Andrew Goldenberg

Looking Ahead to 2022

22 Dec

Let’s face it….. 2021 well… in a word…. SUCKED!

COVID-19 maintaned its stranglehold on our country and it seems like no matter what we do, we can’t get out of this pandemic quite yet.

People are suffering immense losses from businesses, to friends and family. It’s truly tragic to witness.

I personally have been fortunate enough that myself and my family all live under one roof with the exception of my younger brother. Thanks to technology, I have been able to maintain contact with him as well as friends that are all over the country and overseas.

For those of you who can’t see friends and family during the holidays I really feel for you. Those of you who can be with friends and family during the holidays, cherish the time you have. There are a lot of people who can’t.

To those of you who are struggling and need someone to talk to, please reach out. I am happy to hear you out and offer some advice, or just an ear to hear your story and offer some kind encouragement to stay here. You are loved, you are appreciated, and god damn it, you are worth it.

There’s a few things that I would like to do in 2022 and try my hand at.

My kids have recently expressed interest in making video content on YouTube and sharing their gaming experiences on their ipads. Personally this is something I have thought about doing for quite a while. I’ve tried my hand at streaming on Twitch, as well as making a YouTube video here and there. Ideally I would like to get more consistent and experienced with the tools such as Adobe Premiere, OBS Studio, green screens, and everything else that goes along with video production. In 2022, no more excuses. I have the tech, I have the patience, and everything I need to know can be learned. So in 2022 I want to put together a consistent content schedule, and keep things up to date while improving my skill set when it comes to creative work. If you have any great tips or tutorials, I would love for you to leave me a comment and let me know.

In 2022 I’d also get back to a regular schedule of gaming. Whether it’s playing a game with my kids, or Fornite or Counter-Strike, or something on my Nintendo switch. I’d like to get back to spending more time on it like I used to as a kid / teenager. I made a lot of amazing friends, and relationships from the games I played back then and would like to experience that some more in 2022.

The last thing I would like to do a lot more of in 2022 is take more time for my family. My mother, my brothers, my wife, my kids, and friends that are like family. I want to spend more time with them and less time focused on work.

Hopefully 2022 will be less of a disaster than 2021 has proven to be, and I am looking forward to seeing you all in a better place next year.

Thoughts on the Worker Shortage

27 Nov

The last few months, I’ve been reading quite a few articles where business owners are speaking out about not being able to find suitable staff to work in their establishments. According to many of these business owners the issue stems from Government handouts and the fact that “people just don’t want to work”.

I personally believe this all to be a massive falsehood being perpetuated by business owners, who for a long time, have profited off the backs of their workers and now are actually having to adapt and pay their staff what they are worth.

Before the pandemic hit Canada, restaurants and bars had plenty of staff who were serving their patrons. It is my contention that a majority of these people fall into a very specific camp that now have more options.

The camp I am referring to is people who are stuck in a job they don’t want, with an emlpoyer who treats them poorly, and before the pandemic, they really could not afford to train or branch out for a new job and a new beginning. What the pandemic has shown is that when you give someone who feels they are in a dead end job or are being mistreated by their employer and opportunity at a better life, most of them will take it.

The main argument I hear is that with Food costs and overhead, these poor restaurants and bars can’t afford to pay more than minimum wage, and need their patrons to supplement their workers income via tipping. I’m sorry but anyone who can do even basic math knows that is simply untrue.

A 10KG bag of flour costs a REGULAR customer roughly $14, not someone buying in bulk or regularly taking delivery of large quantites of flour. An average pizza shop (mom and pop not chain) charges anywhere between $10 and $20 for a pizza. Doing some simple math you can easily see that a regular bag of flour pays for itself with the sale of a single pizza. Even factoring in toppings, sauce, and cheese, a pizza still has very healthy margins if you’re selling a quality pizza and have regular customers (literally everyone is ordering in at the moment) there’s absolutely no reason that you can’t pay your staff a living wage.

I’m sorry but that argument is absolute bull shit!

Avoid PlayOJO Like the Plague!

11 Nov

Many of you may know that I generally like gambling and find it to be a fun passtime if you can afford it.

That being said, it’s incredibly difficult to find an “honest” casino much like it’s hard to find a reasonably priced lawyer. Almost every online casino boasts some kind of rediculous RTP or “Return to Player”. This is the amount of funds returned to the playerbase by the casino. The problem with that is it is incredibly untruthful.

Let me explain.

A lot of casinos will show the RTP of a given slot machine as being 96-97%. Meaning 97 cents of every dollar gambled is rewarded back to the player base. What they generally don’t explain is the percentage is based on millions if not billions of slot bets.

So lets say over the course of a year you gamble $1,000 in theory $960 of that is returned to the player base however, what it really means is you lost a grand and at some point they will give that $960 to someone else. RTP is not based on a single player but rather the whole playerbase. This means an online casino can suck millions of dollars out of its player base, and then reward a couple players with $100K and keep the rest of the balance while remaining true to their RTP. In other words, it’s a load of bull shit!

One of the most egregious offenders is PlayOJO.com. If you have a look on TrustPilot.com PlayOJO has one of the worst ratings possible. The reason for this is a couple of things.

Their support staff are incompetent for the most part.
They are completely unaware of how Interac works while still offering it as a deposit and withdrawal mechanism.
They advertise themselves as the worlds “fairest” casino which is an outright lie.
Their games payout very infrequently. I will say I have one a large sum here once but that was over the course of 3 years gambling on this one specific site.
Bonus games never pay and usually pay out the pitty amount.

Specifically with item #5 a lot of the games have bonus games triggered by three scatter icons on the slot reels. Generally these bonus games will have a pitty payment (a minimum it’ll pay out regardless of the result of the bonus game). This is generally the only amount you’re going to see which is typically 10x your bet. So a bet of $1 would yield $10 IF you hit an extremely rare bonus as they come up very infrequently.

Some games allow you to buy the bonus game at a rate of 100x your bet level. If you want a $5 bonus, it’ll cost you $500 and likely pay you $50. So the game providers value the bonus at 100x and very seldom will ever pay more than 10x. PlayOJO is one of the worst offenders of this. The games on their site very rarely, if ever go above that pitty pay of 10x your bet and in the course of playing $100 you would be very lucky to see a single bonus game.

If you’re looking for an online casino to try out, let me recommend Wildz.com. While they also do not pay out all the time, they frequently hit bonuses that pay at least over the 10x multiple so you don’t feel like you got robbed when you played $200 worth and then land a bonus for $20.

As always, only gamble what you can afford to loose, and if you need a resource or help with a gambling problem, please reach out to BeGambleAware.

Gambling is something to do for fun once in a while and you will never break even or even come close, so please only every gamble what you can afford to loose, and don’t ever try and win it back once you’ve lost it. If you feel the need to, you’ve gambled too much and should seek help at BeGambleAware.

Why Online Casinos are Bull Shit!

14 Aug

Let me first preface this post by saying this: As of writing, I have gambled and have had some wins, and some losses, but mostly losses. Take it from me kids, as much as the good folks gambling over on Twitch.tv would have you believe, you can’t make a career out of gambling unless you have a massive bankroll or are already rich!

Online casinos have a much different way of luring pepole in and keeping them there. A lot of it comes down to how their banking works. For instance almost all online casinos offer some kind of sign up bonus or deposit match bonus.

Say for instance the deposit match bonus is 200%. This means you depost $100 and they give you $200 extra to play with. Now hold on little Timmy, because that money isn’t real nor is it worth accepting when you understand the rules that come with it.

Almost all casinos require that you play a certain amount before you are able to withdraw the money (before it becomes real) this can vary, but is usually anywhere from 100 to 500 times the total amount they give you. This means if you deposit $100 and they give you another $200, you need to play $2000 – $5000 at their casino before they are going to let you pull the money out.

Speaking of pulling money out, the withdrawal process is absolutely brutal! First of all you have to provide the casino with proof of residence and proof of who you are before they will even consider letting you withdraw funds.

Next you have to deal with the Canadian banking system which basically tells you “No fucking way are you gambling on the internet!”. They make gambling and crypto near impossible to do with any form of speed.

Now you finally have some cash in your casino account. Go ahead and play some games. We have an amazingly high RTP. RTP is the return to player percentage which is essentially the amount of money the casino returns to its player base. This number at most casinos means absolutely JACK!

The way a casino calculates its RTP is it runs simulations of its games 24×7 which will tell them how much money they took, and how much was returned to the player. If a casino tells you they have an RTP of 95% it means that the casino keeps 5% and the other 95% is distributed to its player base.

What the casino forgets to tell you about is just because the RTP is 95% that doesn’t mean anyone is winning anything. The simulations the casinos most likely are around 20-30% RTP and on the second last simulation the system runs against any particular game it hits a monster win of several million dollars which would bring the RTP in line with what they are boasting about but still ends up being total bull shit.

Finally you manage a massive win and are ready to cash out? Great, provide all the same information you did when opening your account at your respective online casino so they can confirm who you are once again. Once this is done they will allow you to withdraw your funds. If it’s over $10K well you’re SOL.

Most online casinos use Interac E-Transfers to fund your casino account. This comes with several annoying limitations.

If you are a high roller, tough shit. You can only transfer $3000 per day, and $10,000 per week into your account.
If you want to withdraw more than $10K, you have to pull the first $10K and wait a week for it to hit your bank account. Then you cal pull more out.
The casinos intentionally delay your withdrawals because well…… they want your money and the longer it’s loaded up at the casino, the more likely you are to go back and have it brutally taken away from you.

Take if from someone who has been heavily beaten by the casinos on a fairly regular basis. Online gambling is bull shit. Stick to a real casino where you can cash out and walk away because otherwise, you might as well just hand all your money to your online casino of chioice, let them kick you in the junk, and then move on with your day.

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Raid: Shadow Legends

22 Jul

I only just recently started playing Raid: Shadow Legends, as I was looking for another gacha game to play while waiting on energy refills to happen on the other gacha games I play.

This game gets a lot of exposure and shout outs by quite a few prominent YouTubers and Twitch Streamers which is honestly why it took me so long to give this game a try. Usually when I see a game advertising and pushing into the market this hard it usually signifies to me that the game is having a hard time getting adopted by gamers.

A few weeks ago, I decided to give the game a try purely out of curiosity, and I have to say I am really enjoying the mechanics, the content, and the creator of this game the more I play.

Raid: Shadow Legends has plenty of content, consistent updates, and now they even have a collab with Ninja! If you log in for 7 days straight you can get your own Ninja Legendary Champion. This champion Plarium designed to look like Ninja is crazy good. He’s a great PVE farmer and nearly all of his skills are stronger against bosses. Definitely worth logging in 7 days for!

Overall I am really enjoying this game and look forward to any future collabs they may have. If you click either of the links in this article and sign up tp play Raid: Shadow Legends, you and I both get some pretty awesome rewards in-game. Best of all, it’s a free game with no need to spend money. There are always events and other ways of obtaining amazing champions without spending a dime.