It’s graduation season, and thousands of new college graduates are entering the workforce. If you haven’t seen this – watch it.
The full speech is available here.
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Check Your Credit Score for Free!
There are lots of offers for free credit reports out there. In fact, the credit bureaus do give you one free credit report per year, per bureau. But, there are not very many places where you can get a free credit score.
Let’s make this short and sweet. Check out MyFico.com right now, and take advantage of their 10-day free trial of Score Watch (MyFico’s parent company developed the FICO score themselves, so you can trust them with providing an accurate score). You’ll get access to your credit score, your credit report, and detailed descriptions and tips about how to improve your score. MyFico even tells you what’s hurting your score, and lets you role play different scenarios to see how various factors might impact your credit score.
Note: The one important bit of information to remember is to cancel your trial before the end of the 10-day period. You won’t be charged one cent unless you forget to cancel your trial before it ends, in which case you’ll be billed $14.95 per month. What you could do is check out everything that MyFico’s Score Watch has to offer, download a copy of your credit score and report, and then cancel right away.
Why Cable and Phone Companies Run Hard Inquiries on Your Credit
After receiving my free credit score and report from myFICO, a division of the company that invented the FICO system itself, I was disappointed to see that Comcast ran a ‘hard inquiry’ on my credit profile.
A hard inquiry is when a potential lender checks your credit history, and shows up on your credit report for a duration of 12 months. A soft inquiry is done by yourself, or someone such as a potential landlord that uses your report to make a decision about conducting business with you, and soft inquiries neither show up on nor affect your account.
One or two hard inquiries pose no significant impact on your credit score, especially if you have a long credit history, but lenders see multiple hard inquiries on your account as suspicion that you’re in financial trouble. In addition, multiple hard inquiries can lower your credit score.
Upon checking my report and FICO score, I was pleased with what I saw: A good credit score, a clean account, and an overall spotless history. However, I noticed one hard inquiry on my account from Comcast. Why, I wondered, would I have a hard inquiry from Comcast? They don’t lend me credit…or do they?
It turns out, cable and phone companies DO lend us credit. We don’t prepay for Verizon or AT&T or other phone commitments and THEN get to use our service. The same is true for cable – we don’t prepay for watching TV, we watch it for a month and then pay for that month of service. Therefore, cable and phone companies run hard inquiries on your credit because they DO lend you credit in terms of being able to use their service prior to receiving your payment. It’s as simple as that, like it or not (and I don’t – I’d rather prepay than be extended credit any day).
Music Artists’ Websites and their Genre Features
The subject of genre is vast, but not everything can be lumped into a genre. The definition of genre, per the New Oxford American Dictionary, is a category of artistic composition characterized by similarities in form, style, or subject matter. Artistic composition is any composition requiring creative skill or ability (poem, song, story, film, etc.). One could stretch the phrase ‘artistic composition’ to include much more than those just listed, but for the purposes of this essay only musical genre will be analyzed. The similarities and differences between musical genres themselves and between artists in the same musical genre are substantial. This discourse will identify varying features that run through eight artist’s websites, and comment on the way each musical genre meets audience needs.
The bands and their websites up for critique include three country, two rock, and three rap/hip-hop artists. The country groups are Luke Bryan, Jason Aldean, and the Zac Brown Band, the rock groups are the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Goo Goo Dolls, and the rappers are Eminem, Lil’ Wayne, and Dr. Dre (for simplicity, we will refer to them all by their stage names).
With the limitless capabilities of the Internet, no two band’s websites look the same, regardless of genre. Each of the eight bands identified in this analysis have paid someone to create their website for them, resulting in high-quality, clean, and carefully proof read material. Bare-bones similarities exist, such as links to tour info and merchandise, but this analysis is not concerned with those nuances. Thus, any references in this analysis to the graphic/visual components or structuring of the websites themselves serve to identify larger genre features. Continue reading
CAPSIM Example, Strategies, Tips & PDFs
Are you participating in the CAPSIM Business Simulation? Looking to get ahead of the competition? Click the PDF link below to view all 8 rounds of a real CAPSIM simulation. The Capstone Courier and Annual Report for Team Chester are provided within the document. The other document contains the Industry Conditions Report, outlining a number of conditions to shoot for throughout the simulation, including target performance and size measurements for each round.
CAPSIM Example (Capstone Courier & Annual Report PDF)
CAPSIM Industry Conditions Report
Note that the teams in the example above all performed below average. For example, the lead team by the end of the simulation (Team Chester) continuously performed poorly on their Balanced Scorecard, with a total score of 617 out of 1000. The PDF is provided only to serve as an example, and not as a recommended plan of action.
General Strategies & Tips:
- Long-term debt does not need to be paid back during the simulation, only interest. Therefore, use long-term debt to your advantage, particularly later in the simulation, to get an edge on your competition.
- Buy back shares. This is the easiest way to drive up your company’s stock price. Do not raise money by issuing more shares to the public.
- Always pay attention to your R&D revision dates. You will need to sacrifice performance and size to keep your revision dates as early in the year as possible.
- Don’t forget to adjust your R&D based on ideal spots (not always the center of the segment’s circle).
- Please your employee’s labor requests on labor negotiation rounds as much as possible or you’ll face a strike.
- Don’t overspend on TQM, pay attention to which ones are useful and which ones are not.
- Increase automation each round and plan on being close to 10 (the limit) by the final round.
- You can produce up to two times your capacity each round (1st shift plus 2nd shift, so 400 capacity = 800 total units to produce, assuming 2nd shift works at full capacity) – You’ll need to pay attention to segment growth rates and be sure you always have enough capacity to meet demand. Also, never sell capacity. It takes one full round to add capacity.
- Keep inventory levels as close to zero as possible while still meeting demand. Excess inventory is expensive to hold on to.
- Gain high awareness and accessibility early to get an edge on the competition.
- Read the pop-up tips available on each decision spreadsheet for more help.
Again, use the information above as you see fit. There are exceptions and counter-arguments for nearly everything, depending on your specific situation. For answers to specific questions, leave a comment below.
