Today’s WSJ features the sad, sad story of retired churchman Fred Osborn, who might have to sell his family home. It only has single-pane windows, making it expensive to heat in the winter. And even after renting it out in the summer, Osborn ends up losing money on the old place. On top of that, his son has moved in, along with his four kids. If it got sold, three generations of Osborns would be kicked out at once.
“I want to enjoy retirement now, but I really can’t afford to do that,” Osborn tells the WSJ’s Anne Miller. “It’s a very conflicting, emotional thing.”
But here’s the rub: the story is in the WSJ’s real estate section. It’s basically about a home for sale. The price is $200,000, plus $1,000 a year in taxes. Will you help poor Mr Osborn out?
Hang on, I might have missed out a zero. Actually, the price is $2,000,000, plus $10,000 a year in taxes. A little bit less sympathetic now, I guess.
Wait, I’ve just found another order of magnitude down the back of the sofa. Osborn, it turns out, “will entertain offers above $20 million”, while taxes are “about $100,000 a year”.
Oh, and he’s the great-great-great-great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, which I guess makes his gambolling grandhildren Vanderbilt’s great-great-great-great-great-great-gran dchildren. But who’s counting.
Not Miller, whose math doesn’t make much sense at all:
Heating the 14-bedroom stone mansion can run $200 a day in the winter—too expensive for year-round living…
Mr. Osborn IV, a former Columbia University crew coach, rents out the castle for weddings between June and September. Day rates start at $55,000.
But it’s barely enough. The Osborns estimate the property consumes at least $500,000 a year, including taxes.
If the Osborns pay $200 a day every day for six months, that comes to about $36,500 a year to heat the old pile. A lot of money, to be sure, and a lot of carbon emissions too, but still a tiny fraction of those total running costs, which themselves can be covered by renting out the castle for nine days over the course of the summer. Beyond the heating and the taxes, there’s no indication of what makes up the lion’s share of those half-a-mil-per-year running costs, but it hardly seems as though $200 a day for heating would tip the scales enough to force the family to move out of the mansion.
All the same, there’s a hint of possible good news at the end of the story.
Over Thanksgiving, Mr. Osborn III learned that some younger cousins have done well in online ventures and banking. Maybe they will have the funds—and interest—to move in, he said, even if the property doesn’t stay in his direct lineage.
“I’m an equal-opportunity family patron,” he said.
Those younger cousins might not be named Frederick Henry Osborn IV. But their blood is still blue. And that’s what counts, surely.
As my Facebook friends and coworkers are tired of hearing, I’ve been on a serious fitness kick over the past year and a half, having lost 83 pounds. But I now have a new problem, and I admit it’s a pretty good one to have: My current set of fitness apps, geared around watching calories and tracking workouts, don’t seem ready to take me to the next level.
That’s why I was pretty pumped to hear about Gain Fitness, a new workout-recommendation site from former Google and YouTube employee Nick Gammell. Currently, the site offers randomized but scientific workouts that you can customize based on your experience level and available equipment.
The fitness industry is a $120 billion-a-year business. So there’s money to be made in the margins by making it more efficient, social, and data-driven. Gain’s service is aimed at regular exercisers who already hit the gym two to five times a week, but get frustrated at their lack of progress and the time it takes to both plan and track workouts. The notion of the site’s Quick Workout is that Gain Fitness can take out the time it takes to think through and plan a workout, while using principles of exercise science to design a sensible routine. Gammell estimates this demographic includes 50- 60 million people in the United States alone.
I certainly fit in that group: I’ve taught myself a fair bit about exercise and work out with a personal trainer but don’t consider myself an expert. When I clicked through Gain’s Quick Workout generator to show a workout I could do at home, what I saw both felt familiar and in my range of capabilities, yet seemed appropriately challenging — decline pushups, bodyweight squats, planks, and so on. (Gammell’s cofounder, Sam Morrell, is a certified personal trainer, while Gammell is a former college football player.)
There’s a host of fitness apps and websites out there, from DailyBurn and LoseIt to two personal favorites, MyFitnessPal and GymGoal. But Gammell hopes to harness his quantitative background — he was a financial data analyst at Google — and today’s sophisticated social networks to take online fitness to the next level. His plans for the site include public profiles, workout sharing, and social challenges. (Another site I’ve started using recently, Social Workout, already lets people create and join challenges and share them on Facebook, but doesn’t have Gain’s workout-generating function.)
What I’d really like to see is a way to tie more of these sites together. Just as location-based services have started to cooperate on place databases and check-in data, fitness sites should be able to share food diaries, calorie expenditures, and workout plans among themselves. Gammell agrees and said he’d like to be part of that move.
Gain Fitness, formerly known as eFitPlan, has raised $80,000 from friends and family members. Google executive Ben Ling, who’s well-known inside the tech business for his brutal workout regime, is an advisor to the company.
Gammell’s not just CEO of the company, he also uses the product — and offered this before-and-after photo as proof. As I joked with him, most people would consider themselves lucky if his before was their after, but it shows there’s an opportunity for fitness apps that go beyond the basics.
And here’s a presentation Morrell and Gammell gave at the Quantified Self, a workshop for fitness-tracking aficionados:
Next Story: VentureBeat on the prowl for DEMO startups in New York, Toronto Previous Story: Projects in 2010 took aim at cleantech’s chicken-and-egg dilemma
Foot-and-Mouth Outbreak Spreads Through South Korea - AOL <b>News</b>
South Korea is suffering its worst-ever outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, with the highly contagious virus spreading to farms across the country despite a nationwide quarantine effort.
Moore: EA not backing away from Tiger <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net
Read our news of Moore: EA not backing away from Tiger.
<b>News</b> - Lindsay Lohan Moving Next Door to Ex Sam Ronson - Celebrity <b>...</b>
Even fresh out of rehab, the actress can't seem to stay away for her former flame.
robert shumake detroit
Foot-and-Mouth Outbreak Spreads Through South Korea - AOL <b>News</b>
South Korea is suffering its worst-ever outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, with the highly contagious virus spreading to farms across the country despite a nationwide quarantine effort.
Moore: EA not backing away from Tiger <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net
Read our news of Moore: EA not backing away from Tiger.
<b>News</b> - Lindsay Lohan Moving Next Door to Ex Sam Ronson - Celebrity <b>...</b>
Even fresh out of rehab, the actress can't seem to stay away for her former flame.
robert shumake detroit
Today’s WSJ features the sad, sad story of retired churchman Fred Osborn, who might have to sell his family home. It only has single-pane windows, making it expensive to heat in the winter. And even after renting it out in the summer, Osborn ends up losing money on the old place. On top of that, his son has moved in, along with his four kids. If it got sold, three generations of Osborns would be kicked out at once.
“I want to enjoy retirement now, but I really can’t afford to do that,” Osborn tells the WSJ’s Anne Miller. “It’s a very conflicting, emotional thing.”
But here’s the rub: the story is in the WSJ’s real estate section. It’s basically about a home for sale. The price is $200,000, plus $1,000 a year in taxes. Will you help poor Mr Osborn out?
Hang on, I might have missed out a zero. Actually, the price is $2,000,000, plus $10,000 a year in taxes. A little bit less sympathetic now, I guess.
Wait, I’ve just found another order of magnitude down the back of the sofa. Osborn, it turns out, “will entertain offers above $20 million”, while taxes are “about $100,000 a year”.
Oh, and he’s the great-great-great-great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, which I guess makes his gambolling grandhildren Vanderbilt’s great-great-great-great-great-great-gran dchildren. But who’s counting.
Not Miller, whose math doesn’t make much sense at all:
Heating the 14-bedroom stone mansion can run $200 a day in the winter—too expensive for year-round living…
Mr. Osborn IV, a former Columbia University crew coach, rents out the castle for weddings between June and September. Day rates start at $55,000.
But it’s barely enough. The Osborns estimate the property consumes at least $500,000 a year, including taxes.
If the Osborns pay $200 a day every day for six months, that comes to about $36,500 a year to heat the old pile. A lot of money, to be sure, and a lot of carbon emissions too, but still a tiny fraction of those total running costs, which themselves can be covered by renting out the castle for nine days over the course of the summer. Beyond the heating and the taxes, there’s no indication of what makes up the lion’s share of those half-a-mil-per-year running costs, but it hardly seems as though $200 a day for heating would tip the scales enough to force the family to move out of the mansion.
All the same, there’s a hint of possible good news at the end of the story.
Over Thanksgiving, Mr. Osborn III learned that some younger cousins have done well in online ventures and banking. Maybe they will have the funds—and interest—to move in, he said, even if the property doesn’t stay in his direct lineage.
“I’m an equal-opportunity family patron,” he said.
Those younger cousins might not be named Frederick Henry Osborn IV. But their blood is still blue. And that’s what counts, surely.
As my Facebook friends and coworkers are tired of hearing, I’ve been on a serious fitness kick over the past year and a half, having lost 83 pounds. But I now have a new problem, and I admit it’s a pretty good one to have: My current set of fitness apps, geared around watching calories and tracking workouts, don’t seem ready to take me to the next level.
That’s why I was pretty pumped to hear about Gain Fitness, a new workout-recommendation site from former Google and YouTube employee Nick Gammell. Currently, the site offers randomized but scientific workouts that you can customize based on your experience level and available equipment.
The fitness industry is a $120 billion-a-year business. So there’s money to be made in the margins by making it more efficient, social, and data-driven. Gain’s service is aimed at regular exercisers who already hit the gym two to five times a week, but get frustrated at their lack of progress and the time it takes to both plan and track workouts. The notion of the site’s Quick Workout is that Gain Fitness can take out the time it takes to think through and plan a workout, while using principles of exercise science to design a sensible routine. Gammell estimates this demographic includes 50- 60 million people in the United States alone.
I certainly fit in that group: I’ve taught myself a fair bit about exercise and work out with a personal trainer but don’t consider myself an expert. When I clicked through Gain’s Quick Workout generator to show a workout I could do at home, what I saw both felt familiar and in my range of capabilities, yet seemed appropriately challenging — decline pushups, bodyweight squats, planks, and so on. (Gammell’s cofounder, Sam Morrell, is a certified personal trainer, while Gammell is a former college football player.)
There’s a host of fitness apps and websites out there, from DailyBurn and LoseIt to two personal favorites, MyFitnessPal and GymGoal. But Gammell hopes to harness his quantitative background — he was a financial data analyst at Google — and today’s sophisticated social networks to take online fitness to the next level. His plans for the site include public profiles, workout sharing, and social challenges. (Another site I’ve started using recently, Social Workout, already lets people create and join challenges and share them on Facebook, but doesn’t have Gain’s workout-generating function.)
What I’d really like to see is a way to tie more of these sites together. Just as location-based services have started to cooperate on place databases and check-in data, fitness sites should be able to share food diaries, calorie expenditures, and workout plans among themselves. Gammell agrees and said he’d like to be part of that move.
Gain Fitness, formerly known as eFitPlan, has raised $80,000 from friends and family members. Google executive Ben Ling, who’s well-known inside the tech business for his brutal workout regime, is an advisor to the company.
Gammell’s not just CEO of the company, he also uses the product — and offered this before-and-after photo as proof. As I joked with him, most people would consider themselves lucky if his before was their after, but it shows there’s an opportunity for fitness apps that go beyond the basics.
And here’s a presentation Morrell and Gammell gave at the Quantified Self, a workshop for fitness-tracking aficionados:
Next Story: VentureBeat on the prowl for DEMO startups in New York, Toronto Previous Story: Projects in 2010 took aim at cleantech’s chicken-and-egg dilemma
robert shumake
Foot-and-Mouth Outbreak Spreads Through South Korea - AOL <b>News</b>
South Korea is suffering its worst-ever outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, with the highly contagious virus spreading to farms across the country despite a nationwide quarantine effort.
Moore: EA not backing away from Tiger <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net
Read our news of Moore: EA not backing away from Tiger.
<b>News</b> - Lindsay Lohan Moving Next Door to Ex Sam Ronson - Celebrity <b>...</b>
Even fresh out of rehab, the actress can't seem to stay away for her former flame.
robert shumake
Foot-and-Mouth Outbreak Spreads Through South Korea - AOL <b>News</b>
South Korea is suffering its worst-ever outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, with the highly contagious virus spreading to farms across the country despite a nationwide quarantine effort.
Moore: EA not backing away from Tiger <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net
Read our news of Moore: EA not backing away from Tiger.
<b>News</b> - Lindsay Lohan Moving Next Door to Ex Sam Ronson - Celebrity <b>...</b>
Even fresh out of rehab, the actress can't seem to stay away for her former flame.
robert shumake detroit
Why do so many people often dive headfirst into starting their own online business or getting into an internet moneymaking scheme, when they would think twice about starting up a business or entering a get rich quick scheme offline? Because there's this persistent myth that the internet is the only place in the world where you can rake in tons of dough with zero investment. Want to make money off affiliate advertising? Sign up for a free webhosting account, build a site using a pagebuilder, slap some adblocks up and watch the money roll in. Want to make money off your photographs? Sign up for a microstock agency and snap pictures with your pre-existing budget point and shoot. Want to sell your graphic design services? Sign up with a crowd-sourcing website, then make a bid on a project using nothing but the image editor that came installed on your computer.
Easy as pie, right? Unfortunately not, and here's why: although it's true that you could technically spend no money at all getting an internet venture started, you won't go very far in terms of revenue. Why? Because the only way to really get anywhere is to invest some money. The reason? An important key to creating a successful online business is to present something as professionally as possible. And guess what? Professionalism costs money.
Let's examine this "professionalism = money" principle with a few examples. Let's say you want to make money from Google Adsense by putting up a website and placing some text ads on it. If you want to make any real money from this site, you can't just build a lame home page using a free web hosting account. You have to buy a domain for your site, get it hosted at a fee-based web host, and-- if you don't have the design skills-- either purchase a template or hire someone to design it for you.
It seems like a lot of trouble to go through, but there's a good reason for it. In order to make a decent amount of income money off of Adsense, you have to attract thousands, if not millions, of visitors a month. The only way you could come close to achieving that type of traffic is to have a site that people will take seriously enough to visit and recommend to other people. If you put out a poorly designed site hosted at a free web host that slathers it in chintzy ads, carves it up into a multitude of frames, and gives it a really long, indistinct URL like www.freewebhost34.com/~username/mywebhost, you'll never see the type of numbers needed to earn a substantial amount of money. So spending money to buy a domain, host your site, and even design it is a must if you hope to earn any kind of decent revenue off Google Adsense.
Let's look at another example-- microstock agencies. People have flocked to microstock in droves, because they believe that all it takes to make money is to just use any pre-existing budget old point and shoot that they have lying around. As a person who's done microstock I can tell you that nothing could be further from the truth. The major microstock agencies have very high technical standards in terms of the images they'll accept into their inventory; any image that falls short of the ideal will get rejected. What this means is that more often than not, when you join an agency you will have to invest in a pricy prosumer camera or DSLR that can take higher quality photos than the one your cheap point and shoot takes. You can try to submit images shot with a 3 year old $150 camera, but trust me-- you'll get nothing but a string of rejections for your efforts no matter how well composed they are.
One last example of this "professionalism= money" principle at work is freelance graphic design. Let's say you're absolutely brilliant with an image editor (in fact, you're the Picasso of computer graphic artists!) You decide to offer your graphic design services to the public, whether through your own portfolio site or as a member of a crowdsourcing website such as 99 Designs. If you want to make money-- real money-- you can't just use whatever OEM software came bundled with your printer or installed with your O/S. You have to invest in a high end graphics application like Adobe Photoshop, because one of the many requirements that clients demand from a professional designer is that the finished piece be delivered in Photoshop's native image format (.psd) so it can be customized to their liking. You could try to run your graphic design business by squeaking by on a generic image editor, but it would be at a huge cost. You'd lose out on scores of potential business opportunities, since you wouldn't be able to produce a .psd for many clients.
Bottom line? True to the entrepreneur's credo, if you want to do well at earning revenue online, you have to spend money to make money, because professionalism demands it. This doesn't necessarily mean that it's impossible to make any money should you not make a small investment, just that you probably won't make nearly as much as you could. So before you even think about starting an internet business or affiliate scheme, be prepared to spend the money you need to get your internet venture off the ground as professionally as possible. Resist the temptation to be a cheapskate, because the money you invest initially could make a huge difference in how much you wind up earning in the long run.
robert shumake
Foot-and-Mouth Outbreak Spreads Through South Korea - AOL <b>News</b>
South Korea is suffering its worst-ever outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, with the highly contagious virus spreading to farms across the country despite a nationwide quarantine effort.
Moore: EA not backing away from Tiger <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net
Read our news of Moore: EA not backing away from Tiger.
<b>News</b> - Lindsay Lohan Moving Next Door to Ex Sam Ronson - Celebrity <b>...</b>
Even fresh out of rehab, the actress can't seem to stay away for her former flame.
robert shumake
robert shumake detroit
Today’s WSJ features the sad, sad story of retired churchman Fred Osborn, who might have to sell his family home. It only has single-pane windows, making it expensive to heat in the winter. And even after renting it out in the summer, Osborn ends up losing money on the old place. On top of that, his son has moved in, along with his four kids. If it got sold, three generations of Osborns would be kicked out at once.
“I want to enjoy retirement now, but I really can’t afford to do that,” Osborn tells the WSJ’s Anne Miller. “It’s a very conflicting, emotional thing.”
But here’s the rub: the story is in the WSJ’s real estate section. It’s basically about a home for sale. The price is $200,000, plus $1,000 a year in taxes. Will you help poor Mr Osborn out?
Hang on, I might have missed out a zero. Actually, the price is $2,000,000, plus $10,000 a year in taxes. A little bit less sympathetic now, I guess.
Wait, I’ve just found another order of magnitude down the back of the sofa. Osborn, it turns out, “will entertain offers above $20 million”, while taxes are “about $100,000 a year”.
Oh, and he’s the great-great-great-great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, which I guess makes his gambolling grandhildren Vanderbilt’s great-great-great-great-great-great-gran dchildren. But who’s counting.
Not Miller, whose math doesn’t make much sense at all:
Heating the 14-bedroom stone mansion can run $200 a day in the winter—too expensive for year-round living…
Mr. Osborn IV, a former Columbia University crew coach, rents out the castle for weddings between June and September. Day rates start at $55,000.
But it’s barely enough. The Osborns estimate the property consumes at least $500,000 a year, including taxes.
If the Osborns pay $200 a day every day for six months, that comes to about $36,500 a year to heat the old pile. A lot of money, to be sure, and a lot of carbon emissions too, but still a tiny fraction of those total running costs, which themselves can be covered by renting out the castle for nine days over the course of the summer. Beyond the heating and the taxes, there’s no indication of what makes up the lion’s share of those half-a-mil-per-year running costs, but it hardly seems as though $200 a day for heating would tip the scales enough to force the family to move out of the mansion.
All the same, there’s a hint of possible good news at the end of the story.
Over Thanksgiving, Mr. Osborn III learned that some younger cousins have done well in online ventures and banking. Maybe they will have the funds—and interest—to move in, he said, even if the property doesn’t stay in his direct lineage.
“I’m an equal-opportunity family patron,” he said.
Those younger cousins might not be named Frederick Henry Osborn IV. But their blood is still blue. And that’s what counts, surely.
As my Facebook friends and coworkers are tired of hearing, I’ve been on a serious fitness kick over the past year and a half, having lost 83 pounds. But I now have a new problem, and I admit it’s a pretty good one to have: My current set of fitness apps, geared around watching calories and tracking workouts, don’t seem ready to take me to the next level.
That’s why I was pretty pumped to hear about Gain Fitness, a new workout-recommendation site from former Google and YouTube employee Nick Gammell. Currently, the site offers randomized but scientific workouts that you can customize based on your experience level and available equipment.
The fitness industry is a $120 billion-a-year business. So there’s money to be made in the margins by making it more efficient, social, and data-driven. Gain’s service is aimed at regular exercisers who already hit the gym two to five times a week, but get frustrated at their lack of progress and the time it takes to both plan and track workouts. The notion of the site’s Quick Workout is that Gain Fitness can take out the time it takes to think through and plan a workout, while using principles of exercise science to design a sensible routine. Gammell estimates this demographic includes 50- 60 million people in the United States alone.
I certainly fit in that group: I’ve taught myself a fair bit about exercise and work out with a personal trainer but don’t consider myself an expert. When I clicked through Gain’s Quick Workout generator to show a workout I could do at home, what I saw both felt familiar and in my range of capabilities, yet seemed appropriately challenging — decline pushups, bodyweight squats, planks, and so on. (Gammell’s cofounder, Sam Morrell, is a certified personal trainer, while Gammell is a former college football player.)
There’s a host of fitness apps and websites out there, from DailyBurn and LoseIt to two personal favorites, MyFitnessPal and GymGoal. But Gammell hopes to harness his quantitative background — he was a financial data analyst at Google — and today’s sophisticated social networks to take online fitness to the next level. His plans for the site include public profiles, workout sharing, and social challenges. (Another site I’ve started using recently, Social Workout, already lets people create and join challenges and share them on Facebook, but doesn’t have Gain’s workout-generating function.)
What I’d really like to see is a way to tie more of these sites together. Just as location-based services have started to cooperate on place databases and check-in data, fitness sites should be able to share food diaries, calorie expenditures, and workout plans among themselves. Gammell agrees and said he’d like to be part of that move.
Gain Fitness, formerly known as eFitPlan, has raised $80,000 from friends and family members. Google executive Ben Ling, who’s well-known inside the tech business for his brutal workout regime, is an advisor to the company.
Gammell’s not just CEO of the company, he also uses the product — and offered this before-and-after photo as proof. As I joked with him, most people would consider themselves lucky if his before was their after, but it shows there’s an opportunity for fitness apps that go beyond the basics.
And here’s a presentation Morrell and Gammell gave at the Quantified Self, a workshop for fitness-tracking aficionados:
Next Story: VentureBeat on the prowl for DEMO startups in New York, Toronto Previous Story: Projects in 2010 took aim at cleantech’s chicken-and-egg dilemma
Foot-and-Mouth Outbreak Spreads Through South Korea - AOL <b>News</b>
South Korea is suffering its worst-ever outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, with the highly contagious virus spreading to farms across the country despite a nationwide quarantine effort.
Moore: EA not backing away from Tiger <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net
Read our news of Moore: EA not backing away from Tiger.
<b>News</b> - Lindsay Lohan Moving Next Door to Ex Sam Ronson - Celebrity <b>...</b>
Even fresh out of rehab, the actress can't seem to stay away for her former flame.
robert shumake
robert shumake detroit
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