Shellee, normally a newb would not merit such dedicated threads, and so it's as warning to your atittude and manner that you should take a thread (or two or three now?) begun in your honour...
Sarettah is (kindly and gently) baiting you, as you probably are aware, and the pressure you feel to respond shows the compulsion you have to justify yourself that has prompted you to write and post things you shouldn't, at least until you begin understanding the end of the pool you're wading in...
Rhetorical's success came at a time when such types of businesses didn't need the corporate structure Microsoft evolved after years of existence and which it probably didn't even have when you had your thousands of shares (and why the hell would you ever sell those, I wonder?). I get the feeling you just responded the way you did to drop your microsoft mention...
Besides, 150K is hardly competition for Microsoft ventures, even back then.
If you can make 600k in your sleep because you wisely invested in microsoft a few decades ago doesn't qualify you as a person who knows how to make money; in fact, it's just maybe the opposite.
Statements like "I am sorry but I did not catch the name of the adult company that you run?" show you for an arrogant, brick&mortared old-school, pre-web business person who really has no notion of internet business reality.
Rhetorical doesn't need to have an "adult company" to be wise enough to give you advice; an affiliate with a little time spent in the trenches (no offense there, Rhet) will have more authority than you will ever have with an attitude like the one you show here.
I met a corporate rep from Yahoo who came to Internext with four suits and a headful of standard concepts about business in Florida one year. The suit lasted about an hour, his concepts lasted much less than that; he sat and listened like a kindergarten kid, to his credit, for hours, while we told him about the world we do business in.
There's a message here, Shellee: take it easy, you're a kid around here... if you can aknowledge that the guff who *only* pulls in a couple thousand a month has more experience and knowledge to impart than you do with your 600k a night riff, you'll be okay.
But if you start whipping out your 20,000 shares in microsoft and posting blindly into this universe as if it's the same as any other corporate/industrial ghetto that could care less about whether it's founded on carpet samples or styrofoam cups, you will stick out like the sore thumb you're sure to become from constantly hammering away at things you can't possibly grasp until the light is turned on and you actually see what's around you.
That will only come in time, and from circulating along these tunnels that are dug beneath the traditional world business culture from which you're coming.
Understand this: because adult business is what it is in the eyes of the world, you are welcome here, completely and without prejudice. We are open. But learn this place and how it functions, or rather how it exists in more of a individualistic state of formlessness, before you try to impose the structured, standard world's concepts upon it.
So, welcome aboard, take it mellow... and post away if there's anything you'd like to know about. We're all here
