truth.
Another common theme I have heard in social media is the concept of “true for you.” This is the concept that something can be true for one person and not true for another person. “Your truth,” is another way of saying it. This is another way to undermine the human quest for knowing what is.
Personal truth is utter nonsense as well. Something is either true or it is not true. What varies from person to person is their knowledge of the truth. Truth does not care about who knows it or who does not know it. Some people are, gasp, wrong.
One Deviation From 1984
In 1984, all of the tyranny was being driven by the state. Yes the mob was whipped up into a frenzy in support of all of this nonsense but truth itself was under attack by the state.
Today, it’s a bit different. Truth is under attack by a minority of the mob. Somehow they have gained the power to threaten professors and employee’s jobs if they speak truth. Now if people speak it, they lose their jobs and are blacklisted from ever working again. These social tyrants also use this power to get payment processors to shut them off from their ability to earn money.
We have seen this bottom up destruction of truth before though. See the French Revolution. The French Revolution is one reason why freedom loving people believe that revolutions don’t work. What they don’t get is that it was a revolution by people who wanted tyranny. The goal of the revolution matters. We are now facing the potential of another one like the French.
What’s Next?
We are dealing with people who’s primary goal is to steal from those who earn, so they don’t have to. That’s the ultimate goal. In the process, if we let them, they will destroy much of the wealth producing capability of society.
The truth is against these thieves and they need people to be incapable of reasoning for themselves and finding it. They need those who will always be capable, to be silenced. We must wrestle the ability to speak truth back from these people before its too late.
If it was illegal for the governor (of Michigan) to do it, it’s illegal for the dictator in Oakland County to do it too. I don’t know how anyone can take the framers of the constitution seriously when politicians are allowed to blatantly violate it, and violate you in the process and all that happens to them is they are told to stop.
If the framers were serious about setting up a republic with individual freedom, the people in charge of the government would go to jail when they don’t follow the rules established for them to follow, in such a blatant way. The court could issue a warrant for such arrest upon overturning the order, legislation, arrest etc.
What are people supposed to do? Vote? LOL. Protest? None of this works. This is why there are riots. People are at a loss for what to do. It doesn’t work because these people face no consequences for what they do. It’s a global problem. It’s not just masks or lockdowns either. It’s everything.
We need to turn over the tables and take away these peoples’ power. It’s illegitimate anyway.
Update, Randy Shared This On Facebook.
I have zero surprise about this. It doesn’t matter though, because of what I said above. All they will do is get told they weren’t supposed to do this, 6 months later. You could contact them at the phone number in the image at the top but it won’t matter. There are no consequences for them violating the state’s own rules.
I saw an add from Bed Bath & Beyond on Facebook. I know that ads are a good place to get a fast response from many companies. So, I took the opportunity to ask this question. Now we know that Bed Bath and Beyond is going to continue with this nonsense, even though nobody is going to fine them for not doing it.
Today, I went into Sam’s Club, briefly, because I use their app and can use the store like a convenience store. I did not wear a mask and I only saw one other person without one. Like last time, not a word to me was said. I’ll be shopping there more. If I need bedding, I’ll be buying it there, not BBB.
I also went into a brewery, today. The staff were in masks. Only one person from my table of 7 had a mask. The bartenders did not care.
I’m just wondering how long this will go on, now that the court finally spoke and told us there was never a law requiring masks because that’s not how the statist system works.
The Court Ruling Changes the Nature of Business Mask Mandates
Before the court ruling, businesses were compelled under threats of fines, to require customers to wear masks. Then, not wearing one wasn’t so much a disrespect for property as it was a protest against the state. Now, it’s a matter of private property rights. You’re trespassing if you don’t do as they say.
Now, we can separate, those businesses that want to serve us how we want to be served from those who don’t. Now, we vote with our feet (and their dollars).
Those who want mask mandates go to where they are and those who don’t, don’t go there. I’m hoping that sense will prevail. I’m hoping enough people will stop shopping where masks are required that businesses stop the nonsense.
