All –
I’m not sure why but – like someone threw a switch to “off” – reader support has fallen to virtually nil this month.
The pie chart on the main page ought to be about half green (and half red) at this point. But – as you can see – it is three-quarters in the red.
This is why Dom’s not around anymore. I literally cannot afford to pay him – unless I am willing to operate this site at a loss.
And I can’t do that. I wish I could. But it’s just not possible.
Right now, the worry is that I won’t be able to cover the servers – seriously. They cost $220 a month. We have good servers – which is why the site loads quickly and is stable. I think it’s worth the money. But – again – I can’t afford to do this as a charity or vanity press.
I truly dislike having to post these appeals. I want you to know how much I’d like it if they were unnecessary; if we had sufficient revenue coming in from advertisers to cover our costs and earn a decent enough profit to justify the time and work put into this thing.
I’d really like to be able to bring Dom back, too. I’m going “public” about this to let you know just how tight things are. That I have had to take over doing the site maintenance stuff – which I don’t have the expertise to do properly. But I can’t expect Dom to work for nothing – and I can’t work at a loss in order to pay Dom.
Goo-guhl has killed off the revenue stream we used to earn from ads. I’ve written about this before (see here, if you’re new and haven’t read about it yet). They’ve really put the arm on independents, those of us not shilling for the corporate-government matrix.
And it’s working. They’re starving us out.
So, please. If you enjoy EPautos, if you think EPautos is worth supporting, please support us to the extent you’re able.
We depend on you to keep the wheels turning!
Our donate button is here.
If you prefer to avoid PayPal, our mailing address is:
EPautos
721 Hummingbird Lane SE
Copper Hill, VA 24079
PS: EPautos stickers are free to those who sign up for a $5 monthly recurring donation to support EPautos, or for a one-time donation of $10 or more. (Please be sure to tell us you want a sticker – and also, provide an address so we can mail the thing to you!)
And the bots go on! (cue Sonny & Cher)
http://www.wired.com/2014/12/bots-now-outnumber-humans-web/
LOL! That made me think of Gypsies, Tramps And Clovers!
I guess I’m some kind of cyberhobo Andy Kaufman, eternally bringing up things that make others uncomfortable, for reasons unknown. Hell, I don’t even why these things occur to me half the time.
There is no second best, alternate or equivalent for this site. This is the only one of its kind, as near as I can tell. I think the world of it.
I wonder if either of these 3 contribution systems Cantwell uses would work for you.
Chris Cantwell’s Wish List
Chris Cantwell Birthday: November 12
http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/1NBLFAIY9HRQU/ref=cm_sw_su_w?sort=universal-price&view=null
Chris Cantwell’s Walmart Wish List
https://www.walmart.com/lists/view-wish-list-items?id=0d5014b5-c994-423d-b76c-3330d14cceac&adid=1500000000000039380010&veh=eml
Chris Cantwell Affiliate Links
http://christophercantwell.com/shop/affiliate-links/
Just speculation, but it seems Cantwell says and does his most extreme things outside of his own sites. Probably because of the strict Amazon affiliate agreement he signed.
He also holds in moderation any kind of hyperlinks. Again, probably because of Amazon and their googuhlesque control freakism regarding content they permit on their affiliated sites.
That paleo diet guy someone linked to is making $25,000 a year on his amazon affiliate links. Not enough I’m sure, but at least you get something tangible for what you give up.
There’s also a very good chance that being in compliance with Amazon gets you back into compliance with Googul. Their mega-servers are similar and both are rather like Gort, there is no human decision making at Amazon, Googul, and so on.
Basically you violated the Klaatu Barada Nikto clause, and that was your downfall and the reason you’re adrift now alone without your cyberwingman, Dom.
No human even knows why you were bounced out of adsense, you violated the Panda Algorithm in the eyes of Gort and that was that. KBN. You will comply. KBN. Maybe someone knows a better system. A sort of Gort-Lite, where you can be an affiliate and get back on Googul-Gort’s radar in a good way. And get your rightful ranking back.
Or maybe, Crom Forbid, you have to start going on the road again and hitting the airport even? Reviewing the cars wherever they are. I’ve resorted to wearing $2 reading glasses and $1 flesh colored earplugs when forced to go anywhere unpleasant.
That way everything’s a muffled blur. People feel sorry for me that I can’t comply with their rube goldbergisms and demands for consumer compliance. They have no idea how much I loathe them, because I’m too busy trying not to run into anything to focus on my seething dislike for their very existence.
Eric, Instead of maintaining an independent website and hosting it and all, why not just use a free forum, like Proboards? Not only would it cut your expenses, but having such a forum where us members could post topics would not only be great, but would be a boon to libertarianism in general- and draw in people who otherwise might never find such stuff.
I know, it’s nice being independent and all- but I couldn’t see (if it were me in your shoes) spending $220 a month to subsidize something which doesn’t even pay for itself; much less actually make you anything.
I’d like to send a few more bucks your way, too- but I’m reluctant to, as I’ve never been able to get confirmation that you received my last payment….
Hi Mole,
Well, this is how I make my living – and I’m kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place in that I went off the reservation (gave up my MSM gigs) and if I can’t make this work, then I’m looking at going back to MSM work… or some other thing.
We’ve had some good months – Oct. & Nov. made book. But there was a big drop-off this month for some reason.
Did you send in via Pay Pal?
Or through the mail?
If it was PayPal, you should have gotten confirmation from them; if via snail mail, it should have been confirmed by me…
Let’s try to figure out what happened!
Hey Ya, Eric!
UUHhGGG! No! You CAN’T go back to the MSM! I just couldn’t picture you writing that vanilla pablum, any more so than could I see me doing it!
Gotta make this work!
I’ll keep the ol’ gears turning….I’ve always been good at thinking outside the box, and on today’s we, tyrannized by Ghoul-gle and co., that is sorely needed.
I had sent you a money-order- $40- I put “Moleman” in the “from” part :)- I still have the receipt, in case it got lost. (Sheesh, why would it not surprise me if “they” were intercepting your mail? I’m sure we’re both on their feces list!)
I tried tracking the MO- but the one time I did, it didn’t have any info on it…I’ll try it again.
December is a bad month for anything except retail….what with the phony “holidays” and all. T’is the season to be greedy- and the materialism seems to consume about 99% of people’s thoughts/time/energy and money for ther whole month- gotta buy all that crap to give to those who’ll be buying the same for you! 😀 (If ya can’t tell, I’m not a fan of Xmas/HAaaaHnukkah/Festivus or any of the up Saturnalia-based occasions which people use as an excuse to indulge in unbridled hedonism/materialism…)
Thank you Moleman!
Here’s what it entails; returning to one’s Kafkaesque-Cubical and working for the PTB:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlKEybkVl0M
Even the greatest among us must submit to their byzantine labyrinths if we wish to make a living serving them.
The logic of working for the man is the logic of a dream. Of a nightmare.
I can’t claim any virtue, Tor- it’s just the way I’ve always been, since i was a little kiddie- Pooblik school in those very first years gave me enough of an idea of what their system was about; and how it worked against one’s personal freedom and very being. I never wanted any part of it; and I’ve done a pretty good job of avoiding it for half a century. “Live free or die” is a good motto, ’cause there ain’t no other way to really live. The interwebz offered a glimmer of hope for a reprieve of a free market within the communal one….but that didn’t last long, did it?
I agree.
It blows my mind the way people accept another man’s hand on their person so lightly.
For instance, when the lifelong smokers were told where they had to go, and they just meekly bowed their heads and shuffled their feet off to their designated smoking areas, like Jews in Hitler’s Germany getting on the trains.
I became incorrigible by age 3 as a child. And for the most part, got away with it.
If I wouldn’t even let my own flesh and blood rule me for my own good, I’m certainly not going to let some perfect stranger tell me how to live, not if I can help it.
It won’t be easy to get a reprieve, but its seems well worth giving it a try. I always enjoy stopping in here, and hearing the latest ways someone got one over on the man, or at least scored some kind of small moral victory.
Hi Tor,
I don’t smoke, but – for obvious reasons – find the jihad against smokers outre in the extreme, especially the punitive taxes imposed on cigarettes. “Sin” taxes. Only in America.
Not even the Soviets did that.
Dear Eric, Tor,
Me three.
The jihad against tobacco and guns both offend me, even though I have never been a smoker.
I’m reminded of this video of former AG Eric Holder talking about how “we” must “basically brainwash” people into feeling the same way about guns that they do about cigarettes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVt9bwHfrdU
Dear Tor,
Welles’ film of Kafka’s “The Trial” really pulled it off.
The nightmarish quality of the experience really came through in the film visuals.
Great film, but really tough to watch.
I saw it once on TV, and never watched it again. Too much of a downer.
I’ve lived the nightmare to some extent. That unnerving feeling of dread because I chose the path of an outlaw(in my own estimation, not officially).
Downer isn’t the half of it. It’s soul-crushing. If there is a hell, it might just be the feeling of belonging nowhere that comes from bucking the system on an existential level.
It’s very hard to communicate to the average Joe who’s never dared go past his assigned gatekeeper.
I’ve always thought libertarians felt the same pain of being “before the Law” as I do. Of being told to be patient, because in the near future, the rules will be less onerous – but not just yet. But now I’m not so sure.
Kafka’s parable of Vor dem Gesetz (Before the Law)
A man from the country seeks the law and wishes to gain entry to the law through an open doorway, but the doorkeeper tells the man that he cannot go through at the present time.
The man asks if he can ever go through, and the doorkeeper says that it is possible but “not just yet” (“jetzt aber nicht”).
The man waits by the door for years, bribing the doorkeeper with everything he has. The doorkeeper accepts the bribes, but tells the man that he accepts them “so that you do not think you have failed to do anything.”
The man peers inside through the gate into the inside. The gatekeeper takes note and laughs, saying: “If it tempts you so much, try going inside in spite of my prohibition. But take note. I am powerful. And I am only the most lowly gatekeeper. But from room to room stand gatekeepers, each more powerful than the other. I cannot endure even one glimpse of the third.”
The man decides it would be better to wait until he gets permission to go inside. The gatekeeper gives him a stool and allows him to sit down at the side in front of the gate.
There he sits for days and years. Sometimes the gatekeeper interrogates him briefly, questioning him about his homeland and many other things, but they are indifferent questions, the kind great men put, and at the end he always tells him once more that he cannot let him inside yet.
The man does not attempt to murder or hurt the doorkeeper to gain the law, but waits at the door. Over time, he becomes childish, and in the long years studying the gatekeeper he has also come to know the fleas in his fur collar, he even asks the fleas to help him persuade the gatekeeper. Finally his eyesight grows weak, and he does not know whether things are really darker around him or whether his eyes are merely deceiving him. But he recognizes now in the darkness an illumination which breaks inextinguishably out of the gateway to the law. He also recognizes he is about to die.
Right before his death, he asks the doorkeeper why even though everyone seeks the law, no one else has come in all the years.
The doorkeeper answers “No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it.”
Dear Tor,
So true.
If we expect the rule of law to give us our day in the sun, we are just like the man in Kafka’s parable.
As long as the rule of law is administered by a conventional monopolistic state, it will never provide justice, because that is not its function.
Its function is to ensure our passive compliance by deluding us with the promise of justice, like a carrot dangled before a donkey.
The Law: what the government calls its gang rules.
— Quotations from Chairman Zhu
The rule of law: rule by those who write the laws, interpret the laws, and enforce the laws.
— Quotations from Chairman Zhu
Tor & Bevin,
EXACTLY, guys!!!!
This is where the “Common Law”/Strawmen/Freemen/etc go astray; they think that if they use the right incantations; say the right words; know the “inside” info, that it will somehow obligate the lawless rulers who rule by brute force, to somehow be bound by their own laws….LOL.
Justice will rarely be found in a court; justice will more often be effected by avoiding entanglement in such filthy institutions, at all costs.
(How is it that I had never heard of that Welles movie?!)
Dear mm,
Check!
The sooner we realize that justice from any entity that enjoys a monopoly on the use of force is an impossibility, the better.
The notion that the fox will ever guard the hen house on behalf of the chickens is sheer lunacy — once one sees past one’s past indoctrination.
The funny thing about it is that anarchists are dismissed as “naive utopians who would leave everyone at the mercy of evil doers. ”
But what do they think the people in government are? They’re the worst f**king evil doers of all. Get a clue!
Anarchists are hardcore realists who know how the world works.
Apologists for government who keep buying into “change you can believe in” are the naive dupes who are living in a dream world.
Bevin said “…..The funny thing about it is that anarchists are dismissed as “naive utopians who would leave everyone at the mercy of evil doers. ”
But what do they think the people in government are? They’re the worst f**king evil doers of all”.
Right-on, Bevin!
What you said there, is the pivotal revelation, which once realized, turns one irrevocably into a liberal/anarchist.
Anyone who is not such, is erither ignorant of what goes on in this world/doesn’t care about justice/is O-K with trading convenience or personal benefit for freedom and justice.
When you think about it, virtually all statists- across the whole spectrum, from communists to neocons, spend all of their discussion time trying to deny reality, or to justify why they believe that assaults on people/rights/property/freedom/thought are justified.
Ooopppps! That should have been: “turns one irrevocably into a libertarian/anarchist.”
Yikes! That was embarrassing!
Dear mm,
Actually, as Hayek noted, libertarians are the original liberals, as the term was first used in the 18th century.
Social democrats stole the term from us, forcing us to use “libertarian” instead.
Very true, Bevin!
People who don’t know any better see a reference from 100 years ago, to someone being “liberal”, and they think that person was one of their own…but then they discover, that they were really one of us!
Or: Even before it became a political term, it simply meant “generous”. (Today it seems to mean “Generous with other people’s money” 😀 -as G. Gordon Liddy said “A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to society; which debt they propose to pay with your money”! :D)
I’d dare say that Christmas season–even though people on this site claim that they are independent–is the biggest cause of shortfall this month.
I’m planning on putting ericpertersautos.com on the back of my cabs. I don’t know how many contributors you will get from Mormonville but, its worth a try.
Thanks, Ancap!
I’ve also got two half-finished manuscripts I need to get finished… I’ve let them languish due to time constraints and other issues I can’t get into here…
Lawdy, it’s been a tough year…
Folks, this site is definitely worth keeping. Eric does a great job and I chipped in an extra $30 above what I normally contribute. Let’s help him through this rough patch. I don’t want to see epautos go off the net.
I am not doubting Dom’s abilities at all, but as a sysadmin myself I am amazed you guys need servers that cost $220 a month. I’m open to pro-bono help with figuring out how to reduce that cost. That’s not the best solution (make more money) but it’s something. I am sure there are good reasons for these servers. I am just not aware of what it could be.
I also just donated (put my money where my mouth is). I don’t have paypal (and never want it!) but I plan on doing this manually every month. How does this translate into a registered account here?
Hi Lysergic,
Thanks! And – if you register, I’ll approve you as soon as I see it, and your posts will not be held in the moderation queue!
You’re “in,” Lysergic – membership as Contributor approved!
Victory! I found the very obvious bar at the top right after I posted.
Hey Eric, just sent a small amount your way. Just wondering though, have you considered putting up Amazon ads? From what I’ve heard they can be pretty profitable, and even if the customer buys something else on the site than in the ad, you get a small piece of it. Also makes it pretty easy for visitors here to help out as a lot of people shop there anyway. Just food for thought.
Thanks, McSack!
We’ve tried Amazon; they use the same model as Goo-guhl and the return is so small it’s not worth doing. It’s pretty egregious. They demand what amounts to free advertising. That is, they only pay if someone actually buys (or clicks on) whatever the product is. No compensation whatever for the “getting their product in front of the readers.”
It would be like a print or TV ad only paying the newspaper or network if someone actually went out and bought whatever the product or service is – and told them, “I’m buying it because I saw the ad (put name of publication here).”
I understand you frustration on that, as the tables seemed turned these days, but as an experiment it might be worth just putting up your affiliate link on the donation page or in a small space near your ads. I know a site that I frequent which does this, and he just has a small blurb asking readers to click the link before shopping at Amazon to support the site. That way you won’t have to put up a full blown ad, but if readers see it, they may be more willing to use it to throw some easy change your way.
Here’s a post he has on how much he made from it (skip to the section “How about the money”): http://freetheanimal.com/2014/10/taking-accounting-loosing-favor.html
Granted, YMMV. 🙂