I finally got around to enabling reader payments on my Substack, which involved creating a Stripe account (Hobson’s Choice apparently) and linking it to my bank account. Five of the 8 pledges were converted to actual payments, 1 was blocked and two are in limbo marked ‘incomplete’. The fee for receiving these payments is something like 12% of the gross payment. Nice work if you can get it Stripe/Substack. The Stripe dashboard is a nightmare to navigate and very confusing; numbers all over the place which are difficult to understand where they come from.
Well, we all each have a unique MAC address for each phone, each computer, and data processing horsepower is cheap, so they already know who we are and where we are.... they only lack the will to register everyone and decide if we are worthy to participate on the internet. .
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I once got banned from Google as I hacked their algorithms and posted web pages on their first 20 pages of that particular key word. The first 200 items listed were mine. Just showing off to some friends. They only banned my MAC address so I just mover to another server and behaved myself. Proof of concept stuff. Well, showing off... I did not do it for money. Childish.
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They can do it whenever they wish... No-one will stop them.
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Remember when William the Bastard became William the Conqueror and invaded Britain? 1066 with fewer than 10,000 men. and they spoke French in the British Court for 350 years. No one stopped him. I doubt if anyone will stop this invasion either so we will just have to make the best of it and look for opportunities as men and women have for thousands of years.
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Survival of the fittest and all that.
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Not the strongest, nor the fastest, maybe the smartest and we will always have the "Body and Spirt, Mind and Will, wildcards to play.
I tried three times but it kept telling me card declined. No idea why. Wondered if my card compromised but it worked yesterday. Will get to it! Sorry 🤦🏻♀️
I always thought the pledge was a dubious idea. It gives false encouragement to the receiver, and leaves too much room for both intentional cheating and bureaucratic messups. Everything is messed up lately.
Somebody said on a podcast: "Welcome to 2023, when nobody is doing their job and everything is ten times harder than it should be." On the dot.
There's a reason why nobody is doing their job. After three years of war, nobody is a willing servant. A similar situation happened in 1946, when the system expected everyone to slip back into their old prewar and predepression roles. The result was two years of strikes and malicious compliance. Ordinary people take revenge one way or another,
His opening chimes with my own thoughts, pointing out how obvious the machinations of our politicians are and lamenting that so many people still don’t see through them and let them get away with murder (quite literally):
“I honestly don't know how much more ridiculously, hysterically inept our would-be totalitarian overlords have to get, how much more obvious their playbook has to be, how blatantly one-dimensionally predictable their behaviour must become before finally enough of us, of the general population, just guffaws into the faces of our supposed oppressors and spins them around and whips down their trousers and drives them out of town with a succession of swift kicks up the bahookie. It's the textbook definition of "farcical". Do they have to put on white face, red noses and giant shoes ... before everyone recognises them as the clowns, the malevolent clowns that they are. ... It's truly, truly beyond absurd to me now, what they keep getting away with. I've seen what they are up to for a long time now and it's frustrating when you see something that other people don't, or refuse to see”.
Is there another method that we might use to express our gratitude and support to you and the work that you do? I buy many books, prefer ebooks to support the authors that I like. Amazon gift cards work globally although an email address would be necessary for security.
I subscribe to many medical journals that are fee based usually thru a credit card with discounts for students, heck my credit card gives me 2% 'back' with each purchase and has caused me to wonder how much they charge the merchant. How long they have to wait to be paid.
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I endeavor to pay cash to small merchants and always leave cash for wait staff. I give gifts to my primary care physician and her staff on every visit. Gratitude can be expressed in many ways. I ruptured an ear drum once when I was climbing a mountain with a terrible head cold, my climbing friend wanted to turn back when she saw blood dripping out of my ear but we pressed on and finished to the summit.
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My otolaryngologist, my ear surgeon, is still on my Christmas gift list out of Gratitude and that was almost 10 years ago. I still remember the pain, think stabbing with an ice pick to the tune of your heart beat pain. He made the pain go away, not with opioids or any pain meds I don't do those, but with his education, experience and dedication.
.
Yep, Gratitude with a capital G... Not Gifts to friends or lovers but to people you encounter in life that make the voyage more interesting, more enjoyable, more satisfying.
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Pain, Yes, pain may be 'God's way of telling one to Stop doing that you Damn Fool!' and you wouldn't want to dull those words with drugs.
.
Your words express your education, experience and dedication the same as his and help the pain of the world's crazy cults go away.
.
I am not sure what degrees you hold or what your background is but your writing indicates a strong foundation in math, science, history and etc. some would call you a 'polymath' in the classical sense. Perhaps tutoring or teaching at a college?
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We all have to earn our daily bread and our Lord's and Master's frown on any mere mortals poaching their franchise of grifting, stealing and selling lies...
.
Pardon me while I ramble but I have seen people who have paid consultants $5,000.00 per day for their expertise.. 'education, experience and dedication' also they bought 'Focus, commitment, sheer will and sacrifice..." traits that cannot be found everywhere.
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Never, never, never sell yourself short, never allow anyone else to either. I'm not sure Churchill actually said those words you know how I like to mangle quotes.
I apologize if I seemed flippant about substack, I consider many of the authors, you included, to be valuable resources, but whether or not that can be monetized is another question. I made my money by discovering high value people and stealing them away from what ever job they had by paying them more.
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They made me look good.
.
I'm the guy who although educated and intelligent am the one who scribbles ideas on the back of napkins in restaurants and goes on and finds capital to create and develop an opportunity. Florida is great for entrepreneurs, boom and bust and booming right now again.
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I'm the guy who stands in front of the zoning board and wonders which one would like an all expense paid trip to Hawaii... I did not offer that just thought about it as they bickered about the merits of my proposal. I won my zoning but only because one member of the board hated another member and gave me the 3 to 2 vote I needed.
.
I went in harms way and won a prize way bigger than I deserved, harm in the sense of money lost and ridicule and scorn form those who said it couldn't be done.
.
What price glory. One has to give the powers that be a chance to say yes.
.
They did not teach me that in college. I inherited my brains, my IQ from my mother and have always respected brainy smart women. My dad contributed my fearless, manipulative, charming and exploitative behavior, or so I have been told.
.
But we are all unique and different in our own way but few demand as much as they are worth from friends and peers because of preconceived notions and stereotypical pigeon holing.
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You also have a fiery nature when provoked which I consider to be a valuable trait. Not meek. Not passive. Probably would not be happy in a routine 9 to 5 type job.
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But God only knows how much time the Internet has, before THEY clamp down on critical thinking and intelligent discourse and debate and criticism. Just shut us down.
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We might all have to sign up for Starlink, e. musk's satellite based internet just to keep tabs on the rest of the world.
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So many brilliant minds are out there, trapped in their bodies in their local place and time who can reach out and share their thoughts and passions with other people anywhere in the world. What an incredible resource we have that we seem to be getting ready to lose.
.
I retired for the first time when I turned 30. I had lost two friends to lung cancer that year, they were both heavy smokers, but were only 41. Most twenty year olds do not think they are middle aged but... I spent several year sailing around Florida, and the Caribbean and looking at the stars at night, thinking about life and death. Have you ever sailed off-shore, out of sight of land and looked up at the stars? You can literally see for millions of years. People climb mountains today and tomorrow they will sail to the stars, some would trade their wealth for an opportunity to do that.
.
Got bored found another opportunity worked 100 hour weeks, wash rinse and repeat..
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Lost a very good friend who departed with the loud words "You are a workaholic, alcoholic, sexaholic, jerk... with the emotional maturity of a 15 year old."
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Hmmm, I might not be a good one for advice, but I do wear her blessing as a badge of honor.
It does look like they are coming for the internet. There is talk that it will change beyond all recognition in the next year or two and will no longer remotely resemble the 'wild west' creative, free, global platform of free speech and ideas which it was in its early days. Maybe they are right. But I suspect it may be too late, that the internet cannot now be killed - chop off one head and another will grow in its place. Bar pulling the plug and disconnecting everybody, I cannot see the powers that be ever exercising complete totalitarian control over what happens online.
Don't be down hearted. I know it feels really tough to soldier on against what we see 'out there'. But a courageous voice with calm intelligence such as yours is a vital and wonderful part of our battle. I hope that in some small way this comment will uplift you and encourage you. I only wish that I could do so with a subscription too but sadly that is not possible for me at the moment. Keep going. Remember it is not personal (they are out to get us all!!) and that you are a true gift to the side of light human spirit. Best wishes.
Well, we all each have a unique MAC address for each phone, each computer, and data processing horsepower is cheap, so they already know who we are and where we are.... they only lack the will to register everyone and decide if we are worthy to participate on the internet. .
.
I once got banned from Google as I hacked their algorithms and posted web pages on their first 20 pages of that particular key word. The first 200 items listed were mine. Just showing off to some friends. They only banned my MAC address so I just mover to another server and behaved myself. Proof of concept stuff. Well, showing off... I did not do it for money. Childish.
.
They can do it whenever they wish... No-one will stop them.
.
Remember when William the Bastard became William the Conqueror and invaded Britain? 1066 with fewer than 10,000 men. and they spoke French in the British Court for 350 years. No one stopped him. I doubt if anyone will stop this invasion either so we will just have to make the best of it and look for opportunities as men and women have for thousands of years.
.
Survival of the fittest and all that.
.
Not the strongest, nor the fastest, maybe the smartest and we will always have the "Body and Spirt, Mind and Will, wildcards to play.
.
Some of us will always find our way home.
.
Jaime, are you considering offering swag like ‘stop a windmill save a whale’ tee shirts? 😉
Ps Gosh does Substack really take 12%?? That is criminal!
It's 13.5% actually and they've added another separate fee for 'billing'. Absolute ripoff.
I tried three times but it kept telling me card declined. No idea why. Wondered if my card compromised but it worked yesterday. Will get to it! Sorry 🤦🏻♀️
No, don't worry Josie. Their system is obviously rubbish. I've got more 'cancelled' payments on my statement than I received pledges!
I always thought the pledge was a dubious idea. It gives false encouragement to the receiver, and leaves too much room for both intentional cheating and bureaucratic messups. Everything is messed up lately.
Somebody said on a podcast: "Welcome to 2023, when nobody is doing their job and everything is ten times harder than it should be." On the dot.
There's a reason why nobody is doing their job. After three years of war, nobody is a willing servant. A similar situation happened in 1946, when the system expected everyone to slip back into their old prewar and predepression roles. The result was two years of strikes and malicious compliance. Ordinary people take revenge one way or another,
Sheesh, I hope this isn’t the “new normal” everyone (media elites) talked about at the beginning of the plandemic. We must recover one way or another.
Here’s something that might cheer you up, a home monologue by Neil Oliver on conspiracy theories which turn out to be true, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-vMk4d5QX0&t=10s.
His opening chimes with my own thoughts, pointing out how obvious the machinations of our politicians are and lamenting that so many people still don’t see through them and let them get away with murder (quite literally):
“I honestly don't know how much more ridiculously, hysterically inept our would-be totalitarian overlords have to get, how much more obvious their playbook has to be, how blatantly one-dimensionally predictable their behaviour must become before finally enough of us, of the general population, just guffaws into the faces of our supposed oppressors and spins them around and whips down their trousers and drives them out of town with a succession of swift kicks up the bahookie. It's the textbook definition of "farcical". Do they have to put on white face, red noses and giant shoes ... before everyone recognises them as the clowns, the malevolent clowns that they are. ... It's truly, truly beyond absurd to me now, what they keep getting away with. I've seen what they are up to for a long time now and it's frustrating when you see something that other people don't, or refuse to see”.
A Neil Oliver monologue is always good for chasing away the blues!
Is there another method that we might use to express our gratitude and support to you and the work that you do? I buy many books, prefer ebooks to support the authors that I like. Amazon gift cards work globally although an email address would be necessary for security.
I subscribe to many medical journals that are fee based usually thru a credit card with discounts for students, heck my credit card gives me 2% 'back' with each purchase and has caused me to wonder how much they charge the merchant. How long they have to wait to be paid.
.
I endeavor to pay cash to small merchants and always leave cash for wait staff. I give gifts to my primary care physician and her staff on every visit. Gratitude can be expressed in many ways. I ruptured an ear drum once when I was climbing a mountain with a terrible head cold, my climbing friend wanted to turn back when she saw blood dripping out of my ear but we pressed on and finished to the summit.
.
My otolaryngologist, my ear surgeon, is still on my Christmas gift list out of Gratitude and that was almost 10 years ago. I still remember the pain, think stabbing with an ice pick to the tune of your heart beat pain. He made the pain go away, not with opioids or any pain meds I don't do those, but with his education, experience and dedication.
.
Yep, Gratitude with a capital G... Not Gifts to friends or lovers but to people you encounter in life that make the voyage more interesting, more enjoyable, more satisfying.
.
Pain, Yes, pain may be 'God's way of telling one to Stop doing that you Damn Fool!' and you wouldn't want to dull those words with drugs.
.
Your words express your education, experience and dedication the same as his and help the pain of the world's crazy cults go away.
.
I am not sure what degrees you hold or what your background is but your writing indicates a strong foundation in math, science, history and etc. some would call you a 'polymath' in the classical sense. Perhaps tutoring or teaching at a college?
.
We all have to earn our daily bread and our Lord's and Master's frown on any mere mortals poaching their franchise of grifting, stealing and selling lies...
.
Pardon me while I ramble but I have seen people who have paid consultants $5,000.00 per day for their expertise.. 'education, experience and dedication' also they bought 'Focus, commitment, sheer will and sacrifice..." traits that cannot be found everywhere.
.
Never, never, never sell yourself short, never allow anyone else to either. I'm not sure Churchill actually said those words you know how I like to mangle quotes.
.
I'm thinking of writing an e-book. I do have a Physics higher education background - nothing special though.
I apologize if I seemed flippant about substack, I consider many of the authors, you included, to be valuable resources, but whether or not that can be monetized is another question. I made my money by discovering high value people and stealing them away from what ever job they had by paying them more.
.
They made me look good.
.
I'm the guy who although educated and intelligent am the one who scribbles ideas on the back of napkins in restaurants and goes on and finds capital to create and develop an opportunity. Florida is great for entrepreneurs, boom and bust and booming right now again.
.
I'm the guy who stands in front of the zoning board and wonders which one would like an all expense paid trip to Hawaii... I did not offer that just thought about it as they bickered about the merits of my proposal. I won my zoning but only because one member of the board hated another member and gave me the 3 to 2 vote I needed.
.
I went in harms way and won a prize way bigger than I deserved, harm in the sense of money lost and ridicule and scorn form those who said it couldn't be done.
.
What price glory. One has to give the powers that be a chance to say yes.
.
They did not teach me that in college. I inherited my brains, my IQ from my mother and have always respected brainy smart women. My dad contributed my fearless, manipulative, charming and exploitative behavior, or so I have been told.
.
But we are all unique and different in our own way but few demand as much as they are worth from friends and peers because of preconceived notions and stereotypical pigeon holing.
.
You also have a fiery nature when provoked which I consider to be a valuable trait. Not meek. Not passive. Probably would not be happy in a routine 9 to 5 type job.
.
But God only knows how much time the Internet has, before THEY clamp down on critical thinking and intelligent discourse and debate and criticism. Just shut us down.
.
We might all have to sign up for Starlink, e. musk's satellite based internet just to keep tabs on the rest of the world.
.
So many brilliant minds are out there, trapped in their bodies in their local place and time who can reach out and share their thoughts and passions with other people anywhere in the world. What an incredible resource we have that we seem to be getting ready to lose.
.
I retired for the first time when I turned 30. I had lost two friends to lung cancer that year, they were both heavy smokers, but were only 41. Most twenty year olds do not think they are middle aged but... I spent several year sailing around Florida, and the Caribbean and looking at the stars at night, thinking about life and death. Have you ever sailed off-shore, out of sight of land and looked up at the stars? You can literally see for millions of years. People climb mountains today and tomorrow they will sail to the stars, some would trade their wealth for an opportunity to do that.
.
Got bored found another opportunity worked 100 hour weeks, wash rinse and repeat..
.
Lost a very good friend who departed with the loud words "You are a workaholic, alcoholic, sexaholic, jerk... with the emotional maturity of a 15 year old."
.
Hmmm, I might not be a good one for advice, but I do wear her blessing as a badge of honor.
.
But damn, but in my opinion you have potential.
It does look like they are coming for the internet. There is talk that it will change beyond all recognition in the next year or two and will no longer remotely resemble the 'wild west' creative, free, global platform of free speech and ideas which it was in its early days. Maybe they are right. But I suspect it may be too late, that the internet cannot now be killed - chop off one head and another will grow in its place. Bar pulling the plug and disconnecting everybody, I cannot see the powers that be ever exercising complete totalitarian control over what happens online.
Then someone will want tax...it's ok to write for the joy of writing too.
Courage, mon brave! Don't let the bastards grind you down.
Speaking with my online shopkeeper hat on I can say with certainty that there are always problems with online finance whoever supplies it.
I don't plan to have paid subscriptions - I have enough trouble getting anyone to read my rag in the first place.
Don't be down hearted. I know it feels really tough to soldier on against what we see 'out there'. But a courageous voice with calm intelligence such as yours is a vital and wonderful part of our battle. I hope that in some small way this comment will uplift you and encourage you. I only wish that I could do so with a subscription too but sadly that is not possible for me at the moment. Keep going. Remember it is not personal (they are out to get us all!!) and that you are a true gift to the side of light human spirit. Best wishes.
I made a pledge some weeks ago but I don’t recall being asked for payment card details.
Not to worry. I think Stripe are telling me now that your payment is cancelled along with several others!
I upgraded to founding member. My bank is telling me the payment went through. Let me know if you don't receive it.
Many thanks Alan. Just checked, it's gone through.
Thanks, I will check that out. I am becoming somewhat disappointed and disillusioned with Substack.
Thanks for the heads-up about nostr!