The lives of celebrities are marked by the five Fs: fame, fortune and friggin’ fabulous funerals. Wait…what? The famous and famously infamous often choose to enter their afterlife in a manner befitting their intoxicating mortal life. From Michael Jackson’s $25,000 casket to a parade of 16 white limousines transporting mourners during Elvis Presley’s funeral procession, celebrities and their families spare no expense to leave a lasting impression on the departed’s fans and followers. Then again, when you are a religious leader, a royal, a president or a world conqueror, why would you go online and purchase a Wal-Mart casket?
 
 

Princess Diana – 5 Million Pounds

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It’s not difficult to deduce that airplanes are based on birds — some of the better pilots in the animal kingdom. After 3.8 billion years and a lot of trial and error, animals have become astoundingly good at a variety of tasks (humans still take the cake in the “watching stuff and getting fat category”).  As a result, the field of Biomimicry has ballooned in recent years as scientists and companies are discovering new and interesting ways to steal Nature’s intellectual property.   
 

Bullet-Proof Skin

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Plenty of people (ie: Paris Hilton, Lisa Vanderpump and other celebrities with too much money to spend) pamper their pets with elaborate wardrobes, plush bedding and tasty treats filled with pricey meats. Plenty of people (ie: the rest of us) also have problems with ravenous dogs that eat what they please, despite daily offerings. A strappy sandal here or plate of lasagna there – these are things we expect dogs to shamelessly destroy when our backs are turned. But as shown in our list below, man’s best friend can also covet man’s most expensive items; from high-end jewelry to cold hard cash.

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The thing that caught our eye about this infographic, besides it’s great sarcasm, is the fact that hidden within its core message is one of the most valuable business lessons you’ll ever learn: you’ve got to manage your clients, else you’ll get burned.

Business is all about providing a service or product that other people need. But the mistake that many new entrepreneurs and freelancers make is to think that business relationships will naturally take care of themselves. After all, I provide a service the client needs… it’s a very natural, beautiful, simple kind of relationship, right? Well… sort of like sex… it’s more complicated than that.

The fact is that your business customers almost always need to be given structure, push-back and guidance in the business transaction, else you’ll experience a living hell. That’s human nature. If given no structure or process, people try to get the upper hand, to take advantage of the situation, to eek out as much value for as little cost as possible.

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Buying a used car is a swampy world of deceit and disappointment, which is why you should do thorough research and leave no room for trickery, sorcery, or other kinds of sordid magic that will leave you stuck with a lemon. By knowing the tricks of the trade, you can keep yourself safe and smart — and get the deal you want at the same time. Here are 10 nasty tricks used car dealers try to pull on unsuspecting customers, and how to avoid falling for them.
 

Pulling the Keys/’This Won’t Be Here Tomorrow’

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Now that the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests have somewhat died down due to reports of “Man it’s freezing in Zuccotti Park”, we can take a moment to look back on the movement.  One of the chief criticisms leveled at OWS by detractors was that its message was garbled, incoherent, and the type of socialism we hate except when it’s our Medicare.  On the opposite side of the argument, there’s the opinion that maybe there is just so much wrong that it doesn’t easily distill itself down to a CNN bullet-point.  It may take some reading between the lines, but here are the most salient points that emerged from the admittedly schizophrenic protests.   
 

Too Much Money in Politics

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A friend of mine who lives in California wrote up a rant on PMI this morning. It was so telling that I felt compelled to re-post it here on BP. PMI may help buyers get into a home, but in the long run, it’s a sour proposition. Here’s my friend’s letter:

Personal Mortgage Insurance (PMI) is totally stupid. As it stands, people who can’t pay 20% down on a home loan are penalized for not having enough stockpiled cash and required to pay PMI ($200/month in our case), money that does not go toward principle and can’t be written off when you supposedly make “too much” as this support article defines.

Granted, homes in California are not cheap, my wife and I managed to pull together 12% which was awesome but still 8% shy of avoiding PMI. Despite 800+ credit scores and stable jobs, this is the third year that we have paid $2,500 in PMI. Each year, I think about how this chunk of our taxed income hasn’t gone toward our debt and how we don’t “qualify” to use it as a write-off. Yet it’s mandated by the government to bail out banks when they take bad risks.

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Half-assed resolutions aside, there are a number of ways you can examine the success of your new year thus far. If you don’t believe in ‘starting the year off wrong’ since our concept of years/the calendar is completely fabricated (or other various reasons), good for you. You don’t have to superstitiously worry about hidden omens in your day-to-day life which predict the happiness or unhappiness of the next 12 months. For the rest of us, here are 10 reasons you know that 2012 is off to a bad start.
 

Fighting Through New Years

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It’s undeniable that small businesses today benefit greatly from the use of social media sites. Whether for promoting their enterprise, reaching out to clients and responding to queries from customers, regular networking efforts on social media indeed has its rewards.

A big chunk of entrepreneurs using Facebook, Twitter and so on belong to the small business industry. It should be noted, however, that even the Fortune 500 companies are also taking advantage of these sites.

Apart from the real time communication that the sites offer, it’s absolutely free to promote a business and keep in touch with customers. One does not need to have technical skills to be able to manage a social media account and this ease of using the sites is what primarily attracts business owners to use them.

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