JimSwift.net

Sorry, but this screen grab is too hard not to blog about. Where do I start?

Writing is a job. It is finally time the 6,000-plus bloggers (freelance­) writers who feed HPost to get paid for their services.

Yes, Rudy, writing is a job — for writers. You know, people who interview for jobs and contractually agree to write for money. Freelancers, or better known as “the unemployed” or “people with opinions” willingly agree to post stuff on the internet knowing they’re not getting paid. I don’t know who taught you what about economics, but “finally” suggests you feel your work has been deserving of compensation for some time. Wrong.

It is time to rebel, Egypt style. Don’t file your blogs unless there is at least a token reward, a minimum $20 for well thought copy of 60 words or less, and much more for in-depth pieces.

Rudy, if you’re going to go all Atlas Shrugged on us, at least you could have done it on a site other than Huffington Post. Do you honestly think that liberal blowhard blog commenters are going to rebel against the only site with significant traffic that gives their views free publicity? Second, I know you’re from Canada, but $20 for 60 words? That’s $.33 a word. Even adjusted for currency differentiations, your demands are hilarious. I’ve written about 230 words so far, and you think I am going to get $75 for this blog post? Ha.

The 1990s are calling, they want their inflated demands for pay-per-click advertising back.

Third, do you think you can really compare 6,000 left leaning bloggers to Egypt’s protests? If so, I seriously doubt your political acumen. 6,000 people isn’t even a good turnout for a protest about, well, anything, in San Francisco on the only day they get bad weather in any given year.

Rebel. Bloggers are being taken advantage of on Huffington Post and on other so-called news sites which depend on free labor. Demand payment. Rebel.

Yes! Good old fashioned class warfare. Huffington Post has been purchased by some largely irrelevant mega-corporation that probably would have gone bankrupt had it not become part of Time Warner. Clearly, these big corporate fat cats owe you something for speaking your mind.

Let’s delve further. AOL bought HuffPo for $315 million. Divided by 6,000 commenters, that’s about $52,500 per person. At $20 per “well thought” 60 word copy, that means you have the rest of your life to post, ehh, roughly 2,625 posts around 60 words to earn $52,500. So, one comment per day for the next 7 years and you’re golden.

Or, you can take your demands elsewhere. If that doesn’t work out, maybe you and the rest of the commenters can form the Huffington Post Commenters International Guild and seek arbitration with the Department of Labor.

And, if these comments, and these comments are yours, I don’t think they’re worth a dime.  But Rudy, if you somehow come across this post, please send me your address. I’d be glad to send you a book or two about politics and economics. It’s clear to me you don’t know much about either.

Regards,

Jim Swift

As I was listening to the radio this morning, a topic that came up was economic freedom and prosperity in Egypt. I went to Egypt not too long ago, and it was a fun place to visit. Steve Landsburg did a blog post about it called: Freedom, Prosperity, and the Future of Egypt.

Here’s one thing I remember about Egypt being really backwards. Car tariffs. Egypt has really old cars that are typically made locally. Some argument for “buy local” through government decree! In 2004, Egypt slashed tariffs – sort of.

Seriously, who doesn’t love a 40% tariff on cars? Local producers, that’s who. Oh wait! We almost forgot the value added tax (VAT). Talk about expensive cars. No wonder people tend to keep them for a very long time. Of course, also, they pollute like nobody’s business. I rode in a couple taxis that were about as old as my parents. It was interesting, and also scary. It sounded like a lawn mower.

Well, Egypt has lowered tariffs even a bit more, which is good. And according to this enlightening article, in 2019 there will be no tariffs at all.

With many raising the protectionist banner, pushing for government mandates of “buy American” and “buy local,” I wonder — could Egypt’s lack of economic freedom be part of the reason they’re protesting? Maybe.

I have a feeling Chris Johanson will like this website:

In other news, going to Arlington Cinema and Draft House tonight for the first time to see my friend Scotty throw down some jokes. Suck on that, Carole.

Watch the full episode. See more Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

I just wanted to throw out some thoughts on one (of many) paragraphs from President Obama’s State of the Union I have some concerns about. Maybe I’ll do this from time to time.

Our infrastructure used to be the best, but our lead has slipped. South Korean homes now have greater Internet access than we do. Countries in Europe and Russia invest more in their roads and railways than we do. China is building faster trains and newer airports. Meanwhile, when our own engineers graded our nation’s infrastructure, they gave us a “D.”

I’ve traveled a lot, and while our infrastructure has its problems (whose doesn’t?) there are a lot of things we do really well. At the end of every trip, whether it’s to France, England, Spain, or Germany, I’ve always thought our infrastructure is better. But there’s probably some confirmation bias going on there.

First, the President compares the speed, presumably, of internet access in South Korea to the United States. Bad comparison.

Comparing size, South Korea is puny compared to the United States. It is 38,691 square miles in area. That is just a little bit bigger than the state of Maine.

(Alaska, Hawaii and map are not to scale.)

Population wise, South Korea is huge. Its population is bigger than California, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico combined. All living in a space the size of Maine. Of course, their internet connection might be faster per capita than ours because we have a significantly larger country to connect to the internet. That’s why I think it’s a bad comparison.

The President continues by saying: “Countries in Europe and Russia invest more in their roads and railways than we do.” Well, here we don’t know if he’s talking about individual countries or the countries’s collective spending. But ‘investing more’ is not the same as having better roads.

China is building faster trains and newer airports. Meanwhile, when our own engineers graded our nation’s infrastructure, they gave us a “D.”

This one is actually easy to connect. The President is referring to the American Society of Civil Engineers 2009 report, which gave us a D. So a group of people, whose job is to build things for the public, is saying we’re doing a bad job. Gee. I wonder why?

In other news, Jiffy Lube called and they said you really should change your car’s oil more often. Got it checked last month? Oh, well. Can’t hurt to get it checked again.

But at the end of that report, I see this:

In addition to having such bad infrastructure, which curiously we always seem to have, they think we can “improve” it by spending, say… $2.2 trillion dollars. A good round number.

So, while I have friends who are engineers I trust, I expect engineers will always have tons of ideas of things we can spend trillions of dollars on.

How we get as many high-speed rail tracks going as a communist country that doesn’t respect property rights (China) and offers little remedy for citizens in the case of eminent domain, I am not sure. Whether newer airports always equal better airports, I’m not sure, either.

But, I can tell you that I’m happy Ohio refused the “high speed rail” project, if you consider 38.5 miles per hour high speed.