Volume Xxx Number 4: Fill & Download for Free

Here's a super simple business that I started with $300 and 20 sheets of paper:An iPhone buy/resell business.Step 1: Post FliersI created a really simple flier that said something like "Want to make up to $300 for 15 minutes of your time? Sell that old iPhone collecting dust in your drawer. Accepting all models and carriers. Text XXX-XXXX."I printed out 20 of them and posted them all around my alma mater's campus. Took about 5 minutes to design, and cost me about fifty cents in total.Step 2: Determine Buy PricesI wrote a bunch of code that scraped various sites and gave me pricing graphs for every carrier, model, memory capacity combination of iPhone, so I knew exactly what prices I should buy at.You can do it much more simply, though.When someone texts you, just search that item - for example "Verizon iPhone 5 64GB" - on eBay. Look at the "closed" (important!) auctions and average the 10 most recent sale prices. Offer 60% of this number.Step 3: Meet and BuyWhen you meet with the person, you MUST inspect the phone. I have an infographic for a ~30-point inspection if you want it.Basically, you want to check:Screen - Brightness, Pixels, Touch SensitivityCamera - Photo, Video, FlashAudio IO - Quality, Volume, CrispnessApps - Internet, GPS, App StoreHardware - Power Button, Volume Buttons, Silence Toggle, Home ButtonService - Call, Internet using WiFi/Carrier, TextIf any of these are malfunctioning, I'd either drop my offer price significantly or just walk away altogether.Step 4: Sell ("Flip")Once you buy the phone, repost it on Craigslist or eBay. I like Craigslist because I can meet up with people right in NYC - no shipping debacles - and I don't have to worry about not meeting a reserve price or anything like that.My turnaround in NYC was 1-2 days.This was a really profitable venture for me. I would scoop up an iPhone 4 for $60 and sell it for $100. I bought a few iPhone 6's for $350 and sold them for $550 the same day.At the end of the day, people are busy. They have a lot of stuff to do, and they don't want to go through the hassle of that nightmarish task known as "selling online".You capitalize on the convenience of being able to put cash in their hand in minutes for no effort on their part. Of course, you leverage this convenience by offering less that what you both know the phone could go for.You profit off of the effort that they are unwilling to put in to sell their phone. iPhones are probably the easiest thing to sell, so basically, people are paying you upwards of $200 to create a Craigslist ad.Cash Money.

OK, here’s the deal. I have been hearing this argument from the Republican party all. My. Life. And like the recent president trying to use those things called words, Republicans always make this claim as though there are no Books. Or nowadays no Internet.A long time ago it was thought wise not to couple the wage to inflation, because, Stupid? I mean why even have one if it isn’t relevant to the cost of living? It’s like a world series played by one nation.My first job at 14 was dishwashing under president Ford. I ‘got in’ with a family connection. I didn’t care what the wage was, I was adulting and learning stuff. Mowing lawns was very straightforward. I used someone else’s gas and machine (thanks, dad btw) and got paid to cut- the neighbor disposed of the cuttings… So clearly this whole business of having equipment and rent, and labor in the space two doors down from the big grocery store, and omg the size of the power switch and GAS pipe coming into the place must have meant a huge utility bill… I loved that job as long as I was learning about it, say the first 26 hours.Next job was corporate, at 16 I was the newest face of McDonald’s and there was a Ton of stuff to learn. The store had a Classroom! They had a ‘learn-o-matic’ that showed us powerpoint slides with an audio (you thought that was new?)… This was SO high tech I almost wanted to pay to learn! I don’t have any interest in the restaurant business, it is just something to occupy my mind while doing the brain killing repetition of selling burgers or washing dishes.Still didn’t care about the wage, I didn’t feel oppressed by a corporation, though I certainly thought what we all did as a team was worth another ¢.60/hr. We were Better than the king of burgers across the parking lot, and premium teams are worth more. But of course we weren’t.One of the things they hammered into young brains through the powerpoint machine was SCALE. And those were the days when the McDonald’s sign had a little scorecard window that would update. I remember when it changed to just saying ‘billions served’. So I could Clearly see that the cost of the raise across the XXX number of stores which they were always updating for us, times the Volume of business could easily absorb a $1 raise, which was an unthinkable jump in 1977.Anyway the economy was toast from Viet Nam and the Oil Embargo, basically our policies, and a minimum wage increase was arranged. They are ALWAYS phased in over many years. ALWAYS. That is Always left out in the conservative talking points.They always say, “this raise will close businesses and cost XXX number of jobs, it will end up hurting the very people it is intended to help.”The simple response to this and many Republican claims (the last 4 years on steroids) is:Prove it. I’m not going to bother rehashing the reasons why it is incorrect economic thinking because I am not an economist.But I can look up the employment numbers following the last raise a dozen years ago. The Evidence disproves the Republican claims. So it was a fluke. What about the one before 2009?ditto.Raising the wage injects more money into the bottom of the economy which has to hire more people to handle the increased activity which causes more employment that even the shareholders get a slice of a minimum wage increase… It’s so simple to comprehend, but maybe 40 years of giving it to the one percent instead (tax cuts) is better?I see a lot of poverty and political unrest in the broken down, burnt out, under educated, profits extracted country if what the GOP practices were anywhere near true.

Everyone has an opinion here. Some will cite whatever car they’ve had that they perceive was reliable. Others will quote completely non credible sources like Consumer Reports as gospel. While others will swear by what their great Aunt Myrtle told them 40 years ago.There’re some absolute truths here, and they are not always brand specific.First, simpler cars are always more reliable. They have less things in them to break, simply (pun intended). If you get a full boat “luxury” car with all sorts of crazy features, well, they will likely break, like the “air scarves” in my Mercedes E550 cabriolet, that warms your neck with hot air when the top is down in the winter (not kidding)Next, the car market is really several different industries.. Volume and (sort of) less volume. Toyota, Ford, VW, GM, Nissan, Honda, and the like are really focused on huge volumes. Many of them are now selling 10 million units per year. That’s huge volume! Mercedes, BMW, Jaguar-Land Rover, etc sell less than a quarter of those numbers in many years, at much higher price points.Volume cars that are designed for enormous markets tend to be more reliable, because they are simpler, with far more conservative designs, put in place for people who want a transportation appliance. As you say, “Point A to Point B” with as little fanfare as possible. Toyota is the poster child here, as their cars take little if any risk in design of subsystems. And volume cars, because they are the bread and butter cars and problems affect so many people, get the most attention at the manufacturers.But, the big BUT! EVERY volume car manufacturer has bad designs or components that kill their reliability every so often. Honda was considered the pinnacle of reliability, until they weren’t. They’ve had huge amounts of recalls, their market share is down over the past few years, and many of the executives that ran the company were summarily fired in the past 2 or so years because of all the problems. Does that encourage you?Next, another big BUT. EVERY volume car manufacturer is focused on costs, ie, how much each part of your car costs them to buy/make, and install during assembly. They are all cutting corners all the time. The lucky ones are well, lucky. But even Toyota, with their reputation for reliability, has had periods of enormous reliability problems and dozens of recalls, engine oil leaks and burning, brake problems, steering problems, etc. They even had floor mat design issues that trapped the gas pedal and cause cars to accelerate out of control on several occasions.Next, anyone that attributes an entire nations automotive output to being the most or least reliable is living in an alternative universe. No, Japanese cars aren’t the most reliable. Japan has 8 (eight) car manufacturers. Are they all reliable? Of course not. Is France’s or the USA’s automotive output terrible, of course not. The funniest thing here is that most high volume Japanese cars are now manufactured in the US!Another thing that is special… Every single human has some story about some car that is bad/awful/terrible/”I’ll never buy that”, etc. Every. Single. Person. I’ve heard people say that “XXX” car is terrible, I’ll never buy another one after, get this, “it needed tires at 100K miles”. Huh? Of course it did. They wear out.And finally, those crazy “surveys” that the TV news and internet news sites report on with authority. “XXXX” is the most reliable car, its what you should buy claims “Blah Blah Blah” newspaper. Dumb, and simply not reliable (pun intended). Consumer reports is horrible, not credible, and basically makes stuff up about reliability. They have something called “Predicted Reliability” ratings. I guess they can predict the future? Neat trick but no. Things like JD Power are a little bit better, but then again, gullible news media takes all their data out of context all the time (shock of shocks!).One more thing on these surveys. Often, if you really look at the real data, a ton of complaints that are considered “reliability” issues have to do with in-car electronics being confusing, not a car breaking down and stranding someone on the side of the road. Each year, consumers complain about these complicated systems making their cars harder and harder to operate. And its really clouding what “reliability/dependability” really mean.So after all that, what do you do.If you’re in the US, stay with the volume car companies and their better sellers. Ford, GM, VW, Toyota, Nissan, Honda all make huge volumes of cars. A 4 cylinder simple Ford Escape will likely be as reliable as a Toyota Camry these days. If you really want something that starts every day, nearly every car will do that. If you want something that never requires maintenance, that car doesn’t exist. If you want something that is easy to operate, you have to try them out, because everyone is different and every car is different.Hope this helps.