Month: September 2014

House flipping might be risky, but it can also be highly profitable. According to a new report by CNBC, however, house flippers need to get smarter -- the margins for flippers are smaller, and it's led to a much larger group of high-end house flippers, at least for now. "Flippers no longer have the luxury of 20 to 30% annual price gains to pad their profits," explains Daren Blomquist, the VP of RealtyTrac, a real estate information website. "As the market softens, successful flippers will need to focus on finding properties that they can buy at a discount and efficiently add value to." Consequently, many home-flippers have been looking toward high-end neighborhoods. Not only do these homes have greater potential for adding value, but they are also being bought by less penny-pinching ...

Recent studies have discovered something surprising about the use of closed captioning for video content created for search engine optimization (SEO): it's surprisingly effective. According to a July 29 Business2Community article, adding closed captioning and transcripts to a video can increase "traffic, page views, search rank, and engagement." In a Discovery Digital Networks study that measured the impact of captioning on web videos, videos with closed captioning saw a 13.48% growth in views and a lifetime increase of views by 7.32%, according to Business2Community. In addition to causing an increase in the number of views a video gets, closed captioning can also help a video move up the ranks in search engine results faster, which is what every SEO strategy tries to attain. ...

Job seekers and current employees alike are usually pretty familiar with random drug testing, and the majority of people have either had to take a random drug test for a job or expect to do so in the near future. Jobs that directly affect the health and safety of others -- and especially those jobs which have the potential to be very high-profile, such as police work and firefighting -- are nearly expected to mandate drug tests for employees. But one group of workers have remained untouched by random drug tests, despite being directly responsible for the health of others: doctors. But if the state of California has anything to say about it, this may change soon. This coming November, a mandate, called Proposition 46, requiring that all doctors be subject to random drug and alcohol tests...

California is still caught in the grips of a severe drought that has everyone worried about what the future holds for residents, farms, and rivers alike. According to the latest released records, the state's reservoirs are still "dangerously low."The drought has caused a series of repercussions that there is no quick relief from anytime soon. Residents have been asked to drastically cut back on their water intake. Consequently, the sale of pools has fallen dramatically in a state often known for its excessive homes and gardens. Landscaping has had an impact, as many residents choose to stop watering their lawns every day. Almond farmers are battling local tribes, who rely on salmon in the Klamath River, for reservoir water.In San Diego, Bruce Henderson was worried about his lemon groves, w...