I asked my mom how she started her business with grandma and, without getting into the weeds of it, they did it with even less money than I guessed. Maybe it’s just being in a small town where everyone knows everyone’s business, maybe in Kansas, at that time, people were just cooler. Even bankers, against all evidence to the contrary. I don’t know, but I do know that my memory of it wasn’t far wrong. I wonder if a person could do so much with so little now. My guess is no. Systemic hatred for small business is more advanced than I’ve ever seen it. The wealthy want very much to keep all the money, power, and control for themselves. But perhaps the tide is turning…

This puts me in mind of something. I’ve noticed a few voices absent from the comments. Generally when this happens it’s because people accidentally stumble into the list of forbidden words that get comments moderated. If the system flags you without me noticing it’s functionally a permanent ban unless I specifically ok your IP. If you think you’ve been moderated into the shadow realm you’ll have to contact me vie the site’s email, or mask your IP via a VPN. The reason that people accidentally stumble into these pitfalls is usually because I add the names of annoying public figures to the list regularly. So if you go on a tear and mention someone in the news who is annoying you can accidentally get banished. I am very random about the moderation list, as I tend to be with most things like that. Also, sites like facebook are banned words because so much spam is built on a foundation of their name recognition. In spite of the very strange moderation practices of the site since I try never to bring up banned words people getting banned is actually pretty rare, but every so often people will get their dander up over something and fall afoul of the moderation bot.
Just a little admin for anyone who may be wondering why their comments keep disappearing.

The site doesn’t get anything approaching the level of spam it did when the personal website was still relevant on the internet. At one point it was thousands of spam comments a day. Now it will sometimes hover under a thousand for a few days. The level of spam comments has been declining for some time now. I have a feeling that all the attention has shifted to using AI to relentlessly attack social media sites now. A site like mine, which has very limited reach, is not the enticing target it once was.

I often peruse the spam just to see what kinds of scams they are trying to pull, or what they are using as a base for the comments. It tends to go in waves. Right now a lot of them are talking about septic systems. I have no idea why that would be a subject they think would trick people, but who knows, maybe the gullible online tend to have septic problems. For a long time the comments were clearly targeting blogging style sites and just assumed that’s what my site was. I mean, it’s not exactly wrong is it? I’ve maintained a much more robust blog than any of my peers that I can think of. Probably to my detriment since I am far more open than most sensible people would be. As I said earlier facebook and amazon have long been problem terms for the spam comments. At one point so were Tumblr, Pintrest, Instagram, and others. They fell off quite a bit recently though. Facebook has always been the worst because it has always encouraged botted engagement as a means to inflate its importance.

Anyway, it is what it is. My comments have always been pretty heavily moderated because I didn’t want them turning into a big damn mess. At the same time I wanted to be a more present than someone who just silently posted comics. Of course when I started the idea was that the cartoonist was supposed to be a minor celebrity who made their work seem more important by way of their force of personality. I don’t have the kind of personality that can make that work since I openly hate many of my peers. You have to be… Obsequious, shall we say, to advance in most professions and cartooning is no different. I am not that.

Unrelated. It’s going to be an annoying month. Annoying things are going to happen that I can’t avoid and I’m fuming about them the closer they get. I have been isolated for so long now that I can just barely tolerate the outside world. Humans are supposedly social creatures, but if you don’t slot in very comfortably we begin to break down more and more. Before Covid most people I knew didn’t really get what it’s like to live like I do. Now they understand it at least. Many of my friends and associates developed anxiety disorders during the lockdown and they got a lot more empathetic when it was all over. You have to be broken in a very particular way to continue to survive long term. The longer you go though and the more difficult it gets to get back, if you even want to. At this point one of the only motivating factors for me to improve my health is so I don’t have to go anywhere to deal with its decline. I’ve managed to reduce trips to the hospital for bloodwork to levels I can almost tolerate. If I can go just a little bit further I can limit my human contact even more again. Maybe if I get past this month I’ll be able to go back to just sitting in my dimly lit room making up the life story of made up people and dealing with real ones as little as possible. I should really be taking advantage of this unseasonable warmth to get out and walk, but after the holidays my insomnia snapped back the other way and now I want to sleep for uncommonly long stretches. The entire time I’ve been typing this I’ve wanted to go to sleep but it’s only 6PM. If I go to sleep now and go for 9 hours I’ll be up at 3AM. If I could trust myself to just take a little nap that would be one thing… Of course the problem is that if I don’t take advantage of feeling sleepy I’ll get past the feeling and then I’ll be stuck awake for god knows how long. It’s probably better to just go to sleep and deal with whatever happens then to not sleep and be even less effective than usual when I’m wide awake.

Well whatever. I will return on Wednesday with another page, assuming some dire fate doesn’t befall me. Let’s plan for a future where I continue to exist. Since that is the plan we have agreed on I hope to see you here at that time. Please try to avoid a dire fate so we can make this future we have planned for a reality. Until then, be vigilant!

12 Comments

“…Then even if they fail I’ll still be richer than you.”
Oww.
:D

Fair reply. Reggie is being fair too; for him, 15k is, what, half his annual salary? More, considering the time period, the state, and his part-time status? I remember loaning 2 grand to someone once and people were like “Whoa, are you insane?”

Huh.
I’m going with the idea that she’s replying to Reggie, who said he wasn’t that-level-of good friends with anybody, by suggesting that- [If she fails in this endeavor] her large number of friends, makes her- “richer/more lucky than him”, by having more friends than him, or something.
Who knows?
Cheers.

Please imagine a comma after: “…endeavor]”.

Agreed. She is basically telling him that good friends are worth more than any amount of money. So even if she never sees that money again, she’ll still have those friends.

Thanks for posting banned words. Last I heard, the only banned word was that googly website everyone is so fond of for some reason.

Small businesses are only avoiding total collapse because of the internet; the ability to whip up a website, post inventory, order things immediately, send statements via text and email, all this stuff has been a huge boon. But it is still hard, and the people who most advocate against big businesses tend to push the most punishing laws for small businesses (they mean well, they just don’t see the effects it has on little shops, while bigger businesses can handle it, or find a way to dodge it). I work at a small business and it’s staggering what things cost and the hoops we have to jump through for every single little thing. Social media hasn’t helped, since now you have to pay to get any attention on Metabook or Twatter, meaning they are dominated by ads for major corporations anyway.

I wonder if the future is going to consist of increasingly-sophisticated AI spam bots versus increasingly sophisticated AI spam-detectors? Skynet is going to nuke the world because it’s the only way to truly end the offers of discounted ED pills.

Oooh, good zinger at the end there.

As for the tides turning… I would say that the tides are chugging along even stronger than ever. I would have to check the data, but the general feel is that small businesses die faster and faster, and fewer and fewer pop up.
Ignoring how how banks manipulating the system and how corpos bribe congress to pass laws that favor them and punish small business… the big businesses are also using their size to be extremely efficient. Small businesses have a harder time competing with massive economy of scale. And basically every store has to compete with internet sales which is dominated by giant monopolies.
The only exception is the restaurant industry… except they get totally ruined by stuff like Door Dash. Something about them illegally putting up fake posts for restaurants that refuse to work with them so they can steal customers.

As someone who has started their own business within the last few years, it depends on the business. I started mine with only a couple thousand dollars, but it’s a very niche business that didn’t have a lot of overhead and I could run it out of my house. I didn’t have much to expand it, but there personal loans only pushed up timetables rather than were a necessity; it was literally just a matter of time to save up the money to do so. However, in the case of something like retail or some kind of service industry like car repair or something it requires purchase/lease of buildings and special equipment/product, which can be *way* more expensive than people realize.

I feel like this is a first showing of slight incompatibility. While he is becoming less of a jerk, Reggie is still a little more antisocial than Alex and kinda by choice.
I really hope this doesn’t become a situation where Alex thinks she can change Reggie.

I don’t think she intends to change Reggie. Remember that most of her circle of friends are horrible little monsters in some way.

But I think Reggie will see this as a wake-up call about what is truly important in life. That maybe being a good friend is better than trying to get ahead in business.

Reggie only set sail on the “friend ship”, as Carol put it, with some of his coworkers a couple of weeks ago or so.

Compare Alex and Evrina, since grade school.

As an introvert (even though he isn’t) I recognize his feelings.

Reggie may not be a classic introvert, but in many ways, he is one. He tends to push people away rather than drawing them in, and he is very purpose-driven and focused.

2929 The Value Of Nothing.

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