A short while ago, I started working for Wizards of the Coast again, on D&D. I am currently working with talented members of the R&D staff, exploring various options and experimenting with the game. Which is to say, doing what I really love. At this point, you can think of me as a mad scientist in a rpg design laboratory, concocting crazy creations to see if any of them have any value.
I'm really not at all concerned with edition wars or arguments of that nature. Please don't try to drag me into those discussions. D&D is bigger than any of that, and my job is a lot more open ended and broad minded than such things. While I'm at it, let me also add, please don't make assumptions about what I'm doing based on things I've done in the past. The future is not yet written.
Speaking of writing (and the future), I'll be writing the Legends & Lore column at the Wizards' web site starting this week and going forward. I'll be using that as a venue to give you updates on my thoughts on these topics, new (and old) ideas, and experiments."
Wizards of the Coast, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc., and the world's largest publisher of adventure games, including Magic: The Gathering® Trading Card Game and Dungeons & Dragons® Roleplaying Games has an exciting opportunity for a Director, Brand Marketing: Dungeons and Dragons ® to join our team.
POSITION: Director of Brand Marketing, Dungeons and Dragons®
TEAM: Marketing
REPORTS TO: Vice President of Marketing
POSITION PURPOSE
Global brand management for Dungeons and Dragons®
KEY RELATIONSHIPS
Within the company, the Director of Brand Marketing - will determine the strategic direction and manage the P/L globally for the D&D brand in conjunction with research and development, sales, organized play, finance, project management and international Hasbro offices. The Director of Brand Marketing will lead the entire product lifecycle and development in collaboration with Hasbro Studios, Hasbro Labs, Hasbro Digital Hasbro Corporate.
Supervises:
- Lead and develop a team of Brand Managers and Assistant Brand Managers
JOB DUTIES
Essential Functions / Major Responsibilities:
* Set strategic objectives for the brand to ensure customer needs are met. Reconcile brand objectives with corporate goals.
* Create and drive overall brand strategy and positioning across product design, marketing and marketing communication.
* Foster the development of innovative digital and analog products targeting meaningful age groups and psychographics
* Grow profitably the brand by leading its regional expansion and category growth across a wide range of expressions (movies, TV series, books, games, licensed apparel, etc.)
* Leverage the most up-to-date digital marketing practices including online media, social media, interactive and direct marketing to grow the player community
* Manage brand P&L and makes key decisions on quality, cost, and timing for marketing programs and product under parameters set by the group Vice President.
* Manage overall brand A&P budgets and operating cost.
* Develop high-impact global marketing strategy, positioning and plans for major regions, in support of defined business & overall brand objectives.
* Write comprehensive strategic marketing, business, and sales plans
* Define and communicate all elements of the marketing program for the brand, including advertising, promotions, PR, retail programs, packaging, merchandising, and media initiatives.
* Ensure consistency of brand expression and essence throughout various marketing programs.
* Lead cross functional team members to excel in planning and execution of marketing and product plans Provide guidance to internal Wizards teams to tactically execute marketing plans.
* Provide internal International Marketing teams strategic direction for the brand.
* Evaluate current market trends and competitive activity; report on key findings.
* Coordinate with Hasbro product and media partners to deliver seamless marketing and brand messaging to the consumer.
* Act as key brand contact for business partners, international groups, Hasbro corporate, and press.
* Manage licensor/licensee relationships.
* Occasional travel required.
* Develop and mentor a team of intermediate and junior level marketer(s)
Performance Measures:
- Brand objectives, goals, strategies and measures as defined at the beginning of each year.
QUALIFICATIONS
Education and Training:
- Bachelor's degree from a four-year college required; specialization in Digital Marketing strongly preferred.
- MBA in International Business preferred.
Prior Related Experience:
- Minimum 5 years experience in digital marketing required including digital games marketing and/or social media marketing, online marketing and community marketing.
- Other consumer marketing and/or publishing experience preferred
- Knowledge of analog or digital role-playing games preferred
Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:
- Proven communication skills, particularly written and verbal required.
- Strong planning and organizational skills; ability to juggle and manage multiple priorities under tight project deadlines required.
- Experience with MS Word, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint and/or equivalent software required.
- Familiarity with Wizards products a plus – particularly Duel Masters
- Ability to work effectively with diverse groups of people.
Time Expected to Reach Full Performance Level in Position:
Three months
Physical Requirements: Standard office environment.
The above is intended to describe the general content of and the requirements for satisfactory performance in this position. It is not to be construed as an exhaustive statement of the duties, responsibilities, or requirements of the position.
We are an Equal Opportunity / Affirmative Action Employer.
See Job Description
Question for those in the know, what is duel masters and what is its relationship to d&d?
I am a firm believer of K.I.S.S. Keep It Simple Sir...Get rid of the current tax system and just tax things that you buy. Prices will jump but they should come to a steady price or no influx of tax money...Everyone pays even non US citizens...Damn I am a Genius LMAO
Do you want a value added tax, or a simple sales tax? Should we only tax goods, or will we tax the purchase of services as well?
Avice is an immerser, a person who flits between worlds by sailing the immer, the strange sea of time and space that underlines our own. To satisfy his curiosity, she takes her new husband to see her homeworld of Arieka, where the native Hosts communicate in a language unlike any other known to humanity and only specially-trained, genetically-engineered humans can talk to them. But back home in Embassytown she discovers that a new Ambassador has arrived, one with a different way of speaking to the Ariekei Hosts...one that may shatter their way of existence and endanger the human population of the planet.
Embassytown is China Mieville's eighth novel and his first science fiction book. This shouldn't be taken to mean that Mieville has dramatically moved away from his traditional fare: this is very much still in the weird vein he is known for. Arieka is a world of uncanny bio-technology where farms and factories are living creatures, whilst the Hosts are an utterly alien, difficult-to-comprehend species whose thought and speech processes are totally different to that of humanity. Even Mieville's take on hyperspace - the immer - is a place where strange and bizarre things can happen. In Mieville's SF novel the usual SF trappings - spaceships, FTL travel, futuristic weapons - are given his typical weird spin, but it wouldn't be hard to re-set the novel on a remote part of Bas-Lag or in another fantastical milieu.
What does make Embassytown SF is its take on the idea of language. The notion of one species trying to talk to another when their reference frames, histories, backgrounds and ways of life may be completely different is a difficult and challenging one, but also something that SF has usually papered over with a universal translator or the like. Here the difficulties of communication between two different species are studied in depth. The Hosts can only understand language when there is sentient thought...
Well, comrades, I'll be back later. I have to prepare tonight's session of Crimson Crown so that my comrades can defeat the reactionary paper tigers of Harrowstone and foil their plans to introduce usurious interest-rates to the free yeomen of Ravengro!
Spoiler:
The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is furthered by France’s poor means of communication and the poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the small holding, permits no division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science, and therefore no multifariousness of development, no diversity of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, directly produces most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of life more through an exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, the peasant and his family; beside it another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few score of these constitute a village, and a few score villages constitute a department. Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. Insofar as millions of families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention.
I think you have to let them be oppressed, in order to foster their class conciousness and transform them from potatos to proletariat.
Harvey's recent work is pretty accessable, it seems to be written for a broader audience than your usual academic crowd.
Typically, you are correct, when a company operates an active business through a permanent establishment, they do pay local taxes, and get a credit/deduction. Double taxation would put american firms at a disadvantage. However, a lot of ta structures are set up to game the system, usually by transferring ownership of "ip" developed in the US to a shell company in a tax haven, like the example above.
Google is fairly tame as far as arbitrage / power gamey tax optimization goes. IIRC GE has a very interesting strategy where they pay more tax abroad than they do at home, but I'll have to get to a real computer to check.
According to their own publicly-available Form 10k, GE paid $2.7 billion in taxes last year.
On a related note, one of the benefits of living in a free-market, governed (and thus taxed) society is that I have the opportunity to be an entrepreneur. My success is a boon to my society whether anyone sees more money because of it or not, simply by virtue of encouraging others to make business as well.
My success should not necessarily be shared down or forward to anyone--it's my success, not yours just because your tax contribution was necessary to maintaining the infrastructure and government that allowed it. I paid into that too.
Stop whining because I won the race while you overslept and failed to even compete.
GE employs something like a thousand tax lawyers for a reason. No one is sure exactly how much tax they are actually paying, not even the kind of tax nerds who become profs:
Higher taxes also allow the state to switch over accumulated capital (capital that can't be invested for an acceptable rate of return) from the primary circuit to the secondary and tertiary circuits (infrastructure / social spending and technology and innovation) and avert for a time recessions / depressions / inflation (crises of overaccumulation). You can temporarily fix the excess capital in space and time by building big dams, or ploughing it into tech (according to some theorists) - eg funnelling it into public goods instead of allowing it to float around and get invested in continually more speculative investments (derivatives, greek debt, gold, etc.) that cause bubbles.
Jeff, maybe we are talking about two different things. But I do not see that if my dad had one employee, then that employee has a right to my dad's company. He doesn't. He gets his pay and benefits, but that is it. He should not be able to take anything but that from my dad. But the lady sounds like my dad owes something to his employee more than his pay aka more taxes.
The lady is saying if you end up getting rich thanks to the fact that you live in a country that provided an infrastructure that allowed you have a working business, that is awesome. But you should understand it was built on the backs of those who came before you and built the infrastructure, and understand you have an obligation to pay forward for the next generation.
The electrical system that your Dad plugs his tools into. Infrastructure.
The roads and rails that bring the materials to the suppliers, where he picks them up and takes them to customers. Infrastructure.
The phone and internet lines used to get business. Infrastructure.
The insurance he gets, generally government backed. The FDIC protection on his bank account, etc...
People like to complain about government and taxes while accepting all the benefits.
It's annoying.
But he already pays taxes for those things. What is the difference between him and other people that use those same services?
It's the government that we don't or can't complain about is what we should worry about.
sts
The basic justification behind taxing him more is the concept of vertical equity. A "good" income tax has some basic characteristics:
1) Horizontal equity: Similarily situated person should pay a similar amount of tax.
2) Vertical equity: Differently situated persons should pay a different amount of tax.
3) Economic efficiency - don't discourage people from making money
4) administrative efficiency - don't be so difficult to administer and costly to comply with that the whole process is futile
These equity and efficiency issues draw on concepts of the marginal utility of wealth (a dollar makes a rich person less happy than it does a rich person) and pareto efficiency (your marginal rates shouldn't discourage people from earning more). There are big problems with measuring relative utility.
Here in Canada (and I believe this is roughly applicable to the states) the income tax started as a tax on the extremely rich to fund the first world war and second, based on the understanding that they could afford it - after the war the tax base was broadened on the understanding that it would fund the welfare state- social capital and buy in was much higher from 1950-1970. Since the 80s that contract , social captal and buy in has been reduced (or destroyed), but the income tax remains.
You folks down south also have a problem with tax expenditures, your congress iikes to hide spending programs in the tax code and then pretend they don't exist, or pretend they are tax cuts instead of spending programs.
You need to lower your corporate tax rate, get your small business rate down to 10-15%, add in a non regressive vat, raise your top personal margins and start taxing foreign accrued property income instead of letting it sit offshore.
That way you can continue to buy our oil and lumber and we don't have to ignore chinas human rights violations and constant attempts to spy / infiltrate our government. Your friends and allies want you to get better damn it!
Jeff, maybe we are talking about two different things. But I do not see that if my dad had one employee, then that employee has a right to my dad's company. He doesn't. He gets his pay and benefits, but that is it. He should not be able to take anything but that from my dad. But the lady sounds like my dad owes something to his employee more than his pay aka more taxes.
It's actually worse than that. She's saying that if your dad makes a profit thanks to public services, he has a responsibility to pay a "hunk" of it back to ALL the other tax payers.
Despite the fact it was NOT that taxpayers that put up any of the capital to start your dad's company. It was your dad's money.
And despite the fact that IF your dad's company fails, every taxpayer isn't going to send him money back to make up for his losses. He's going to be out that money, not the taxpayers.
well, capital is taxed differently than income, in part to recognize those risks. I think you'll find most of the people who are serious about advocating higher marginal rates are also serious about funding a basic social safety net. A lot of tax policy is coming from a very rawlsian place.
If you really feel like getting theoretical you can also look into questions of primitive accumulation and accumulation by disposession. Y
Spoiler:
currently doing a masters in law with a focus on international tax law
Yes, 5e is coming out any day now, just like it has been for the last couple of years. By the time it finally comes out, everyone can feel justified and claim they predicted it.
Marc Radle wrote:
It's also interesting since Monte has worked with Paizo on Pathfinder stuff AND he has been somewhat less than glowing about WOTC and 4E ...
Source on him being "less than glowing" about 4e?
His forward to the PFRPG core book could be read that way if you felt like it.
I suspect that the best place to get the straight dope on whether gold is likely to be confiscated would be in the management discussion and analysis of Goldcorp Inc, AngloGold Ashanti, Barrick, and their ilk. Barrick spent about 5.7 billion two years ago completely unhedging, I don't think they are expecting owning gold to become illegal.
Why not? Gold is a superior superconductor and when alloyed - a better grade of inductor/transformer winding.
Silver on the other hand is a better conductor and once the price of electricity is high enough, Silver and gold will become industrial application commodities.
Besides - Gold is better off in the hands of the state - exclusivly for use in science and industry - and currency should only be used to conduct trade between states.
Everyone else should be required to work for food and shelter to validate their citizenship and that compulsory seat in parliament.
Both gold and silver already are industrial application commodities. Most silver is used for industrial purposes, or in film. Back in the late 90s and early 2000s there was a lot of doom and gloom about digital cameras hurting the price of silver.
Gold still gets used for jewelry more, but your cellphone probably contains about a dollar's worth of gold in it.
I suspect that the best place to get the straight dope on whether gold is likely to be confiscated would be in the management discussion and analysis of Goldcorp Inc, AngloGold Ashanti, Barrick, and their ilk. Barrick spent about 5.7 billion two years ago completely unhedging, I don't think they are expecting owning gold to become illegal.
The only reason I'd pick one up would be to get Ice Cream Sandwich on it near the end of the year.
Unless they are planning to hand out free ice cream sandwhiches with the tablet, I wouldn't hold my breath on that. HP Tablet is [i]webOS[/] - ie, Palm. Not Android. Sure, someone might be able to get Android on it, but it isn't a native Android device even so it will be rather sketchy.
They're both Linux derivatives so it may be closer than you'd think. People are already running Ubuntu on it...
Oh please, the Linux fanboys will make Ubuntu run on anything. Give them a breadboard and a lawnmower engine and it will be running Ubuntu in a week. The problem is making Android run on it.
Why would I want android if i can get ubuntu or debian on it?
The reason we have these situations is because the VAT gets higher and corporate taxes get lower. The reason we have these situations is because the infrastructure crumbles, the social safety net falls apart, and business profits have never been higher.
Did they raise the VAT without a corresponding rebate for low income people? That's tax policy 101, consumption taxes are regressive and bad if you don't do that.
Raising VAT and lowering corporate rates is a fairly reasonable way of ensuring an adequate tax mix. I'm not super familiar with the UK tax system but a 28% corporate rate is not crazy low - and iirc you get double taxation of dividends to shareholders.
Probably not the right thread for this discussion. I'll drop it.
As an atheist I've always had trouble articulating what a norm building and continuing set of traditions should be. I don't want to have beliefs dictated to me, and don't really want to dictate them to...
Yeah, that's pretty much what I'm trying to get at. I guess I'll put Durkheim on the TBR list.
And I think a lot of people turned to Dungeons and Dragons out of a craving for the stories and myths that transmit values -- or at least the trappings thereof.
Now, I agree that one shouldn't just bend over backwards to incorporate and accept all cultural norms. Some are just too abhorrent to accomplish anything good.
On the other hand, just because something is historic and "how we always do it" doesn't validate it either. Things weren't always better "back in the good old days."
This is a line we often see from republicans (not talking about the US political party, although most of their members would probably fall into this category), nationalists and conservatives.
That the good old (often so-called Christian) values should be defended at all costs.
But we've survived lots of changing values, heck, we're even mostly better off today BECAUSE of changing values. So it's not a question of values and...
True, the character of the West has changed and evolved over the centuries, but we reached a point where we pulled that process up by the roots and put it on the shelf. And even though, yeah, traditions and history don't validate themselves, we can't live without them without becoming nihilistic.
What really struck me about the London riots (following them on the internet here in the US, anyway) was all the rioting in the Muslim parts of London... No wait, there was none as far as I know. Why? Probably because they have a community they care about founded on traditions that they are not going to throw away. People absolutely crave that and do not want to live without it, and if we can't manage to provide some kind of tradition for the next generations besides the choices of consumerism and fundamentalist Christianity (both afflicted by materialism), we are going to falter and fail on a wide scope.
As an atheist I've always had trouble articulating what a norm building and continuing set of traditions should be. I don't want to have beliefs dictated to me, and don't really want to dictate them to others.
The best things I've come across have been RPGs like D&D, and the common law. A base set of rules worked out largely by consensus that can be modified to fit particular circumstances of the era.
What, is it news to you that humans are primates? That we are animals?
It's kind of old hat.
Yes, humans are primates, I understand evolutionary biology, you understand it, we're both very clever.
So let’s replace ‘primate’ with ‘human’ in your quote.
Quote:
Poor people are generally very badly trained domesticated humans that are under too much continuous stress have any real awareness or enlightenment.
It still sounds awfully elitist and discriminatory man. Maybe you didn’t mean it. It doesn't sound like you to imply that some people's circumstances makes them better than others.
Give him the benefit of the doubt, maybe he's a believer in Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
There is a race at school. Bobby, is one of the youngest kids in his class. His family isn't really wealth, but they make due. Keith, is one of the oldest kids in Bobby's class, 11 months older than Bobby. Keith's family is much better off and can purchase some of the best items for their family.
The race starts, Bobby tries his hardest to win, but being smaller and younger, he can't beat Keith. Keith wins the race.
Afterwards, Bobby comes to his father crying, "It's not fair! Keith is almost a year older than me! He has really good running shoes, and I have the same tennis shoes I wear everyday! He shouldn't get to race with us! It's not fair!" Bobby's father takes his chin in his hand gently and looks in Bobby's eyes, "Did you try your best?" Bobby nods yes, tears running down his face. "Then why are you upset? Because you didn't win? That is nothing to be ashamed of. There will always be someone bigger and faster than you, someone with more advantages. You can't always live your life worrying about if you the best or not. You have to live your life being the best you that you can be. In the end, the only race that truly matters is you against yourself. Now wipe those tears and let's go see your mother."
Sadly our society has forgotten this. We too often judge our accomplishments by how others are doing, then what we are doing ourselves.
Are you honestly arguing that the rich are literally genetically superior to the poor?
You also forgot the part of the race where Keith hired someone to trip Bobby, and then stole all his money after the race, and that he doesn't have a dad to comfort him because his dad was murdered by the police (if not thrown into jail), and that his mom can't do much to comfort him because she spends all day trying to find a job so she can keep feeding him.
What I'm saying is, your analogy is crap.
I think the 11 month difference there he's refering to is the fact that some people make a conscious choice to time their kids birth in January for the host of advantages it gives children in North America. Not a genetic thing, just a result of when kids are allowed into school that has a knock on effect for sports and other measured learning outcomes.
Being 6 months or close to a year older can make a huge difference. I think they call it red-shirting in football.
So here's something I've never really gotten about the "don't have kids you can't afford" bit. Sometimes people have every reason to believe they are ready to have kids...they have a good job, decent savings, stable household, etc. So they have a child...and then things take a dump. They get fired. Someone gets very sick. A spouses leaves. And suddenly they can't afford to support their children any more. The point is, situations change, a fact that seems to get routinely glossed over by the "don't have kids you can't afford" crowd. As usual, things aren't that black and white.
Yeah, and here's the other thing I notice: The "don't have kids" crowd is almost always male. And generally straight males at that. Which means they don't really know what its like to be a woman and the pressure that men exert in order to get sex.
I don't want to go all Andrea Dworkin and be like "all heterosexual intercourse is rape," but the radical feminists are right that men -- even good, decent, honest non-rapey men -- can exert a lot of pressure on women to put out. And men don't always think about the consequences of that.
Which is how a lot of women end up with kids they can't afford. Because some guy said he loved her, but then he threatened to leave if she didn't put out, so she put out, then she got knocked up (because he didn't want to use a condom that one night, and she was too afraid of him leaving to argue), and then he dumped her.
Or, you know, she's a minority, and the father got arrested for one of the many "crimes" that is only illegal if you're not white (you know, like drug possession or trespassing).
As a gay guy, I'm a third party here. I gotta say you're painting a fairly complex dynamic in monotone. Power and sex leave men disenfranchised in a -lot- of ways (like only women can choose an abortion). But, this thread has enough going on in it to bring sex and power in it too.
That monotone is also leading to him misquoting / misinterpreting Dworkin too.
Nasty brutish and short eh? How very Hobbesian of you.
Leviathan gets a big ::thumbs up:: from me.
It has always left me feeling scared and disgusted. Absolute sovereign is crazy talk. And he's a flat taxer. Makes the Communist Manifesto seem reasonable.
Why does a abused monkey fling itself against the bars of its cage until its broken and bleeding? Does it think that will accomplish anything?
Comparing the poor to monkeys now?
The sense of noblese oblige/white man's burden you feel must weigh heavy on your shoulders
When you boil away all the poetry and self-flattery, human beings are just domesticated primates. Truth hurts, but that's all we are.
Poor people are generally very badly trained domesticated primates that are under too much continuous stress have any real awareness or enlightenment. Not all of them, obviously, but that is the consequences of poverty. It leaves you morally, spiritually and intellectually impoverished, and thus closer to the animal nature that underlies all human behavior.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not a liberal because I've got a big bleeding heart that cares for everybody. I'm a liberal because poor, stupid people annoy the crap out of me, make life tiresome, and I'd like to see them eradicated. Since you can't just kill poor people, you have to do stuff like...you know...educate them. Give them work to do. Help them become fully realized people.
Nasty brutish and short eh? How very Hobbesian of you. Personally I'm more of a Jean-Jacques Rousseau type...
I'm advocating offering family planning and seed capital to those who want it. It's a voluntary program, noone is forced to participate. And, yes, I do believe it will eradicate a large amount of poverty as it will lead to people having kids later in life when they are more economically capable
My idea was to take some highschoolers on a field trip to Wal Mart with me when I went to buy formula and diapers. Then they can go to the condom aisle and do a price comparison.
I thought they frowned on sex ed south of the border.
I find the comments sections just as enlightening as to the causes. "They're criminals because they're criminals and need to all be shot" indeed, and then they turn around and reproach the church for abandoning morals.
The wage disparity thing has been getting a lot of play lately, for example:
Ram the riot act through parliament, read it, and since the met seems incapable of doing its job call in the army to arrest anyone who doesn't disperse. Looting a corner store and setting flats on fire is not a legitimate form of political protest.
The only place I've seen advertising for Essentials is in the Dungeons & Dragons comic book. You know, that thing you're probably not going to pick up if you aren't already playing D&D.
True. Now if they were in other comic books... And on WoW boards and on Geek websites around the web and had posters up at bookstores and game shops and on podcasts and every three minutes on Cartoon Network, then we might have a chance to entice new gamers.
I think the fact is that we as a hobby can no longer rely upon the D&D brand to bring in new gamers. With the rise of the 3rd Party Publishers becoming on a footing with the old masters, we need to look at new avenues to entice new gamers into the hobby. Things like Free RPG Day and Free Comic Day are good starts, but we need a corps of volunteers willing to demo games at libraries, game stores and events to keep interest up.
Getting the penny arcade guys on board with 4e was a pretty smart move. That's positive word of mouth from people normally associated with WoW and console gaming.
I was disappointed with the red box. I'm hoping paizo's beginner set doesn't make the same mistakes. That said, it was clearly planned. Boxed sets don't materialize out of thin air. A quick search on these boards will turn up a number of threads where Lisa and Vic talk about how hard / expensive it is to set one up.