Irvine folks… If you’re looking for some guidance on voting in the Mayor and city council races, here are my thoughts/endorsements for our mayor and city councilmembers. These are my opinion only. Would love to hear your thoughts or questions if you have any.
tl;dr
Mayor: Farrah Khan
Irvine City Council (vote 2): Anthony Kuo, John Park
Twenty years ago, I got on the Green Bay Packers season ticket waiting list. Every September or October, I get a postcard that tells you where you are in line. And so, I’ve been tracking my progress every year for twenty years.
Here’s the latest:
I calculate the projected time left by taking a linear regression from the beginning and average it with the linear regression for the last five years. And yes, it looks like the projected time to get my tickets has actually increased this year.
This milestone snuck up on me today, as with most of the world, the COVID pandemic has taken center stage for pretty much everyone. My business is showing the same revenue as last year, which in a normal time would be disappointing, given that previous years I’ve grown the likes of 50% or even 5X. But, in this time, I’m very thankful and blessed to be at 0% growth and not a 90% drop. I really hope the restaurant, travel, entertainment, and events businesses hang in there because I know there’s a lot of pent up demand for these things. I for sure am feeling it!
Every once in a while, I play the “what if my business would go to zero” thought experiment to prepare me for the worst. I never would have imagined that it might have become reality. My business was set up perfectly in this pandemic, low overhead, work from home, and cleaning products for Pete’s sake. Despite that, supply chain issues almost made me have to start executing the plan that I had war gamed out. Namely, sprayers for spray bottles had gotten scarce, being gobbled up by governments and big companies who needed to disinfect their space. Ironically, BECAUSE I was in the cleaning space, I almost lost access to all my inventory, which would then leave me with no products to sell, and BAM… business going to zero.
First plan for my e-commerce business going to zero was to work on a completely different product. A product so different it should be able to hedge against an e-commerce cleaning products business. And that would be a football office pool picks site, confidencepoolpicks.com. Well, COVID threatened the football season as well, and with no football season, there would be no need for football picks. At least the football season continued on this year, even though revenue dropped by 50%. It’s just amazing how far reaching this pandemic was. I had two very different businesses that were both threatened by it.
But I count my blessings every day that I was able to keep things going. My life wasn’t as adversely affected as much as many others were. As we hopefully see a light at the end of this pandemic, with vaccines coming through, things hopefully are starting to get back to normal and I can resume my quest to become a $1 million business again!
On election day in 2016, I was visiting San Francisco, watching the electoral vote count add up for Trump until it became clear that he was going to be elected. I was somewhere between being disappointed and devastated, as to me, he was the epitome of a terrible leader.
Of course, the hatred started flying. People were outraged, the usual jokes about moving to Canada, doomsday predictions, and the bashing of Trump supporters.