Observations of the Random sort

[Shem]

There's this commercial for either ThreadUp or Poshmark -- one of those "resell your designer clothes online" sites -- where women were saying things like "I made $10,000 selling my clothes!" (over a fine-print disclaimer that most sellers don't make nearly that much) ... but of course my immediate thought was "I highly doubt this woman made that money via buying clothes in a thrift store and selling them for a profit online -- if she made $10,000 selling used clothes, she must've spent at least ten times that much buying them when new."

It's possible, though it helps if you have an angle. I know someone who made about that much in a year; she did it because the local Goodwills just put what they got directly on the shelves where they were donated, and she knew where the sports teams donated their used workout items at season's end. It got there same price as other workout great got (even though it was tagged as having been official), so she'd buy it all up and sell it as what it was. They eventually got wise, but not before she made quite a bit of money.

[Mo]

I wouldn't be so skeptical about that.

https://www.inputmag.com/features/teens ... hrift-shop

[Warren]

A Modern-Day eBay

[Mo]

A Modern-Day eBay

eBay is as old now as Wal-Mart was the year eBay was founded

[Warren]

A Modern-Day eBay

eBay is as old now as Wal-Mart was the year eBay was founded

Get off my lawn!

[Ellie]

A Modern-Day eBay

eBay is as old now as Wal-Mart was the year eBay was founded

*crumbles into dust and blows away*

[Jennifer]

I have on occasion wondered if I couldn't make a few dollars that way--I'm not enough of a fashionista to know all the "hot labels" or whatever, but I do recognize some of the upscale names, and they're not THAT rare in the thrift stores (and presumably, I'd find far more if I were looking for "things to resell" as opposed to "things I personally would wear." (Not making money selling on Instagram, but on a clothing resale site.) What makes me reluctant to even try is, right now I do not have anything to sell (all my clothes are either "I'm actually using them" or "They're not nice enough for resell"), and I don't want to risk wasting money buying "just for resale" things which might not even sell.

[Mo]

Maybe it’s because I’m on this side of the pond, but the BSA thing feels like it should be bigger news with more coverage.

[Warren]

Hunting flea markets, thrift stores, coin rolls, etc. etc. has always been a viable means of making money. The thing is, you have to invest a lot of time becoming an expert in whatever your dealing with in order to tell the gold from the pyrite. And while it does happen from time to time that one stumbles upon the mother load, most of the time you're putting in long hours for little or no money.

[Jennifer]

Hunting flea markets, thrift stores, coin rolls, etc. etc. has always been a viable means of making money. The thing is, you have to invest a lot of time becoming an expert in whatever your dealing with in order to tell the gold from the pyrite. And while it does happen from time to time that one stumbles upon the mother load, most of the time you're putting in long hours for little or no money.

FWIW, in the early days of eBay (before it totally sucked for small-time sellers via such means as "mandatory PayPal"), I did make pretty good money buying box lots* or table lots** at estate auctions and selling the items for a profit online. But with rare exceptions, I wasn't selling actual "valuables" or "antiques," more like "tchotchkes." Like, one of my single most lucrative bids was paying three or five dollars for a table lot which included two or three boxes of old Avon perfume or cologne bottles from the 1960s or 70s (when such bottles were usually in the form of figurines). I remember putting all the different pipe-shaped men's cologne bottles together in a single lot, then divided the larger number of women's bottles into two lots whose themes I forget ... point is, I made something like 80 bucks off the Avon crap alone, in addition to whatever else was in that table lot.

But of course, where clothing is concerned -- especially the kind of clothing nice enough to resell, used, for a profit -- even MY frugal, bargain-hunting thrift-shopping self can't find similarly low prices on "a metric shitload of nice clothes bought all at once."

*Box lot: items not worth selling individually, so you bid on a whole boxful of them.

**Table lot: bid on an entire table covered with box lots.

[Mo]

For clothes, there’s a lot that’s not just the quality of the specific item, but how you present it. You don’t need to find a hidden box of YSL if you can combine a bunch of cheap crap into an awesome outfit, bu that requires fashion skills from the seller.

[Jennifer]

Pfft. For the hell of it, I checked the websites in question: looks like items sold on ThredUp are all on mannequins (which of course I do not have), whereas Poshmark won't even let you browse the offerings without registering first.

[Kolohe]

Maybe it’s because I’m on this side of the pond, but the BSA thing feels like it should be bigger news with more coverage.

Not sure what else people can say about it unless they want to re-profile victims.

Their financial situation is not as complex as the Catholic church’s, and in this case it is the national organization that’s restructuring assets and debts, not councils (as the dioceses did with the church)

[D.A. Ridgely]

It may be that, like the Episcopal Church, Roman Catholic diocesan property in the U.S. is legally held by the diocesan bishop. You can't very well sue Rome in the U.S. but you sure as hell can go after the value of real estate owned by the church. I get the sense that your typical BSA troop owns diddly, probably operates for free out of some church or veteran's club and doesn't have enough money to go after, so it makes sense to go after the national headquarters.

[Shem]

It may be that, like the Episcopal Church, Roman Catholic diocesan property in the U.S. is legally held by the diocesan bishop. You can't very well sue Rome in the U.S. but you sure as hell can go after the value of real estate owned by the church. I get the sense that your typical BSA troop owns diddly, probably operates for free out of some church or veteran's club and doesn't have enough money to go after, so it makes sense to go after the national headquarters.

You actually have that backwards. Most of the camps and other valuable property is owned by one or several local troops, or held by regional organizations, so there's actually more money at the local level overall. The national organization just has the benefit of liquid resources, a single point for a class action, and the plaintiffs not having to go to the grocery store and get recognized as the guy who took away Troop 537's summer camp.

[Jennifer]

So I'm in a restaurant booth sitting across from Jeff when suddenly I feel the unmistakable sensation of someone grabbing a handful of my hair and giving it a pull. There was still enough slack for me to turn my head so I did, prepared to rain fury down upon the perpetrator, until I saw it was a baby looking over his mother's shoulder. So I said (more for his mother's benefit than his) something along the lines of "Hello there, little one! I'm going to need my hair back," and of course his parents apologized and of course I said no worry, and the mom extracted my hair from her son's little fist (then moved to the opposite side of her booth, where there was no hair for the baby to grab) ... but if there had been secret cameras aimed at my face, I'd be very interested in checking out a frame-by-frame breakdown of my facial expression going from "apocalyptic rage" to "affectionate amusement."

(This was much better than the LAST time a baby grabbed my hair, at a grocery store in Connecticut: that kid actually put it in his mouth, so the last three or four inches were soaked in baby drool and I had to wash my hair again even though I'd just done so that afternoon.)

[Eric the .5b]

Dear illuminati/deep state/trilateral commission: Thank you for COVID-19. For your next pandemic, can you please engineer a virus that spreads through Twitter?

Looks at the list of twitter accounts with most followers, joins Team Hugh.

I'm amused at the weird mixture of tweets they picked. On on hand, a surprisingly charming photo memory from Kim Kardashian-West, Obama being classy, Taylor Swift actually making me chuckle...and on the other, Trump being Trump and Bieber throwing out a generic holiday tweet without even punctuating the sentence. It's definitely a list of popularity, not quality.

[Eric the .5b]

In the last couple of months, I've looked at online discussions of song meanings, and I've seen several people who actually think music videos indicate the true meaning of songs.

I love music videos, but now I actually get why some artists hated them on principle.

[Dangerman]

This is a bit disturbing to me

https://youtu.be/AN3VTsWUCiU

[dead_elvis]

"Here comes the bomber, watch out kids!"

Yikes.

[Shem]

This is a bit disturbing to me

https://youtu.be/AN3VTsWUCiU

I know, if you're going to work that hard for the rhyme 85% of the time, going lazy the other 15% just raises uncomfortable questions about the state of our children's edutainment.

[Eric the .5b]

This is a bit disturbing to me

https://youtu.be/AN3VTsWUCiU

I know, if you're going to work that hard for the rhyme 85% of the time, going lazy the other 15% just raises uncomfortable questions about the state of our children's edutainment.

I don't even know where to start. Maybe a cheery visit to a military base where an ambulance is constantly evacuating wounded? This seems appropriate for toddlers?



Heh.

[lunchstealer]

I'm concerned that the ambulance is just 'taking away' the wounded soldiers. Let's just get them out of here, they're depressing.

[Warren]

For me it's the "army base" with the coast guard "navy" ship.

[Eric the .5b]

For me it's the "army base" with the coast guard "navy" ship.

That's just called a "navy", as distinct from a submarine or an aircraft carrier.

(Also a British show pretending they have stealth bombers...)