Netropolitan Is a Facebook For the Affluent, and It's Only $9000 To Join 178
MojoKid writes Facebook has become too crowded and too mundane. With around 1.3 billion Facebook users, it's understandable to be overwhelmed by everything and want to get away from it all. However, unlike Facebook which is looking to connect everyone to the internet, there is a new site called Netropolitan that focuses more on exclusivity and privacy. The site was founded by composer and former conductor of the Minnesota Philharmonic Orchestra James Touchi-Peters who wanted to provide a social media site for affluent and accomplished individuals. People wishing to join need only pay a mere $9,000 to join. Of that amount, $6,000 is the initiation fee and the remaining $3,000 is for the annual membership fee which users will continue to pay. So what does the initiation and annual fee get you? For starters, Netropolitan will offer an ad-free experience and will not promote any kind of paid promotions to its members. However, it will allow the creation of groups by businesses in which members can advertise to each other under certain guidelines.
I'm starting my own exclusive club (Score:5, Funny)
and you only need to pay me $100k to join! Hurry, offer is limited!
Re:I'm starting my own exclusive club (Score:5, Funny)
with blackjack and hookers?
Re:I'm starting my own exclusive club (Score:5, Funny)
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Bender, is that you? :P
.info (Score:5, Interesting)
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They don't even seem to have a running website yet.
I guess they just want to share the idea with the rest of us so that someone else can implement it.
Re:.info (Score:4, Funny)
Re:.info (Score:5, Informative)
$6,000 to join $3,000 pa and they only have a .info domain? Nothing says "exclusive" and "accomplished" like a .info domain...
they have a .club: https://netropolitan.club/ [netropolitan.club]
(and it runs on wordpress...)
Neopolitan? (Score:1)
$6,000 to join $3,000 pa and they only have a .info domain? Nothing says "exclusive" and "accomplished" like a .info domain...
they have a .club: https://netropolitan.club/ [netropolitan.club]
(and it runs on wordpress...)
I don't like that. I find the chocolate distracts me from the strawberries and vanilla.
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(and by its speed, it looks like it runs on a laptop in a mother's basement)
Re:.info (Score:5, Funny)
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Actually, it's pretty clever. Make up something lame, call it "exclusive", and sell it to people with more money than brains. It reminds me of some company that made fancy, massively-overpriced cellphones to sell to rich people (with sapphire mechanisms in the buttons, no less) back when the iPhone v1 was revolutionizing smartphones.
This thing doesn't have to become a giant commercial success, it just has to make a bunch of money before the owners bail out and it collapses.
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Those already existed long before Facebook. It's called forums.
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$6,000 to join $3,000 pa and they only have a .info domain? Nothing says "exclusive" and "accomplished" like a .info domain...
they have a .club: https://netropolitan.club/ [netropolitan.club]
(and it runs on wordpress...)
In all fairness - although Netropolitan runs on Wordpress, users do have their choice of a vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry color theme.
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What does it mean for an ISP to 'not support' a TLD? The only way a TLD would be inaccessible is if it is being deliberately blocked, and I wouldn't call that 'not supported', I'd call it 'blocked'.
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Try the .WEB TLD sometime.
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.info has been around since 2001. Is that really new fangled? (Or is this just a Slashdot dupe from 2001 lol).
Re:.info (Score:5, Interesting)
A: "Hey look at this social media website I made last weekend"
B: "Does it have all the features of Facebook?"
A: "No, it was just meant as an experiment and I don't expect anybody would want to use it even if we gave it away for free"
B: "How about we tell everybody it's exclusive and charge a very high entrance fee?"
A: "Great idea, that'd solve the scaling issues too!"
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Re:.info (Score:5, Funny)
According to their website:
"The entire service is inaccessible from the public Internet, including search engines. "
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That doesn't sound terribly useful then, does it.
Re:.info (Score:4, Insightful)
A private domain for all the stuff you only want to share with close associates doesn't sound useful to you?
Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter results in my google searches are just noise that I have to filter out.
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I have stuff that I only want to share with close associates. I wouldn't use any social media site to do it, though.
This idea is just stupid. However, there are a lot of rich people with more money than brains so it could be wildly successful.
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I ain't sayin' she a gold diggah
But she ain't hangin with no broke niggah
In fact some nigga gave that hoe $9000 to join a stupid social media site
That hoe she smart
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According to their website:
"The entire service is inaccessible from the public Internet, including search engines. "
You have to call their number on your 14.4k dial-up modem.
Yet another scam (Score:2)
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Welcome NewUser003!
We recognize everyone's desire for privacy, so for an additional $5000 you can get "Blocker" which stops even the other club members from seeing your page.
Then, for an additional $5000 you can purchase "UNBlocker," which allows you to see the pages of everyone who bought "Blocker."
(turtles all the way down)
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The rich don't need good service. They'll pay their $9k each, get pissed off, and the site will be down after a couple of years due to non-renewals; meanwhile, the site founders will have made $10-20 million (2,000 people, your numbers, times $9k = $18M) and can retire quite comfortably.
I wish I had thought of it....
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$6,000 to join $3,000 pa and they only have a .info domain? Nothing says "exclusive" and "accomplished" like a .info domain...
Well, for $60 down and $30 a month you can join the .MOBI version...
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$6,000 to join $3,000 pa and they only have a .info domain? Nothing says "exclusive" and "accomplished" like a .info domain...
I can't think of a single TLD other than .com for Facebook that I've ever heard of anyone using, and yet 1.3 billion people still manage to find the website every damn day.
With a list as long as my arm of things to tease and nitpick this site over, this ain't one of them. Let's not act like morons and pretend every search engine suddenly disappeared.
TLDs stopped meaning anything more than a bullshit marketing ploy when we found a "need" for more than com/net/org.
As long as URL:s are visible to viewers .com and .org will remain as status markers. The fact that these people couldn't afford to acquire the .com is evidence that there isn't a lot of financial muscle behind the project.
Another piece of evidence is that the site is now down. I'm going to go ahead and guess that they are on this plan: http://mediatemple.net/webhost... [mediatemple.net] with "unlimited bandwidth" for $29 a month, laws of physics be damned.
rotfl (Score:1)
why this is on front page?
Re:rotfl (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: rotfl (Score:2)
So obviously front page material.
And.. (Score:2)
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Oh my (Score:3, Insightful)
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At which point they might even have enough money to hire a developer to actually build a site and keep the yearly fee rolling in.
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As Moist von Lipwick already knew, this is the essence of a really good scam. Nothing lets someone leave all sense and care behind as the prospect of fleecing someone else.
"Affluent and accomplished" is not the criterion (Score:5, Interesting)
It's rich people. Let's just put that down in here in black and white. A nine-thousand-dollar entry fee doesn't test for your contributions to medicine or the arts, or whether you've taken your hard-earned wealth and invested it in a nice brownstone filled to the brim with the best contemporary art has to offer. That $9000 bouncer will be just as happy to let in every reality TV star, pop artist, flash-in-the-pan record producer, and fleetingly-wealthy action movie screenwriter.
And if you think that a $9000 fee is going to stop somebody from registering just so they can grab all your "private" communications and put them up on the public web, you have seriously underestimated human puckishness.
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Yeah, that's what affluent [wordreference.com] means. Had to look it up myself.
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It has certain connotations, though; I don't think I've ever heard someone describe, say, the Kardasians as affluent. Rich, yes. Affluent? No. People like this company's founder, people who work in classical music, those are the people you reserve hundred-dollar words like "affluent for".
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Just my $02, but I'd have to disagree. I've heard the term used many times for people who basically have cash to burn.
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Now that I am done with word fun I seem to frequently hear people describe others as affluent solely based off of their perceived net worth.
Re:"Affluent and accomplished" is not the criterio (Score:5, Insightful)
That $9000 bouncer will be just as happy to let in every reality TV star, pop artist, flash-in-the-pan record producer, a
Those TV and music starlets will stay on FB because they want and need to stay in touch with their fans.
The wealthy have always segregated themselves. That $10k membership fee in the golf club is not because keeping the grass short is so expensive, either. It is to make sure everyone you meet there is in your class.
Frankly speaking, I'm mostly surprised that this doesn't already exist.
"Keeping the grass short" is hugely expensive (Score:5, Informative)
I've done work for country clubs and "keeping the grass short" is very expensive. The equipment and grounds crews for a 18 hole golf course are both extensive.
Most operate at least one full-service restaurant and bar area, sometimes more than one in certain seasons (ie, fine dining room and a more low-key grill type food service) and they staff them like they were going to be 3/4 full despite being empty or only 1/3 full much of the time. Food waste is huge, plus they usually feed their employees a separate meal.
A lot of clubs have big, old clubhouses that are maintenance nightmares. They don't get replaced because its a multi-million dollar expense that has to be paid for through assessments on members and there's a romantic attachment to the clubhouse because someone famous played there 100 years ago.
And your $10k initiation fee? That's a joke, $10k is for some low-rent club with a bowling-alley class snack bar. Try $100k, which usually buys stock which is refunded to members when they resign the club. It's usually $2k/month with dues, food and beverage and golf fees. And this is for a better Midwestern club, I'd double those figures on the coast, or more in certain places.
The fees aren't to keep people out, either, even if they have that effect, they're just to keep the place running. The members openly practice discrimination on who gets to join, you don't just apply for membership, you have to be asked and sponsored by a current member. But despite the veil of exclusivity, most really make ends meet by renting the place via their banquets office and low-cost "social" memberships that enable use of the foodservice areas. They need them to keep the place running.
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But despite the veil of exclusivity, most really make ends meet by renting the place via their banquets office and low-cost "social" memberships that enable use of the foodservice areas. They need them to keep the place running.
Great spin there. No, that money is spent for opulence. No grounds should cost that much, nor any snack bar. The point is that golf exclusive golf courses are not supposed to make a profit. They are supposed to spend all their money on the course. The high fees and rentals are for increased opulence, you know, more gold faucets in the bathrooms, and another tenth of a millimeter off the putting green, cuter blond waitresses.
Re:"Keeping the grass short" is hugely expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
There was one club around here kind of like that, a truly world-class golf course that has hosted 3-4 majors in the last 30 years. Their clubhouse was a dump and it allowed them to get serious golf members who didn't care about embroidered hand towels.
The irony with a lot of the old-money exclusive clubs is that their courses may be challenging for amateurs, they're not capable of hosting major men's tournaments. Not enough yardage. A big name professional came in for a one day, high dollar "seminar" and the story was he was driving balls off the tees past the greens.
Frankly, the "opulence" is way less than you think. The facilities are more like a shop-worn high-end hotel, 5 years overdue for a remodeling. There's no models as waitresses, the clubs have to compete for waitstaff against real restaurants that turn a lot of tables. If you're a hot waitress you'll make a ton more money at a trendy new place that's booked three weeks out or some corporate expense steak place where a tab for four runs $500+.
I'm often at a loss why someone would join -- they're nice, but not THAT nice. Most decent cities have more good restaurants than you can visit fast enough before the celebrity chef moves on to some other new, high-end place. The facilities aren't that great and for the kind of money it costs you could certainly get into a lot of other luxury experiences.
Re: "Keeping the grass short" is hugely expensive (Score:5, Interesting)
The grounds crew is usually made up of 2-3 well paid full-timers who manage the entire grounds operation along with another half-dozen full-timers who are better (but not well) paid people who do stuff like maintain a fleet of equipment, oversee the massive irrigation systems, the extensive chemicals used to keep the grass up and then oversee the dozen or so seasonal low-wage hourly employees who do the grunt work.
There's a lot of irony in the club business. I've heard a lot of stories -- pictures kept screwed down so the members won't steal them, floral arrangements strategically timed so that the bridge ladies don't take them home hours after they get put out, members blackballed for getting caught loading their trunk with snack items like bottled soda/beer/chips and the never ending calls from members nitpicking their monthly bills over things like "I didn't have desert that night" or "we only ordered one drink". Not to mention the few whose accounts get sent to *collections* over unpaid dues/bills.
While they are really wealthy people there (I've seen new members come in and just write checks from a blue vinyl checkbook for $80-100k initiation fees), I think there's an awful lot of "keeping up appearances" that goes on -- people whose money ran out yet try to maintain an illusion of wealth, or climbers with short-term leases on Mercedes, rented luxury houses and the hope that they can snag some money from the truly wealthy for whatever shell game they're running.
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Jobs pay what the market will bear. Should these people be paid more because they're working on something used by others who are wealthy? No. In fact, the jobs wouldn't exist without those wealthy people. Maybe the personality problem you spoke of is called envy.
Re:"Affluent and accomplished" is not the criterio (Score:5, Insightful)
Frankly speaking, I'm mostly surprised that this doesn't already exist.
It does exist, but it's in a real-world setup. You know, if you want to have a discussion with your buddy that lives 1,500 miles away, you can email/chat/facebook/twitter them. And there you are, holding your $device in your hand looking silly to anyone that's not doing the same. But you don't see really wealthy people standing around with their eyes glued to some $device. That's because they can just get in their private jet and go talk to their friends, or vice versa. They can afford the time to do so because they have people that do their lawn, people that clean their houses, and people that make them money. Rich people would have the poorer people believe that time=money, but they know that time is waaay more valuable than money. If you spend your time making money, then they can spend their time living life.
So what we have is not so much the need for a private club that keeps the 99% out, as it is a need for a free place for the 99% to go to stay out of the way of those in the 1%.
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There was a lovely country club where I lived for a while. Out of curiosity I stopped by. It was only something like $5k/yr. I could have afforded it, but I didn't see any good reason to get a membership. They had a pool. I had a pool. They had a golf course. I don't play golf. They had tennis courts. I don't play tennis. They had their bar and sitting room. I have booze and a TV at home. They offered free wifi to members. I had Internet service at home. The buildings and grounds looked
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I can't see wasting money just to say I have money to waste.
Exactly. You're the kind of people they want to keep out. People who think that $5k is a waste. For their target audience, $5k is either not worth even thinking about, or a fair price to pay for making sure you spend your time only with people who fall into either of these categories.
Re:"Affluent and accomplished" is not the criterio (Score:5, Insightful)
People.
The reason is people.
They put their bar and siting room and tennis court in their leaflets, but you buy your membership because of who is sitting, drinking and playing there. And the information they have.
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Mod parent up.
It's about rubbing elbows with people of influence. One good contact can easily be worth the cost of membership.
That said, I've never been a member of one, and am too close to retirement to give a crap.
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Netropolitan would appear to be the same thing, only without the pool, golf course, tennis courts, bar, sitting room, free wifi, buildings, or grounds. Or, for that matter, the booze and TV.
Re:"Affluent and accomplished" not the criterion (Score:5, Interesting)
Frankly speaking, I'm mostly surprised that this doesn't already exist.
It does. There's a Craiglist-type feature on Bloomberg trading info terminals. Yachts, rentals in the Hamptons, that sort of thing. You can message other people via the Bloomberg system if you see something you like.
There's a paid social network for rich conservatives. This is independent, not a Bloomberg thing. It's only $5/month, which is apparently enough to keep the noise level down.
There's a persistent rumor that there are special news sources for rich people. There are, but they're very narrow. There are lots of newsletters you can buy for $50 to $1000 a month that provide detailed coverage of obscure business subjects. If you really need to know what's going on with bulk carrier leasing, oil drilling equipment activity, or wafer fab capacity shortages, there's a newsletter for that. Offshore Alert [offshorealert.com], which covers offshore scams, is one of the more readable ones, and you can see the first few lines of each story for free. There are expensive newsletters devoted to security and terrorism, which give the illusion of inside information, but they tend to be marketing tools aimed at rich paranoids.
If you want to know what's going on in the world, read The Economist. After you've been reading it for a year, you'll have a good understanding of how the world works.
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In fact this sounds a lot like the Harvard grads only dating site the Winklevoss twins claimed that Mark Zuckerberg stole from them and and turned into Facebook. I wouldn't be surprised if this website also fails and turns into a footnote in some other tech billionaire's life story.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... [wikipedia.org]
The range shown is $50-600k annual household income. I'd have to agree that most of them could afford it, not that they'd want to.
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Anybody capable of $6K down and $3K/year, I guess. At $250/month, it's less than paying off a new car. Lots of middle-class people spend more than this on hobbies. If this was attractive to me, I'd have no problem scraping the money up.
Of course, what this would buy me is access to a social network populated by people dumb enough to pay $9K plus further annual fees to join a social network whose only attraction is being populated by such people, so no thanks.
How (Score:2)
Re:How (Score:5, Funny)
I tried your http://127.0.0.1/ [127.0.0.1] website and all I see is porn.
Some symphony/director joke goes here (Score:2)
Is this the online equivalent to getting tickets to the symphony? If so, it's no wonder they're all going under.
or maybe
If a symphony director thinks having all his buddies sign up for $9000 websites is a good idea, maybe we're paying symphony players too much.
or, perhaps better
Symphony conductor wants to keep all of the instrumentalists off his new site, so he sets the entry fee to be more than what they make in a year.
build on wordpress and wp template for 50$ (Score:3, Funny)
bitch please
Trolling the rich (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Trolling the rich (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not their worry. They would just ban the 4chan account.
The worry is TMZ buying in and lurking for years without disrupting.
More basically this will never work. The rich didn't get rich by pissing money away on truly brain dead things. That's for their grand-kids to do.
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Dummy Accounts (Score:4, Interesting)
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You have a point, but it depends on how strict they are with identity checks (which also goes for the 4chan prank idea above).
I don't see the point of this service. (Score:5, Insightful)
A big part of exclusivity is secrecy. The most exclusive establishments do not advertise. Their names are passed around hand to hand. The simple fact that we the unwashed masses know about this service means its ill suited for its purpose.
Perhaps it might serve as an effective trap for the new rich... but the whole thing strikes me as more then a little absurd. Especially when you can find the royal families of a few countries on Facebook.
I can't wait to sign up. (Score:3)
I can't wait to sign up. Finally a facebook for our sort of people. Do you think $9000 will be enough to keep the common riff raff out?
My driver said the funniest thing yesterday....
Which Orchestra? (Score:5, Informative)
There's a prominent and well-known orchestra in Minnesota: the Minnesota Orchestra, renamed quite a few years back from the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra. The Minnesota Philharmonic Orchestra, which the Netropolitan founder was affiliated with, is something entirely different, being founded recently as a specifically GLBT-friendly orchestra. Just trying to avoid confusion.
High end scammers take note (Score:2)
This site should save you huge amounts of time weeding out the low net worth targets
April Fools!!! wait, what? (Score:2)
I had to look at the date... It's not April 1st, why is this even here? /. news and I doubt most of us would be their target audience.
This is really not
Rich people on a plane... (Score:2)
I guess the Netropolitan folks didn't actually know any rich people, so the image of rich folks on their site is a stock photo called:
"Businessman showing project on digital tablet with colleagues in private jet"
http://www.shutterstock.com/pi... [shutterstock.com]
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Damn, beat everyone else to I Am Rich (Score:2)
Came here just to ask if there was a discount, or if the membership would offer/reinstate a free I Am Rich app. for the first x users!
Re:Blatant slashvertisement (Score:5, Funny)
Nope. But you can start your own version of Slashdot, and ask $9000 to join.
Just make it classic, not-beta and you get more! (Score:3)
I'm gonna go build my own slashdot, with blackjack and hookers!
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It would be better than the Beta version I bet.
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I'm gonna go build my own slashdot, with blackjack and hookers!
... I think the bar should be much higher..
Wait... old slashdot, blackjack, hookers, AND a bar designed for tall people? Shut up and take my money.
Okay.
On a more serious note, I'm one of many that would be willing to a pay a small amount for an ad-free Facebook experience. Remove the ads and the buzzfeeds, the link-spam, and remove everything with more than 10 'shares' or reposts. Show me only my actual friend updates and comments and photos. In fact, that was in the news last year [zdnet.com]. Social Fixer is good for a workaround, but the company could mak
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What's this "beta" I keep hearing about?
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I use classic-- beta's kerning is horrible. But, honestly, beta's easy to turn off-- rather close to permanently,
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Nope. But you can start your own version of Slashdot, and ask $9000 to join.
He did that already, the only member so far is Larry Ellison.
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Seems like submissions from certain accounts (MojoKid is one of them) get approved, regardless of the value to the community. I'd speculate that sites like hothardware do advertorials which they then promote through various "social networks".
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But good alternatives?
Or did you just want another site that will advertize to you?
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Affluent AND Accomplished? (Score:2)
Re:Thanks (Score:5, Funny)
Necropolitan is even more exclusive.
It's free to join but only open to the dead.
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Awesome idea. If the site fails, no big loss. If the site is a success, congratulations, there is one stop shopping for exploitation. Congrats you just paid a lot of money to share your data with a bunch of friends only to have it exploited.
Nothing better than creating an easily accessible haven for all of your no-no shots and painting a giant target on it.
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Spoken like someone who's never actually made money.
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His business plan is to 'take money from the poor', so yes he's never made any money. Note: First world 'poor' aren't really poor. You can't be both poor and fat. First world 'poor' have nice disposable incomes and are dumb as rocks.