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  • Politics Is Like Hiring A Hitman
    by Scott Woods inPolitical on2020-08-13

    For me, politics is like hiring a hitman. I have values and things I care about. I care enough about them to at least bother voting for 5 minutes every year for one issue or another. And because I care at least that much, I vote for people who align with the ability to realize the things I care about.

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  • Punching Above Our Weight
    by Roger Madison Jr. inPolitical on2020-07-24

    I believe our vote is the punctuation of our voice. Without that resounding exclamation mark, I believe our voices are just incoherent noise.

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  • BLACK PROGRESS AMIDST SOCIAL CHAOS
    by Roger Madison Jr. inPolitical on2020-06-16

    Recent events have raised the profile of historical injustice and inequities here in the USA. The entire world has taken note of the fact that BLACK LIVES MATTER.   We invite all of our friends to engage in actions that result in the greatest movement for change in our history. It is imperative that we take advantage of this opportunity to affect a positive change by ACTING IN OUR SELF-INTERESTS.

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  • Living in a Black No-Man's Land
    by Roger Madison Jr. inOur Community on2019-10-28

    There are many narratives that define the Black experience in America in this 2nd decade of the 21st century. Our striving over the centuries of our sojourn in this nation is a tapestry of every human experience -- oppression, enslavement, forced assimilation, dehumanization, exclusion, segregation, isolation, struggle, perseverance, achievement, excellence, celebration, mourning, despair, progress, setbacks, lynching, assassination, genocide, terror, self-hatred, low esteem, pride,...

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  • Fighting Racism
    by Scott Woods inOur Community on2018-10-25

    I had a boss who was racist. Not an outright bigot, of course; her toolbox was more subtle than most. We bumped heads a lot over inconsequential things. She frequently couldn’t keep my name out her mouth. Lot of gaslighting. You know…2018 style. I tried a lot of ways to combat or navigate her issues. None of them worked, and that’s saying a lot because I’m really good at fighting racism. But at the end of the day – every day – she was my boss, I had to deal with her, and that was that. Finally I...

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Are you getting what you pay for?

Just because you paid a lot for that website development and hosting does not mean you received what you paid for.

Content Management System (CMS) companies are notorious for selling you a complete load of crap for a bucket of cash. Most CMS application worth anything are GNU in the first place and cost the developer nothing, zip, nada. The only thing you should be paying for is the cost of labor for installation and setup and of course hosting fees of your domain name and web space.

A good rule of thumb for pricing is $25 to $40 an hour for a good developer to build the system. This would equate to about $100 of labor for a standard CMS install. Throw in the yearly hosting of about $50 to $120 and you are in the right ballpark.

Don’t get fooled into paying monthly charges of any kind. Some companies that offer CMS websites will try to charge you by the number of members on your site that register and still others will charge you house keeping fees to keep your software up to version. While updating a version is time consuming it should be included for at least the year and cost no more then 1 hours worth of labor if not included.

Charging monthly for the number of members is just plain robbery because it cost no more for 1 member as it does for 1000 of them. The systems are completely automated and require not manual member processing so why the charge?

Remember for a good solid CMS website don’t pay any more then $400 tops even if it has tons of bells and whistles.

Darnell Smith, CEO of Business In The Black