I opened a board game/trading card store in May. We host events and sell products. Takes up a lot of my time but ultimately it's a passion project that actually makes money.
I dunno if it's in your wheelhouse, but I recently discovered a "game cafe" locally that allows folks to check out games by the hour (like a very specialized library), but they also sell beer/wine/coffee/pastries plus running the events like you said. I am so incredibly sad I didn't think of that first - that forehead slapping moment is my definition of a "good idea"
We've let people rent on and off - the issue with renting is there's not much we can do scalably about verifying missing components, rules, good working condition (when non-board game people are running the store) - I charge about $10/wk for a game rented but it's definitely not a service we advertise actively.
There's a certain charm to doing things in person. Same reason as to why some people prefer film photography when digital exists - traveling in person when google maps exists, reading books when movies exist. It's just a different medium of interaction. I personally enjoy it (heavy board games) but totally understand why others don't.
You can basically think of insects like this as organic ASICs. Input in, output out. It's a biological circuit that just has a raw response that's hardcoded in. Kind of like asking how does a computer know to do "MOV". It's baked in to the circuit. Do trial and error trillions of times and some of the circuits end up functioning and survive.
Disclaimer: My partner works as a small animal surgeon, and I'm honestly appalled by seeing some of the comments asking for more government intervention in here.
Private equity scooping up veterinary practices makes sense - it's a good investment. It's the same way PE firms will pool together a bunch of discrete dentist offices. I see many posters in here talking about how it's "rent-seeking" behavior, but frankly, these services are in demand and consolidating them is an increase in market efficiency. It's still good business to open up new clinics, even if the end goal is getting bought out (the standard practice for 95%+ of companies for which everyone here works for or is the beneficiary of).
If people are willing to spend more, then nothing really changed. If anything, goods and services were mispriced beforehand. If they raise the prices too high, nobody can afford the vet services and they will go out of business. If they make prices too low, we end up in a UK-style NHS situation where your dog's cancer is in line to get treated 8 months after they die, and they go out of business. Prices going up is natural for a restricted supply of extremely skilled labor (yes, you still need surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, drugs, human-tier equipment) and growing demand for the services (people having more pets in lieu of children in western countries). People were getting "better deals" before and are now being priced appropriately.
A big trend here is the increase in desire to spend on pets, particularly in the US, the richest country in the world. Yes, consolidation is one part of it, but we have to look at demographic trends as well. More and more people are spending more and more money on pets (in lieu of children). And yet, the increase in supply of skilled veterinarians has not increased nearly as much. Obviously, investment firms need their cut, but prices go up while owned by an investment firm does not make it evil, nor does it not make sense or outrageous. What might actually be considered outrageous around here is spending $20k on surgery for a domestic pet (common occurence as far as I can tell in a metropolitan area).
Lastly - there's actually a competitive healthcare market here! I have enjoyed being able to peek behind the curtain and look at what procedures of this scale should really cost, e.g. we still need the same training, people, equipment, and time relative to human medicine (arguably with a much lower tolerance of risk), but the prices are...... reasonable. $10-20k for a crazy surgery would be highly affordable for a human, and these PE firms are actually competing with each other for clients for these expensive procedures. It makes me wish for a similar competitive pricing landscape for humans - even if they are PE owned.
The last thing anyone needs when caring for their pet is a government bureaucrat handing out human-medicine style hospital monopolies to a "partnered provider" knighted by the government which will force a 100x billing charge to bill the govt and make it illegal to not have pet insurance while driving your premiums up 100x over the next 30 years.
> The last thing anyone needs when caring for their pet is a government bureaucrat handing out human-medicine style hospital monopolies to a "partnered provider" knighted by the government which will force a 100x billing charge to bill the govt and make it illegal to not have pet insurance while driving your premiums up 100x over the next 30 years.
Do you really think this is what people want when they call for increased government regulation?
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Government regulation can take many forms, not all of them dystopian, and many of them leading to better outcomes. Sadly there are a lot of people, even here in the comment section, for whom, when you say "government regulation," their imagination jumps to the worst possible form of government regulation they can think of, and they project that imagined scenario on the person who said it. There are no doubt many ways the government can rein in the excesses and abuses of private equity without leading to hospital monopolies and forced purchases of pet insurance.
Unfortunately, I think I'm in that boat. Truly, I appreciate the discourse.
However, whether or not that's what people want, that's the reality. Next time you get a medical charge, even with insurance, ask for an itemized bill. Compare the bill you receive to the one you receive when you tell them "I'm paying with cash". When I pay cash with a third party provider, they "magically" reduce the amount I owe by orders of magnitude, even for simple bloodwork (United States, major metropolitan area).
Again, in good faith, what am I supposed to expect when I hear regulation in animal medicine? People like my partner are studying and training for years to do this work. People are leasing or buying real estate for these facilities.
They are buying equipment, they are hiring trained surgeons, nurses, and practitioners who have been committing at minimum a decade of their life for this - what am I supposed to expect with "calls for regulation" a la human medicine style (the only comparison we have), especially when prices are ACTUALLY competitive, as I believe the human medicine market should be?
I can be convinced of any position, but it has to make sense. What prices or charges, even with private equity-funded veterinary firms, do you consider egregious and need a non-opt-outable mandatory third party oversight for? Has there been a good or a service you feel was only available at a specific provider that they gouged you on? Again, not being aggressive, just genuinely curious.
For the record, I am more in favor of the government regulating Private Equity (in particular, the use of leveraged buyouts, LBOs): 1. more scrutiny of their own business practices, and 2. limitations on their ability to buy up companies from a community, plunder them, and then leave the community strip mined. I really don't think regulating the operations of veterinary hospitals is going to solve the problems brought up in this comment section.
This is the weird thing to me. When I was a kid, a pet was more or less a thing. You took care of it, but if it got really sick or badly injured you put it down and maybe got another one.
The idea of people spending 5 or 6 figures on pet health care is rather mind-boggling.
In total, for a 15-year old cat, I have spent $8,000+ USD. He plays a large emotional part in my life and I don't think I would spare any expenses given the opportunity. It is worth it.
> If people are willing to spend more, then nothing really changed. If anything, goods and services were mispriced beforehand. If they raise the prices too high, nobody can afford the vet services and they will go out of business.
I don't agree with this theory or pricing when the purchase decisions are often made under duress, and the market is opaque. The last time I called around for quotes for getting my cat's teeth cleaned, nobody would give numbers over the phone, they all wanted me to come in for an exam first, and the next exam opening wasn't that week, it was in like 2 or 3 weeks. If a person is at the vet for something relatively urgent, they don't have much of a choice.
Married to a boarded vet of over 20 years. She's been through the era of working for privately owned clinics and now the PE-dominated landscape. 100% agree with you. The comments here range from short-sighted to plain-old stupid, especially those complaining about costs.
What many fail to realize is that vet care went through a professionalization in the 80's and 90's. Boards and specializations that humans had like dermatology and cardiology cropped up and really exploded in the past 20 years or so. Along with that was quality of care, and along with that, cost.
What frequently happens is this: If you go to a clinic with an old-school vet, he'll charge $300 for a dog spay. Down the road with the younger vet, she'll charge $600, but that's because she's running a wider blood panel with a course of anti-biotics. She won't do the surgery without it because research shows that course improves survivability by 50%.
Which are you going to choose? Don't kid yourself in thinking the quality of care is the same. Business and veterinary schools have researched this to death. You can't cheap out and get the same care.
Maybe you'll find a young vet that's willing to skip the extras, but many won't. The worst thing to happen to vet care is Yelp and Dr. Google who emboldens self-righteous hacks to complain to state boards at every little thing they think the vet did wrong.
Finally tons of people flat out belittle the cost of labor. Vets go to school a minimum of 4 years post college. They can practice right out of vet school, but many go through an internship these days. If you go to a specialist, that's an extra 1-2 years of internships and another 2-3 years of a residency and a board exam, too. On top of that, many states require veterinary assistants to be licensed, which is equivalent to an AA. In practice, most have bachelor's these days and we've known a few with master's degrees.
Meanwhile, people bitch and moan here for $500 a night of emergency care, ignoring the fact you're hiring a team of highly trained and educated people to take care of your precious Fluffy.
50% survivability increase, but is that going from 2/10000 to 1/10000 deaths? My impression is that spaying is relatively safe, so how much are we willing to spend to get more 9's?
Edit: deleted distracting details that the comment below rightfully calls out.
My fault, I shouldn't have mentioned that because it's not my key point. Given animals that come in to be spayed, say in a large US city, how risky is spaying? Is it worth everyone paying $300 more to reduce it by a very small absolute percentage? Should vets actually be more up front about this than the ones I'm familiar with are?
I get you're saying it's not the key point, but in practice, it really should be.
The spay and cost numbers were just examples. In general, yes, spays are safe, but it is anesthesia. There's a risk of death and it gets much more complicated with a huge variety of factors - age of the animal, species, whether she is in heat, and of course like we mentioned - pre-existing conditions that do not obviously present itself without a clinical workup. The last one is huge. There are plenty of values that are indicative of organ failure that would not be obvious to an owner. A dog can't tell you it's been having a nagging pain on its side for the past week.
Thanks! Glad to see someone else with similar experiences. The other issue I think people are overlooking is... 20 years ago you would present to your local, low-cost veterinarian, and they wouldn't know what the issue was (or they knew and couldnt treat it), and your animal would just die.
Now we have a ton more information, a ton more training, and an issue now that would be game-ending prior is now treatable, but it comes at a cost. We see the same patterns in human medicine too. A lot of it has to do with demographics and cultural shifts in my opinion, as well as the supply/demand factor of trained practitioners.
skipping succession episodes is insane, i'm sorry. it had a niche following but the entire series is a work of art in every aspect. i don't think i can point to a single episode that was "wasted".
This is crazy because I kept getting ads like this for MDMA (after checking the next IG story), I finally got tired of it and reported one, they actually manually reviewed it and DENIED the report, so I re-reported and they denied it again. Definitely enabling sales.
This is a common scenario with them if you report anything. This shows how taking care of the legality of the content is an expense they just save on as much as they can. It’s ironic that they actually give you an explanation that they didn’t check the content because they don’t have enough capacity to review every report. And then they report the earnings they do.
Similar story here. There was a crypto scam ad including "Libra" and AI produced Mark Zuckerberg video where he was pitching how he would distribute some of his wealth etc.
Reported it, it got reviewed and it got denied. They kept the ad.
It’s remarkable what can be done with interpreting and generating content, but things like advertising quality, Twitter bots and obvious scams are basically CAPTCHAs to their systems.
I get that, but can't I just go to TCGPlayer and click the first category - Magic, and browse the same goods in a more liquid market?
What I'm trying to say is what sets you guys apart, or why would I as a seller (or buyer) prefer to use Mana Pool over TCG?
Is it commission? I'll say from personal experience that 10% commission (or 10.25% or whatever) is quite expensive as a seller. If the commission is the killer, are you hoping to capture more of the market from TCG for Magic? Is it sustainable to run a price war on commission?
Genuinely asking all of this btw, I do prefer the design here to tcg
1) If you go click Magic on TCGPlayer, it doesn't get rid of all the non-Magic stuff. And the feature development isn't focused everyday on MTG, it's focused on TCG, and it's missing an infinite list of changes that we personally want. Plus, you can't build a community around TCG, but you can around MTG.
2) TCGPlayer is the market price, and it's a nicely liquid market. And their owner eBay is worth $25B. And there is stiff competition from whatnot.com and goat.com in collectibles. It is an incredibly hard and fun world to build in. I think e-commerce is going to continue to evolve, and Amazon or whatever isn't the end state.
2) Answers on fees and features throughout the thread.
It's interesting, because there is indeed a system in the EU known as carbon allowances. While everyone and their dog can buy offsets, allowances exist in the EU and California (I think?) which are a legal mandate that firms must purchase which are necessary to pollute. There's even tradeable products based on this, and the market seems healthy enough. Offsets are definitely a scam, but I'd love to hear anyone else's opinion on allowances.
Hailing from a coal-heavy EU member state(Poland), the least carbon allowances did was to dissuade investors from financing new coal projects.
There's also a shift to renewables - the public at large especially jumped on it because fossil-genereated electricity simply became expensive and there are government subsidies in place to to further sweeten the deal.
There's a law coming into force soon which will allow apartment blocks to produce more solar energy than they consume and sell it, which wasn't the case to date.
Overall the system is working as intended and the share of renewables went from a low point of 11% in 2018 to 20% in 2022 and the trend is likely to continue considering how many new solar projects are in the pipeline.
People have been claiming to see UFOs for years, ever since the popularization in mass media with the start of "the war of the worlds". In nearly all cases, even (at the time) credible sightings were advanced weapons programs. Additionally, with the proliferation of everyone having access to relatively high quality cameras, the amount of "legitimate" sightings has dropped dramatically.
Now, what has changed? We have several videos, that are public knowledge, that show objects moving in ways that no level of technology we have now can demonstrate.
These objects were recorded as early as 2004. These objects were recorded not by a loony bin boy cried wolf UFO-ologist but by US Navy airmen.
Ok, maybe they are a camera issue? e.g. one can imagine it's a bird or a balloon or an object that shows up as moving much faster than reality, or something to do with parallax/tracking error with the IR (infrared)? That would be believable, especially if it's a single recording, solo pilot, new equipment. The issue with this is that in addition to the declassified IR videos, we saw this happen multiple times, in multiple locations, on different aircraft, with multiple pilots present in the aircraft at the same time making the same visual (with eyeballs) confirmation, radar confirmation, IR.
Ok, maybe it's an advanced hologram program/electronic warfare test/drill or something? Which was my next guess, but the visual confirmation rules out electronic warfare and in addition to visuals, IR, we also have radar bouncing off - not just recorded by the aircraft, but recorded by the entire USS Nimitz carrier group that was in the area at the time - hence real, physical objects. And, again, it wasn't just one signature, in fact the reason they were up there to begin with was because of the unidentified objects in the airspace.
Ok, maybe it's just a balloon or an experimental drone by the US or its rivals. The issue here is that the physics described are not just "next-gen" a la F35 but some sort of groundbreaking physics that would change the way we do anything.
"For two weeks, the operator said, the Princeton had been tracking mysterious aircraft. The objects appeared suddenly at 80,000 feet, and then hurtled toward the sea, eventually stopping at 20,000 feet and hovering. Then they either dropped out of radar range or shot straight back up."
Fravor reported that he saw an object, white and oval, hovering above an ocean disturbance. He estimated that the object was about 40 feet long. Fravor and another pilot, Alex Dietrich, said in an interview that a total of four people (two pilots and two weapons systems officers in the back seats of the two airplanes) witnessed the object for about 5 minutes. Fravor says that as he spiraled down to get closer to the object, the object ascended, mirroring the trajectory of his airplane, until the object disappeared. Hovering 50 feet above the churn was an aircraft of some kind — whitish — that was around 40 feet long and oval in shape. The craft was jumping around erratically, staying over the wave disturbance but not moving in any specific direction, Commander Fravor said. The disturbance looked like frothy waves and foam, as if the water were boiling.
Fravor began a circular descent to get a closer look, but as he got nearer the object began ascending toward him. It was almost as if it were coming to meet him halfway, he said. Fravor abandoned his slow circular descent and headed straight for the object. But then the object peeled away. “It accelerated like nothing I’ve ever seen,” he said in the interview. He was, he said, “pretty weirded out.” The two fighter jets then conferred with the operations officer on the Princeton and were told to head to a rendezvous point 60 miles away, called the cap point, in aviation parlance. They were en route and closing in when the Princeton radioed again. Radar had again picked up the strange aircraft. “Sir, you won’t believe it,” the radio operator said, “but that thing is at your cap point.” “We were at least 40 miles away, and in less than a minute this thing was already at our cap point,” Commander Fravor, who has since retired from the Navy, said in the interview.
Thus, they are able to move on their own, not just floating in the wind (balloon, birds, launched radar reflectors), they're quite large, and can move large distances in short amounts of time. Additionally, no exhaust ports, no exhaust fumes, no control surfaces of any kind were observed. If we actually break down and analyze the movement based on the recording, we get results that are beyond physics. From the University of Albany - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7514271/
Even the most conservative and minimum models for acceleration give us ~70g with maneuverability, which is more than double what we have, and only in a rocket-like manner. Not without exhaust, control surfaces, and non-linear movement.
"It is difficult to draw any definitive conclusions at this point regarding the nature and origin of these UAVs other than the fact that we have shown that these objects cannot be of any known aircraft or missiles using current technology. We have characterized the accelerations of several UAVs and have demonstrated that if they are craft then they are indeed anomalous, displaying technical capabilities far exceeding those of our fastest aircraft and spacecraft."
Ok, maybe it's a secret weapons program we don't know about. The issue with this is that we'd see a ton of people "disappearing" from public life and essentially vanishing, similar to what happened during the Manhattan Project. Physicists, mathematicians, materials scientists would seemingly end their career, stop publishing, and go off the grid to live and work at some facility. Currently, we haven't seen an exodus/brain drain of any level in the fields we would expect towards "nothing" - if anything, everyone's going into finance and adtech. Not to mention, this kind of stuff would be "Theory of Relativity" tier, not just cutting edge stealth tech.
The only other thing I can imagine is that it's a coordinated government attempt to spread disinformation regarding our military capabilities to our adversaries. Even then, it doesn't explain what the objects were.
I really really don't want to be a "UFO guy" but maybe even this mindset is part of the problem. Given all of this information, I don't understand why so many are so quick to dismiss any sort of theory, because as far as I see it anything terrestrial is exponentially more likely than aliens, but I can't come up with any ideas for these objects to have originated on Earth.
> Ok, maybe it's a secret weapons program we don't know about.
The problem with this is that there is no evidence to support it. No one has ever leaked anything about a secret propulsion mechanism that can do 1000+ Gs. On the other hand, there have been those who have leaked information about secret UAP programs. Congress seems to be if the opinion that the latter is the more likely of the two, which makes sense when you think about it.
Congress has been briefed about secret weapons programs before. There are procedures in place to protect national secrets when they need to be discussed by the Legislative branch. If it were a secret propulsion mechanism then Congress would already know about it, and all this energy would not be being spent on holding hearings re: AARO, whistleblowers, etc.
I would put weight on this if it were to re-occur. The navy has done lots and lots and lots and lots of drills since 2004. Nothing like this has magically re-appeared.
'In September 2019, a Pentagon spokeswoman confirmed that the released videos were made by naval aviators, and that they are "part of a larger issue of an increased number of training range incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena in recent years".'
If we only want to go off of verified sources, of course it's all classified since we can only trust the military to provide us information on this as far as veracity goes. Based on the official, released, declassified videos from the Pentagon, it happened in 2004, 2014, and 2015 AT LEAST.
I totally understand the skepticism and want to reiterate that I am not nor do I want to be a "UFO guy". It is also especially hard to prove, because there are so many outs. One could ask for photos, and then if photos are provided, they're photoshopped/doctored/not high quality enough (which is the case 99.99999999% of the time), and then if they're provided from the government then it's not real because it's a one-off situation e.g. lone wolf, and if there's multiple then it's a psyop/disinformation, and then if they provide a witness or a whistleblower then they're crazy and a nutjob, but if they provide multiple it's just part of the conspiracy, etc etc.
