Today’s Thoughts . . . Aug. 20, 2013

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EPAutos may not be deay-uhd!signs of life picture

I am amazed – speechless – at the extent of the support shown so far. In the roughly 48 hours since I posted the item about the State of EPAutos, we’ve already received financial support such that, if it maintains, we will be fine. We may even be able to keep the site completely free of all advertising.

But the main thing is, we now have real hope that we may get around Google – and be able to survive without it. The last two months have been brutal. Not just the near total collapse of the revenue we’d been earning from Google Adsense – but not knowing why (or what we could do to fix the problem Google has with EPautos). But, they may have done us an inadvertent favor. This method of supporting the site eliminates a third party that doesn’t care about cars, liberty, the readers or anything except making a buck off us. Now we’re in a more personal – and direct – relationship with the people who come to EPautos and I think that’s pretty cool. Receiving financial support from people who aren’t obligated to send a penny is, for me, extremely gratifying – much more so than getting anything from an entity such as Google. And, who knows? We may have tapped a vein of resentment toward Google that has reached or will soon reach a critical mass. I suspect people have simply had it with these arrogant, unaccountable corporations – which can be just as obnoxious and even evil as government itself.

I know it sounds a little cheesy, but you’ve bucked me up at a moment when I really needed it.

So, to everyone – thanks!

19 COMMENTS

  1. Just made a small donation, Eric. Even though I don’t spend that much time here these days, I believe this site is too important to allow it to be destroyed by evil forces. Your courage and tenacity are inspiring, as are the insights of almost all who comment here.

  2. One reason for the renewed signs of life, vigor, and vitality evident here, is that some small manner of justice is now being dispensed to the intellectual creators of this website. We are adhering to a natural law, what Andrew Galambos called – volitional science.

    In this dysfunctional world, we often resort to robbing Peter to pay Paul – such as downloading media without payment, or reading onine content with no compensation or even note of thanks. We may even feel justified because something similar is being done to us. But this is a poor and unsatisfying work-around, we all should admit.

    Under our current societal pyramid of theft and looting free-for-all of a Kleptocratic world, one is discouraged from trying to produce, and instead feels forced to loot. Looters and takers by force seem to have it better than the rest of us.

    This leads to misery, dissatisfaction, and hinders us from contributing to and enjoying the prosperity we all are capable of.

    intellectual property owners should have primary control over their own ideas and over how others might secondarily use those ideas. According to Galambos, all forms of property came from a combination of “primordial property” (a person’s life) and “primary property” (a person’s own ideas).

    By using the natural resources available in the physical universe, individuals use their primordial property, guided by primary property (actions, guided by ideas, respectively) to create “secondary property”. Which Galambos denotes as “secondary property.”

    Capitalism is overly concerned with secondary property and the well-known, established, goods and services which individuals trade, use, and consume as they live their lives.

    Before these well-known goods and services become established, they first have to be conceived, discovered, and recognized by their primary owners. These acts of conception, discovery, and recognition denote the true primary property” of tangible, individual, original owners.

    There are no commodities that exist in a vacuum. Somewhere, a man conceived of making a drink with the coffee bean. This unknown primary conceiver and realizer of this new beverage is someone billions of people continue to be indebted to.

    Andrew Galambos – Volitionologist

    Private enterprisers seldom recognized that knowledge and ideas are a form of property. Andrew Galambos rectifies this with his Theory of Primary Property. By providing the highest of rewards for intellectual accomplishment, Galambos conceived of a society in which everyone receives what is due them, not just freedom, but an even higher concept: Justice.

    A Volitional Society is one driven by intellectual accomplishment instead of tangible wealth. This society most rewards those who conceive of capital, and is a society that has never yet existed. It would be one in which intellectuals such as Archimedes, Newton, Paine and Einstein would determine the course of civilization, not politicians, not base money-grubbers.

    Under the Theory of Volition, for the first time in history, absolute and precise definitions would be provided for Property, Morality, Truth, Crime and Rightness as well as many other important and necessary concepts.

    Combining these with observationally verifiable postulates regarding the behavior of people, a societal structure emerges which is capable of providing a future that is stable in structure, rich in opportunity, and exciting in challenge.

    One of the critically important concepts in true, total capitalism, is that of Gratitude. This should take the form of both monetary compensation, and more significantly, public acknowledgment of the values one has received from others, particularly when those values consist of intellectual works.

    Andrew J. Galambos was an astrophysicist by education, the son of a Hungarian immigrant. He was the creator of the Science of Volition, founder of the Free Enterprise Institute and the Liberal Institute of Natual Science and Technology.

    To understand volitionalism, one must read and understand: Frederic Bastiat’s The Law, Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, and Ludwig von Mises’ Planned Chaos. Reading enlightened society advocates such as Thomas Paine is also helpful.

    Mankind is achieving huge technological advancements, yet as a society, we are still barely out of the cave. Using cooperation as a yardstick, we are not even the most advanced primate, seeing as we are far behind the Bonobos of Africa.

    It is more important than ever to develop a society based on natural laws similar to the ones we have in physics, and then to track our progress in following these laws, to enable us to mature culturally and as a social species.

    – – – – –
    Failed Robbery Attempt In Brazil
    http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=380_1377111165

    Snowy Mountain Bike Race Starts at 11,000 ft in France
    http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=5a0_1376922612

    Samsung Apex – The Must-Have Tech Gadget of 2013
    http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=f51_1373051470

    • Goof morning, Tor!

      I’m sitting here at a coffee joint in CA trying to catch up with posts – including this excellent one you’ve left for us. I’d never heard of Andrew Galambos, but am intrigued – and indebted to you for making me aware of him.

      Thanks – again!

  3. 4th attempt to post comment on the epautos is dead article. Tried to post it here instead, but that didn’t work wither. My suggestion is definitely being blocked by an outside source. I’ll email it to you.

  4. I was sort of shocked when you wrote that you had anything to do with google, actually… I’ve blocked google EVERYTHING, especially ads and scripts for a very long time, so I never saw any of that stuff. But yes, the pages loaded very slowly at times and now there doesn’t seem to be any glue in the works.

    Good job, everyone. 🙂 And my wee mite will be in the mail after payday this month.

  5. I’m amazed how many people have supported this site too! Totally Awesome! Thank you all! I still can’t believe that without the Goo-guhl ads and all their site metric scripts (webmaster tools and analytics) how much faster the site is. The site loads at least three times faster for me and we’ve had three times the amount of users online at all times since we removed the shit.

    • Dear dom,

      The site loads at least three times faster for me and we’ve had three times the amount of users online at all times since we removed the shit.

      Sounds uncannily like an Austrian economist discussing how much more efficiently a market functions when government controls are removed!

    • The site loads for me now, where it didn’t load at all for a good while. Gurgle anal probes were the problem all along, I bet. I’m glad y’all left Gurgle in the dust. Can’t even see them in the side mirror anymore. Yay!

      • Morning, Ed –

        It’s incredible. The site loads 2-3 times faster and our traffic is rapidly returning to normal levels – that is, active and growing!

        Throw Google in the Woods!

          • Hi Ed,

            I’m sitting here at a coffee place in San Diego marveling at what a ride it’s been. We went from abject defeat/despair to resurrection – psychological as well as financial – in the space of about a week now.

            Amazing.

            And all because we ditched Google.

            It’s a tonic I highly recommend!

          • Oh hail yayuh, Eric. Enjoy your stay in San Dee. Your site is going to live and do well. Have a tall double latte w/ nutmeg for me.

  6. Eric,
    I wanted to help because I appreciate the work you do here but I’m not in a position to give money so I took it upon myself to donate a few minutes a day to driving traffic here.

    I’ve created an Eric Peters Autos Facebook page which can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/EricPetersAutos

    What I’m doing with it is manually pulling from your RSS feed, and putting it on Facebook with a link back here.

    I hope you don’t mind, and anytime you want access or control of it let me know. As far as I’m concerned it’s yours.

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