What's with all the GameStop Store Front Photos?

Don't get me wrong, I am well aware of the news about the $GME stock squeeze and what r/wallstreetbets is doing to Melvin Capital and other predatory hedge funds. I even made a t-shirt to recognize the occasion. No, I'm not curious about why people are talking about the GameStop stocks; I'm wondering why almost every article I have seen has a photo of GameStop in the headline. 

Someone was paid actual money to take this picture this week. I guess to have an "up to date" picture of this crappy strip mall. 

My partner hypothesizes that it creates a good visual shorthand for the Boomers who are reading the paper. A sort of "Yeah, that GameStop, that store that you think your grandson would want to go check out, but he never seems to want to go in". But still, it's absolutely baffling to me that they are showing photos of the storefront when a picture of the logo would suffice. I don't know why this bothers me so much, but I think I've figured out why: it's because the fact that the stock is associated with GameStop literally changes nothing about the story. 

A Rebuttal to The 8 (Actually 11) Way's Millennials Accidently Ruin Their Finances, by FinanceBuzz

 I spend too much time on Facebook. Can you really blame me? I'm a social butterfly who run a quasi-legal advice blog, of course, I check Facebook often. It was while checking Facebook recently that this sponsored ad popped up on my feed. 

BS articles like this were the inspiration for Financial Pro-Tip, and I haven't really been seeing many of them recently. But I wanted to take this article, rip it apart piece by piece, and save you the trouble of actually reading it and, god forbid, giving this creeps more money. 

Let's begin. 

The First Message FPT Ever Received

So much financial advice is bullshit. I'm glad to see this point come around more and more often. So many money writers in the mainstream write for a young, middle-class, white-collar, demographic that just doesn't exist anymore. We are being bombarded with advice like "Here's the best way to invest that extra $10k you have laying around" and not enough "Here's how to tell that debt collector to shove it in a way that will make them dread the idea of calling you back".

That's the joke behind Financial Pro-Tip, rephrased and rewritten every day, I wrack my brain for hours to come up with another way to say the same thing again, and then, like Sisyphus being run over by his boulder, I do the same thing again tomorrow. I fucking love it. 

Financial Pro-Tip Q&A 1

Well, a threat is only as good as its followthrough, and I am nothing if not a credible threat. So you asked, and so long as the gag order is still in litigation, I am free to answer your questions. 

Q. Any advice on retirement planning?

Yeah, if you were born after 1972, don't.

I'm not kidding. 

Even Jail Won't Save You From The Landlord

 I wasn't expecting this particular post to get the Beyond the Character Limit treatment, and I almost thought of just adding this as a comment underneath, but in the spirit of NaNoWriMo, I may as well do some more writing.

Believe it or not, I do research these ideas before I post them. That doesn't mean that the posts are 100% accurate. This page is, first and foremost, satire, with the occasional piece of actual criminal advice, but that's how I roll. my philosophy is to chuck a few rocks into the enemy trench before you throw your grenades. 

But it was when researching this that I hit a very interesting roadblock. It was easy to find out if you need to keep paying rent if the Tennant goes to jail, but it was tricky to figure out what to do if your landlord goes to jail. In fact, framing it in that way, there is no information as to whether or not you still have to pay rent if your landlord is in prison. In order to find the answer, I had to search from the landlords perspective (i.e. "Can I still collect rent in prison.") 

Lets Stop Rewarding Cops For Murdering People.

One of the agonizing things about writing Financial Pro-Tips is when I have several ways of framing an idea, and then I need to pick one. I find this is more often then not the case when talking about how the police are corrupt. There are so many different ways in which the police as an institution are awful, racist, murderous, and leeches to the public coffers, so even thoughts its the most popular post ever on FPT (yes, really) I think this just scratches the surface. 

 Luckily, I have a blog where I can dig deeper.

How the Government Loots (and How to Loot Them Back)

This recent post generated a lot of, let's say, discussion 

Mainly that discussion centered around people wanting to know how to actually do this. Including this comment.

This made me think of a point that I was going to elaborate on further, but I decided that the long form of that should go here, rather than dropping an essay on someone's comment.