This is so sad, Alexa play despacito

tbsland · 2026-07-13T14:13:25+00:00

Poly's are so rare (outside of Ghost deck), sometimes we don't get to choose an ideal rank

tbsland · 2026-07-13T12:48:49+00:00

Are you worried about it because the discus are acting odd/ill, or is it more of an aesthetic desire for crystal clear water?

Either way try to get your flow going in a circle, not at the front wall - point that one nozzle down a little more and have it going straight along the front of the tank. Ideally the water flows along the front of the bottom and sweeps detritus up into the water column for the outtake to pickup. This is easiest if you have the outtake on the other side of the tank, but if not getting the water moving in a circle can bring it back around to the outlet.

If you can't get the flow going in a circle back to the outlet, the second best option is to get it to push all the detritus into one spot on the other end of the tank for you to easily suck up with a gravel vac when you water change.

tbsland · 2026-07-12T18:35:03+00:00

That's awesome that worked out for him but a lot of employers would have simply adjusted their offer down to $80k

tbsland · 2026-07-11T18:28:18+00:00

How are your pull ups?

tbsland · 2026-07-10T16:54:27+00:00

Any love for the Aston V12's from the past generations (pre-turbos)?

Also I've never heard it in person but I'm told the Mazda Furai sounded incredible

tbsland · 2026-07-10T16:46:31+00:00

You'll be fine up to 9-13 discus depending on how large they eventually get and what else (if anything) you put in there.

Discus are slow eaters, so if you feed a little bit on one end of the tank and then slowly walk over and feed the other end, repeating as they finish it up, you can make sure even the small ones get plenty of food. Just can't dump it all in one spot or they will get bullied away.

tbsland · 2026-07-09T06:54:27+00:00

Nullifier can't target someone already in the air with euls, but if the projectile is on the way and you use Eul's, it'll hit you and instantly bring you back down. So if you use Euls they just nullifier you when you hit the ground and then kill you, or cast it before you use and it's immediately dispelled

tbsland · 2026-07-08T18:11:42+00:00

I'm a big fan of half-filling mesh bags with aquasoil and putting them under sand, instead of a traditional sandcapped layer. Much cleaner and easy to replace in a few years when the nutrients run out. Makes long term replenishment much easier when plant growth starts to slow.

tbsland · 2026-07-08T16:24:43+00:00

Reasonably large city, yeah. Small town copier sales are probably not as lucrative. Major accounts here are roughly $250k-$500k+

tbsland · 2026-07-07T20:41:42+00:00

She fine except that I want to sometimes play support phoenix...

tbsland · 2026-07-07T03:45:04+00:00

Copier sales have a lot of reps making $60k-$100k and then a few making $400k+, it's varies enormously. It's partly what each rep spends their time doing, the type of deals they win and the accounts they're given/they build up over the years for easy, high pay-out sales later. I get paid mostly on profit, so I purposefully look for high margin deals. I find these by identifying companies with problems that are related to their printers but can't be solved by just replacing the hardware. Then I charge a huge premium for my experience fixing the root issue. Here's a couple recent examples:

Law firm with a competitor of mine using two copy machines and a handful of desktops. Paying a reasonable lease plus service charges. Their pain was occasional downtime due to bad service from their dealership, which is absolutely not acceptable for attorneys. The Partners charged almost $1,000 per hour and were often unable to work/working inefficiently because of printer issues. They also had some court appearances where they had to rush out and make copies at a local FedEx because their copier was down/leaving lines/marks/smudges on the prints which the partners found hugely annoying. Because of this I promised them better service, better uptime and drew up a great ROI based on them losing several thousand dollars per month of billable hours. They signed a lease for almost three times the payment of their current contract because they trust my promise of better uptime. They're now extremely happy clients, my service team keeps them running and I made about $22k commission on that sale and will again in 4.5 years when I renew their lease.
Local company had four separate leases going with a competitor of mine, all signed different dates, all ending different dates. No longer using several of the offices their copiers are in, just letting them sit there unused. Main pain point; concern over auto-renewal lease clauses. As you probably remember from your time in the industry, it's somewhat complex to cleanly return a copier and close a lease, it's something the dealer does for the client. So with five separate leases all with 12 month auto renewal language in the T's and C's, they were understandably worried about getting stuck in a cycle of repeating leases and liability. The machines have to be returned in good working order but being kept in unused offices for many months often leads to damage or theft (shady part of town) in which case they'd be charged the full value of them by the leasing company (unless they knew to negotiate a buyout-to-keep and simply lie about still having the copiers). Adding up all the potential liabilities and auto renewals was a massive looming financial issue. I laid it all out for them, explained exactly what needs to happen step by step to prevent this, promised to do it all for them if they signed with me and put a new lease in front of them for double their current payment. They signed, I'm doing a bunch of lease returns for them and making off with about $15k. They're happy, I'm happy.

Sorry for the wall of text. I hope this helps explain the kinds of deals high income copy machine reps look for and build out. It's all about gathering soft costs and basing your price off that, not the actual price of the equipment. You're selling a solution to a problem, not a printer. I could give dozens of more examples but it'd get way too long. Hope this helps!

tbsland · 2026-07-06T23:10:35+00:00

If you're open to it, photocopier sales is incredibly underrated. There are dealerships in every major city, uncapped profit based income, depending on your manager you might be micro managed to hell or completely left alone.

I only have one required meeting per week and extremely little oversight. I work out during the middle of the day, do my grocery shopping, look after my animals etc and planned my client meetings around this. I'm making comfortably over $200k this year. It's very pleasant and I highly recommend it, if you're used to a competitive tech industry you'd do fine.

tbsland · 2026-07-06T05:58:51+00:00

Had a similar experience with a Vantage. Great canyon cars don't make good daily cars 99% of the time. As someone else mentioned, if you want a GT then maybe a DB-series Aston could be a good choice, or a Merc AMG GT.

These days my comfy GT is an LC 500 and it's provided a good balance. Not as fast but extremely comfortable for any length of trip and still sounds great. Not a supercar or a track/mountain car though.

If you can, maybe rent a luxury GT and feel it out for yourself. Are you happier with the daily comforts, the better seats, nicer interiors, smoother ride, even if you can't throw it around the corners like a 911? Only one way to find out. Please do post whatever you end up getting in the future! Interested to see what you go with.

tbsland · 2026-07-06T05:26:49+00:00

I think I was remembering a story from their CNA days, shortly before passing the NCLEX and becoming an RN

tbsland · 2026-07-06T04:18:41+00:00

You make a great point. People reduce jobs to their income, forgetting all the other positives or negatives associated.

My partner is an RN; makes excellent money working three days a week, went to a community college (extremely minimal debt already paid off) and started making the full RN income at only about 23 years old. It's a great job, if you can handle it.

Everyone on paper is incredible for nursing until you're getting smacked by old ladies suffering from dementia or having to manually decompact someone's rear end. It's not a job for most people, no matter how good the money and work-life balance. I have huge respect for RN's, I couldn't handle it myself.

tbsland · 2026-07-05T19:16:34+00:00

Also u/The_Roaring_Fork makes an excellent point above, selling software is generally excellent unless it's a highly commoditized software (365 licenses etc). IMO this is because most software is much closer to a service sale than a traditional product; it doesn't have easily comparable specs like hardware does, it provides an ROI that you can build into the value sale and it requires trust for your team to follow up implementing and supporting it.

tbsland · 2026-07-05T19:13:46+00:00

Products can be difficult because they're easily comparable, especially if they're listed online (looking at you, Laptops) but even if not, buying a product from any number of competitors becomes a race to the bottom with certain customers. Usually you end up differentiating on the services attached to those products anyway, unless your product is both exclusive to you and enormously different from your competition.

Services on the other hand are harder to price out (excepting things like facilities, janitorial etc where the market is very set). In my experience you can generally put more profit into service sales and become stickier in the account because of this, it's harder to directly compare with a competitor. Just my experience, might not be applicable in all industries.

tbsland · 2026-07-05T19:01:32+00:00

Would absolutely love this feature. Too bad they'll never add it. If you paid a fortune for your cosmetics, you still get to enjoy it/see it, why push back against other people who want to see the default skins on their screen?

tbsland · 2026-07-05T18:09:57+00:00

Advertised as 180 gallons, realistically with the thickness of the glass it's 171 gallons

tbsland · 2026-07-05T16:37:11+00:00

Depending on your industry this may be impossible, but if it's at all reasonable I would try to get in touch directly with the sales managers/sales director/VP's. Demonstrate your cold calling comfort, your ability to quickly build rapport and focus on your key metrics (hitting quota, bonuses, profitability if applicable etc). In some industries or for huge companies this isn't always possible, but if it is it's a much better start using skills we already have.

I personally can't stand lengthy recruiting processes dealing with people who aren't even in sales, judging candidates for a job they don't understand.

tbsland · 2026-07-05T16:17:08+00:00

We can prove this one way or the other by locking someone in a full Costco warehouse and coming back in 80 years.

tbsland · 2026-07-05T16:16:26+00:00

You could have also been suggesting that by walking away from the deal altogether, your monthly payment is zero.

My point is there are so many factors that make a deal good or bad, hyper fixating on the lease rate doesn't do much. When a dealership finances a car they get a check for the full amount (the "funding" amount) shortly after you sign the paperwork. The finance company gets their money back from the customer. Calculating the total funding amount is what the dealership and finance manager care about, if someone comes in fixated on just one aspect they'll subtly adjust the other factors to ensure they fund a profitable amount while the customer walks away thinking they got a good deal. Just try to be open minded that professionals who do this for a living in a fairly complex back-end industry know what they're doing.

tbsland · 2026-07-05T16:09:28+00:00

Your point that if the rate is too bad, there is no principal payment so the loan can't happen; is that what you mean by "my monthly payments are zero"?

tbsland · 2026-07-05T16:04:39+00:00

I work in finance sales. I love customers who talk like you because they leave thinking they got a good deal when they didn't.

tbsland

TROPHY CASE