What Happened to My Ads Part 2

Yesterday I asked what had happened to the adsense ads that I used to have on this page. Then I went and did some research. It seems, that unless I’m getting 10,000 views per month, I won’t be getting any ads. It also seems that I need to keep my posts longer than 500 words.

I don’t know about any of my readers, but I think that for the most part I’m going to have no problem meeting that word limit. Although to a poet like myself (at least I have pretensions of being a poet at times) that 500 words is a large amount of fluff to throw at the page without ever really saying anything.

On any subject that I’m familiar with I can actually get some good detail done with a piece of that size, and as anyone can see by this post, it isn’t really hard to stretch out what is written in a post that really isn’t very informative.

One other thing that I found is that it seems that it is a good idea to link your blog to your youtube channel. Now one thing I must admit is that I don’t really have a youtube channel, though I do comment on items on youtube.

But why don’t you have a youtube channel? Simple, because I have a face for radio, and a voice for silent movies! Or in other words I at least feel that I don't do well at speaking, and that my audience would be in danger of hurling if they saw my mug.

Of course I could just do audio with white boards or screen shots to back the audio… But like I said, at least in my opinion, I don’t have a very good voice.

Ah well, off to upwork www.upwork.com to see if I can’t find some sort of small gig to get my foot in the door as a proofreader… Though what I’ve seen there is very frustrating. It seems that everyone who wants someone to do that job is looking more for an ‘expert’ reader than a proofreader. After all you really don't even need a MFA to proofread effectively. At least for English you don't need such a credential. After all what you really need is to be familiar with written English and how it should be done. And that familiarity can come from a variety of sources. I like to say that my source for my knowledge of how the English language is written is from reading a large number of both fiction and non-fiction books, where I’ve had the displeasure of having spent my money on something to discover that there were spelling errors in it!

I do believe that I’m going to see if I can also convince another place to take me on as an ‘extern’ that is someone who learns while they work but from a remote location, rather than a central office. I’ll make an offer that ought to be hard for them to refuse, that is to work for a certain amount of money each week regardless of the work they shove in front of me. If past experience is any guide, I get through quite a pile of work anyway when it comes to proofreading. I guess I should go now.

Until my next post, read, rate, and follow my work please!

What happened to my ads?

Lack of posting I think, so I'm hoping that they will come back if I put more items here more regularly...
Still I tried to put up an adsense gadget here today and see no result on my main page... Oh well, research into the obtuse area of online ads is evidently required.
Not that easy really, as this is one area where my ignorance is worse than usual. Still, if I would even make phenning from this (or mils) I need to discover what happened. It used to be that you could put up a tip jar, so I suppose I'll check that out next.

Lesson 60 from The Hard Knocks School of Life

Everything eventually gets lost!

Or in other words, at some point I’ve lost my original set of these pithy observations on life. What would have been the best solution for me? E-mail it to myself. That is the poor man’s version of i-cloud or Carbonite^® which is in essence online, offsite storage. There are several drop-boxes out there that offer a gigabyte or more of storage ‘free’ as well. I should have (I thought I did, but I can’t find it) taken advantage of one of them! I have a partial novel stored as a draft (somewhat easier to find than an actual e-mail) which also works. After all I don’t know the limits of the other systems but Google^® has 15 gigabytes of storage as a ‘free’ service of their e-mail application.

I hope today’s lesson helps someone who thinks they can do without one of these services. Life happens. Guard against it to the best of your ability!

Flailing and Failing

I actually started writing this piece before the last one that I posted was begun, which is part of what goes to the title of the piece. That is that I spend a lot of time flailing about for subjects to write about. It isn't that there is nothing to write about, it is more that there is so much I could write about that I often get hung up on deciding what to write about and therefore write nothing! So with no further ado, onto my subject for the day.

As is probably pretty obvious at this point, a lot of the activity in my life amounts to flailing. Of course since flailing is undirected activity I shortly tire and of course fail. Thus the title of today’s blog: Flailing and Failing.

It is obvious from personal experience that undirected (without a plan) activity is bound to fail. Yet as I’ve noted before, I don’t even have the very basics of writing a plan. So if I can’t write a plan how can I direct my activity that I may avoid the cycle of flailing and failing that has been the signature of my life to this point?

Whew! I really don’t know how to remedy the flailing that is at least 99% of all the problems I have with life. One thing that is pretty certain to me (and ought to be to anyone else who may ask me later) is that if you don’t know where you’re going, then you end up wandering in the wilderness…! And frankly I’ve had it with wandering in the wilderness! You’d think that reading the Bible would have given me a clue that wandering in the wilderness means I’ve missed something important in my life!

And I guess that today’s blog is really about that. I know where my heart has been for some time. I want to proofread, and possibly write for a living.

It is obvious to me that unless something changes drastically this blog is little better than a hit and miss hobby, and I’m certain of this: you cannot make a living at a hit and miss hobby. It is my hope to begin to write regularly here; if for no other reason then for the practice that makes me write a certain amount each week or each day.

With that in mind I’ll get this posted and hope that my days improve.

Bad Ideas, and Answers to Them

I have to admit I’m a fan of some ideas and not of others. I’m not a fan of the idea of socialism. Frankly I hold socialism to be an evil idea that holds a lot of ideas that are inimical to human flourishing at least, and given some of what I have heard from certain sources socialism is against human existence.

At its best socialism holds being poor as a social good or a condition which may not be remedied without government intervention. I find both of those ideas (that being poor equaling a social good or that being poor as something that may not be remedied except through government action) to be reprehensible. For this reason even though my disorganization has prevented me from implementing his ideas I’m an absolute fan of Dave Ramsey daveramsey.com because he has done as much as any one in modern times to explode the myth that government action helps those who are in dire financial straits.

I’ve lately also become a fan of Dr Alex Epstein https://industrialprogress.com/ (I may be incorrect that Alex is a Doctor of Philosophy) but if he is not he works with a couple of actual doctors of philosophy. But enough of the man’s credentials, as far as I’m concerned there is far to much concentration on credentialism these days. That is that we first concentrate on a person’s credentials rather than his ideas.

I’ve long been against the ideas forwarded by the ‘green’ energy cabal. First because they ignore or discount the obvious solutions to using less ‘fossil fuels’ and second because most of their preferred solutions are at best not reasonable if our goal is human flourishing. After all ethanol requires that we grow crops then turn them into fuel for our transportation needs. And yes if our goals are human flourishing then transportation is a basic need. I’m convinced that at best ethanol is a net negative as far as a fuel goes. That is that it takes more energy to produce ethanol than is yielded in the final product.

I’m not sure I could prove that right now, however that is my feeling, that is that ethanol produces less energy than it uses. Therefore I leave that argument to people willing to do the mathematical work and research that question at this point it is only a contention of belief for me. However be that as it may, there is another and worse effect of concentrating on ethanol for transportation fuel. That is that at its very best this idea changes the use of land from producing food for humans (for humans to flourish they must have a consistent supply of food) to using it to produce crops to be turned into fuel. Even if we assume no net loss on the energy produced by making ethanol and using it for transportation, repurposing land from food for people or for food animals to producing fuel is going to interrupt the economy so far as food production goes.

I’m a fan of nuclear energy, and two designs that I’ve seen pieces on, though I don’t think I’ve seen the technical papers on either of them but the overviews I’ve gotten say that either one is much safer than current LWR (light water reactor) designs. The designs I’m speaking of are the MSR (molten salt reactor) and the PBR (pebble bed reactor) as far as I can understand (and if the summary pages I’ve read are correct) both the MSR and the PBR are meltdown proof. Which eliminates one of the major concerns when dealing with nuclear power. Now why is nuclear exciting? Because the fact is that reliable access to electricity is indicative of the ability of people to flourish, oh and by the way improves the probability that people will move from poverty to wealth!

If I were to argue at all for a ‘renewable’ fuel in the transportation sector I would argue that we must move to CNG (compressed natural gas) natural gas is easy (relatively) to produce, and as a bonus could be produced in large quantities from something that we are already throwing away. I E a ‘resource’ that we are treating as a waste product. Of what am I speaking? I’m speaking of sewage! How easily could we change our current sewage treatment systems to methane (CH₄) I don’t know? But I do know that as long as we have sewage, we could produce endless supplies of natural gas (methane) if we were willing to spend the resources necessary to do so. However at this point of time I’m guessing that turning our waste water treatment systems into methane breeders is not economically feasible.

However if I were in a place where the state has embargoed the importation of methane via pipelines I might start asking if it was possible to build a proof of concept plant for a small city. That though is not really my point today. I want to go back to the beginning of my piece and note that there is an idea (socialism) that is bad for humans as it tends to militate against human flourishing. Once you understand this then you can see a virulent strain of socialism is actually at the base of the ‘green’ energy movement. And that folks frightens me, and ought to frighten anyone who has any historical perspective, for socialism has been responsible for all sorts of human suffering in the name of making all men equal in their outcomes.

Have a good day and resist bad ideas!