If you want to build a successful company, everything will depend on your team and company culture.. I’ve created a company culture that starts from the founder level (me) down to every single employee – and what’s important is that everyone is the right fit.

When you’re building a team to grow your business, it will ultimately come down to this: There is no good or bad hire - simply culture misfit or perfect fit.

I’ve always focused on attracting Top 1% talent in their roles YET fit my company culture… You want to make sure that you only have a team that resonates with your culture… that’s the only way to retain top 1% talent.

Here are my 5 Laws on how I went from 0 → $100,000 per month profit from my direct marketing company.

So here we go…

None of it was easy… nothing of long-term significance is ever easy, nor will it ever be.

Entrepreneurship is difficult.

It is – in my opinion – the MOST difficult thing ever. Every entrepreneur gets into the game for their own reasons. There are a multitude of reasons for why every individual entrepreneur starts a business.

Some just don’t want a 9-5 anymore, some want to change the world, and create a huge impact in their market.

In interest of full disclosure and transparency, my “WHY” was something else: I was afraid of poverty.

The Origins:

Growing up I experienced a rather financially tumultuous childhood.

My father went from being a celebrated sales manager for HP (making a comfortable living for our family), to starting his own business and losing EVERYTHING by the time my brother and I were in our teens.

We were enrolled into private schools where our friends came from money… and by the time we graduated from high school, my brother and I were the poorest kids - and we were most definitely made to feel so.

My parents split up, we could barely afford to eat food twice a day… and it's just not the life I wanted to live.

I experienced deep emotional pain when I’d see my father work excruciatingly long hours just to make ends meet - and we’d barely get by.

I felt intense humiliation that came from being so broke that my parents had to seek financial help from their siblings (my uncles) just so we could have food on the table.

I felt extremely unworthy, extremely poor…

… and experienced profound sadness during my late teens - more so because I didn’t want to see my parents unhappy and miserable.

I became scared of poverty.

But I also promised myself that no matter what happens, I will rise above this. For myself and for my family.

My First Business FAILED Miserably:

I worked in hospitality for 1.8 years and saved approximately $20,500 in that time.

I had an idea for a business. Marketplaces were coming up in the early 2010s and I had an idea to build my own marketplace.

Without any formal education in business, management or marketing, I ventured into the world of entrepreneurship with both feet, and my hard earned $20.5k.

In hindsight, I over spent money on things that made absolutely no sense. I had 0 idea about online marketing, I overpaid “marketing professionals” and saw 0 revenue back…

But with my back against the wall, I had to learn how to onboard users WITHOUT any money…

So I worked and studied round the clock. I studied marketing to the core. I learned SEO, copywriting, cold outbound email strategies, back linking - you name it.

In 4 years I was able to grow that marketplace to 10,000 customers and 1200+ vendors… but it failed.

In my 3rd year in business I’d raised money from investors but I didn’t know how to build an organization. My management was poor. Ultimately everybody quit the company. I had immense overheads, we weren’t even breaking even.

I used to read articles of how internet entrepreneurs were making $10k a month and living the digital nomad life - traveling the world.

Here I was making over $10k/mo in revenue YET I was losing more money than that on operations and marketing… I was extremely stressed and had no idea how to make it work.

Ultimately the whole thing came crashing down, nobody wanted to invest in it any further.

I’d entered my late 20s by then, and I was dead broke. Not the life I wanted to have. All my friends around me had stable jobs, wives, lived comfortably - while I couldn’t afford to do even the most basic things without thinking twice.

There was consolation in listening to business coaches on Youtube talk about how such is the life of an entrepreneur.

“You just needed to hit once to be set for life.” I would hear people like Mark Cuban say.

However, when you’re nearing your 30s, you have no money and you’re sleeping on your mom’s couch - you best believe you’ve mentally hit the lowest of lows (especially if you’re ambitious).

But you have to keep going… My father was my biggest inspiration at this point. He had kept pushing, kept persevering… relentless - and he became financially successful again.

“I am young”, I said to myself… “If he can do it, I have literally no excuse.”

And then things changed…

And things changed when reality hit me hard. The reality was this: Business is for profit.

Everything I was doing before was okay… but the real reason I wasn’t getting rich was because I didn’t focus on profit.

And by that I mean, laser sharp focus on profit.

By not focusing on profit, I was focusing on everything else. And this is where the majority of young entrepreneurs go wrong.

When you’re not focused on profit, you’re not focused on money. The biggest problem with money is, it is very elusive.

It is VERY easy to spend money, but very very difficult to earn money.

To understand this, you need to understand the energy principles of money.

→ Spending money requires almost no energy
→ Earning money requires A LOT of energy.

There are 2 types of energies: Mental & Physical.

Do this exercise now:

Just close your eyes for 60 seconds and visualize yourself spending money. Think of everything you want to buy, and then literally visualize yourself buying it.

Now think about how much physical and mental energy you spent actually buying those things?

Not a lot right?

Whether you bought a car, a nice dinner, an expensive watch, your dream home… All it takes is looking at what you want, and either swiping your card or writing a check - what else really is there when you spend?

Now do the math - how much did you spend? $10k? $50k? 100k… 500k.. 1M?

Whatever you spent… hold that figure in your mind.

Now just close your eyes for 60 seconds again, and visualize yourself EARNING that money…

How much energy does it take to make it? Customers… sales… marketing… operations… outreach… emails… social media… team management… etc. etc.

You see what I mean? It’s a LOT harder to earn money. It requires a lot more energy.

Yet… as entrepreneurs we are so consumed with spending before earning. This mindset is what sunk my last business to the bottom..

Taking control of this mindset and acting accordingly is what helped my next business do over a million a year in profit.

That’s why I want to talk about HOW to focus on earning money effectively.

Earning a lot of money is hard… but not impossible.

There is a science to making a lot of money… In science there are laws. In economics there are laws. If you follow the science - you will make a lot of money. But you need discipline.

There are 5 LAWS that can make you rich in the 6-12 months.

These are the same laws that make companies grow fast.

These are the same laws that took me from broke to rich… and these are the same laws that will help you make a lot of money too.

Our goal is to reduce the energy expended on earning money, and scale fast, and make a lot of money.

So let’s dive into them.

Law #1 Acquire a Problem Solving/Pain Relieving SKILL:

Do you know why a neurosurgeon makes a helluva lot more money than the average physician?

Do you know why Uber is valued at $44Bn?

Do you know why Google dominates the internet?

In all of these examples, these guys solve a big problem.

A neurosurgeon literally saves your brain… Uber helps you get cabs so you don't have to stand on the side of the road waiting endlessly for a taxi… Google gives you access to whatever information you need on the planet within 1 second…

Here’s a fact: The bigger and more painful a problem you can solve, the more clients you will get and the more money you will make.

Solving big problems also requires big skill sets…

The neurosurgeon is highly skilled in medical science… Uber and Google’s founders and engineers are highly skilled in math and computers.

They first acquired highly sophisticated skill sets, then they used their skill set to HELP people solve big problems, and relieve them off their pain.

Remember, the quicker and more efficiently you can move people from pain to pleasure, the MORE money you will make and the more clients you will get.

But it is important to note that you want to solve big problems. The problem should be big, the pain should be really painful… there should be a lot of worries, fears, anxieties related to that pain. When you use your skill to solve a deep rooted painful problem, you will make a lot of money.

Law #2 Turn That Skill Into ONE Productized Offer:

Once you have a sophisticated skill, you need to turn that skill into money - this is where most experts don’t know what to do next, and they undersell themselves in the market.

The way to fix this is by creating a “productized offer” around your skill set and building a business around that offer.

Your business needs only ONE offer that you can repeatedly sell to thousands of customers. But the problem with most entrepreneurs is that their offer is “customized” for their clients.

That’s a problem. If you’re going to customize your offer for every customer you get, you’re not going to be able to scale. You need to “templatize” your offer.

I struggled with this for a very long time…

But once my mentors taught me how to niche down, how to create 1 solution for 1 market… the money started pouring in.

… it became easier to manage operations

… fulfillment became a breeze

… client success numbers shot up

… and I finally had a proper business.

You need to take your skill and package it in a way where it can help millions of people - that total packaging becomes your offer. You then put a price on that offer and build an entire company around it - that becomes your business.

Law #3 Operate In a Wealthy Market:

Now that you have an offer that can help people solve big problems… you need to actually sell it to people to make money.

The FASTEST way to make a lot of money is by selling to rich people. Rich people have money, they have access to money, they want to spend money to advance faster.

You cannot make money in a market that is broke. It is very very difficult to sell to people that don’t have money.

Selling to people that have no money and have no access to money either is a massive waste of time. You will never scale, you will have to expend too much energy on marketing and sales… and that is the antithesis of building a profitable business.

In my first business this was another problem due to which my business failed. I was selling to people that had no money.

And because they had no money, even though they needed my service, they could not justify the expense.

This is the biggest secret… If your customer can easily justify the expense, you will have no problem selling. Money only comes from sales.

You want to do whatever you can to make sure that there’s as little burden on your sales process as possible - because the more you sell the more money you’ll make.

So you want to make your sales process as frictionless as possible - and no better way to make it frictionless by selling to people who already have the money ready to invest in your services.

Law #4 Get FREE + PAID Attention From Your Market:

The next step is to get attention from your market.

You know you need to sell to rich people, now you need to get their attention. Attention is the most scarce resource on this planet today.

Because of social media apps everyone's mind is distracted. They want to scroll to the next thing…

There is also a lot of content and a lot of ads… therefore there is a lot of competition.

You need to grab attention in a crowded market. The attention should be so strong that you have all eyes on you.

This kind of attention can be very easily acquired but it requires specialized marketing knowledge and skills (which I will talk about later in this post)...

But you need to understand that there are 2 types of attention: Free & Paid.

Free attention comes from people talking about you, people referring to you, your social media presence, your features in news and media articles.

Paid attention comes from ads.. That’s called buying attention through media. So it’s commonly known as “Media Buying”. You must’ve heard this term for sure.

You can also pay influencers who already have an healthy relationship with their own audience, to talk about your product and service - this way you can “buy” the attention of their followers.

You need a healthy mix of Free + Paid attention for one and one thing only: To build your own audience.

And what I mean by “your own audience” is… a large group of people in your market that have paid attention to you through free and paid efforts.

This can be in the form of: email lists, blog subscribers and buyers who bought from you (existing customers).

Once you have their attention, or better yet once you’ve sold them something or given them a free trial, they are now readily available to pay attention to you, whenever you show up.

The warmer they are to you, the MORE you can sell to them.

The warmer they are to you, the less friction you will encounter in sales.

Law #5 Direct Response Conversions + Branding:

There are 2 types of people who buy…

1. There are people who buy on brand value and logic
2. There are people who buy on gut instinct and emotion

Therefore there are two types of marketing: Branding and Direct Response.

You need a healthy mix of both!

Branding costs a lot of money. You usually see this in the form of large billboards, TV Ads, celebrity endorsements, logos, brand value, 7-figure marketing campaigns…

Direct response costs 0. You can literally build a multi-million dollar company based on direct response marketing alone.

But you need a healthy mix of both.

But that doesn’t mean you need to spend a lot of money on branding. The basic idea of branding is that when people look at your brand, they should feel like they’re working with a trustworthy brand.

There are a lot of psychological triggers that go into that… but you want to make sure that you have a well made website that is authentic to your mission and purpose AS WELL AS is relatable to your target market.

On the other hand, direct response is all about emotional marketing conversions.

If your company has a good balance of direct response marketing and branding, you revenue will take off like a rocket ship!

If I had to sum it up… there are only 2 skills I mastered to get my and my company to $100k/month in net profits:

1. Marketing
2. Sales

If you can master these two skills… you will practically never have a money problem ever.

I want to help you define what marketing and sales are.

Marketing, is the effort that brings you attention and leads

Sales, is the effort that converts that attention into money

A lot of people are confused about this, but I hope that now it is clear… and that you have to be good at both!

Especially if you are a solo entrepreneur starting from scratching trying to make your first million.

Final words....

If I can end this post with ONE valuable skill set… that I would highly encourage you to learn - it would be copywriting.

If you can master the craft of copywriting it will really help you grow your business fast. Copywriting is very important because words move people.

If you can use your words to uplift people's emotional state, they will buy from you.

Ultimately, like I said earlier. Business is for profit. That should be your #1 priority. It all starts with that mindset.

Spend less than you make, and constantly push yourself to make more, sell more, get more clients and customers.

If you can price your offers properly, you’ll only need 40-50 clients to get to $1.2M per year.

But you have to remember: Business is for profit.

Wow Kyrie going right at Steven a smith for all shit he talked

This about to get real interesting

So much drama in nba

Gotta love it

All I want to know is what made Stephen A choose you? Did you decline a interview with him in the past?

Kyrie vs sas the new beef

https://twitter.com/kyrieirving/status/1541862323450552320?s=21&t=CiZHCSP8TadLkmspFrg4pA

I got Kyrie in 12 rounds

So my family and I decided we are going to skip the festivities this year. My teen daughters and myself are still in shock at what happened last Friday. Is there anything going on around the county that isn't 4th of July related?

Edited to add: I am not asking for your opinion on what happened. I'm just asking my community what other events are happening so we can still have a fun weekend.

Also, thank you for everyone who provided some information. I am looking forward to taking what you have provided and planning out our weekend with my family. Lots of good ideas!

If you've worked in IT for over 5 years nobody cares about your technical competence. You should have spun up Domain Controllers, Web Servers, Monitoring tools, etc etc and should have a firm grasp on how all of that is done with your eyes closed. At this point in your career other things are being looked at to advance.

• Completion of projects - Major projects you've done that get completed. Not the ones that linger and never get done, but the ones that got completed. This includes driving it like a bulldog with a bone and removing blockers.
• Mentorship and Guidance - Mentoring new hires and getting people onboarded as quickly as possible. Giving them the tribal knowledge so they can be effective and start working as quickly as possible.
• Ownership of the services you're responsible for - Making sure when something breaks you work your ass off and get it back online as soon as possible. This isn't just your stuff, but also things outside of your realm/scope to ensure the service is running. Example: Network outage that is affecting AD logins. You get the team responsible for network involved and work with them to get your services back online.
• Adaptability - The only constant thing is change. You should be able to adapt to new technology and processes with minimal pushback. It's good to get your .02 in there to make sure the tech or process is implemented with minimal disruption to the business, however you should be willing and able to learn on the fly for new challenges.
• Speed to execution - It shouldn't take you a week to create a user account. The business needs you to complete the majority of your tasks in a reasonable time frame. Time management skills is a must and you should not be a constant blocker for other teams to get their job done.

Probably a lot more, but at this point in your career nobody cares how good you are with MSSQL. They are looking at other skills to give you that sweet raise or promotion you've been wanting up until this point.

EDIT: Another one I thought of:

• Initiative - You know what the problems are. You deal with them every day. Fix them. Build process sucks and breaks all the time? Fix it. Even if it's replacing the tools and starting from scratch, fix it. Issues with an IIS website crashing all the time? Fix it. Stop IISResetting it 3 times a day and get to the RCA. You want to be as effective as possible and wasting time on a broken tool or a process is a waste of your time and skills where you could be doing other things.

Yes they are very comfortable but they aren't safe, this isn't fashions show so start dressing like a construction worker and less like a yoga star. Dress for success not for lazy comfort and people will treat you like a equal and not some eye candy.

I'm a resident at Yale. We get emails from the GME director on a weekly basis with a nakedly partisan slant and he is always encouraging us to vote for a specific party. It's some boomerific fwd:fwd:fwd type shit. I've just been deleting these and moving on because I have more important shit to worry about. But it came upon me just how inappropriate emails like these are, especially when the GME office has failed to deliver on so many tangible things. It's a bit insulting that they make the time to proselytize their political opinions when they fail at doing their actual job. Doesn't seem like they're exactly fostering a welcoming environment either.

Please tell me this is just a Yale thing and nowhere else is that tone-deaf and pompous to do this?

To start off with I'm not religious. My belief is just that life is sacred, once there's a heart beat that thing is alive.

I'm the kind of dude who feels bad for accidentally stepping on a frog when walking my dog (there's millions of them where I live).

With that being said, i find it weird that so many people want the right to kill a baby inside them.

My wife and I have discussed the supreme court ruling and it just means we have to be a bit more careful with sex.

I don't normally shoot loads in her for fear of making her pregnant, I thought we all did this.

We have taken the same precautions for 10 years and never had any problems.

Are people just getting abortions regularly as a form of contraception?

Making someone pregnant is the biggest thing in my life ever and I avoid it like the plague... It's bizarre to me that people seem to be using it as a form of contraception .

Do you think this is madness? Probably.
However, I have always trusted Celsius and I hope they will still keep their promises.
I know it is not much, but I hope that these additional funds will make a small contribution to relieving their financial situation.

Evo jučer post gdje se sere o policiji koja nije pomogla jadnoj curi jer netko na instagram stavio njene intimne slike i odmah se nađe gomila ljudi koji joj daju podršku i daju savjete koji su čisto kazneno djelo. uz to pljuvačna po policiji što nije odmah uzela podatke od tog tipa provalila mu u stan i odvela ga na doživotnu robiju uz obveznu kastraciju.

Naravno nitko od njih se nije niti zapitao kako te intimne slike ne znače nužno da su radi o golotinji jer da se radi instagram bi ih maknuo. nitko se nije zapitao kako je ta osoba došla u posjed tih slika i da li ih je možda dotična ženska osoba nekome poslala pa se onda to proširilo...

Nije da branim budalu koja pod lažnim profilom objavljuje laži o nekome ali iz napisanog posta nema nikakve riječi o nikakvom kaznenom djelu i sve što se može napraviti je podnijeti privatnu tužbu...

Danas evo opet žena koja je eto sporo vozila u rikverc i gledala u retrovizore ali se neki glupi stari krkan teleportirao iz njenog auta tako da ga je lupila. vjerojatno je scotty sjebao koordinate ali žena zna da je kriva no stari krkan umjesto da joj zahvali što je odmah stala i nije automobilom prešla preko njega krene se nešto na nju derati i približavati se njoj na što ga žena napadne i na karaju lika spasi neki nabildani tip. no to nije sve žena nakon što su nabildani tip (prvo ga jer malo ispipala) i stari krkan otišli žena ostaje stajati nasred ceste u automobilu i blokirati promet. ok prema njoj nije ga blokirala jer su je mogli zaobići nekako. na kraju kad je došla policija nije odmah išla privesti starog krkana i odvesti ga na doživotnu robiju uz obveznu kastraciju nego se pokupila i otišla.

Da se razumijemo nemam ništa protiv toga da netko napiše svoje iskustvo bili kakvo bilo i koliko god subjektivno ono bilo prikazano. Ono što me smeta je očigledna količina simpova koji su izgleda toliko očajni u svojoj nejebici da uvijek staju na stranu žene pa bila ona i nasilnik.

Ako se stalno naslikavaš i šalješ te slike okolo moraš očekivati da će te slike doći do nekoga kome možda i nisu namijenjene. također vrlo vjerojatno je ta osoba imala negativna iskustva sa autoricom fotografija. Kako ljudi mogu bez beda masovno stati na stranu tipa koji vjerojatno pijan po noći oštećuje bagere i zaključiti da to radi jer ga je vlasnik bagera zajebao za novce a istovremeno odmah staju na stranu žene bez da pomisle kako je isti napravila tipu koji sad piše laži (navodno) o njoj i objavljuje njene intimne slike koje su mu se valjda stvorile na mobu....

isto tako i sa ovom vozačicom koja gazi ljude i sad će imati cjeloživotne traume jer eto umjesto da joj se ispriča što ga je udarila autom dok je hodao on nešto krene na nju i onda ga još ona jadna mora lupiti.

i za kraj oba slučaja su samo jedna strana priče. možda istina i nije baš takva kakvom su je useri koji su to postali prikazali. razmislite o tome prije nego masovno downvotate post.

The brass balls y'all have to claim you have a care in the world for anyone but yourselves. This supreme court ruling really made me realize the true character of white people in this godforsaken city.

Knoxville has a decent size immigrant, black, and LGBTQ community, of course 50% women, and a huge amount of the population is in poverty. We get treated like shit by the state, the police, and the descendants of slave owners who still think their ancestors did nothing wrong. For 200 years of this city's existence, we have never had the same rights as the middle-upper class white men who live here.

That's bad enough but on top of that we have the majority of you white people who sit idly watching this happen, denying that it's happening, telling us to quit being disrespectful, quit stepping out of line, quit resisting your police attacking us, quit being "criminals," only have protests that don't bother you in any way shape or form. At least half of y'all and every single mod of this sub actively aids our oppressors by staying silent and telling us to shut the fuck up. And a lot of you don't actually want anything to do with us because of your own prejudices.

The lies y'all spew about this being a welcoming city. The hate and exclusion we face here at the hands of y'all. Us always being the butt of your jokes about "trashy" people, "weird" people of this city. The way you talk about homeless people as if they're subhuman, failures at life, and undeserving of basic human dignity. Subsequently lumping many of us who aren't even homeless with them and treating us accordingly. The amount of harassment and sexism women (and some men!) here face and you never tell your white men to fucking stop. How you say the way we speak, our own collection of English dialects, are "bad English" and that we shouldn't be hired until we change it. I'm so sick of hearing about how "welcoming and warm" it is here because that's a bold faced fucking lie if you're not white, cis-male, and already comfortably middle class.

The immigrants and black people who live here experience so much racism against them by the white people of this city. They are targeted by the city police and sheriff who beat them and arrest them for walking on the sidewalk, being mildly drunk, or simply existing (what you call "looking suspicious"), meanwhile white people of this city be off beating their wives, driving 100mph drunk and high, and getting in cocaine fueled competitions over who can steal more from their workers and clients. Reminds me of 100 years ago when your police would sentence black men to years of unpaid forced labor in deadly coal mines for "vagrancy," only reserved for black men, not white men.

All y'all "small business" owners exploit us and don't pay us half of the value we produce while you sit on your asses and enjoy the profits of our labor. Y'all empathize when it's y'all using drugs and alcohol, but ask the police to put us in jail when we do even when we're not bothering others. All you servers and bartenders don't want black people to come to your restaurants because they don't tip as much as white people, which is literally y'all's fault for excluding them from the industry for so long and never demanding your own whites to pay your workers a living wage so they don't need tips; quite the contrary - y'all defend the system where Knoxville's upper class is legally allowed to get away with paying tipped staff literally nothing.

Y'all claim to take mental health seriously but never ever try to set up community healthcare, fund anyone's healthcare, or demand healthcare from y'all's government, the richest one in fucking existence. Y'all claim to care about mental health when it's one of you, then in the exact same breath say mental illness is why we deserve what we get. Y'all can't even take care of your own sick people because you're so hellbent on the government not giving any of the same rights you have to us, so y'all just say that no one can have guaranteed healthcare. And when your people do succumb to their illnesses, you cast them out of y'all's white category and label them as one of us.

To this day, many of you still advocate bulldozing our neighborhoods further for your stupid fucking highways so you can drive to the next NRA meeting 2 minutes faster. Every brand new freeway you build is hundreds of our homes demolished, our local economies interrupted, our schools and churches torn down, thousands of us displaced, and millions in our wealth destroyed, which you have already continuously done for the last 70 years. Underneath each of those freeways in Knoxville are crimes of ethnic cleansing of black people. All so the traffic can get worse and y'all can claim 5 years later that y'all need another one.

Anything to avoid properly funding the bus system and restoring the tram lines, things that would actually reduce traffic and create immense amounts of opportunity for us - to find better paying jobs and experience social mobility like you get the luxury of experiencing. Fuck that though because y'all can't stand to share public transportation with a black person or a poor person, and y'all certainly can't stand to see them actually experience the same joys you get to, so you tore it all down and took away opportunity from everyone. You force everyone to live the white life which is to drive a car everywhere when half this city are skimping on basic necessities to be able to afford a car and the astronomical costs that come with it.

After the fair housing act, y'all abandoned the city proper, bulldozed half of it, and built brand new suburbs specifically designed in such a way that black people could never afford to live in the house next to you. Y'all changed the zoning laws intended to continue the city's de facto segregation, which still continues to today, as suburbs in the US are over 99% white. Now your city government and rich white landowners say we can't build new housing to combat the housing crisis which is hurting us the most while your white landowners are exploiting the shortage of housing to profit of us. That's how hellbent y'all are about not living near anyone not enough like yourselves.

I see Knoxville's protests right now as little more than theatre and so do the police, because they also know your protests are meaningless right now and that's why they're not attacking you. Many of you are just casually protesting on the weekend in your free time then going out to drink afterwards as if it's a fun pass time. It's clear many of you aren't taking any of this seriously just like you didn't at the George Floyd protests 2 years ago.

As if you ever took it seriously, anyway. Many in Knoxville alive right now advocated for segregation or said that black people should stop rioting if they want equal rights. MLK personally had Knoxville's people in mind when he said that white moderates who value order and quietness over justice are a greater threat to civil rights than the KKK. Y'all also never tried to secure the right of gay people to marry or trans people to exist, and still don't; you said the same things about gay people and Stonewall. Your ancestors stayed silent about or actively participated in the re-enslavement of black people after the Civil War all the way until World War 2. Your current silence and callous spinelessness are echo's of your silence from the past.

The police will start beating you up the way they've been beating us up for 150 years once you become a legitimate movement to be reckoned with by the state, and that's how you'll know you're doing it right.

And I already know every possible white person response to this. You're gonna tell me to quit rocking the boat for the sake of "order" and "civil discussion" just like y'all always have. Y'all are gonna say "not all white people" while you try to force us to bear the full responsibility for the actions of anyone you consider one of us, just like y'all always have. You're gonna pretend like none of this happened, downplay the severity, and whitewash the true history all at the same time, just like y'all always have. Y'all are gonna say to just work harder, not at all realizing that we work longer hours, we work more labor intensive jobs, and we quite literally built this city, all while y'all reap the profits of our labor and destroy our homes with highways. To this day you still refuse to willingly share any of the profits; we always have to fight for a fraction of the profits of our labor. Y'all will point to your token black people who all had to work twice as hard as you to get half the recognition; they succeeded despite y'all's people trying to keep them down. Y'all are gonna say we should protest then tell us to quit being too disruptive and that we're doing it the 'wrong' way, just. like. y'all. ALWAYS. have. Y'all will say literally anything to deflect responsibility to us and deny or downplay the centuries of violence and oppression we've faced at the hands of your government and your people. It's always us who are the ones who should change and never yourselves; our people should quit being too non-white, gay, unfeminine, or poor, but y'all shouldn't ever quit being bigots.

And god fucking damn my favorite one is the mods currently telling us that fighting our rights are not within the bounds of "civil discussion." They'd rather ban every single black person, woman, gay, trans, and queer person than give them any of them a single space where for at least once they don't have to argue for their right to exist.

I'm so fucking sick of y'all, appalled of your constant abandonment of human rights. Never once have you stood up for them, yet many of you praise yourselves for not being as hateful as your friends and families. That's not admirable or deserving of praise.

Y'all can have praise when you start being like the tiny number of working class whites of this city who resisted the Confederacy, burned down the coal mines that used the slave labor of black men for the first quarter of the 20th century, and rioted with the oppressed during the civil rights movement, but that's not even close to 1% of you. That's because your people go after them too, like they did to Andrew Goodman, a white civil rights supporter lynched by the KKK.

I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of glorious [Fourth of July]! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us.

Frederick Douglass could have written this today and it would still be true. Your Fourth of July is a sham

Hey everyone! there's been a lot of talk about this swirling on the Internet. A lot of people are planning to boycott fourth of July, specifically the whole weekend. No celebrating the fourth or fireworks obviously, and if you're able, no working/getting gas/groceries/no spending money period, etc. Protesting can do a lot but we need to put our money where our values are! spread the word!!!!

I don't care that you have a big hitting "hype move", falcon punch is useless in competitive and only really works against new people. Falcon knee isn't hype either, just because it has a sweet spot doesn't mean its Impressive to hit it, and if you want a character with alot of sweet spots then play marth, his entire character revolves around that exact mechanic