Beautifully flowing curved book displays in the Zhongshuge-Hangzhou bookshop in China. Love this #design #curvaceouspic.twitter.com/9igSCRfwTg
You might not think of a dental procedure as dangerous, but when the operation takes place on lions, leopards and hyenas, the stakes are raised. Watch as, over the course of a week, one of the most ambitious wild animal dental operations takes place on Kevin Richardson’s sanctuary in South Africa.
Check out more videos on Kevin’s channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/LionWhis…
This article originally appeared at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6acqFJuLGU
You’re ready to move on, but that doesn’t mean you have to let go of your first property.
There comes a time in many homeowners’ lives when it’s just time to move on to the next home. Maybe it’s because of a job change, the arrival of a kid (or more kids), a marriage or divorce, or you just don’t like where you live anymore.
Many millennial homeowners — who represent half of all home buyers these days, according to the Zillow Group Consumer Housing Trends Report — are ready for that next home purchase. Maybe that describes you.
So, now you have a decision to make: Do you sell your first home, or hang on to it and rent it out?
Kate Currett, a millennial homeowner, rented out her first home in Utah for three years while living in her second home in Ohio. Her goal, like most who rent out a property, was to earn additional income.
Sounds simple enough, but there are many factors that you should weigh when making this big decision.
In addition to having the potential to make some money on renting a house, buying a second home and renting the first is one way to build a real estate investment portfolio.
Millennials, in particular, are typically in a good position to do this: You can convert your primary residence into a rental and “leave your owner-occupied mortgage intact, which was likely (and hopefully) obtained with a down payment and the most favorable mortgage interest rate, as low as 3.5 percent,” says Kelly Hannah, a certified residential specialist at Eightline Real Estate.
Purchasing a non-owner-occupied property (that is, a house that you’re purchasing specifically to rent out) generally requires a 20- to 25-percent down payment and has an interest rate .375 percent to .75 percent higher than you’d get for an owner-occupied property.
Bottom line, it will likely cost less to convert the house you live in now into a rental and buy a second home to use as your primary residence than to purchase a second home to use as a rental property.
The financial hurdle you will have to leap is qualifying for a second mortgage. “In the beginning, [it was difficult] making sure we could qualify for a dual loan,” Currett admits.
But if you have a lease in place on your first home prior to closing on your second home, “your lender may allow a portion of those future rents to count as income in their calculation of your debt-to-income ratios,” Hannah says.
However, lenders “prefer to see that you have property management experience in order to count those future rents as income,” he warns.
As for tax advantages to renting out one of your properties, Leigh Anne Bernal, a property consultant with cityhomeCOLLECTIVE, advises making it a priority to speak with an accountant, as tax rules can be complicated when renting out a property.
Generally, “the most substantial tax advantages to converting your current home into a rental come in the form of depreciating that property, the deduction of maintenance expenses, and the deduction of your mortgage interest,” Hannah explains.
Before you make any moves toward converting your home into a rental, you need to assess whether or not your home is rentable.
Generally speaking, a “one- to three-bedroom home is going to be easier [to rent] than a larger home,” Bernal notes.
She suggests researching who the renters are in your city and the types of properties they rent. “The broader the appeal, the more luck you will have,” Bernal says.
Hannah adds that the best way to determine whether your home is an ideal rental property is to meet with a professional and “create a comprehensive strategy tailored to your individual situation and specific market.”
Needless to say, rental rates vary greatly, “especially with respect to single-family homes and condominiums,” Hannah says, as rental rates for privately owned homes are not easily tracked.
Currett agrees, and notes that a tough part of owning a home while renting out another was balancing having a competitive rental rate and still making a profit.
However, a reliable way to determine the rent for your first home is to search the rental market for homes similar to yours.
“This will allow you to see what rental rates are in real time and space, and price your rental competitively,” Hannah notes.
“Do your homework,” Bernal says. “Take all of the costs into consideration, including property taxes and insurance.”
Perhaps the most difficult aspect of renting a property is being a landlord for the first time. Costs can come at you from all sides, from repairs to late or unpaid rent from tenants to property damage. Go in planning on incurring expenses beyond the mortgage payment.
“Some of this can be handled with a property management company, but that comes at a price, so make sure you have that included in your math,” Bernal advises.
When it comes to renting out your extra home, “Do it,” is Hannah’s advice. “Buy and hold is almost always a good idea.”
But Bernal recommends really analyzing your situation before making a leap: “If you’re in a seller’s market, that can make it tougher to get into your new home without cashing out the equity in your first home. You may be able to refinance your first home to get some of that equity out.”
Slack co-founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield boasted about the ad on Twitter. Twitter: @stewart
Slack founders are taking marketing lessons from Steve Jobs.
The workplace communication company took out a full-page ad in today’s New York Times, ahead of Microsoft’s Office event which will kick off at 11 a.m. EST. It has been reported that Microsoft will likely reveal a Slack competitor, Microsoft Teams, during said event.
The ad is reminiscent of Apple’s 1981 ‘Seriously’ ad, from ChiatDay, which welcomed IBM to personal computing by making it clear all the work that Apple had already done to dominate the space. With its ad Slack uses a similarly condescending tone, laying out all that it has learned since launching three years ago.
Slack created the ad in-house, according to a spokeswoman. The company worked with creative shop redpepper on previous ads.
Slack co-founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield posted a photo (see above) of himself reading the ad on Twitter. “That feeling when you think ‘we should buy a full page in the Times and publish an open letter,’ and then you do,” Buttersfield wrote.
Read the ad in full below:
Dear Microsoft,
Wow. Big news! Congratulations on today’s announcements. We’re genuinely excited to have some competition.
We realized a few years ago that the value of switching to Slack was so obvious and the advantages so overwhelming that every business would be using Slack, or “something just like it,” within the decade. It’s validating to see you’ve come around to the same way of thinking. And even though — being honest here — it’s a little scary, we know it will bring a better future forward faster.
However, all this is harder than it looks. So, as you set out to build “something just like it,” we want to give you some friendly advice.
First, and most importantly, it’s not the features that matter. You’re not going to create something people really love by making a big list of Slack’s features and simply checking those boxes. The revolution that has led to millions of people flocking to Slack has been, and continues to be, driven by something much deeper.
Building a product that allows for significant improvements in how people communicate requires a degree of thoughtfulness and craftsmanship that is not common in the development of enterprise software. How far you go in helping companies truly transform to take advantage of this shift in working is even more important than the individual software features you are duplicating.
Communication is hard, yet it is the most fundamental thing we do as human beings. We’ve spent tens of thousands of hours talking to customers and adapting Slack to find the grooves that match all those human quirks. The internal transparency and sense of shared purpose that Slack-using teams discover is not an accident. Tiny details make big differences.
Second, an open platform is essential. Communication is just one part of what humans do on the job. The modern knowledge worker relies on dozens of different products for their daily work, and that number is constantly expanding. These critical business processes and workflows demand the best tools, regardless of vendor.
That’s why we work so hard to find elegant and creative ways to weave third-party software workflows right into Slack. And that’s why there are 750 apps in the Slack App Directory for everything from marketing automation, customer support, and analytics, to project management, CRM, and developer tools. Together with the thousands of applications developed by customers, more than six million apps have been installed on Slack teams so far.
We are deeply committed to making our customers’ experience of their existing tools even better, no matter who makes them. We know that playing nice with others isn’t exactly your MO, but if you can’t offer people an open platform that brings everything together into one place and makes their lives dramatically simpler, it’s just not going to work.
Third, you’ve got to do this with love. You’ll need to take a radically different approach to supporting and partnering with customers to help them adjust to new and better ways of working.
When we push a same-day fix in response to a customer’s tweet, agonize over the best way to slip some humor into release notes, run design sprints with other software vendors to ensure our products work together seamlessly, or achieve a 100-minute average turnaround time for a thoughtful, human response to each support inquiry, that’s not “going above and beyond.” It’s not “us being clever.” That’s how we do. That’s who we are.
We love our work, and when we say our mission is to make people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive, we’re not simply mouthing the words. If you want customers to switch to your product, you’re going to have to match our commitment to their success and take the same amount of delight in their happiness.
One final point: Slack is here to stay. We are where work happens for millions of people around the world.
You can see Slack at work in nearly every newsroom and every technology company across the country. Slack powers the businesses of architects and filmmakers and construction material manufacturers and lawyers and creative agencies and research labs. It’s the only tool preferred by both late night comedy writers and risk & compliance officers. It is in some of the world’s largest enterprises as well as tens of thousands of businesses on the main streets of towns and cities all over the planet. And we’re just getting started.
Adobe is working on a new piece of software that would act like a Photoshop for audio, according to Adobe developer Zeyu Jin, who spoke at the Adobe MAX conference in San Diego, California today. The software is codenamed Project VoCo, and it’s not clear at this time when it will materialize as a commercial product. The standout feature, however, is the ability to add words not originally found in the audio file.
An Adobe representative confirmed the project’s existence to The Verge, clarifying that it was shown off today as part of a sneak-peek program at the MAX conference. The project is currently in development as part of a collaboration between members of Adobe Research and Princeton University. News of Project VoCo was first reported by the art and design website Creative Bloq earlier today.
Like Photoshop, Project VoCo is designed to be a state-of-the-art audio editing application. Beyond your standard speech editing and noise-cancellation features, Project VoCo can also apparently generate new words using a speaker’s recorded voice. Essentially, the software can understand the makeup of a person’s voice and replicate it, so long as there’s about 20 minutes of recorded speech. In Jin’s demo, the developer showcased how Project VoCo let him add a word to a sentence in a near-perfect replication of the speaker, according to Creative Bloq.
Adobe
“When recording voiceovers, dialog, and narration, people would often like to change or insert a word or a few words due to either a mistake they made or simply because they would like to change part of the narrative,” reads an official Adobe statement. “We have developed a technology called Project VoCo in which you can simply type in the word or words that you would like to change or insert into the voiceover. The algorithm does the rest and makes it sound like the original speaker said those words.”
So similar to how Photoshop ushered in a new era of editing and image creation, this tool could transform how audio engineers work with sound, polish clips, and clean up recordings and podcasts. Of course, there’s all sorts of ethical implications involved when we have the ability to falsify entire sentences using a person’s voice. But just as Photoshop taught the general public to be wary of suspect images, Project VoCo might do so the same with regards to doctored audio clips.
This finger puppet is so awesome. Not only does it glow in the dark but its dance moves are so incredible that you’d think it was alive. It just moves so fluidly.
Barnaby Dixon, the genius controlling the finger puppet, came up with a dance routine that involves some crazy finger gymnastics and both his feet. You gotta see it.
According to the report (“Consumers Show Robust Interest in Self-Learning Navigation”), consumer interest is strong for systems which learn driving habits and use them to provide traffic alerts or a one-touch option to navigate home. This interest is especially strong among middle age groups and premium car owners. However, interest is much weaker for systems which use learned phone-calling and radio-listening habits to provide some type of benefit.
Derek Viita, senior analyst and report author, explained that “in order to ease privacy concerns, the benefit of a system that learns driving, calling, or radio-listening habits needs to be effectively communicated to the consumer. And for maximum delight, the in-car enhancement must be relevant to the driving task itself.”
Chris Schreiner, director of IVX, added, “This pattern of consumer interest in self-learning technology aligns with interest in similar connected services for the car. Consumers are most interested in services which provide an immediate benefit relevant to the drive itself, such as traffic updates and parking finders.”
He’s 8-months-old and just now hearing his mom’s voice for the first time. Watch Xander’s amazing smile at the end when he seems to realize what’s going on.
This article originally appeared at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzQZaZoZPg8
This article originally appeared at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y9jwxE0TJA
Tesla stock price increased 4.45% after hours on Wednesday, perhaps giving a San Francisco-based vandal a creative idea for a crime yesterday evening. “In the most San Francisco crime ever,” Silicon Valley recruiter Morgan Missen tweeted, “someone tagged my neighbor’s Tesla with its afterhours stock price. His other Tesla appears unharmed.”
Before the markets closed on Wednesday, Tesla was at $202.24, but after hours, the stock price shot up to $211. Some people clearly could not contain their excitement, although it only went up $9, which isn’t cause for such extreme celebration.
Last November, a woman in the San Diego area vandalized a Tesla with the word “PIG,” along with 21 other luxury cars. The culprit told the San Diego police department she did this because “she hated rich people.”
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It’s hard to tell whether this new case of vandalism was born out of a love of stocks, a hatred of rich people, or mere boredom.
Our thoughts and prayers are with Missen’s neighbors. Thank god their other Tesla is OK. Tragedy, thwarted.
