Choose that business carefully. Operated a successful professional photography business for nearly 40 years, until digital and cell phone cameras essentially killed most of my industry. Now ai is improving exponentially and coming for visual arts in the near future, so final nail in the coffin.

Just played with ad taglines on chatgpt. Blown away. Saved a week of creating!

Wonder if it would go crazy with my lazy eye? ;-)

"dagnabit, we got this here fancy new mcmansion in our safe gated community to keep the riff raff out and now we're getting bombed from the sky from obnoxious buzzing drones!" - bubba

lol!! Lived behind it when they started it, TWO DECADES ago! Perhaps waiting for 2nd coming to finish?? (Grew up dealing with Detroit unions who got things done much much faster.)

That's a mega merger, glad they chilled it.

Did work for Simon & Schuster in 90s and they were so merger happy then that with every new title we did, it was a guess which publisher name would show up on our checks! When they changed to IDG and idiots guides, I got teased in good natured way for working with "idiots". Publishing, it's not just a job. It's a freaking adventure!

In the 80s, they built pipelines to transport oil to/from the underground reserves right across some of the most wild and pristine parts of coastal Texas and Louisiana. The oil is pumped into old salt mines.

My experience was a shocking before and after, when as a youngster, relatives in SW LA took me out to the swamp (National Wildlife Refuge) before and after the pipeline was built. My 2nd visit was within a year of it being built and it was heartbreaking to see the damage putting it in did, and how almost every support section had a chemically caused circle of death (agent orangish) 10-20 feet in diameter and some icky stains under pipeline. In the midst of the absolute wilds, seeing nothing growing was sad. That and seeing fresh oil spill in Mobile Bay colored my view of the oil industry for the last 40 years.