Regardless of some of the few good points the Occupy Movement may have, just who supports this group of “takers” and their actions speaks volumes, one just needs to read some history to see that even the Nazi Party in Germany had some “points” such as bringing up the economy of Germany while the rest of the world languished in the depression as well the creation of Volkswagen, a first in this being a car for the masses unlike the Mercedes; but do these few exceptions make right?

Occupy Movement, the Parasite Party backed by Supporters of Hate and Evil

See Also: Occupy Movement Hypocrisy

A Couple Friends of this Website:
*UV Bulbs
*LED Aquarium Light Information

As of November 15, 2011, PayPal has required ALL businesses shipping via PayPal to login and out of eBay, worse ANY business with more than one employee must use the same administrative login.
This means any business MUST give out administrative passwords to all employees, thus providing critical access employees that might be new or simply not to a level of trust for such information.

In speaking with an arrogant PayPal Supervisor, I received the usual condescending Obamanite rhetoric.
Worse they informed me if we took our USPS shipping elsewhere we would not be fully covered under their already terrible and fraud ridden seller protection program.

Why PayPal made such a decision without polling their merchants has got to be one of the biggest corporate blunders I can think of.
Of coarse this is typical of eBay/PayPal to roll out changes without testing for bugs or asking their merchants for input; this of coarse has much to do with the contempt PayPal has for their merchants.

It has also been put forth by many merchants “in the know”, that the main reasons for this change is to provide the illusion of growth for the eBay sector (which has been struggling) for their stockholders; this is obviously corporate malfeasance.
As well this shifts all shipping for PayPal/eBay to one sector providing larger postal & UPS discounts for eBay, of which they only pass this along to a their select few “Top Sellers” and pocket the rest, including us poor shlubs that are only PayPal customers!!!

This said, our company is now moving all our USPS shipping to stamps.com (we already shipped our larger packages via FedEx). In speaking to a stamps.com employee (not to mention the unusually long wait time), it is apparent that other merchants are leaving PayPal shipping in masse.

See Also:
PayPal Dishonesty; Fraud, Customer Service; Review, Positives and Negatives

Verdict: It SUCKS Sorry for the crudeness, but when one considers what an arrogant bunch PayPal/eBay are, this simply needs to be said.
If you own stock in eBay, pull it out as this company is obviously on their way out (not just due to this but in many of their business practices that often result in financial loss for merchants due to fraud).

Why?? i can only guess, but I can certainly put forth a few FACTS that one might draw conclusions from.

First though I will briefly mention what I am referring to;
I receive many “communications” from customers and non customers asking for help with certain aquatic problems, many of these persons are otherwise friendly persons. HOWEVER often these persons have no boundaries when comes to others time and even though I respond to initial emails 16 hours per day, these person will take advantage (or attempt to) of my help by refusing to read the plethora of researched aquatic information I provide to back up and provide further information to their questions.
The result is further question after question, en though the article I suggested reading contains answers to these continued questions. Worse though is when I tell these persons that I have no spent copious amounts of time I do no have (often during my little amount of family time), they get mad!.
A common reply is “I do not have time to read your articles”.
Of so my time counts for nothing? What about my time I spent researching along with the 30 plus years that has gone into these article that are provided free of charge (no need to go to Amazon and purchase a book that is likely very much out of date and anecdotal on the subject)?
This is just one common example.

Others although thankfully not a daily occurrence, but still occur with regularity are the downright rude emails where we provide a plethora of information, documentation, cite references, etc. YET these persons feel the need to challenge our/my responses in very condescending and rude manners. Aquarium Lighting & correct UV Bulb replacement are common subjects of these persons.
Sometimes these persons demand we not follow the business practices we installed in 2009 after suffering through years of no profit an losses as we were attempting to be everything to everyone, so most of our time was in email and phone calls. The result was losses that we are still paying back to this day in loans we had to take out.
Bluntly these persons have no right to tell me or anyone else how to run my business and especially in ways we know result in losses just so to be someone’s personal answer person.

Other issues are forums especially local (which I no longer waste my time on) ignoring what I have to say.
Facebook is a place where narcissism runs amuck even among otherwise “nice” persons.
I follow others posts when time allows (for this reason I try and keep my friends lists short). Yet anything I post often updating my life’s work (which also is what pays the bills and hopefully will dig us out of the hole I have been in since being forced to move to Oregon in 2002), it is never read, “liked”, etc. but for one or two persons. Even my nieces refused to ever “peek” at any of my posts, yet were on constantly posting about their adventuress. What ever happened to looking out for each other? I know that search engines rank these likes, so being in an online business it is important to me and it would simply be nice to have such favors returned one in a while.
However since this boils down to a relatively minor issue compared to the above emails & phone calls; I simply do not visit the waste of time the narcissistic social media is of late.

What are the Causes?

While the causes of this pervasive rudeness, lack of boundaries, and extreme narcissism are speculation (subjective), the facts that support this are not and are in fact objective.

So what I will give are a list of FACTS and let readers mostly draw their own conclusions.

(1)FACT; when tracking these rude and clueless (without boundaries) persons via name or any other identification to web sites such Facebook or Blogs; what I (& others) have found that over 90% display very liberal political views.
Even among the other slightly less than 10% with more so called “conservative” views proclaim an Evangelical religious view point.

(2)FACT: .gov and .edu emails address make up a disproportionate percentage of these before mentioned emails. While these two email suffixes are well under 5% of are general emails (of which we receive 100s counting sales), these two suffixes make up nearly 20% of rude, & narcissistic emails

(3)FACT: When you go to liberal enclaves, especially YouTube; you will find that most of the of the insulting language and support for strange causes comes from these liberals or libertarians (such as Truthers of supporters of the Occupy movement).
As well when my videos for my business get rude or condescending remarks (that I usually delete), I look at the persons YouTube account that made such comments and sure enough in almost every instance I find a person with far left Michel Moore type views.

A few Subjective Observations based on these and much of what I have seen/witnessed in life

• With the most Narcissistic President in history along with places such as Twitter and Facebook that also champion Narcissism, I believe this to be suspected.
• Dishonest News Media.
  This same media has been able to convince many that Democrats are for the “working man” well this could not be any further from the truth other than “country Club Republicans (RINOs) also are not at all for the working man either.
  Democrats are only for those who blame others for their problems work the “working union man”

  As well the news media has done a good job of ignoring the facts of who the true major political contributors are, with the result being most in America falsely believe the Republicans receive the top contributions.
  See: Democrats Receive 89 Percent of Donations Made by Four Top Political Donors

• Occupy Movement; that amount of disinformation that persons believe from this mob (mostly of thugs, but sadly made of up many “good person” that are so woefully mis-eductated as to the facts of business finance and much more about life and believe anything the left leaning media tells them)
• YouTube; there is probably no more better forum for sleaze other the owner of YouTube; GOOGLE which is a corporation that would not know honestly if it hit them in the face with their rampant plagiarism of small businesses and small entrepreneurs.
  See: Google Lies, Dishonesty, Plagiarism; Adsense, Adwords & Google Search Fail
• The education system itself which although many will disagree, it is over paid in my view based on “market value” of the work they do. Tenure is the primary evil as I have seen the good teachers that were not tenured let go at our local schools and going back to my school days I had a downright evil teacher put me down in class in the 4th grade only to have this ridicule follow me to my High School Graduation. She should never been allowed to teach and had she worked in the private sector she would have been fired immediately.

This are just a few opinions of mine, others may draw different conclusions, however the facts noted earlier speak for themselves

I have always had a problem with Ron Paul’s inability to denounce the despicable and immoral “truther” movement within his groupies (see: “Debunking the 9/11 Myths: Special Report), but this latest episode seals the deal for me that if this man somehow becomes the Republican nominee for president.
If nominated, I will either vote third party or hold my nose for Barrack Obama, who thankfully actually did the “right thing” in vetting and signing off on taking out this terrorist. Do not get me wrong, I find Obama’s socialist over-reaching government and plain dishonesty despicable, but then I find Ron Paul’s “look the other way, its not my problem” libertarian view equally troubling and both views have had catastrophic affects on my family on a personal level.

Back to the so-called rights of Anwar al-Awlaki since he is a US born citizen (I say he gave up his citizenship), I would refer to:
Article Three of the United States Constitution; Section 3, Treason.
While I am certainly no constitutional scholar (I will leave this to Mark Levin), my reading seems to indicate that Anwar al-Awlaki essentially denounced his citizenship.
One analogy I would put forth to Ron Paul and others that see this as a first step in a slippery slope of the US government denying certain constitutional rights such as a fair trial is this:
During the Civil War, should we have Mirandized every Confederate Soldier prior to firing on them? (BTW, I know the term to give Miranda Rights occurred well after the Civil War, about 1967 if my memory serves me).
This analogy is far from perfect, for one I think Anwar al-Awlaki is bluntly an evil bastard nearly on par with the likes of Hitler and Pol-Pot, while Confederate Soldiers were anything but evil, even if I might disagree with their cause (even then it is slavery I disagree with, not States Rights, but the right to be free and not owned by anyone transcends ANY States rights).

Anyway, this is my 2 cents as to two issues as to why I think Ron Paul is the least qualified person running for president of the USA, even though he certainly has it right that we need to stop spending immediately.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Here are a few unrelated, but interesting articles by a friend in my main line of works; Aquarium/Pond Keeping:
*UV Bulb; an excellent UV-C Bulb Replacement Guide along with articles

*Aquarium LED Lights, Lighting; a top notch article about choosing the best in LED light fixtures for your aquarium

What is Link Cheating?

Link Cheating is where a service that often claims to their clients to raise their link popularity and/or search engines results.
These persons used to be more honest, however of late these services now ask for reciprocal link exchanges from higher search relevant websites, and one obtained these services will remove their back link to the site from which this link exchange was granted/obtained, usually within 2 months, but sometimes sooner and sometimes longer.

Part of the reason I suspect is that Google has devalued reciprocal link exchanges considerably and this is a cheap, albeit dishonest way to obtain cheap “one way” link for their clients (versus actually performing hard work and incurring more expenses).

Please feel free to comment with email or URL addresses of known link cheats so that others can watch for these dishonest services.
This growing will also help their clients or future clients avoid such link building services, as often web sites such as the many i mange eventually catch these link cheats and remove them, thus their clients initial good results end up going back down, often leaving a bewildered and frustrated client with their fees paid long gone.

Here is the List (Which I am sure will grow)
*contentsage.com

*bestmarketingstrategist.com

*easygetlinkz.com

*rankachiever.com

*resource-works.com

*sarawebpopularity.com

*onlinemarketingtoday.com
This company is sneaky, they send you an email saying their back link is missing when it is not and that your link is now removed when in reality it was never removed and they never reply back to their email

(1) Google Panda Update
This article proves that Google’s Panda update of 2011 is nothing more than a sham.
The company line is that Google is attempting to get rid of content farms (hence the nickname “Farmer Update”; however this article proves otherwise.
This article puts forth that this is basically a cover for “Content Scrapers” that plagiarize excellent original content websites then post this content on their websites for Google Adsense.
IMO, from what I have seen this may not be always the case, but certainly spammy content sites have jumped over good content web sites.

This article also has links to further Google information as well

(2)PayPal
This article is both positive and negative; providing an opinion on PayPals excellent and simple website integration, simplicity of sales, and more.
As well the unfortunate negatives are also explored such as poor fraud protection and a technical department with absolutely no interest in whether their clients succeed or not.

(3)Tom Paterson Process for Productivity in Business
This is 100% positive business post/article dealing with Tom Paterson and his life accomplishments in business productivity.

(4)FedEx Claims, Technical Support
This article is from this website/Blog, but I though I would include it too.
This article deals with an otherwise excellent shipping company, that has absolutely no understanding of customer service or honesty when they do make a mistake and damage others property (their technical support could get some “Schooling” in customer service/respect as well).

(5) Pet Mountain; Alleged Parasite Retailer, (TruAqua section of article disabled, although comments still available)

See this article for more about a LED Aquarium Light:
Aquarium LED Lights; Poor Emitter Example

I will first admit that I was sure that Casey Anthony was guilty based on the media presentation of the case, in particular based on Nancy Grace’s so-called expert presentation of the case.

Even after the not-guilty verdict, I listened to her “expert” commentary and trusted the fact she was actually there (unlike myself).
However, I then thought to myself that she was rather sure of herself and was then curious as to her background. I was horrified to read and find out her background “screamed” of some of the dishonest person that have severely harmed my family based on provably false accusations.

Here are just a few of Nancy Grace’s questionable actions

*Obviously in the Casey Anthony case she had her mind made up

*During the Elizabeth Smart case, when suspect Richard Ricci was arrested by police on the basis that he had a criminal record and had worked on the Smarts’ home, Grace immediately and repeatedly proclaimed on CourtTV and CNN’s Larry King that Ricci “was guilty,” although there was little evidence to support this claim. She also suggested publicly that Ricci’s girlfriend was involved in the cover-up of his alleged crime. Grace continued to accuse Ricci, though he died while in custody.
It was later revealed that Smart was kidnapped by Brian David Mitchell and Wanda Barzee, two individuals with whom Richard Ricci had no connection.
She has not apologized for this either to my knowledge.

*She has on at least two occasions as a prosecutor played fast and loose with the truth.
Based on a case from 1997, Nancy Grace ethics were commented in a 2005 opinion on by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals that Grace “played fast and loose” with her ethical duties and failed to “fulfill her responsibilities” as a prosecutor in the 1990 triple murder trial of Herbert Connell Stephens.

*In 2006, 21-year-old Melinda Duckett committed suicide following a harsh and over the top interview conducted by Grace concerning the disappearance of Duckett’s 2-year-old son Trenton.
This is not a vindication of Melinda Duckett by me, my point is that Melinda Duckett deserved a trial by jury, NOT a trial by over zealous District Attorneys turned CNN reporter/commentators!

See: Nancy Grace Faces Charges (Melinda Duckett)

*Nancy Grace embellished the story of her college fiancé’s 1979 murder and the ensuing trial to make it better support her image.
See: Did Nancy Grace, TV Crimebuster, Muddy Her Myth?

* It is obvious to me that Nancy Grace has built her career by stretching the truth and her bully tactics that leave no room for human error on her part

Summary

First this is/was a lesson for myself; while only Casey Anthony and God likely know the full truth, the jury found Casey Anthony innocent and I believed malicious commentators such as Nancy Grace without doing my homework

Second; Nancy Grace smacks of the irresponsible and downright evil persons I have encountered in DHS, CPS that are self appointed guardians of the “facts” as they fit their corrupt agenda.
These DHS, CPS persons actually believed charges made by a psychopathic predator rather than the facts backed by many reliable references, facts of time and location that were backed up, facts of written letters/emails of proof showing origins of evidence, financial records, and testimony of my daughter’s therapist based on years of sessions.

In one incident in 1999, one so-called child advocate was even told off by a Los Angeles County Sheriff Deputy after he saw the evidence totally contradicted here false charges (he even had to forcibly remove her). Sadly this all occurred after my son was born with many issues (including a bout with Meningitis) to which I was the primary care giver all while working long hours with my business (my wife was suffering severe postpartum depression at this time which in part allowed for the predator to get a foothold)

In an incident that stemmed all the way back to the other incidences of the late 90s and early 2000s, the Oregon DHS took evil actions based on a very questionable piece of so-called evidence (ignoring all the facts I noted earlier). After the court threw out the charges and the evidence finally got the light of day, this corrupt individual still would not admit her mistake, instead she made lame comments similar to Nancy Grace has when she has been proven wrong.

See: DHS, DCS, CPS; Oregon Children Protective Service Abuse of Authority

Other References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace

I first will point out that in general FedEx has great shipping rates, great personnel (especially our agent), and generally does an excellent job in both handling & shipping time.

Updated 12/22/11

As I previously noted, FedEx is a great company in most instances.
HOWEVER, it you ever need technical help or worse if one of the relatively rare instances of FedEx breakage occurs; LOOK OUT!

FedEx’ claims department is like Obama on steroids as per their integrity, honesty, lack of returned calls, lack of follow-up, misinformation, etc, etc, etc.
We had a Monday in early May of 2011 where at least 5 packages were damaged. We resolved 3 of these on our own (at our cost both in time and product repair cost), in fact one of these had the box severely damaged yet the product was in usable condition, so the customer told us he was “good” with it.
This resulted in us only filing claims on two packages that also had declared value placed on them. I should point out that we have shipped literally over 1000 of these UV Sterilizers and even more noteworthy on the particular UV Sterilizer in question, we un-box and the re-box with layers of bubble wrap, THEN another couple of layers of bubble wrap outside the main box before adding another box over this. This particular UV Sterilizer is shipped to us form the UK with only the outer cardboard box and to this date only one has arrived broken.

However attempting to get FedEx to honor this claim, you would think WE committed murder with every excuse being used and disinformation, and lying the standard of the day. I once had a car accident that was my fault and I was treated vastly better than this, yet this was clearly FedEx mishandling.
If FedEx had any integrity in their claims department, they would fire half the staff to start with, then also look into how much a business ships versus their claims percentage. FedEx would quickly realize that we make only 2-3 claims (usually low dollar) versus $40,000 plus in shipping (up to this point it comes to .005 in dollar value of claims versus shipping expenditures with FedEx)

Another silly aspect of FedEx claims is why bother placing declared value on an item if FedEx is going to find every excuse to not pay for their own mishandling. Just on this one UV Sterilizer alone we have paid about $1500 in these fees (not all the sterilizers or other products that we add declared value), this is well above all claims for every item ever shipped and damaged by FedEx in 6 years of using their services. This logic of FedEx’s claims department is just incredible IMO!

Here is a list of Reasons FedEx lacks any integrity/honesty in their claims department:

1. Asking for information then changing the rules and asking for more but then only when contacted by the FedEx customer. Providing a completely different answer depending upon who you speak with. Basically; LYING!!
2. (Similar to above) Lack of communication/ability to contact the FedEx customer when further information is necessary.
   Even when contacted few calls are ever returned, even from upper management!
3. Looking for any loop hole to disqualify a claim (Basically; no integrity!!)
4. Ignoring the statistical facts
5. Ignoring Customer Shipping History (come on FedEx; .005% claims versus amount spent with FedEx certainly shows our ability to pack well, especially considering 70% of our shipments are fragile)
6. Treating customers that have spent Thousands of $$ like criminals
7. The scam that is declared value

Further;
I will also point out in dealing with FedEx’ Technical department, while not as dishonest, they are rather condescending with little interest in providing the businesses such as ours what would improve our business efficiency (such as a usable and reasonably sized Address book and ability to cross use this between our employee sub accounts).
There is more, but I will leave it at that as we have come to learn to deal with this aspect of FedEx shipping and could “live with it” if it were not for the extreme lack of integrity of their claims department especially Debbie (beside being clearly in the wrong line of work, she cannot accept any responsibility for hers or her companies actions).

In fact Debbie kept attempting to call this a UV Bulb when it is more better defined as a UV Filter that has a bulb inside it, this was her dishonest attempt to use legal fine print to get out of paying a claim that was clearly the fault of FedEx. This attempt to mislabel this product was ludicrous and the same as attempting to get out of paying for a damaged laptop computer based on LCD “lights” and similar that are part of the computer.

Updated 9/30/11
In another case a package with lights and an aluminum reflector, FedEx dropped something heavy on this box, crushing the neck of this reflector.
The dishonest claims person never made any attempt to contact us with any questions (which is typical) & denied the claim based on e a picture where the customer attempted to put together the shipping box, leaving the bubble wrap to the side (which she lied about as we and others looking at this picture could clearly see).
This FedEx employee cited paper as the reason for denial, ignoring the stated fact that this box had bubble wrap and layers of card board over this neck. She also ignored the fact that we have shipped literally 100s this way (and so does our distributor, MINUS the bubble wrap!!).
Her manager had the condescending audacity to state we should contact a department at FedEx to learn how to correctly pack; WHAT? In fact I and our shipping manager have been working in shipping together for over 8 years, including a couple years at Candy Factory where we listened to this same lame story from another FedEx employee. In that case in 2004, we stopped using paper as a spacer and instead substituted styro peanuts as was suggested in this recent case. The result you might ask? The candy shifted much more resulted in this high end candy looking very scuffed and resulting in many un-salable boxes. In the end we went back to paper.
This is not to say we do not use styro peanuts as these are great for single light bulbs which we wrap in bubble surrounded by peanuts and whip 100s per month with only very rare breakages, but with larger items we have found using bubble wrap around the items, followed by cardboard dividers and paper to fill the gaps and finally extra layers of cardboard works quite well, but to FedEx this is a way to deny a claim which is ludicrous at best and dishonest at worst

In summary; as I noted FedEx has a lot to offer a small business that needs reliable reasonably priced shipping, as well our account manager (Trevor) is awesome (& hopefully if any reader either has a FedEx account or is getting one is lucky enough to have a good FedEx representative).
I will also point out another positive is Sharon at the Atlanta CAT (CAT stands for Customer Advocacy Team if I am correct); was VERY polite and understanding, so my hats off to her too.

However if you use FedEx as a shipper or are thinking of using FedEx and your items are even remotely fragile (assuming you package very well too I might add), I would recommend taking a step back and re-considering the cost of the time to package (the item I referred to we spend almost 40 minutes re-packaging, only for FedEx to make every attempt to not take responsibility for their poor handling in this incident), the cost of your time in dealing with FedEx (we have lost over 8 man hours from this one bad day of shipping by FedEx), and simply the aggravation of dealing with persons with absolutely no integrity to do the “right thing”.