"Facebook parenting for troubled teen"

I planned on doing a separate long, detailed post on parent-off-spring responsibilities since I come from a troubled background myself and discuss the mistakes my parents made with me and vice versa. How I was a troubled kid with anti-social problems, but that won't be in this post.

This post is my response to the sentiments put forward by the parents in the above video. I just happened to be reading the paper today and found this story before looking it up online.

I'm mostly in favor of the father's points. I think his daughter needed to learn all the luxuries and income does not come without giving in return. And posting personal family matters online can have consequences which is why the father did the right thing by putting something of his online.

What goes around comes around. You slander somebody in front of so many people, you must face the consequences of it coming back at you.

What I did disagree with was him shooting up the laptop. Instead of shooting up an expensive piece of machinery and wasting resources, he should have publicly given it to someone who really needed it. He should have donated it to a school for poor children or something of that sort.

Additionally I think he should have also demonstrated to her how to do her chores on video to prove to her and the world how easy they are. This would have given his message the right meaning.

The father also was a bit too hard on his daughter. Just because he happened to leave his home, do two jobs, high school and collage (assuming he's not exaggerating or even making all this up) doesn't mean he should suddenly expect the same form his daughter, unless of course he plans on doing sending his daughter to live the same life he did at her age. I doubt most teenagers live the way he did. It's unfair for him to expect his daughter to suddenly be the same.

All he should have done was deprive her of her luxuries unless she earned them.

The shooting part might have been more dramatic and get more public attention to the video and the message in it, but it certainly gave a lot of supporters the wrong message.

What appears to be this trigger happy dad is what I mean:


The point wasn't to shoot up your daughter's favorite things, the point was to teach your kids a lesson depending on the situation. And in her situation I might have used a more basic approach by telling her that no chores means no luxuries.

But again, I'm no one to judge. These are my two cents on that whole video and drama. I'll cover more of my opinion on parent-off-spring relations and responsibilities in another post.

Don't sell heavy items on Amazon

If you are a seller on any of Amazon's branches, be careful of what you sell. Selling more heavy items like large books or DVD box sets could cost you a lot in shipping.

This is despite that Amazon giving you a rough estimate on how much the shipment will cost. I recently sold a six disc box set of Planet of the Apes on DVD and the shipping cost me over ten dollars of what the estimate of what Amazon gave.

I obviously tried to pursue it and when I managed to get a caller to contact me, he tried to justify the whole thing by claiming Amazon does not give the exact amount. I asked for an email or phone number to be able to pursue this. He ended up giving me an email that was not valid.

I couldn't bother pursuing the whole thing all over again. But it taught me a lesson not to sell anything large or heavy that will cost far more than the shipping price enlisted by Amazon. All sellers need to take this into consideration if they're planning on making their Amazon sales profitable.