I can’t even with this
oh my god
Geez noooo!!
But.. that… that is employment. It’s self-employment. You are earning income straight from clients or organizations as opposed to relying on a business as a middleman.
Why do people think that self-employment means that people just laze around all day and shit out content at will? Because that’s not how it works.
Self-employment is an actual job. You’re not only your own boss, but you’re your own creative director, your own accountant, your own PR manager and your own… everything else under the damn sun.
Sure, you’ve got the choice of not working for an entire week and you could just play video games instead. But you’ll lose money off of that. You need to plan accordingly. It’s not like working for a company in the sense that you’ll get compensated time and a half, because that is not how self-employment works.
Then you’ve got taxes to worry about, which presents a far different beast than just filing a W2. You can’t afford to make a mistake lest you get audited, and if you don’t get audited, chances are you might owe taxes.
You also have to pay for your own insurance. General stuff on top of maybe dental and vision too. Even so, if you get into a situation where you’ll be unable to work for an extended period, guess what? You get no sick leave much less extended leave. You won’t get a consistent paycheck like you would if you were employed elsewhere. You lose money for each day you don’t work, and much much more if you can’t work due to injury or illness.
The great thing about it though, is that once you get a good grasp on how to handle being self-employed, it can be pretty damn rewarding. If you’re skilled enough, you can produce a lot more content in less time, or perform a service in less time than if you were employed elsewhere. Depending on the type of work you do, you can spread your work out to be done throughout the day, and you don’t have to completely sacrifice your social life to do what needs to be done.
If you know your friends want to hang out at a bar one evening, you can spend most of the time before then that day to work, then hang out with them and relax a bit. And depending on the type of job you do, you can also work while eating lunch somewhere, or eating dinner, or elsewhere that’s not even your house. If you’ve got the proper items to do your job with and you’re able to lug them around somewhere, you can work wherever you damn well want.
So I mean, as long as you know what you’re in for, know how to do your taxes, know how to keep a good budget, then for all I care you can stay self-employed.
All Patreon does is provide a very easy platform for artists to allow their clients and customers to pay them on a consistent basis. It allows for content creators to keep doing what they’re already doing regularly instead of having to take up an entirely unrelated job that would inevitably take more time away from the things that they want to do. And those that do pay the content creator monthly truly WANT them to keep doing what they’re doing because they like their content, and want to see them do shit more often.
So to all of you who think that they’re entitled to every single little thing an artist makes– fuck you. A good amount of artists produce enough stuff for everyone to indulge in, if they want to produce something special for the people that, you know, want to support them they’ve got every right to do so.
Go take your dumbass entitlement complex and shove it up your ass.
yis plz
I don’t get why some people think they can dictate what a creator does with their own patreon :TCapitalism Stage V: even entrepreneurs are now entitled lazy-asses who don’t deserve income or respect
it’s been a while since i checked it, but there really aren’t as many jobs as you’d expect on USA Jobs
“You could be a freelance artist so people will pay you for your art, instead of starting a Patreon where people will pay you for your art.”
Um.
Category: General
-
-
How People Eat Fries Around The World.
This is relevant to my interests
I could LIVE on chips in curry sauce. I haven’t made them in forever, but now I am craving them.
I’ve made the India and Russian style ones. I still eat them with ketchup though.
if you take out the sausage in salchipapas you get the correct way to eat french fries (that is, the Ecuadorian way, though sausage is great)
Gimme gimme
I could handle a french-fry based world tour. And poutine is a wonder food. A wonder food for people who make their own insulation and need no green veggies. Poutine is love.
I also saw them in Germany with currywurst. Sausage and fries with curry ketchup (or curry powder sprinkled over regular ketchup.
-
An unfortunate bird got a soaking when it was sneezed on by a giraffe. The unlucky oxpecker was clearly in the wrong place at the wrong time and caught in a jet of drool when the giraffe seemingly let out a massive sneeze. Amateur photographer, Lisl Moolman was photographing animals at a waterhole in Kruger National Park South Africa when she captured the funny moment on camera.
Picture: LISL MOOLMAN / CATERS NEWSThe oxpecker had it coming.
See, oxpeckers eat ticks off large mammals. “Awww!” say the more starry-eyed naturalists. “Nature! So glorious! So symbiotic! So occasionally not horrible!”
“Not so fast,” say their more hard-headed counterparts. “They’re basically eating blood. In fact, their primary nutrition is the mammal’s blood. They’re getting it by eating the ticks that are already engorged from having fed. How does that help the giraffe (or rhino or whatever)?”
Actually, it turns out oxpeckers are little bastards. They eat the engorged ticks, not the flat ones that haven’t fed yet, and if there’s no ticks, they’ll cut out the middleman and enlarge wounds on their mammal victim so they can feed directly. They’re little goddamn vampires. A mammal with oxpeckers is actually LESS healthy than one that just has ticks.
I hope the giraffe sneezed on him twice.
-
During the siege of Leningrad, 12 scientists starved to death rather
than eat the grains stored at Pavlosk Agricultural Station, the world’s
first seed bank.Gardening has many saints, but few martyrs. This one always chokes me up a little.
-
Settle.
Life continues to be more or less the same as it ever was. I’ve been working, at least intermittently, and I’ve even been paid. That has been rather nice, although it’s led to a bit of a flurry of spending as I’ve taken a bunch of stuff off the ‘want list’ which included several things that I’d decided I wouldn’t buy until we got to the US.
I’d been holding that restraint for a couple of years. Adding in the last 3 months of me not buying pretty much anything (I bought a few books, and a few items for our business) and then say “look, you’ve been paid”. I snapped. Much of this is ‘fun’ stuff, but the other thing that’s sucked up funds is things like ‘UK to US’ plug adaptors (10 of ’em, on the way). I’d thought I’d replace the old UK plugs with US ones, but bare US plugs are actually ridiculously pricey, so instead I’ve just bought adaptors. From China. Also, bonus, I get to keep the fuses for added safety.
And BC – Edison Screw lamp adaptors. I was unaware that such things existed – so I’d bought one of the 85-250v LED BC lamps for one of the anglepoises (as a test), but having discovered these I can just go to the store and get what, in the US, are regular LED bulbs and throw those in. Hurrah! These adaptors were way cheaper than the special bulbs and had free postage. Since I’m not in a raring hurry to get the lamps working, that’s fine.
I also started setting up my ‘home lab’, as it were. Up until now I’ve scrounged stuff from the lovely John, but 4k miles is a little far to take things for testing, and it’s a little tricky to ask John if he’d like to pop over for an evening of tinkering with electronics. I’ve finally got it together and bought a (new) soldering iron / rework gun combo. I wasn’t going to get a rework gun, I mean, me and surface mount are not close friends. But with our business plans, I may want to put together some kind of board with surface mount components, in which case a rework gun will become handy – and it was a few dollars extra to get that functionality. Second hand kit that’s also winging its way to me is a ‘scope that weighs approximately the same as the house (50Mhz Tektronix 453*).
I doubt mine will look 1/10th as nice when it arrives. Indeed, I know some of the plastic knobules from the switches are missing (the selector knobs are all there). I’m hoping (really hoping) that one day my 3D printer will arrive and I can print myself some new ones. If not, I’ve got some sugru in the toolbox.
I thought about getting something a bit fancier that would be better for digital hardware (perhaps the 150Mhz 454), but if I decide I need that later I can either sell off the Tektronix 453 and get something ‘more modern’, or just suck up the expense if I’ve got attached to the 453. I’ve also got an HP 6200B bench power supply on its way too. John has infested my mind with his HP / Tektronix lovin’, which meant that other, cheaper options got ditched on the way to this selection, but I think they should be handy. And the 453 seems to be considered to be a pretty good scope – which it’s within the realms of my knowledge to repair and keep going.
Whilst the scope is slightly frivolous at the moment, and is partly a ‘I have little to do at home’ thing some of the kit will be handy straight away. The bench supply will be handy getting the car alarm configured… since it wants to charge a bit before it works, and you need to send it various text messages to get it configured. That bench supply will also be doing duty building up the circuit for the first kit we’re planning for our business.
Most of this kit is pretty tatty, but should be enough to get me ‘up and running’. At least, once I’ve given it a really, really good clean it should be.
This splurge of spending does mean that I’m now rather over excited when I see UPS and USPS vans, which tediously never seem to actually stop here…
Still. I don’t think I can buy much else for the rest of the month (except for needs – like maintaining my poor Minor, that’s had hundreds of miles added some weeks). At any rate, I shall try to exercise restraint. I’ve put a bit into my savings this month and then I’m hoping to put some of the funds we extracted back into the house-savings too.
At any rate, the rain paused yesterday for long enough for me to go and throw silicone sealant around the minor with reckless abandon.
Water’s been dripping in through that wiper spindle’s hole for a while. In an attempt to prevent it totally destroying the glove box liner, and the radio underneath, and then the floor below that, I whipped off the nut cleaned up the seals and put them back with a thin layer of windscreen silicone on them. I note that this has been done before, with what appears to be gasket sealant. That might have been me… but it didn’t work that time. Here’s hoping this time it does work. Overnight it’s rained and there wasn’t any water that I could feel, so fingers crossed I might get some relief from that.
I also attacked the boot (trunk) – using sealant around the holes where the “MORRIS 1000” badge is mounted. This morning the boot (trunk) was actually bone dry, which I think is a first, and made me quite happy.
I also commenced trying to understand how to fit the alarm – and realised that actually, it’d probably make more sense for it to be on our family contract for it’s SMS messaging, rather than me stick it on the Net10 sim I’ve got kicking around. Well, maybe. We need to go and see if we can beg a cellspot for the house as it is slightly ridiculous that you have to go outside to make calls a lot of the time and while we’re there I’ll see if I can add it on at a low rate. Otherwise I’ll see which provider is cheapest for a pure voice/SMS option. It doesn’t need data of any sort, so it’s a big silly getting it a voice/data contract. I also realised that the alarm wants an SD card for some of its more handy features, and it makes sense to fit that before I put the alarm in the car.
Given that it’s a cheap Chinese system the manual is somewhat challenging to understand at times. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem to require too many features the Minor doesn’t have (indeed, it looks like it should actually be able to track the fuel level of the Minor, which is pretty nifty, though why I’d want to is unclear).
I thought about fitting it this morning; indeed that was my ‘plan’ for the day. But I am distrustful of the weather, and although it said “0% chance of rain” the forecast started to get a bit sketchy around lunchtime, and it looks like rain every day after now for a while, so getting part-way through is undesirable. I succumbed to my rain-fear and went for a walk instead.
Which was probably a good plan as it’s been hacking with rain for the last hour and half, and I’d’ve probably still been out there dangling upside-down. I think when I have all the relevant bits, I’ll be a bit more enthused about getting it done.
In other news, I headed out yesterday to see if I could find a stick blender. We’ve wanted one for a long time, and before I got paid I kept seeing them at goodwill and value village. Of course, now I’ve actually been paid, they’ve vaporised. Goodwill does make me miss the cleanliness of most British charity shops. I’m sure there’s awesome stuff in there, but the electronics sections always make me feel rather like I need to wash my hands thoroughly on leaving. Anyhow, what I did find was ‘Goodwill Outlet’, which is a fearsome place. Unsorted, sad old things piled into plastic waist high bins… It’s the kind of place I feel the need to have a companion, because rifling through the stuff in there by yourself, it feels kinda weird. I suspect that there probably are stick blenders lying prone at the bottom of those bins, but I didn’t quite have the guts to pull so much stuff out.
And then we come to the elephant in the absent room. The house.
We’re off looking at properties this weekend. Five of ’em. One with a building, one with a ‘building’ (it’s a house of “poor quality” built in 1901), and 3 bits of land that are just land. I continue to feel the disappointment from the permit-disaster-wetland-hideousness, but hopefully one of these will speak to our souls. One of them, funnily enough, enormously close to where Kathryn’s mom used to live, and would give us effectively the same view. Which is weird. Although the land-with-buildings-on may be better for us, in terms of both location and usefulness. Still, we’ll see what happens.
* Handily, this is old enough that the entire manual is available here
-
I didn’t trust the weather enough to work on the car, but had to go out for a walk… on Flickr.
I didn’t trust the weather enough to work on the car, but had to go out for a walk…
-
Just a few of the stories my great aunt told me about women in the 60s:
1) A woman she worked with at the hospital who had a baby with one of the ambulance drivers. When work found out they fired her (he kept his job). She tried to self-abort with a knitting needle.
2) The sister of one of her neighbours who wasn’t able to rent a room because she was a ‘fallen woman’.
3) A girl who got sent to a convent house and scrubbed floors until the day she gave birth. Her baby was given up for adoption without her consent.
4) Girls who had babies with priests.
5) Women who were on their fifth, sixth, seventh child, who had been pregnant for the best part of a decade, begging for sterilisation because their husbands wouldn’t wear a condom.
Banning abortion has never ever stopped it from happening. It’s just meant more stigma, more prejudice, more risks and more deaths.
In 1962, my mother was going thru a divorce, got pregnant and knew this fact would be used to deny her divorce (they used to do that, in case you didn’t know).
My mother was given a “shot”; she lived 3 blocks from the doctor. He never told her what it was, likely an “overdose” of progesterone, which is how they used to “induce menstruation” in a hurry (i.e. abortion off the books). She was about 7-8 weeks by her estimation. He said, GO STRAIGHT HOME, go to bed and stay there. She walked fast, but nearly collapsed at the curb and my grandmother went out to guide her into the house. She went to bed, stayed there and bled steadily and heavily for 3-4 days. She said it was like being very very sick, headaches, nausea, vomiting… and then, gone.
She never let me forget this and took me to my first NARAL meeting when I was 15 yrs old. And here I am today, in my 50s–and I still remember my grandmother’s scary account; my mother swaying, literally, at the curb, and nearly falling, under the strength of that one shot.
How did she get the doctor to do it? She told him, “If you don’t, I will do it myself”–and if you knew my mother, you knew she meant it. She would have. After all, lots of women she knew had.
This is what they want to take us all back to, the fucking middle ages. Please remember.
I really don’t think we will go back the middle ages just because abortion is illegalized. Society is different now and abortion is not some HUGE factor in this. Those were the 1960s and it is no longer the 1960s.
The reason this isn’t the 1960s is because women can access contraception and abortion – thus enabling them to have careers, to have bodily autonomy, to actually have sex without bearing the entire burden of social stigma and physical danger, to equalise sexual autonomy.
Without abortion we very well will go back to the 60s. And it wasn’t the bohemian dream everyone acts like it was, as shown by the original point.
-
Hey, ignore me if you’ve answered this already, but where did your interest in plant life and gardening come from? I am forever marveling at all this practical knowledge that I was never introduced to as a kid.
Oh wow, that’s a good question! My mother was a gardener, and I think it was from her that I got the desire to grow things, but I didn’t get much practical knowledge. (Not her fault, I was just young and dumb and also things that grow in Oregon are not always things that grow in Minnesota or North Carolina. I did learn how to build a drystone wall from my stepfather, though, which is surprisingly useful knowledge, because it teaches you that stacking a bunch of rocks can fix all kinds of things.)
No, I got all the actual knowledge from books and sticking my hands into dirt. Mostly books. I knew nothing when I started. I kept ordering mulch from one place and they gave me Black Kow compost instead, because the clerk didn’t know anything either. So I spread like three hundred pounds of cow manure on my flower beds and then wondered why the weeds grew, but oh my god, the plants exploded.
And I also did a lot of things that were stupid, some of which worked great. For example, nobody told me you couldn’t build a garden bed by marking out a chunk of lawn and dumping dirt over it, until after the fact, when they said the grass would grow through. Those beds did awesome. Still do. Mind you, I used a LOT of dirt. (If I were doing it again, I might try flipping the sod, but at the time, I just got in and dumped dirt and smothered everything.)
I had no idea how big anything got, so I’d plant it and find out. In some cases, that means that I’m still dealing with having Rattlesnake Master at the front of a bed and having to stake it, and I’ve moved (and slain) plants that got out of hand.
Anyway, the moral of the story is that gardening is often a blood-borne pathogen, but practical knowledge can be gleaned by reading and doing and failing and trying again.
How so many gardeners learn, really. Nothing like actually going out and playing in the dirt!
Also: MUCH easier than turning the sod is to just throw a few layers (4 ish) of cardboard under the pile of dirt. Insta bed, grass won’t go through, you don’t have to turn sod (which is a HUGE pain in the backside).
‘s how we did almost all of our last garden…
Worked a treat.
-
Hey, the sun’s come out for 5 minutes… Quick! Do some work on the car! on Flickr.
Hey, the sun’s come out for 5 minutes… Quick! Do some work on the car!
