S07.E14: Hatch Baby, Village Scholarships, Fixed, Beard King

[Tara Ariano]

In case you missed it, here's the Previously.TV post on the episode!

 

We'll Never Be Royals (On Shark Tank)
Everybody's like Uber, beard kings, apps fighting parking tickets, scholarships, baby scales, Lori with a gold crown -- we don't care, we aren't caught up in this show that aired.

[NoThyme]

Put the baby in a big bowl and weigh her on your 30.00 dry ingredients scale. Scales that measure dry ingredients for baking are very sensitive. So much cheaper.

[DocTerv]

Here's a thought for new parents. Buy a $50 baby scale accurate to 0.1 oz. Weigh baby. Feed baby. Weigh baby again. Subtract. Plug result into health app that's already on your cell phone. Now send me half of what you saved not buying the Hatch scale. Oh and UBER!!! UBER!!!

[Jersey Guy 87]

The crowd-sourced college tuition thing was bizarre.  The only people who are going to contribute to your kid's college fund are relatives.  And you can ask them directly.  You don't need a web site skimming 8% off the top.

 

It wouldn't surprise me at all if the baby changing pad with a scale take off - hyper competitive parents with too much money will buy just about anything to show what better parents they are.

 

I have a beard, I trim it daily.  I clean the sink when I'm done.  Nobody seems to have a problem.

[ddawn23]

Despite what's been said upthread, there are legitimate, non-snowflake reasons for parents to keep a close watch of their baby's weight.  Breastfeeding doesn't come naturally to every baby and mother, and it can be very hard to tell if the baby got a full meal or just a few drops.  Babies can have non-breastfeeding related weight issues, too.  My brother and his wife had breastfeeding issues with their first kid which caused a lot of stress and anxiety.  So when their second was having weight issues they went out and bought a baby scale.  They're like $45.  The only discernible difference between a regular baby scale and the Hatch changing pad is the app connectivity.  I don't know many people for whom app connectivity is worth $255.

 

Thumbs down on the Hatch changing pad/baby scale.  It's solving a problem that has already been solved and for six times the price.

[ae2]

As annoying as he can be, Chris Sacca nailed it when he tried explaining that the Village Scholarship company was doing too much. If they billed themselves only as connecting donors with suitable recipients I think they would have garnered interest.

 

E.g., local small business wants to give $1000 to help a minority single mother go to community college, they go into the app and insert some parameters. The fund is matched with a scholarship seeker matching those parameters. Village Scholarship handles the distribution of the scholarship fund so it's practically 0 effort for both the giver and receiver.

 

Tacking on the crowd funding, friends and family stuff was never going to fly.

[columbot]

Oh man, I seriously thought that Sacca WAS the GoPro guy just from how much he was shilling his investments. ..

[needschocolate]

If you can't get your man to clean up after he trims his beard, you probably can't get him to wear a giant bib and make sure all the trimmings go into the garbage.  However, those Snuggly people made a ton of money because people bought them as joke gifts, I could see Beard King doing the same thing - although, the 80k or whatever they have already sold might be all the joke buyers out there and it may already be on its way out.

 

Wouldn't it be cheaper to make a smaller scale that could weigh breasts before and after feedings? Then you wouldn't have to worry about waking the baby by putting them on the scale. I am joking, but I think a boob scale is as important as a $300 changing pad scale (when you can get a baby scale and a changing pad for about 1/5 the price).

 

Wouldn't it be better to have an app where you take a picture of the "confusing" parking restriction sign and the app tells you whether you can park there and what time you need to be back, instead of an app that fights your tickets?

 

I know a guy who used to get a lot of tickets.  Then he got an app that he can use to pay the parking meter, including adding to the meter from wherever he is, without having physically go to he meter. He still has to set an alarm to let him know when the meter is up, but his ticket count has gone way down.

 

ETA: I am spending far too much time thinking about it, but how do you account for a dirty diaper or a clothing change? Yes, I am sure you can remove the diaper/clothing and weigh it, then subtract to get the difference; the scale is very sensitive so any clothing change would skew the numbers, amount of pee or poop varies every diaper change. If you consider all the permutations and combinations, it can make your head ache. How has humankind lived without this scale for all these thousands of years?

 

If you are weighing to determine the amount of breast milk your baby drank, then you just weight the baby before and after feeding, without changing clothes or diapers.  If the baby wets/poops during the feeding, it doesn't matter, because the weight of the pee/poop in the diaper is the same as weight of it when it was still in the bladder/colon.

Edited January 22, 2016 by needschocolate

[theatremouse]

Wouldn't it be better to have an app where you take a picture of the "confusing" parking restriction sign and the app tells you whether you can park there and what time you need to be back, instead of an app that fights your tickets?

I have this hazy memory of one city that was actually developing its own app specifically for this, or basically, people complained about how confusing the multiple cascading signs were so they were replacing the confusing signs with one with a QR code on it and then you just zap it from the city app and it returns a giant red X if you can't currently park there, a green check if you can (and if you can but only until X o'clock or something) it'd say that too.

I remember being sort of surprised they'd be willing to bother trying to make it easier for constituents since I assume at least part of the goal was to confuse people and make more revenue that way, but from a transparency/serving the public perspective being impressed at the initiative.

Anyway, when dude used the same type of 4-signs-in-one as his example for the scenarios in which people get tickets he'd get them out of, it immediately made me think of the article. Can't find it now of course.

(or possibly the whole thing was a remarkably realistic dream)

Edited January 22, 2016 by theatremouse

[Auntie Anxiety]

 

If the baby wets/poops during the feeding, it doesn't matter, because the weight of the pee/poop in the diaper is the same as weight of it when it was still in the bladder/colon.

I don't know if that is true.  Disposable diapers seem a lot heavier when they are wet than when they are first put on.  But it's been a long time since I changed a baby so.....

[designing1]

 

 

QUOTE

If the baby wets/poops during the feeding, it doesn't matter, because the weight of the pee/poop in the diaper is the same as weight of it when it was still in the bladder/colon.

I don't know if that is true.  Disposable diapers seem a lot heavier when they are wet than when they are first put on.  But it's been a long time since I changed a baby so.....

Well, yes, but that weight was in the baby pre-pee/poop.

[margol29]

Why would I donate to your college fund when I had to pay my own student loans back. Get out there and apply for grants and scholarships. Get a job and work your way through college. Sheesh!!!

[bilgistic]

As an old person of 41, I guess I don't really understand this [fill-in-the-blank]-funding thing. I have only ever contributed to one fund, and that was to help a local indie band make an album, of which I would get a copy. (They didn't make their fund goal, but released the album anyway and I still bought it direct from them.) Something about kids shilling for tuition that way is weird to me, but then, I worked through school way back in the 1990s and still have a mountain of federal loans I'll never be done paying off.

[starri]

I've given to a few Kickstarter projects, probably most notably Veronica Mars and MST3K, a few web series, a niche videogame, and a documentary.  Some of that stuff wouldn't happen without crowdfunding, and I'm happy to kick in a few bucks.

 

But then there was something I ran across the other day where a young couple from Southern California wanting to raise $5000 in order to fornicate (their phrasing) in all 50 states.  Now, it's great to have goals, but as a slightly younger Old (not quite 38), it seems to me that if you really needed five grand, perhaps getting a job and earning it might be a better option.

[bilgistic]

Yeah, that just pisses me off.

If you want to bike, hike, backpack or whatever the hell across whatever, godspeed and may the wind be at your back. Plenty of people did it before you and didn't ask anyone for a cent.

And some of them even wrote books about it!

[Amarsir]

Blame the potato salad.

A guy puts "potato salad" as his kickstarter project as a joke. People pledge $55,000 as a joke. He gets famous and receives a bunch of money. Lots of new people think they can get easy money too. Since there's no real barrier to asking, now anyone's nonsense is a crowdfunding opportunity.

[nobodyyoucare]

Blame the potato salad.

A guy puts "potato salad" as his kickstarter project as a joke. People pledge $55,000 as a joke. He gets famous and receives a bunch of money. Lots of new people think they can get easy money too. Since there's no real barrier to asking, now anyone's nonsense is a crowdfunding opportunity.

Did that guy actually give the majority of what was raised to charity like he said he would?

[Amarsir]

Did that guy actually give the majority of what was raised to charity like he said he would?

Best number I saw was $20,000 plus what was collected at the potato party he threw. If that's accurate then it's not technically a majority, but still a good chunk.