thats the kind of adsense revenue you can make when you have a top 50 website. its for the guy who owns/started/runs plentyoffish.com, a free dating site. he pays 5400/month for hosting and 8000/month for the IM service. this check is for 2 months because the electronic transfer didnt go through due to being such a large amount. this guy is amazing. he is my idol. all it takes is that one site that tweaks something already out there.

901,733.84 - 16,000(IM) - 10,800(hosting) = 875,000 dollars for 2 months of adsense revenue

epic win

Kantian Ethics is lame

Kantian ethics, also known as deontological ethics, is a weak theory. you take the assumption that there is good and evil (even though thats not what Kant believed) and try to establish a standard for determining what is good and evil. according to Kant, what makes an act good or evil is the reasoning that leads up to this act. That makes this ethical standpoint ripe for exploitation. it basically gives people free reign to do what they want as long as they follow up with "but i meant to do good by it". Someone could reason that to end world hunger they need to simply kill off 1/3 of the worlds population. their reasoning is to end world hunger, a "good" thing. they put all their good will behind it, and focus all of their being into accomplishing the goal of ending world hunger by mass killings. according to Kant, as long as your motives were good and you followed through with all you could muster, it is a good deed. Conversely, if one donates one million dollars to charity, but is motivated to do so by the desire to receive public recognition and fulfill their ego, it is a bad deed. it is impossible to truly know the reasoning behind anyone other than yourself performing an action (and sometimes not even that), and that is the deal breaker for Kantian ethics. one could perform a "good" deed with a "good: motive, even knowing that it will lead to a poor or disastrous outcome, and still be lauded as a hero by way of deontological ethics. Anyone and everyone could exploit this system of ethical standards to be a "good" person, as long as one has "good" (in the sense of right and wrong, not in the sense of logic) motives.

its just plain stupid.

The problem of government subsidies and tariffs in the agricultural industy

Thanks to the good old American government, the farm industry has become yet another "rich get richer" capitalist failure. Farmers can sit around and grow whatever crop they feel is best for them, and the government will rush in to "save" them by providing subsidies, setting price floors, and placing tariffs on foreign imports. In 2007, grain, soybean, and cotton farmers earned record net income, and received an additional $5 billion in direct payment crop subsidies, at the expense of taxpayers. The top 10% of recipients collected 60% of the money. While direct payments are limited to $40,000 per person or $80,000 per couple, large subsidized farming operations with complex, interlocking business organizations and multiple owners routinely enable individuals to collect up to $80,000 apiece each year in direct payment subsidies under USDA rules governing subsidies for partnerships, corporations, joint ventures and trusts, with a pending provision to increase those limits to 60,000/120,000. These payouts are given without any regard to the individuals’ economic state or the condition of the Farm industry. Farmers who grow corn, a crop grown mainly for ethanol, a component of gasoline, benefit from a 51c/gal federal subsidy in addition to state and local subsidies, independent of market conditions. They are also protected by a 54c/gal tariff on imported ethanol.

These government programs are exploited for the benefit of the already wealthy, at the expense of the working class taxpayers. We were once a country that was the catalyst for innovation, now we are a country where everyone sits around waiting for their handout, who then complain when the free ride is over. Removal of these subsidies and tariffs might cause a scare in the short term, but in the long run it will promote new ideas in the farming industry, and more than likely lead us to better agricultural techniques, stronger and more fertile crops, and a larger overall supply of goods. International trade will flourish, and *gasp* we might help end global hunger by being a little less greedy. These policies are relics from the depression era, where 25% of the population lived and worked on 6,000,000 farms. In modern times, only about 2% of our population lives on farms with 157,000 farms producing almost 75% of the sales. It’s about time to end these programs that are only kept alive through exploitative lobbying to keep what is essentially free money coming into the hands of the wealthy.

source:
Environmental Working Group: Farm Subsidy Database: http://farm.ewg.org/

First

First post from Aside of Toast. took a while to think of a good pun i could use involving toast. good thing i have an expansive vocabulary in my cranium. ill publish random thoughts, philosophies, etc, and try to back it up with facts and sources as well. here's to many more posts and a big thank you to potential readers/followers!