QuickBooks Online 2023 e-commerce, QBO commerce integration with Shopify, Amazon, or eBay. Get ready to earn the skills needed to boost your bank books on up with QuickBooks Online 2023. Here we are at our QuickBooks Online test company file using the accountant view. As opposed to the business view, you can toggle between the two views by going the cog up top and switching the view down below. Let's duplicate some tabs to put reports in by right-clicking the tab up top and duplicating it. Right-clicking the duplicated tab and duplicating it again. Back to the tab to the middle, reports on the left-hand side. We're opening up the first one, the balance sheet. Let's go to the tab to the right, the reports on the left again. This time, the profit and loss, the income statement. Closing up the hamburger, let's run this for the full year this time. A 2025, 010125 tab, 123125 tab, running it. Going to the middle tab, same thing. Closing the hamburger, changing the range to the same. 010125, 123125, and running it. Let's go back to the tab to the left. We've been thinking about e-commerce situations where we're selling inventory but not on ground in a store. But rather online in the cloud with the help and use of third-party apps such as a Shopify or an Amazon. And thinking about ways that we can pull that information from the third-party app into our accounting software. In prior presentations, we thought about manually pulling that information as well as just simply using support accounting instruction by clicking the link below, giving you a free month membership to all of the content on our website. Broken out by category, further broken out by course. Each course then organized in a logical, reasonable fashion, making it much more easy to find what you need than can be done on a YouTube page. We also include added resources such as Excel practice problems, PDF files, and more like QuickBooks backup files when applicable. So once again, click the link below for a free month membership to our website and all the content on it. The bank feeds to record our data. Now we want to move on to the QuickBooks online integration that they have in the QuickBooks online system. So if you open up QuickBooks online and you go down to the commerce tab, that's the integration that we're going to be taking a look at now. So the general concept is going to be much the same, very similar to what we have looked at before remembering that our methods for being able to pull this information in from a third party platform into QuickBooks is either number one, just integrating the bank feeds and not using any other integration, but you're going to lose data. If you do that, it won't be as detailed or you can use a manual entry system, which we have taken a look in prior presentations. And that system will be similar to the next system we're looking at now, which is QBO commerce, because the QBO commerce is doing what most people kind of recommend on the bookkeeping side for many people that use a third party commerce platform, which is don't pull in all of the information in order to have each sale recorded, to have each customer recorded, because it's going to overload the information in QuickBooks and in order to properly account for things like the inventory on a perpetual inventory system, you would have to set up all the items properly and so on. And it could get quite complex to set all that up and it might be redundant because you already have that information for the most part in the Shopify side of things. So the idea would be that we're going to consolidate the data in the similar process we did with the journal entries, but see if we can automate that process so QuickBooks is going to pull in that information and try to group it together for us. Now third party apps, I could do a similar type of thing like an A2X is quite popular. And again, if you're looking at third party apps, there's some apps that might group the data together in a similar fashion as we're talking now, like an A2X and there's some apps that possibly means that you can pull in all of the data and try to recreate the information in QuickBooks online and try to track the inventory, for example, on a perpetual inventory system. Again, most a lot of bookkeepers don't really recommend that for many people trying to integrate QuickBooks in the third party platforms because it could be complicated and bogged down the system. So if we look at the commerce within QuickBooks online, it's still relatively new as of the time of this recording, but it looks like they're trying to do the most simplified type of thing, which would make sense for QuickBooks online. They're trying to streamline and automate things. So it looks like they're doing what most people kind of recommend in grouping this information as they pull it in. But because they're trying to make it simplified, there may be less options in it as there would be if you use some kind of other integrations like an A2X or something like that. So first, I'm going to jump on over here to the sample company file, which you can find and you might want to open a separate window if you want to open these two files up at the same time. If you have two files open so that it doesn't mix up your log in so you can open an incognito window if using Google Chrome by selecting the three dots, new incognito window, type into the search engine QuickBooks online test drive, select the option that has into it in the URL, into it being the owner of QuickBooks, and that's how we get here. I just want to scroll down to the commerce section in here because it's not turned on yet. So if you have not connected commerce, then the connection process is generally the easy process. So if you have something like a Shopify or an eBay or an Amazon, then you need to connect to it. And to do that, I'll just read through this quickly here. Seamlessly connect your sales channel will automatically bring your orders and payouts so you can track everything in one place. You can check out the little video if you'd like to get more information on it there. Brief summary, match payouts with bank deposits, run reports and see trends at a glance. Stay on top of cash flow effortlessly. And then of course you can go through the process of connecting your channel, choosing the item that you want to connect. For example, we turned on a Shopify channel, bringing your past orders. So what this means, you can view sales trends and insights across sales. So how far back do you want to go? So it depends on the platform in terms of how limited oftentimes or how far back you can go to bring in the data. Oftentimes you would want to bring the data in for an entire year if you can. And so I'm going to say next and then connect your Shopify and a few quick steps will get your accounts synced. First, you'll choose how much of your Shopify data to share with us. Two, next we'll take you to Shopify to sign in your account and authorize in three. Then we start bringing in the transactions. So I will continue here, need consent into it needs consent here. This is where they're going to bring the data in from. And then we can say, okay, I agree and consent. And then you'd have to finally give them your Shopify email. They already have the dot Shopify here and you can't really get rid of that. When you type in your URL, make sure that you're accounting for the fact that this piece is going to be connected to the end of it. If you double it up, if you put Shopify.com twice in there, it won't recognize your URL. So that is that. So that's the connection process. So once it's connected, it's going to look something like this. Now we have a very basic information. This is our Shopify store. So we're imagining stuff is happening over here in our Shopify store. We're making sales over here. We're tracking the inventory on this side of things, at least from, from a unit perspective so that I can stock my inventory and have sufficient inventory to meet what I presume will be the demand in the future and whatnot. Remember that as we pull this information, as we've talked about with the prior methods, we're breaking out the concept of the sales and inventory happening at the same time. In other words, we're not using a perpetual inventory system. We're going to use a periodic inventory system. So we're mainly thinking then about this integration pulling in the sales side of things and we're still going to have to deal with the inventory side of things. It having its own issues because it's going to be tied not to the payouts but to an inventory flow assumption like a FIFO or weighted average. So we'll deal with that later. This integration isn't generally designed at this point and QuickBooks could give you more options in the future. But I would think that they're going to try to keep it simplified and therefore not and have the so therefore your inventory will be a separate kind of thing. We're pulling in the sales side of things. We'll talk about inventory later. Okay, so the sales are happening here and then we've talked about before our finance reports here and our analysis. So in our analysis, we have our reports which can give us the detail about the payouts that are going to be happening. And then we looked at our finance reports and our payouts to see to pull the information in. So these payouts right here represent multiple sales that are happening on the third party platform that are being grouped together in one particular payout. When I come over here into QuickBooks then I'm not going to have a system where I pull in every transaction and try to enter a separate sales receipt for every customer in every transaction. Not pulling in all that kind of information. We're only going to pull in the summary of the information that's going to tie into the payouts. And then we're not going to be dealing with a perpetual inventory system in that case as well. Okay, so then if I go down here into commerce, let's just take a look at the overview. We've got three tabs up top. I'll close the hand boogie overview and then the orders and then the payments. Now note that most of this stuff stuff if I go to the overview is just for appearance, meaning it's not actually pulling the information into the QuickBooks system. So it's kind of giving you a nice look that is similar to the look that you would see over here on Shopify. It's just mirroring the same data in a different kind of format over here, but it's not adding to your QuickBooks. So that's what this first page is basically doing. It's giving you kind of a summary of that information that's coming directly from your third party store like a Shopify. Then you have your channels over here. So here's the channel. Now some people could have of course Shopify and Amazon and ebay and you might have multiple ebay's and Amazon's and whatnot. So then you would list out the different channels would be listed on the right hand side. We've just got the Shopify. If you wanted to connect a sales channel, then you can go into the connect button up top and you can connect multiple sales channels. The number of sales channels that you can connect could be limited to the subscription that you have. And then you've got this, which will take you a shortcut to the transactions and the profit and loss and you can take a look at some tips on down below. Then, and by the way, if I look at my Shopify for like this analysis, you can see this analysis is similar to what they're pulling in to QuickBooks here. So in any case, then I can go into the orders. Now the orders once again are not actually the things that are going to be posted to our system. This is mirroring the orders that are over here that are just pulling in each individual order. If we were to record each individual order into QuickBooks, that would look something like it would pull these each individual orders and into like a sales receipt kind of thing. What's happening? It's just showing you some of the detail within QuickBooks. You don't have to go to Shopify to see some of this detail. So for example, if I go over here and I look at my reports, for example, and I look at my total sales and your reports could differ depending on what, you know, how much you're paying on Shopify, what tier you're in. But here's, you know, each of my transactions, the individual purchases that took place that are pulling in here 1001, 1002, 1003, and so on for those individual items. But again, these aren't actually recording anything. Then we've got the refunds and back to the sales order and then the payouts. So these are the payouts that are actually happening. So this gives you a summary of the payout. The payout represents the money that's coming out of Shopify and is going to eventually hit our bank account. So we expect the payout to eventually go into our checking account. That's going to be the idea. So for example, if I go to the Shopify store and look at my payouts, here's that 715 of the payout. Here's the 715 here. If I want to see the detail of that payout, it's pulling in the detail to help make the journal entry. And just like what we did over here with our journal entry when we had like the two, you know, the components of the journal entry that we pulled in from Shopify, it's doing the same thing here. We've got the sales side of things. Here's going to be the transactions that are included in that particular payout.  And this is showing the Shopify expenses. So that's similar to what we had over here when we looked at the two reports that are going to be in play here. If you go into your analytics in like a Shopify and take a look at the reports and we look at the total sales report. Then I don't think it's including that dollar right there. So here's the, you know, the gross sales, the net sales and the shipping and so on. And then this, it's really not including that $1 right there. So it comes to 870. 870 is this amount right here. And then if I go back on over here and I go to my payouts, which is in the finance and the payouts, then we can see that all of those transactions are included in this payout and then they charged a fee for the payout fee, which is, you know, the fee for them to do the financing of it or to facilitate the transaction. And that comes out to that 155. So those are the two sides that QuickBooks nice and neatly pulls into this little review item here. So you can see it there, which is nice, but this still isn't posting anything. So then if I want to, you have transactions to review. If I go into those transactions, if I say go to those transactions, they then I, they took me up here from the commerce tab up to the banking tab. Now in the banking tab, we have our bank feeds, which we connected to the bank. So we expect that $7 to eventually hit the checking account. We would, we would see that, that amount that we were talking about 715. I think it was hit the checking account. It would be in here. And but we're trying to break out the detail of it in a similar way like we did with the, with the manual method. So if I go to the apps tab, this is where it's going to store that data. So now you've got your apps tab. Here's the Shopify stores. It looks similar kind of like to the bank feeds. If I had multiple channels, I can toggle between, you know, the multiple channels here. And then you've got a similar layout for review, reviewed and excluded. You can change basically your date range here. And here's the detail of the transaction. So it's got the sales, it's got the shipping income, and then there's the subtotal and then the selling fees. So you can see this lump sum is going to be the 715 that's going into our checking account, but it's breaking that information out basically kind of with a journal entry format here, not in the bank feeds, but in, in the app transaction. I can, I go to more of the detail here. Let's take a look at it in this case. And this takes us back to that detail page that we looked at before to give us the actual sales that took place and the expenses. Now, before I record this, let's just take a look at how we can adjust the mapping. If we, if we want to see what it's going to do when we, when we actually record this item. So let's go back down to the commerce tab and I'm going to close the hamburger and I'm going to go to the, to the overview. And each one of these channels, we're, is going to have a dropdown up top. So if I hit the dropdown, I can go into the settings. So let's take a look at the settings.  How would you like to confirm payments? This setting takes effect for future transactions. The default is manual because I'm going to say, Hey, look, I want to see these in that, that transactions tab. And then I want to manually say, okay, I approve of that transaction, pull it in. It's probably recommended to do that for a while until you get to the point that you are comfortable and then you can automate the transaction. Because like with the bank feeds, nothing's really affecting your financial statements until you pull it in from that feeds transaction. And so you probably want to double check it on a manual system and then pull it over. So this one says check each payout in for review, then confirm. And this will automatically confirm connect after. So this would be the disconnect if you wanted to disconnect here. If we go into the items, they have the sales items, which is going to be pointing to the default in QuickBooks sales Shopify item shipping Shopify shipping item and then discount Shopify discount. You can edit these items here and then change, change them here. And so I'll cancel that. These are going to be the defaults and then you've got the customers and vendors. Now note, we're not pulling in all the customers. All the customer data is going to be over here in your Shopify store. And that's probably where you want it because you're usually going to be a bulk seller.  You don't really need to know all the information about the customers other than put their email on your email list most of the time, right? So they're not so they need to have a customer. So they're just going to put it into a generic customer, meaning this is going to be one customer for all transactions that are going through your Shopify store. If you need to have more detail about a particular transaction, then you're not going to go to it in QuickBooks because we didn't pull in all that data. But rather you're going to go to the Shopify, right? And then on the advanced, these are the mapping accounts. So these are kind of like the defaults that it sets up basically automatically. So you've got a clearing account. This holds Shopify payouts before they're reconciled with your bank account. So just like we did in the manual method, we still have to deal with this clearing account, which means when the money is coming in and it's not going to deposit directly into the checking account, it's going to put it into the clearing account and then we can match it to the deposit that's going to clear the checking account, which will bring the clearing account back down. Same concept as we looked at with the manual method. It's just trying to automate it now. Then you've got the sales Shopify item sales is QuickBooks categorization Shopify sales income account shipping income. These are the charges that you're going to have for the shipping. It's going to go to the Shopify shipping income account. And then you have the discounts, promotions applied to sale Shopify discounts. It's going to break that one out and then selling fees, commissions and fees related to sales. It's going to go into the Shopify selling fees. If you want to adjust these accounts, then you can map it differently, right? I can go into here. Here's my list of accounts. I can add new accounts if I so choose. So I'm going to close that, but I'm going to keep the defaults here. So if you've been doing your system prior to this and you already have mapped out accounts, then you might want to use those accounts and you can change the mapping here to the accounts that you have set up. And then you've got subscription fees. What you pay for your Shopify subscription, Shopify subscription fees is where it's going to go. And then adjustments, channel adjustments and miscellaneous Shopify other adjustments. And then you've got the sales tax based on your region Shopify sales tax. And then we've got the reserve balance payout balance reserved by channel Shopify reserve balance. So that's the general mapping. So if I close this back out and I open up my chart of accounts, for example, if I go down to my accounting down here. And I look at my chart of accounts. When I set up the Shopify, it set up those accounts for me, right? So here's a clearing account. Here's the Shopify item here. And it set up some of those accounts. Shopify sales tax could have set that up, but it's good. Those accounts that are mapped out are now over here in the chart of accounts. I've added a bunch of other accounts as well when we've been doing the practice problems. So it's getting a little muddled at this point. Notice if I go in the sales tab and I look at the customers, then we've got our customers here. And it set up this Shopify customer. So it's not going to add all the customers. Of course, again, it's just made one customer. That's going to be our lump sum customer. Now also remember there's the same kind of issue with this system as we had with the manual system, which is that Shopify is now kind of connecting to QuickBooks, so that QuickBooks can pull in the detailed information breaking out the deposit. But if you're dealing with other payment processors like a PayPal or a strike, for example, meaning customers are paying you through PayPal or Stripe, something other than Shopify pay, like not using just their credit card, for example, on Shopify pay or something, then you might have other items that are going to be on the PayPal level that you're going to have to deal with for fees on that level. So this is going to be a common problem with many different kinds of integrations that we saw. So that's something that you've got to be mindful of as well. So the question would be, do you have PayPal turned on? Can they pay you through PayPal or can they only pay you through the Shopify pay? If you have the PayPal turned on, you want to make sure that you have a system that's going to be dealing with the PayPal component of the payment similar process or problem that we talked about with the manual system. All right, so then if we were going to approve these, let's go back on up top into the banking and say, let's go ahead and add this one. So this one came through, we analyzed it and we didn't auto add it. We said we want to add it manually. So let's go ahead and add it. Boom. The 715 is in place. Now I should be able to map that in the future. I would be able to see in the checking account that 715 and I can match it out. But let's see what happens over here. Let's run this for 010123 to 12312323 this time on the balance sheet. So note that it's got its clearing account here, but it actually puts the transaction in and out of the clearing account and does put it into the checking account ultimately. So if I go into the checking account, there's our 7.15. Note, however, if I go back on over here and exit out that if I go into this account, the clearing account, what it actually did was go in and out of this clearing account. So within this clearing account, you've got these transactions. It created a sales receipt and expense and then a deposit. And it basically increases and decreased the clearing account as part of the transaction, but ultimately did put it into the checking account, which does remove one added step on our end if the deposit comes in perfectly to the exact dollar amount. Because now it should be in our checking account over here. So if I go into my checking account, if I go into my bank feeds and go into my banking checking, if the deposit that hits my checking account matches exactly what that journal entry did, then notice it'll just match up here and it'll record a match. So when I record the deposit on the bank feed side of things, no new transaction will happen. It's just basically helping with the bank reconciliation. We're just saying, okay, we found that it matches out to the deposit that was put in there by the journal entry process that was done through the bank feed Shopify app connection. All right, so let's take a look at the income statement. If I go to the income statement and I'm running it for 2023 because that's when we put the information in. And now we've got the Shopify sales. So if I go into the Shopify sales, we've got our detail here. I'm going to hit the drop down on the Shopify sales and it created in essence a sales receipt, but it's a group sales receipt. So the sales receipt is the form typically used for a cashed based type of sale that you would use in a cash register, but note the customer is not each customer. It's just one lump sum customer that was used to create that sales receipt. So if I go back on over and exit, then we've got that. We've got the Shopify shipping income. So it broke out the shipping income that we charged for us. And once again, it did that here with the sales receipt form going back on over and exit. So instead of just having a journal entry, it did kind of a similar thing we did with a journal entry with the sales receipt. It's got the Shopify selling fees, which it did put under the categorization of cost of goods sold. So if I go into the selling fees and hit the drop down here, now we've got the selling fees that broke out individually per that data that we saw that's pulling in for all the different sales transactions that happened. Let's X out of that. And then we've got the the shipping selling fees here and then that is it. Now, if I go back on over to the first time and we go to our app transactions, notice we were in the for review, then we added it. So now it's in the reviewed section and you can see kind of the detail which will link to what it did here as well. You can go into this one. This is the the sales receipt that it generated. You can see what it built. It built a sales receipt, which is typically the form used for a cash based sales that like a cash register situation that we just saw sales receipt. And I'll close that back out. Here's the expense form that was generated. So expense form like a check form decreasing the checking account. But it's putting it into the the clear and account that it made up here specifically for this expense form. So we have those items and then we've got the deposit form, which is of course the form typically used to increase the checking account. So we made the deposit here, not with the bank feeds, but with the integration of the of the app. And then if I go back on over to the first tab, then we went to the banking and we can connect this out, which will just not record anything new because it's already in the checking account. It'll just verify helping us with like our reconciliation process. So it looks like, you know, they're doing a similar process that we did with the journal entry grouping everything together with this integration, which is kind of what is recommended. It works quite well. If you have a situation where your payment structures tied directly to the Shopify store in this case that the other payment processes just like we saw with the journal entry methods will add another wrinkle into the system that we'll have to deal with. You possibly can kind of work around with that system. They've recorded the transactions, not with like a normal journal entry, but rather they use the forms like the deposit forms expense forms and sales receipt forms, but they made group deposit forms sales that are combining sales together. So the general concept is much the same we saw with the journal entry method. So now the general idea then would be with the methods that you want to use would be, do you want to just do the simple method where you integrate the bank account? Do you want to then use a journal entry method, which has a lot of manual work to it? Of course. Do you want to use an integration? Possibly the QuickBooks integration here, which is still a new type of integration, but it does look like they're trying to do in essence what a lot of people recommend for the best practices of the third party integrations or applications like an A2X type of system. But even as you're doing these integrations, you've got to think about what's actually happening, which is similar to what we did with the journal entry. It's pulling in the information in a summary kind of format. It's not pulling in all of the information in terms of every sales type of transaction. And you would think that the QuickBooks system here looks to be set up the way the QuickBooks system is set up for the particular apps that Shopify, Amazon and eBay. And it's trying to make it as simple as possible, which means you might have less options than maybe you would have with a third party integration. So if you need to do more customization or do something different, maybe the third party integrations might give you more to do with that. But obviously you would think the QuickBooks having it in house here is kind of nice because then you don't have a third party. You don't have the payment for the third party. You don't have to deal with a third party application. So we'll have to see what QuickBooks does with it going forward. But there would be a similar process if you used a third party app. Usually most people recommend an app that does kind of a similar thing as we saw here. Pulling the information in like a group format, basically making a journal entry format and using a clearing account system as we saw with the manual method.


At GitLab, we want to make it easy for anyone to contribute, be it your first open source contribution or your first merge request at a new job. We are building a web ID inside of GitLab to make this possible. If you're anything like me, switching branches is annoying. Stashing your changes, trying to remember the name of the branch, then switching to the branch can easily feel like it takes longer than actually fixing a bug or resolving merge request feedback. Let me show you how the web ID makes this easy. Let's open a Rails app I've been working on in the web ID. It's a simple blog and I'm going to add an article list. The web ID should look familiar if you've used an editor before. On the left is the file tree, our files are in the middle, and the commit panel is on the right. Using the file tree, I'll open the article controller and add an index function I need for the article list. Also, using the file tree, I can create a new file for the template for the article list. Finally, I'll quickly update the new article template with a link.  Since I'm happy with my changes, the next step is to open a merge request, which can be done directly from the web ID. It looks like I've already received feedback from my merge request. I forgot to link the article list to the page where we can actually add a new article. The web ID is integrated with merge request, so I can open the merge request in the web ID and immediately address this feedback. The web ID knows that we've opened a merge request and takes us straight to the merge request diff. I'll switch back to the edit mode and add the link I forgot. So now I can compare my change, like I showed you before, but I can also preview the merge request diff I'll see once I commit my changes. This shows me the total set of changes that would be applied if I committed this change and then my merge request was merged. Using the web ID makes it easy to contribute improvements and resolve merge request feedback right from your browser. But this is just the beginning. GitLab is an integrated product and will be integrating the web ID with more and more of GitLab over the coming months, including CICD and merge requests. And we'll make it possible to use CI runners to test your code before committing and preview your application too. You can try the web ID right now on gitlab.com. Please let us know what you think.


Let's let's pivot to Joseph Robin at Biden the Vainglorious. He will on March 7th, which is two days after Super Tuesday. I got a lot of dates in my brain be delivering his state of the unit dress, which according to reporting by Politico, he's going to be using it to attack shrink flation and corporate greed, the latter of which got me thinking we don't talk enough family about government greed, do we? So let's get our galaxy brains on and go around the table and each of us come up with an example of the government being greedy. So I think there's the government being greedy, but I think what Joe Biden is, Joe Biden is not accusing the market of being greedy. He's accusing kind of individual companies or maybe even individual CEOs of being greedy. So I'm going to return the favor and say that the best example of government greed is public sector unions because it's just individual people looking out for themselves at the direct cost of the taxpayer and of like the fiscal health of the nation or of their relevant states. Not only do we have this incredible, horrific, broad based, unsustainable, you know, accumulated obligations to public sector unions. There's been a lot of resistance to reforming, even for future generations, how those are structured. The Reason Foundation, which publishes this podcast, has done some good work in some states chipping away at that. So there's like occasionally a situation where you can kind of move from defined benefit to defined contribution like the rest of Schmos. But for the most part, public sector unions are perfectly happy to know that the math is not matting, that the numbers will never add up and that the taxpayers will be bailing them out. And they're just going to proceed a pace, assuming that that's going to work out. They're delighted to screw future generations without a single pause. And they fund political activity with the direct, that direct goal in mind. So just massive, massive, massive contributions, mostly to democratic candidates to sustain this unsustainable way of life as long as possible. If that is not agreed, I don't know what is. Like that is just a very direct, I'm going to take money that should be used for something else, has been promised for something else, money that we don't have, and I'm just going to put it in my retirement account, and then I'm going to go buy a boat in Boca.  Do they have boats in Boca? I don't really know. Yeah, I think Marco Rubio had one. It was a whole, like it was like a month-long news story in 2015. They're going to park their boat next to Marco Rubio's boat, and you and I have paid for it. Do you think the public sector unions were mad when they saw the Barbie movie? And she didn't say, man, this is hard. Wow. Wow. I was going to say, it's going to be great when teachers unions in Alabama say, you know what, yeah, those IVF President embryos are taxpayers. So they've got to be birds. They've got to be birds, because we need that money. Otherwise, I can't buy the boat. The embryos are going to count as enrolled students in the district where they are frozen for the purpose of appropriating, like per capita student funding. Yeah. Let's not forget that our teachers union friends managed to make sure that the well in excess of $100 billion that was thrown by the federal government in the direction of K through 12 schools, which generally receive per year something like $40 billion from the entire Department of Education, maybe less, that almost all of that went to fund pensions and do hiring and almost none of it. This is for a COVID relief stuff. And almost none of it went to like get new air filtration systems or whatever it is, water fountains. And never forget, there is something for everyone to hate in public sector unions because we have the police unions and we have the teachers unions. So just like summing up your most hated union and plug it into my argument. When I wrote that piece back in 2020 or so, I was reliably informed to Catherine menu word that those are two totally different things. Oh, I see. Yeah. No good point. There's actually absolutely nothing that those two unions have in common except for everything that either the teachers unions were good and the police unions were bad or vice versa. But it couldn't be that both of them shared a lot of characteristics that were negative. My favorite is that is how forever on the left in the criminal justice reform people. They have centered the idea of private for profit prisons being a source of not all evil but lots of the evil in the system compared to the less ballyhoot for them prison guards unions. And who do you think actually spends more money on lobbying? Yes, look it up. All right. Nick. No, not Nick. Peter, I keep mixing you guys up. Why not? Come on. This is like how my mom can't tell me and my brother apart. Yeah, just call them all Sam. Sam, what's Sam Suderman? What's your example of government greed? Sam, I am. So not that long ago, Washington state passed an excise tax on capital gains. And something happened right before that excise tax went into effect that is kind of notable. Jeff Bezos decided to relocate from Washington state to Florida. And he also sold about about $15 billion in stocks right before the excise tax went into effect, which would have cost him about $70 million for every one billion worth of stocks that he sold according to at least one estimate. That's a lot of money. $70 million. And he did $70 million. He avoided $70 million in excise tax 15 times by selling early. And this is also taking place in a state that has contemplated a wealth tax just very similar to the wealth tax that we have seen proposed by Elizabeth Warren. And the wealth tax, I think it's related to the excise tax sort of works a little bit like a wealth tax, not exactly the same thing.  Because it's not even a good way to raise money. Like if you want to raise money, there's just efficient ways to do that via taxation. A value added tax of that is a pretty proven revenue razor. But what has happened when just about every European country that has tried a wealth tax is they've actually repealed it because it didn't really raise a lot of revenue. Instead, what it did is it had what I'm going to call a Bezos effect. The producers, the people who were making money and who were wealthy in those countries, they just found some way to relocate to a jurisdiction that didn't have a wealth tax. And so what they ended up doing was depressing economic activity without raising a bunch of money.  But it's also just totally ineffective at the thing that it is supposed to do, which is raise money for the government. And to be fair, there are at least some proponents of the wealth tax on the left, not mostly in the academic side of the world, who are kind of okay with that. They'll just say, well, we'd like to raise some money with this. But the real goal is to punish wealthy people. They don't quite use the word punish, but they use words that are very close to this. And their goals are very clear. It is just about punishing wealthy people for being wealthy.  That was a clip from the latest episode of the Reason Roundtable. To watch another clip, click here. To watch the whole episode, click here and make sure to subscribe to the Reason Roundtable. You'll be glad you did.


Have you ever found yourself in social situations feeling awkward or unsure of how to interact with others? It's as if you're constantly searching for the right words to say or the right actions to take. You're not alone. Today, we're going to explore some social intelligence skills that can help you navigate social interactions with confidence and authenticity. Social intelligence is about getting the hang of social situations. It's like being able to read a room, understanding people's feelings, and knowing the unwritten rules of how to behave. Each skill is important in our day-to-day interactions. It's what helps us build stronger bonds, communicate better, and smooth out any rough patches by letting us walk in someone else's shoes. In other words, it's like our secret tool for making our relationships with others more genuine and meaningful. So let's dive in and discover these essential skills together. Empathy Can you recall a time when you truly understood and shared the emotions of another person? You felt a deep connection with them and could offer genuine support. First an expert in emotional intelligence, Dr. Daniel Goldman, emphasizes the importance of empathy in social intelligence. It's considered essential for navigating meaningful social interactions. By putting yourself in someone else's shoes, you can build trust, strengthen relationships, and show compassion. A study by Gable and others in 2012 revealed a positive association between empathy and increased social closeness, relationship satisfaction, commitment, intimacy, and trust. Active listening Have you ever experienced a conversation where someone was fully present and engaged, making you feel truly heard and understood? They were hanging onto your every word with undivided attention. Communication expert Dr. Carl Rogers emphasizes the power of active listening in social interactions by actively listening, maintaining eye contact, and being genuinely interested. You can foster open communication, build rapport, and deepen connections. Non-verbal communication Have you ever noticed how much information can be conveyed without saying a word? There's a whole world of unspoken cues, gestures, and body languages that add depth to our conversations. A pioneer in the study of non-verbal communication, Dr. Albert Moravian, suggests that words only account for a small portion of the overall message we convey. By paying attention to facial expressions, body postures, and tone of voice, you can better understand others and communicate effectively. Emotional regulation When you think of the time where you managed your emotions in a social setting, it's as if you were able to stay calm, composed, and respond thoughtfully. Psychologist and expert in emotional agility, Dr. Susan David, highlights the importance of emotional regulation and social intelligence. By understanding and managing your own emotions, you can navigate conflicts, handle stressful situations, and create a positive social environment. Social awareness Have you ever walked into a room and immediately sensed the atmosphere or noticed someone's unspoken discomfort? It's like you have a radar for social cues and dynamics, Dr. Richard Wojacy, emphasizes the importance of social awareness in building successful relationships. By being attuned to the emotions and needs of others, you can adapt your behavior, show empathy, and create a supportive and inclusive environment. Conflict resolution Can you recall a time when you successfully mediated a conflict and helped others find a resolution? It's the art of diffusing tension and finding common ground. Psychologist expert Dr. John Gottman emphasizes the importance of effective conflict resolution in social intelligence by actively listening, showing empathy, and seeking win-win solutions you can foster understanding, promote cooperation, and build stronger relationships. Perspective-taking Do you ever challenge your own beliefs to try and see the world from a different perspective? It entails stepping outside of your own bubble and embracing diverse viewpoints. Psychologist and expert in multiple intelligences Dr. Howard Gardner emphasizes the significance of perspective-taking in social intelligence by embracing different perspectives. You can cultivate empathy, bridge divides, and promote a more inclusive and understanding society. Social adaptability Adjusting your behavior and communication style can help you fit in with different social contexts. It's the ability to adapt and connect with various groups of people. An expert in cultural intelligence Dr. David Livermore emphasizes the importance of social adaptability in social intelligence by understanding and respecting cultural norms, demonstrating flexibility and embracing diversity. You can navigate different social environments with ease and create inclusive relationships. Do any of these social intelligence skills resonate with your own experiences? Remember my friend, social intelligence is a lifelong journey of growth and development. By honing these skills, you can enhance your social interactions, build meaningful relationships, and navigate the complexities of human connection. Please remember to like and share this video with someone who might benefit from these skills, and let's continue to learn and grow together. Until next time.


Mystery file is the next challenge in Ryan Nicholson's captured flag competition. It's 100 points in the extreme category. It says find the hidden flag in the flag file. So it gives us a shell we can connect to with some credentials to log in, CTF 8 and challenge 8. And in our home director we have a file called flag which I would wanna do some file reconnaissance on it. And we actually have the file command here in this issue of the container, the Docker container for us. So that's pretty handy, except it tells us it's just data. So let's actually see what this thing is. It says ha, ha, ha, ha. And what seemingly a lot of garbage. So no particular flag in here. I thought for a while that maybe this was like base 64 stuff that I could get out of there. I wanted to try and cat capital A so we could see any of the special characters. So there were a lot of escape sequences and stuff that we saw and it even had the terminal flash for us. So I thought, well, I could open this in Vim and take a look at it. It gives us those escape key sequences but nothing particularly interesting in there. So what I did is I actually tried to take a look at it in hex. So I use XXD to spit out just its hex representation and you can see all the ASCII here for ha, ha, ha at the very top and the zero A for the new line. So following the new line after that first line of cheesy laughter, it goes into some of those other bites and interesting things here. So I note, okay, following the new line character zero A there's one F, eight B and zero eight. And I'm thinking maybe I can use that as some kind of magic number or file header to determine what kind of file this thing actually is because I can't run strings on this thing to actually get anything out of it. I can't run bin walk or foremost or scalpel or anything that I could usually to like extract things on my own. So what really is this thing inside it? So I tried to keep in mind one F, eight B, zero eight. So I went to check out file signatures and there is a super awesome and common link by Gary Kessler. Yep, Gary Kessler. And I thought let's search one F space eight B, zero eight. And I can see right here that this is a GZIP archive file. So I can gun zip this thing. Props to illicit tiger, by the way for kind of finding that note and checking it out in the Discord server. If you aren't part of the Discord server you should totally join, come hang out because a lot of us will find random CTF things or other problems to try and solve and we'll all attack it together. And it's really fun. So just link in description. So I wanted to figure out, okay, I've got to cut up this file now. So I've got one byte, two bytes, three bytes, four bytes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I counted up to where does the new line end and where does the actual file that could be a GZIP file begin? It looks like it's 17 bytes in and onward. So I tried to use the cut command for a long time and I don't have a man page in here. So I'll do it in my local system. You can select the bytes forward and onward. So I tried to use 17 bytes on. I did cut cat flag for one thing, get it in centered input, centered output and I piped it to cut tack B, 17 onward. And it didn't look like it was getting me anything. It still had the seemingly notions to it. So I wanted to see like, if I give this to another file called something, can I check out what that something is? And it's still just data. I can't GZIP that something. Even if I tried to give it a proper file here, file extension, it was not willing to GZIP. So I figured, okay, that must be wrong. And again, props to illicitTiger because he actually used DD to cut up this file or extract out what is necessary. So the syntax for DD is kind of strange, but you specify a bunch of input arguments, just like IF, so input file, output file, the bytes that you want to read in and then the number that you want to skip. So we can use DDIF equals flag out F, excuse me, OF can equal winner.GZIP, IBS input block size can be one, read one block at a time, and then skip can be 17 bytes. Okay, so once that's done, now we have winner.GZ. If I run file on that, it will tell me that, okay, that is actual GZIP data. Great, so that's progress. Let's gunsip this. And now we have a file called winner, which we can check out. Winner, cool. It looks like it did find the flag for us and we can take note of that, write it down, put it in our, did it actually save? Nope, where's that hydrostat, right? Hygrostat, whatever. I hate copying and pasting out of a web shell, but that was that, that was the solution to mystery file. So keep in mind the file header or the magic numbers that denote the top of a file or the end of a file or specific signatures that are like a good thumbprint for a specific file and trying to determine that in hex. Always, no matter what, no matter how much it sucks, looking at the hex of some other file may be good to do in a CTF zone. So, cool.  These individuals are fantastic. $1 a month on Patreon will give you a special shout out just like this at the end of every video. $5 a month on Patreon will give you early access to all my videos. If you did like this video, please do like, comment and subscribe. Please join the Discord server, hang out with us for a little bit and it would be awesome if I could see some love from Patreon. See you soon, guys.


Now we use prisms to bend lights. Now I'm gonna take you back to that time in middle school when you learned about prisms. When light hits a prism, there are two things that happen. One, it bends light, and two, it moves an image. Right now we're gonna focus on a light bending part. Every prism has two components, an apex and a base. The base is kind of that thicker part. So what happens is that light will travel to the prism and light always bends towards the base. This is a law. The light will always bend towards the base. So remember that as we're going through this. Now if we take these two prisms and we place them base to base and apex to apex, and now I have two prisms that we're going to work with, if we do that, what's gonna happen here? So we've got on the image on the left, we've got the bases together. And on the image on the right, we've got the bases on the outside. And the light always bends in which direction? The light will always bend towards the base. And so you'll see that in the first image the light will actually come together. And in the second image, the light will spread apart. We call this converging and diverging. What do these two things kind of resemble? If you remember from the illustration I gave you a little earlier, they look like this. A plus lens and a minus lens. So you'll notice that the plus lens has a thicker center and then the minus lens has a thicker edge. Same thing here with these two prisms. So this is the basic concept of the plus prescription and the minus prescription. We're bending the light and we're converging or diverging the light. The light will come in and hit the lens and it'll actually converge together. And then on the minus lens, it's going to hit the lens and it'll actually go apart and it'll spread. So it spreads light and brings light together. Where the two prisms meet, apex to apex, or base to base, that's what we call optical center. And so in the optical center, there's actually no deviation of light. It actually goes right through the lens. It doesn't spread or come together. It's just constant. So you'll learn a little bit later on in our measurements about why it's so important to take the optical center. Let's take this patient and remember with the plus lens, we're gonna converge light together. So we're gonna allow the light to come together. So what happens with this hyperrope is that when we put this lens in front of their eye, rather than the light focusing behind the retina, this will allow the light to come in through the lens and actually focus right on the retina where it's supposed to. Ta-da! That's the magic of optometry.