9mo ago

Shaq

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Met Shaq for about ten seconds in Atlanta about five years ago. I'm not big into sports but knew who he was and pointed to him and said "Hey, aren't you famous?" He laughed and said "I guess so." We talked for a second about the city and he went on his day. My general impression was that he was a nice, down to earth guy.
- "Oh my god its Kazaam!"

I would vote for Shaq for President.
You should really look into this Prince. He's such a genuinely good person, savvy entrepreneur, hardworking individual who is genuinely interested in 'doing good for the sake of doing good''.
The big one for me is the Shaq Shoes. He specifically built a brand of high quality basketball shoes that don't look like trash because kids were getting killed over Jordons and Shaqs Reebox brand were too expensive.
Brief article on it: https://www.complex.com/sneakers/a/gerald-flores/shaq-sneakers-interview
- I find it funny that I'm not a sports ball fan, nor do I know much about Shaq, but I do know the shoe story!
- “A lady cursed me out one day at the arena. I reached in my pocket to give her $1,000 and she smacked it out of my hand,” Shaq reminisced. “She said, ‘Why doesn’t anyone try to make affordable shoes?’”
  Shaq just shaqin
- I mean, if the anecdote is an example of how he solves problems, maybe he's not cut out for that. If you don't like online classes you could just go to pretty much any other college/university instead of paying 15 times the price to a for profit diploma mill.
  
  Wouldn't he be distracted by interrupting fans? If it's his friends then he can just talk to them about homework and projects.
  
  🤡
- Are you sure about that?
- Idk, I'd argue that given his wealth and influence he's probably in a better position to do good as a private individual rather than having to get consensus with people who think migrants deserve to be shot on sight (as long as they aren't white), that "freedom of religion" means choosing which Christian sect you belong to and that women shouldn't be allowed healthcare
  
  Where did that come from?

imagine having functionally unlimited money.
- And apparently the man is worth $500 million. By ultra rich standards that's not even wildly wealthy. How many people could somebody like Warren Buffet pay education costs for?
  
  Average cost of college is under $150k/person. Warrant Buffet is worth $133,500,000,000 (rounded heavily). Warranty buffet could pay for approximately 890,000 people to go to college.
  However given the fact that is most of a million people, and how much of a racket education in the US, I think the actual figure is much higher, because he could do several things to drastically reduce the overhead involved.

He could have went to a state college or university system instead of the for-profit University of Phoenix.
Shaq is great but he chose an online for profit school with accreditation concerns and then paid them more money so it wasn't online.
- Yup. Essentially a degree mill
  
  They do have some state of the art facilities and laboratories, and I do mean literally cutting edge, which makes it all the more sad that they're so shit in every other regard.
  EDIT: Might be confusing them with ASU in downtown Pheonix, idk.
- He paid to not have to deal with the general public interrupting his academic learning time.
- I used to like Shaq, but he's been involved in promoting a lot of seriously sketchy stuff. He will put his name on literally anything if they pay him enough. Few celebrities put their name on more stupid scummy crypto bullshit. He lost my respect with that. I bet he had a financial relationship with Univ of Phoenix

"You need 15 people in the class Mr. Shaq"
"No problem, I'll just pay for 15 friends to take the class"
"....uh, we don't require 16 people, but you do you. We'll gladly take your money."
- To be fair, Shaq hadn't yet earned his master's when he did that.
- I mean, he doesn't want them to cancel his class if someone skips so he needs an alternate to ride the bench just in case.
  
  That's funny. I'm imagining him responding,"Man, you don't know my friends..."
- Just in case one of them gives up

Isn't Shaq known to be a legendarily nice, chill dude?
- Not when it comes to Derrick White's forhead.
  
  (Tracker removed) aight that’s pretty good, brutal but good
  
  Lmao big "kids in the back of the classroom" energy
  
  Shaq didn't really say anything tho? Yeah he was laughing his ass off, but he didn't seem to say anything to me.

He is a overall a good dude. I love what he did with his Sneakers:
As per Joe Pompliano, In 1998, when Shaq was on his way out of the Orlando arena, a mother was seen cursing at him. She posed the question, “Why don’t one of you s** o** a B****** make an affordable sneaker?” in front of him that made him wonder. He even offered her $200 which she violently refused.
The Lakers legend stopped to think about the enormous difference in the actual cost of basketball shoes and how much a typical family could spend. This led to his decision to leave Reebok and start his own line. A thought occurred in Shaq’s mind and he turned to the biggest retailer in the world, Walmart.
It’s been two decades, and Shaq has been selling most of his shoes at Walmart for $15-$30, compared to Nike’s $200 and more. This helped him sell over 120 million pairs of shoes.
- Heartwarming sweatshop labour, although I expect that's the case at both price points.
  
  Are there companies that make stuff without child slavery?

He seems a nice guy but I lost some respect when he did gambling advertising in Australia.
- I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and say he didn’t know Aussie gambling is 90% money laundering.
  But advertising for gambling in general is scuzzy.
- ¯(ツ)/¯

To me sounds like a great guy, though he should have just went to a real university.
- Why?
  Shaq just wants the knowledge. He doesn't need to pay for "elite" accreditation.
  
  There is a bit of a midpoint between elite accreditation and University of Phoenix
  
  Why go to an online university if you don't want an online education? There are plenty of places that have in-person classes, without being elite or elite priced.
  
  Community college or a state school could have done the job.

At that point, why the university of Phoenix?

That's legend shit right there.

I had a series of classes in college with 6 students, including myself. If one of us failed, the rest wouldn't be able to do the next course in the series. It didn't help that the classes were some of the most difficult in our major. Barely made it through all 4 classes lmao
- Sounds like some once in a lifetime team building experiences
  
  It was honestly incredible. We all had so much time between classes, so we'd just get that classroom unlocked and hang out in there. There was a time all 6 of us decided to just have nap time. Professor walked in to all of us sleeping in makeshift beds. A couple of us even stashed blankets in that room. We really did work together on everything. Like, we'd have communal study guides and just edit it as we saw fit, then go over it as a group before tests. I was considerably shorter than everyone else, so I was the one who got to crawl under desks to plug in Ethernet cables and all that jazz.

How to improve your life with this 1 weird trick.

Every comment:
Shaq's great, but goes on to describe something decidedly not great
Let me say this, between him making fun of a handicapped person on social media and him buying a tiger from Joe Exotic I'm gonna go ahead and say he's just a straight up piece of shit.
- He generally comes off as a nice person but he's pretty irresponsible and ableist. People always want to build up images of celebrities but they're just human beings with flaws like anyone else.

Someone i need to know?

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