Tempers flare on MSNBC as Mehdi Hasan argues with Israeli official: Your government ‘killed children’

MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan launched into a heated argument with Israeli official Mark Regev, an advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, live on his show Thursday.

Hasan accused the Israeli government of killing children and of spreading propaganda and false information in the wake of the Israeli-Hamas war. 

“They’re dead, Mark,” Hasan said, arguing that he has seen Palestinian children “with my own lying eyes being pulled from the rubble” from bombings. “But they’re also people your government has killed. You accept that, right? You’ve killed children? Or do you deny that?” 

PIERS MORGAN REPEATEDLY ASKS JEREMY CORBYN IF HAMAS IS TERROR GROUP IN TENSE EXCHANGE: ‘REFUSING TO ANSWER’

“No, I do not,” Regev responded. “I do not. I do not. First of all, you don’t know how those people died, those children.”

“Oh wow,” Hasan said in return.

Hasan also claimed that the Israeli government was peddling “disinformation” in the wake of the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas on Israeli, American and other citizens. 

“I agree with you. We shouldn’t blindly believe anything Hamas says,” he said. “But why should we believe what your government says either? Your military spokesman on Monday pointed to an Arabic document in the basement of a Gaza hospital and claimed it was a guardian list on which every terrorist writes his name. But that was false.” 

DEMOCRATIC STAFFERS REVOLT OVER BOSSES IN CONGRESS ‘NOT LISTENING’ TO CONSTITUENTS ON ISRAEL: REPORT

In another tense exchange about casualty numbers, Hasan told Regev that he was avoiding his question on the issue.

“But you’re dodging my question, Mark,” Hasan said. 

“I’m not sure that’s true,” Regev returned. 

Hasan also pointed to a tweet from Israeli diplomat Ofir Gendelman who made a post “from a Lebanese short film” that the MSNBC host said was another example of “endless disinformation” from the Israeli government. 

When Regev attempted to disagree with Hasan’s accusations, the two launched into another back-and-forth argument. 

“Allow me to answer your question!” Regev told Hasan, raising his voice. “I’m answering your question directly, if you’ll allow me. We originally said in the atrocious Hamas attack on our people on Oct. 7, we had the number at 1,400 casualties, and now we’ve revised that down to 1,200 because we understood that we had overestimated: we made a mistake. There were actually bodies that were so badly burned, we thought they were ours. In the end, apparently they were Hamas terrorists.” 

“When we make a mistake, we admit it,” Regev said. 

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Shopify Vs. Wix

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As an ecommerce seller, you’ll find yourself making a lot of choices.

Is the clothing niche more profitable than accessories? Which theme would be better: Wokiee or Porto? Is Shopify better than Wix, or is it the other way around?

Of all the questions, choosing the best ecommerce platform remains the most crucial. Although Shopify and Wix have overlapping features, Shopify edges forward in the race if you’re specifically looking for ecommerce functionality.

Still, it’s a close call between the two that boils down to your intent. Small businesses or brand-conscious entrepreneurs will love Wix with its easy-to-use, cheap features, and greater design flexibility.

But if you want a powerful online store, Shopify can do a lot more. So long as you’ve got a bigger budget and the technical knowledge to flatten the learning curve, Shopify is going to be the better long-term ecommerce solution.

Shopify or Wix: Which Is Better?

Shopify is a solid option for ecommerce applications with its fully responsive templates, AMP support on product pages, and dropshipping features. It also supports multi-currency selling functionality and offers useful integrations with other essential apps.

Overall, it’s a more professional choice for anyone who wants to build an online store. If this is exactly what you’re looking for, make sure you sign up for a free trial ASAP.

Wix main page for Shopify Vs Wix

Wix has a drag-and-drop interface and a wide range of bundled templates, making it a great choice for those who want to build a general-purpose website. It also comes loaded with page layout tools, data capture, and email marketing features.

Plus, it’s cheaper, and you don’t have to worry about paying transaction fees. Ready to check out Wix? Give it a try with a free trial.

A Review of the Best Ecommerce Platforms

Shopify and Wix are hardly your only two options for starting an online store, and you owe it to yourself to look around.

My team reviewed dozens of ecommerce platforms and narrowed them down to the eight best options that tick off all the right things on an ecommerce seller’s checklist. Wix and Shopify both made the list.

Head over to my best ecommerce platforms guide for an in-depth look at where every product stands, along with a buyer’s guide to help you navigate your options.

Shopify Wins 

Useful Ecommerce Features: As it’s specially designed to be for ecommerce, Shopify sites come with many useful ecommerce features to cover every little aspect of the sales process. It has multiple payment gateways, inventory management tools, third-party platform integrations, and shopping carts. The platform is also scalable, allowing you to grow with your expanding business needs.

Fluid Themes and Greater Flexibility: Shopify offers 60+ professionally-designed and customized themes, giving you the liberty to add individual product pages based on your needs. Moreover, this customization and flexibility extend to changing page elements too. You can move, add, remove, or resize page elements to make your shop more on-brand.

Tweaking themes is also possible—provided you know HTML and CSS. If you’re tired of how your site looks, you simply have to choose a new theme, and you’ll have a brand new store within minutes!

Shopify themes for Shopify Vs Wix

Custom Domain Name: Every Shopify user gets a custom domain name that allows them to brand their respective stores and online business more efficiently and effectively. You can handle your domain on the same site location as your domain store, which, in turn, allows you to make changes to either with ease while simultaneously managing your domain.

Shopify connect domain for Shopify Vs Wix

Excellent Built-In Analytics: Shopify goes the extra mile by offering you plenty of built-in analytics features like Google Analytics, customer behavior, stock levels, and conversion tracking to know exactly how your store is doing and which aspects need a bit of tweaking for better results.

You can also view online store sessions, total sales, top-selling products, returning customer rate, average order value, and behavior reports (phew!) on the platform to make better decisions.

Shopify analytics for Shopify Vs Wix

Shopify App Market: Nearly every ecommerce plugin and feature are developed for Shopify first due to its vast popularity. Whether it’s free or premium add-ons for marketing to content management, you get all kinds of unique features with this platform. Case in point: An augmented reality feature that allows you to use your smartphone to navigate the product and see every little detail.

What’s more, even other marketplaces like AliExpress and Oberlo offer compatible apps to make your store management easier.

Shopify app store search for Shopify Vs Wix

Faster Checkout Options: Shopify has prioritized customer preference when designing login and checkout options. You can make the registering of users before heading to checkout mandatory, optional, or prohibited. Plus, registration is also incredibly easy as users only have to fill out basic information. As a seller, you can add users manually or import the list via CSV and sort them through a tag system.

More Payment Options: Shopify gives you several options to sell items anywhere in the world thanks to its Amazon FBA or a 3PL order fulfillment support, along with multiple-currency support through a complex, non-supported HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Liquid hack. This may not be ideal, but it’s definitely there. You also get direct access to 100+ different payment gateways, including PayPal, Stripe, and Shopify’s fully integrated payment system.

No Cap on Products and Inventory: Most web servers or external platforms restrict the number of products you can add to your store—but not Shopify. You can add unlimited products to your Shopify store. Even the lowest subscription package does not put any restriction on the number of products you can add to your inventory.

Shopify payment types for Shopify Vs Wix

Shopify Losses

Learning Curve: Shopify developers claim the platform is the best for creating and managing online stores, but they don’t claim to be the easiest, and rightfully so. Although Shopify uses templates that eliminate the need to edit HTML code and CSS styling, its websites are harder to edit than Wix. It’s because the focus is on the products and how you present the page. If you want to make additional changes, you’ll have to learn to edit the backend code.

Limited Free Themes: While we love how modern and responsive Shopify themes are, it’s the limited number can restrict your options. You have to pay a one-time fee for most themes, ranging between $140 to $180, as only ten themes are free.

Expensive: Shopify gives you a wide range of subscription plans starting at $29 per month. However, not only is it more expensive, but you also don’t get a free plan (only a 14-day free trial). The basic plan includes only the barest of features, so if you want access to advanced features like fraud analysis and reports, you have to pay a higher price.

Further, unless you use Shopify Payments—something that isn’t available everywhere—you have to pay a transaction fee on top of the payment processor fee.

Shopify pricing for Shopify Vs Wix

Lacks Email Hosting Facility: You don’t get an email hosting feature despite web hosting being included in all Shopify plans. So, you can’t host a domain-based email address like info@shopname.com. What you can do, however, is set up email forwarding. This will forward all emails sent to info@shopname.com automatically to your regular email account. You’ll have to set up other third-party email hosting connections to use the email forwarding function.

Wix Wins

Massive Template Collection: The basic Wix editor lets you pick from 500+ beautiful templates for your site and populate it with any content of your choice. There are several built-in dynamic templates—from homepages to blogs to landing pages—suitable for novices and experts. People on a tight budget will be happy to know the platform offers 60 completely free, modern, and stylish ecommerce templates.

Wix themes for Shopify Vs Wix

Intuitive Drag-and-Drop Interface: The drag-and-drop interface is the heart of Wix, making it incredibly user-friendly. Because of this, not only people with all levels of skills can use the platform, but it also gives you enough options to convert your side into a real powerhouse by extending its functionality. You can use the mobile editor to review and edit your site to optimize it for mobile devices.

Wix builder for Shopify Vs Wix

Free Plan: Wix is definitely the cheaper platform, with prices starting at $23 per month. There’s also an entirely free plan and a free domain name facility (for the first year) that further boosts its appeal. Plus, you don’t have to worry about paying any extra fees with the platform.

Wix pricing page for Shopify Vs Wix

Built-In Video Function: Wix seriously lets your products shine, which is one of its biggest USPs. It has a built-in product video function that helps improve customer experience by allowing them to see the product live. You’ll also appreciate the product zoom feature and the fact you can build a distinctive checkout page to make the checking out process as hassle-free as possible.

Secure and Reliable: This is a platform that takes a lot of care in making sure its infrastructure is resilient and never vulnerable to attacks or data breaches. Between 24/7 monitoring, multiple site data backups spread across Wix’s servers, the highest levels of online security and data compliance, and zero-downtime maintenance, your site on Wix will always be secure and available to visitors.

Efficient SEO Guidance: Wix helps you optimize your ecommerce site for SEO by highlighting areas that require your attention. It then does the hard work by letting you fill in keyboard tags and other metadata. You can also modify the URL of each page, so it best fits what Google needs to know.

Wix SEO tools for Shopify Vs Wix

Tons of Extra Features: Aside from the core functions, Wix is built with an entire ecosystem of useful tools and products to make website building easier. It offers your free HTTPS to ensure visitor interactions with your website remain secure, templates to create quotations for customers, and integrated payment options like PayPal and Stripe. There’s also a logo maker to make branding even easier!

Wix logo creation tool for Shopify Vs Wix

Online Store Integration: You can include an online store with your website at no additional cost with Wix. As the interface is easy to use, the integration process is very straightforward, and you don’t even require an external shopping solution.

Wix Losses

Harder to Redesign: The intuitive drag-and-drop interface of Wix makes designing your site simple, but it’s the redesigning where you have to pay the price. You don’t have the flexibility to make any major changes by just selecting a new theme. Instead, the redesigning process is extremely manual. If you want to make any drastic changes to your online store, you practically have to rebuild your entire website. Besides that, you don’t have access to HTML and CSS, which makes the overall process more time-consuming and tough.

Wix builder options for Shopify Vs Wix

Limited Integration With Third-Party Apps: When we talk about app integrations, it isn’t even a fair fight as Wix has far fewer ecommerce developers creating apps for its platform. For instance, you won’t find a Google Shopping Feed or Facebook Product Feed. This means you can’t run Google shopping ads or run dynamic product ads on Facebook from the platform. Native integration with email marketing applications is also absent, making it troubling for owners who rely on email marketing for revenue. The only way you can integrate a Wix store to an email marketing add-on is to use either Zapier or write the code yourself.

Forced Wix Branding: They say there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and Wix very well proves it. If you decide to choose and stay on Wix’s free plan, be prepared to carry Wix branding—right at the top of your site. It isn’t too obnoxious, but it isn’t exactly discreet. What makes it more annoying is it appears before your website header!

Wix forced branding for Shopify Vs Wix

Non-Transferrable Site: While some may justify Wix not wanting users to export websites created with their technology, it’s a con for those who want to migrate. And the fact that scalability isn’t Wix’s biggest forte, makes this an even bigger problem. If you want to recreate and transfer your website away from Wix, you have to pay some serious amount of cash. In short, if you sign up for Wix, they might just have you for life.

Comparing the Top Ecommerce Platforms

While Shopify and Wix are excellent ecommerce platforms, there are several other alternatives with their own advantages. Make sure you check our top picks for the best ecommerce platforms to find the right option based on your specific needs.

  1. Wix – Best for flexibility and customization
  2. Squarespace – Best ecommerce platform for creatives
  3. Bluehost – Best for hands-off WooCommerce store setup
  4. BigCommerce – Best for medium to large stores
  5. Shopify – Best all-in-one ecommerce platform
  6. WooCommerce – Best for WordPress websites
  7. OpenCart – Best for selling digital products 
  8. Ecwid – Best for integrating with your current platform

Summary

Shopify is the more obvious choice since we’re concerned with ecommerce functionalities in particular. But that doesn’t mean Wix has lost its charm.

Shopify is the best solution for sizable online stores that need all the bells and whistles of scaling and selling everywhere around the globe, while Wix is more appropriate for general-use cases and for owners who rely on content creation to acquire more traffic. It also offers more creative freedom as opposed to Shopify.

In the end, the choice is yours—just make sure you make the right one.

Business Financing with Bad Credit is Possible: 5 Business Loans You Can Get Even With Bad Credit

Bad credit business loans are kind of a mystery. You probably aren’t going to find them at a traditional bank. Rather, business financing with bad credit generally comes in the form of alternative types of financing and from alternative lending sources. 

Is it Possible to Get Business Financing With Bad Credit?

If you have collateral, you may be able to get a loan, even with bad credit. Still, there has to be something to mitigate the risk to the lender. So, here are 5 options to consider. 

business financing with bad credit credit suite 4#5 Business Financing with Bad Credit: Cash Flow Financing or Merchant Account Financing

To get cash flow financing, your cash flow must be positive and well managed. That means, you must spend it wisely and avoid taking on more debt than you can handle. 

In essence, you are borrowing from part of future expected cash flows. Consequently, the payment schedule is based on projected cash flows and an analysis of historical cash flows. There may be a minimum credit score requirement.  However, it will usually  not be as limiting as with other types of funding. 

Merchant Cash Advances

A merchant cash advance is like cash flow financing.  Yet, the amount of funding and repayment is based on credit card sales. Therefore, the business needs steady credit card sales to qualify. Similarly, repayment is a percentage of daily credit card sales. Rates may be much higher than other types of funding, but credit score minimums are lower.

business financing with bad credit credit suite 8

#4 Business Financing with Bad Credit: Equipment Financing

Equipment financing is a great option for purchasing hard assets for your business. The time in business should be at least one year, and there is no requirement to provide financial statements. 

 

business financing with bad credit credit suite 7#3 Business Financing With Bad Credit: Other Collateral Financing

The amount available depends on the value of the asset being used as collateral. For this type of funding, open invoices and accounts receivable are considered assets that can be used to secure a loan.  

Inventory Financing

The inventory itself serves as the collateral for the loan. There may be revenue requirements and a minimum FICO score.  However, it will probably  not be as limiting as with a traditional loan. 

Invoice Factoring

This is an advance on open invoices, with lenders buying outstanding invoices for less than they are worth.

Honestly, the difference in what they are worth versus what the lender pays is the price you pay for getting the cash up front.  It’s not technically interest, but similar. As a result, you do not get the full amount of the invoices, but you will get the cash faster. The lender will collect the full amount and keep it. 

Account Receivable Financing

Accounts receivable financing is lending that uses unpaid invoices as collateral. Thankfully, there is no personal credit check.  Instead, credit providers consider the payment history of your customer to determine the likelihood they will pay you

#2 Business Financing with Bad Credit; Securities Based Financingbusiness financing with bad credit credit suite 6

This is a type of collateral financing that can take many forms. The security is investments like stocks, bonds, and investment funds. 

IRA Financing

In this scenario, the borrower invests part of retirement funds into the business. It allows more control over retirement plan assets as well as working capital for the business. 

Stocks Financing

This type of financing uses securities as collateral, providing ready access to capital. The only restrictions are that you cannot use this for other securities-based transactions.

Bonds Financing

This type of funding is usually for a large business acquisition or real estate purchase. The value of the loan is based on the borrower’s investment portfolio. The best part is, if stocks or bonds have value over $25,000, you can get approval even with bad personal credit.

#1 Business Financing with Bad Credit: FinTech Lendingbusiness financing with bad credit credit suite 5

This is lending from alternative lenders. Generally, they operate online and offer less stringent lending requirements. As a result, they also have higher interest rates. 

BlueVine

BlueVine offers invoice factoring and lines of credit. For invoice factoring, there are no reserves or minimums. There is a minimum personal credit score requirement of 530. 

They also offer a revolving line of credit for up to $150,000. To get this, a business must have revenues of $10k or more per month, and the borrower must have a consumer credit score of 600+.

OnDeck

At OnDeck, you can get  short-term loans and lines of credit. To do so, there must be annual revenue of at least $100,000. In addition, the time-in-business has to be at least 12 months, and you need a personal credit score of at least 600. 

To get a line of credit the revenue and credit score requirements are the same, but the minimum time-in-business is 9 months. 

Fundera

Fundera offers term loans to businesses with at least one year in business and $90k in annual revenue. The minimum credit score is 600. 

They also offer business lines of credit if you have at least 6 months in business and $50k in annual revenue. Collateral may be necessary in some cases, and borrowers with lower credit scores will have higher interest rates. 

To get invoice financing from Fundera, there must be at least 6 months in business and $50k in annual revenue.

Bonus: 401(k) Financing

This type of financing is not a loan. Rather, it is a 401(k) Rollover for Working Capital program. The IRS calls this type of program a Rollover for Business Startups (ROBS)

To qualify, the plan must have more than $35,000 in it, and it cannot be a plan you are currently contributing to or with a company where you are currently employed. Better yet, there are no credit score requirements. 

Business Financing with Bad Credit Is Possible

It is possible to get business funding with bad credit, though it may not be the traditional type loan you are used to. These options can look different, but they all serve the purpose. If you have bad credit and need funding now, these are good options. However, to get the best rates and terms in the future, work on improving your personal credit score and building business credit. Want to know how to get started? Get a free Business Finance Assessment today!

 

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New comment by andrestoga in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2022)"

Location: Guadalajara, Mexico

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: C/C++11, Python3, Robotics (ROS1/ROS2, Gazebo, FlexBE), Linux(Ubuntu), Embedded Systems, GIT, Code Review, Agile(Scrum), Unit testing(gtests, rostests).

Resume: (PDF on request)

Email: andrestoga [at] tutanota [dot] com

I’m currently seeking a Robotics Software Engineer position at a Robotics company/startup/institute. My research interests lie in Robot Algorithms, Navigation, Motion Planning and Autonomous Ground Vehicles(AGV). I’m open to all sorts of opportunities, so please reach out!

Xi Jinping Doesn't Know What to Do After Popping a Real-Estate Bubble

He wants to raise living standards while limiting the ‘barbaric growth of capital.’ Good luck.

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