TL;DR - I use the craft beer industry as a way to understand Capitalist Propaganda, how Capitalism and Socialism are inextricably linked to each other, and how through the use of propaganda, companies use the "illusion of choice" to coerce you into believing that you prefer the products that are most favorable to them. In order to change this into the consumer's favor, you need to be an informed consumer in the free market, and raise class consciousness to overthrow the tyranny of Capitalist Propaganda, that is called "Marketing".
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You can't understand Capitalist Propaganda unless you have a solid understanding of what Capitalism is beyond the literal definition of the word, which is just an abstract ideal. Propaganda plays off of the discrepancies between the ideals of Capitalism, like the free market, which is another abstract ideal, and the reality of Capitalism in practice in America, which can be characterized as Trickle Down Economics. Capitalism sought to be a pragmatic alternative to its economic predecessors, a fact which drives Capitalist Propaganda. However, through layers of abstraction throughout the years, it has become more of a religion, as critics refer to the increasingly ideological concept as "Supply Side Jesus", meaning you give all the money to the rich, it'll trickle down to the poor, and they can "vote" on the actions of the capitalists through monetary interactions in the free market.
Capitalist Propaganda is engrained in America, because at the time of our founding, Adam Smith wrote "Wealth of Nations", which is considered the Bible of the Free Market. This groundbreaking work utilized Newton's Laws of Physics, which were en vogue at the time, to describe how interactions in the marketplace would balance each other out, just as the laws of Newtonian Physics do.
The very noble purpose of Wealth of Nations was not create the oligarchy we have today, but to do the opposite. He wanted to describe a system that would protect individual freedoms and be truly democratic. Just as Lenin and Stalin bastardized the works of Marx, so too have capitalists in America bastardized the intentions of Adam Smith.
Capitalism and Socialism are best learned side by side, in my opinion, to avoid falling into the trappings of either ideology that our brains like to do. Which one is better? It depends on the market, but the answer is almost always somewhere in between.
Through learning how Socialist concepts can be applied to problems in Capitalism, you can cut through the propaganda and will see for yourself that these problems can be solved if we just drop the labels and do what's best for society and the individual. The problem is always finding the proper balance.
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WHAT? CAPITALISM AND SOCIALISM ARE JOINED AT THE HIP?
Yep. You can never live in a pure economic system. Purity is always an illusion. If you want something to be pure, you have to put a lot of energy into making it that way. Nature likes to mix stuff up. This is why ideologies around racial purity and fascism always fail. There are people who want a "pure" economic system, but they are usually the people at the top and would only get richer from more purity while the rest of society loses freedom and slowly starves.
In a nutshell, Capitalism promotes laws that benefit those with money, while Socialism promotes a safety net that benefits everyone. Every single human is born into Socialism. As a baby, you need food, someone else works for it and gives it to you, but then at some point, you are expected to exchange labor for capital, and buy your own food. See? The two are forever bound as the yin and yang. You can also grow your own food, but for that you need land, which is capital.
These interactions are very tricky. I only want to tell you enough so that you can start to see Capitalist Propaganda, because right now, you're like a fish in water that can't see water. I often use this line to describe a person who can't see their own homegrown propaganda. The best way I found to study Capitalism is by relating it Socialism, the "air" above the "water" of Capitalism, if that makes sense.
I always find it best to look at a microcosm to understand these concepts. And today, that microcosm is beer.
Mmmm....Beeeeeeeeeerrrrrrr.....
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CONFLICT OF INTEREST AND THE ILLUSION OF CHOICE
Before I poison your mind with my own propaganda, picture you're on vacation and you walk into a bar and want to order a beer. If you really want to understand the power of propaganda in your own life, really think of this before we break this all down. Really think, what makes you decide which beer to order? Do you like to look at the labels on the tap or bottle? That's obvious propaganda. It has absolutely nothing to do with the taste or quality of the beer itself, but sways your opinion toward logos you've seen before, which is why you see so many beer advertisements, which means that money that could've gone into quality is instead going into propaganda, and you're already biased towards an inferior product. Interesting. You really can't help being swayed by marketing, but at least you can be conscious of that fact, and that's important in order to be an informed consumer.
Do you ask the bartender for a recommendation? Why would you do that? You don't know the bartender any better than the beers in front of you. How do you know they aren't paid more to offer you a beer that sucks and is 12 years old and the owner wants to get rid of it? Do you ask for a certain style of beer? Do you ask for a local beer? And once you finally narrow it down to a few choices, do you ask for samples so you can make up your own mind? You should always do this. Then we get into "flavor propaganda", which we'll discuss later. Jeez. Did you every realize there was so much complexity behind being an informed consumer and just ordering a simple beer? Maybe you'll give in and just tell the bartender to pour whatever. Choice is difficult sometimes.
If you really visualize this and take a minute to let this sink in, you'll start to understand how external forces hijack the processor in your mind to manufacture desire through the illusion of choice. However, your health and enjoyment of the beer is not the goal for these external forces, they only want you to purchase. The perfect example is fast food. They know their product sucks, but they know you'll keep buying it, but that doesn't keep them from lying about how delicious it is in their ads. There is far more at play behind the curtain. There is a science behind addicting you to things, this is reinforced by a corporate tax and subsidy system that contorts the free market pushing centralization of production through homogenization and use of chemicals to hide the homogenization, and simply because there is more than one option, they make you feel like you have choice. This, in a nutshell, is how the illusion of choice works in the free market. It's not about what YOU want. The producer manipulates you to think you want what they have. Through this, they deceive Americans into buying products with a list of ingredients that a person would never freely choose to consume. So if you want to order a beer with no shit in it, then you're shit out of luck in America. You could in Germany, but we'll discuss that later.
While you're standing at that bar, you aren't conscious of the fact that your interests are in direct opposition to those of the bar owner's. Capitalists hide this fact with their perfect smiles, but Marx described this in detail. You want the best beer for the cheapest price, and the bar owner wants to sell you the cheapest beer at the highest price you'll pay. It doesn't stop there. The bar owner flips roles in the same situation with the beer distributor, who does the same with maybe another level of distribution, and continues to the brewer, then goes to the brewer versus supplier, supplier to farmer, and even though you'd think it stops there, the farmer has to deal with suppliers of equipment and seeds, and on and on.
Add to this list their auxiliary staff of HR, drivers, managers, brewers, bottle/keg makers, and of course owners, none of them care whether you actually like the beer you're drinking as long as you keep buying more. That's the big driver here.
Did you ever realize that every time you buy a beer, your own capital is partially responsible for creating and sustaining all of these jobs involved? You, my dear beer drinker, are the true job creator. Budweiser can brew all they want, it means nothing without buyers, who are the true engines of capitalism. Instead, you're treated as a rube by suits in a boardroom somewhere.
Capitalist Propaganda tells us the billionaires are job creators, but this is a lie. Jeff Bezos can't drink enough beer to sustain all these jobs. So why do we let him hoard all the money? Wouldn't the economy do better if we spread out Jeff's money so more people could buy more beers and more jobs would be created? According to Socialist Economics, yes. That's actually, quite simply, a Socialist Free Market. Did you even know that existed? The power hungry greedy people who are too lazy for manual labor go to such great lengths to make sure you don't learn it. They want you to think that only Capitalism allows you choice in the market. I'm sure you can guess why they say that.
Capitalism maintains itself by exulting the wealthy who use their economic power to punch down. The only way this system won't fall into fascism and fail is if the consumers start to punch back. Where Marx envisioned the Dictatorship of the Proletariat as they usurped power from the Bourgeoisie, a modern alternative is just teaching people to understand the system we live in, so that we can just start making changes in the way we live and to whom we give our money.
See that? Capitalism and Socialism can get along nicely, so long as the consumers are informed.
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CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE ALIENATION OF LABOR CAUSING LONELINESS IN SOCIETY
What I described within the previous section is what Marx called "Alienation of Labor". Each step in the process of making your beer is isolated from the others, so no one feels ownership over the end product or a true connection to the consumer, or job creator. Even the bartender selling it is alienated from the profit of their labor in serving the beer, so they only focus on the service aspect of giving you the beer, because that is where they earn their tip. They can't really fix anything about a shitty beer other than to offer you a different brand. The capitalist owner is usually not there. Their only interaction is setting the rules for everyone in the bar to follow, and pay themselves more than everyone who has to follow those rules. This is part of the conflict between the classes. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, I'm just pointing it out. The bar owner themself has to spend money on propaganda to attract customers that could be spent in other places, so has to find ways to cut costs. Unfortunately, they buy cheaper beer...and this is why you end up with IPAs. No one is connected to the products, so they only look at prices and find the cheapest, passable product. This is the race to the bottom of Capitalism.
Compare this to when brewpubs were a new thing. The brewer would come out and talk to you about the beer, you would give feedback that could effect future batches and it connected everyone to each other through commerce. It makes business "social" and I think nearly everyone enjoys that, but it is losing out in competition with chain breweries that enforce isolation and make cookie cutter propaganda and cookie cutter business models so they can turn owners into managers and suck all the profit back their corporate headquarters and offshore accounts. They kill the experience and make everything transactional. And all the kitsch they hang around their cookie cutter chain bar is just to hide the fact that no one in that place cares about anything other than not getting fired. Everyone is effectually alienated from everyone else. It's worth a read to check out this page on Marx's Theory of Alienation.
This alienation is the root of a lot of misery in society. Humans are communal animals forced to live in a society of individuality and alienation. As they mope around, they seek an escape. And that is why advertising is so nefarious. It seeks to manipulate you in that state. Imagine driving home from your alienating job to you empty home, but looking up and see a billboard with bunch of actors laughing and drinking beer. They take pictures that make these actors look like friends. It's just for show. They aren't selling beer to those laughing people in the picture. They're tempting lonely people to drown their sorrows. Capitalist Propaganda is used so your brain doesn't understand what it wants. It wants friends, then sees the words Bud Light. So when the bartenders asks...Make it a Bud Light. Look at how much money they spend to manipulate and capitalize on people's suffering.
Propaganda in Communist countries is controlled by the government, so it's clear who the enemy of your freedom is. Capitalist Propaganda hides behind the layers of complexity of the same economy you rely on to survive, so you never know what's propaganda or where it's coming from. Marketers find every way imaginable to get their disinformation in front of your eyes, even enlisting your friends on Facebook in annoying MLM schemes. Propaganda invaded everything that can be legally monetized. It's in the media, and not just commercials anymore. There's product placement, stories injected into the news, and even movies and social media created an entire industry of "lifestyle propaganda", telling you how to live your life and indulge in overconsumption. It's REALLY hard to get away from Capitalist Propaganda. There is so much money and research behind it and so much depth, even this long post is only barely scratching the surface. I just want to open your eyes to it.
I can't make you see all this. No one can. I can only describe it as best as I can. What you will experience when you understand this is what I call "Economic Enlightenment", similar to what Marx called "Class Consciousness". Once it happened to me, the world looked amazing, and the shitty propagandists selling us false hope all look like clowns in a very odd circus of vanity, despair and mediocrity.
Once I understood this, I saw clearly how we are increasingly trapped in a form of Corporate Slavery, led by seriously ridiculous oligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg, who thinks he's the reincarnation of Augustus Caesar or something. That's why he has that haircut! This is a guy who stole a company and hired "screen psychologists" from Las Vegas to get you hooked on Facebook the same as casinos do with slot machines. He wants to be the funnel for propaganda throughout the world. He wants to be the kingmaker, decide what people buy, who they like, what views they hold. He can only do this because so many companies spend so much money to put their propaganda on that platform. They can only have this much money because the free market is not actually free. It's bought and paid for on platforms like Facebook and Amazon. The money that was supposed to "trickle down" is instead being spent on Capitalist Propaganda on these platforms, to get the proletariate to trickle their money up through endless, nonsensical online purchasing and local businesses who send the town's money to people who can't do anything with it but buy up properties that increase your rent and cost of living.
When people get drunk on the power of propaganda, they forget the lessons of the past. Propagandists always fall prey to their own delusions over time. In reality, your life is better without Facebook. There isn't anything on there that is healthy. Even if you just want to talk to a few friends, you are going to fall for the propaganda there. You can't help it. And if your bar advertises on Facebook, just think, that money could've gone into purchasing higher quality beer then sold at the same price, instead of going to Mark Zuckerberg so he can drop $30 million to buy the houses around him so no one can spy on him while he spies on you. You really gotta watch out for a guy who combines spying and propaganda all into a single app and thinks he's going to bring 200 years of peace to America. History is littered with knuckleheads like that. It's best to get off Facebook and encourage everyone else to do the same. Zuck only wants to lead himself to the Promised Land, and he's using your ignorance to fuel his own delusions by deluding you into thinking you want what he has to offer.
Let's get back to beer.
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IPAs AND THE FREE MARKET VS THE RACE TO THE BOTTOM
I like beer. When I worked in Germany, it was easy to walk into a bar and, like Farva, just order a liter o' beer. Often, there would only be two choices, light color or dark. As a matter of fact, even at the most famous beer festival in the world, Oktoberfest, people mostly drink the same standard type of beer, and no one complains about the lack of choice. It's quite easy. You can order with one finger. No need to see a menu or ask what's in it. It's simply beer. This worked for centuries. Consumers are fine with it. Prost! Have you ever shared a story like this and people say, "Oh, that would never work in America. Americans want choice." Yeah. Because we are flooded with Capitalist Propaganda.
So if consumer choice isn't pushing for a selection, why would a free market call for it? Imagine there are two bars and one of those bars says "30 beers on tap" and the other doesn't. You're more likely to choose it, and the other bar will have to compete in some way, often by copying. This forms trends, and people mistake this for something customers wanted. Trends are always marketing. Don't believe me? What happened to fidget spinners? So now you have a bunch of beers that no one asked for, yet will now demand. Competition creates more Capitalist Propaganda to create demand for something you never even wanted, but makes you think you do. And that's the best propaganda. You think you are thinking for yourself. This is the fallacy of consumer choice.
If you want to understand just how important that last paragraph is, consider this, "consumer choice" is the same propaganda they used to get you to carry around a device that spies on you 24/7 and sends that data to people you don't know, and you can't stop it, can you? You chose that. You wanted it. Not only that, but you paid $1,000 for the device to opt into their spying program, for the privilege of being mind controlled by the propaganda their AI selects for you. Did you read the Terms of Service? As bad as you may have thought Communist Propaganda was, Capitalist Propaganda is far better, and far stealthier. You believe you have freedom of choice. But your only choice is usually take it, or leave it. Oh, you need it for work? Maybe find a different job. Or just succumb to mass surveillance, and next year, you can drop another grand on a device with a marginally better camera.
There is a way to free yourself. You just have to understand the nature of propaganda. It took me a while, but I eventually broke free. Under Socialism, there would be laws against the exploitation of consumers. Capitalist Propaganda tells you that this takes away your freedom. This is a lie. Regulations give you the freedom to not have to worry whether the beer you're drinking has poison in it.
Germany has a lot of regulations on beer. It has the Reinheitsgebot (purity order), a law passed in 1516 that states that beer can only consist of water, hops and barley. Note, this is a different use of the word "purity" from earlier, as beer is itself a mixture of things. Historically there have also been regulations where beer could only be sold regionally, so no matter what part of Germany you were in, you only got a certain brand of beer at the bar, but it didn't matter because they all had the same ingredients. They could make wheat beers or unfiltered, but they were generally variations of pilsners and lagers. One meaning of the word "Lager" in German is "storage", meaning the beer was brewed in a way that it could be stored, allowing them to brew in bigger batches and store it.
Lagers use a more complex brewing process, so only larger breweries would make them, but this worked because of protected territories. America has a similar system, because each state has its own regulations on alcohol, but this is changing as corporate lawyers fight to homogenize the rules favorable to them, but the consumer loses control. Big brands tend to be lagers as they have general appeal to a wide audience. Did you notice this is the second time I pointed out that corporations create homogeneity? Without regulations, corporations create Fascism. That is why I tell people that we already live in the NWO but corporations rule the world instead of governments. Why do you think so few conspiracy theorists make this connection? Propagandists are paid a lot of money to keep even our small community confused about the reality of what's happening. Now, check out conspiracy and you'll see what I mean. They are spreading propaganda for the NWO over there and don't even know it. I tried to point that out and they finally banned me. Oh well. They'll figure it out in their own time.
In America, in 1978 it became legal to brew beer at home. This is what led to the explosion of new beers in the US decades later. Americans don't have purity laws, so could test new recipes. But people didn't generally like IPAs before, so how did they become so popular that they control 30% of the market? Marketing, of course. Create the market and tell people what they want.
IPA stands for India Pale Ale. It was invented by the British as an easy way to make a beer that they could drink in India. People only drank it out of necessity, as the other beers couldn't make the trip. IPAs are very easy to make and very forgiving, because if you mess it up, it already tasted bad anyway. As people started trying to get into microbrews, they often didn't have the capital to make lagers at small scale, and also wanted a simpler process so they didn't have to hire or train expert brewers, IPAs are cheap and easy to make at smaller scale.
In order to make it drinkable, brewers experimented with many different flavorings. This created a cult following of craft IPAs, where people would drive hours to stand in line for hours to try the newest concoction. The trendy nature of the craft beer world kept people training their palate to adapt to the taste of an IPA, making people start to actually like them. The flavorings made people think they were different, so even if they didn't like it, marketing tactics kept people coming back to try the latest blend. Your palate can adapt A LOT. Swedish people love Surströmming, but watch this video of Americans trying it for the first time. They tried to get me to eat it several times, but I would rather sit in a sauna until Tuesday to avoid smelling it while watching them eat it. It really smells that bad.
IPAs enticed people with popular, aromatic ingredients like bananas and pineapple. This is what I call "flavor propaganda". It's not bad in and of itself, but it can be easily misused to cover issues with quality or hide the taste of preservatives. Since we don'e have laws like Germany, you're left to rely on the knowledge and honesty of the bartender to find out. They don't make this info readily available, which is another form of Disinformation.
So if you think you actually like IPAs, just remember, you are just like a Swede eating rotten fish. A lot of propaganda went in to making IPAs popular, but it's the cheapest, easiest product to make that can be sold at the highest price, so they become popular. This is what business students call a business plan. To overcome the bad taste, IPAs were marketed as "classy" to shame you if you choose the more expensive to produce and more appealing pilsners and lagers, which were given a bad name due to being associated with major brands like Bud Light. This makes it harder to market microbrew lagers, which can only fetch a certain price due to association. And this is what is referred to as the "race to the bottom" in Capitalism.
Instead of trying to innovate ways to produce the beers you want, they just figure out how to get you to pay more for an inferior product, just like they do with BBQ. They make you think you want it. From this you can understand why "food" is full of junk that you wouldn't feed your dog. Whatever legal poison helps cheapen the product is considered "smart business", another propaganda term designed to hide the reality of doing immoral and harmful things to other humans for profit. If you make money on it, it's good. As if there aren't better choices we could come up with if there truly were a free market with an informed consumer.
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STRENGTHEN THE FREE MARKET BY BEING AN INFORMED CONSUMER
We don't need a Communist Revolution to make positive changes, so take off your ski masks and put your Antifa flags down. I like microbrew culture and still enjoy IPAs, but understanding the marketplace is how I do my part as an informed consumer and job creator to help create the world that I want to live in. I encourage you to do the same. Vote with your dollars. Don't let the Zuck-type sociopathic, corporate people in a distant land decide what you consume by looking at ads on his platform. Visit local breweries and talk to the brewmaster. Don't reinforce alienation from labor. Connect with the people who make the things you buy. Support independent entrepreneurship. These are the paths to a brighter future where we share in the abundance of wealth.
Discover Economic Enlightenment for yourself and realize that We The People are ultimately in control. Wealth inequality is greater than it was in France before the French Revolution. Don't let this train take us into the depths where another Lenin will arise and spend the night shooting people.
How you choose to spend your money today is what decides what will become the society of tomorrow. And remember, you always have the choice to buy nothing at all. I never saw a billboard that said that.
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LET THEM DRINK BEER!
I hope this gave you a glimpse behind the curtain of Capitalist Propaganda. Propaganda isn't just political, it has invaded everything and it's at full blast right now. I hope you can piece together how Capitalist Propaganda is actually designed to make you subservient by controlling what you want so they can maximize their own profit and teach you to accept whatever they offer, the homogenization of choice. However, your life is your own and you should remain in control of all aspects of it, including your desires.
Richard Wolff is an economist who studied at three elite universities in America and discusses how he was not able to even learn about Socialist Economics in the ivory tower, even though Capitalist Propaganda calls universities leftist. He found no department in America that is even willing to teach it or study it. Capitalist Propaganda censors these ideas, especially at the university. People in power don't want the serfs to learn about themselves. Check him out on YouTube. You'll realize that unchecked Capitalism leads to Fascism and Slavery, which is why they want to get rid of the minimum wage, so that we can return to sharecropping which is already increasingly happening in America under different names, like "student debt", "mortgages" and "insurance". Don't you think it's odd that a person has to go into debt so they can generate profits for corporations who really ought to be paying for this education themselves? If you have to go into debt before they'll hire you, it's much easier to negotiate against you.
If you want to see other examples of propaganda, check out this random tweet from one of America's Top Capitalist Propagandists. These are very odd pictures, and the only thing I can see in them is that they must be promoting those outfits, likely the blue dress, maybe those men's outfits as well. One thing you know is that she didn't become a billionaire by letting any single opportunity to enrich herself at the expense of others pass her by. I didn't look it up, but I am certain they sell that blue dress, or whoever does paid her to post this.
That's the main reason celebrities use social media. It's marketing. Their whole schtick is to sell garments made in a sweatshop in a foreign country by people who can't even afford a beer to Americans who are facing bankruptcy and homelessness themselves.
Read the replies of the tweet. These people have influence that vastly outsizes their understanding of their impact on the world. There are guillotines in the comments. There usually are. I'm seeing them a lot lately.
This type of propaganda is everywhere. And it's destroying America. Just like propaganda led to the demise of Nazi Germany, we could be looking at the same thing, but worse. It could start off as famine.
If you're having trouble deciding between the beers you are being offered, it's probably because you don't want anything at all, in which case the proper choice is: nothing. Or, try tap water. Maybe you're just thirsty. Now ask yourself, when you envisioned yourself at a bar, did you ever think to order water instead? Did you entertain the idea that you didn't even want a beer. That's the power of suggestion.
What if the rest of the world just cut America off from the means of production outsourced to areas with cheap labor? We would have our own famine and likely war. And if we have a revolution here, with the masses in the country being so disinformed about everything and not having any sort of class consciousness at the moment and instead stuck in alienation, the leader that rises here will likely lead to something horrifying. And we censor ourselves from pointing out the simple fact, that the only way America will survive is to tax the deluded royalty like Kim and Mark back to reality, so they can't indulge their reckless, childish delusions by selling off the very fabric of our nation to the highest bidder.
That doesn't make me a Socialist, that just makes me honest.
Enjoy your beer!
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Thanks for reading and I hope I helped you understand how you can empower yourself. I'm excited about the one I wrote for Election Day tomorrow to keep our NOPOL spirits up while all the politics clouds the airwaves. Cheers!

Hi there, so I platinumed GTAV a while ago and I ranked them based on difficulty, how long they took, and just generally how fun they were to achieve. This also is kind of a walkthrough of some sorts and includes tips for some of the more difficult ones. Oh and keep in mind that this is just my opinion, some trophies can be achieved easier by other people.
And there is some swearing in this, but that shouldn't be a concern considering this is talking about GTAV Pick option C at the end of the game so you don't miss any achievements

1. Pimp my sidearm- works on any gun, recommend beating the game and then fully mod a pistol for the cheapest results.
   
2. Los santos customs- beat the game and take franklins car (trust me, do franklin's car) and go to a Los Santos customs and buy every option
   
3. A lot of cheddar- When you finish the game go to one of the stock websites and purchase every stock you can, which means you should be able to purchase 40 million worth of stocks at a time, do this until you unlock the achievement. This should take around 2 minutes.
   
4. Out of your depth- Purchase a boat or call a taxi (if you do the taxi achievement before this one the taxi skips are free) and go to the ocean, drive or swim to the very end and swim down to find a shark, annoy the shark so he will kill you. Depending on how you do it should only take around 5-15 minutes.
   
5. Off the plane- nothing needed to be said here, just complete it.
   
6. Clean sweep- Just stay behind cover and purchase snacks and body armor, and use a gun like a pump shotgun or a one-shot weapon, such as the revolver.
   
7. Trading pure alpha- you can do this anytime within the game, just purchase a stock and then kill yourself repeatedly until next to your stocks a green arrow pointing up appears, sell it and you should get the achievement. Can take up to 5 minutes if stock prices don't go up quickly.
   
8. Three-man army- Play as franklin and call Micheal and Trevor and pick them up, get a wanted level and stay in your car, kill a cop so you can get 3 stars, and start driving away but still have the cops on your ass. Do this for 3 minutes and you should get the achievement easily. Make sure your car has some armor upgrades though.
   
9. Alls fare in love and war- After beating the mission Mr.Philips you are able to purchase businesses when you're able to play as franklin purchase the taxi business for 200k and then you should get a call after a while, do the job and you should get the achievement. The missions themselves don't take a long time, maybe around 5-10 minutes, if you don't get the achievement to try to do another one.
   
10. Red mist- After completing the Trevor Philips industries mission this will just look like standard strangers and freaks, complete it, and then the others should pop up after you finish the one before. Complete all 5 and you should get the achievement. Can take up to 30 minutes to an hour if you're not good at it, I recommend trying to get the gold for all these for another achievement.
    
11. Altruist acolyte- There are certain markers that will appear as you get close to them, play as Trevor and go to the "Domestic" random event, there are a few closer to the location such as the hitch lifts but I wasn't able to spawn them. Drive to the cult and you should get the achievement after the cutscene. Took me around 10 minutes if you use the domestic random event.
    
12. Wanted: Dead or alive: This will also appear as Trevor strangers and freaks, after doing it you will get an email giving a picture of where he should be hidden, you can search it up on youtube as I did and capture him, don't kill the target no matter what, deliver him to Maude and you should unlock the achievement. Took around 10 minutes.
    
13. Kifflom! Play as Micheal and go to the Epsilon Program website, and pay the 1000 dollars to start this, I recommend using another guide for this but whenever you need to do something like wear the robe for 5 days just go to Michael's house and sleep until you are able to go on another mission, and when you need to walk around the desert for 5 miles just walk in a circle. this can take up to 3 hours if not done correctly.
    
14. San Andreas sightseer- Purchase a helicopter for the quickest results but can be done using a car or a boat. Travel around and get 95% of the map uncovered, you can tell if it's uncovered by it being transparent, meaning you can see through the map. The reason why I recommend a helicopter is you also need to uncover the ocean as well, which can be done with a boat but the helicopter is faster, you can either steal one or purchase a helicopter hangar and a helicopter. Took around 5 minutes because I already had a lot of the map uncovered.
    
15. Multi-disciplined- You'll need to get a single gold in only one of the shooting range challenges, triathlon, a flight school lesson, a sea race, a street race (which only franklin can do), and an off-road race. Complete all of them anyway for 100% achievement. This can take up to 30 minutes to an hour if you aren't able to gold one.
    
16. TP Industries arm race- After beating the mission Mr.Philips you need to purchase the hangar after beating the mission, it should cost 100,000 dollars. You get a special marker for the dune buggy and the airplane, there are 10 in total, 5 for the dune buggy (which is mainly just collecting supplies) and another 5 for the airplane (which is also mainly just supply drops) After doing the two quick save your game and reload it for the two missions to spawn. Can take up to an hour if doing the quick save method.
    
17. Crew cut- To easily finish this you either need to make a crew for a friend to join or join a friends crew
    

and play a contact mission with them to get the achievement.

1. A new perspective- Just leave one of the characters in the first person and just wait for the 15 hours or play some of

the story in the first person, I just recommend leaving it on overnight.

1. Calling digits- reach rank 20 and have 5000 dollars, call up Merryweather and ask for a backup helicopter.

20- stick up kid- rob every store on the map, can take up to an hour depending on how fast you move to each store.
21- enjoy your stay- for this achievement you need to play golf, play tennis, play darts, arm-wrestle,
win a shooting range challenge, rob a store, buy a lap dance, buy any clothes, buy a tattoo and change your hairstyle. Make sure you win or lose the sports activities because if your teammate leaves in the middle of the match it won't count.

1. Three-bit gangster- Pretty simple since ranking up is easy, just play 3x or 2x events or contact missions for the best RP. Can take up to an hour or two.
   
2. American dream- You're most likely going to need at least 1,000,000 dollars for everything, grind the 3x or 2x event or play heists for money.
   
3. 4-bit gangster- Same as a Three-bit gangster but more grinding is required. Can take up to 5 hours of pure grind.
   
4. Full refund- After rank 50 have a friend call Lamar so he can call a thief on you, kill the thief and take back your money. Takes around 5 minutes.
   
5. The midnight club- You can have a friend let you win 5 races by going to the menu-jobs-races and then
   

invite your friend and have you win 5 with a custom vehicle, depending on the map you play on
(I recommend taxiing, takes around 2 minutes to complete it) this can take up to 10-30 minutes.

1. Backseat driver- Do this with a friend, wait for people to join or join a rally race, and then guide them through the map. Once again I recommend making the rally race so you can play on a map you are familiar with.
   
2. Run like the wind- I did this in a solo match, I stole a car, got a bounty, and survived a GTA day (which is around 48 minutes) Move around and don't get kicked, you can die by anything but another player. You can do this with a friend where they have Lester give you a bounty.
   
3. Show off- Use an upgraded vehicle (preferably franklin's personal car) and search up a guide for all locations, ill put a link to the guide I used in the description, while most are easy 10 of them are a complete bitch, and took me around 15 minutes just to do one of them because of the requirements. This can take up to 3-5 hours.
   
4. From beyond the stars/a mystery solved- I can't really decide on which one is harder so I will group them up into one, both took me around 3 hours to do since there are so many. You can use the rockstar social club website or use a guide on YouTube as I did.
   
5. Waste management- After the second heist Micheal or Trevor and purchase the old dock for around 250,000 dollars, while it can be confusing just follow the dot on the map. Took me around 2 hours to do.
   
6. Close shave- Look up a guide, it's pretty much required for this. Buy the buzzard helicopter for the under the bridge and keep in mind not to do too much damage to your helicopter or it won't count, while most recommend stealing a jet from fort zancuddo I instead bought the mallard for 250,000. Took me around 3-4 hours.
   
7. Decorated- In GTA online there are certain rewards for doing certain things such as killing people with a pistol a certain amount of times, every single platinum that I earned were headshot kills, sniper kills (not sure how to be honest) Kill people using melee weapons, kill people using sticky grenades, kill players in GTA online, kill psycho's (I recommend doing most of these in deathmatches) win 10 waves of survival, (it's painful and achievement on its own), rob 20 stores which is also an achievement, pay for 25 lap dances (all you need to do is pay for the dance and then exit it) buy 25 haircuts, have a friend drive you around for a few hours (sit in a car with your friend in it, pretty simple one) Flippin hell (go to a stunt race with a flying car, get high in the air and do the flips) steal vehicles (pretty simple) Achieve the fastest lap in a race (can be done with a friend) land jumps 300 feet in a road vehicles win every deathmatch and race mode (can be done with a friend) participate in 25 races, buy 25 pieces of clothes (just buy 25 shirts) get the most kills in a 4 player survival (not too hard unless you camp all game, can be done with a friend) get the most kills in a gang attack (also can be done with a friend) shoot cop choppers down (when you get 3 stars start shooting the choppers down with a homing missile) win every race mode at least once (needed for 2 achievements) get a tattoo on every body part, win a race in a custom vehicle (needed for achievement anyways) wheelie for over 2000 feet (I don't remember getting this one, but the best way is to do it at the airport) Activate a 2 person key switch (I did this on the diamond casino heist) Complete the fleeca heist finale, do the aggressive approach on the diamond casino heist and earn 1,000,000 dollars and use the elevator on the diamond casino heist.
   
8. Solid gold, baby!- Do the heist setups and the strangers and freaks, every mission and strangers and freaks I got a gold in (not including prologue) was
   

Franklin and Lamar, Complications, Fatheson, marriage counseling, friend request, chop, the long stretch, daddy's little girl, the good husband, carbon rifles, Mr.Philips, Trevor Philips industries, Deadman walking, did somebody say yoga, by the book, Tow truck, boiler suits, masks, The multitarget assassination, Mr.Richards, Hang ten, Fresh meat, The ballad of Rocco, reuniting the family, Architects plans, doting dad, fire truck, meltdown, stingers, every gauntlet, something sensible, the times come, every Pulling favors, every rampage, shift work, Grassroots Micheal, grassroots the drag, Paparazzo, paparazzo the sex tape, Paparazzo the highness, every vinewood souvenirs expect Al Di Napoli, Exercising demons-franklin, liquidy risk, minute man blues, exercising demons Micheal and Trevor, targeted risk, uncalculated risk, a starlet in vinewood, chasing the truth, the last one, delivering the truth.
I may have missed a few but those were the ones I counted, this can take up to 5-10 hours unless if you already have quite a few on gold. You don't have to do every single challenge at once, so you can try to beat the level as fast a possible, reload it and try to get as many headshots as required for example.

1. Career criminal- This one requires pure fucking grind, let me tell you everything I did for the 100% completion. for hobbies and pastimes, I did Stunt plane time trials, 3 medals in every shooting range challenge, won every race (meaning offroad, street, and sea,) won every sport, got par or under in golf (getting par or under is required,) Bail bonds quarry and farm, every flight school mission, every arms traffic race (required for an achievement anyways,) got a private strip club dance, hunting, yoga and parachuting. Only franklin's strangers and freaks are required, my random events were the ATM robbery, Bike theft 1, construction accident, gang imitation, mugging 1, 2, and 3, security van 3, 4, and 6, sportbike theft, a countryside gang fight, a deal went wrong, and the drunk driver. To find out the spawn points of the random events go to the rockstar social club. All 30 misc were buying a haircut, weapon, any clothing, a car mod, a tattoo, and 5 properties, a vehicle from a website, ride the cable car, use the car wash, go on the rollercoaster, friend activities (meaning call up Micheal, Trevor, or franklin as any of the 3 characters) Visit the cinema, bar, play tennis, darts, golf, go to a strip club, 25 stunt jumps, 8 knife flights, rob a store, purchase stocks, watch T.V. (do at Micheals) complete a booty call (Play as Trevor in a strip club and get one of the girls like the bar to the max and drive them to their apartment) 25 under the bridge, walk and play fetch with chop, get 30 submarine pieces (one of Micheal's strangers and freaks) 30 nuclear waste (it's an achievement anyway) get all 50 spaceship parts and letter scraps (both achievements.) This can take up to 10-20 hours, it's a fucking pain.
   
2. Unnatural selection- Holy shit, this took me so fucking long to do, me and 2 other friends grinded for 10 hours straight and couldn't even beat it. Buy max snacks and body armor and the best map to do is the nuclear silo,
   

there is a certain hiding spot near the stairs and the stairwell that if you hide behind it's super difficult to get shot unless you peak for too long. Use the combat MG, does a lot of damage and can shred through enemy health, be careful at the beginning when getting health and armor not to be out for too long for else you will lose all your health and maybe even die. This took me prolly around 10-30 hours to complete.

1. Above the law- This requires so much god damn grinding that I grinded for 3 days straight, I started grinding hard on level 67 and got to level 100 by doing the 3x event "Target assault race" But by the 3rd day, it was this stupid deathmatch where if you die you can come back to life by an enemy dying or some shit, heists are also good ways of gaining RP, and heist setups too. this took me around 10-20 hours to complete starting from rank 67.
   
2. Numero Uno, the requirements for this achievement is to win a single Bike, Land, Sea, Air, Rally, and GTA-Race, win a Deathmatch, Team-DM, Gang-Attack, and Survival (10 rounds), and win Arm Wrestling, Darts, Parachuting, Golf, Tennis and Shooting Range. So not only do you need to complete the survival bullshit but more on top of it, now everything but a rally race, team deathmatch, and survival you can boost with a friend. But even then this still took me around 10-40 hours to complete due to the fucking survival bullshit.
   

Hey guys, just took a look at the current NVDA calls and the Greeks behind them. This is for the riskier calls this week. This is for 8/28 expiration calls. Here's what I found out (as of close of 8/21):
OTM:
550c: Delta=0.1270 Theta= -0.5182 Gamma=0.0060 Vega=0.1462. Price = Ask: 2.20, Bid:2.08, Median: 2.14. IV:49.59%
This call has a current profit/loss of 12 cents per dollar increase/decrease. This call has a current decrease of 51 cents per day. This call has a current IV of 49.59(50)%, which means half of its value is due to volatility- this is further evident by the Vega being larger than the Delta - a 14 cent increase/decrease per 1% change in volatility. I wouldn't buy this call because, as of now, NVDA would have to increase in price at a rate of $6 per day just to offset the Theta loss and gain 0.12 on the call. The increase in price would likely affect the IV of the call as the week goes on - so a potential of 0.25~0.50 per day of a $5~6 increase. With a current median price of 2.14, you would need a $20-30 share price swing within 3 days to turn an okayish profit. On the fourth day, the call will be worth appx. 0.16 if the share price stagnates. Additionally, the Gamma is under 1 penny - this call has poor acceleration in regards to profit.
It's the same story up to 515c - 515c has a ridiculous Theta of -0.8485: nearly a dollar deduction in value per day.
ATM:
510c: Delta=0.4773 Theta=-0.8658 Gamma=0.0131 Vega=0.2798. Price= Ask:11.00, Bid:10.75, Median:10.88 IV: 43.27%
This call only requires a $2 increase in share price per day to offset the Theta loss. Assuming a huge run up, the Gamma modestly works in your favor at a 0.01 increase in acceleration - but once again, the Vega is a major factor in the price at 43% IV and being over half of Delta value. This is definitely a better purchase than the OTM calls in regards to daily profitability, although at around 5X the price of the 550c. I would buy this call if I anticipated a large run up of $20-30 before the 28th. The reason for this is the Delta value - even if there was a stagnation, you would at least be able to sell this off (maybe) at half of the current purchase price.
505c:
Nearly identical to 510c analysis, but a higher purchase price with a marginally better profit assuming a run up.
500c:
Same. One thing of note is that the Vega is less than 1/2 of the Delta, so this call will be more affected by actual share price as opposed to IV. If I were to do a modest debit spread, this is where the cheapest entry would be as of now for an increase in value in regards to share price.
ITM:
495c: Delta=0.6721 Theta=-0.7768 Gamma=0.0120 Vega=0.2538 IV=42.78%
This call only has a .10 differential between Delta and Theta - meaning that at a $2 increase in share price per day, 42% of the increase is profit (.60×2=1.20; 1.20-.70=.50; .50/1.20=0.4166). For ITM calls, this is the worst performing call. If I were to do a debit spread, this would be my ideal starting point in regards to frugality. In regards to performance/gains, this is the worst ITM buy for a debit spread.
Everything else ITM, the delta is greater than than the Theta - so assuming at least a $1 increase in price per day, you will turn a profit.
Hope this helps some autist on the fence about NVDA calls this week. I did this because I was bored. If my analysis is incorrect, please let me know what is wrong because this is my first time analyzing the Greeks in regards to profit/loss. I would like to improve.
EDIT/TLDR: Any FD 540c and above is going to be mostly based on market volatility for your gains - hope there is a lot of traffic Mon, Tue, and Wed for profit. Anything ITM 485c and more ITM will print at least $0.70 per $1 increase until expiration. Do what you will. This is a casino.

–This is a guide mostly for new players. I'm sure anyone whose been playing this game for a few years knows all this–
I started playing GTA online roughly two months ago and I already have practically everything I wanted, just from grinding the casino heist over and over again.
It can get tedious, sure, but so can everything else in life. You just have to have a positive mindset and think of the reward at the end– all the jets, planes, cars, bikes, clothes etc...! PLUS I personally find the preps a lot more enjoyable than doing sell missions for the bunker or doing import/export over and over.
I'm doing this on mobile, so please excuse any formatting errors :)
Note– doing this with two people is always the most optimal way to make money. Give yourself a huge cut. You deserve it for doing all the preps.
•step one: buy an arcade in Las Santos. Don't buy the one in Paleto Bay because that long drive to the casino will drive you crazy if you do it enough.
•step two: do all your prep works/setups in an invite only session. Trust me, it makes life so much easier when you're not bring chased by an oppressor all the time.
•step three: you can shuffle the contents you get in the vault. –NOTE THAT YOU CAN ONLY DO THIS IF YOU HAVE ALREADY COMPLETED ALL THREE HEIST APPROACHES–. YOU DO NOT WANT CASH. Art is better than gold (in my opinion) purely because it's very easy to do with two people... meaning you can keep a much bigger cut for yourself. Gold is awesome, but I'll talk about that in a bit.
•step three (b): to shuffle the vault contents and try to get something other than cash; simply do the vault contents prep. When you go to the casino and access the security camera feed, find the camera which reveals what's inside the vault. If you get art or gold, perfect! If you get cash, identify the target and wait for Lester to stop talking. Back out of the camera and then call Lester. Cancel the heist BEFORE you leave the casino. Leave the casino and go to your arcade. You will then have to pay another 25,000 to setup the heist again. When you pay, you will notice that a target has already been identified and there's a chance that this target will be different to what you already had. It's random so you may have to do it again. If you get cash again, go outside, cancel the heist again, restart your system, setup the heist again and repeat the previous steps until you get a better target than cash :)
•step four: always choose either aggressive or the Gruppe Sechs approach. Silent and sneaky with randoms is a nightmare abs it's not worth the frustration. Only do silent and sneaky with friends or people with mics
•step five: in order to even unlock the Gruppe Sechs approach, you have to first do the scoping out prep. Go to the sewer tunnel entrance that's closest to the casino. Go down the tunnel and look to your right. You will see a large semi-circular shaped get made of steel poles. Take a picture of it and send it to Lester. This will unlock the group Sechs approach!
•step five (b): always pick the cheapest gunman, the cheapest car guy and the best hacker. The best hacker you can get is AVI and to unlock him, you have to destroy all the signal jammers around the city.
•step six: there are optional preps. Some you can always skip and some you should absolutely do. You should ALWAYS get the level 2 keycards because if not, you will have to deal with that awful hacking minigame involving circles. Save yourself the headache of dealing with it and always do that prep. There's no point in getting the masks for any approach.
•step six (b): If you are doing the aggressive approach, I would highly recommend doing the enhanced body armour prep, Duggan's shipments and the level 2 keycard prep. You can skip everything else that isn't mandatory. The enhanced body armour will make your life so much easier... trust me. Doing Duggan Shipments and getting all 10 will makes the guards extremely easy to kill and will give them weak weapons.
step six (c): for the Gruppe Sechs approach, I would recommend doing the level two keycards and getting the exit disguise. I personally recommend going for the firefighter outfits because they're easier to get OR if you have the time, you can collect 54 playing cards, unlock the high roller outfits and you can use those as an exit disguise instead. They'll be permanently unlocked, meaning you can skip the exit disguise in future if you have it. Those are really the only optional preps you need. Patrol routes might seem important, but it's not.
step seven: when you're finished in the vault, always exit through the staff entrance. This will leave you in a position with the least amount of noose and the best position to escape from and to get to your getaway vehicles.
step eight: get in any vehicle you can find. Doesn't have to be your getaway vehicles. Drive to the police station that's near the casino, climb to the roof and get in the helicopter. It's the fastest way to your destination and to lose the cops. To see a tutorial of how to do this, there a tonne of guides on YouTube :)
step nine: you're done! You just completed the heist. Now you have to wait about 5 to 10 minutes to receive a call or text from Lester, suggesting you to do the heist again. Now, just do all steps again and you can easily make 2-3 million in about three or four hours.
If I'm missing anything, please let me know :)

Before I start, I wanted to say that I've lived in many different countries (brick/concrete buildings) & I never experienced so many problems as I have with US homes. The use of cheap plywood and wood chip, poor or no insulation, flimsy siding and roofing that either blows off in high winds or just rots away after a few year, in addition to high prices have made life a living miserable hell for the average American.
I've lived in US for the past 20 years, mainly in the west coast. I owned a nice peaceful house in Seattle area back in the 90s, things were not this expensive & I had a great mortgage rate until the collapse of housing market happened in 2008, and my mortgage rate went up from 3.25% to 6%, although I paid my mortgage onetime & didn't do anything wrong. Around the same time, my utilities, and taxes went up drastically. The house was built in the 80s and the constant rain & termite damage & carpenter ants had made the wood rot underneath the house, not to mention the leaky roof & many other issues with plumbing, mainly to do with wood-structured houses.
Long story short, my house was peaceful, but because of high taxation, crime, constant rain & cold, & other problems like high utility & mortgage rate, I made a decision to sell the house and move to California.
I rented a two bedroom luxury apartment unit in Orange County around 2015 for $2500/months, but everyday there was an issue with the management, constant noise of performance cars revving their engine, garbage trucks, leaf blowers & landscapers, you name it ....
After a year, I finally got sick & tired of high rent & high taxation in Cali & moved to Nevada, Las Vegas. The apartment I moved in was ok for a few months until a loud motorcyclist moved next door to me. The guy worked all odd hours and he used to love revving his bike at nights, like 12 am, 3 am, 5 am, multiple times, when he commuted back & forth to work every day ... Calling the police, talking to Management or leaving nice notes on his bike, none of them worked, until I was forced to move out.
Everybody said rent a house, apartments are crap. oh how little I knew
So I ended up renting a home (paying $2100) to have more privacy & peace of mind. The house was fine for a few years (except the loud neighbors kids screaming & swearing, dogs barking all day & night, neighbors doing landscaping at 8am Sunday morning, etc etc), but I still put up with it, at least I had few hours of quiet at nights & I used white noise machine to drown out some of the noise. Until one day, out of the blue, the house started making weird noises, mainly coming from the ceiling/attic. It started with one loud knock/snap every morning at 8:30 am, and over a week period, the knocks went from one loud one to 20 knocks a day. Within a month, things became so bad that every time the sun would come up or go down, the roof would pop like 200 times. At nights, I would hear a lot of loud banging/popping noises coming from chimney and the attic. I let the landlord know right away (which they didn't believe me at first), I even paid for pest control (we thought it maybe rats or some other animal in the attic), which no trace of any animal was found in the attic. We brought roofers, inspectors, you name it, no one had any clue what was going on. Things got so bad that I couldn't sleep more than couple of hours every night, waking up with a very loud knock or bang, sometimes every 30 min. I lived in that house for 3.5 years, and didn't hear a beep from the structure of the place, so I have no clue how a building that quiet could go suddenly crazy & it was so frustrating that no one had any clue what was going on . Haunted house?
I was forced to move out of the lease & find another place. I ended up living in another house (1,900/mo) that had severe zapping issues (the floors were made out of cheap laminate & they wouldn't let you ground), so every time I touch a door knob or kitchen appliances or doors or windows, I would get zapped like crazy. I also would hear loud banging from pipes when I took a shower & once every two weeks I would hear loud banging from the roof/siding of the house. But at least the structural noise of this house wasn't constant, like the other property. But a few months to my lease, I discovered that the house is foreclosed and the owner has no intention to fix anything, so I moved to another single family home in a very nice area & gated community (paying $2,300/mo).
Oh boy, renting this new place was probably one of the biggest mistakes I have ever made. I moved there around December last year & the first night I slept there I realized that I have made a giant mistake. There were LOUD snaps/pops once every 30 min all over the house, I mean snaps as loud as gut shots that could be heard overheard all over the house, even in the closet or bathroom, day & night. It wouldn't go away. When the heater ran, the snaps & knocks would become so loud, as if wood is splitting in half on top of your head. No amount of white noise or ear plug could block that noise. I work from home & my clients could hear the loud snaps over the phone & often asked me what is that loud noise in the background and if someone is shooting.
Because I had moved twice in less than 3 month I ended up putting up with it & staying there for 7 month, I have a background in structural/civil engineering, so I thought I could bring inspectors & could figure out a way to minimize the constant loud popping & snapping noises. I talked to PM & they send people who had no idea what was going on, charging the owner thousands of dollars in roof & pest control. I paid out of pocket myself, bringing contractors to screw the ceiling drywall, in case the nails holding the ceiling boards were moving in & out of 2x4s. We tried re-screwing the ceiling in one room & to my surprise it made the popping noises a lot worse & even more often. By then I knew the property has serious foundation & possibly truss uplift issue. I even got covid during this whole mess around January & not sleeping, constant stress & loud noises made my illness prolong for 4 months Dry coughs, severe diarrhea, shortness if breathe, severe joint & muscle pain & high fever. At that time I was so devastated & all I wanted was to sleep & I couldn't I couldn't even go rent a hotel room for a few days, since around March the Gov had shut everything down, so I was stuck inside a big house that I couldn't sleep in any of the rooms.
Eventually when I recovered from covid, I thought I've had enough of homes with severe structural/roof issues & it's time to go back to condo/apartment living. At least, they wouldn't have serious foundation/roof issues, right? I moved to this condo a few months ago & of course it's another wood-structure multi-family home made with flimsy roof & floors. What I didn't know about this building is the fact that there is absolutely NO insulation in between the units, over the floor & walls that I share with other neighbors, NON, whatsoever, so I could hear normal conversation, dogs barking, constant door slamming, banging noises from other units. Also because of covid, some neighbors work from home, sometimes repairing heavy machinery & auto parts! Imagine , only sharing a thin plywood with the unit underneath and the loud obnoxious neighbor next door! Another issue with this condo is the shaky floor, when I walk around my unit or neighbors walk around their own unit, my floor shakes violently & ends up shaking my heavy coach as well as the bed. If I'm sleep & the noise doesn't wake me up right away, the shaking of the floor definitely would. I never thought I could hear this much from units downstairs or on the side, because I had lived in other apartments before, and I had never experienced this level of noise traveling up from downstairs neighbors or the hellish neighbors on the side.
My neighbor on the side works night-shift, I hear her coming home, all odd hours (like 1am or 4am, every day- it's Vegas so people work odd hours at the casino), I hear everything, when she is taking a shower, slamming the hell out of her bathroom door, her dogs barking, walking around her unit, I've tried to reason with them & talk to them to at least not slam doors 10 times an hour day & night, but had no luck. Unreasonable people can't be reasoned with. As a matter of fact, I think they are doubling down on their door slamming & banging noises. My neighbor downstairs also has a habit of slamming every door & drawer & leaves the house at 7 am (every morning) & my floor shakes violently every time she goes in & out of her building, which is 5 or 6 times a day
I have moved 4 times, in less than a year. I lived in single family homes as well as condos that were uninhabitable, because of poor construction & use of cheap plywood, if these structures were built with concrete/brick, none of these issues would have happened. Trust me, I have lived in many concrete/brick structures before, my first apartment in Seattle was an old building made out of brick & you still may hear loud trucks or bikes, but there is no way you would hear your neighbors talking in normal voice, taking a shower, wiping their ass, or closing their door.
This is so depressing that we pay so much in mortgages or rent in America, yet we have to live in such horrible living spaces that are uninhabitable. American houses often have the appearance of having brick walls, however these are just stuck onto the outside of the plywood walls giving a false sense of quality and strength. I understand that using flimsy wood is much cheaper than using stone, brick or concrete, but this is not really evidenced by the prices of houses. Even multi-million dollar new houses in the States are being built from the same cheap plywood, poor insulation, shabby roofing material as cheaper houses. The fact that walls are paper thin and conversations can be heard a room away is nothing strange in American houses. I'm not even gonna mention horrible loud structural problems/noises that no one has any clue how to fix (god help you if something goes wrong inside the attic), rotting walls, water getting into insulation, pest issues, termite damage or leaking roofs.
You will be surprised that the average material cost (cost of wood chip) for a cheap flimsy American home is around $5,000, but since we live in a mafia state, by the time the city, the contractors, & the utility companies are all done with you, you will end up paying hundreds of thousands of dollars, in some case millions of dollars for a home that's gonna end up having too many problems, in just 10 years or less.
Sorry for the long rant, i know this has been a tough year for many with people dying alone of covid, but I'm penniless, sleepless, stressed & exhausted & I can't bare the idea that I have to move again soon , to another wood chip rental, I wonder what kind of a horror is gonna be waiting for me there? costing me thousands of dollars in rent & moving cost.
> I have a masters degree in civil/construction engineering. I used to do cost analysis for different projects & I know the material cost, for just the framing of a house (the cost of timber & plywood) is around $5,000, I have worked with many reputable construction companies all over the NW. All of them used the same cheap crappy plywood, even for the construction of multi-million dollar homes.
> I have owned & rented many homes/condos, town homes/apartments all over US (mainly in NW), new & old. I understand there are individuals who have ulterior motives & are doubling their already doubled profit by enriching themselves off of consumers. But these of the realities of wood-frame residential buildings: the use of weak beams, cheap plywood, poor insulation, flimsy siding and roofing that either blows off in high winds or just rots away after a few year, termite damage, carpenter ants that chew and push out wood by finding crawl spaces underneath your house & you wouldn't even know until half of the house is gone, high expenses regarding pest control (over the years, I've spent at least 20K regarding pest control - rats, squirrels or ants, that will chew the wood & will find a way to get inside your attic/basement again & again) ... Rotting walls, water getting into insulation, moisture damage & mold, termites, leaking roofs, etc, etc. Houses built of plywood and low quality beams will not last all that long. Using staple guns to hold plywood to beams that ends up shabby. Contractors using the cheapest materials to throw up buildings as soon as they can in order to maximize profits. For some reason this shabby building tradition has become the norm in US. Simply using concrete, brick or stone will prevent all these issues related to wood.
> If the price of these flimsy wood-frame buildings were as cheap as the cost of its materials, it wouldn't be that big of a deal. At least, it's not costing consumers an arm & leg. The argument I've heard over & over is that we can't afford to build homes made of concrete or brick in US, but this is a gross lie. Even multi-million dollar homes are built with the same material as the cheap ones & how come other countries can afford to build homes made of concrete & still make money? There are so many newer technologies like building homes with precast concrete, so cost effective because they are modular homes (many parts can be per-manufactured) & are a LOT MORE cost effective & durable
> Loud popping/snapping noises in wood structured homes are a recent phenomenon, which I believe has occurred as a result of rapid changes in the climate. Super dry or humid & hot summers depending on which side of the country you live in, long cold winters, constant rain, moisture & high winds are taking their toll on wood-frame buildings. Three out of the three recent homes I lived in had severe issues to do with constant loud snapping/popping noises coming from the structure of the house, mainly from ceiling joists as well as walls. Never experienced this issue ever before & here is a video that even new constructions are not immune to this disease
Buyers be aware, there is no way to know that a property has this particular issue until you spend a week sleeping & living at the property. I know homes with this problem that were sold & the problem was concealed & the inspector never found anything wrong, because the issue is hidden from naked eyes, check out truss uplift & the effect of rapid changes in the climate on wood-frame buildings. I believe more & more buildings are gonna end up having this issue in the near future. This issue is NOT related to normal expansion/contraction of the wood, these noises are not normal home noises, they are as loud as gunshots, happen all the time, & no one can even figure out what is going on. The building you buy might not have this issue right away, but there is no guarantee that within a few years, you will not end up with this nightmare.
> I have lived in homes as old as 300 yrs old, in Germany & UK, built from brick/store & I tell you they are as solid as a rock. They are warm & cozy during winter & cool & pleasant during summer. As far as sound insulation goes, concrete, brick & stone have high mass density, and they muffle & dampen sound quite a bit, whereas wood echos the sound by reverberating it & transmitting it all over. In fact, stealth plans are mainly made of wood, in order to reduce reflection/emission of radar, so they CANNOT be detected, where as signals would bounce off other solid materials. Knock on a wall made of wood & see how it feels hollow & void, whereas concrete or brick will dampen the echo quite a lot. If you punch a concrete wall, you will end up breaking your hand, where as you can easily punch a hole in a plywood wall & if you live in a multi-family home, you may end up in your neighbors unit.
Many US houses or buildings will not be around, let's say 500 years from now, as a result of a wasteful consumerism system & a mindset of bulldozing the old & buying something new, even if it's cheaper quality. All great civilizations have left structures for us to admire: Rome, Egypt, Greece, Byzantium, Incas, Aztecs etc. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem likely that American civilization will leave any impressive physical structures behind.

Hey everyone, it's me again, that wall of text guy from the overwhelmed or lost post. I wanted to go over a few other things I get asked about a lot in a few more little tips and guides so bear with 'my new to reddit poor formatting skills' at least one more time! Thank you so much for your support on the last post and I hope this one helps you or someone you know too!

[Free to Play - Inventory Management]

First and foremost as a free to play player you have a few limitations versus someone willing to spend BUT ultimately you're not gated or any worse off at all. The most obvious difference versus someone spending money is going to be your inventory size. Luckily, in PSO2 you can send items straight to your storage from the field. The best way to do this, that wasn't clear to everyone on console at least, is you can hold the [Right Trigger] on controller or I believe [Shift] on Keyboard to select multiple items at once.
After you have them all highlighted you can quickly send items to your storage and then sort them out after when you get back to town. Knowing what to pick up helps a lot as well. Unless you really need to feed your MAG and have nothing else OR you just fought a boss that drops a valuable soul or augment, there is little reason to pick up the low rarity items and they can clutter your inventory. Completing Emergency trials will sometimes also award you with low rarity units and weapons which can be discarded for space.
Items you have equipped can not be sent to the storage so you don't have to worry about that. Just quickly highlight the tab (weapons, units, discs, materials, etc.) you'd like to send to storage and send away! I would avoid using the [All] items tab just in case you accidentally send all your healing Mate and Atomizer items to the storage.
I went over this in my other post but just to reiterate here. Unless the item has high value augments on it you generally want to:

• 7-9 star items you can sell at a vendor if you dont need to feed them to your mag or use them to enhance
  
• 10 star weapons you can turn into Excubes or Photon Spheres if you need them more
  
• 5x 10 star units you can turn into a Photon Sphere
  
• 3x 12 star weapons you can turn into Lambda Grinders
  

All of this can be done at the [Swap Shop] which can be found in your menu under the shopping cart [Store] and then selecting [Swap Shop]. The actual store stand is found south of the concert area in the Shopping Plaza (the Funporium is found here too).
When I sort my inventory I try to leave at least one Photon Booster, Unique Weapon Badge and Grinder in my inventory because you will almost certainly get one in the mission almost immediately and it helps me plan how much space I have better.

[Free to Play - Maxing the Classes]

Another limitation on Free to Play players is you only have one MAG. This can make it feel awkward to level all the classes to max level for those sweet sweet title bonuses when you're a Force with a 200 Melee MAG.
Don't worry too much! You have 3 characters made (because you want those extra skill reset passes, right?!) and each one of them has a MAG. This next part takes a little bit of pre planning and a little more effort up front but the payoff is worth it.
You're going to take the classes you want to play and designate and level those classes with that one character by MAG stat. Something like this:
Melee MAG Character:

• Hunter
• Fighter
• Bouncer
• Braver - Katana Build
• Techter - Wand Smack
• Summoner - S Switch

Ranged MAG Character:

• Gunner
• Ranger
• Braver - Bow Build

Technique MAG Character

• Force
• Summoner
• Techter - Spells (Highly recommend Wand though)

You can also make a Dex MAG instead for Bouncer and Braver and use one of those classes as the sub for any other class.
Any class you hit 75 on gives permanent bonuses to all other characters on your "account" and playing in this way you dont end up with any weird instances like I said before where you have a 200 Melee MAG on your Force. You only need to level Braver and Techter once to 75, just pick which playstyle you like (or level Braver twice so you can Bow or Katana if you like!).
It might seem like a lot of work at first juggling 3 characters BUT when you hit level 50 on all 3 characters you'll be making some serious meseta every week by completing the Daily and Weekly ARKS Missions and Yerkses turn-ins. In fact, even if you are Premium, I recommend doing this for the meseta anyways and to my understanding you'll later get extra chances at Tokyo Gold and Silver keys by having multiple characters also. Maybe one of our JP big brothers or sisters can confirm that?!

[Free to Play - Personal Shop and Trading]

This is what I get asked about the most. "How am I supposed to make meseta when I can't sell items on the [Personal Shop]?" No worries friends! You CAN sell items on the [Personal Shop] Here's how!
You need a consumable item called the Personal Shop (3 day) Pass which will let you, crazily enough, use the personal shop for 3 days.
The Pass can obtained from FUN scratch tickets which can seem frustrating at first but as you get higher in levels and 10 star weapons become more common it will be more of an afterthought.
Upstairs in the northern area of the Shopping Plaza (when facing the Casino exit turn left up the stairs) is a set of Badge and Exchange Vendors lit by a red billboard light. You're looking for the vendor 2nd from the left, the Excube Exchange vendor. For 2 Excubes you can get a FUN ticket which gives you 1000 FUN points. You then use those 1000 points for 10 FUN scratch tickets until you get a Personal Shop pass.
This is also where you get 250% Rarity Boosts for 6 Excubes (dont worry about these until 75) and 75% Experience boosts (for when you inevitably run out of free ones). You can have an Experience boost, Rarity boost, Meseta Boost, Triboost and Ex Triboost active at once.
Any extra passes you get just store for when you need them. In fact, if you don't have anything stockpiled to sell yet or 1 item that you know will sell for a lot, I would wait to use the ticket until you do.
Again, you can get Excubes en masse from [Swap Shop]ing 10 star weapons into them.
Once you have one you can do some tricks with friends like 'trading' meseta by selling a Monomate for millions of Meseta. You are going to eat the meseta tax but it's better than nothing! In fact you can use this to get 13 star weapons over to your friends too by having them do the Monomate trick for the amount you want to sell the weapon for (don't put it up for 1000 meseta unless you are okay with the possibility of someone else buying it) and then you put up the weapon you want to give them and they buy it with the Meseta you just gave them which gets sent right back to you. Again you will eat the tax on it, but what's a few taxes between friends?!
For those that don't like taxes between friends, if one of you are premium and you're trying to give your non premium friend some items or such, you can go to the [Funporium] near the [Swap Shop] south of the concert area in the Shopping Plaza and for 3000 FUN points (6 Excubes) you can get a [PRE Box]. A [PRE Box] is basically a gift box and to use it you go to your friends [Personal Quarters]. Do this by pushing [Back] button on Xbox or [End] key on keyboard by default to go to your own room and to visit someone else's find their name on your Friends List, Alliance List or Nearby Characters List and select their name then [Communications] then [Visit Personal Quarters].
Now go to your friends Personal Quarters control panel, and like it's your room, go to [Place Furniture]. If your friends room is maxed out for furniture limit they will have to pick something up so you can place. THIS NEXT PART IS IMPORTANT Once you place the box it immediately asks you in a new menu if you want to [Place an Item] or [Place Meseta] I believe. If you back out now or place the wrong thing you will place an empty box or wrong item in their room and lose that 3000 FUN, so go slow.

[Free to Play - Generating Star Gems]

I know everyone has 3 characters made already (right?! Skill resets everyone, do itttt!) and because you do there's something you can do that seems a little tedious at first but becomes less so later when you're logging your character for Daily ARKS missions anyway. Even if your other characters are Level 1 though, they can still earn you Star Gems daily.
Wearing an AC Scratch Ticket Outfit will generate 10 star gems from your costume, one time, after wearing it for 22 hours including logged off time. To acquire them, go to [Items] then select your costume and hit [Acquire Star Gems]. You can tell if your costume will provide star gems if it has a long bar across the information panel for it that ends in a Rainbow Gem. This tracks the progress of how close you are to being able to claim star gems and when full and ready, will have a check mark on the diamond.
If you do this on all 3 of your characters you are earning 30 Star Gems a day, not counting daily log in bonuses. This helps a lot with Star Gem purchases you may want from fresh finds after you run out of your bulk of them from completing the story.
I know fashion is the true end game of PSO2 so if you don't want to do so on your main then you don't have to, I don't. That being said I do so on both my alts which nets me 20 Star Gems a day.
Now that we are earning at least 600 star gems a month, I want to take a moment to talk about the material storage.
I can't speak enough about this thing, it is amazing. If I could make a recommendation I would use story Star Gems to get the Material Storage and then use the costume Star Gems to repurchase it every 30 days for 300 star gems.
The Material Storage holds all your materials like harvests, grinders, drops, quest items, monster parts, etc. and at 2500 max limit space it is hefty.
But wait, there's more! Items automatically go to the material storage if they are capable of being placed there AND you do not have to pull items out of material storage to use them. That means no pulling out grinders and spheres to enhance items, no looking for harvest items in your storage to make rings, no looking for that monster part to hand a quest in.
I use a male and a male cast for my alt characters as the male costumes are generally much cheaper to purchase. I usually find an outfit for about 100,000 meseta, just the ugliest, cheapest thing I can find, and then put it back up the next day on the player shop. If it sells great and if not I lower the price until it does and that's why I do dailies on multiple characters.
I recommend in addition to doing the Daily client orders with the blue arrows, also grab the the exploration and supress a boss dailies. There's usually 2 or 3 of them and they are worth over 100,000 meseta. Even if you dont do them that day they will carry over and eventually your Daily Client Orders will match up with your meseta earning Client Orders.

[Freemium - Minimum Cash for Maximum Stash]

For those that can spend some but can't spend the 1500 AC a month there are some things I personally think are more important than others and I just wanted to go over that here too.
Firstly, inventory space on your main. It costs about $20 to add 50 inventory slots or about $4 for 10. Having a max inventory (~$40) on your main character is pretty sweet as it can be a bummer sometimes stopping to stash constantly.
Secondly, MAGs. Even though you can make it work using the above method for now, it's about $3 for a new MAG or $9 so you can have all 4 on one character which makes feeding them much much easier and you can play every class on your main.
I also would like to take a moment to talk about the content of the 2 packs available for PSO2 NA right now. Right now we have the Ragol Pack and the Sonic Collaboration Pack.
The Ragol Pack is $30, can be purchased multiple times and comes with:

• 1 month premium ($15)
  
• One 12 AC scratch ticket ($22)
  
• 1 Gold Pass (Costs 200sg, unlocks the bottom part of the Mission Pass 'battle pass')
  
• 10 Ragol memories for some PSO flair or you can sell stuff from there that usually works out to about 4mil meseta or so.
  

The Sonic pack, firstly, for some reason doesn't show up, at least in my experience when you search the store for PSO2 or look at the addons for PSO2. If you search the store for Sonic though and look for the one with PSO2 characters on it you should find it just fine.
The Sonic Pack is $60 and can be purchased once and contains:

• 50 Permanent inventory boost ($20)
  
• 1 month Premium ($15)
  
• Mission Gold Pass (Costs 200sg)
  
• 250 Character Storage Space ($40)
  
• 12 AC Scratch ticket ($22)
  
• 5 Ragol Memories for PSO flair
  

And a bunch of less important stuff that's nice to have but not a huge deal like:

• Sonic Suit M
  
• Sonic Suit F
  
• Sonic Hair 1
  
• Sonic Hair 2
  
• Emotes 602: Sonic/Tails
  
• Sonic Knuckles
  
• Sonic Mask
  
• Salon Free Pass
  
• EXP Earned +150% x15
  
• Triboost +125% x10
  
• Grinder x500
  
• Great Enhancement Aid +50% x99
  

I think that about sums it up. If theres anything I missed let me know! And if you made it this far thank you so much for giving it a read and giving me another chance to hopefully help out!
Thank you!~

Before I start, I wanted to say that I've lived in many different countries (brick/concrete buildings) & I never experienced so many problems as I have with US homes. The use of cheap plywood and wood chip, poor or no insulation, flimsy siding and roofing that either blows off in high winds or just rots away after a few year, in addition to high prices have made life a living miserable hell for the average American.
I've lived in US for the past 20 years, mainly in the west coast. I owned a nice peaceful house in Seattle area back in the 90s, things were not this expensive & I had a great mortgage rate until the collapse of housing market happened in 2008, and my mortgage rate went up from 3.25% to 6%, although I paid my mortgage onetime & didn't do anything wrong. Around the same time, my utilities, and taxes went up drastically. The house was built in the 80s and the constant rain & termite damage & carpenter ants had made the wood rot underneath the house, not to mention the leaky roof & many other issues with plumbing, mainly to do with wood-structured houses.
Long story short, my house was peaceful, but because of high taxation, crime, constant rain & cold, & other problems like high utility & mortgage rate, I made a decision to sell the house and move to California.
I rented a two bedroom luxury apartment unit in Orange County around 2015 for $2500/months, but everyday there was an issue with the management, constant noise of performance cars revving their engine, garbage trucks, leaf blowers & landscapers, you name it ....
After a year, I finally got sick & tired of high rent & high taxation in Cali & moved to Nevada, Las Vegas. The apartment I moved in was ok for a few months until a loud motorcyclist moved next door to me. The guy worked all odd hours and he used to love revving his bike at nights, like 12 am, 3 am, 5 am, multiple times, when he commuted back & forth to work every day ... Calling the police, talking to Management or leaving nice notes on his bike, none of them worked, until I was forced to move out.
Everybody said rent a house, apartments are crap. oh how little I knew
So I ended up renting a home (paying $2100) to have more privacy & peace of mind. The house was fine for a few years (except the loud neighbors kids screaming & swearing, dogs barking all day & night, neighbors doing landscaping at 8am Sunday morning, etc etc), but I still put up with it, at least I had few hours of quiet at nights & I used white noise machine to drown out some of the noise. Until one day, out of the blue, the house started making weird noises, mainly coming from the ceiling/attic. It started with one loud knock/snap every morning at 8:30 am, and over a week period, the knocks went from one loud one to 20 knocks a day. Within a month, things became so bad that every time the sun would come up or go down, the roof would pop like 200 times. At nights, I would hear a lot of loud banging/popping noises coming from chimney and the attic. I let the landlord know right away (which they didn't believe me at first), I even paid for pest control (we thought it maybe rats or some other animal in the attic), which no trace of any animal was found in the attic. We brought roofers, inspectors, you name it, no one had any clue what was going on. Things got so bad that I couldn't sleep more than couple of hours every night, waking up with a very loud knock or bang, sometimes every 30 min. I lived in that house for 3.5 years, and didn't hear a beep from the structure of the place, so I have no clue how a building that quiet could go suddenly crazy & it was so frustrating that no one had any clue what was going on . Haunted house?
I was forced to move out of the lease & find another place. I ended up living in another house (1,900/mo) that had severe zapping issues (the floors were made out of cheap laminate & they wouldn't let you ground), so every time I touch a door knob or kitchen appliances or doors or windows, I would get zapped like crazy. I also would hear loud banging from pipes when I took a shower & once every two weeks I would hear loud banging from the roof/siding of the house. But at least the structural noise of this house wasn't constant, like the other property. But a few months to my lease, I discovered that the house is foreclosed and the owner has no intention to fix anything, so I moved to another single family home in a very nice area & gated community (paying $2,300/mo).
Oh boy, renting this new place was probably one of the biggest mistakes I have ever made. I moved there around December last year & the first night I slept there I realized that I have made a giant mistake. There were LOUD snaps/pops once every 30 min all over the house, I mean snaps as loud as gut shots that could be heard overheard all over the house, even in the closet or bathroom, day & night. It wouldn't go away. When the heater ran, the snaps & knocks would become so loud, as if wood is splitting in half on top of your head. No amount of white noise or ear plug could block that noise. I work from home & my clients could hear the loud snaps over the phone & often asked me what is that loud noise in the background and if someone is shooting.
Because I had moved twice in less than 3 month I ended up putting up with it & staying there for 7 month, I have a background in structural/civil engineering, so I thought I could bring inspectors & could figure out a way to minimize the constant loud popping & snapping noises. I talked to PM & they send people who had no idea what was going on, charging the owner thousands of dollars in roof & pest control. I paid out of pocket myself, bringing contractors to screw the ceiling drywall, in case the nails holding the ceiling boards were moving in & out of 2x4s. We tried re-screwing the ceiling in one room & to my surprise it made the popping noises a lot worse & even more often. By then I knew the property has serious foundation & possibly truss uplift issue. I even got covid during this whole mess around January & not sleeping, constant stress & loud noises made my illness prolong for 4 months Dry coughs, severe diarrhea, shortness if breathe, severe joint & muscle pain & high fever. At that time I was so devastated & all I wanted was to sleep & I couldn't I couldn't even go rent a hotel room for a few days, since around March the Gov had shut everything down, so I was stuck inside a big house that I couldn't sleep in any of the rooms.
Eventually when I recovered from covid, I thought I've had enough of homes with severe structural/roof issues & it's time to go back to condo/apartment living. At least, they wouldn't have serious foundation/roof issues, right? I moved to this condo a few months ago & of course it's another wood-structure multi-family home made with flimsy roof & floors. What I didn't know about this building is the fact that there is absolutely NO insulation in between the units, over the floor & walls that I share with other neighbors, NON, whatsoever, so I could hear normal conversation, dogs barking, constant door slamming, banging noises from other units. Also because of covid, some neighbors work from home, sometimes repairing heavy machinery & auto parts! Imagine , only sharing a thin plywood with the unit underneath and the loud obnoxious neighbor next door! Another issue with this condo is the shaky floor, when I walk around my unit or neighbors walk around their own unit, my floor shakes violently & ends up shaking my heavy coach as well as the bed. If I'm sleep & the noise doesn't wake me up right away, the shaking of the floor definitely would. I never thought I could hear this much from units downstairs or on the side, because I had lived in other apartments before, and I had never experienced this level of noise traveling up from downstairs neighbors or the hellish neighbors on the side.
My neighbor on the side works night-shift, I hear her coming home, all odd hours (like 1am or 4am, every day- it's Vegas so people work odd hours at the casino), I hear everything, when she is taking a shower, slamming the hell out of her bathroom door, her dogs barking, walking around her unit, I've tried to reason with them & talk to them to at least not slam doors 10 times an hour day & night, but had no luck. Unreasonable people can't be reasoned with. As a matter of fact, I think they are doubling down on their door slamming & banging noises. My neighbor downstairs also has a habit of slamming every door & drawer & leaves the house at 7 am (every morning) & my floor shakes violently every time she goes in & out of her building, which is 5 or 6 times a day
I have moved 4 times, in less than a year. I lived in single family homes as well as condos that were uninhabitable, because of poor construction & use of cheap plywood, if these structures were built with concrete/brick, none of these issues would have happened. Trust me, I have lived in many concrete/brick structures before, my first apartment in Seattle was an old building made out of brick & you still may hear loud trucks or bikes, but there is no way you would hear your neighbors talking in normal voice, taking a shower, wiping their ass, or closing their door.
This is so depressing that we pay so much in mortgages or rent in America, yet we have to live in such horrible living spaces that are uninhabitable. American houses often have the appearance of having brick walls, however these are just stuck onto the outside of the plywood walls giving a false sense of quality and strength. I understand that using flimsy wood is much cheaper than using stone, brick or concrete, but this is not really evidenced by the prices of houses. Even multi-million dollar new houses in the States are being built from the same cheap plywood, poor insulation, shabby roofing material as cheaper houses. The fact that walls are paper thin and conversations can be heard a room away is nothing strange in American houses. I'm not even gonna mention horrible loud structural problems/noises that no one has any clue how to fix (god help you if something goes wrong inside the attic), rotting walls, water getting into insulation, pest issues, termite damage or leaking roofs.
You will be surprised that the average material cost (cost of wood chip) for a cheap flimsy American home is around $5,000, but since we live in a mafia state, by the time the city, the contractors, & the utility companies are all done with you, you will end up paying hundreds of thousands of dollars, in some case millions of dollars for a home that's gonna end up having too many problems, in just 10 years or less.
Sorry for the long rant, i know this has been a tough year for many with people dying alone of covid, but I'm penniless, sleepless, stressed & exhausted & I can't bare the idea that I have to move again soon , to another wood chip rental, I wonder what kind of a horror is gonna be waiting for me there? costing me thousands of dollars in rent & moving cost.
> I have a masters degree in civil/construction engineering. I used to do cost analysis for different projects & I know the material cost, for just the framing of a house (the cost of timber & plywood) is around $5,000, I have worked with many reputable construction companies all over the NW. All of them used the same cheap crappy plywood, even for the construction of multi-million dollar homes.
> I have owned & rented many homes/condos, town homes/apartments all over US (mainly in NW), new & old. I understand there are individuals who have ulterior motives & are doubling their already doubled profit by enriching themselves off of consumers. But these of the realities of wood-frame residential buildings: the use of weak beams, cheap plywood, poor insulation, flimsy siding and roofing that either blows off in high winds or just rots away after a few year, termite damage, carpenter ants that chew and push out wood by finding crawl spaces underneath your house & you wouldn't even know until half of the house is gone, high expenses regarding pest control (over the years, I've spent at least 20K regarding pest control - rats, squirrels or ants, that will chew the wood & will find a way to get inside your attic/basement again & again) ... Rotting walls, water getting into insulation, moisture damage & mold, termites, leaking roofs, etc, etc. Houses built of plywood and low quality beams will not last all that long. Using staple guns to hold plywood to beams that ends up shabby. Contractors using the cheapest materials to throw up buildings as soon as they can in order to maximize profits. For some reason this shabby building tradition has become the norm in US. Simply using concrete, brick or stone will prevent all these issues related to wood.
> If the price of these flimsy wood-frame buildings were as cheap as the cost of its materials, it wouldn't be that big of a deal. At least, it's not costing consumers an arm & leg. The argument I've heard over & over is that we can't afford to build homes made of concrete or brick in US, but this is a gross lie. Even multi-million dollar homes are built with the same material as the cheap ones & how come other countries can afford to build homes made of concrete & still make money? There are so many newer technologies like building homes with precast concrete, so cost effective because they are modular homes (many parts can be per-manufactured) & are a LOT MORE cost effective & durable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZxskJojRLY
> Loud popping/snapping noises in wood structured homes are a recent phenomenon, which I believe has occurred as a result of rapid changes in the climate. Super dry or humid & hot summers depending on which side of the country you live in, long cold winters, constant rain, moisture & high winds are taking their toll on wood-frame buildings. Three out of the three recent homes I lived in had severe issues to do with constant loud snapping/popping noises coming from the structure of the house, mainly from ceiling joists as well as walls. Never experienced this issue ever before & here is a video that even new constructions are not immune to this disease: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c07aIV-ddR0
Buyers be aware, there is no way to know that a property has this particular issue until you spend a week sleeping & living at the property. I know homes with this problem that were sold & the problem was concealed & the inspector never found anything wrong, because the issue is hidden from naked eyes, check out truss uplift & the effect of rapid changes in the climate on wood-frame buildings. I believe more & more buildings are gonna end up having this issue in the near future. This issue is NOT related to normal expansion/contraction of the wood, these noises are not normal home noises, they are as loud as gunshots, happen all the time, & no one can even figure out what is going on. The building you buy might not have this issue right away, but there is no guarantee that within a few years, you will not end up with this nightmare.
> I have lived in homes as old as 300 yrs old, in Germany & UK, built from brick/store & I tell you they are as solid as a rock. They are warm & cozy during winter & cool & pleasant during summer. As far as sound insulation goes, concrete, brick & stone have high mass density, and they muffle & dampen sound quite a bit, whereas wood echos the sound by reverberating it & transmitting it all over. In fact, stealth plans are mainly made of wood, in order to reduce reflection/emission of radar, so they CANNOT be detected, where as signals would bounce off other solid materials. Knock on a wall made of wood & see how it feels hollow & void, whereas concrete or brick will dampen the echo quite a lot. If you punch a concrete wall, you will end up breaking your hand, where as you can easily punch a hole in a plywood wall & if you live in a multi-family home, you may end up in your neighbors unit.
Many US houses or buildings will not be around, let's say 500 years from now, as a result of a wasteful consumerism system & a mindset of bulldozing the old & buying something new, even if it's cheaper quality. All great civilizations have left structures for us to admire: Rome, Egypt, Greece, Byzantium, Incas, Aztecs etc. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem likely that American civilization will leave any impressive physical structures behind.

GTA 5 Online Premium Edition: What's in Epic Games Store Criminal Enterprise Starter Pack?

Get yourself everything you „Starter Pack“ contains, you get properties, vehicles, weapons and clothes for free in a worth of $9.000.000 GTA Dollars. You also get extra $1.000.000 in cash, but this could take up to 7-10 days to get it. All the sales you have will be shown with a dollar sign! Here’s what and how:
For property and vehicles open your phone (arrow key up) and go to Internet (arrow key done>enter)
Property: (In the internet go to „Money and Services“)
Maze Bank West Executive Office (on Dynasty 8)
Paleto Forest Gunrunning Bunker (on Maze Bank Foreclosure)
Great Chaparral Biker Clubhouse (on Maze Bank Foreclosure)
>Senora Desert Counterfeit Cash Factory (if you own the clubhouse, go to the computer there and unlock this property)
1561 San Vitas Street Apartment (on Dynasty 8)
1337 Exceptionalists Way 10 Car Garage (on Dynasty 8)
Vehicles (in the internet go to „Travel and Transport“)
Enus Huntley S, Invetero Coquette Classic, Grotti Turismo R, Bravado Banshee, Enus Windsor, (Annis Elegy RH8) (on Legendary Motorsports click „Sort by Price“ once)
Western Zombie Chopper, Obey Omnis, Pegassi Vortex (on „SouthernSanAndreasSuperAuto.com“ click „Sort by Price“ once)
Frogger (on Elitas Travel click „Sort by Price“ once) you can request any aircraft vehicle you own by calling Pegasus on your phone (you can do that in your contacts). The helicopter are an essential vehicle in the game to travel from A to B
Dune FAV (on Warstock click "Sort by Price" once)
Weapons, Clothing & Tattoos (not on your phone but on the map)
Compact Grenade Launcher, Marksman Rifle, Compact Rife are avaliable at every Ammu Nation Gun Shop (Pistole sign at the map)
(Stunt Race & Import / Export Outfits, Biker Tattoos)

Some more tipps:

Solo Public Lobby: really worth it if you wan’t a online session for your own/friends and don’t want to be killed by other players randomly. Press ESC + CONTROL and look up for „resmon“ in your search line. You will find a sort of Task Manager. Find GTA5.exe > right click > hold on the process > wait for like 7sec > right click > continue the process. Now all players will be kicked.
How to turn off your car radio: Yes, I have been asked about this. If you want to change your radio channel or turn your radio off press Q.
What weapons to use as a beginner: Buy the Mikro SMG to shoot out of your car and the Special Carabine to fight NPCs and equip them unconditionally with a silencer and an extended clip as quick as possible. It costs about $40.000 with extensions each. The Homing Rocket Launcher ($75.000) is also an important investment if you need to shoot down helicopters. Also buy Sticky Bombs, they will be really useful.
Learn to fly! On the map is a plane sign, which is a flying school. Flying is a really important part in the game and you have to get known with the controlls of it. You also get a bonus of $230.000 Cash if you complete all flying lessons with a gold medal.
How do I find people to play heists with: If you have no friends who want to play GTA with you there are of course other opportunities. On specific subreddits like HeistTeams or gtafriends you will find people who are solo players too and need heist members. There are also GTA community discord servers like the one from the youtuber TGG: here. You will never be alone!
Weekly Discounts/Bonuses: really worth to look for that. It changes every Thursday at 10 CET. On gtaonline it will be pinned on top of the subreddit. There may be huge sales for cool vehicles and properties (for example 40% off). Sometimes there are double or triple $ and RP events, which is extreme worth grinding. Like for this week 2x for bunker sell (during an 2x money event on the stock of your business the value is already doubled!). Do the Time Trial which you can do once a week to get a $100.000 each. How to drive these races "the right way" and where to find them can you look up on the pinned discount posts on gtaonline.
Lucky Wheel: In the casino you can spin the Lucky Wheel every 24h. Prices are Money, RP, sales, clothes and the podium car. The podium car changes with the Weekly Discounts every Thursday and you can with the car every week (Tipp: When it says S to spin the wheel count to 1,2 ,3 in your head to have a higher chancer to get the car).
Best investments: For absolute beginners for sure invest in the cheapest High End Apartment Del Perro Heights Apartment 7 ($200.000) on the Dynasty 8 website where you get the opportunity to play your first heists. Play the Fleeca Job then (about $80.000 earnings), where you unlock the sale for a Kuruma ($525.000) which is a must have car for beginners. It’s fully armored and you can literally do every missoins with it because the NPC’s can’t shoot you in there. It can be bought on SouthernSanAndreasAutos**.com.** And if you want to upgrade your helicopter get the Buzzard Attack Chopper for $1.750.000 with machine guns and the essential missiles. In my opinion the best investment you can make to grind for money. It can be requested everywhere for free instead of $25.000 if you are registered as CEO (open shortcut menu with M>SecuroServ>CEO Vehicles>Buzzard).
Fast Money: There are plenty of guides on Reddit how to make quick cash in grinding. (Money Grinding) My recommendation: Play Heists with friends who are high level. If you are alone or new with your friends go for Contact Missions (How: ESC >Online>Jobs>Rockstar Created> Missions) Every Contact Mission gives you about $10.000-15.000. The longer you play a Contact Mission, the more money you will get. But on the long run it's more worth it to play the job as quick as possible (in 4-6min $115.000/h and remember with double $ and RP event $230.000/h) Each player in the mission increases the payout by 10%, so best is to play in a full round. (Payouts and other questions for Contact Missions here).

Businesses:

There are plenty of businesses you can run. You own the Bunker business and one M(otorcycle)C(lub) Business . Go to the location of your business, do the setup missions and refill your supplies regualary. In each of this businesses you can improve your production by buying equipment upgrades and staff upgrades (first buy the cheaper staff upgrade then equiment upgrade). You can also buy security upgrades because your business will be raided by NPCs (like Police) and trough this you can minimize the probability of raids. The security upgrades doesn't affect your production! (but in my opinion not really worth it because you still can be raided). You can steal or buy supplies. If you didn't bought the upgrades yet, steal the supplies. If you have all upgrades who improve the production of your business buy the supplies for $75.000. The businesses stock will fill in a certain time, but you have to be online in the game! If you have good stock you can sell your products (invite friends for that). Always sell to the best priced location. (Los Santos most of the time) And go in a public solo session, you don't want your products destroyed by some idiot, random player. If your vehicle gets destroyed or you was not able to deliver everything you will lose money. Business is easy money for doing close to nothing + during the time your business fills up you can grind on other Missions or the Special Cargo Crate Missions, whatever you like. Choosing the right location for you business is very important! Look that your businesses are as close together as possible. You will drive crazy going 7 miles all the way up on the map just to look how many supplies you have left. Here's a map for all properties there are, so you can choose the best locations for yourself!
Don’t buy the nightclub business as a beginner! You will need the other businesses first to play missions in the nightclub + to get in running you need to pay millions for the 5 mechanics who will farm the money for you.
You can switch between beeing a CEO or MC President: Open your shortcut menu with M. .To retire as a CEO go to SecuroServ>Retire. To retire as a MC President go to Motorcycle Club>Disband MC.
You can add somebody to your CEO Organization or your Motorcycle Club: to add someone as CEO go to SecuroServ>Hire associates and select who you want to add. As a MC President go to Motorcycle Club>Find prospects and select who want to add. With this function your friends can help you do to deliver your products.
Bunker Business: In the bunker you can decide between Manufacturing, Research or both. For money do Manufacturing only. On Research you don't get money, you will unlock weapon upgrades for particular vehicles which also costs money to be customized on your vehicle (Research takes a lot of time and their 51 different weapon upgrades which takes about 7 days if you run it non stop) Doing both may sound smart, but it takes twice as much of the time it would normally take. So doing both is not worth it. If you sell solo sell your stock at $125.000 with no upgrades and at $175.000 with upgrades for one vehicle. For higher stocks invite friends to help you. If you're interested in the number of production, supplies and time it takes: Read it up here.
MC Business (Motor Club Business): Your sort of command center for all the businesses will be your clubhouse. The best clubhouse is the Grand Chapparal Clubhouse. It's the cheapest and will be located near your businesses. You can own 5 different MC Businesses ($/hr with staff- and equipement upgrade + recommended location): Cocaine Lockup in Alamo Sea ($46.500/hr); Methamphetamine Lab in Grand Senora Desert ($29.500/hour); Counterfeit Cash Factory in Grand Senora Desert ($27.000/hr); Weed Farm in San Chianski Mountain Range ($24.000/hr); Document Forgery Office in Grapeseed ($12.000/hr). If you're interested in the number of production, supplies and time it takes: Read it up here and the "nerd" version here.
Special Cargo Missions: In your CEO Office which is directly located next to your High-End apartment (if you bought the one for 200k) you can grind the Special Cargo Missions. You have to buy a warehouse and source crates. There are three kinds of warehouses: small, medium and large warehouses. The bigger it gets, the more money will it costs but the more you can store in there. You can choose between stealing 1, 2 or 3 crates. Always go for 3 crates. It is the expensivst but you will get the most money out of it in the long run. There is a 5min cooldown between every mission, so people buy a second warehouse to instantly start the next mission when they arrived at the Office (Yes, it's annoys to always wait). Cheapest small warehouse $250.000 (16 crates space, full stock sale $144.000 profit), cheapest medium ware house $880.000 (42 crates space, full stock sale $483,000 ) and cheapest large warehouse $1.900.000 (111 crates space, full stock sale $1,554,000 ). (table of profits and time it needs to fill) If you do solo, sell every 9 crates stored to get only 1 vehicle!
Import/Export Business: A CEO Mission (on your Office Computer "Vehicle Cargo"), where you steal cars and source them into a garage. The cheapest garage is $1.500.000 and you can buy in on your Office Computer. There are three catergories of cars: Standard, Mid- and Toprange. The top range cars are the one you want to sell. You can always tune them up for $20.000 and for delivering you get $100.000 which means about $80.000 Profit if you not damage the car. (Sometimes you will be attacked while you steal/deliver the car) There is an algorithm that if you have 10 Standard- and 10 Midrange cars in your garage, you will only get Toprange cars. Always tune them up before you sell and never sell Standard or Midrange cars except you really need the money. You always want to go for the Toprange cars to get the most money out.

Final word

These are just some recommendations in how the game works and what variations there are to make fast money. You can still choose your business locations for yourself, but I recommended the best and effectivst (in my opinion). The most important part is to have fun in playing the game. There are pretty good guides on Reddit and also on Youtube. It’s really worth reading/watching these if you want money. The Guides on Reddit are much more precise. But keep in mind, you have to invest plenty of time to get rich. It’s not done tomorrow.
And please, don’t be an asshole in the lobbies. Be a friendly and nice player and do not kill players and destroy their cargos. Every GTA Player hates this kind of people and remember, high level players are stronger and will go for revenge. They will target the shit out of you until you just want to quit the game.
Have fun playing the game and I hope I could help some new players with my information!
I’m sure if there are anymore questions Reddit will help you.
Here are useful links to other guides on Youtube or Reddit
Please send, maybe better, Youtube and Reddit Guides under this post so I can add the links, thanks. I'm open for improvement on this guide!
Youtube Guides:
(Playlist) GTA Online Solo Beginner Guide - TGG
My personal playlist which helped me a lot
Bunker Beginner Guide
MC Business Beginner Guide
Best Business Guide
Best and Worst Business locations - TheProfessional
Reddit Guides:
GTA Online Mega Guide and Weekly Simple Question Thread - May 14, 2020 <-- is the best with the most information about grinding and different variations to get fast money.
The complete CEO/MC solo Guide
Special Crate Guide
Offices, Warehouses & Crate Missions: CEO FAQ & Guide Index
Thanks for reading.