Unique Baby Gift Ideas

Illustrate My Name offers pretty neato looking unique baby name gifts. Totally unique idea perfect for the web.

Cause & Effect

So what if somebody teaches you something that is complete bullshit, but it causes profound positive life changing effects? Is it wrong to teach that? Is it enough to look at the outcome and judge the quality based on that?

I think most stuff that is taught is intentionally biased to reinforce our worldviews to make us passive consumers who are easy to exploit (or in other words, most information outside of spam is intentionally inherenatly wrong to express a point of view which helps to control the activity of others).

The bars are set too high on somethings, like beauty, productivity, creativity, and then we are given false ideals (you will excell, fight for your country, etc).

I am suspicious of almost anything that is organized because I don't trust authority, and generally think most people in positions of great power were drawn their not by their creativity, skill, and intelligence, but by following the leader or a deep desire to have power & control others.

Why do most courses teach us to look at the world around us instead of the world within us if the easiest way to change the world around us is to change how we perceive it?

Honesty Tax

From my personal experience most US businesses are not that honest or forthright. A few examples from today:

• publisher wants to publish book. all throughout negotiations the ebook rights are no big deal until day of contract :(
  
• tell lawyers to contact me if spend will go beyond $5,000. they never fucking do and send me a bill for $12,500. :(
  
• mechanic tells me car belt is fine because they are too lazy to want to change it. roommate says it is fucked. :(

To be honest, I think there is an honesty tax. Most businesses are not 100% so, and if you are not you are taxed for it.

Lyrics, Poetry, & Writing

I love these lyrics:

My heart is broke
But I have some glue
Help me inhale
And mend it with you
We'll float around
And hang out on clouds
Then we'll come down
And have a hangover

My mom said that I told her in high school that I wanted to be a poet, but genuinely I now recognize that I have about 0 skill on that front...and even less when I am not suicidally depressed.

Then I grew old and bitter and didn't want to write or do or think about anything. Now I write daily.

Weird getting a book offer from a major publishing house, as I don't recall ever viewing myself as the type to be a book author. I guess ebooks and blogs count for something though, but it surely would feel weird reading a book I wrote knowing it was published by a major publishing house.

Will the Recession Stop the War

I think Bush and co are going to have to stop bleeding the country or they soon will bankrupt it:

• Consumer sentiment falls unexpectedly
• economists warn on housing market (due in part to rising interest rates)
• Dollar Erases Gains as Traders Say Refco Freeze Forces Selling (part of that story is also the widening trade deficit)
• U.S. consumer prices shot up an unexpectedly large 1.2 percent last month, the biggest gain in more than 25 years
• US industrial production fell 1.3% in September as hurricanes Katrina and Rita and a strike at aircraft producer Boeing dented output, the Federal Reserve said today. It was the largest monthly drop since 1982 and worse than the 0.4% decline expected by private economists.

Calling Out Authority

Sometimes it is not good to say negative stuff about others, but if nobody calls out people that are doing hyper aggressive self promo marketing then that leads to bad stuff. I don't feel guilty for the following post:

I am not so certain I can agree with Ken's recent posts. To me it
seems like the real message he thinks everyone is missing is the
sales pitch deep inside the post.

I can't agree that he can personally control the spider visits,
re-visits, indexing, and ranking for over 10,000 sites. He may have
that many customers (or host that many sites), but he does not
control the search spiders. They run on their own crawl schedules.
If he is artifically trying to control and bait those spiders across
a network of 10,000 sites well then that is NOT working WITH the
engines.

I too could post that with the obvious trends in search my book is 5
years ahead of it's time and that SEO will be defined by whatever I
say, but it would be naive.

Quotes like "SBI! actually sells itself." would have a bit more
credibility if they were not part of self promotional posts.

Аарон Уолл

I think that is how you spell my name in Greek...just so you know :)

Giving Away 1,000's of Free Ebooks

So I got a phone call from a person who wanted me to help him give away thousands of free ebook. He told me he knew nothing about the web though.

I asked him how he got all those free ebooks without knowing anything about the web, and he stated he got them from free bonuses in spam email.

I told him there was a 0% chance of me helping anyone market email spam, and by creating a site that gave away that stuff he would be marketing email spam, since most email spam freebies come with spyware or rippoff hidden gems like bogus affiliate recommendations.

He kept emphasizing volume, and I kept saying "right, lots of garbage." Sometimes I wonder if I am a bit too blunt with some people, but I think sometimes you have to be, especially when they don't get that promoting scammers = promoting scammers.

A few sentences that help change the way I think can be worth thousands, but volumes of text promoted by sleeze marketing is not going to do anyone any favors. It's part of the reason blogs are cool. Subscribe to the channels you want and usually get the content you want.

I think I hate email spam almost as much as telemarketers.

Questioning the Divine Word?

Catholic Church no longer swears by truth of the Bible

THE hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church has published a teaching document instructing the faithful that some parts of the Bible are not actually true.

The Catholic bishops of England, Wales and Scotland are warning their five million worshippers, as well as any others drawn to the study of scripture, that they should not expect “total accuracy” from the Bible.

Well, at least the president still believes.

Myriad

So the word Myriad is on over 28,000,000 other web pages. I used to not notice how common the word myriad was until I created a site with that name in it. Now I laugh about how much more often I notice the word on websites and in books.

A myriad of things to laugh about. I am corny w a bad sense of humor.

Bush Loves Religion Enough to Kill for It

God told me to fucking blow up that country - says Bush

why stop at countries? why not launch a war on science?

I still am disappointed in evolution for letting that thing get in that position.

For The Purist Bloggers...

Payday Loan News:

13% of americans are ignorant assholes getting fucked by system

click this payday loan ad get your loan

what makes that any more honest or less spammy than other techniques?

Spam Via IM

spam: Hello Aaron

aaron: hi

spam: Is it the right time to talk?

aaron: it depends on the conversation
for example
if you want to make a sales pitch it is the wrong time
however if you want to chat about somerthing interesting it is not

spam: ok so when is the right time
?

aaron: it is never the right time to make a sales pitch
have to go
cheers

Chicago Mercantile Exchange

I had no idea that the Chicago Mercantile Exchange was a public company. When they went public 2 years ago, just based on how fucked up our leader is, one could easily have predicted that commodity markets were going to have lots of activity due to rough times ahead. Sure enough, in two years the stock went from $40 to $340.

I don't know exactly how their business model works, but I don't see things in the world getting real stable anytime soon (at least not with that nutter president). CME is worth 11.71 billion, so assuming their business model is good (and based on profit per transaction or other volume based activity), I am sure there is plenty of room for growth.

I probably would not buy their stock at this point though, as I suspect the oil market will retreat a bit in coming months, and that there is a bit much momentum priced into the CME 43 P/E ratio.

NXY, a Canadian oil company, has shown weekness in 2 of the last 3 trading days, and to me that is a foward looking indicator of oil prices (although the most recent drop was in tandem with lowering oil prices).

Their recent growth was heavily driven by increasing oil prices. As NXY drops it means people are losing their confidence in the oil commodity. NXY has a beta of 0.56, but when oil sinks NXY sinks much quicker, since a large part of their future business model is heavily reliant on expensive oil prices. If oil gets too cheap there is not much margins in getting the oil out of the oil sands in Alberta.

I bet NXY is back in the 30s before the year is out, although longterm the company, from my limited understanding, is in a great market position.

So Yesterday

I forgot
what I did
but everybody told me
it wasn't good

or was that last week
or the month before
or last year
I am really not sure
but it happened
allegedly